Why a Financial Plan is not the Whole Family Plan with Dave Nacke

In this episode of My Parents Lied to Me, Nicole Porter sits down with financial advisor Dave Nacke of Southwest Financial Concepts to talk about the conversations most families avoid until life forces them to have them.

Nicole and Dave discuss why a financial plan and estate plan are important, but not always enough when adult children are suddenly faced with aging parents, long-term care costs, caregiving decisions, Medicare confusion, powers of attorney, home safety concerns, and emotional family dynamics.

They explore why proactive family preparedness matters, how long-term care can impact retirement savings, why adult children need to know who their parents’ trusted professionals are, and how families can begin asking better questions before a health crisis, care need, or emergency happens.

This conversation is especially valuable for adult children with parents in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond who want more clarity, less chaos, and a more complete family plan.

Nicole also shares how her SAFE Family Preparedness System™ was created to bring the bigger picture together, including conversations, home, care, legal, financial, family roles, and future decisions.

guest info

Dave Nacke - Southwest Financial Concepts.  

dave@swfinancialconcepts.com (480) 520-2121

Your Parent Porter

Nicole Porter - Founder 

nicole@yourparentporter.com 480-269-0290

https://yourparentporter.com/

key topics

• Proactive family conversations about aging
• Financial and legal planning for elders
• Strategies for funding long-term car

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Background

02:36
The Importance of Financial Planning

05:08
Caring for Aging Parents

07:40
Conversations About Care and Finances

09:54
The Role of Caregivers

12:29
Planning for Long-Term Care

14:52
The Need for Open Conversations

17:27
Holistic Financial Planning

19:47
Collaboration for Family Preparedness

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to My Parents Lie to Me, the podcast about navigating aging, loss, and all the midlife changes no one warned us about. I'm Nicole Porter, here with real stories and expert advice to help you face what's now and what's next. Live. We're live. Welcome to my podcast, My Parents Lied to Me. I have a friend here, Dave. We actually met on LinkedIn because we're both Sparties that were, I'm living in Arizona. So we are. We are we connected that way. And I was telling him about your parent porter and my safe family preparedness plan. And we were like, oh my gosh, we need to collaborate and talk to more families because the service that I offer is a proactive service. Um, a financial plan is one piece of the puzzle because when I've asked families, like, hey, do you know what to do? They're like, Oh yeah, we have the financial plan. We're good. We have the estate plan, we're good. But there's just so many more components to it. Um, but I do want to stress the importance of having a financial professional, a major piece of the puzzle. So I'm gonna let you take it from here, Dave. Introduce yourself and your company and what you do, and we'll just go from there.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

All right, well, cool. Thanks, Nicole. First of all, thank you for having me. This is really cool. So my name's Dave Nacke, and my company is Southwest Financial Concepts. Uh, I'm based in the valley, but I cover all of Arizona as well as multiple other states, mostly in the western United States. So if you have friends and family who live in another state, we can talk about that because there's a good probability that I can help them. So I'm not just local. I'm also part of a culture of over 1,700 financial advisors who all network together. We're originally based in Kansas, but we cover every nook and cranny of the entire country. So if I can't help you in a state, I can find one of my colleagues who can certainly give you a hand as well. I've been doing this now for a little over seven years. I came out of corporate America in the outdoor and sporting goods industry of all things. Growing up in Michigan, there's our Sparty Alliance there. I grew up outdoorsy and skiing and all that kind of stuff. And that led into me being in that industry for many years. So I was part of executive management of a number of different large companies. Really, really good. And when that ride ended eight years ago, I decided that it was really time to listen to that inner calling that I had from somebody who preceded me in this business, one of my uncles. I really wish that I would have started helping people doing what I do years ago. The satisfaction is huge. And when you really engage with somebody and see what a difference putting together a concrete plan makes when it has to actually start executing, the relief that people can go through all of the emotional parts of life that come when somebody gets ill or aged or in a financial pickle to know that they've got a plan in place. It's it's so huge. It's so huge.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

And what age do most people come to you? Like all ages, do people just reach a point they're like, oh my gosh, I need help?

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Like and it's all of the yeah, all of the above. My oldest client, I love this lady to death. She will turn a hundred on September 1st. And we started retirement planning for her at 97. Oh my gosh. So never too late. Okay. My youngest client is now seven months old, happens to be my grandson, but we've already started all 10 of our grandkids' retirement plans, then uh we put money into it. Parents match it. It's not a lot, but over the course of their entire lifespan, it'll be pretty significant.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

So that's awesome. When families come to you, how often do they consider um taking care of aging parents?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

That is it's a huge turning point in our culture right now. We've been around for years, but now we're facing the reality that all of us are living longer. There are things that are out there that whether you buy into it or not, but you know, as we live longer, we get more exposed to illness and the chances go up. In fact, statistically, if you are age 60 or over, there's a 75% chance that you're going to need some sort of care. Now, that care could be in your home, that could be adult daycare, or it could be full-on moving into a care facility, like memory care, et cetera. And typically it starts off over here and it kind of migrates maybe all the way over here. Hopefully, it stops somewhere in the middle, but it could go over here. I have one client right now. She's in North Scottsdale and she has been in a care facility for 14 years.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

At over $120,000 a year expense. So imagine and they were financially prepared for that? They were not. Okay. They were not because nobody had really sat down with them and and really just kind of shared the facts so that they could make good decisions.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Now, is it because the older generation just didn't anticipate the financial needs, or is it that so much inflation and everything, the price has gone up so much that now the kids just have to get involved because there's no way they can cover it?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Well, and I think that's kind of one of those all of the above, and that's a great question, because typically it used to be that a care facility was was kind of thought of that you had to be wealthy to to do that. And and if it's $120,000 a year to some degree, yes, you do need to be we wealthy to do that. So a lot of that burden fell upon family members. And family members took that on, they quit their job, they worked less at their job. So there was a financial burden, not just in terms of the care, but there was a financial burden that the family bore because they might have changed their lifestyle completely. If you had two breadwinners in the family and all of a sudden now you have one breadwinner, what does that do to your household budget? Because you're taking care of mom, or in some cases, you're taking care of a grandparent. So we've we've always had this situation where we may have kids at home that we're taking care of and raising, but we also may have responsibility to take care of parents and grandparents as well. We've just layered on so much complexity in our lives. And culturally in America, we tend to be workaholics. So that nine to five is really more like eight to seven, and throw in a couple Saturdays. And and exactly and all of a sudden now you throw in a big twist where you know, my parent is sick, and we all love our parents. We all want to take really, really good care of them. And, you know, I'm fortunate that I still have one when my dad's been gone a long time, but it's in fact 19 years, I still miss him every single day. So but we want to take care, we you know, we want to show that love that they gave to us when we were little.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Right. Well, and I think conversations I didn't have, I mean, my parents passed in their 60s a year apart, but we had never had a conversation of like, what if one parent outlives the other? What happens if either one of them needed care? We've just kind of went la la la, you know, my parents had their financial advisor. I'd never asked any questions, but kind of in the back of my mind, I was like, well, I know how they worked, I know about what they made, you know, I can't imagine that they saved that much. And I started thinking, you know, like I'm gonna have to be the responsible child. You know, I'm the single one, the oldest child with no family and kids. And I'm like, I'm gonna be the one that has to become the caretaker or financially take care of them because my brother has a family and he's got his own responsibilities. Right. So that was my big why before losing my parents. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get this awesome real estate career going and I'm gonna be financially free and you know, I'll be able to travel home whenever I want and take care of my parents. And it didn't happen that way. And, you know, when I saw their finances at the end of the day, I was like, oh my God. Thankfully they didn't get sick for a long time. Like, I just can't imagine how we would have financially been able to afford if mom would have had to go into a care facility because her health had always been kind of down there and without my dad, and we would have had to take care of mom. And I'm like, I just don't know how we could have afforded it.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Right. I mean, there's there's affordability and then there's the emotional part of it. And and they are intrinsically tied together. But if you've got peace of mind that you've got a nest egg not to retire on, but another nest egg that could be used just in case somebody got sick and all of a sudden there were significant expenses. You know, the amazing thing is that none of us want to think about this, but there are a lot of retirees, a lot of aged who end up filing bankruptcy. And they don't file bankruptcy because they're going on cruises and living these lavish lifestyles. They file bankruptcy because they're living longer and then they get sick and then they're financially wiped out. And then the last thing you want to do is become a ward of the state and go on Medicare because your net worth, first of all, has to be down to $2,000 in Arizona. It it goes as high as $3,000. So just imagine if any of us were worth $2,000. You have no choice of what doctors you go to. They they can move you around. I mean, it is truly a welfare state, um, both care wise as well as financially. So that's a bad option.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Well, and there's a lot more to that. I think there's a lot of rules around even getting paid to get to that $2,000 income. Or I know families have to manipulate a lot of money and sell things and do stuff, right? To get that extra assistance. But it's not like you can just do it overnight. It's got to be something that you've planned for too.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Well, and now the state will do a look back. So if you have liquidated assets or transferred assets into somebody else's name, the state will go back and say, no, those are actually your assets. So you don't qualify for Medicare. Right. So, and they go back 10 years. It was seven, and now they're going back even farther. They do their due diligence because it is a burden on the taxpayers. So they have a legal responsibility to the taxpayers to go back and make sure that somebody's not defrauding the system. So they go back and they do it uh effectively very well.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Right. Well, and here's the other thing, too. Like, okay, so say mom and dad don't have money, I decide to be a caretaker. Right. I physically wouldn't be able to do a lot of the things. My mom was a little overweight. We would have needed help to, you know, bathe her and move her and do things, and that costs money. And I don't think people think about the in-home care. They're like, oh yeah, I'm gonna be the caretaker, but sometimes the caretaker needs help and that costs money. And it could be like up to a thousand dollars a day when I've talked to some of these advisors.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Right. And, you know, and you and I both circulate in that world. We work with a lot of caregivers, and some of them aren't physically big enough to pick up a large person. So they don't have that upper body strength to get someone out of a bathtub or um, if they've sat down to use the restroom, that they can't get them back up. So those are all real world things that have to be thought through and having a real strategic plan, both financially as well as physically, you know, the environment that they're that they're living in. Can they manage that? And you do a great job with helping people prepare for that part of their life.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Right. Well, and that's why I created the system, is because I started hearing all the stories and visualizing the future that obviously did not happen with my parents because they passed, but I was like, this isn't just about the money, this isn't just about a will. This is like their home. There was a lot of obstacles. And my dad had told me, you know, it hurts to do the stairs sometimes. And so I sleep in the chair. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, when did this happen? You know? And at that point, we're like, we might be on a time crunch here. And with a real estate background too, I'm like, man, there's a lot of changes that we should have started doing 10 years ago as they were getting older. Like, we never thought about how the stairs were going to affect them. They've been doing the stairs, no problems. And they don't like always tell you all these things either. So again, you need to have a financial plan because you can't just downsize, especially here in Arizona. You can't just downsize your house. You lose so much equity. And, you know, where's that money going? Are they reinvesting that back with the financial planner? Are they having to live on it? Like, what does that look like? So, I mean, that's why I wanted to come up with the whole system because there's a bigger picture that people are not visualizing when they're planning for their aging parents with the financial planner and with the estate planner. Like, people don't update all those things as life continues to happen.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Uh, I was listening to a podcast. I think most people are familiar with the gentleman named Warren Buffett, you know, from Berkshire Hathaway. He's one of the wealthiest people ever in the history of the world, much less in today's times. But he's in his mid-90s now. And he did a podcast that was how would he do things differently if he could turn the time back to age 70? And it was really interesting because he talked about family legacy and he talked about being very open with family in terms of one, telling them exactly what happens to the wealth that he would leave behind, because he can't possibly spend all the money that he's worth, but being just very, very open, what would happen to him if he got sick and he had to go into a care facility? He goes, and this was a very hard conversation to have with my kids because your kids never want to think about living life without their parents. It's a reality that we all face at some point in time. So I was really fascinated by this podcast coming from a man who is self-built and has done obviously very well for himself beyond what any of us could ever dream to ever reach. But him talking very openly and very honestly about these are the conversations you need to have with your parents. And he said, you need to have these conversations with your parents before they become sick. You need to have a plan in place. And if it doesn't happen, bless the Lord. You don't have to do it. But at least you're all on the same page. He goes, and you should be having those conversations when your parents are in their 50s and you were in your 20s, not waiting until your parents are in their 70s. And I was like, you know what? That's really, really, really good advice for what you and I do for people is like, what's the right timeline to start talking about this? And it's tough. I mean, I've got two kids, and I remember well being in my 30s when they were young and getting them to brownies and soccer and this and worrying about my job and worrying about taking care of my wife and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, one of you're up at 4:30 in the morning and you go to bed at 10 o'clock at night and you're grateful that you can get six hours of sleep, and you really get three because your brain doesn't turn off and then it turns back on. So, you know, I've run that rat race as a as a parent. So to sit down with my parents is sit down and have a plan in place and force them to have a conversation that's gonna be awkward. It's just not high on the list of things to get done. It probably fell out to 101 off the top 100.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

But it's really important to do that.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Right. No, I think you hit that point like in your mid-late 30s where you're just like, we're getting older. You know, like I mean, I'm getting a little older, my parents are getting a little older. Like, when did they get older? Like, I don't remember.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

When did that happen? Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Yeah. I'm like, but if they're older, that means I'm older. Like, what's going on here? And I think, like I said, that is a conversation nobody wants to have. And you know, when my dad passed, I was home a couple weeks before he did. And I was like, hey, we're sitting around, like, do we know what to do? We just had the estate planning attorney at our real estate office. Um and my dad's like, yeah, we just finished our will. You want to read it? And I was like, nope, la. Just right. And you know, I didn't know he was going to be gone a week later. But then we were like planning a funeral and all this stuff. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I don't know the answers to any of these questions. And my family had had some conversations without me. I mean, I live in Arizona, they're in Michigan, but it still caught me off guard. And that's why my family preparedness system is just even if it's just conversations, if you can't get things, you know, legally, financially in order, at least have some idea of what the wishes would be, what you would do in an emergency. Because, you know, hey, you need to know who their financial planner is. That's in my workbook.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Because if I can't pay for mom and dad, I need to know what their finances are and what does that look like? Um, how do kids just they don't automatically get access to that?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

I assume they need a power of attorney or they do need powers of attorney and they need different powers attorney for medical, they need different powers of attorney to access bank records, they need different powers attorney for real estate documents. And a lot of that can be tied up by somebody who uh does wills and trusts. But if we could talk just a second about uh, you know, a financial planner. In the world of finance, there are so many different tools that you can possibly have. And a financial planner, for the most part, they're worrying about building wealth. They're worrying about building that nest egg. So when you hit 65, check that box off, boom, go have a nice life. How do you take that and make that income? But what they legally can't talk about because they're not licensed is the need to explore options to fund health care. You know, most people think Blue Cross, Blue Shield. Nicole, I can't tell you how many people I run into who say, Oh, I've got Medicare. I'm good. Well, Medicare will cover some long-term care. They cover the first hundred days, and then their money runs out, and then they kick to the curb, and then you're like, then you got to figure out what your real plan A would have been in the first place. Do the kids come in? What do you do? Do you move in with the kids, etc.? So Medicare is not the resource that people think it is in terms of long-term care needs.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

So, you know, when you think about what I do, the tools that I use, and we've talked a little bit about the fact that whether you're using a hammer or whether you switch to a wrench, you have to switch the tools, but at the same time, you're still building that house type of a concept. For years, as an insurance advisor, people have kind of poo-pooed looking at insurance for funding their potential long-term health care. And a lot of it was, you know, grandma or grandpa might have had a policy that was uh called a use it or lose it. They put money into it. And if they didn't end up uh needing it at all, then the insurance company just kept the money. It was, you know, kind of like your car and your home insurance. Think about how many people have car insurance that have never filed a claim, but they pay their $300 every six months and they do it for the years, right? That insurance company keeps all that money. So life insurance companies issue long-term care insurance, but they now issue long-term care insurance that you get the money back, not the person who paid into it, but their beneficiaries. So it's never lost. It's always there if you need it, and it can become part of your estate plan. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

So, how often does somebody need to review their financial plan? Because I mean, those are things topics you that people still have to go do out on their own. They still have to go find their own estate planning attorney. They still need to have those conversations with their parents about the long-term care. There are the different life insurance products.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

One of the things I specialize in, yeah. I call it a holistic plan where we look at not only income, but we look at protection. Okay. How do we how do we protect that asset that you built with your financial plan or your investment guy, you know, that had a 401k forever, and it can't legally or she can't legally tell you that you can take part of your 401k and convert that into a fully paid long-term care strategy. If you do use it, great. You've had that protection. So instead of losing your 401k money, you've got your insurance covered or your care covered.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

You don't do the stocks and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

I don't do stocks and all things like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

That's a different type of financial planner.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah, that's somebody who's really up to those retirement age days to build that big nest egg. They've got 40 years, they can worry about the dips and the and the the peaks and valleys of you know the stock market and all that kind of stuff. Mine is taking all those pieces of the puzzle for the last 30 years of your life.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Okay, perfect. Yeah, because I think like my clients, your clients, and why we need to collaborate because families aren't always up to speed. They're like, oh, I did that a long time ago. I'm done with that. You know, and it's it's not. You need to keep preparing and you need to keep revisiting things, especially as you age and you have life changes. Like that is a time that they need to talk to their financial plan.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Yeah, and you really should review those. I mean, some people want to review them every year. There are people who, you know, every other year is fine. You know, that's my job as a professional to calendar those types of visits with folks to know what their comfort level is, you know, because when you get a little older and care needs can start in your 30s, there are people who need long-term care in their 30s. So it doesn't necessarily have to mean that you're getting older or are old. I could tell you plenty of stories, you know, with people who had a stroke in their 30s and now are disabled. And how do they fund the rest of their lives? So it's not necessarily just confined to an older phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Right. Very complex. I guess 20 to 30 minutes is not enough time to talk about everything.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

No, it's probably not. But at the same time, there are specialists like myself. I don't do auto and home insurance. They sell life insurance policies. They usually do like an expensive term so they can hit their quota numbers. There are financial planners. Only five to ten percent of them are legally licensed or trained to talk about life insurance and specifically long-term care type uh life insurance products. So they're not the answers. You really need a specialist like myself or my whole network that covers the whole country to bring that level of expertise. You deserve it.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Right. Yep. Whole picture, whole picture planning.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Exactly. Exactly. I call it holistic, and it really some people go, that's a little too Yeah. But I mean, there's there's Nano Nano, but it is really taking a holistic look at what your retirement strategy is and protecting your nest egg, not continuing to grow your nest egg, but changing your mind shift. You're not in a growth phase anymore. You're about protecting and you need a different tool to do that, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Yeah, and that's why I wanted to partner with you because I'm not the professional. I'm not the financial planner, I'm not the estate planning attorney. There's a lot of other professionals in the senior industry or whatever the family needs are. Um I am just kind of the holistic big picture plan, how to have the conversations, what things to think about as families start having these life events, you know.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Well, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

I just want people to be able to ask better questions and get pointed in the right direction for the right people that they need to protect their legacy.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

I think we're a culture, we don't know what we don't know. And it's okay to give yourself permission to not know. Right. But it's in my humble opinion, it's not okay, since we are responsible for helping take care of not only ourselves and our family and protecting them, but also our parents as well. Is if there's an opportunity to learn and then decide if you need to act on what you learned, great. And if you don't, at least you knew going into it what other options that you had.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Right. Yeah. I think you can't ask enough questions because you just don't know what life is going to hand you.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

And at what time.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

Right. And you don't have to go too deep down the rabbit hole. It's like we talked. You can read the time or you can find out how the watch works, but you you're just a little bit smarter just because you asked a couple questions and learned something. Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Well, thank you. I really appreciate the it feels like a very short conversation. I feel like we didn't even cover anything. I think we got, you know, a nice conversation for families to start thinking about some of these things. And again, I will put Dave's information in the show notes. So if you want to reach out to Dave and have a conversation, like he's been doing this a long time and, you know, really cares about families. And we're working together to make sure that people proactively plan with their family. Thank you, Dave. My name's Nicole Porter, and I am the founder of Your Parent Porter. I created the safe family preparedness system where I help families have the conversations, look at the big picture, and proactively plan for who knows what's coming down the line. So thanks for joining me today, and we'll chat again soon. Thanks, Dave.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Thanks, Nicole.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Thanks for listening to My Parents Lives Meet, where we face the realities of aging, family change, and midlife reinvention with a little grit and a lot of heart. If today's conversation helps you feel left alone, I would love for you to like it, share it with a friend, and click follow so you don't miss the next story or tell that might help you navigate what's best. Because even if our parents didn't tell us everything, we're figuring it out one chapter at a time.