Listen Now:
The Smart Take:
On this episode, we dive into real-life scenarios to gain insight into crafting a successful and early retirement plan. Hear Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP®, dissect a client’s journey of retiring in their late 50s. Exploring the intricacies of their tax-smart distribution plan to fund their retirement lifestyle and obtained significant tax credits to offset their pre-Medicare healthcare costs.
Here’s some of what we discuss in this episode:
- Background on a real-life scenario with a family we met a few years ago.
- What we learned about the challenges to their retirement, which included healthcare.
- The different healthcare decisions to choose from and the costs most aren’t prepared for.
- Places you can trip up with healthcare.
- How we approach the distribution planning.
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The Hosts:
Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA – About – Contact
Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP® – About – Contact
Episode Transcript:
Tyler Emrick:
Today on Retire Smarter, we dive into real-life scenarios and gain insights into crafting a successful retirement plan. I’ll dissect a client’s journey, exploring the intricacies of early retirement, healthcare decisions, and tax-smart distribution strategies. Coming up today on Retire Smarter.
Walter Storholt:
Hey, welcome to another edition of Retire Smarter. Walter Storholt here with you alongside Tyler Emrick, Wealth advisor, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER, and chartered financial analyst at True Wealth Design. Got a great show on the way today. Always love it when Tyler’s able to share some stories with us about clients who have gone through a particular planning scenario. And we usually drop a few of those in each and every episode. But today, Tyler, you’re giving us a tree. We’re really truly, you said dissect in your intro. We’re going to dissect somebody’s financial situation and their plan and really dive into the nitty and gritty over the entire episode. This should be a lot of fun.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, no, excited. It seems to be common feedback from the listeners. They like the stories, see how it applies to their specific situation. So we’ll see if I can give a few good tidbits today.
Walter Storholt:
That’s a great point because even if something in today’s story you listen to and you hear, folks, and you’re like, “Well, I don’t have that, I don’t go through that situation,” the point isn’t to try and match this up with your exact scenario, but hopefully you can put yourself in the folks’ shoes that we’re going to be talking about today and kind of see how the planning process would work if you were to come in and go over your specifics. So sort of our goal of the show today. So looking forward to that. Tyler, before we dive into all of that, is everything else going well in your life?
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, everything’s going well. I made it through a trick-or-treat-
Walter Storholt:
That’s right.
Tyler Emrick:
With my two little girls. So even though it did snow on us-
Walter Storholt:
It did.
Tyler Emrick:
… here in Northeast Ohio, so it was a bit chilly, kind of cut us short a bit. And then for whatever reason, my two little girls, again, I don’t don’t know if I should say this or not, but Applebee’s is their favorite restaurant ever for whatever reason.
Walter Storholt:
Oh my gosh, it was mine when I was a kid. I loved Applebee’s. Yeah.
Tyler Emrick:
I was like, “Yeah, it’s not maybe my favorite. But boy, they love it.” And so when you got two little ones after they’re put in the car seat and you look back and they’re going, “Applebee’s, Applebee’s, Applebee’s, Applebee’s.”
Walter Storholt:
Oh my gosh, that’s crazy.
Tyler Emrick:
It’s kind of hard not to slide in. So we did get some Applebee’s afterward and warmed up a bit.
Walter Storholt:
So you were eating good in the neighborhood.
Tyler Emrick:
That’s right. That’s their time. That is, so hopefully-
Walter Storholt:
That is so funny. Applebee’s was my favorite place growing up, and I will tell you, I probably haven’t been to an Applebee’s in a decade.
Tyler Emrick:
Me honestly, before these two little girls, they went one time with a family member. And boy, after that, they were hooked. I don’t know what it was, but yeah [inaudible 00:02:48].
Walter Storholt:
That is so funny. What’s the thing to get at Applebee’s? I’m going to find when I go to it over the next couple of weeks.
Tyler Emrick:
It’s not exciting. Chicken and broccoli.
Walter Storholt:
Chicken and broccoli, all right.
Tyler Emrick:
And the different honey mustard sauce, I guess, which I don’t know if that’s super healthy, but-
Walter Storholt:
Oh, gosh. Well yeah, that spices broccoli a little bit. I feel like that whole type of chain between Applebee’s and Chili’s, and I don’t know, just similar, maybe a Ruby Tuesday, they kind of have that similar vibe. I used to go to them all the time and now just over the last several years, just don’t know why we just never go to those places anymore.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. So yeah.
Walter Storholt:
That’s funny.
Tyler Emrick:
But other than that, yeah. And then we got the holidays coming up, so hopefully good Thanksgiving and all that stuff. And yeah, just wind down for the end of the year here.
Walter Storholt:
Very cool. Yeah, will you guys be hosting this year or letting somebody else do all the cooking?
Tyler Emrick:
Actually, we’ll be doing some cooking, so I think we’re going to do a little bit of hosting for Thanksgiving. I’ll have to let everybody know how it goes. We’ll see.
Walter Storholt:
Yeah. Are you going to try to think out of the ordinary or going to try and stick with the traditional basics?
Tyler Emrick:
If we can knock out the basics, we’ll be good enough.
Walter Storholt:
Not a bad deal.
Tyler Emrick:
I wouldn’t call us the best cooks in the house, so we’ll see how it all turns out. We’ll get through it.
Walter Storholt:
Nice. Very cool.
Tyler Emrick:
How about you?
Walter Storholt:
Yeah, we’re going to probably do a little hosting on Thanksgiving since we don’t have a lot of family nearby and we’re going to be heading back East for some Christmas festivities a couple of weeks later. So we’re going to do the Friendsgiving thing. We know of a few other folks who don’t have a lot of family members close by, but we’re not going to do Friendsgiving on a separate date. We’re just going to do it on Thanksgiving.
Tyler Emrick:
Nice.
Walter Storholt:
And so we’ll still have a nice traditional Thanksgiving gathering, but just do it with the friends that are kind of in the same boat as we are. So that should be fun. That’ll be the first time we’ve ever really kind of done that sort of deal.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, I’m sure all the listeners are getting prepped for their end-of-year stuff as well and the holiday season, but yeah.
Walter Storholt:
I’m debating whether to try my duck or not or just stick with the turkey.
Tyler Emrick:
Oh, you’re way far out there than me. Turkey and maybe buying a Honey Baked Ham are probably as far as we’ll get. So yeah.
Walter Storholt:
Very good. That’s not a bad deal. A friend of ours is being gifted three different pies, and so they were like, “I don’t want to eat all this pie on my own, so we’re just going to bring all three pies to the Thanksgiving gathering.” So I was like, “Perfect.” So dessert is taken care of, they don’t even have to cook it, we don’t. They’ve been gifted, their realtor and I think maybe their financial advisor and somebody else gives out pies every Thanksgiving and so they’re like, “We got pies taken care of.”
Tyler Emrick:
“We got them all.” Nice, good jumpstart.
Walter Storholt:
Yeah, good jumpstart.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah.
Walter Storholt:
All right, well let’s dive in here, Tyler, and get to this great story. Tell us all about these folks who came in to meet with you.
Tyler Emrick:
You got it. And let me set them up a little bit. As I think back, I’ve been working with the family now for about a handful of years, and he had been in IT for most of his career and she had been in the healthcare field, which is definitely not uncommon for a lot of the families here in Northeast Ohio. A lot of healthcare professionals that we work with. They raised a family, had a few kids, and as I think most families, you get to a point where you’re starting to look at those retirement accounts and kind of wake up one day and go, “Oh my, wow, that’s a good balance in there. Do we have enough? Hey, could we actually pull the plug here and actually dive into retirement?”
And they were really starting to think through that and see if they were going to get to that point. And they actually signed up to go to one of our retirement workshops that we put on, two-day course, kind of talks through a lot of high-level decisions and transition points and challenges that face retirees, we put it on at the local university here, and they had attended that class and at the end of the class wanted to have a more, I guess, intimate sit-down meeting to talk through their situation a little bit more, in a little bit more detail.
They were in their late 50s, early 60s, which I think poses some unique challenges that I think will be good for us to touch on here as we kind of progress here through the podcast. But that first meeting when we sat down together was very similar to a lot of the first meetings I had with families. And it was really just a lot of listening on my end and trying to understand and think through and hear what they had to say about where they were at in their life and what goals and what they were trying to accomplish as they started to look out over the next 10, 15, 20 years.
And I’ll never forget he was sitting there, it was almost like two different views of retirement almost. He was very much an avid traveler, loved to travel, and he’s like, “Hey, I want to make sure I’m okay in the long run, but I want to spend as much as I can and get as much out of this travel gig in retirement. I don’t want to give it up just because I’m not working. So I want to make sure that whatever we do, if we pull the plug and we jump into retirement, that we don’t have to give up some of all that traveling that we had become accustomed to and that we enjoy so much.”
And then from her perspective, it was a little different, maybe a little bit more conservative, a little bit more hesitant about just the transition at all. And a lot of comments like, “I don’t know, we probably don’t have enough to go. We’re only in our late 50s, don’t we have to work till 65 or even later?” So much more of conservative conversations around, “Hey, I don’t even think we’re close to go,” from the wife. Which again, I don’t think that’s too uncommon at all when you get down there and have an opportunity to have the spouses both paint that picture of what retirement looks like and kind of [inaudible 00:08:34] those concerns.
Walter Storholt:
One’s got their foot on the gas, the other’s hovering over the brake a little bit.
Tyler Emrick:
Right. And I want to explore today that some of those unique challenges of someone wanting to go early in retirement, as I mentioned with her, a big thing on her mind was, “Hey, do we even have enough?” And then two, “What are we going to do for healthcare?” Which I get that a lot, especially with individuals who want to go before 65. And you know why 65 is a big one, right, Wal?
Walter Storholt:
Full retirement age? Oh, Medicare.
Tyler Emrick:
Medicare, you nailed it. Good job. Yep. So Medicare. So it’s like, “Well, what the heck are we going to do for healthcare before age 65?” [inaudible 00:09:19].
Walter Storholt:
Yeah. And even if you retire at 62, you’re still waiting on that Medicare deal to come through.
Tyler Emrick:
But a little bit closer. As we think about these, I want to dive in a little bit more into just these two things. One, healthcare and what options were afforded to them and how they navigated that concern. And then two, let’s get into a little bit of that distribution strategy and thinking through how they made it work and how they were able to actually be retired now for the last couple years. So again, healthcare and living off our money and how do we make that work and make it come to life.
Walter Storholt:
Okay, perfect. So how did those options start to come together?
Tyler Emrick:
Sure, you got it. So as you think about healthcare, just to give a high-level overview of, well, what options are out there for individuals as they think about healthcare? And I think the big one that comes to mind for most families is COBRA coverage, which is essentially something that’s available to you when you leave your employer. You’re able to maintain that COBRA coverage for a period of time after you leave your employer. Now, there are a few quirks around that time period, but for most families, you’re eligible to maintain COBRA coverage for 18 months after you leave.
And that COBRA coverage is the exact same healthcare, in most cases, as that you had through your employer with one key difference, that you actually now have to pay upwards of 102% of what that healthcare costs. So a lot of individuals might look at your pay stub and go, “Ooh, this is what I’m paying for healthcare. That doesn’t seem too bad.” But you got to keep in mind that a lot of times your employer is paying a nice healthy chunk of that as well. And of course, once you do go on to COBRA and you’re no longer working for your employer, well, the employer is not required to maintain their part of the pie, so you got to make up theirs as well. So for a lot of families, that COBRA coverage is quite expensive. Have you ever had to do anything with COBRA before, Wal, on a job transition or had any family members that have done it?
Walter Storholt:
Yeah, I remember most specifically when we moved to Colorado last year, and Connie ended her job kind of looking at our healthcare options while we knew she wasn’t going to be working for a period of time during that transition. And I remember looking at seeing how expensive COBRA was, and I was like, “This is insanity.”
Tyler Emrick:
I looked back through my notes and for this family, their COBRA payment was about $1,800 a month.
Walter Storholt:
Oh my gosh.
Tyler Emrick:
And that was just for the two of them.
Walter Storholt:
Insane.
Tyler Emrick:
So it can be quite pricey for them. So then we start looking at saying, “Okay, well, we’re looking at those numbers and that’s not really doable. What other options do we have?” And there are a host of other options. I’m not going to dive into all of them, but I’ll rattle off a couple. I mean, if you’re going to be working as a consultant, you might be able to get a small business healthcare plan. There are short-term medical plans, private plans. There’s even what’s called faith-based healthcare plans where a lot of people can get them through their church and there’s a required membership. So there are a handful of options that are out there, maybe even more than what most people realize, that if you meet one of those unique circumstances, you might be able to jump on and take advantage of these types of plans for a period of time.
But again, I’m not going to dive into those. I want to talk more about the one that is available to all families and what most individuals are going to maybe settle on or have as an alternative to COBRA. And that’s what we call individual healthcare plans or Obamacare, or maybe you’ve heard of them as Affordable Care Act plans or ACA. There’s a whole host of terminology [inaudible 00:12:56].
Walter Storholt:
It’s always nice when they give us 85 names to go by to reference something, isn’t it?
Tyler Emrick:
Yes, that’s right. But I’ll call them ACA plans today, probably through the rest of my terminology as I go through. And again, we just think of that as individual healthcare plans that are available to you.
Walter Storholt:
This is where we’re hitting the marketplace that was created, gosh, has that been a decade or-
Tyler Emrick:
Oh, Obamacare. So it’s been a while. I don’t know if it’s quite been a decade.
Walter Storholt:
Not quite a decade?
Tyler Emrick:
Don’t hold me to that, but maybe it has been.
Walter Storholt:
It’s getting close to it.
Tyler Emrick:
It’s been a while. Yeah, it has been. Well, I guess, yeah, it probably has been. But as you look at the marketplace, I think there’s a lot of maybe misconceptions on how that works. So I want to peel back the onion on it a bit because I think understanding the details on it, well, it might open up a lot of listeners’ eyes as to, “Hey, this might be a possibility for us.”
Walter Storholt:
Before you do, Tyler, I fact-checked this. 2010, believe it or not.
Tyler Emrick:
Longer than a decade.
Walter Storholt:
Longer than a decade. The first plan was March 23rd, 2010.
Tyler Emrick:
Man. Well, see, there we go. Over a decade now.
Walter Storholt:
Time is moving even faster than we had hoped or even our worst fears.
Tyler Emrick:
Or realized.
Walter Storholt:
That’s right.
Tyler Emrick:
So as you think about those plans, they are very specific to your local area. A lot of times you would go on healthcare.gov and run a search based off of your ZIP code to see what type of plans are available to you in the area. But what a lot of individuals might not know is that the government steps in and provides a lot of help in the form of what they call premium subsidies to certain families. And the amount of that premium subsidy is very dependent on the amount of income that hits your tax return, specifically modified, adjusted to gross income is the number that they look at.
So here in Ohio, you’re able to get potentially here in 2024, upwards of almost a little over $20,000 for a couple a year in healthcare subsidies. And the way those subsidies are applied is they lower your monthly premium. So you think about that almost a little over $20,000 in subsidies available. And what’s that break down to? Maybe a little bit over $1,700 a month. So there could be a scenario there where your entire healthcare premiums for the individual healthcare plan are pretty much wiped out and are zero per month depending on how much of these subsidies you’re able to pick up and how you’re able to do it.
So when we look back on this family specifically, they’ve been actually on these individual healthcare plans for the last two years, and they’ve picked up almost $30,000 of tax subsidies over those two years. So almost a little under $15,000 per year, and essentially wiping out their healthcare premium to where they did not have a monthly premium. So you compare that to their option on COBRA, which was the same healthcare that they had while working, close to $2,000 a month, but the last two years on an ACA plan, their premium has been zero per month. It’s a pretty hefty difference.
Walter Storholt:
Yeah, that’s significant, especially when you see a pile up over a couple of years like that.
Tyler Emrick:
Absolutely. Now, there’s a lot of places that can trip you up here, so we want to be careful. I think the first one is that overall plan selection. I made a comment earlier that it’s very dependent on your ZIP code and where you live, so you want to make sure that you’re looking at what plans are afforded to you in your area, what the deductibles are, what the out-of-pockets are, are your healthcare professionals in network, and are you going to be able to get access to what you’re looking for at a reasonable deductible and max out of pocket?
Some of those plans can be paired with a health savings account. There’s some opportunities to when you actually fill out the form and apply for the plans, you have to actually tell them how much your income is going to be. That’s how they pre-calculate that tax subsidy and tell you how much your actual healthcare premium would be. So there is some strategies there where you can actually take advantage of and pick up a little bit of extra money when you file your return. And then you also have to have a very, very good understanding of, “Well, what is income?” And what is the appropriate number for you to put in there so that way you can judge how much money that you’re going to get from the government.
Now, from a timely standpoint, we’re really kind of right in the thick of it now because this open enrollment for these individual healthcare plans to start in January 2024 is actually right now, kind of runs through December 15th. So there’s a lot of work being done right now for families that are looking to retire at the end of this year, kind of weighing their options on, “Hey, what plan options are going to be available to me? And are one of these ACA plans going to be in my best interest as we kind of start that January 1st, 2024 date?”
Walter Storholt:
It helps to kind of see how these different moving pieces can come together to help a retiree or somebody trying to plan for that retirement. But already, I mean, we’ve only hit this healthcare side of the equation. I know you’ve got more to dive into here, Tyler, you can see just retiring early just creates all sorts of extra little layers of challenges.
Tyler Emrick:
Challenges and even opportunities, because as you think about it, I look at it as an opportunity for them to pick up and kind of make that retirement work where it wouldn’t even in their mind didn’t even think that it would be possible to get a reasonable healthcare plan at a reasonable cost. And when you kind of peel back the onion and get down into the nitty-gritty and the weeds, well, it could be possible. Some of the listeners might be thinking through this and going, “Well, okay, that’s great. We can pick up these healthcare subsidies. It can save us a few bucks on our healthcare premiums, but we have to keep our income very, very low to pick up that free money?”
And that’s a very good observation if you’re asking yourself that. So this other piece of the pie that I want to talk about here is their distribution planning and how we made that work. Healthcare is a big piece, very important. But obviously understanding that distribution plan is what makes it all work. So as we think about distribution planning for them, one of the first places we had to start is we had to have a very good understanding of, “Well, what spending are we going to have over the next 2, 3, 4 years here and how much money are we going to have to get to live off of?”
Because remember, they’re in their early 60s. They can’t start social security until 62. And likely in most cases, we recommend deferring that later anyway. But yet again, we got to manage and try to pick up as much of those tax subsidies as we can. So starting with, “Hey, what do we need?” And I go back to this family situation again in that very first meeting. We’re sitting in there and he said, “Hey, I want to retire, but I want to travel. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to retire just to not be able to do what we want to and live a life that we’ve, again, become accustomed to.”
So that spending and working through that and having an understanding of, “All right, hey, what do we need over the next few years?” Allowed us to start thinking through that and then starting to solve for that problem of, “Where is our money going to come from?” Because a lot of people would think about this and go, “Well, if you just pull it up and set a distribution out of your pre-tax retirement account and pulled out enough to get almost $100,000 dollars per year, well, you’re looking at paying taxes on that money of, oh boy, maybe $10K a year, somewhere right around there.” And then you’re also looking at saying, “Well, that’s not super efficient because then, well, that’s going to lower the amount of tax subsidy that we get from the healthcare standpoint because our income’s going to slowly start to get higher and higher and higher.”
So with them, what we decided on and what was a solution is they actually had a very, very unique opportunity afforded to them where he had actually had some stock inside of his 401(k) that he had had for a number of years that appreciated significantly in value. So we were able to take advantage of a unique tax strategy called Net Unrealized Depreciation, where we were able to take a large distribution from his 401(k) account and only pay taxes on a fraction of the amount, which afforded them the ability to dump that money than in just a normal trading account or a taxable brokerage account that they could live off of very tax efficiently over the next few years, still get them the money that they need to live off of, and then maximize that healthcare tax subsidy and minimize the amount of taxes.
I look back on their tax return over the last couple of years, and again, they’ve paid almost nothing in federal taxes for the last two years, but again, have still gotten that money to live off of and picked up almost $15,000 a year, so $30,000 in total in healthcare tax subsidies, which minimize that healthcare premium for them. So a lot of moving parts there, but as I kind of think about this story and their specific situation, I kind of look at it and go, “Wow, if we weren’t taking a look at their entire financial picture, we probably wouldn’t have been able to accomplish and build the strategy the way that we did.” We had to understand, “Well, what healthcare plan options were available to them? Are they going to work? Are their doctors in network?”
All right, two, well, to make that work, we have to have a distribution plan that minimizes their taxes. What opportunities do we have and accounts do we have to pull from? So there’s quite a bit of retirement and distribution planning there. And then three, well, that Net Unrealized Appreciation, that’s a pretty big tax strategy that we were able to take advantage of. So we had to have a very good understanding of their health situation, their retirement plan and their distribution strategy, and then taxes and kind of marry that all together to come up with what the best solution for them would be.
And I think that just really reiterates the value of, well, if you’re listening and you’re sitting there asking yourself, “Well, does my healthcare professional talk to my CPA, who talks to my financial advisor and my investment advisor? And how efficient is that communication between those professionals?” Because if it’s lacking, having someone that’s centralized to be able to do it and have an understanding of all those, really this, I think the story kind of reiterates the value of that.
Walter Storholt:
I talked about challenges, you talked about opportunities, and then it makes it very obvious when those things aren’t coordinated, the challenges don’t go away, but the opportunities certainly do if that communication’s not happening between all those different people and you don’t have somebody quarterbacking the situation.
Tyler Emrick:
That’s right. And again, some listeners might be thinking back and saying, “Okay, well, hey, to make their situation work, they took advantage of this unique opportunity, Net Unrealized Appreciation. I don’t have company stock in my 401(k). Well, what should I pay attention to or what should be the opportunities where I can make a similar strategy work? And I’ll kind of piggyback off of, I was working on a plan with another advisor here in the office and we were kind building a similar strategy for them. They wanted to retire a little early. I think they were in their early 60s. So very, very similar to the family we just got done kind of walking through, but they did not have that unique opportunity.
So as we looked at their situation, we put a lot of focus on where is your money going and what do you need in those first few years of retirement? And when we were talking through their situation, they were very charitable-inclined. So they were having a hefty portion each year going to their church, which is not uncommon at all. And we looked at that and said, “Well, is there a way that we can kind of get the money that you need for gifting so that way we don’t have to go into your retirement account, pull it out, have that be taxable to you?” And then again, again, a similar situation as the family before. So healthcare is big for them, we’re still looking at individual healthcare plans where that taxable or that income matters because the higher it is, the less money we get in subsidies.
We were able to look at their gifting and say, “Hey, can we front-load some of that gifting?” We used a donor-advised fund to be able to do that. So that way you have an account or a pot of money that you can pull from that wouldn’t hit your tax return over the next few years, but eliminate a pretty hefty expense that you are going to need early in retirement and thus not have to pull it from other retirement accounts and make it be taxable.
Likewise, I don’t know how many listeners are using an HSA, I feel like I try to say HSA on every podcast that we do, because I love that type of account, but for that family, we had been recommending an HSA plan and they had had a sizable amount of money that was built up in there that we were able to then say, “All right, hey, we got this HSA account now. We’re going to be able to minimize your healthcare premiums, but you’re still going to have deductibles. You still might have some out-of-pockets, some copays that you’re going to have to pay.”
We were able to then say, “All right. Well, that expense is going to be covered from your HSA account because we can pull money from there. It’s not taxable, it doesn’t add to your income.” And we’re starting to, in their situation, again, eliminate some of those big expenses. So their expected healthcare spending was down a bit because we had the HSA to be able to help pay those expenses that were coming out. And then the big gifting that they wanted to continue to do was already pre-funded. And then the last thing that we looked at in their situation, we did two sizable Roth conversions over the last few years where we were able to pay taxes on the money, get it into an account that grew tax-free, and start to build a pot that we can pull from in that Roth account that we can utilize and withdraw from, that would be tax-free. That again, maximizes that healthcare tax credit because those distributions aren’t taxable to them.
But that was, well, something we’ve been doing for the last two years for them. So there’s definitely a lot of planning involved, but you can still make it work. You just got to plan for it, and there might be things that you do first couple years before you actually pull the trigger and retire to start positioning money in accounts to where you can efficiently pull them out and manage that income a little bit lower and make that healthcare concern and turn it into something that’s not as much of a concern and something that’s realistic for you to be able to do.
And all in all, we’re doing this so that way you’re able to retire and live the life that you want. So in their situation, which I want to reiterate, I think I mentioned it a little bit with the story that we had talked about, but for this family too, it’s not like we had to keep their income down to zero. They were still spending a significant or a sizable amount of money each year because they didn’t want to give up that spending. But again, we just had to have the foresight to look at their situation and position those assets and put the plan in place for them to be able to work it those first few years of retirement before and this situation before he had actually hit 65 here in the next couple of years.
So it definitely can work. Every family situation is different. So us as financial advisors, it’s extremely important that we take the time to understand what’s your situation, what are you trying to accomplish. Where have you saved your money? And what are the things that we need to do now to put you in a position to be able to say, “Hey, I can make this early retirement work”? And some of these challenges that a lot of people would think that would stop them from retiring early, healthcare, not having money to pull from because they’re not taking their social security. We can work around those and make it work from a financial standpoint.
Walter Storholt:
Well, if you ever wanted to know how the planning process really plays out in real life, well, there you have an example and a half of one, I think. So one and a half ways to kind of understand just what it’s like to go through true planning. I mean, really true planning, not just picking out a product or even one strategy, but integrating all of those different moving parts, retirement, taxes, distribution thoughts, healthcare, that’s just scratching the surface too on the story as well, but really shows you the level of thinking and detail that goes into everybody’s plan when they come in and meet with the team at True Wealth Design.
So if you would like to go through your own planning process, the way that it starts is with a simple phone call or a simple scheduling of an online meeting or have a conversation, see if you’d be a good fit to work with the planning team at True Wealth Design, here’s how you can set that up. You go to truewealthdesign.com, click on the, “Are We Right for You?” Button. Pretty simple and easy to do that. You’ll schedule a 15-minute call with the team and they’ll talk about your goals and what’s going to help, maybe see whether you’ll be a good fit to work with one another or not. And then it’s just basically an information-gathering meeting, and then they’ll take it from there.
Or you can call 855-TWD-PLAN if you want to engage in conversation that way. 855-TWD-PLAN. You can talk to Tyler, Kevin Kroskey, and the great team at True Wealth Design. Tyler, thanks for breaking down these great stories for us on the show today. Really enjoyed the level of detail. We’ll have to do some more of these over time as well. I know it takes you a lot of prep to put these together to talk to us about all these intricacies, so appreciate the extra mile that you go through to come up with great content like this.
Tyler Emrick:
You got it. Always a pleasure.
Walter Storholt:
All right. Hey, enjoy your Thanksgiving, my friend. Hope everything turns out and the turkey’s not dry and everything is a hunky-dory for you. And we’ll be chatting with you, I think a week after Thanksgiving will be our next episode.
Tyler Emrick:
Sounds good.
Walter Storholt:
All right, very good. That’s Tyler Emrick and Walter Storholt. Thanks for joining us, folks. We’ll see you next time right back here on Retire Smarter.
Speaker 3:
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