Are You Still On Track With Your 2022 Financial Goals? | The Retirement Income Show

Mark Elliot: Welcome to The Retirement Income Show. I’m Mark Elliot, glad you’re with us alongside, of course, Troy Sharpe, the CEO and founder of Oak Harvest Financial Group. You can always go to the website to find out more; oakharvestfinancialgroup.com, a lot of great information there. One of the more incredible websites, a lot of information about retirement, about finances, about Troy and the great team he’s assembled, oakharvestfinancialgroup.com.

Of course, the office is located at 920 Memorial City Way, right off I-10 and Bunker Hill. If you’d like to come in and sit down with him and talk about where you are on your road to retirement, or you have some financial questions, some retirement questions, “Hey, Troy, when can I retire? Do I have enough? Will my money last as long as I do? Will my loved ones be okay if something happens to me?” Those are big, big questions, and that’s really what Troy and the team are here to help you come up with a plan.

You’re the CEO, it’s your retirement. Look at Troy and Oak Harvest as your CFO, your Chief Financial Officer, you’re the pilot, they’re the co-pilot here to help guide you. 800-822-6434 is the number, no cost, no obligation, no pressure to chat with the team. Troy will give you that number throughout the program. It’s 800-822-6434, and then, of course, over 100 videos on Troy’s YouTube channel. You just search for Oak Harvest and Troy Sharpe and you’ll find well over 100 videos, and there’ll be topics that maybe you want to learn more about, great opportunity.

Troy or Chris Perras, the Chief Investment Officer. A lot of different informational-type scenarios. There’s also the, “Hey, you’ve got X amount of dollars, you’re at this age, can you retire,” and Troy we’ll walk through all of these scenarios. It’s really fun, a lot of great opportunities for you to learn about things that you’re concerned about when it comes to your retirement on the YouTube channel. Just search Troy Sharpe, Oak Harvest.

All right, Troy, New Year’s always mean resolutions. I know you’re a guy that always plans. When you get into January of a new year, it’s really about okay, what do I need to do personally? What do I need to do for my company to make strides in whatever year it is, right? You spend a lot of time planning and getting ready for an upcoming season or upcoming year. Do you have any resolutions? Do you ever do that or is it just more about goals or planning? I don’t know, how would you say it?

Troy Sharpe: I wouldn’t say I have resolutions necessarily, but I have very specific initiatives. We set out an action plan, we set out– we’re very good at project management over here. Let’s say we’ll have three big initiatives, what I’ll do is I’ll delegate and I’ll put someone in charge of executing the or executing the action plan for those specific things, and then we’ll have check-ins and updates and hold people accountable, et cetera.

This year, for example, we’re opening up the legal side of Oak Harvest Financial Group, the tax side of Oak Harvest Financial Group. In the process of bringing those attorneys and CPAs on board now, we’ve grown tremendously. A lot of that is thanks to you, the listener, those of you that are clients, those of you who have been listening for years and plan on reaching out or maybe just happy where you are but you still tune in to listen and learn. Either way, we’ve grown a ton.

The mission from day one has always been to help as many people retire successfully with an income plan, an investment strategy that manages risk, a tax plan. Taxes are huge in retirement, if you don’t have a tax plan or a tax strategy, it’s very possible you’re leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. For some reason, most financial advisors, investment advisors, they don’t put together tax plans for their clients. I don’t see how you can be a fiduciary without having taxes at the forefront of your retirement strategy. Then also the estate planning side and that’s been our mission.

With the success of the YouTube channel, which really was inadvertently, I’d say inadvertent success, we’re bringing in dozens and dozens and dozens of clients from all across the country. Part of the mission has always been to expand it to help as many people have that income and investment and tax and estate plan to where the attorney is in the same office with the CPA, is in the same office with the investment advisor. When you do your taxes or your estate plan, or you’re talking with your financial advisor, all of those professionals are working together as well, and they all understand what’s going on. The goal is to create a synergy.

With the success that we’re having nationally, with the YouTube channel, and if you haven’t been to the YouTube channel, just go to YouTube, search Oak Harvest, and we have 130 videos out there about retirement planning, getting hundreds of thousands of views because the content is valuable to people. I’ve always had the philosophy let’s make as many deposits into people as possible, and those that decide to reach out to us, great, those that are happy in their current situation, hopefully, they can learn, talk to their advisor and apply what they’ve learned from what they’ve heard on the radio or the YouTube channel to their own situation. With the success that we’re having there, we’re starting to look at regional expansion. Our number one priority is our clients. We’ll never outgrow our ability to provide world-class service to our existing clients. That is the priority first and foremost. One of the initiatives that we have is we’re looking at a COO, people that have helped companies like ours, we look forward to what the year has. Long answer there, Mark. No, I don’t necessarily have resolutions, but I do have specific goals that we throw into a project management type funnel and set initiatives and timelines and deadlines and mechanisms to hold those accountable that are responsible for executing there. Hope that answers your question.

Mark: Okay, well, I’m going to tell you this, I’m going to try to get through the rest of the show but I’m disappointed because I was thinking I was going to be the chief operating officer taking clients to play golf every day. Just trying to build the company and make sure the clients are happy by playing golf, but I guess not. I’ll try to get through the show.

Troy: It’s not actually a bad position honestly, because we have, obviously, many of you have listened to the show, I’m a big golfer, Mark’s a plus two or three handicap, I used to coach over at K-State and that is actually not a bad role to put on the agenda, maybe not this year but maybe sometime in the future because I know I would like to be a client of the firm where there was someone specifically in charge of taking me out to golf every once in a while.

Mark: Absolutely. If you’d like to learn more about Troy and the team, I always encourage you to go to the website oakharvestfinancialgroup.com, but if you have specific things that you’re concerned about, especially starting a new year and it’s when we get excited about new things and hopefully, we’ve made it through a couple of very difficult years as far as health and all this COVID and all that stuff and there are still challenges, we certainly understand that but there’s a lot of information on the YouTube channel. Just search for Troy Sharpe and Oak Harvest and I guarantee you there’s probably going to be something there that you will want to know more about and Troy’s already done a video on it. On YouTube search for Oak Harvest and Troy Sharpe.

When you think about the old resolutions, I want to lose weight, I’m going to get out of some debt, those things. We think they’re good ideas. Certainly, I think it’s nice that we always have some optimism starting a new year, but typically by February or March, it’s no longer in play anymore. We’ve not carried through with our resolutions. You mentioned accountability when you’re doing action plans and you’ve got different people in charge of different areas and really trying to hold people accountable to make these action plans come to fruition. I would think to a degree you are your client’s accountability partner.

If you’re going to go, your goal this year is to get in better shape, you’re going to go to the gym, well, you better have somebody you go with, a friend or something like that or you work with a trainer, something that will make you accountable the mornings you get up and you don’t want to go. That’s really important I think when it comes to the financial world too, is having somebody like you and your team at Oak Harvest, Troy, to guide us along the way because nobody’s really retired before, we want to get it right the first time.
Troy: You have different types of people out there, of course, we’re all unique and we all have our own belief systems and we’ve had our own experiences. There’s a certain segment of the population that are DIYers, so Do It Yourselves investment type people. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but what I want to convey is that is just such– managing the investments really as a small part of an overall retirement plan.

Anyone who simply manages their investments without looking at the amount of taxes that they’re going to have to pay in the future because they’ve been putting money into that 401(k) or the IRA for years and years and years, they’re doing themselves a disservice because you don’t have the context of what type of domino effect is going to be triggered by simply deferring those taxes in the 401(k) forever.

Once you hit 72 and those required minimum distributions start, right around about 4%, they increase throughout retirement 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, 8.5%, 9% if you live long enough. What that does is that forces large amounts of money out of the retirement account. You have to pay income taxes on that money on top of your Social Security, on top of any rental income you have or dividends and interest in your non-IRA accounts. Many of you are completely oblivious to the fact that you’re probably going to have income in the $200,000, $250,000, $300,000 range, when you’re 82 years old, 84 years old, 86 years old, and it’s because of requirement on distributions and that’s the type of context that we need.

If I do nothing and keep going at this pace, if I average 4% or 6% or 9%, what are my account balances? What does that do to my income in the future? What does that do to my taxes? What am I doing with Social Security? How are all of those decisions integrating into one clear-cut action plan? What we do for clients, and this is my original point where I think a lot of the public’s misconception of what a good retirement advisor does, it’s not just manage the investments. Now, unfortunately, there are bad advisors in the industry and unfortunately, there are even bad firms that have bad business models, in my opinion, that it’s all about sales. It’s all about get the client, get their friends, get their family, get them into bad products, get them into things that make the advisor or make the firm more money than what the clients actually make, and that’s sad.

It’s tragic really because if those same people happen to find someone who did put their interest first, someone who built a relationship and actually put a plan together that improve their financial life, that improve their investment portfolio, that improve their tax situation, they wouldn’t feel that way, but for a lot of you out there, it’s like, what’s done is done. It’s hard to trust anyone ever again and I get that.
I deal with that on a constant basis, and for many, many years talking to families that have went through that, but what we actually do, what a good retirement advisor will do is almost a project management type role, meaning you have an initial discussion, you set out the initiatives.

This is what’s important to me, I want to reduce my risk, increase my income and reduce my taxes. Those are three of the most typical ones that we see when someone enters into retirement. How do we do those most optimally, but then again, what are the action steps that we need to take 1, 2, 3, 4? What is the process moving forward to monitor, to adjust, to review, to continue to have conversations?
Same thing when I’m doing project management for the team and our growth here at Oak Harvest Financial Group, like I said earlier, I’ll set out typically 3, 4 main initiatives for the year and then I’ll start to delegate and we’ll create a project management type funnel for those initiatives. We’ll create clear action steps for what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and then we’ll create periodic check-ins to see what is your progress, how are you doing? Where are you coming up short? Where can I support you? Then just simply having discussions about what challenges and hurdles lie ahead, which ones are we currently going through?

That is what a good retirement advisor does with a family and retirement. They understand what’s important to you, not just financially but emotionally, and what brings security to the family, what helps you sleep at night, and then we set out a very, very clear action plan. This is the steps that we will take, or these are the steps that we will take. Here’s the order, here’s the deadline, here’s the benefit, here’s the consequence, here’s the ups and downs, and have reviews to discuss the ongoing progress and what we need to do based on the economic realities, based on the market forecast, based on whatever’s out there in the world that could impact the plan that we already have in place.
We’re really project managers in the retirement income, investment risk, and tax management space, not to mention estate planning, trusts and wills and power of attorneys, and all of those documents that need to be in place for families that they bring more peace of mind and ensure that everything they’ve worked their entire lives for stays in the family and it’s protected if your child gets a divorce or if creditors come into one of the children’s future, those are all parts of the plan.

That’s what we do at Oak Harvest Financial Group, 1-800-822-6434. Give us a call if that sounds like something that you’re in new not receiving that you’d like to receive. Maybe you’ve never worked with an advisor before, maybe you have worked with an advisor before but the advisor only manages your investments. They don’t have a clear actionable plan to help you reduce taxes, increase income, reduce risk and they’re just telling you to take 4% out or 3% out and figure out the taxes on your own. That’s what we are here for. Oak Harvest Financial Group, 1-800-822-6434.

Mark: Just getting started on the program today The Retirement Income Show with Troy Sharpe, the CEO and founder of Oak Harvest Financial. We got a lot more to get to, stay with us, we’re back right after this.