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Episode #566 - Retirement Year End Planning: Withdrawing from Assets

Roger: The show is a proud member of the retirement podcast network. 

“It's all about gear, not stuff.”

- Michael Easter

Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to really lean in and rock it.

All right, today on the show we are going to continue this month long series on year-end action items, things that we want to bring to the surface and examine so you can see if there are any risks or opportunities you should be taking action on to optimize your retirement planning. We're going to talk about withdrawing assets today. Next week we're going to talk about charitable giving and family giving. In addition to that, we're going to answer some of your questions. Before we get to all that though, a couple of things. 

Number one, we're gearing up for our Retirement Plan Live case study for January. That's where we take a volunteer from you, the people listening, bring them on the show and work through building a retirement plan of record that they can have confidence in following the process, the agile process that we preach. This January we're going to be focusing on someone that is single with no children, so if you are single with no children, there's somebody that is, and want to raise your hand to be the subject for this case study, we're going to have a link in our 6-Shot Saturday email to a quick Google form where you can share a little bit about yourself and we'll review all those so we can find the person to create a plan of record for. You'll get a link to that in 6-Shot Saturday, and that means we'd like you to be signed up for 6-Shot Saturday. Even if this isn't for you, It's a great supplement to the show. You get a summary of the show, you get links to resources that we share and we're going to talk about a few of those resources today. If you hit reply to that email, it comes directly to me so you can give me feedback directly. You can sign up for that at 6shotsaturday.com all right, so that's number one.

The second thing I want to talk about is just an aside. We recently had our cabinets painted in our home in our kitchen and it's like a special thing you have to do. You can't just get a roller and paint your cabinets evidently. So, we had to empty the cabinets, take everything out of all the cabinets because they took the doors off, they took those to the shop and then they came in and prep the cabinets. 

Well, all that was done and I got back from my trip with my buddies golfing this year, last week, and now we had to put everything back in the cabinets. We're using this as an opportunity to declutter at least partially, right? Well, there is a lot of stuff that gets accumulated when you live in a house. As long as we do stuff, stuff, stuff everywhere and we're doing a lot of purging where a lot of stuff is going to Goodwill, a lot of stuff's going to the garbage, which is going to go into the dump. That reminded me of Michael Easter's book the Scarcity Brain, where he points out that the average home contains about 10,000 items. Michael and I have become friends and I get to hang out with him periodically and he has this big concept that he focuses on talking about gear, not stuff. I'm going to read from his website, twopct.com where he says that stuff is possession for the sake of it. Stuff adds to a collection of too many items. We often buy stuff impulsively to fix our boredom or our stress or to solve a problem we could have figured out creatively with another item. 

Gear, on the other hand, has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose. Gear is a tool we can use to have better experiences that make us healthier and give our lives meaning. That is the distinction between stuff and gear. Gear has a very specific purpose, a higher purpose where with stuff we just get more and more and more. I'm a techie guy, so we accumulate a lot of stuff. It was very evident as we're culling the contents of our cabinets, it's amazing how much stuff is thrown away or donated. Check out Michael Easter's stuff, or gear, rather. It's wonderful.

I want to couple that with. I may have told this a month or two ago, and this is just where my mind is. I was on a podcast being interviewed. It was a panel. We were talking about frugality or spending. I talked about buying high quality stuff, pay a little bit more, buy something that's high quality, that will last and get the job done. I recently bought a hatchet from Sweden. It was extremely well made. It will last longer than I will. It was a little bit more expensive, but it's quality gear. It has a purpose. There was a lady on the show who was a self-described environmentalist that was talking about stuff and consumerism and pointed out that every single thing that we buy will end up in a landfill. So, we don't need to buy nearly as much stuff as we do. Every single thing we buy will ultimately end up in a landfill, just get buried in the dirt. That's not very healthy for the economy and all that stuff because we're at a race to the bottom of cost is cheap, cheap, cheap, generally built in China or some third world or emerging country and sometimes built by very abusive labor practices, sometimes literally slave labor or child labor. That's bad. 

Both of those things sound bad to me. I don't describe myself as an environmentalist, but I'm not for either of those. Then I started thinking, and literally in the interview when we were talking about it, it's actually an argument for buying really good quality stuff. Buy gear you're going to pay a little bit more maybe because it was made by craftsmen or made domestically, hopefully it will be built better. If you buy things that are built better, you won't need to replace them because they won't break near as much and that means less stuff in the landfill. As we enter this holiday season when I'm going to be thinking of gifts for other people and you are too, I'm guessing I'm going to try to focus on what gear do they need and what can I buy them that is quality made and I can feel good about that has a real purpose rather than just simply to be wrapped under the tree. 

So okay, coming off of that soapbox, but it's been on my mind because I just got done working on our cabinets for today.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

With that said, let's get to today's year end checklist. 

We're going to talk about accounts we need to consider withdrawing money from before the end of the year. First account is going to be flexible spending accounts. That's an FSA. These are use it or lose it accounts. So, these are employer sponsored accounts where you are able to contribute money for certain types of expenses but if you don't take the money out for those expenses, that money will go away. So, if you have a flexible spending account with an employer, the key action is to go find it and make sure you understand the specific deadlines of taking the money out. Generally, that's going to be December 31st. 

The next account we're going to talk about are inherited pretax accounts, that could be an inherited IRA, inherited 401k, inherited Roth accounts we can throw in there. The rules around these types of accounts that are inherited from the original owner have changed substantially over the last few years and up until recently still haven’t had clear clarification on what the rules were. So, we're going to go over the basics and then I'm going to share in our 6-Shot Saturday email a flow chart to follow. If you have an inherited IRA, you can understand which rule applies to you. I'm going to go through the basics here on the show, but I'm going to refer to the flowchart that we're going to share in our 6-Shot Saturday email so you can get all the details.

If you inherited an IRA, we're going to assume that you are a non-spouse. If you are a spouse, the rules are different because you can just bring those into your own IRA or Roth IRA. So, we're talking to non-spouses here. If you inherited an IRA prior to January 1, 2020, so you would have been already doing this a while and you are a non-spouse, your required minimum distribution is required to be taken out by the end of this year, 2024, December 31st. We will have a link to a Schwab required minimum distribution calculator for inherited IRAs in our 6-Shot Saturday. So, you can see why this email is very helpful because we can get you the links to the resources very quickly. 

The way that a required minimum distribution is calculated, although you're probably familiar with this, if you've been doing it, is you're going to look at the balance at the end of the prior year. So that would be December 31, 2023. You're going to apply the uniform life table of life expectancy for you and that will tell you the amount that you need to take out as a required minimum distribution. That should be pretty straightforward. 

Now what happens if you inherited an IRA or 401k after 2020? Well, we have a couple different rules that are going to apply here depending upon whether the person that deceased was already taking required minimum distributions or not. But the big rule is that you are not able to continue to just take out required minimum distributions for the entirety of your life. Like before, you have what's called a 10 year rule, meaning that if you inherited an IRA or a 401k from the original owner and you are a non-spouse and not what's called an eligible designated beneficiary, which the flowchart that we're going to share goes through this, then you have to drain that account within 10 years of the date you inherited it. 

Now, if the person that passed away after January 1st, 2020, was already taking required minimum distributions, you still have to take it out within 10 years. But there may be some required minimum distributions each and every year that you have to continue doing. That was something that was very unclear. The IRS hadn't given guidance on it. They gave us a little bit of guidance finally. I think it's best practice to take out that amount if the deceased was already taking the RMD, But we'll have this flowchart. 

This is an important one because if you don't do this, the penalty for not doing the required minimum distribution is not inconsequential. Since the Secure Act 2.0 started in 2023, the penalty for not taking the required minimum distribution is 25% of what you should have taken. As an example, let's assume that you were supposed to take a $10,000 distribution as a required minimum distribution, and you failed to do so, the penalty would be 25% or $2500. Now, you can correct these, and I've actually had to go through this process using IRS Form 5329. But the main point for our discussion here, because we're not trying to be experts on this in this setting, is that if you have an inherited account IRA Roth IRA 401k and you are a non-spouse or eligible designated beneficiary, maybe you don't even know, you need to explore this further before the end of the year so you don't have something not good happen in the form of penalty. We'll have this workflow in 6-Shot Saturday to help you do that.

Now, the next type of required minimum distributions I want to talk about are those that are age related for the original owner of an IRA. So, if you were born prior to July 1, 1949, you are required to do annual distribution from your IRA after you've turned 70 and 1/2. So, if you're born before July 1, 1949, and you're over 70 and a half, you have a required minimum distribution you need to get calculated. If you were born between July 1, 1949, and December 31, 1950, your required minimum distribution age is 72. If you were born on or after January 1, 1951, your required minimum distribution is 73. Now, for future folks, this includes me and maybe many of our listeners, for those that were born on or after January 1, 1960, you don't have to start until you're 75. We have got some time for that one. The key point is if you hit those ages at some point in this year, you have a required minimum distribution based on the required minimum distribution rules. Make sure you pay attention to that and explore that so you don't get hit with a penalty.

Now we're going to switch from the punitive side. Hey, we have got to pay attention to these because there might be a penalty involved to the more opportunistic side, which is proactively taking qualified distributions. 

To do this I'm going to share another resource, which is the 1040 tax calculator under dinkytown.net, don't you just love the name dinkytown.net, which is an amazing resource of all sorts of calculators. Under the calculators, under tax, they have a 1040 tax estimator where you can get an idea of where you're going to be tax bracket wise for this year. Now, alternate versions are to use a CPA or use an early version of tax cut or turbo tax, etc. So, I'm going to go into dinkytown right now and I'm going to give you an example. 

Let's take a couple that is married and filing jointly. We're going to just look at federal taxes and let's assume they earned $65,000 in wages and salaries and then they had $10,000 in taxable interest, $10,000 in ordinary dividends and $5,000 in long term capital gains. Very quickly, using the calculator, you can see that they had total income of about $90,000, total taxable income of 75,400 and total income tax of $11,297. Now these are going to be very inexact. They're using the assumptions that they have and the data that you're inputting, but this is the best free estimator that I have come across. We use something much more sophisticated in our practice, but this will do. 

Now why do we want to understand this? Looking at the calculator, obviously they're going to be standard deduction. Here their total tax was $11,297. That means that their average tax rate on their 90,000 income was 12.55%. That is important because it appears that they are below the threshold of the next tax bracket, which is the 22% tax bracket. We go from 12% tax bracket from $23,201 to $94,300 and then it jumps up to the 22% tax bracket. But then we're not factoring in the standard deduction, which would increase those numbers somewhat. Just as an experiment, we have a 12.55% average tax on their 90,000, which is 11,296 in taxes. What if they took out an extra 15,000 from their IRA? What would that do to their taxable income? Well, the total income would be 105. Their total taxable income would be 90,400 and their total tax would go up to $14,597, which puts them, with an average tax rate of 13.9%. This is an opportunity that we want to look at from a withdrawal standpoint, especially in retirement, where you can control what your income is and it's called filling up the tax brackets. We can mess around very quickly with, well, what if I did a qualified distribution, basically an IRA withdrawal or 401k withdrawal, and chose to pay tax on assets this year because I have some room in where I fall in the tax brackets in a given year and if I'm going to pay 12% or even 13% on a withdrawal, that might be better than allowing it to continue to accumulate and have to take it out later and perhaps pay a higher tax bracket. 

The important thing, conceptually, is why would I choose to pay taxes earlier on dollars? The reason is that you can observe these levers and perhaps work to lower your overall tax rate through your retirement lifespan, because we'll have these required minimum distributions when you hit age 73 or 75, where they're going to force you to take money out and that might throw you into a higher tax bracket rather than take it as a qualified withdrawal, that might build some after tax cash for that extra trip that you're going to have to take next year. So, this is an important thing to observe and you can do it very easily using this calculator, dinkytown.net, taxes 1040 estimator so those are the items that I want to bring to your attention to make sure you observe to see if they apply to you. 

Now remember, this is an optimization exercise. In ideal world, you have a feasible and resilient retirement plan of record that you should have confidence in. These are optional items to enhance the plan through optimization tactics that may put money in your pocket but are not required for you to rock retirement.

LISTENER QUESTIONS 

Now it's time to answer some of your questions. Next Month, we're going to focus on answering a lot of your questions. They've been building up a little bit, and I want to help you take these little baby steps with things that are specifically important to you. If you have a question for the show, you can, you can go to askroger.me, you can type in a question or leave an audio question. 

SCOTT’S QUESTION ABOUT PRINCIPAL VERSUS INTEREST WHEN IT COMES TO DECUMULATION

All right, our first question comes from Scott. 

He said, 

“I just listened to podcast #562 concerning decumulation. I have been mostly retired for the last 10 years, with the exception of some freelance gigs. How do you define principle versus interest, Meaning, is there a point where one draws the line and says, from now on, everything else I earn is icing on the cake? 

Thanks in advance for clarifying the term.”

 So, Scott, I'm going to make some assumptions on what you're asking here. 

Let's first define what we mean by principal. Let's say you have a bank account and you have $100,000 that you deposited in that bank account. That is the principal that you deposited. The interest is the interest earned on that account. So, if you have $100,000 in that account and you earned $5,000 over 12 months, that $5,000 is the interest that you earned on the principal that you put in there. That's concept number one. One is the money you put in, the other is what you've earned on it. That can be in the form of interest or it could be in the form of capital appreciation. I put in $100,000 and bought a mutual fund, and now it's worth $200,000. 

First concept, how do we relate that between accumulation and decumulation? Accumulation is building assets, where we're putting our $100,000 into an investment and allowing it to grow and grow and grow for some future purpose, which is accumulating assets over time by deposits, by interest, and by capital appreciation. 

Decumulation is okay, now I've reached retirement, my income is going away, which is paying for my life, and now I have to turn to my assets to supplement my life. That's the point of the assets, right? That's the whole point of the exercise of accumulating is so when you don't have income, you can use your assets to pay for your life. Sowing versus reaping. Traditionally 20, 30, 40 years ago, the concept was, if I have my $100,000, that's my principal. I never want to touch my principal, and I need to focus on how I invest that principle to pay me an income. So, in this very simple example, if I only have $100,000, I'm going to invest that. If I get $5,000 of interest in capital appreciation each year, that's the money that I have to live on because I'm never touching my principal. I will only touch what it is able to generate. That is a traditional way of thinking about retirement years ago. 

The problem with that becomes when you can't generate enough income via interest because interest rates have been low for 30 years. So just trying to build has forced us to go buy assets that don't just simply pay interest, but they try to have capital appreciation, which you can't guarantee in any single year. They're going to go up, they're going to go down, they're going to go down, down, down. Then they go up, up, up. So, your principle is going to go up and down with the markets, which means you can't just let the value go up, take money out and live your life. What happens when the markets go down? What are you going to take out? You're going to have to dip into your principal, most likely in your retirement. 

That's one reason why with decumulation, I think there should be less consideration of my principal versus my interest. I would think of it, and this is the way I do think of it, as a total return portfolio that we don't designate. Is that principal or is that interest or is that capital appreciation? This is the money I have. These are the liabilities of my spending. How do I make it work without breaking it up in the more traditional way? 

Now you ask at the end about the concept that everything above is icing on the cake. Icing on the cake conceptually means that this is free money, money I don't actually need. It's just a blessing above my minimum. Where you factor that in is building a feasible plan of records which considers that we can't just simply put it into a bond and think we're going to get enough interest or buy a fixed annuity that will pay us a guaranteed income. Those are definitely good options as part of the plan, but it's not going to protect against spending shocks because of life, circumstance, health or otherwise down the road, or change in preference. So those can be coupled with we're going to have to have appreciation because of inflation. That came about because we're living much longer and we're living more active lives. So, inflation is a much bigger issue than it was say, for my grandfather, whom I'm going to read his next mission at the end of the show. When he retired, he had a 7, 8 year timeline to solve for. His pension and his Social Security and whatever he had in CDs were fine because he was investing in CDs in the 80s, he didn't have this huge 20, 30 year timeframe which brought inflation as a bigger risk in retirement.

What I would suggest, Scott, is to build a feasible plan of record so you know that the assets you have are matched to the liabilities of your spending over your projected lifespan. When you do that feasible plan of record, it's going to come out with three basic results. 

Number one, you're underfunded. You don't have enough money, principal or otherwise, to cover your life. That's going to force you to negotiate or prioritize with yourself of what do I need or what levers do I have to create a feasible plan? You can have underfunded, you could have constrained, which is going to be most of us when we run the Monte Carlo or whatever type of scenario planning you do, it's going to say, yeah, it should work, but it couldn't. There are possibilities that it might not. That's essentially what an 80% confidence number in a software is going to say in a retirement planning software. If you get an 80%, 90% confidence number is basically saying in human words, yeah, you're constrained, it should work, but you know, stuff could happen and it might not, but most likely it will. That's essentially the message that's being sent. Whereas if you're 99% or way over 90% confidence in the retirement planning software, it's probably saying, dude, looks like you have icing on the cake more than enough to cover even if we have some bad markets. 

You want to build a feasible plan of record and then you focus on how to make it resilient, which is planning out the five year cash flow. It doesn't matter whether you're dipping into principal or interest or capital appreciation. I mean, you can factor in the interest you're going to receive, but you can't factor in capital appreciation because you don't know if it's going to be there. So, I think those terms are not as important in modern retirement planning as they used to be. Hopefully that gives you some perspective on the issue.

JOY NEEDS HELP WITH RETIREMENT PLANNING AND DECUMULATION

Our next question comes from Joy. Hey Joy. 

Joy says, 

“I am 60 years old and retirement is on the horizon. I have been working with a financial advisor for over a decade. 

Yet as I get closer to retirement, I can see that the decumulation of assets is not his strength. He runs the Monte Carlo, but I do not see any strategy specific to my situation. So now what? Do I switch to a retirement advisor? Do I drop the financial advisor or use both? 

I assume that using both might be a win win, but in the interest of frugality, is there a better solution?”

I do think, Joy, that if they are not focused on decumulation, you would be better served with a true retirement planner. Running the Monte Carlo scenarios to help see what's feasible is not that difficult. It will give you a long term vision of whether you are on a safe course, but as you stated, it will not get specific enough in the areas of how exactly I am going to do this? How am I going to make it resilient? That's usually where it falls apart for a generalist advisor because the Monte Carlo tool is readily accessible. 

I do think you would be better served with a retirement planner. That said, I also think if you have a great connection with your planner and you've walked for a decade with this person and there's a lot of relational currency there, you know, like and trust them and they may be a little light here and just need some outside help. I also think enrollments close now, so this is not self-serving. I think if you can become better educated on a true retirement planning process, what we talk about here on the show, or what we teach in the Rock Retirement Club, you can become a better client to bring up topics to your advisor to improve your plan. 

In the club we have about 30% of the members actually work with advisors and they are starting to drive the agenda with their advisors more than they were before because they're building their own plan of record and they're surrounded by people that are thinking about this all day long. By doing this, they're able to extract more value from the advisors that they're working with. You could do that by being a member of the club, but you could also do that by consuming this and other content and start creating an agenda with your advisor saying, okay, I see that my Monte Carlo is at this percentage, let's build out an allocation so I have total clarity of how I'm going to pay for the first five years. Force or press the issue on getting specific of how exactly this will work so you can make a more resilient plan. I think that approach can work as well. 

If you don't want to drive that conversation or do the work to become more educated on what I believe is a sound retirement planning process, then I think you should say this is a change of seasons. This person has served me well, but I need something else now. Just like we might go from an amazing pediatrician to a general practitioner because I'm not a kid anymore. I have different issues. I think that there's a couple different ways that you could approach that, Joy.

MIKE ASKS HOW PRE-RETIREES POSITION THEIR ASSETS AS THEY REACH THE LAST FIVE YEARS BEFORE RETIREMENT

Our next question comes from Mike related to decumulation and resilience. 

“Hey Roger. 

One topic that I don't hear you touch on much is how pre retirees might plan to position retirement assets as they approach the last five years or so before retirement so as to provide principal protection for their income floor that you described to minimize sequence of return risk. How soon should one start? Would moving more risky assets into safer assets be prudent gradually from 5 years out? Clearly this is a personal comfort level issue, but I suspect that many may not be this soon enough along and a severe market downturn, say in the last two years before, could really impact their retirement plans. 

I am eight years from retirement, so this is something that I am trying to be thoughtful about. Any wisdom from you on this approach would be very welcome.”

Hey Mike, great question. 

So, think about driving on the roads in Colorado. I'm thinking about it now. You have got some twisty roads, right? You're in fall, you're in summertime or you're coming out of summer into winter where the roads can be a little bit more slippery and you might get snow. Maybe that's how we visualize this eight year path to retirement. When it comes to asset allocation, when should you start pivoting from accumulation to building a pie cake or a resilient plan? I think now is not a bad time to slowly start that process, Michael. You can do that by just redirecting other assets. Maybe you were saving in accumulation accounts in after tax assets. I would start with your after tax assets by trying to build up more after tax assets and have those assets be less risky in terms of sequence of return risk. That could be something that you start now in just baby steps and monitor as you get closer. That would be step one. I think that'd be a phase one of how to slowly start to slow down because you can see off in the distance this turn coming and the fact that it might be a little slippery and you don't want to fall off the road, retirement speaking. That would also help you because you're building up more after tax assets, which is generally where we are deficient as accumulators, I don't know your specific situation. 

One way to also do that is if you have after tax assets, let's say you do have a lot of substantial after tax assets that are in accumulation investments with low cost basis. You could simply turn off all the dividend and capital gain investments and that would naturally start to build cash rather than reinvest and buy more shares. I would include that in phase one as well. 

As you're moving forward, start to forecast what you think you’re going to need in the first five years. That can help you target how quickly you start to focus on this so you can do it in a tax efficient way. If you are much more of a safety first person, then you could do it earlier and this is the personal perspective that you talked about. You could do it earlier either by managing capital gains and after tax assets or just simply de risking in your pretax assets like your 401k or your IRA more quickly since there's no tax consequence. But I would start this process right now and start slowly since you're eight years out and slowly accelerate that as you build out your retirement model.

One aspect of this Mike, I want you to consider is, and I've done this oftentimes is we have a number of clients that are positioned to retire next year and have been positioned to retire in the subsequent year for a number of years, meaning that they've had their pie cake built out as if they were going to retire at any moment but they've continued to work for three plus years. The reason we did that is from a planning perspective, they are in a position now that if they wanted to retire today, they wouldn't miss a beat, and that changed the perception of their work for them. It allowed them to recognize I can get off of this “I have to please everyone and say yes to everyone” corporate structure. So, when the promotions come, you can say no. When the opportunity comes to take on a project, you can say no or put boundaries around that because you don't need to. You don't need to please everybody because you're not as worried about how they feel about you. You could retire today if you want. It gives them that agency. 

Another reason is that the more you're positioned for retirement, even eight years out where you already have it built out to maybe three years. You can now feel more confident in building boundaries. I turn my phone off at 4:30 or 5. I don't check my email. After a certain time or on the weekends. You can start to build the boundaries around when you actually do your job so you can start to find or nurture a life outside of work. Feeling like I have to say yes to everything and play the political structure to be pleasing to everybody, which probably got you far along. 

Whatever kind of work you're in, if you're eight years out and you are well funded from a feasibility standpoint, building the resilient plan earlier might give you the option to start saying no more and building boundaries around your day so you can recapture more peace in your life. There's some perspective to think about, but I think right now is not a bad time to start doing baby steps.

TOM ASKS ABOUT THE FIVE YEAR RULE FOR ROTH 401K CONVERSATION

Okay, one last question for today is from Tom on the five year rule. We need to ring a bell every time we have a Roth five year rule question. 

Tom says, 

“If I had a Roth 401K for 5 years and convert it or move it to a Roth IRA, is there another five year waiting period?”

Yes, there is. If you are contributing to a Roth 401K, which I've been doing personally, and you do not have a Roth IRA with at least a dollar in it already, you have a new five year rule. It does not come over from your 401k. So, when you're in this position, Tom, you want to do what I just did and should have done a few years ago, you want to establish a Roth IRA and if you have an IRA, you want to convert just a dollar, I did like $300, convert some money into that IRA, because that IRA will start its five year rule January 1st of this year. Then ultimately, when you move your Roth 401k into that account, the Roth 401k assets will take on the five year rule date of the first dollar that funded the Roth IRA. So, get that Roth IRA started if you haven't and fund it. 

With that said, let's go to our smart sprint. 

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

On your marks, get set, 

and we're off to set a little baby step that you can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.

All right, in the next seven days, take a look at the items that we talked about in terms of withdrawing assets, either it's because of required minimum distributions, flexible spending accounts, an inherited account of some sort. If you have those, look at the rules. 

If you don't, do an estimate of your taxes to see if there are any opportunities from a tax bracket management standpoint to either do a qualified distribution or a Roth conversion. 

BONUS STORY

All right, I am going to continue reading my grandfather's journal. Let me get to the next page. Remember, he was shot in the leg on his first mission. Can you imagine that? My mother was two years old, one or two years old when he was over there. So, he did his first mission on 05/25/1944. His second mission wasn't until 07/04/1944, he got shot in the leg. He had a couple months of recovery. He was on ship number 918, sortie number two, back and ready for the grind again.
“Must admit that I was a little nervous on this one, but okay. Target, Oil depot and refinery. Target seemed to be hit. The flak was moderate. Had 38 for escort today, carried 12500 pound bombs. Target was in Romania.”

That was mission number two and three. Next week we'll read mission number four, which happened the very next day. With that said, I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll talk with you next week. 

The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All, performance reference is historical and does not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.