The Retirement Trainer

In the first part of this series, Pat Puhl joined the podcast to talk about operating a sustainable nonprofit in 2020, what he did to ensure that their entire calendar’s worth of fundraising didn’t need to be scrapped or canceled, and the many potential tax benefits available to you when you give to charity. If you haven’t yet, click here to listen – we highly recommend you do so before you dig into today's. 

In this episode, Pat and I continue our conversation. We talk about the impact of the Trump tax code and COVID-19 on nonprofits’ finances and donations, and why charitable giving is so incredibly important at this moment in history. 

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn: 

• Why the Trump tax code led to significant decreases in charitable donations from large donors. 
• What Families For a Cure is doing to ensure that they can keep the promises they made in 2019.
• The vicious cycles created by poverty.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/38

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

Charitable giving is more important now than ever before. The challenges, setbacks, and losses caused by COVID-19 have affected not just families and businesses, but the organizations they support as well.

That said, there are a lot of people out there who are rising to the occasion and doing good. One of them is Pat Puhl, who is a co-founder of Families For a Cure, which helps families in need in Columbus, Ohio by supporting cancer research and patient care programs. 

Today, Pat returns to the podcast to talk about operating a sustainable nonprofit in 2020, what he did to ensure that their entire calendar’s worth of fundraising didn’t need to be scrapped or canceled, and the many potential tax benefits available to you when you give to charity.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn: 

• How Families For a Cure rethought their operations in light of COVID-19.
• What Families for a Cure did to ensure that they wouldn’t miss major fundraisers for the first time in history.
• How smart planning helped Families for a Cure give grants and assist patients in need in extraordinarily difficult times.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/37

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

Business owners have a lot of choices when it comes to providing employee benefits, and one of the biggest benefits available is the 401(k). However, many employers don’t know how they work, what their liability is, or how to protect themselves. 

If you’ve had a job with benefits, you’ve likely had a 401(k), but implementing one as an employer is another story entirely. Today, we’re walking through everything that you need to know as an employer about how 401(k) plans work, how to implement them, and why it’s so important to have an advisor who’s focused on them in order to help both you and your employees benefit.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn: 

• How a 401(k) advisor can help business owners make sense of planning and implementation.
• The many different individuals and government organizations involved in 401(k) implementation and administration. 
• Why 401(k)s are not one size fits all plans - and how people accidentally put themselves at risk when dealing with 401(k)s.
• Why mistakes with 401(k)s can be very expensive - and how to best avoid them.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/36

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

For many people, the 401(k) is one of the biggest parts of their retirement portfolios. In times of great uncertainty, and especially of market volatility, many want to know how to protect their most valuable assets. Especially after the Great Recession of 2008, it’s easy to want to make rash decisions. However, it is a great time to assess your overall risk and understand how best to protect your money - and yourself. 

Everyone’s situation is different. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to retirement planning, and every family likely needs to take different approaches and positions to ensure that they will be able to enjoy retirement on their terms. 

Today, we’re talking about how to invest - or simply defend your portfolio - in times of volatility. You’ll learn about the unique factors that lead to market instability, how to understand your exposure to risk, and the important questions you and your advisor should be discussing as you create a 401(k) to meet your unique needs.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn: 

• How the COVID-19 pandemic, elections, and a wide variety of other factors can create wild market volatility.
• Why investing is more about how much money you’re willing to lose - and why you don’t benefit from looking at your account every day.
• Why you can’t make changes to your retirement accounts overnight - and why working proactively with your financial advisor will almost always lead to better outcomes.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/35

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

In the previous episode of this podcast, we explored what taxes currently mean for retirees - and why taxes are the most expensive thing in almost every retirement plan. 

If you save the wrong way, you’ll be penalized for it. If you were so lucky as to live to be 115 years old, you’d be required to withdraw 50% of your pre-tax retirement accounts each year - and no matter what age you are, your required minimum distributions can lead to massive tax spikes. 

Today, we get at the heart of why your pre-tax investments are so expensive when compared to Roth investments, how to effectively prep your taxes regardless of what happens in this year’s election, and why the health of your investments won’t tell you anything about your spending when it comes to your taxes. 

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn: 

• Why 59 ½, 70 ½, and 72 are the magic ages when it comes to taxes - and what tax penalties you face when you withdraw from your retirement plan at each age. 
• How retirees can use qualified charitable distributions to minimize Social Security taxes. 
• Tax opportunities created by the CARES Act that may be worth considering.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/34

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

Taxes are the single biggest expense that people have in retirement. Everyone wants to have a plan in place to deal with them, but few know how to do it well. 

When you retire, paying taxes on Social Security and even on ordinary income can be voluntary, but only if you have the right plan in place. With the national debt rapidly rising and no predictable budget set by Congress for several years in a row, personal planning has gotten more important than ever.

Today, in the first part of a two-part series, we take a look at the state of taxes for retirees right now, why retirees are proving conventional wisdom about taxes wrong all the time, and what the future may hold.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn:

• Why most people don’t need less income when they retire - and aren’t in a much lower tax bracket in retirement, contrary to conventional wisdom. 
• Why the low taxes brought into effect in 2018 will likely go away in the event of a Biden win. 
• Why your tax retirement is the most expensive money you can buy - and how to plan accordingly.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/33

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

Many people buy the wrong life insurance products. It’s easy to make bad decisions when you don’t have a concrete financial plan in place, and as a result, you may end up purchasing products that don’t cover all your needs. 

There are no “bad” or “good” types of life insurance products. There are simply insurance products that do or don’t serve you, and a proper financial plan ensures that you and your family have access to the right coverage when you need it. 

In today’s episode, we walk through the basic types of life insurance products, the key questions to ask when purchasing a life insurance policy, and how to identify potential gaps in your life insurance coverage.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn:

• What makes term life such a popular option for young families.
• Why whole life insurance was so popular 15-20 years ago - and why it may (or may not) be a good fit for you and your family. 
• What differentiates whole life from permanent life insurance - and why you need a clear strategy to utilize either. 
• What makes indexed universal life insurance so popular with businesses.
• How to customize life insurance products to meet your unique needs.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/32

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

We are all living in one of the craziest, most volatile markets in history. To get through it, you need a plan, and that plan needs to change over the course of your life to ensure you conserve when you need to, have cash flow, and can make transitions with confidence and ease.

These are the core concepts of age-based investing - looking at risk as part of your plan to achieve safety, income, and growth.

Today, we explore target date funds and how to use them as you age to reduce your risk over time and meet your financial targets, no matter what happens along the way.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The three basic places to put your money - and how to think about all of them as you age.
• How to use target date funds effectively - and how you can use the 2008 financial crisis to understand the common misconceptions surrounding these assets.
• Why everything in the market has risk.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/31

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

In last week’s episode, we started a deep dive into annuities: what they are, how they work, and why they might (or might not) make sense in your retirement portfolio. If you haven’t yet, we recommend you listen to that episode first, then come back to today’s. 

More than anything else, you need to remember that whether you’re talking about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, or, yes, annuities, there’s good and bad in everything. You need to make sure that you’re using the right tool for your situation and your family, because the wrong investment can get really, really ugly, no matter how “good” it might seem. 

Today, we continue our deep dive into why annuities may - or may not - be right for you. You’ll find out what questions we ask in our discovery process as we determine whether a client should leverage annuities, why being able to track and monitor your assets’ performance is so important, and discover the biggest problems facing retirees when it comes to annuities.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn:

• The four different types of annuities, why a pension is a type of annuity, and why principal is not guaranteed. 
• Why it’s so important that you do the math before purchasing any financial product - and how crunching numbers can save you from financial distress years down the road. 
• Why you want to get any guarantee pertaining to your benefits in writing.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/30

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com

When many people think of annuities, they say, “Oh my gosh, that’s horrible.” Many people either love or hate them, but this is almost never the right perspective to take. Why is this? It’s simple: many financial planners can’t clearly explain where it makes sense to use annuities or make sense of the complicated industry terms surrounding them.

Annuities are one of many investing tools available - just like stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or real estate. You have to have the right tools to get to where you want to go, and you need to understand exactly which tools will better your situation, whether you’re transitioning into retirement or already retired.

In today’s episode, we’re breaking down what annuities really are, how they work, and how they might - or might not - make sense as part of your retirement portfolio. You’ll learn the basic terminology surrounding these products, the different types of annuities, and the ways that the financial industry makes this far more complicated than it ought to be.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn:

• Why so many people have such polarized opinions about annuities - and why either loving or hating annuities is such a flawed approach.
• Red flags that should always stop you from buying any financial product, including annuities.
• The four basic types of annuities and the important terminology that defines these products.
• The major difference between fixed indexed and variable annuities - and how these terms get used interchangeably.

Show Notes

To get access to today's show notes, including links to all the resources mentioned, visit TheRetirementTrainer.com/29

How Fit Is Your Retirement Plan?  We can help you manage your finances so you can pursue your goals. To learn more, visit EGSIFinancial.com