Retirement Planning Isn’t Just About Investments | It’s Tax, Estate, Healthcare & Income Planning | Retirement Planning at 61

Welcome back to the retirement income show, I’m Mark Elliott alongside the CEO and founder and certified financial planner, it’s Troy Sharpe of Oak Harvest Financial Group. Always encourage you to check out the website: oakharvestfg.com

A lot of great information there, find out more about Troy, the team, the Oak Harvest Retirement Process process, all that information is there on the website. You also, though, can search for Troy Sharpe on YouTube because he’s got over a hundred videos out there on retirement financial topics.

It’s really incredible how the YouTube channel has taken off, but you can certainly go to that, you subscribe, there’s no cost whatsoever, just search for Troy Sharpe and Oak Harvest.

We’re talking today about the complete planning approach and at Oak Harvest it’s called the Oak Harvest Retirement Process process. Starts with the investment plan, which is what most people think is their retirement plan, just the investments. No, investments are super important, and it’s why Troy starts there, but really, when it comes to retirement, it’s probably more important about your income.

Will you have income to maintain your lifestyle for as long as you live? Then it goes into tax planning with 401Ks and IRAs, tax deferred things that we have in our portfolios; we’re looking at a serious tax issue down the road when we get into retirement, so, tax planning is very important, health care, long term care, legacy, estate planning, Social Security’s in the income part, Medicare is a the health care part. A lot of moving parts.

Troy, we’ve talked about this a lot, the Oak Harvest Retirement Process process, and in last time you said, hey, if you’ve got concerns about this go to your advisor, go talk to them, see if they can give you a written income plan or written tax plan; and then if you get that satisfactory to you, then you’re good to go because you like them and they’re doing a good job for you.

If not, give us a call at 1-800-822-6434, and we’ll look at your situation.

And, Troy, you said you had some people actually take you up on that offer.

What was the result?

One of the most important things is that you have somebody you trust unequivocally. If you have someone you trust and they are trustworthy; they’ve earned your trust and they have acted in your best interest, and they are a fiduciary and they have the resources and tools available to them, the team, the support to do the very best job for you.

If you have that person, that is the most, well, I don’t want to speak in absolutes, but it’s one of the most important aspects of retirement because you don’t want to go this alone. Now, I know many people think they can go it alone.

They think it’s too expensive. I don’t want to spend a 1% fee. But trust me, it’s far more expensive to make mistakes, to take income from the wrong accounts, to not have a tax plan, to be indecisive, to allow your emotions to take control, because this is your money.

You can’t go back to work all the time. When people come in, they say, Troy, I got out before the presidential election. You know, I didn’t want to pay 1% for someone to manage my assets. Well, we didn’t have a single client get out before the election when Joe Biden was going to be elected, even though many people wanted to, because we sat down and we explained why you should stay invested. Historically, we provided the context to help people understand that the odds are very good that the market will continue to rise after the election, no matter if President Trump wins or Biden wins.

And we anticipated somewhere between a 25 to 30% upside. So, someone who is trying to go it alone and they think politics has a massive impact on the market, they get out, they’ve cost themselves, if it’s a million dollar account, maybe two hundred thousand three hundred thousand dollars.

That’s twenty years worth of fees, and that’s one decision. OK, if it’s a two or three million dollar account, goodness, that’s more than a lifetime’s worth of fees that a good trusted financial adviser could have saved with just that one part.

Now, if you have that person (a trusted advisor,) and that is one of the most important things. I want you to go to that person and I want you to say, “Hey, I’m concerned about taxes. What are we going to do for taxes with my retirement now?”

If they can put a tax plan together and show you why it makes sense to to either convert to a Roth or not convert to a Roth, or to take X amount of dollars from your IRA, X amount from your non qualified or your non IRA accounts, mix conversions into their charitable contributions, charitable planning; if they can show you all that, and quantify the benefit from making certain decisions versus others. That is a tax plan. OK, and if you trust that person, you absolutely should stay with them; don’t give us a call. Or, you can give us a call if you want to.

But you found someone. It seems like you’re probably in a pretty good position. You also need an income plan, and like I said, the rest of Oak Harvest Retirement Process is the health care and the estate plan. So, I want you to go and I want you to ask, “Look, I need to know, I have all this money in

my IRA, I have all this money in my non IRA, I want to get money over to my Roth, but I’m not sure if I should do that, should I go up to the 10% to 12%, the 20 to 24% tax bracket? Should I even do bigger conversions? I want those questions answered.”

Go to your person and see if you can get that done. If they aren’t able to get that done or if they drag it out, or if they don’t get back to you, or if they say, you know, this excuse, that excuse, it’s probably not the right person to help you get through retirement. It’s just probably not. They don’t have the time. They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the team, the planning approach, the experience, whatever it may be, they probably don’t have it.

That’s why I want you to give us a call. Come, go through the Oak Harvest Retirement Process process. I was explaining that to somebody recently, and sure enough, they called their advisor and they asked for a meeting to go through taxes and retirement. And they said, “Look, I want a retirement plan. I want to know what the next five and 10 years look like when it comes to my investments, my income, where am I going to take income from and also my taxes.”

So the advisor says, great, no problem. Give us a couple of weeks, give us time to put it together. And, they go see them after a couple of weeks go by. They get the meeting scheduled and the entire meeting was spent talking about how the investment allocation will change from their current asset allocation, which was about 60% stocks, 40% bonds to 25% stocks, 75% bonds. And then the income plan that they came up with and, [you can’t make this stuff up,] was to continue exactly what they’re doing, take 4%. They couldn’t tell them which account to take it from. Take 4%, and then once required minimum distributions start, we’ll see where you’re at at that time, meaning how much have your accounts grown, your distribution percentage?

How much are you forced to take out? How much does that cover your income need, and then we’ll take the rest from your bank money. Now, I do this every single day, so I know that is the common advice given in this country, and I also know for the majority of you, it’s the absolute wrong advice to be given. So, once they went through that, they asked them [their current advisor], OK, what about the tax plan? What should we do here and here’s the advice they were given: “Well, if you want to do some Roth conversions, you know, you can do that. You should probably go talk to your CPA.” So, you know, that didn’t cut it for these people, so they called us and they came and saw us and we went through our process. It’s our Oak Harvest Retirement Process process. We’d already gathered all the information, the objective data that the subject of data understood what was important. This guy’s name was John, we understood what was important to John. And John told me, he looked me straight in the eye and he said, “Troy, the most important thing to me is that if something happens to me that my spouse is taken care of, I don’t want to worry. I don’t want her to worry. I want to make sure that we are 100% taken care of if something should happen to me.” So, we understood who they were and what was important to them.

So when John comes back, he brings the wife. We sit down and we start to go through all the analysis that our planning team had done in the interim, while, they were going through that process with their current advisor.

And when you walk into our building here, we’re at 920, Memorial City way, got a security guard up front. Twenty four hour security, marble floors, beautiful, beautiful building. You walk to the back left hand corner of the first floor and you’ll see our name all across the glass windows there.

It’s a really, really pretty office. You come in, sit down at the conference room table and Nancy gets everyone a cup of coffee or tea or water or whatever it is that they may need or want. And then we start to go through that analysis.

And as we go through that analysis, we’re starting to show, John, what it looks like to be a client. So, we go through when he should take Social Security, why he should take Social Security at that time in conjunction with taking income from the IRAs and also from the non-qualified account.

We showed specifically in times, in years. “Now, keep in mind that this is fluid. It can change, it absolutely can change, but as of now, this is where we wanted the income to come from and this is why we want the income to come from here, John.”

And then we said this is why we want to do these Roth conversions, because when our tax team did the analysis, there was over $800,000 in potential savings by doing this conversion strategy, according to this method, this way.

1-800-822-6434. We’re going to pick this up on the other side of the break. Continue telling you the story. Give us a call.

We’ll sit down, go through the Oak Harvest Retirement Process process. OakHarvestFinancialGroup.com, 1-800-822-6434.

So the question is, when you’re listening to Troy talk about the complete planning approach that Oak Harvest uses for their clients, and it’s in conjunction with you retiring, you’re the CEO of your retirement, Oak Harvest Group is basically your chief financial officer.

They do this day in and day out. You’ve never retired before. They understand because they’ve helped a lot of people retire. So, running you through the complete retirement planning approach, the Oak Harvest Retirement Process process, the investment plan, the income plan, the tax plan, the health plan, the estate plan, it all goes together and it’s all tied together.

So we’re going to hear the end of that story. What happened to John and his wife when they came and talked to Troy and the team at Oak Harvest. We’re going to hear that when we come back.

This is the retirement income show. Troy Sharpe, the CEO and founder of Oak Harvest Financial Group.