In this episode, we dig deeper into the conversation about how a financial advisor adds value. In this fourth installment of this ongoing series we delve into the strategies and advantages of managing and minimizing your taxes. No one wants to pay too much in taxes. Learn about the right way to have your tax professional implement deductions, tax credits, taxable events, HSAs, and Roth conversions.

Show Notes:

• 1:11 - Are you sure that you aren’t paying too much in taxes
• 4:08 - Don’t miss available deductions and tax credits
• 6:00 - Horizon Advisor Network looks back at old returns to find savings
• 8:06 - Certain investments produce tax credits
• 8:17 - Coordinate taxable events with your CPA or tax professional
• 9:07 - The higher you go, the higher amount of tax opportunities you can use
• 9:31 - What are the advantages of using HSAs
• 11:14 - How can you make Roth conversions work for you
• 12:05 - Horizon can help you coordinate charitable givings

3 Key Points:

1. Know the right questions to ask your taxes and financial advisors to confirm you aren’t paying too much in taxes.
2. Changes to your tax bill have to be done before December 31st of the tax year.
3. In 2019, you can put $19,000 in your 401K plan.

Tweetable Quotes:

• -    “Who wants to pay the government more than they really need to?” – Bill Bush
• - “Are you confident that your tax and financial advisors have proactively turned over all of the stones to minimize your tax bill?” – Pete Bush
• - “How would you overpay? Well, you would miss a deduction. You miss a strategy there where you could have reduced your tax bill.” – Pete Bush

Resources Mentioned:

• https://confidentwealth.libsyn.com
• Horizon Financial Group

In this episode of The Confident Wealth Podcast, Bill Bush and Pete Bush, Advisors at Horizon Financial Group, continue their series on how financial advisors offer value. This time, they discuss planning and managing investments including the typical mistakes that investors make and how advisors can help them avoid those mistakes.  

Show Notes:

• 0:35--- Introduction of the financial advisor series
• 2:10--- The logical and emotional sides of investing
• 5:55--- What studies say about investing with and without advisors
• 6:30— Investor behavior is the most important factor that affects an investor’s bottom line
• 7:50--- The common mistakes that investors typically make
• 10:58--- Why people make multiple mistakes at one time
• 12:00--- Disciplined investment is integral
• 12:35--- Talking through investment processes is helpful
• 14:30--- How advisors help increase your bottom line
• 17:35--- The average investor does not have the expert knowledge of a financial advisor
• 18:30--- Advisors can make adjustments along the way
• 19:20--- The next episode in the series will have to do with taxes

3 Key Points:

1. Investors typically make emotional mistakes.
2. When investors make mistakes, they typically make several together. 
3. Financial advisors help in a few major ways - saving time, providing expert understanding.

Tweetable Quotes:

-        “The herd is usually wrong. They’re always doing the thing that they shouldn’t be doing.”

-     “Most people don’t make one of these mistakes isolation, they make them in conjunction with each other.”

-     “Make sure you worry with someone.”

Resources Mentioned:

• The Confident Wealth Podcast-- Discover more about the Podcast
• Horizon Financial Group

• Contact Information:
  • [email protected]
  • [email protected]

Summary:

In this episode, we continue the conversation about how a financial advisor adds value. We talk about how the financial advisors role is to “lay the tracks.” The advisor encourages positive habits and behaviors that help you get to your end financial goal. They make large tasks bite-sized achievable actions.

Show Notes:

• :30 - How to break your finances into habits you do everything
• 1:00 - Making Your financial goals small, bite sized achievable actions
• 2:00 - Big, 30-40 year long-term goals can be intimidating
• 5:15 - Why your behavior determines if you will succeed of fail
• 5:30 - How your financial advisor laying your action track so that you will take action and be successful
• 6:00 - Inertia is a big thing especially in personal goals
• 10:00 - The financial advisor plays the role of a sounding board
• 12:30 - The financial advisor helps break large tasks into manageable tasks
• 13:30 - Laying the foundation of habit is important so that the investment train can run on them

3 Key Points:

1. A financial advisor plays a key role in making large asks achievable.
2. The advisor lays the tracks and holds you accountable for the goals you want to achieve.
3. The financial lays the tracks so that investments can run on that foundation.

Tweetable Quotes:

• -    “A good coach is going to keep you on track to where we know he knows that if you eventually just follow this track, that it leads to success and you get down there a month, six months a year down the line and you look at and go wow, I got the results. But I didn't get them all at one time. I got them inch by inch. Yeah. And so the reality is, if there's no accountability built in, it's easy to veer off” – Pete
• - “Some people may say, Well, I don't make enough money, or, you know, I don't have enough to do what I want to do, or whatever. The truth of it is, is that most of the time we behave ourselves out of what we want.” – Bill
• - “So we have things that scare us, they take us off our path, we run into challenges that maybe we're not motivated anymore. And so we get off our path. So to your point without a coach or accountability partner, let's say accomplishing anything of these important magnitudes is very, very tough.” –Pete

Resources Mentioned:

• The Confident Wealth Podcast 
• https://confidentwealth.libsyn.com

• Horizon Financial Group

In this episode of the Confident Wealth Podcast, the Bush Brothers talk about the value of a financial advisor. The starting place for any relationship with an advisor is to sit down and create a roadmap of your financial goals - past, present, and future. From there, the financial advisor serves as your thought partner, mirror, and accountability partner. There is a lot of value that can be captured from having a relationship with a financial advisor.

Show Notes:

• 1:28 - How people can get value out of their financial advisors
• 2:00 - Managing the relationship with your financial advisor
• 2:20 - Financial advisors build your financial roadmap for you
• 6:14 - The importance of writing down the roadmap
• 7:00 - The financial advisor also serves as a coach - a mirror for their client
• 10:00 - Financial advisor also helps manage emotions - fear of loss is twice as strong as the excitement of the game
• 12:34 - The unique, defined planning process of Horizon
• 13:39 - Taking your plans out of your head and onto paper helps to figure the little things out and take care of them immediately
• 15:15 - The financial advisor is your thinking partner and mirror

3 Key Points:

1. One of the main roles of a financial advisor is to create a roadmap with you, allow you to share your goals, and be your thought partner.
2. Financial advisors manage your emotions while helping you achieve your goals.
3. At the end of the day, your financial advisor is a person you can count on to hold you accountable and tell you where you need to improve financially.

Tweetable Quotes:

• -    “It could be eye opening for folks that have never had that type of relationship or engagement. Many folks might think of it as well, you know, advisor kind of looks over investments and that kind of thing. But really, it's a hopefully a long lasting relationship that has many levels in many ways to bring value.” – Bill
• - “At some point, you stop, and you go, Okay, I have all these things, I have some assets have all this stuff. But what does it mean? Like, you know, how can I turn it into income, or what is my plan, so to speak. So I think the very first thing that we can do, again, any journey you go on, obviously got to know where you're starting from. So not just taking an assessment of where you are now. But really defining where is it what you want to go and then laying out that building that roadmap so to speak.” – Pete
• - “Because a coach can do something that no other human can do for themselves, which is hold up the mirror and go, Hey, look at that. See that right there? Yeah, that's what I see. Now, you're in your own head, you're in your own body, you're living in your own financial life, you may not be able to see outside of that.” –Pete

Resources Mentioned:

• The Confident Wealth Podcast
  • https://confidentwealth.libsyn.com

• Horizon Financial Group

During this installment of The Confident Wealth Podcast from the Horizon Financial Group, hosts Pete Bush and Bill Bush discuss how to manage, save, and withdraw savings for your child's college education. They answer questions around how much money to save, when you should start saving, and how to withdraw it.

Show Notes:

• 0:50---Introduction of today´s topic--saving and paying for college. How do you do it?
• 2:00---The 529 plan is a good way to save for college. You save after-tax money and all the earnings on this money is tax-free when you withdraw it. Depending on your state, you may also get a tax deduction or match.
• 4:00---College isn't a surprise. You know it is coming and the cost of education is escalating. Plan for it.
• 4:30--- Where do you start with saving? How much do you save? The sooner you start, the more time you have for your money to compound.
• 5:24---Time is your best friend when it comes to saving.
• 6:00---You don't need to know what school they are going to to start saving.
• 6:34---Saving for college is like the reverse of buying a house. You need to save like it is a mortgage or a bill. However, with college, you incur the bill at a later date.
• 8:30---Louisiana isn't broker fund. They are government funded, and they use Vanguard so the funds are leaner.
• 9:00---Now with the new tax code, you are capped at deducting $10,000 from taxes. College savings have tax and Match incentives.
• 10:30---There is a limit on the deduction, but you can always save more than that.
• 11:30---You can also make up a prior year´s max amount the year after if you weren't able to get the tax return.
• 12:12---In the past, you couldnt use 529 money for high school or any time before college. 529 isn´t available before college now. It is strictly regulated.
• 13:00---However, now there is a k-12 start account that you can use for high school tuition.
• 14:00---How do we decide when to withdraw the funds?
• 14:30---The funds are relatively easy to withdraw. You can write a check to the school and then write a check to yourself through the 529 plan. Or, you send the money to the school directly from your 529 plan.
• 15:15---What happens if your kid gets a scholarship? You are still allowed to take out the amount of money up to the amount of the tuition. They don't penalize you for scholarships.
• 16:20---If your kid decides not to go to college, you can change the beneficiary to your other child who wants to go to college. This is a tax free change.
• 17:30---The parents can also use the funds towards going back to school as well.
• 19:27---Sometimes the 529 makes you declare which school the kid will go to, but this does not restrict where the kid goes to school. Also, the child just needs to be a resident of the state when the account is opened, meaning that your kid can go to any school out of state without penalty.

3 Key Points:

1. Saving money for your child to go to college can seem complex.
2. Setting up a 529 plan is an after-tax way to compound your earnings and pay for your child's education without tax stipulation on your account´s earnings.
3. You don't need to know which school your child will attend or the state of the school. You start saving by setting up an account, and if your child chooses not to attend college you can always pivot the account to support someone else´s college education--your other child or even your own. The 529 plan is flexible.

Tweetable Quotes:

-       “529 allows you to put away after-tax dollars. However, the earnings on these dollars can grow tax free if it is put away for college.” –Pete.

-       “Start as early as you can.” –Pete.

-       “You kind of have to assume, in this day and age, that they are going to want some form of higher education.” –Pete.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Confident Advisor Practice-- Discover more about the Podcast
• Horizon Advisor Network

In the 18th episode of the Confident Wealth Podcast, Bill Bush and Pete Bush from the Horizon Financial Group talk about the illusion of wealth. They analyze the difference between liquid income and assets that are investments.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:37 – Having a million dollars isn’t as substantial as it used to be.
• 01:08 – Business owners that builds a business and sells it , but squanders the money, profession athletes that spend faster than they earn, and trust fund kids that inherit money.

• 02:14 – Just because you have a large sum of wealth, it doesn’t mean you can touch it all right away.

• 03:10 – Like the level of water in a bath tub, the water coming in is like money coming in. If you keep taking water out and investing, its wealth that aren’t liquid.

• 07:07 – Don’t look at the value of an asset, look at what its ability to produce income is.

3 Key Points:

1. Examples of the illusion of wealth: business owner that squanders their money, pro athletes that spend a four-year contract in one year, and trust fund kids.
2. A lot of wealth isn’t liquid, you can’t touch it immediately.
3. If your expenses grow, you need more coming in to keep your lifestyle the same.

Tweetable Quotes:

-    “A million dollars is not what it used to be.” – Pete Bush.

-    “The illusion of wealth, in other words, a person looks at their balance sheet, which is all of your assets minus your liabilities…and they look at that bottom line number, let’s say it’s $5 million…and they live like they have $5 million” – Pete Bush.

-    “Instead of looking at the bottom line number, the value of an asset, look at what its ability to produce income is.” – Pete Bush.

Resources Mentioned:

• Horizon Financial Group – website for Horizon Financial Group

In the 17th episode of the Confident Wealth Podcast, Bill Bush and Pete Bush from the Horizon Financial Group talk about a concept that Pete Bush refers to as distracted finance. Learn some strategies to prevent yourself from losing track of your financial goals.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

•  00:55 – There are parallels between distracted finance and distracted driving.
• 02:20 – At stop lights, most people are probably not checking their financial records.

• 03:06 – You can’t do two things at once with full attention.
• 06:30 – People get distracted with regards to their money.
• 06:47 – People may not have a financial plan to get distracted from to start with.
• 08:13 – Pay attention to your wealth like you do with your health—with regular check-ins.

• 10:14 – Seek a financial advisor, and develop a plan.
• 12:20 – Once you have a plan, take responsibility and see an advisor with a system in place.

3 Key Points:

1. Many people don’t have a financial plan to be distracted from in the first place.
2. Pay attention to your wealth like you do with your health—with regular

    check-ins.

1. Get your head out of today, and think three years into the future.

Tweetable Quotes:

-    “It’s all about being present right? You can’t be in two places at once.” – Pete Bush.

-    “The overwhelming majority of people don’t have the plan (financial) to begin with.” – Pete Bush.

-    “It’s really just about becoming present in your financial situation. Don’t take your eyes off of the road. Don’t look down on other things.” – Bill Bush.

Resources Mentioned:

• Horizon Financial Group – website for Horizon Financial Group

In the 16th episode of the Confident Wealth Podcast, Bill Bush and Andy Bush talk about the Horizon Financial Group’s internal program called the 401K Confidence System.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:04 – The 401K Confidence System can be overlaid onto any plan regardless of the plan provider.

• 01:31 – 1st Way the 401K Confidence System can be used: if a company wants a third set of eyes looking over their plan.

• 02:14 – 2nd Way the 401K Confidence System can be used: with ongoing plan relationships.

• 03:43 – Things to look for in a plan advisor: experience, designations,
• 04:59 – Part 1 of the 401K Confidence System: the clarity conversation.
• 05:22 – Part 2 of the 401K Confidence System: the confidence plan evaluation.
• 07:44 – Part 3 of the 401K Confidence System: the plan improvement report.
• 09:54 – Part 4 of the 401K Confidence System: the guided transition step.
• 12:22 – Part 5 of the 401K Confidence System: the participant engagement experience.

• 14:45 – Part 6 of the 401K Confidence System: your fiduciary check-up.

3 Key Points:

1. The 401K Confidence System has six steps and can be used as a third party set of eyes and on an ongoing basis.

1. If you haven’t seen your financial advisor in a long time, you are paying for service that you aren’t getting.

1. Horizon Financial Group has assisted retirement plans for industries such as:

    healthcare, engineering, law firms, and construction companies.

Tweetable Quotes:

-    “What are you excited about your plan? What is not working with it? What opportunities that you’ve maybe heard of but you haven’t taken advantage of yet?” – Andy Bush.

-    “The confident plan evaluation…the forensic deep dive into their plan. It is the “do you know” conversation.” – Andy Bush.

-    “They have an advisor, which is good. But they haven’t seen their advisor in quite some time, which is not good.” – Andy Bush.

Resources Mentioned:

• Horizon Financial Group – website for Horizon Financial Group
• Confident Advisor Practice – podcast for Confident Advisor Practice

Summary:

During the 15th episode of the Confident Wealth Podcast, Bill Bush and Pete Bush talk about the known and unknown factors in one’s financial life. Bill and Pete address elements and the importance of The Financial Confidence Quadrant for clients and potential clients.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:02 – Pete Bush created a tool called The Financial Confidence Quadrant with known and unknown positives and negatives for clients to get started with.

• 02:00 – Admitting what you don’t know can give you the needed jolt to seek a financial planner.

• 02:25 – The Known Positives: things you are on the right track with.
• 03:31 – The Unknown Positives: things like not knowing you picked the most successful financial planners in your area.

• 04:43 – The Known Negatives: things you need to approve that you are aware of.
• 06:28 – The Unknown Negatives: things that need addressing that you are unaware of.

• 07:56 – Financial advisor assistance for the four quadrants includes: giving validation, identifying issues, and increasing awareness.

3 Key Points:

1. Admitting what you don’t know can give you the needed jolt to seek a financial planner.

1. The Unknown Positives: things like not knowing you picked the most successful financial planners in your area.

1. Financial advisor assistance for the four quadrants includes: giving validation, identifying issues, and increasing awareness.

Tweetable Quotes:

-    “To know what you know and know what you do not know is true knowledge.” – Bill Bush.

-    “It takes someone from the outside looking in to even show you that these (unknown negatives) even exist.” – Pete Bush.

-    “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that aint so.” – Pete Bush.

Resources Mentioned:

• Horizon Financial Group – website for Horizon Financial Group
• Confident Advisor Practice – podcast for Confident Advisor Practice

Summary:

In the 14th episode of the Confident Wealth Podcast, Bill Bush and Pete Bush talk about what inflation is, what its effects are on the economy, and how inflation impacts the overall spending power of consumers.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:14 – When bubble gum went from $0.01 to $0.02 taught Bill about the effect of inflation as a kid.

• 02:04 – In 1985 a first-class postage stamp cost $0.22, by 2014 it is $0.49, and could be $0.76 in 2025.  

• 03:06 – Everything gets more expensive annually
• 04:01 – At an inflation rate of 3%, in 25 years $100,000 will be worth the equivalentbof $47,000.

• 07:01 – Inflation effects are daily lives, on our savings, on bonds, on the overall economy, on unemployment, and energy prices

• 10:24 – Inflation rising is good on savers abut bad on borrowers.
• 11:43 – Things to pay attention to in a rising inflation environment: owning bonds,
• 13:02 – Stand by your financial plan if your goals are the same.

3 Key Points:

1. Inflation is the rising cost of goods and services.
2. $100,000 will be worth the equivalent of $47,000 in 25 years.
3. All money is, is what it can buy.

Tweetable Quotes:

-    “Inflation, it’s an invisible tax I like to call it.” – Pete Bush

-    “What is inflation…of course it is the rising cost of goods and services.” – Bill Bush

-    “Everything you purchase gets more expensive every year.” – Pete Bush

Resources Mentioned:

• Horizon Financial Group – website for Horizon Financial Group
• Confident Advisor Practice – podcast for Confident Advisor Practice