Embark on a journey through the financial landscape of retirement with your hosts, Justin Gaines and John Proper, as we uncover how the once stable ground of employer-funded pensions has given way to the rocky terrain of self-funded retirements. Discover the essential strategies and tools you need to navigate this new world, from 401Ks to annuities, and ensure your golden years are as secure as they are rewarding. Witness firsthand the historical shift that started in 1978 and the challenges faced by those caught in the transition, as well as the vital importance of taking control of your retirement destiny.
As the waves of the Great Resignation lap at the shores of traditional employment, we'll reveal how baby boomers are recalibrating their retirement plans to weather the storm. Learn about the lifeline that annuities offer, providing a steady income comparable to the pensions of yore, and how to integrate them into a broader, diversified retirement strategy. With guidance on managing market volatility and insights from financial advisors, you'll leave this episode armed with the knowledge to construct a retirement portfolio that's not only robust but poised to flourish in the face of economic uncertainties.
Embark on a journey through the financial landscape of retirement with your hosts, Justin Gaines and John Proper, as we uncover how the once stable ground of employer-funded pensions has given way to the rocky terrain of self-funded retirements. Discover the essential strategies and tools you need to navigate this new world, from 401Ks to annuities, and ensure your golden years are as secure as they are rewarding. Witness firsthand the historical shift that started in 1978 and the challenges faced by those caught in the transition, as well as the vital importance of taking control of your retirement destiny.
As the waves of the Great Resignation lap at the shores of traditional employment, we'll reveal how baby boomers are recalibrating their retirement plans to weather the storm. Learn about the lifeline that annuities offer, providing a steady income comparable to the pensions of yore, and how to integrate them into a broader, diversified retirement strategy. With guidance on managing market volatility and insights from financial advisors, you'll leave this episode armed with the knowledge to construct a retirement portfolio that's not only robust but poised to flourish in the face of economic uncertainties.
Welcome to the Balanced Blueprints podcast, where we discuss the optimal techniques for finances and health and then break it down to create an individualized and balanced plan. I'm your host, Justin Gaines, here with my co-host, John Proper. In this episode I discuss the history of pensions and how to develop your own. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy. I mean, essentially, we're talking about financial planning and how to make sure we have enough in retirement. That's the main focus.
John Proper:That was kind of guaranteed money that you'd get through work, right. So I mean, how do you even know you're going to have enough at the end of the day, when, if those are going away, what else is going to go?
Justin Gaines:away. Well, yeah, I mean pensions made it easy, right? I mean the company managed your retirement account which is what it was.
John Proper:It was still a retirement account. There was still a lump sum of money that they were managing.
Justin Gaines:And ultimately the reason why pensions went away, was life expectancy started getting longer, and because pensions were guaranteed for your lifetime, the amount that they were paying out was increasing. But they weren't adjusting the amount that they were paying out, so eventually they just a lot of these companies bankrupted their pension systems, and so then, naturally, I think the year was 1978, was when 401K started to become a thing, and so over simplifying things here.
Justin Gaines:But effectively pension plans are going bankrupt, they aren't working, they're too expensive for a company to maintain and it's going to cause the companies to go bankrupt. So they need an alternative plan to fund retirements for employees. And so that shift from pensions to 401Ks resulted in really the retirement planning being the responsibility of the employer to being the responsibility of the employee. Because now you set how much you contribute to your 401K, you set how much you're going to save in other retirement vehicles, whether it's a Roth or any of those other accounts we've talked about. But it's on you. It's on you to make sure you have enough money saved up and to develop that plan to distribute properly in retirement.
Justin Gaines:And so, even though we've had so many years of financial planning history, realistically modern day financial planning started around 1978. For the average employer Now ultra-wealthy individuals, people who had more than just their pension those people most likely had financial planners before 1978. And we're planning and maximizing that. But for the average employee, 1978 was that starting point for 401Ks. So you probably had 10, 20 years before you had a large sum of people getting off pensions. So 20 years later.
Justin Gaines:that's when you really have people planning for retirements that are self-funded. So you have 20 years later you're really talking about late 90s, early 2000s 24 years of history of trying to set up and plan for these, and that's where you're a lot of the information or misinformation, or different strategies and there's not a set way to do things.
Justin Gaines:And not to say that there is a set way to do things. There's definitely not a set way to do things, but there are ways that you can still guarantee your income, guarantee certain amounts of your income in retirement to effectively create your own pension. But today, roughly 13% of the market the employee market so meaning employees at jobs roughly 13% of those employees will have pensions. And in 1978, it was much higher than that.
Justin Gaines:It wasn't 100%, but it was nearly people who had retirement pensions had retirement pensions and there wasn't a noticing there. So it was probably somewhere in the 70 to 80% of the workforce had pensions. Now roughly 13% does.
John Proper:And I do my best not to shake my fist and get bitter because basically we have a very low chance of ever getting one but I feel bad for my dad and people in his age group that started their job and they had a pension and then, halfway through the company, just cut it. So I mean how dare them to put that extra responsibility in our hands for the common folk?
Justin Gaines:Well, that's a tough spot to be in too. So what do? You do so. In that situation you have to look at how much they have in retirement assets and then create your own pension, which I'll get into. But what makes that so tough is, you know, if your average working career is, we'll say, 40 years, you start working at 25, you retire at 65, that's 40 years of working life.
Justin Gaines:If you were assuming that you're not assuming you were told that you had a pension for the first. We'll go aggressive the first 20 years of that. Then you got told okay, that's not going to exist anymore. If the company didn't properly compensate for that, you just lost 20 years of accumulation and now you have to plan and accumulate for retirement. In a 20-year time period.
Justin Gaines:Having the amount of money, having that large asset or nest egg for retirement, becomes much harder than somebody in our positions where we know, going into our working lives, that we are going to have to develop our nest egg and then develop the distribution channels for it and the income buckets Now. So that's where it's as much as we like to say the older generation had it so much easier. That's a situation where it's not that we necessarily have it easier, but we're not having something yanked out from underneath us and having to then shift to a whole different set of assumptions. Now, not to say that that couldn't happen to us, but currently we're operating on a set of assumptions that requires us to take a lot more ownership of our retirement distribution, retirement income, than previous generations had to, such as your dad and individuals in that age bracket.
John Proper:Yeah, I think things like that to a fall almost make us want to take everything into our own hands, I mean house world, financial world, you see it. So it's good because, like you said, even if some things get taken away, we're distilled. That take these things into your own hands it's beneficial, but I'm sure it can get overwhelming. One quick thing question there Pension, I assume it's not just like you're getting it from working at your company. You're taking it out of your paycheck, right, you're paying into it.
Justin Gaines:Depends on how the pension plan is set up.
Justin Gaines:Sometimes, I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, I would say, yes, it's coming out of your paycheck.
Justin Gaines:Some pensions the way they were set up it was a percentage went to your paycheck and if that started day one, you never saw that money. So it effectively was like it never came out of your paycheck because you never got used to having that income, which is the best way to do it. Which is why I tell people if your company has a 401k match, contribute all the way up to the max contribution on that 401k and do that day one, because if you're not used to having the money in your paycheck, you'll always be used to not having the money in your paycheck and it's like it never happened. So it doesn't hurt as much to put that money there. However, there are some pension plans where you would have contributed out of your paycheck and you would see that and it might have increased over time. So it's hard to say whether or not, as a blanket statement, whether or not it came out of the paycheck but at the end of the day.
Justin Gaines:there's never a free lunch, so it effectively was coming out of your paycheck just as a result of lower pay. Even if it wasn't directly coming out of your paycheck, it was oh, you're getting this for free. It's the same thing when an employer nowadays says you're going to cover 50 percent of your health insurance premiums and comparing that to an employer says you're going to cover the company is going to cover 80 percent, or the company is going to cover 100 percent.
Justin Gaines:I guarantee you all the same the income levels that they're making, their salary take-home isn't going to be the same, because the company's taking out a larger expense, so it just ends up reflecting in your pay. That's why it's so important, if you don't understand finances, to work with a financial advisor or somebody who understands finances in order to evaluate your total compensation package at work, because it's not just your salary.
Justin Gaines:There are so many other components health, vision, dental, your 401k contribution limits and how much is the company going to match? The limits are the same because they're set federally, but how much is the company going to match? What other benefit options do they have? What other things are they willing to pay for? Putting a value on all of these components is what's going to allow you to really understand what your income bracket makeup is.
Justin Gaines:Because, once you know, how much income you have there and how much you're putting towards these other retirement accounts and investment vehicles. You'll then be able to know how much you need to save in order to develop the correct nest egg to be able to distribute in retirement properly. That's why we're always looking at stage three of retirement planning, which is distribution of income in retirement, because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you save for retirement if it doesn't generate enough income for you in retirement. If you had $5 million in retirement assets but it doesn't allow you to cover your cost of living and live the lifestyle you want to in retirement, $5 million isn't enough for you then. But you could also have a million dollars and have it structured properly and maybe that is enough for you.
Justin Gaines:That's why we need to know what's retirement lifestyle ideally going to look like. What is that utopia retirement lifestyle that you're looking for, what's the absolute match you're trying to hit? Then how can we cover those expenses? Because, depending on what you follow on social media and what you like because I'm in the finance world and I like all of that stuff and I'm constantly engaging with those accounts One thing that's on my feet constantly right now is the fact that the great resignation hasn't occurred yet, but on paper it should have already occurred. It should have occurred somewhere, or at least started to occur somewhere, in the last three to five years.
John Proper:What is that? Because I didn't know.
Justin Gaines:Right. The great resignation is you have the baby boomer population that is now approaching and has approach for retirement age. So in theory they should be resigning from work and retiring and moving into their stage three of retirement distribution. But a lot of them are still staying in stage two of accumulation and continuing to work. I'm generalizing here, but also just from conversations with clients.
Justin Gaines:Part of the reason that that's happening is they're afraid that they don't have enough assets to be able to sustain retirement. They're worried that if I go into retirement and then halfway through I'm going to have to pick up a part-time job in order to cover my income or cover my expenses, have some additional income and be able to retire effectively. They don't want to do that. They don't want to retire and then on, retire and re-retire. Nobody does. That's not an ideal situation. A lot of that comes from they don't have the pensions. They don't have the guaranteed incomes. When you don't have guaranteed incomes, as inflation hits, as the cost of everything is going up so rapidly and as you have economic downturns, you have economies or not economies. Stock market goes down. Your nest egg decreases At those rates when you start getting closer to retirement. A 10 percent pullback in the stock market isn't going to feel like much in your 20s and 30s when you only have between $100,000 in retirement assets because you're only going down $5,000 to $10,000 or less.
Justin Gaines:But if you now have accounts between you and your spouse and the total of those two accounts are, we'll say, $2.5 million, you go down 10 percent. That's a quarter of a million dollars that went down. That's significant. Then your mind starts to go into preservation mode and say, well, what if this continues to happen? What if I continue to take these hits?
Justin Gaines:Well, that's going to be a problem that's going to make it so that I'm going to have to retire, then unretire and re-retire. So effectively, what we're doing with those clients is building them their own pensions and setting it up so that we can have a portion of their retirement guaranteed. It's not that we want all of their retirement guaranteed, unless the client wants that, and that's why they're going to feel safest than we can do that. But we want at least a portion of that to be guaranteed income. They know every single month I'm going to get a check for X number of dollars. The other thing that we'll typically do with that is we'll also make sure that it's going to increase each year with the cost of living. So as the cost of living goes up to do inflation due to cost of prices increasing, make sure that increases with them as well. That's why the annuity market right now is on fire.
Justin Gaines:Lots of annuities are being purchased and it's because it directly correlates and directly coincides with the great resignation being able to occur as these individuals move into retirement. They need guaranteed income. They need to build their own pensions. The only way to do that with the current financial vehicles that are out there is through an annuity. When I say it's the only way to do it. It's because it's the only product out there that I can guarantee the income for the rest of their life. I can guarantee that it'll go up with the cost of living the rest of their life. There's no other product out there. So if we take a section of their retirement assets, we can then go and buy an annuity, structure it so that it distributes with a cost of living adjustment and have it be able to make sure that they have a set number, a set amount of income in retirement.
Justin Gaines:Now what we need to do in order to do that is, again we need to look at what's their financial utopia, what are their minimum living expenses. Let's create a budget for them in retirement. What does that look like Then? From there, what we'll be able to do is calculate how much they need to receive each month in order to sustain that lifestyle. Once we've figured out the income they need now, we can figure out how much of a funding of a pension we need, and then what that lump sum amount is by the annuity, and go from there.
John Proper:Because even in the annuity contract, you're still going to get interest, you're still going to get growth on that because you're not distributing 100 percent of it right away.
Justin Gaines:You're still going to get some interest growth. You're still going to get some growth on that principle. But it's guaranteed.
Justin Gaines:The interest growth is guaranteed, the distribution is guaranteed, the cost of living adjustment is guaranteed, that the cost of living investment will be there. Now the cost of living amount is going to be based off market conditions. Cost of living has guarantees on the minimum that it'll do, but as far as the max there's caps and there's set amounts there. But it's one of those things that you can take somebody who has no pension. You can take 13 percent of the population that has no pension and as long as they have retirement assets.
Justin Gaines:We could make it so that 100 percent of that population has a pension equivalent or, effectively, a pension in retirement.
John Proper:Let's see here. I have a bunch of questions. I'm going to formulate them real quick. So can we do a quick brief overview of where someone goes, how they set it up, because we've talked about a lot of other strategies. But obviously the big difference here you're saying is this one's guaranteed. Then I know you mentioned you want to know maybe the minimum someone takes to survive. Is that how much you want your annuity to give you in retirement? So how much should an annuity give you versus like how much your 401k should give you in your other things? What percentage should that be contributing?
Justin Gaines:So your first question where does somebody get these? Annuity products are sold by life insurance companies.
John Proper:Okay.
Justin Gaines:Do you have to go to a life insurance licensed agent that represents a life insurance company in order to acquire an annuity? Now the most important part is going to be working with somebody who understands annuities and understands how to create a budget for you to make sure that you're putting in the right amount and it's distributing the right amount for you, so that you actually get the luxury and the comfort of knowing for the rest of your life you will not have to worry about income, because you're going to at least get this minimum income distribution. So that's where you get it. Calculating it out A lot of times the conversations I'm going to have with the client is we start off and we say what is your most expensive day? They're still working, and so I could even ask this to you what is the most expensive day of the week for you, the day you, on average, spend the most money?
John Proper:I guess like a weekend when I grocery shop and stuff and restock up for the week.
Justin Gaines:Right, so Friday, saturday is typically most people's potentially Sunday is most people's most expensive day.
John Proper:That makes sense. They do things too.
Justin Gaines:You do things. You go out to eat, you go meet up with friends, you go golfing, you go skiing. It's when you spend the most amount of money. So they say it's a Saturday, or they say it's a Friday. We'll say a Saturday. Saturday's the most expensive day. They go skiing they go bowling they do all their fun activities with their friends. They go hang out Every day.
John Proper:In retirement is Saturday you're able to do all of those things every single day on Saturday. Nice, yeah, plan for the worst, I guess. Well, yeah, plan for the highest expense situation.
Justin Gaines:And so we start to look at what do you do on Saturdays? What do you enjoy doing? That cost you money. And then, naturally, in retirement you're probably not going to be doing that every single day. So we're not gonna assume that you're gonna do that every single day. But we'll figure out what are your costs of living expenses and then what is your minimum threshold for entertainment expenses. Build a budget for them. Now we're gonna get a monthly expense number. So then say it's $2,000 a month. $2,000 a month is the absolute bare minimum that they need of after tax revenue in order to cover their expenses. And again, that may sound like it's not much, but you have to remember these are people who are going into retirement. So that $2,000 number is assuming they've probably paid off their house, they've paid off their car. They don't have many of the expenses that the average working person does. So they are gonna need to buy new cars on point most likely and have these expenses.
Justin Gaines:And that's why we're not taking 100% of the retirement asset and doing it with this. We're looking at what's the minimum amount of income you need to feel comfortable and let's build that for the rest of your life. The reason why it has to go, the reason why annuities are sold by life insurance companies. Because the next part of the equation is we know how much you need of income. What's your life expectancy? Because your life expectancy is what's gonna determine how much money we need in order to generate $2,000 of income for the rest of your life. And that's where there's risk here. So, upside downside to annuities, if you die prematurely, you die before your expected age, you can have a beneficiary on there, you can have a second person the income goes to, you can have it set. So there's a period of income that has to pay out for. There's combinations to make sure that you don't lose all of your money.
Justin Gaines:But if you take just a bare bones basic annuity that works identical to your pension, if you pass away, you take retirement, you start, you buy the annuity, you take retirement. Two months later you pass away. That's it. Your income's done, it's gone, there's nothing there for anybody else to take. Same thing occurred with your pension that once you passed away, that was done. Now, similar to pensions, same with annuity. You could have named your spouse or somebody else that if you passed away before a certain period of time, the income passes to them. So you can do that as well. With a annuity, you can also say I want it to pay out for at least 10 years plus the rest of my life. So whichever is greater, either 10 years or the rest of my life whichever is greater, and it'll pay out for that.
Justin Gaines:So there's ways to make sure that we protect portions of your principal. But it's the other reason why we're not moving everything into this, because if we move all of your retirement assets into the annuity even if we pick a second, say, we put your spouse on there for them to have income for the rest of their life as well. If you both passed away in a tragic accident five years into retirement, you now have a large lump sum of assets that you could have passed down to the next generation. That's eliminated. So we don't want to move everything into this. We want to move a portion to recover and pay for that retirement so that you have enough to live off of.
Justin Gaines:We don't want to move everything in there. We want a stream of income coming from this and then we want other streams of income coming from other areas. So it's effectively the best situation in your working years is to have multiple streams of income. Best situation in retirement is to have multiple streams of income. Right, right, we're just making it so that you don't have to work for these streams of income, but you still have them.
John Proper:So a couple of things. So you can pass it on to someone else who's alive, but you can't pass it on to a future generation.
Justin Gaines:Not without negatively impacting the distribution of the income. No, Okay, perfect. And then? Like you can do it, it's just not optimal which is why you need to meet with somebody who understands these things to be able to structure it properly, assign the right allocation of asset into it.
John Proper:Okay. And then the other thing is. Normally we talk about the younger you start, the better. So like, when should someone start paying into this? Because it seems like if you start earlier you could pay in less than a month. But does it work like that, or?
Justin Gaines:I would tell somebody so, because there's guarantees, there are limitations on how much you can grow one of these and there's tons of annuities. For sake of time and keeping us to our normal timeline, I'm not gonna break it down that deep. But there's caps, okay. So there's a maximum interest you can raise. There's guaranteed rates and a lot of times you know standard annuity there's just gonna be a guaranteed rate and then there's gonna be a floor, the guaranteed minimum rate. Those rates are gonna be way less than what you can get from actively being involved in the stock market. So my recommendation would not be for somebody our age, somebody in their 20s, 30s, 40s to get an annuity. That would not be my recommendation. My recommendation for them would be contribute to your 401k all the way up to your company match. Max that out as far as your company match is concerned. Max out your Roth 401k. Work with an advisor, talk about IULs into your investment strategy and then an IRA, an investment account.
Justin Gaines:But you wanna be actively participating in the market when you have a longer time horizon and the reason being is that you're gonna get a higher rate of return on your capital during that period of time. And then what we're gonna do is that higher rate of return is going to allow you to amass a large sum of money, and then that's where we're gonna take a portion of that large sum of money in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and buy an annuity, and then we'll keep. We're gonna keep a portion. We're gonna keep 60 to 80% of your investment accounts as investment accounts and just adjust them down for your risk tolerance so that they're not super risky. But we're gonna take anywhere from 20 to 40% of that.
Justin Gaines:Move it into fixed income that's guaranteed for the rest of your life. So it's one of those things that, yes, typically you wanna start younger and you do wanna start younger, but it's starting younger in an investment account and then, when you get towards your retirement years, moving it over. Generally speaking, you're gonna get into an annuity, either when you're in retirement or, as you know, when you're in retirement at any point basically, and then we'll come back to 10 years before retirement is when we wanna start potentially moving it in there, because if we do it, then I would say optimal is 10 years before retirement, and the reason being is part of the reason why Great.
Justin Gaines:Resignation hasn't occurred. Is COVID occurred with a massive knockout of retirement account valuations? Yes, it recovered very quickly, but that's only if you stayed in that market. If you got concerned during COVID and you took the initial hit and then reallocated your portfolio to not take more of a hit, which isn't necessarily a bad advice the problem is you probably didn't recover as quickly or you're still recovering from COVID Now.
Justin Gaines:If we take your amount of money and we say, okay, this is how much we know we're going to need in retirement as fixed income. We know what our 20-40% number is going to be. This is what we need. We need $2,000 a month, or we need $3,000 a month of retirement income after taxes.
Justin Gaines:In retirement we can then take the money out of the market, get a guaranteed fixed rate of return on that money for 10 years and then in 10 years, we'll then be able to move it into an income stream for you. By doing that, we make it so that you don't have the downside exposure of the market. We're protecting you from that. Then what we've done is because we now know that you're going to have your bare minimum needs in retirement covered, that 60-80 percent of your portfolio can now be ever so slightly more aggressive and be able to get a higher rate of return on it than it would be if you didn't have anything guaranteed. Because we have your minimums covered, we now can grow this. God forbid we get into a correction or a stock market downturn and your investment accounts lose money.
Justin Gaines:It's not a concern, because we've already locked up and guaranteed your minimum distributions in retirement. We can weather the storms of stock market downturns. We can weather the storms of these problems as a result of making sure that we've built our own pension, bought our own pension and guaranteed our minimum distributions in retirement.
John Proper:Yeah, that sounds like a nice strategy because really, if you just start earlier with the retirement strategies we're supposed to do, you're using that money that it grew itself to then do this other strategy, the annuity. It's not like you're even putting. You are putting your own money in there, but money that grew on its own. That's a good way of doing it.
Justin Gaines:Right.
John Proper:If you started early enough it could be.
Justin Gaines:The money you're putting in there is actually just all growth, all appreciation. And the benefit too is if you're working with somebody who totally understands these, you can move. You could take a portion of your Roth and move that into an annuity, so 100 percent of it will be distributed tax-free and not cause a tax consequence when you buy the annuity.
John Proper:Right.
Justin Gaines:Or you could move from an IRA and have it so that a portion of it's taxed in distribution. But, what you don't want to do is you don't want to take money from a Roth and an IRA. You take money from both of those accounts and buy a singular annuity, because now you just mix those money and you just lost all your tax benefits from your Roth.
Justin Gaines:Yeah, that makes sense, and that's just one scenario where, if you're working with somebody who doesn't understand these things, it's going to be disadvantageous to you, versus working with somebody who totally understands it and focuses on this area.
John Proper:Probably why they've gotten a bad wrap, I'd imagine.
Justin Gaines:But annuities, I wouldn't say necessarily have a huge bad wrap. They're just misunderstood. Most people don't understand what an annuity is and because 401Ks only just started becoming a thing in the 80s and people haven't really had to use them, their utility didn't use to apply to the masses, they used to apply to higher net worth individuals, Whereas now it's inverted it applies to lower net worth individuals all the way up to high net worth individuals because it allows you to buy that pension, whereas before those lower net worth individuals weren't accumulating funds, they had a pension and so they didn't need to go and buy an annuity because they had a pension.
Justin Gaines:If you start to think about an annuity as a pension, that's where that mindset will shift, and if it's charged properly, it's effectively the same thing.
John Proper:So I'll let you decide here, because I got a question, but it may be way too long and we can do it in another episode and you can either wrap us up or, if it's a quick, you can answer it. But I know before Usually you've mentioned, like the 7702 plan or the IUL, that's another plan that you use to weather the storm of if the stock market goes down. So is one better than the other? Should you pick one over the other, or are they just I wouldn't say pick one over the other With my clients.
Justin Gaines:it's another income stream. So we talked about how you want to have multiple income streams in your working years. If you have in your portfolio your 401k, your Roth 7702, you now in retirement can take a portion.
Justin Gaines:So to make it simple, let's just we'll say we'll take all of the 401k by an annuity, that's one income stream 7702, additional income stream and then all of the funds in the Roth is your additional, your third income stream in retirement that sits there and accumulates, all three of these being three income streams from three different areas. Two of them guaranteed and protected from downturns in the stock market, one of them completely guaranteed and known, one of them mostly guaranteed, somewhat unknown, and then one of them at risk. But we would effectively have it where 60% or better of your income stream is protected and guaranteed and then 40% is at risk instead of 100% being at risk. So it's not a matter of one is better than the other. It's a different piece of the pie to make sure that your retirement years can be as stress free as possible.
John Proper:Right, yeah, I just know we've talked about briefly like there's obviously a lot of options and we don't want to be paying into a million different ones a little bit. We want the best ones. I mentioned that you just talked to someone and you keep talking about different ones because there are a million options, but really you need to talk to someone to figure out what ones are best for you.
Justin Gaines:Correct and effectively the 7702 you need to start contributing to earlier. Yeah, and as 7702 Roth 401K matches, the earlier you can start with those, the better. Anuity. You want to wait until you're in that 10 years prior to retirement or in retirement to start looking at that as an option, right?
John Proper:Well, that's some good information there. I'm sure there's like always more to go deeper, but anything else you want to add or no, I think that pretty much sums it up. Thanks for listening to our podcast.
Justin Gaines:We hope this helps you on your balance freedom journey.
John Proper:Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Justin Gaines:Until next time, stay balanced.