Kevin Gaines (00:00):

So we’re all used to seeing quizzes and surveys and magazines, whether it’s GQ, Cosmo, or even Highlights, for those of us who remember that magazine. But actually, in the financial industry, we love this crap. Some of it’s geared towards us, some of it’s geared towards our clients, but either way, we put out a lot of this stuff. And today, on Take Back Retirement, we’re going to be talking about a couple of them.

[Music Playing]

Stephanie McCullough (00:34):

Hey, dear listeners, we need to let you know that Kevin and Stephanie offer investment advice through Private Advisor Group, which is a federally registered investment advisor. The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations to any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Now let’s get on with the show.

Stephanie McCullough (01 :10) :

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 Sophia 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. Kevin Gaines is my longtime colleague with deep knowledge in the technical stuff, investments, taxes, and retirement plan rules. He’s a little bit giggy 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 (01 :58):

Coming to you semi-live from the beautiful West Lakes Office Park in suburban Philadelphia, this is Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines of Sophia Financial, an American financial management group. Say hello, Kevin.

Kevin Gaines (02 :08):

Hello, Kevin.

Stephanie McCullough (02:12):

So, yes, we got suckered into taking a retirement income literacy quiz because, you know, I feel like these things play upon all of our, you know, kind of needs for comparison and grading. And, and the purpose of this conversation is definitely not to point you all to the quiz. You’ll notice we’re not even linking to the quiz, but to discuss some of the topics that came up from it. What were your thoughts, Kevin?

Kevin Gaines (02 :38 ) :

Well, you know, this particular quiz came from American College of Financial Services, and it’s an institution that I have been a student of. That is, you know, some of my letters come from, or ICP, comes from the American College. So, clearly, I, you know, this is a credible institution, but, yes, you know, as with all of these things, there’s always things you could do better or say better. But what attracted me to this quiz was once you read through it and understood, they were trying to bring up a lot of the more important topics that are going to impact how you live your retirement. Things to think of, be aware of, and things that can liberate you.

Stephanie McCullough (03:28):

So, as with anything, right, you want to look at the source. Where is it coming from, and who’s it aimed at? In this particular case, this was a quiz aimed at financial advisors, which, again, is why we’re not going to link to it for all of you. Because our goal is not that you know the answers to these things, but it’s that you know, hey, these are issues. These are things I should be aware of, should be thinking of as life progresses. And, you know, a lot of the specific answers are completely Google-able, but it’s more the concepts, the planning issues, and things to keep in mind.

Kevin Gaines  (04:05):

Exactly. Awareness. It’s like, oh, yeah, I do need to know about this. For example, I’m going to say right is as far as long term care, who’s going to keep care of you? Everybody says, oh, Medicaid’s going to pay for it. And I’m going to be in a nursing home and have the professional services. Well, for those of you who have listened to previous episodes, you know that’s bunk.

Kevin Gaines  (04:33):

Primarily, it’s going to be family members that are going to be taking care of you, whether you want them to or not. And unfortunately, it’s not going to be Medicare. It’s going to be Medicaid. And Medicaid has certain requirements, such as drawing down your assets and hmm issues like that, that may impact other parts of your retirement plan.

Stephanie McCullough (04:58):

Well, and the way to remember that, the way I remembered it in the beginning was that Medicaid really is aid. It’s designed for people who have no assets and no income [Kevin Gaines overcross: Right]. So if you want to qualify for Medicaid, you have to get to the point where you have very low assets and very low income. So it’s not going to be, for most of our listeners, I would think the first place that they turn.

Stephanie McCullough (05:18):

But yeah, Kevin, long-term care, there was, it was the topic of several questions in this questionnaire, both the need for it, which was interesting, right? There was a question, what is the proportion of the population that is going to need assistance with the activities of daily living, which means need long-term care at some point? So if you’ve listened before, you know that long-term care is not medical care. It’s not doctors and medicines and hospitals. It’s help getting out of bed in the morning, getting a shower, getting dressed, feeding yourself and that kind of thing.

Stephanie McCullough (05:51):

So Kevin, I noticed on your quiz, you got the wrong answer to this one. The proportion of the population that will need care.

Kevin Gaines  (05:59):

Ah! Yes, I did.

Stephanie McCullough (06:01):

What did you guess?

Kevin Gaines  (06:03):

I said 50.

Stephanie McCullough (06:05):

50% of the population. And you guessed too low. The statistics say it’s 70% of us at some point will need assistance with these things. And when you think about it, we’re living a lot longer, most of us. And of course, it kind of stands to reason that we’ll need some type of care.

Stephanie McCullough (06:26):

What are the other things that hit you on long-term care, Kevin?

Kevin Gaines  (06:29):

The question I probably liked the best was talking about the purpose of long-term care insurance [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Hmmm]. And the question was long-term care insurance is intended to cover Hospital after surgery, Emergency room care, Alzheimer’s care, all of the above. Or I don’t know [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Hm hm].

Kevin Gaines  (06:51):

And I did like this. What I did like about the quiz is I don’t know was always an answer. So at least you could always say that [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Right[-]. But the correct answer is Alzheimer’s care. Now that’s not the only thing it covers, but I liked that it was making the point. It’s not hospital. It’s not emergency room. It’s not this immediate medical stuff. It’s, It’s stuff that is, as the name implies, longer term.

Stephanie McCullough (07:19):

Yeah, and sometimes they call it custodial care. So besides the things I mentioned before, getting up, getting dressed, getting showered, Alzheimer’s care means you don’t remember what’s going on or where you should be. You get confused. You wanna walk out the door and walk down the street and get lost, right? You need another human keeping an eye on you, watching out for you. And that’s what long-term care refers to. And it is a big risk.

Stephanie McCullough (07:49):

The second piece that we wanted to talk about was a National Institute for Retirement Security survey about what women think about retirement. And when women talk about why retirement is getting harder, the rising cost of long-term care was number three. 70% of women identified that as a reason that living through retirement is getting more difficult. And I would have to agree with them.

Kevin Gaines (08:15):

Absolutely. It’s not getting cheaper.

Stephanie McCullough (08 :19):

Yep. So back to our point that this quiz was pointing out some of the main themes about retirement planning, retirement income planning. So one of the things it talked about was you know various retirement tools, retirement income tools, retirement benefits, right? It has some questions about Medicare, about social security, of course, which we’ve had episodes on before. We will link to these in the show notes. It had questions about life insurance and the treatment of that, long-term care insurance we’ve mentioned, 401k plans and that kind of thing.

Stephanie McCullough (08 :50):

And then also it went over some basic investing principles, which is good, right? We keep saying you don’t have to become an expert in this stuff, but investments are gonna play an important role in your future and and funding your needs in quote-unquote retirement, whatever that might look like for you. But for most people, it’s not gonna be working full out for the rest of their days. So leaning to some extent on what you have saved and accumulated and invested over time. And the reason investments is important, Kevin, is because of inflation.

Kevin Gaines (09:28):

Inflation.

Stephanie McCullough (09:29):

Yeah. So there was a question on this quiz that you really liked.

Kevin Gaines (09:33):

I really liked this question. And it was, you’re earning 2% on your savings account. Inflation is going up 4%. In one year, your spending capacity will be higher, lower, the same, I don’t know.

Stephanie McCullough (09:55):

Mm-hmm. Meaning you could buy more, same or less than today with the same, with the dollars in that savings account.

Kevin Gaines (10 :03):

Exactly. Which is, you look at it and say, hey, I earned 2% of my savings, so clearly I can spend more. But the point of the question was, the cost of this stuff went up 4%.

Kevin Gaines (10 :16):

I still think back to talking to people older than me generally, but even some people our age you know claim that they took advantage of this. Back in the 80s, when I could get 15% on a CD and or my savings account was paying 8% and everything was great, everybody always misses the point that inflation was higher at that time as well. So it wasn’t that you earned 15% in what we call real terms, meaning what you earned minus inflation. You were only earning, maybe 1% or 2% is what you were really earning versus inflation. Or a lot of times when it comes to savings accounts, it’s actually negative. That you’re going to be earning less than what the current inflation rate is.

Kevin Gaines (11 :10):

So, and I think that was really important to bring up, you know especially today as interest rates are going up on savings accounts and CDs and things along those lines, that’s great. But be aware to ask you know, well, how much are cost of stock going up? Because that can influence how great of a deal the CDs or savings accounts are.

Stephanie McCullough (11 :39):

And this brings us back to the question of risk. Some of the women I talked to when we talk about investing, they’re scared of the risk, which to them means the risk that the value of the investment account might at some point go down, which is of course a risk, which is why we talk about investing for longer term money, not for short term needs.

Stephanie McCullough (11 :58):

But there’s a risk with your savings account too. And that’s just what you were saying, Kevin, is that if you’re earning even something lovely like 5% today or 15% back in the 80s or whenever you were saying, right? You have to compare that to what’s the cost of living going up? What’s the inflation rate? Am I really gaining ground or to what this question was pointing out? Am I losing what in the economics terms is called purchasing power?

Stephanie McCullough (12:29):

I can’t actually buy as much. I can’t buy a Big Mac next year for the same price it was this year because of inflation. So the risk of not investing is that your money does not keep up with the growth of the cost of living and you’re falling behind.

Kevin Gaines (12 :45):

And there was actually even a question about that in this quiz that actually gets to that issue, Stephanie, as far as, you know, that you need to take some quote unquote risk in order to offset, well, other risks [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Yes], specifically inflation. You know, it was, you know, to maximize your safe withdrawal rate over a 30-year period. What percent of stocks do you need to have in your investment account? [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Hm hm]. Now the answer is 25 to 35. And the actual percent is, it depends on the timeframe and all these other things. It’s an average.

Stephanie McCullough (13 :23):

Endlessly debatable.

Kevin Gaines (13 :25):

Endlessly. And trust within our industry, we go on endlessly about this. But the point is, do need something that has the potential to earn you more than what inflation could be doing to you. It doesn’t mean you need to have all of your money in it because there’s several other risks that stocks enhance as opposed to offset. But you do, but you do want to have some. That’s the, that’s, that was the key point of this question. And I do like it for, and I like the fact that they tried to ask that question.

Stephanie McCullough (14 :05):

Yep. Yep. So we face many risks. Investment market risk is not the only one, right? You have to balance these various risks in the period of retirement.

Stephanie McCullough (14 :16):

So another question, which I really liked, which gets to one of the key pieces and honestly one of the risks of this period called quote unquote retirement is about life expectancy. And I feel like this is one where the popular kind of awareness hasn’t necessarily kept up with the reality, the medical reality, the statistical reality.

Stephanie McCullough (14 :38):

So the question, ladies, you’ll be unsurprised to hear this was a 65 year old man has an average. An additional how many years? 10, 15, 20, 25? I don’t know. Kevin got it wrong, people. Kevin got it wrong. He said 15 years. Well, right answer is 20. An average 65-year-old man has a life expectancy of 20 years. And for a woman, I think it’s slightly higher.

Stephanie McCullough (15 :05):

However, while that’s important, we also have to remember the definition of average, right? If the average life expectancy for a woman is around 86, 87, fully 50% of women live longer than that. So you can’t plan just to age 87.

Stephanie McCullough (15 :24):

In fact, one of the statistics I found from, I believe, the Social Security Administration is that for women in their mid-50s, like me and my classmates, one in two women, one in two women in their mid-50s will live to be age 90. And that doesn’t mean, ladies, that we’re going to die at 90 and a half, right? A lot of us will live beyond that.

Kevin Gaines (15 :48):

Yeah, I mean, that’s the danger of averages. So, you know, here, here’s a way to think about averages working against you. I walk into an average bar with Bill Gates and the bartender looks at the two of us and says, hey, look, there’s a couple of billionaires. Technically, yes, the average of my net worth and Bill Gates’ net worth is—

Stephanie McCullough (16 :14):

Several billion.

Kevin Gaines (16:17):

Yes, trust me, I contribute very little to that math.

Stephanie McCullough (16 :22):

Kevin has been waiting to use this for weeks now.

Kevin Gaines (16:28):

Yeah, I, I, I heard it on another podcast and I said, oh, my gosh, that’s great. And the funny thing is that that particular joke was for retirement professionals only. And they still had to explain the joke because a lot of us just didn’t initially grab on to what the joke was [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Yeah].  So it is a little thoughtful. But once you realize the point it’s making, it’s like, yeah, that’s pretty much. Yeah, that’s how averages work.

Stephanie McCullough (16 :53):

Right. I mean, statistics can be very useful and then they can hide a lot of information, right? The quote is lies, damn lies and statistics. So, you know, people can make statistics say a lot of different things. But pay attention to this. The likelihood that you’re going to live longer than you may quote unquote want to is high.

Stephanie McCullough (17 :12):

I have a dear client whose mother I met when she was 99 and her mother did not want to live to be 100. It was only three or four months away at this point. That was four years ago. Her mother died just a couple of months ago at 104. So, you know, we don’t get to control this stuff. A lot of us are going to live longer.

Stephanie McCullough (17 :31):

The other stat to bring up is that a couple heterosexual couple who make it to age 65. There’s a 50 percent chance that at least one of them will live to 92. So, you know, we got to plan for a long period of time here. Life expectancy is certainly a factor in planning for retirement and retirement income.

Kevin Gaines (17 :55):

I mean, and, you know, they even hide longevity into Social Security on another question when they were saying, you know, a single person who is going to live to 90. We assume we know we’re going to live to 90. Which age is best to file for Social Security [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Hm hm]. The answer is 70 because, you know, you’re going to have that longevity. So you want the bigger payout.

Kevin Gaines (18:23):

Now, should everybody wait till 70 because everybody thinks they’re going to live to 90? Absolutely not. But it does–

Stephanie McCullough (18 :29):

It’s case by case for sure.

Kevin Gaines (18:30):

It’s a case, but absolutely. But it does raise the conversation of ..Don’t assume that there’s this one size fits all when it comes to Social Security or frankly, any other

Stephanie McCullough (18 :45) :

Any other strategy

Kevin Gaines (18:46):

….program or retirement tool or anything out there that works for everybody. There isn’t, but there are factors that you need to take into account and longevity is definitely one.

Stephanie McCullough (18 :57):

Yeah, the frustrating part about for people who ask us questions is the answer is always, well, it depends, which can get really tiresome if we say it too often.

Kevin Gaines (19 :08):

My one complaint about the quiz was it did spend there were too many questions about investments, in my opinion. That, yes, investments are and investment returns are important to, you know, retirement income to be able to pay for this life after you’re done having to work. But a lot of people, both within and outside of the industry, I think, put too much emphasis on investments versus looking at all these other topics where, frankly, there’s more control and them going the right way or wrong way can have a bigger impact on your retirement than the market going up and down as it does every day.

Stephanie McCullough (19 :57):

Well, and the investment answer is going to be, it depends on a lot of these other things [Kevin Gaines overcross: Yes].

Stephanie McCullough (20 :02):

Right. They’re all interconnected.

Stephanie McCullough (20:04):

My only other comment is to renew my slight rant against the word literacy when it comes to money. The title of this quiz was the retirement income literacy score, which just really pisses me off because literacy usually refers to reading. Well, we are all taught to read in school, often by our families, starting around age what five at the latest. And for years, right, they reinforce how to read.

Stephanie McCullough (20:39):

Very few people get taught about money, how to function with money, how to make financial decisions, how to survive in this very artificial, really money world, financial world with these crazy rules and tools and all these things. I mean, it’s not intuitive. No one teaches us. So I don’t like the word literacy. And another reason we’re not pointing you to the quiz is because we don’t want you to get a bad score and then feel bad about it.

Stephanie McCullough (21 :04):

And this is not the point. The point is not to know the answers. It’s to know the questions to ask and have the guts to ask them. OK, rant over.

Kevin Gaines (21:14):

But that being said, as far as bad score, they actually do say in the beginning average score of this quiz, 31 percent, which means a lot of people don’t know a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about, which shameless plug time is yet another great reason you should continue to listen to the Take Back Retirement podcast.

Stephanie McCullough (21 :40):

Moving along to the what do women think about retirement survey results? I mean, honestly, none of this is going to come as a surprise, but there were a couple of things that we thought would be useful to point out, like, for example, the headline 80 percent of women say the nation faces a retirement crisis. I mean, yeah, women are worried about retirement. Of course we are. Of course. How could we not be?

Kevin Gaines (22:06):

What I found interesting is, you know, they’re asking everybody, you know, all these women about their attitudes on retirement. And it does show this unease of, you know, we don’t have enough or what we have isn’t secure. Which is also an interesting point. You know, it’s great to have a million dollars, but if you’re worried that million dollars is going to become one hundred thousand dollars overnight. You’re not going to feel any better about retiring than if you only have ten thousand dollars when you walk away from your job.

Stephanie McCullough (22 :46):

Well, and let’s harken back for a second to our just previous episode with Dan Haylett. Right. And he was talking about how we really are in a new world of retirement. Right. Kind of the whole idea of living long enough to be able to stop working at some point is relatively new.

Stephanie McCullough (23:03):

And for a lot of those generations initially, they had pension plans provided by their employer where they had some continuation of income. Right.

Stephanie McCullough (23:11):

My grandfather had one. My grandmother lived to be 100. She had a pension plan and retiree medical insurance paid for by the company my grandfather worked for. And my grandfather had died. Oh, my gosh. At least twenty five years before my grandmother died. So there was some level of security there.

Stephanie McCullough (23:29):

Dan’s point was that really, for the most part, we’re on our own now in terms of saving for this period of life called retirement. So it’s a brave new world. We’re forging trails. We’re trying to figure out how to do it. Yeah. Of course, we’re anxious.

Kevin Gaines (23 :46):

Absolutely. Although they did ask, I think, some question about Social Security. But when people say they don’t have pensions, people always forget about Social Security. Social Security is the greatest pension out there, which is to say, yes, you have this guaranteed source of income outside of your own savings. It gets cost of living adjustments.

Kevin Gaines (24 :11):

There’s the possibility of these benefits increasing. For other reasons as well, you know that you can earn a little bit more money and it doesn’t have to be with one company, unlike most other pensions. It’s only what you do for that one company. When it comes to Social Security, you can work for anybody as long as you’re paying into the Social Security system. You’re getting credit for it, including after you start collecting Social Security–

Stephanie McCullough (24 :35):

If you’re still working.

Kevin Gaines (24 :35):

..which a lot of pensions, you know don’t allow for. So that really, to me, that really drives home the point of how important social security is for all of us.

Stephanie McCullough (24 :48):

We’ll link to our previous episodes on social security in the show notes, so you’ve got that. So Kevin, there’s some interesting findings here about why women believe retirement is getting harder. So, they listed a bunch of different factors. I mentioned before that rising cost of long-term care came in as number three, but what was number one?

Kevin Gaines (25:05):

Well, number one, two, and three are all different ways of saying inflation. One was high inflation, two was rising cost of healthcare. And then number three is, we’ve said a few times, rising cost of long-term care. Rising cost is mentioned in all three. And then number four is salaries not increasing.

Kevin Gaines (25:25):

Well, if there’s no inflation, then your salary, it’s not as important that your salary increases because costs aren’t increasing. But if costs are going up, high inflation, your salary better be going up. So, you know even that fourth answer is connected to having enough income to meet the cost of stuff.

Stephanie McCullough (25 :48):

Yeah, and interestingly, there have been, there’ve been studies, I think there’s even an inflation factor for retirees. There’s regular old inflation we hear about on the news, CPI, Consumer Price Index, and then there’s different kind of subsets and different hmm ways they measure it. And inflation for retirees, meaning for older folks, actually is higher because healthcare is a big chunk of it.

Kevin Gaines (26 :14):

Right. Yeah. That there’s three main CPI measures and they all weight things differently for different reasons. Obviously, healthcare is a bigger impact the older we are because we have less health, sadly. So yeah, so you know depending on what’s actually driving it at the time, you can see some really different numbers.

Kevin Gaines (26 :39):

But what I also, liked seeing in the survey … well, not also like, because it implies that I like seeing high cost as a being a problem. Ahm, what I did like seeing in the survey was concern about the stock market was last on this list [Stephanie McCullough overcross: Yup]. Not because, again, to the point that I made earlier, it’s not that because the stock market is unimportant, it’s just these other things will have a bigger impact than markets going up and down. I think, and it seemed like the people they interviewed for this got that.

Stephanie McCullough (27:22):

Yeah, yeah, they didn’t put that as the biggest concern. They put it as the smallest in the list that they were given.

Kevin Gaines (28:28):

What did you take away, Stephanie? Was there something that stood out to you?

Stephanie McCullough (27:31) :

Well, second to last on the list was people are living longer. So I think that maybe gets again to kind of, one of the articles I looked at said longevity literacy. So I just had my rant against literacy, but this idea of people not really catching up to how long their longevity might actually be.

Stephanie McCullough (27:48) :

So a lot of us still have that idea of 65 as the retirement age, like that we all somehow deserve to be able to retire at age 65, even though when that was instituted as the full retirement age for social security, life expectancy, I think was slightly under 65.

Kevin Gaines (28:08):

It was indeed.

Stephanie McCullough (28 :08) :

Right, now it’s mid 80s and higher. So is it really realistic without pensions that we’re gonna be able to save enough to float ourselves for 20, 30, even more years?Hm, may not. So we always encourage clients to at least think about how they might be able to earn, have some dollars coming in in some way after quote unquote retirement, right? After they kind of sign off from their primary gig or their full-time gig or whatever it was, every dollar coming in is a dollar of your own you don’t have to spend. So it makes a big difference. So that worries me a little bit that that wasn’t higher on the list of things to be aware of.

Kevin Gaines (28:50):

Right, yeah, somehow finding some outside party to share some of that risk, which, and this isn’t a plug for insurance products or anything, but you know this is where annuities do come into, do have a purpose to at least look at because you’re taking some of your income risk off of your shoulders and you know how I have my money invested and you’re putting it on this big insurance company shoulder saying, hey, you just send me a check every week or every month, however often you need it.

Kevin Gaines (29:28):

Pros and cons, as always with any of these tools we discussed. But again, these, you know, there are purpose for a lot of these things that do exist.

Stephanie McCullough (29 :39):

So for those of you who want to know a little bit more, go back to episode 60, what women need to know about annuities.

Stephanie McCullough (29 :45):

So, yeah, like Kevin was saying, you know, some dollars coming in, I was thinking like part-time work or some type of, you know, rental income, something that’s a dollars coming in.

Stephanie McCullough (29 :55):

An annuity, at least the traditional plain vanilla annuity is going to pay you for life like social security, like the old fashioned pension, downside being usually no cost of living adjustment, the majority of the time, no cost of living adjustment.

Stephanie McCullough (30:10):

So I’ve talked to people, even one of my my best and oldest friends, who she’s not the oldest, even one of my best and longest term friends has a very relatively small pension payout from a previous job. You know, I think it may be as $350 once she turns 65, which is not for eight more years.

Stephanie McCullough (30:29):

And she’s like, is it really worth keeping this? Shouldn’t I just take the lump sum? Very often, if you have a pension, especially an old pension, you might get an offer like, hey, we’ll write you this check for $4,000 if you let us off the hook of having to pay you for the rest of your life.

Stephanie McCullough (30 :46):

So, usually, my recommendation is keep the pension, keep that guaranteed lifetime income. Even if it’s only enough to maybe pay for your cell phone bill, they got to pay it to you for the rest of your life. The investment risk is off of you. The longevity risk is off of you. It’s onto the pension payor or the annuity company payor or whoever, right? Social security, hm whoever’s going to pay you that lifetime income. You know, it’s not going to cover all your bills by any stretch, but it’s something.

Kevin Gaines (31:14):

Now, the one thing about this survey that I did find, I don’t know if I’m using is the right word, but the survey results say prices are a huge concern. And then they spend the rest of the survey talking about pensions, which unfortunately outside of social security are a lousy job of keeping up with cost of living adjustments. Because there are, you know, those of us with, you know, those pensions that do exist, very few of them have what’s called cost of living adjustments or COLA. You hear that once a year when they’re talking about social security benefits getting increases, the COLA adjustment.

Kevin Gaines (31:56):

But most of your traditional employer pensions do not have or do not offer that inflation protection.

Kevin Gaines (32 :07):

So, you know as good as a job pensions do for some things, back to our earlier point, it’s not going to solve all of your issues. But by all means, do we do need to explore what can we do to replicate that benefit?

Stephanie McCullough (32 :28):

So dear listener, if you’re reading any of the financial news, if you’re reading your newspaper and there’s a personal finance column and they suck you in with one of these quote unquote literacy quizzes, don’t get caught up in your score.

Stephanie McCullough (32 :43):

Take the information and take it as, oh, right, I have heard about the need to plan for inflation in retirement. Maybe I need to think about my longevity likelihood and working that into the plan and look at the various risks that you’re exposed to as life goes on. And as maybe, you know, the full-time work gets left behind at some point, God willing.

Stephanie McCullough (33:06):

That was our goal here today. We hope you have enjoyed this. We’ll talk to you next time. It’s goodbye from me.

Kevin Gaines (33:12):

And it’s goodbye from her.

[Music Playing]

Stephanie McCullough (33:15):

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 :30):

Investment advice offered through Private Advisor Group LLC, a registered investment advisor. Private Advisor Group, American Financial Management Group, and Sophia 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. Thank you.