09.15.26 Ask An Advisor With Wes Moss

How To Build Wealth Without a Tech Job & Hidden Dangers of Coast FI Forget the myth that you have to work on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley to build massive wealth. Wes reveals the power of the "Everywhere Millionaires" – the 3 million Americans who have accumulated a collective $65 trillion by building unglamorous, low-tech, and non-tech businesses. Discover why tactile, essential industries are producing some of the richest entrepreneurs in the country (including a former hot dog stand owner who sold his business for $1 billion). Then, Wes issues a crucial warning for young investors drawn to the Coast FI movement. While saving aggressively early in life is fantastic, relying solely on compound interest while taking your foot off the savings gas pedal in your 20s or 30s carries massive hidden risks. Wes explains why life’s unexpected variables mean you shouldn't step back from your financial goals too soon. Mentioned on the show: Are You Well Invested? Here’s a 6-Point Check Backdoor Roth IRA: How High Earners Can Still Contribute How To Invest a Lump Sum or Cash You've Left Uninvested Pension vs Lump Sum Calculator - Clark Howard The Biggest Investing Lesson From Trump Accounts - Clark Howard All this and more on the September 15, 2026, Ask an Advisor episode of the Clark Howard podcast. Submit your questions: WesMoss.com/askDiscover the research-backed path to a happier retirement – order The Retire Sooner Method by Wes Moss today at retiresoonermethod.com 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Welcome to this week's Ask an Advisor. I'm Krista Duvias here with Wes Moss.

• 0:55Speaker 04

  Hey Krista.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Wes Moss, bestselling author as of last week.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  All right, I'll take that. Thank you for everyone for your interest in the Retire Student Method. USA Today bestseller list, which is very cool. None of my other books have done that. I have a special place in my heart for USA Today because it really helped me become an author and they did a big profile on my first book many, many years ago. And that was back when they had a bunch of newspapers went out to the country and people read about it and that it's a big part of my early journey. But yes, thank you. Excited.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  So today on Ask an Advisor, you're going to be talking about what we call the everywhere millionaires first, right?

• 1:36Speaker 04

  We can talk about that first. Let's do that first.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Okay. And that is, I won't even tease what that is. And then later on, this movement called coast fi.

• 1:45Speaker 04

  It's getting so popular.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  I even had a kid ask me about it. Happened to be one of my own kids. Hey, what's this coast fi thing? And it's gotten super popular. It's not, I think our audience probably knows kind of what it is. And it's a great concept, but there's a danger lurking around it. I want to make sure people understand.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  If you have a question for Wes, you can ask it at wesmoss.com/ask. That's W E S M O S S dot com slash ask.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  I think our audience maybe by now realizes that about half of my stories, maybe more come from, the genesis is usually some conversation with my kids because I have four of them and they're high school. So they're thinking about college. I've noticed I've talked a lot more about college this year than I have in past years on radio and podcasts. I'm getting pinged from, let's call it the Moss family, asking questions. One was about artificial intelligence. How is that, is my dad, I, how is this, my GPT is terrible. How is this supposed to take over the world? But this topic kind of came from two places. One, the Wall Street Journal just did an article about it. And two, I had a conversation recently with my kids about considering low tech in a very

• 3:00Speaker 04

  high tech world. The world is, is high tech as it's ever been. There's worries, headlines this week, worries about artificial intelligence literally taking over and destroying humanity. Everything is about technology. And if you look on social media, which the Wall Street Journal mentions, the flair and the glamour is around wealth that comes out of usually tech. The reality is a massive part of this economy is built on low tech. And in some cases, almost no tech. And if you think about when you're competing in the world, and I'm thinking about what are my kids, we all think about that, what are my kids going to do to make a living

• 3:44Speaker 04

  in America if they're not some sort of computer aligned industry or high technology somewhere? Not bad at all, but what if you're not in that camp? And the answer is that this term everywhere millionaires, which is a concept, but it's very similar to the millionaire next door, but it's a little bit more about how Americans have gained great wealth in low tech jobs and the jobs that are not glamorous that you don't hear a whole lot about. So a friend of mine is very close with the franchising industry and they have a relatively new, I'd say within the last 10 years, food franchise. And it's around the Southeast.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  And talking about what some of those franchisees make, 100, 150, $200,000 per store, they may own three, four, or five of these. I started to think, wow, what a great way to make a really amazingly strong living in a place that's probably not a whole lot of glamour. And that's the conversation I have with my kids. Like, have you ever thought about having your own little store and having a franchise? None of them have ever thought about that. None of them ever thought about that. That's not what's on the internet. But it's something for, I think, all of us to consider. And first of all, here's some of the statistics. There are 3 million, what the authors call everywhere millionaires.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Collectively, those 3 million folks in America have a net worth of 65 trillion with a T, which is not a typo. There are a lot of these folks that are in the multi billions and they started out in areas that are not Silicon Valley and not Wall Street. They don't have hedge funds. These are unglamorous, they call them tactile businesses where you actually have to move things and bend things and open and shut things in a tactile way. The poster child of this is Dick Portillo, who started a hot dog stand somewhere in the Midwest that eventually ended up with 4,000 employees, $9 million a year that he was

• 5:51Speaker 04

  bringing in. I guess this is a single location can bring in 9 million bucks, which is double, triple what a McDonald's will do.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  And he sold the company to Berkshire Partners for $1 billion in 2014.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  That's what they did. They did hot dogs. They profiled another Chicago billionaire, private jet, 12,000 square foot home, also down in Naples, Florida. Oh, this is Portillo. So, so this is from hot dogs. Then you've heard of the story. Maybe you've heard of Dave's Hot Chicken. They started in LA parking lot with 900 bucks a couple of years ago. Eight years later, so they started with $900 in a parking lot and eight years later sold 70% of the business to a big private equity food company at a $1 billion valuation.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Talking about chicken. So I want us to just be open to thinking about the areas that don't get a lot of press. We think about HVAC and gutters. There's a story about someone who started bending their own gutters, the auto parts industry where they can make extraordinary money. If you look at a map and look at where self-employed income is really high in the United States, it's not in the coastal cities. It's not necessarily Wall Street. It's not necessarily in the Northeast. It's spread out along the South, in the Midwest, all over the plains. And people can find a way to make a living in this very high tech world, I think in a very low tech way.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  And I think we should be open to it. By the way, the largest amount of income, this is self-employed income in the country is Walker County, Alabama averages $1.9 million as far as their income. These are pass through returns, which means it's self-employed income.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Why that, why? Do we know?

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Probably because they're in low tech businesses in a high tech world.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Okay. Think becoming a plumber, electrician. I've talked to my son about this when he's been thinking about his career. There are so many trade schools and a lot of trade schools will pay you to go to the trade school and learn a skill and you can build your own business over time. Let's go to some questions. This one came in from Mark in Florida. Wes, I really enjoy listening to your perspective on financial topics. Here's my question. I hear some financial advisors say, as you get closer to retirement, that you should have less risk, such as bond funds. There's a certain person on the radio who is a financial person and says to stay in the market full speed ahead because since the inception of the stock market, it has averaged over 10%. What are your thoughts?

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Is that person on the radio me?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  I was wondering.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Well, it wouldn't be if Mark's asking. Mark from Florida. Let me tell you, what makes good radio is black and white. Just, you should be 100% stocks all the time. If you don't do that, you're crazy. You should always do a Roth conversion. Otherwise you're crazy. You should never take social security until you're 70. You're crazy. That maybe makes good radio, but it's just not great advice because it is not couched. It's not customized. And, and part of that is, is good radio. So maybe I'm bad at radio. Maybe, maybe our podcast numbers were high or hammered on my rules of thumb a little bit more, but it's not necessarily wrong because think about this.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  What asset class has had the highest return over the course of the last 20, 50, and 100 years? It's going to be stocks for the most part. So you can make the case that if you have an iron stomach and you have no worry about volatility, which happens, 10% corrections happen on average every single year. The average intra year drawdown in a given year is 16, almost 17%. That's the average. You've got bear markets that comes, come on average, once every three years. And then the really terrible bear markets, down 40, 45% that happen a little less frequency, but they happen over time and in cycles. And if you're one of those retirees and we get into a scenario where you have just stopped working, you're starting to pull money out and we go into one of those bear markets.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  The question is, what do you do? Do you have this great risk tolerance and you're totally fine? You're going to add more cash to it? Or does it ruin your plan because it forces you to make a change? Go to cash, then you miss the next market up, the next market rise or recovery? So there's a whole lot about understanding our own risk tolerances, our own time horizons. And for most people, having a balance where you do have some in fixed income, safety assets, bonds, I call it three years worth of dry powder. For a lot of people, makes them better overall stock or equity investors. It gives them some Pepto Bismol to have more of an iron stomach. And I think that combination works for a whole lot of people.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  So my answer is, is not a black and white. It is usually somewhere in the middle, and I think balance is our friend. And that's my call, even though it may not be good radio.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Okay. Anonymous in Connecticut says, our child, who is 27 years old and single, just graduated from a top five law school and will be practicing law in Washington DC. First year associates earn about $250,000. She has student loans to pay back, will be renting an apartment in DC, saving for retirement, and hopefully managing the rest of her expenses wisely. It appears her taxes for a full year would be in the neighborhood of $75,000. What advice would you give her as she steps into this new high earnings and big financial responsibilities world? Some advice seems to be heard more easily when it's not coming from mom and dad.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Well, I'd be happy to be that outside voice. It's the same thing. My kids don't really listen to me. We'll be talking about something money wise and Lynn will say, well, what does Clark say? You should talk to Clark about this.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  Maybe Clark, maybe the same thing happens. You should talk to Wes about this. We'll, we'll say, this is a big time job. First of all, anonymous in Connecticut. Immediately I get this picture of suits, the show. I immediately think the first year associate 250K, 75 grand, that's about right. 30% in taxes because the federal rate is somewhere in the twenties. Then you've got the District of Columbia, which is progressive in itself, which may end up at, I think it eight, maybe seven or eight percent on that amount of salary. And then you've got FICA, which is another big chunk that adds to, yeah, 30%. That's the rate, that is the harsh reality of making a lot of money. You're going to pay a lot of taxes.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  So what do you do about that? If you're a W2 employee, it's kind of the opposite of the everywhere millionaire. That's self-employed income with all these different write offs. And maybe I can buy a truck that weighs this much and write it off of the business. You can't do that as a lawyer. There's only so many dinners out with clients. And if you're an associate in the first year, you're probably not doing a whole lot of that anyway. You're billing, billing, billing. So you don't have a lot of areas to offset income. What can you do? Well, the simple answer is one, totally max out 401k and do it starting day one immediately. The second would be, and it sounds like she's in a big fancy law firm. So they probably have a big fancy retirement plan that allows for hopefully mega backdoor Roth conversion.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  So if they have this, if she can put into the after-tax 401k up to, let's call it up to 72 grand minus the 401k contribution, and then convert that into the Roth side of the equation, that's a huge head start for somebody who's in their twenties, making a ton of money. And the only way to shelter some of it would be the traditional 401ks, which is where she should start.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  All right. Well, good luck to her. And DC is such an expensive place to live too. I'm sure rent is not easy to pay. Andy in Florida says, I'm 50 years old and have around $800,000 invested for retirement, continuing to put more away too. After working 11 years for a company, I have an annuity with a lump sum payout of about $40,000 when I turn 65 or a monthly payment of $278. So if my math is mathing correctly, it's a 12 year payout of around eight and a half percent payout rate. With the monthly payout being so little, I was planning on doing the lump sum, but if I follow your 6% rule, you say I should do the monthly payouts.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  With the monthly payments only being around $270, should I take the $40,000 lump sum, which I'm guessing would be considered income and then just reinvest it? Is it even worth investing that much into retirement when you're already in your mid to late 60s?

• 14:41Speaker 04

  How old is Andy again? Did he say?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Well, he's 50 right now.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  You're right that the formula that I would use for this leans toward, remember it's a lean, remember this is the gray episode, which is again, probably terrible for ratings. There is the black and light white formula would say you're above the 6% line. You must go towards the monthly amount. That's not how I think about it. The, you should lean towards the monthly amount because you're right. That's 3,300 bucks a year divided by 40,000. It's 8.34% way above six. Hmm. Pretty good deal. Pretty good deal to take the monthly. But then there's other variables. You're young enough that you will hopefully get this for 30 years plus. That's great. But on the other side of that is what? These pension payments do not have what, Krista D?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  They do not have cola. They stay flat.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Most of the time, I guess in this case it stays flat.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Most pensions are going to stay flat. Teacher retirement system usually go up by inflation, but the traditional lump sum versus pension question is you're getting that same exact amount. So think about this, in 20 years, Andy, when you're 70, 275 bucks is going to feel like 140 bucks probably. And you're going to wish you had taken the 40, which by the way, if you're rolling that into a retirement account directly, you shouldn't have to worry about taxes. Yeah. If you take a check and go and spend the money, then that's, that would be a taxable event typically, but 95% of the time you, you have the option to roll into a retirement account so you don't get a tax bill and then let it grow and let it grow.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  That's, that's how I would think about doing this, even though you're right, the math leans towards the monthly, but I can totally see why the taking the 40 and investing it may be a better choice for you.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  All right. We're going to take a quick break, but when we get back, Wes is going to talk about why he likes the coast five movement, but doesn't love it.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  There's some, there's danger in the coast five movement. Let's put it that way.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Danger. All right.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Pricing participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Modafinil was invented in the 1970s and has been used by the highest performers on and off the planet. Soldiers, pilots, and even astronauts aboard the ISS use modafinil in high stakes situations where full concentration and alertness are paramount. And it's now available in liquid form to qualified patients at mod.com. Visit mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with promo code spotify at mod.com.

• 18:35Speaker 07

  We just moved into our new house and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about blinds.com.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at blinds.com experience excellent customer service from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if blinds.com is right for you. Shop Black Friday all month long at blinds.com.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Don't miss huge deals dropping every week. I want young people to be very careful with what has become a very popular financial movement. It's called coast fi and the concept very simply is I'm going to get to a certain age in my twenties or thirties. And because I have another 25 or 30 years, I have now enough money to grow at seven or eight percent a year that it's going to hit a million and a half or $2 million into the future, which is awesome and amazing. I love that it has gained popularity, but there's a twist in it that makes me wonder why it's so popular. And the reason it's gotten so popular is it makes

• 19:44Speaker 04

  it feel like financial planning is really easy and it's done. And it's done in my early twenties or mid twenties or early thirties. And then I can quote coast. It's literally in the name coast fi as in I can coast financially downshift to the job. I don't really like that's giving me all this money because I've saved aggressively and then the market will do all the rest of the work. And by the time I'm 60 or one or two, I have plenty of money to really completely stop working. And I love the concept and I love that it's gotten super popular on Tik Tok. Evidently in the past year, the searches and the dings and the alerts and the popularity of coast

• 20:28Speaker 04

  fi is up 50%.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  What's happened in the last few years? Why is it so popular now? Part of it is the the youth of America is saying, gosh, maybe I only have a few more years to make a lot of money because AI is going to take the rest of the jobs. But it's okay if I can coast from there. And the motivator in that is amazing. And the awareness to save early. Awesome. Love all of it. The catch that I would say and the naivety that can go into this is that you can now stop saving at 30 or 32 and just let the market do the rest of the work for the rest of your life, growing until you stop

• 21:11Speaker 04

  working and then supporting you for the rest of your retirement. In theory, that could work out well, because markets have averaged more than 7% per year. So I love that theory as well. The problem is that when you're in your young thirties, you still don't even know what how life will completely unfold. Maybe you get married. You didn't think you would. Maybe you didn't think you were going to have kids and you have kid one. That may change things. You know what would change it even more? Kid two. What would change it even more than that? Kid three or kid four. So we don't know the expenses of our lives when we make these early decisions that if we're locked

• 21:49Speaker 04

  in in a black and white way, I'm going to get to 260 grand because that 260 by the time I'm 60 is going to be $2 million. You're putting a whole lot of faith in a formula that may not work out. And then maybe we end up with a really prolonged period of time and you don't get that growth. Maybe we have hyperinflation, which we have only experienced a couple of years of in the last, really since the early 1970s. It may not be that everything works out so well that you can get to a certain number and expected to grow without saving another dollar. So my warning to

• 22:31Speaker 04

  the group that is putting so much faith in coast fi, again, a big fan of the concept. And even the founder of coast fi acknowledges that the really, the way we should be looking at this is let's get to that number. Yes, the market can do the work for the next 20 or 30 years. But in my opinion, I wouldn't fully take my foot off the gas when it comes to saving. I would still be putting money away every year because we just don't know what the future holds.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Sure. And you may want to retire earlier than you're thinking. So maybe you'll want more money when you're older, like so many life circumstances, like you talked about four kids, huh? You know how that is. Okay, let's go to some questions. Rhody on in New York says, love what you guys do with your podcast. I'm considering purchasing an apartment in New York City for $172,000 and I don't want to use a traditional mortgage. What is your take on an S block securities backed line of credit? I have a net worth of around 1.7 million combined in all my investments with one and a quarter million of that in a brokerage account. It's mainly in Vanguard funds and I wanted to ask what might cause a margin call. I was approved for around 500K, but my loan long

• 23:45Speaker 03

  term value ratio, I think it's loan to value ratio with the apartment will be 14 to 15%. What's your take and am I safe?

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Rhody on in New York City. I am a real advocate. I am a fan of using securities based lending. I think it's a really useful vehicle and it's a useful tool in the toolkit for a lot of different reasons. One, you can buy real estate. You can't buy more securities with it, by the way. Two, when you take a loan out, a traditional mortgage anyway, you still have the property itself is the collateral. And if you don't make your payments, well, after a couple of months, what happens to the property? They take it away. If you don't make your payments with security lending, then they're going to force you to sell and they'll force you to make the payments. The good news

• 24:39Speaker 04

  about this particular situation is your leverage ratio is pretty low. Most of the security based lending and almost every big firm now has these, they give you up to 70% release on your asset base. So if you have a million bucks, that some of these will give you all the way up to 70, particularly before you get a margin situation happening. So a lot of them give you a release of 70% on XYZ fund or stock, etc. But they want you to keep the leverage ratio at 50% or below. So when you're taking a loan, that's only, let's call it 14%, 172K out of 1.25 million,

• 25:20Speaker 04

  because usually these, the securities based lending is almost always on your after tax brokerage. Krista, it's not on like IRAs, it's usually, it's not on retirement accounts. So the available asset to borrow on is that one and a quarter in 1.25 million in the brokerage account. So you probably have room of 500 or maybe even 600 grand. And if you're only taking 172, you've got plenty of room for even a 20 or even 30% market correction before the margin would kick in. Because remember, our loans stay the same. We pay them down little by little by little, but

• 25:59Speaker 04

  your account value doesn't necessarily. But in your case, I think anything under 25% is typically a good situation to use securities backed lending. The other, and the other thing is that what are you avoiding? Having to sell what are probably highly appreciated securities. That's another valuable piece of being able to access something like that.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  When would you recommend a traditional mortgage over that?

• 26:22Speaker 04

  I think it depends because the rates are going to be similar. I think it's a matter of preference. There is maybe, there's more ease in a security based lending. It takes a couple days because the bank already has your money.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  If you think about it, there's very little paperwork and it's very flexible and you can choose to pay it off the next day, or you can just choose to pay the interest usually. So if you're looking for even more flexibility, then securities based lending is a, is a great option.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Angela in Texas says, my 28 year old daughter, who is a high functioning autistic, asked us if she could take a break for one year from her fast food job and pursue being a content creator. She thinks it's a good time as she still lives with us and has no bills to pay, which we agreed. We talked about her health insurance. Since we live in Texas, it looks like she has to stay above the federal poverty level, which is a little over $14,000 a year in order to get a subsidy on ACA. I've heard from the financial independence community that they get income from their investments. My daughter has a brokerage account with about $40,000 and $10,000 at Vanguard. We

• 27:32Speaker 03

  asked chat GPT and it said to realize gains in order to add to her income. How exactly can she do this? Realize the gains and dividends? It looks like she will just withdraw her funds. After withdrawal, can she deposit the money back into her account? And does she buy the same funds or should it be different? Like a different fund in Vanguard? Will she be able to do this for the next year if needed? Or will her gains be much less since it will only be invested for a year? Please advise if I missed anything else. Many, many thanks in advance.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Hey, Angela in Texas, to get some income. So what Angela's problem here is that to get an ACA subsidy, you do have to have some income. And in where you are, I don't know exactly what it is. Let's just call it roughly 15K. And if your daughter in, in this first year doesn't have a whole lot of income because she's a startup, let's call it creator, then you got, how do you get income? You do not need to take money out of an account in order to create the income. The way to create income is just to take a gain. So if you have an account, let's say the $40,000 and the basis is 20. What you would do is that you, if you sold the whole thing, you'd now have

• 28:48Speaker 04

  $20,000 in gains. Don't need to take it out of the account. You just need to transact within the account. And then that gets reported. It gets reported as a long-term capital gain if it's been over a year. And it creates the income you're looking for. The problem you mentioned is that it may, you may only have enough gains here for that first year. So I would be judicious and sell only as much as you need to get to that, let's call it $15,000 lines. You probably don't have to sell everything. Or depending on how large the gain is, so you may be able to sell part of that 40 and get the gain that you need. And then the next year, there's a little bit more gain to

• 29:29Speaker 04

  be able to realize in order to do the same thing. Hopefully by then, her content creation is generated enough income that you don't have to worry about that anymore. And she has other income to do that. The other great thing about this is that because her income will be super low in this first year, for anybody new starting a business, her long-term capital gain rate should be zero. So she can kind of be able to, the system almost allows her to make the transaction. And then you're right, you could reinvest it in anything. And if you like the funds you're already in, you can buy something very similar or another version of that, let's say that's a little less expensive. The one great thing about investing is that over time, things

• 30:12Speaker 04

  keep getting less and less and less expensive. So there may be another option out there. Now, I don't want to confuse, one addendum asterisk on this is that if you take a loss and you rebuy the same thing back, the loss gets disallowed, called the wash sale. It's a 30 day window. When it comes to gains, I don't think there's a worry about buying something back because most people wouldn't necessarily just do that. But you would be, I believe you could, on the upside side of it, you'd be fine. Usually, there's so many other options that are similar, maybe even less money. But if you like the funds you're in, stay with it.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Okay. Chuck in Florida says, hi Wes, can you share your thoughts on the strategy of converting a Trump account to a Roth account when the child reaches 18? I understand that it's possible to pay little or no tax on the Roth conversion by chunking the conversion over a few years when the child has very little or no earned income at all. This sounds like a great way to set up your teenager with potentially six-figure Roth account in their teens that could compound to multiple millions of tax-free retirement dollars over 45 years in a broad-based US equity fund, even with no additional contributions.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  I'm doing the math, 5K a year, which is the max into the Trump account over 18 years is 90K. Maybe that's grown to 200. Couple of things to watch for. It's these Trump accounts, when the child becomes an adult, let's call it an 18, they become IRAs, individual retirement accounts. And at that point, we can, we can always choose to do a conversion. The downside of conversion is it creates income. You may have a lot of money in this thing by then. And if the child is still a minor under your care, let's say they're a full-time student and they're 21, 22, and they're still under your care, a conver, they may be in a low tax bracket, but they may trigger the kiddie tax, which

• 32:10Speaker 04

  is under your tax bracket, if they convert too much. So just to note, maybe a hack here would be wait till they're no longer a dependent of yours, and they're in their first couple of years of work and their income is low because they're just starting out. That's when you would slowly convert so that it doesn't impact your tax rate, doesn't push your tax rate all that much higher. And that's the way I approach a lot of these Roth conversions is to do it slowly over time, only convert as much that won't get you into the next higher marginal tax bracket. And that's usually a good way to be thinking about conversions.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  That's going to do it for us today on Ask an Advisor. Thank you so much for being with us and listening. And please go out and buy The Retire Sooner Method. I sound like I'm advertising for you, Wes, but it's actually a really great book.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Thank you. I really appreciate it.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  We appreciate all the comments we've gotten and everybody loved that, the rapid fire we did last week. So we'll definitely do it again soon.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Keep the questions coming. They're always a challenge. You're always pushing me here and I appreciate it.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Well, hope that you have a great day and we'll be with you next week.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 33:38Speaker 07

  We just moved into our new house and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about blinds.com.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at blinds.com experience excellent customer service from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if blinds.com is right for you. Shop Black Friday all month long at blinds.com. Don't miss huge deals dropping every week.