Winning in Retirement

Retiring Single

• Akers Financial Group

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Brian Akers and Jeff Akers discuss the financial challenges of retiring single, highlighting that 45% of people over 65 are single. They emphasize the importance of financial planning, especially after a spouse's death, to manage tax implications and ensure financial stability. Key points include the need for Roth conversions to take advantage of lower tax brackets, the impact of Medicare premiums under IRMAA, and the significance of having a retirement income plan and annuities. They stress the importance of working with a financial advisor to navigate these complexities and maintain a secure financial future.

Unknown:

The following is a pre recorded show, welcome to winning in retirement with your host, Brian AKERS, Certified Financial Planner, professional and founder of AKERS Financial Group, now helping you win in your retirement. Here's Brian AKERS, welcome

BRIAN AKERS:

to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group. I'm president and founder of AKERS Financial Group. Our show, winning in retirement, is our radio podcast. Here with me today is our co host Jeff. AKERS, good morning, Jeff, good morning. Brian. For all those listening that might not know just my cousin. He's not my brother, but he's been around since the day he's born, so we sort of know each other pretty well.

Jeff Akers:

Our fathers are brothers, so we have the last name. It's

BRIAN AKERS:

same last name. I can write the whole name out when I use my signature. I don't Jeff struggles on five letters. I'm using that as a original joke to start today, because I have a feeling Jeff might make fun of me as we cover some topics today where I use some big words. There is so much material. There's a lot covered, lot to be covered today, but thank you for listening to our show. Thank you for taking the time, wherever you're going, whatever you're doing. At this moment, we want to thank you for listening to our show. Winning in retirement is what we want our clients to achieve now. Winning in retirement is going to feel like winning some days, and some days it's not. And so some days we got to have a more serious show, right? And so what we've done is put together sort of a more serious show when it comes to financial struggles, things that cause us stress, things where we need to figure things out to make things get reset for a new future, whatever comes in your life. So this show that we're talking about today is called retiring single. Retiring single this could be something where you're suddenly single, and then now you're getting ready to retire, or you're already in retirement, and you need to really think about what has changed, and what do I need to do to make sure that I can stay retired as a single person,

Jeff Akers:

right? What does retirement look like when you're single? What? Do we have to do differently?

BRIAN AKERS:

Absolutely. So as we talk through the show, we talk through this, we're going to call it retiring single. So retiring single is for people. As you think about Americans and you look at statistics, there are some stats done by a Limra, which is like life insurance managers agency. I can remember all that there are group that does some studies on retirees, right, 2018 one of their studies was that people that have been single their whole life is 9% okay. And one of the things about being single the whole life, you sort of, you know that comes your life, and you're used to certain things, how to protect yourself, how to build, right? That works pretty well, right? You're used to it your whole life. And then the reality of people over 65 retiring. What happens you see is that 45% of people over 65 are single. Wow, almost half. Almost half have become single. And so when we talk retirement planning, we do talk a lot of times about joint married filing jointly. We talk about spouses, about giving money to each other, how to take money from each other's benefits and make it work. But then,

Jeff Akers:

right? When we do that, it's like we're only talking to half of you, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

So the show really needs to be well, all right, that happened. Now, what? Right? What's next? What's next? A retiring single? This is we're gonna talk about the single versus married in financial planning. We're gonna talk about the financial concerns as you're hearing us talk that you might think of your parents, you might think of yourself, you might think of a friend, whoever you're thinking about. Understand that we have some general advice. We have we have some examples, we have some ideas and things that people really need to consider doing. We're gonna cover all of that throughout the show. Okay, all right. Jeff, so single versus married. Now, you have a degree in married and family counseling, right? And have you done grief counseling as any part of that back in the day?

Jeff Akers:

Well, I did receive some training and that kind of thing. Yeah,

BRIAN AKERS:

and so we're not going to make the show about grief counseling. We're going to really focus on the just the financial side of certain aspects,

Jeff Akers:

right? There are certain things that we need to do now, yes, something happens, you're going to need to grieve through that, but there are certain financial things that just have to be done, regardless of what stage of grief you might be in at the time. Absolutely.

BRIAN AKERS:

So where to begin is a hard thing. So becoming Suddenly Single. So what happens is the suddenly single part of it is just a moment of time life changes, right? And so there are some advice that people give, and one is not to move too quickly, not to make changes too quickly, not to really upset what's going on,

Jeff Akers:

right? When, when a spouse passes away, and I'll just use as a that as an example, sometimes the emotions take over, and. We, we don't think through our decisions as clearly early on, so we want to wait for certain big decisions so that we've had time to process it, talk it through with an advisor, someone trusted, and make sure that you're doing the right thing.

BRIAN AKERS:

And so basically, this idea of being single. Now single, this could be from a divorce. So a divorce, sometimes you have some warning time, right? Sometimes you don't, right. Some people have almost like a start over after a divorce. Some have a I need to figure this out after a divorce, right? And we've met all these type of people, all these different situations and clients and cases throughout our careers, trying to assist and help people where they are, right.

Jeff Akers:

But even in in a divorce situation, you don't want to jump to making decisions, because, well, sometimes that decision is made out of anger, instead of out of, you know, planning,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, or or or almost like it doesn't matter. I'm not going to fight for my half of the retirement plan. I'm just not going to fight. Just let it, let it dissolve, and then we give away our financial future just in quick reaction. So we're also not trying to do a show on divorce planning. That's a whole nother, right? Major show. So what we're getting at is there's lots of topics that are tied to this, but the idea of becoming single, what is the main things you need to think about? What we're going to do is start with this premise. Is that when, if you are now find yourself single, you're going to need to understand that, how can you be successful financially as a single person? Many times, the first thing is, you need an advisor, or you need a person, a team of people, to help you make those major decisions, to help you get out of the stress you have, and have someone that you can say, is this a good idea? Should I be doing this? Does this work instead of all these extra people adding advice to you that don't know your whole situation, right?

Jeff Akers:

It's kind of, we've talked about the cocktail party advisors that you know you just you're out, and they're telling you, oh, well, you should do this, or my cousin did that, or my brother did this, that, or the other thing, what we want to do is sit down with you, go through your entire situation, and then we can make the right decisions. What is the next right step for you to take and not just jump to something that might feel good at the moment?

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah. So basically, it goes like this, you make the call to AKERS Financial Group. You say, I need a meeting. I become single. I need to go over what's what's going on, and we'll say, we need you to bring information to know what we need to start with as an advisor, we become your advisor. And then we want to build a retirement income plan to make sure the income flowing in is going to fit what you need. We're also going to work on actually taking the least amount of risk to reach your goals, so that you can know that this money will last a lifetime, and many times, an annuity will provide some of that guaranteed income that lasts a lifetime, so that you know you won't run out of money, right?

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, and we need to know your situation to know what's going to work, what's the right thing to do.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yes, so I'm sorry that was tough, tough one. So what happens with is single versus married, knowing your needs, what that's going to be, understanding your taxes, your cash flow, what income you're going to have now, all of

Jeff Akers:

that, right? And a lot of times when you become single, well, your income is going to go down. Now, is it going to be cut in half? Is it going to go down more than half? Less than half. Those are all specific to your situation, and we need to look into that. And if it's going to go down significantly, all right, is that still going to be enough to live on, or do we need to supplement that somewhere else? You know? What do we need to do to make sure that you can maintain a lifestyle for the rest of your retirement?

BRIAN AKERS:

This is not to set a plan that's going to be in stone that can't change. It's a get a what can we do right now? Right? And then we go from there. Now, in my career, there was one, one person passed away on a Sunday afternoon. I knew the couple very well. The next morning, I was at their house, and the wife wanted to me to tell her that she was okay, okay, and the fact that they were a client together before on the suddenly passing away, it was easy for me to say, we've done all the planning. We got all this organized, and the whole idea of the plan is you're okay now you're on like a large piece of property. Over time you're going to work on wanting to sell that because you want to downsize that we talked about years ago in the planning, right? So a pre plan is wonderful because then on that day, on that moment of life, when things change, the financial advisor says, Well, this is the plan we have. This is what the way it's going to work, and we'll guide you through. And do most of this work, and that's good financial planning, right?

Jeff Akers:

And that's a case where the husband loved his wife enough to have that plan in place so that if something happened to him, she was going to be okay, and then it was just your job to come back as the messenger and say, This is what we planned for, and you're going to be okay.

BRIAN AKERS:

Now in some cases, we can't do that in one meeting personally, might not have been a client yet, and then they call us after the fact and say, this is where I'm at. Then we say, we need information. Bring stuff in. Let's start the evaluation. Now, a lot of advice isn't the larger decisions you know, like moving, selling your house, to do other things, we want you to take your time to make sure you work out the best decision for you, to make sure you're going to be okay with whatever decision then it fits your budget and everything else. Now there's lots of things we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about Irma. Oh, Irma for a single person. Yeah, that's not just your aunt. So Irma, we don't have time even to cover the topic Irma's Irma is going to be our topic. Irma for single. It's something people need to know about. The tax brackets. When you're married filing jointly, when someone passes away, all sudden, your your tax bracket, single will jump, and we want to explain that to you. We want to go over concerns about being taken care of knowing that you have enough money. Should you buy long term care as a single person, because you want to know you're taken care of. I think it's very valuable, right? Yeah, I have, I have younger clients where their spouse might be older, and they're like, you know, Brian, I'm gonna be alone. I need something to know I'm taking care of when I need it, right? Because they might be in their later 30s, no kids, older spouse, and they're looking at the the years of not having people around, and so the need of insurance becomes very, very valuable,

Jeff Akers:

right? They're in a position where they're going to have to pay someone to take care of them. So absolutely.

BRIAN AKERS:

So all this is part of planning. The sooner we do planning, the better we can do it, the better we can get things in place to meet all the needs. That's what we do at AKERS Financial Group, AKERS, financial groups, a local, independent financial services company. We don't report to a big company on Wall Street or a big company in Iowa. We report to you. We do. We do have offices in Lutherville, Forest Hill, around the state. We have satellite offices, and we meet people throughout the Mid Atlantic and around the country, and even a few around the world, it's so easy to be begin winning in retirement, just give us a call and schedule your meeting with one of our team of advisors. Call 833 win retire. That's 830 3w, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule your free in person meeting good AKERS Financial Group, calm, or call us at 833-946-7384, to start planning for your retirement now, the calendar year when you become single is significant. We'll talk about this when we return.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded Show. Welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS.

BRIAN AKERS:

Welcome back to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group. I'm Jeff AKERS, his co host with me today. We're both certified financial planners from AKERS Financial Group, and this is the show winning in retirement. Yep, a radio podcast that AKERS and financial reports on as financial advisors, just been working along with me for 25 years, and then I actually worked a few years before you just a few. Add another 1213, on top of that. Yeah.

Jeff Akers:

So when we go through these topics, just, just keep in mind, Brian has seen these firsthand, and now I've been at it long enough so have I

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, the thing is, is that you've seen so many situations, you just want to help people not get into them. And so having a radio show is like, please listen. This is totally off topic, Jeff, but guess what? I would love Baltimore for Maryland, for our core listeners, to be successful financially, to win in retirement. I would love Maryland to be known as Oh, they win in retirement because they're all doing the right things for their finances, right the people that don't think they'll ever get there learned how to get there. The people that had it, preserve it and keep it and let it grow more. My concern for 2025 has been when we have people come through the door, the ones that seem to be stressed out, the ones that need help right away. Becoming single has been a big topic. Multiple cases of people we've been helping and guiding and helping them through, and getting them to where they feel proper again, about their finances, to know that they're okay. That's why we're doing the show called Becoming single, talking about finances, talking about that. That's what this show is going to be about. AKERS, Financial Group, financial advisors to help you with from planning to implementing, through managing your wealth and managing that money, taking the risks that are, that are proper. We have, we're also licensed insurance agents that. Can help you with things that provide fixed and insurance annuities that are guaranteed by the companies. There's all kinds of ways of implementing the answer. What we try to do is do the plan and implement the answer. Right? All right. Jeff, so this first topic for the retiring single second quarter is the calendar year when you become single. Is significance? Yes, significant. It's also important or really good to do really good, really important. Like, I'm important? Yeah, there are some things to do. Significance a big word for me. I try not to talk those big words well. But why is a calendar year significant for

Jeff Akers:

people? Well, one of the biggest reasons is taxes, because walk me through what that means. So let's say you're married, yep, and you're filing your taxes married, filing jointly. Well, your standard deduction this year, and I'm not counting age in this part, but your standard deduction is$30,000 right? Well, let's say your spouse passes away. Next year, you're going to file taxes as single. The standard deduction for a single person is$15,000 so the amount that you can deduct on your taxes is cut in half, right off the bat, right? So for a lot of people, when they become single the year after their spouse dies, their taxes go up. The standard deduction is only one reason. There are several pieces in the tax code that make that happen, but we want to do some tax planning in that year, that first year when your spouse has passed away, or you got divorced, or whatever, that the situation is that last year that you can file is married filing jointly. We want to take advantage of that, because there are some advantages to filing jointly.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, so we're going to cover jointly after someone passes away, rather than divorce, because divorce typically there's a negotiated settlement on the filing of taxes and join, join after legal separation is probably not going to happen, so you're in a horrible tax situation until you get to head of household. But that's a totally another show too. But for today's show, retiring single, and we're talking about the idea of your spouse passes away, that means that you can file married filing jointly for that year that they pass away. So if that's early in the year, you have a whole year to understand your taxes. If you pass away, if someone passes away on the 27th of December, you have three days left in that year, right? And so, um, so we're not doing them preventative. Someone's, um, diagnosed for terminal illness. We're talking about after someone passes away, we have that year. So in 2025 if a spouse passes away, and you have the rest of the year, you are going to be in a married filing jointly bracket, right? So tax brackets, I want you guys to think about steps. There's a first step in taxes, a 10% bracket, then it goes to 12 on the next step, right? And then there's this big step that goes from 12 to 22 Yep. And so for married filing jointly from 12 to 22 what is that taxable income? Number Jeff for 2025

Jeff Akers:

now for single or joint, for married found jointly, okay, married filing jointly from 10 to 12.

BRIAN AKERS:

That's from 22 to 12 to 2222 $96,950

Jeff Akers:

of taxable income. All right? So $96,000

BRIAN AKERS:

taxable income, married filing jointly. Anything below that, you're at 12% right now, if you're suddenly single the very next year. So January 26 what's the what's the level for a single person? That 140's 8004 75 so it's cut in half. So 48,000 so what that means is this, those steps, if you, let's say you and your spouse figured out income you made 100% joint survivorships that you're going to you lose one of the Social Security's, but your income still going to be pretty high, maybe 75 80% of the other income you have just jumped tax brackets because of a spouse dying,

Jeff Akers:

it's kind of a shock when your income goes down and your taxes go up,

BRIAN AKERS:

exactly the topic we're trying to cover. Jeff say that one more

Jeff Akers:

time, well, your income goes down but your taxes go up, and

BRIAN AKERS:

that's all because you'll be filing single the year after. So the thing would be is, well, what can we do in the year where one spouse dies to help the person that's becoming single, what is some of the topics? John,

Jeff Akers:

well, one thing we can do is convert some IRA money to Roth IRA. Fill up that tax bracket, whatever bracket you're already in, fill that up with income while you've got it, and then later on, that'll help us with having tax free income. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So Roth conversion is where you have retirement money and you want to pay the tax now under this lower bracket, because, you know, next year, you're going to be single, and being single, you'll be at a higher bracket with the same income, right? That's what this is the hardest thing the higher bracket. Same income, tough,

Jeff Akers:

very tough, or higher bracket, lower income. I mean that that's even

BRIAN AKERS:

worse. But I was those that was basically covering the idea of this. There are planning that we can do. And one of the reasons to Roth convert is because you might think that one of you might be alone. So if you have an age difference, you might have a health difference, there's going to be or you might always have a conversation, oh yeah, you're going to outlive me. You always have that conversation. Why not Roth convert while you're both together. Maximize these brackets, get money tax free, so that no one pays tax on it, right? You pay tax now at the low bracket, and then never again. Now in the tax brackets, there's these steps. We had step 1012, and then we had the big jump to 22 right? Now the next jump is just a little jump, 22 to 24 Yep. Now, if Mary found jointly, what is that number?

Jeff Akers:

Let's see 206 700 so

BRIAN AKERS:

if you make taxable income, 206 or under. You're in a 22% bracket for the portion from 96,000 to 206 right? And then from 206 to what's the top of the 24% bracket, 394, to 394, so when you listen to this, these are steps, if you had a 2% change, that's not much of a step, right? That's just sort of a that's one of those things you trip over, you walking off, and you have a little change. But the hard part is when you get to 384, married filing jointly taxable income, and you jump to the next one, that's the next big step. It's an 8% jump, where you go from 24 to 32 that's the secret jump we don't want, right? If we can manage 32 and under, that'd be great, right now, Jeff, what's the problem with going to 384, if you happen to be over 63

Jeff Akers:

Well, the amount that you pay for Medicare will be higher because of what's called Irma, because

BRIAN AKERS:

you made too much money. And that's a whole separate

Jeff Akers:

chart, right? That's another show yet.

BRIAN AKERS:

So Irma is an income related monthly adjustment amount that basically affects your Medicare premium. Makes it go up if you show income, yep. So we have people that when they're both married and they're in the ones alive, they're they're fine, they're under the limit of, say, 216, 220, married filing jointly for 2025, that affects your 2027 Medicare premium. And then, all sudden, one passes away, and then their incomes at 131 40, and they're like, Oh, now they've charging me more money on my Medicare. And that, we say, well, that's because now you're on a different chart. You're on the single chart for Irma, and the number might be 1081, 10, it's half of the joint number. And everything goes up on your Medicare premium, and then, depending on the pension and the income design, because it's all taxable, I'll send you Medicare premiums for the rest of your life is

Jeff Akers:

higher, right? So we already said you earn, you have less income, and you pay more taxes, but you also could pay more for Medicare, right, with less income.

BRIAN AKERS:

So a proactive approach to planning and Roth, Roth conversions and planning and levelizing your taxes, watching Irma, making this all work out, is beneficial for you each and every day, but extremely beneficial when we suddenly become

Jeff Akers:

single, right? Yeah, down the road, we have to plan for what's coming up next

BRIAN AKERS:

when somebody becomes single suddenly. We only have one year to do some planning. We don't have massive number of years ahead, right? We can't get a redo. We can't go backwards. That's why we want proactive planning. And we also want reactive quickly in the year of someone passed away, when it comes down to proper tax planning and investment planning all tied to it.

Jeff Akers:

So if you're listening today, and you're married, you're thinking, Oh, they're talking about single people. No, we're talking about you right now plan so that when one of you is single down the road, you're in a better position.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, imagine you got your tax return, you got a big refund, you didn't pay much income tax, right? Is that really the right thing? No, because always there's a wave coming at RMD, age 73 or 75 that wave is that IRA, retirement savings. You're a 401, K millionaire. You're gonna need 4050, 100, 250,000 we've seen all these numbers. You have to pull out a year. Need it or not, right? And that just hits the brackets hard, and it affects greatly your surviving spouse, right? That's the what we're trying to get at here on our show today called retiring single now, when we talk about planning and talk about this, this is what we do for a living, so you don't have to figure all this out on your own. We help you. We love doing this because we're helping planning is for the unexpected may not be your favorite thing to do. We know that that is what we do. We want to make this as easy and comfortable for you as possible, so that as we meet with you and put a plan together, it includes that it's taken care of, it's planned for, and that you're going to be. Okay, because we plan for it. Perhaps you've been sold something, regardless of whether you need it or not, not at AKERS Financial Group with us, your retirement money follows your financial fingerprint. It's a retirement plan based on your unique fingerprint that determines where your money goes. It's not about us, it's about you. So go ahead and give us a call at 833, win retire and schedule an in person, free meeting with one of our team of advisors. That's 830, 3w, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, or call us at 833-946-7384. Or go to our website, AKERS, financial group.com scroll down and give us a message through the schedule a meeting tab right there. When your tax filing changes from joint to single what to do. We'll talk about this even more in a moment.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded Show. Welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS,

BRIAN AKERS:

indeed. Welcome back to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group. Here with me today is Jeff AKERS. We're both certified financial planners practitioners, and we work with AKERS Financial Group. We have clients here in Maryland, all around the many, many states, a few around the world, all kinds of clients that we love working with. We have built a team of advisors at AKERS Financial Group to help people with where they are and help to guide them into what they do. We are advisors, money managers, and we truly help people throughout whatever they face with their financial world. All right. So Jeff, you ready to go second half here the show, yeah. All right. So the second half our topic is called retiring single. And if you've been listening from before, you'll be finding out that this whole idea of taxes from married to single, the big changes is huge. So we want to talk more about that topic, because this tax filing changes when a spouse passes away, you only have that calendar year to stay married, filing jointly. The very next year you're single, and that means everything's cut in half. If your income stays about the same or just a little less, you're gonna pay more taxes than you than you did before,

Jeff Akers:

right? You're gonna have higher expenses. It could be taxes, could be for Medicare, could be for a number of things,

BRIAN AKERS:

right? All right. So the so the idea here is this, when you're doing your planning and doing what to do after something happens, what you got to look at as well. Is there something I need to do right now? So you have any examples of that, Jeff,

Jeff Akers:

so need to do right now. We get into the Roth conversions. We get into taking money out of IRAs, because we do need to get that done before the end of the year. We need to make sure that's that's taken care of. Then there's the things that we don't necessarily want to do right now, and that's where we get into, like you've said before, with the house and stuff. We don't want to make big decisions with where we live, but so on, the need to do right now, anything tax related. You've got a calendar year, yeah? And December 31 that's the end of your opportunity. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So when you think about the year, if we pass away towards the very end, you have to do very quickly any planning at all. Right? If you're if you're up to the planning part, it's one of those necessities. We have to talk it through whenever this situation might occur in your family or even happen to yourself. So some of the things about somebody passes away and you become single, you have to make some decisions, some of them involving the pension. A lot of times, someone's already been drawing a pension, right? This decision was made at retirement, right? Like joint survivor type

Jeff Akers:

things, right, right? So a survivor might usually the default is like 55% that the survivor would receive for federal

BRIAN AKERS:

government, yeah, for federal government, but 50% is an option for, like, some sheriff's office to the 50% is the only choice. And then you can also opt in different programs, get 100%

Jeff Akers:

might do 100% you could do 0% to the survivor. So there's a wide range now that's getting into folks when they're retiring. I encourage you to not take the the payments going to stop when I die, and I'm not going to leave anything to my surviving spouse. We need to plan around that. But sometimes people see, well, that's the biggest number, that's the one I want. But then that leaves the surviving spouse in a lurch when you pass away.

BRIAN AKERS:

And there's financial topic out there caught on pension maximization, and what they try to do a calculation on is the difference in payments you'd get between single life and joint and then they put that money into life insurance. Now, the advantage of that is that life insurance becomes tax free right after a person passes away, and you get a lump sum of money, tax free, to recreate your pension. Yeah, the hardest part is that is when interest rates are lower, and then you have to have a lot more money, right? When interest rates are high, and then you would have less money. And so the idea of being fully funded, properly funded, is hard to do. It's a big number. It's. I like if you have pensions from government, like I'm federal especially, I believe a federal government guarantee with the cost of living is an investment that I can't sell, right? I believe that that's a good deal. It's a good thing. It's hard for me to ever recommend not doing a joint survivor, unless you just have a rare situation of spouse's age, spouse's health, a situation that calls for you not to take

Jeff Akers:

it right? So back to folks who are getting ready to retire and they're married, come see us so that we can go through and explain which option is the best for you, so that when one of you passes away, they're taken care of.

BRIAN AKERS:

So don't take for granted that a retirement plan should be about a joint retirement. And it's lovely to have you both living to 90s, both together, dying on in the same week, type thing, right? And we've had clients die like that in their 8990 died Tuesday and Thursday of each other. You had a few days. I had one on Tuesday, one on Thursday. That was a little bit of an estate issue. But that's not why ever everybody's plan works. And so the reality of survivorship planning, with your retirement planning, is what you need to do. Because becoming single, you need to see what that means. Because if you've done well with retirement savings, all sudden that goes to one person. That one person has take RMDs, and that RMDs, if it's very large, could hit very hard on your on your tax return, and you pay more taxes than you did married filing jointly, right?

Jeff Akers:

And your RMD, that's required to minimum distribution coming from an IRA is based on your age. And so if the sometimes the younger spouse passes away, and now the older spouse has to take a bigger required distribution. And sometimes it works the other way, where one was taking required distributions and the other one isn't that age yet. So there are a lot of circumstances that we have to work our way through. When

BRIAN AKERS:

you're thinking about this, you got to understand that a married couple, they if they both have Social Security going on. What's great about that is they both get it right when one passes away, typically what happens is you get the highest one of the two or so security likes to call it a combination of your own plus theirs. Whatever it the idea is you'd get the highest. The number works out to the higher benefit. Yeah, it doesn't so. So the idea is this, if you're been married, and you've been married for at least 13 months. You then get the joint there are, there are rules for everything out there. Yes, there are, but there's, I think it's 13 months you got to be married for this to count. So, so you get your spouse's Social Security. Yes, absolutely, okay.

Jeff Akers:

There's a lot of other rules out there.

BRIAN AKERS:

There's lots of topics there, but the but the idea is that when you're making decisions after a person passes away at the when you go do the funeral planning, they will actually notify Social Security right away. So security will take the remaining days in the month out of your bank account within days. Oh, yeah. So security is very efficient at that, and then they will work on recalculating yours. And that's supposed to be automatic, and you just have to check it,

Jeff Akers:

right? But it is important to check it, because that doesn't always happen as quickly as we would

BRIAN AKERS:

like, yeah, not as quickly as you'd like. It happens in time. Sometimes you got to have an appointment, and they recommend you get an appointment and go straight there. The other thing is, if you're not drawing Social Security and a spouse dies, you have choices, and you need to know the choices. As advisors, we guide people through those right the handling of transfer of assets from one to the other is very, very important process, understanding the new secure act rules. If some reason, the spouse split the beneficiaries, creates some new problems. We're not covering that too much today. No, a lot of times I love you plan where it goes from husband to wife. Can be simple, but depending on the age of the surviving spouse, you might not want to just flip it right into yours, especially if you're under 59 and a half, right,

Jeff Akers:

right? And boy, this coming up just reminds me, you know, someone passes away the surviving spouse, one of the things that you're going to need to do as a surviving spouse is look at your beneficiaries, and what do you want to have happen down the road. Now, hopefully you've done some beneficiary planning before this, so that things flow to you the right way. But then you want to make sure what happens down the road for the next person? So many times I've seen a lady come in and she says, Well, my bank account was joint with my husband. He died. I just took a death certificate. It was mine, so I figured I'd add my kids to the account, and that way when I die, it'll just go right to them. Well, that's not always the right thing to do, so they made them join, not payable on that joint owners, that's right, instead of setting up power of attorney and pay on death and keeping it safer that way. So come talk to us before those are the kinds of decisions that we say. Let's talk about it and make sure that we're doing the

BRIAN AKERS:

right thing any inheritance before you sign anything. Talk to a financial advisor who's going to look at your situation, look the titling, look at the titling of each and every inherited asset that's coming, and tell you what. What are your options? There is multiple options, yep. Tax today, tax over 10 years, all kinds of choices. You need to know your choices so you can effectively make the right decision for you and your situation as of that moment, right?

Jeff Akers:

Because, as Brian mentioned, with the secure act, depending on how you receive that money, that retirement money from your spouse, you might take it so that you have to take it out in 10 years. You might take it so that you can take it out over your lifetime. It just becomes your IRA. Or you might just take a lump sum. That's generally not going to be the way we'd want to go. Yeah, we

BRIAN AKERS:

like lump sum life insurance, though. Yes, lump sum life insurance. So life insurance on your spouse could be a group benefit, could be something that was bought that through a term policy, or could have been a more permanent policy that will be there no matter what age. And this death benefit comes in totally tax free, and that could be the answer to current cash flow problems. It could get us totally out of debt so that we can make it fit real well financially. This is very important when we have responsibilities, responsibility for people, responsibility for debt, for mortgages, things like that. Having life insurance has its purposes, and when we deliver tax free checks, no one ever says, Oh, I don't need that, right? They go like, wow. They are. They're very grateful, very thankful that it slides in into that plan. And then they get decide what to do.

Jeff Akers:

The first thing they usually say is, how much am I going to owe in tax on this? Correct? And when the answer is nothing.

BRIAN AKERS:

And most recently, I had a husband pass away from cancer. After a long time, they've been clients for like, 30 years. Bought the insurance years ago, and all of a sudden, we kept the insurance as he was diagnosed. We made sure the premiums are paid, make sure it kept going, and then they get to death benefit, about half a million dollars, tax free. And then the question is, what do you want to do with it? And the question was, I'm not sure yet. And I said, That's okay, right? Let's keep that. Let's build a a low risk way of investing, making 4% or so, and make sure they had that money set aside until she was ready to make the next level of decisions. Right? Becoming single is stressful by itself right becoming single and not knowing how to handle your finances is a very high stress, especially if the one that passed away did handle the finances. These are all a lot of topics that we got to do. The thing that we love talking about on the radio show is winning in retirement. When we have stressful events that we've been talking about today, it's hard to realize that you still can have a good retirement. We just need to make sure you build your foundation. So we want the best part of retirement to be that time, that free time that we get back from all of our other commitments in life. We want to have the winning in retirement idea of whatever hopes and dreams and things we want to do, we want to return to that no matter what circumstances are occurring. To do this, go ahead and check out our website at AKERS financial group.com scroll to the schedule a meeting section and let us know you like to schedule a free consultation with one of our team of advisors. That's AKERS financial group.com or you can call us at 833 when retire. That's 830 3w. I n, r, e, t, I R, E, and we'll give you a call Monday to schedule a free in person meeting. So go to AKERS match group.com or call us at 833-946-7384, for your planning for your retirement. Now you're single. Now, are you retirement ready? We'll talk about this when we return. You're

Unknown:

listening to a pre recorded show, welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS.

BRIAN AKERS:

Welcome back to winning in retirement, the AKERS Financial Group, radio, podcast, and welcome to our fourth quarter. This is Brian AKERS and Jeff AKERS. We're both financial advisors, Certified Financial Planner practitioners from AKERS Financial Group. Our website that we have you guys go to is AKERS. It's a K ers financial group.com, you click that, check us out there. You'll have a radio podcast tab. You can also hear past shows right there. You can hear this show should be posted by the beginning of the week each week after we do a show, you can hear what you might have missed. You can also type in winning in retirement any podcast form, and you can hear our voices guiding you in the financial life,

Jeff Akers:

if you're listening right now and you think, Oh, I wish I'd have heard the beginning of this. Well, that's where you can do it.

BRIAN AKERS:

Jeff loves to talk to you, or we all like to talk to you. We love meeting our clients. It's been a lot of fun. It makes our career wonderful when we're helping people and helping them reach the goals. That's what am I saying? That's fulfilling. I had a meeting last night where they were the last one of the night, and we just kept talking about things. I said, you know, Brian, we never, never even thought about retirement being like this. Yes. I said, What do you mean by that? He goes, Well, you're asking us to choose what we're going to do, and then we actually have the money to actually choose what we want to do. Wow. And he goes, we never thought they really never thought they'd have those that ability, that option, but they did. I tell you, what you did was the hard work when we first met 10 years ago, and that's why you have these choices now, right? Getting rich quick is what everyone tries to sell us. They always try to push us on all these things, getting rich quick. My thing is this, let's get wealthy, right? How do you get wealthy a little bit at a time, making wise decisions, growing your money over time. Let your money do the work,

Jeff Akers:

and it works. You know, Wasn't there some book about get wealthy slowly or something.

BRIAN AKERS:

I don't know. I don't know. I did not write it yet, so we'll get there. Okay, all right, so winning in retirement the radio show today's topic is called retiring single. It's a tough topic because a lot of times retiring single is became single, right? That 45% of people over 65 are single in these retirement years. So we do not want to neglect them and have a topic geared towards things they need to think

Jeff Akers:

about, right, how to how to win in retirement when you're single, all right? So we've

BRIAN AKERS:

been talking about becoming single and about the dramatic changes that occur now, there is things like stress that occurs, and one of the things about we want to highly recommend is this, how do you deal with your finances when you no longer have a spouse? We believe you need an advisor so that you can get the weight off of your shoulders and put it on theirs, right, and help them

Jeff Akers:

help you, let someone else carry part of the

BRIAN AKERS:

load. Absolutely and knowing that you're going to be okay is going to be the key to planning. We build that foundation. That foundation truly, truly has to help understand that you're going to be more confident when you have your finances in order, when you have an advisor, when you have a retirement income plan, and you might even be using an annuity for the guarantees it gives to make that money last a lifetime. So right, Jeff, we're talking about, you're single now, okay, are you retirement ready? And I just, I just said the main thing, which is an advisor, retirement income plan, and then the annuity. So the retirement income plan, what does that look like when someone comes in and their spouse has just died, right?

Jeff Akers:

So we're going to take a look at what are your assets. How is it titled? Is it retirement money, or is it, you know, regular I'll call it taxable money, non qualified money. And where are the places we can draw income from? Now, you mentioned in it the annuity. It could be that an annuity is part of that retirement income plan. So we want to use that as necessary to have some guaranteed income. You'll have Social Security, possibly pension, possibly whatever sources of income are. But we want to build something that's going to send you a check every month, I say check, but it's probably going to be direct deposit every month into your bank account so that you know you've got the money you need to take care of your expenses. I was talking to someone the other day. She never had a whole whole lot of money, but she's very good at organizing and making sure that she spends what she has coming in and not more. And we built up her income over time, and so she's got money in emergency fund. And so she feels confident that as things go along and things come up, that she's got it, she can handle it, she can take care of it. And so we want to build a plan that gives you that sense of confidence. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So the reason I sound like this, like retirement single I started thinking about the situations that I've had my that the clients have been in when I met them. Some of the hardest ones is more divorce than a person passing away, and that divorce means a total reset. Might not even living in the same house again, right? And depending on the amount of family the kids, what ages the kids are, and and all kinds of agreements and things all involve the planning to make sure things are going to be all right. And so the hardest part is survival becomes the first thing you do, and then you don't look at finances, and then the finances come at you fast, right? And so having the advisor. When you become single through a divorce or somebody passes away, it seems to make sense. When someone passes away, you got immediate help needed for situations divorce, the same thing happens, because you need to know what what you have, what's going to be your portion left over that you can work with, and what can it do for you? And then what happens next? Where is the money going to come from? How you how you going to use the money, where you're going to live? How's that all going to work?

Jeff Akers:

Right? And when someone passes away, we can look at your your assets, and say. Okay, here's what you're going to have to work with when it's a divorce. Until the settlement is done, we don't really know what you're going to have to work with, and so part of it we have to work our way through. Here's what you have now, and we'll see what comes later.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah. Well, another tough one I was thinking about is a client I had who second marriage. Second marriage, the husband goes, I want to give it to my kids. And then the other spouse says, I'm giving mind of my kids. And then the reality is that they both didn't have equal savings, and so after they've been married for a while, they added the existing spouse on for like 20 25% but it didn't go all the way. And the hardest part is the others, the one spouse who ended up being a surviving spouse said, Oh, I'm fine, and now she's single, with a portion of the of that transfer, not all of it, right, because she felt she'd be fine, and it's a different lifestyle that she agreed to without getting the lifestyle with the spouse in that second marriage. The second marriages, more and more people are involved in the beneficiaries inheriting just there's a lot of situations, a lot of moving parts when we're building a survivorship plan after someone dies, the survivorship plan before is what. One of the things we recommend in planning is this, yes, do a retirement plan, but do it as if one of the other guys quickly. Are they okay if you're in a second marriage or something like that? Understand if that

Jeff Akers:

works, right? A blended family is like a whole other show. Absolutely.

BRIAN AKERS:

So is the idea of not getting married, and you don't get these benefits unless you qualify under some other type of civil union concept. But the hardest part, if you're not married, you don't get the Social Security, right. You don't get the widow benefit, widower benefit, age 60. You don't qualify for all these benefits unless you meet other requirements, right. Health insurance is hard to get unless you make sure you got it all lined up properly before,

Jeff Akers:

right? And you know, sometimes health insurance is through someone's retirement plan, and you're not married, so you're not eligible to be on that, so you've got to fend for yourself.

BRIAN AKERS:

But some cases, you can be on it. Some you can depends on the company plan, right, right? That's what we've seen. So the idea of planning it is, you got to plan. It's like you do a show like this, retiring single. Well, guess what? 45% of people are going to be single in retirement. Have you planned for this? Are you retirement ready for a single life? Have you thought about it? Is things in line is, are you going to be okay? I think if you're whatever spouse, the husband or the wife, whichever one, you need to think about worst case scenarios and planning and make sure there's enough. If you're gonna get rid of your life insurance just cause you think you've reached your goals, make sure you reach your goals, right? I mean, it's not fun to pay premiums, but the premium is not for you. The premium is for the survivor, and that money is going to help them reach the lifestyle that you we want them to have, let them have a good life you want to provide it for you're

Jeff Akers:

paying that forward, yeah, to to help your family be

BRIAN AKERS:

secure, yeah, make sure that they accomplish the goals, even if you're not there, right? It's a loving decision to do these things, right? It's a tough decision.

Jeff Akers:

And Like Brian said before, my background is marriage and family counseling, so I I like marriage, but that idea of loving your family enough to plan for them,

BRIAN AKERS:

I love marriages. I'm pretty happy. Yeah, you're pretty happy. Yeah. All right, so we're talking about retiring single. We've been covering some some deep topics, some of the ones that I want to recover again at the very end, here is the big deal of married filing jointly and then you become single. How you only have that calendar year right to stay in married file generally tax bracket, and then all sudden you file single, you could see it a much higher tax bracket.

Jeff Akers:

That's right. So you want to, I hate to say this, but someone passes away call an advisor. Go ahead and start getting that advice, because right now we're, if you're early in the year, that's fine. You've got time to take care of it. But if you get later and later in the year, you know, people, a lot of times, pass away between that Thanksgiving and Christmas time, a lot of times, and it becomes it's a tight window to get things taken care of that we really need to take care of.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah. So today, we've been covering retiring single we've covered a lot of topics, and the discussion on the things you need to think about this is the big point. Single retirees feel more confident about their finances when they have an advisor, a formal retirement income plan, and, many times, an annuity, that gives you a guarantee of income for a life, money that you cannot outlive, right?

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, so that formal retirement income plan, where is my money coming from, and how long is it going to last? And so when the annuity is in there, well, it's going to last the rest of your life. Is it going to increase, or is it going to stay the same? We can work that out. But then the. Rest of the income plan is, well, what if something comes up where I need extra income? That's part of the plan. So when you know that I've got this in place, I know what's coming and I know where I can get it from if I have to that gives you that sense of confidence that I'm going to be okay,

BRIAN AKERS:

absolutely. So general advice I give to most people, or pretty much everybody, is you plan your estate plans as as if you might die tomorrow, and invest like you're going to live forever to make that money last a lifetime. Thank you for listening to our show today. Thanks just very much. The show's been called retiring retiring single. We do look forward to meeting with you. We want you to win in your retirement by taking advantage of this opportunity to begin planning with us at AKERS Financial Group to schedule your free meeting with one of our team of advisors. Go to our website at AKERS financial group.com scroll to the schedule meeting section. Let us know you like to schedule your free meeting right there. That's akersnatcher.com or you can give us a call at 833 win, retire. That's 830 3w. I N, R e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule a free in person meeting with one of their team of advisors. Start planning for your retirement now. Go to AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833-946-7384, thank you for listening. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group, and we want you to be winning in retirement.

Unknown:

You've been listening to winning in retirement with your host, Brian AKERS of AKERS Financial Group. AKERS Financial Group offers securities through arcadios capital, an SIPC and FINRA member firm. Advisory services are provided through arcadios wealth. AKERS Financial Group and arcadios do not share any common ownership. Neither arcadios nor AKERS Financial Group provides tax or legal advice. Advice given on winning in retirement is general in nature, and one should seek further advice from their financial advisor, broker, attorney andor tax accountant before investing, be sure to read each prospectus carefully to understand all the risks associated with each investment. Examples and scenarios shared are meant to be for illustrative purposes only past performance is not indicative of future results.