Hopefully your famous last words in life won’t be “Hey y’all, watch this!” And in the financial world, there’s quite a few phrases that you don’t want to be your famous last words either...Find out more information about Brian Butler and Beyond The Pie Charts here: https://www.wealthstandardfinancial.com/Full transcript below...----more----Transcript:Marc Killian: Hey, everybody, welcome in to Beyond Pie Charts. Thanks for tuning in to our podcast with Brian Butler, President and Wealth Management Advisor at Wealth Standard Financial, serving you here in the greater Houston area.Marc Killian: I am Marc Killian, the cohost, as we talk about investing, finance and retirement with Brian. If you've got some questions or concerns, he's been helping families for over 20 years in the financial services industry, and you can reach out to him any time by calling 713-955-6007. That's 713-955-6007.Marc Killian: If you've got an immediate question or concern, we always urge you to reach out and contact Brian, try to contact a professional before you take action. Sometimes you may hear something on a show like ours or other podcasts or radio programs and you think that sounds interesting and you want to pursue more information, well, always check with your advisor before you do so, and if you don't have one, Brian's here to help. But give him a call, 713-955-6007.Marc Killian: Go online to the website at wealthstandardfinancial.com. That's wealthstandardfinancial.com and while you're there you can check out the team, a lot of good tools, tips and resources, and also you'll see a post for podcast and right there you can listen to past episodes or you can subscribe to future episodes, you can check out the blog as well, so, lots of ways to get Beyond The Pie Charts with us here on the program.Marc Killian: And Brian, buddy, welcome and how are you?Brian Butler: I'm good, man, how are you?Marc Killian: I am hanging in there, hope that you are doing fantastic. You're always so energetic, I look forward to talking to you each week. Everything going well?Brian Butler: Everything is great, man. You know, the business is growing, the podcast is growing, and I'm excited that I've done this.Marc Killian: Well, very cool, very cool. Well, listen, we're both from the South, okay. As we've talked about here on the podcast and we are going to our sixth episode here. Obviously you're in the Houston area, I'm in North Carolina, so we don't always have to be together when we do this. We're letting people in on the inside secrets of the podcasting world.Brian Butler: Right.Marc Killian: Sh-sh. Don't tell anybody. Just the people listening share that with each other. Don't tell anybody else. But anyway, in all seriousness, but the South has lots of funny little quirks, just like any place does, and as Southerners I thought this might be kind of funny for us to relate to.Marc Killian: Famous last words is what I want to go with here as this week's topic, and, here in the South you might hear something like, "Hey, y'all, watch this," right?Brian Butler: Right.Marc Killian: And that's usually preceded by some sort of goof or some sort of funny video, or maybe it's "Hold my beer," I think that's like a common one now, that's been pretty popular. But anyway, usually, that's something that winds up preceding an event that you probably don't want to be your last words or your last statement. So I thought we could have a little fun with that and parlay that over to the financial side, and hopefully these would not be your famous financial last words. So I've got a couple of statements here that I've kind of thrown together, and you tell me what you think if this was... what your reaction would be if someone said this to you. Okay?Brian Butler: Okay.Marc Killian: Here we go. So, you might hear someone say, "I told myself, Brian, a few years ago, that I was going to get out of the market if I ever got back what I lost in 2008, but now I think I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing because I want to squeeze out as much as I possibly can." Is that setting yourself up for potential problems, if you're not being smart and setting yourself up to repeat 2008?Brian Butler: Well, you know, people go through this emotion that nothing can go wrong when the market's doing well, and if the market tends to do well for five, six, seven years, everybody jumps on that bandwagon, and right at the peak of everybody jumping in, the market is ripe when the market decides to go down.Marc Killian: Right.Brian Butler: And so people ride that roller coaster down, halfway down they're like, "Okay, I'm going to get out of the market." And then when it hits the bottom, everybody's, "I'm never going to invest again." I've had so many people tell me that, and right when it hits the bottom is the perfect time to get back in the market. Now, of course, no one can time the-Marc Killian: Exactly.Brian Butler: ... bottom of the market-Marc Killian: Or the top.Brian Butler: ... but it could be somewhere in the general vicinity, you can do well, but nobody does it. You get out of the market but you ask a client, "Okay, when would you get back in?" They don't know. And so, because of that, they miss out on a lot of opportunity, and usually over a 20 year period, individual clients that manage their own money have shown to not make as much money as any other asset class. So, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, gold, real estate, they tend to underperform not because they're picking the wrong investments, it's just because they're trying to time the market, and no one can time the market. Even the best money managers on earth can't. Warren Buffett can't. And so, if he can't do it, what makes you think you can?Marc Killian: Yeah, especially with the data that a lot of those folks have, they get access to, right?Brian Butler: Exactly. And you're at work during market hours and when are you doing this research? And if you spend most of your time watching investment news, it's going to drive you nuts. There was a study done by, I think, Yale University, and they tracked people for 10 years, and the people that watched and studied investment news underperformed by 15 to 20% to people that never watched any investment news or paid attention to their account.Marc Killian: Oh, wow. That's interesting.Brian Butler: So, more information is not always good.Marc Killian: Okay. All right. So, we're talking about some famous financial last words that you don't want them to be your famous financial last words, for example. So, let's talk about this way of looking at it. Someone who might be like, "Well, I like the security of keeping my money in cash because I know I won't lose it." Well, that could be some famous last words because all you're doing is losing your money safely.Brian Butler: Right. You're losing your money safely and people always ignore inflation, and people hear it all the time but they ignore what it really means. It means everything that you're buying is going to cost more later on, and health care inflates at about 7%. Then you have interest rate risk. Are we in a rising interest rate environment or are we in a declining interest rate environment? That's going to affect how much money you make on your cash, your tax rate.Brian Butler: So, our country owes 22 trillion dollars in debt, and so, where is that money going to come from? It's going to come from people with money in the form of taxation. Now, because of that, if you just have money in a cash account, you have all these obstacles that you have to overcome. Cash could not keep pace of 5, and 6, 7% levels of inflation, and so, true, that money will be there in its current form, $100,000 will be $100,000 ten years from now, but it just won't buy you as much as it has today. [crosstalk 00:06:37]Marc Killian: Yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny that you say that. I don't know if you saw the story or not. It's a little bit older now, I think, maybe it was last year or a year-and-a-half ago, and I don't even know how this happens, but a gentleman was using one of the... You remember the really old big TV sets, the big console sets that-Brian Butler: Oh, yeah.Marc Killian: ... we used to have in the '70s and the early '80s? It was massive and it sat on the floor and it had its own legs and the whole nine yards, big wooden things, and apparently this gentleman had an old one that had burned up a long time ago but he used it as his safe. And so he was storing money in the back of this TV set, and, don't know, 30 years went by and he forgot about it. And the chest was given away or whatever, and it went to the dump, and, kindly enough, amazingly enough in the world today, people found it, found the money that he had in there and returned it to the gentleman, which was great.Marc Killian: But he had forgotten that he had it and he said he was saving it and he was going to give it to his grandkids so that they can use it to buy, like put down a payment on a home or something like that. And his comment was, "$100,000..." It was $100,000 by the way, it was in the back of his TV set, which is crazy. And he said, "$100,000 sure doesn't buy what it used to." And it was like, that was perfect, right?Brian Butler: That's exactly what it means. If that money gets lost, then you come back, think of what a million dollars was 20 years ago and what a million dollars is today. It's still a lot of money-Marc Killian: Sure, sure.Brian Butler: ... but it's nowhere near as much as it was 20 years-Marc Killian: Yeah. So you're losing money safely, basically, if you're not worried about at least keeping up with inflation, and you're losing purchasing power. That's really what it comes down to.Marc Killian: So, okay, how about another one? Now, I'm going to toss myself under the bus for this one, Brian. I like to do this on the podcast because it's easy to let people get a frame of reference when someone else is in that same... can relate to, or can actually be in that same situation. So for me, all the males in my family have passed away quite early, and I've already had heart surgery, I think I may have mentioned that here on the show, and I'm only 48, but I am one of those people that I am pretty sure that I'm going to pass away probably somewhere around 70. Somewhere between 68 and 72 or so, but I'm not planning to die early. I'm planning to live much longer.Marc Killian: But a lot of people will do that. They'll say, "Well, nobody in my family lives past 70, so I'm not planning on it either, so I'm not going to worry about planning for longevity." And that's a huge famous last word mistake because what if you're wrong and you wind up being 85 and now you have no money?Brian Butler: Right. One of my clients, we had this exact conversation last week, and I told him, I said, "When you look back at your parents when they were your age, did they look a lot older than you do?" And he said, "Well, yeah, they did." I said, "Were they as active as you are, currently?" "Well, no." "Did they work out? Did they watch what they ate? Did they have all the health care advances that we have today?" And the answers were, "No." This is the best age to live in in human history for health care.Marc Killian: Right.Brian Butler: And the things they weren't able to do can definitely extend that life. And I'll give an example. My father had a stroke at 51-years-old, so he was really young, and he passed away and had complications along that when he was 57. But at the same token, his grandfather, so my great-great-grandfather, passed away at 106.Marc Killian: Right. There you go.Brian Butler: So, how you take care of yourself, your diet, medical advances, have something to do with it but genetics has some, but what we found are... When I look at my lifestyle and I look at my father at the same age, I'm in much better shape. I'm much more active, and so that gives me comfort to know, if I keep doing these things there's a good chance that I'm going to live well past 75. So, the biggest way that I can tell clients to lower some of your health care cost are exercise and watch what you eat. That's going to initially save you so much money in retirement and it doesn't cost you hardly anything.Marc Killian: Yeah. And if you are a pessimist, like me, then that's fine but at least plan. And plan for your partner as well, right? By planning to live to 85, if that's the case, then great. Then everything's taken care of. But if I happen to do pass away early, that money is still there and will then go to help support your spouse's lifestyle and retirement as well. So, even if you want to take that stance and say, "I'm not planning to live long based on genetics in my family," fine, you can think that but at least plan to live longer, because no one wants to be 85 and have to go to work. That would be no-Brian Butler: No.Marc Killian: That would be no fun at all, right? Definitely don't want to go that route. Okay, and I'm going to stay with the same theme here as we're talking about this, and reference my mom.Marc Killian: Now, like your father, mine passed away at 63, pretty early as well. My mom, now, she's 78, so she's cruising along pretty good, but she's one of these that's like, "I'm not going to a nursing home. You can just take me out in the woods and put me out of my misery," which first and foremost is pretty silly, because, I'm not going to do that to my mother, and secondly I'm not going to jail.Brian Butler: Right.Marc Killian: But a lot of people will do that. They'll say, "I don't care, I'm not going to the nursing home." They'll find all sorts of crazy things to say, and it's not necessarily that the nursing home is the end result that you may have to be in, but if you're not at least addressing and talking about some form of long-term care, that could potentially be in your future.Brian Butler: Yes. 70% of Americans will need long-term care at some point in their life.Marc Killian: That's a big number. That's a big number.Brian Butler: It's a huge number, and going into a nursing home does scare many people because they've seen on television some of the nightmares there can be in certain nursing homes and that's not what they want. They want to stay in the comfort of their own houses or have people around them that they know.Marc Killian: Right.Brian Butler: And what a lot of those people don't realize is, long-term care does not necessarily mean going into a nursing home.Marc Killian: Exactly.Brian Butler: Many times you can get help in the house, whether that be a family member or a home health care service, and so the days of you just going to a black hole and people forgetting about you are the nightmares that people have, and it's not necessarily the reality of today. Many nursing homes are high-end apartments, essentially, where you have some medical help just in case you need it, and that sense of community that many people think that they're going to lose by going into a nursing home is a little bit different than what they perceived once they do some more research. And so, it's not as bad as people can think.Marc Killian: Well, and I think to your point though, there, is pretty solid when you're talking about the fact that it's changed so much and that assisted living really is where the majority of things are at nowadays. There's so many... We'll just take nursing homes in the cliché sense of the word off the table. A lot of assisted living complexes now where you have... She's actually in assisted living. She's in a senior community right now. Now they don't have any medical help, but it's only seniors that are allowed to live there. They have like the emergency pull cord thing where something happens, they pull that and it dispatches fire and all that kind of stuff, and EMS.Marc Killian: But the costs are lower so that they can, if they're on a budget, that kind of thing, there's all little... People that come by from time to time and they come by and see if they... when one wants to go for a walk or do some gardening in the community garden, things of that nature, so a lot of those places are becoming more and more popular. So, yeah, to your point, the traditional thought of a nursing home is not what it used to be where you're put in a bed in a cold hospitaly type room and just left alone.Marc Killian: So, yeah, I think that's a good point where a lot of people get wrapped up in. So don't let that be your famous last words by thinking silly things like that that may or may not happen, but, really, what it comes down to is, don't put yourself in that situation by not talking and having communication about the possibility of any of these things happening because as we age, and as we all know, Murphy's Law, Murphy likes to strike at any time, and if you've taken the time to plan and talk to someone about building a plan, then hopefully you can stave off a lot of these worries because you'll have a plan in place. Right, Brian?Brian Butler: Absolutely.Marc Killian: And so, that's why working with an advisor is so important, and that's a lot of what you guys do day in and day out at Wealth Standard Financial.Brian Butler: We enjoy, and it's the best part of my day, is when I get to meet new clients and then my current clients and then just be part of their story as they retire, as they plan for grandkids, college, whatever they're planning for, it's what I enjoy most.Marc Killian: Well, there you go. All right, folks, well, that's our bit for this week here on the podcast. Don't utter some of those silly famous last words. Make sure you're doing yourself a favor, having a conversation with your financial advisor, and not just one. This is an ongoing thing. Your financial plan should be a living document, just like you're alive and you're going through life and things are going to change through your years in retirement, or your financial plan's going to change with you. It needs to change with you because it's not going to be a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal.Marc Killian: If you have questions, you have concerns, you need some help, you're not exactly sure how your plan is set up to do, if it's going to help you get to and through, give Brian a call at Wealth Standard Financial, at 713-955-6007. That's 713-955-6007. Have that conversation, maybe do a little checkup, follow in, whatever the case might be. We get checkups on our health, we should also get them on our wealth as well.Marc Killian: And share the podcast with folks who you think might enjoy it. Have them go to wealthstandardfinancial.com. That's wealthstandardfinancial.com and you'll see the link for the podcast page. You can subscribe to it that way and I'm sure you'll be seeing things from Brian and the team on Facebook and social media and whatnot as well.Marc Killian: So, Brian, thanks for your time, buddy, I hope you had a good time and I will see you here the next time.Brian Butler: Great time as usual, man.Marc Killian: All right. We'll talk to you on Beyond Pie Charts here with Brian Butler. We'll catch you next time. Bye-bye.