Oak Harvest Retirement Process: How We Connect Retirees with Their Money in Bear Markets
We’re in a bear market, how can I withdraw my retirement income without putting my nest egg at risk? Do I have enough to retire? How can I pay fewer taxes in retirement? How can I plan for healthcare? In this video, Troy Sharpe addresses the questions you have about retiring in a bear market and keeping your retirement income safe.
Our Retirement Process:
Host: Troy, how are things at Oak Harvest?
Troy Sharpe: Things are great. Things are great. I appreciate the birthday wishes there, another successful trip around the sun, complete. Grateful for every day. Appreciate all the opportunities we have. I try to wake up with a smile on my face every morning and appreciate what we have.
Host: We aren’t guaranteed anything, that’s for sure. The people that you’re trying to- maybe, I don’t know, you go so in-depth, all your advisors go so in-depth in creating the retirement success plan for your clients. That inflation and market volatility are a part of those plans, because we know the markets just don’t go up in a straight line and they don’t go straight down either. They kind of zigzag all over the place. It’s always something, whether it’s 10 years out or 10 years ago, you’re always dealing with market volatility.
We’re dealing with inflation that we’ve never dealt with really before. We’re going to talk today about investment decisions and then withdrawing income when we are in a bear market. When the markets are down, how do you do all of that? There’s a lot of moving pieces in today’s program, and I know you just did a question-and-answer live stream. How did that go? Some great questions, I imagine.
Troy: Yes. We’ve started a monthly Q&A with myself and either another advisor here, or maybe Chris Paris from the investment team, or Jessica, co-founder here. The goal is to answer questions, to talk about relevant topics, and discuss what’s going on in the world, the financial markets, tax law, congress, everything that impacts your retirement. We’re doing a monthly live stream on YouTube. To follow this, all you have to do is go to the YouTube channel and you hit the subscribe button. You have to hit that little bell icon to be notified whenever we’re doing these, or if you send us an email, you can get on the newsletter.
We send an email out to let you know when these are taking place. When you subscribe on YouTube, there’s no cost, as you said. All it does is, if you think about your channel guide on the TV, if you have Comcast or DirecTV, you have a channel guide, and subscribing to the channel, what that does is it puts us in your channel guide. There are millions of content producers out there, but when you subscribe to a channel, it just allows you to go to your channel guide and easily find the content from the producers that you’ve viewed in the past and you enjoy and you find value.
I recommend you go to our YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube, search Oak Harvest Financial Group. You’ll find it, hit subscribe, no cost, and we’ll go on your channel guide. Every now and then you can come back and click to see what type of content we’re producing, when the live stream Q&A’s are. If you want to be notified when we upload new content, you have to hit that little bell icon. The live stream went great. Our job from day one here has been to connect people to their money. What does that mean? It’s a vague concept. It starts with having a detailed process of, how are you going to manage risk?
How are we going to build the portfolio to generate income in retirement, and then that bleeds into how are we going to pay less tax. Risk management and investment planning, income planning, and then tax planning. Those are the first three components of what we call the retirement success plan, and we’re a very structured firm. We’re a very process-oriented, so we walk every single client through this structured process, and we develop the risk management strategy, the income plan, and the tax plan.
From there, we move into the healthcare side of things, whether you’re prior to 65 or pre-65. We’re trying to reduce costs on health insurance premiums prior to Medicare, or maybe you’re after the age of 65, what is the impact of Medicare Part B, Part D, IRMAA surcharges, which is a potential tax on your Medicare premiums that can increase them thousands of dollars per year. It’s not just one year we have to be careful of, we need to be planning out into the future, because if we don’t pay attention to that tax infested retirement account, that IRA, if it continues to balloon and you’re forced to take distributions, they’re called RMDs in your 70s, that can bump you into unwanted territory in regards to higher taxes on your Medicare premiums.
Really planning that whole healthcare situation out. Long-term care flows into that as well. That’s step four of the retirement success plan, and then step five is estate planning. Now we have to work with your attorney or an attorney that can help put those legal documents together, but please I beg you, do not make the mistake that so many people have. What that is, it sounds like it’s a logical thing to do. Hey, I want a trust, let me go see an attorney. The problem with doing that, and we deal with it all the time, is that attorneys when you go see them they’ll put that trust together for you, and then they go on their way to the next client.
Now you still have to transfer assets into that trust. There may be some future responsibilities you have to deal with with that trust, but the most important thing is you need to have a financial plan that is congruent with your estate plan. I had a meeting with a client just yesterday. He said, “Yes, Troy, I’m going to go speak to an attorney. I want a revocable living trust.” I said, “Okay, why do you want a revocable living trust?” He says, “When the money goes to my daughter, I want to make sure that it is protected, and if she gets a divorce that that money won’t go to her spouse.”
All the litany of things he went through of why he wanted the revocable living trust, but then I had to tell him that the revocable living trust doesn’t do any of those things. Now, if he just went to an attorney and said, “You know what? I want a revocable living trust.” Guess what the attorney’s going to do? He’s going to charge him $4,500 or so, give or take, and give him a revocable living trust and then he’s going to go on his way. Now, the revocable living trust does have some benefits, but those benefits are during your life.
It’s a living trust. On top of that, the attorney is not going to hold your hand and make sure that you transfer the appropriate assets into that trust so you get the full benefits of it. What do you do? This is where the CFP comes in. The Certified Financial Planner professional. We are the quarterbacks of the financial planning team. Financial planning does include estate planning. Now, we’re not attorneys. We don’t draft those legal documents, but you tell us what’s important to you. We educate you about what your choices are and the pros and cons to a certain extent.
We’re not experts in legal matters, but the education is deep enough to where our job is to educate you on the pros and cons and what may make sense for you. Then a good CFP pro is going to work with you and that attorney to make sure your wishes are carried out, that the attorney is drafting the proper instruments. Some attorneys out there, you go see them, it’s like a hammer hitting a nail. Everything they see is a nail. You should get this, you should get this, you should get this. Another attorneys do it a bit differently, but we’ve worked with dozens and dozens of attorneys over the years and we’ve learned a lot, working with various law firms, on behalf of clients.
The CFP, his or her job is to make sure that your wishes are being carried out, and that you understand what the attorney is saying and what the attorney is putting in place for you to accomplish those objectives. Then once the attorney goes on their way and they’ve drafted those legal documents, there’s still work to do. Drafting legal documents is pointless if you don’t do the follow-up transferring of assets. That’s where the financial professional comes in. Once you have those legal documents, making sure you have the right ones for what you’re trying to accomplish, then we got to make sure we retitle assets, we get them in there, your beneficiary designations are correct, et cetera.
That’s what the retirement success plan is. We walk you through this in a very structured manner. Our belief is that once we have these pieces addressed, we move into the monitoring and review phase and make adjustments as needed. This is what we call optimizing your retirement. Now, many of you listening, you could probably make a lot of mistakes and still be okay with retirement, but that’s not optimizing. I am personally, I’m huge on efficiency. Someone asked me what my pet peeve is the other day, and I have a few of them once I really started thinking about it.
One of them is efficiency. I cannot stand things that are inefficient. We have a very structured efficient process here. We walk you through, and if you want to optimize retirement, if you want to optimize your income, optimize your overall tax plan, optimize your risk management, your estate plan, healthcare side of things. We’ve designed this structured process to walk you through. What you get at the end of this process is answers to those big questions that you have. Do I have enough? Can I retire? If I can retire, how much income should I withdraw?
If I withdraw that much income from which account should I withdraw that from, my IRA? My non-IRA? What is that going to do to my tax bill? How do I pay less tax in retirement? How do I make sure that I have money left over to pay health care bills, long-term care bills, assisted living, maybe chores around the house, nurses in-home? Then, after all that’s said and done and everything I’ve worked my entire life for and accumulated and then distributed, when I’m gone, how is my family going to be taken care of?
How are the people that I love most going to receive the money that I have left efficiently and in a way that protects them? That’s what the retirement success plan does. It answers those questions, puts you into a place where it’s efficient, it’s optimized. From my experience, what I find is most people then rest a bit easier at night because they know they’ve dotted the i’s. They’ve crossed the t’s. They’re working with a professional that not only has their best interests at heart, but is a specialist when it comes to these various aspects of retirement planning.
The retirement success plan process answers those big questions. Do you have enough? Can you retire? How do you pay less tax? Will your family be okay if something happens to you? If you want to start that conversation, if you want to sit down, our offices are here at I-10 and Bunker Hill, and we can do it through Zoom. We can do it in person, face to face, but you have to pick up the phone. You have to give us a call. The phone number is 1800-822-6434.
If you want to visit the YouTube channel on your own time, get familiar with who we are, the type of planning that we do, some of the more nuanced concepts of the retirement success planning process, go to YouTube. Search Oak Harvest Financial Group. Hundreds of videos out there. Get a feel for that if- maybe you’re not ready to sit down, but if retirement is upon you or your family and you want to take that next step and you want to have a retirement success plan in place for you and your family, give us a call at 1800-822-6434.
Visit the website, oakharvestfinancialgroup.com. As I said, check out the live stream Q&A that we recently did this past week on YouTube, and check out the rest of the videos while you’re there. Go to YouTube. Search Oak Harvest Financial Group.
Host: How do you make investment decisions during a bear market? How do you, if you’re retired, withdraw income from your portfolio in a down market? That’s where we’re going next. Stay with us. This is a Retirement Income Show with Troy Sharpe, the CEO and founder of Oak Harvest Financial Group. Back right after this.
Speaker 3: Investment advisory services offered through Oak Harvest Financial Group LLC. Oak Harvest Financial Group is an independent financial services firm that helps people create retirement strategies using a variety of insurance and investment products. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principle. Any references to protection benefits or lifetime income generally refer to fixed insurance products, never securities or investment products.
Insurance and annuity product guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims paying ability of the issuing insurance company. Oak Harvest Financial Group LLC is not permitted to offer and no statement made during this show shall constitute tax or legal advice. You should speak to a qualified professional before making any decisions about your personal situation. We are not affiliated with the US government or any governmental agency. This radio show is a paid placement.
