Trading Secrets - 178. More Than Money: Retire like a badass! Robert Pagliarini breaks down financial terms, his secrets to retirement, and how to be successful with your money

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

This week, Jason is joined by retirement specialist, Robert Pagliarini! Robert is the president of Pacifica Wealth Advisors and has some serious credentials. He’s earned a PhD in financial and retirement planning, a certified financial planner and an enrolled agent with the IRS. He specializes in serving sudden money recipients to help clients overcome sudden wealth syndromes. Robert reveals his simple, yet effective equation for saving for retirement, what an IRA is versus a 401k, when it is time to retire, how to utilize PERK, not to get emotional when it comes to finances, and even answers some questions from the Money Mafia! What kind of questions should you be asking to an advisor? What is part time retirement?  It’s an episode you can’t afford to miss!  Host: Jason Tartick Co-Host: David Arduin Audio: John Gurney Guest: Robert Pagliarini Stay connected with the Trading Secrets Podcast!  Instagram: @tradingsecretspodcast  Youtube: Trading Secrets Facebook: Join the Group All Access: Free 30-Day Trial  Trading Secrets Steals & Deals! Cort Furniture: Get furniture on your terms with CORT. Rent or Buy furniture that flexes to fit any situation, style and budget and to get 50% off your first month’s furniture rental head over to cort.com/podcast Farmer’s Dog: Brighten up your dog’s bowl with fresh, healthy food. Get 50% off your first box, delivered to your door here MeUndies: From all black classics, to fun, expressive prints, MeUndies has a look for everyone. Plus, they come in sizes XS-4XL, guaranteeing a flattering cut for every body. Good things come in big packages at MeUndies. Get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping, at MeUndies.com/trading

Welcome back to another episode of Trading Secrets, More Than Money Edition. Today I am excited about our guest, a retirement specialist, Robert Palliorini. He's the president of Pacifica wealth advisors. He has some serious credentials. He's earned a Ph.D. in financial and retirement planning. He is a certified financial planner and an enrolled agent with the IRS. It scares me a little bit. He's also a best-selling author of the six-day financial makeover, transform your financial light in less than a week. As a president of Pacifica wealth advisors, this is one of my favorite things. Robert specializes

in serving sudden money recipients, so sudden wealth, helping clients overcome these sudden wealth syndromes. The boutique wealth management firm is located in Orange County, California. Now, if you think sudden wealth, the first place I go is, of course, the lottery. Yes, those are Robert's clients. But of course, there's more, right? Like big exits and other entertainment contracts and things like that, athletes, etc. Robert has appeared as a financial advisor on 2020. Good Morning America. Dr. Phil, ABC morning news, NBC, NPR's marketplace, and many more. In print, he's appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Business Week, and Money magazine. In addition to his best-selling title, Robert is also the author of Get Money

Smart, Simple Lessons to Kickstart Your Financial Confidence and Grow Your Wealth, The Sudden Wealth Solution, The Other Eight Hours, Maximize Your Time to Create New Wealth and Purpose in Plan Z, How to Survive, the 2009 Financial Crisis. If that's not enough, I don't know what it is. Everyone, thank you so much for being here, because we are doing a live Trading Secrets episode, and Robert, thank you for giving us your time. you for inviting me. I feel like we're out of time now with that. Thanks for all the questions. We'll see you next time. Pretty much all we're here to do is yeah,

because clearly with that resume, he has enough information, enough access to give us what we need to know. But Robert, we're going to start with just like 101, okay? Retirement planning. For all my 101 buddy mafia is out there, where do we even start? Should you start with a 401K? People talk about Roth IRAs, Roth, there's so much big jargon out there. And for my 101ers that are confused, what's the starting point? Where do we go from here? That's a great question. There are a ton of

acronyms and it can be pretty confusing. But at the end of the day, all retirement planning is making sure that we're maximizing the income that we have today. So it really depends on how old or how young you are if you're working or if you're just retired or not. But retirement planning is really about how can I extract some of the income that I'm earning now, put it away in an account that will grow over time. So then when I want to retire, I've got enough capital there that I can live a comfortable life. I mean, at the most basic level, that's all retirement planning is. Okay. One of the rumors out there are that there's a certain people say like they want a benchmark. So they hear what you're saying. They hear the acronyms. They start to get

comfortable with the idea of what we have to do is put money away so that eventually we will have enough to pay ourselves so we don't have to go work for someone to pay us. Got it, I'm with you, Robert. But there are these different equations out there that people use as a benchmark to say, am I where I should be based on my age? And there's a whole lot of them that are out there, especially if you go in the TikTok world. Robert, do you have a place that based on our age or who we are or where we live or any type of idea that we can benchmark to say we're behind, we're a hen, we're right on pace. Yeah, so I came up with a really, really simple formula.

Maybe I should go on TikTok and share this. But it's, you should be saving half your age. Okay. So let's think about that. So if you're young, you just got out of college, you're, you know, 20 years old, 22 years old. aim for saving 10% of your income. And if you're, let's imagine you're 40 years old, try to save 20%.

And the reason it escalates like that is because when we're young, presumably we're probably not making as much money. And so we don't have the luxury of being able to save. But as we get a little bit older, we might make a little bit more and we might have the capacity to save a little bit more. And so I love that as a rule of. of them. And if you do that, if you're able to sort of follow that rule, even loosely, they're going to have enough money set aside when you're 55, 60, 65 that you're going to be

able to retire. That's a great trading secret. Right there, we're already walking away with one tip. Take your age, divided by two, and that is the percentage of your income you should be saving. Now, we have a question that just came in from this conversation, because we are live for everyone listening, from Trish. And she said, so when you save it, right, she does her job. Let's just say Trish is 40. And she divides it by 2 and she says 20%. She's on pace.

Her big question is, where do I put the money? Like, where do I? Like, what type of account? And then once it's in there, where do you recommend we start with that? Yeah, great. So I would say that half the battle is over. just being able to save half your age. So if you can do that, consider yourself like already way ahead of the game. And anything that you do after that is, is nice, but just know that by

saving that amount of money, you're, again, your, your, your, your lead, leap years ahead of, of where everyone else is. So let's imagine that you've been able to save 10%, 20%, whatever half your age is. So the next question, Trish, is, all right. Great. Now, what do I put it? Under the mattress, at my bank, in my 401k. And I would start by putting it in your 401k. And the reason that makes the most sense for most people is because for a lot of employers, they will match a certain amount of your savings. And so a match is basically free money that the company is giving you. You're not going to get your bank to match. any deposit. So start with your 401k, put in as much as they're willing to match. And so, for example, let's imagine that they say your company, they'll match 6% of whatever you put in. Well, right there, I would immediately put at least 6% in your 401k. And then you've got to match. So that's, that's free money. It's great. You get the tax deduction. It's wonderful.

If you're in the wonderful situation where you are maxing out your 401k, you're putting in as much as you possibly can, then I would consider other types of accounts. So IRAs and more importantly, Roth IRAs are really the next place I would be looking. So in the financial world, there are two types of IRAs. There's the traditional with a traditional IRA, you put money in and you get a tax deduction. With a Roth IRA, put money in, you don't get a tax deduction now, but what you do get is the ability to take money out when you're retired and never have to pay tax on the account. And so that's why I think the single greatest type of account is a Roth account. So that's the next place I would be looking.

Great, Robert, I'd stop you there on the Roth account and just put some parameters out there because sure, she's been followed up, and I know it's a question that we get from a lot of our money mafia is a Roth IRA or a Roth 401k or any Roth account. What type of limitations are there? What is the cutoff on salary annually that you can't contribute? What are things we need to know about a Roth that maybe we might not know? Yeah, so you'd want to talk to your tax person

because they're going to be able to let you know if you qualify for a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA and how much you're going to be able to contribute. But the nice thing is they've been increasing both the income limits as well as the amount that you can contribute each year. So it's roughly $7,000 a year for an IRA. If you have access to a Roth 401k, then those limits are basically double. And so very few employers offer a 401k that has a Roth option.

Sadly, I wish more did. If yours does, I would just. I would jump all over that. It is one of the greatest ways to save money for retirement. And so I would look very closely at a Roth option if you qualify. And if you do, I would try to max that out.

Okay, great advice. We'll get into what to do with the money there. Just some overall tips and tricks, but I want to take a couple steps back. One thing I would say, just to Robert's point, explore everything that your company offers. He already mentioned a match. He said that Roth 401 case most of the time aren't available, but they might be.

You never know. Go to your human resource department. Make sure you're talking with people internally to understand everything, A to Z that they offer. Now, we'll get into, once that money's there, what do you do with it? But another one people ask me a lot is, how do I know exactly when I want to retire? The timing is a big question mark. They didn't have this sudden wealth. They didn't win the lottery, get the big contract.

but they're in that space of like, I think I can retire, but I'm not sure. What are some benchmarks that you would recommend, Robert? Yeah, good question. I think if you ask most people when they want to retire,

they'll say today. The question is, when can they retire? So that's sadly, usually a different answer. So if you're a few years away from retirement, you're thinking about,

well, I don't know, am I prepared, do I have enough saved? Maybe I want to retire a little bit early. It's retirement is one, one of the most significant financial and life transitions that any of us will ever make. I mean, people, if you haven't retired, you, you, you just don't understand what kind of life transition it really is because imagine for 40 years, you, you woke up every morning,

you got dressed, you did your commute, you went to work, you had responsibility, you had people who counted on you, you had things to do, you had stuff scheduled, like you were important. You had a purpose. And not only did you have a purpose, but every couple of weeks, you would get a paycheck directly deposited into your bank account. You didn't really have to worry about money that much. And then you retire. The day after you retire, everything has changed. Absolutely everything. you have no commute. You don't really have to get up for anything. You have no responsibilities. You have no schedule. People aren't counting on you. And you don't have that income that you used to have. Like your entire world has been flipped upside down. And in working with retirees for almost 30 years now, every single one of them says the same exact thing.

It doesn't matter if they've retired early or retired late. It doesn't matter if they have millions of dollars of investments put away or or if they have a few hundred thousand dollars the experience strangely is exactly the same they feel like it's an out-of-body experience where like they can't really appreciate their new life they don't understand it they're sort of grasping at what to do and i know i'm painting this picture of retirement as this bleak thing it's not trust me i mean people who've retired most of them absolutely love it but at the same time you have to go into it with the expectation that your life is going to be different, for better or for worse. And so your question, which I will answer is,

when do I know that I'm ready to retire? Well, I would like to break that into two different answers. There's the financial side of when am I able to retire financially, but then there's the non-financial questions that you have to address. Do I have people in my life? Do I have relationships? Do I have purpose? Do I have something to do in retirement?

because I've seen many people with with plenty of money who are capable of retirement who have retired only to retire and then go back to work. They didn't go back to work because they needed to from a financial perspective. They went back to work for something to do. Like they missed the people. They missed they missed the growth. They missed the responsibility. They missed feeling like wanted. And so those are two sometimes very different answers to that question. And the financial side is probably even easier to answer because you look at your social security, you look at any pensions you might have, you look at your investments, your assets. And doing some calculations, you can kind of figure out how much money you're going to be

able to pull in versus what your expenses are. And if you have more income than you have expenses, that means that you are capable of retiring. But before you jump to do that, I would definitely have that conversation with yourself or with your partner about, is this the right time from an emotional, psychological standpoint? Because you don't want to blow that. That's an interesting facet, right? Because I think we get so focused on the dollars and cents. We forget about what comes with the weight of the psychology of no more obligation and also living off what we've already created and saved as opposed to what will come in for future incomes. There is a huge psychology component to it. And I love that we're

live right now with some of the money mafia because they are chiming in in the chat. We have Terry who said that she agrees with what Amy said, which I'll share in just one minute, but she retired at 53. Her dad had her starting to save at her first job at 15, and she is so painful. She did. Time works on your side. Amy is also here, and she said she is retired. The best advice she can give is to make sure you find an advisor that you trust. She was able to retire at 60. If your money isn't working for you and making money on your money, it's an uphill battle. Who has time to keep up with investments when you're working full time? Two great points that lead into another question for us, Robert, which is people that didn't start at 15,

people that didn't have the best advisor and could retire at 60. They're late to the game. They're older parents. They didn't plan earlier in life. but it's almost time. What advice do you have for them? Yeah. So if you're in that situation, just know that you are not alone. Most of the country is exactly in that same situation

where they feel like they're behind the eight ball a little bit, wish they would have started earlier, wish they would have saved a little bit more, are approaching retirement and feel some anxiety because they just don't know if they can do it or not. So I would say firstly, congratulations. At least you're looking at. this, right? Because a lot of people will just put their head in the sand and say, ah, you know,

it'll work out. Like, uh, I think I have enough. I'm, I'm sure I'll be fine. And maybe you will, but maybe you won't. So at least you're having that conversation, you're looking at the numbers. And if there's some anxiety, okay, well, at least you have, I've identified it and you haven't retired yet. So what can you do to improve your situation? Well, the first is, can you save more? Savings is really the, there's only two factors that go into savings, and that is income and expenses. Can you increase your income? Maybe, but it's probably more fixed, especially if you're approaching retirement. There's probably not a lot of opportunity to make another $10,000, $40,000 a year. So you're probably not going to be able to adjust

the income side of things. But fortunately, there's the other side, and that is expenses. If you are approaching retirement and you haven't saved enough, then this is the opportunity to cut back on your expenses, even just temporarily. I'm not saying you have to cut back forever, but this is a great opportunity because for every dollar that you cut back in your expenses, that's an extra dollar you can put into savings, get that match at the 401K, put it in the Roth, whatever it might be. And so just to cut your expenses, there's a, there's an acronym I created called perk. And the strategy is super simple, like almost everything I say. And that is you simply list all of your expenses, everything from insurance to food, utilities, to gas, to whatever.

You list everything out. And then next to each expense, you write either a P and E and R or K. So with a P, those are expenses that you can postpone. So for example, maybe there was a trip you were going to take. You still want to go on the trip, but you know, maybe you want to save that money. So you put a P next to it. For expenses that you can eliminate, you put an E. And I know, because I've done this a lot of times with a lot of people and at first they'll say, well, you know, I can't cut anything. But if they really, if you really look at each line item, chances are there's going to be a handful, maybe more, where you can eliminate that expense.

And frankly, it won't even affect your lifestyle. People don't even realize the crap that they're spending. on. So that's an E. The R next to each item, you would, you would, you would, you would, you would write the R if you can reduce that particular expense. And this is an area ripe for being able to save money because there are a lot of expenses that we have where, you know, we have to have, we can't really postpone them. We definitely can't eliminate them, but could we reduce them? Again, every dollar you reduce is an extra dollar for your retirement. And finally, there are those

expenses, we can't postpone them. We can't eliminate them. Unfortunately, we can't reduce them. We have to K, which is we have to keep them. But if you go through this process, I guarantee you, you will come up with some amount of savings that you should then immediately start funneling into one of those retirement accounts we talked about. It's great. I think that's great advice. The idea of there's two ways to really make a difference, analyze your income and increase it, or minimize your expenses by prioritizing them. It makes perfect sense. And I always tell people out there,

when you spend $100, just literally multiply that times 1.5, assume a tax rate at 50%. You just spend $150 of income coming in. So it winds perfectly. Now, let's assume that those people are doing that. They start cutting their expenses. They now have enough to make some moves. And those people that start saving at 15,

like people in the money mafia who are retired by 53, they have that lump sum. The big question is today, now, more than ever. Savings accounts are yielding less than 1%. You have some CDs that are yielding 5% plus. And now we have inflation that's working against us. And mortgage rates at 7 to 8% and a 30 year mortgage. The big question is, what the hell, Robert, do we do it this month? What do we invest in? How do we invest? Where do we even start when we have a big pile of money for the future? We don't know what to do with it. What advice do you have? Yeah, great question. And so the answer is almost always the same. It doesn't matter if it's 2023 and inflation is high or it's 2004 or 2009, frankly, doesn't matter that much because what we're not trying to do is we're not trying to time the market. We're not trying to look at what the Fed's doing and look at what the 50 day moving average is on the S&P 500 so we can get in and and then get out when the market's too hot.

Like that, that's a loser's game. I often joke that if you want to become a millionaire in the stock market, it's really very simple. And I'm going to give you the secret. You start with a billion dollars and then you try to time the market. And you will end up with a million dollars. You will lose. Everyone who tries it eventually loses.

You might get lucky. You might get out at the right time. You might get back in at the right time, but it's not a strategy. You cannot do that consistently. So because of that, it makes our lives so much easier because we don't have to follow CNBC. We don't have to watch it day in and day out. We don't have to read the Wall Street Journal. We don't have to do any of those things.

All we have to do is create an asset allocation that makes sense for our risk tolerance, buy index funds, and freaking forget about it. Honestly, that is the answer. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. Okay, with index funds, do you have any funds specifically that you would recommend? Do you have a certain group that you think has lower expense ratios, certain funds we should look at? How do we drill down on the whole idea of index funds and make it applicable and executable for us listening right now? Yeah.

So just to step back briefly, there are. two types of funds out there, there are active management funds and then there are passive index funds. The active management funds, they spend a lot of money on marketing because they're trying to get your dollars because they charge really high fees and they're usually very tax inefficient. And oh, by the way, they usually don't beat the index funds. So avoid active management. So then again, we try to make this simple. So forget about all those guys. And then you just focus on passive index strategies. There are a lot of them out there from Schwab has them, Fidelity has them. I happen to like a lot of the Vanguard funds. They're so low cost and they're

tax efficient. And you just, you put together an allocation with these index funds. Some in stocks, some in bonds, maybe some in large cap, some in small cap. And if I'm losing people, I'm sorry, we can talk about that. But you just basically put together a portfolio of these index funds and when you get a hundred bucks you put it into the account and then it'll be diversified across all of those funds it it's really the the approach that creates the most long-term wealth for two reasons one is because it's really hard to beat the index averages there are thousands of money managers out there who try every single year and guess what almost all of them fail. So that's one reason. You'll probably do better because your money's in an index

fund because the fees are low. But secondly, and this is maybe even more significant, I've found that people who are into active funds, they're really active in their accounts, too. So they're trying to, again, get in, get out. Oh, they read a headline that spooks them. Oh, you know, shoot, I should probably get out of that because I don't like what I'm seeing. And so they're much more involved in their portfolio and the more it's like a it's a negative correlation the more involved you are in your portfolio chances are the lower your return is going to be and so when you're indexing it's so hands off that you don't have to pay attention to what's going on in the markets that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to your accounts or you shouldn't pay

attention if you have an advisor to what he or she is doing but it just means you you don't have to be worried every time you see some headline or watch some stupid tic talk video about what's going on we had one of the money mafia members in this group send me a message directly and they said it's wild how little i have in my brain i don't know any of this stuff what i want that person to know is again you are not alone but this is the stuff these are the conversations we have to have And if we break it down even further, even just think about like something as basic as, let's say, understanding your spending habits, right? If I go to the mall, I know I'm going to be emotionally charged because I see the store.

It's on the mannequin. It's there. I'm probably going to buy it. I might not make the best decision. So a simple concept, like Robert's saying, of just the whole ideology that the same people that are trying to time the market or work it perfectly, the same people that are active, like those are the same people who will say they're going to the mall and then not spend anything but then get trapped into it because emotions take over our behaviors, whether it's

investing or spending or anything we do, right? So take concepts when you're stuck or confused with finance, retirement, money mafia, and try and relate them back to something simple and then you can back into exactly what the play is and how it is. Now, Robert, I'm going to get a little bit more technical with this one. So index funds, you gave some great examples like Vanguard, low cost funds, low expense ratios, we're not trying to be market. The market is efficient. We can plan for the long run without being emotionally involved in working on living the best life and working our best life. Now, there are a lot of people out there that will say to manage risk, you should balance the fund by maybe keeping some monies in cash or keeping some monies in bonds or even like

laddered CDs as an approach. Do you think any of that makes sense or do you think 100% allocation in index funds that best suit you with low expense ratios is the claim. Yeah. So with index funds, you can be 100% invested in stocks or they also have index funds where you're all in bonds. So the index approach is just a hands off passive kind of style. But you can be in real estate bonds. You can be in stocks. It's across the board. So I think maybe some of the questions that you're getting are related to, great, I'm saving enough. Okay, check that. I've put it in the right account. Wonderful. Check that. It's in cash right now. Okay, what should I leave it in cash? Well, like, what do I do with it once it's in those accounts? So we talked about an index fund,

a passive strategy. Okay, great. There's like 2,000 of them. So what, you know, help. Like, how am I supposed to invest? And I would say that, for example, if we're particularly, taking Vanguard as one of the low cost index strategies. Again, one I really like, but there are many others. Okay. So what, what would you invest in from Vanguard? Well, this comes down to what's the right asset allocation for me. And so when I say asset allocation, all that means is what percent of my savings of

my portfolio should be in stocks versus real estate versus bonds versus Like how should I how should what should what should the division of my retirement account look like and to answer that question you it's based somewhat on your age be there's this idea that when we're younger right we have a lot of time before we retire so because we have literally decades probably doesn't matter really what happens in the short term over the next few months even few years. years because again, you're not going to need the money for decades. Compare that to someone who's going to retire in a year. Okay, well, what we know is if they're retiring in a year, they're going to need access to that money. So they, they kind of care what happens in the next 12 months or 24 months. It's going to directly impact their portfolio and will directly impact the amount

of income that they're going to have in retirement. So part of it is a function of your age. part of it's a function of your risk tolerance. Your risk tolerance is basically what amount of stocks can you have in your portfolio? How much volatility can you have in your accounts without you freaking out? Like that's the non-technical definition of what risk tolerance is all about. It's like how much swings on the downside can you handle before you're like, all right, forget it.

I'm out. Like I can't stand another day of losing money and I just want to sell everything because that is the worst place that you can be. You talked earlier about emotions and decisions. When it comes to investing, your emotions, they're the devil, right? You do not want your emotions to get mixed up with your decision making when it comes to your money. But what often happens is people will save, they're doing the right thing. They think they're invested correctly. And then, we have a market that's not so friendly. And we see that the market's declining first for a few days, then for a few weeks and maybe for a few months. And you're like, oh my God, every time I look

at my damn statement, I'm losing money. Like this sucks. And then maybe during the day, you start thinking about it more. Maybe you start looking at your accounts more often. And then at night, like you're trying to go to sleep. And all you can think about is your damn account and how much money you're going to lose the next day until you get to that point where you're, again, you're just, You just throw in the towel and you're like, sell everything, put me all in cash. So that's not, that's where we do not want to get to. So your risk tolerance is how much volatility can I live with and sleep with? That's where you want to be because what the research shows is that the more stocks you have

in your portfolio, meaning the more of the higher allocation you have to stocks, again, versus bonds over longer periods of time, the better off you're going to do. Like that is tried and true. That's exactly what the research shows. If you have a long time horizon, stocks are the place to be. But that's only if you can ride out the downs. If you can't, you're going to sell and then the market's going to turn around and you're going to be in cash and be like, shit. Like now what? When do I get back in? You do not want to be in that situation. So have enough in stocks where you can write out that volatility. That's the answer to how much I should have in stocks. I love it. It's a great, great answer. Think about that risk tolerance and

an asset allocation. When people get confused by that, I'm going to go back to my 101ers out there. Like, I just don't understand the concept of risk tolerance and asset allocation. I give a very, very basic example. Suppose 10 of you and your friends is a bachelor, it's a bachelor, it's a bachelor at party. You're going to a casino. What's going to happen? There might be one person in that batch red party who's going to put every single dollar on every single bet. There might be one person who says, I'm not going to bet at all. I'll just take the free drinks there, right? That's the definition of different risk tolerance.

Asset allocation is just like that. The one person decided to take all their money and put it on red while the other person said, I'll keep it in my pocket and keep it in cash. Those are very, very basic concepts. One thing I want to talk about, though, is there going to be people out there that are going to give you much different advice here than Robert is and that I'm endorsing from what Robert's saying. The reason they're going to do that is because they could put.

you in products, they could take those assets you have and allocate them towards extremely high margin, self-profiting investments that will pad their pockets. Before I talked, before I had Robert on, I went through a whole unrealistic people I could have had on and then had a conversation with Robert because I knew that his portfolio, his background, his credibility was so well balanced and so right on. So I want to bring this to the attention of everyone here. Robert, what are some questions that people back home should be asking their advisor, should be asking the people they're getting advice from to know that the advice of where they're telling them to put their money is in the best interest for them and not for the person that is suggesting

that solution. I'm so happy you brought this up. I don't think people talk about this enough. And it's so, it's so important. So one, you don't necessarily. have to have a financial advisor. Are they helpful? Yes. Will they save you some money? Most likely, will they help you ride out any volatility in the portfolio and help you not make emotional decisions? Yeah, but you don't have to have one. If you decide to get one, make sure you get one that has your best interests in mind. And when I tell people this, they usually look at me like I'm an idiot because they're like, well, yeah, no kidding. I Obviously, if someone's giving me investment advice, you're like, of course, it's in my best interest.

It's like going to a doctor, right? You don't think for a moment that, well, my doctor's prescribing this because, you know, he's going to get a cut on it. Or, you know, my doctor says I should have this surgery because she thinks I, you know, I need it. And but you don't think, oh, she's just saying that because, you know, she's going to get some sort of a commission. Of course not. In the medical field, we, we hold doctors to a high esteem because we know that they're really trying to help us and nothing that they're telling us is going to help them or hurt them financially. Like they're going to get paid one way or the other, that's that.

But sadly, when it comes to finance, we play things a little differently, unfortunately, because in the financial world, most financial advisors do not have to have your best interests in mind when they provide you with advice. I mean, it's such bullshit. Like, when I say that, like, I can't even believe it's true. Believe me, it's true. So here's how you can eliminate, oh, maybe 99% of the advisors that you talk to. Ask them if they are a full-time fiduciary.

All right. So fiduciary, what is that? Well, it's super, super simple. A fiduciary is someone when they, they provide advice, it has to be in your best interest. That's it. They have to. They're legally and morally obligated to provide advice that's in your best interest. That's not in their best interest. But again, most advisors are not fiduciaries. They can provide you with advice that's in their best interest. Hey, buy this product. Oh, this life insurance policy. Oh, it's great for you. Oh,

and it's also great for me too, because I'm getting a big fat commission. So start the process asking if they're a fiduciary. If they are not, say, adios, if they are, great. That's just, that's the starting point. Like there are so many other questions that you can ask. Are they a CFP, a certified financial planner? That's sort of the de facto gold standard of education. And it's a credential that really good advisors will have the CFP. Again, it's sort of like the starting point in my mind. They should at least have that. I put together, I don't know, probably 40 different questions about what you

should ask. I've written articles about it and I even created this interactive free website. It's called advisor fit.com. And once you've identified a few advisors, you put their information in. It sends them an email with a boatload of questions. And then what happens is you get a, assuming they answer it, you get a reply back where I sort of critique how they've answered things. And so you can see if there are any red flags or not because obviously one of the things that you want to look at is have they had any litigation,

have the regulatory bodies that govern them, have they like dinged them for something? If so, run. Like there's so many good advisors out there that you don't need to settle for mediocre. And you definitely don't need to settle for, like, fraudulent. Such a good point. I mean, you even think about the basic things we do before we order Uber Eats. We check the ratings. We check the, we Google, do we see the food? Can we look at it?

Does the restaurant look legit? No, true. With just a drug meal, you know, someone who has every penny of ours, right? You can do this stuff. Yes, that's hilarious. That's so true. Right, exactly. Oh, true.

Such a good point. Great question. coming in here from Hillary Hillard, do you want to come on and ask your question? That's one we haven't asked yet. Sure. So I run my own business, and as much as I have a sales pipeline and projections, it's hard to have predictable income, and retirement planning is a priority for me, too. So I'm wondering if, in addition to the half-year-age percentage, advice that there's

anything else to kind of think through as a business owner. Yeah, great. question Hillary and congrats on the business. So I will often joke that there are things that business owners can do that would put non-business owners in jail. And what do I mean by that? I'm talking about taxes. The IRS has like two different versions. They have the personal version. If you have a W-2, if you have a job, there's like very limited things that you can do. There's the, there's the IRA, there's the 401k, and yeah, that's about it. But for business owners, oh my goodness, like the laws are written to support and benefit business owners.

So if you have a business, like you do, there are all kinds of things that you can do. I would say, firstly, depending on what your cash flow is, you can set up your own 401K. I don't know if you have employees for a lot of people that have independent contractors. they can set up a solo 401k where they can put quite a bit of money in more than what you could put in as a W2 employee because you can put in a profit sharing piece. You can even open up a Roth 401K.

It's your company. You could definitely do that. Depending on you seem like too young for this, but if you're slightly older, people can start a solo defined benefit pension plan, which are just, ridiculous. I don't even know how these things are legal, but they are. You can basically put potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars away every single year in an account and get a tax

deduction for it. Again, if you tried that without a business, you'd be locked up. Like, you would absolutely be in jail for doing that. So business owners, there's so many things that you can capitalize on that again, non-business owners wouldn't dream of doing. I don't know if you, if the business owns real estate, but you can form an LLC, the company can buy the, buy the real estate, you can rent it back to yourself. Like, there's just, we could do a whole podcast on just strategies for business owners. Awesome. Thank you so much. Hilary, did you get the answer that you wanted there? Yeah, my mind, my mind is blown. I feel invigorated and I need help, definitely. So thank you. Yeah. So a great person for you, maybe a financial advisor,

But I would have a really good tax person because so many of the strategies that you can potentially deploy will be tax related. So being able to shelter lots of money, not pay tax on it now, put it into accounts that will grow tax free. So then when you're ready to retire, or if you sell the company, like you're just going to be in a much better position. I think that is such a good piece of advice, Robert, especially when you own your own businesses and your income is going up, nine out of ten times, it's going to be a really,

really good CPA that's going to help you make money on your money. You'll spend more time with your CPA and tax credits than you will with your advisors. That's for sure if you have them. Marge, I thought you had a really great question if you want to come on and ask a little bit about the question regarding the health care cost, because that's one we hadn't talked about. Marge, you ask your question? Yes, hi. So, you know, I'm probably a few years out from retirement. probably about four or five years. And as you're looking and looking at all of your expenses and you talk about trying where you can reduce expenses, the one expense that I have the hardest time just trying to even

estimate in the future what it could be is health care costs. You know, right now I do have some sort of a lifetime health through my previous employer. I don't know how much really that could cover because at some point when you get to Medicare, that kind of goes away. But even at some point, how do you go about trying to put some sort of, of estimate together on health care costs, especially going into the future. Yeah, that's a tough question. I wish I had a simple answer for you, but it's really, really one of the hardest things to

answer because there are so many unknowns there regarding health, what's going to be covered, the inflation of health care costs. I mean, it's been dramatic over the past couple of decades. we can only imagine it's going to be going up at the same rate, if not more, in the future. So when I have a situation when we're doing planning, where we just, we just don't know the answer. What I will do is I will, I will create a financial plan and then run different scenarios. So for example, in this particular situation, I would say, okay, well, how much are you spending now? Okay, X. All right. Well, does the plan work? And when I say, does the plan work?

What that means is, can I retire at this age based on the income from Social Security, my investment accounts, maybe some real estate? Will it cover my expenses? Do I have a very low risk of running out of money? That's like the plan works. Okay, great. Well, what if I double my health care costs? Does the plan still work? If you run it and it does, okay, great. That's a pretty conservative approach saying, all right, I'm going to double my health care costs. If you run it and it doesn't work, well, then you've got, you've got a tough decision to make because you either then work a little bit longer until you get to the point where you can double your health care costs and the plan still works, or you risk it.

And you say, okay, well, maybe maybe the plan works at one and a half times the current health care cost. I'm okay with that. I really want to retire. And so I'm willing to to deal with that risk. One of the things that I write about a lot in in my book, by the way, badass retirement, check it out, is the advantage of part-time retirement. We often think in terms of, well, retirement's either all or none. Like, I work for all these years and then one day I just stop and then I don't work ever again. But there are so many advantages. One of them is health care and health care costs to gradually moving into retirement. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to do that.

Sometimes where we work, it's either your full time or your no time. But sometimes we're in situations where we can gradually move into a full time retirement. And if you're able to do a part time retirement, even for a couple of years, think about that. It's the 401 match that you're still getting. It's the income that you're still earning. It's the fact that you don't have to pull money out of your retirement accounts to live on for those couple of years. Maybe it gets you closer to full retirement social security age.

Maybe it gets you to the Medicare age where you're not having to try to pay for that stuff yourself before Medicare kicks in. So I'm a huge, huge proponent of part-time retirement. I think it works in a lot of situations. there are very little downside risks. And so I think that's a great strategy. I know that's going a little off topic, but for you, I would run a few different scenarios,

see at what point those healthcare costs have to get to for the plan to break. And then ask yourself if you're comfortable with that. That's awesome. Robert, thank you so much for that answer. I think it is a great thought and customizing a solution, giving your situation,

but also running different equations to try and project and forecast, what the cost could be and how that influences your overall money situation is fantastic. We covered the types of accounts that people can look at, things to consider with their employer, how to deploy funds, tips, tricks, and tactics of what to do when considering retirement, acronyms to reduce spending, acronyms and equations to think about where you're at and benchmark your current retirement and even business owners. We could cover so much more and three, four, five more episodes of a podcast, but we have to get your trading secret

before we wrap. And I also, before we, after we get your trading secret, Robert, I want to make sure you let everyone know where they can find more information, where they can find your books, because there's such a wealth of information that we all need here. So thank you so much for being on. Money Mafia. Thank you for being live with us. But Robert, you're not free yet. We need one trading secret. It could be a life trading secret, career trading secret, or it could be retirement specific, whatever you prefer, one trading secret that you could leave us with. Interesting. So, you know, I don't do a lot of trading, buying, and selling in the market. But the big part of what I've written about in the badass retirement book is financial related.

But a lot of it is also about life, about creating that life in retirement that's just going to blow you away. And the one thing that I think people miss that they don't have in their retirement is they're under this impression that as we get older, we need to settle down and we need to relax and we need to step back and we need to just sort of exist. And that is crap. Like that kind of mentality will ensure that you have just a mediocre lackluster life in retirement. I fully believe that as we get older, we have more time, money, resources, and wisdom than we've ever had in our entire lives. Retirement's not the time to retire, to step back. It's the time to like go on adventures, have fun, live outside your comfort zone to truly

live. And unfortunately, the culture and the media perpetuate this myth that, you know, when you get old, we just got to, you know, settle down. And I think that's crap. And I'm doing everything I can in the book. I'm active on Instagram. It's all at badass retirement. So check it out. We'd love to help have you join the conversation. I'm sure there are more, more training secrets in that book so check out bad ass retirement and also go in the reviews give us five stars right now and let us know if we should have robert back to talk all about sudden wealth management because there's so much to cover with retirement but for everyone out there i find it super entertaining robert is the go-to guy in the country when the lottery gets up there when the mega millions and the powerball gets to about that billion dollar amount

you'll probably see robert on good morning america there's some network out there talking about what those people could do with the money and tragedies he's seen and how to protect those. So for some reason, that just has me intrigued. If you guys think it intrigues, give us five stars, let us know in the reviews. And Robert, thank you so much for being on trade secrets. Where can people find all the books you have, all the information you're putting out? Where can they get more Robert if they need more Robert in their financial? If you want more Robert in your life, I guess you can go to badassretirement.com.

And again, on Instagram, it's just badass retirement. There we go. Robert, Halia Red. Thank you, Robert, for being on this. show we appreciate it and all the money mafia thank you for being with us