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Video Transcript
Rebecca Powers 00:21
Welcome to this week’s edition of On the Money with Secure Money with Brian Quaranta. Brian created this show because he wants to bring education and awareness about your retirement plan. He’s the CEO and founder of Secure Money Advisors. I’m Rebecca Powers. I’m a retired news anchor, and now it is so fun to work with you. Brian, good to see you.
Brian Quaranta 00:43
It’s been a blast. It’s been a blast. And what’s great about it? Your background in investigative journalism, my background and getting to the truth with this retirement stuff and giving people the information they need to make really good, informed decisions. You know, people are smart, yes, they just need really good, transparent information to make the decisions.
Rebecca Powers 01:06
It’s such a good point. Think how many people are googling. You know, the market goes down. Can I retire? What do I do if I lose 25% that causes more confusion? So, it’s almost like too much information in the world.
Brian Quaranta 01:17
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s information overload and it’s paralysis by analysis. Yeah, I mean, you do, if you’re ever searching anything and you’re trying to learn something, you do get very paralyzed with all the information. And then the worst is when you think you’ve got it figured out, and you kind of do, but you got a lot of wires crossed.
Rebecca Powers 01:39
Exactly, a lot of wires crossed. That is why you wrote this book, and I want to show this. It is something that Brian will happily send to you. Really, he spent a lot of time and money writing this book. And why do you send it? You even pay for the shipping and handling. Gold envelope will be in your mailbox. Why do you want them to have this even before they come for the free appointment?
Brian Quaranta 01:59
You know, it would have been so much cheaper to give a download. That’s right, PDF, true. A lot of people do. But you want to know why I didn’t want to do that. You love books. I love books. But more importantly, when someone downloads something, it gets lost in their email. That’s true, and they don’t read it when, when a book is sitting somebody may get this and it may be sitting on their kitchen table for weeks, but every time they walk in the door, they go, I gotta get to that book. I gotta get to that book. And I’ve heard those stories. I had one guy come in one time. He said it took me three months to read your book, but I did, and I was so sad once I read it that I didn’t read as soon as I got it.
Rebecca Powers 02:43
Oh, that’s so cute. I thought I was going to say that it wasn’t longer.
Brian Quaranta 02:47
But it’s such important information. And, you know, think about it, I’m spending the money to send that. That’s how much I want to get this into people’s hands, because I don’t want them to go down the Wall Street path. It is a dangerous path to go down. People need to understand that retirement all starts with protecting their money first. Our clients are more concerned about the return of their money versus the return on their money.
Rebecca Powers 03:21
And when you’re looking at the news lately, several months that we’ve been seeing the volatility in the market, you know, roller coaster. And then you’ll call your broker, they’ll say, Oh, it’s just a loss on paper. Stay on the ride. It will get better. What is really going on, in your opinion, and what can retirees count on?
Brian Quaranta 03:37
Well, this is why you don’t build a plan on Wall Street talking points, right? I mean, remember, well, you were in the news, yeah. I mean, I got to imagine there was some slow news days. Yes, yeah. So, you got to find stories Exactly. This is what happens. They need to find stories, especially with the 24-hour news cycle.
Rebecca Powers 03:55
Exactly. I was going to say cable news is when it really got crazy. Yes. That’s still 24 hours.
Brian Quaranta 04:00
That’s right. And here’s the problem is that the news, especially if you’re watching investment news, right, who are they talking to when they’re giving that advice? You know, when guys like Jim Cramer, Dave Ramsey or Susie Orman, or any of these pundits on TV are giving investment advice, who are they giving it to? Are they giving to the 45-year-old, the 65-year-old, the 75 year old?
Rebecca Powers 04:23
I’m not sure. I guess everyone?
Brian Quaranta 04:24
They don’t tell you
Rebecca Powers 04:25
It’s a blanket.
Brian Quaranta 04:25
It’s a Blanket and blanket doesn’t work, and that’s why talking points are not how you build a plan, right? You build a plan by sitting down with a comprehensive, fiduciary firm that’s independent, that believes in a comprehensive planning model like we do it Secure Money Advisors, where we’re going over five areas of your income, your taxes, your investments, your health care strategy and your estate plan strategy and folks, I hate to tell you, but if you have a pile of statements that are just a mix of stocks, bonds and mutual funds. I’m glad that you do and you’re on the beginning track of getting it right, but that pile of paperwork that you have is an investment strategy, and there are so many things that you need to be aware of going into retirement. When do you collect your Social Security? What’s the best time for that? What if you’re widowed or divorced? And when do you collect your Social Security? Then? Because you could take your widow benefit, and then, you know, take your spouse’s benefit later on, depending on your situation, if you’re divorced, you’re entitled to your ex-husband’s benefit. So, there’s all kinds of moving parts, and it’s so unique to you, because there are so many moving parts. And then on top of that, if Social Security is not going to be enough money, how are you going to build the additional income that you do need? And then after that, you go, Okay, I got all this income, but we got to pay taxes. So just think about it. Just goes on and on and on. And I’m telling you, if you’re not trained in this, yeah, if you’re not doing it every day, I mean, we’re seeing probably anywhere from 60 to 70 people a week at our office, wow. We are doing this every day with the same age group, over and over and over, and the things we hear are, I don’t know when to collect my Social Security. I can’t afford to take a big loss in the market because I don’t have time to recover, right? I feel like I’m taking too much risk, and I don’t know what to do about it. My advisor keeps telling me I’m okay. I want to retire, but I don’t have a pension, and I don’t know how to create one, and it just goes on. And these are the concerns we hear over and over, and these are the things folks that we sit down and fix together, us, working together, us. We’re not selling you something. We are working together. You are utilizing our expertise to solve the problems and challenges that you have so that you can do what we all want to do in life, and that’s just go enjoy it.
Rebecca Powers 07:16
Absolutely. If you would like a copy of Brian’s book, as he said, very short, easy to read. He kept it very simple. It says a simple planning strategy to help you reduce risk, build income and provide peace of mind. We’re going to talk about peace of mind next, especially if you’re watching the news and seeing the market doing this, there is hope. Brian will explain it all starts with a plan. We’ll be right back.
Brian Quaranta 07:40
Most people worry they’ll run out of money in retirement. Are you one of them? After decades of working, you deserve peace of mind knowing your money will last 20, 30, even 40 years. Maybe you want to leave some for your family after you’re gone. I’m Brian Quaranta president of Secure Money Advisors, after getting to know you and hearing your goals, we build you a customized principal protection plan based on your unique needs, focusing on five key areas of retirement, Secure Money Advisors helps you with things like income, investments, taxes, health care and legacy planning. We can right track your retirement. Let us show you how. Visit our website or call us to schedule a free meeting today.
Rebecca Powers 08:29
Welcome back. For those of you unsure about your rock-solid plan, especially the do it yourselfers, there have been a lot of there’s some brilliant people in this world, and they say, well, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself, but the law changes so much, then you have volatility in the market. What would you tell someone that has just been drinking the I guess, Wall Street Kool Aid, stay in there, ride the wave. It’ll come back. What’s your advice?
Brian Quaranta 08:53
Well, look, I’ve met a lot of individuals that manage their own money, and they do a pretty good job, yeah, you know, and I’ve met those where the wife goes, he’s lost us again, and I’ve seen some disasters, yeah, but you know, people can do it. If they want to do it, you got to have a passion for doing it. Yeah, not everybody has that, but there are people out there that are good at managing their own money, and they should, quite frankly, stay managing their own money, but that’s not the majority of people out there, right? You know? So, you know, for us, it’s all about helping those of you that have no desire to go through 25 years of education like I have, and figure out all of these moving parts. That’s what you have us for, right? And when you work with Secure Money Advisors, you have access to us as many times out of the year that you need us, right? We don’t limit you to just one annual Review. Because, quite frankly, we don’t believe in annual reviews. What we believe in is planning reviews, because planning needs to be done when life events happen. We don’t want to get together and just talk about performance, because when you’re working with us, you will know every time you get your statement whether or not we’re on track. Because I’m going to teach you how to tell whether or not your advisor is actually doing the job that they need to be doing, so that your plan continues to work.
Rebecca Powers 10:31
I think as Americans, we’ve all been conditioned to just stay in, keep investing. Why does that not work for everyone?
Brian Quaranta 10:37
Well, because not everybody is working and not everybody’s putting money in. We hear dollar cost average. Dollar cost average. You’ll hear this a lot on the investment channels, yeah. Well, okay, well, that might be good advice for a 35-year-old that’s working and is actively investing in, but my dad, at 78, has no money going into his retirement plan right now. And if he hears that, and he comes to me and says, Hey, Brian, was listening to news, they said I should be dollar cost averaging with what extra money we’re taking money out of your plan right now so that you guys can enjoy retirement. So again, it’s no different than this. My brother came to me when he was younger, and he started making money as a business owner, and he says, Uh, I’ve got some money now, and I want to start investing. And I said, Great. I said, I think it’s a good plan. I said, before we start investing, let me ask you something. If you die, how is Danielle going to continue to pay the mortgage? How are the kids going to go to school? You got enough money saved to do that? And he said, No. And I said, so you want to start investing. So, we want to do you want to invest $20,000 we want to buy stocks, yeah, and hope that it goes well. What if you die tomorrow? Do you think $20,000 is gonna be enough to take care of them? Right. It’s backwards. The first thing my brother needed to do was get life insurance, right? Right. Not start investing, yeah. The next thing he needed to do was make sure that they had enough emergency cash reserves before he started investing. They needed to make sure they were out of debt before they started investing, there’s a process, and you have to follow that process, and then it continues to change. As you get older and your financial situation, the more it changes, the more the rules change, and the more things and strategies you have the availability to do.
Rebecca Powers 12:35
And isn’t that proof of what we were just talking about, how our society is so conditioned invest, invest. He thought he was doing right by his family by saying, Okay, I’ve got this money. Let me go make more.
Brian Quaranta 12:46
That’s right, yeah. And, you know, as soon as I said it to him, he goes, jeez, I didn’t even think about that, right? But even, like, I mean, you know, take, for example, I’ll give you a story just about my own family, right? So, you know, my mom and dad, they went through some challenges financially. And my dad, it’s always been important for him to leave money to us kids. I’ll never talk him out of it. He’s a stubborn Italian guy, you know, but, but it’s very important for me. I was like, Dad, Dad, go, you know, I want you and mom to have the money, you know, to go do what you need to do. Yeah. And he goes, No, no, no. I, you know, I want to make sure we’re preserving enough for you kids. I said, Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t I show you a way that you can spend all your money and you can still leave us at inheritance, and this is a great strategy for families. So, what I proposed to him, and I said, Dad, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to buy a life insurance policy on you, because I don’t want all the money you saved anyway, because they’re going to tax the hell out of us. So, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to be the owner of the life insurance policy. You’re going to be the insured, and I will be the beneficiary. My brother will be the beneficiary, and my sister will be the beneficiary. And awesome, when you die, there will be $500,000 left, tax free to all three kids. And he says, how the heck do we do that?
Rebecca Powers 14:10
Yeah, is this legal, son? Legal? I don’t want to bail you out of jail.
Brian Quaranta 14:12
Yeah, it’s absolutely legal. Why would we leave the life insurance to mom? Because, if we leave the life insurance to mom, and then mom passes that money to us is no longer going to be tax free, because it’s not life insurance coming to us anymore. Gotcha. It’s money coming to us.
Rebecca Powers 14:30
It’s like a game, instead of life insurance, which is tax free.
Brian Quaranta 14:33
We want to skip mom and go to the next generation.
Rebecca Powers 14:36
Brilliant.
Brian Quaranta 14:37
Yes. And so, you want a strategy that can really help your family out. Yes, have your kids buy a life insurance policy on you.
Rebecca Powers 14:43
How old do you have to be? Because my daughter’s only 17, what’s that like? How old do you have to be to buy an insurance policy on somebody else? Well, she could very easily purchase it on you. Give her the money, even a 17-year-old can do a contract for the insurance company.
Brian Quaranta 14:55
Yeah, absolutely.
Rebecca Powers 14:56
Does he you have to have a medical exam.
Brian Quaranta 14:58
You would have to have a medical exam, yeah, but even, I mean, she- you could get the life insurance policy technically yourself, she could pay the premium. Now think about this.
Rebecca Powers 15:08
It’s kind of building her credit too!
Brian Quaranta 15:10
It’s building her credit, and think about this, it’s absolutely 100% guaranteed money to go to her- 100% tax free. What better investment could she put her money into than buying a life insurance policy on you? And my dad says to me, he goes, so all you need is my life.
Rebecca Powers 15:32
You gonna bump me off?
Brian Quaranta 15:34
You got it.
Rebecca Powers 15:36
You got it. Hey, our parents already give us their lives. So, you know he’d be happy to.
Brian Quaranta 15:40
He’s got three kids, right? Think about your kids are trying to save, too, and they’re putting money away in 401(k)s and IRAs, all taxable, all messy, when they could all team up together and say, Hey, part of our investment strategy is going to be paying this premium on mom and dad, right? Because you could buy what you call a second-to-die policy, which makes the policy even cheaper. So, they could all split it, put money in, and now they have that as an investment. And now they could buy $1 million, $2 million, $3 million for very cheap, and they were tax free on top of whatever they’re saving at work. That’s incredible. Again, these are strategies that you are only going to find out if you’re working with an independent fiduciary firm. Remember, your strategies, your money is only as good as the people advising you, because if they don’t know about these strategies, how are they going to help you? And this happened to me with tax accountants. Yeah, as my company got bigger, I’m doing the research, and I’m going to the tax accountant and saying, Well, what about this, this, and this? They’re like, yeah, you could do that. It’s two years you know, you haven’t said anything to me?
Rebecca Powers 16:52
And she was a former professor of yours.
Brian Quaranta 16:54
That’s right, you remember that.
Rebecca Powers 16:55
In accounting. I remember that.
Brian Quaranta 16:57
She was my college professor. What smarter of an accountant can you get than my college professor that taught me accounting?
Rebecca Powers 17:03
You outgrew her.
Brian Quaranta 17:05
I outgrew her.
Rebecca Powers 17:08
And you had to break up with her, you were scared.
Brian Quaranta 17:08
I had to break up, but I was scared. And you will be scared when you have that aha moment, like a lot of people do when they come to Secure Money Advisors, and you go, Gosh, why hasn’t anybody told me about these things, your biggest challenge will be, how do I break up with Bob, the advisor that’s been sending me a Christmas card for the last 15 years. Folks, remember, it’s not that Bob’s a bad guy, right? It’s just that everybody’s knowledge is different. It’s no different than doctors, right? I mean, every doctor, there’s good ones, there’s mediocre ones, there’s not so good ones. Is the same thing in the financial world. And don’t be afraid to interview your advisors. Don’t be afraid to ask them tough questions. Remember, it’s your money. You deserve the answers. We love it when you come prepared with questions, because we want to take that deep dive with you. And on top of it, we want you to be part of that planning process. We want you to be hands-on so that you can see how we’re arriving at those results. You know, what I hate more than anything is when you go to your advisor and you get a big, thick report of charts and graphs, and you look at it, and you go, I don’t even know what this means, right? I can’t tell you how many plans we’ve seen that people have brought in. And I go, I don’t have a clue. You don’t even know what this guy’s trying to show them.
Rebecca Powers 18:34
Let alone what the family is thinking.
Brian Quaranta 18:37
Because it’s 30 pages thick.
Rebecca Powers 18:38
They must be smart.
Brian Quaranta 18:39
It must be smart, right, right, let alone it’s just a software that they’re printing off. We build everything on Excel. You want to know why? You can see how we arrived at the math. When you use planning softwares, you have no idea what calculation they’re using in the background to determine the probability of how long your money is going to last. And so, there’s, I have a big problem with planning softwares. I just don’t like them. To me, Excel is the easiest way to build it out. I think this is why we have so many engineers as clients, because-
Rebecca Powers 19:09
They nerd out on the numbers.
Brian Quaranta 19:11
They nerd out on the- and the thing they say is, can I get a copy of those Excel spreadsheets, please? Yes, when you become a client. You absolutely can, but folks go to OnTheMoneyOffer.com. Please get a copy of the book. Read it. It’s a great read. It’s a short read, but it will guide you and give you the principles that you need to build a real retirement plan. And again, of course, you can call 888-382-1298, the team is standing by to take your call. Get you scheduled to come on in and sit down with us,
Rebecca Powers 19:42
Or you can go to OnTheMoneyOffer.com Ask for the book, get your scheduled appointment, and we can’t wait to meet you. Stay with us.
Speaker 1 19:57
The work never seems to end, until the day it finally does. Because after nearly a lifetime on the job, you should be rewarded for all the time you spent working, whether that’s crossing off items on your bucket list, learning a new passion or rekindling the love of an old one. After all, life isn’t over when you stop working. It’s the start of an all-new chapter, the one where you’re the writer and you get to choose how your story will go. A way to achieve that is by having a clear financial plan to sustain your golden years. The biggest fear most retirees have is if they’ll have enough money to maintain the lifestyle they’ve always enjoyed. Having a plan to help protect you against the curveballs life often throws will help to maintain your lifestyle. Call today to get your free written financial plan so you may live every day to the fullest and enjoy the retirement of your dreams.
Rebecca Powers 20:48
With recent volatility in the market. You may be tempted to act on emotions and sell, but we always say you should ride the wave. That’s what Wall Street has conditioned us to do. Then you google and you hear advice like, rebalance, diversify, buckets, use the bucket strategy. I love that. Target date funds. How do you make sense of it all, Brian?
Brian Quaranta 21:12
Yeah. All great ideas, just not realistic for everybody. Gotcha because again, I mean, we’re dealing with married couple, divorced folks, single, different ages, people that want to leave inheritances, people that don’t want to leave inheritances, people that have a desire to leave a lot of money to their churches, a lot of money to a charity. You know, we have one client that has 28 different beneficiaries on her accounts, but it’s very important for her to have, yeah, we had it
Rebecca Powers 21:42
So sweet.
Brian Quaranta 21:42
Yeah, it’s so sweet.
Rebecca Powers 21:43
Lots of nieces & nephews probably?
Brian Quaranta 21:45
Yeah, until she calls and goes, can you take these five off?
Rebecca Powers 21:47
That little jerk didn’t call me on my birthday!
Brian Quaranta 21:51
But all great ideas, And, you know, look, I mean, take rebalancing, for example. Rebalancing is a good thing, and rebalancing all that means is, if I’ve got a few different stock positions, and one grows faster than another, it puts the portfolio out of balance. So, what you would do is to bring it back in balance. You would sell some of this one off to level it out again. Okay, good to do, but not always. Okay, not always. I mean, if you got a really good position that’s doing really well, we might not want to sell that off. Let’s take- let’s take it the way that it is, rather than rebalancing. Diversification helps. But diversification is very misunderstood.
Rebecca Powers 22:30
It really is. It’s one of those buzz words you first hear when you retire from HR.
Brian Quaranta 22:33
Great way- it is a buzz word, diversification, diversification, right? What does that mean? Well, we all know that it means to have different things, right, right? And usually, if we’re talking about investments, it means different types of investments, different sectors, consumables, pharmaceuticals, you know, energy, yeah. But diversification in retirement, and I write about it in the book, is about how much money you have diversified between guaranteed, safe assets versus risk assets, okay? And the first thing you have to do, and I know I sound like a broken record, but the first thing you have to do is to make sure that you have money set aside for cash flow, right? And even those of you that might have enough money because of pensions and Social Security, you want to have a position of your money that you could at any point in time turn on a whole ‘nother stream of income. Because what if the cost of living goes up? What if you get what if one of you get sick? What if you want to move and it costs you a little bit more money? You want that. It is always beneficial to have multiple streams of income, and that’s what we’re teaching you to do at Secure Money Advisors. I talk about this. You know, I buy income annuities personally for myself. I’m not telling everybody to go out there and buy one. But the reason I purchased them, and I purchased multiple ones is because I can turn them on at all different times and see the benefit. Some people will say, aren’t I too old to buy an annuity? And I’m like no, I- there’s sea turtles, I got sea turtles older than you, you know, but the reason is.
Rebecca Powers 24:21
So, what you’re telling me is sea turtles buy insurance?
Brian Quaranta 24:25
But the reason for this is, you know, if you wait to take your social security, security, you get more money. Yes. So, if I ladder a bunch of different income annuities, okay, and let’s say I retire and I turn, let’s say three of them on, okay, the other ones that are still in deferral, the income that they’re going to produce for me is going to get higher and higher and higher. So later on life, I turn another one on, give myself more income. Later on life, I turn another one on, give myself more income. And this is the way you want to build it. You can stack it that way and ladder it. People do this with CDs. They do it with bonds, but with income annuities, boy, is it powerful. It is powerful.
Rebecca Powers 25:00
And it’s tax free-
Brian Quaranta 25:03
No-
Rebecca Powers 25:03
-right? Insurance products?
Brian Quaranta 25:04
Well, again, we’re talking about annuities. So, this would be money from maybe IRAs or whatever, going into an annuity, which you can do without being taxed on rolling money into the annuity. Right now, my annuities will produce tax free income. Why? Because the money that is in my annuities has been converted from traditional IRA money to Roth IRA. So now I have a stream of guaranteed tax-free money. See how you can get all these different combinations? Yeah. And this is why working with an independent fiduciary, these are the strategies that you’re going to get. And all of my advisors at my office have been personally trained by me. We all follow the same philosophy. One of the things I always hated, and this happened with the big box where I was at, you would see this. You would see, you know, a client working with an advisor. That advisor would retire or maybe move to another firm. That client would get passed on to another advisor, and that advisor would have a different philosophy anyway, and he would say, Well, I, you know, I wouldn’t have done that. And they work at the same company. You know, that’s why, when you work with Secure Money Advisors, you have an entire team of people, not just one advisor. You might the way our team is set up, it’s set up in a diamond approach to where you’ve got your lead advisor, you’ve got your client servicing, you’ve got a servicing advisor, you have a new business person, and you’ve got a whole staff of people taking care of you and your accounts, and I’m telling you, people absolutely love it, because when they call, they can get somebody on the phone that knows them personally. They know about their case, and that’s the benefit of working with a team.
Rebecca Powers 26:53
Especially during these volatile times. You’ve said your phone’s not ringing off the hook, because your clients have a rock-solid plan. The mistakes are made on paper, you know the scenarios, that is the definition of peace of mind.
Brian Quaranta 27:05
And it’s the level of communication that we have with them every week. They hear us on the radio. They watch the TV show,
Rebecca Powers 27:11
You send them emails when something happens.
Brian Quaranta 27:15
Educational events. We do client events. I send out a tip of the week every week personally, just to my clients on different tips or what’s going on in the market. We were always talking to them. Now, you tell me, is that level of communication better than a onetime annual review to tell you about your performance Anyway, go to OnTheMoneyOffer.com get a copy of the book, folks, you will absolutely love it. Or call 1-888-382-1298, teams standing by to take your call and get you scheduled.
Rebecca Powers 27:44
And there truly is no obligation. Their feelings will not be hurt if you’re not the right fit, get the book for free. Get that first appointment for free. We love you Pittsburgh, and we will see you next week.