transcript

Speech-to-text transcription can look a little quirky. Please excuse any grammar or spelling errors.

Episode #484 - Listener Questions: “How Should Spouses Claim Their Social Security Benefits?”

Roger: "Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are they aren't paying any attention to you." -Eleanor Roosevelt. I love that.

Oh, hey there. 

Welcome to the Retirement Answer Man Show. This is Roger Whitney, and this is the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to help you do the work so you can have the confidence to lean in and rock retirement. Today we're going to answer some of your questions. Got some really good questions today on non-qualified stock options.

How do I simplify a portfolio as I move into retirement? Really important question, so we're going to explore those. Before we do that though, I have a few announcements. 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Number one. Next month on the show we're going to talk about the eight principles of rocking retirement. 

Now, originally next month was going to be about expat retirement. We're going to postpone that for a couple of reasons. I'm sorry that I forecasted it and now we're pivoting, but that is what we're going to do. So next month is a five-week month, we're going to talk about the eight principles of rocking retirement in the financial realm and in the non-financial realm.

So that's number one. All of those that emailed me on Expat Retirement, I'll be emailing you to work on building that series so we can explore that possibility. 

Number two is we have open enrollment for the Rock Retirement Club starting May 11th for about four or five days. We're going to have an open house on May 11th.

I'm going to talk about the four stages of creating a great retirement plan, and we're going to show you what we created in the club, which gives you virtually everything you need to create a plan you can have confidence in. We're going to teach you how to do that, give you the tools, the planning tools to do it, have the coaching to help you along, as well as the community of people all in the same place doing amazing things.

I'd love for you to join us there and learn more about the Rock Retirement Club. You can go to livewithroger.com to register for that open house. That will be online, or we'll send links in 6-Shot Saturday. So that's number two. 

Number three is, and I don't talk about this very much, but we had some changes going on in our advising, our retirement planning practice, Agile Retirement Management, where we are doing flat fee plans, where we will help set up your project that you can take and implement, and we also have a little bit of capacity to take on clients that we can work with on an ongoing basis and actually walk life and help them manage the plan over time. So, if you have any interest in that, you can go to retireagile.com and there's a place where you can schedule a fit meeting so we can have a chat and see if we're fit or not.

With that, let's get to your questions.

LISTENER QUESTIONS

That was time to get to your questions. If you would like to ask a question or even just share a comment privately, you can go to rogerwhitney.com/askroger, and you can type in your question. You can leave an audio question. You can just say, hey, how you doing? Whatever you'd like, we'd always love to hear from you.

QUESTION ONE

So, our first question is actually a suggestion from Kathy. 

Kathy heard Rita's question about groups for widows and whether we would do one in the Rock Retirement Club or not, and we're taking that under advisement. But Kathy had an idea for you, Rita. 

She said, 

"Hey, Roger, in response to Rita's question about gathering your RRC widows together, I hope you pass this along to Rita. As I am an experienced widow and I know a lot of online resources, the group Soaring Spirits International is a widow-widower group that offers both Zoom get-togethers of widows and widowers, and also in-person get-togethers in various local areas. If Rita Google's soaring spirits, she'll be able to join a weekly Zoom call with other widows to walk that journey together."

Thank you so much, Kathy, for sharing that resource. I never had heard of that. 

QUESTION TWO

Our next question comes from Al in claiming social security strategies. This would fall into the optimization phase or principle of retirement planning and when creating your plan of record. 

Al says,

"My wife and I are both over 65. She is retired and I will retire in a year or so. At full retirement age, my wife's social security benefit will be slightly less than 50% of mine, less than $200 difference there. The original plan was to delay both of ours until age 70, as the income won't be a make or break for us. Now, I'm wondering if she should take her benefit at full retirement age, then switch to the spousal benefit when I take my social security at age 70."

That's a great question Al. 

The foundation in order to get a better judgment call on this is going to be to have your base plan of record, and I would just assume that it was full retirement age for both of you in that base plan. Now that you have that base to work with, you can start to think in an organized way as to whether one or either of you should delay.

So, I would start with both of you claiming at full retirement age, even if that's not the case. I like that you're addressing this now in more detail because I would call this a ripe banana. This is something that is eminent. You have a decision point coming up here in the next year or two. It's not green and you're not like 56 and thinking about this.

I think that makes sense. It's time to focus your attention a little bit here, but there really is no easy answer. There's a lot of situational aspects to this in coordinating the spouse claiming and you claiming. 

Step one is to get the most accurate numbers you can. So, both you and your spouse should go and get their social security statement so you can understand what the actual benefit is for each of you at full retirement age, spousal benefit and delaying. You can get those reports at ssa.gov. If you haven't already established an account there, you should. 

The second step, Al. Is going to be to frame in what exactly you are trying to solve for within the context of your retirement plan of record, and that's the situational part.

Given the fact set of your life, what exactly are you trying to solve for? Are you trying to solve by preserving your financial assets, either because you want to pass those on, or you want to have more liquidity on your balance sheet later in life? Are you trying to solve for the highest possible survivor benefit for whoever is the surviving spouse between the two of you? Are you trying to solve for the fact that you have part-time income, or do both of you have income of some sort? If you were to claim social security, either of you, most of it would be taxable, and that income may be going away later in life, maybe at age 68 or 69.

This is actually the most important question. What exactly are you trying to solve for? Then you can take your plan of record and create an alternate scenario, say, modeling both of you taking it at 70, to see what the impact to the cash flows are to your plan, and you can compare them relative to your plan of record.

Another thing you could maybe try to solve for is maybe you're worried about required minimum distributions being large. That might be a reason to delay social security, so you can draw more money from pre-tax accounts. So what you're trying to solve for is really important. 

Then you can start to create what if scenarios using your base plan, but if you don't have that base plan, you're not really moored into one direction of thinking, you're just free floating and that can make it more confusing. But if you have your plan of record, you have the actual data from Social Security, you determine what exactly you want to solve for to the best of your ability, the path becomes much clearer.

I would argue as a default, not specific to your situation, that social security is an extremely valuable social capital asset. It's guaranteed payments, inflation adjusted for the rest of both of your lives. Maximizing the ultimate payment for their surviving spouse is more important than what the breakeven point is on when the claiming strategies that was the traditional way, what's the breakeven point where one passes the other?

I think maximizing those guaranteed income sources from a longevity standpoint is really, really important. But I would go through those steps out, and that will not get you a crystal-clear answer. It's going to get you to a point where you can make a judgment call on what's best for you, and that's the best that we can do in almost all of these situations.

QUESTION TWO 

So, our next question comes from Marcello related to non-qualified stock options. Let's listen to Marcelo. 

Marcello: Hi Roger. My name is Marcello and I learn a lot from your podcast, so I appreciate that. Thank you very much. 

My questions regarding stock options, non-qualified stock options from employment. How do you integrate that in the retirement planning as you retire? They still have up to 10 years of stock options to be exercised, what do you assume when you put this in the financial plan on the retirement plan? 

Thank you very much. 

Roger: That's a great question, Marcelo. So, let's define what non-qualified stock options are for everybody. 

These are incentive benefits that you receive in working for a corporation, and a option gives someone the right to purchase the company stock at a specific price, and that right to purchase that stock at that price usually vests means that they grant you the right, but you can't do it until you hit the vesting schedule. 

It sounds like Marcelo hit the vesting schedule. Then there's an expiration date on when you can exercise the right to purchase the stock at said price.

In this case, Marcelo probably has a whole schedule of non-qualified stock options that expire or are vested over the next 10 years, and the value of a stock option before you exercise it is the difference between the price of the stock and the current price, the strike price, where you can purchase the stock, the right that you have, and whatever the current price is.

Assuming that the current price is higher, the difference between the exercise price and the current price is the value of that non-qualified stock option multiplied by the number of shares that you're allowed to buy. 

Okay, that's the technical part aside. When you exercise a stock option, that becomes earned income, and so there's a lot of tax planning that needs to come into play here.

Marcelo, step one is you want to have a plan of record where you show the stock options as in the value, the inherent value, that differential, as a financial asset assuming that they're vested. If they're not vested, then you don't really want to show them as an asset, because you don't really have any rights yet.

How you actually incorporate these, Marcelo, into your plan is going to be an optimization question of how you enhance the plan by being thoughtful on the exercising of these stock options and the realization of that taxable income that's attached to that. So, when you have that plan of record, how do you approach this?

Part of the equation, Marcelo, is going to be how is your overall plan from a funded-ness standpoint? Do you already have a feasible plan and is it already a resilient plan? Meaning that you have confidence that you can meet your cash flows for at least the next five years from other assets or other income sources outside of these non-qualified stock options.

Assuming that you have a highly feasible plan and it's already resilient, you have more opportunity to optimize the realization of the value of these non-qualified stock options. You could hold onto them; you could manage them over those 10 years to try to group together the realization of earned income by exercising a number of them in one year.

Perhaps you do those two years prior to Medicare, so you can avoid IRMA surcharges. Perhaps you spread them out in order to manage your tax brackets over a number of years. You have a lot of options there because you're not under pressure to need the value of those options in order to fund your life.

I would approach it that way if you're in that situation, thinking more about the tax end of it related to your income brackets to IRMA surcharges, to social security taxation. When do you want to realize these things? 

If you are not as well funded and you're trying to build a more resilient plan, it becomes a little bit more pointed on what you do with these non-qualified stock options, because essentially what you have here, assuming that there's value in these options, Is a very concentrated position.

It is a one individual equity, say Intel or Microsoft or whatever it is that is part of your overall net worth, and in some cases it could be the majority of your net worth, I've seen those instances and worked through those problems with clients, where they're non-qualified stock options and other corporate incentives represent the majority of their net worth because the strike price is so low and the stock has done so well. If that is the case, it's very easy Marcelo, to get way too cute in trying to manage the tax end of it or even the price of the stock. 

In my experience, if you work for the company and you have really highly appreciated stock options because the company has done so well, you're inside the glass tube and you have rose colored glasses on because the company has been very, very good to you and it's easy to overestimate or be overly optimistic on the prospects for that company. 

That can be dangerous because even if it's an amazing company, if it happens to go through an economic storm in general, it will be affected. If it happens to go through a storm in the particular industry or sector that the great company is part of, it will still go down with the whole sector, most likely, even if it's a great company.

If you look past at great companies, name them, Microsoft, Apple, or even General Electric at one time, they can all go through seasons where the stock price is not performing very well, sometimes gets cut in half. 

So, if you're not highly overfunded and already resilient, I would treat this as compensation, and my rule of thumb is I exercise my non-qualified stock options as they vest because that is part of my compensation package.

I would use that as the default, Marcello, or anybody that has these that are building up. Then you have that as your plan of record, and just like any other income, you're going to realize income when you exercise these stock options, take that money and put it on your balance sheet to reallocate.

Then you can create a plan of, well what if I'm more elegant about how I do that? Maybe I do it over a period of time in this case. But you got to be careful here because that value of those stock options is fictional and it's very concentrated in one stock, and you don't want to lose the value of that because you're trying to get cute on taxes.

I have some, especially back in 2000 when we had the tech bubble bursting, I have some very pointed examples of clients that I worked with that tried to get too cute with their non-qualified stock options and incentive stock options back then, and literally gave away tens of millions of dollars to try to save on taxes.

So, Marcelo, the way I would incorporate these is have your plan of record. Assume that you execute them all in that plan of record and just take the money and reallocate it in your balance sheet, and then start to do some optimization tax planning on how you can extract it in a more elegant way, and that is just going to take having that first model and then creating what if scenarios.

Again, you're going to end up getting to a judgment call, but I would be careful in getting too cute with these, especially if your plan isn't already resilient. 

One final word here is this is why you need to have a process that is somewhat tight. So, you are following the same process. You're using the exact same tools, whether it's software, software plus spreadsheets, which is my preference. Use the exact same tool. Because if you're using different tools for different scenarios, you're really not looking at apples to apples as closely. All the tools are going to be deficient, but that tightness of process becomes really important in this really uncertain world. 

QUESTION THREE

Our next question comes from Brian, related to simplifying your investment portfolio as you transition into retirement. This is a great question and we're going to have fun talking about it. Let's listen to Brian. 

Brian: Hi Roger. 

My name is Brian, and I live in Virginia, and I have been listening to your podcast for several years, and am currently a member of the Rock Retirement Club. Huzzah!

I have a question that I'm sure many of your listeners as well as club members have run across.

What thought process should I consider when I'm trying to simplify my investments by wanting to sell individual stocks and some ETFs to create a much simpler investment portfolio, such as having an S&P 500 ETF, a small value company ETF, international Emerging Market and Bond Funds? 

Over the past couple of years, I've dwindled my portfolio down.

However, most of what I have already sold have been very small investments. Right now, I have 31 different individual stocks and ETFs, and having a simpler portfolio would make it more manageable mentally, and I wouldn't have to worry about any significant drop or rise in a single company stock and then having to decide whether to sell or hold.

I'm 59 and two years into retirement and want to make this part of my retirement journey simpler. So, what thought process should I use to help me get started in determining which ones to sell now and which ones to keep in order to create a more and more manageable portfolio size, and what range of ETF holdings would you consider as a manageable portfolio for most do it yourself investors?

Thanks, and keep rocking.

Roger: Huzzah Brian and thanks for the question, it's a great question actually. 

Let's think through this logically. First off, I like that we want to make a simpler portfolio. So, we can manage and it's really important. This is a great point. It's very important to simplify things, especially in retirement.

Recently I was talking about simplifying my wardrobe and decluttering my closet of stuff that I've collected over the years. That same concept goes to your investment portfolio, and I've gone through this iteration myself, Brian. We have collected a lot of investment over the years, especially if you've been into this stuff. You have 31 different stocks and ETFs. Some of them have come in and out of style, or you just have laying around that you haven't really thought of before. 

As you work to simplify things, it’s important to know. That doesn't mean it's going to be simplistic. There's a big difference there. Simplistic is really not thought out very well, but the more simplified a portfolio is, the easier it is to manage, which frees up mental energy and emotion to focus on more important things.

So, I think this is a very important step that we are taking, Brian. As an aside, we have as a sprint this month within the club anyway, to build a decision pot of how I implement my pie cake. Which is going to be, how do I actually implement it and reconcile what I have to, what I've decided I should have within the context of the club.

So how do you go about this? You have 31 individual stocks and ETFs, et cetera. What do you actually need, Brian? If you go through building your plan of record, this is going to be in the resilient stage when you're building your pie cake. Pie cake, bucket, I don't really care what you call it, where you want to really have a purpose for every single dollar on your balance sheet that is tied to the life you want to live in retirement.

Up until this point, your purpose has been simply accumulation of wealth. Save it, invest it, embrace risk. Let it grow. Make sure you have enough liquidity for the gaps in income versus expenses. That's been a very simple thing. So, it's easy just to buy growth, growth, growth, growth. 

Now that we're tying it to specific cash flows, in some cases, we want to have our contingency fund, which is our emergency fund. We want to have a pathway for how we're going to pay for life for at least the next five years, and that has to be safe. That's going to be individual bond, individual CDs, et cetera. That's where we're concerned about the return of our money, so we can use it to pay for our life. Your payroll reserve. Then we're going to have the upside portfolio, which is going to be concerned about return on my money so it can grow and keep up with inflation and hopefully build for later in life. 

So those are the three buckets. Now we're building some scaffolding around how to simplify this, Brian, and we can do that, we teach you how to do that within the club. Then you deal with the issue you're dealing with Brian, right?

Okay, great. I've built out my frame for my pie cake. How do I actually take what I got and make it that? Because that can get a little complicated. 

So first, let's assume these are all tax deferred assets. We'll start there and then we'll talk about taxable assets. Let's assume they're all tax deferred assets. It becomes much simpler then because we're not worried about the tax management part of it. What do you do with these 31 individual stocks and ETFs? 

Well, you're going to determine how much you need for your contingency and your liquidity floor for your life. You're going to determine how much you need, so let's just use some basic numbers here.

Let's assume you have a million dollars, Brian, and you need 100,000 for your contingency, 400,000 for your five-year floor, and then the remainder 500,000 is your upside portfolio. So now we've divided it. That $100,000 contingency, you're going to raise that money from these tax-deferred assets and put that as cash CDs, T-bills, et cetera. Your 400,000 in the five-year income floor. The default would be that you would buy a bond or a CD that matured right when you needed to refill your income floor so you could pay for your life, that would be the default. Then the rest of the money, 500,000 is longer term growth. Let's assume that's 70% stock, 30% bond, just as an example.

So now we have the scaffolding of what we do at those million dollars, and you're sitting here with your 31 ETFs in stocks. Start at the beginning, contingency, raise money. Sell money, sell individual equities or ETFs to get your 100,000 and your 400,000, that's going to be pretty straightforward.

Now, what do you do with the other half a million dollars? Do you keep your ETFs and your individual stocks? Do you still need to have 31 of them? 

You really don't, Brian. That upside portfolio, if it has a target allocation of let's say 70% stock and 30% bonds, and I'm just using that as an example, you can actually buy a single fund that will give you that allocation, and it will rebalance dynamically over time. 

So how many investments do you actually need? If you can find a fund that is low cost, that has the target allocation, you could literally just have that one fund. Now inside of it, it will likely have different indexes or different investments that create that allocation, but it solves the issue.

In this case, Brian, that could do the job. The downside to that, Brian, is going to be, you're going to have less opportunity to rebalance and decide strategically where you pull money as you manage this over time, but it could do the job!

So, let's assume you don't want the all-in-one fund or ETF solution. How many investments do you need? 

When I'm building a core portfolio, Brian, we have four investments. We have a US core, a US bond, an international developed, and an emerging market for investments. If it's much more growth oriented, we would add small cap, and we would add international bond as part of that. For you, I would say four is enough, especially if you're buying a core where, say if you buy a core international, it's already going to have a sleeve with emerging markets, et cetera.

So, I think four is reasonable. It's going to be diversified over thousands of individual securities. If it's a core fund, not just simply an S&P 500 fund, it's going to have a sleeve for small cap, et cetera. Now, an S&P fund likely won't because it's so cap weighted. 

That's enough. And then when you're rebalancing over the years, it gets much simpler to rebalance and you've decluttered your closet of all of this stuff, and that has saved you a tremendous amount of time to focus on much more important decisions around rocking retirement.

Now you can really start to think about Roth conversions or avoiding IRMA, or how do I create those memories with the kids or grandkids, et cetera, because you're not all tied up in watching markets and doing analysis on things that literally aren't going to add much incremental value to your overall journey.

So I would say four is reasonable, whether it's ETFs, or open-end funds, I'm pretty agnostic about that, especially in an pre-tax account, an IRA, because they both have their advantages and disadvantages. We could talk about those another day. 

So now what do you do, Brian, if all or a portion of this is in taxable assets? This is where it gets a little bit more complicated because you can't just simply sell everything and build it from scratch, because you may realize a lot of capital gains and tax consequences if you've held these things for years. So, what do you do in that situation? 

The true answer is there is no easy answer. So, let's go back to that million-dollar example, and let's assume this is all taxable investments.

We have those million dollars. And you've identified I need 100,000 in an emergency fund or contingency fund, and then I need 400,000 to have some pathway to pay for my life to fill the gaps because my income has gone away. You got to do that analysis and that's why you go through the class to build this structure.

That's pretty critical, and if all of your money, we'll say the whole million is invested in these 31 stocks and ETFs. Tax management be damned, I got to take care of my contingency fund and my income floor because that is going to pay for my life and for unexpected things happening. So that is critical.

That is going to override tax consequences. You got to make sure you have the pathway for how you're going to pay for life, and taxes are the benefit you have for having good outcomes in your investments. As a side note, I had to remind myself of that when I sent my very large tax payment a few weeks ago. I totally miscalculated my estimated taxes. "I am so lucky to have that great outcome".

Now when we get to the upside portfolio, that other half a million dollars when we're dealing with tax consequences, the goal of say getting to those four investments and simplifying things, Brian, when you're incorporating tax management, it’s going to become a judgment call.

Am I diversified enough? I have clients that I've worked with for five, six years where we are still slowly simplifying things in after tax accounts because we feel it's diversified enough, and the tax consequence is so large that we can take our time and we already have the liquidity part of paying for our life taken care of. So, it's literally a multi-year journey to slowly simplify. One way we do that, especially with open-end funds, is we turn off reinvestments so we're not just adding to those multitude of positions. Then every year we do tax lost harvesting. We strategically realize some gain and we make that decision at the end of each year, and then we take the proceeds of that and help refill things.

So, this could be a multi-year journey. Brian, but to the core of your question, this is definitely a resilient question, and then it becomes an optimization question. 

I think for or enough, if they're broadly diversified, tax efficient, low cost, because it's going to be a small lever in changing your life relative to all the other things that you could think about.

All right, with that, let's move on to the bring it on segment.

BRING IT ON

Now it's time to bring it on and do the work to rock retirement in the non-financial area of life, and today we're going to talk about passion or work. 

A week or so ago, I was talking with a client and they're just one of the coolest dudes I know. He works at the Apple Store part-time. He is an Apple genius. So, if you've ever been to an Apple store, you schedule an appointment with them, and they troubleshoot how to access your iPhone, or I can't find my photos or I broke my screen. They show you what all the Apple products can do. They're very passionate people and very technically sound. You walk into an Apple store; they have this spirit about them.

They just love the Apple product. They've drank that Kool-Aid. That's what an Apple genius does, and I'm talking to this guy, and he has that passion really about everything in life, which is really exciting. But this guy is 83 years old, and he works as a genius at the Apple Store. Think about that.

Think of all the technology, the changes that have occurred that he's had to keep up with in order to be a genius at the Apple Store. Sure, he's probably technically minded. He has a curious soul for sure, but when you are retired, you are going to have to have projects or passions that drive you. I was just recently reading a summary of You Learned by Living by Eleanor Roosevelt. We're going to do a book study of that in the club in a little bit. 

She said the most unhappy people in the world are those that face their days without knowing what to do with their time. She says, but if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. I love that when we're thinking about work or passions in retirement, you don't have to go change the world, but you have to have a purpose, a passion to spend your time with.

It could be being a genius at an Apple bar. It could be being a great grandparent. It could be. Riding your mountain bike or swimming or whatever it is, but you got to have your days planned to some extent. I was talking with another client, or actually not a client, a member of the Rock Retirement Club, he was sharing, he's been retired about a year or two now, and he gave himself some grace to just decompress.

Makes sense. He was in a high-pressure job, lots of project management, but he had expressed it during a meetup that, okay. I'm getting a little antsy, I could easily just fall into this rut of being totally unscheduled and unmotivated and just relaxing. It's easy. An object in motion, stays in motion, and the opposite, but he had identified this. I need to get some structure here again; I can see me leaning this other direction and it's easy to do that. It's so easy to do that. 

At night, it's like my rule is I can't sit on the couch, as soon as I sit on the couch. Usually, I'm not getting up. I've trained myself. That's when I start to decompress. So, if I happen to sit on the couch early in the evening, I'm done.

I purposely avoid the couch until I am ready to sit on the couch. It's sort of that type of thing. So, I want to challenge you as you're thinking about what you're going to make of this grand adventure of retirement. Maybe you're already in it. Plan your day out. Doesn't have to be time blocked to the second, but have reasons to get up, have things to spend your time on.

If you don't know what to spend your time on, pick one thing. Just pick one thing and do some little things. It doesn't matter what it is because just doing one little thing. Maybe it's walking your dog and picking up garbage. You have to walk your dog, anyway, maybe pick up some garbage. One little thing that you start just as an experiment without huge expectations can lead to all sorts of things that you can't even imagine.

Let's take the dog and garbage for example. It might cause you to meet a neighbor you never talk to or see someone doing something that you're interested in. You start talking about cars or knitting or whatever it is. You can't forecast what intersections you're going to have that might spark you to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

That's how you create a great life. So, make sure you have passions and make sure you have some things planned for your day. 

Now let's go set a smart sprint. 

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT 

On your marks, get set,

and we're off to set a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but hey, rock life. 

All right, in the next seven days, here's my challenge for you. My challenge for you is to declutter one thing. It could be one thing out of your junk drawer, your closet, your garage, your portfolio. Just declutter one thing, and perhaps you can make that a habit to just declutter one thing per day.

CONCLUSION

Thanks for hanging out with me today. 

I want to remind you of our pledge as producers of this show with you and what the show's all about. 

We are focused on you and your journey to transitioning into Rocking Retirement. We want you to have hope, an inspiring goal, agency, and then pathways to apply that agency so you can be in control of your journey.

We want to do this in an authentic way. No pretense. We're going to be humble, we're going to be respectful. We're going to be who we are. 

We're going to always be curious and approach life with fresh eyes and hold our own beliefs. Then we're going to challenge you to hold your own beliefs up for examination so you can affirm them, amend them, or discard them.

We want to be free from big finances. We're not working for a big company. We want to be free from products and gimmicks. We want to focus on you. We want you to focus on taking incremental action and expanding your perspective so you can create a great life. 

Myself and my entire team, we are all in on this.

So, let's go do this. 











The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance references are historical and do not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.