Check out Episode 86 of The Best Interest Podcast below.
Show Notes – Episode 86
In today’s AMA, Jesse delves into various financial dilemmas and strategies to maximize benefits and secure a stable retirement.
The first question comes from Mindy, a 50-year-old widow, weighing the pros and cons of remarrying due to its potential impact on her survivor benefits. Jesse explains the complexities of Social Security spousal and survivor benefits, urging listeners to consult with a Certified Financial Planner to navigate the intricacies and optimize their benefits.
Then, Bob seeks Jesse’s advice on whether to use retirement savings to pay off a mortgage on a new home. With $1.2 million in retirement savings and plans to retire in five to ten years, Jesse takes into consideration some additional context to make some suggestions. Of course, any financial planner or advisor will answer unknown questions with “it depends” – we need to know all of someone’s financial “puzzle pieces” before we can put that puzzle together.
Jesse then addresses Tad’s query on compound interest and its application to stocks, bonds, and stock funds, clarifying the concept of “compound growth” in investments and the benefits of reinvesting profits.
Our penultimate question is from Dan, a retiree who shares his bond-avoidant investment strategy, relying on pensions and CDs for market downturns. Jesse discusses the potential risks if Dan passes away, affecting his wife’s income, and suggests considering a small bond allocation.
Last up is Amy’s question about setting up an annuity from a 401k to create what some might call a “retirement paycheck”, prompting Jesse to caution against high fees and sales tactics associated with annuities, recommending traditional investment portfolios for better returns, flexibility, and liquidity.
If you’d like a question in a future AMA, send Jesse a message!
Key Takeaways:
- Consult a certified financial planner to navigate the complexities of Social Security spousal and survivor benefits, especially when considering remarriage.
- The most common answer to finance questions is “It depends”. It depends on your city, your state, different tax rates, your income, your relationship status, your goals. There is no one size fits all solution.
- Understand that “compound growth” is a more accurate term than “compound interest” for investments like stocks and stock funds, with reinvested profits accelerating growth.
- Bonds can be a useful asset in your investment strategy, but of course, it depends on your goals and life situation. It’s important to consult with a CFP to get a more complete picture.
- Be cautious about setting up an annuity from a 401k due to high fees and sales tactics; traditional investment portfolios often offer better returns, flexibility, and liquidity.
Key Timestamps:
- (00:00) – Introduction
- (01:49) – Social Security and Survivor Benefits Explained
- (09:46) – Financial Planning for Retirement and Mortgages
- (19:34) – Understanding Compound Growth vs. Compound Interest
- (25:49) – Dan’s Retirement Strategy
- (27:59) – Evaluating Risks in Retirement
- (32:51) – Amy’s Annuity Question
- (36:29) – Comparing Life Insurance and Annuities
- (42:46) – Immediate Fixed Annuities
- (47:08) – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Key Topics Discussed:
The Best Interest, Jesse Cramer, Rochester New York, financial planner, financial advisor, wealth management, retirement planning, tax planning, personal finance, annuities, compound interest, compound growth, death of a spouse, prenup, mortgages, ask me anything
Mentions:
More of The Best Interest:
Check out the Best Interest Blog at bestinterest.blog
Contact me at [email protected]
The Best Interest Podcast is a personal podcast meant for educational and entertainment. It should not be taken as financial advice, and is not prescriptive of your financial situation.
Transcript – Episode 86
[00:00:00] Jesse: Welcome to the Best Interest Podcast, where we believe Benjamin Franklin’s advice that an investment in knowledge pays the best interest, both in finances and in your life. Every episode teaches you personal finance and investing in simple terms. Now here’s your host, Jesse Cramer. Hello and welcome to episode 86 of the Best Interest Podcast.
My name is Jesse Cramer. After much fanfare and lots of requests, we’re back with a second Ask Me Anything episode or AMA episode here on the Best Interest Podcast. If you’re interested, episode 81 was our first AMA episode, and it shot through the roof in terms of being the most listened to episode so far in podcast history.
And today we’re back with some great questions from you listeners about social security, about annuities, a question about compound growth, another one about using retirement assets to pay off a mortgage early. That’s an interesting planning question. And another financial planning question about defining the risks or the lack of risks in someone’s retirement plan.
But, before we get to the first question, let’s do a customary review of the week. This one comes from listener Years, Y E I R S, Years, who left a 5 star rating and wrote in, Very helpful. I came across the podcast about a week ago and have since listened to 8 episodes in no particular order. As a newbie, I find it immensely helpful and easy to follow, which is exactly what I needed.
The variety of guests on the show discussing different topics has also been very helpful. I look forward to discovering more valuable content in the content library on the blogs and on future episodes to come. Years, thank you very much for those kind words. Shoot me an email to jesse at bestinterest.
blog and we’ll get you hooked up with a super soft best interest t shirt. Now on to the AMA questions. The first question comes from Mindy, who wrote in and said, I’d love to be used as a non traditional case study. I’m 50 and was widowed last year at age 49. My daughter is currently receiving survivor benefits, and I will be able to collect widow benefits at age 60 unless I remarry.
I’ve thought about my potential benefit in a lump sum dollar amount that would produce 4 percent per year, just like he stated in your article, and unless some dude is willing to sign a prenup with a non refundable deposit of 800, 000 to 1, 000, 000, I’m not remarrying. What are your thoughts, Jesse? So, Mindy, sorry for your loss, that is far too young to lose a spouse, and you present a very interesting question, which, listeners, Mindy is alluding to an article I wrote, which we will link in the show notes, that talks about thinking of your social security or your pension or any other sort of fixed income stream as a lump sum, 4 percent rule or potentially a different rule, I actually recommend using more of a 5 or 6 percent rule.
You can use it forwards or backwards, meaning you can take your lump sum portfolio and think about it using the 4 percent rule as a, a stream of income out into the future, or you can take a stream of income out into the future, like social security or a pension, and divide it by 4 percent or 5 percent or 6 percent to work your way into a lump sum amount.
Let me start with a caveat to all your listeners when it comes to part of Mindy’s question. And the caveat is that the world of social security spousal benefits and social security survivor benefits, It is a deep and nuanced and confusing world. It is not a casual personal finance topic. And so I highly recommend, there are tools out there on the internet that you can use and calculators that you can use to.
Do some math on your own to try to understand how it works. The language, if you spend enough time, it’s all English words, right? We should be able to understand it. But even then, rules have changed over time. Not every resource that you find on the internet will get those rules correct. And this is the kind of thing that you want to make sure you get it right.
It might be worth sitting down with a certified financial planner, even if only for an hour, to make sure that your plan is working correctly and that your understanding of spousal benefits or survivor benefits is correct. So, in Mindy’s case, we would need to start by asking her questions like, is Mindy caring for a child under the age of 16?
Is Mindy caring for a child with a disability? Is Mindy herself disabled? Does Mindy, or was her husband before her husband’s death, caring for her husband’s elderly parents? All of those kind of questions can qualify or potentially disqualify Mindy for various different types or levels of survivor benefits.
As Mindy alluded to, she’s likely going to wait at least until age 60 to start collecting her survivor benefits. And she’s not planning on remarrying. Now, why is that? Well, for starters, If Mindy’s own future benefit, you know, the benefit that she’s earned through her own work and through her own social security taxes and through her own earnings, if Mindy’s own future benefit is lower than what her husband’s benefit would have been, then Mindy will be best served in the long run by collecting a survivor benefit, which will take the place and will supersede her own benefit.
So to be clear, she doesn’t get to collect both benefits. She doesn’t get to collect her own earned benefit. and her husband’s survivor benefit, she only gets to collect the higher of the two. But if her husband’s benefit is higher, then that’s going to be the one she’s going to want to collect. Now, if Mindy remarries, and depending on the age at which Mindy remarries, she could disqualify herself from collecting that survivor benefit from her husband’s passing.
If she remarries before the age of 50, then Mindy is not going to be eligible for any survivor benefits. Unless, and this is where it gets nuanced, and you really have to be careful here, unless Mindy later divorces the remarried husband, then potentially Mindy can become eligible again for survivor benefits via the death of her first husband.
Nuanced. Nuanced. Nuanced. Now, if Mindy remarries between ages 50 and 59, then no survivor benefits are available for Mindy at all. And then, if Mindy does get remarried after age 60, then survivor benefits may be available for her. It depends. Again, there are more corner cases and if then scenarios. Divorce throws another monkey wrench into this conversation.
So, just a quick example. Now, let’s say Bob and Sharon are our favorite couple. Let’s say they’re a married couple and they’ve been married from ages 25 to 45, after which they divorce. And for the sake of example, we’re going to say Bob was the main breadwinner in the family while Sharon stayed at home with the kids, mostly.
So Bob’s social security earnings history is great while Sharon’s is not. Now in that scenario, even after their divorce at the age of 45, Sharon will eventually be able to collect a spousal social security benefit based on Bob’s earning record. And that fact that Sharon is collecting based on Bob’s record, it doesn’t negatively affect Bob’s own benefit at all.
Now, some of the qualifications and the reasons why this is possible for Sharon is that their marriage lasted at least 10 years. It’s based on the fact of Sharon not remarrying in the future. It’s also based on the fact that Sharon’s ex, Bob, would be eligible on his own to collect Social Security or disability benefits.
Meaning, Sharon can start collecting a spousal benefit once Bob is old enough to start collecting his own social security benefit, right? Bob has to have reached age 62. Again, we have to do a comparison. In almost every case that I’m aware of, a person can only collect one type of social security benefit at a time.
So Sharon would have to compare her own earned benefits to the spousal benefit from Bob, and Sharon’s gonna collect whichever one is greater? It’s also dependent on Sharon being a full retirement age of 67 years or older, and the divorce has to have occurred at least two years ago. Okay, lots of little nuances and lots of rules around this.
But back to Mindy who asked us this question in the first place. Mindy said, I’ve thought of my potential benefit in a lump sum dollar amount, which would produce 4 percent per year, as you stated in your article on the best interest. And unless some dude is willing to sign a prenup with a non refundable deposit of a million dollars, I’m not remarrying.
So again, Mindy’s referring to an article I wrote, which we will throw in the show notes. That encourages all of you listening to consider your social security, your pension, or any stream of income benefit as if it were a lump sum of fixed income in your portfolio. Now, is Mindy’s survivor benefit actually worth a million dollars?
I’m not sure of the details, but I will say that the average person’s social security is about 1, 800 per month for about 20 years of their life. Which, if we use what I think we should use, which is about a 6 percent rule, not the 4 percent rule that Mindy recommended, But either way, it equates, that social security benefit equates to a fixed income lump sum of about 350, 000.
If Mindy’s husband was a high earner, if Mindy’s gonna be collecting that benefit for a long period of time, maybe she’s very healthy, it could be realistic to think of her survivor benefit as more than twice of what the average person’s benefit is. It might be three quarters of a million dollars or more.
And depending on the rest of Mindy’s financial situation, that kind of benefit, three quarters of a million dollars, more than that, that benefit could be a keystone that remarrying might remove from her plan and potentially damage her retirement. So I don’t want to encourage Mindy or any of you to put money above love.
But I do think it’s simply smart financial planning to consider how your relationships can and will affect your finances. Mindy is right to think this through. These are the kinds of questions and scenarios, and if then logic, that a team of professionals, whether it’s a family attorney or a CFP financial planner, can help you work through.
So Mindy, best of luck and thank you for the great question. Okay, next question. Bob wrote in, and this is different by the way than Bob and Sharon, completely different Bob. Sorry for the, the double use of the name here. Bob wrote in and asked, Jesse, I’m a new listener to your podcast. I love the content.
I’m going through the many episodes that interest me and I’ve been enjoying all of them. Well, thank you very much, Bob. I recently started working with a Vanguard CFP and I’d like to get your opinion on our future plans from a financial perspective before I float this question to our advisor. My wife and I are in our late 50s and we have 1.
2 million in our retirement savings. We’re planning to retire in five to 10 years. We also want to sell our home and move to a newer home. We owe about 150, 000 on our existing mortgage at about a 4 percent rate, and we have estimated on a 600, 000 sale price. The new homes we’re looking at would cost about 700, 000.
So if you do the math, it means that we would need a 200, 000 to 300, 000 mortgage on our new home. My question is, do we use some of our retirement savings to lower the cost of our monthly mortgage payment? Or, should we potentially use our retirement savings to have no mortgage altogether? In other words, to make up that 200, 000 to 300, 000 gap?
Or should we just take the mortgage, leave our retirement savings as is? Okay, great question Bob. A perfect, perfect financial planning question. Because you have lots of options, various knobs to turn, and most likely, there is an optimal decision out there that does exist, if we can find it. So for starters, you listeners, I did ask Bob for a bit more information about the various puzzle pieces in his life.
I wanted to know more about his family’s total assets, any debts, their current income, their projected social security income, and a few more items. Thank you very much. The reason is, it’s hard to give advice without knowing all of the potential consequences. And it’s hard to know all of those consequences unless you really have all the chips on the table.
As far as I’m aware, the CFPs, the Certified Financial Planners who I know, who are worth their salt, they insist upon collecting as much information as possible before ever giving advice. And this is why a good financial planner will often give the frustrating answer of, it depends. If you ask them a question about your life, but they don’t know all the details about your life, the only responsible answer they can give is, well, it depends.
Bob gave me a lot more information, most of which falls into the camp of reasonable, typical, pre retiree info. There’s nothing too crazy in Bob’s situation that I’m aware of. And that allowed me to make the following recommendations for Bob. So, what Bob doesn’t want to do, in my opinion, is use 300, 000 of his retirement accounts all at once to pay off or eliminate the mortgage.
Now, why? The main reason why is because that would realize 300, 000 of extra income into one tax year. It would push Bob’s marginal federal tax rate into the 32 percent tax bracket, maybe even into the 35 percent tax bracket. And depending on what state Bob lives in, it would also spike his state marginal tax bracket.
A CFP, worth their salt, will analyze this kind of question, will give a very confident answer to Bob. I have a safer path that I’ve laid out for him. But these are the kind of analyses that I think doing a home ownership analysis, typically for a younger family who might be buying their first home, it’s something I’ve done a number of times at work.
Very, very fun to do. In part because it’s such a local problem, right? It can depend on the specific metro area where someone’s looking to buy a home and what the home prices are there. It can depend on certain county taxes. A really fun one we did was for a couple who lives in Washington, D. C. And depending on if they lived in Washington, D.
C. itself or in Maryland or in Virginia, their state income tax would change. So not only is it a housing question itself of the cost of the house and the mortgage rate and all those kind of things and what their income is, but there’s also this part of the question, which is to say, well, depending on which state or D.
C. in which they live, Their income for quite a long period of time will get taxed at a different rate. So anyway, very fun questions that a CFP can help provide answers to. But here are some of my thoughts for Bob. A safer path, I think, would be to get the mortgage as soon as you’re ready. As soon as you’ve found the house that you want, go ahead and get that 300, 000 mortgage, but do not pay it down early.
At least not yet. The next step is at the end of the current tax year, whatever year this ends up being, at the end of the current tax year, you need to ask yourself, A, do you have extra room in your current tax bracket that you haven’t realized the income to fill up that particular tax bracket? And then B, is that current tax bracket relatively even to your future expected tax bracket?
In other words, are you paying a 22 percent marginal tax today? and also expecting to pay a 22 percent tax throughout retirement. You might not know the answer to that. Your financial planner should be able to help you with that question. Now, if you answered those questions, yes and yes, if you have extra room in your tax bracket and your current tax bracket is relatively even or favorable compared to your future tax bracket, then you can and should fill up your current tax bracket with extra withdrawals to pay down your mortgage.
And then you can rinse and repeat for future years. So, again, to break that down potentially in an even more simple way is to say, if Bob is in a favorable tax situation as compared to the future, if he’s paying less taxes now, then he’ll pay in the future. Then, he should go ahead, take some retirement assets out of his retirement accounts, pay those taxes, because we’ve just established they’re relatively low right now, and then he can use the proceeds to pay down his mortgage.
But if Bob’s in a situation where right now he’s in a pretty high tax bracket, and in the future he’ll be in a much lower tax bracket, it does not make sense to pay high taxes right now simply to pay off a 7 percent mortgage or something like this. video, Now, most likely, this will result in Bob paying off his mortgage considerably early, but over the course of multiple years.
The rate at which he’s paying off the mortgage will increase dramatically once both Bob and his wife are fully retired, right? They’ll have no more W 2 income, they’ll be in very low tax brackets, with lots of extra room for those mortgage payments. So, in other words, Bob, your best bet might be that you have the mortgage in full while you’re still working, and then you pay it off rapidly once you fully retire.
Now, this also means that Bob should likely delay taking Social Security until after the mortgage is paid off, because there’s no sense in taking Social Security in years when you are intentionally and knowingly increasing your taxable income, right? Social Security can be partially taxable, and the rate at which it’s taxable increases the more money you earn.
So what’s the point in taking Social Security and paying extra taxes on it? in years when you know that you’re going to be increasing your taxable income to pay off your mortgage. So pay off the mortgage first with those years of higher taxable income and then once you’re done paying off the mortgage then you can turn on social security.
All of this too, we should say, is based on the assumption that Bob’s mortgage rate will be in the roughly seven percent or so range because as I’m talking to you right now in in June of 2024, seven percent is about the prevailing mortgage rate. So, with a, a 7 percent guaranteed return from paying down the mortgage, that’s worth pursuing.
That’s worth potentially, you know, realizing some taxes to, to pay off that mortgage early. But if you were to ask me this question again next year, and mortgage rates were back in say the 4 percent range. My answer would absolutely change. There’s no need to pay down that 4 percent mortgage early. You’d much rather keep the tax deferred money where it is in the IRA, in the retirement account, growing at what’s likely, uh, much greater than 4 percent per year.
Bob then asked a quick follow up question, which is how to balance Roth conversions with this idea. So again, we’re throwing a little bit more complexity into the situation. Not only is Bob looking to pay down his mortgage early, he’s also hoping to potentially do Roth conversions. So again, Bob, this comes down to a mortgage rate and a tax rate question.
Depending on the mortgage and the mortgage rate, you might be best served by drawing on your IRA. Paying income taxes to pay down your mortgage early. In that case, your best bet is likely to pay down the mortgage completely before changing your attention over to raw conversions. But with a low enough mortgage rate, I wouldn’t worry about the mortgage debt at all.
And then assuming you’re in your lower earning years, potentially your earliest retirement years with no W 2 income, but before you’ve turned on social security, Well, those are the perfect years to use your low marginal tax rate to conduct Roth conversions. So Bob, best of luck with these choices. Feel free to let me know, let us know what your Vanguard CFP says.
And if you’re interested in a second opinion from my colleagues, we can certainly talk. Here’s a quick ad and then we’ll get back to the show. Serious question. Why do podcasters constantly ask for ratings and reviews? Yes, they do help highlight our shows to new listeners. They help strangers find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
It’s totally true and a good reason to ask for ratings and reviews, but I have something more important, at least more important to me. I want to know if you like this stuff. I want to know if you like my podcast episodes, my monologues, my guests, the information I share with you and the stories I tell. I want to improve and make your listening more enjoyable in the process.
So yeah, I would love to read your reviews. And sure, if you throw a rating in there too, that’s great. If you like what I’m doing, please share it with me. It’s such a great feeling to read your feedback. I’d love to read your review or see your rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you. Next question.
Tad wrote in and said, Hey Jesse, we all know leaving one’s money alone in an investment account is advantageous over many years due to the magic of compound interest. I’ve heard this hundreds of times from many personal finance bloggers. However, when explaining this to a novice investor, I stumbled on how exactly this works for stocks, for stock mutual funds, and stock index funds.
It’s easy to explain for a savings account at a bank. There is no interest earned from stocks. So would you please explain the math taking into account that some stocks pay little or no dividends at all? And would you reach out to other bloggers and podcasters to stop using the phrase compound interest when explaining this phenomenon?
And, as long as we’re down this rabbit hole, please confirm that this does not apply at all to bonds or bond funds. I love your show. Thanks. Well, Tad, very, very interesting question. You’re right. Compound interest is real. Quite often a misnomer. I think the more appropriate verbiage and perhaps the more all encompassing verbiage is compound growth.
All right, so forgive me if I ever use the word compound interest here. You get the principle, but I think compound growth captures the principle more widely for all different investment products because as Tad pointed out, some types of investments do shed off interest. Other types of investments simply grow.
And there is a nuance difference there, which we will get to in this answer. So the question then from Tad is, how does compound growth work for a stock? First, we need to remember that owning a stock is simply a different way of saying owning a company. Right? Stocks are businesses. Stocks are companies.
How does compound growth work for a business or for a company? Let’s go simple. Let’s think of a lemonade stand, okay? So, the first summer, you are the one and only employee of the lemonade stand, Tad. Then there’s one stand at the end of your one driveway, and you sell 100 cups of lemonade per day. And over the course of the summer, you earn 1, 000 in profit.
Good for you. Fast forward to the second summer, you have your 1, 000 in profit. And you decide to use that to hire a second employee and to build a second lemonade stand on some other corner in another part of town. You essentially double your efforts and sure enough at the end of the summer you now have 2, 000 in profit.
Enter the third summer. You use your 2, 000 in profit to rinse and repeat the same thing. You now have employees three and four and lemonade stands three and four and you earn 4, 000 in profit. Now, oversimplified, yes, but if I keep going in this business You’ll see that my profits are doubling every year.
That is compound growth. And as my profits grow, I’m able to reinvest those profits and increase the amount of growth the following year. My business is not only is my revenue growing, but the overall value of my business is growing too. And not only is the business growing, but the rate of growth, as measured in dollars of profit, is actually accelerating.
It went from a new business to 1, 000 in profit, to 2, 000 in profit, to 4, 000 in profit. Ostensibly next summer it would be 8, 000 in profit, then 16, 000 in profit, right? The delta between each summer, is accelerating. And that’s the goal for most businesses. If you own a portion of the lemonade stand with me, then the value of your ownership would be growing.
And the rate of the value growth is accelerating. Your investment is experiencing compound growth. Now, let’s bundle my lemonade stand with your bicycle shop, with a local ice cream shop, with a local accountant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We now have a fund of many different businesses. All of which are trying to grow.
Now, some succeed and some fail. Some grow quickly, some grow slowly, but on average growth is achieved. And on net, that growth is accelerating over time. This fund, which we could call in the stock world a mutual fund, is also experiencing compound growth. So Tad, that is how compound growth works for stocks.
You have businesses, that are growing and that are trying to accelerate their growth over time. And that leads to a net compound growth for anyone who owns those businesses and we as stockholders are owners of those businesses. But then Tad also asked, please confirm that this does not apply to bonds or bond funds.
Tad, let’s start with the basics. What’s a bond? A bond is when you own someone else’s debt. For example, a U. S. treasury bond is literally the fact that you are lending the U. S. government your money. And the U. S. government is promising to repay you over a certain period of time with interest payments along the way.
You own the U. S. ‘s debt and the U. S. is going to repay you in time with interest. So if you’re collecting 5 percent interest payments from the U. S. government, you have a couple options of what to do with that. So the first option is you could take the interest payment and you could just stick it under your mattress where it will sit there and it will not grow at all.
But the second option, and the better option, is that you take your interest payment and you reinvest it. You can reinvest that interest payment into more bonds, or into stocks, or to something else that’s growing, some other type of investment. And in this case, I hope you can see that we are taking the profits from the investment, just like we took the profits from our lemonade stand, and we are putting those profits to use to create even more profits.
So by reinvesting our bond income, we will achieve compound growth. Anything that’s growing, as long as the profits are used to generate more profits, you will achieve compound growth. In the case of companies, it might look like the company itself reinvesting in their own business. If the company does provide you dividends, which was part of your question, Tad, well now you have that cash on hand.
You can stick it under your bed if you want, or you can choose to reinvest it. In the case of a savings account or bonds or real estate rent, which is another example, they all require you as the investor to take your proceeds, to take the cash that you have earned from the investment and to reinvest it yourself.
So either way, reinvested capital, that is the underpinning of all compound growth, whether it’s compound interest or whether it’s occurring inside of a company, inside of a stock. As long as capital is being reinvested in the pursuit of more revenue, more profits, that is the underpinning of compound growth.
So, Tad, I hope that answers your terrific question. Thank you for writing in. The next question comes from Dan. Dan wrote in and said, Jesse, I’m in retirement. To me, bonds are useful to help stabilize my investments by operating the opposite of stocks. However, I have four pensions, of which three are indexed to inflation.
The pensions cover about 80 percent of my household budget. and cover all of my must pay bills. I’ve set aside some money in CDs or certificates of deposit to cover several years of a potential down market. I also have term life insurance, which I do plan to end in a few years. So I’ve treated the pensions as the stabilizing bucket, the CDs as a risk management against down markets, and I’ve ignored bonds altogether, putting all of my remaining investment dollars into stocks.
To be clear, my wife and I have 137, 000 in annual pensions while I am living. And my wife will have 42, 000 in pensions if I were to die. So I’m trying to live as long as possible to leave more investment money to her in the future. Financial planner looked at my plan and said that my approach was high risk because I had no bonds.
What are your thoughts, Jesse? So Dan, very interesting question. And listeners, first off, you should know that Dan did share a few more specific details with me which I’ve left out for the sake of brevity. The main details are that Dan and his wife will also be eligible for Social Security. And once you account for the fact that 80 percent of their spending is covered by pensions and Social Security, Dan needs to cover the remaining 20 percent of his annual spending somehow.
And if you actually run the math and you look at Dan’s CD safety net plus his stock portfolio, Dan has about 50 years worth of money. Dan only needs to cover 20 percent of his annual spending. The rest is covered by his pensions. So, to cover that small 20 percent slice, Dan’s got about 50 years of that sitting in stocks.
So, between cash and CDs, Dan has about 10 years worth of coverage sitting there to help cover for that 20 percent slice that isn’t covered by his pensions. And then if you look at stocks, Dan has about 40 years worth of spending in stocks. Again, 40 years worth of those 20 percent slices in stock index funds.
So, is Dan at high risk? Now, it’s hard for me to say yes. I certainly wouldn’t use the term high risk. But if there is a risk in Dan’s retirement plan, we should ask, at risk of what? There are different types of risk. We’ll get into this in the next question. There’s the risk that someone dies early.
There’s also a risk that someone lives a really long time. There’s the risk that markets tank, there’s a risk of high inflation, there are all these different types of risk in retirement. And some assets are really good at addressing some types of risk, while bad at addressing other types of risk. And to me, I do see one risk in the details that Dan has shared with us.
That risk, in my opinion, is the risk of Dan’s death. You know, as Dan pointed out, the family’s pension income would drop from 137, 000 a year to 42, 000 a year if Dan died. That’s a 70 percent decrease. When a spouse passes away, the household spending does typically decrease, but it doesn’t get cut in half.
Only certain expenses get cut in half. Many expenses, some expenses, they stay exactly the same. So the total household spending might only drop by 30 percent or 40%. So we have a 30 percent drop in spending upon Dan’s death, but a 70 percent decrease in the pension income. That presents a potential risk.
And it’s worth, Dan, going through that math to, first off, to verify whether the numbers actually bear that risk out. Is it real? If that were to happen, does Dan have enough cash and stocks to kind of mitigate that risk? But, if it is still there, then Dan might have to find a way to mitigate that risk in some other way.
Or at least to talk through what kind of knobs are left to turn in the event of Dan’s death. He should talk about that risk now and put together a plan now while Dan is still alive. And sure, while listening to the Best Interest Podcast. So in my opinion, the most objective investment approach is for Dan and his spouse to look at their assets, to assign those dollars to specific goals in their life.
Because they have so much pension income, Those goals might not be day to day lifestyle. The goals might be something else. It might be something extravagant. It might be something soon. It might be something in the next decade. Some of those goals might be at death. You know, they might have a goal to say whenever we die, who knows when it’ll be.
We’re going to leave some of our money to the kids. We’re going to leave some of our money to charity, that kind of thing. And then Dan should find appropriate investments based on those timelines. It might lead, and it probably will lead to a very small bond allocation to ensure that Dan’s nearest term goals are sufficiently met.
But with the amount of pension income that Dan is receiving to cover day to day life, there is a high likelihood that a vast majority stock portfolio is totally appropriate for Dan. Now, I haven’t written this article yet, but by the time this podcast airs, I hope to have written a blog post about need, ability, and willingness.
Those are the three words to consider when an investor thinks about risk in their portfolio. Does Dan have the need to take on risk? Does Dan have the ability to take on risk? And does Dan have the willingness to suffer the downsides of risk in order to achieve the upsides? Need, ability, and willingness.
Now, need and ability are objective, right? Those are numbers based. So Dan has so much pension income. He likely doesn’t mathematically need to take on risk or to seek large investment returns in order to live his preferred lifestyle, right? He could probably take his stock investments. Put them all into a high interest savings account and he could cruise for the rest of his life.
Now, I might be wrong there, but it’s certainly the impression I get. He doesn’t need to take on risk. However, Dan does have the ability to take on lots of risk because his short term cashflow needs are so well covered. Dan can earmark a lot of his dollars for long, long periods of time in the future and take on investment risk because of that.
And then as far as willingness goes, willingness is more subjective. He sounds like he’s willing to take on risk. So, because Dan has the ability and the willingness to take on risk, even though he doesn’t have much need, it’s probably okay for him to take on risk. So that’s another way I would approach the problem, Dan.
I think about your need and ability and willingness to take on risk. And find a balance between those three words. It’s mostly objective, but with a pretty solid sprinkling of personal subjectivity based on your personality, Dan. And then once you find a balance between those three words, you invest accordingly.
So thank you Dan for the great question. Here’s a quick ad and then we’ll get back to the show. One of the more common questions I hear is Jesse, what do you like and use books, blogs, podcasts, even banks and brokerage firms? What are your recommendations? So, to answer that question, I put together a webpage.
You can check it out at bestinterest. blog slash recommendations. Again, that’s bestinterest. blog slash recommendations to check out how I’m improving my financial life. And now we have our last question from Amy. It’s a short question, but it’s a doozy. Amy wrote in and said, Hey Jesse, I’ve heard a segment on another show about having an annuity set up from your 401k to create a quote unquote paycheck in retirement.
It sounds convenient, but there were downsides of course. It seemed like a topic that might be fun for you to unpack. Thanks for the question, Amy. And yes, when I hear annuities are paychecks, I do get a little nervous, a little concerned. It’s not because of a factual error. But instead, it’s because it sounds a little bit like a sales pitch to me.
And while certainly not all sales pitches are inherently bad, there’s nothing wrong with a sales pitch per se, but with annuities, the problem is that probably about 99 percent of annuities are raw deals for the investors in them. And also about 99 percent of annuities are sold. In other words, they’re pushed instead of being bought or sought after by the investor, by the consumer.
So, when we have mostly bad products, which are mostly being pushed or sold via shady or error ridden sales tactics, when I hear a sales tactic like, ooh, an annuity is like a paycheck in your retirement, my alarm bells go up a little bit. So, that all being said, I’ve kind of painted a bad picture of annuities so far, and I think they deserve to have a bad picture painted of them.
But I also think it’s interesting to approach the problem from the steel man point of view, so to speak. Uh, right, you’ve heard of straw manning. Straw manning is where you build up an argument in a kind of a less than ideal way, and then you tear that argument down. Steel manning is the opposite, where you intentionally force yourself to make good arguments for something, even if it’s something that you disagree with.
So, even though I disagree with annuities, For the most part, and what they represent, I’m going to paint you an ideal picture right now of annuities. And so let’s assume that all annuities out there have absolutely zero fees associated with them. Great. They are completely free products. Maybe they’re sponsored by the government or something like that.
How exactly would that work? Imagine we have a hundred people who buy my free annuities. Each person uses a million dollars to buy their annuity. And then they immediately start to receive a monthly payout from the annuity, just like the paycheck that Amy referred to in her question. So now we have this pot, a hundred people put a million dollars each, we have a pot of a hundred million dollars, which is sending out a hundred paychecks every single month.
Now this is my hypothetical, so we’re going to continue down this path of it being a perfect, ideal world. And the question is, does this pot of money have any risks associated with it? And it does. The main risk for the pot of money, essentially for the annuity company itself, is that too many of the 100 people live too long, and thus I’m sending out too many paychecks over their lives, and the 100 million pot essentially runs out.
And that problem is why annuities are run by insurance companies. The problem is, well, when are these people going to die? It’s hard to know when a single person is going to die. But when you group many, many people together, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even more, and you get a large data set, a large population, well, you can use actuarial math to find the probabilities and the averages of how many people are going to live a certain amount of time.
That is the fundamental mathematical problem that all life insurance companies need to answer. The cost of, say, a life insurance policy, it has to be based on the probability of a person dying, based on their age, their gender, their health, their habits, all that kind of stuff. And similarly, the promised monthly payout of an annuity also has to be based on the probability of a person dying.
Now, with term life insurance, let’s compare life insurance to an annuity, because they’re very similar in some ways, but they’re kind of the opposite sides of the coin in other ways. We’ll start with life insurance. With term life insurance, if you die early, your beneficiary will receive much more in a lump sum than you ever paid in in premiums.
But if you don’t die early and the policy lapses, you and your beneficiary will receive zero payout, despite all the premiums you paid. That is the probabilistic wager when buying term life insurance. All the people who survive, they pay all these premiums in. And the people who die, they get the lump sums or their beneficiaries get the lump sums going out.
Now, the benefit of the security, both financial security and emotional security, of having term life insurance, that benefit comes with a price. And with term life insurance, that price is usually appropriate and well worth paying, right? Most of us, most of the time, are saying, Yeah, I’m going to buy term life insurance for the next 30 years.
I understand I’m going to be paying a monthly premium. And I kind of want to survive, so I’m actually hoping that I put all this money into the term life insurance policy and I’m hoping I never pull anything back out. I hope that it’s a quote unquote waste of money because on the off chance that I get hit by a bus, I want to have that security for my family.
I want the financial security and I want to have the emotional security that allows me to sleep at night while I am living because I know they’ll be taken care of. So that’s term life insurance. Now, with an annuity, if you die late then you will have received much more in monthly payouts than you paid up front.
It’s the opposite of the term policy. Term life insurance, if you die early, you get more than your fair share. Well, with an annuity, if you die late, you get more than your fair share. But if with an annuity, if you die early, then you’ll likely receive much less in payouts than you paid up front. So while term life insurance protects against an early death, Annuities protect against a late death.
That’s why they’re sometimes called longevity insurance. It’s insurance against the fact that you might live until you’re 95 or 100. And if annuities were free or low cost, like in my ideal world, then the benefit of having that longevity insurance would likely be appropriate and well worth paying, right?
If we’re all putting our money into this annuity pool together, with the understanding that some of us are going to die early, And others are gonna die late, and we’re all sharing the risk, and we know that some people might benefit more than others, but we’re okay with it because the costs are really low?
Okay. That seems like a reasonably fair deal. But. I have reviewed annuities for many clients who came to work with us, they weren’t happy with their annuities, they wanted to work instead with a fee only, a fiduciary, a planning heavy team, a traditional investing firm. And those annuities that I’ve seen, the statements and the policies with my own two eyes, the fees are often in the two to three percent range per year.
Traditional stock investing, you can build a portfolio of stocks and bonds in the tenths of a percent range. And these annuities had fees 25 or 30 or hundreds of times greater than that. And then the annuities, some of which do have an underlying investment product tied to them. I mean, there’s a million different types of annuities and we’re not going to get into that here, but the growth rates on the annuities that I’ve seen tended to be under 2 percent or under 3 percent per year, even over the past 15 years, which was one of the best periods for public market investors in history.
So in other words, these were not appropriately priced products. And there’s certainly not a product in terms of growth that you want to have all of your assets in. And because of that, even when you look at the payout structure of someone who gets lucky with their annuity and lives for a ridiculously long time, someone who has 50 or 60 years worth of annuity payments, or even something unrealistic, someone who has a hundred years worth of annuitized payments, you can calculate the return on investment of that annuity.
So if I give you a million dollars today. And then I wait 10 years, because that is the way a lot of annuities work for what it’s worth. There’s a delay between when you put the money in and when you can start to take the money out. So I give you a million dollars today, and then I wait 10 years. And then you have to start paying me 10, 000 a month for the next 50 years.
10, 000 a month on a million dollar investment. I mean, that’s 1 percent a month. That’s a 12 percent per year annual return for the next 50 years. And I can look at that and say, what’s my return on investment for what it’s worth. That’s a very typical type of promised return from this type of annuity.
It’s simple in Microsoft Excel to do what’s called an internal rate of return or IRR. It’s a problem that is very easily solved. And you might be thinking, well, yeah, okay, 1 percent per month, a 12 percent annual return, that’s huge, but it only kicks in after the first 10 years. And meanwhile, the 1, 000, 000 original investment, it’s locked up.
It’s illiquid. Just some basic off the top of the head math. It’ll take nine years of payments of 120, 000 per year for us to get our 1, 000, 000 back. So after 10 years of nothing, It then takes another nine years for us to get our money back. In other words, our internal rate of return, our IRR, it’s negative for the first 18 years of that investment.
A negative return for the first 18 years of the investment. Not ideal. So let’s keep going. After 25 total years, that’s 10 years of waiting plus 15 years of payment, our IRR does increase. It’s now positive, thankfully, and it’s 3. 6 percent per year. Again, 25 years, 3. 6 percent per year return. After 40 years, our IRR is about 5.
9%. out to infinity, you know, the IRR curve eventually flattens out. It reaches a local limit. And if we have an annuity for an infinite number of years, our IRR maxes out at about 6. 7%. So just to be clear, do I want to pursue an investment that is illiquid, has a negative rate of return for the first 18 years of its life, and if I literally held it forever, would max out at a 6.
7 percent rate of return? To me, that is not what I’m going after in the investment universe. And if I have to pay a 2 percent fee on top of that, because this was a fee less annuity, so if I have to pay a 2 percent fee on top of that, it’s a non starter. So now, let’s pivot. There are a class of annuities that Jonathan Clements mentioned here on the Best Interest Podcast in Episode 82 that work a little bit differently.
In fact, they work so much differently that Jonathan is using one in his own retirement plan. It’s a super simple, generally low fee type of annuity, and therefore because it’s low fee and has a low commission. It’s not pushed by insurance salespeople, and so far so good, that’s what we want. This type of annuity goes by two different names, but you’ll often hear the words immediate and fixed involved in the titles of these annuities.
Something like, an immediate fixed lifetime annuity. The immediate means there’s no waiting period to start your monthly collection. And the fixed portion means that your returns are not based on market performance, unlike the far more common variable annuities, which are based on market performance. So immediate fixed annuities is what we’re looking after here.
So I went to the Schwab website and I got some numbers on their immediate fixed annuities. I assumed it was a 1, 000, 000 annuity for, in this example, I decided to use a 64 year old man. 64 year old man seems like a reasonable age and type of person who would be looking for an immediate fixed annuity.
Schwab would start paying this man 73, 000 per year right away. So, let’s plug this into Microsoft Excel. Let’s do our internal rate of return, our IRR. It takes 14 years for this guy to get his money back. So for the first 13 years, he’s got a negative IRR. If the guy lives to 84, which right, 20 years of payment, his IRR will be 4.
5%. If he lives to 90 with 26 years of payment, his IRR jumps to 6. 1%. If he lives to 100 years old, his IRR will be 7. 2%. Again, an annuity is longevity insurance. If you die early. You probably shouldn’t expect for something called longevity insurance to work in your favor. That’s just the way it is. But if you do live to 100, which was 36 years of life for this, uh, 64 year old guy, if you do live to 100, is an annual rate of return of 7.
2 percent what you’re looking for. Now my honest answer is, I kind of want to think about it some more. I’m interested to know what you guys think. Because on the one hand, you could say, well, a 30 year bond right now is only returning 4. 5 percent per year. So, 7. 2 percent sounds pretty good. But if I die early, with a million dollars in bonds, I will get to pass that million dollars on to my wife so she can use it.
It’s an asset that I can pass on. But if I die early, with a million dollars in an immediate annuity, I cannot pass those dollars on to my family. The money is essentially gobbled up by the insurance company because they have to cover the risk of other people living longer. That is just how insurance pools work.
And of course, many people hate this idea, understandably so, and insurance companies understand that. So they do offer immediate fixed annuities with a survivor benefit, but nothing is free. So in that case, the rate of return on the annuity is lowered. And not only is the rate of return of the annuity lowered, but the most your beneficiaries can receive is the amount of your original lump sum minus the amount of benefits you’ve been given.
They give you your million dollars back minus any payouts, which I think is relatively understandable. But why do I need an insurance company to do that for me when a well constructed investment portfolio does the same thing, in my opinion, but better with higher long term returns, with lower fees, with more liquidity, with more flexibility, and with a return on investment starting from day one, right?
I don’t have to wait 14 years to have a positive return on investment. And there’s just an easier inheritance plan for my heirs. I just get to pass the assets onto them. I don’t have to wait for a check from an insurance company. So I don’t see the appeal of annuities necessarily, even when they are put in the best light.
Maybe there’s a corner case where it’s the right tool for the right person, but I think those cases are relatively few and far between. And to me, the benefits of a traditional and even a conservative investment portfolio. It’s better early on than the annuity, and it’s better later on than the annuity.
So I just don’t see the appeal. But Amy, thank you for the terrific question because I think it spawned a very interesting answer and it allowed me to dive deep on a topic that I haven’t gone too deep on before. So that’s it for today, everybody. Thank you for all the great questions to those of you who have written in.
I am keeping a very active spreadsheet list of all the AMA questions that come in, and I’ll do my best to touch them all or to get to them all. If there comes a point when it’s just too much and too overwhelming and I can’t put out enough AMA episodes, maybe I’ll just have to trim to the best ones. But keep them coming.
You can send your AMA questions, email them please to jesse at best interest dot blog. And as always, thank you for listening to the best interest podcast. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the best interest podcast. If you have a question for Jesse to answer on a future episode, send him an email at jesse at best interest dot blog.
Again, that’s jesse at best interest dot blog. Did you enjoy the show? Subscribe, rate, and review the podcast wherever you listen. This helps others find the show and invest in knowledge themselves, and we really appreciate it. We’ll catch you on the next episode of the Best Interest Podcast.
The Best Interest Podcast is a personal podcast meant for education and entertainment. It should not be taken as financial advice and is not prescriptive of your financial situation.