We have taxes coming up as a topic of conversation. Earlier, we talked about how tiring a daily commute to the office can be. There may be a transition step you can take to get out of that high-stress environment, even if you’re not quite ready for retirement.
A client called our radio show, and he came in for a meeting. He told us he was sick and tired of the traffic. He wanted to get past this stage and retire. He got a Retirement Right Report from us to figure out how fast he could retire. It wasn’t that he wanted to retire, but the frustration of fighting traffic, and the pressure of his job, was getting to him. He loved his work, but he wanted to change the circumstances of his work. He wanted to work on his terms, not somebody else’s terms.
We helped him make that transition, but he had to have his financial planning ducks in a row. That meant we had to help develop some income and tax strategies for him. Tax strategies were particularly crucial because he was switching to self-employment.
Financial advisors are a dime a dozen in financial planning. They all want to take your money, invest it for you, and get paid to do that. They do investment management.
Financial planning in retirement is unique. Financial planning when you’re thirty-five versus financial planning when you’re of retirement age are two very different animals. We focus on financial planning during retirement. If you’re in that position where you’re tired of having to drive into the office every day, wasting your time in the car, and feeling more and more pressure at work, maybe it’s time for a change for you too. Can you pull it off? That’s where financial planning, focused on retirement, can help.
Try asking your investment advisor what the best way to move a large amount of money out of a 401K is. Can they help you get close to a 0% tax bracket in retirement? Ask your advisor what their plan is. What strategies are they recommending you use to reduce your taxes in retirement?
If your advisor can’t do taxes, I feel you don’t have an advisor that can help you in retirement. If you’re beginning to think that a life transition makes sense, you should call us. It is free to talk to us. The purpose of the call is to provide you with a super easy way to get a checkup on where you are now, and whether you’re ready to make that transition. We can help you figure out if it will work for you. If it doesn’t work for you now, we can help you find the timeline for when it will. It’s free, and there’s no obligation, but you must be one of the first ten callers and have over $500,000 saved for retirement. Our number is 512-886-5850.
Everybody we do this for asks us why we do it for free. The reason is simple. First, we can’t do it for everybody because we don’t have the capacity. That’s why I said, you must be one of the first ten callers and have $500,000 saved for retirement.
Second, of the ten people that call us, only about three end up working with us and becoming long-term clients. We still help the other seven and give them great information. We may not be a good fit for them, or they may not need us, but we still help them.
I’m going to set the stage for the topic of taxes we’re discussing later. Toward the end of 2021, we had an interesting situation arise. A gentleman I’ll call “George” came to our office. He worked for Amazon and as a result, received a lot of shares. He came to us with a capital gain of roughly $2 million. His stocks had blown up. His problem was this; he was nearing retirement and wanted to retire, but most of his retirement portfolio was in Amazon stock, and he had a $2 million cap. He knew he needed to sell the stock to diversify, but he couldn’t bring himself to sell it because of the high tax rate. His capital gain made his tax rate about $425,000. He was looking for a way to sell the stock and not get walloped with taxes. In the next segment, I’m going to talk about how we tried to help him do that.
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