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White Coat Investor Podcast
WCI #428: Estate Planning and Passing Wealth to Your Children
01:00:16
Today we are answering your questions about estate planning and passing on of wealth to future generations. We talk about the value of giving your kids their inheritance earlier in life when they need it most. We discuss if buying variable annuities...
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- [00:00]
Jim Dahle
This is the White Coat Investor podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
- [00:16]
Paul Moore
This is White Coat Investor podcast number 428. Today's episode is brought to us by SoFi, the folks who help you get your money right. Paying off student debt quickly and getting your finances back on track isn't easy. The that's where SoFi can help. They have exclusive low rates designed to help medical residents refinance student loans that could end up saving you thousands of dollars, helping you get out of student debt sooner. SoFi also offers the ability to lower your payments just $100 a month while you're still in residency. If you're already out of residency, SoFi's got you covered there too. For more information go to sofi.com whitecoatinvestor SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank, NA Member FDIC, additional terms and conditions apply and MLS 696891 okay, thanks out there everybody for being a white coat investor. Thanks for what you do. Your work's important. No one told you. Thank you. Let me be the first today. It is important work you do. Last week we talked about making a disability insurance claim and I didn't spend a lot of time talking about the fact that if you need help getting disability insurance, we can help you do that too. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com insurance we have partnered with a bunch of agents who are, I don't want to say they're the best agents in the country, but they probably are. They do more policies for doctors and other high income professionals than just about anybody else. Plus they meet with us regularly. They know how we feel about insurance. They know we're huge fans of getting disability insurance. We're huge fans of term life insurance if you need it. We're not huge fans of, you know, everybody buying whole life insurance policies for retirement purposes or something. So they're not going to sell you all this stuff you don't need. They're going to help you with what you do need. They've been vetted not only by us, they've been vetted on in an ongoing way by literally thousands of white coat investors who use their services. Okay? So if you don't have disability insurance and you need it, go get it. Whitecoatinvestor.com insurance those agents will also help you look at your policies and decide if you got the right policy or not. Help you compare it to, you know, the group policy you might have available, help you sort out whether you need to go track down a guaranteed standard issue policy, if you have some medical issues, those sorts of things. They can help you with all things insurance, particularly disability insurance. They'll help you if you need some term life insurance as well. That's relatively straightforward compared to disability insurance though. Okay, we're going to talk a little bit about some estate planning kind of stuff today and and giving money to kids and so on and so forth. So let's start with an email that was sent to me by somebody not much older than me. Email says I'm curious to hear your perspective on a recent article by Jonathan Clements titled when they're 64 and think it could be an interesting topic on the podcast. In the article, Clements discusses how he purchased variable annuities for his kids and grandkids when they were very young. I realized that this would be way down on the list of financial priorities and may not be the most tax or fee efficient way to invest, but it does seem like an interesting way to begin retirement investments for heirs that are too young to have earned income to contribute to a Roth ira. For context on if it might make sense in our financial situation, my husband and I are in our mid-30s. Kids are 2 and 3. We've got a couple million dollars in investable assets. Our only Debt is a $400,000 mortgage with plans to pay off in the next four to five years. We maxed out available retirement accounts and HSA and already have two front loaded 529s for a combined $300,000. Additionally, my parents are about to get a windfall from selling my childhood home and downsizing. They've been making annual contributions to separate 529s for their grandchildren should they consider purchasing variable annuities instead. Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks for the work you do. My husband and I have been faithful listeners for the past eight years and it's not an exaggeration to say that your podcast and blog have been life changing, led us to be in the secure financial position that we're in today. Well, that was nice. Put paragraphs like that in a five star review on your. You know, wherever you get your podcast, they're very helpful. Okay, so let's talk about this stuff. This is a. This is a fun conversation. This is near and dear to my heart because like this couple, Katie and I have more money than we need. Like this couple's parents, Katie and I have more money than we need. And so we do a lot of thought about giving to our kids. And there's a lot of ways to screw this up, right? I mean, there's the question of how much do you give? There's a question of when do you give it, There's a question of how do you give it. Right. It's complicated. And you got to know your kids and your approach has got to be personalized to your kids because every kid's different, right? Some kids could get a big inheritance at 25 and they're probably okay with it. Other kids, you're going to ruin their life by dumping a bunch of cash onto them at 25 or worse, 18. So you got to be a little bit careful with how much you give. So there was a book that came out a few years ago called how to make your kid a millionaire. And each chapter of the book involved basically a different financial product. I think there was a chapter, probably one for whole life insurance. There was certainly one for UTMA accounts or UGMA accounts. There's probably something there for 529s. And I know there was something there for annuities. And the idea was, yeah, start an annuity when they're super young. And now it can compound in a tax protected way for decades, five, six decades before they use it for retirement. Because annuities, remember, have got the 59 and a half rule, just like IRAs. So you don't put money in annuities that you want to spend before retirement age. But what if you could fund your kid's retirement? Right? It doesn't take that much money if you got six decades for it to compound, right? So that's super exciting option there. The problem is most annuities are products made to be sold, not bought. They have high fees, they tend to not have great investing options. Sometimes they have low returns if they're fixed annuities. And so if you want to do that, it's really important that you pick the right kind of annuity. It needs to have low fees, it needs to have good investments. But you could do this. You know that. How much is tax protection worth? Well, it's worth a lot, right? The problem is you also are losing something in exchange for it. You're losing fees and you're losing tax treatment when you take the money out. Because you're not getting like a tax break when you put money into an annuity. But when it comes out, the earnings, like for a non deductible IRA contribution, the earnings are fully taxed at ordinary Income tax rates, they're not taxed at lower qualified dividend rates, they are not taxed at long term capital gains rates. And annuities don't get awesome tax treatment. Right? Whereas with a whole life insurance policy, you get your principal out first. That's one of the cool benefits of it. That's not the case for an annuity. Your principal does not come out first and so the tax treatment's not awesome. So you really do need a long time of tax protected growth to overcome that less than ideal tax treatment and overcome any fees you're having to pay. And obviously, if there are huge annual fees and the only thing available in there are some crummy mutual fund equivalents, these sub accounts, and a variable annuity that charge you 1.5% a year. This isn't going to work out well enough for you to be doing this instead of just some sort of other taxable investment. Okay, so there's lots of other options besides an annuity. You can invest for their retirement just in a taxable account. Now, if you want them to have control of it, probably at 21 in your state, you can use a UTMA account. That's the type of account we use for my children's 20s fund. The main part of their 20s fund is a UTMA account, but that becomes their money at 21. If you don't want them to have access to that money at 21, you need a different plan now, an annuity that's in their name. They also have access to 21. They could cash the thing out, pay the 10% penalty, pay the taxes on any earnings and spend it all on cocaine if they want to. Right. There's nothing to keep them from doing that just by putting it in an annuity. Yes, there's a penalty for taking it out before 59 and a half, but they can do it if you're legitimately concerned. And this is a really a large amount of money for you or for them, if you're legitimately concerned, they will not leave it alone until whenever you think they should be using it. You need to put it in a trust, Right. And it needs to have those terms in the trust and trustee ensuring that they don't get to have it until they're supposed to have it or they fulfill whatever conditions they are supposed to have. Okay? So this is a reasonable thing to do. Over long periods of time, the tax protected growth can overcome loss, you know, the fees, if the fees are low and can overcome that change in tax treatment. But we don't do this. We have chosen to give money to our kids in a lot of different ways, right? They've all got 529s for college. They've all got this UTMA for a 20s fund. Any money they earn during their teenage years, we gave them the daddy match for, right? We put in the same amount of money they earned into the Roth IRA and let them keep their money. Technically they're spending our money and their money went in the ira, but money's fungible, right? They also get, you know, we help set up a checking account for them. We don't put a bunch of money into their checking account, but they get a checking account set up and get to learn how to use that. And the last part that we just started doing the last couple of years is an hsa. While they're still on our family high deductible health plan, but not our dependents, they can actually make a family contribution into an HSA. So we started doing that for them between age 19 and age 26. That's their, you know, their early inheritance. They get some money later, but that's their early inheritance. Their 20s fund, if you will. But we haven't messed around with an annuity to do that. But it's not crazy to do so, right? If you want to fund your kids retirement, you can do that. You don't have to put that much money into that account when they're four years old to have it be worth a million dollars in 60 years. You could pay for your kid's retirement if you wanted to. And this couple writing in, they're certainly high income enough and wealthy enough that they could do something like this for their kids. I think they've only got two kids. They've already got ridiculous amount of money in 529s. They're almost surely going to have overfunded 529s and for some crazy reason the grandparents are thinking about putting even more in there. I don't know what these kids are going to do for their education. They must be planning to go to Yale and then go to dental school or something. I don't know how they can possib possibly know that about a two year old, but they're going to have enough money to do it. I mean, just $150,000 each they've already got in there at 2 and 3 years old. That's going to double twice more by the time they get to college, right? That's going to be $600,000 for each of them in their 529. Not counting any additional contributions, not counting what the grandparents are doing. So, yeah, I think it's time to start thinking about other ways to give money to the kids than just sticking it in a 529. Right. 529s are great until you get into the lowest six figures. And then you got to start thinking, is this really what we want to do? Put more money into 529s? They've got to really want to be going to an expensive kind of school, and you got to want to pay for a whole big chunk of it in order to put much more than that into 529s. Okay. We should also talk a little bit about inheritances, right? I mean, it's interesting. Those of you who've read the book Die with Zero, and this is a good book for a couple like this, it's already multimillionaires. They're still young. I think they said they're in the their 40s. No, they're in their mid-30s already. And multimillionaires. This is a good book for a couple like this to read called Die with Zero. It's by Bill Perkins. The idea behind the book, well, first of all, people that shouldn't read it, right? If you're a brand new attending, you owe $300,000 in student loans and you don't have much money. This might not be the best book for you to read right now, but once you are becoming wealthy, it should be on your list. It's not perfect. I've written some blog posts about some issues I have with the book, but for the most part, I, I think it's the best book out there for people who frankly need to spend more money or give more money away. And I like a few things about it. One of the things I like about it is it talks about inheritances. The average age to get an inheritance is 60, right? When your parents keel over, that is not a great time to get an inheritance, right? For most people, by the time you're 60. If you've been listening to this podcast, you don't need money from your parents by the time you're 60. When do you need money? When would you really benefit from an inheritance? At some sort of earlier age, when you pull large groups of people, according to Bill Perkins, and ask them, when would an inheritance really be useful to you? When should you get an inheritance? They say 26 to 35 decades before age 60. And so one of the main ideas in the book is the books called Die with Zero and the Idea is you don't want to leave money accidentally to your kids when you die at 85 and they're 60. You want to leave money deliberately, you know, intentionally, at the times in their life when it really will make a difference. And so if you're giving money to charity, you know, he says, give it now. Even if you could give more later after it grows, if you are sure this money is going to charity, give it now. If you sure this money is going to your kids, give it now. That's maybe not when they're 18, but he thinks by the time they're 26 to 35. Yeah, give them the money now and they can buy a house with it when it can really make a difference in their life. So think about giving inheritances earlier. Then. The idea is you can spend money in earlier decades a lot better in ways that bring you lifelong happiness and memories. Whereas when you're 80, maybe you don't feel up to traveling the world or up to buying some fancy new boat or airplane or truck or whatever, whatever you want. And maybe you ought to buy that stuff a little bit earlier and so you have less money when you die. I mean, he's literally trying to die with zero. And there's some tools to help you avoid the obvious problem with trying to die with zero, which is running out of money before you die. And so you can use some immediate annuities. You can delay Social Security to 70. You can even consider things like a reverse mortgage to help you, you know, not run out of money. But if this money you're pretty darn sure you're not going to be needing, he says give it to him earlier, he says, you know, give it away to charity earlier, etc. So think about that as you craft your estate plan. Maybe some of that inheritance you're surely not going to need, and you can give it earlier, you know, we were aware of these concepts before I ever read this book. When we set up our estate plan, we not only we're giving our kids money in their 20s, when we think an inheritance is most useful and when we wish we'd gotten a bunch of money from our parents, but we also are giving them money periodically throughout their life. We'd set it up at age 40, age 50, and age 60. Since we read the book, we were thinking maybe we need to move that up a little bit. Maybe there should be another big chunk of money to help buy a home, especially with housing prices the way they are these days. So we may be changing that plan, but the idea is if you are doing so well that you're thinking about funding variable annuities, do you really just want to leave them money that they can't use until they're 59 and a half, or would you rather maybe give them enough to buy a house down payment? Of course, money's fungible. If you're funding their retirement, maybe they can use their money to buy the house. But lots of things to think about when you have more money than you actually need. Okay, let's take another question about an annuity from the speak bite.
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Noah
Hi, Dr. Dali, this is Noah from the East Coast. Thanks for all that you do. My grandfather recently passed away and I received a letter from an insurance company stating that I'm the beneficiary of an annuity contract from his estate and asking me to determine how I want to receive the annuity. My options apparently are a lump sum which would be about $50,000, a five or ten year deferral where the lump sum would be paid in five or 10 years from his death or annuity payments totaling about $80,000. The letter states that for the annuity payments, they must be in within a year of his death and generally the final payment must be received in the 10th year following his death. I think it makes the most sense to take the annuity payments over 10 years, which would be larger than the lump sum. I do think I would have to pay taxes on these at ordinary income rates. Is that correct? Have you ever come across anything like this and am I making the right choice? For some context, My wife and I are both W2 employees and our total income is about $400,000 per year. We currently max out our 401s, HSA and backdoor Roths each year. We don't have any current student loans.
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Paul Moore
Thanks. All right, Noah, let's talk about inheriting an annuity. So here's the good news. The good news is you're in a great spot, right? You paid off your student loans, you're making $400,000 a year. It really doesn't matter what you do with this, right? It's extra money for you. You weren't planning on it. It's a windfall and it's not a huge windfall for you. So you don't have to spend a lot of time stressing about it. You know, one of the benefits of annuities is you get tax protected growth and if you spread this thing out as long as you could, you would have more tax protected growth. Sounds like you can stretch it out over up to 10 years. Wonderful. Maybe stretch it out over up to 10 years. Yes. You're going to be paying taxes on it. You may not be taxed on the entire thing. Some of it may represent principal. I don't know if this was qualified money, that is money that was in a retirement account. If it was in a tax deferred retirement account, you're going to owe taxes on the whole thing. If it was bought with taxable money, there's going to be some percentage of it as it comes back to you with each annuity payment that will not be taxable. But all the earnings are going to be taxed at your ordinary income tax rates. So taking it all at once, some of them might be taxed in a higher tax bracket than your current marginal tax rate. That might not be wise. It might be good to spread it out at least over a few years. If it's not the world's worst annuity and seems to be giving you some sort of reasonable return, whether that's fixed or whether that's investing it into more variable investments, spreading it out can make some sense. So I'd probably look into maybe spreading it out. The one upside of just taking the money now, paying your taxes on it, moving on is it eliminates complexity in your life. If you're going to spread this thing out over a decade, well, you got to deal with it for a decade. And you probably wouldn't buy something like this yourself. So you got to deal with that. And it may not be worth it, especially if it's only $80,000 in your financial situation, it might not be worth it. So that's really the question is additional tax protection, additional tax protected growth really, versus reducing hassle in your life. Those are the things to be thinking about. It's kind of similar question to if you inherited an Iraq. You can take all the money out right now. There's no penalty, you just got to pay taxes on it. But you could stretch it out for 10 years. And most of the time stretching it out is probably the right move to make. So I think that's probably going to be the case for this annuity as well, unless it's a particularly terrible annuity. Okay, let's talk a little bit about a separate subject. Let's talk about state estate taxes. And I got an email recently, said I recently learned that a handful of states have estate, inheritance and or gift taxes and it's not hard to figure out which ones. And unlike the federal limit, the thresholds they say are quite realistic. Well, I would say quite low rather than as high as the federal limit is. I came across this information while reading one of the blog posts at White Coat Investor, and I consider myself well educated in personal finance, but I never heard of a state death tax, so I thought you should share it with more White Coat investors. Okay. So that's why we're talking about this. If you are not aware, there are state estate taxes now, you know, the good news is most states don't have. So let's do the list of which states have estate taxes. And I'm just going to read the list here because a lot of you are not aware of this. And let's just tell you which states have stated state taxes. So a whole bunch of you will quit worrying about this that you just learned about. All right, here they are. Okay. They're mostly blue states, by the way. Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, and Hawaii. Okay? Those are the ones that have a state or an inheritance tax. So if you're in any of those states or planning to move there, you ought to look up what your state taxes, when it starts doing it, et cetera. There's two types of taxes we're talking about here. There's an estate tax, which is levied on the estate. You know, when you die, your money is owned by your estate. That's an estate. And the estate has to pay taxes. They have to pay an estate tax. If your money's more than the estate tax exemption now, federally, that's a huge amount of money that most White Coat investors are never going to get to. I think it's up to 14 million bucks or something. It's something around there each. Right. If you're married, it's another 14 million bucks. So it's like $28 million total. It's an index to inflation. It goes up every year. Under current law, it's supposed to be cut in half starting next year, but the likelihood that that isn't fixed during 2025 by the Republican House, the Republican Senate and the Republican White House seems very low to me. So I think this is going to be extended. But the state estate taxes can have much lower exemption amounts. Okay. For example, Connecticut basically matches the federal amount. Hawaii has a significantly lower amount. It's like 5.5 million. Maine's 6.8 million. Some of them are really low. Oregon's only 1 million. After a million dollars in Oregon, you start paying a huge estate tax. Okay. Washington has recently had changes. This list I'm looking at on the Internet has not updated for those changes. Washington has a new estate tax that those of you in Washington should know about. So you can move out of Washington before you die. Just kidding. Maybe. I mean, maybe some of you do want to move out of Washington. It becomes effective if you die after July 1, 2025. So it's now in effect. By the time you're hearing this, the estate tax exemption amount will be increased to 3 million. But the rate is really high, 35% highest in the nation for Washington. Okay. So it's possible if you have a really large estate, that you're going to lose 40% of it to the federal government and you're going to lose 35% of it to the Washington state government. So I assume most wealthy people are moving out of Washington before they die now that this is in effect, because that's a lot of money. Okay, so that's how estate taxes work. Right. Any amount above that exemption amount, you got to pay estate tax on it. Whatever the rate is, it's typically not 35%. It's typically much lower than the federal rate, but it can be high. You know, for example, you look at Connecticut, it's 12%. Hawaii is 10 to 20, Maine's 8 to 12, Maryland's 0.8 to 16. So some of these rates are relatively low. DC's got one 11.2 to 16%. I don't know if I mentioned that earlier. DC has an estate tax as well. The other type of tax is an inheritance tax that is not taxed to the estate. It's taxed to the person who inherits the money. Okay, now those exist. Sorry, I said there's an estate tax. In Iowa, there's not. That's an inheritance tax. But in Iowa, Kentucky has both kinds of taxes. Oh, no, it just has inheritance tax. In Kentucky, it just has a really small exemption for it. Maryland has got an inheritance tax. They're one of those that have both inheritance and estate taxes. Nebraska has an inheritance tax. New Jersey, there's an inheritance tax. Pennsylvania has an inheritance tax. Okay, so some of these are not estate taxes. They're inheritance taxes. They're taxed to the inheritor. Now, I believe if the decedent dies in a state without an estate tax or inheritance tax, but you live in one of these states with an inheritance tax. Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, you got to pay taxes. So if you're expecting a big inheritance, you might want to move out of an inheritance tax state as well. But be aware that these taxes exist. The exemption amount is often dramatically lower than the federal estate tax limit. If you're not in one of those states that I've named and you don't have 13 or $14 million apiece, you don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about this. That's not the purpose of your estate planning. Maybe you want to avoid probate with some revocable trusts and beneficiary designations, but mostly your estate planning is just going to be making sure your money goes to who you want it to go to when you're done. You don't have to mess around with, you know, this crazy planning people do when they have estate tax issues. But if you're one of those with either a federal or a state, state or inheritance tax problem, it's worth spending some time looking at your state laws, what that is, what you want to do about it. All right, let's do a quote of the day. This one comes from Burton Malkiel said, the greatest of all gifts is the power to estimate things at their true worth. Love it. Okay, let's talk about family properties. We're doing lots of estate planning kind of stuff today.
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Jeff
This is Jeff in Texas, longtime listener, first time speak pipe caller. My question ties to the great wealth transfer. My family has four cherished Texas properties, two ranches and two lake houses passed down from our grandparents. They're used primarily for family retreats, hunting and cattle on one ranch. They're currently jointly managed by aging siblings. My generation is financially secure and we want to keep these properties intact across generations, not divided or sold. There's no family conflict, but we have no formal structure like an LLC or trust. With expanded details in a recent email, we're seeking guidance on the best entity structure to ensure longevity, flexibility, asset protection, and inclusion of future generations considering state law. Thanks for helping us and other white coat investors think through legacy planning.
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Paul Moore
Okay, lots to talk about here. Let's start by mentioning this is not a do it yourself project. Okay? This is not something you guys just, you know, sit down and figure out. Or you can just email some podcaster and come up with the right answer here, right? It's time to get a professional. You got four properties. It sounds like some are really valuable and large. They're ranches, they're lake houses, et cetera. There's millions of dollars. You can afford to get some advice from an estate planning attorney in Texas and you should do that. If there's not an estate planning attorney in Texas involved in this discussion, you are doing this wrong. So let's start with that point. We should also start with the caveat that I am not an estate planning attorney, nor am I in Texas. So I don't know all the stuff that may come into play in this sort of a situation. But I can give you some practical advice. This is very kind of generation One to set this up. Right? They did very well for themselves and obviously have passed this on to other generations. Is a wonderful thought. It is a wonderful thing to do. However, this is not the best way to inherit money and assets, right? Because it's messy. Not only are you getting something that's pretty darn illiquid, but you are also getting something that is going to involve some conflict with other family members. Now, maybe in generation two, there's not much conflict. Maybe there's only two or three or four of you and you get along really well and you're all doing really well. Like you mentioned, everybody's financially secure and this is all just bonus stuff for you, right? You go use the properties, we're going to go out to the lake house, we're going to do the ranch this weekend, whatever, no big deal. But there's another generation coming. There's generation three. And not only are there going to be more people involved, but maybe they're not all as financially secure as Generation 2 is, right? The old saying is shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. There's a lot of truth to that. Something like 70% of generation one's wealth is blown by generation two and 90% by generation three. It's very unusual to have multi generational wealth and there's a lot of reasons for that. One of which is just simple division. There's more people in these future generations. One of the reasons is a state and inheritance taxes, right, Cuts down on how much is passed through generation to generation. But the main reason is the people in generation three are just not the same kind of people as the people in generation one, right? They've grown up relatively wealthy. You know, they spend money more effectively than generation one might have and they're likely to blow it. Right? So you got to keep that in mind. What are your real goals here? You're trying to keep generation three from blowing it, generation four from blowing it. Well, if that's the case, you're going to have to do a lot of ruling from the grave, right? There's got to be some sort of a trust with all kinds of details about how that trust can be used. What you don't want to do is every generation you're going into, you know, equal ownership of these entities, everybody's names on the title and now you're really fighting about it. It does need to be in some sort of entity. That entity, I suspect for most families is going to be end up being a type of trust, not necessarily a company like an LLC or a corporation. It's almost surely going to be owned by a trust. Now the other thing to keep in mind is as white coat investors, we're looking for this perfect account, this perfect entity type that not only reduces our taxes but gives us perfect asset protection, facilitates estate planning and management. It just doesn't exist, right? There are trade offs. By setting up a trust one way you might be getting some more asset protection, but you're losing flexibility or you're losing tax treatment. So there's all these trade offs that go into exactly what entity you choose and exactly how it's set up. Whether it's a family llc, whether it's a family limited partnership, whether it's some type of an irrevocable trust. You're making trade offs between flexibility, between asset protection, between how it's treated tax wise and those sorts of things. So I think this is way more complicated than a speak pipe question can really answer. This is complicated enough that if I were you, I would gather up generation two and go into the estate planning attorney's office and iron this out. If generation one's still around, I'd take them with you. Maybe not if they're totally senile or something, but if they're still around and want to have input into this, and I suspect they probably do, they should come along and this should be set up in an intelligent way that meets the goals. Another thing to consider is to recognize this just gets harder as the generations go by and maybe it's not a great idea to try to make this last forever. For example, I stayed in a property once with a friend who was a part of generation three. Generation one had paid for this property, expensive property in an expensive place. And they had put together money to maintain it in trust, right? Property's in trust, the money to maintain it is in trust. And the plan was whenever the money runs out, the property is going to their favorite charity. It happened to be a university. And so the family knew they were going to get, you know, generation two was going to be able to use it a lot. Generation three was going to be able to use it some generation four might be able to use it a little bit, but eventually it was going away and everybody knew up front where it was going. It was going to this university. As soon as that fund of money being used to pay the maintenance and being used to pay the insurance and being used to pay the property tax was gone. And my understanding is now the money's dwindling pretty good. So it's not much longer. It's just a few more years. Everybody's trying to get out there and use it while they can because this thing is going away. But that method eliminates lots of fights, lots of problems, lots of hassles, right? So you might want to consider something like that if you're setting this up. But if the goal is to try to get this to generation eight, there's a lot of work ahead of you and there's going to be plenty of work for generations 4, 5, 6 and 7, because it's hard to keep this going for a lot of years. So not only do you need to pass along money and assets, but you got to pass along, you know, financial sophistication, financial literacy, for example. Imagine a time when this property is not generating any money but still has substantial expenses. You know, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, et cetera. It needs a new roof now. Well, who's paying for the roof, right? Generations four is looking around at each other going, well, there's six of us, so you got one sixth of the roof. And the roof on this big ranch is going to cost us 30 grand. So pony up, send us $5,000. Now, what happens if somebody isn't willing to pay the $5,000? What are you going to do? Right? You got to think about these things in advance and set it up in a way that is going to work. Otherwise it's going to cause problems. Hope that's helpful. Work through that with a professional. This is not a do it yourself project. Okay, we've got an interview I want to have here. This is with one of our sponsors. Full upfront disclosure. We're going to talk a little bit about real estate investing these days and as well as an opportunity, if you're interested in private passive real estate investing. And afterward, we've got at least one more speak pipe question. I think it's also about private passive real estate investing. So we'll talk about that. My guest today on the White Coat Investor podcast is Paul Moore, the founder of one of our sponsors, Wellings Capital. Paul, welcome to the podcast.
- [35:51]
Katie
Hey, Jim, great to be here.
- [35:53]
Paul Moore
Now, one of the fun things about Wellings Capital is that you are not afraid to invest in more than one type of real estate. You know, when I Look at the holdings in the currently closed real estate income fund that I invested in through Wellings. There are self storage facilities, there are mobile home parks. There's a lot of multifamily in there. I think there's some light industrial. Other asset classes. As you sit here in 2025, what real estate asset classes seem most attractive to you?
- [36:24]
Katie
Well, you know, I wrote a book called the perfect investment in 2016 about multifamily. I know it's a humble title. And then I went on dozens and dozens of podcasts from 2018 to 2022 saying, Time out. The perfect investment's not perfect if you have to overpay over leverage, use risky floating rate debt, and believe that trees, AKA rents, have to grow to the sky to make this work. And it did work for a lot of years and for more years than I ever dreamed. But of course, the 11 interest rate hikes exposed a lot of these problems and a lot of people are in a lot of trouble and a lot of investors are in a lot of pain right now. But that doesn't mean multifamily is a bad investment. It just means, you know, honestly, some of the operators were bad. They didn't really know what they were doing, and it was covered up by this rising tide that lifted all boats. A lot of times the debt structure was the problem. A lot of times these same people overpaid, and some did all three of those things wrong. And so multifamily as an asset class. A 2022 study by the National Multi Housing Council said that There was a 4.3 million unit shortfall that had to be overcome as of 2035, which is about 10 years from when we're recording this. It's almost impossible to imagine how we'll get to that 4.3 million new units. So that's going to be in favor of multifamily investing. Another asset type I like which is similar, another type of multifamily, so to speak, is manufactured housing communities, AKA mobile home parks. Mobile home parks are the only asset type I know, Jim, that have increasing demand and decreasing supply. Every year there really is an affordable housing crisis. 10,000 people will turn 65 today, but 6 in 10 won't have $10,000 saved for retirement. And a lot of them do have home equity, though, and they are willing to move to a mobile home park to get their own walls, their own yard, their own deck, their own front door, and at a much lower cost than living in a home and a much better situation in their minds than Living in an apartment building. They're not building any more mobile home parks to speak of. And they're tearing them down every year as they age out or as their septic systems wear out or whatever. And so I really like mobile home parks. I like multifamily. But I also like the other asset types we invest in as well.
- [39:07]
Paul Moore
You said 10 million people are turning 65 this year.
- [39:10]
Katie
Did I say that? I meant 10,000 are turning 65 today.
- [39:14]
Paul Moore
Okay, 10,065 today. All right. I thought I heard a million. I don't know if you said that or not. I thought I heard that and I'm like, wow, that's a lot of people. But that's a lot. It's still a lot of people. Either way, very cool. Now, what do you see as being unique about investing with Wellings Capital?
- [39:33]
Katie
Well, I think the biggest problem in investing is lack of time, knowledge and resources to do due diligence. It's very hard to find that one cell in a massive spreadsheet that has an error in it, or to really understand how the underwriting was done wrong, or to know how to check a schedule of real estate owned to see what other assets in someone's portfolio might drag down your asset that you want to invest in. Or to do a $9,000 net operating income audit. Most investors don't have the time, the resources, the knowledge to do all that. We do that and so much more. We looked at 745 different investment opportunities last year and only invested in five, which was a huge strain on our company, to be honest. But it meant that our investors can know that, at least in our opinion, these are some of the safest, most potentially profitable opportunities to invest in. And so investing with Wellings Capital means you're getting all this due diligence. You're also getting diversification. A lot of folks would love to be in multiple asset types, multiple geographies, multiple hand picked operators, different places in the capital stack. But everybody has limitations on how much they can invest. With one $50,000 or more investment, investors can get access to diversification across all those different items. And so investors love the fact that they can just give US again, a 50,000 or more dollar check and be diversified across these hand picked, well, due diligence assets.
- [41:28]
Paul Moore
Yeah, I think you summed that up well. You know, there's a lot of people out there that, you know, they've finally got enough money that it's reasonable to consider some passive private real estate investments. Let's say it's a doctor with two or three million dollars now in his or her nest egg and wants to add some private real estate to that, to that nest egg. How would you approach that if you were that doctor now that you have the experience you have from spending, you know, a career in, in commercial real estate?
- [42:03]
Katie
You know, I was talking to a periodontist in the Pacific Northwest and he was excitedly telling me about his investments. He says, I'm building a 20 home portfolio that's going to replace my income so I can retire. My wife is an orthodontist. I'm excited to do this. And then he sighed and said, but you know, I'm on the phone with painters between my oral surgeries and I'm on the phone screening tenants in the evenings. And then he took a long pause and he said, and I'm only on my third house. You know, I think the most common white coat investor that comes to us has tried real estate on the side. They've watched, they've seen on HGTV how fun and profitable it is. And they're often disappointed with the amount of profits it takes that they make and the amount of time it takes. They're spending evenings, weekends, lunch hours, even vacations, looking for deals, painting closets, dealing with toilets. And honestly, I think the ideal investor is someone who recognizes pretty early on that the best way to do this is to stay focused on your career, stay focused on your family, your hobbies, your rest time, your hobbies, you know, your recreation, your exercise, and allowing somebody else to do the heavy lifting on real estate. And investing in Wellings means you have an additional layer of fees. And the question is, is that a problem? Well, if we're able, and there's no guarantee we are, but if we're able to pick the very best of the best operators and deals, chances are we might be able to get enough additional return and enough additional safety than more than offset to more than offset our fees.
- [44:00]
Paul Moore
Yeah. Now Wellings this year is, is running out two funds. One is focused on income, one is focused on growth. How can somebody decide which one of those they ought to be investing in?
- [44:13]
Katie
Yeah, if you're an investor who really is trying to replace or augment your income, you can do that through the Wellings Income fund. We are generally planning to pay out about 7, 8%, maybe 9% per year and have some growth on top of that. This is an evergreen fund, so investors can have liquidity. If they want out in three or four years, they can do that. If they want to stay for decades, they should be able to do that as well. If you're like me and you're looking for growth and you're looking more for long term appreciation, you don't need the income along the way. Then you might want to invest in our Wellings Growth Fund, which is a close ended fund. It's something we'll be basically accepting commitments for for one to two years and then it'll run probably about seven to 10 years. It will have no promised income along the way though. There'll be some here and there, but it should have much higher total annual returns at the end of the day if things go as planned.
- [45:20]
Paul Moore
Thank you very much. For those looking for more information about Wellings, you can go to whitecoatinvestor.com Wellings and learn everything you want to about Wellings Capital. Paul, thank you so much for your time on the White Coat Investor podcast.
- [45:33]
Katie
Thanks Jim.
- [45:35]
Paul Moore
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that interview and hope these are helpful. Now these occasional 10 minute interviews that we have on the podcast with our sponsors. They are sponsors, right? That's part of their sponsorship package is we interview them once a year on the podcast. We've got, I don't know, 100 hours of podcasting a year and we got like 60 minutes, 70 minutes of interviews with these podcasters over the course of a year. So it's a very small percentage of the time on the podcast. But it does help support the podcast so we can keep producing all this great content for you. And we also try to keep the interviews educational as well. So hopefully you learn something about that. Let's talk a little bit more about passive private real estate with the Speak back question.
- [46:21]
Caller
Hi Dr. Dali, I am intrigued about private real estate debt funds due to its high returns and relatively low risk and low correlation with the stock market. Its tax inefficiency gives me pause inside a taxable account and I don't have access to a retirement account to shield the income from taxes. I'm currently in the highest marginal tax bracket. I don't need private real estate in order to reach financial independence, which I should reach about my mid to late 40s. I plan to retire at age 60. My question is this. What are your views on private real estate debt funds as an alternative to bonds to provide fixed income, especially if my marginal tax rate during my 60s is lower than during my working career. I might be okay with this tax inefficiency if my marginal tax rate Is in the 20% range, considering the returns are typically higher than TIPS or bond funds. Also wondering if you think debt funds could be a strategy to mitigate sequence of returns risk as well. Thank you.
- [47:16]
Paul Moore
Okay, great question. Let's talk a little bit about real estate debt funds. Most investments. Most investments in my portfolio. Most investments in most of your portfolios are publicly traded investments, right? They are totally liquid. Any day the market's open, you can basically take all your investments and turn them into cash, right? That is one of the benefits of a publicly traded investment. Now imagine you're running an investment and you don't have to offer the ability to turn into cash. Does that give you the ability to do some other things that you might not be able to do if you had to be able to offer that sort of liquidity? Absolutely, it does. So one of the theories behind using private investments is that you can be paid some sort of a premium for being willing to be illiquid. That illiquidity is worth something to the investing fund. And so theoretically, you should earn more money doing that. In addition, when something's not traded publicly on the markets, there is at least the appearance of lower correlation with public markets. Now, whether that is just hidden correlation, hidden volatility, it can be debated, but for the most part, most studies show that the correlation between publicly traded stocks and publicly traded real estate is higher than between publicly traded stocks and private real estate. So that's another reason why people look into private real estate. But even moving beyond that, within private real estate and actually within public real estate, you can invest on the equity side or on the debt side. Okay. And just like when you're investing in a company, you can invest on the equity side by buying their stock, or you can invest on the debt side by loaning them money, a bond. Right? The debt side's a little bit less risky. Yeah. Your returns are probably going to be lower long term because you're taking less risk. But you can do that in real estate as well, for example, or you can do that in private real estate as well. For example, you can go out and you can buy a syndicated apartment building. So for $50,000 or whatever, now you own 1/100th of this huge apartment complex. When it makes money, you're going to make money. When it loses money, you're going to lose money. And in a syndication, it's typically mailbox money. Right? Because you are not doing anything. You're not doing any management. You've hired a manager, essentially, who manages not only investment, but the apartment building. So there's not going to be any toilet calls or anything like that. And a lot of people like that it's very passive. But if you don't want to own the apartment building, you can invest on the debt side. Somebody that buys this apartment building and decides they want to fix it up and then sell it again in a year or 18 months or whatever, they often will use borrowed money to do that. This developer, and it's really hard, takes a lot of time and it's a big hassle to go to a bank to get that money. So a lot of times they will go to a real estate debt fund that gets them, that understands they need to close quickly, that understands that this is going to be mostly backed by the property, and they understand how to value the property and they understand what they're doing with this value add strategy they're doing at the property. And so it's an easier place to get money. It happens a lot faster and more reliably. And often they go back to the same lender over and over and over using these debt funds to fund their projects. It's just a cost of doing business for the developer. And because the developer's only paying for this debt for 6 months or 12 months or maybe 18 months for a really long one, they're willing to pay a little more for it. So their interest rate is often pretty high. 10%, 12% is not unusual to borrow money at from a debt fund. And oftentimes there's points as well. So they might be paying 12% plus 2 points. The beautiful thing about that on the investor side, right, if you are funding this debt fund, is the debt fund can pay all its expenses, keep a reasonable profit and still give you a pretty good return. When it's charging 10 or 12% plus 2 points on these loads on these loans, it's not unusual for a debt fund to offer a return of something between 7 and 11%. And it's pretty darn non volatile. Like every month, well, every month you're getting the equivalent of an annual return of 7, 8, 9, 10, 11%. You don't have these years of minus 20%, right. Like you might with stocks or might with on the equity side of real estate, it's pretty reliable most of the time. Now, in a big terrible real estate turndown, even debt funds that are at the top of the capital stack, or the bottom, depending on how you look at it, the least risky part of the capital stack can get into trouble, right? If the property really drops a lot in value, maybe you can't even get your money back by foreclosing on the property. Maybe you can only get some of your money back so you could lose principal. But for the most part, in most times, you're in pretty good position. Most of these funds, all the loans are sitting in first lien position, meaning when things go bad, you're the one who gets all your money back before anybody else gets any money back. So you gotta foreclose on the property, you sell the property, you only get 60% of what you thought property was going to be worth. Well, that all goes to you first. So it's just a lot less risky way to invest in real estate. Now, you're not going to make 15%, you're not going to make 20%, you're not going to shoot the lights out on some particular project, make 25 or 30%, you're going to get your 7, 8, 9, 10% is what you're going to get out of a private real estate debt fund, assuming it's well run. And they'll loan the money out to 20 or 30 different developers. And there will be 80 or 90 or 200 loans in the fund. So there's some diversification there. But there may be one developer that has a fairly good chunk of the fund that wouldn't be unusual for 10 or 15% of the fund to be going to one developer over multiple projects. So this is not buying an index fund where you get 4,000 stocks. It's a little less diversified than that, but it's way better than just giving your friend the mortgage, paying for the entire mortgage on some house flip your friend is trying to do down the street. This is way better than that. These are much more professional borrowers and there's a lot more of them than just using all your money to loan to your friend to flip a house. But that's basically what the idea behind these investments are. Now, one of the downsides of this, as the caller alluded to, is the entire return is paid out to you every year, right? Because the only source of this return is interest and points, right, that they're charging to the developer. There's not something else, there's nothing to appreciate, right? It's just interest. That's it. So all of it gets paid out every year and it's basically all paid out in a manner in which it's taxed at ordinary income tax rates. So it's like the least tax efficient investment out there. Now you do get the Section 199A deduction, right? This is the QBI qualified business income deduction. So 20% of that payment is not taxed, but the other 80% is taxed at your ordinary income tax rates. So that helps a little bit in a taxable account. But because this is such a tax inefficient asset class, if there was ever an asset class that would ideally be inside some sort of a tax protected account, whether it's a retirement account or some sort of annuity or HSA or something like that, this is a great investment to put in there because it's so tax inefficient. So Katie and I, we own three real estate debt funds to try to diversify. Between the funds we have two of them inside retirement accounts. One of them is in a taxable account and so it is better to get it inside a taxable account. It's way better thing to have in there. I would take out even bonds, I would take out REITs, equity REITs into taxable before I would take out real estate debt funds. They're like the least tax efficient thing out there. Now does that mean that you shouldn't invest in them even in a taxable account? No, not necessarily. But a lot of your return is going to go to taxes for sure. If you're investing in this sort of an investment in a taxable account, don't let the tax tail wag the investment dog. I would not necessarily change your asset allocation because of tax reasons. Choose your asset allocation first and your tax location second. But it is something to think about as you're setting up and constructing your portfolio and maintaining that portfolio, that if you can get this sort of investment into a self directed IRA or a self directed 401k, this is probably a good investment to do that with. I think it's important to recognize that although this kind of acts like a fixed income investment and although it is the least risky way to invest in real estate, real estate is not bonds. These are not established safe as something like a Treasury inflation protected security from the U.S. treasury. They're not as safe as a total bond market fund. That's why you're getting 7 to 11% instead of 4% or whatever total bond market fund is paying right now. So keep that in mind. A good rule of thumb with fixed income is if the yield is higher, the risk is probably higher even if you can't see what the risk is. So the fact that you're getting a yield of 7 to 11% on a real estate private debt fund would suggest to you that it's significantly more risky than a bond mutual fund or buying individual tips or something like that. So I don't think this should take the place of bonds in your portfolio. If you feel like you need bonds in your portfolio, these are not a replacement for that. This is not an ultra safe investment like a CD or like, you know, tips or something like that. It is more risky than that. It is an investment in real estate. It just happens to be the least risky way to invest in real estate. So our allocation to real estate is totally separate from our bond allocation. And you know, I wouldn't necessarily use this as a bond replacement. If you wouldn't use stocks to replace your bonds. If you wouldn't use equity real estate to replace your bonds, you probably shouldn't be using debt real estate to replace your bonds. Hope that's helpful. As I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, SOFI could help medical residents like you save thousands of dollars with exclusive rates and flexible terms for refinancing your student loans. Visit sofi.comwhitecode investor to see all the promotions and offers they've got waiting for you. One more time, that's sofi.com WhiteCodeInvestor SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank NA member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 don't forget, if you need disability insurance or you just need your disability insurance reviewed, you can find all of the agents we refer you to@WhiteCodeInvestor.com insurance. They'll treat you right. If what you have is not what's best for you, they'll help you get something else in place. Yes, they are sponsors. Yes, they get paid for helping you do this. We get paid for referring you to them. But we have set this up for you because we think it's really helpful. The White Coat Investors and the feedback we get continuously is that it's really helpful for us to help make that connection for you. Thanks. For those of you leaving five star reviews, one came in from JW Said Trustworthy Advice. Good to see trustworthy advice exists. Been following for a while now. Any conflicts of interest are clearly disclosed. You can get this advice elsewhere via books and blogs, et cetera, but it's compiled in an easy to digest format so no need to scour the Internet, et cetera. Keep up the good work. 5 stars. Thanks JW for that 5 star review. It does help spread the word. We're thankful too for those of you who just tell friends and colleagues and students about the White Coat Investor. That is one very important way that we grow our audience, that we are able to help more people. Our goal is to help as many as we can. So any help that you can give us in reaching that goal is much appreciated. All right, our time's up. Keep your head up, your shoulders back. You've got this. We're here to help. We'll see you next time on the White Coat Investor Podcast.
- [59:56]
Jim Dahle
The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating your situation.