How To Prepare For Retirement Ep. 123 Artwork

Excel in Retirement

Where financial planning becomes understandable. David brings interesting stories each week to listeners of his Excel in Retirement show along with actionable ideas that may help listeners avoid pitfalls that many people face in their retirement. David C. Treece began his career in the financial services industry in 2011. He is an independent financial adviser. He has passed the Series 65 securities exam, and he is health and life insurance licensed in several states. David’s financial advisory firm focuses on retirement income planning.David worked for two other financial advisors before founding his firm in 2018. David launched Clients Excel because he has a desire for his clients to have a second to none experience when it comes to their financial planning for retirement. David relentlessly strives to be the best at helping people prepare for retirement.The bedrock of David’s ethos is treating others as he would want to be treated.David works tirelessly to continually bring pertinent content to our clients and friends through our weekly newsletter and podcast. Through these, David brings informative content that may aid you in preparing for retirement. Through his financial planning work, David’s hope is that his clients are empowered to have a confident financial future.David and his wife, Mallory, have a daughter named Amelia and rescue dog named Oscar. They also have a backyard flock of chickens that Amelia loves to tend. David and his family are active in their church in Spartanburg. He is also a volunteer mentor with JumpStart, which is a ministry for people who have been recently released from prison.

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Excel in Retirement

How To Prepare For Retirement Ep. 123

July 24, 2024 • David C. Treece • Episode 123

People come to us for financial planning at different stages of life. Most of our clients are closing in on retirement or they’re in retirement, but that can be a 10- to 15-year window of when people generally become a client of our firm. I’ve gotten a bird’s-eye view into what works well and what doesn’t.

We normally recommend that people begin working on their financial plans for retirement when they are five years out from retirement. It makes sense to begin making the transition from an accumulation stage to an income and distribution stage five years out. Once we are closer to potentially using our funds, it makes sense to dial down our risk on some of our funds in order to figure out a way to increase our probability of being able to successfully take income out of our accounts. For that reason we are downside focused first because most of our clients are transitioning into retirement.

We also want to begin figuring out how much income you may be able to sustainably draw from your retirement accounts and make them last as long as possible. This may include tax planning strategies like converting tax-deferred 401k accounts to tax-free accounts and the implications around this. Healthcare planning and taking a crash course on Medicare is often helpful, as is figuring out your best Social Security claiming strategy.

We can do all this quickly, but when there is a window of time to work through these things, it allows for you to not feel like you have an exhausting summer of activities and you have time to rest in between mental exercises. It’s not easy planning the next 25 to 40 years of your life, and it’s best done methodically. If you’re like most of our clients, it took you 30 to 40 years to accumulate the funds you have. It definitely merits taking a few hours off work to figure how to make them last for the next 30 years.

Whenever you have questions about your financial plan, please reach out at 864.641.7955. Get David's book How To Excel in Retirement.

Investment advisory services offered through CreativeOne Wealth, LLC. Clients Excel, LLC and CreativeOne Wealth are not affiliated companies. Licensed Insurance Professionals. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Any references to protection or lifetime income generally refer to fixed insurance products, never securities or investments. Insurance guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims paying abilities of the insuring carrier. Annuity withdrawals are subject to ordinary income taxes and potentially a 10% IRS penalty before age 59-1/2. Roth distributions are tax free after age 59-1/2 and the account has been open for at least 5 years. This video is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet particular needs of an individual’s situation. Clients Excel is not permitted to offer and no statement made during this show shall constitute tax or legal advice. Our firm is not affiliated with or endorsed by any governmental agency. The information and opinions contained herein provided by third parties have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed by Clients Excel. The use of logos and/or trademarks of hosting sites are the property of their respective owners and are not an endorsement by those owners of our firm or our program.

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Welcome back to the Excel in Retirement podcast, where we help good people make wise financial decisions so that they may excel in retirement with confidence. Learn more at clientsexcel.com. Now to your host, David Treese.

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Welcome back. Thank you for listening. This is episode 123. Well, we have gotten to the point in our summer where we are tired at our house. The summer beach trip has come and gone, and Amelia and Ansley have had swim lessons a couple times a week. Amelia has had tennis. She's gone to camp three weeks this year. And I don't know of many six-year-olds that are as busy as she is. I mean, she went to art camp, sports camp, STEM camp, and on and on and on. I remember when I was a kid, I was a kid looking forward to summer so much. I was so ready to be done with school so I could spend time outside and we would always go to the beach in the summer. That was just a lot of fun, but it kind of got depressing when school was about a week or two out and it was time to go back to school. Unfortunately, that's the way that I felt about it. But Amelia, our six-year-old, boy, she launched out of bed like a rocket this morning. She was ready to go. That's how she is most mornings. And so maybe I should rephrase that first sentence. And Mallory and I are the ones that are tired. And you know, I heard on the radio over the weekend when I was coming back from a mountain bike ride that taking naps is biblical. So Jesus took a nap, right? He was in the stern of the boat, and I believe it's Mark 4, and his disciples awoke him during a storm and they were distraught. But Jesus was down there taking it easy. And the DJ on the radio said it must be biblical to take naps. Boy, that resonated with me. I don't know about you. In our modern world, it's easy to go, go, go. and never really slow down to rest. Come to think of it, resting is a lot like preparing in many ways. So planning to rest prepares us for what we need to do the next day or what we need to do after our nap. And so I've heard it in some kind of personal development. Maybe it was Zig Ziglar. I'm not sure. I think it was. He said that a good day starts the day before. And so he would plan his day beforehand. And I've really gotten in the your day go off a lot more seamlessly if you don't start your day reactionary. So Mallory and I got a fitness tracker called a WHOOP and I've had mine since Christmas and it gauges your overall readiness for the day. It tells you how recovered you are based on several bodily metrics like your heart rate variability and heart rate and how you slept and how intense the day has been and stress. It even illustrates how stress affects you and it tells you how ready you are for different activities from cycling to running to doing whatever and and it shows how these activities affect your physical performance. So we get to see in real time how staying up too late affects us, or how that late night brownie in the kitchen when everybody's gone to bed, how that affects us, or how working out too hard or stress affects us. It's really been eye-opening to better understand the way that I feel. And it's interesting getting that real-time information. And so People tend to come to us at different times and different stages in their lives for their financial planning well-being, and that's sort of like getting a gauge on where they're at in real time, right? Kind of like the fitness tracker, meeting with an advisor can help you see your readiness for retirement and see if you're on track for your goals. Most of our clients that we work with are closing in on retirement or they're in retirement. But that can really be a 10 to 15 year window when people retire a lot of times. I mean, some people retire a little bit earlier and some people work well into their 70s. And that window of time can generally be a pretty big from client to client. But what the point is, is I've gotten a bird's eye view into what works well and what doesn't work for folks. Now, we can come into the situation on two wheels and say, hey, we're going to retire in six months or three months or whatever. And we can make that work and figure out our best options but from a best practices standpoint I think it makes a lot of sense to start evaluating where you're at when you think you've got a tentative plan about five years out from retirement. And so we want to make that transition from an accumulation stage that I talk about to an income and distribution stance about five years out from retirement. Because once we are closer to potentially using our funds, it makes sense to dial down our risk on some of our funds, right? In order to figure out a way to increase our probability of being able to successfully take income out of our accounts. And for that reason, we are downside focused first at our firm because most of our clients are transitioning into retirement. When we have years to recover from market losses, we may be able to take a little bit more risk. But when we're within five years of retirement, it makes sense to begin transitioning to a strategy where we can increase our probability of success. Yeah, we don't have a crystal ball. In fact, I was talking to an 81-year-old guy on the phone, I believe it was last week, and I was asking him how he was feeling about the stock market and the economy and so forth. And he said, well, David, my crystal ball is a little bit cloudy right now. And it seems like the older you get, the more that crystal ball gets cloudy, right? Or the more aware you are of it being cloudy. Maybe that's a better way to put it. But what we also want to begin doing is figuring out how much income we might be able to sustainably draw from our retirement accounts and make them last as long as possible. Now, this process may include tax planning strategies like converting tax-deferred 401k accounts to tax-free accounts and the implications around this. Healthcare planning is another thing. So we want to take a crash course on Medicare and figure out how to maximize that and figure out our best choices with health insurance. That's often helpful. And also, we want to figure out what our best Social Security claiming strategy is. And we want to figure out how to maximize that or at least know all the details so that we can make the best well-rounded decision going into it. We can do all this quickly, but when there's a window of time to work through these things and these math issues, it allows for you to not feel like you're having to exhaust or you're not having exhausting summer activities and you have time to rest in between these mental exercises, oftentimes important questions come up that can be a little laborious to figure out mentally. And so it's easier if we have a little bit of time to figure these things out because financial planning is a fluid situation. Things change, right? And we have to say, it's not easy planning the next 25 to 40 years of your life. And when we are retiring at, say, 60 years old, there is a possibility that Maybe some of those folks could live well into their 90s. And so 30, 35 years you're planning there and you're planning to not work for those years. And so it pays to be methodical about the situation and figure out if all of your I's are dotted and all of your T's are crossed. If you're like most of our clients, it probably took you 30 to 40 years to accumulate the funds you have. It definitely merits taking a few hours off work to figure out out how to make your funds last for the next 30 years, don't you think? That's always so perplexing to me when people say, I can't meet until 5.30 or 6 or Saturday. I don't understand why people can't And if you have questions, we'd love to preview some questions in the podcast. So please put those together. But I hope you have a great day and look forward to our next show. Take care.

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Investment advisory services offered through Creative One Wealth, LLC, Clients Excel, LLC, and Creative One Wealth are not affiliated companies. Licensed insurance professionals. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Any references to protection or lifetime income generally refer to fixed insurance products, never securities or investments. Insurance guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims paying abilities of the insuring carrier. Annuity withdrawals are subject to ordinary income taxes and potentially a 10% IRS penalty before age 59 1⁄2. Roth distributions are tax-free after age 59 1⁄2, and the account has been open for at least five years. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet particular needs of an individual's situation. Client's Excel is not permitted to offer and no statement made during this show shall constitute tax or legal advice. Our firm is not affiliated with or endorsed by any governmental agency. The information and opinions contained herein provided by third parties have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed by clients Excel. The use of logos and or trademarks of hosting sites are the property of their respective owners and are not an endorsement by those owners of our firm or our program.