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Episode #567 - Retirement Year End Planning: Charitable and Family Giving
Roger: The show is a proud member of the Retirement Podcast Network.
“I don't enjoy humble pie. It never tastes good, but I do appreciate it when it happens.”
-Simon Sinek
Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence to really lean in and rock it. Today on the show we're finishing our month long series on year-end action items to consider in order to optimize your plan. This week we're going to talk about charitable and family giving. We don't have to know everything about these topics, but it's important to bring out some opportunities so they become front and center so you can decide whether you explore them further. In addition to that, we're going to answer some of your questions.
Two little announcements before we get on with the show.
Number one is the humble pie. In this case was my quoting of the HSA contribution limits in episode #565 where we talked about don't forget those. If you are in a health savings account compliant plan, I gave you the wrong numbers and a number you emailed me and let me know that, which I love. All of you did it in a very kind way. I just misquoted the numbers I had in front of me so I want to make sure I correct the record and this helps me sharpen my skills as well. So if you are enrolled in a HSA compliant health care plan, this is who this is going to apply to. Essentially these are000000 plans that have high deductibles to them. You are eligible to make a tax deductible contribution to a health savings account. And if you are an individual and you are enrolled in one of these type of health care plans, you can have an HSA account and contribute up to $4,150 for 2014. So, you don't want to forget to do that because it's the benefit of being in a high deductible plan. If you are in a family plan that limit is $8,300. Then lastly if you are over age 55 you get a catch up. So not like an IRA where it's 50, this is age 55. If you are over age 55 you can contribute an extra thousand dollars. So that will be in the important numbers worksheet which we've been sharing for the month in our 6- Shot Saturday email. It's one of those critical documents I'm like excited for 25 important numbers to come out because it has such great data in it. So that's number one.
Number two, in January we are doing a live case study with a listener where we talk to the listener on the show and talk through the first three pillars of building a retirement plan. What is your vision? is it feasible? What resources do you have? How do we make it resilient? This year we're going to talk with somebody who is single with no children and we're going to explore all the opportunities and risks that come along with retiring single with no children. So, if that is you and you would like to raise your hand to be a volunteer, we will have a link in 6- Shot Saturday to a short form and then we'll follow up with all the people that raised their hand and we'll pick someone as the candidate to be this year's case study. We'll have that in 6- Shot Saturday email, getting the links to all the resources we talk about. The only way you're going to do that is if you are on our 6- Shot Saturday email. So, if you are not, it's a weekly email you can sign up for that sixshotsaturday.com or rogerwhitney.com.
Lastly, December is a really big month. Really big month. We're going to have Christine Benz on about our new book how to Retire. We're going to have Michael Easter on to talk about gear, not stuff. We're going to have Daniel Crosby on and we're going to have Tanya Nichols from Align Financial on which I am really excited for. It's going to be a fun month. In addition to that, we're going to really plow into answering a lot of your questions. With that said, let's get on to today's topic of charitable and family giving.
PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT
Today we're going to talk about charitable and family giving, and this is not meant to be a complete guide to these subjects. It's meant to bring them to the surface to spark ideas in your mind to potentially pursue. Between now and the end of the year, we've been having a lot of year end meetings with clients where we're talking about a lot of tax things related to Roth conversions and qualified distributions. We've had more than one instance by going through the discussion on charitable giving, were we found opportunities to materially impact the tax implications of a Roth conversion, let's say, or qualified distribution by coupling it with charitable giving. We're also going to talk about family giving. So, the point of this exercise, the intent, is to bring some of these topics for you to explore to make sure you don't miss an opportunity to execute on a charitable or family giving intent as well as manage taxes, because it's easy to miss these things because we're so busy. How do you remember all this stuff? I don't know, so let's talk about charitable giving.
Number one is it's important to understand when you're giving from a charitable perspective to a qualified charity, that there's no real impact from a tax perspective unless you itemize your tax return, meaning that you have items to itemize over and above the standard deduction for, in this case, 2024. For 2024, if you are single, your standard deduction is $14,600 that you automatically get to deduct from your tax return. If you are married, it's $29,200. So, unless you have deductions that you can itemize above those numbers, charitable giving isn't going to have an impact on your tax return. So why do we want to give to charities? I mean, obviously the number one reason is to fulfill a charitable intent. The United States historically has been one of the most charitable societies in terms of giving to charities that do a lot of work in rescue, health, education, you name it. We work towards helping each other, and charities are one way that we pool money. In order to do that, think of the Red Cross and helping the people in North Carolina and other areas of disaster, just as one example. So that's the main intent in giving from a charitable standpoint that I see, because the standard deduction is so high and the vast majority of people do not itemize on their tax return, the tax benefit of charitable giving gets a little bit more difficult to navigate. So, one reason you might think about it between now and the end of the year is how can you batch your charitable contributions by giving in certain years in order to deduct and get into itemization from a tax perspective so you get the tax benefit. There's nothing wrong with getting a tax benefit for charitable giving. That is one thing to think about. We'll use an example or two as we talk about this.
What are ways of giving to a charity? Well, the normal way that we think of giving to a charity is we write a check. We just write a check for cash to a charity that we care about. We go online. They make it easier than ever before using online charitable giving or ACHs. That's the normal way that we would give to a charity.
One way that we often forget, though, is let's say we want to give $30,000 to a charity. Rather than write a check, many of us forget that we can give appreciated stock in the amount that we want to give. Let's say we bought Nvidia and we bought it for $1,000 and now it's worth $30,000. That stock has done really well. Rather than sell the Nvidia, pay the capital gains and write the $30,000 check, or take $30,000 from your savings and give it to the charity, one thing that you can do is give $30,000 worth of the Nvidia stock to the charity. And what happens is you avoid the capital gains on that highly appreciated stock in this example. So rather than gig cash, you can avoid the capital gains on an investment that you had that's done extremely well and give that to the charity. The charity will sell that. They don't have a tax consequence. It's a win-win that is preferable in many cases than giving cash.
Let's say you have the $30,000 lying around. One thing you could do is give $30,000 of the stock, then take your $30,000, rebuy the stock and reset your cost basis higher. It's one of those things we just don't think about a lot of times. Another direct gift that you can do if you're over 70.5 is what's called a qualified charitable distribution from an IRA. So, Once you're over 70 and a half, you're able to do what's called a QCD. In 2024, you can do a distribution from your IRA, and have it gone directly to a qualified charity. You can't take the money and give it to a charity because it has to go directly to the charity, up to $105,000. That will help satisfy your required minimum distributions. Now many of us have required minimum distributions from our pretax accounts at age 73 or 75. So why would we do it at 70.5 if we don't have RMDs yet? Well, the reason you might consider doing that is that you already have the charitable intent. Let's check that box. There are a lot of people that have too much money in their pretax accounts and the required minimum distributions when they start are going to move them up the tax brackets because of the amount of those distributions. This is a way to help mitigate that by getting money out of your IRA or pretax account, fulfilling your charitable intent, and lowering your required minimum distributions later. Just something to think about. You can do these anytime during the year.
Now, what if you want to give money to a charity, or maybe you're doing a huge Roth conversion this year, or you just have a very big tax year and you want to give money to a charity, but generally you only give, let's say, 25,000 a year to a charity. Now, I say only, that's a lot of money, but if you give $25,000 a year to charity, that's what's in your family budget and you're in a big tax year either because of Roth conversion or something else. From an income standpoint well, the 25,000 charitable contribution isn't going to get you above the standard deduction if you're married in order to itemize. So, you're not going to get a tax benefit unless you have a lot of other deductions. One thing that we've had a few cases of this year, probably three I can think of, where we were doing larger Roth conversions and looking at the tax impact of that. Then separately, because we go through a checklist like this, we said, well, what about charitable contributions? Well, yeah, this is what we give a year. This is where there's an opportunity to batch charitable contributions into one year in order to have a significant impact on the tax you pay in reduction. You couple a large Roth conversion and you make a larger charitable contribution. So, in my particular example, if we're talking $25,000 a year, which is the normal giving, and let's say it goes to one charity, you know, a church or the Red Cross or what have you, well, you may not want to give multiple years of that gift in one year in order to get your tax deduction. So, what do you do? Well, what you can do is donate to what's called a donor advised fund. It's a qualified charity that Schwab, Fidelity, pretty much all the major financial institutions run. They're a qualified charity that are able to accept a contribution into the charity. You get the deduction, and then each year from the amount that you contributed, you're able to give grants to specific charities. So, let's say it's the Red Cross, and you give 25,000 a year. Well, in this huge tax year, Maybe you give $100,000 in the form of a donor advised fund, which is a charitable contribution. Then each year you submit to the donor advised fund a grant to the Red cross for your $25,000 a year donation. We won't get into the details of a donor advised fund right now. I think we've done that in the past. We'll do that again. But that is a way of batching your charitable giving in one year.
In a year, say you're doing a large Roth conversion in order to have a material impact on your tax and still fulfill your annual giving objective by doing it all in one year. Another thing you can do is you can couple that. Rather than give the $100,000 in cash, you can give $100,000 in appreciated stock to the donor advised fund. Avoid those capital gains. Now, the deductibility of giving cash versus an appreciated stock is different. My intent here is not to go into all the details on that. My intent is to bring this to your attention. So, if you are maybe in a really high tax income, year, or you're looking at doing big Roth conversions or qualified distributions, take a look at batching your charitable giving, take a look at giving highly appreciated stock, or take a look at a donor advised fund and work with your tax advisor through the details of that. The exercise here is to just not forget about it.
All right, let's talk about family giving. This year, 2024, you have an annual gift exclusion of $18,000 per year. What that means is you can give $18,000 up to $18,000 a year to anybody you want. You could send me a check. You give it to your garbage guy, you could give it to your caretaker, whoever you want to. You could give it to your son. Let's say you want to give money to your son and you're dealing with possibly taxable estates. Well, you can give $18,000 to your son. So, let's assume you're the mom. Mom gives son $18,000. But what if you really want to get your son more money than $18,000 and you don't want to have to deal with tax reporting or anything else? Well, if you are married, dad can give $18,000 to the son. So now we're at $36,000. But what if you want to give them more money? Well, if son is married, dad can give $18,000 to the daughter in law, mom can give $18,000 to the daughter in law. So daughter in law receives 36,000, son receives 36,000. So now you've gotten $72,000 without really having to report anything to your son and their family. You could do that for your daughter. If you're married, you can couple these.
Those types of gifts are just annual exclusions. Anything above that in a given year has to be applied to your lifetime gift exemption. What is that? Well, in 2024, the lifetime gift exemption is $13,610,000. So almost all of us are never going to have to worry about this. But if you give over the amounts, then there's some accounting you want to do from a tax return to apply excess gifts to that lifetime gift exemption. There are two last things from a family giving standpoint that I want to talk about. One is that you can pay educational expenses and medical expenses without limits as long as you're paying them directly to the institution. So as an example, let's say your son and daughter in law have a baby and they don't have insurance and there's a huge bill for the delivery. As long as you pay the bill directly to the institution, the hospital in this case, you pay the invoice directly. You can do that without limit. Similar to a college. If you have a grandson and he's going to New York University, one of the most expensive schools in the country, as long as you pay the tuition bill directly, you can do that without limit. In our 6- Shot Saturday email, we'll have a link to a resource titled Things to Consider Before the End of the Year, that will have a lot of these listed as well as many others. You can just quickly go through that checklist and bring them to the front of your mind to identify things you might want to explore before the end of the year.
With that said, let's get on to your questions.
LISTENER QUESTIONS
I had a discussion with a member of the club yesterday. It was basically a question and it was related to using the tool, but it explored an issue that I thought some of you might have that I wanted to talk about and answer here publicly.
CLUB DISCUSSION
I’ll not share the specific details of this person, but the situation was that they are single, no children, they live in a state with no income tax whatsoever. They are relatively constrained from a feasibility standpoint. They have some assets, but they're definitely not overfunded and they have a relatively healthy pension and they want to move from the state that they're in. It's a pretty cold state and they want to move to reestablish themselves in a community for retirement because they're single and pretty independent from a family perspective. They were considering two different states. Both states had state tax. So, when analyzing the feasibility of their plan, their plan was feasible in the state that they were in and then this person tested two separate states that had the state tax, but when they tested only changing the scenario of moving to state A, the feasibility of the plan went down significantly. But when they tested moving to state B, the feasibility of the plan was impacted, but not as significantly. It was still feasible, and they couldn't quite understand why, because the state tax rate of the two plans was relatively similar. We were trying to figure this out, and sometimes it's just easy to hop on a call to understand what's going on. For this particular person, state A had an income tax between 5 and 10% that was on income, they didn't have tax on Social Security, but they taxed pension income. That was the key to the significant decrease to the feasibility of their plan. If they moved to state A, because a lot of their retirement was going to be funded by this pension coupled with Social Security, these particular tax pensions hurt more. State B, that had a little bit of impact to the feasibility of their plan, but it was still feasible, also had an income tax, also taxed pensions, but had a provision that up to $24,000 a year or whatever of a pension is not taxed. They got a deduction. So about $24,000 of their pension ended up not being taxed, and they did not tax Social Security. That was the reason for the big difference between state A and state B was the taxation of that pension.
The reason I want to bring this up is we talk about tax management as an optimized pillar, meaning that if you don't optimize at all, it shouldn't matter. That is the case unless your plan is highly constrained. When you're highly constrained, the tax code can have a material impact to the feasibility of your plan. This discussion brought this to light for me because this is someone that was highly constrained. In my practice, we don't have too much of that and it's not something I think about. So, I wanted to make sure I point that out. The more constrained you are, meaning that, yeah, this plan should work. I have a lot of guaranteed income, but I don't have a lot of assets relative to what you hear from others, where you live and the tax code matters significantly, and it did in this case. When you're looking at where you might live and you're relatively constrained, it's important not just to understand the tax rate of a particular state, but how they tax certain income, how they tax Social Security, and how they tax pensions. I could imagine this person living in State A, going through building a plan of record, not really thinking about moving from State A and seeing that their plan was not feasible and making decisions based upon that understanding and not really exploring that they could literally retire today or next year rather than five years from now. If they explored moving to a state that taxed their income differently, in this case pension. I would feel really bad for someone that lived in State A, that did the analysis and didn't realize if they were just moved to another state, they would be able to leave work and they would have a much more feasible plan. So, this is the kind of creativity and poking around at angles is something that we need to do in retirement planning, because if we don't explore things like we've talked about today, we can miss some really big opportunities. In this case, the opportunity could be five years of your life working related to this. This person was exploring, what if I work one more year? They were targeting this year and they realized it wasn't going to make a difference. They weren't set for this year. There were too many open loops. So, they decided fall of next year and they mentioned that as we're looking at how they use the tool, and they tested working another year, but it didn't really make a difference in the feasibility of their plan. They were a little perplexed by that. to be honest with you, I was too. The material reason why it didn't make much of a difference is they said, oh, yeah, but if I work an extra year, my pension will go up just $300 a month and that did not seem very significant, so they did not update their pension assumption in their feasibility model. Well, in their case, because I did update it, and $300 a month in their situation made a huge difference to the feasibility of their plan because their pension was the thing that was going to significantly fund their life and the pension had an inflation adjustment. So, they had sort of written it off as, ah, it's just $300 a month, so I'll just change the year that I'm going to retire and not update my pension estimate. It didn't look so great. But by changing the pension estimate for certain people, this can make a big difference. It did in this case. We want to think outside the boxes and want to have a systematic way of doing this, because little things that we write off could make all the difference in rocking retirement.
DO I HAVE TO BUILD A WHOLE ASSET ALLOCATION FOR AN UPSIDE PORTFOLIO?
All right, so let's go to some of your questions that were submitted.
One question I had related to for the upside portfolio, do I have to build a whole asset allocation for that?
This actually came from the club. Christine Benz and I will talk about this next week in our discussion. So, to refresh your memory, we're building a bucket or a pie cake approach. You're going to allocate your assets into three piles.
Number one is your contingency fund, which is your financial airbag, that emergency fund to help you manage against unexpected expenses, bad assumptions on what you thought you would spend or the income you would have. That's bucket number one. You want return of your money because it's cash.
The Second layer of the pie cake is to prefund your spending for a default of five years. So, if you know you're going to need $50,000 from your money in order to supplement your life because you don't have the income for it, you're going to have $250,000 invested in something that's going to return your money when you need it, $50,000 maturing each year like a bond ladder. That's going to prefund your spending. That five years can be higher or lower depending on how feasible your plan is.
The next layer is what we call upside. This is money that has a five or more year time horizon. It's where I want return on my money, I want to grow my money because I want to battle inflation and I want to have more money to manage spending shocks that might come into the future. So, the question is, do I have to build out a whole asset allocation for that? In our practice we do, it's usually four or five ETFs or index based or passively based vehicles that are tax efficient and low cost. But the true answer is you don't necessarily have to. There are asset allocation portfolios in the form of open end mutual funds or exchange traded funds where you can buy an instant allocation targeted for different spectrums of the risk horizon. This could be through aggressive growth that is 90% stocks. There are moderate growth ETFs that buy different ETFs underneath them and give you a one solution fund. The nice thing about those is that they automatically rebalance, they reinvest in it. You don't have to think about it. Some of the downsides of this one solution type of portfolios, especially in an after tax account, is that you don't have the opportunity of doing tax loss harvesting in bad tax years. A good example, let's say, you had a 60% portfolio of stocks and 40% in bonds. Your bond portfolio portion is down. You may be at a loss on paper in that bond portfolio and if you're in an after tax account, you can do tax loss harvesting to use that tax loss. However, if instead, you have this one solution upside portfolio, it doesn't break it out by the individual asset classes. Even with this, they definitely are there and I think they're a very simple way to do it as long as you are aware of the potential downside.
HOW SHOULD I REFILL LAYER TWO OF MY PIECAKE?
Our next question is an audio question related to rebalancing your pie cake.
Darren: Hi Roger.
My name is Darren. I love your podcast. I've been a listener for several years now. I have a question about the process of rebalancing your pie cake. I'm clear on the need to get a return on my money as well as a return of my money compensating me for the risk of sequence of returns and inflation risk. What I'm trying to understand now is what process should I use or what triggers should I consider to refill my layer two of the pie cake to continually fund the next five years of my life. I think this is especially important during a down market. I don't want to automatically rebalance every year in a down market. Would love your thoughts on the rebalancing process for the pie cake. Thanks again. Have a great day.
Roger: Great question. That sort of segues in what we talk about layer two, which is that income floor, so thanks for the question.
I'll just walk through the process that we use. It's going to happen in the third quarter of every year. In the third quarter, what we do is from a long term planning perspective, we close out the current year. So, in Q3 this year we closed out 2024 from a spreadsheet perspective and we started forecasting for 2025 and beyond. That's step one. When you do that, you want to update all of your spending assumptions. You want to understand, okay, this is what I said I was going to spend for my base great life. This is what I'm actually experiencing. Determine the new estimate for your base great life for 2025 and beyond in this example. That's number one or number two.
Number three is to do the same thing for your discretionary wants. You want to look at what you had forecasted, what your travel budget was, when you were going to buy that car, and you want to look at what you actually did and recast those estimates going forward. Perhaps you were thinking you were going to buy a car this year, but it's actually not going to be for three years now, so you're going to adjust that. You thought you were going to spend $15,000 in travel, but you're spending $18,000 in travel, so you recast that you thought you were going to do a big trip every other year that was going to cost $30,000. But you realize that life is too busy, you have got a new grandbaby or something else, so you move it out to the year that you think it's actually going to happen because now you have more information than you did in the third quarter last year. You can also bring in new goals, whether it’s in your base great life or your wants. Maybe you have had that new grandbaby and you want to start a 529 or you want to give a gift or there's some other expenses. You want to recast all your spending estimates and this is where you're going to capture inflation as well, because you're going to experience your own inflation. If prices just keep going up, if you're like us, you're not going to buy the same quality of meat. I want my filet and lately I haven't got my filet. We're buying other meat because we're managing our own inflation. What I have found with inflation is we model it as going up every single year. But generally, what happens, it's more like the steps on a staircase. It stays flat for a number of years and then we up it because we have to readjust. We do a lot of swapping in our personal lives and I imagine you do too.
Then you want to recast all of your financial assets. What is your income? what's the income that you expect over the next few years with Social Security, pension, and work? Then recast your financial assets. What is the current value of those relative to the last time you did it? Then you rerun the feasibility analysis, and all of this happens really quickly. It's a very organic thing if you get into a rhythm with it. That's why we use a guided agile process in the club because it's a call you always have to make.
Let's just go do these things. It doesn't have to take a lot of time even though I'm explaining it like it might. When you see the feasibility of your plan, you're also going to see how much liquidity you have relative to the new spending estimates that you have just updated. Perhaps your liquidity is a lot lower than four years if we've gone a year since we've done it because you have more expenses that have come in. Or maybe your liquidity isn't one year less because you have expenses that have come out. So, we recast it like it's day one in planning, and then you make decisions on how much you want to refill that layer.
Relative to your question from your upside portfolio, that's the rebalancing that we're talking about here. Now, what's going to go into that is partly, are we okay with four years from now? There's nothing magical about five years. That's our default. But let's say we're in this horrible market where everything is down 20%. We're still feasible. We still have four years of cash flow. Maybe we don't rebalance right now because we don't want to sell into a bad market and four years of cash flow is pretty good.
Next week, Christine talks about having two years of cash flow. I actually went through 2008 period with only two years of cash flow in reserves. So, there's nothing magical about five years. Perhaps you don't rebalance and build out that fifth year again, or perhaps you build out your fifth year, but only for your base great life and you don't prefund some of the discretionary spending because if you're at four years cash reserve for your base great life plus discretionary, you may be at six or seven years if it's just your base great life. So, if this storm continues in the market, you're going to do what you're going to do if you were in Florida when the storm's coming. I don't live in Florida. But if the storm's coming, you're going to batten down the hatches a little bit. You're not going to do the normal things because you're just working at protecting your home. Well, in retirement that might be, wow, these markets are really bad. This is the second year in a row so I'm not going to travel like I traveled. I'm going to travel more modestly or I'm going to delay that car purchase.
I think you want to think about it in this way and then just make a judgment call of how much from your upside portfolio do you want to harvest to rebuild this liquidity. There's no hard and fast rule to this because this is so dynamic and things are coming in and out of your life. Obviously, if you don't have a lot of after tax assets, you don't have any levers to rebalance that help you tax wise. The point of the exercise I think is feel comfortable not having quote unquote the answer, It's better to have not have the answer when there isn't one. It's okay in the third quarter. We're planning well ahead of the end of the year that you go through spending, updating all my assets, making sure I'm still feasible and then making a judgment call or how much you refill or rebalance that layer two of the pie cake. That could go for a couple years in an extreme situation. So, imagine we go through an extreme market situation. You start at five years. Okay, we're a year in. Markets are horrible. All right, so we don't rebalance, we go through year two. Markets are horrible, we don't rebalance, but maybe we start to moderate some of our spending which makes our three year floor a little longer. Maybe that moves it back up to four years because we've negotiated away some of our discretionary spending to weather the storm. This is the part of being agile, but I like to do that in the third quarter and we have a protocol that we go through in our practice and we go through in the club every third quarter just to remind ourselves.
With that said, let's get on to a smart sprint.
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
On your marks, get set,
and we're off to take a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.
All right, in the next seven days it's going to be to review your charitable and family giving. Look at how you did this year, how you want to bless the world and those around you and just do it thoughtfully so you can have some tax benefit as well.
BONUS STORY
I'm going to continue reading the record of my grandfather's journal of his flights, flying as a waist gunner in a B17 in World War II.
This is mission number four, July 5th. So last week was July 4th. this is the next day.
“1944. Ship number 183, sortie three. Had a long run today, eight hours and 40 minutes to France. 6,000 pounds bombs dropped on a marshalling yard and did a pretty good job. Flak was accurate and concentrated.”
Think about that. They're flying up in an uncompressed aircraft. They did it on 07-04-1944.
“Next day flew almost nine hours in the cold with concentrated flak.”
Look at how matter of fact he writes these. He has a few instances and you'll see them as I read these over the next year or however long it takes where he shows maybe a little bit of emotion. But this is definitely just the facts type of commentary which I get, I guess.
I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. As always, I am very thankful for you. I'm thankful for Graham, I'm thankful for Allison and Nicole and Tracy and Kim and Scott and the entire RRC team. It's getting so big I get scared I'm going to miss people. So, I just love you all. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
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 reference is historical and does 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.