Stop Guessing: Let’s Plan Your Retirement in Advance!

2.20.26: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

2.20.26: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Any examples used are for illustrative purposes only, and do not take into account your particular investment objectives, financial situation or needs and may not be suitable for all investors. It is not intended to predict the performance of any specific investment, and is not a solicitation or recommendation of any investment strategy. Any examples used are for illustrative purposes only, and do not take into account your particular investment objectives, financial situation or needs and may not be suitable for all investors. It is not intended to predict the performance of any specific investment, and is not a solicitation or recommendation of any investment strategy.

Speaker2:
Welcome to Retirement Results, the national radio show and podcast for listeners like you who want to protect and grow their hard earned money in a world filled with so much uncertainty and financial risk. We seek to cut through the noise and build successful plans for hard working Americans on their road to financial freedom. Retirement results is powered by Active Wealth management a team of fiduciary advisors who always place your needs first and now your host. He's a registered social security analyst, member of the Forbes Finance Council, and author of multiple books on retirement planning. Here's your chief financial advisor, Ford Stokes.

Speaker3:
And welcome to retirement results. I'm Ford Stokes, your chief financial advisor. Got Sam Davis, our senior financial advisor and co-host with us here on retirement results. And thanks so much for making us one of the most successful financial radio show podcasts on the internet, especially with YouTube. And thanks so much. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and also listen to the podcast wherever you get podcasts. Just retirement results. You can search for it. Our goal is to help you build a tax efficient, fee efficient and market efficient portfolio for you for that long term success for your retirement. And today we're talking about how to see retirement results actually in advance. You actually can do that. And we're going to help, you know, pre-retirees and retirees out there implement a better plan for each and every one of you. Um, let's get started. Sam, why don't you go ahead and talk about, first of all, our quote of the week.

Speaker4:
And now Folsom Financial Wisdom. It's time for the quote of the week.

Speaker5:
This week's quote of the week. We've got one from Benjamin Franklin and then Ford. You've got one to share as well. And Ben Franklin was a man who lived, uh, in our founding years of, of this country's history. And he took a lot of ships across the Atlantic Ocean in his time. And he once said, beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship. And I think this is a great quote any time of the year. Uh, I think it's especially appropriate this time of year when people are starting to look into taxes and getting that preparation together, taking a look at their expenses following the holidays. Maybe a little bit of holiday hangover on some of those credit card statements. But it's true. You want to be aware of those little expenses, because little expenses add up to a big expense, and we want to keep expenses low for you, especially if you're trying to last for a 30 or 40 year retirement.

Speaker3:
Yeah, one one specific point on little expenses. Make sure your money is not just there just to pay the bills. You really that money needs to be there to be able to save and pay yourself first. So let's try to do that. And from one of my favorite historical figures, I wasn't alive when he was alive. But, um, Winston Churchill said, let our advanced worrying become advanced thinking and planning, and I agree. Let's let's try to help you. If you're worried about your current retirement plan, you want to do more with it. You feel like you need to do more. You feel like you need to go from just putting 6% in your 41K to putting 15% away between a combination of your 401 K and also let's say an IRA Roth IRA. Let's say you also want to get more tax efficient and start moving money from your IRA to your Roth IRA. Or maybe you want to just save into a Roth IRA one K. The best time to do that is starting right now. It's you're not gonna be able to go in and get the time machine and go back ten years. You're better off just starting right now. Let's get going. And let's go ahead and dive straight into this. Sam, on how to build a results and advance plan for your successful retirement. Step one is really we want to start deleting the IRS and minimize your taxes in retirement by implementing that strategic Roth ladder conversion.

Speaker3:
We don't want to pay too much in taxes. We don't want to convert any money from our IRA to a Roth IRA at a higher tax rate than the 24% bracket. Also, we may want to get to a tax free state if we can. If you can work remotely as an example, we work with a lot of IT people. We work with a lot of manufacturing executives who usually can work remotely. The manufacturing executives might have multiple plants across the country, and they're going to a lot of them will go to Florida or Texas or Tennessee and get to a no state income tax. That might be something to consider. But when you're moving money from your IRA to your Roth IRA, here's how we like to do it. We like to move money from the IRA to the Roth IRA, and use money that's sitting in an investment account, a savings account, a checking account, or even rental income that went into a checking account to pay the taxes so that we can move dollar for dollar from your IRA to your Roth IRA. So as your IRA goes down, your Roth IRA goes up. So as the tax deferred money goes down, the tax free money goes up, and we're using the taxable dollars in the middle to actually pay the taxes.

Speaker3:
So it's just as easy math just for just for our purposes, let's just say you're going to move $100,000 and you're in a 20% top marginal tax bracket based on your modified adjusted gross income we're going to take 20 grand from the investment account. It might have been your car fund. You're saving to pay for the next car. We're going to go ahead and take 20 grand and pay the taxes, and we're going to move $100,000 instead of just 80. We're going to move 100,000 from the IRA to the Roth IRA. So that's what's going to help us get that done. Um, also, please understand that the current 24% bracket in 1960 to 1963, during the Kennedy years, it was actually 56%. So that is 8% higher than two x of where it was. It is a big deal to reduce your tax burden. And with $36 trillion in debt and national debt, chances are that taxes could go up in the future. And also, if we don't have a Republican in the white House, taxes are going to definitely go up in the future, as we saw with Joe Biden and his administration, and also with the inflation going there as well. Sam, why don't you go ahead and handle step number two on how to delete unnecessary portfolio fees in that results in advanced plan.

Speaker5:
Yeah. We're trying to get these drags on your portfolio out. You really touched on one of the most important ones that the first one, that being taxes. You know, a lot of you out there listening your RMD age is going to be 73. So definitely heed Ford's words there and take the time that you have to do some of those conversions. Step two is getting another drag out of that portfolio fees. We find that pretty much everybody we talk to for 99%, they just don't understand the fees that they're actually paying inside their portfolio. You're going to have a combination of fees in there. If you're working with another advisor, you're going to have an advisory fee. A lot of the funds that you may be holding, you may or may not know it, but they may have fees within them. You know, one thing we like to look at and see and show everybody and really help them understand their money better than they ever have before, is show them what their expense ratio is. That's essentially your total that you're paying in fees divided by the total amount that you have in your portfolio.

Speaker5:
For a lot of people, we can see this be, you know, two, 3%, sometimes higher. You want to get that as low as possible, because these are fees that are coming out of your portfolio every single year. We're not talking about growth or losses. You know, even if the market stayed flat, those fees are going to come out. We really try to help people take advantage of some fee efficient strategies utilizing ETFs. Um, also using insurance products and diversifying the portfolio where you actually take a portion of your portfolio and put it into an FIA or a personal pension, and that actually will remove some of the advisory fees that are going on the total amount of the total portfolio. So there's a few different things you can do to get those fees out of there, so that you're keeping more of your dollars in the portfolio and keeping them invested. Just imagine if all those dollars that you've been using to pay fees over the years could have been staying in the portfolio, compounding and invested instead.

Speaker3:
Yeah. The one point I want to make here is when we look at 401 K plans, we work with a lot of people that are looking to transition from, okay, I've been working, I've got money in in my 401 K, and now I'm going to roll it over into an IRA. Well, almost 100% of the time, Sam, when people come to us at that stage in their life, their expense ratio is much, much higher than the expense ratio that we use to implement our portfolios. What we do is we utilize exchange traded funds or ETFs to implement our portfolios, whereas a lot of 41S have mutual funds that are heavy with 12 one fees and admin fees and, um, subaccount fees, all kinds of different things, especially if you have a variable annuity. Um, as well, we want to do everything we can to keep that expense ratio way down. Uh, the example is for us, our expense ratio basically averaged between 0.15 and 0.17 on most of our portfolios. Conversely, if you put that up against the typical 400 K that comes in like the average, 400 K is probably between 0.78 and almost over 1% coming in with expense ratio, which almost the difference in the delta on that almost pays our complete advisory and portfolio fees. You get a professional private wealth management firm to manage your stuff for the same amount of money, versus you just picked a few selections at the beginning.

Speaker3:
And when you started working years and years ago and and you're like, oh, wait a second, I could have done a better job in investing. I could have been more active with what I'm doing. That's why our firm is called Active Wealth Management. We believe in strategic and tactical asset allocation, where we're rebalancing quite often to try to help you maximize, minimize your losses and maximize your gains. And so I would just say be very careful and cognizant of the expense ratio that's in your portfolios as well. Let's just try to make sure we delete all of those for sure. And then step three is we want to generate more income from savings. And Sam, you and I are both going to tackle this. I'm going to let you talk about, um, one of the products is Spida and the underlying index with that one, I know you're really passionate about that. I would just say retirement really is more about income than it is just about one big nest egg and one big wealth number. Um, you really want to do everything you can to make sure that you're starting with a positive retirement income surplus and not a negative retirement income gap. And we do that retirement income gap analysis for you when you come in and meet with us.

Speaker3:
And here's what you get when you meet with us, when you're kind of getting into step three to generate more income. Number one is we're going to give you the portfolio savings and the portfolio analysis. Number two is we're going to give you, um, a registered Social security analyst roadmap and a roadmap that is that Social Security maximization report. You're going to need to maximize your Social Security income you paid in for years and years and years into Social Security. Don't you deserve more than what you're getting? I think you deserve a lot more than just $0.70 on the dollar. If you were to take it at 62.5. So let's have that conversation. And there's things you can do as a married couple that single filers can't. So that we can also help single filers as well maximize their Social Security income. Number three is we're going to give you a financial plan to your 95th birthday with your current plan. That has nothing to do with us. Number four is we're going to give you a financial plan to your 95th birthday with our recommended portfolios. And number five is we're going to give you a financial plan, your 95th birthday with a strategic Roth ladder conversion with our recommended portfolios as well. So you're getting all five of those two.

Speaker3:
But let's talk about that income piece. Did you know you could replace the bonds within your portfolio. And the bonds are there for income. Right. But you could replace those with fixed indexed annuities that only 1% of financial advisors have access to. We have proprietary annuities that are available to us from carriers like Nationwide and Aspida and Athene, and North American and large, large annuity corporations that go through independent financial advisers like ourselves. But Sam and I both have worked with a company called Amara Life, and they helped develop these proprietary products with some of these major carriers. And it allows us to get these products that pay out a little bit higher, that grow a little bit more, that have ties to indexes that perform better, that really that kind of performance will add up over time. So I'd encourage you to reach out to us on how to get one of those products to replace the bonds. So let's say the typical portfolio, you might have it now, which is 60% stocks and 40% bonds. If you were to take the bonds out and replace them with fixed indexed annuities, there's a couple of things that happen. Number one is you have no advisory and portfolio fees. You got 40% more cost effective and more expense effective by deleting 40% of the expenses. Day one. So that's fantastic.

Speaker3:
Number two is you're getting financial market gains and market like gains without any financial market losses, because 100% of the money you give them to a an annuity company, because annuities are are regulated by the states, you have to put 100% of the money you give them into the ten year US Treasury. They cannot invest it in the market. What they do is they invest it. Let's say you're going to give them $100,000. They're going to take $100,000. They're going to put it into the ten year US Treasury. And today, at the time of this recording, the ten year US Treasury yield is right around 4.2%. So you're you're going to be making $4,200 a year off of that 100,000. What they do is they take the $4,200, and they invest it into options that give you higher leverage, because it's called a hybrid product that will allow your those options to grow. They can also these annuity companies. They buy options in $100 million blocks. They buy it a lot more effectively than you and I can as retail investors. And therefore you can get better leverage on your money. So let's say the market goes up. You're going to get the market like gains. If the options go up, you're getting the lion's share of the gains and they're taking a portion. But even better, even though onto the downside is that the market goes down.

Speaker3:
Guess what. Your money's invested in the ten year US Treasury. Only the interest is invested in the options. The options might go to zero, but your interest, I mean your actual premium and principal is sitting in that. The ten year US Treasury. So zero is your hero. You can't lose more than 100% of your money. So that's a fantastic situation too. So you're protecting the income portion of your portfolio, but you're also able to generate the third big component here. Number one is just saving an advisory portfolio fees. Number two is to get market like gains without market risk. And number three is to get higher payout factors than you would normally get in the typical 4% withdrawal rate that you would take from your principal. Let's say you got $1 million sitting in an IRA that you just rolled over from your 41K that has that high expense ratio. You can only take $40,000 out a year without running out of money. That's what the 4% rule states. If you only take out 4% of your money each and every year, you're likely not going to run out of money during retirement. But here's what we would advocate. Take $400,000, put it into a fixed indexed annuity, and generate four years later, you're going to be generating $44,000. Plus you're generating between 10 and 1112% of your original principal.

Speaker3:
And that's a whole lot more than four. Give you an example. If you were to take out 10% a year of your IRA, you're going to run out of money in like 12 years. Even with growth with us, it might be 14 to 16 years. But you're talking, you know, if you're taking out 10%, that's way too much money to be taking out of your of your nest egg every year. So let's try to get to that. Hey, let's just take 40% and I'm going to let the rest of my money grow. Or if you want to, you can take out 4% of the other 600,000 and add another 24 grand. That's $68,000 you would generate from your million dollar portfolio. And you're not running out of money, and you're likely not losing principal either. And oh, by the by plus, let's say $60,000 coming into the household from Social Security, that's 128,000 USD that you get to live on. And a lot of people are if they own their house, they can live on that and really live comfortably and travel and have a great time. Sam, your thoughts on each and every one of these assets. And if you can also just go into a little bit on what it's like to generate your own personal pension for our clients.

Speaker5:
Yeah. And this is really once again about getting another drag out of the portfolio. We've talked already in step one about getting taxes out of there where you can in step two, get the fees out of there. This is about eliminating risk, and a lot of people fear they'll think that, oh, if I take all the risk out of my portfolio, I'm going to be sacrificing gains. But that's not necessarily true with a lot of the products that we're seeing in the indexing options. You want to eliminate that risk of running out of money. You want to eliminate the risk of not having the income that you need to live on and pay your expenses in retirement, and some of the indexing options forward are really attractive. One of them, in particular a Speedo with their synergy choice. Fia has the Invesco as an indexing option. A lot of the investment accounts IRAs, Roth IRAs that I look at, I see people invested in Q-q-q. And if you're listening to this and you're invested in that yourself, you've seen some good gains over the over the last few years. It's a heavy Nasdaq and tech stock index and ETF.

Speaker5:
The Synergy Choice Max has 105% participation rate on a two year point to point protection period. So that means every two years you're going to get 105% of what the Invesco Qrc performed. You eliminate the downside risk. So if the index goes down, zero is your hero. You don't have any losses for that portion of your portfolio. So just as an example, taking a look today, this is February 2026. Over the last two years, the Invesco Qrc has gone up 40%. So if you had invested in this product two years ago today, you would receive 105% of that 40% and your account would be credited with a 42% increase. Meanwhile, you had no downside risk. So if the tariff tantrum ended up being something worse than what it was, or if some of the volatility related to some of this global conflict ended up being worse than what it was, and the trade wars, you would have been protected regardless. You were able to still get that gain from that index while being protected and setting yourself up for that income stream that you can't outlive.

Speaker3:
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's a no brainer for, let's say, if you wanted to diversify your streams of income, let's say you want to take 20% of your overall portfolio, put it in the Aspida synergy Max, get 105% of how the Qkc performs. That's accumulation, which also allows you to still generate between 1 and 10% in actual withdrawals. You can throttle it up or throttle it down, but let's just say you take out 5% of that. That's not a bad situation at all. It's beyond the typical 4% withdrawal rate. Then the other 20% I would do this, of which is the other 50% of the of the retirement income portion. Let's just say that 400,000 to put 200,000 in the synergy Max. And I'm going to put 200,000 into the nationwide peak ten, which is another product we want to kind of focus on the nationwide peak. Ten is that was one of those proprietary products. Only 1% of financial advisors have access to, and it does have a two year protection period. They have an underlying index called the BNP Paribas Global Factor Index. And they're giving you a 295% participation rate. Now that's a little bit more of a volatility controlled index. It's kind of built to kind of fly at between 4 and 6%. Let's call it around 4 to 5% average annual rate of return. But if you're talking almost three x of of 5% that that starts adding up to real money.

Speaker3:
So I mean, that would be ten. Let's say it's 5% a year for easy math. This is an estimate. I mean you're talking crazy amounts of growth. So you're 10% growth on the index over the two years. But you've got 295 times 2.95 times that. So that's 29.5% less than 1% spread rate at 28.5% net growth for two years. They get you a little bit by not giving you compound interest over the over between year one and year two, but they're giving you 2.95 times less than 1% spread rate of how the index reforms, which I think is remarkable. And imagine getting increasing your overall principal by 28.5% in two years without having any downside risk. That is crazy great. And that's really what you get when you work with us here at Active Wealth Management. You're going to get that results in advance plan. You're going to get tax efficient, fee efficient and market efficient investing. You're also going to get a higher payout ratio on the income portion of your portfolio that allows the rest of your assets to grow. And this is what private wealth management really looks like. I would encourage you to reach out to us. Go ahead and reach out to us at retirement results. Com. You can also call us at (770) 685-1777. Our number again is (770) 685-1777.

Speaker3:
Again. Tony Robbins says if you don't take action you actually haven't made a decision. If you made a decision, hey, I'm going to do something about my retirement future. I would encourage you to go ahead and do that today. Reach out to us at (770) 685-1777. The toll free number. We work with a lot of people in all 50 US states at is at 1-888-814-0304. That's (888) 814-0304. Um toll free. You can call us. And you can also just reach out to us at retirement com forward slash you put your information in that's retirement com forward slash and we'll get started right away. We'll give you a call. And again this financial planning and portfolio analysis. All of this and also the retirement income gap analysis and the retirement income planning with Social security maximization reporting all that, all that planning, all that together is about a $2,800 value. And we're going to give it to you absolutely at no cost to you on purpose. Because we're fiduciaries. We want to make sure you can make an informed decision about what to do with your hard earned and hard saved dollars. Sam, thanks so much for being with us here on this episode of Retirement Results. I think it was really a good one to be able to talk about how to get that results in advance plan, and I'll let you have the last word.

Speaker5:
Yeah, we want to help everybody out there listening, get their retirement results in advance, reach out to us at whatever way works best for you. Give us a call, shoot us an email, go to our website, retirement results.com or learn more about us at wealth.com. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and check out past episodes.

Speaker2:
Thanks for listening to retirement Results. You deserve to work with an independent team of fiduciary advisors that will strategically work to protect and grow your hard earned assets. To schedule your complimentary financial consultation, call us now at (770) 685-1777. That's (770) 685-1777. To connect with a qualified advisor. To learn more about our mission and our team, visit retirement Results.com. Investment advisory services offered through Brookstone Capital Management, LLC, a registered investment advisor and Active wealth Management are independent of each other. Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM, but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Past performance cannot be used as an indicator to determine future results.

Speaker1:
Registered investment advisors and investment advisor representatives act as fiduciaries for all of our investment management clients. We have an obligation to act in the best interest of our clients and to make full disclosures of any conflicts of interest, please refer to our firm brochure. The ADV two, item four for additional information.

Speaker6:
With news headlines about recessions flipping from imminent to unlikely almost weekly, a lot of individuals are left wondering, how do I prepare my money for whatever 2026 throws at us? I'm Jim Tarbuck, here for the Retirement Radio Network powered by immorality. Recession talk is back for 2026, not screaming from every headline, but lingering in the background with odds that aren't zero. And honestly, that's okay. The good news you don't need a crystal ball. You just need to be prepared. Her Money.com CEO, Jean Chatzky, outlines the signs to watch for when a recession is looming.

Speaker7:
Keep an eye on unemployment. We'll look at consumer spending. Consumers often lose confidence. The tricky part about a recession is that we could be in one already and not know it.

Speaker6:
Financial experts say the first step to being prepared is surprisingly simple. Get clear on what you actually need, not what fear is telling you. Start by building or topping off an emergency fund that covers 3 to 6 months of living expenses. Perhaps consider a high yield savings or money market account so your safety net is actually growing. Next, pick a budgeting system you'll stick with, whether that's the old school envelope method, a spreadsheet, or even an app. And finally, how to configure your financial portfolio and investment strategy in uncertain times. Cnn's senior business writer Jean Shehadeh explains a key component.

Speaker8:
You want to be really diversified in your portfolio, meaning between stocks and bonds, between sectors of the economy. You can't predict what's going to do well and what's not going to do well. A diversified portfolio where you have some stocks, some bonds, they will perform differently.

Speaker6:
Whether it's covering the basics, making easy cuts, redirecting that money to high interest debt. The people who come through economic uncertainty best aren't the ones who panic. They're the ones who planned calmly, lived a little bit below their means, and keep investing anyway. A well-built budget doesn't just protect you from a recession, it gives you freedom no matter what the economy might do. Small steps now. Big piece of mind later for the retirement radio network powered by Amare Life. I'm Jim.

Speaker3:
Hi, this is Ford Stokes, chief financial advisor with retirement results. You've saved your whole life so you wouldn't have to worry about your money when you retired. But you worry now more than ever. You've been a good saver. You have 500,000, $1 million, or maybe even more. You should feel confident, but you don't. You're worried a big loss will wipe you out. You want to retire, but you don't. You're worried you don't have enough. Any of this sound familiar? It should, because we hear these things all the time from people just like you who are preparing for retirement or already retired. So why do you worry so much? It's because you don't have an actual plan in writing. Nothing to guide you through retirement. Retirement results helps people just like you. You'll get a free, customized written retirement plan. That's right. Free and no obligation. Schedule your meeting now at retirement results. Com forward slash plan. That's retirement. Com forward slash.

Speaker2:
Investment advisory services offered through Brookstone Capital Management LLC, a registered investment advisor.

Speaker6:
Any comments regarding safe and secure products and guaranteed income streams refer only to fixed insurance products. They do not refer in any way to securities or investment advisory products. Fixed insurance and annuity product guarantees are subject to the claims paying ability of the issuing company, and are not offered by Brookstone. Any bonuses mentioned may be subject to additional restrictions and regulations based on the offering annuity company. You may not receive bonuses if the contract is fully surrendered, or if traditional annuitization payments are taken, and if the policy is partially surrendered, it could result in a partial loss of bonuses. Because these are bonus annuities, they may not include higher surrender charges, longer surrender charge periods, lower caps, higher spreads, or other restrictions that are not included in similar annuities that don't offer a bonus feature.

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