Winning in Retirement

Building Your Financial Plan

• Akers Financial Group

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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,

BRIAN AKERS:

welcome to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS, president and founder of AKERS Financial Group, we welcome you to our show. Here with me today is Jeff AKERS vice president, Certified Financial Planner, practitioner, financial advisor from AKERS Financial Group. Good morning, Jeff.

Unknown:

Good morning. Brian, you could keep going talking about me. That was really nice. All right, Master's degree in marriage and family counseling. He's married to my cousin in law,

Jeff Akers:

yeah, cousin in law. She's also known as Lynn from Chick fil A.

BRIAN AKERS:

And then we have, you have two sons. You didn't name them after me, but their last names are AKERS, so that's close enough. Yeah.

Jeff Akers:

Well, that now you've said too much about me. So now I gotta say, well, Brian's married. He's got a son and a daughter. They're married. Very true. That's really good. In fact, sometimes you hear his son on the show absolutely

BRIAN AKERS:

Now, today's show is Jeff AKERS and Brian AKERS and we put together a show called Building your financial plan for all those that don't know. Jeff is my cousin, and Jeff works for me now, but Jeff used to work with me at another career During high school. Indeed, my first job was construction. And when you work construction, carpentry, especially custom home building, if you're a lone person in, you get in the basement and you dig, and you dig a level. That's one of my first job. I love the job so much. Soon as my cousin got old enough, I made sure that they hired my cousin Jeff, who came in and got that job, and I moved up.

Jeff Akers:

I got to do this stuff Brian didn't like, so he could do something he did like, which was more carpentry.

BRIAN AKERS:

And I loved that for a year or so, actually, three years. Then I gained financial planning back in 1987

Jeff Akers:

sometimes it's good to have a job to understand. I don't want to do this the rest of my life.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, but the idea of building and construction, we drive by houses that we were part of back 40 some years ago, and we still remember, and they're still there, because most basements, we spent two months in the basement, digging in and out. Long story there. We can't do the whole story today. We're talking about financial planning, and we're thankful that you're listening to our talk show about building your financial plan. This is going to be about you and why it's so important to actually do the work to build it right now, Jeff, do you love doing the work

Jeff Akers:

I do? I actually love planning stuff.

BRIAN AKERS:

So if they don't love planning, the people listening don't love planning, you love it. So you'll walk them through, take care of it for them. Of course.

Jeff Akers:

You know, come talk to me. Tell me what you want, right? And then I'll start working on a way to get there. And you can tell me, Well, I like that. I don't like that. And we adjust the plan till we get

BRIAN AKERS:

where you want to go. How about the first big question?

Jeff Akers:

The first big question, is planning fun? Oh, is planning fun? So I like driving, and I love getting out the map and figuring out, there's where I want to go, here's where I am, and look at all the different ways to get there, and what are the different things I can do as I as I get there. So yes, I love it.

BRIAN AKERS:

How old are you? You get out the map? Is it in the trunk?

Jeff Akers:

Paper? Okay, so when you use just like Google Maps or GPS, it just tells you, here's how to go. Here's the fastest way. I don't care about the fastest way. You want to see everything. I want to get to see stuff along the way.

BRIAN AKERS:

There has to be an AI search you can do about scenic route. I know you drive 100 miles out of the way to get roles thrown out, thrown as I do. There's all kinds of things in your life that's pretty funny, and what you'll do for that experience, that's right, but you love the experience. But the experience with a new client, they come in and they, Hi, Jeff, how you doing? I'm great. I'm Jeffrey with a er, why? Or are you why? Er, why? Er, why? He makes sure you know that. And then you sit down in there, and then you you're talking with them. How do you get them to start talking to you about their goals, their life, or even wildlife? Why are they there? How do you do that?

Jeff Akers:

Right? So, well, sometimes I'll just ask the question, why are you here? And what is it that you

Unknown:

want a nice way or in a tough way? I'm done. We're talking. How do we say that? I'd say so. Brian, what brings you in today?

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, Jeff, I'm thankful to be here, and my wife and I, we really want to begin financial planning. We know it's a good thing. We want to make sure we are going to be able to retire someday.

Jeff Akers:

Okay, well, what I'm going to do is ask you a whole bunch of questions, just to gather information about you, and then we'll start working on figuring out where you want to go and how to get there.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right, I'm gonna stop role playing. Okay, we're done. Role playing gets a little weird, because I would say, I tell you nothing. Not everyone says that, but sometimes the clients, they walk in, some come in happy and they're ready to tell you a lot of information. Someone want to find out who you are first, right? Sometimes they start with a questions. They might have a list of questions that they printed from somewhere about financial interviewing, financial planner. Yep. Whatever those first questions are, that's where we start, right?

Jeff Akers:

Sometimes they've got questions for me, and so I'll answer those. And sometimes they're like, I. Just want to know what's next. And so I'll start into my question.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, I love saying it probably was from a TV show, how? How can we help? And then ever, and I say, I'll tell those stories. Say everybody comes in the door and they have a question, you know, the question they got to get answered. What is your question? And then that usually one of the two, if there's a couple, and we'll speak up right away. Said we got to know this. And I said, Well, that's great. We'll need to know this kind of information to decide what to do right now, the reason we love to ask questions to find out your goals, your objectives, what you're doing, is because we believe in planning first, right? What does that mean to you? Jeff, planning first.

Jeff Akers:

Well, back to driving. If I don't know on the map where I want to go, I'm not going to get there. So you have paper maps. I do have paper maps. Where do you find updated paper maps? You can still get them at the Welcome Centers when you drive into a new state. I'll see fold them out. Oh yeah, yeah, while you're driving, not while I'm driving. Ahead of time I know where I'm going before I leave. Of course, you're a planner, right? That's kind of the financial plan. You want to know where you're going. Now, you might have in mind there's a couple of things I'd like to do, besides just retire, you know, I'd like to visit certain places or do certain things.

BRIAN AKERS:

Your drive's not but based on where bucky's is on the way, it's not based on

Jeff Akers:

bucky's is kind of a draw,

BRIAN AKERS:

all right? So today's show is called Building your financial plan. We're talking about is, how do we build a financial plan? Think about this. You're going to walk into an office with a financial advisor, probably just met, and then they're going to ask you some questions that you've never told anybody the answers in your life, right?

Jeff Akers:

Well, you might have told some people, but you don't expect to tell someone new.

BRIAN AKERS:

You know, especially everything, right? If you're at a party, you tell them the good things, right? And I got a great job. I'm pulling in like six figures. I got a 10% raise, or that stock, I bought one of 200% in three days. That kind of thing. You don't talk about the losers. You don't talk about that last job I got fired from. I'm on to the next one. But generally in financial planning, what happens is the best clients are the ones that truly talk about themselves, and what we want to do is listen right?

Jeff Akers:

And the person who says, you know, I had this great stock that went way up, I say, Great, let me see the statement. And that's, well, sometimes that's hard for folks, but most of the time they're like, Okay, fine, I'm here to get help.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, there's engineers. They bring no papers, but they have spreadsheets, but it's folded up in their pocket. Yes, it's folded up. It's everything in their life on one piece of paper, one side. It's probably so small you need a microscope to see it. But an engineer that they have in their pocket, we know that when you come in, right? We know later on, you'll bring it out. So we write down whatever you tell us, right? And in the first meeting, it goes at your pace. You talk about it, we talk back. We understand what's going on. We're trying to understand who you are, what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are, what the big questions, what you think is affecting your life. And then we try to bring our experience of doing this so many times, for helping people go from hello to retirement all the way through. We've done it many, many times. We don't just retire once. We've retired like five times last week.

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, one of my favorites is folks come in and they're at retirement and they're like, well, we want to move and we're going to live here. And I'm like, so do you have kids? Yes. Do you have grandkids? Yes. Where do they live? And so there are plenty of folks that have moved away, and they're like, Oh, I can't be away from my grandkids. And so they move back, yeah. So we know that in advance, so we plant that in your head, that, okay, are you aware of this?

BRIAN AKERS:

Keep the keep the home base. If you have kids around the home base, and that's right, you can always have two houses for a little while, or right rent little while, or RV it. We have lots of

Jeff Akers:

we can experience right? We can find solutions to help you out.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right, so we at AKERS Financial Group have a saying. It's called one client at a time. One client at a time is an approach where we want to sit down and talk about you and your situation. It's not going to be the same answer for everyone? No, each client's different. So one client at time. What does that mean to you? Jeff, yeah, one

Jeff Akers:

client at a time means I'm focused on you when we're in that meeting. I'm not thinking about, wait, you know, somebody else needs X, Y and Z, so that's what you need. I'm thinking about, what do you need? The person in front

BRIAN AKERS:

you don't have one one product to sell that person, and you just got to squeeze them into it?

Jeff Akers:

No, I got to figure out what their situation is and then find the product that fits. I very seldom have the product in that first meeting.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, so the idea is, building your your financial plan is about you. So understanding your goals. Do you have to know all of your goals in the first meeting? No, no. I believe when you have a husband and wife, you're going to have two sets of goals, and sometimes they've never talked to each other about it. That's right, that's fun, yeah? And they look at each other, I didn't know that. Like, or she goes, or he goes, Oh, we're gonna retire 67 she's like, No, I'm not. He's like, what? Yeah, I'm retiring 63 How can we afford that? And then that, then I'm not even in the room anymore, right? What? You left? Well, sometimes you got to leave, especially if you bring up a question. That's a little too

Jeff Akers:

hard, right? Yeah, sometimes folks just need to chat between themselves, and then they're ready to give an answer to us. But in

BRIAN AKERS:

the first meeting, you're not asking for questions that's going to be, oh, that's concrete. That's the answer, right? Financial Planning is we start with things, start with ideas and planning. Get to know you write it all out, and we build so today's show, as we're talking about building your financial plan, we're gonna tell you how we do it, and then how we ultimately get to taking the plan and creating a Things To Do list, right? AKERS Financial Group, our goal is long term client relationships as your advisor. Yep, we're considered a fee and or commission, depending on what's best for that client, right? Depending what they've paid in the past. Can we take that over as a broker of record, Agent of record, and help you understand what you bought from somebody and how that works with your plan?

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, and sometimes that is the first meeting is, okay, here's what you really have. No like, well, that's not what they told me, and so we just have to show them on a statement or whatever, what's there, right? So you get a lot of that, yeah, that that happens quite a bit, yeah, but that those long term relationships, I like, those AKERS financial groups, been around for 20 years, and we've got clients that we've had for even longer than that, but we've got a lot of clients that have been with us through,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, I don't have one client from the very beginning, 35 years ago. Oh man, yeah, from the almost the second week of being licensed. That's great. That's very cool. So goals change, and the plan must change throughout the long term, advisor, client relationship. That's just a standard way of thinking about things. AKERS, Financial Group. When you hear that name, want you to think about planning, understanding that AKERS is going to do the planning. You don't have to do the planning. We get to do it for you, but we got to talk, right?

Jeff Akers:

And you said, sometimes things change, sometimes you choose, this is when I want to retire. And then sometimes you go into work one day and find out you're retired. Yes.

BRIAN AKERS:

And what's great about having an advisor beforehand is you're ready for it, yep. Planning. Planning does make a lot of sense. All right, so AKERS financial. We're local, we're independent. We don't report to a big company on Wall Street. We report to you. We do have offices in Forest Hill and Lutherville, clients all around Maryland, clients all around the country and even a few around the world. It's so easy to begin winning in retirement, you just give us a call and schedule your free meeting with one of our team of advisors. Call 833, win retire. That's 833, W, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule your free in person meeting. Go to AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833-946-7384, to start planning for your retirement. Now you are unique. Is your financial plan as unique as you we'll explain 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:

Welcome back to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS, President, founder of AKERS Financial Group. Here with me today is Jeff AKERS. We're both certified financial planner, practitioner, the old CFP.

Jeff Akers:

That is correct. CFP registered trademark.

Unknown:

What's the little half circles around it? You put the little bracket and R in it, and then it, like pops it up to the top the brackets. What's the fancy word for brackets? Oh, I don't know, yeah, let's not say the fancy words I don't know. All right,

BRIAN AKERS:

so being CFP is I say it. We were fiduciary before it was cool, because I've been a CFP since 1991

Jeff Akers:

man, right out of college.

BRIAN AKERS:

I got out of college 89 and then the firm I worked with at that time did not let me pursue anything. So I quit starting my first company, and I had to do all the testing, so I did it all and got done quick. That's fantastic. Yeah, it was back then. You can do challenges and doubles and stuff like that. Was a lot of fun. But CFP since 91 for me and Jeff got a number of years later. Yeah, but your CFP,

Jeff Akers:

yeah, I am. I got it later, Brian. Brian got me to working in financial planning, and then it's like, yeah, I should really do that.

BRIAN AKERS:

And so today's show is called Building your financial plan. The reason for bringing up CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNING is that there's a process to this. There's a way that you do financial planning. A certified financial plan is an organization where you pay fees, you abide by their tenure, educations, you work with them to understand what's going on. We do some pro bono work with certain clients. There's a lot of things tied to it's been a great organization for almost 35 years. For me, well,

Jeff Akers:

yeah, for Brian, he's always wanted to help people who need help, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have money. Sometimes we have to help people, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

So if they come through a door at AKERS Financial Group, our goal is to help, to guide them, but you got to want us to do planning. We believe that you are unique, so that the tie into this quarter is that you are unique, you are different than everybody else, right? Now we have a thing called financial fingerprint. Do you mind explaining what the financial fingerprint is and how it works for us? So the

Jeff Akers:

financial fingerprint get tries to get at, well, simple things like, what's your income, what's your net worth, but it also digs into, how are things titled registered? Do you have IRAs Roth? IRAs 401, KS joint, just money in the bank. It's, it's your situation. Some people work for the the government, they're going to have a pension. Some people don't, and they're not going to have a pension. So the plans for those are going to be different, absolutely.

BRIAN AKERS:

So we're not going to fingerprint you when you come in. So financial fingerprint. So a fingerprint is individual to just you, right? Just like a snowflake, right? All right. Snowflakes are unique, so they say, but they milk it, but there's a billion of I can't compare it, right, but a fingerprint is unique to you, and the financial plan needs to be unique to you. That's correct. The book has to have your name on it. The financial planning book, years ago, used to be a bound book. Some companies will do binding of the pretty color graphs. Some people will charge a fee for it. Some people won't. Some people the plan is a product. They don't really write it out. We believe in writing out the answers, the writing out where your money is, where everything and benefits, bringing it all together. We want to know about you so a financial fingerprint is really taking that first meeting where we do our goals and we talk about where you are, and then we give you a list of information that we need to need provided to us so that we can provide in meeting number two, a write up of what you told us. Right? It might be the first time your life you've seen it all together, right?

Jeff Akers:

Here's what you said, and here's what we think. Yeah, so

BRIAN AKERS:

it starts with, here it is. Do you really give it what we think all in that second meeting?

Jeff Akers:

Or sometimes it depends, but sometimes that's as far as I'll get in that second meeting.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yes, I love to make sure we got it right. I always joke about the name, the experiment, right, right. And then we get the name right. We got the birth dates, right? Then we start looking at, I usually have a Things To Do List, which a lot of people love, Things To Do lists. Some people will do it right away. Some will put it off because it's a to do list. It's not like school. We don't put a deadline, but it is your plan,

Jeff Akers:

right, right? So we need to that information from you, yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So what happens is financial fingerprint is getting us, getting to know everything you're doing so on, everything that you've done. Some people might have had multiple people they've dealt with over their career. They might have multiple jobs statements from everywhere, and they just don't really know what they have or understand what they bought.

Jeff Akers:

That happens a lot, particularly government contractors here in Harford County. And they work from one job to the next, the next, the next. And they come in, they're like, Well, I've got 15, four or one case.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, I got the military, federal government. I call them the Triple Threat retirement, where they have three different pensions, and the combination, are they still okay, right? It's pretty cool. And then what health insurance to pick? Right? Yeah, which is the best? Yeah. So there's a lot of and then I like working with that nurture nurses and teachers, that they're very good people, and I've really enjoyed guiding them well.

Jeff Akers:

Their whole life, they've been helping people, and it's nice to help people who have helped people.

BRIAN AKERS:

Oh, yeah. And they want to do planning, right? Not everyone wants to do planning, that's true, and so we love to do the planning. So if you don't want to do it, it's okay, right?

Jeff Akers:

If you don't want to do it, that doesn't mean you don't need to have one.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yes, that's a very big deal. So gathering information, let's talk about this. Jeff, let's say someone gives you information, but not all the information. How does that hinder you?

Jeff Akers:

Well, the plan is going to be incomplete garbage in garbage out back to the engineer. They understand that.

BRIAN AKERS:

Have you ever had a redacted statement for an initial client, a redacted state. I love that new level. Keep stuff out. They might had one cut it out with scissors. They cut out their account number and anything identified to them. And some one did highlight it with black so you couldn't read

Jeff Akers:

it well. My favorite one is they bring the first page of the statement and say there's what it's worth. It's like, well, there's 16 pages behind this that says what's actually in that account. Yeah, I need to see those.

BRIAN AKERS:

And why, why it's so important. And so, like, we, we like to have you bring in your logins, your current 401, K, yeah, this might be embarrassing, but we log into it and we, first thing we do is check the beneficiary, yep, and you better have there. You're the current wife on there. That's right, not your mom, not your brother, not the first wife. I've had all these scenarios. It's always just left blank. I meant to change that. Yeah, and we just begin the conversation of we need to check everything for titling, for beneficiary purposes, your bank accounts, you have payable on death, investment accounts, you have transfer on death. Who's it going to? Who are they? Is that who you really wanted to go to? Well, how old are they? When should they receive money? Is your one grandchild a special needs child? I'll have you do anything about that right?

Jeff Akers:

Grandchild, children, all kinds of issues that come up.

BRIAN AKERS:

Some people buy things like annuities from people and they don't know what they bought. So we say, Bring the con. Track. Let's figure it out, and we'll teach you how to use it, whatever you bought, right? And we'll walk you through the advantages, disadvantages, why it's a good thing, how it fits into a plan, how you can make it work, or if you need to get out of it because the rates are too low, or, you know, something's not fitting your planning, then we help you with that too.

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, I had someone last year that came in with an annuity contract that they were using incorrectly. It wasn't the best for them the way they were using it.

BRIAN AKERS:

Oh my, variable annuities, where people are doing withdrawals without using the income rider that they've been paying for for 20 years, right? That's a common error, right?

Jeff Akers:

So what we did was fix how they're taking money out of this thing so that will last a lifetime and not drain it to zero, and then they get nothing.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, they were sold a variable annuity by someone, and then that person no longer right. They're gone. They sold it, and they moved on, right, yeah, and see what we got to do is say, Well, what do you own and what's best, what's best for you, how to make this work. And then we can do that. Being independent, we have the ability to become the agent record. And so we can guide you through situations or whatever you own to figure it out, right? We can do whatever we need to do. We figured out mineral rights, oil rights, all kinds of things over

Jeff Akers:

the years, right? Yeah, those are great to have, but hard to track down.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right? So a client walks in to talk to you, what's one of the things that they've never done? And then you like, we sort of know when they walk in the door, they probably had never done what's, what's

Jeff Akers:

that one thing they've probably never done is actually added up everything that they have

BRIAN AKERS:

absolutely okay? So they don't, they don't know their net worth, right? What's another thing that they they've never done

Jeff Akers:

that one cracks me up, though, because we add up the net worth. Like, okay, you've got $1.3 million they're like, What

BRIAN AKERS:

is that enough? Wife just retired the moment you said it, I'm retired, right?

Jeff Akers:

So another thing that they've never done, hmm, actually contemplated what's going to happen to their stuff when they when they passed away. You mentioned that before with beneficiaries and things

BRIAN AKERS:

like, because no one wants to talk about death, right? So they usually don't do wells, right? We have, we have a lot of police officers as clients, right? And you'd assume they got the free will, because the unions offer free will, free but guess what? No, they don't. They don't, they don't. So we encourage that right away as part of planning, right? You got a plan as if we might die tomorrow, and then live and invest like you're like, they're gonna live forever, right? And then you've got the other the worst case, sent handle, and you're done, yeah. The other thing we ask about is your car insurance, your home auto. And if you have umbrella, people worth millions of dollars, don't even have an umbrella, right?

Jeff Akers:

Umbrella insurance, liability insurance, it protects what you have. So you've got to have enough insurance so that if something bad happened and you got sued, you don't lose all your money.

BRIAN AKERS:

I had a successor, successful investor came in the first meeting we're talking and there they have grown their retired to $4 million nice. And they're talking about the protections under lawsuits of 401, KS versus IRAs versus what state you're in and all that. Then I said, Well, do you have umbrella insurance? No, what's that? Well, the one that protects you from liability for every situation and right and was just, like simple insurance, or like, as one case, a lady had 500,000 in the bank, didn't have any beneficiaries on it, one bank, so it's just her okay. And so there's no FDIC protection. All she had to do is add her beneficiaries to it. And all sudden, she had a million coverage. We started talking more and more about it. We got a copy of her auto and home, and she had the state minimum, oh gosh. I mean, really low. I think it's, what, 60,000 of liability. And I said, I know you've probably never been in an auto accident, but there these auto accidents are very expensive, right? And you need to protect your net worth by having proper insurance and an umbrella. So these are just simple things that we identify right away. So what happens is this a financial plan is as unique as you are. That financial plan, we have to gather information. We have to get that information. We need to see it. We need to see the statements. We need to see the titling, the beneficiary. We need to read them. We need to get ready. We asked for that information before the second meeting so we can write it all out, right? And if you're really on it, you could always bring it to the first meeting. We do, like surprising people do, yes, I have had people bring it, and they're really they've been thinking about it. They've been waiting for a planner. Maybe they listen to their shows for a while. They go into our podcast, and they're ready. Yeah, the

Jeff Akers:

simple things are, like statements and a tax return, just we can see what's going on.

BRIAN AKERS:

It doesn't have to be this month. It could be the beginning of the year. It could be halfway through the year. It's just knowing where things are. So we can start there, right? We need a starting point. We do all this work because the best part of retirement is getting your time back, where you decide how to use it. Before retirement, your time is tied up with other commitments, you know, mainly your job. A lot of that goes away in retirement, your time is now consumed by things that you want to do. It's so easy to begin winning and retirement. Retirement, go to our website at AKERS financial group.com scroll to the schedule meeting section and let us know you'd like to schedule your free consultation with one of our team of advisors. That's a k, e, r s, financial group.com or you can call us at 833 when retire. That's 833, W, I N, R e, t, I R E, and we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule that free meeting, go to AKERS match group.com, or call us at 833-946-7384 to start planning for your retirement. Now. Have you ever seen all your financial information put together in one place? We'll talk about that 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. Here with me today is Jeff AKERS. I'm a growth Certified Financial Planner practitioners, which means that we're financial advisors, and so our show, what we do is we talk about financial topics. This is topics you and you really need to sit down with a financial advisor before you do any of this, right? It's almost like, don't touch the oven. Don't touch the stove. Be careful.

Jeff Akers:

It's hot. We're touching on topics. We're not telling you what to do today.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah. So the idea when you listen to rip that talk shows is a the people are going over these things. Was that someone I could work with? Should I work with someone? Should I have an advisor? Have I been so successful? Is it now time for an advisor? Right? I think that's when you have those thoughts. I think they're in your head. For a reason. There's opportunity to sit down find out if the advisor is a good fit for you or not, right?

Jeff Akers:

Sometimes people come they're like, Well, I've done this myself for a really long time, but now I'm tired of worrying about it, and so for help,

BRIAN AKERS:

I love people that delegate. A lot of very successful people want to delegate it out to someone they can trust, and we want to be that kind of company that they can talk to. All right, so this topic in the third quarter is, have you seen all your financial information put together in one place? So we actually use software where we bring it all in, and we can track it day to day. Yep, but they see it and that sometimes they're surprised, like I had, I had one case. It's a couple in their mid 50s, and they start out the conversation and first meeting of I will never retire. Give me information. Give me all the information that they each have little pensions. They have social security numbers. They have the most important part their budget was very reasonable. They have house that they they're paying off very little debt. And then they saved a little bit everywhere they went, and we put it all together. And I said, Well, can you retire on this? They go, Oh, that's more than we live off now. And so the weirdest thing is, they went from, oh, we'll never retire, to, you mean we can actually retire? I'm giving my notice tomorrow. No, no, no. They're mid 50s. We're projecting that they can retire, right? So we sort of have good habits and finish the race. Well, all those

Jeff Akers:

talks, so we're not there yet, but we're well, 6265

BRIAN AKERS:

67 and we're saying, all right, just don't let the door hit let the door hit you on the way out. I love financial dependence, where we can say, hey, you got enough. I like being able to say you're on track. I love being able to say you're not on track. And it's how you fix it, right?

Jeff Akers:

Yeah. A lot of times people will say, Do I have enough? And my first question is, what are you going to spend?

BRIAN AKERS:

What is enough, right? So when people ask me about retirement planning, I say it's a cash flow battle, okay? Cash Flow battle. It's not a number, like some of those commercials. Have 82 point 5 million or 8 million, or whatever it's about, what you spend, what's your lifestyle, what's it now with? What do you want it to be? What's the dream or the goal, and what reality? And what can we do?

Jeff Akers:

We've both seen clients that have a lot of money in the millions, but they're spending means they need more than what they have, right? And then I've seen other clients that they don't have the millions of dollars, but they're very disciplined in their spending, and they've got more than enough.

BRIAN AKERS:

It's interesting, like in America, 90 some percent of people are bad on their finances. Yeah, they live day to day, paycheck to paycheck. They don't listen to talk radio financial shows. They don't do any of the work it takes to get better, right? They don't think about it, but the few that do do very well at it, right? And I don't know how to get the other 90% to actually change their habits, even in a small way, to get better, right?

Jeff Akers:

Just to tweak what they're doing, develop one good habit.

BRIAN AKERS:

And so this show goes all around Maryland. Wouldn't be great if Marilyn would listen to planning shows and say, we're going to be different than everybody else in America. We're going to live within our means. We're going to start saving a little bit and build something for our own future, right as a state. If the whole if all of us in the state did it, we'd be in a lot better shape, yeah, in all ways, personally, because it's personal. Everything's personal. We can't count on our government to provide long term for us. We can't count on our job. Can't count on pensions. You have to design a plan to make this work, right? So we're talking about meeting number two, and we're talking about sitting down with an advisor. We're writing out where you are now. We got to get you to where you need to be if you're starting at zero and there's very little information that's all right, right, that's a starting point. Yeah, we know what to ask. Is that financial fingerprint? That's your financial fingerprint. Where do you work? We don't have pensions. All. We have social security. We get your security numbers, where they are. Now we talk about Social Security and a possibility that they might not be around at full. It might be 78% based on July of 25 report from Social Security. But you never know, right?

Jeff Akers:

Whatever that number says on your statement right now might not be the number that it will be when you're ready to take it. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So when we write it out, we want to make sure everything's right, and so we can start to build recommendations on it. I had one the other day where the first comment was, we've never saved for retirement, okay? And talking to them and but we have money in the bank, and we paid all of our debts off. I said, Honestly, if you walk through the door of no debts, you have the habits to be successful. You're ahead, so most likely, you have money in the bank. How much money on the bank? He goes, Well, I have 120,000 in the bank, okay? And then his wife had 105,000

Jeff Akers:

in a bank. Oh, so a mere 225,000

BRIAN AKERS:

in the bank? Is it in a CD money market? No savings account, savings point. Oh, one. Oh yeah. So the money's not working for him, right? I said, Well, what's the goal with the money? You have something big in mind, something you gotta Oh, no, just not sure what to do with it. Okay? I said, Well, how about do you have retirement? Roth, no pensions, no. How much is your 401? K, well, I don't really use do that. Do you have a match at work? Yeah. How long you been there? Six years. Do you put the match in? No, I haven't opened a four, 1k account yet. Oh, gosh, but he has 100 200,000

Jeff Akers:

in the bank. Yeah, let's, let's open the 401, K, and get that extra free money.

BRIAN AKERS:

Oh, you think about people that that. So I get called in to help them and trying to figure it out. And so the interesting thing is that we got to start and give them the Okay. In the future meetings, I'm going to bring them in and some of our staff are going to sign them up for 401, K, help them sign up, right? Get overcome whatever is causing them not to do it, right? So one of the things I found out is that, oh, we only have 250 a month free or 500 a month. But obviously it's more than that, because the savings build up so much, right? So the idea is something's going on. What can we do to make life better and be able to at least get the free match right? I hate turning down free money from your employer. That's right. Would you go to your employer and say, Oh, don't give me that 3% raise. Keep it and that's exactly what they're doing by not getting the match is right? And they say, all my salary is like 90,000 but I don't, I don't accept the 3% raise.

Jeff Akers:

I don't need a few 1000 more now. Don't

BRIAN AKERS:

say for my future. Don't put money in there that I that's automatic. Don't do that. Don't invest it and grow it. For me, I don't want that, right? And or might be, the reason might be as I just not sure I can afford it and all, but I think we we can't afford not to. It's free money, right? That's one of the conversations that we have. Our budget has to be, pay yourself first, put money away, save it, get to maximize your match, then we can do the next goal, right?

Jeff Akers:

Save it, but save it wisely. And one of the smartest things to do is get free money if it's sitting on the table, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

So that meeting number two from that was meeting number one. So me number two for that client is going to be we're signing you up today, right? So we're not talking any more in that financial plan until we get them in the four, 1k getting that free map. Bring the instructions with the way to log in, or if you don't even know that, we'll do it. Here we have younger people who know how to work computers.

Unknown:

We bring them in. We'll let them do it.

BRIAN AKERS:

That's always the goal. The youngest person in the family can help you with your phone. You learn this as you get older. All right, so, so a reason I want to bring up that topic is the idea is, what? Who needs financial planning? Well, obviously, this client is now a client. They they learned how to pay off their debt. They have a lot of good financial habits, but the financial planning is going to help them in so many ways that they just never did, right? They need guidance. They need coaching. They need, hey, yes, that's great. Let's do this. Like I asked them, How much is are you comfortable having an event? Oh, it's just 20,000 Oh, man, you have 120 right? What do you want to do with that? I don't know. And so it's an idea is, let's make your money work harder for you. Let's discover the way, as I explained. Roth IRAs all in the first meeting about, if you hire us this, what we do, right? Get you doing the basics, build up your fundamentals of financial planning. Normally, our first three things, make sure the right insurance, emergency fund, and pay off your debts, right? I told them, you're already you're Ding, ding, ding. You're done, right? You're on to this phase two, save for college, save for retirement. Save for your dreams, build your estate plan, those kind of things, right?

Jeff Akers:

They already had the mortgage paid off, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, completely paid off, which is incredible, but they're in a smaller house. They never, they were too nervous to buy a bigger house. So that's part of the gold is like, well, do we need it cash? They do want to build or go to a bigger house. They don't want to spend the money, which, that's a frugal thing, which I'm okay with frugal, right? But, but in reality, if you have three kids and one bedroom, they only stack so high, right? Yeah, bunk beds only come to these are all part of financial decisions, and financial advisors help guide through that and get you to make sure you have a good balance of today and tomorrow. And within the choice modern America, what we do is give me a new car at 1200 a month. Give me a new house 5000 a month, give me this. And all sudden, you have more debt than you can handle. And then then both have to work, and they both have to find a job that pays them a little bit more than they get fit right. Then they got all these taxes and surprises. And then they, then they go in the credit card debt, and then, and then the credit card debt starts to build, and that's like a standard thing. And then what we have to do is go from debtor to saver, with their with people, and most, most America,

Jeff Akers:

right, right? Because the American Way is spend everything I have and then a little bit more. And that's how you end up in debt, like Brian's talking about. We don't

BRIAN AKERS:

want to wait to have something. Let's have it now. That's right. That's marketing. That's how they talk to us. That's how they try to get to do things. What planning is saying or listening to what you say you want. Okay, we write it down, right? And then we tell you how to achieve it, and then you're gonna have to say and say no to things you officially don't want. Do you really want it? Or do you really need it? And the reality is, most accumulators accumulate too much junk and stuff, and if they had stopped earlier and understood that it doesn't fit in the house, and I got six of them already, they would have more money.

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I don't need this one.

BRIAN AKERS:

I like doing true talks. Jeff, yeah, all right. So so far in this meeting, we're talking about financial information, getting it all put together, seeing it all together, and understanding that it all works together, your thoughts, your your your abilities to save, your inability to save, all of that comes together for answers. And that brings us to financial planning. And what we've been talking about is building your financial plan. This is what we do for a living, so that you don't have to figure it all out on your own. We help you. We love doing this. Jeff actually said he has fun planning, right? I do. I do. Planning for the unexpected may not be your favorite thing to do. We know that this is what we do. We want. We want to make this as easy and as comfortable for you as possible, so that as we meet with you and put a plan together, it includes that and things are taken care of. It's planned for. Then when it happens, you're like, Oh, we planned for this. We're okay. Perhaps you've been sold something, regardless of whether you needed it or not, not at AKERS Financial Group with us, your retirement plan 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 give us a call at 833 when retire. 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, that's 833-946-7384, or visit our website, AKERS, match group.com, do you want to build a snowman? What does this have to do with your retirement? Let's talk about that. When we return with more winning in retirement,

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 indeed.

BRIAN AKERS:

Welcome back to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group. This is our winning in retirement radio podcast, and we love putting this on for our model listeners. And I brought Jeff AKERS in with me today. Jeff AKERS is vice president. Both of us are certified financial planner practitioners, and we enjoy financial planning, right?

Jeff Akers:

Jeff, doing the radio podcast is fun, and doing the planning for folks is fun. Yeah, which would like better? Which do I like better helping people with our plan? Yeah, the

BRIAN AKERS:

radio is fun. But when you're talking to someone, I love it. When that, when you finish planning, they come back and they point at our winning and retirement sign and go, I know what it means now. Oh, I love that. I love that moment. That's pretty cool. So today we're talking to our show is called Building your financial plan. I originally called this, let's build your financial plan, okay? And so I I called the fourth quarter something that I wanted to make sure you understand, and it's about this thing called, do you want to build a snowman? So, do you want to build a snowman?

Jeff Akers:

Jeff, build a snowman. You're talking about something specific, obviously.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, come on, you got to be a frozen fan. Do you want to build a snowman? I'm not singing. Come on out and play, Jeff. Come on, Jeff, play. Okay. I know you're Mr. No. He. Don't come out and play. You don't like the cold. You don't like building the snowman. I go out and shovel now, if you build us, if you ever build a snowman, okay, when I was a kid, would it be different than my snowman? Of course, it would be different than your snowman. Mine be bigger than your snowman. Probably, right. I remember mine was so large as a kid, I had to get three people to push the bottom base ball through the yard. I was pulling grass up as I was rolling the snowman. So my snowman was, like, seven foot tall. Oh, man, you needed a ladder. But the concept of building a snowman is really individual. It's something you might not build one because too cold. It might be. You have a grandchild or a child, and just time to build some. It's their right age. Let's build that certain ages of life you're building some in other ages of life, you're not. You're not, yeah, sometimes you're the put things in the eyes, carrots. Then there's some people you throw a stick in there. Some people you throw furniture into the snow.

Jeff Akers:

Some people are just lucky. They got ahead.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right, so I'm not singing the frozen song. Frozen has been on Broadway a long time. Hopefully most of you know about it. There's a wonderful it's great. There's heard of it someday. Jeff, but yes, I go to Disney. Yes, I do to sing along frozen show. I enjoy that.

Jeff Akers:

I got nothing for you,

BRIAN AKERS:

but how we're gonna build a plan, a financial plan. There we go. You want to build a financial plan? Jeff, yeah, play, yeah. Okay, all right. So, so the idea is this building a financial plan. We got to love what we're doing, but any planning, you got to be prepared. What we want you to do is to be prepared for building a snowman, building the plan. We don't You don't have to build the plan. I think that's important.

Jeff Akers:

Yeah, be prepared. If you're going to build a snowman, you got to put on the coat, you got to put on the gloves, put on the hat, make sure you're going to be warm. You don't go out there and shorts and a T shirt.

BRIAN AKERS:

So one of our other co hosts has a three year old. Oh, there we go. And do you think the three year old built a snowman or didn't know? Did that co host Alex build the snowman? Co host Alex built a snowman, but the three year old says, I build a snowman. That's right. So guess what in financial planning?

Jeff Akers:

Well, yeah, we build it for you. And you get to say, Hey, look at my snowman.

BRIAN AKERS:

I did a financial plan. Yeah, you did, because you talked to us, you got us the information, and you sat through and talked about your what you want out of it. And that truly helps us build a financial plan, right? That plan isn't already on a shelf. It's not a 90 page marketing material, like what they used to call financial planning. It's true. Planning, line by line, is where your money is. Things to discuss, what to do. Talk about it all, group benefits, life insurance, disability. We make sure you sign up for the right things. Do you need it or not? Why wills what? What does your will say versus what you think it says? Do you have a will? Do you really want that kid to get the money at 18? What's going on there?

Jeff Akers:

Who's your power of attorney? Yeah, really want them to be your power of attorney.

BRIAN AKERS:

Who's next and next and next? Is that really what you want? Yeah, I love when people realize that their planning is good, yeah, but not what they really want. They want to tweak and get it better, right? We have some that come in fully prepared. Everything's fully done. They just can't make the big decisions, like I had one that sophisticated, very brilliant people, save great The hardest part is they wanted to Roth convert. Just couldn't do it, the pain, the pain of paying tax now and never again. So it

Jeff Akers:

was something that you thought they should do, but they absolutely they couldn't. Yeah, because

BRIAN AKERS:

they they knew they had a phase. As they retired, income went down, and they've been best because they don't need that extra money to Roth convert for a few years to get to get their RMD down. So they're not at this crazy high level forever, right? They're to pay now and never again. So that concept became a, you think, a multi million dollar, four, 1k, person, you try to figure out long term planning, right? And then what they need is a plan. And they say, yeah, yes, let's do that.

Jeff Akers:

What's interesting is, some people, you go through that scenario with them, they're like, Oh, this is no brainer. How much can we convert? And then other people say, Well, how much is that going to cost? And so they don't want to. So people are unique, back to what you said, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

And so their emotions, they're the way to come into it. They might come in and basically, you know, they want to be no but then, when you're trying to explain to them about tax rates, and with the one big, beautiful bill, we locked in these tax rate, tax rates so called permanently, right? We don't view them as permanent, permanent. We view them as the rules of the moment, right, rules for the next 434, years, five years, maybe depending on how long.

Jeff Akers:

The only permanent thing is Congress has to vote for them to change now, yeah,

BRIAN AKERS:

it's harder to change it, and so that means more likely to stay and so let's get to work. Let's write, why not pay some tax now, never again, especially within your current bracket, right? We know what it is. Now, let's take advantage of it. All right. So these are just examples of what we can do for people if we have the right plan. How do we know Roth fits for people with a couple I'm talking about have one kid, oh, and that kid's gonna get, let's call it, let's call it $3 million okay, Ira all pre taxed, yep. And we had her on a call one time, and we're talking about Roth's. And I said, I. You know, the rules are, you'll get $3 million and you have to take out over a 10 year period. What's your income like? Well, let's go put her at, like, half a million a year high, way higher brackets than the parents. And the parents are 24 so they'd be, she'd be at like, 35 I think, right? And it's like, I believe that if the parents don't need the money, we need to deliver to you money that's tax free, right? Life insurance, Roth IRAs are two of the ways to do this.

Jeff Akers:

So if they pay the tax for you, you're gonna get it tax free. That that's, that's

BRIAN AKERS:

a win for her. She's like, she's a cheerleader for me, saying, Yeah, Roth, convert. Roth, convert. Yeah. It was a good, really good meeting, because she's the only person that's gonna be their executor. It's, she's the beneficiary all of that, so we have to have a counter to her in case she's disabled or something's wrong, right? She might get married soon. Okay, that the boyfriend was on the call which I saw, that was about didn't like that, yeah, because he's like, all right, I'm with the right family. But the idea is a planning is really trying to see why? Why we Roth converting? Like if we're converting to pay tax now we're paying higher tax than our kids. Should we do that? Especially if you're not going to touch the money right, or if you need the money next year? Should your Roth convert? And probably not right, unless it's a rare situation,

Jeff Akers:

and it doesn't do much good to pay the tax now when you're going to use it next year anyway.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah. So financial planning, is it just a one time thing, Jeff, where you do get the plan done and the books off, books done, you just throw it at them and they walk out the door.

Jeff Akers:

No, it's an ongoing relationship. We like to meet at least, at a minimum once a year with folks, just to make sure nothing has changed, or to see what has changed and make sure that if we need to make some tweaks we can Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So the idea of review is a very important piece of after you do a plan, doing a plan and not implementing is sort of a thing, a habit of a lot of people. That's good idea. I'll get to it. Yeah, and it never happens, yeah? Well, if you're driving your car, you probably know that's me. I put it off. I believe what you got to do is just make a phone call, yeah, get get appointments set up with one of our team advisors, sit down and just begin. You don't have to do it all. You don't have to do the planning. We just want to talk about it. Get us information. We'll do the planning. We'll do the fancy graphs. I had one guy, he's an engineer. Course, he decided to run financial planning through an ai, ai calculator. And we went through it was, it was, it was okay, and then we went through all the detail that was missing and that applies to them, and right? How to make decisions? That's what a financial plan does. Financial Plan gives us the data, the information we need to then make decisions. So implement it, right? And that is a value add by the advisor that you're with, right?

Jeff Akers:

So there are things we've seen over the years that help us in figuring out how to help you. So let us help you

BRIAN AKERS:

that way. We build personalized financial plans designed around your timeline, your goals and your risk tolerance, no guessing, no reacting, just a thoughtful strategy built to guide you through from now until the future, right? And we whatever that now is, it could be right now, and you might be 30, you might be 16, might be 80. Whatever is going on in your life, wherever you are, is fine. That's where we start. Right financial fingerprint. You just need to make the next right decision. So we start financial fingerprint. Get to know them, we find about their goals, and then we implement that, we gather information, then we write it out. In meeting two, we start to review that between meeting 2345, we implement or a year. Usually takes 12 months to really get everything up and running the way we should. It is a lot of work, but the idea is making sure that we get one thing at a time people know what we're doing. Why?

Jeff Akers:

Right? And in 12 months we can see, okay, here's what we did last year. Here's the next step. Or we could say, Okay, we did do everything last year, and it still looks

Unknown:

good. Yeah,

BRIAN AKERS:

life changes. It does good and the bad, yeah. And so what you have to do is understand what's going on, how it affects you. These help us with our tax returns. Helps us with planning. A lot of people do not do planning properly when it comes to tax returns. They don't tell their accountant everything. They tell us everything. So we review a tax return and then we say, Oh, that's not reflected on your five to nine. Didn't tell them. You get a Maryland deduction for that, right? Or we rolled that money over. It's not taxable, yeah, or, or back to our, back to our Ira wasn't recorded correctly. Um, right, these are just some of the ones we caught recently, right?

Jeff Akers:

Qualified charitable distributions not being reflected properly. Yeah, lots of things. So, yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So what happens is, when you're building your financial plan, you need an advisor, an advisor that you want to work with, trust talk to. It's a confidential relationship, where, if you're talking to us, you're not talking to everyone, right? When we talk about a client on the radio, we change the numbers, we change the names, we protect the innocent, right? We're not talking about you. It's always Fred and Wilma Flintstone, yeah.

Jeff Akers:

Well, every now and then it's. Barney and Betty. But yeah, it depends. Yeah, very true.

BRIAN AKERS:

But the idea is this, building your financial plan is something that's very, very important. And when you want to start, you want to start right now. Get everything organized, get everything set up for you to be successful so you don't have any worry, but so that you can win in retirement, right?

Jeff Akers:

So you need to make the next right decision, and the next right decision is to contact us and set up that first appointment.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right, so Jeff, thank you very much for a good show today. Appreciate it. Thank you, sir. It was fun. Yeah, I had fun. Planning is fun. Really more fun than radio. That's right. All right. So today we covered building your financial plan. 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 with one of our team of advisors. Go to our website at AKERS financial group.com, scroll to the schedule meeting section and let us know you'd like to schedule your free meeting right there. That's a k, e, r s, financial group.com or you can call us at 833, when retire. That's a three, 3w, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule your free in person meeting with one of our team of advisors. Start planning for your retirement now. Go to our website 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.