Reaching your financial goals builds confidence and peace of mind, which are essential for making informed decisions that benefit your entire family.
In this episode, we’re following a fictional pop culture couple from newlywed to pre-retirement, to demonstrate how their thought process around an emergency fund could evolve with their changing circumstances.
Join us as we lay out a case study of planning that helps them balance their accessible wealth with a healthy emergency fund.
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Retirement, a phase many of us anticipate for a long time, comes with its own set of financial intricacies. Specifically, how do you effectively withdraw funds from your savings to ensure a comfortable, sustainable, and tax-efficient lifestyle?
A well-crafted retirement blueprint is essential. This plan should outline your long-term goals and the steps needed to achieve them. More importantly, your financial plan should be flexible enough to accommodate life's unexpected expenses, such as healthcare costs or home repairs. Revisiting and updating your blueprint annually—or when significant life changes occur—can help ensure you stay on track.
In this episode, we’re sharing the essential steps to develop a retirement withdrawal plan that caters to your needs. We dig into which accounts to draw from, how to minimize taxes, and how to manage unexpected expenses. You'll also learn about advanced strategies like Roth conversions, tax-loss harvesting, and the benefits of Qualified Charitable Distributions and Donor-Advised Funds.
Retirement planning is a delicate process, and you need to carefully consider your various income streams, including Social Security benefits. For those of us who plan to continue working while claiming Social Security, it’s important to understand how this decision can impact the monthly benefits you receive.
In this episode, we’re sharing how to avoid financial shocks in retirement. We discuss the essentials of earned income, the reduction in benefits due to excess earnings, and specific scenarios such as spousal and ex-spouse benefits.
We all have visions of our ideal retirement. However, our financial plans can quickly veer off course if we haven't appropriately managed our risks.
On this episode of Financial Symmetry, Greg Suggs from Greg Suggs Insurance joins me to discuss how to manage common risks that could negatively affect your wealth. You won’t want to miss out on these easy-to-implement pieces to your insurance puzzle that could save your assets.
How do you begin to save for your children to go to college? With the rising costs of college education, is it worth the monetary commitment?
Including tuition & fees, room & board, books & supplies, etc. the average cost of college is anywhere from $27,000 for an in-state public school up to $80,000–$90,000 a year for an Ivy League School.
How you pay for your student’s college is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make. In this episode, we cover the three phases of saving for college and what you need to pay attention to in each phase.
Some problems are easily solved with a bit of reasoning, logic, or by using a bit of math. Other problems go beyond quantitative thinking.
The most thought-provoking issues aren’t numbers-based. Many decisions surrounding retirement require much deeper consideration and often cause you to reevaluate your thinking of what you had originally imagined retirement to be.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to identify “wild problems” people face when retiring and develop a framework for working through them.
What if you had a magic app that told you how much of your net worth you never got to spend at the end of your retirement?
The trouble with planning for retirement is all the uncertainty, however, proper planning can help. In this episode, Cameron Hendricks joins me to discuss how you can learn to spend more in retirement.
Have you considered how your instincts influence your decision-making around retirement planning?
Our natural instincts and biases create frameworks that lead our perspectives on how we think the world works.
These frameworks influence our decisions surrounding our financial decisions.
On this episode of Financial Symmetry, we discuss how to build prosperity by analyzinging and identifying your perspective. Listen in to learn 10 instincts identified by the book Factfulness and what you can do to combat the biases they lead to.
Today we’re diving in to a specific path that many retirees consider as they move away from the “corporate” world and enter their second act – which is starting a business.
With increased life expectancy, cost of living increases and a desire for continued fulfillment, many retirees are excited to begin a new experiment in an area they are passionate about.
Some surveys show the proportion of people starting businesses at ages 55 to 65 has increased in recent years and, at one point, even surpassed the typical entrepreneur age group of 25- to 35-year-olds.
So today we’re speaking to those currently operating sole proprietorships and single-member LLCs OR those considering starting their own business. We’re going to shine the light on the S Corp business type and provide some details on why this could be an opportunity to explore.
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Now that you have made it through the retirement danger zone, you have made it to the Arrivement phase of retirement. You may be wondering, what are my next steps?
This season can be full of opportunities and connection with those you care about. At this point in your life journey, you may face some difficult decisions around relocating or how best to spend or give the wealth you've worked hard to accumulate.
Listen in to hear about the financial and tax moves that we see most commonly used during the middle years of your retirement.
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Have you thought about retiring abroad?
Oftentimes when we think of retirement, we think about sunny beaches with crystalline water shimmering in the sunshine. Could this or some other idyllic vision be your future?
The realities of retiring abroad can be exciting, but at the same time overwhelming. Complex financial strategies need to be considered before grabbing your passport and setting off for the unknown.
In this episode, we discuss seven crucial financial considerations that you’ll need to keep in mind if you are interested in retiring abroad.
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If you are retiring soon, you've most likely wondered if your asset allocation is too risky.
Some have called the period just before and after retirement the Retirement danger zone as it's a time where understanding how you should be invested matters for your long-term financial success.
After years of great returns in tech and large cap US stocks, many retirees could have bigger risks present in their allocations than they realize.
In today's episode, you'll learn why sequence of return risk has been called the retirement danger zone and how to prepare for it within the context of your retirement plan rather than by planning by generalized rules of thumb.
Retirement can hit us with numerous curveballs. One of those could happen right out of the gate–being forced with an early retirement.
We all know that layoffs are part of the corporate landscape. While they are commonplace, when you are faced with one later in your career it can cause you to reevaluate your financial situation.
In this episode, we discuss your options if you are laid off and how they fit in with your financial plan, your tax plan, and your 401K.
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While most of our listeners are in or on the cusp of retirement, many have loved ones who are earlier in their careers. Often we get questions on how our listeners and clients can help their younger family members make better financial decisions.
As we celebrate International Women's Day with this episode, you’ll meet our newest CFP, Niamh Douglas. Niamh and Allison discuss some tools and strategies to help young people who are just starting out get off on the right financial foot.
Many investors have been tempted to invest more, if not all, of their portfolios in the S&P 500 given the incredible run it’s had over the last decade.
But today we are talking through five reasons why you should consider not making a concentrated investment only in the S&P 500.
Don't let recency bias rule your decision-making on the road to your ideal retirement.
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🎯 Article - A Few Thoughts on Spending Money
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One of the biggest financial disasters that people can experience in retirement is divorce. On this episode of Financial Symmetry, Grace Kvantas chats with licensed marriage and family therapist, Lesli Doares.
Lesli shares warning signs to look out for, misconceptions about keeping finances separate, and why couples should seek marriage counseling in retirement. Your marriage affects every aspect of your life. Listen in to learn how you can improve it.
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🎯 Article - Many Happy Returns by David Booth
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In our usual episodes, we aim to arm you with a particular insight or strategy that can help you inch closer to your ideal retirement. But, with todays show, we want to close the year by providing a list of 15 surprising financial facts about the year that you could share in a conversation with a friend or family member.
We also pay tribute to the great investor Charlie Munger, by providing a few of our favorite Mungerisms.
As you begin your 2024, we thank you all for listening and sharing our show. We look forward to continuing to provide you with helpful steps on your journey to reach an ideal retirement
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If you are planning on retiring before age 65, there is no doubt that you have had this question.
What do you do about health insurance?
In the United States, the health insurance landscape is ever-changing and takes quite a bit of planning.
Many people even feel anchored to their jobs because of the prohibitive costs of health insurance. However, there are options for healthcare before age 65.
Listen in to discover what your options are and what you should be doing to plan for this complicated aspect of early retirement.
On the journey to reach your ideal retirement, stock options can be a valuable tool to have in your arsenal.
However, it’s easy to make mistakes given most people don’t have a class in high school that provides pointers on how to handle when they vest.
There are many things to consider with stock options: the different types, timing deadlines, tax consequences, and the leverage involved.
Since it is such a complex topic, they’re often put on the back burner and can easily be forgotten about causing you to miss out on a valuable opportunity to increase your wealth.
If you have been offered stock options with your company, you’ll want to hear these 8 common mistakes to avoid when managing your stock options.
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📬 Tips each month to help you Enhance Your Today and Enrich Your Tomorrow. Download our Pre-Retirement Checklist Ebook today
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There’s so much we can overlook with retirement plans. Here at Financial Symmetry, we are constantly finding ways to help you be aware of retirement opportunities and rules and improve your wealth.
On this special Halloween-themed episode of Financial Symmetry, Allison has come up with some retirement plan horror stories to spook you. Listen in to ensure that these horrors don’t ruin your retirement plans.
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📬 Tips each month to help you Enhance Your Today and Enrich Your Tomorrow. Download our Pre-Retirement Checklist Ebook today
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If you are a long-time listener you know that we like to go through the nuances of financial planning that may be valuable to you.
In this episode, Allison and I take a look at net unrealized appreciation (NUA). Listen in to learn what it is, who could benefit from it, and the benefits and pitfalls of using NUA. You won’t want to miss out on hearing one of our classic fictional case studies involving Freddie Krueger. Press play to hear if you could benefit from using NUA.
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📬 Tips each month to help you Enhance Your Today and Enrich Your Tomorrow. Download our Pre-Retirement Checklist Ebook today
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When it comes to the question of rolling over a 401K or 403B to an IRA, many people fear making mistakes. It’s true, that retirement account mistakes can be costly. On this episode, we’ll explore the options you have, the factors to consider, and the reasons you should and the reasons you shouldn’t roll over your employer-sponsored retirement account.
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Investing is simple but not easy. To that end, what are the impacts if you do a poor job managing your investments?
Several studies from Vanguard and Morningstar have attempted to quantify how behavioral coaching can impact your savings. The numbers settle around 1.5-2%/yr. That may not sound like much, but could equate to millions of difference over 30+ years of savings.
On this episode, we continue to explore the benefits of the wealth management relationship. If you haven’t listened to the first part you can find it here.
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If you're a Modern Family fan, you should enjoy today's episode.
Today, we're diving in the mistakes made when we make assumptions about our IRA beneficiary forms.
Many people don’t realize this but their IRA has the opportunity to be the star player of their estate plan. In this episode, we walk through real world examples, to help you take steps now to avoid similar pitfalls in your own lives.
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📬 Tips each month to help you Enhance Your Today and Enrich Your Tomorrow. Download our Pre-Retirement Checklist Ebook today
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The behavioral and emotional side of financial planning takes precedence when planning for our future.
I see this play out frequently in the form of anchoring to a perceived value we’ve grown accustomed to, based on prior experience.
This “value”; however, can unfortunately lead to decisions that damage the success of our financial plan.