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The Smart Take:
Hear Kevin give an update on the current state of the markets and financial planning to-do’s that need to be done through the Coronavirus turmoil. Proper execution of your financial and investment plans is required in large amounts to make sure you stay on track.
It’s not all bad news out there. Many opportunities are being created that you can capitalize on.
And be sure to listen to why you may want to reconsider your Roth Conversion strategy and Social Security claiming decision in light of current circumstances.
Prefer to read? See below for the transcript.
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Timestamps:
5:02 – High-Quality Bond Behavior
12:06 – Considerations For Client’s Portfolios
18:13 – What Makes A Good Advisor
26:00 – How True Wealth Is Operating Currently
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TRANSCRIPT:
Kevin Kroskey:
If there’s a time for anybody to go ahead and be humble and maybe reach out for some help, even if it’s for a one-time thing and just make sure that you’re okay. I would say now is definitely it. Now’s not the time to dig your head in the sand and bury it there and leave it there and just hope things are going to be okay, whether you’re doing it by yourself or with another advisor.
Introduction:
Welcome to Retire Smarter with Kevin Kroskey. Find answers to your toughest questions and get educated about the financial world. It’s time to Retire Smarter.
Walter Storholt:
Hey there and welcome to another edition of Retire Smarter. Walter Storholt here, alongside Kevin Kroskey, president and wealth advisor at True Wealth Design. Serving you throughout Northeast Ohio with offices in Akron and Canfield. You can find us online by going to truewealthdesign.com.
Walter Storholt:
And Kevin, we have no shortage of things to talk about. From the stock market and the coronavirus pandemic fallout, that continues throughout our country. To now a stimulus package and bill that we have lots to discuss. So much must be running and swimming through your head these days. Trying to keep it all straight and figure out how to navigate all these waters. I know you’re probably enjoying the challenge of it all but what’s the last couple of days been like for you?
Kevin Kroskey:
Well, I guess on a personal level, if we could start there briefly. So certainly, I think everybody is spending more time with their family. At least that family that’s within their household. And, last week was just a huge week in the Kroskey household. My six-year-old daughter Aubrey still had training wheels on her bike and we’ve been getting a lot of practice, just in the front of the house.
Kevin Kroskey:
And, not only do the training wheels but we had a little scooter for her. A little pedal scooter just so she could learn balance and then that clicked for her and we had the pedals off. We have the training wheels off the bike and I took the pedals off so she could use it more as a strider. And, as soon as I saw her get the scooter down, I was like, “It’s time, I think she got it.”
Kevin Kroskey:
And, she’s a more cautious person. It’s her nature. And, I told her, I said, “Aubrey, when daddy was little, and I was probably five, we had an alley behind our house and that’s where I learned how to ride my bike. And, I remember, I mean, it was a big pothole filled alley and my dad just shoved me down the way and it was to sink or swim. And, bloody knees and scraped elbows later, eventually I got it.”
Kevin Kroskey:
But, I was holding onto her and she didn’t fall once. So she got going, just see her smile and see her face light up was just fantastic. So it was a huge week. She also lost one of her front teeth last week. It was a bit of a collision with my year and a half-year-old daughter and they were just playing and wrestling but her tooth was really loose. And so, the tooth fairy came last week in the Kroskey household. She rode a scooter last week and then wrote a bike. I mean, just a lot of… Coronavirus aside…
Walter Storholt:
Those are a lot of big milestones, all at once.
Kevin Kroskey:
It was a big, positive week in that regard, in the Kroskey household. I wanted to share that and try to kick things off with a bit of a positive tone. And…
Walter Storholt:
My first bike ride was straight into a tree. So I think I was with you on the hop-on, dad gave me a really strong push and then right down the hill, into a tree.
Kevin Kroskey:
And, I’m sure we didn’t have, I know I didn’t have a helmet on back then. Now, the helmet’s not only on, but mom makes sure it’s like extra tight and was strangulating the kid out of protection concerns. And, it’s just a different world that we live in these days, for sure.
Walter Storholt:
I think I did have the helmet, not sure if I had the knee pads and arm pads and all the rest of it. But, I do think I had a helmet strapped on. So my nickname before that moment, and it is still is to this day, is an accident waiting to happen. My parents were well prepared by the time the bike came out, that I would probably need a little extra protection.
Kevin Kroskey:
That’s great. So not only did we have a positive week in the Kroskey household last week but when we were recording the podcast last week on a Monday, it was a Monday morning.
Kevin Kroskey:
The Federal Reserve had just come out with really unprecedented support to the markets and try to correct some liquidity issues, that we mentioned last week. We’ll talk, probably talk about it a little bit this week, as well. And so, we were just really just digesting this before we started recording. And, what you saw happen last week was, that really provided some support to the markets, particularly to the credit markets.
Kevin Kroskey:
The Federal Reserve doesn’t go out and buy stocks but what they did historically, they buy Treasury obligations. Obligations of the U.S. government, whether it’s short term or long term. And so, they’ve always done that but they started buying municipal bonds. They started by corporate bonds, investment-grade corporate bonds, assets that they typically have not purchased in the past. There are also some special other facilities, is what they’re called. To buy some other sort of credit instruments, more securitized debt. Really won’t get into it, it gets fairly technical.
Kevin Kroskey:
But, if we were looking at the returns, so say we were recording a week ago Monday, and we were looking at returns for the fixed income assets for the prior week. Really what you saw were municipal bonds and these aren’t junk, high yield municipal bonds. But, there was an aggregate mix. Municipal bonds were down 7% in a week. U.S. corporate bonds were down nearly 9% in a week. The aggregate bond benchmark, which is really common and probably everybody that has a 401K has a similar option to invest in. Within that 401k, it was down nearly 2.5%. So that’s roughly about half treasuries. There’s a lot of mortgage bonds in there too.
Kevin Kroskey:
And then, corporates as well. So we mentioned this last week but this is just something that’s really important to keep in mind, and we’ll set the stage here as we move on, as for why. But, whenever stocks go down, you generally expect bonds to hold up and to counteract that. Well, this liquidity crunch, basically people were just selling whatever they could, whatever was most liquid, whatever had fallen the least in value or held its value.
Kevin Kroskey:
Starting with treasury bonds and then moving down in some of those corporates and municipal bonds, what have you. Basically, they weren’t selling stocks by and large, which you saw within the mutual fund industry over the last couple of weeks. The outflows from bond funds, compared to stock funds, orders of magnitude greater for people selling bond funds. And so, it really created this liquidity crunch and you saw these fairly high-quality assets, whether again, whether it’s U.S. agency, really high-quality mortgages, treasury bonds, even had negative returns on some days at the stock market, sold off a lot of these high-quality municipal bonds.
Kevin Kroskey:
I can’t remember that happening in 2008. One of these days when I have a little bit more time than I’ll go back and do some additional digging. But, the real high-quality stuff is supposed to hold up and be that balance your portfolio, whenever stocks sell-off. And, that didn’t happen. But, when the Fed came in on Monday morning, they had done some prior things previously. But basically, they came in and said, “Hey, we’re going to do unlimited asset purchases. We’re going to expand what we can buy and we’re going to bring liquidity back to the market.” And, that has definitely happened.
Kevin Kroskey:
So if we… Here we are, as of this week, for March 30th you saw that stock returns were up 10% at large. I would deduce, I would argue that a lot of that was just from the Fed restoring liquidity of their credit markets and filtering through the whole financial system. Certainly, with what Congress did and the President signed into law later in the week certainly helped us. Well, a lot of that news had already been priced in, as well. But, when you look back over the last week, you saw bonds rebound quite quickly. Other bonds, maybe less liquid, not as high quality of bonds, still are taking some time to work through some things.
Kevin Kroskey:
You’re still seeing some issues in certain parts of the mortgage market but it’s just been really unique. So we were recording this a week ago, stocks were down about 15%, U.S. stocks, recording this a week later, the market went up more than 10%. So not only were things good in the Kroskey household personally, for my kids but certainly, it was a really good week last week to be a stock and bond investor, as well.
Walter Storholt:
It was interesting to be one of those out there trying to refinance their home, over the last two weeks or so. And, thinking… Definitely falling into that trap of, “Oh, interest rates, they’re slashing again, let’s go all get mortgages and refinances.” And, then talking to the mortgage lender saying, “Whoa, well hold on a second, actually rates went up.” And then, there were a lot of people disappointed by that fact. And, a quick lesson in how that side of the world works a little bit for many of us.
Kevin Kroskey:
Yeah, you’re going to see, I mean, you’re already seeing mortgage rates come down and they’re going to continue to come down. One quick tangent to this, we own mortgage bonds in our portfolios in the bond portion of our portfolio. And, when you look at, this is a little bit technical, a quick wonky alert, I guess. But, whenever you look at, everything in the bond market is measured, really is a spread to Treasury. So a spread meaning, safe treasuries of similar maturity of say, I don’t know, say 10 years, we’re paying 1% for a U.S. government bond and municipal bond was paying 1.5%, while there’s a .5% spread or corporates could be a higher spread, so on and so forth.
Kevin Kroskey:
Where we’re at right now, the spread of agency, high-quality AAA mortgage bonds to treasuries has been the highest of all time. And, when you look at mortgages, the way that they’re structured, there are different protections, basically, for these high-quality mortgage bonds. But, going back into 2008, which was really a real estate and debt crisis, a financial crisis like we talked about last time. High-quality mortgage bonds didn’t lose any money in 2008, by and large, if you look at the high-quality mortgage index, if you will. Some of these dislocations, and we’ll talk about this in upcoming episodes, but the changing market conditions are certainly providing a whole slew of things that we need to be doing and considering. Certainly first and foremost, again, you got to stay disciplined. You can’t be reactive, you can’t panic out.
Kevin Kroskey:
You got to have a plan and you need to stick to that plan. And, this is really when you need to step up and execute a down 15% two weeks ago, up more than 10% last week. Who knows? I certainly don’t think this is going to be over anytime soon. Certainly, the markets are probably going to continue to be volatile for a while. I would say that it’s going to be more pronounced in the stock market and the equity markets, rather than in the bond markets, which are receiving that direct support from the Fed. But, whenever you see these kinds of dislocations between prices, the mortgages and the treasuries that I mentioned, part of prudent asset allocation is, “Hey, look at these forward-looking expectations.”
Kevin Kroskey:
These are high-quality bonds, they seem to be giving extra compensation for risk, at this point in time. Maybe we want to own more of it. So maybe we need to go ahead and tweak our mix, tweak our ingredients and tweak our recipe a little bit. To go ahead and have a better allocation on a forward-looking basis. But, that’s really what’s been taking really all of my time over the last couple of weeks. I mean, the market conditions were really changing, not only on a daily basis but on an intra-day basis and there’s a lot of things that we needed to do in the office. Some of those things and I’ll just mention them in a list format today, but we’re going to dive into these over the coming weeks and just really utilize some case studies for client work that we’re currently doing, to show how this actually works in practice.
Kevin Kroskey:
The last podcast was, This Is Not 2008. I don’t think it is for all the reasons that I described. However, when you look at how the market reacted in times of uncertainty, it always discounts things sharply and so you have to plan for that and then most importantly you have to execute through that. So we’re going to be going over all these things over the coming weeks. But, a lot of the things that we’re looking at right now, certainly again, changing allocations, changing market expectations, going ahead and making sure that we have sufficient cash and good, high-quality bonds in the portfolio. To really have a bridge or have a runway for our clients that are taking distributions from their accounts for their retirement income.
Kevin Kroskey:
We did a lot of tax-loss selling in the portfolio over, not last week because again, the markets rebounded quite a bit and had been doing rebalancing, really all the way through. But, stocks had sold off by about 30%. Some stock markets even more than that, the real estate market was similar to that, as well. And so, when something goes down, you sell it, you book the tax loss and or on a retirement account and then you buy something similar. Not identical, but similar to go ahead and realize that tax loss and then move forward. Doing that certainly helps, it’s going to save you on taxes for your 2020 tax year. There are all kinds of other planning that we can do around that, that we will talk about moving forward, as well.
Kevin Kroskey:
Some of the other things that we’re doing, we started executing for a lot of clients, in the fourth quarter last year, Walter you may recall, we did a couple of episodes on fourth-quarter tax planning. And, Roth conversions are certainly one thing that we’ve been long proponents and fans of. Does that ring a bell for you, Walter?
Walter Storholt:
It always does. Yes. Absolutely.
Kevin Kroskey:
All right, thank you. And, really we wait until the fourth quarter to do that, however, stocks sold off about 30%. Whenever we’re doing those fourth-quarter projections and looking at the current year. We’re also looking at the next year, so we’re doing that in the fourth quarter of 2019. We were looking back over 2019 and ahead to 2020, we really have a budget for how much we’re planning to do a conversion in 2020. But, generally speaking, we would wait until the fourth quarter of this year to do those conversions. Moving the money from an IRA over to the Roth, paying tax at a known and likely lower tax rate today versus what the client would otherwise pay in the future.
Kevin Kroskey:
I’ll give you one client example briefly, but this client we were planning on doing about $120,000 moving from his IRA over to his Roth IRA. Well, stock sold off about 30% so we’re in… Certainly, it could sell off more so we are not going to wait until the fourth quarter. We are going to do it in a couple of chunks. And so, we’re doing about a $50,000 chunk this week. We did another… We’re planning to do another $50,000 chunk of the $120,000 so that gets us $50,000 and $50,000 is $100,000, so a $100,000 of the $120,000 and we’re going to go ahead and do that soon. And then, we’re just going to leave a little bit of buffer before we get into to year-end. So it’s a pretty sizeable conversion that we’re doing.
Kevin Kroskey:
If we were just going to do, say $10,000 or something like that, I’d probably just do it once and be done with it. But, because it’s sizable, we’re going to try to average it out a little bit. We’re not going to pick the best spot, we’re not going to pick the worst spot. But, by and large, we’re doing it at prices that are appreciably lower at least versus what they were just several weeks ago. So certainly, we’ve been tweaking the portfolios, we’ve been doing the tax-loss selling, we’ve been accelerating some Roth conversions for clients. We also are re looking at, social security for several clients. And, this may be on the surface, a little counterintuitive for some, and we’ve talked about social security in some prior episodes and we’ve always been big proponents of delaying it, as a general principle, subject to applying it to a client’s unique circumstance.
Kevin Kroskey:
But, whenever you think about social security and the delay that’s involved, there’s an opportunity cost to that delay. So if you are going to go ahead and say, “Hey, social security, don’t give me the money now at say 66. I’m going to wait until 70.” Well, you’re going to have to use more of the money that’s in your account to go ahead and provide the income that you’re going to need to bridge the gap between 66 and 70. Well, the opportunity costs, say a year ago, was significantly less than what it is today because stocks have sold off a good bit. So when we analyze this, we would use some sort of assumed rate, a fairly conservative rate for that opportunity costs, on the order of around 3% or so.
Kevin Kroskey:
Well, for a lot of clients we are increasing that rate and really rerunning these analyses. So if you are investing in stocks and have a more stock dominant portfolio, then you probably have a higher opportunity cost or a discount rate to go ahead and run that analysis. If you are a very conservative investor, delaying security is probably still going to make a lot of sense because interest rates are so very low now, that your opportunity costs for not investing in bonds probably isn’t all that great. So there are several things that have been keeping us busy.
Kevin Kroskey:
Portfolio work was really first and foremost, making sure that people still are on track. If we need to adjust any spending, we’re going to be diving into this again over the coming episodes. But, a lot of to use tax losses, Roth conversions, social security delay, and re-analyzing that. Just a lot of things that have been on our plate. But, these are all the things that we talk about. We’ve done nearly 50 episodes, podcast episodes, on these topics now and this is really when all those ideas, all those strategies, really come together. And, just what has happened provides an ordinate amount of opportunity to go ahead and make sure that not only were we planning properly, but we’re taking advantage of the opportunities that have been presented to us, as a result of this recent dislocation.
Kevin Kroskey:
So whether you or your advisor are handling things. Certainly our clients, I mean, we’ve been doing all this work for them. We’ve been reaching out to them, letting them know what to expect and we’re just working through it on a day by day basis. But, if you’re not working with us, these are the things that really, you or your advisors should be doing at this point in time because otherwise, you’re just sitting down and going to ride through it. But, you’re going to miss a lot of opportunities.
Walter Storholt:
Well, I just find this interesting, Kevin, because I’ve talked with a couple of financial advisors over the past few weeks. And, one of the questions that I’ve asked each one of them is, “What are you doing for your current clients?” What’s the… It’s one thing to talk about… It’s two different conversations. What are you doing for somebody who doesn’t have a plan in place? What’s the plan of action for those folks who maybe have suffered big losses and are struggling to prepare now that we’ve had the big market downturn and we have all this uncertainty. And then, the other side of the equation is what are you doing for folks who you already have a relationship with? And, I’ve been amazed by how many times the answer has been basically nothing, not really doing anything. Just waiting for it to go back up or may default.
Walter Storholt:
Well, we didn’t have to do anything. So it’s interesting to hear yours from a completely different angle of, well we’re doing this, we’re doing that, where we have all these opportunities, we have chances to look at this. I mean, you are searching under every rock to make the most of the situation that’s been placed in front of us. So is that just part of your philosophy, the way that you build plans or is that just every advisor should be doing this stuff? It’s just rare that the teams are actually going out there and making these consistent changes and tweaks and betterments to the plan.
Kevin Kroskey:
Yeah, Walter, I’m grinning right now. Honestly, I wish all advisors and advisory firms were doing it because the things that we’re talking about here, I mean frankly, are in the no brainer category. All this stuff with the tax losses, with the conversions, we’re talking about prudent planning. We’re talking about science-based, process-based, empirical planning and these are things that we have control over. We don’t have control of what the market’s going to do today or tomorrow or next week. But, we have a plan in place and we have a process and we know how to execute for several clients. We’ll talk about this again in the coming episodes, but for several clients that have a lot of capacity for risk, they have a lot of ability to go ahead and take risks. We sent out an email to around a third of our clients. About 60 clients or so saying, “Hey, we should really reconsider your current allocation and consider increasing risk and do it in a prudent fashion.”
Kevin Kroskey:
We’ll talk more about how we are going about doing that for people but we’ve been executing that plan for the last couple of weeks. Certainly, we look pretty smart right now but it wasn’t a market timing call, it was a process-based call. It was more of a prudent thing to look at, for certain clients that could do that. For other clients, on the other hand, that maybe don’t have as much safety margin, that doesn’t have the risk capacity to go ahead and increase risk. Well, we’re looking at their spending plans and just really saying, “Hey, how impacted, are you? What was your travel budget?” Because pretty much everybody’s travel went to zero now for at least the next several months. So do we need to make any changes to your spending plan?
Kevin Kroskey:
I mean frankly, these are the things that clients pay us to do and to worry about. To just tell them to say, turn off the news and it’ll come back. I don’t think that’s wrong. I just think it falls way, way short of what a good advisor should be doing for his or her clients. To make them make sure that they’re staying on track, to make sure that frankly, that they’re earning their fee and that the client’s getting a return on what they’re paying for. I mean, it’s just, I don’t know. I mean again, I like to say that we dot the I’s and cross the T’s. I don’t think we’re anything special in a way but for whatever reason, we seem to be special. And, maybe the bar has been set pretty low but these are the things that we’re doing. These are the things that have… It’s a no brainer. Again, it’s just proper planning.
Kevin Kroskey:
These are things that everybody should be doing and thinking about. These are also things if you’re not working with somebody, one I would be… If I was working with an advisor, I would be asking them, “What are you doing? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? Hey, I listened to this bald guy talk on the podcast and he said he was grinning, but these are the things that he’s doing. Why or why not? Does that make sense for me?” And, if you don’t get a good answer, then call us and you’ll get a second opinion. But, if you’re doing this by yourself, I just hope that you’re really navigating through this in a prudent way. I can tell you that nobody’s immune to feeling the emotions of any sort of panic or fear or uncertainty.
Kevin Kroskey:
I mean, I’ve frankly… I hope it’s been noticeable through the podcast in the last couple of weeks. I mean, I feel, I don’t want to say I feel overconfident and hopefully, I’m not. But, I feel very clear on the direction that we need to go and what we need to do for our clients and how we’re going to navigate through this and we’re executing. So if, and I can tell you, I did not feel that way in 2008, I think 2008 was different. But frankly, I also had a lot less experience back then and I hadn’t gone through something to the extent that, that was. And, that at least up until a week ago, that we seemed to be in now. Again, things are different but the magnitude with how quickly things went down was the quickest on record, so that was historically unprecedented.
Kevin Kroskey:
So talking to other advisors too, I mean, I can just see the ones that are less experienced than you can just feel it. You can sense that they don’t know what to expect, that this is scary. And, I’m not saying that it’s not, but again, it’s like you dust off. You always have the 2008 playbook in mind, that’s really the stress test that we have for portfolios and for somebody’s retirement plan. But I mean, this is when somebody needs to step up and execute. And, even if you have a professional person that may not know how to do that if you’re doing that on your own, it’s… If there’s a time for anybody to go ahead and be humble and maybe reach out for some help, even if it’s for a one-time thing and just make sure that you’re okay. I would say now is definitely it. Now’s not the time to dig your head in the sand and bury it there and leave it there and just hope things are going to be okay. Whether you’re doing it by yourself or with another advisor.
Kevin Kroskey:
We’re going to try to make this as concrete as possible. People hire an advisor because they know, like and trust them. So if anybody’s been tuning in, we give a lot of content here. If it’s something that makes sense to you, if you’ve gotten to know me personally a little bit, there are four CFPs that we have on staff. We have the capacity to help additional people. We had more than a handful of people reach out to us last week. People need help now. People need leadership. People need to be shown a plan of how they’re going to get through this and how they’re going to be okay. And, that’s what we’re doing and if you don’t have that, then give us a call. We’re here to help.
Kevin Kroskey:
This is really when some people, you, your family, people that you care about need help because if they don’t take proactive action and make sure that they’re doing the things that we’re discussing, they might not be okay. Again, I’ve seen people panic out in 2008 and sit out of the market for years and miss tons of wealth creation and not being able to go ahead and retire when they wanted to or having to spend less. I mean, these are the life-changing things that are going to be happening as a result of what we’re going through right now. And, that’s why we’re in business. We’re here to help people navigate through that, to keep them on track and make sure that they’re going to be okay.
Walter Storholt:
Well, it’s easy to get in touch, as we mentioned. All the time here on the show, you can call the old fashioned way. 855-TWD-PLAN is the number, that’s 855-893-7526. You can also go online to truewealthdesign.com, that’s truewealthdesign.com. Click on the Are We Right For You button to schedule a 15-minute call with an experienced advisor on the True Wealth team. Just go to truewealthdesign.com and we’ll put all the contact information that you need in the show notes of today’s episode. So whatever app you’re using to listen, just check the show notes and you’ll see the different ways that you can get in touch with Kevin and the team at True Wealth Design.
Walter Storholt:
Kevin, just looking at some stats we’ve certainly picked up, I think a lot of new listeners over the last couple of weeks, as people are just obviously more in tune with finances right now. Especially, if it’s a coronavirus related topic. I know we’ve got a lot of new listeners tuning into the show now and so I probably will ask you this each week, just in case it’s the first episode somebody is hearing. What do you look like operationally right now? Can you give us a quick recap of how you’re meeting with folks, how you’re helping folks? Is it in person? Is it mostly digitally right now? What’s your latest on that front?
Kevin Kroskey:
Sure. So we’ve been conducting remote meetings for more than five years as clients have migrated out of state. We are, bi-state at this point, having offices in Ohio and Florida. And so, working virtually is not a problem. We had a few of these meetings last week with clients over Zoom. You’re hearing… I never thought I would hear my 64-year-old mother say Zoom before but she did last week. And so, this is obviously going to change our culture and our lives. Not just for now but there’s going to be on a forward-looking basis. We’ll talk more about this down the road after we get through it because I think it will be some interesting conversation on those outcomes.
Kevin Kroskey:
But, we can certainly have an initial phone call. We can have a Zoom meeting. It’s real easy, you just have to go to a website, you don’t have to download anything on your computer. So we can see one another and get to see body language communication, which is so much of it and so important, as well. We had a few of those Zoom meetings last week and we’re in a relationship business. So one of the reasons why people hire us is, oftentimes because we are local. I mean, certainly, we have some clients that are out of state or some people that work with us remotely but a lot of people prefer to have somebody that’s in their backyard and that they can stop down at the office. And, we are an essential business, essential service in Ohio. So we are still open, we can maintain social distancing in the office. And, we had a few people that had Zoom meetings that do want to move forward and work with us on an ongoing basis.
Kevin Kroskey:
And frankly, two out of the two last week wanted to just pop down the office and just meet us briefly in person before they transferred over, really their life savings, over to the custodian that we use. So we don’t hold a client’s money, the custodian holds it, the custodian like Fidelity, Schwab, TD Ameritrade. We use a too big to fail bank that’s about 10 times the size of any of those. But, they hold the money and then we direct it on behalf of the client. So we’ve been doing this for a long time and we can go ahead and meet the clients or prospective clients wherever they are, to help them.
Walter Storholt:
Well again, if you want to get in touch, you can go to truewealthdesign.com or give a call to 855-TWD-PLAN. I’m curious, to end today’s show Kevin, on a lighter, funnier note. I just had the experience of all the salons and hair cut, I just call them hair cut places, that are barbers or whatever term you use to call where you go to get your hair cut. I was seriously needing a haircut and then everything closed down, so I’ve really been struggling. So we finally bit the bullet and my wife buzzed my hair this weekend. Let me tell you it, it did not turn out well. And, it looks even worse when I’m trying to do a video chat.
Walter Storholt:
So I was teaching… I’d taught my parents, speaking of Zoom, I taught my parents Zoom the other night and it only took like two minutes. They figured it out pretty fast. So that was certainly a very easy program for them to understand and poke around with. So that was great. It is a good tool to use but I’ll tell you what, the hair looked even worse in Zoom. So I’m curious since you are not shy of talking about your baldness, does it look better in person or does it start to look worse when you get on a Zoom call or a video chat? Or, does the shine help it a little bit more?
Kevin Kroskey:
You’re asking me about my bald head?
Walter Storholt:
Yeah.
Kevin Kroskey:
I couldn’t be the judge. I see it every day so it’s nothing special to me. But, yeah, you… Walter, I’m not even sure I can answer the question.
Walter Storholt:
I didn’t know if you look in the camera and go, “Oh the fisheye lens makes the baldness look like even better today.”
Kevin Kroskey:
Well, we anyway… We can help people through video if they don’t want to see a shine on a bald head or what have you. Or, we had some people that we see, frankly bring it back down on the runway here, Walter. But, we’ll show people us but sometimes they’re at home and they just don’t want to mess with their camera and get on. And, that’s fine too. We certainly again, body language is I think about half of communication. So I think it’s really important to see one another. There have actually been studies that have been done that, after you have a video meeting and people ask a week later, it has a similar effect of having an in-person meeting. So they’re not perfect, there’s still a lot to be said about getting together belly to belly.
Kevin Kroskey:
But, certainly, we have to be smart, given what we’re going through. And, we’re well equipped to do it. So we reached out to about 60 clients to schedule their progress meeting here last week and we always have an option for people to select whether they want in-person or for the web. And, we let them know, “Hey, we should probably just schedule the web and then if things change or clear up, we can get together in person.” But, just let us know what you prefer. And, I think we’ve had about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 people schedule their meetings already. And, the vast majority just picked a web meeting. So our current clients are defaulting the same thing, it’s just the reality that we’re living in right now.
Kevin Kroskey:
But, regardless of what your expertise is on Zoom, we can do a phone call, we can do Zoom, not a big deal. We’ve had our IT people actually help clients before, as well, with their own personal stuff so we can see one another. So whatever it takes, we’re here to help.
Walter Storholt:
Very cool. Well again, 855-TWD-PLAN, the number to call, or go online to truewealthdesign.com and schedule a 15-minute call with an experienced advisor on the team by clicking the Are We Right For You button. Well Kevin, thanks for the information today and the help. I hope you have a great rest of your week. Looking forward to hearing about more milestones in the Kroskey household. We have a bike rode and a tooth lost, who knows what the next week will bring for you.
Kevin Kroskey:
Yeah, we’ll see, we’ll see.
Walter Storholt:
Thanks so much for being with this and thank you for listening to today’s show. Much more coming up on the next episode so come back and join us on Retire Smarter. In the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on your favorite app so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and many other popular podcasting apps. Just search for Retire Smarter with Kevin Kroskey. Thanks for joining us. We’ll talk to you soon, right back here on the podcast. Thanks for listening.
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