Moving to Retirement Living with Jason Totedo

*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Happy Saturday everyone. It’s answers for elders radio and I am thrilled to have Mr Jason to Tito here again from a GP wealth advisors. Jason, welcome to the program good afternoon. Thanks for having us. You know I love our Saturdays together because you get all kinds of information that if I would have known when I knew and when I was faced with those situations, my life would have turned out a lot different. Jason, I’m glad you’re going to talk about this topic today. As you know, I remember when my mom sold her house and she was moving into retirement living. All of a sudden she had a wad of cash. Let’s just say she had four hundred thousand dollars. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but all of a sudden you’re faced with the situation where I’m going to have to be paying out for her, you know, six seven thousand dollars a month for her living. How do I make those funds accessible to her but also safe? I don’t want to put it in a situation where you know, I was concerned at the time, and thank God I didn’t, because this was before the collapse of the stock market. I was nervous about putting your money in the stock market, but I didn’t know, and I and I was concerned about going to a financial advisor, that that’s their product, that’s what they do, and so, you know, I I loved. I’m so glad at number one, that your firm is not beholding to one solution, which is very unusual. And so, Jason, you know, fill me in about how you work with families like that are in my situation. Sure, great question. Again, as you mentioned, we’re not we have what’s called an open architecture, so we have a wide range of solutions available to us. Think about it, use an analogy. You think about it as a as a pharmacy. We have a tremendous amount of medication available to us to satisfy the needs of our clients. If you are diabetic, right, insulin and penicillin are both very good medications, but if you’re diabetic, you should have insulin and not the penicillain correct. So having a trusted advisor who understands what ails you financially, what you need to accomplish financially, and then pulling from a wide solution set that allows us to specify exactly what you need and make recommendations without worrying about how much of one particular solution we have to offer. Sure, sure, and then obviously a lot of it has to do with, you know, their pension or their retirement benefits. There’s the social security that comes into play, there’s other assets such as their other stocks, bonds, just situations like that. And then obviously it affects you as the family. Obviously you know you check into a retirement community and they want their money every month. So how you know? What are the options for families like that? What do? What can they do? You touched on a couple good things. That really depends on what resources, what resources they have available to them. Give you an example. We have a large client base up in Southeast Alaska where they have not paid into the social security system. Wow, so what you have is a lot of clients who tend to have a large asset base, some cases a couple million dollars or more, but they don’t have any pension like perpetual cash flow or income coming in for the rest of their life right no social security, oftentimes no pension. So the solution we create for them is vastly different from someone who’s worked here in America, say for Boeing. Sure that will get and the old I have some clients that work at going. They get four five thousand dollars a month in addition to social security of thirty three or thirty five hundred dollars a month. So now you’ve created eight or nine thousand of fixed income coming in on a monthly basis. They can now live right. Those two answers are vastly different, very different scenarios. I can see too, that as the longer they live, there’s obviously different options along the way where, for example, maybe they have certain amount of assets that are not like you said. They’re not getting pension like the Boeing person, but like up an Alaska, maybe they don’t have assets worth one or two million. Maybe they’ve got assets of, you know, five hundred thousand that can run out and obviously to take a look at what those options are. I know there’s things that we’ve talked about with what a spend down is, different things like that. As an adult child, obviously on the spend down piece that’s a big factor and also it really affects you and how you know the money transfer happens between you and your parent, I’m sure too. Is that correct? Sure you know there’s only there’s what’s called a sustainable with draw rate on any portfolio and depending on how you look at it academically, can range in between three, four, five, six percent. As you get above that to the higher end of that range, that’s not sustainable. Got It. So when we look at it, we look at it comprehensively and we really like to build each client relationship around a financial plan, MMM, which is a deliverable. Both are written deliverable but also it’s an ongoing dialog with our clients around what’s changed in your life. So you have talked about an asset base, whatever the size of it. The ability to create a comprehensive road map, sure for spending down is very, very valuable. There’s a lot of talk now about the taxation of spendown and what that looks like. I are a k, withdraws are taxable. Should I convert it to a Roth? Do I need Long Term Care Insurance? There’s a lot of different pieces that a financial plan allows you really to look at holistically and create a road maps that sets the expectations on both sides, because a lot of times you’ll find people are spending a little bit too much and at that point you have to say hey, well, this is this is unsustainable. MMM. Conversely, you might have some people that are spending a little bit not enough and you think, well, how can they be not spending enough? Depending on the size of the asset base, and people tend to be a little bit concerned they might not be utilizing all the resources they have. A SAIR to them sure, or like my mom, she would she had a little bit of dementia and she’s on the buying stuff from catalogs every day. It’s like we had to put a stop to that. We’re talking to Jason Totito from a GP wealth advisors, and Jason a little bit about your firm. You work with multigenerational families quite a bit then, and so you see the scenario happen. You know, how do we take care of mom or dad? There’s a huge concern. But also, you know, as an adult child caring for your parent, there’s a lot of issues that you’re facing in that care. What are some of the scenarios that you see with families? Well, I think not only do you see the the adult children looking to provide for the parents, but you have that that parental need to to take care of the children and the grandchildren and balancing that, particularly when you have enough resources. It really becomes a situation around optimization of that. If you if you make an assumption that in most cases the families we work with are going to have sufficient assets, that they’re going to be able to take care of their needs, sure then it’s about what does the family really want to do and what’s the optimal way to accomplish that from a tax perspective, particularly because that the tax bill is the biggest bill that any family or any of our listeners is going to pay over the balance their life, and obviously that change is dramatically. Let’s say, if mom gets Alzheimer’s, dad is still healthy, there’s that affects the portfolio, I’m sure in that scenario. Well, I think that speaks to an earlier topic around the long term care. Right when you think about those types of things, they’re realities in this world. We are statistics. Statistically, a lot more people are going to be affected by those types of things and they have in the past, and proper planning towards those goals and towards that end is very valuable because once you’re diagnosed with something like that, it’s hard to go back and create the type of protection that you need. The latest statistics, I’ve heard from one of our guests here in an earlier so right now it’s projected that one out of every three people will die from either Alzheimer’s dementia. That’s overwhelming, staggering statistics. How it’s on the rise and really understanding that, you know, you gotta you got a really strong possibility that’s going to happen to your family in some way, whether it’s a brother or a sister, or it’s a husband or it’s yourself. And obviously to think about the long term care piece and to look at that scenario. And then, obviously, if you’re an adult child of somebody that has Alzheimer’s or dementia, that increases your risk as well, absolutely, because it’s a creditary thing. Yeah, I can’t stress enough the idea that if you just focus on the cost piece of it, you really leaving out right what the family member needs and a lot of the clients that we work with aren’t experts in these areas. And I did, I did exactly what you’re talking about. I thought, well, I don’t want to spend very much money. I need to. You know, mom doesn’t need that much care. Well, she really did need that much care and what happened was is she took a fall which caused her to spiral into a lot of you know situations when you break a hit or f Helvius or something like that, and those are the kind of things that we all try to be, you know, good with, good stewards with our parents and helping them. But, like you said, that isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. The right thing to do is to look at what’s needed and then figure out the plan around that. Is that what you mean? The best way to provide that stewardship is to really make it a point to focus on these things while they still have the ability to make those decisions and while the the cost benefit analysis is still favorable. So putting that plan in place and putting those various pieces of the solution in place, at least getting them out on the table. I can’t tell you how many clients I have that don’t have a proper estate plan in place. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Every year, every quarter. They come in year after year and they say, well, we haven’t gotten to our will yet. And then, as you think about it, the parents of these adult children need to get those things updated. So wealth, tax and estate planning all in one place is what we provide and it’s an invaluable resource and when you look at the benefits of it far outweighs any cost. Sure, sure so, Jason. How do we reach you? Our website is a GP wealth Advisorscom. We can reach any time at four to five, two to eight, onezero. Jason. Thank you so much again for being on the program you’re welcome. Thanks for having US