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Would You Want to Know the Date of Your Death? by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 66)

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  If you could know the date of your death, would you want to?   On our drive back to St. Petersburg from our summer stay at our place at the Lake of the Ozarks, my wife and I listened to “My Husband’s Wife”, by Alice Feeney – a book I highly recommend.   One of the many plot twists is around whether or not the company owned by one of the central characters can actually predict that date of a person’s death as it claims it can.   Not surprisingly, that got me wondering if I would want to know my death date. From a retirement planning perspective, the answer would clearly be “yes”.   As I’ve discussed in several previous blogs, one of the hardest parts of creating a retirement income plan is not knowing how many years you will live in retirement.   Will your retirement assets need to sustain you for 5 years, 15 years, 30 years or even more than that? You can easily go online and find a life expectancy calculator that will give you your life expectancy. ...
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I No Longer Have the Stamina for Four Day Music Festivals, by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 65)

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  One of the great things about retirement is that I now have time to do some things that typically wouldn’t fit into a regular work week.   On the flip side, the problem with waiting until I’m older to do some of these things is that I find I no longer have the stamina I once had.   Last week my wife and I attended the Bourbon and Beyond Music Festival in Louisville, Kentucky.   This was a four-day festival with over 30 bands each day playing on four separate stages.   When you add in the 2 travel days, this became a six-day commitment for us.   If I was still working, I might not have wanted to burn four vacation days for an event like this.   In retirement, that was not an issue.   But I didn’t expect to be so exhausted when we reached the final day of the festival.   It didn’t help that Sunday’s lineup was particularly strong, therefore it was also our longest day.   We arrived at the festival shortly after noon on Sunday so that we ...
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Driving a Car in Retirement Will Soon Be a Thing of the Past by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 64)

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  Dr. Joseph Coughlin, the founder and director of the MIT Age Lab, recently published an article in ReThinking65.com , entitled “The Retirement Number You Probably Haven’t Calculated For Your Client”, ( The Retirement Number You Probably Haven't Calculated for Your Client, Financial Planning Articles for Financial Advisors & Wealth Managers ).   I’m a big believer in putting in strategies to minimize the financial risks in retirement, hence why I’ve named this blog “retirement moats”.   Therefore, I read Dr. Joe’s article with great interest.   Could there be a risk I hadn’t considered in my own retirement plan?   The premise of the article is that eventually, most retirees will no longer be able to drive.   That means there is likely to be a new expense anytime they want to go somewhere.   As Dr. Joe put it, “retirement planning prices the car, it doesn’t price the driver.”.   If you don’t consider the additional expense of paying someone ...
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"Predictable income" is not good enough for me, by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 63)

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  I recently received an email from Bank of America that encouraged me to “start my next chapter” by enrolling in their Merrill Lynch “plan for predictable income in retirement.”   As a recent retiree and retirement income geek, I was obviously intrigued.   I was curious to see the methodology BofA/ML suggested to provide me with “predictable income for my retirement.   And just how “predictable” would it be?   A few clicks later and I found myself inputting the necessary personal information that was necessary to get an illustration of their Guided Investing advisory program.   I told the online tool that I was 66, had $100,000 to invest and wanted to start receiving income in January of next year.   I was offered three risk profiles – low, moderate and high.   The low risk profile portfolio would be more heavily weighted in fixed income and provide more what they refer to as “baseline income”.   The high-risk profile portfolio would be more...
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What if Your Kids Don't Want Your Vacation Home? by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 62)

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  We were lucky enough to inherit a lake house on the Lake of the Ozarks from my wife’s parents.   For those of you that watched the show “Ozarks” let me say for the record that the actual Lake of the Ozarks is nothing like the fictional Lake of the Ozarks in the show.   The show makes it look like a backwoods place with cabins and a few small boats.   In reality, it’s a happening party place where 40+ foot boats seem to be everywhere.   We spend most of the summer here for a change of pace and a break from the Florida heat.   The break from the heat part hasn’t worked out very well this year.   Today, it’s “only” expected to reach 97 degrees, which will break our five-day 100-degree streak.   In fact, I think we’ve experienced more 95+ degree days here than we would have had we stayed in Florida.                                    Another Beautiful Sunse...
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Boys are Still Falling Behind Girls in School - Why This Matters by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 61)

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  In 2000, Christina Hoff Summers published a book entitled "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men”.   If you don’t want to read the entire book, you can find a YouTube video that lays out her premise for the book ( War on Boys | 5 Minute Videos | PragerU ).   In short, she argues that our public schools have evolved to the point where typical boy behavior is viewed as disruptive to the learning process and therefore is actively discouraged.   Girl behavior – attentively sitting still and listening – is what is rewarded.   Consequently, boys are increasingly underperforming girls in the K-12 years.   And since they underperform in those years, they are less equipped for college, which in turn makes them less prepared to get a job in today’s economy.   This educational failing of boys is often referred to as “the boy crisis”.   Not surprisingly, this theory quickly became controversial.   In a world where w...
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The Time Has Come For the First Sports Team Fixed Indexed Annuity, by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 59)

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  Twenty years ago, I put together a training session on fixed indexed annuities (FIAs).   The annuity world was much different back then.   Variable annuities made up almost 70% of total annuity sales.   FIA sales were only $25 billion in 2006 – only about 20% of what is being sold annually today.   To say that most financial advisors didn’t know how these products worked back then would be an understatement.   In order to take away the mystery of how a product could provide upside with downside protection, I needed a simple way to explain the mechanics of the product.   I invented a fictional FIA I called the “Sports Team Annuity.”   Rather than base the returns on a stock index, I proposed that an insurance company credit interest based on how a particular sports team performed during a season.   I explained that the insurance company would take a portion of each policyholder’s deposit and place bets on that team in Las Vegas.   I rea...
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