5 Things a Retirement-Focused Advisor Should Do and a Long-Term Care Question

Retirement brings unique challenges that you may not experience during your working years. Advisors that work with retirees or those close to retirement should understand this and adjust their practices accordingly. In this episode, Joe Allaria is joined by 30-year industry veteran, Scott Carson, as the two discuss five things a retirement-focused advisor should do.

We also cover a listener question from Julie on long-term care premium increases, and if it makes sense to keep these policies as the premiums go up.

About Our Guest
Scott Carson, AIF®, CEPA is a Senior Wealth Advisor with CarsonAllaria Wealth Management and specializes in working with retirees and those close to retirement, and takes a keen interest in the holistic aspects of financial planning, including tax and estate planning issues. Many of Scott's clients are current or former small business owners and Scott has helped several build succession plans to transition those businesses.

Scott began his financial planning career in with IDS (An American Express Company) in 1989 after working as a commercial banker for five years with MidAmerica Banks and Citigroup. He was a partner with the Pines Financial Group prior to founding Meridian Financial Group in 1999, where he continued to build his client base for over 15 years. He co-founded CarsonAllaria Wealth Management, an independent Registered Investment Adviser, in 2017. 

Resources mentioned in the show

- How to Get Your Free Retirement Assessment

Submit Your Questions
To submit a listener question, visit our website HERE and enter the details of your question.

Disclaimer: All material discussed on this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as individual tax, legal, or investment advice. Investing involves risk of loss and investors should be prepared to bear potential losses. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. Joe Allaria is an Investment Adviser Representative of CarsonAllaria Wealth Management, a Registered Investment Advisory firm. Information discussed on this podcast may be derived from third parties that are believed to be reliable, but CarsonAllaria Wealth Management does not control or guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of such information and disclaims all liability for damages resulting from such sources. Any references to third parties are provided as a convenience and do not constitute an endorsement.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:02

Welcome to the Retirement Power Hour Podcast, where you'll hear direct financial insights from financial planner, writer, and consultant Joe Allaria , as he and his guests uncover key wealth management strategies to help listeners invest wiser and retire better. Now, here's your host, Joe Allaria.

Joe Allaria: 0:23

Welcome everybody to the Retirement Power Hour. My name is Joe Allaria , and this is episode 10. And today we are going to be joined, I'm going to be joined by Scott Carson. Scott is a senior wealth advisor with Carson Allaria Wealth Management, and he is a 30-plus year industry veteran working in the financial planning business. And we're going to talk about five things a retirement focused advisor should be doing for you. But first, it's sort of a milestone. Like I said, we are in episode 10 today. So I want to take a moment to thank everyone for listening and tuning in. We have made a lot of strides this year on the show, and we're going to continue to do that. Getting better and better every time, you can now go to retirement powerhour podcast.com to view all of our resources, all of our past shows. You can ask your listener questions on the website. You can type them in or you can record them on your phone and we'll play them and answer your question on the next show. So go ahead and do that. And we've got a really good question this week before we get into the main discussion. So I want to read that now. And this question comes from Julie. Julie says, I am 65 years old and have owned a long-term care policy for about 10 years. My premium has stayed fairly consistent over that time, but I just received a notice that my premium is about to go up from $494 a month to $653 a month, which is an increase of over 32%. I was given options on certain benefits I can adjust to lower my premium, but I'm not sure if I should even keep the coverage at this point. Is this typical for my premium to go up so much? What are your thoughts? Well, thank you, Julie. First off for that question. And uh I feel for you. I I hate to see this. Unfortunately, I have to say that I've had several clients come to me with this exact same issue. So unfortunately, uh it is somewhat typical to see this. Now we don't always see an increase of over 32%. It is a fairly large increase. But again, I can't say that I've never heard of this before. It certainly does happen from time to time. So what do you do now? I think is the biggest question, right? Well, here are some things that you can think about first. Think about why you first obtained coverage. Do you still have that same need to offload the long-term care risk? If you do, then you probably need to keep the coverage. If not, by all means, cancel the coverage. Why pay the extra if you don't need the coverage anymore? But you know, chances are you probably still have that same need. And so if you need to keep the coverage, now we we can move into, well, how do you keep it? Because it can be tough to afford all those premium increases. So here are a few options to think about. Number one, I know it stings. I know that seeing a 32% increase is definitely hard to stomach. But I would say this if you have good benefits and if you can sustain the increase, even though it would be a very hard pill to swallow, if you can afford the increase, what you could consider is to just pay the extra and keep all the benefits as is. Why would you do this? Because then you don't have to lower any benefits. Yes, it's going to cost you more, but it sounds like you've had this for a while and you want to keep that coverage. You've been paying for it for a long time. Is there a guarantee that they won't go and do this again next year? No, not at all. So I'm just saying, you know, first off, you probably need to have an idea or have someone develop a financial plan, a retirement plan for you, and see if you can sustain that higher premium. And if you can, it's something to at least consider. No one ever feels good about paying more to an insurance company, but it's something to consider. Now the second thing, second option I see as the lowest hanging fruit is the elimination period. So if you have to reduce benefits, oftentimes I start by looking at the elimination period because I see policies that have maybe zero days, 60 days on the elimination period, but changing to something like 90 days, 120 days, it could lower your premium. And also, according to Medicare.gov, it's possible that between Medicare and a Medicare supplement, you could have up to 100 days covered for skilled nursing care if you did need that. It's possible. So you can go to Medicare.gov and read more about that. But you may not even need coverage until the 100th day in a skilled nursing facility. So that could make sense to extend that elimination period. The other thing is if you had to pay a couple months of you know, worth of a stay in a skilled nursing facility, yes, it's it's expensive, but consider it almost like your own little long-term care deductible. If you have to pay a few months, that's not going to be the end of the world. But the third option would be to look at the lifetime maximum. And you could think about reducing the lifetime maximum to try and lower your premiums as well. Again, if you had to lower benefits. And I like this option because it still can give you strong benefits in the short run, but again, just for a shorter amount of time. So you don't have to lower your daily maximum. So you can still have most or all of the stay covered in the early months, a couple years. But sometimes I see that policies have benefits that could last up to five years, you know, and a lifetime maximum that's a really high number. Well, maybe you'd only need to stay around three years. So you can do the math, lower that lifetime maximum to reflect around three years, which is really more of the average stay in a long-term care or skilled nursing facility. It's more around three years, not four years or five years. And the last thing, the last option, the fourth option is you could consider lowering your daily maximum. And I feel like this is a last resort because this is going to potentially cause your policy to not cover all of the cost that you're going to have. But maybe it at least, maybe it doesn't cover everything, but it maybe it covers most of it. Maybe you just have to cover a little bit of the of the extra, and that could help you bide some time before really having to dig into your other accounts. So I hope that helps. And again, thank you for your question. This is something I'm I'm glad this came up because it's very common, unfortunately. People do see this. So if you're out there and you want someone to take a look at your long-term care policy and that and that letter that you receive about your premiums going up, again, go to retirement powerhourpodcast.com. You can contact us directly and you can put your question in the box and we can discuss it on a show. But if you want to talk one-on-one, you can click the work with me tab and we'll take you through our process. And it starts with just scheduling a 30-minute phone call. Julia, thanks again for your question. And now I want to shift gears as we move into the segment of the show. We're going to have Scott Carson on and we're going to begin talking about the five things that a retirement-focused advisor should be doing for you. It's going to be a good interview. I always enjoy having Scott on. So with that, I'm going to go right into the interview with Scott Carson as we talk about five things your retirement-focused advisor should be doing for you. Scott, welcome back to the show.

Scott Carson: 7:38

Glad to be here again, Joe.

Joe Allaria: 7:39

Scott is a 30-year industry veteran in the financial services industry and is a senior wealth advisor at Carsonal Area Wealth Management. Scott started all the way back in 1989 at a company called IDS, which is an American Express company, and began working in the financial services industry there. And Scott says you were you worked as a commercial banker for five years with Mid-America Banks and Citigroup. You were a partner with Pines Financial Group prior to founding Meridian Financial Group in 1999. Today we're going to be talking about five things a retirement-focused advisor should do. And I think this ties really well back into where you started early in your career because we were talking offline when you first got into financial planning. At that time, hardly anyone was doing financial planning, but I don't want to steal your thunder. We'll we'll just get into it here in a second. But I think the main thing, Scott, is when people are looking for advisors and they're trying to find someone that's a good fit for them, it's hard to differentiate and it's hard to understand what this advisor does that's different than this advisor, and even how well they do X, Y, and Z services and different things. And I think we all have an idea of what we think advisors should do. There's some low-hanging fruit, but then there's some other things that maybe people don't know. You know, they you don't know what you don't know. A phrase I'm gonna steal from you, but people don't know all the time what an advisor really should be looking at on your situation. So I think we're gonna get into that a little bit today and maybe bring to light some things that people didn't think that really fell under an advisor's umbrella. But with that, with no further ado, let me get into the first thing. So again, we're gonna talk about five things a retirement-focused advisor should do. And Scott, let's just jump in. Thing number one, these are all your, these are your five, Scott. I'm moderating here. I'm gonna let you talk on these. The first one you have here is ask thought-provoking questions and be an excellent listener.

Scott Carson: 9:37

Yeah, Joe, having started out at a financial planning-based organization back in an era when the industry was far more transactional based, which means the people who were calling themselves at that time stockbrokers, financial advisors, etc., they were predominantly living and working off of a commission, and it was a sale to a client or a prospect, and then move on to the next. And I had the good fortune of starting with a firm that said, we're gonna do planning first and we'll worry about transactions second. We're not there to sell, we're there to advise and consult.

Joe Allaria: 10:24

And I think there's two types of questions you can really ask. There's qualitative and quantitative. And when you get trained on how to be an advisor, the focus is really on quantitative. It's the numbers. What accounts do you have? What are the balances? What's your income? You know, things like that. The the numbers side of it, because hey, I I, you know, as a young CFP, you know, I'm talking about people that are trained, but we need to have the numbers to put in that financial planning software. And fortunately and unfortunately, we have younger and younger advisors, and those advisors are becoming certified in what they do, but they're really, I think, getting certified in one area, and that's the quantitative side. Because it takes years of experience to get the qualitative side, those questions that really invoke feelings and emotions and really get to the meat of what the goal and what the objective is. And I just I've witnessed it myself, younger advisors, they they want to rush to show you that financial plan, but they don't have a good understanding of what makes you tick and what are you trying to accomplish and what are your fears, what are the things that keep you up at night, your concerns.

Scott Carson: 11:35

Agreed, Joe. And we need to understand, again, by asking the right questions, how important is that to them and where do they want to rank that or put that in the scheme of their overall financial plan?

Joe Allaria: 11:47

Yeah. And those are all really good conversations to get into. And I love when I'm in that moment having that conversation, I feel inside like I'm doing my job. But we know that those conversations don't happen with every advisor, you know, in every client meeting. I think the maybe one of the biggest reasons is time constraints. You know, with a lot of firms out there, it's just a different model. And we understand advisors provide investment advice. That's part of the title, investment advisor. So we get that. But I think if you maybe, if you're an advisor out there, even that's listening, and you have 300, 400, 500 clients, you don't have the time to get into that depth. And so you have to just pick off the low-hanging fruit, the investments, make sure that your ducks are in a row there, and then you got to move on because you got six more meetings that same day. So, what helps is any firm that has a low client-to-advisor ratio should inherently have more time to get deeper into those conversations. And if you get the response, I've never had anyone ask me these questions before, or no one's asked me these questions before. We know, again, we're doing a good job. Let's go to the next one, Scott. So we're we got five things here that a retirement-focused advisor should do. Why do we say retirement focused? Well, is not all advisors specialize in the area of retirement. So maybe these aren't five things that every advisor should do. If you're an advisor working with younger people, you have other things you should focus on. But if you are an advisor who works primarily with people that are trying to transition into retirement, if you're listening to this show, it's the retirement power hour. That's what we're talking about, is getting into retirement. You're either close or you're retired. So that's why we're talking about five things a retirement focused advisor should do. And the second one, Scott, you have here develop a financial plan that is consistent with the client's goals and dreams.

Scott Carson: 13:41

I like to look at it this way: all of us go through essentially three phases of life. We go through what I would call a learning phase, and then most people enter the workforce. So that becomes their accumulating years, right? And then there'll come a time, hopefully for everyone, where they'll transition to retirement and that becomes their distribution years. Right. So learning, accumulating, and distributing. And we have to have a solid plan in place, no different than an architect developing house plans for somebody to build a new home, right? You got to have a blueprint. You got to have something to work off of. And if you stick to the plan, right, they typically will be successful.

Joe Allaria: 14:24

Well, on what you said there, I think the learning phase is pretty much mapped out for us. Right. Because we just follow, you know, K through 12, go to college. It's all mapped out. You know what it's going to look like for the most part. Even the working phase, I would say the vast majority of people, it's sort of mapped out. When you hit that retirement phase, it's a completely, it's not mapped out at all because everyone's situation is different. We have to answer questions like, where is the money going to come from? How much can we take out safely? So, yeah, it's a very new, new phase in life. Would you agree?

Scott Carson: 14:56

It's definitely new. And I go back to my earlier comment about we as individuals shape our ideas based upon things we witnessed in our own family. So, give you a great example. In an era of my parents' generation, let's say, yeah, many of those people retired with defined benefit pension plans. So a lot of kids looked at their parents and said, geez, the roadmap kind of appears to be you work until you're 62, 65-ish, you tell your employee you're going to leave, and then you start collecting a check every month for the rest of your life.

Joe Allaria: 15:34

Pretty easy if that's the case, then that's again, that's kind of mapped out for you. You don't have to think about where the money's going to come from or running out.

Scott Carson: 15:43

So they didn't have to think about all the other caveats that come along with the transition to a distribution model.

Joe Allaria: 15:51

Which guy, I think, leads to your point of develop a financial plan, you know, or develop a retirement plan. What does that mean? We talk about it a lot on this show. What does it mean to develop a retirement plan physically? What does that look like?

Scott Carson: 16:03

Sure. Well, again, it goes back to that questioning session with the prospects or clients to understand exactly what it is they want to get out of retirement. Do you see yourself staying in the area? If not, where would you go? Why would you go there? Do you have any idea what it costs to go there? What would you do there? How do you see your travel activities in retirement? Again, a myriad of questions can be asked to start the client thinking, you know what, haven't really thought about that. Or yeah, we have thought about that and we need to do some more work on it.

Joe Allaria: 16:37

And the way I think it materializes is, you know, we show sort of that roadmap, but a roadmap and a retirement plan sort of looks like let's map out year by year income, expected expenses, like you said, maybe one-time expenses that come up, changes in distribution, portfolio withdrawals. And you just kind of look at it from when you're doing a financial plan, you're looking at the financial aspects of everything in your life that might happen, including, you know, how long you live and expenses as you get older, inflation, all that stuff. But the way it looks is you just kind of look year by year, you know, and see what we think will happen to your entire financial situation, your portfolio year by year, based on what you know, the things that you want to do. Like you said, where you want to go, where you want to be, how much money you're gonna spend. Do you need to spend a little bit less? Can you spend a little bit more? And then you just start to massage that. But it's a retirement, that's a retirement plan, is you have to map it out the best you can. It's like building a house, like you said, that architect putting plans together, a blueprint for your house. The house isn't built yet, but it's as close as we can get to understanding what that house is going to look like, the measurements of each component, you know, what goes where, which way the doors are gonna open. I mean, you're really trying to get down into the details. And that's what a good retirement plan looks like too. And it's kind of like garbage in, garbage out. If you don't get down to the nitty-gritty details of what changes are gonna occur in the future, you're not gonna get good output. So bad input, bad output. Scott, the third one here. So we talk about retirement, kind of projecting out retirement. Your third one here is manage the relationship from a comprehensive and holistic perspective. So, what does that mean?

Scott Carson: 18:21

There are things outside of what the typical person would think of that are important to incorporate into that plan. And when I say comprehensive, it's looking at the big picture, which might include assisting someone with applying for Medicare, helping them with a Medicare supplement. Again, they get bombarded by these things when they get to the age of 65. Oh, yeah. And most people who've had no experience don't know where to go, don't know what to choose. So being able to provide advice on those two things are critical when it comes to helping that person with a comprehensive and holistic plan. And then we all know that as we age, certain things happen to our bodies, and we may need to see medical specialists, helping people understand their insurance benefits to know how to use those properly and most effectively, because it can become a very big expense in the overall scheme of things.

Joe Allaria: 19:20

That could be medical health or even long-term care, just to throw that in.

Scott Carson: 19:25

Exactly.

Joe Allaria: 19:26

The concern for retirees. But there are other areas that they may not, like taxes and estate planning where an advisor might not do your taxes, and we'll get to that in a second. But there are still some things that you can do as an advisor that we can do to help reduce taxes to get more efficient, right? To help the estate be set up better, even with beneficiary designations. So I don't have to be an attorney to help with beneficiary designations or, you know, on the tax front, there are things you can do. And I don't know if that's where you were going.

Scott Carson: 19:55

A good, well-rounded advisor should be competent in all of those areas. Now, again, that doesn't mean do a tax return or draft a will. Right. Right? We don't do that. That's outside the scope of our fiduciary and professional duties. But we need to have great resources. An advisor should have a good resource pipeline to introduce clients to help with those things because they all matter very importantly. So that's what I mean by the holistic approach. Don't just stick to managing assets. You just got to continually ask questions every time you're in front of a client to understand if situations have changed. And again, do they need to be introduced to someone to update their estate plan as an example? Right. Have they had a unique tax event? Do they need to be introduced or coordinated with their tax preparer or CPA? Those are only able to be accomplished by just continually asking questions every time you're in front of that client.

Joe Allaria: 20:56

And like I said, there are a lot of things that can be done without being an accountant, without being an attorney, just as an advisor. You know, I think about taxes. I think about looking at things like does a Roth conversion make sense? And we we haven't done a show only on Roth conversions. I'm sure we will at some point, but you know, that's a strategy from a tax standpoint that can help save taxes over a long period of time. Tax loss harvesting is something that you can do in the year to save you taxes this year. You know, like for example, in 2022, the market's been down. We've been able to do some tax loss harvesting here at our firm to lock in some losses without exiting the market, you know, and that will help offsetting future gains, offsetting a little bit of this year's ordinary income. So there's things that can be done. What accounts should you be contributing to? That's also a tax conversation. So advisors, again, should be having those conversations with you. This is a good segue into the next, the fourth point, Scott, uh, you know, that we're talking about things that a retirement focused advisor should do, which is coordinate advice amongst all clients, professional advisors. Before we get into that, is if you're listening right now and you've kind of already heard a few things that maybe you haven't been advised on and want to get some advice on, you can go to our website, retirement powerhourpodcast.com. You can right there on the website, you can either ask a question or you can just schedule a call with one of our advisors, and then we'll start the process of asking those thought-provoking questions and helping you uh with whatever you're looking to get help on. But like I was saying, we can do a lot in tax planning, we can do some things in estate planning. We don't give tax advice or estate planning advice. If a client needs that, now we need to get an attorney involved. We need to get an accountant involved. Scott, I think too often everyone in the professional circle, accountant, advisor, we just say, not we, but I think a lot of those individuals will say, I'm just gonna do my part and I'm not really in control or I don't have any responsibility on any of the other parts.

Scott Carson: 22:57

Most of the people that I have seen over the years are very busy and don't always understand what a lawyer actually does for me when it comes to an estate plan? What questions do I need to ask of my banker if I want to go about financing a project? And that's where a good advisor, being well-rounded, being holistic in nature, knowing as much as they can about the client's situation, allows them to help coordinate that advice. And if we can help the client be more efficient in getting the right answers that they need for their specific situation, it turns out to be a better result at the end for the client.

Joe Allaria: 23:33

Yeah. I think the default is again, everyone does their own thing and then runs everything through the client. And the client is automatically their own coordinator of their financial plan. So the accountant says, talk to your investment advisor about doing X, Y, and Z. And the estate planner says, Okay, I'll set up your trust, but there's no action to do the most important part, which is fund the trust. One time someone came in, I asked about estate planning. They said, Nope, we're all good. We got that done. We have a trust. And I said, Oh, okay, great. So then we're going through investment statements, and I see they have a joint investment account. And I'm like, You said you had a trust, right? And they said, Yeah, oh yeah, we got a trust. I said, Well, did you ever fund the trust? And they kind of looked at me with a blank stare. What do you mean? I said, Well, titling your assets in the name of the trust so that those assets actually go through the trust. They said, I thought the attorney did all that. They did all a bunch of stuff. And I said, Well, I can see right here by the the registration on this account that this account at least has not been funded in the trust. And there may be other things. So rather than have everything run through the client, you know, you listener out there, you know, you don't know about accounting, you don't know the investment side, you don't know the estate planning side, that's not what you do. So rather than have everything run through you, it's a retirement-focused advisor should be helping coordinate all of those things.

Scott Carson: 24:53

Yeah, I think one of the most important things an advisor can do is develop their own relationships with those other professionals, again, CPAs, lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, and make sure you're comfortable with the way they manage their business and interact with clients so that you have a good resource to go to when these situations come up. And most people don't just wake up on a Thursday morning and say, you know what, probably need to get an estate plan today. No. It typically is a result of an interaction potentially with their advisor who asks some thought-provoking questions to the point where the client says, you know what, we've been thinking about this and we think we need a trust. Okay, why do you feel that way? Well, I don't know. I just hear friends talk about them, I read about them. Okay, well, let me understand more about the situation, and I think we can probably guide you in the right direction to the right professional to help truly determine if a trust is important and how to utilize it best in your situation.

Joe Allaria: 25:56

Sure. You know, I think about this in medical terms because we are all forced to be our own coordinator of our own health plan and benefits. And most of us are not qualified to do that, including myself. You know, I'm among the least qualified. But that's sort of exactly what we have to do. We have to go see the general practitioner who might refer us to a specialist, and then we go see that specialist. And, you know, how much are they actually talking? I mean, you've got the medical records, but it sure doesn't feel very coordinated when, you know, the two people, you know, they don't know each other, they've never had a direct conversation. And then you're having to make big decisions like, well, do I get this surgery or where do I go? I mean, it's really all on your shoulders. And it's something that, you know, with medical stuff, with dental stuff, it's just hard to do. And it doesn't leave you feeling like you've got a great experience. And I've often wished, I wish I could have a medical quarterback, like a financial quarterback, but a medical quarterback. Just uh tell me all the things I need to be doing, where to go, who to talk to. And people they're telling me to go see are actually people they know, they've talked to about my situation. Boy, wouldn't that be awesome to have from a medical standpoint? But you can get it from a financial standpoint. I guess that's the good news. It's a silver lining.

Scott Carson: 27:13

Well, real quick, you can actually, it's becoming more prevalent in the medical community now. So having a concierge doctor is the equivalency of having a holistic financial advisor. That's right. It's just they're focusing on the health piece, right, and the advisor is focusing on the finance piece.

Joe Allaria: 27:31

Yeah. And if if you're in retirement and you've built up all of your savings over your entire life, you've probably have as much money or more money than you've ever had before, and you don't want to make a mistake. You know, the stakes are higher at that point in time. So the importance of coordinating and having a cohesive plan that works together just gets more and more and more important as you get older. Scott, the last one here, something that doesn't deal a lot with the financial component, but still something that you mentioned is important for a retirement-focused advisor to do is to help clients transition to retirement emotionally and psychologically. So why should a retirement-focused financial advisor be talking about the emotional and the psychological part of retirement?

Scott Carson: 28:16

Well, I think the big reason there, Joe, is if the client has not prepared themselves well on the emotional, psychological aspect of transitioning from those working slash accumulating years to that retirement slash distribution years, oftentimes there's going to be a bad outcome, or at least not the outcome that that client worked all those years to achieve. So coaching and helping clients understand what retirement really looks like is critical to helping that client again shape and formulate their ideas, their plans, their objectives, whether it be travel, whether it be post-retirement, some type of employment. A lot of people do that to keep busy. So again, you got to ask a lot of questions to see if clients have prepared themselves mentally for this next phase of their life because it could last another 30 years. That's a long time to go down a path without a plan and just wander.

Joe Allaria: 29:20

Absolutely. It's the folks that retire and they don't stay retired. They go back to work. You think about them because they're just, they're not satisfied, they're not fulfilled. What I try to help some clients think about is how can you get the most out of your life savings and what you've worked so hard to actually have the retirement that you want to have. And that doesn't mean not talking about everyone having a yacht, having a jet, having five different homes. I'm just talking about using your money in ways that will provide you more fulfillment. And maybe they were things, again, a lot of people don't even think about what they can do because they're so focused on that first hurdle of can I even retire? I just want to take what I need and. Maintain and maybe do a little travel and things, but nothing too crazy. But as time goes, we start having conversations with some clients about help me design a charitable gifting plan, or I want to gift to my kids or my grandkids. Well, how much can I do? And those conversations are really exciting, really fun, because they really mean something to the people that you're working with. You know, at that point they're confident in their own plan. Now they're looking, how can I impact others with what I've saved up and what I've what I've built?

Scott Carson: 30:28

Advisors will find that every client's situation is different and unique. And some adhere to that transition quicker than others.

Joe Allaria: 30:36

Oh, yeah.

Scott Carson: 30:37

But I think they'll find, as an advisor, that clients have to be convinced and fully comfortable to make those gifting decisions or spending decisions that they put off and put off, even though they really want to do it down deep because it makes them feel good about putting their capital to a higher purpose. That's right. And that's where the planning process, if you continually keep that in front of the client before long, the black and white under good and bad circumstances will reflect whether they have the financial wherewithal to do those things. And as you said, Joe, that's probably going to be some of the most rewarding experiences for advisors when they can tell a client with confidence, you know what? If you want to start gifting to the kids annually, I think it's more than affordable. If you want to give more money to your church, there's a great way to do it through a qualified charitable distribution, which helps tax-wise. If you want to commit money to a community foundation, let's do a what-if scenario. The advisor can do a what-if scenario in their plan and show them that if they decide to commit on a regular basis to some sort of charitable entity, that it really is not going to affect the bottom line when the day is over. Absolutely. I'm just saying every client's different and unique, and they'll tell you what's important to them. And based upon that, you can guide them in the right direction.

Joe Allaria: 32:16

I found that some people have, like you said, no problem transitioning over to retirement. They've been thinking about it for a long time. They have a lot of hobbies, they know exactly what they want to do. But other people really struggle with it. And I think advisors who are, again, retirement focused would be doing their clients a disservice to not be trained and equipped to have those discussions with them because who else are they going to talk to about that? So there's only so many things that uh, you know, one person can specialize in. We talked about five today, but one of the five is to make sure that you have a network of other professionals readily available. And so, you know, we're not trying to be, you shouldn't, as a retirement-focused advisor, try to be a jack of all trades, but do what you do very well. We hit five. There's a lot of things we could add to this. I'll throw in a bonus number six really quick, and that's educate. A good advisor, good retirement-focused advisor should be educating his or her clients all the time. And really that's what we're doing. So we we check that off the box. But if your advisor isn't educating you, isn't bringing ideas to the table, doing things, I think, like this, or whether it's a written communication periodically, then again, I think they're probably doing you a disservice. You don't need to get the PhD, as we said, you don't need to understand how the watch works, but you do need to know what time it is, and you need to be in the ballpark of you know, understanding kind of the things that are happening and the things to be aware of. But we did a whole episode, Scott, uh I think it was episode five, designing your retirement life. That that pairs well with some of our discussion today. Definitely point number five. So for those that are listening, feel free to go back, check that episode out. Uh, it's a good one. Scott, thanks for coming back, being again on the show again. Always good to have you. Glad to be here. All right. And thank you for everyone for listening to the Retirement Power Hour where we help listeners invest wiser and retire better. Take care. Hey everyone, this is Joe Allaria. I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Scott Carson as we talked about five things a retirement focused advisor should do. Now, if you listen to the interview and you have some questions that are still unanswered and you want to learn more, you can go to retirement powerhourpodcast.com and click work with me. It starts by scheduling just a 30-minute phone call with myself, and we'll start to talk through your situation. And what our team will do is we'll prepare a free complimentary, no obligation retirement analysis for you, where we'll show you some of the areas that you may be weak in or some of the things that you haven't thought about up to this point. We'll kind of give you that roadmap like we talked about on the show and get you started off on the right foot. So again, if that's you, go to retirement powerhourpodcast.com, click work with me, and schedule that 30-minute phone call. And one favor I would ask of you, everyone that's listening, go to Apple, go to Spotify, and leave a review on the show. You have no idea how much this helps to increase our reach. And we would just greatly appreciate you. Go give us some feedback, tell us how we're doing. Hopefully you're enjoying it so far, but leave a review, Apple, Spotify, anywhere you're listening to the show, and I will greatly appreciate it. With that, look forward to talking with you all again on our next episode on the Retirement Power Hour, where we help listeners invest wiser and retire better. Take care.

Speaker: 35:32

Thank you for listening to the Retirement Power Hour Podcast. All material discussed on this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as individual tax, legal, or investment advice. Investing involves risk of loss, and investors should be prepared to bear potential losses. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. J oe Allaria is an investment advisor representative of Carson Allaria Wealth Management, a registered investment advisory firm. Information discussed on this podcast may be derived from third parties that are believed to be reliable. The Carson Allaria Wealth Management does not control or guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of such information and disclaims all liability for damages resulting from such sources. Any references to third parties are provided as a convenience and do not constitute an endorsement.