Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Dan Hill, CFP®, AIF® CEO & Founder Hill Wealth Strategies Discussing Social Security Strategies

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Dan Hill CFP®, AIF®, is a recognized Financial Educator, Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Retirement Specialist who appears as a financial expert on CBS-Richmond’s Virginia This Morning and has contributed to USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and others.Dan is a Co-Author of the Amazon # 1 bestseller Retire Like a Shark, with Kevin Harrington, the original ‘Shark’ from hit TV show Shark Tank.In his recent book release, Retire Abundantly, Dan explains how to separate facts from fiction in our dramatically changing retirement landscape. He’ll provide answers to some of your biggest questions, and answers to questions most of us do not even know to ask.As President of Hill Wealth Strategies, Dan and his team, using the Predictable Personal Pension Process, have been providing families and businesses with innovative financial strategies, solutions and planning leading to financial clarity and security since 1998.Dan, and his wife, Susan, reside in Williamsburg, VA. Their oldest son, Derek, and younger son, Brett, and his wife, Sarah live in Richmond, VA with their two-year-old daughter, Landon. Dan has been an active member of the community with his involvement in Youth League and American Legion Post 39 baseball as a coach for twenty-seven years.Dan can be reached at (833) DAN HILLLearn more: https://hillwealthstrategies.com/This content is developed from sources believed to be accurate and complete; however, no guarantee can or is given for such accuracy or completeness. Nor is the information in this material intended as tax or legal advice. Please consult your own legal or tax professionals for specific information regarding your individual situation. The opinions expressed and material provided are for general information, and should not be considered a solicitation for the purchase or sale, or the solicitation of such an offer, of any security, insurance product, or annuity in any jurisdiction in which the persons represented on this site are not appropriate licensed, registered, appointed, or otherwise qualified by law and regulation to make or solicit such purchases and sales. Logos as displayed herein are not intended to imply any endorsement by the owners of such logos of Hill Wealth Strategies. All written content on this site is for information purposes only. Opinions expressed herein are solely those of Hill Wealth Strategies and our editorial staff. Material presented is believed to be from reliable sources; however, we make no representations as to its accuracy or completeness. All information and ideas should be discussed in detail with your individual adviser prior to implementation. Fee-based financial planning and investment advisory services are offered by Hill Wealth Strategies a Registered Investment Advisor in the State of Virginia. Insurance products and services are offered through D. R. Hill & Associates, Inc. Hill Wealth Strategies and D. R. Hill & Associates, Inc. are affiliated companies. The presence of this web site shall in no way be construed or interpreted as a solicitation to sell or offer to sell investment advisory services to any residents of any State other than the State of Virginia or where otherwise legally permitted. Hill Wealth Strategies/D. R. Hill & Associates, Inc. and Daniel Hill are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other government agency. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be used to make any financial decisions. Unauthorized use of the material is prohibited.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-dan-hill-cfp-aif-ceo-founder-hill-wealth-strategies-discussing-social-security-strategies

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Dan Hill, who's the CEO and founder of Hill Wealth Strategies. Dan, welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. for having me on. I appreciate it. Hey, you welcome. And I know we want to talk about Social Security,

which I know is a hot topic and probably would take us about three days and a weekend seminar to fully cover. But we want to hit the highlights. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the financial services industry? Yeah, sure. So I got into this industry almost three decades ago, kind of in a selfish way, because when you work in this industry, You're able to kind of, if you don't work for one of the companies, which I'll talk a little bit about, you're able to set your schedule. And so you can still work, make a great living, but still have great family time. So that's the reason I started doing it way back when three decades ago.

That's awesome. It's kind of like, you know, I want to have the flexibility to structure my time so that my family comes first. and what is a good field to do that? Maybe being a manual labor construction worker kind of a thing wouldn't accomplish that, but getting into helping people and financial services would. So I think that is spectacular. What was it specifically that attracted you to financial services as an industry?

Kind of what you just said is just, I don't, I mean, there's a lot of professions where you can help people. I have a lot of respect for teachers and nurses and doctors and firemen and policemen and military guys, because they're all helping. Everybody's pretty much helping people in somewhere or another. But here's a way that I kind of looked at some of the issues that my dad ran into when he was dealing with some of the big box financial advisor brokerage houses.

And I had enough to know that they weren't really steering him in the right direction. And I know how hard my dad worked for his money. So I didn't want to see other people that I know work hard for their money, getting taken advantage of it and not getting good information and making good decisions. You know, I hear that so many times that, oh, my family member got taken for a ride or my family member just struggled and had confusion to get to, you know, the good information. So I want to make sure that my clients never have that problem. And so I hear that so many times, which is just spectacular. So today we want to talk about Social Security. And I think that probably, you know,

what some of the burning questions people have is, of course, you know, the elephant in the room, is it going to be around? Well, we don't know. I mean, you ask 10 people, you get 27 opinions, but what is your opinion of is Social Security in danger and can it ever go away? Well, you know, you can never say never, but it's it's not in danger. The latest statistics have it, uh, solve it through 2057. And, um, it's, it's not really that far out of whack. You know, we have the baby boom generation where everybody's retiring. So now we have a lot more what I call takers than givers. So that has a lot to do with how many people in the workforce and are, you know, funding Social Security and how many people aren't in the workforce and are defunding

Social Security. But right now we're solving through 2057, the latest reports coming up from the government statistics centers. And one of the things I tell the class, because I don't have a crystal of all that works is, and I teach these classes every week, and I have one tonight, actually, is I think what's going to happen is that our children, which my child, my oldest son, will be 40, and so I'm in that same generation of baby boomers, we'll probably have to wait a little bit later. Yeah. Turn it on.

You know, because they did that before, they added in there that people born after 1960, their four retirement days is 67. So they keep pushing back that four retirement days. I think sooner or later, and they probably got to do it sooner because I know my son at 40 if they tell him, hey, you can't turn yours until 70. He won't worry about it because it's 30 or down the road. But if they do that as he gets closer to 70,

he'd probably be a little bit more disturbed. You know, it reminds me of a member back in the economic crisis when all the banks were failing and you heard the term, too big to fail. and the government stepped in and kept whatever company from going under because they were too big to fail. It would have too many ripple effects. It reminds me, so security, this conversation here reminds me of that concept, meaning, you know what? I don't think the government can let it fail because there's so many people depending on it.

So it might be what you just said. It's not going to go away. It just might be modified, tweak, might you have to push it out a little bit. So I think those are the kind of things people need to realize that the government realizes we've got to make sure we take care of people that have paid into it for so long. Yeah, one of the things they're doing, Mike, is they're taking the income threshold to where you don't pay into Social Security keeps going up every year. I always tell this story that back in my previous life, I worked a lot of overtime.

Like we worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And if you did that, you would have satisfied your Social Security requirements sometime around August or September. Now, this is about 30 years ago. Yeah. Okay. And the number was something like $70,000, which there's a lot of money now. It was even a lot more money then.

But if you worked a lot over time, you hit $70,000, you no longer paid in Social Security. You have satisfied your annual requirement. That number now is like 170, close to about $170, that you have to pay. So those are one of the things that change. That number keeps going up that they take money out of your paycheck more and more every year. So let's talk a little bit about. you know, now whatever the age is, like, oh, you can claim starting at whatever age. Is that, is the moment you can claim, is that the best time to do it?

So should you claim right then? Could you claim early? And let's talk a little bit about some of those choices because I do realize that there are some people out there that go, I am going to claim the minute I can. And then there's some people that go, you know what, I could claim right now, but I don't need it. So I'm going to let it roll. What are some of the thought processes? behind those.

It's a great question. So our philosophy, which is contradictory to most, a lot of people tell us like, well, I've never heard anybody say that it is sooner's better. Yeah. Sooner is better. In most cases, and everybody's unique and everybody's individual circumstances are different. But in most cases, sooner's better. There are some extenuating circumstances.

So what I tell folks is every month you delay taking your Social Security is going to take you about 10 years to recoup that loss benefit. Okay. Every month you delay, I used to say every year, but it's just math. Every month you delay, it's going to take you about 10 years and get that back. Your Social Security only goes up about a half a percent every month. Okay. So there are still any certainty. That's one of them if you're not at full retirement age and you,

are still working. That's a concern because the income threshold is only like $23,000 an earned income you can have before your benefits start getting reduced. Okay, if you're below for a time and age. So we discuss that. But usually sooner is better. That's, it really is counterintuitive because I've heard so many people go, if you can hang on until the last, last, last year, you're going to gain six or eight percent per year and that compounds and that's going to give you more. And you're saying, nope, just take it. Just get her done. Because it's, it's, it's, it's, that calculation there reminds me of how advisors will say, oh, if you took a hit in the market of 10% last year,

the market doesn't need to recoup 10% because it needs to recoup like 19% to get you that 10. So it's that same concept in reverse, right? You know, take the money because if you wait, it's going to take a long time to get that. Yeah, and so you have to always tell people you have to die on time because if you die earlier, if you have to be 100 like my uncle, you win. But one of the things you mentioned earlier

is people say, I don't need the money. So I'm going to turn it off. So here's, this was my cousin, Fourth of July, family union. My cousin's wife says,

yeah, Johnny's going to turn 65, he's going to retire, but we're not going to take sorrow social security. And this is my question to everybody. Oh, okay, that's cool.

How are you going to eat? Yeah. How are you going to eat? Well, oh, well, we're going to take money out of our IRA. I said, okay.

and who can you leave your IRA to? Well, the short answer is anybody, everybody, college, charity, church, whatever. Who can you leave your Social Security to? Only one person, your surviving spouse. And that's only a portion of it. And it depends on whose benefits, hiring, so on and so forth. So I don't want to get too complicated with it.

But most people who say, I don't need the money because we're just going to spend down our IRA. I want to leave my IRA to my granddaughter. My Social Security can only go to my wife if I pre-deceaser. So those people are saying, I don't need the money in most cases are just taking money out of some other bucket that they could do what I would consider better things with. Yeah, if you think about it through that lens,

you're taking money out of your family member, your heirs, back pocket. Legacy, yeah. Legacy, yeah. Interesting. I like that approach. Yeah. So now, are there ways to make, maximize the income. So let's say that you've gone through these calculations with someone and they've

said, okay, I see this point, at that point, we're going to take so security this right here, boom. Are the ways to maximize it or is it just you check the box and here's what I get? Yeah. Yeah, so we run very sophisticated. We have three different software programs because not one of them will do everything I like because I'm so OCD. But so, and I tell people, those, those printouts are better, more beneficial to us in the office to do planning than they are to you. Because I can show them on a whiteboard in about 120 seconds how to maximize your social security. Okay. And based on kind of what we already said, it only goes up about a half percent a month.

What's your circumstances? Are you working? You're not working? Are you full retirement age? Not full retirement age? So the one question I always ask people is, I need to know the answer to one question. and I will tell you the exact day to start your Social Security, what is that question I need to know the answer to?

And they look around and everyone's welcome, oh, when are we going to die? Exactly. Tell me when you're going to die, and I'll tell you when you should start, but we don't know when we're going to die, right? Yeah. I kind of just put that in respect.

So I always tell them, in order to maximize it, if you delay, you have to die on time because Social Security has their own mortality table, separate distinct from the Internal Revenue Services, requirement of distribution table. And typically the math is always, it's going to take you about 10 years to recoup the delayed benefit.

Like I said, even if you stop one month, one month, you don't take one month, you don't take one year, you don't take five years, you wait until for retirement age, you delay it to your 70. Okay, if you delay it to your 70, and now you have to,

you won't see a benefit until you're 80 because you have to recoup all the money you didn't take from 62 to 70, which is probably an excess of $100,000 or more, now I have to make back that $100,000 before I actually benefit from delaying. Yeah. And so that, you know, and then the other thing I tell people was, when do you want money? When do you want more money?

When you're 70 or when you're 65? Okay. To steal it from one of my coaches, we call those the go-go years. I want more money up front when I'm ready to go now that I've retired, not when I'm 80 years old and I'm not, I'm ready. I'm in a no-go mode. Yeah. You know, I, it just, I think people don't think that way. And that is so enlightening because let's just pick the number 2,500. Let's say someone was going to get $2,500 at the earliest age. And do you want this starting, you know, as soon as possible, $2,500? You go, oh, no, no, I'm going to wait until whatever so I can get $2,900. Well, that's fine and good. But then $2,500 did not come to your back pocket this month, next month, the next month, the next month, the next month. So all of a sudden here's thousands and tens of thousands of dollars,

didn't come to you so that you can get $300 extra dollars next year or two years from now. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And if you, if you finish that math that you're doing right there, it comes out to about 10 years. It might be, eight, nine, it might be 12, 13, but average is 10 years to recoup. Yeah. So I love that.

I think that's a big star by that concept. And I think that just shows the way that you approach things is fresh. it seems to me like with anything like you put numbers in a computer and you're like okay here's your you know spit out and report you can't ever do that because like you said everyone's different are there opportunities within decisions like once you've decided when you're going to claim like right now take it are there other decisions that would help maybe get a little bit more that you might not have expected like as an example i've heard that some people go oh my word i had no clue that i could get so scrutiny benefits from my spouse that i divorced a handful of of years ago. Or, oh, my special needs kid, does that give me more benefit? What are some things that way that people might not think about off the cuff? Well, one of the ones that we usually have a person or two in class talking about divorce spousal benefits, okay? And aren't familiar with those. Or an interesting story that just came to mind because the divorce spousal benefits are pretty easy. You've got to be married at least 10 years. We had a lady in class.

Oh, that's all she came to find out. And she goes, oh, my gosh, I got divorced nine years and in like nine months. And I said, well, you needed to hang in there, you know, three more months. And you would be eligible for divorce spouse benefits, okay? So the other one is survivor benefits. There's this quirky rule about survivor benefits. So this is my least favorite topic because it means someone has left us. Yeah.

It's passed away. So now you can start collecting your survivor benefits. as early as age 60 or 50 if you're disabled, okay? And then they're reduced because you started early. Anytime you start early, divorce, spousal, survivor, your benefit is always reduced because you're starting early, okay, because it's just a time value calculation that you're going to die out here. So if I start at 62, I'm going to get five more years than if I start at 67.

So you get a little bit less. It's just math. But survivor benefit has a quirky rule. We had a lady come to class and said, I heard that if I can't. get remarried before I'm 60, I'll lose my survivor benefit. And we said, that is correct. So that's a really quirky rule because all you have to do is wait until you turn 60, and then you can get remarried, and you won't lose your survivor benefit.

Interesting. I don't know where they come up with these things, but that's the rule. So we just report the news, so to speak. Right. Don't shoot the messenger. One of my classes called me the day about paying off his student loan for his kids. and he said, Danny, by the way, thank you for telling us about spousal benefits because we didn't know. So this was a case where the wife, you know, didn't work that much.

So her benefit wasn't that great. She wasn't working anymore. So she started at 62. Tim waited, you know, until he was 65. He retired at 65 and he started taking his benefit. And then I said, okay, so when he had come to me, he'd already started, I said, did your wife apply for her spousal benefits now? He said, what are you talking about? I said, well, now that you've applied for your benefit, your wife is eligible for spousal benefits.

And spousal benefits are 50% of the spouses. Okay. So her benefit, when that high, turns out she got a little raised based on being eligible now for spousal benefits, which you aren't eligible for until your spouse files. It's kind of confusing to say that over the air, but it's, spousal benefits cannot be applied for until the spouse applies, the other spouse. Okay. makes sense. And it's a conservative sum of money. One time, one of our classes was $800 a month

difference, which is $9,600 a year. Multiple-d-tenth-it-old intends, it's just short of $100,000 in lost benefits because they weren't aware of that spousal. Wow. So that's probably teach the classes. We want everybody to get every penny they're deserving. You know, that's huge. And I hear spousal and divorced and six, eight-60. And if before or after, or you have to apply all of these things like triggers makes me think, okay, is it like once you make a decision, is it irrevocable and you're too bad so sad, that's everything? Or are there some chances where you can go, ooh, ooh, ooh, I should have done it this way.

Can you make a change? Talk a little bit about, you know, possible. Oops. I need to, you know, kind of roll it back a little bit. Yeah. So the only chance you get at the proverbial second bite at the apple is if you just, if you decide in the first 12 months, for whatever reason,

you didn't want to turn it on. You can turn it off. We actually have had some of these people come to our presentations. You can turn it off, okay? But you have to pay all the money back. Okay. Oh, okay. You use your example of $2,500 a month,

and now I get in month 10, and I've collected $25,000 of benefits, but for whatever reason, I can't even think about the reason why you would want to turn it off. But you turn it off. Well, now you've got to have $25,000 to pay yourself back to put it back in your Social Security button. So basically, it's in that situation, there is that chance, but why would you? You better have someone that is guiding you through the process, right?

But most importantly, like in Chesh, you make the move, you keep your finger on the piece and go, is this the right move? Okay, yes, it is. Take your finger off. Now it's done. you better make sure that all of these things up front or figure it out, calculated, polished up. Yep, this is the way to do it. So this begs the question that from me hearing you talk like this, some people would go, oh, hey, Alexa, or, oh, let me go to Google.

Well, talk about some of the people that just go to Google for any little thing, but is getting this type of advice prudent to go to Google? That's a great question too, Mike, because sometimes, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, but there are so many rules. There's over 2,000 rules. There's over 500 different ways you can claim, kind of based on what you just heard of say in the last 15 minutes. You can kind of picture that.

So, but we sometimes have to go to Google to try to figure out some stuff that we haven't heard. That's a great thing about teachers' classes, these classes is people will come up with stuff. You're going like, oh, that's interesting. I haven't heard that one. Yeah, but I think the difference between you go into Google and a pre-retiree, you know exactly with surgical precision what you're looking for and boom, you're in and out. You're like, yep, okay, here's what we get.

The general population is going to Google something and get completely confused, I would suspect. Yeah, I would agree with you. I mean, it's the old saying it's Greek, okay? Yep, it's Greek. We all have different alphabets. You know, people say, what are all these RMD, IRA, I'm talking about, I'm going, you know, military people have their alphabet, police have an alphabet, doctors have an alphabet. You know, we all have these little abbreviations for stuff.

So it is Greek to the common person. You know, we're authorities on it because that's what we do. You know, and that's a really good point that you bring up there, your authorities. You're not just someone that works in financial services and you're not just a general practitioner, you know, like in the doctors, you know, If you've got a gastric issue, you're not going to go to your primary care and just that took, you know, one class on that. That's it. You're going to go to someone that is a specialist. So you do classes every week.

You're a specialist in. So security claiming maybe you go to you versus your person that has your homeowners insurance that's giving you some advice. So talk a little bit about the difference in working with the generic financial professional or someone like yourself that really specializes. Yeah. So where I think we are a big differentiator is that we are planners first and foremost. When I started this industry almost three decades ago, I worked at a big insurance company. A friend of mine brought me in. I'm still thankful for him for where I'm out today because he brought me into the industry.

But I, and I was ignorant, so I didn't know what was going on. And I learned very quickly working for a big company is working for a big company, okay? and what we were taught to do was sell product. So if you work for company X, it's kind of like I say this. If you work at Chevrolet, there should not be anybody coming in and they're looking for F-150.

Okay? And if you work for Ford, they're not looking for silveradoes. So at the big bucks, we were taught to sell, sell, sell. And I said, well, how do we know everybody needs one of these things? Like we haven't done any planning.

I mean, we'd ask questions, but we never really dive into comprehensive planning. So that's the difference between us as independent. We're not beholden to anybody or any firms or any mutual fund companies. We're only beholding to our clients. We are true fiduciaries, okay, that always are going to do what's our client's best interest. And when you work for a company, you're kind of handcuffed in, this is what we have to offer. And this is what everybody's going to get. So I think that's the difference between us and we are comprehensive planners. We're going to do a plan. You know, people come and say, I just want you to put all my money over here. So, yeah, we don't do

that. We don't do that. We have to do a comprehensive plan. And it's key. Like you're on this topic we're talking about when's the best time to social security. Well, I got to know some other things. I got to know everything. Yeah, because you want to make sure that all the dominoes aren't going to start falling in the wrong direction. Yes, exactly. Awesome. Well, Dan, you brought up some really, yeah, planning, holistic, the whole view, everything. You really brought up some great points about security that people should really, really take consideration. So if someone is, interested in learning a little bit more and then reaching out and connecting with you? What's the best way that they can do that?

So I was very fortunate, one of my brainstorms to procure the toll-free number, 833 Max MySS. So that's 833 M-A-X-M-Y-SS-S, Max My Social Security. Or you can go to our website, Hillwellst Strategies.com, and either call us or go there and set up an appointment, and we're here to try to, like I said, help everybody get every penny they deserve. Excellent. Well, Dan, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show

or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.com.