C (2:24)

Yes. So much so that I donated that gift immediately.

B (2:28)

Yeah.

C (2:28)

At the end it was a bottle of. I thought it was a big bottle of soap.

B (2:34)

It was basically a margarita bottle.

C (2:37)

Yeah, it looked like a. It was a green, round, squishy bottle that looked like a big bottle of soap. That you would have on your counter. Turns out it was some sort of margarita mix. Tequila.

B (2:48)

Yeah. And it had been like 25 and then it was on clearance for two.

C (2:53)

And there's a reason it was on sale for two. Yeah, I believe, I believe I was trying to get my own gift that I had brought in and which was one of those fluffy blankets.

B (3:02)

I did the same.

C (3:03)

That's super comfortable.

B (3:06)

Yep.

C (3:06)

And it turned out it was Grace's son that got it. Sebastian. And I didn't want to. Because you can steal. I didn't want to steal from a little kid.

B (3:15)

Right. Understandable.

C (3:16)

Which was now, upon further review is probably Grace that one of the blanket. So she had Sebastian steal it knowing that no one would steal from her son. You can't take from like a nine year old. No, he's very smart.

B (3:28)

Very. She's, she's very, very crafty. So on today's Ask an Advisor, we're going to talk about two topics. One is why the happiest retirees. Your social life is so important if you're retired. And then also the new jobs report that came out recently.

C (3:46)

Yeah, we have a lot of economic catch up to do because we had the government shut down and we missed big chunks of data and they just finally rolled in jobs numbers, inflation numbers. So we get to do a catch up of how the economy's doing. Number one, we'll do that. Second, first, we'll do. Maybe it was, I think our Christmas party that inspired me to talk a little bit about socialization.

B (4:07)

I like it.

C (4:07)

So we know that this is an important component. And I studied this because in my formula of being a happy retiree and the retire sooner method, it's not all financial. A big chunk of it is financial. As you can imagine. Getting to a place where we don't have financial anxiety anymore and we can feel as though we'll never run out of money. And that's a really important place to be. And it's a hard place for a lot of Americans can get to. But the other side of that are lifestyle choices. And one of those primary lifestyle choices, and I say it's a choice because it is also work. It also is effort. It's not something that just happens. Just like you don't just accidentally end up with a million dollars, you don't accidentally end up with a social group that carries you through the rest of your life in your retirement. It takes some real effort. It takes some, some intentionality. And I've studied the impact of what it means, whether or not we have relationships and how many of those relationships that we really should be looking for and cultivating in order to be in the happy group of retirees in America. So this is really based, this is based off data for my 2025 money and happiness in America study. This is just what the research says. This isn't so much my opinion. I have an opinion about the research, but this is what I've found in asking retirees about their lifestyle and in this case particularly, socialization. And first of all, I think the overarching climate that we are in, if you go back and there's lots of data and different studies on this, you'll see that having close friendships and having just AKA friends, that has been declining in America for really, for an entire generation. If you go back to 1990, very few people reported that they had only two or one or zero close friends. By the time we got to 2024, almost 40% of America noted that or reported that they had two friends or fewer in the world.

B (6:14)

Wow.

C (6:14)

Two close connections or fewer. My buddy Dan Buettner, who's the author of the Blue Zones a couple of years ago, this has been going on for a while, said that we, you know, in the 90s, we used to have on average three friends. Today we're down to 1.7.

B (6:28)

It's crazy.

C (6:29)

Despite social media, which is connected us at least digitally and more broadly and vastly than ever before, but actual close connections, people that on any given day that's really good or really bad, you can call, that's a close connection. You can give someone really good news or really bad news. And we're similar. About 20% in 1990 had three to four close friends, about 19%. Today it's at 21. So that's a, it's a tiny bit better, but let's call that flat. But in larger friend groups, five close friends or more. Back in 1990, almost 2/3 of America had five or more friends. So a larger social group, 64%, that's dropped all the way down to 42%. So that's a third, about a third, that's about a 33% drop. So that has been just culturally what has happened in the United States. And I don't know exactly why that is the case. I don't have, I don't have a reason for it.

B (7:33)

I think social media is probably a big part of it. The Internet and social media, we're spending time online instead of connecting with people in person, perhaps.

C (7:41)

Now, where are these, the levels we want to get to and for me, I look at this as what level of, let's call it the size of your social network gives you a better chance of being in the happy retiree group or the non happy retiree group. So I think of this as happiness relative to the number of close friends and connections. And a lot of the way we look at the Data from our 2025 study is what is the average person doing? What's the baseline happy person in America doing? And if I'm doing something different than that baseline group, does it give me a better or worse chance of being in the happy retiree group? And when it comes to the size of your social network, if you have one to two, if you're in that category of one to two close friends, you're 22% less likely to be a happy retiree, 22% less likely. If you have five or more friends, you're 21% more likely. So, so there is definitive data that says if we have, if we report, yeah, I've got these, I can call Krista, I can call Mallory, I can call Jim, Bob, Mark, and if that is the social network that you can rely on. And by the way, there's tons of longevity tied to social relationships. We live longer if we have closer friends when we're in retirement, but we're also happier. So getting to that 5 number is really important. That kind of the middle group, which is I would call neutral, the baseline happy retiree is 3.6 close friends. So if you have three to four friends, you're. I think you're totally fine from a happiness perspective. You're in that neutral group. It's not necessarily bad or good. It's just kind of baseline. But I'm not here to propagate being on the baseline. I want people to have the best possible retirement they can and be happy retirees. And one of those pieces of the formula is to really work at and make sure you're intentional of having a social network close friends that are five people or more. The other thing I think a lot about when we talk about socialization is that socialization and your social circle does not stay static. It changes a lot. When you're in your 20s and 30s, you don't really feel the phenomenon because everyone's always around you all the time. The first big move is when people graduate college and there's some spreading out and then all of a sudden a good friend may have moved to Arizona and you kind of never see them again. So that's the first big one. And Then you're back to, hey, I live in this neighborhood. You maybe live in the same town. And there seems to be a lot of stability of people that if you know them, they're going to be around for a while. Then as you get a little bit older, you realize people do move for work, people get divorced, people get sick, people die. So our social networks are not a given.

B (10:30)

If you have children, you start to hang out with more parents.

C (10:33)

Yeah, it's definitely, well, that's one of the ways that we can build our social network.

B (10:37)

But maybe you drift from other friends. It's. Yeah.

C (10:39)

So I don't want folks to think, oh, I'm in good shape, I've got my three to four, maybe five close friends. Those networks, they change. You can't really take that for granted. And that's where I think their intentionality comes, is that we have to constantly be having an eye on trying to be involved. And as a parent, I think you run into you feeling guilty about doing anything beyond your kids and they can take up all of your time. But my message is to really think about how our networks change, evolve. Sometimes they shrink without us wanting them to. So we have to constantly be thinking about being intentional, being part of organized groups because socialization begets more socialization. And the numbers prove it out. And it's a super important piece of the formula for the retire sooner method.

B (11:34)

Okay, we'll go to questions now. David in Texas says Wes, between my wife and I, we currently have around $3.5 million in life insurance term, of course, our oldest is about to turn 18. He's a good kid and is going to start college as of now, in our trust and will, we have someone different to manage money. And our kids would be left to a family friend. Her parents are too old and mine wouldn't want them. And my family can't be trusted with that amount of money. My question is, should we consider making our oldest the one responsible for his siblings? Can we put it into the will that only a certain amount of money is given each year to raise kids and pay for college, etc. I'd hate to leave that responsibility to an 18 year old, but hey, it'd be better than if he were us.

C (12:15)

I don't know what that means. Better than keyword, I don't know. Well, in this case, David, you're not there, so you have to make a call on this. I would look at this as two ways. You want a in the will and your estate planning documents, which would include a trust which by the way, the trust is what's going to determine when people get money and how much. It's the trust that will do that. The will say send this amount of money to the trust and then the trust has the directions on who gets it. When you need a guardian that will watch over the kids and a trustee that will watch over the money. And I think an 18 year old is too young to be a guardian and too young to be a trustee. I think the 18 year old could probably be a successor guardian down the line, maybe when he's in his early 20s. But even that's really, really young. Lynn and I, my wife and I were just talking about how so many folks that are out of college are still living with their parents because financially they can't even. They're college educated and you would think they could go get jobs like when we were in our twenties. It's much harder today because the world is more expensive. So I wouldn't put the responsibility just yet on your son at age 18. I would have another family person that is the guardian and maybe that could be the family. You said you just don't trust him on the money side, which is not rare. That's not a rare phenomenon. Then on the trustee side, you do need someone in. If you say it can't be a relative, maybe it is a close friend that you've known for your whole life. Your most. Think of your most responsible friend who's always been responsible. The guy that was driving everybody home from the party in college, the guy that never got in trouble. The guy that's maybe he's a CPA or financial advisor. To this day, that may be the person that is the trustee of the money. It's not their money, they're just there to manage it. Then a guardian that is someone that you can trust at least until your son is in their at least early 20s. And then maybe they can become the guardian if your kids are still under the age of 18. Very simply, yes. The will can direct money to the trust and the trust can say, here's how much they get at certain times for certain things. Something called hems, Health, education, maintenance, support, those are the typical things that are there to be allowed to be paid for. And the trust, you get to spell that out today while the sky is blue.

B (14:41)

Okay, Terry in Ohio says, what's the best metric to use when assessing a bond fund?

C (14:46)

We had a one line question. Yeah, love, Terry. Thank you, Terry. All right, so I would say there's three things. One, the kind of Bond, because that's number one. Number two, when you're assessing whether it's a bond fund or bond etf, Terry, the kind of bond, the yield of course of the bond. Three, I would say the duration of the bond and then the expense of the bond fund or the bond etf and then what does it look like relative to the bond index? So kind of course, corporates, Treasuries, high yield, that will determine a lot. That is, is this a safe, super safe bond with a little bit of interest or is this a riskier credit bond with higher interest? That that's the first decision. And the fund will say in its name, typically government bond fund or corporate this or high yield that. Just remember, high yield is a fancy word for junk bonds that will determine mostly the yield of what, what it is paying the income amount. So you want to say is this paying 3% or is it paying 7%? If it's 3%, it's probably like a treasury. If it's 7%, it's probably a junk bond or high yield fund. The duration is a really big part of this and that is a number that you on any bond fund, it should show you the duration. It's essentially the length of the average bond. Also calculating the amount of interest you're getting throughout the years, essentially how quickly do you get your money back? The higher the duration, the more the price of the bond fund will move. A short duration if the duration is a 2. If interest rates move 1%, your bond fund will only move about 2%. If the duration is 15, a 1% movement in bond or bond yields. Interest rates could move the fund 15%. The duration is, is a huge piece of the equation when you're looking at these funds and then of course look at expenses. Last thing I would do is check the fund relative to the aggregate bond index. Look at the two of them and that'll give you an idea if the bond fund is more or less volatile than the aggregate.

B (16:51)

Okay. Dick in Arizona says when might be wise to use Roth IRA money for short term cash needs. My wife and I both are in our 70s and have no debt. Is it wise to consider withdrawing about $100,000 from our Roth accounts to purchase a home and then sell an existing home? Except for real estate, our assets are in regular IRAs. Roth IRAs and joint brokerage accounts are at Schwab. Our residence is in the Northwest and we have a winter home in Arizona where we spend about five months a year. Both homes are worth about $550,000. We plan to sell the Arizona home and replace it with a more maintenance free home with a smaller similar value. We're going to buy first and have a leisurely move, then sell the home we're replacing. We can access $500,000 from our brokerage account for the purchase without tax consequences. We will probably need a little more temporarily. If we use regular IRA money, the taxes would be 22%, then jump to 24%. If we take more from the brokerage account, we would be paying capital gains tax. If we use marginal money, the interest would be about 10%. A HELOC on our primary residence would be about 6. When we sell the Arizona home, we would pay off any loans and put the $500,000 back to work in the brokerage account. Our pension, Social Security and RMDs more than cover our needs including travel, vehicles, remodeling, et cetera. As Clark would say, this is a good problem to have. Your thoughts. And P.S. it won't surprise me if your answer to using the Roth funds was no.

C (18:19)

Dick. It is a good problem to have. It's a high class problem. As probably Clark would say. I was just drawing on a map here of the United States. You're going from northwest to Arizona, two $500,000 homes, but you're going to swap out the Arizona home and buy another $500,000 home. So you've got IRA, brokerage margin, HELOC, all different choices here. Definitely not the IRA, probably not the Roth, and the margin, definitely not the margin. Which leaves us with more brokerage money that you're going to be pulling from or heloc. You say you already would be able to, you'd use up the 500k in the brokerage. That's kind of tax neutral that you're not going to pay taxes. Which leads me to believe to get the next hundred K you're going to pay capital gains on that. I think it depends on how much capital gains. If you have to sell a hundred and you've got a $30,000 capital gain at only 15%, you're only talking about 4,500 bucks in tax. That might be the easiest, quickest way to do it. But if the whole hundred is a gain then then you're talking about 15,000 in taxes. So it really depends on how big or how much that next hundred grand is you need. I would be willing to bet it's probably the entire thing is in gain. And if you only have a 20 or $30,000 gain in order to access that a hundred K you're probably best just to pay the 15%. It's not that much. Remember, it's only on the gain. The other way to do this dick would be to use a HELOC. Even though it's it's going to be more than 6%, I think it's probably more like 7. But remember, if you use the HELOC, there shouldn't be closing costs. If you already have this ready to go, you pay for the house in Arizona and you can still leisurely move. And then in two, three, four, five months, even when you sell the other Arizona house, you pay off the heloc. So you're only paying interest for three, four, five months, which again is probably only a few grand to do that. So those are my two options. But yeah, no reason to use the roth. Remember, you can use the ROTH and still do the 60 day rollover. You can put it right back in within 60 days. But this sounds like it's gonna be longer than 60 days. So you were not gonna be able to put it back at the roth. So don't use the roth, don't use the ira, don't use margin either. Use the brokerage or the HELOC and you're home free to Arizona.

B (20:49)

Nice. Okay, and coming up straight ahead, we're going to talk about the jobs report and just catch up on the economy.

C (20:55)

Let's do it.

A (20:58)

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B (21:02)

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A (21:04)

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A (22:57)

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C (23:25)

1-800-Contacts. Welcome back to Ask an Advisor. I'm Wes Moss along with Krista dbs.

B (23:33)

Hello, Wes.

C (23:33)

We're talking jobs here. And the reason we wanted to do this is that this is the great catch up. We had economic data piling up at the edge of the dam. For a long time we had all this economic data and it was just stuck going nowhere. And then finally we got the government shutdown ended, the dam opened and then a big release of data that flooded the city. And the city is flooded with economic data because we got not just one job report recently, but two. It was the October job numbers and the November job numbers. One of those was partial, but it was kind of. It's a very unique situation. I can't remember ever really having two job numbers all at once. So we had this donut hole of not understanding really where the economy was without official numbers. And now we know. And the government data release is. It's kind of like you're looking in the oven and you look at the turkey and it looks like it's cooked and you pull it out and you're like, well, maybe this part's overdone. This one's underdone. You can't really tell. That's kind of how we were operating for a little while. It seems okay. And upon further review, I would say it is okay. I would say it's not amazing, not great. But it's also not bad. It's Goldilocks, which I love. When economic numbers are in the Goldilocks zone, there's two job numbers. So there's three job ideas. I'm going to talk about labor market, the, what we call the establishment survey or the payrolls survey that gets the press and the headline. There's the household survey where the BLS calls people and talks to people and they say, hey, are you working? Are you planning on working? And. And then there's the epop, which is the prime age employment to population ratio, which gets a no press. But it may be just as important as the unemployment rate that everyone that gets talked about a lot. What is that? Well, it went up to 4.6, so we were at 4.3, then 4.4, 4.5, now we're at 4.6. So wait a minute. Isn't that bad news? We're going higher in the unemployment rate. Well, it's not good news. It is. Part of the reason we're seeing the unemployment rate go up is that we have more and more people come back into the labor force and they want jobs. They don't have them yet. Number two, as far as the numbers were concerned, November, the most recent jobs number, we added supposedly 64,000 jobs in November and we saw 105,000 job losses in October. Now that doesn't sound good. However, a lot of that was from, remember Doge and the Department of Government Efficiency. And I remember being in Atlanta, we have a lot of government workers here in the city. And seeing the email from, I guess it was from Doge that said, we'd like you to take a buyout. If you don't, we don't know if you're going to really have a job. So you roll the dice. So tons of people said, okay, I'm going to get paid for nine months and then be gone. Their last paycheck was in September. And that huge group of folks that said, I think I'm done, and they took the buyout government jobs, they showed up in the unemployed camp in October. So that's why the unemployment numbers looked like it was bad in October. And then again, here we are at 4.6%. What's interesting is the other side of the labor market. The household survey showed that we've have an increase of about 400,000 people working over the last couple of months. So two different reports telling a slightly different picture, but we're getting the unemployment rate from the, from the household survey. I would say this is a Goldilocks number. It's not bad, but it's not good. It's not that the world is falling apart, but back to my or circling this up with my final ratio, that's actually I would say it's if there's a red light, green light, yellow light, this one is green. That's the prime age employment to population ratio. Essentially it looks at age 25 to 54. That is a of prime working age. Under that, you may still be in college or haven't figured out a job yet. After 54, you may be starting to think about retirement. How many of those people are working relative to the population of those people? And the answer is 80.6% percent. 80, almost 81% that number is has stayed really steady and I'd say continues to be strong. And it's been that way really for the last couple of years. And we saw periods of time where it dropped down to 75 during the financial crisis back in the call it 2010, 2011, 2012, it was all the way down to 75. Today it crested it kind of 80, 81. Tom it's still really close to 81 and has been staying very, very steady. That's a number that you may want to be looking at more and more important than the unemployment rate. And I'd say it's still in the green zone, not the red zone, not even in the yellow zone. So good news for the job market for all those who are worried that I would go ahead and take all the jobs. Hasn't happened yet.

B (28:46)

Okay, we'll go to questions. If you want to ask a question of Wes or of Clark, you can go to clark.com Ask Sarah in Florida filled out that form and she said, this is a question for Wes. About a year ago, I received $30,000 in a settlement for a car accident that left me with a broken arm and unable to work. I opened a Roth IRA at the age of 22 and used nearly half of this money to fully fund my account for 2024 and 2025. The rest of these funds are being kept in High Yield savings account along with my other savings. The total of this account is about $30,000 and I also have $15,000 in a CD. I've been saving up to buy a home in the next three to five years. Should I fully fund my Roth IRA again for 2026 or just start contributing monthly? I'm able to save about $500 per month and I was considering maybe a 7030 split with the majority going into my home savings each month.

C (29:41)

Sarah, the simple answer here is yes, I would go ahead and be funding the 20266 Roth because remember, it sounds like you've done 20, 24, you've done 25. So let's call it. You probably have around 15 plus in the Roth. You can do another 7, 500. I would go ahead and do it now. You don't need a dollar cost average or do it monthly. I would, you could go ahead and just do the, the entire amount because remember, the cool thing about the Roth, Sarah, is that all of your earnings can come out tax and penalty free even if the Roth isn't five years old and doesn't have the vintage. So you're not locking, it's not a lockbox for your contributions. You can go ahead and take them at your will. You can always do that. It gets a little trickier when you're taking out your earnings. And if you don't, if you haven't had your earnings in for five years, you can still use the $10,000 first time home purchase exemption to pull money out of the roth without a 10% penalty. But you will be if it's not five years old, you still are going to have to pay some tax on those earnings. But I don't think that would discourage me from still using the Roth because you have plenty of money in contribution.

B (30:55)

So hopefully she won't have to pull any out of her Roth and can just use that extra 500. She can save a month to save for the down payment.

C (31:02)

Exactly. So you, hopefully you won't even have to do that because you'll have saved other money over the course of the next several years. But it sounds like you're young, you're thinking like an adult adult and you're putting this money to good work for sure.

B (31:17)

Andrea in Connecticut says, my employer is offering a Roth in plan conversion option. I understand I would be taxed on money moved from the traditional to the Roth. Can you explain why it would be a good strategy to do the in plan conversion now rather than withdraw from the traditional IRA after retirement?

C (31:34)

Andrea.

B (31:34)

And retirement's next year for her.

C (31:35)

Oh, it's next year. It depends on your tax rate. The Roth calculation, it's pretty simple if you think about it. The numbers to get to the perfect numbers are hard to get to. But if you're in the 30% tax bracket today and you're working, you have a high income. To convert money into from the 401 to the Roth will cost you 30% in taxes or maybe more because it'll push up your income. But if you get to retirement and your retirement tax rate is 15%, then it is not a Good idea to do a Roth conversion. It's about taxes today versus taxes in the future. Why pay 30% today when if you wait a year, you'll be pulling money out of 15%? And a lot of Americans end up in a situation because you can start to manage and control your income in retirement. They they end up in lower tax brackets when they are no longer working. However, there are still millions of Americans that find themselves in higher tax brackets because they might have a pension. And when they get into their 70s, they have big IRAs. And those IRAs produce RMDs. Those required minimum distributions are taxable income. And you've got Social Security. So you may find yourself today in the 15% tax bracket, but in retirement you're going to be in the 20% bracket. So if taxes in the future are higher, then it's very likely that a Roth conversion today would make some sense for you to pay at a lower rate. Just be careful not to do too big of a conversion all at once because the conversion itself increases your income, which increases your tax bracket. So typically the right way to do Roth conversions is in chunks spread out over time.

B (33:21)

Okay, and then we've got a question for you from Eric in Georgia. Eric, 2025 has been quite a year for me. I got laid off in June from a high paying job. After 12 years with the company, I finally managed to find a new job that may or may not be equitable in pay. It's a contractor position with an hourly rate. The twist here is that While it's a W2 contract and the company I contract through offers a 401k, they do not offer any kind of match. My wife and I are 54 and 55 respectively and currently have 1.6 million in tax deferred accounts. 850 in a managed IRA. 650 in my former employer's 401k which I'm keeping there for the option of accessing that money through the rule of 55 and 100k in an old 401k from my wife, which is all invested in a super low cost index fund. And I didn't see the point of moving it this time. I also have a very small Roth IRA that I opened last year to start the five year clock. My savings priority is currently to rebuild our emergency fund which we tried to keep at 120k but because of the job loss we tapped about 50 of it after that. What is the right move? The new employer's 401k. These are the options the new employer's 401k with no match. But again, I would be available to me via rule of 55 should I lose that job. Two, I can also start contributing after tax money to the Roth which I'd be able to access in 2030, but I would hit contribution limits of 8,600 as the plan is to put more than that into savings. Or three, create a taxable brokerage account where I would make after tax contributions that pay long term capital gains when I withdraw the money. Are there any good options I'm not considering? Thanks for the great advice you give.

C (35:00)

Hey Eric, I would say that one thing I caught in that, that I would just want to make sure you're paying attention to is that you're 54 and you said you had an old 401k. That means it's the prior employer and you've got $850,000 in there. Remember, the rule of 55 will not apply to that because you left at 54. You have to be 55 plus to access that particular 401k. Now the good news is you can solve for that by putting that money in your new 401K. So that's probably what you were planning on doing. But just be really careful about that. That's a year difference. It's a big accessibility difference. Your issue is accessibility, not value because you already have a ton of money saved. You already have 1.6 million. So you're already in the. I call that you're in the green zone already for retirement. The bigger priority is accessibility. All of this is almost all your money is IRA money. So it's taxable when it comes out. So you want to build up as much other areas as you can at this point. So do you do the Roth an emergency fund, 401k or brokerage? Here's the order and sequence. I would use one Roth max that out because again to your point, it's only going to be 8,600 for you. So do that for the first dollars for probably for you and your wife. So that's that times two. Roth first. Then you've spent some emergency money. But I look at your brokerage account as somewhat emergency money, like because you can get to it. Just like you can get to that Roth money. It's the contributions you can get to. It's accessible. I would probably then really lean on adding money to the brokerage account and I would be thinking of that particularly let's say you're putting some of that in safer investments and as dry powder, which is similar to your emergency money, so you're both keeping it accessible if a portion of it is in safe assets. You're also adding back to your emergency bucket, which dry powder really is emergency money. And that's how I would do it. And probably not unless you are making tons of money, which you said you're not. Now doesn't seem like you can do all the above, so I would probably be leaving out the 401k. I know you're missing the pre tax contribution so you could make an argument to do some of that, but definitely Roth one. In a perfect world, max out the 401k and then do brokerage. But if you don't have the money, focus in on the brokerage because it's after tax money. You need that going into retirement.

B (37:42)

Okay, well that does it for us for this week and this year.

C (37:45)

Okay, that was it.

B (37:47)

Thanks again everyone for listening. For one watching for all your comments on YouTube, Spotify, your reviews on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, we're very grateful and hope you have a healthy and safe new year.

C (38:00)

We'll see you in the new year.

B (38:01)

We will.