#42 7 Super Simple Tasks to Complete Before You Rock in the New Year [Podcast]

Yeah, there are lots of articles this time of year talking about year-end tasks to complete, but mine are Super Simple ones. Okay...maybe it's just my way of trying to sound different. Still, these ARE 7 relatively simple tasks that could make a big difference in your financial life (so indulge me).

Invest Wisely - When Should I Rebalance My Portfolio?

Today I read an article on market watch titled "The Hidden Truth About Rebalancing Your Portfolio." The article discusses a recent study that argues that rebalancing can actually increase the risk in your portfolio. In this episode, I discuss my observation on their conclusions and my "best practices" for rebalancing a portfolio.

Plan Well - 7 Super Simple Tasks to Complete Before You Rock in the New Year

Pay your real estate tax bill, before year-end if you want to deduct it on your 2014 taxes.
Get your RMD done. If you are over 70 1/2 or have inherited an IRA you need to do this before year-end to avoid a huge IRS penalty. Click here to learn more.
Identify opportunities to harvest tax losses. If you have realized gains for the year, look for current positions with losses that you can use to offset your gains. I discuss a few strategies for doing this.
Conduct an annual beneficiary review. Even if you know the primary beneficiary is correct, you still need to make sure you have contingent beneficiaries. There is a worksheet to do this in the Retirement Toolbox.
Consider year-end giving. You can give $14,000 to any individual without tax consequence. If you have charitable intent, consider making charitable gifts before year-end.
Change your important passwords. Changing your passwords is like locking your door at night. It's just common sense. This is so important and almost no one does it. The holidays are a perfect time to do this. I use a password manager, 1Password (see my review here) to create and track complex passwords.
Consider diversifying your tax liabilities. The pressure to save on taxes each year can cause you to save too much in tax-deferred accounts. It's important that you have assets in taxable, tax-deferred and tax-free accounts. When you retire, you'll have more flexibility to manage your cash flow and tax bracket. If all you do is save in tax-deferred accounts (like most people), you could end up staying in a high tax bracket during retirement

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The Retirement Answer Man Episode #42

Do you know what just happened? My son is driving home from college, from Texas Tech University, no doubt very anxious to see his family, and he got a speeding ticket. His second speeding ticket! “But, Dad, you don’t understand! I had to get around that truck! I had to get around that truck!” “Well, how fast were you going, son? What was the speed limit?” “The speed limit was 75.” “Well, how fast were you going?” “90!” I’m like, “Dude, you don’t have to get around the truck at 90 mph!”

Holy cow! No doubt, he was anxious to see his family – not! So, we’ll have to see if he’s on the naughty or nice list after that. Holy cow! Send me an email or a tweet if you have any suggestions to what I should do to teach my son responsibility. He’s an awesome boy but, like most 18-year-olds, he’s very overconfident.

Anyway, thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Roger Whitney. I am the Retirement Answer Man. Today, we have two great topics.

In our Invest Wisely segment, we’re going to talk about, “Should you rebalance your portfolio?” There was an interesting article I read today that basically argued that rebalancing your portfolio actually introduces more risk, not reduces risk, which is very counterintuitive so we’ll talk about that.

In our Plan Well segment, I’m going to cover – yes, like everybody else, but mine are super simple – I’m going to cover seven super simple year-end to-dos that you can take care of before the clock ticks out on 2014. The difference in mine is they’re very super simple. They’re not just to-dos. They’re super simple to-dos which makes them special.

Anyway, I’m also going to put a link in the show notes. A little bit ago, I did an interview with Lauren Gaggioli of higherscorestestprep.com .She and I discussed how to save for college without sacrificing your retirement. Lauren is a test prep guru on helping kids prepare for the SAT and the ACT exams and she’s also a great lady. We had a really good discussion on a framework of how you can balance taking care of college education and still not sacrifice your tomorrow which is not what we want to do. You can check that out at higherscorestestprep.com and I will have a link in the show notes.

All right. Well, before we get started today, let’s have that all-important disclosure and that is only you know your entire financial situation so don’t take what I say as recommendations for you to go do something. Think of this as helpful hints and education. I can’t give you recommendations because I don’t know a thing about you and I think that’s true for anything you read or hear on the internet or on a podcast. Use it to help color your discussions with the people that do know you, and that could be your tax advisor, your legal advisor, or your financial advisor. That’s not just a great disclosure; that is a fundamental principle of planning well and investing wisely so make sure you remember that, all right?

All right. Well, in our Invest Wisely segment, I get asked a lot, “When should I rebalance? When should I rebalance my portfolio?” I guess, first, we should start off with, well, what is rebalancing? What does that mean? Well, if we use a super simple – that’s my term today – super simple portfolio like a 60 percent stock portfolio and a 40 percent bond portfolio, that will have a certain characteristic about it. it’ll have a typical historical return expectation based on history and it will also have a historical volatility or risk profile based on how volatile a portfolio like that would be over time, and that’s a standard thing to look at in constructing a portfolio for retirement or for anything in that matter.

Well, what happens is, over time, if you had 60 percent in stocks and 40 percent in bonds, and stocks do really well because stocks can do that – like they have the last couple of years – well, then stocks will grow a lot faster than bonds and bonds may actually go down. I think they did last year. So, your 60-40 allocation which represents the return expectations and the risk expectations that you signed off on when you implemented that investment, over time, as one asset class – say, stocks – does a lot better, that allocation can get out of whack and what will happen is you’ll go from 60-40 in this example to, let’s say, 70 percent in stocks and 30 percent in bonds because the stocks grew so much in your portfolio. Now, that’s a good thing, right? Because you’ve made money in equities. But what that does is it changes the whole profile of how you’re investing. Now, you’re investing – in this scenario – much more aggressively than you originally intended because your allocation, your return and volatility profile, went out of whack because your stocks have grown so much and your bonds have lagged.,

What the process of rebalancing is to have a systematic approach of selling the assets that are doing really well in your account and buying or reallocating or rebalancing to the assets that are underweighted so you stay relatively close to that target of 60-40 split in this scenario. That will keep you, theoretically, on a consistent risk return profile so you don’t get too risky or too conservative. You’re invested always like you originally agreed to, and that’s what can happen over time. So, that’s what rebalancing does.

Rebalancing is simply that systematic way of getting back to what your original risk return profile was supposed to be.

Over the very long term, the logic goes that it will force you to sell the things that you intuitively want to buy more of, right? When things are going up, we tend to be very optimistic about it and project that it will happen again in the future. Rebalancing makes you sell the things that you intuitively actually want to buy and it makes you buy the underperforming assets which you intuitively or emotionally probably want to sell. I’ve experienced that over my 24 years – over and over again – and I’ll tell you, personally, as an advisor, it’s very hard not to feel that as well because we want to please our clients and the conversation usually goes, “Well, I want to buy more of that, Roger.” I’m like, “Well, no, actually, we want to sell some of that and buy more of this,” and then they’ll say, “But I wanted to sell that so I could buy more of that because that one’s doing really well. That’s generally how we react emotionally when we have assets performing well and some not performing so well.

Rebalancing flips that on its head to slowly peel off the cream and reallocate it to things that are out of favor, and the logic being that, over time, everything goes in cycles and we know this, historically, that asset classes tend to go in cycles so this method of rebalancing helps instill discipline on selling high and buying low even when it feels a little uncomfortable so it can be really valuable.

The recent study that I read – and I’ll put a link to it in the article and I actually read the article, I didn’t read the entire study – it was in marketwatch.com and it was “The Hidden Truth About Rebalancing Your Portfolio.” A professor – I think at John Hopkins, is that where he was? No, at Duke University along with four other co-authors – did a study and what they said is that rebalancing can actually introduce more risk into your portfolio, not less risk, which is very counterintuitive.

Here was their argument in a nutshell: they said they very act of selling things that are doing well and buying things that are doing poorly on the short term can actually hurt you because, generally, if something’s doing really well, it’s in a long-term upward trend and something that’s doing poorly is in a downward long-term trend, and trends rarely, rarely reverse themselves. So, what ends up happening – they argue – is that, when you do this – selling the things that are doing well and buying the things that are doing poorly – and those trends continue, you end up feeling it. You end up actually introducing more risk into the portfolio because you’re buying more of the things that continue to do poorly. I guess that makes sense; on the shorter term, you are introducing a little bit more risk because you don’t know when those trends are going to reverse themselves. They’re basically saying, “Yeah, that’s great, but those trends are going to continue.” They’re basing that all on these trends.

But the problem with that also is that it’s not easy to find a trend – whatever a trend is – until after the fact, right? And it’s not easy to know when those actually reverse. They do concede in the article that, if you’re very long-term oriented, this process of rebalancing does have a benefit, but they’re saying that there’s more risk in the mid-short term by doing it because these trends probably will continue because things tend to contribute. So, I get what they’re saying.

What are my thoughts on rebalancing? Now, I do believe in rebalancing and I have three thoughts that I would suggest you do in establishing a rebalancing policy. These are the three steps that I use in my practice.

First off, you don’t need to rebalance that often and I was trying to find a hold of the study. When I used to teach a wealth management course at Texas Christian University, I used to have the research from UBS on the benefits of rebalancing and what they did was they showed the long-term benefits of rebalancing showing different rebalancing policies.

One policy would rebalance to that, say, 60-40 split like I talked about. Every day, it would get back to that 60-40. Then, they would show what happened if you rebalanced every week, what happened if you rebalanced every month, if you rebalanced every quarter, every half a year, or every full year, and the study was – at least the statistics that I saw and used in my class – it was a slam dunk that you don’t need to rebalance more than annually. Rebalancing any more than annually really doesn’t give you any benefit in maintaining the same risk reward profile over the long term and I wish I could find that study. I’ve looked for it all over and I can’t find it.

In addition, you don’t want to rebalance too often because, what do you do? You create more transactions so that’s going to create a trading cost of some sort and it’s going to be more complicated in your statements. There’s just going to be a lot more noise and friction going on and you could create more tax consequences or a tax cost to it because you’re buying and selling so much.

When I think of rebalancing – how often to do it – you want the minimum effective dose to accomplish what it is you’re trying to accomplish. In my experience, rebalancing more than annually is more than the minimum effective dose. That would be my first counsel or thought on the subject. (Remember: I don’t give you counsel. I don’t give you advice. My attorney just went, “Whoa! What are you saying there, Roger?”)

The second thing I would say is you don’t need to do a hard rebalance. What is a hard rebalance? Well, a hard rebalance would be, “I say my portfolio’s going to be 60 percent stocks and 40 percent in bonds. So, when I rebalance, I’m going to go right back to 60 percent and 40 percent – regardless of where the numbers were. If it was 63-37, I’m going back to 60-40.” That’s a hard rebalance where you’re going to go right back to the exact percentages on a periodic period – periodic period, is that the word or phrase? On a systematic basis, regardless. I don’t believe in that. I think that is where you want to have some ranges around what and when you’ll actually rebalance.

Think about this. Let’s go back to that 60-40 allocation again. Well, you could write the policy and I think this would help and alleviate some of the things that the study was talking about but also eliminate trading cost and tax cost is to give yourself some drift around your allocation. If you have a 60-40 stock to bond allocation, you can allow a range around those numbers that you don’t rebalance.

As an example, your stocks, although they’re supposed to be 60 percent, you don’t rebalance until that gets 15 percent away from that 60 percent number. I’m just using that as an example. Say stocks run and, after a year, it’s at a 65 percent allocation to stocks, if you had a 15 percent drift on either side of that target allocation and it moved up to 65, well, that’s well within 15 percent of that number because 15 percent of 60 would be about 69 percent so you wouldn’t rebalance. Give some of that trend following that this study and the article talks about. It gives room for trends to flow without always having to be hard rebalanced right back to that rigid number.

It’s hard to explain on a podcast a little bit. Hopefully that makes sense. But, rather than go to a hard number, you give things a little bit of a range and, as long as your allocation is within that buffer around your target allocation, let it be. That can lower trading cost, lower tax cost, and probably take some of the benefits that they refer to in this article of allowing trends to actually trend a little bit because that can be your friend from an investment standpoint, but it doesn’t give you all the rope to just let it run forever without ever getting back to that risk reward profile that you’re trying to target with your portfolio. Does that make sense?

And then, lastly, my last thought on rebalancing would be, especially in retirement, I like to use rebalancing as a periodic way to raise cash in retirement. As an example, each year – and we’re coming up on the beginning of the year, you know, we’re coming up to 2015 – we always set what the spending policy will be for clients for their retirement. If they’re drawing assets from their investment accounts, we set that spending policy will be for the year – as best we can with them – and then we raise money to make sure we have those cash reserves set aside to cover those expenses.

One way of rebalancing would be not simply to sell what has done well and buy what has done poorly but, if we need to raise cash, we can just sell a certain portion of what has done well to raise the cash to cover those cash reserves for that particular client. That’s one way to rebalance without having to do buys and sells because the more transactions you create, the more friction you have in the account in general. We want to be nice and passive and boring for the most part once we’ve decided what that return risk allocation is so one way to rebalance is just doing a periodic way just to raise money when you are trying to refill those cash reserve buckets.

I’ll post a link to this article and I’d love to hear your thoughts on rebalancing. I wish I could find that UBS article but I think, if you rebalance no more than annually, you give yourself a buffer around what your target allocation is and you use rebalancing as a periodic way to raise liquidity if you need that in retirement, that will go a long way to making sure that you maintain a specific risk reward profile so you’re positioned as best you can to have investment success over the long term and not take more risk that you actually want to take. That wouldn’t be good.

All right. Now, in our Plan Well segment, we’ll go back to that super phrase of the day. We’re going to talk about seven super simple year-end to-dos. I don’t know why I wrote that but seven simple year-end to-dos.

We have the clock ticking. As I record this, it’s going to be December 9th that you’ll be hearing it – probably on the 10th – so it’s tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and I know you’re probably already freaked out about Christmas and that may not even be on your radar yet. But, from a planning perspective, there are seven super simple things that you can do to get yourself out of the kitchen, get yourself out of all the craziness going on on the holidays. You can go into your hideaway – in your den or in your bedroom with your laptop – and take care of these seven items or at least evaluate them so you can plan well in your life on these somewhat time-sensitive events.

Let’s go to number one.

The number one super simple year-end to-do is to pay your real estate taxes before the end of the year. Now, most of us get our real estate taxes, I think I get my tax bill in early November and it says it’s due in January. Well, if I pay it in January, I don’t get to deduct it in 2014. If you have not paid your real estate taxes and you’re planning on paying them in January, just remember, you don’t get to deduct it in 2014 unless you pay it in 2014. That’s a pretty super simple to-do that you could take care of if it makes sense for you.

The second super simple to-do is to get your RMD done – your required minimum distribution. Now, if you don’t know what a required minimum distribution is, you can go to my Retirement Toolbox and I have a super simple video – I’m sorry, I’m making myself laugh – in the toolbox that will explain how required minimum distributions are taken care of and you can sign up for that toolbox right on rogerwhitney.com.

If you’re over 70.5, you’re required to make a minimum distribution this year, or if you’ve inherited an IRA from someone, and that could be anybody – that could be your mother, your father, your sister – anybody but your spouse, you’re going to be required to make a required minimum distribution, even if you’re 25. It might not even be on your radar. It’s important that you get that done before the end of the year because, if you don’t, the IRS will hammer you, and when I say hammer, they will impose a 50 percent penalty on what you should have taken out. Let’s say you should have taken out $10,000 based on your life expectancy, well, if you don’t by the end of the year, you’re going to have to take out that $10,000 but then they’re going to charge you a penalty of $5,000 or 50 percent of what should have been. So, that is a super simple year-end thing to calculate.

You can go to your advisor. There are a lot of online calculators. If you have any questions, just go to my website and go on You Ask, I ANSWER, and I will show you how and get you the resources to take care of that, and it is super simple. It’s just a matter of doing it.

Now, the third super simple thing you can do before the year-end is you can use investment losses to your advantage, possibly. If you’ve taken gains throughout the year on investments, and it’s been a good couple of years so, if you’ve sold anything in a taxable account, you may have had some gains – either long-term or short-term capital gains – that you’ve realized this year, and even if you haven’t sold anything and you own funds – mutual funds or index funds – they’re going to issue capital gains and probably reinvest those into more shares and that’s going to be a capital gain liability for your taxes. So, even if you’ve never sold anything and you’ve had mutual funds, you may have capital gains that you’re not even aware of yet.

What you can do is, if you have any positions that you own that are at a loss at the moment, you can sell those and offset 100 percent – or as much as your loss is – of any capital gains that you’ve realized throughout the years. That can be pretty powerful. If you don’t have any gains, you can still offset up to $3,000 of your income by realizing some losses this year if you can utilize that for your taxes.

But you say to me, “But, Roger, I got this loss over here and I have these energy positions,” because energy has done really poorly over the last month or two, and we’re going to have a segment on that probably in the next week or so: What do we do about these energy prices and what does it mean? But, if you have loss on these positions that you have, say, in the energy sector, you’re like, “But I still like that sector, I’m getting a good dividend on my master limited partnership shares, why would I want to sell that?”

Well, here’s what you can do: you can sell it even if it’s a position that you like and then put a little task in your tickler file to buy it back in 31 days once you get outside the wash-sale rules and realize the loss and then buy it back at whatever price that it’s trading at after a little over a month. That’s one way to maintain that position.

Another thing that you can do is you can sell it and buy something similar. Let’s say you have some position in some energy mutual funds and energy is getting killed so a lot of those are at a loss year to date and have done very poorly. Let’s say you still like energy and I own XYZ energy fund and I’m at a $5,000 loss because of what’s happened with energy prices recently and I still like energy, well, I can sell that fund and buy the ABC energy fund that will be very similar in how it acts to the one that I just sold so I’ve maintained my exposure to the area that I want exposure to, but I’ve realized or I’ve harvested whatever loss I had there. Other than the name on my statement and a slightly different exposure to whatever that investment is, I’m really in the same position, but I’ve harvested the loss so that I can use it to offset my gains and possibly lower my income a little bit. That would be one very simple thing that you can do, but you’ve got to do that before the year ends.

That’s the third simple thing and the way you would do that is just go through your taxable investment account and look at any realized capital gains that you have and then see if you have any positions that you own that are at a loss. If there are, you need to determine, “Well, do I really want to own this, still? Am I really passionate about it? Does it fit my overall strategy?” and if it’s no, now might be a good time just to get it off your statement because you probably just ignored trying to sell it. But, if you think, “No, I still have conviction about this investment and it fits my overall strategy,” then you can do this swap into something similar and still harvest that gain. That’s how you would go about doing this.

Okay. The fourth super simple year-end task is you can conduct an annual beneficiary review. Now, that doesn’t sound that important and it sounds actually sort of boring. Your beneficiary on your 401k or your IRA or your Roth IRA or your life insurance, if you’re like most people, you put down somebody when you established the account because you had to and then you never looked at it again. Well, if we’re all about planning well, it’s about looking at it once a year. Again, it’s like holidays, things are slowing down; you probably want to get out of all the craziness in the house. Go pull up who your beneficiaries are on all of these types of accounts and it’s important for two reasons. One is you’ll want to make sure that primary beneficiary is the person you still want to be the primary beneficiary.

Now, I had a client a number of years ago. It was five years after a very nasty divorce and he came to me and says, “Roger, I’ve got this life insurance policy,” and he brings it to me and we were reviewing it because he wanted to know whether he should keep it or not. We looked at it. I’m like, “Well, John,” not his real name, “You realize who’s the beneficiary of this life insurance policy? It’s your ex-wife.” He looked at me and he goes, “Uh!” He never looked at it. Trust me; he did not want to give a death benefit to his ex-wife. That’s one reason why it might be important to – at least annually – look at those primary beneficiaries of accounts that you have beneficiaries on.

Now, if you’re like me and been blessed, I’ve been married 24 years – a little over 24 years – that’s not going to change. My wife will always be my beneficiary and I will always love her – I will. It’s still important to look at it because you want to know who those contingent beneficiaries are. What a contingent beneficiary is, it’s that person that, if my wife and I died in a plane crash together and both of us were dead, then who would get it if she wasn’t alive? That’s what contingent beneficiary is. It’s important to have those and a lot of people don’t have those because, well, the odds of that happening are very low and we usually don’t know who to fill out at the time or we don’t have the social security number or whatever information we need so we don’t put them on there.

I have dealt with instances where there weren’t and there should have been and the tax consequences to the person that ultimately inherits those becomes impaired. Basically, they have to take it all out at once and they pay taxes on it whereas, if there was a contingent beneficiary, they would have been able to manage their tax liability over their lifetime. It’s a good idea to review all those and it’s actually super simple. It’s just taking the time to do it.

The number five super simple tip is to consider year-end giving. Now, you can always give money to me. Just go to rogerwhitney.com – no, you don’t need to do that; I don’t need your money. But year-end gift-giving is one of those things that runs out every single year. So, each year, you are allowed to give up to $14,000 to anybody you want, to as many people as you want, without any gift tax on anybody – on the receiver or the giver’s side.

Say, take my son to help pay his speeding ticket, my wife and I, combined, could give him $28,000 and not have any tax consequence and he wouldn’t have any tax consequence. That’s not going to happen! More than likely, he will be paying me money for my increased insurance, but you get the point.

You have the opportunity to give $14,000 to anyone that you want, and this can be a great strategy if you’ve done the work to know that you are in a situation where you’re not going to run out of money and you actually have excess money that will go to an estate. Then, the question becomes, do I give some to them now and have some say and enjoyment in how they use it? Or do they just get a bigger pile at the end? That’s really what it comes down to. But the key is, first, you need to know whether you’re actually in that position and that’s why you need to plan well in the first place.

The second idea of giving before the year-end is to a charity. If you have charitable intent and you know you’re going to be giving money to a charity anyway, say in 2015, if you can use the deduction now, you can go ahead and get that done in 2014 so you can write it off this year so that can help you in managing your tax liability based on your particular situation now.

The idea with charitable giving or giving to kids is that you already have the intent. You have to already have the intent first. You don’t give typically – except with some advanced strategies – unless that was your initial intent regardless of the tax consequences. But that’s something to consider before the year-end because, once 2014 is done, now that is gone and you can never make that up. You can just start going forward from there.

The number six super simple year-end to do is to change your important passwords. I’ve talked about this before. I did a little review – it was very rudimentary now that I read it but – of 1Password which is the password manager that I use and you can find that at 1password.com. I have no affiliation with them but I do like their password manager a lot. The holiday season is a great time to change all of your important passwords, hopefully to complex passwords, and a software program like a 1Password – and there are many other things out there – can do that for you.

But you want to change these at least on an annual basis to heighten your security for your online traffic because, more than ever, identity theft – you hear all the LifeLock commercials – identity theft does happen. I’ve had things like that happen in my practice where I’ve seen and had to deal with clients that were having their identity stolen or attempted to be stolen. These things really do happen. It never feels like it happens until it happens to you. If you get on an annual schedule – say every holiday – make it one of your seven super simple tasks – that will go a long way in protecting you and your financial assets.

Now, the last of the seven super simple year-end to-dos, there isn’t really a time clock on but I do want to bring it up and that’s diversifying your tax liabilities. At the end of the year, everybody wants to defer money into their 401k, into their IRAs, and all these tax-deferred investments so they can save on taxes and avoid the tax man this year, and that’s a great strategy. There are a lot of benefits to being in tax-deferred accounts. But I’m going to give you a word of caution – and this is one reason why, in the Plan Well process, we focused on the net worth statement – you want to diversify your tax liabilities. What I mean by that is, yeah, you want to have tax-deferred accounts, but that’s not all you want to have and that’s usually what ends up being what the majority of your liquid assets are in – your tax-deferred assets. You want to diversify into tax-free assets and that could be into Roth assets and you want to diversify into taxable assets. You want to make sure you have these buckets filled and not just filled in the tax-deferred bucket because, if you don’t, what’s going to happen is when you do retire and all your liquid assets are in your tax-deferred account, well, you have very little flexibility on how you’re going to manage your tax liability. You’ll end up taking a lot of money out of your 401k or your IRA every year to supplement your income and you’ll be in a high tax bracket whereas, if you have these different buckets of tax-free assets, taxable assets, and tax-deferred assets, you can manage your tax rate so you can save on taxes while you’re retired and that’s really where it pays off. We may do a whole Plan Well episode on that alone.

That, my friends, are my seven super simple year-end tasks that you can do to maintain your sanity while all your family is around for the holidays and feel good about yourselves that you’re on the path to planning well for 2014 and ready to rock in 2015.

Now, I have worksheets and checklists on a number of these in the Retirement Toolbox which you can get at rogerwhitney.com. If you have any questions as you go through any of these and you need some help or just have a quick question you want to ask somebody, go to rogerwhitney.com and click on You Ask, I ANSWER or send me a tweet and I’ll contact you directly and answer any questions that you have.

I want to thank you so much for joining me. Have a wonderful holiday and a merry Christmas. I’ll be here next week. I’m not taking any time off.

Until next week, this is Roger Whitney, hoping that you plan well and invest wisely.

Is that my son I hear at the door? Spencer! Get up here!