Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 03.31.26 Ask An Advisor With Wes Moss About this episode The Hack That Turns Trump Accounts Into $3M Nest Eggs & Retire Sooner Method vs. FIRE Wes Moss breaks down a powerful financial "hack" involving the new Trump Accounts that could change the trajectory of your family’s wealth forever. By shifting the conversation to a "Year 0" savings plan, parents and grandparents can use these accounts to kickstart a child's financial life from the day they are born. It’s a dramatic shift in how we think about retirement, proving that the one thing we can truly control is the amount of time we allow our money to grow. Also, Wes tackles the growing divide between the "Retire Sooner" method and the popular FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which over half of Gen Z now claims to follow. While the FIRE movement often requires hyper-lean budgeting, high savings percentages, and extreme deprivation to retire by 40, Wes argues for a more realistic and sustainable approach. Plus, Mallory shares your #AskWes questions and Wes gives his take. All this and more on the March 31, 2026, Ask an Advisor episode of the Clark Howard podcast. Submit your questions at clark.com/ask. Note: Christa will be back on Ask an Advisor next week! We hope you enjoy our weekly Ask An Advisor episodes. Let us know what you think in the comments! Learn more about Wes: BOOKS BY WES MOSS Wes Moss, CFP® Wes Moss - Clark.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.
0:12 Speaker 01 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
0:15 Speaker 02 They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats, order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
0:50 Speaker 03 Welcome to the Clark Howard Show, Ask an Advisor. I'm Wes Moss here for Ask an Advisor. And who is this next to me? This is Mallory Boggs. Krista D is traveling today. So we're going to give her a travel pass because the Clark Howard team loves to travel more than anyone else I've ever known.
1:11 Speaker 04 It's amazing. And you know, she was there for a steal.
1:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, of course she was. I will just say that I hope she's not in one of the airports where she's waiting hours and hours in line. So Mallory and I have worked together for a long time. So Mallory stepped in, thought this would be fun. So you're going to be asking questions here on the Ask an Advisor.
1:32 Speaker 04 I'm excited. You know, I'm just going to try and make Krista proud. It's really my goal today.
1:37 Speaker 03 Okay, well, good. Well, I think we're going to start with, before we jump into questions, and we love that when you send in questions, I'm amazed that they just continue to be great questions that I've never heard before. Somebody asked me the other day in the office if, does it kind of end up being the same questions over and over again? We've been doing this for almost a year and a half now. The variety is endless. And I think the reason the variety is endless with financial questions is that once you have a math equation that has more than a few variables, the combinations, almost like Like the March Madness brackets are almost infinite and you've got dozens and dozens of financial variables that we all face all the time from investing to planning to taxes to
2:19 Speaker 03 your age, your family. It's kind of, it's a really long list and you start doing the math on that, the questions really do end up being endless.
2:27 Speaker 04 Well, and it's great. I feel like we get a lot of people who write in saying they've listened for a good bit at this point and, and how much it's helped them. So if you've got questions, please send them in.
2:37 Speaker 03 Well, let's start with this. I wanted to start with, I don't know if this is going to be controversial to me. It's, it's not because really this is a discussion about financial planning and the title of this is the hack that turns Trump accounts into multimillion dollar tax free nest eggs. So I know that any, anytime you throw the word Trump somewhere, there's going to be people commenting on one side or the other. This has nothing to do with politics. This has just everything to do with a new vehicle that we should just all know about. And here we are, we're in the spring. These accounts technically start this summer. So they technically haven't really even started. Now you can get them started now, I believe,
3:20 Speaker 03 but there have been four million of these opened and 800,000 of them qualify for the free $1,000. So this is already has an awful lot of momentum and the Wall Street Journal just did an article about these and the hack that they talk about is to think about maybe doing a Roth conversion when someone gets to be 18. But I think the even more important point with these Trump accounts is that they shift the conversation to saving really early. And another reason I thought it'd be cool to have you here today is that I did a segment a couple of months ago about what I call the year zero savings plan and year zero and Mallory
4:04 Speaker 03 is a new mom and little baby Larry is
4:07 Speaker 04 He's eight months old now.
4:09 Speaker 03 Eight months. Avon's 20 pounds and he's a giant baby and around, I guess it was a couple of months ago because I thought, well, if Larry really started with Larry. I think of Larry like he's already a grown up.
4:24 Speaker 04 It's because of the name. Larry is a grown man.
4:26 Speaker 03 It doesn't sound like a baby.
4:27 Speaker 04 No.
4:27 Speaker 03 But Larry, if he were to start today, what would that look like if it wasn't just around educational planning? So we think about, oh, it's time to start a 529 the year your child is born. And it makes total sense, all the sense in the world. But there are more and more reports that Americans are falling behind in their savings. Goldman Sachs did a report not too long ago that talked about the financial vortex that we face in America, which is higher housing costs and higher healthcare. And the average age to be able to buy your first home in America has now gotten into the, to the 40s. It used to be in the 20s. So everything has gotten more expensive,
5:11 Speaker 03 more quickly than Americans have been able to really keep up. And really, one of the things you can control when it comes to saving for retirement is the amount of time you save. And if you can extend the game as long as possible, that can help make up for what is a really big challenge. And that's getting to levels where people can stop working and still maintain their lifestyle. So the way I think about these new accounts, it's great that you get the free $1,000. That's cool. That's great.
5:41 Speaker 04 Not terrible.
5:42 Speaker 03 Who's not going to take that? If you're eligible, you get a $1,000 seed money, free money from the government.
5:48 Speaker 04 A little happy birthday card if you will.
5:50 Speaker 03 From day zero.
5:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:52 Speaker 03 And then what it does is I think it shifts the conversation towards not just a little bit. Well, you should save younger and younger. It shifts it to the very beginning of life. And that's what I think is kind of interesting about it. So think about how this could work, not just for how we typically think about starting to save early for Larry. So he can afford school. What about if the whole family thinks of savings as a whole lifetime? Not just, I'm going to get started in my 20s or 30s. And that's what this, I think, gives us the opportunity to do. So think of it this way, it's $1,000 right out of the gate. You can put up to a maximum of $5,000 in per year. So let's do this math here.
6:38 Speaker 03 In the math is the way I see this and the Wall Street Journal wrote about this too. If you start in year zero, so the day Larry is born, you get the $1,000 and you add $5,000 every single year for the first 18 years, that's $90,000 worth of savings. Now that's a lot, but grandparents can contribute, parents can contribute, employers, if they sign up for this, can even contribute part of that.
7:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've seen, I think some big employers are playing ball with this.
7:10 Speaker 03 Right. It's up to half of that $5,000. So it's, it can be up to $2,500 a year. So now we start doing this math, but we're doing it over a, an enormous timeframe. You're doing this over six decades. So baby Larry starts with this contribution every year. It adds up to 90,000. At a 7% rate of return, let's say it's in US equity markets and the options are going to be things like that, low cost index funds. And let's assume it gets 7% rate of return, you end up with about $280,000, $278,000 by the time Larry is 24.
7:52 Speaker 04 That is a big old chunk of change.
7:54 Speaker 03 It's a huge amount of money. Then you can convert that, let's say to a Roth at some point after age 18. And let's just assume, now this is also the assumption that they talked about, it also would be very generous for mom and dad or someone else to pay the taxpayer to convert to a Roth. So who knows if that happens, but we're just going with those numbers. Then we end up with that 280,000. Again, if Larry never touches it and says, that's, that's retirement money. It ends up being over, a little over $3 million by the time he's 59 and a half.
8:28 Speaker 04 And that's without him actually adding anything else.
8:30 Speaker 03 Well, it's still a lot of contributions from friends, families, parents, et cetera. But it just illustrates the, one of the few things we can really control is time. And this is a dramatic shift in thinking about saving for retirement. Somebody's in their twenties saving, you're super young and that's early. But if we were to radically start thinking, wow, maybe we should start thinking about this as savings forever. And it can really move the meter. And that's just the math that goes into this. There are also other parameters. These accounts essentially turn into IRAs at age 18 when they become the property of the beneficiary.
9:12 Speaker 03 Then there's rules around it about not taking out money before the age of 59 and a half. But I like thinking of these as really long-term accounts that could really move the meter. Even if you do half of this, do a quarter of this, even if it's 10% of this, it still could really move the meter long-term when you're starting retirement.
9:35 Speaker 04 Amazing.
9:36 Speaker 03 Let's get to some questions.
9:37 Speaker 04 Let's get to some questions.
9:38 Speaker 03 This is the point of the show where Krista usually starts asking me questions that I'm jotting down these numbers as quickly as I can.
9:45 Speaker 04 You just let me know if I need to repeat any.
9:46 Speaker 03 Okay.
9:47 Speaker 04 All right. The first one comes from Ann in Pennsylvania. She asks, my husband and I have been out of the stock market for years now. We instead have bonds and CDs. I'm 64 and retired. He is 74 and likely to retire next year. We have about $5 million in savings and no debt. We have one adult child and would like to leave some money to her. All the advice I read assumes a long time horizon. With the market overvalued in our opinion and talk of an AI bubble, I'm worried about investing now, but also about not keeping up with inflation. Do you have any advice? Thank you.
10:23 Speaker 03 And from my home state of Pennsylvania, you're caught in the everything's overvalued trap. And it's very understandable because if you're really paying attention, you're thinking there's an AI bubble. And obviously now we have a worry about oil prices and inflation. There is always something to worry about and think about. And if we only were invested in markets and when things were undervalued, we wouldn't be invested all that often. So we'd, we'd miss an enormous part of that journey. We, we'd cut out half of the time the market we have available to us. So that in itself is one part of where I'm going here.
11:06 Speaker 03 The second part, and I'm sitting here drawing out what is called the efficient frontier. The efficient frontier was the economic research by a guy named Harry Markowitz, who eventually won a Nobel Prize in economics for this. And it essentially says that there is a portfolio that can be constructed along this efficient frontier that is designed to optimize the amount of risk you're taking and the amount of return you're getting. And what always stuck with me, and I learned about this, it was one of the first things I learned about in the investment world is that the curve bends backwards at a certain point.
11:48 Speaker 03 And that bend shows us that, and if you think about this curve, stocks are at the upper part. There's a lot of risk in stocks, but there's also a lot of return. Then as you, as you start adding safety assets, in your case, you're mostly in bonds today, Anne. As you add safety assets, the portfolio risk comes down and so does the return. But it's an interesting point that about where the curve starts to bend is about an 80% bond, 20%. So still super conservative account. The curve starts to bend there. What I mean by that is that when you get to 100% in just in bonds, and I know your situation may be a little bit different because you have bonds and CDs. You get to a situation where the risk, even though you think, oh, I'm adding more and more
12:32 Speaker 03 safety assets, the risk actually goes up for that portfolio relative to a 20% stock, 80% bond. And the return, this is all expected, return actually goes down. So it's just kind of this fascinating point where in my mind, if I ever want to be the most humanly possible conservative portfolio that I think makes any sense, is when you go all the way down to 80% in bonds, but no more than that. You still want to have 20%. So that's just a suggestion is that over time, and that's still a super conservative portfolio. So
13:11 Speaker 03 maybe, and I'm just trying to help you psychologically figure out a way to participate again. So you can, we can address your second fear, which is almost a guarantee that our money will wilt, our dollars wilt if they're in our wallet, not invested because of inflation. So for Ann, my thought is that think of a conservative portfolio that does have some balance. And then you can figure out how you would want to get to that point. So maybe you do 10% in markets today to the portfolio and in six months, you do another 10%. And maybe that's all you need and you're at 20%, but at least you have some balance. So think
13:51 Speaker 03 about the efficient frontier. And what always resonates with me is that the most conservative portfolio on, on that curve, according to this research and this theory is that your, your risk can actually go up and your return expected can go down if you get too far along the curve.
14:12 Speaker 04 Wow, this is crazy.
14:13 Speaker 03 Wild. Yeah, we never had a question. We've never, I've never brought that up here.
14:16 Speaker 04 No, and it's so funny. Yeah, you really think that if you're all in cash savings.
14:20 Speaker 03 Well, technically it's portfolio of all bonds. So, so it is the, the part of that curve, that frontier portfolio, different portfolio mixes along the way, is a balance between assets that are not necessarily correlated. They don't move necessarily together over time. That's the key.
14:36 Speaker 04 Oh, I see. Well, we're going to go to the next question from Patrick in Florida.
14:40 Speaker 03 Hopefully it's a little less complicated.
14:42 Speaker 04 I make no promises.
14:43 Speaker 03 Patrick.
14:44 Speaker 04 All right. So Patrick says, my spouse and I have 2.5 million in TSP slash IRA accounts. We both receive military pensions and VA disability benefits as a result of injuries sustained while on active duty. Both are annual COLA adjusted. What are your thoughts on keeping the above 2.5 million fully in stocks and mutual funds? And treating our pensions and VA money as dry powder?
15:07 Speaker 03 Patrick, thank you for your service. I will say that it's a concept that I agree with. So I'd say mostly, the short answer is mostly yes, is what I would say. If you have a pension, a pension is quote guaranteed from the company paying it. In this case, you have the federal government. So that's about as good of a guarantee as you can get. So it's a highly, highly safe and secure pension. I like to take an annual amount and translate that to what it would be in money sitting in account. So just divide it by 5%. So if you have a pension that's $50,000 a year, as an example,
15:47 Speaker 03 $50,000 divided by 5% should be 1.25 million. Is that right, Mallory? 50,000 divided by 1.25%.
15:54 Speaker 04 This is why I let you do the numbers. I don't.
15:55 Speaker 03 It's a million. I'm sorry. It's a million dollars. So that's a $50,000 a year guaranteed pension with COLA is really worth, it's like having a million dollars sitting. Now, it's, it's not exactly the same, obviously, because you can't go get $250,000 out of that account. But it does give you the safety and security of income coming in, which is the whole reason you would have dry powder to begin with. So going back to, could you just put everything in equities? That whole 2.5 million in TSP and IRAs? And the answer is yes, you could, if you have the risk tolerance for it. If you feel you're totally fine with.
16:38 Speaker 03 20%, 25, 30% stock market moves lower, you can handle that mentally and you can still sleep at night, then I think it's okay. From my perspective, this is just my opinion, I still would at least have some balance and safety. Maybe go back to that efficient frontier.
16:55 Speaker 04 Oh, there you go.
16:56 Speaker 03 I could see having 80 or 90% in equities, but just, I always like to have some sort of balance. We go through really rough periods of time through the equity markets or stocks. I like to have a piece of the equation that may be uncorrelated, that's either going up or staying steady.
17:14 Speaker 04 All right. Well, I've got one more question for you for this portion. This is from Alan in Georgia. He asks, our US citizen daughter lives in Germany and has only German earned income. Is it legal for me to fund her Roth IRA with my after-tax dollars? Donkashen.
17:31 Speaker 03 Did he say donkashen?
17:32 Speaker 04 He said donkashen.
17:33 Speaker 03 That's cool. Okay. So, all right, Alan, just goes back to earned income. Being able to contribute to a Roth, whether your daughter's putting money in or you're helping her fund it, it just comes back to, does she have earned income? And I think that's the crux of your question. If she claims the, and again, this is for a CPA, and I'm not a CPA, so this is not tax advice. This is what I'd be asking a CPA, is if she's using the foreign earned income exclusion, the FEIE, and she's using that and has no earned income in the United States, then the answer's likely no. You can't do it. If you're using the foreign tax credit, then it's very possible that she ends up with
18:18 Speaker 03 income, which means that yes, you can help, either she can fund it, or you can help her fund a Roth. Really comes down to the tax return, which again, you'd want to, you want to consult a CPA on this, or tax attorney, and even more so, someone that understands foreign income, that's a whole nother layer. But see if it's the earned income, or the foreign earned income exclusion, or the tax credit, that's what I'd be asking CPA, and I think that gives you the answer to earned income in the US or not, hence Roth contribution available or not.
18:52 Speaker 04 Well, I think we're going to run to a quick break, and then when we come back, we are going to discuss the difference between the retire sooner method and the FIRE savings.
19:00 Speaker 03 Oh, FIRE versus retire sooner. Let's get realistic. Right, straight ahead.
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20:59 Speaker 03 All while tasting suspiciously homemade. Come join us. Sam's Club. Individual oven times may vary. Welcome back to Ask an Advisor. Wes Moss here today along with Mallory Boggs because Krista is traveling. Hopefully not in a giant, long TSA line.
21:18 Speaker 04 They're so long these days. It's just scary, but hopefully that's not her case.
21:22 Speaker 03 We're going to go with a, we talked about the zero year savings plan and
21:29 Speaker 04 Getting Larry set up for life.
21:30 Speaker 03 Getting baby Larry, offensive lineman, baby Larry set up for his future. The next topic here, and this is kind of inspired from a question we've got a couple of weeks ago. And I've had a few of these right here on the Clark Howard Show, but the difference between retire sooner and FIRE, maybe we should start it the other way. The difference between FIRE, because everybody knows FIRE.
21:53 Speaker 04 Well, I think maybe we should define FIRE.
21:55 Speaker 03 Okay, so FIRE, for those who don't know, and by the way, 53% of Gen Z identifies and says they're part of the FIRE movement.
22:03 Speaker 04 That's a huge.
22:04 Speaker 03 53%. Financial independence retire early. That's what FIRE stands for. And the basic formula is save 50% or more, or maybe even more than that of everything you make. And you do it as soon as you start working. You, you invest aggressively and you do that right out of the gate as well. You live on a hyper, hyper lean budget. So you're spending as little as you possibly can. Then you keep that budget lean for decades and decades. And I think that it doesn't, often assuming that you don't have a whole bunch of kids too, because I think that it's almost impossible to stay lean when you've got a whole bunch of kids.
22:46 Speaker 04 So it's. But kids are budget busters in a lot of ways.
22:49 Speaker 03 They're a budget buster. They are. The, I've got four of them and it can still be lean and, and be on a budget.
22:55 Speaker 04 Clark Howard has kids. So like clearly even people who are budget sensitive do still have children. I think you just have to be okay with spending a little more.
23:02 Speaker 03 But it's have to be FIRE and FIRE, meaning that you are financially independent, retire early.
23:09 Speaker 03 And the, the movement for a lot of folks is really, really early, like age 35.
23:17 Speaker 04 That's really, really, really, really.
23:20 Speaker 03 And to me, as I think our audience probably already knows, I wrote a book almost 15 years ago called, You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think. And I have a book coming out this year called The Retire Sooner Method. So I'm a big believer in being able to retire sooner than the traditional retirement age in America, right? For most Americans that are still not collecting social security yet, their full, their FRA, full retirement age is 67. So that's the quote, "normal" retirement age. I still think of it as a zone of 62 to 67 is the quote, "normal" retirement age. And to me, retire sooner is about making sure that you don't make big mistakes,
24:04 Speaker 03 knowing that you have a GPS that's getting you there on the most efficient route, and not having a giant detour that can take you extra time or into overtime. And if you can do that and have a really nice roadmap and avoid big mistakes, that I think that if you're intentional about it, retire sooner method to me is a realistic version of FIRE, where you shave off 10% of the journey, maybe 15%, and that may be shaving off four years, five years, six years, maybe it is 10 years. But to be able to be age 40 and totally stop working and then have to fund a life that could take you to age 100, that's 60 years of retirement. And I think that that's just, that's almost too much to ask for anyone mentally and, and financially all put together.
24:49 Speaker 03 So to me, I appreciate the idea of FIRE. And I know there's a lot of different levels. There's lean FIRE, and that's the one that may get the most press, the lean FIRE.
25:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think, I think.
25:01 Speaker 03 Minimal life, minimalistic life, and then you retire, and then you have a minimalistic life for the rest of your life. Then there's fat FIRE, there's coast FIRE, and then there's, I think it's barista FIRE.
25:12 Speaker 04 Yep, yep, yep. And it's so funny, there's so, such a wide variety here. I will say, one thing that I like about the Gen Z, such a large percentage identifying as FIRE, is I hope that that means they're really good at saving. I figure even if they don't make it to FIRE, at least they're going to have some great savings and be set up for retirement, hopefully at least sooner.
25:30 Speaker 03 The reason the concept has never really sat well with me is that a lot of the FIRE mentality, or at least the folks that I've met, and it's a little bit centered around deprivation and perfect spreadsheets, rather than, in my research, has so much to do with what retirees are doing and the habits that they're engaging in for a very happy, fulfilling, purpose-filled retirement. And that comes with tons of core pursuits. It comes with real emphasis on family and community. Again, not that FIRE folks can't do that, but I
26:10 Speaker 03 think that if you're so tight, if you want to stop working cold turkey, light switch, at such a young age, it really makes it difficult, A, to get back into the workforce, particularly in the fast-forward world we live in today. And it sets you up for such a long journey that it's easy for things to go off track. And that's, to some extent, the reality here. So when I hear, can I retire at 40? I think, okay, well, if you're going to do it that early, then you need to get into the money green zone. And the money green zone, really, whether it's FIRE or anywhere, you need to be able to generate, you need 25 times in
26:52 Speaker 03 savings what you need in income. So if you need $50,000 in a given year, and that's going to be what you are spending or needing to pull from your investments, $50,000 times 25 is $1.25 million. So you've got to be able to do that. If it's $100,000 a year, it's $2.5 million. And that's really hard to be able to get to that in your 30s and early 40s, for the vast, vast majority of Americans. So those aren't magic numbers. That's just based on the 4% rule. You can get to it by multiplying by 25. It also says that on that amount of money, you can have that 4% of that over the course of your life plus inflation.
27:35 Speaker 03 So what I tell super young couples that are looking to retire super early is think of the no longer working as more of a dimmer switch versus a light switch. So as opposed to saying, okay, I'm going to be done and I'm totally done working, even if I've saved my 25 times what I need per year. So I've got my 1.25 billion or I've got my 2.5 million. Think of that next phase as dimming the switch on work as opposed to just cutting it off. And I think that's where you get a ton of flexibility. Now, I think that the fire move would probably say, well, that's similar to Barista.
28:16 Speaker 03 Maybe it is, but staying engaged in work to some extent, particularly as the world evolves. And I know there's a lot of fear about what AI will do with jobs and the job losses that will come with that. I think it will ultimately be the opposite of that. I think there are going to be more jobs that are created because of the technological need, but from now moving forward, not that it's, this is that big of a change from history. We really need to be participating in this workforce or else the train is moving really fast and you can get left behind, I think, really quickly. So to be able to just say, I'm out of the workforce and having to be able to jump back
28:57 Speaker 03 in as opposed to dim the switch and work less, to me is I'd rather be dimming the switch. The other thing I love about thinking about this retire sooner, not super, super young, is that once you do hit some of these green zone numbers, whether it's a million dollars in liquid assets, or you figure out a way to have a hundred thousand dollars a year in income, that's another green zone level by your retirement age. The minute that starts to come to fruition is the minute your job now should have at least mentally less stress and less pressure because you've reached things financially. You've gotten there.
29:40 Speaker 03 And I do find that folks, once they they've reached the financial point where they could say yes to, quote, retirement or not working, work gets a little bit more enjoyable.
29:51 Speaker 04 And we do love when people actually enjoy work. It's a small percentage of people.
29:55 Speaker 03 It is. The varying surveys about the studies around that, it's it's one in five, one in four, one in five people love work.
30:02 Speaker 04 Small, smaller percentage than you'd like for it to be, for sure.
30:05 Speaker 03 So I think the dimmer switch is a healthier version than stopping working. Never working again at age 40 or 45 is just a little bit too young. I appreciate the sentiment. I love that it gets people supercharged on saving, but I think real life dictates being able to retire five to 10 years before traditional retirement ages, not 20 to 25 years soon.
30:29 Speaker 04 Makes sense. Well, listen, Wes, you can't retire yet. Let's get to some questions.
30:32 Speaker 03 Okay, not today.
30:33 Speaker 04 Not today, not today. All right. So we have Dave from Detroit wrote in and he said,
30:39 Speaker 03 Now, that's a great name.
30:41 Speaker 04 Great name. So Dave from Detroit asks, longtime fan of the show. I am of the age where most of my money is in a traditional IRA, two thirds of it. I often hear the advice to convert traditional accounts to Roth before having to take a required minimum distribution, RMD. I don't understand why the advice wouldn't be that if you are not in the highest tax bracket to just spend down the traditional IRA and not draw on social security until 70, instead of converting to a Roth.
31:10 Speaker 03 Dave from Detroit, the simple answer here is that the Roth conversion has taken on its own virality. It's like, whoa, you gotta do a Roth conversion. Everybody needs to do a Roth conversion or else you're you're crazy. That's not true at all. It is great if you are in a position where a Roth conversion makes sense, but it always comes back to a tax question, which is an income management question.
31:45 Speaker 03 And for Dave, you're saying, well, wait a minute. It's about taxes today versus taxes tomorrow. If you're going to convert IRA money to a Roth and pay 20% to do it, or 25% to do it, but you know, in retirement, you're going to be in the 15% bracket federally and your state tax may end up at zero. Then why would you pay 25% to get money out of an IRA and put it into Roth when you're only going to be paying 15% in the future? It really is about taxes today versus taxes tomorrow. And if you can convert at 20% in taxes and know your future rate will be 25 higher, then it makes sense.
32:26 Speaker 03 It's almost as though it's been painted with this, this brush that can do no wrong. It's been painted with a golden brush. Roth conversion, of course, everyone should do it. The reality here is it's always, it's very much a tax today versus tax tomorrow problem. So for you, Dave, your income management is what you're asking about when to take social. The taking social question is a, is a break even question, among other things. It is, if I don't take social until I'm 70, when do I earn back? How many years to take me to break even on the money I left behind? Because I didn't take the payments. And that is a break even question and a longevity question and an income stream question.
33:08 Speaker 03 But the Roth conversion, don't feel as though you're crazy because it doesn't make sense to you because it doesn't make sense for a lot of people. Some people it does, some people it does not.
33:18 Speaker 04 Awesome. All right, well, the next question is from Andrew in Missouri. He asks, my wife has retirement money going into the fidelity target retirement 2035. She will be able to retire in three years. For her last three years of employment, should we move her monthly retirement allotment to a fidelity target retirement 2040? We have enough in other retirement accounts that I don't see as needing these funds until 2040 or later. So I was thinking that we should keep the money in a slightly more aggressive fund to keep it growing.
33:49 Speaker 03 So is Andrew from Missouri just saying they don't need to touch the money for five years beyond when she is going to retire?
33:58 Speaker 04 For the last three years of the next, the next three years of saving.
34:03 Speaker 03 The next three years of saving. So, okay, Andrew, the short answer is I think that's fine. I'd say mostly yes. Target date funds get a, again, also painted with a golden brush, as in they are set up exactly to do everything for you in the year you need them to do that for you. And the reality is they're really just a branded asset allocation mutual fund that slowly gets more conservative over time. It gets branded with a year and people think, well, I've got to pick the right year, but you're on the right track because the year of the labeling, the moniker, if you will, is when it starts to get, I would say even
34:45 Speaker 03 more conservative and it gets very, very conservative starting in that year. Usually for retirement funds, and this is a broad brush here, by the time you get to, whether it's 2035 or 2040, in that year of demarcation, it's usually down to about 60% in stocks and it's about 40% in bonds. And now it's got US, international, and maybe some other components like small and mid-cap. But then, over the course of the next 20 years or so, it goes down to something closer to 20% in stocks and 80% bonds. So it gets really conservative.
35:24 Speaker 03 So what I would say that it is good to line up that allocation with when that allocation is right for you. And if you guys really don't be, you don't need this money for the next three years, then the clock maybe shouldn't start of getting more conservative. If the clock's starting in three years, and again, it's, last time I checked, it was 2026. So, we're talking about 2029 slash 2030. But I think you're just looking out into the future and it makes sense that if you don't even need to start relying on that money until the year 2040, then that target date fund might work for you. The overarching key on any of these
36:04 Speaker 03 conversations is to always go into the target fund, whether it's a webpage or it's a prospectus, to show you what that allocation, how it migrates over time. I think that's the key.
36:19 Speaker 03 And you should be checking anyway, every year or a couple of times a year to know what your allocation is. And target date funds make it very easy for you to look that up. It's all about the mix inside. It's less about the year and more about understanding the mix. Once you open up the hood. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you.
36:40 Speaker 04 And thanks for all of the questions that were submitted. We really appreciate it. That wraps up today's show.
36:46 Speaker 03 Thank you for just hopping in here, Krista Devias, off traveling the world, probably standing in a long line somewhere.
36:54 Speaker 04 I hope she's actually on a hot beach with a coconut in her hand and I can't wait to see pictures when she gets back.
36:59 Speaker 03 All right. Well, thank you so much for tuning in.
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