10.13.26 Ask An Advisor With Wes Moss

Are High-Yield Investments Dangerously Risky? & Why Wes Updated His Thinking on HSAs Jim Cramer says high yields are dangerous – so is retirement income actually at risk? Wes sets the record straight on high-dividend stocks, interest rates, and how to safely build a yield ladder. Plus, Wes shares a personal shift in his own financial strategy: why he recently updated his thinking on High Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs) and how Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) can become a triple-tax-free powerhouse for your retirement. Mentioned on the show: ⁠ The Overlooked 'Rule of 55' Could Unlock an Earlier Retirement⁠ TIPS: The Inflation-Proof Alternative to Standard Bonds How To Find and Choose a Financial Advisor - Clark Howard Best Financial Advisors in 2026 - Clark Howard All this and more on the October 13, 2026, Ask an Advisor episode of the Clark Howard podcast. Submit your questions: WesMoss.com/ask Discover 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

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• 1:05Speaker 02

  Welcome to this week's Ask an Advisor. I'm Krista DeBias here with Wes Moss, headline maker.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  It's interesting to make some headlines.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  It is. And so one headline that involved you, you're going to talk about today. And we'll find out if it's truth or fiction made up to get clicks, right? As we often see.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  That included Jim Cramer, who I watch every day, like twice a day.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  So it's cool to be in that same headline. It was like Jim Cramer and Wes Moss. What?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  And then a listener recently questioned your stance on HSAs and you've changed that now. So you're going to talk about that as well.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  We've got lots of questions and you can go to wesmoss.com/ask to submit your question. W E S M O S S dot com slash ask.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  So I am not chasing dangerous stock yields. There's an article that was published this past week and I found it a couple of different places, Yahoo Finance, I think it was 247 or 247 Wall Street that originally published it. And the headline, when I read it, I thought, wait a minute, I didn't, I didn't say that, Krista? Did I say that? But here's the headline. Kramer, as in Jim Cramer, he's the guy on CNBC. He does a morning show and then he does an evening show. I don't know, gives the most energy of any human on the planet.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  He gets exercise.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  He is literally on TV six hours a day, five hours a day. Anyway, here's the headline. Kramer says, high yields are dangerous. Wes Moss says, that's where retirement income lives. And I thought, wait a minute, I did, did I say dangerous high yields? Where is this coming from? And here's the problem with that very, very misleading headline. And I think, I think the article itself did try to explain it more. But what's happening in that headline, and this is really important for all of us to understand. When you hear the word yield, it is a percentage and investment is paying you. But a yield can be from a rental property. What is my rental yield? It can be a dividend from a stock.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  What is my stock yield? That's from a dividend. If I own bonds, I can get, I'm getting a yield. Well, what is the, it's really coming from the interest rate of the bond. So this word yield is technically correct, but it's encompassing any investment that is paying you money. And where interest rates are today, what I've talked about over the last couple of months, as rates have gone up, now we see bond yields that used to be 2%. And now for a similar bond from the United States government, a treasury is yielding 5% or 5 and a quarter percent. So pretty recently we've updated what I call the yield ladder. And that yield ladder is a way for you to visualize as an investor, hey, if I want

• 3:58Speaker 03

  to get income and not just rely on the growth of the portfolio, but I want to get some cash flow, which I think gets really important as we get into retirement or closer to retirement. You can get quote yield or income on these different rungs of the ladder. And yes, because the S and P 500 yield today is only around one and a quarter percent. And a utility stock might be yielding dividend yield of 3% and an energy stock maybe 4%. If we're going beyond that in the stock category, those stocks do get to be a little dangerous because you're worried about the company having to cut the dividend or the reason it has a high yield is the stock price has fallen dramatically.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  So when we're going up this yield ladder in the world that we live in today, that now government bonds are paying in the 5% range. What I was talking about this yield ladder is that I think I'm very comfortable or am very comfortable getting a one and a two and a three and even a 4% yield from stocks. But above that, that's when we switch to interest, which would be coming from bonds. So it's a totally different animal. It's apples are stocks, oranges are bonds, totally different way of getting income. And to get a 5% yield now or interest rate from a bond is not stretching and is not in the danger zone at all, because these are US government treasury bonds.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  So to intimate that I'm leaning into these, these dangerously high levels is missing the point. Yes, if you're looking for stocks that are yielding six and seven and 8%, a stock itself paying that much in a dividend can flash some warning signs, some danger. But then there are other categories as you go up that yield ladder that are, let's say they use options or covered calls, or they're designed more for current income. And it's actually taking away from the growth, but that's okay, because you really value getting a steady paycheck in retirement from an investment category. That can not be out on a limb either.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  So I just think it's really important to explain a headline that if on the surface seems like I'm advocating for really high yielding stocks, and that is not the case. The yield ladder starts to move into other areas, bonds and other specialty categories, so that we're not leaning in on these ultra high yielding stocks. I think I just wanted to make the record straight.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  I like it. All right. Well, I've got questions for you. This one's from Trey in Georgia. Wes has mentioned the difficulty of transitioning from saver mode into retirement mode. So I hope he can help me overcome my trepidation. I just turned 54 and I'm considering retiring early at age 56. I have $1.2 million in a high yield savings account with most of it earning nearly 5% interest, which generates about $54,000 per year. I also have 1.6 million in my 401K. My home was worth a million and has no mortgage. My spouse is 11 years younger and plans to keep working, but we would like to sell the house and downsize in the next few years. My spouse has their own 401K. We have no kids, no car payments and no debt.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  I'm a conservative spender and my annual expenses are $25,000. I believe that.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Annual expenses 25,000?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Whoa, okay.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  I believe the $54,000 per year in annual interest income can bridge me to 62 to start social security. My dad died at 56 and my grandfather at 59, so my own mortality is a factor in not waiting for full social security and my interest in seeing if an early retirement would be feasible in two years. Should I go for it and retire super early at 56?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Let that be a lesson to all of us coming from Trey in Georgia. And what's the lesson? No kids. No debt.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Too late for some of us on that.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Equals spending of 25K a year. God bless you, Trey. If you had a bunch of kids running around like I do, 25K just doesn't cut it. But that is again, that's the choice we make and you've been able to keep your expenses super low. And I'm looking at your net worth here, doing the quick math. Outside of your home, million dollars paid off, no mortgage, you're at $2.8 million. And the 4% rule says that you could take how much per year? 2.8 million times 4% even at a young age is 112K a year, Trey. Right now you're getting that just from high yield savings. So you're not really even having to dip into anything.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  So I look at it this way, you've got a range from 25, what you're spending today, all the way up to 110K. You're at the totally low end of that. Even if you doubled your spending need, Trey, I don't see why there's any reason at all why you couldn't be in the early retirement zone. Your house is paid off, you're hitting all the green zones, you're hitting the money green zone, housing, check. Liquid money, check. Liquid money, check. Income, check. And yeah, you're a little young to start tapping the 401K because you're only 54, but that's okay. Cause A, you maybe have the rule of 55, if that's all in the employer where you're going to leave, even if it's not, no big deal, because you've got this 1.2 in high yield

• 9:21Speaker 03

  savings that can totally bridge you to age 62 to start social if you want. And notice Krista, he's really leaning in on talking about his own mortality. If he said, hey, I'm going to live to 100, maybe you don't retire today. But if you're saying maybe being just upfront about you don't have a ton of longevity, why not try to get some of those years back now? And that's why I'm a big advocate of retire sooner and retire sooner method is about that. I think you're on the right track.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Plus, I mean, if you can only spend $25,000 a year, mortality or not mortality, you can absolutely retire if you want to retire.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Well, here's the other, part of the reason, another reason, and I'm joking about no kids and having low costs in that way, but also when your mortgage is gone. That check that was 2,500 bucks a month or 3,500 bucks a month, that doesn't happen anymore. And you see spending come down dramatically when mortgages go away. And that's another thing that he's done at an early age. Awesome job, Trey.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Okay, this is an anonymous question. What percentage of bonds should be in TIPS for a retired couple? Background, 100% of our TIPS are individual bonds held in an IRA. 50% of our portfolio is in stock mutual funds and ETFs, and 50% individual treasury products and CDs. Thank you for all you do.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Anonymous in Georgia, the short answer is that TIPS are treasury inflation protected securities. Again, they're issued by the US government and they have an inflation kicker on them, which sounds awesome, right? I'd love to have bonds, get interest, and whatever inflation goes up, so does my TIP, my treasury inflation protected security. So they sound really good, and I would say they are good. But I don't have a particular percentage of your fixed income that needs to be in TIPS, and here's why. You do pay, you pay for that inflation protection with lower yields.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  If you have a treasury, a regular treasury bond that's paying you 5%, do you really think you're going to get a 5% yield from a TIP plus inflation? The answer is no. You're getting less interest because you are expecting it to go up by inflation. And I've owned TIPS and I've looked at TIPS for many, many years. And if you look at a chart of, let's say, XYZ TIP ETF, and there's lots of them, and you track that against a total bond market index, you're going to see that on a total return basis, they're really, really similar. On a year-to-date, a one-year, a three-year, even a five-year, there's very little difference between what you're going to end up in total return out of a TIP

• 12:04Speaker 03

  versus a treasury. And there are certain nuances to that, depending on the environment in any given month or quarter. But in general, they perform very similarly, total bond market and a total TIP-type investment. With that being the case, I don't think that there is a mandate to have a certain amount in TIPS. So I don't think it's a bad thing if you have some of your fixed income in TIPS, which would count as dry powder, but I also don't think it's needed either.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  All right. This one's from Paul in Pennsylvania. I was recently laid off after six years in pharmaceutical manufacturing, and I'm deciding what to do with a $64,000 fidelity net benefits pension. Should I roll it into a retirement account with no tax penalty or elect 100% joint and survivor annuity that pays $363 per month for life? Admittedly, I'm no expert on annuities, so I may be oversimplifying things. I listened to your podcast on the 6% rule. The monthly payment is at 7%, and while I'm not nervous about dealing with the lump sum, the answer to your other three questions is yes. Background, my initial reaction was, I'm a Clarky. Annuities are bad. Roll over the pension.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I've already rolled my 401K into my IRA, but the appeal of another guaranteed monthly check has me reconsidering. We currently receive about $12,800 per month, 153,600 annually after federal withholding from three passive income sources, my 26-plus-year army pension, thank you for your service, my 100% PNTVA disability benefits, and the interest on $560,000 in a 4% high-yield savings account. We always lived below our means. We have roughly $1 million in retirement accounts and another million in fidelity brokerage accounts. Our last three years of expenses suggest we could essentially break even if I treat the layoff as an early retirement.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Future major costs include our son's car, insurance, and any college expenses not covered by my post-9/11 GI bill. Our $3,000 monthly mortgage will be paid off in 2035. I'm work optional now and hope to volunteer more while I look for work that brings renewed purpose. Given our situation, would you take the rollover or the annuity?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Paul in PA, I love that you're looking for the next cycle of purpose. And even though we don't find it, we can create it. And I think that's what you're really saying. And if you're in search of it, you end up creating that next chapter for you life-wise, work-wise, purpose-wise, because the money part is really very much taken care of. It's two and a half, over $2.5 million in liquid assets. Your house is going to be paid off in a few years. You've got three different income streams, $12,800 a month. That's amazing. And you're right. Like, if you go down the checklist, which is, this is how we think pension versus lump sum now, which is lean towards the lump sum right out of the gate.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  And only if, three other questions are answered yes, yes, yes, should you even consider taking the monthly amount. And the first one is yes, because it's over 6%. I did the quick math here, 363 times 12 divided by 64,000 is 6.8%. Pretty good. You win on the 6% test. So at least that's a decent amount of return on the money that you're handing over for the rest of your life. You don't get it back, but you get an income stream. And almost 7% is pretty good. It's small enough that the PBGC would protect it if something happened to the company. So that's another check. You have plenty of liquidity

• 15:46Speaker 03

  that would lean towards saying, yes, you can take the income amount instead. And the other piece of the equation here, you didn't mention longevity, but that's the hardest question for anybody to answer. We don't know how long we're going to live. The earlier question said he had early mortality in the family, so he's balancing that. I don't know what it is for you, but you do answer yes to all those questions that say, take the monthly amount. And there is also, in some respect, the calculate, just the size of this relative to the rest of your portfolio. I mean, you're getting $12,800 a month already.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Is $363 per month, is that gonna, are you going to even feel that? Or is it going to feel like it's kind of going into the abyss? But listen, if I'm looking at my decision tree, everything points to take the monthly. You say yes to all the main questions on that. So you're fine to take the monthly. If it were me, I still would lean towards rolling it over into, into an IRA, just because it's now yours for life. Something happens, your heirs get it immediately. The pension these days, and this is the other thing Krista and Paul that I would bring up. You know, I developed the 6% test and it's been great for 20 years,

• 17:10Speaker 03

  but it was also back when rates were really low. It's a different story today where a treasury bond yields 5 1/4%. So you, with taking essentially no risk or the lowest risk you can take, just putting it in a treasury gets you over 5. So does the 6.8, is it that enticing? It's less enticing to me these days. So you can't go wrong either way. And yes, monthly would make total sense here, but I'd still lean towards the rollover.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about HSAs and we'll get to more of your questions.

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• 20:17Speaker 03

  I'm updating the way I'm thinking about HSAs and it's because of Krista and it's because of a listener question. You've got to remember, we get just thrown so many questions every single week. It's not as though I have the perfect or right answer to all of them. I mean,

• 20:32Speaker 02

  We're all works in progress.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  We're works in progress. And so here's what I'm doing, updating how I think about HSAs. And what I've been answering over the past year, I'd say is good. But there's a much better way to skin the cat when it comes to HSAs. And we had a listener question a week or two ago that said, hey, Wes, why aren't you stacking HSA money and waiting for the long term? And I,

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Because you mentioned you have four boys and that you guys end up with high medical expenses, so you usually go through it.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Right. And we're new. So I've had, the company that I'm with, we've always had a regular healthcare plan that wasn't high deductible. And it's only been very recently, the last two years or so, that we switched to a high deductible plan so that we can have HSAs. And we, because of that, the company, we give some HSA money for free to supplement these higher deductibles, et cetera, and a slightly more expensive plan. But now we also have HSAs. And I think that for a lot of years, as a parent with many, many children, number one, and two, a couple of health issues that were recurring in the family, we were always

• 21:46Speaker 03

  spending lots of healthcare money right out of the gate. And as soon as we got an HSA plan and the convenience around having an account and having a card that when my wife went to the pharmacy, she could use that. And it was kind of a nice upgrade from what we'd been doing before. The money goes in pre-tax. We get some of it is matched or is technically a benefit from the company. It grows tax deferred and then it comes out tax-free. So it's win, win, win, win, win. It is the only account that does that. It's better than a Roth. I mean, I know Clark loves Roth IRAs, but he'll even, he'll admit that this is one step better. You don't get a deduction when you put money into a Roth. It's after-tax money.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Here you're getting a deduction off of your income when you put money into HSA. So that's a tax win, grows tax deferred. That's a tax win, comes out tax-free. That's a tax win. So it's triple. It's a, it's a triple tax-free vehicle, as long as you're going to use it for healthcare. And the vast, vast majority of us, and when I've discussed this with other folks, the number one thing they say, when, when I say you should be now stacking your HSA money is, well, I still have to use it for healthcare. What if I don't need it for healthcare? Well, who doesn't need it for healthcare?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Well, also you can save your receipts. You don't have to do your claims in the year that you incurred the medical costs. You can save your healthcare receipts for years to come and then go back and claw that money back if you don't need it.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  And one, a friend of mine, I was talking to this about, pulled up his HSA receipt account and he has receipts now for the last year and a half. And he said, every time my wife goes to the pharmacy or the doctor, she sends me the bill, I scan it, I put it in my folder, hasn't used it yet, but is going to use it at some point in the future. So it is still a good thing. If you have a high deductible plan, you have an HSA, your money goes in pre-tax and then you can spend it. And if you can't afford to pay out of pocket today and wait for that HSA money to compound, then I get it. And not everybody can afford to HSA stack and put your money and save it and wait and wait and wait to use it when you're in your 60s.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  But if you can afford to pay your current medical bills as you go along, year after year, then there is great power in taking your HSA money and putting it in the HSA account, investing it for the long run. Here's an example, age 45, you do this for 20 years. If you're single, and again, these are today's numbers and the HSA limits will probably go up over time, but let's say it's 4,400 bucks a year. You contribute 88,000 over that 20-year period. At a 7% rate of return, it would be worth around 100, 180. And that should be able to, once you start taking and spending it, it should last you for your retirement.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Family, 87, 50, age 45, 20 years, 7%. You're going to end up with 350, $360,000. Again, needs to be spent on medical care in order for it not to be taxed or penalized. But if you can afford to do it, banking your HSA money, letting it grow, investing it in either an equity-based account or even a balanced account to get 7, 8% a year for the long run, I think is an absolute home run strategy, which I've already switched to doing. We still have plenty, we do have HSA money left right now. So that's what I'm doing. And I appreciate a listener question that kind of woke me up to saying, hey, that's

• 25:27Speaker 03

  what we should be doing.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, we,

• 25:28Speaker 03

  And Krista, and Krista.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  We often, you know, we're hearing about the lack of long-term care policies, certainly that are, they're not written like they used to be written. And so this is one more way to help with that potentially. We'll go to questions. Daryl in Georgia says, Wes, when selling an asset, Vanguard offers several ways to list the sale. You can do FIFO, HIFO, minimum tax or average cost. How do I decide which one to choose? I don't know if I said those right, by the way. F-I-F-O,

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's HIFO, FIFO. I think,

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Minimum tax or average cost.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Okay. So what, what do these stand for? What is Daryl trying to do? Daryl, you're trying to reduce your tax bill when selling in an after-tax account. Your after-tax account is 100K and one stock that you bought, 50,000 is worth 90. And another stock that you bought for 10 is still worth 10. So you have 100 grand. If you sell anything on the stock that's 90, you're going to have a big tax bill. If you sell the 10,000 that's still worth 10,000 and there's no gain, there should be zero tax bill. And HIFO is a way, or highest cost first out, that's what HIFO means, is that if you have a stock that you've been reinvesting in and you had 100 shares originally and now

• 26:47Speaker 03

  you have 200, because you've reinvested dividends, dividends, dividends, dividends. What you end up with are these lots. So when you click on your position and look at the unrealized gain, you'll have a gain, if it's up, on the original 100. But then you'll have a different gain for every single time and every single other lot that you were able to buy with the dividend reinvest. And the closer we are, the more recent ones probably have a much higher cost basis, meaning there's less tax. So HIFO, if you set your withdrawals or your sales to HIFO, it's always going to take the highest cost basis, which means you have the least amount of gain.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  And that's a really good option if you're trying to manage your gains, if you have to take money out. The min-tax that Vanguard, I believe, has, does that for you, but it's even a little more complicated. The min-tax option, I believe that they sell the short-term capital losses first, then they go to zero gains, then they go to long-term capital losses, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a little more complicated in how they do it. Either way, and they're not going to work out exactly the same, either the minimum tax option or the HIFO option, in my opinion, is the way to do it.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Now, if you do average and it's a mutual fund, most companies, if you choose average, you're locked into selling average. You've got to watch for that. So the reality here is that they're both good. The min-tax option is probably good. I like to look at HIFO. But again, the way I typically am doing this is I'm looking at the different lots and choosing, but if you have to pick a formula, you're fine with HIFO or min-tax.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm going to go to Janet from Kentucky. She says, I have a million dollars in my IRA. My security advisor wants me to put 35% into an opti-blend fixed indexed annuity for seven years. There's no cap and no management fee. It would be invested in the S and P. He would then put 45% in the stock market and 15% into different bonds. What do you think?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Run.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Janet, run. Just the, the name of this is silly to me, the opti-blend. This is, what you just mentioned is all, I'll politely say it's all misguided. Another way to say that, it's totally wrong, because you said it's going to be invested in the S and P 500. Incorrect. And again, this is, you're just hearing this from your advisor. So it's not your fault. That's false. There's no cost. That's false. There is no penalty. That's false.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  It's, all of those are wrong. And that's why annuities, that's one of the reasons they get a bad rap, because they say they're invested in the S and P 500. That's not true. They're insurance contracts that are invested in some sort of general account that then looks at a formula that might have the S and P, but then it'll cap it at certain amounts every single month. You could, an insurance company could theoretically base the return that you get on anything. The number of leaves that fall off this tree in autumn. Okay. Maybe it's 10,000 leaves, but guess what you're going to get? We're only going to give you the first two. And that's how the formula works. So it almost

• 30:29Speaker 03

  doesn't matter what the, what it is. It's totally there for the perception that it's in the S and P 500, when it's not, or it doesn't need to be. It can be anything. The number of cars that pass by, capped at two. The number of leaves that fall off a tree, capped at three. That's how these work. So it's not in the S and P 500. The reality is the cost is, there's a, there's a big commission in these. So that's false. You're locked in Janet for usually seven years or more. And if you want to get the money out, there's big penalties to do so. And I think there are just a lot of other ways to invest

• 31:09Speaker 03

  for growth and for income that doesn't turn your money over to an annuity company. That by the way, if something happens to that one annuity company, where do you go there? What happens next?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Right. So I would definitely look for a fiduciary advisor if you feel like you need an advisor. This person clearly is not. Brian in North Carolina says, hi Wes, what do you think of carrying life insurance after retirement to protect loss of social security income? I always thought I would be finished with life insurance after retiring, but I saw a video where someone said they were carrying some term life in retirement in case one of the spouses dies.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Brian, this is why I think financial planning and investing is so hard, because there's a video on everything. We're guilty of it too.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Sure. There are TikToks, there are every, there's so much financial advice, and I'm doing air quotes out there.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Brian, there's no reason you should carry life insurance into retirement. Brian, there's every reason you should carry life insurance into retirement. I mean, you can make a case either way. Here's, here's what I've just seen in the real world. If you are 50 and you end up with a term policy that's 20 years, well, it takes you to 70. Now, the person retires at 65. So you've got five years and you're paying this term policy and it's annoying. And you say, I'm retired and I'm, hey Wes, I'm still paying this. Should I, should I still pay it? What's my answer? To keep paying it. If you have an insurance policy that was for a term five or 10, 15, 20 years, and it's at a decent cost relative,

• 32:42Speaker 03

  then why not have the insurance? So I don't recommend folks stopping insurance just because you've retired. Technically, you don't need, you shouldn't be needing life insurance because you've paid all the big bills. The kids are out of school. You've got your income streams, but you're right. If one of you passes away, then the other spouse is left with one social security payment. Now, it should be the higher payment, but you're still left with a void. And there is no problem having some term insurance that would fill that gap. I do not recommend getting rid of these policies just because you retired. Do you need to buy a new one to solve for this? Typically, by the time you're buying it, it's maybe too

• 33:27Speaker 03

  expensive to do so. That's why your other assets are meant to now be in place to fulfill your lifestyle. And that's why you shouldn't need to have insurance, but I wouldn't be getting rid of it prematurely.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Okay. That is going to do it for this episode of Ask an Advisor. Clark is back tomorrow. Remember, you can ask Wes questions at wesmoss.com/ask. Hope the rest of your day is fantastic. Thank you for being with us.

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