It is time for another episode of How to Retire. Welcome back. I am your host, Jackie Post. How does that feel? It felt really good. I’m joined by the head of Fuchs Financial, Ben Fuchs. Ben, good to be here with your rhyming host. Listen, I like it. There are some things that work with my last name, but none of them are actually appropriate. You can’t say them on air. No. I mean, I could, but then I’d be canceled. Yeah, canceled. Exactly. Okay, so I have a question for you. Sure. How many offices and people are part of Fuchs Financial? Because I think people might see the show, and they see Ben Fuchs, and they hear Fuchs Financial, and they don’t realize that there’s a whole team behind you, right? There is a whole team behind me. Because if there wasn’t, then nothing would actually get done. And you’re going to meet two of the people that get a lot of work done. So to answer the question, we have four offices. We have West Hartford, Middletown, Middlebury, and Mystic. And we also have a lot of clients. all over the country, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, you name it. Anywhere people have retired and then moved away, we’ve got there. And then in terms of people, I believe we are now, this is terrible, oh, we have 12 and a half, we have an intern. 12 and a half people. Well, she’s an intern, not a full-time employee, but she’s still like part of, like, you know, she’s going to go to the, she goes to the end of the year stuff when she’s part of the planning, but is she full-time? Yeah. The 12 people. So that’s a team behind you. I love it. I love it so much. And I have to say, I’ve been working with you for a few months now. Four to six months? Four months? I don’t know. Anyway, I just love the team. Everyone is super friendly, warm. I love the atmosphere. We’re actually recording here in Middletown at your Middletown office, and it’s a fun little office with lots of games and fun people. Well, we try, and that’s important. Listen, I think… We’ve all worked in a lot of different office spaces with a lot of different people. And you can train a lot of people how to do very specific things the way you want them done. But you can’t train nice people. You either are or you are not. And so that really is like the first qualification. And then also, like, because of that, we tend to attract some really nice clients. When we did our end-of-year, like, party that we do here where we give away pies, when we did that, like… was talking about how nice all of the other clients are and how and so you know it’s very important for us to have the right atmosphere and to We really protect that culture. It does not surprise me. Ben is the real deal and he is who he is on camera. So I love it so much. All right. So moving on to the topic at hand, we’re kind of talking about something that unfortunately is a little bit sad. Half of all married retirees will deal with losing their loved one. And then obviously they have to face some of the realities that go along with that. How does a person’s income change once they have lost their spouse? Yeah, so it’s difficult. A lot of people, when they think about things, this used to happen a lot, is that when we would talk about pensions, we’d have a couple where each person, each spouse was getting a pension, and I said, oh, I’ll just take it a single life, which means just based on their life and not on the spouse. And so if they’re each getting, say, $3,000 a month from the pension, and then they’re each getting $3,000 a month from Social Security, what they don’t realize is that you lose the pension, and then you also lose the smaller of the Social Securities. So if as a couple you had $12,000 a month coming in, now you have half of that. And so a lot of the things that were happening, that were going on, you know, the second house, that all of a sudden becomes unaffordable. And so on top of dealing with this grief, right, now you’ve just lost so much more of your income because of the way that things were planned. And for us, we want to try to get ahead of that, right? We want to fix that. That’s one thing that happens. In the other direction, you could have people that have saved too much money. Right. Which is, you know, in a grand scheme, not a big problem to have. But when one spouse dies, you go from being married, filing jointly for your taxes to being single. And when all of a sudden you have to take all this money because of required distributions, all of a sudden you have to pay so much more money in taxes that you would have had to before. Oh, wow. And the amount of money that you were forced to take out every year, that doesn’t go down because that was in the retirement account. So sometimes it’s the opposite problem where all of a sudden there’s too much money. penalties go up. So, you know, what would it be? No penalties for a married couple. All of a sudden you have to pay extra penalties for Medicare and you lose exemptions and you lose certain things. So, you know, here you are dealing with grief and then, oh, by the way, sorry, you have to pay a whole lot more money in taxes also. Right. But you have to prepare for these things. So that’s the best way to do it. So how should someone adjust their spending once they lose a loved one? So the sad thing is, it’s not something that happens right away. right it’s something that you know you you have to i mean not a grief counselor um donna are you going to meet later wonderful human being i have known donna for a long time i love donna um and she is really somebody that can help somebody through difficult times in a way that i just can’t which is why i wanted her to be on because it doesn’t it’s not the same with coming from me from her You know, she’s in your life. She wants to help. But the spending is difficult because all of a sudden it’s, you know, a lot of times you don’t want to spend. You don’t want to do anything. Everything that you used to do all of a sudden changes. And it’s hard to get back out and to be the person that you are and to do the activities that you were. Sometimes I just want to kind of crawl in a hole. It’s hard all around, I can imagine. What are some of the tax implications when someone loses a spouse? You did go into that a little bit, but maybe if you can get into it a little bit more detail. What I like to do is I like to read the script and get ahead of the questions that you’re going to ask me. And then answer them before you ask me. Yes, read my mind. Yeah. I like it. Thank you. I like it. As I was asking the question, I realized you already answered it. Yeah, so the tax separation is yet difficult because, again, it depends on where you are. If, you know, you’re in a scenario where all of a sudden the income got cut in half, it’s not as big of a deal from a tax perspective. But, again, there are a lot of times when the income stays the same. and the taxes go up. So when we talk about things like Roth and Kershams, right, where you pay the taxes now so you don’t have to pay them later, when you’re doing that as a married couple, you have a lot more room in the tax system to pay less in taxes when you’re taking that money out. All of a sudden, you become a widow. You’re the single, you know, you’re filing as a single person. You don’t have that room. So now you’re forced to take more. So, you know, these are difficult conversations. And then the other difficult conversations are, Not just you and your spouse, but also your kids. Do your children understand what it took for you to earn what you’ve earned, to save what you save, to be in the position where you are and how hard you had to work to get here? Because what we see is a lot of inheritance go right away. Okay. So, you know, people inherit money and it’s found money for them. Interesting. Your parents may have worked 40 or 50 years to get this money. They don’t want to spend that money. You know, Tony, who he had on last week, you know, drive the same car for 21 years. Right. You know, does just fine. But, you know, when somebody inherits that money, it’s a completely different scenario. So you want to have those conversations or give them the opportunity to have the conversations. And sometimes as the advisor, you know, me, Alex, who you’ll meet later, we have to bring these things up even though it’s not necessarily what someone wants to hear. Yeah. So let’s talk about life insurance. What if there is a payout and how should someone approach it? So life insurance, one of the benefits of life insurance is that it’s not really a it’s not a taxable thing. Right. You’re you get the life insurance. You don’t have to pay taxes on any of that life insurance money. And it’s way more important, like for me, you know, than for a lot of my clients. A lot of my clients have saved enough to where they can retire and they don’t need the life insurance to cover any kind of a gap. You know, I don’t have any kids in high school. Right. So, you know, something happened to me. We need to replace all the income that I’m no longer earning. Right. That’s a bigger concern. So. But when it comes to life insurance, that’s what it’s there for. You do get that money without paying taxes as long as, you know, with a certain stipulation, there are some circumstances where it happens. But that’s meant to be there and really saved. You don’t want to go through that. You want to be very careful with that money because that’s it, right? That’s the money that you’re getting. And it’s, you know, it’s not like you’re going to. Not like there’s more coming from it. Right, right. So it’s a difficult time. There really is so much to consider. So definitely need to come up with a plan, come up with a strategy. And of course, you can always call Fuchs Financial and their team. We’re going to learn a lot more about their wonderful team right after the break. We know the market is going to get worse from here. This is the biggest monthly decline in 10 years. People’s 401k. Well, my investments are tanking. My retirement isn’t going as planned. I can’t believe I let my kid talk me into buying crypto. I mean, what is that anyway? This was the fourth worst contraction in history. Doro, you two do it. Your financial future doesn’t have to be uncertain. Plan your retirement right. Call now for your own complimentary portfolio review and tax analysis. Welcome back to How to Retire. I’m here with my special friend, Donna. Donna has worked with me for a while. How long have we been working together? Over 13 years. 13 years. God, that’s horrifying. Well, I wanted to have you on because this episode is about dealing with loss of a spouse. And I know from my end, from an investment standpoint, what has to happen. I understand the tax implications. But when it comes to working through that process, you know, working through like, you know, you’re dealing with our clients one-on-one in a much more personal way in that scenario than I am. Can you tell me a little bit about what that’s like? Yeah, I mean. It’s sad, obviously, but when the call comes in, and it’s usually from the other spouse, and first I have to go through grieving too, because we know these people. We spend a lot of time with them. We learn all about them, their family, their dreams, everything. So first, you know, I talk with them to see if they’re okay, because this isn’t just a transaction anymore. It never is a transaction, but it definitely isn’t in this realm. And I ask how they’re doing because that’s important. It’s not just, oh, you know, let me get this paperwork out to you. When my parents passed and I had to call different places, you know, they would always say, oh, I’m so sorry. But it was very dismissive and it wasn’t personal. And I would never want that from someone, one of our clients. I want them to know that this is important and it’s. And it’s sad. And we’re going to help them. And that they’re not alone. And if it’s scary, we’re going to be here to help. And we’ve helped with other things, not just finances. You know, we have so many stories I can tell. Please, don’t let me stop you. Well, I mean, you know, there was an unfortunate incident. And it drew a lot of media attention. And my first thing was to protect the spouse. Yeah. You know. protect them because media was knocking on their doors and they were overwhelmed. They didn’t need to feel that way. What they needed to feel was human. They needed to feel safe. And, you know, they’re very vulnerable with so many things. To bring money into it is an additional, you know, frustration. It’s an additional worry. You know, what’s going to happen? And then to have to be… almost put on stage at the same time. It’s like, you know, here you are dealing with this grief, dealing with everything. And then, you know, the last thing that you want to do is look into a camera and, you know. Talk about anything. Right. And so I felt very protective with that particular situation. In every situation. I am. I am very protective because I truly care about everyone that comes in these doors and trusts us with what they are of value to them. Not only children, you know, money is very valuable, obviously. They’ve entrusted us. This isn’t something that I take lightly. It’s not something that you take lightly, any of us. So it’s important. I will say, if anybody wants to know what the definition of a mama bear is, Donna is your, like, she is the protective, like, nothing is going to happen to you. Um, we had another scenario where they weren’t initially a client and then someone came in and became clients, but they had this like scavenger list of accounts to find. And, you know, they come in the room with me. I sit down, I listened to what they have to say. And then I go, Hey Donna. And then we set for another, and then I leave the room and then Donna, you probably work with them. I can’t. How long do you think that you spent with them trying to figure out all these different pieces? I mean, not at one time, but it was a considerable amount of time. But at the end of every time that we spoke, every time they left, they felt better and better about where their things were, how we were arranging it so that they could understand it better. We could work with it better. And it was a lot of time. I can’t just say better and better. Right. I mean, you do good work, but you also have to keep in mind, you know, this spouse died, right? And he was the one that controlled everything. And he had all the passwords and she didn’t have any of the passwords. So we’re waiting for like months for a quarterly statement to come in just so we can find where the, because she doesn’t even know, you know, where all the money is, what accounts they are. And then, you know, also having to go through the process. So from an operational side, somebody passes away. Yeah. What has to happen for the accounts to go from one person’s name to the other? This is an instructional video from my wife when she kills me. She should know exactly what has to happen. I mean, first thing is first. Unfortunately, there’s a death certificate that has to come into play and who is going to be the executor or executrix. If it’s a spouse that we’re dealing with, because it’s not always spouses that we deal with, but if it is a spouse, that’s… Very easy. You know, they are the executor or the executrix, but you have to wait for the death certificate and then they have to give you the death certificate. And, you know, it’s not it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s also a very finality that they’re facing and every single thing that they’re doing is. grieving and heart-wrenching to them, you know? So once you procure the death certificate, we look up all the accounts that they had and just methodically going through and getting that paperwork to pour the switch. So I didn’t prepare you with this question. I’m sorry. But, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is estate planning, right? Trusts versus wills versus other accounts. Have they ever been in a situation where, you know, somebody has an account and all of a sudden they’re having difficulty getting to it? Yes, because they don’t know the right way to go about it. They’re knocking their head against the wall saying, I have a death certificate and trying to talk to a specific company. But unbeknownst to them, there is, you know, a hitch in the system where they need to provide something else. But they’re not hearing that. They’re grieving. All they know is the person that they love has passed. And now they’re left with pieces that they’re trying to put together. That’s what we do. You know, we help them put the pieces together financially. And by we, we mean you. Yes, me. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, like I’m I’m not the one hunting down. I’m not the one going on. No, I don’t spend 45 minutes on a conference call for one account out of 25 where we have to figure out how we can get this piece back into someone’s name. So it’s a lot of time. It’s a lot of patience. And, you know, you kind of undersold the amount of work that you do and the care that you give for somebody. I think that’s really important for people to understand. Yeah. I mean, if anybody walks into Fuchs Financial, I think that they’re going to. understand immediately that we care but it gives me joy not in their sorrow but it gives me joy to know that they do have somebody that will protect them and non-stop until that account is where it needs to be and that they understand everything because again if they weren’t the ones used to doing financials or even talking to you sometimes people don’t come in as couples. And then all of a sudden, here they are, you know, they’re nervous, they’re scared, they’re sad. And so we’re going to make sure that everything is taken care of. We were talking about another couple that you wanted to bring up. Please get into whatever story you feel like is going to be most appropriate for people to hear and understand. Well, we were talking a lot about spouses, but there is also situations where parents pass, you know, the last parent. And now we’re just dealing with beneficiaries who we might not know. So now that’s a new situation where they already are grieving. Do they trust us? Well, their parents did. What’s going on? So we take our time. We bring them in. We don’t just shove paperwork at them. They are people. They are grieving. So they weren’t our clients to begin with. But they either become clients or they just become very grateful that we were there to help them. And I think that’s important. I mean, listen, we can’t solve every problem, obviously. But all we can do is be there when someone needs us. And, you know, for me, I would joke around when a client is grieving and they need a hug, I won’t hug the client because I don’t want to get sued. But I will yell from the office, Donna! And then Donna is the hugger of the office, which is not like we’re not selling Donna. Like you can’t pay for a hug. Like we don’t allow that. But, you know, in certain circumstances where appropriate, I think that’s where we go. But, I mean, you know, I think that you take that approach in all things, right? It’s we’re here, we care, but, you know, what can we do to improve the situation? How does that get done? And it’s not like we’re just rubber stamping papers and moving on and saying that. And that’s never, even in, I know we’re speaking of death and everything, but it’s never that way, even in happy times when people call. And say, you know, my daughter’s getting married. I need money, you know. We don’t just rubber stamp it. Everything that our clients go through, we do go through with them too. And I’m proud of that and I’m appreciative of that, that I work at a place that values that. And it’s really important to me. Donna. Thank you so much for being on. I’m not going to give you that. I was preparing like a little hand to like mess with her, but I wouldn’t actually do that to my friend and then get killed later. So thank you so much for being on. We’re going to be back with Alex in a little bit to talk about his scenario. Alex, another advisor, a certified financial planner that works at our firm. And he’s going to go through some of the stories that he’s had and how he’s been able to help people get through that grieving process. Congratulations, Nancy and Mark. You’ve been chosen to play the retirement game. All right. First question. How long will you live? Too slow. Spin the longevity wheel. Nancy, will inflation eat your savings alive? I hope not. Let’s spin the slot machine and find out which strategy will you pick? At Fuchs Financial, we don’t spin wheels. We build real plans, personalized, adaptable, and clear. Welcome back to How to Retire with Fuchs Financial. I am your host, Ben Fuchs, and I’m here with my friend and colleague, Alex Cal. Alex Cal is also a certified financial planner. And I feel like you all have heard enough stories from me, and so I feel like it’s important that we get some stories. And you have a client that you work with for a long time, and you, you know, I think the idea of working with people seems very transactional when it comes to a financial advisor. And part of the goal here is to… people understand that that’s really not how we treat things. Can you give us some background on your client? Yeah, I see it. So I originally, they were actually a phone call. They came in. They said, hey, you know, we have this situation going on. And it was. So they were both, they were both alive. They were both alive. Okay. Yeah. So the wife had ALS and she couldn’t move neck down. So he was the primary caretaker of her. She did everything from like the bank accounts to the taxes to the bills. Right. Even grocery shopping. And so he his main job was just take care of her. Right. She can’t get out of bed on her own. She can’t do even the littlest things that we take for granted. Right. Even getting out of bed, putting on their shoes, socks, things like that. So they called in. They’re saying, hey, if she has to go to a nursing home. Like, what are we doing? We talk to a few people, but they’re not really giving us an idea from a tax perspective or what account are we taking it from or what does that process look like? So it really just started off by saying, hey, you know, this is what that looks like. So, I mean, without getting too in depth, and I don’t mean to, like, stop the story and start it, but can you give me some, like, what was the advice that you gave? What was from that perspective? So for them, they had a large amount in IRAs. So for us, the first thing I said was, well, based on all of your income, which is just Social Security right now, we want to pull it from this IRA. The reason being is, yes, we’ll pay a little bit of taxes. But the other piece to it is we’ll have all these different medical expenses. So we’ll be able to write off a large amount of it. Not all of it, but it’ll at least help the burden of a lot of the costs. I’ll set some of the costs, okay. A little bit, right? We don’t want to touch the Roths because those are still going to be tax-free. And then ideally, if God forbid something happens, those will be the last things we ever touch. Got it. We just want to start building as much interest as possible because we want to preserve a lot of the money because we’re going to have to pay like 15 grand a month for a lot of these things. So that was really the conversation. And they were already just so happy to get some clarity that everyone else was just saying, Hey, well, we just got to throw it in some investments and let it ride. Which is the most frustrating thing, but yeah. And no one told them what account we should bull from. It was just, hey, we’ll just take it from something. We’ll taffle it as it happens. Or even worse, they’re like, well, ask your accountant. Which is, hey, that’s the whole reason I’m asking you is I just want to know. Yeah, you’re the financial advisor. Give me some financial advice. I think that’s a fair thing. Okay, so. They came in, you were able to help them, you were able to restructure their investments so that they could generate enough income to pay for the long -term care in case there was need. And then what happened? Unfortunately, while we were in the process of getting everything started, she did pass it. And that was the hardest call that I’ve ever had. Because from the very beginning of, hey, these are all the steps we’re going to take. These are all the things we’re going to do to prep for it. I remember even going to one of the nursing homes and interview it. with him to make sure it was the good spot that she wanted to be in. It would be the most comfortable for her. And once we had all the paperwork and they wanted all the statements and all the documents, of course, and they finally approved it, you didn’t even need it. Awful. Okay. So she passes away. All that work that you’d done, all the preparation that you both had done was no longer needed. How did the relationship progress? Yeah. I mean, initially it was just… Just his best friend of 50 years is just not there. I remember him telling me all the trips that they took together and all the things that they wanted to do. But they couldn’t. But the first step I had to do was I had to teach him how to use the internet and how to pay bills. Because I can’t have you not have electricity or you not have heat or do any of these things. So we do say she did everything. You mean everything? She did everything. Okay. And so I even had to, I remember going to his house, getting this book of all the pastorates and all the things. And I remember writing out all these different instructions for him. Like, this is the website we’re going to. This is the login. This is how we pay it. And I was just on standby. You know, hey, let’s do it together the first time. The second time, I will watch you do it. The third time is, hey, you’re going to try to do it from scratch on your own. But after a while, he got it. And slowly, it was just, okay, he slowly told me more about their relationship and all the things that they did. And it was just, every time I saw him, it was just, like, kind of re-bringing that up for the first year or so. But slowly he did. get back to a better spot to where he wasn’t almost upset at himself, right? That he couldn’t help or he couldn’t do any of these things anymore. He started to realize that this way he could almost live the things that Shu wanted him to do. And I think that was the change for him is, well, why don’t you do the trips that you guys went on? You still have all these things that you wanted to do. The only difference is she’s just in your memory doing it with you rather than being there physically. I think that was the more important piece for him because then it allowed him, it almost took that burden off and allowed him to go on some things where he was almost thinking, you know, I’m a bad person by doing it without her. He almost needed that approval to say, like, it is okay. After the help, after you’ve taught him the internet, after you’ve gotten… How is he living now? Sure. Well, so now I forcibly send him money. And it’s every month we check in. It’s, did you spend the money? And sometimes he hasn’t, which, okay, fine. I’m not going to fault you there. But a lot of it right now is he’s going to gift shops, buying little toys and knicker hats for everyone he finds. The most recent story is he was in Walmart. And there was one lady who was trying to find underwear. And so he bought her 10 packs because he was like, hey, if you want it, I have no problem buying it for $2 on sale. Well, sir. You’ll definitely find him giving out a lot of money and just being nice around the community. I don’t like to make jokes, but one of the things that we’ll see is, oh, wow, Alex is going out to Mystic and he’s going to have lunch with the client again. I just look at it as if I were in your shoes, that’s where I would walk. Right. Or if that were my parent or my grandparent, what is it that I can do to help or make it better? Right. I can’t bring the person back. It could definitely help moving forward and trying to make it better. Listen, I wanted this episode to be one where we could introduce everybody to the team. That’s not just me. Thank God. We have real people that care that I’m incredibly proud of. And I’m lucky that they’re a part of who we are and what we can offer and how we can then really help someone. So if you’re in a position and you feel like, hey, I could use somebody that cares about me as a human being and not just my statement, please give us a call. This has been How to Retire. We’ll see you next week.
