B (9:37)

Okay. All right. Well, the first question is from Kathleen in Ohio. Is the SOFI High Yield Savings Account, highly rated investment account to put $50,000 in?

C (9:47)

Kathleen? I don't use SoFi, so I can't say that I don't have anything bad to say about Sofi. But I'm not putting my, you know, my faith, and I'm not backing SoFi either. What's important to know is that SOFI is a bank. They have a bank charter. I always think of Sofi as the student loan refinancing company, but they're also a bank, so that means they have FDIC insurance. So it's somewhat less relevant how great of the credit they are because they're, they're FDIC backed. So as Long as you're staying under the FDIC limits for you, and in this case 50,000, certainly well within the FDIC limit, then even if something goes wrong with sofi, your money is protected. So. And there's a lot of other options out there where you can go find maybe slightly higher interest rates on some of these other online banks, but they're all very similar. A lot of them have catches, so they'll. It's like you have to. You have to set up auto deposit in order to get the full rate, but that's not a terrible game to play. Do the parameters get the highest yield? They're offering probably something around 4%, maybe four and a quarter. But just know that the credit worthiness is backed by the FDIC and that Kathleen from Ohio is what matters.

B (11:11)

Okay. Makeda in North Carolina says, I just retired from the marine Corps after 27 years and I have a Roth with the TSP. I recently opened a Fidelity brokerage account, but I want to know if I should transfer my TSP to a Roth IRA with Fidelity. Not sure if the TSP is still a good choice now that I'm retired and not in government service anymore. And thank you for your service, Makeda.

C (11:34)

Makeda, thank you A for your service. And B, I still like tsp. I still like the Thrift Savings Plan for Federal Employees. And. And it sounds like you have a Roth would be the equivalent of a Roth 401K, but it's a Roth tsp. If you look at the fund options, it's almost as though one of the knocks on TSP is that it's super limited and there's really just not that many options. You've got five options, common stocks, small cap, international government bonds and fixed income. And that's it. But it also is a good thing. It's almost like a restaurant with a really short menu. But everything on the menu's great. It's the way I look at it because all of those fund options, less than a half a dozen, they're all super low cost. And they basically track the indexes and the indices. So the cost at TSP is really ultra low. It's like 0.3%, 0.03 of a percent to 0.05% on funds which is ultra ultra low. It's hard to find anything really. You can also use their life cycle option where they're putting together those funds for you. And then third, you are able. I haven't used this, but I've read about this. It's something. It's A mutual fund. They call it the mutual fund window with TSP that offers where you can go out and utilize other mutual funds that are beyond that. So that's another option. I think you have to have a certain amount of money. It costs a little bit per year, but that is an option if you're looking for funds beyond just the csi, F and G options. So to me, unless you want to own individual stocks, I think that's the key here. And there's nothing wrong with that either. If you're fine with these funds that are low cost, then TSP is an option that you can stick with and you don't necessarily need to do a rollover. Not that a rollover is bad because your optionality goes up. You can still keep your costs low. You can maybe have more advice if you have an IRA or a Roth IRA at a place like a Fidelity. But the short answer is that I still like tsp.

B (13:57)

Okay. Doug in Oklahoma says I have a question about Edward Jones. I just had my six month review with my advisor whom I always tell I only want him to give me the fiduciary advice and no extra sales pressure for insurance or other products, et cetera. I always ask him to calculate what it costs me to be at Edwards Jones that year. Because my funds total greater than $1 million, they do not charge the load to purchase mutual funds. This year their fees, charges and commissions totaled $6,700. Basically 0.2% of my balance with them. Then they calculated the 12B1 fees from all of my funds to total 15,000 DOL. I do like the personal service and having an office in town with my advisor. Normally I'd transfer to a fiduciary fee only advisor like Clark says. But isn't paying 0.064% pretty reasonable? I feel like 1% is the number Clark has mentioned to make sure to stay below when dealing with financial advisors. My question is, could there be any other hidden fees they're not mentioning? And how much could I save if I switch to another way of investing? I'm 59 years old and I'm retiring this year.

C (15:07)

Doug, let's just do some math here. The 6700 is 0.2 and then another 15,000 in 12 B1 fees here 20, that would actually be 0.44, not 0.04. I think that's what he was saying with his math. So you're paying around 2/3 of a percent. Call it 55, 56 basis points, which is comfortably below 1%. So I think that's good, particularly if you know the advisor. You have a relationship with the advisor. That's important to some extent. It's almost like having a relationship with a doctor where when you need them, they're there. That's really important. They're aware of your history, your history. You can do planning with them. And that is a fee that is comfortable. It really is. What I would say is that the only knock on having everything in mutual funds is that there is a tax issue with mutual funds. Now, if 100% of this is in an IRA or a 401k or it would be an IRA, then the mutual fund capital gain distributions are not a problem because if everything stays underneath in the IRA crock pot, then you don't have to worry about these distributions. But mutual funds tend to pay out large capital gains in any given year because they do trading whatever the taxes are within that, they distribute it out to all the shareholders. So you can have a fund that is flat in any given year and you get a distribution of 5, 10, 15% that you now have to pay taxes on. That's a big deal. That is a really big deal. And that's precisely why. Well, not the only reason, but there's two reasons why. If you go back 20 years, if you look at investment assets in the nation, ETFs only made up 3%. Today they make up 33%. And almost all the growth in new money has gone into ETFs for two reasons. One, lower cost. So instead of paying 0.5 or 0.6 or 1% in a mutual fund, ETFs started to bring down the cost to 0.3, then 0.2, then 0.1. ETFs are in general much less expensive than actively traded mutual funds or actively managed mutual funds. The second piece of the equation of why ETFs have really not fully displaced because there's still a giant legacy amount of money in mutual funds and it's continued to grow, is that there's much, much less tax distribution that comes out. So they're much more tax efficient for you. So that would be something to ask your advisor about and say, now if you're in an after tax account and you've got a bunch of gains in these funds, it might be hard to be selling them to transition to different investments. But on the surface, the fee, it sounds like they're trying to be really transparent with you. But I would just be really careful about the tax distributions. And maybe what would make sense is newer money should go into more tax efficient vehicles. And that would be what I would consider what we call in the investment industry, tax drag. And if you've got a fund that's always distributing out capital gains, then you've got some tax drag that can eat into your returns over time.

B (18:43)

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about how to pay for that 55 plus kit.

C (18:49)

Oh yeah, that's the fun part.

B (18:50)

Yeah.

D (18:51)

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E (19:51)

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C (21:05)

Rated PG 13. Welcome back to Ask an Advisor. I'm Wes Moss, along with the great Christa Bbiaz. We're back here talking about how to fund the housing overlap headache.

B (21:21)

Yeah.

C (21:22)

Because it creates a housing underlap problem. So we talked about Joe earlier, Krista, and walked through what I thought was a great process that, that he really went through to figure out the next. It's not about the next home. I think it's about the next and right community in retirement that's so important for a happy retirement. So he figured that out the next problem. And I'm just going to write this down as we go because there are a lot of steps here. But the next problem was that the house was 500k and of course finally decided on Myrtle beach in one of these communities. It was a Del Webb community. He liked the Crestwind community. There was a couple Del Webb communities that he really liked. The houses weren't on the water but you could drive to a clubhouse that was on the water and just. He loved it. It was great. So there's a lot of these great options out there. House is 500k. Of course, he spotted it, said that's the place, this is a community. And the problem is his condo, let's call it 250k, totally paid for in Atlanta. Joe, it's still, let's say, on the market. Actually not even on the market, but it's going to be on the market really soon. So he's got a funding issue. So you got to pay for the 500k and you can get a mortgage. But he doesn't want to have a mortgage. By the way, it's another really important piece of the equation going into retirement. Happy retirees tend to have mortgages either mostly paid off or not have any mortgage at all. And mortgages are super expensive. Even let's say you get a mortgage that's only for a year, you still are paying tons of closing costs, 10, $15,000 in closing costs. So it's a really inefficient way to do what. Essentially what Joe needs here is a bridge. He needs a little bit of time to be able to sell this condo and utilize the money to pay for about half of this property. The other half would be coming from his investment accounts. Number one, we know he does not need and does not want to use his Roth IRA even though be tax free because that's longer term money for hopefully 30 years in retirement for him and doesn't want to use IRA money or 401k money either because that's fully taxable. So then you go to his brokerage. Now he has brokerage money to be able to do that. Problem is a Fair amount of the brokerage. Most of his brokerage positions have gains in them. So if he were to just say well I need the other 250, really he needs the full 500 right now. So he could sell the full 500 to pay for this. And that's a tax tsunami. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars in taxes in order to do that. So how do we avoid that? Well, what most brokerage firms will allow you to do. Schwab is an example. Fidelity has a program for this. Morgan Stanley, some of the bigger brokerage firms, Wall street firms have essentially they're similar to margin accounts and we don't like borrowing money to buy more stocks. These are more for multi purpose loans tied back to your investment account. In this particular case, this is called a pledged asset line. A lot of these products, the brokerage firm will say well you've got $500,000 or a million dollars in your brokerage account. You're pretty good credit because the money's already here with us. We're going to give you a loan or a credit line. Most of them don't cost anything to set up and most of them have similar rates to what mortgage rates are now to be able to say well we'll unlock 500k from this account to utilize for a real estate purchase so that you don't have to sell anything. Knowing that pretty soon you are going, it may take a couple of months, but pretty soon you're going to be able to sell your property and in his case pay for half of this. In a lot of folks cases they have even more equity than this and maybe all of that equity will be unlocked to then pay back the credit that you're taking from your pledge asset line. The good news is here that most brokerage firms do this for very little to zero setup fee. And if it's only going to be for a couple of months, you only pay interest for a couple of months.

B (25:44)

So in his case he needed $500,000 for the house. He's going to get 250 for the condo. He can put to pay that off.

C (25:50)

What about eventually the other once it sells?

B (25:52)

Once it sells. What about the other 250k? Would you pay that off over time to manage the tax burden?

C (25:58)

The reality here is that in this particular case he's going to need to take that 250 from somewhere. So not the Roth, not the IRA, but the brokerage account. And then he needs to identify the positions where he pays the least amount of tax. And fortunately he's Got some dry powder areas that he can sell without having to worry about taxes because most of those are flat and more interest paying. And then there's a final step because of most people having to make some sales. Now what's the downside there? Well, if he's selling a bunch of his dry powder, now all of a sudden his allocation's off. The final step in this longer housing overlap headache scenario is, is to, once the transaction is done, rebalance the accounts in a way that gets you back to a position where you're comfortable with your allocation. Now, it still may be difficult as you may have many of your positions are still at a gain. You may have to do some rebalancing in some of your non taxable accounts or your qualified or retirement accounts, or even a Roth account. Now, there's some questions about that because you still don't want too much of your safety money in Roth accounts because they're so long term. But you're going to need to look at the totality of your investment accounts and try to get back to the asset allocation that you feel comfortable with long term. Okay, that's the final step.

B (27:27)

All right, we'll go to some questions. This one's from Anonymous in Florida. Wes. I have a family member who because of a mental health disorder has effectively no financial discipline. The only Exception is a $1,000,000 nest EG. I don't know many details, but they have purchased a sizable annuity with a significant portion of their retirement. Given the danger they are to themselves financially, is this one of the rare exceptions where an annuity might actually make sense? The loss of return cannot compare to the loss of their disordered spending causes. Although the credit card interest is another story.

C (28:04)

Well, Clark would say that's a four letter word here on the Clark Howard show. The annuities can be, in a lot of cases, are not a great option for folks. And I know Clark, he just goes, you know, he goes nuts when he hears that word. In this case, and particularly in Florida as an example, there are some real protections around annuities. And it's, it's, I don't remember the exact statute, but It's Florida Rule 222 DOT, something that says that if you have money in an annuity, it's protected from creditors, it's protected from lawsuits, it's protected from garnishment, et cetera. So that in itself is a, in this particular case where you have a family member that has some real mental health issues, that is a, that is a positive. For the secondly Depending on the kind of annuity it may be the kind of annuity that's just giving you a payout. Well, if you turn a big chunk of money into a lifetime payout, it makes it so that you can't go get chunks out of the big chunk of money to go blow it. So there are some. This is one of those rare situations where this may be a good solution for your family member because they're a financial danger to themselves and this really limits much of that. The only issue, it's not foolproof because even if somebody has a payment stream from an annuity, they can sell that payment stream to either a life settlement company or a factoring type company. So you can still get cash, but then you have these giant discounts that people take and it's very wasteful and it takes away the creditor protection too. So there's still. It's not foolproof, but I think it's a good start.

B (29:51)

Okay, another anonymous question from someone in Texas.

C (29:56)

So if you're anonymous and you're doing. We get a lot of. I'd say a third of folks are anonymous, which is cool. Remember I don't know, we don't know what your actual name is. So if you're worried about you could

B (30:06)

put a fake name for sure.

C (30:07)

Put a fake name on the fence. Frank, we had almost ready to go Abby.

B (30:15)

I mean we've wise. Wes.

C (30:18)

I don't know if that one came through crystal clear, Krista. So you can always do just a fun name as well.

B (30:26)

Okay, so this is. This person is saying I'm 43 years old. I'm thinking of retiring early in two years at age 45. My current expenses are about $60,000 a year. My house is paid off and valued about $350,000. At my early retirement age of 45, I expect to have about 150,000 in dry powder, 800k in taxable brokerage account, 550k in pre tax, 401k and 350k in Roth. At the age of 65, I expect to receive a pension of approximately $4,000 a month, non cola along with Social Security. If I retire at 45, I only want to access the dry powder and taxable brokerage. I don't mind depleting them down to zero by age 65. That is, I want them to last me 20 years. After that, I expect my 401k and Roth to have sufficiently grown enough to supplement my pension and Social Security. Do you think I can retire in two years?

C (31:24)

I'm all for retire sooner method, you know that. But just Krista, just want to make sure how much in the retirement accounts that they were going to wait for 20 years on.

B (31:37)

550k in the pre tax, 401k, 350k in the Roth.

C (31:42)

So $900,000. Okay, so you have two moving parts here. Age 43, trying to retire at 45. This is super early. This is a retire super sooner question. And there's some real logic behind the way Annie in Texas will say for Anonymous is going about this. There's some real logic in it and then what will kick in is the pension, etc. But the first piece of the equation here, which is living on the dry powder, which was what, 150 and 800. So 950 in after tax and dry powder over the course of the next 20 years and in order to do 60k a year from that, think of it this way. 60 divided by 950 is about 6.5% and that's not inflation adjusted. That's just the same amount every single year. So that's way beyond the 4% level of withdrawal. So it very well will run out over that period of time. If you were to adjust the 60 for inflation every single year, let's call it even by 3% a year still assuming at least somewhat of a rate of return on this, the money's still going to run out, let's say by year 15 or 16. At the same time though, and there's some real logic here, the 900, let's call it at 5% a year for 20 years is going to be probably 2.2, 2.3 million. So then you could say, well I've got the $2,300,000 now and then I can take 4% of that 2.3 million times 4% is 92 grand a year, plus the pension of 4K a month, which is 48,000 a year. Now you're looking at $140,000. So on paper I think this kind of works, kind of works. But you're also relying on a lot of things to go right. And you are 20 years, a really long time to have zero income at age 45. And you're going to run into a situation where you're just seeing your account balance go down and down and down and down and down. And that's the after tax money that you can get to even if you're other accounts are going up. That's all retirement money. And what do we know? Well, some of it's Roth. So that's good. But what do we know? We want to have some non retirement money in retirement. We want some brokerage money because then we can choose when we distribute our funds. We can keep our tax situation efficient. So if you just end up with all retirement money, you've kind of taken away that optionality of controlling your tax bracket. Not to mention in 20 years, 140k in income is really only worth probably about 80k today. 80 to 90, which is still good. And it's not like. And your house will be paid for. I think it's already paid for. So on paper, this works. If all goes well. If all goes well, I think this would work. But I wouldn't do it because too many things have to go right and it's too long of a period of time to have zero income. 45 is so young to wait till 65 to be kind of your second phase of retirement. So here's the mental twist I would offer up is that we know, at least this is what I believe through my research, is that happiness levels go up by over 20%. The minute you can answer yes to this question, Are you financially in a place where you can say you're retired, if you can answer yes to that, your overall life satisfaction happiness levels rise dramatically relative to the baseline in the United states, you're at 45, you'll be able to say yes to that question. So what I would do is I'd be saying yes to the question in my head, which makes work much more palatable and more enjoyable because you can always walk away. So I would look at working part time. I was gonna say during that period of time, get a more flexible job that you don't, maybe don't hate. Sounds like if you're trying to stop working 45, you must hate your job. And a lot of Americans do. One in five people hate their company so much, they want their company. They want to help bring their company down.

B (36:15)

Oh, wow.

C (36:15)

They want to see their company go down.

B (36:17)

Oh, my gosh.

C (36:18)

60% of Americans kind of take it or leave it with work. But only one in five people love their work. So like Krista dbs, I do. I would say that you're close. I would just really think about working at least part time and do it for till 50. That's only five more years and see how that goes. But to totally be out of the workforce at 45, it's a little too early in my book.

B (36:42)

All right. Cynthia in Missouri says, I've recently become aware that I'M paying a bit more in fees for my investments than I'd like. While the cost is not terrible, I'd like to switch to something with van for the lower fee. Will selling investments to move them to another place create a taxable event, wiping out my potential gains from lower fees?

C (37:03)

Absolutely will. Cynthia. I mean let's just say you didn't give me the amounts, but let's just say you had $100,000 now grew to 200 and you've got your funds are half a percent a year and you'd like to have closer to zero. Well, you're going to pay 15 to 20 grand in taxes if you sell and then reinvest in a lower cost fund. Even if you're saving 5050 basis points or a half percent a year forever, your break even is still 15 to 20 years. So the answer is no. If you've got a big gain now, if you don't have much of a gain then it may be easy to do it. Or if this is in a retirement account, you can do it because you now have to worry about you're in the crock pot. You don't have to worry about your taxes. So if it's in a retirement account, the answer, simple answer is yes, you can do it. Find lower cost funds. If it's in a non retirement account and you've got a gain like a lot of people do today because markets have been good over the last five years, if the gain is 100% it's going to take you even at a half a percent lower fee wise, it's going to take you 15 to 20 years to break even. I would not say yes to that option.

B (38:13)

Okay, well that does it for us today on Ask An Advisor. Thank you so much for listening or watching. Hope that you'll share this episode with a friend you think could learn something from it. And we hope the rest of your day is fantastic.