04.14.26 Ask An Advisor With Wes Moss

How To Find (and Afford) Your Dream Home in Retirement Deciding where to spend your retirement is one of the most significant transitions you’ll ever make, but it requires a systematic approach to get it right. Whether you plan to stay in your current home or relocate to a new destination, your environment directly impacts your long-term happiness. In this episode, Wes Moss shares tips to find – and afford – your dream community in retirement. Many retirees face the "housing overlap headache," where you find your new home in five minutes, but it takes five months to sell your old one. If you don't want to carry a mortgage or trigger a "tax tsunami," Wes breaks down a strategy that can help. Plus, Christa shares your #AskWes questions and Wes gives his take. All this and more on the April 14, 2026, Ask an Advisor episode of the Clark Howard podcast. Submit your questions at clark.com/ask. 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

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  Welcome to Ask an Advisor. I'm Krista DeBias here with Wes Moss.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  I'm Wes Moss.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Thank you for joining us today. We talk a lot on this show about, obviously, retirement, preparing for your retirement. That's what, you know, on The Clark Howard Show as well, so many people were teaching them to save more, spend less, and avoid rip offs. And then Wes, you've dedicated, from what I know and I've seen, your entire career to educating and helping people prepare and build their wealth over time so that they can enjoy not just retirement, but a happy retirement.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Which is a huge part of the research I've done over the last, call it, decade and a half. And just finished writing, which will come out later this year, The Retire Sooner Method, Retire Sooner Method. But the subtitle is super important, too, which is The Five Secrets Behind America's Happiest and Unhappiest Retirees, which is very much research based. And what I wanted to talk about today is a kind of a two-part idea. I don't know if we've talked about this before, but where are you going to live in retirement?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Where you live is so important. Anytime in your life, it really does contribute to your happiness, your environment around you. At least for me, I feel like it's very important. It's not necessarily a specific place, but having an environment that feels comfortable to me. Some people like, you know, a different type of topography. They want to be in the mountains or by the sea. Some people just feel like I want a home that feels just comfy to me. Maybe I can look out and see some grass, whatever. And I know in retirement, you really have to think a lot. It's even more complicated to figure that out and then how you're going to pay for it. So I'm glad you're addressing this.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is a two-part topic today. The first part is how to figure out a way to kind of systematically understand where your retirement life is going to be. Sure, it could be exactly where you are today. You want to live there for the rest of your life. Or, and I see this happen a lot, folks moving to a different spot and they can kind of restart and say, well, I'm in a different phase of life. I want to go through really a real life situation of someone that I helped figure this out in a systematic way with some real specific goals. And I love how this story happened in real life and I wanted to

• 3:25Speaker 03

  share that. The other piece of the equation here we'll get to happens to anybody at any time. It doesn't matter your age and it doesn't matter if it has to do with your next home in retirement. It could be when you're, the very first time you're looking for another new home, if you already own one. And that's what I call housing overlap headache, which we all run into. We all know it takes some time to sell a home. In this housing climate, it's taking longer than it has over the last several years. So it may be easily two months, three months, four months, six months before you're able to sell a house. And we all know when you're home shopping, You're going to find a place one day and that can happen in a heartbeat.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  You can find a place, stumble upon what you've been looking for, and all of a sudden you know almost right away. So you've found your place in five minutes, but it takes five months to sell your home and you've got equity locked up in your prior home. How do you handle that financially without having to sell everything in your portfolio, create this tax tsunami, knowing that the money's going to be available fairly soon? So it's this housing overlap, but it's a funding underlap. And we'll solve for that in kind of these two parts here today. The first part, let's talk about how to systematically find a place for your, this transitionary period. And if you're in your 40s and 50s, this is something you can start thinking

• 4:53Speaker 03

  about. One of my early research findings that I still think about to this day, it's so important to live near your family. One of the research studies that I did showed that happiness levels really rise the more adult children will live near. So if we have four kids, we want to live near, within driving distance of two of them. If you've got four kids and they're all in different states, spread out around the country, it just makes seeing everybody a lot harder, particularly as your kids start having kids and everyone's busy and schedules. It's really important that your adult children are part of your community.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  And I very often see families, there's a fair amount of folks that I work with that have family-like compounds. And these are not folks that are living in town or in the city, but Georgia's a big state and there's a lot of farmland, there's a lot of rural areas where you can get land that's relatively inexpensive. And mom and dad will have a house on one acre and the kids, maybe adult kids will have a house on two or three acres over. And I've always thought that's kind of an interesting idea. I've seen that happen a bunch and that's a great way. Now, it may be too close to your kids, but most people that do this love it. This situation, we'll call him Joe. Joe doesn't have kids.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  In his early 70s, of really young 70, and wanted to figure out, okay, what's my next phase? Next 20 years. So he said, I'm really interested in a 55 plus community. And/or even one of these continuing care facilities where you start, you're still healthy, knowing that you can step up if your health goes and you can step up even further over time. You looked at that all around the metro Atlanta area and really an hour and a half to two hours outside of Atlanta in almost any direction. And that was not for him. He felt as it was too early to consider that. So he immediately moved, I want 55 plus. I want a 55 plus community. And I love how Joe listed out these five

• 7:02Speaker 03

  things that he's really stuck to that really helped him find his next place. Number one, he wanted a 55 plus. And the key word here is community, because there's socialization in these communities of 100, 200, 500, 5,000 in some cases, homes. And that was super important to him. Number two, near the water. He knew that for his price range, which was in the 500K range, he knew it wasn't going to be beachfront, or maybe lakefront, but he wanted to be somewhat close to the water. Number three, it had to have golf. Now, most of these communities do have golf, so that wasn't a hard one, but also lots of activities so that the community was active. Four, close to the airport. He didn't want to have to

• 7:47Speaker 03

  drive two hours to get to the closest airport. And three, he wanted, because he's very nervous that making a big move like this might not, he might not ultimately love it. So he wanted it so that he could be able to sell his property. And those are the criteria. And I think it's a really good criteria for anybody to identify. 55 plus, near the water, golf and activities, near the airport, and pretty darn liquid. Sounds like a good formula, really, for any time you're looking for a home. And he did that. He went, so the first phase is to identify the goals. So those are your goals, and yours obviously would be different. The second is to test it. And that takes some visits. And the third step here is to how to, how

• 8:31Speaker 03

  to buy it, because Joe also has a paid for home condo in metro Atlanta. So he's got a fair amount of equity in that, that he wants to use. But secondly was testing. So he looked at places, he looked at Fairhope, Alabama. He looked in a couple of places in Florida, Jacksonville, the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Savannah was an, was an option. Myrtle Beach was an option. Hilton Head was an option. Even Wilmington area, North Carolina was an option. So there were lots of different places he was looking for. So what did he do? He went and in some cases he stayed with friends that were nearby.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Some cases he tried to rent. It was actually really difficult to rent in most of these 55 plus communities. Most places you can't do that, but he was able to at least spend a week or so and almost walk in as if he lived in the community, play some golf, see what, how active the groups were. And after visiting several of these different locations, I loved that he really researched this. He settled in on a place near, not in, but near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And the next part of the story is how was he going to pay for this new house? Because he's already picked it out and knows it's going to be a while before to sell the condo.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  How do you do that without just taking money out of your retirement accounts or your brokerage account to pay for it? Creating a tax bill. There was a solution that we found for Joe that I wanted to share. And that's coming up after we do some questions.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  All right. Well, the first question is from Kathleen in Ohio. Is the SoFi high yield savings account, highly rated investment account to put $50,000 in?

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Kathleen, I don't use SoFi. So I can't say that, I don't have anything bad to say about SoFi, but I don't, I can't, I'm not putting my, you know, my faith and I'm not backing SoFi either. What's important to know is that SoFi is, is a bank. They're a charter, they have a bank charter. I always think of SoFi as the student loan refinancing company, but they're also a bank. So that means they have FDIC insurance. So it's somewhat less relevant how great of the credit they are because they're, they're FDIC. FDIC backed. So as long as you're staying under the FDIC limits for you, and in this case 50,000,

• 10:57Speaker 03

  certainly well within the FDIC limit, then even if something goes wrong with SoFi, your money is protected. So, and there's a lot of other options out there where you can go find maybe slightly higher interest rates on some of these other online banks, but they're all very similar. A lot of them have catches. So they'll, it's like you have to, you have to set up auto deposit in order to get the full rate, but that's not a terrible game to play. Do the parameters get the highest yield they're offering? Probably something around 4%, maybe four and a quarter. But just know that the credit worthiness is backed by the FDIC and that Kathleen from Ohio is what matters.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Okay. Makita in North Carolina says, I just retired from the Marine Corps after 27 years and I have a Roth with the TSP. I recently opened a Fidelity brokerage account, but I want to know if I should transfer my TSP to a Roth IRA with Fidelity. Not sure if the TSP is still a good choice now that I'm retired and not in government service anymore. And thank you for your service, Makita.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Makita, thank you, A, for your service and B, I still like TSP. I still like the Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees. And, and you, it sounds like you have a Roth, would be the equivalent of a Roth 401k, but it's a Roth TSP. If you look at the fund options, it's almost as though, you know, one of the knocks on TSP is that it's super limited. And there's really just not that many options. You've got five options. Common stocks, small cap, international, government bonds and fixed income, and that's it. But it also is a good thing. It's almost like a restaurant

• 12:46Speaker 03

  with a really short menu, but everything on the menu is great.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  It's the way I look at it because all of those fund options, less than a half a dozen, they're all super low cost and they basically track the indexes and the indices. So the cost at TSP is really ultra low. It's like 0.3, 0.03 of a percent to 0.05 of a percent on funds, which is ultra, ultra low. It's hard to find anything really below that. You can also use their lifecycle option where they're putting together those funds for you. And then third, you are able, I haven't used this, but I've read about this. It's something is it's a mutual fund. They call it the mutual fund window with TSP

• 13:34Speaker 03

  that offers where you can go out and utilize other mutual funds that are beyond that. So that's another option. I think you have to have a certain amount of money. It costs a little bit per year, but that is an option. If you're looking for funds beyond just the CSI F and G options. So to me, unless you want to own individual stocks, I think that's the key here. And there's nothing wrong with that either. If you're fine with these funds that are low cost, then TSP is an option that you can stick with and you don't necessarily need to do a rollover. Not that a rollover is bad because your optionality goes up. You can still keep your costs low. You can maybe have more advice if you have an IRA or a Roth

• 14:19Speaker 03

  IRA at a place like a fidelity. But the short answer is that I still like TSP.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Okay. Doug in Oklahoma says, I have a question about Edward Jones. I just had my six month review with my advisor, whom I always tell I only want him to give me the fiduciary advice and no extra sales pressure for insurance or other products, et cetera. I always ask him to calculate what it costs me to be at Edward Jones that year because my funds total greater than $1 million. They do not charge the load to purchase mutual funds. This year, their fees, charges and commissions totaled $6,700, basically 0.2% of my balance with them. Then they calculated. The 12 B1 fees from all of my funds to total $15,000.044%. I do like the personal service and having an office in town with my advisor.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Normally I'd transfer to a fiduciary fee only advisor like Clark says, but isn't paying .064% pretty reasonable? I feel like 1% is the number Clark has mentioned to make sure to stay below when dealing with financial advisors. My question is, could there be any other hidden fees they're not mentioning? And how much could I save if I switch to another way of investing? I'm 59 years old and I'm retiring this year.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Doug, let's just do some math here. The 6,700 is .2. And then another 15,000 in 12 B1 fees, so you're 20. That would actually be .44, not .004. I think that's what he was saying with his math. So you're paying around 2/3 of a percent. Call it 55, 56 basis points, which is comfortably below 1%. So I think that's good, that's good. Particularly if you know the advisor, you have a relationship with the advisor. That's important. To some extent, it's almost like having a relationship with a doctor where when you need them, they're there. That's really important.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  They're aware of your history.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Your history, they'll do, you can do planning with them. And that is a fee that is comfortable. It really is. What I would say is that the only knock on having everything in mutual funds is that there is a tax issue with mutual funds. Now, if 100% of this is in an IRA or a 401k, or it would be an IRA, then the mutual fund capital gain distributions are not a problem. Because if everything stays underneath in the IRA crock pot, then you don't have to worry about these distributions. But mutual funds tend to pay out large capital gains in any given year because they do trading.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Whatever the taxes are within that, they distribute it out to all the shareholders. So you could have a fund that is flat in any given year and you get a distribution of 5, 10, 15% that you now have to pay taxes on. That's a big deal. That's, that is a really big deal. And that's precisely why, well, not the only reason. But there's two reasons why, if you go back 20 years. If you look at investment assets in the nation, ETFs only made up 3%. Today, they make up 33%. And almost all the growth in new money has gone into ETFs for two reasons.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  One, lower cost. So instead of paying 0.5 or 0.6 or 1% in a mutual fund, ETFs started to bring down the cost to 0.3, then 0.2, then 0.1. So ETFs are in general, much less expensive than actively traded mutual funds or actively managed mutual funds. The second piece of the equation of why ETFs have really not fully displaced, because there's still a giant legacy amount of money in mutual funds, and it's continued to grow, is that there's much, much less tax distribution that comes out. So they're much more tax efficient for you.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  So that would be something to ask your advisor about and say, now, if you're in an after-tax account and you've got a bunch of gains in these funds, it might be hard to be selling them to transition to different investments. But on the surface, the fee, it sounds like they're trying to be really transparent with you. But I would just be really careful about the tax distributions. And maybe, maybe what would make sense is newer money should go into more tax efficient vehicles. And that would be what I would consider what we call in the investment industry, tax drag. And if you've got a fund that's always distributing out capital gains,

• 19:08Speaker 03

  then you've got some tax drag that can eat into your returns over time.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Okay, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about how to pay for that 55-plus.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, that's the fun part.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

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• 21:51Speaker 03

  Welcome back to Ask an Advisor. I'm Wes Moss along with the great Krista BBS. We're back here talking about how to fund the housing overlap headache.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Because it creates a housing overlap problem. So we talked about Joe earlier Krista, and walked through what I thought was a great process that he really went through to figure out the next, which I, it's not about the next home. I think it's about the next and right community in retirement. That's so important for a happy retirement. So he figured that out. The next problem, and I'm just going to write this down as we go, because there are a lot of steps here. But the next problem was that the house was 500K and of course, finally decided on Myrtle Beach in one of these communities. It was a Dell Web community. He liked the Crestwind community. There's a couple Dell Web communities that he really liked. The houses weren't on the water, but you could drive to a clubhouse that was on

• 22:50Speaker 03

  the water and just he loved it. It was great. So there's a lot of these great options out there. House is 500K. Of course, he spotted it, said that's the place. This is a community. And the problem is his condo, let's call it 250K, totally paid for in Atlanta. Joe, it's still, let's say, on the market, actually not even on the market, but it's going to be on the market really soon. So he's got a funding issue. So you got to pay for the 500K and you can get a mortgage, but he doesn't want to have a mortgage. By the way, it's another really important piece of the equation. Going into retirement, happy retirees tend to have mortgages either mostly paid off or not have any mortgage at all. And mortgages

• 23:34Speaker 03

  are super expensive. Even let's say you get a mortgage that's only for a year, you still are paying tons of closing costs, $10,000, $15,000 in closing costs. So it's a really inefficient way to do what essentially what Joe needs here is a bridge. He needs a little bit of time. To be able to sell this condo and utilize the money to pay for about half of this property. The other half would be coming from his investment accounts. Number one, we know he does not need and does not want to use his Roth IRA, even though it would be tax-free because that's a longer-term money for hopefully a 30 years of retirement for him.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  And doesn't want to use IRA money or 401k money either because that's fully taxable. So then you go to his brokerage. Now he has brokerage money to be able to do that. Problem is a fair amount of the brokerage, most of his brokerage positions have gains in them. So if he were to just say, well, I need to, I need the other 250, really he needs the full 500 right now. So he could sell the full 500 to pay for this. And that's a tax tsunami. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars in taxes in order to do that. So how do we avoid that? Well, what most brokerage firms will allow you to do, Schwab is an example. Fidelity has a program for this.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Morgan Stanley, some of the bigger brokerage firms, Wall Street firms have essentially, they're similar to margin accounts. And we don't like borrowing money to buy more stocks. These are more for multi-purpose loans tied back to your investment account. And in this particular case, this is called a pledged asset line. A lot of these products, the brokerage firm will say, well, you've got $500,000 or a million dollars in your brokerage account. You're pretty good credit because the money's already here with us. We're going to give you a loan or a credit line. Most of them don't cost anything to set up. And then most of them have similar rates to what mortgage rates are now.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  To be able to say, well, we'll unlock 500K from this account.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  To utilize for a real estate purchase so that you don't have to sell anything, knowing that pretty soon you are go, it may be take a couple of months, but pretty soon you're going to be able to sell your property. And in his case, pay for half of this. In a lot of folks cases, they have even more equity than this. And maybe all of that equity will be unlocked to then pay back the credit that you're taking from your pledge asset line. The good news is here that most brokerage firms do this for very little to zero setup fee. And if it's only going to be for a couple of months, you only pay interest for a couple of months.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  So in his case, he needed $500,000 for the house. He's going to get 250 for the condo. He can put that to pay that off.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Eventually.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  The other.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Once it sells.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Once it sells. What about the other 250K? Would you pay that off over time to manage the tax burden?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  The reality here is that in this particular case, he's going to need to take that 250 from somewhere. So not the Roth, not the IRA, but the brokerage account. And then he needs to identify the positions where he pays the least amount of tax. And fortunately, he's got some dry powder areas that he can sell without having to worry about taxes, because most of those are flat and more interest paying. And then there's a final step. Because of most people having to make some sales, now what, what's the downside there? Well, we're selling a bunch of his dry powder. Now all of a sudden, his allocation's off. Hmm.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  So the final step in this longer housing overlap headache scenario is to, once the transaction is done, rebalance the accounts in a way that gets you back to a position where you're comfortable with your allocation. Now, it still may be difficult as you may have, many of your positions are still at a gain. You may have to do some rebalancing in some of your non-taxable accounts or your qualified or retirement accounts or even a Roth account. Now, there's some questions about that because you still don't want too much of your safety money in Roth accounts because they're so long-term. But you're going to need to look at the totality of your investment accounts and

• 28:05Speaker 03

  try to get back to the asset allocation that you feel comfortable with long-term.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  That's the final step.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  All right. We'll get to some questions. This one's from anonymous in Florida. Wes, I have a family member who, because of a mental health disorder, has effectively no financial discipline. The only exception is a $1 million nest egg. I don't know many details, but they have purchased a sizable annuity with a significant portion of their retirement. Given the danger they are to themselves financially, is this one of the rare exceptions where an annuity might actually make sense? The loss of return cannot compare to the loss of their disordered spending causes, although the credit card interest is another story.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Well, Clark would say that's a four-letter word here on the Clark Howard Show. The annuities can be, in a lot of cases, are not a great option for folks. And I know Clark, he just goes, you know, he goes nuts when he hears that word. In this case, and particularly in Florida as an example, there are some real protections around annuities. And it's, I don't remember the exact statute, but it's Florida Rule 222 dot something that says that if you have money in an annuity, it's protected from creditors, it's protected from lawsuits, it's protected from garnishment, et cetera. So that in itself is a, in this

• 29:30Speaker 03

  particular case, where you have a family member that has some real mental health issues, that is, that is a positive for the, secondly, depending on the kind of annuity, it may be the kind of annuity that's just giving you a payout. Well, if you turn a big chunk of money into a lifetime payout, it makes it so that you can't go get chunks out of the big chunk of money to go blow it. So there are some, this is one of those rare situations where this may be a good solution for your family member because they're a financial danger to themselves. And this really limits much of that. The only issue, it's not foolproof because even if somebody has a payment stream from

• 30:13Speaker 03

  an annuity, they can sell that payment stream to either a life settlement company or a factoring type company. So you can still get cash, but then you have these giant discounts that people take and it's very wasteful and it takes away the creditor protection too. So there's still, it's not foolproof, but I think it's a good start.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Okay. Another anonymous question from someone in Texas.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  So if you're anonymous and you're doing, we get a lot of, I'd say a third of folks are anonymous, which is cool. Remember, I don't know, we don't know what your actual name is. So if you're worried about-

• 30:49Speaker 02

  You could put a fake name for sure.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Put a fake name. On the fence Frank. We had almost ready to go Abby. I mean-

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Wise Wes.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  We've had, I don't know if that one came through. Crystal clear Krista. So you can always do just a fun name as well.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Okay. So this person is saying, I'm 43 years old. I'm thinking of retiring early in two years at age 45. My current expenses are about $60,000 a year. My house is paid off and valued about $350,000. At my early retirement age of 45, I expect to have about $150,000 in dry powder, 800 K in taxable brokerage account, 550 K in pre-tax 401K, and 350 K in Roth. At the age of 65, I expect to receive a pension of approximately $4,000 a month, non COLA, along with social security. If I retire at 45, I only want to access the dry powder and taxable brokerage. I don't mind depleting them down to zero by age 65.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  That is, I want them to last me 20 years. After that, I expect my 401K and Roth to have sufficiently grown enough to supplement my pension and social security. Do you think I can retire in two years?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  I'm all for retire sooner method. You know that, but just Krista, just want to make sure how much in the retirement accounts that they were going to wait for 20 years on?

• 32:21Speaker 02

  550 K in the pre-tax 401k, 350 K in the Roth.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  So 900 K. Okay. So you have two moving parts here, age 43, trying to retire at 45. This is a super early. This is a retire super sooner question. And there's some real logic behind the way Annie in Texas will say for anonymous is going about this. There's some real logic in it. And then what will kick in is the pension, et cetera. But the first piece of the equation here, which is living on the dry powder, which was

• 33:00Speaker 03

  what 150 and 800, so 950 in after tax and dry powder over the course of the next 20 years. And in order to do 60 K a year from that, think of it this way, 60 divided by 950 is about six and a half percent. And that's not inflation adjusted. That's just the same amount every single year. So that's way beyond the 4% level of withdrawal. So it very well will run out over that period of time. If you were to adjust the 60 for inflation every single year, let's call it even by

• 33:42Speaker 03

  3% a year, still assuming a, at least a somewhat of a rate of return on this, the money's still going to run out, let's say by year 15 or 16. At the same time though, and there's some real logic here, the 900, let's call it at 5% a year for 20 years is going to be to probably 2.2, 2.3 million. So then you could say, well, I've got the 2.3 now, and then I can take 4% of that. 2.3 million times 4% is 92 grand a year. Plus the pension of 4K a month, which is 80, 48,000 a year. Now you're looking at 140K.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  So on paper, I think this kind of works, kind of works. But you're also relying on a lot of things to go right. And you're, you are, 20 years is a really long time to have zero income at age 45. And you're going to run into a situation where you're just seeing your account balance go down and down and down and down and down. And that's the after-tax money that you can get to. Even if your other accounts are going up, that's all retirement money. And what do we know? Well, some of it's Roth, so that's good. But what do we know? We want to have some non-retirement money in retirement. We want some brokerage money because then we can choose, when we distribute our funds, we can keep our tax situation efficient.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  So if you just end up with all retirement money, you've kind of taken away that optionality of controlling your tax bracket. Not to mention, in 20 years, 140K in income is really only worth probably about 80K today, 80 to 90, which is still good. And it's not like, and you're going to, and your house will be paid for, I think it's already, already paid for. So on paper, this works if all goes well. If all goes well, I think that this, this would work. But I wouldn't do it because too many things have to go right. And it's too long of a period of time to have zero income.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  45 is so young to wait till 65 to be your, kind of your second phase of retirement. So here's the mental twist I would offer up, is that we know, at least this is what I believe through my, my research, is that happiness levels go up by over 20% the minute you can answer yes to this question. Are you financially in a place where you can say you're retired? If you can answer yes to that, your overall life satisfaction, happiness levels rise dramatically relative to the baseline in the United States. You're at 45, you'll be able to say yes to that question. So what I would do is I'd be saying yes to that question in my head, which makes work

• 36:32Speaker 03

  much more palatable and more enjoyable because you can always walk away.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  So I would look at working part-time.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  I was gonna say.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  During that period of time. Get a more flexible job that you don't, maybe don't hate. Sounds like, if you're trying to stop working at 45, you must hate your job. And a lot of Americans do. One in five people hate their company so much, they want, they want their company, they want to help bring their company down.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  They want to see their company go down.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  My gosh.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  60% of Americans kind of take it or leave it with work, but very, only one in five people love their work. So like Krista DBS.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  I do.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  I would say that you're close. I would just really think about working at least part-time and do it for till 50. That's only five more years and see how that goes. But to totally be out of the workforce at 45, it's a little too early in my book.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  All right. Cynthia in Missouri says, I've recently become aware that I'm paying a bit more in fees for my investments than I'd like. While the cost is not terrible, I'd like to switch to something with Vanguard for the lower fee. Will selling investments to move them to another place create a taxable event wiping out my potential gains from lower fees?

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Absolutely it will, Cynthia. I mean, let's just say, you didn't give me the amounts, but let's just say you had a hundred thousand dollars and now it grew to 200. And you've got, your funds are half a percent a year and you'd like to have closer to zero. Well, you're going to pay 15 to 20 grand in taxes if you sell and then reinvest in a lower cost fund. Even if you're saving 50, 50 basis points or a half a percent a year forever, your break even is still 15 to 20 years. So the answer is no. If you've got a big, now, if you don't have much of a gain, then it may be easy to do it. Or if this isn't in a retirement account, you can do it because you don't have to worry about, you're in the crock pot.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  You don't have to worry about your taxes. So if it's in a retirement account, the answer, simple answer is yes, you can do it. Find lower cost funds. If it's in a non-retirement account and you've got a gain, like a lot of people do today, because markets have been good over the last five years. If the gain is 100%, it's going to take you, even at a half a percent lower fee wise, it's going to take you 15 to 20 years to break even. I would not say yes to that option.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Okay, well, that does it for us today on Ask an Advisor. Thank you so much for listening or watching. Hope that you'll share this episode with a friend you think could learn something from it. And we hope the rest of your day is fantastic.

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