Rachel Lutzker: Welcome to today’s CT Buzz. I’m Rachel Lutzker. Retirement and taxes are both inevitable, but if you commit yourself to some serious planning, you can minimize your taxes and maximize your retirement. It can be done, but there are some important questions that you’ll need to answer along the way. And it’s best to not wait until retirement is imminent to start planning. If you get started sooner rather than later, you’ll be in a much better position to enjoy the retirement that you’ve worked so long and so hard for. Rachel Lutzker: Ben Fuchs, founder of Fuchs Financial, is here to talk about how they can help you with getting organized, planning, and asking and answering the right questions to put you in the best position for retirement. Rachel Lutzker: Now, in addition to being a certified financial planner, Ben is also a certified private wealth advisor professional. Now, Ben, you say there’s a checklist to follow to start here. Ben Fuchs: Yeah, absolutely. To begin, it’s a good idea to develop a checklist of steps you can take to get your planning started. Here are some of the key boxes to be checked. Let’s take a moment to look at the screen. All right. You know, important checklist here. When are you taking Social Security? 62, 65, 70. It can make a significant difference. Ben Fuchs: So, as we look through this checklist, how much do you need from your investments every month? Where are you going to kind of get it from to make this all go into play? Yeah. I mean, you know, another key component right now, especially lately with all the stuff going on, is are you protected if the stock market crashes? You don’t want your retirement to crash. We need to make sure that there’s a safety net for you because we know it’s inevitable that it will happen at some point. We just can’t predict when. Ben Fuchs: So, where are kind of the ways that we handle that? Yeah. I mean, there’s a way of protecting the assets. A lot of people have either all of their money in totally safe stuff, which means that they’re kind of hurting themselves if there’s significant inflation, which there could be. I mean, tariffs could cause that. And then another scenario is they have all of their money in the stock market. So, market goes down 10%, they’re down 10. Goes down 30, they’re down 30. By creating a structure and a plan, we can look through and say, “All right, how much do we need from our monthly paycheck? Let’s protect that income. Are we protected from the stock market crashes?” Ben Fuchs: And then the key piece here is, are you actually getting that financial advice that you need to make all this work for you? So, we need to make sure that we have that checklist taken care of to make sure that market crashes don’t hurt you, you’re able to maintain your income even when it goes down like crazy, the Social Security is in line with your income and your taxes, and they’re all working together. Rachel Lutzker: How does scenario-based planning help with all of this for getting people to kind of understand where we are? I’m the type of learner that I… you can tell me something and I can listen, but I don’t really understand, right? I need to see it in order to really absorb it. Ben Fuchs: And so when we sit down with you, when we go through that free consultation or that free second opinion that we talk about, we’re going to go through your scenario. We’re going to put it on the screen, and then we’re going to talk about manipulating some things. If you take Social Security at 62, if you take it at 68, how does that impact your overall retirement? How much money do you have after 10, 20 years? Are you planning for the things that you want to do? Let’s put that in there. Ben Fuchs: You know, I just met with somebody the other day. Normally my clients are 50, 60, 70. I was meeting with somebody who’s 44. We’re planning to pay $87,000 a year for college. So, we had to put that on the screen. We had to add inflation on it because just because it starts at 87 doesn’t mean that it’s not going to go up. So, we plan for him to pay for these things and show how he can do it in a comfortable way and what steps we’re going to have to work around it. Ben Fuchs: So, there are events, things are coming up. And if it’s retirement, a lot of times it’s… listen, it was my goal to take a family vacation, pick the place. I want to bring everybody, their 35 grandchildren. How do we make that happen? Okay, great. Let’s put that in a plan. Let’s see how we can make it work and let’s work backwards to get there. Rachel Lutzker: Now you say having your clients informed is very important too. Ben Fuchs: I think you have to understand it’s your money. And not just saying, “Okay, you just do whatever and I’m along with it.” You want them to understand what’s happening. Listen, I was a terrible student. If I had a teacher that just told me what to do, I need to understand why. And my daughter gets in trouble, by the way, because she’s always asking why, but I get it. If I’m a client, it’s the same thing. Let me understand. Help me understand. That way, I can work with you going forward. Rachel Lutzker: All right. So, let’s get you started. If you’d like some guidance, even help with planning your checklist, you can reach out to Fuchs Financial to start that conversation. Their offices are located in Middletown, West Hartford, Middlebury, and Mystic. Just visit our website taxesandincome.com or call 860-461-1709 to set up an appointment for your complimentary consultation. Rachel Lutzker: Great, Ben. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for joining us for today’s CT Buzz. I’m Rachel Lutzker and we will see you next time.
