How To Bulletproof A Retirement Income Plan

A plan that looks perfect on paper can fall apart in a single day. We walk through two true stories that start with strong income, low rates, and tidy portfolios—and then get hit by the kind of events that no spreadsheet can predict. A cancer diagnosis. A fall from a ladder. A pension election that seemed smart until it erased $8,000 a month for a surviving spouse. These moments reveal the cracks most people miss: survivor income, healthcare gaps before Medicare, taxable withdrawals as a single filer, and the silent cost of picking the wrong pension option.

From there, we unpack the “quadruple whammy” that drains retirements—withdrawals, market losses, fees, and taxes—and show how to counter it with clear income segmentation, protected cash flow, and smart tax strategy. We break down the ten must-answer questions that shape a resilient plan: how you’ll live, where you’ll live, how much net income you need with inflation, when to claim Social Security for the strongest survivor benefit, and how to fund healthcare and long-term care without sinking your savings. You’ll hear why relying on one bucket of pre-tax money is risky, how to pair pensions with life insurance or annuity income for true survivor protection, and why liquidity outside retirement accounts matters when life hits hard.

We keep it practical and human, blending strategy with lessons learned from families who thought they were set. If you want a retirement you can count on through market volatility, tax changes, and health surprises, this guide will help you spot your blind spots and fix them. Subscribe for more candid, step-by-step retirement planning insights, share this with someone who needs a stress test, and leave a review to tell us the next topic you want us to tackle.

To learn more about Brad Pistole and the Ozark Retirement Group, please visit www.ozarksretirement.com 

Transcript

Welcome And Why Plans Fail

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to State Money Radio with your host, Brad Pistol. Brad is a retirement income and tax planning certified professional, primarily serving clients in the Midwest, but he's sought after nationally for his expertise in helping people secure their retirement. Mr. Pistol is a licensed life insurance professional in approximately 20 different states, and he specializes in working with people who are near retirement and those who have already retired with wealth management, income planning, and asset protection strategies using life, health, long-term care, and annuity insurance products. And now, here to talk with you about securing your retirement, it's your host, Brad Pistol.

Snowmageddon And Life’s Costly Surprises

The Stakes: When The Unexpected Strikes

Joe And Nancy’s Hidden Risk

Aftermath: Taxes, Income, And Insurance Gaps

Quadruple Whammy Of Retirement Withdrawals

Bob And Mary’s Pension Shock

Zero Survivor Option Consequences

Ten Must-Answer Retirement Questions

Housing, Income Needs, And Longevity

Social Security, Healthcare, And LTC

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Well, hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us again today for Safe Money Radio. You might be listening on the radio, you might be listening to a podcast. If you didn't know there was a podcast, if you're in your car right now or listening wherever you are to one of our local stations, then just go to YouTube and type in Brad Pistol, and you can subscribe to our podcast and to our show. That way you never miss any information. Because today we're going to be talking about something that is just so vitally important when it comes to your retirement income plan. And this is something that I do with everyone that I meet with. When they come in and they already have a plan in place or they kind of have a plan in place and they say, hey, we just want the free review. Can you look at our plan and tell us whether or not we're in good shape? I'll say, sure, I would love to. And here's the thing: I'm looking for whether or not I can kill their retirement plan. Now that seems kind of lethal, doesn't it? Why would a retirement planner look at another plan and say, let's see whether or not I can kill your current plan? But this is what I mean. Everyone wants to know the answer to this question. Will my current retirement plan survive anything and everything that I face in life? And so I want to know whether or not certain things that can and will happen in life can happen and it can stop your current plan where you thought you were in good shape, but maybe you're not. And so what we're going to do on the show today is I'm going to give you a couple of real life examples of stories that actually happened to clients of ours shared with permission about what happened where they thought they had a great plan in place, but then they found out that they didn't. Now they became our clients after these things happened because they found out the hard way that their plan wasn't the plan they needed to have in place. But before we say all that, I just want to say this. You know, at the time that I record this show, which I've been recording shows now for 17 years, my brain is always working on a show. I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning thinking about this show. I'm always writing and recording, whether it's new books or it's articles for publications or it's radio shows or podcasts, whether I'm a guest somewhere. I got asked this morning to go speak at an event in Las Vegas this summer to be a keynote speaker. And so my brain is just always on the go when it comes to retirement planning. And this morning I woke up and I realized as it was five degrees outside that you know what? I'm over it. I'm over Snow Mageddon. Snow Mageddon happened here in uh late January in the Ozarks. I don't know where you are in the country, but it hit a huge majority of the country. Over 200 million people were affected by Snow Mageddon. And I assure you this has everything to do with today's show because sometimes it's the unexpected things in life that happen that just wipe you out, just leave you completely out of gas. And even though you might expect it a little bit, sometimes it's things that are completely unexpected that come in and just suck the wind out of your cells, if you know what I mean. So here in the Ozarks, we got about eight to ten inches of snow. Now they were saying six inches, and then it turned into ten, and then it turned into it was going to be eighteen on some channels, but that didn't happen. It did uh snow about eight to ten inches. And so, in preparation for this, because in years past I've done way too much shoveling of snow in my life, I bought a snow plow for this year. Now, I will tell you, I'm the first to admit I'm incredibly blessed by God, by our creator. I am way more blessed than I ever deserved to be. I live on a beautiful property, and I have a gated property with a long circle drive and then a driveway that goes on back behind the house, and an eight-car garage, and all this stuff sounds wonderful and beautiful until you realize all the problems that come with it, until you realize what snow does to the cover of a pool, until you realize that when the eight-car garage, which has a slope to it both sides, creates a great big place for ice and snow to gather, and you can't get your vehicles out for four and five and six days at a time, all kinds of issues. You can't get out the driveway because it's sloped, and out the front gates, you can't stop, you can't come up, you can't go out. But anyway, I'll just say this. When all the snow and the ice started and happened, thankfully it happened on a weekend, and we closed the office for a couple of days. Most all of the people in the Ozarks there, uh, businesses were closed down. They told everyone just don't travel. So I did what I always do. I'm a get up and go after it kind of person. You know, I've owned eight to ten different farms in my lifetime. I've always worked on tractors and done all kinds of things, and so I don't have a tractor at this property, they're at my farm. So I got up and thought, well, I'm gonna do what I'd planned to do when the first snow comes. I'm gonna get out there with my snow plow and get after it. And then I found out that the type of plow that I have only works blowing snow in certain directions at one angle. And so if you're not very engineer-like in your mindset, you'll just blow snow right over the places that you just cleared snow. And so it becomes a bit of a challenge to figure out, okay, how am I going to have to create this pattern to where I can clear? And of course, the batteries don't last very long. It does a beautiful job, but eight to ten inches of snow is a lot of snow. And once it's melted and refrozen a little bit, it's not going to work the way you want. It'll take it down to about an inch to two inches, and then you just have melted and refreezed ice. And so here's the thing. After about four straight days of dealing with the snow plow, which included not just working on my property, but also going to our office complex and blowing off all of our sideways or our sidewalks and around the corner and being a good neighbor, doing it for some of the other businesses there, and laying salt everywhere, all over my steps, the front drive, the carport, the back by the garages at the office. I just decided that you know what? I'm over it. I'm over all the snow and the ice and the two weeks in a row of 90 degree difference in weather in about a 30-day period. I mean, do you remember Christmas wearing a t-shirt, 75, 76 degrees, all-time record highs, and then it's what, minus five, minus 10? And we stay that way, we stay below freezing for over two weeks. I'm over it. Hey, I went in and not just the ice and the snow and not being able to travel or all those different things. I also went to the store and purchased some space heaters because I have big high ceilings. Yeah, beautiful place. But boy, it's not great during the winter when the heat escapes up to the upper level. So I purchased some space heaters, and this is what I learned about those, that two of them placed too closely together will trip your breakers. That will then turn off your gas fireplace. It may or may not turn back on the way it's supposed to. Uh one shower froze completely because it was on an outside wall with a north wind blowing at minus five to minus 10 miles an hour. And so just all the fun stuff that comes with snow and the expenses. I mean, can you imagine what the heating bills were like? You know, because about the time this airs, even though hopefully we'll be out of this, you're going to hear this, you know, around late February, early March. Hopefully, we're starting to think about spring, but you never know when the Ozarks, we might have another eight to ten inch snow during the time you hear this. But at the time I record it today, there's still snow on the ground, piled up in piles 10 and 12 feet high in parking lots, here at the office, at the house, and in other places, where it's going to be a long time before the snow's gone. And it created all kinds of electric bills and energy bills and gas bills and all kinds of other problems. If you had any water lines burst, if you had anything happen, if you had the expenses of a car accident or anything like that, you know what I'm going to talk about on today's show, and that is what happens when the unexpected happens. Sometimes you're not planning on the storm that comes through, or the heart attack, or the stroke, or the diagnosis of cancer, or when a spouse dies sooner than expected, completely unexpected, before retirement, or shortly after retirement. There's just all kinds of things that can happen. So today, we're going to be talking about your current financial plan. It's more specifically your retirement income plan. And sure, things may look great on the surface, but what happens when you lift up the rug and look under it? Is there a bunch of dirt and debris under there? Can it cause a problem that you're unaware of? So we're going to be talking about this on the show today. Stay with us. 866-780-7233. You can call us anytime. We are retirement income certified professionals. You can always go to our website at Ozarksretirement.com. Just click on the contact us button, and I will personally get back in touch with you to schedule a free financial consultation. Remember, 866-780-7233. There's always someone standing by to take your call. So, friends, like I said today on the show and the podcast, we're going to be talking about different specific examples of where people thought they were prepared with a great retirement income plan in place, but something happened that was completely unexpected, and they found out that they weren't as prepared as they thought. As a matter of fact, it flipped things completely over on their head, and they found out that they were in dire straits. So even though this isn't the most inspiring message regarding a feel-good, because it's going to share some stories, real life stories that are painful to listen to, it should inspire you because it should make you realize, hey, there's one of two ways to learn things in life. Either from your own mistakes, which are very painful, or from the mistakes of other people. And if you have the opportunity and the benefit and the blessing of learning from the mistakes of someone else, and you don't have to go through that yourself, then you won't ever go through the failing to plan is planning to fail process. You can plan not to fail by having the right plan in place because you watched and learned from the expertise of someone else who walks through this with people every day, or because you watched someone else make the mistake. So today, I want to share a couple of situations where these people didn't realize it. But the plan that they put in place, that they chose, that they trusted, was not the right plan. So let's start with Joe and his wife Nancy. Joe was 60 years old and had a great income. Higher than the average in the Ozarks. Now, nationwide, it might be still above average. Joe was making$300,000 a year at age 60. He had worked a job for a long time, had a pretty decent 401k, a quarter of a million dollars. Now his wife Nancy was five years younger, age 55, and they made the decision earlier in life for her to stay home to help raise the kids. And you know, after the kids were raised, because he had such great income, she just stayed home. She never went back to work. So Nancy didn't have any 401k or anything like that to speak of. They really didn't worry about that, though, because here's the situation. They had$300,000 a year in income. This job provided their health insurance for both of them. Joe had a$100,000 life insurance policy that was provided through work. They didn't even have to pay for it. And they only owed$200,000 on their$800,000 home. Really nice home, a great asset. And because their income was so high, far above their spending need, they didn't worry about paying off the home. It was only a 4% rate. And so they had taken the advice of a lot of people out there. And when you have a low rate like that, you know, don't try to pay it off too early. Just keep making payments on it, maybe make some extra payments, but invest that money for the difference because maybe you can make 7 or 8, 9, 10% on that money and just keep that low home rate. So they did. They had no other life insurance in place. They didn't feel like they needed it. They had a quarter of a million dollar 401k and a$300,000 a year salary. And so this was their plan because they had no other debts, their cars were paid for, all the things that they did on a daily basis were paid for, no other major expenditures. They had planned for Joe to work until his full retirement age of 67. He didn't want to start Social Security until he hit what's called FRA, full retirement age. And they thought, you know what, what we'll probably do here in these last six or seven years of working is let's make some double house payments so that we have it paid off. You know, that$200,000 mortgage will be gone by the time Joe retires. He expected to have a max Social Security benefit because his income of$300,000, it had been high for a long time, for 25 plus years. However, the unexpected happened. Late in his 60th year, Joe found out that he had cancer. And after six months of chemotherapy, they found out that he had incurable cancer. And you know what the saying is regarding chemo and cancer. If the chemo doesn't kill you, the cancer will. If the cancer doesn't kill you, the chemo will. It kind of works in reverse to each other. And in this case, the chemo and the cancer combined killed Joe. He passed away just early in the first couple of months after turning age 61. Now you might remember from earlier, his wife Nancy was 55 at the beginning example, but by the time that Joe passed away after the diagnosis six months later, she was 56. Now, let's take a quick look at a reminder of the situation and see if we have a problem here with our current plan. An income of$300,000 a year, great income. A quarter of a million dollars in a 401k, all tax deferred. A$100,000 life insurance policy provided by work, which they did benefit from, a$200,000 mortgage balance at 4%. Do you see the problem? Now I realize you may not be a financial planner and you may not know some of the things I'm about to tell you, but I can tell you they went from a great situation where they had almost double the income of their bills, weren't going to have any problems once he retired. The Social Security alone with max benefits, with a house paid off, meant that they were going to be able to pocket several thousand dollars a month in income that they could save and invest. But because the unexpected happened, and Joe died at age 61 when his wife Nancy was just 56, they had an immediate loss of$300,000 a year in income because she didn't work. Life insurance of$100,000 would still leave a$100,000 balance on the home mortgage if she took it and paid that off. But that may not be wise, because remember, they have no income now. Because she was only 56, she couldn't file for a Social Security widow's benefit. If you don't know this, you cannot file for the widow's benefit until you turn age 60. That's four more years of waiting before any Social Security benefit. Distributions from the 401k, while it was a quarter of a million dollars, remember that's 100% taxable. Now there wasn't even enough money in the 401k, which seems like a lot of money, a quarter of a million dollars. Yes, but he made$300,000 a year in income. That wouldn't even replace one year of income. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, yeah, but now she's going to be single and there won't be double the expenses. Yes, and in case you don't know this, during the year the death of a spouse, you can only file joint married filing jointly one more time. And after that, you fall back into the single tax bracket, which is basically taking the numbers for income and cutting them in half. You fall into the higher tax brackets so much quicker. So distributions from the 401k would be 100% taxable. She'd have to be very wise about when and how to use that. She's now in a single filer tax bracket. She also lost her credible health insurance coverage because that was provided by Joe's job. So here's the problem there is immediately no income. There is immediately no health insurance. Immediately she is filing after the last tax filing. She is now a single taxpayer. What you have now is someone who, just out of curiosity, I'm sure many of you are thinking, well, what's Mary's longevity like? Well, in her family, her mother's still alive at 92 years old. She has ants that are alive in their late 80s and mid-90s. She might live for another 40 years and she currently has no income. Friends, this is not something that you want to have happen. This could have been avoided. And in the second half of the show, we're going to show you different ways they could have done things differently to avoid this situation. We're going to continue talking about how to deal with life when the unexpected happens. Is your current retirement income plan the right one? Friends, that's why I talk about this in my best-selling book, Bulletproof, The Safe and Secure Retirement Income Plan. And a lot of people have told me over the years the part that they love about the book the most is at the end of every chapter, it's like worksheets. There are questions to walk through that makes you think through your own current situation and whether or not you have the right plan in place. And I very meticulously worked through and created the questions for each chapter. And if you would like a free copy of that book, I'll give you a signed copy, absolutely free. Just call us anytime. That's 866-780 safe. You can also go to Ozarksretirement.com, just click on the contact us button and request a free financial consultation. I will personally meet with you and then I will give you a signed copy from my own hands. So anytime 866-780-7233, there's always someone standing by to take your call. Friends on the show today, we've been talking about some very serious subject matters. We've been talking about whether or not your plan, your current retirement income plan, is the right plan. And for so many people, you know, I've been hosting this show for 17 years now, over 800 episodes. I can't tell you how many times in the tens of thousands of people that I've spoken to over the years, how many times people say, I really don't have a plan? I mean, all I did was what everyone told me to do. I signed up for the 401k, and I've been having money withheld into that pay out of my paycheck going into that plan, and I don't know what that means when I retire. I I hope it works. I mean, I people just don't think through it a lot. They deal with the life process of every day. They're married, they have kids, they have grandkids, they have work, they have church, they have programs, extracurricular activities, events to go to, and they don't sit by and think through, well, I wonder whether or not when I retire, I'm prepared for taking money back out of my 401k or my 403B, the tax ramifications, what would happen if something happened to me, if I got sick, do I have long-term care in place? Just all these things that come into play. That's why in the second half of the show, we're gonna do a revisiting of the top 10 questions that I ask people before they retire. It's an absolute must. But before we get there, let's continue with another situation today. We learned about Joe and Nancy, and their situation probably sounded pretty good. This one's gonna sound great. It's gonna sound like, well, surely nothing could happen to ruin this plan, but I'm gonna tell you a real life story. So here we go. We've got Bob and Mary. Bob is age 67, Mary's age 64. Now, Bob was a retired engineer. You know what an engineer is like, right? They have charts for their charts. He had everything mapped out when he came to meet with me. He showed me where everything was, how everything was in place, and even told me, said, I don't know if you can help me or not, because I don't think I need help. Honestly, I have a pension. When I retired from work, I the beauty to a pension is I did really well, my company did really well, and I have an$8,000 a month lifetime pension. I was like, wow, this person probably doesn't need an annuity. They probably, maybe they don't even need life insurance. But guess what? He had already thought through that. Bob had said, you know, I don't have any other life insurance, I don't need it. Our monthly expenses are almost half of our current income. Now, to tell you a little bit more about the situation, his pension was eight hundred thousand or was eight.$8,000 a month, Mary's Social Security benefit was only$700 a month. She didn't work a lot outside the home. She did enough to have a benefit. And she did trigger her benefit at age 62. And so she had a$700 a month benefit to go with his$8,000. That's$8,700 a month. That was a lifetime pension for Bob. And he also has$300,000 in his$401K. So even better than the example before, where there was a quarter of a million. But since there was$8,700 a month in income, only a$100,000 balance on the home, half of the example from before, that's a$2,000 a month payment on the home at Get This, one of those beautiful rates that existed way back when, if you had one, hopefully you never got rid of it, at 3%. So$100,000 balance,$2,000 a month at 3%,$8,700 a month in income, and they only had$4,500 a month in expenses. That's taxes, insurance, expenditures. So on paper, wow,$8,700 a month in income,$4,500 a month in expenses. They were saving money right and left, had more money than they could ever do anything with, very charitably inclined, was giving money away very regularly, very involved in their church and a couple of charities. But then something happened. And I will never forget the day I got a phone call from Mary. Mary told me about going outside to clean the gutters. And she told me about Bob climbing up on the ladder. And as soon as she told me, I cringed because there's something I don't do anymore. There's a lot of things I do, but I don't climb ladders anymore, friends. At age 55, soon to be, I don't climb ladders. I've heard too many stories like the story I'm about to tell you. She said he was up working near a dormer, trying to reach over to clean the gutter out, and she and her son were standing outside, and they watched Bob fall off the ladder, and he landed on his head, fatally wounding him. It injured his spine and his skull, and he was dead instantly. They called 911, they witnessed everything that took place, which is unforgettable, and they went from a very happy, blessed, wonderful life to immediate sorrow. Now, let me tell you how things can get worse when the unexpected happens in life. Neither Bob nor Mary realized that he had elected a max benefit pension, which meant a zero benefit to the surviving spouse. This is an option that many of you have when you choose to take a lump sum distribution or the pension option. If you choose the pension option, they give you A, B, C, D, E, F, G, as you know. There's all these different options. You can take 100% to you, zero to the wife, 75 to you, 25 to the spouse, 50-50, all these different scenarios. Well, he chose the max benefit. As an engineer, he thought I can put that money to work, do other things with it, which they were good savers, but this is what he didn't plan for. He didn't plan to fall off a ladder at age 67 and kill himself. He didn't plan that he was going to die so young in life, leaving Mary widowed with no income. So here's what happens. When you choose the max benefit as the worker with the pension, if you outlive your spouse, that's a great choice. It was the right choice. A plus, good job. But if you pass first, you have, in essence, left your spouse with absolutely no income or inheritance whatsoever. So you better have a different plan in place there to back that up, like really significant life insurance that pays a tax-free benefit, or annuities and deferral with income riders that are waiting and ready to turn on income from it. In this case, the only thing that was left behind was the$300,000 tax-deferred 401k, which would mean taking distributions and paying taxes, again, like the example from before, meaning they still had a$2,000 a month mortgage. That's$24,000 a year. That also means she had no health insurance because remember, she's only 64. She's not yet on Medicare. That starts at 65, so she now has out-of-pocket for health insurance expenses. And the story just goes on and on and on. Very difficult, hard to work through emotionally, dealing not just with the loss of a spouse and a best friend and a partner, but also an immediate income loss. And do we downsize, do we sell the house? What can we do to generate income? So, friends, this is a very serious topic, but in the second part of the show, we're going to be talking about the top 10 questions that you must ask yourself before you retire so you don't ever fall into situations like this. You can call us anytime, 866-780 SAFE. That's 866-780-7233. I'll give you a copy of my best-selling book, Bulletproof, The Safe and Secure Retirement Income Plan. Just go to Ozarksretirement.com and click on contact us and request a free financial consultation. Remember, 866-780-7233. There's always someone standing by to take your call. Now, friends, on the first part of the show today, we've been talking about taking a look at your current retirement income plan, whether or not you have one. And it may just be that you've gone to the local shop that's on every single street corner, you know, the financial gurus in green. There is no life insurance planning, there's no long-term care planning. There is zero tax planning, but you've got some mutual funds, and you've been told what everyone's been told. Well, just stick it in there and let it ride. And whether it's 01, 08, 2020, 2022, times when the markets drop 30, 40, 50%, it's okay. Just let it ride. Which is an okay plan if you're 30 or 40, or if you never need distributions from the account, but guess what? That concept, that thinking, that that quote quote planning, which is no planning at all, does not work once you retire and start distributions. If it's just stick it in there and let it ride, it'll all be okay. You've got some good mutual funds. Well, trust me on this. I call something the quadruple whammy for a reason. When you retire and start taking distributions, that's debit number one from the account. If you're taking distributions in a year in which the market goes backwards, that's minus another debit from the account, which could be 20, 30, 40, or 50%. If you're paying your advisor a fee, which you are, and in the Ozarks, this part of the country, one and a half is normal. It can be as high as three. I've I've seen it as high as three. You're gonna give up another one and a half to three percent in management fees. That's a debit from the account. And oh yeah, for 90% of you, you're gonna have your money saved in a tax-deferred account, an IRA 401k, 403B, TSP, 457 plan. If it's a tax-deferred account, you're gonna pay taxes after taking the distribution. That's another debit from the account. So distributions plus losses plus fees plus taxes will wipe you out. Have you taken a look at your current plan? Can you kill that plan by extracurricular things in life happening? We talked about here a cancer diagnosis that led to a six-month later passing away, someone falling off of a ladder, which was immediate. You had no idea at the beginning of that day that by the end of the day you would have lost a spouse and an$8,000 a month pension. So, friends, these are the top 10 questions that you simply must ask yourself before you decide to retire. We've had a show about this already, only one time, and I've had so many people call in and email and say that show is so great. You can go online to YouTube and watch this as a we call we call it a short, but there's a video about this where we've got all the graphics and the numbers that'll post up on screen. Just go to YouTube and type in Brad Pistol. Top 10 questions you need to ask yourself before you retire. And I'm gonna read the questions to you, but then I want to walk back through some of them specifically as it pertains to what we're talking about today. So here we go. Before you retire, the top 10 questions you must ask yourself. What will my ideal retirement actually look like? In other words, how will you spend your time? Where do you want to live once you retire? Are you going to stay in your current home? Are you moving to a warmer location? We talked about Snow Mageddon at the beginning of the show. Are you headed to Florida or Arizona or Texas? Well, you may not get away from it. It snowed in Texas too. So, but that's the second question. How much annual income will you need to provide your expected standard of living in retirement? That's question number three. Will my retirement last no matter how long I live? Will my retirement savings last no matter how long I live? That's a very, very important question. Question number four. So here's question number five. Something that everyone faces, it's probably the number one question I get asked. What is the best time for me to claim my Social Security benefit? Question number six How will you pay for your future health care and potential long-term care needs? Do you have a plan for that, or is that something you've neglected to think through? Question number seven, do I have adequate emergency funds saved outside my retirement accounts? In both situations today, neither family had a lot saved in liquid money and emergency money because they had great pensions, they had great 401ks, they had plenty of income, they just weren't worried about the emergency. If they had an emergency, they'd take it out of their 401. But they did have an emergency and they lost income and that wasn't enough. And remember, distributions from a tax-deferred account are taxable. And if it happens after the loss of a spouse, it's going to be taxable at a single taxpayer rate. Question number eight, how much debt do you currently have? We're going to talk about that here in just a minute. It's a very important question. Question number nine, is your estate plan complete and up to date? In both cases we talked about where someone died sooner than expected, their estate plan, in my opinion, was not complete and up to date. Both of them should have had a minimum of half a million dollars in life insurance. It would have helped solve a major part of the problem that was left behind. But because one had no life insurance, because they had a big pension and one only had$100,000, it was provided at work and they didn't want to make those monthly payments on another policy, they basically left their spouse destitute and without income, having to go back to work. Question number 10, am I emotionally ready to stop working? It is a massively important question that my good friend Dr. Wade Powell, retirement planning expert, best-selling author. As a matter of fact, right now, right now on Amazon, he has one of the number one best-selling books regarding retirement planning. It's his 2026 edition of the Retirement Planning Guidebook, Navigating the Important Decisions for Retirement Success. I've already ordered my updated copy for 2026. I'll have him on the show to discuss it. Am I emotionally ready to stop working is covered in this book. So, friends, there you go. The top 10 questions that you need to be asking yourself before you retire. And in our last couple of segments, we're going to walk back through about five of these to go through specifically why they're so important because of situations that can happen that are beyond your control, things that you don't expect. So, friends, on the show, Safe Money Radio, for years and years and years, we've been talking to you about all different types of aspects of retirement income planning. Not just guaranteed pensions or annuities or life insurance. We're a full service house and shop here. We were blessed to double the size of our office space this year. We've got about 5,000 square feet in our office complex with multiple employees. We've added additional staff because we serve more than 20 states, clients all across the U.S. People listen to this show all across the U.S. And they have questions about things that your average broker, your average stock guy, your average retirement expert just isn't talking to them about. Haven't talked to them about Irma, income-related monthly adjustment amounts. They haven't talked to them about Social Security planning and taxation, what happens if one spouse dies, one leg of the stool falls apart, or about health insurance and Medicare planning and all the different things that come with it, especially tax planning. It's not how much you make, it's how much you keep that counts. So that's what we do every day. If you want to learn more about us, just go to Ozarksretirement.com. A lot of my videos are on the page. You can navigate and figure out how to get to YouTube and subscribe to the podcast if you're listening on the radio and you didn't know there was a podcast. You can see some of the people that I'm connected to. Tom Hegna, Ed Slott, Glenn Beck, a lot of amazing people that I've been connected to for many years. And you can check out any of the articles that I've written, and you can also just request a free financial consultation. We would love to sit down with you and talk to you free of charge and find out whether or not the plan that you have in place is the right plan. So call us anytime, 866-780-7233, or you can go to Ozarksretirement.com and click on contact us. Okay, so let's do this as we begin to wrap up the show today. We're talking about the 10 questions that you absolutely must ask yourself before you retire. I think too often in life we get busy with life and with working and all the different situations that are there, and we fail to do the most obvious things, which is to think through whether or not this retirement plan that we work on for 35 to 45 years is the right plan. Should we monitor and adjust from time to time? I mean, you think about it, you started saving for this retirement that was going to happen later in life in your 60s when you were in your 20s. Do you need to revisit the plan in your 30s, 40s, and 50s? Certainly right before you retire, you should be thinking through is what I was doing in my 20s, the way I was investing my risk portfolio and risk management, should it be the same when I'm about to retire? And the answer is almost always no. Not always, but you know, hey, maybe you're one of the lucky people that inherited millions and millions and millions of Roth dollars from your heirs, and you'll never pay taxes on anything, and you're the old saying you're you have more money than God, and you can do whatever you want whenever you want. Well, you would be one-tenth of one percent of all people on planet Earth. Those of us in the real world, that's not the case. My father was a financial planner for 55 years, and he didn't leave me one penny. Friends, I paid for his funeral. I paid for many things for my my mother. I love my father, was a great man, was really good at what he did. But he, like a lot of you listening right now, didn't take care of his own situation. On the airplane, he didn't put his mask on first to make sure he took care of himself so that he could take care of other people. He spent every penny of every check he ever got. He had two of everything, two sets of golf clubs, he had two golf carts, he had an extra vehicle, he took trips wherever he wanted to, and that's all great and fine and good. But when he passed away first, because he had chosen single payouts like we were talking about earlier, pensions, he chose single payouts on all three of his retirement accounts, which means my mother had a massively reduced income when he died. And I don't want that to happen to anyone that I love. So that's all of you, all of you who are listening. I love all of you. So grateful for you and for your patronage and for all the years that you followed us on this show. And I want to make sure that you've done the best that you can do to provide for you and your family so that surprises and when life happens, you're prepared for it. You know, this past weekend was supposed to be the 40th anniversary of my grandfather, Opel Pistol, the Opal Pistol Memorial Basketball Tournament at County Line, Arkansas, County Line High School. It's a junior high basketball tournament. Well, guess what? It snowed an unbelievable amount, and they had to cancel it. Sometimes life happens, and what you planned on happening, we were all going to go down for the 40th anniversary and help hand out the trophies in honor of a great man. That didn't happen. Sometimes those things happen, and what you thought was going to happen never happens again. Things get delayed, you know, and life happens. Now, on a much more serious level, you take our two examples from earlier. When you look at what happened to Joe and to Bob, they left their families in a serious mess because they didn't prepare the way they should have. So let's walk back through a couple of these questions today. Here's a big one. Where do you want to live once you retire? A lot of people are blessed to have more than one home. They have a lake house in the Ozarks, a lot of them. They have a vacation property down in Florida. They spend six months here and six months there. They snowbird. When you retire, are you able to maintain both places? Are you even able to maintain the house you're in right now? Maybe you raise children in your home and it was a 6,000 square foot home or a 4,000 square foot home, and now it's just you and your spouse. Do you need that much space? You need to think through where you're going to live, how expensive it's going to be, can you handle the property taxes on both places and make the appropriate decision regarding that? Here's another one. How much annual income will you need to provide your expected standard of living in retirement? Friends, so much of the time we try to shoot for 70 to 80% of our working income and think that I want to make sure that I'm able to have at least 70 to 80% of my current income get provided throughout my retirement years. Maybe you can live on less than that if you have paid off your homes and you've paid off all your debts and there's absolutely no income, we'll talk about that here in a minute. But for a lot of people, they want 70 to 80%. Have you thought through how you're going to replace your income? If everything got saved into a 401k or a 403B, a tax-deferred plan, an IRA, will you be able to take out enough income and pay taxes and net the amount of income that you need to make ends meet in retirement? And get this. We're currently$39 trillion in debt. So will it be enough to outpace inflation? It may be enough for year one of retirement, but what if you live for the current expectation? That's 25 to 30 years in retirement. If either you or your spouse lives to that 30-year mark, is your current income plan enough to outpace inflation for 30 more years and still provide the income that will be needed by one or both of you? That brings up another question. Will my retirement savings last no matter how long I live? Friends, do you have pensions in place? Do you have the maximized Social Security benefit in place? Did you talk to anyone about how to file, when and how to file your Social Security? We are experts in this. My good friend Heather Schreiber, the nation's leading Social Security expert, will be a guest on this show at least six times this year. She's already aired once. She's about to be on a second time. We talk about maximizing your social security benefit. Have you ever done any planning regarding this? You need to talk to someone who knows the right thing to do. Here's another one. How will you pay for future health care and potential long-term care needs? Remember, we talked about two different situations where one was six months of chemotherapy, left a lot of bills behind, and one was an emergency that definitely left a lot of bills behind also, and an immediate unexpected loss of income. So you want to be prepared to think through things like this. The last thing I want to talk about today is how much debt do you currently have? Here's the reason I want to end with it. When you think through how much debt you currently have, do you ever add your current 401k or tax-deferred retirement plan into that equation? I don't mean just your home. I don't mean just your cars or maybe a student loan you're helping a child with. I mean when it comes to your retirement assets, do you have tax-deferred accounts that you plan on living out of during your retirement years? This would be, for instance, a 401k, a 403B, a TSP thrift savings plan, a 457 plan, a traditional IRA, a simple IRA, a SEP IRA, all these different types of traditional tax-deferred accounts. Because remember, when you own those accounts, which 90% of retirement income comes from that, you have an account that is susceptible to excessive taxation. Uncle Sam is your joint owner of that account. Uncle Sam will come in with his handout and say, based on the year and the date and time and what's going on in the tax world and how much our country is in debt at the time, here's how much you have to give me out of that distribution. You're going to pay federal tax, in many cases, state tax, in many cases, an increased IRMA tax, a Medicare premium surcharge if you exceed certain let uh thresholds, and also additional Social Security taxes if you exceed the thresholds as a single or married filing jointly person. So, friends, these are just very, very important questions that I wanted to. Walk us back through today the top 10 questions you need to ask yourself before you retire because you need to be questioning whether or not your current retirement plan is one that can survive all the what-ifs and the unknowns and the unexpecteds in this life. If you don't believe me, just keep your head up long enough. A good friend, a relative, a brother, a sibling, a parent, someone is going to go through a life circumstance where the unexpected happens. Maybe you're listening right now and you're going through one right now personally, and you know one thing in life that's unexpected can flip your financial world completely upside down. We help people protect them from that by setting plans in place that will keep you from ever having to go through it. We that's why my book is titled Bullet Proof, the Safe and Secure Retirement Income Plan. We want you to be set up so that no matter what happens, no matter what, there's a plan in place to protect you, to turn on water faucets that you didn't know existed, to put out fires, and to have them in place no matter what happens in life. We don't want you to ever run out of income. We don't want you to ever be a financial burden on anyone else. So, friends, thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening every week. Don't forget to go to YouTube, subscribe to the show so that you don't ever miss any podcast or show. Call us anytime. If you would like a free financial consultation or a free copy of my best-selling book, Bulletproof, just call us. Our number's 866-780-7233. You can also go to our website, Ozarksretirement.com, just click on contact us. I will personally reach out to you and meet with you and I will give you a signed copy of my book. Well, I'm about out of time, and I would like to thank you for listening to Safe Money Radio. If you're serious about your financial future, give me a call, and together we'll get your retirement savings on the fast track to accumulation while reducing exposure to market losses. Thanks for listening, and until next time at the same time, I'm Brad Pistol, reminding you to stay safe so you can step into a secure future.

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You've been listening to Safe Money Radio with your host, Brad Pistol. Find out how to contractually guarantee that your hard-earned money is safe while avoiding market loss so you can have the retirement that you deserve. Call Brad Pistol now for your complimentary safe money book and safe money information kit at 866-780 safe. That's 866-780-7233.

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The preceding information does not represent tax, legal, or investment advice. Surrender charges apply to base contracts. Optional lifetime income benefit writers are used to calculate lifetime payments only and are not available for cash surrender or in a death benefit unless specified in the annuity contract. Fees may apply. Guarantees are based on the financial strength and claims paying ability of the insurance company. No information presented today should be acted upon without meeting with a qualified and licensed professional. Obviously, by calling us now, you are just taking the first step towards protecting your retirement. It's important that you read all insurance contract disclosures carefully before making a purchase decision. Rates and returns mentioned on this program are subject to change without notice.