[Music Playing]

Stephanie McCullough (00:06):

This is Take Back Retirement, the show that’s redefining retirement for women. Retirement is an old-fashioned cultural concept. We want to reclaim the word so you can make it your own. I’m Stephanie McCullough, financial planner and founder of Sofia Financial, where our mission is to reduce women’s money stress and empower them to make wise holistic decisions so they can get back to living their best lives.

Stephanie McCullough (00:30):

Kevin Gaines is my longtime colleague with deep knowledge in the technical stuff: investments, taxes, retirement plan rules. He’s a little bit nerdy and quantitative, I’m a little bit touchy-feely and qualitative. Together, through conversations and interviews, we aim to give you the information and motivation you need to move forward with confidence. We’re so glad you’re here.

Stephanie McCullough (00:50):

Recently, someone asked me, “What are the most common questions that people ask you as a financial planner?” So, today, Kevin and I thought we’d share them with you.

Stephanie McCullough (01:04):

Coming to you semi-live from the beautiful Westlakes office park in suburban Philadelphia, this is Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines of Sophia Financial and American Financial Management Group. Say hello, Kevin.

Kevin Gaines (01:20):

Hello, Kevin.

Stephanie McCullough (01:21):

So, the first one that I wanted to touch on is one that I hear commonly, I feel like it’s a common misconception and it’s actually kind of a math thing. So, people say some variation of, “Well, won’t my money grow faster if I put it all together in one account, as opposed to having it in two or three other smaller accounts?” What do you say to people with that one, Kevin?

Kevin Gaines (01:49):

I say it’s quite simple. Like you were saying, Stephanie, it’s math. People like having the count in one number or in one account where you can have a thousand shares and if it goes up a dollar, you made $1,000 as opposed to having two accounts each with 500 shares, and if they only go up a dollar, then they only go up $500 each.

Kevin Gaines (02:14):

So, that 1,000 is clearly better. No, it went up the same amount. And to take it even further, it went up the same percent. So, it makes no difference as far as the dollars if it’s in one account or two accounts or three accounts, or anything like that.

Stephanie McCullough (02:38):

Now, of course, the assumption we’re making here is that you’re invested in the same thing in each account, which may or may not be true. But the point is just on principle, like people think, “Oh, you have to have money to make money. The more I have invested, the faster it will grow,” which is not necessarily true.

Stephanie McCullough (02:58):

If you’re growing at 8%, you’re growing at 8%, no matter if you have a dollar or $10,000. And if you’ve got it spread over in five separate accounts, but it’s all growing at the same rate, then you’re making the same amount of money.

Kevin Gaines (03:14):

And I think that’s important Stephanie, because people, they get hung up on the dollar amount. And yes, at the end of the day, if you need $10,000 a year, then you need $10,000 a year, the percent doesn’t matter. But if you only have so much in savings going up, 8% is going up 8%. Whether that’s a $10,000 account or a million-dollar account.

Stephanie McCullough (03:42):

Now, one thing we should mention, is that you might have accounts at different places that charge you different levels of fees. Because remember, all of our brethren in the financial services industry, most of them are for-profit entities. And even the non-profit ones, they need to make money.

Stephanie McCullough (03:58):

So, there are fees, there are commissions, there are assets under management fees, all kinds of words for the fees. So, maybe you’ve got an account at a really low-cost provider and an account at a higher-cost provider. So, that’s something you need to take into consideration. Maybe consolidating at the lower cost, one makes sense.

Kevin Gaines (04:20):

Or if the higher-cost provider offers something that you cannot get at the lower-cost provider.

Stephanie McCullough (04:29):

This is true.

Kevin Gaines (04:29):

That’s a reason to have that other account. But again, back to our original point, if you’re going to earn 8% in one account or in two accounts that are just half the size, at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. So, the question is about expenses and costs, access to a particular investment idea.

Stephanie McCullough (04:55):

Or whatever auxiliary services you might be getting like financial planning from fabulous financial planners.

Kevin Gaines (05:02):

So, there’s reasons to separate the accounts and there’s reasons to consolidate the accounts. But at the end of the day, none of it has anything to do with, “Oh, it’s going to be more dollars in one versus two.”

Stephanie McCullough (05:18):

It’s not going to affect how fast it grows.

Kevin Gaines (05:21):

So, Stephanie, I hear a variation of that question, which is, “I’m diversified by having multiple accounts. So, I got an account at Fidelity, and I have an account at Schwab, so I’m protected, I’m diversified.”

Stephanie McCullough (05:40):

And this is another common kind of perhaps misconception. People hear that diversification in your investments is good, which is true. However, holding accounts at different places, different financial companies is not necessarily diversification.

Stephanie McCullough (05:56):

For example, you might have your account at Schwab and your account at Fidelity and your account at Vanguard, and your account at TIAA, but if they’ve all got an S&P 500 index fund in them, then you’re not diversified. You’re holding the same thing in each place.

Stephanie McCullough (06:11):

So, one question is, “Where does my account live?” And then the other separate question is, “What’s in it?” And the what’s in it part tells you what you’re invested in and whether or not you’re diversified.

Kevin Gaines (06:25):

And also, the thing is, you see this, “Oh, iShares S&P 500 fund, and I also own the SPDR S&P 500 fund. So, it’s two different funds, so I’m diversified.”

Stephanie McCullough (06:46):

But what we’re talking about here is an index fund. And this is passive investing versus active investing. We are a couple miles down the street from Vanguard, which was on the vanguard of introducing passive index fund investing.

Stephanie McCullough (06:59):

And the theory there was, hey, these active managers, which is the lingo for people who are researching companies and deciding which ones to buy and sell when. On average they don’t beat the market. So, let’s just buy the market, which is what an index fund does.

Stephanie McCullough (07:15):

It picks a particular index or benchmark like the S&P 500, which is the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the country, and it buys them all. And then once a year when S&P reconstitutes the index, which means, oh, these two companies are out and these two companies are in, every S&P 500 index fund sells those two and buys the other two.

Stephanie McCullough (07:34):

So, an index is an index is an index, some might be more expensive than others. Most of them are pretty cheap these days, under 10 basis points, so yeah.

Kevin Gaines (07:46):

I mean, and even if you’re looking at active funds, if they’re still playing in the same pool that they only invest in large cap stocks, which is essentially the S&P 500, there might be a little variation between the two on how the managers approach it, but it’s not necessarily polar opposites.

Stephanie McCullough (08:10):

It’s not necessarily counter correlated, which is what you want with diversification. Not to go too far down that rabbit hole.

Stephanie McCullough (08:16):

So, some people say, “Well, isn’t there a risk to me if all my money’s at say Vanguard? What if Vanguard goes out of business,” which working two miles down the road from their giant compound, I don’t think that’s any danger.

Stephanie McCullough (08:30):

However, that’s the thing we should think about, is how secure are these financial institutions we’re working with? However, we want to refer you back to episode 64 when we talked about money insurance. There’s something called the SIPC, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which protects you, if your custodian, which is the name for these financial institutions where money could be held — if they go belly up, you are protected by the SIPC. See episode 64 for more details.

Kevin Gaines (09:01):

And to be a little bit more nuanced here, you also see this conversation frequently, Stephanie, when it comes to IRAs. “Oh, I have an IRA at Vanguard, I have an IRA at Schwab, and a third one at Fidelity.” And people think they have three different IRAs.

Kevin Gaines (09:21):

And we’ve covered this in previous episodes as well, which is, in the eyes of the IRS and the regulators when it comes to contribution limits, required minimum distributions, all of these things, they consider it the same IRA they put all those dollars together. So, you’re not being clever by having two different IRAs thinking, “Oh, I could contribute twice.”

Stephanie McCullough (09:53):

Yeah, you can’t get around those IRS rules.

Kevin Gaines (09:55):

It doesn’t work that way.

Stephanie McCullough (09:57):

That’s a good point. So, to stick with IRAs Kevin, let’s move to another question that we hear pretty often, which on the face of it seems pretty straightforward, but there’s a couple points we wanted to make. And that is, “Hey, Kevin, financial planner of mine, can I contribute to my IRA this year?”

Kevin Gaines (10:15):

And the answer is always … well, the answer’s normally always yes, to contribute to an IRA. And in this case, we’re talking about what we call a traditional IRA, meaning pre-tax IRA, which is what most people think of. If we’re talking Roth IRA, we pretty much always say Roth IRA.

Kevin Gaines (10:37):

But the regular, the traditional IRA, the only requirement is to have earned income. And so, if you get a W2 or 1099 from an employer you did business with or something like that, you can contribute to the IRA. You can be five years old and if you did a commercial and you got paid for that commercial, that’s earned income.

Kevin Gaines (10:59):

So, yes, a five-year-old can contribute to an IRA. Not every custodian will necessarily take that account. But in the eyes of the law, you can absolutely do that.

Stephanie McCullough (11:13):

Let’s just also say that if you do not personally have earned income because you’re doing unpaid work in the home, for example, but your spouse does, don’t forget, you can do a spousal IRA, and we’ll point you back to episode 12 about IRAs.

Kevin Gaines (11:30):

And where the confusion happens is there’s limits on if you’re allowed to deduct the IRA contribution

Stephanie McCullough (11:39):

From your taxes.

Kevin Gaines (11:40):

From your taxes. That’s where the phrase, “Oh, I make too much money” could come into play. “I make too much money to deduct the IRA contribution.” It doesn’t prevent you from making the contribution, it just prevents you from deducting it or a portion of it, which admittedly will lead to a little paperwork headache down the road. But …

Stephanie McCullough (12:05):

You can still do it.

Kevin Gaines (12:07):

You can still do it.

Stephanie McCullough (12:07):

Even if you make $3 million a year doing who knows what, you can still contribute to an IRA.

Kevin Gaines (12:14):

Now, when it comes to Roth IRAs, that does have two requirements. You have to have earned income and you cannot make over a certain amount.

Stephanie McCullough (12:25):

Well, the other one Kevin, though I hear though, is like you can’t contribute to an IRA if you have a 401(k) at work.

Kevin Gaines (12:33):

Right. And again, you absolutely can. You may or may not be able to deduct the dollars, but you can have both. And depending on your situations, there’s reasons to have both, but that’ll be another episode. That alone … because God knows I could talk about that for a couple hours.

Stephanie McCullough (12:53):

Oh, we don’t want that listeners, we definitely don’t want that.

Kevin Gaines (13:00):

So, that covers a couple quick, specific ones. But Stephanie, what about … here’s one: “I need money, where should I take it from?”

Stephanie McCullough (13:12):

This is big. Something comes up in your life, something unexpected usually, and you need to take some cash, where should it come from? And we talked about in episode 29, how much cash should you have by which may mean things that are not invested.

Stephanie McCullough (13:35):

Cash would be savings accounts, checking accounts, money market accounts, CDs, that type of stuff. Things that are not going to go down in value. But if you need some money, suddenly, a kid has a crisis or your car breaks down, where should you take it from?

Stephanie McCullough (13:50):

And as usual, I’m sorry dear listeners, the answer is, well, it depends. It depends. But hopefully, you have built yourself up an emergency fund or a cash cushion, or an “F-It” fund or whatever it is you might want to call it. But a pile of cash, sitting around for the rainy day. And I guess if all of a sudden you need some unexpected money, that could be a rainy day.

Stephanie McCullough (14:14):

Or hey, maybe it’s an opportunity to go on some fabulous safari to Africa you’ve always wanted to do, and it pops up unexpectedly. So, it’s not always a bad thing. But if you need to take some money, hopefully, you’ve got some cash in the bank, which is not the cash you’re using to pay your monthly bills. It’s not going to put you behind and potentially, put you on the line for eviction or foreclosure. We don’t want that.

Kevin Gaines (14:38):

I mean, and then if for whatever reason you’re not touching the cash because you can’t, it’s maybe tied up in a CD or you just don’t have the savings — understanding the rules of the other accounts you have could come into play. And that’s not just an episode, that’s a series of episodes talking about all the rules with these accounts. But if it’s a medical emergency and you have an HSA, you’re allowed to use that at any point.

Stephanie McCullough (15:09):

HSA being Health Savings Account?

Kevin Gaines (15:12):

Which again, we spent a whole episode talking about that. And taking money out of your IRAs, not always necessarily the best idea, but if you need to, you need to. But being aware of those rules, you can say, “Oh, if I take it from this account, it’s going to be better than if I take it from my 401(k) or something.”

Stephanie McCullough (15:36):

So, it gets down to, if you don’t have the immediate cash reserves, understanding the rules to figure out which account’s going to work better is key to I think, answering this question.

Stephanie McCullough (15:50):

And if you have a workplace retirement plan, they sometimes offer a hardship withdrawal provision or a loan provision, which again, may or may not be the right thing to do, but you want to understand the pros and cons of that. What might it cost you both an interest and opportunity cost versus the benefit.

Stephanie McCullough (16:07):

But then this also comes back to kind of one of my favorite things to talk to people about, which is maybe you don’t want to have all of your investments in a retirement plan. Maybe you want to have a regular old, boring brokerage investment account, which means you’re going to pay taxes when it grows each year. If you’ve got dividends and capital gains distributions, you’re going to get a 1099 in January and you got to pay some taxes.

Stephanie McCullough (16:32):

And some people don’t like that. But guess what, the flip side of that means you can use that money anytime you want to. There’s no 59-and-a-half rule, there’s no penalty for taking it out. You might have some capital gains taxes, but that money is available to you whenever you want it.

Stephanie McCullough (16:49):

So, I personally overlooked building up those types of assets for a long time in my early career. Because I was focused on retirement plan and cash, and maybe paying down some stuff. But that’s one big benefit of having some investments outside of our retirement account.

Kevin Gaines (17:07):

And for those of you hung up on … and I’m speaking to a couple people specifically who I know are long-term listeners: if you’re hung up on paying those taxes year, each year a little bit, keep this in mind — the tax rate you’re paying on your investment account, your taxable investment account, likely is less than the tax you are going to be paying when you take the money out of the IRA.

Kevin Gaines (17:31):

And if you get hit with the 10% penalty, throw that on top of it. So, yes, so the tax rates are going to be or likely to be cheaper coming out of an investment account than out of a retirement account.

Stephanie McCullough (17:46):

Now, let’s talk about the other possibility because we need to talk about that, and that’s borrowing. Well, I can put it on a credit card. And in that case, you want to understand the true cost of that. What is the interest rate on that credit card? How long until you think you can pay it down? So, what’s the extra that you’re paying to that bank? Or for-profit entity, which has issued the credit card.

Stephanie McCullough (18:11):

Or maybe you’ve got a home equity line of credit, if you’re fortunate enough to own a home and have some home equity, that could be a nice place to pull it from. Usually, the interest rates are lower than a credit card, but they’re also variable.

Stephanie McCullough (18:25):

So, interest rates have been going up the past couple of years. The interest rate on our home equity lines have gone up, but they’re lower than credit cards. But anytime, if you’re considering borrowing the money, make a plan for paying it down.

Kevin Gaines (18:41):

That’s the big thing. Understand how you’re going to pay it off. Because if you’re just borrowing money and figure, “Hey, I’ll pay it off somehow, some way,” it has a way of growing and growing and you turn around, and all of a sudden, whammo, you now have this albatross around your neck-

Stephanie McCullough (19:03):

Of debt. The debt growing.

Kevin Gaines (19:05):

Of debt. So, I mean, and the other thing is, and I hear this as well, is, “Oh, I got an offer for 0% on the credit card. And I can take out, 5, 10, 20 $5,000 …”

Stephanie McCullough (19:19):

Cash advance.

Kevin Gaines (19:20):

Yeah. So, I can turn around and do whatever, pay off other debt or invest it in the market, which always scares the hell out of me. I don’t know about you, Stephanie. Well, I do know about you, Stephanie. I know it scares you too. But always again, with those, read the fine print.

Stephanie McCullough (19:37):

Read the fine print.

Stephanie McCullough (19:37):

A lot of times, they charge you 3 or 4% upfront. Fine, they’re getting paid on the whole thing, and it works out probably the same as just a regular cash advance. And what happens if you don’t pay it off within that period of time?

Stephanie McCullough (19:53):

Yes. Make sure you understand all the parameters.

Kevin Gaines (19:55):

That 0% can jump into 18, 19, 20, or even 25%. So, again, getting back to your point, Stephanie, have that plan, especially if it’s like one of those limited-time offers, understand you want to get it paid back soon.

Stephanie McCullough (20:14):

Yep. Anytime you’re borrowing money, think of it as you’re using your future earnings, money you haven’t earned yet to pay for this thing that you’re going to buy now. And maybe it’s something you absolutely need, and that’s the best way to do it.

Stephanie McCullough (20:31):

But understand that you are allocating some of your future earnings to this thing, to paying it off. As opposed to if you’ve got the money in the bank, in the emergency fund, you’ve used past earnings to build up the cash that you now have available to yourself. And you don’t have to pay anyone interest because you’ve got the money, which is nice. And it’s not always a reality for everyone.

Stephanie McCullough (20:55):

Please see episode 57, how to prepare for a recession, for more thoughts along preparing for potentially rocky times.

Stephanie McCullough (21:03):

Now, Kevin, here’s a doozy but we’re going to try not to go on for four days about this one; but I hear this one all the time. Well, given what’s going on in the world, given these headlines, given A, B, and C, that is a scary potential thing that might happen, should we be changing my investment strategy?

Kevin Gaines (21:25):

I’m going to channel Tommy Lee Jones to answer that question. So, for those of you who have seen it, and if not, go see this movie, it’s a fantastic movie.

Stephanie McCullough (21:36):

I agree.

Kevin Gaines (21:36):

Which is Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith. And at one point, the rookie agent, Will Smith is shooting the gun off in the middle of the street at the alien, and Tommy Lee Jones says, “Why are you shooting? Why are you creating all this havoc?” And Will Smith goes, “Well, because if we don’t get this, we don’t capture this guy, the other aliens are going to come in and blow up the planet.”

Stephanie McCullough (22:05):

The world’s going to end.

Kevin Gaines (22:06):

World’s going to end. Tommy Lee Jones just looks at him and goes, “There’s always that threat.” I’m paraphrasing, I’m not going into the whole diatribe, great diatribe, but I’m not going to go into it. So, there’s always that danger. There’s always something else out there.

Stephanie McCullough (22:25):

That might mean the world is ending.

Kevin Gaines (22:28):

Yeah. So, if you allow a scary headline to say, “Oh, let me go to cash, let me sell all my investments and go to cash in case this event happens and the market goes to zero.” Next week there’s going to be another scary headline. There’s always a scary headline.

Kevin Gaines (22:47):

There’s always a chance, “Oh, the government may shut down,” so, what? We’ve been on that precipice how many times in the last couple years and the market pretty much shakes it off anymore. Alright, fine, maybe one time it doesn’t, but is that really worth missing out on any type of your return? Probably not.

Kevin Gaines (23:13):

And here’s the other thing: so, what if you get it right? It’s like, “Oh, I sold everything and this horrible thing happened, and the market went down 5% that next week.” Okay, fine. When are you going to go back into the market? So, not only do you have to be right to get out, you have to be right to get back in.

Kevin Gaines (23:36):

I go back to 2007, saw lots of people saying, “Oh, yeah, it’s getting ugly, it’s getting ugly, it’s getting ugly.” And they sold and went to cash, and they avoided that last leg down. A lot of people were successful on that part. Problem is it took them two or three years and some even longer-

Stephanie McCullough (23:59):

Or longer.

Kevin Gaines (24:00):

To finally get back into the market. And in the meantime, they missed a huge runup that more than covered what they avoided. So, then you start getting into the panic of, “Oh, my gosh, it’s too high, I got to wait for it to come back down.” And guess what? It didn’t come back down.

Stephanie McCullough (24:19):

Well, if you are adding money to this account on a regular basis, it’s actually a good thing if the market has a temporary dip. I know that’s counterintuitive, but if I’m adding $500 a month to my investment account, and the market goes down 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% as it happens on a regular basis, that’s not a scary thing. That’s a normal thing. This should be your long-term money.

Stephanie McCullough (24:45):

But that means I’m buying my shares at a discount. I’m getting more shares for my same amount of dollars, called dollar cost averaging. It’s one of the reasons that 401(k)s are such a gift because you’re sticking that money in whether you like it or not, automatically from your paycheck. If you’re in that situation, a market downturn is not a bad thing.

Kevin Gaines (25:09):

I mean, if you’re in your twenties, frankly, you don’t give a rat’s ass if that market goes up for the next 15, 20 years. Stay at a low level, and then as you approach your forties and fifties, now you’ve thinking about retirement, now you want the market to take off. And all of these shares that you’ve bought at this lower price, they’re now doubling and tripling and whatever sunshine scenario you want to paint is working in your favor.

Stephanie McCullough (25:39):

Well, that’s a good point because most of our clients are not in their twenties. They’re in their fifties, sixties, seventies. And still that gets to the point of what is this money’s job? If the money is invested, it’s relatively long-term money. It’s not your money you need in the next couple of years to pay your essential bills, that should be in cash. See episode 29 on how much cash you should have.

Stephanie McCullough (26:06):

If your money is invested, it is by definition, we hope, longer-term money, meaning that you have planned to ride out some of those ups and downs. So, back to the, “Should I be changing my investment strategy question?” My answer is usually well have your plans changed? Has your personal situation changed? Is it more likely that you’re going to need this money in your investment account sooner than we thought?

Stephanie McCullough (26:33):

If the answer is no, and we had a well-thought-out investment strategy to start with, which of course, all our clients do — then I don’t think you should be changing. But if the answer’s yes, then okay, then let’s talk about it. How much might you need to be pulling out, and when, and then maybe some of that money needs to come out of the long-term bucket and go into the short-term bucket.

Kevin Gaines (26:59):

So, let’s say you have six months, your next six months of sitting in cash to cover your expenses and distributions from your accounts, but you’re worried that the market’s going to have this massive sell-off for whatever reason, and it’s going to take two years to recover.

Kevin Gaines (27:24):

If that is a concern and that’s keeping you up at night, then go ahead and take that portion of money that you will need after the six months, but within that two years and go ahead and put it into cash or something more conservative. Pull it out of the stock market. Fine, chances are you’re not going to make as much money as you would have because chances are-

Stephanie McCullough (27:54):

Would have?

Kevin Gaines (27:57):

What you’re fearing is not going to come to pass. It normally doesn’t, but it could. And if you’re losing sleep, who the hell cares? You’re losing sleep. At least my personal value is I prefer my sleep. So, move that portion to cash, but don’t move your whole account.

Kevin Gaines (28:14):

Understand your account today, we’re talking yes, some of those dollars you’re going to use in the next year or two, but some of those dollars you’re not using for another 20 years. So, even within an account, the dollars can have different roles.

Stephanie McCullough (28:34):

Yes, this is true. And the shorter-term money can be even in the same account in something less prone to volatility.

Kevin Gaines (28:45):

But there’s also nothing wrong with extending your cash pile. And what I mean by that is, if you keep, for example, one year, the next 12 months is sitting in cash, if you’re worried that it’s going to take longer for the market to come back, if it actually does sell off, there’s nothing wrong with saying, “Well, let’s have two years’ worth of cash or even longer.”

Kevin Gaines (29:13):

The point is, you don’t take your whole account and put it into cash because some of these dollars, you’re going to need in 10, 15, 20 years down the road, which is most likely plenty of time for the market to come back and then some.

Kevin Gaines (29:35):

But you don’t need to torture yourself and lose sleep if you’re anxious about a “prolonged” market sell-off and it’s going to take a while for things to come back. Just have extra cash. Then if the market sells off, great and if it rallies back, hey, so what, you didn’t lose sleep.

Stephanie McCullough (29:59):

Well, and as we’ve said many times, once you’re close to or in “retirement” by which we mean in this case, the time when you’re pulling money out of your assets to support your living expenses, it is very understandable that the money in a single account is actually playing multiple purposes. It’s got multiple time horizons, time frames in a single account.

Stephanie McCullough (30:23):

So, if you’ve got most of your retirement funding in an IRA, some of that IRA is going to be for maybe years four or five and six out from now of your spending needs. And like you said, Kevin, some of it’s 15 to 20 years, and some of it’s kind of in the middle.

Stephanie McCullough (30:39):

So, that’s when you need, in our opinion, a little bit more of a nuanced or complex investment strategy because you’ve got these multiple needs happening in the same account.

Kevin Gaines (30:50):

And speaking of nuance and complex, Stephanie, I just want to reiterate that these are quick answers we’re giving. Your particular situation could very easily require many more questions, shall we say, in planning to actually make this happen. The problem with simple answers is they apply to-

Stephanie McCullough (31:15):

Exactly nobody.

Kevin Gaines (31:16):

In general situation, but all of us have specific situations in which, hey, guess what? Details do matter.

Stephanie McCullough (31:25):

Details matter. Talk with your professionals, talk with your advisors, talk with your folks before you do anything based on what we’ve said today.

Kevin Gaines (31:34):

I mean, that was the whole point of the episode we did Stephanie, in which we were talking about the special situations. And it wasn’t to say, “Hey, look at these weird, neat things that we did.” It was to drive the point home of specific situations are going to have specific answers. And that answer is not always something you’re going to get off of the top result of a Google search.

Stephanie McCullough (32:06):

See episode 44: don’t try this at home — unique situations, call for unique strategies.

Kevin Gaines (32:11):

So, I would say that’s probably my final thought for this. What do you want to leave people with Stephanie?

Stephanie McCullough (32:19):

I think the point is that yeah, there are common questions that a lot of people face and our firm belief, if you listen for a while, you’ve heard us say this more than once, is there’s no pat answer. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

Stephanie McCullough (32:34):

It’s going to be a series of questions you got to ask about the situation, about your needs, about your own, very often, kind of your own feelings on the subject in order to come up with the right answer for you.

Stephanie McCullough (32:47):

We hope you found this helpful. Thanks so much for being with us. We’ll talk to you next time. It’s goodbye from me.

Kevin Gaines (32:54):

And it’s goodbye from her.

[Music Playing]

Stephanie McCullough (32:58):

Be sure to subscribe to the show and please share it with your friends, show notes and more information available at takebackretirement.com. Huge thanks for the original music by the one and only Raymond Loewy through New Math in New York. See you next time.

Voiceover (33:13):

Investment advice offered through Private Advisor Group, LLC, a registered Investment Advisor. Private Advisor Group, American Financial Management Group, and Sofia Financial are separate entities. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual security. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. This information is not intended to be substitute for individualized tax advice. Please consult your tax advisor regarding your specific situation.