The Power of a One-Page Plan
Do you feel overwhelmed when you think about retirement? Does it feel like there's too much to know or plan for? Well, if that's how you feel, just know that you're not alone. If you're listening to this podcast, perhaps you're here to learn, understand, and grow in all these different ideas and concepts. That way you can move into retirement a little bit more confidently.
Jacob:Welcome to Retirement Answers, a podcast built to answer your most pressing retirement questions. If you're someone who's either thinking about retirement or already in retirement, well, you're in the right place. Hey there. My name is Jacob Duke, and each week, I'll be walking through different tips and strategies to help you succeed in retirement. So let's go ahead and get started with today's show.
Jacob:Hey, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Retirement Answers. As always, my name is Jacob Duke. I hope you had a great holiday season with both Christmas and New Year now behind us, and we are in 2024, which is pretty crazy to think about, but it's reality and it's where we find ourselves. So I'm wishing you a happy New Year and a great 2024. Today, I wanted to talk about a financial plan or retirement plan or whatever we want to call it.
Jacob:It could be different things. It's different things to different people. And some of them are really long. Some of them are really short. Some people don't have a plan at all.
Jacob:So I've got a question for you just to kind of kick things off and get started. Do you feel overwhelmed when you think about retirement? Is it scary? Does it feel like there's too much to know or plan for? Well, if that's how you feel, just know that you're not alone.
Jacob:If you're listening to this podcast, perhaps you're here to learn and understand and grow and all these different ideas and concepts. That way you can move into retirement a little bit more confidently. And other people are just like you. They struggle with these same concepts, these same fears, these same unknowns of what retirement will be. It's almost like you're walking off the edge of a cliff into this unknown or this abyss that you've never entered or gone through before.
Jacob:And in fact, almost everyone I talk to about retirement has anxiety about retirement. The fear of the unknown is paralyzing at times, and the more you look into it and learn about retirement planning, the worse it gets. So today I wanted to share with you how I help resolve this anxiety for my clients. But first, let's highlight this week's listener review, and then we're gonna jump into the episode. This week's listener review comes in from TheShocker, and he gives the show five stars and says, Above and Beyond podcast.
Jacob:Jacob has went above and beyond in creating wonderful content to help the average consumer like myself get this knowledge and how to use it moving forward. Even more so, he has given me time out of his day to take a few phone calls for me and help guide me through some of the many retirement questions. Thanks again, and to anyone out there needing more information, Jacob Duke is your guy. Wow, thank you so much for that rating and review, means a lot and really happy to hear that this has been impactful and positive for you. So if you find this show helpful or valuable in any way, I'd love if you could give a rating and review there on Apple Podcasts or simply a rating on Spotify if that's where you listen.
Jacob:But that helps me a lot. Just know that I'm providing good content and just hearing your feedback, but also helps other people find the show as well. So with that out of the way, let's go ahead and jump back into this week's episode on how to create a plan and the power of having a plan. So back to this idea of reducing your anxiety around retirement and increasing your confidence. One of the many issues that retirees face is information overload.
Jacob:The more you know, the scarier it gets. And it's hard, right? Because we've got so many different sources of information talking from all these different directions and telling us what to do. Hey, buy an annuity. Don't buy an annuity.
Jacob:Know, should I invest aggressively in retirement or should I invest conservatively? What about inflation rates? What about when I do Roth conversions? What about taxes? All these different questions.
Jacob:And you're probably like, gosh, that is a lot of information and pretty much it's information overload, which I guess that's why they say ignorance is bliss. Because the fears that I see come up in retirement is typically gonna be all these things, but what that leads to is analysis paralysis. And this becomes the biggest hurdle, right? Because everybody's trying to make sure that they do the right things at the right times in the right ways. And it leads to the questions of what do I do?
Jacob:How do I save on taxes? Am I taking social security at the wrong time? You know, I've heard all about these different retirement income strategies. I've heard about the 4% rule, not sure if I'm doing things the right way or not. And it can get overwhelming very quickly.
Jacob:And this uncertainty is a part of almost every conversation I have. So how do I help solve these questions, solve these problems, and reduce the fears for my clients? Well, I like to keep things as simple as possible. I like to create a short list of actionable steps that can be taken. And the keyword there is actionable, right?
Jacob:Because if we have a plan, but we don't take action on it, then it's not worth anything. It's not worth having. It's not worth even going through the process of building. So this short one page plan, we'll call it, it's a distilled list of what needs to be done. And the purpose of this is to really set the path or the trajectory of your retirement.
Jacob:It's not really to figure out every little thing or plan for every single nuance. We're going to have to kind of accommodate and do those things over time because your life is going to be changing over time. The markets are going to be changing. Inflation rates are going to be changing. Everything we know about the future is that it's not going to be the way we thought it would be.
Jacob:So the idea is to set the direction and give us guidelines to go by. So to do this, I like to create this one page plan. Now, I did not come up with this idea or name it that. People much smarter than me came up with it a long time ago and they started implementing it years ago. But I've seen firsthand the impact of creating a One Page Plan.
Jacob:I've seen people enter retirement with a peace of mind and a confidence because of one piece of paper. Now, to be clear, there's a lot of deep work that has to be done to develop that One Page Plan. You can't just assume that it's really easy because it's short. But when you come out the other side of that deep work with a short list of ideas and steps, that's the power of simplicity. So if you've not listened to me before, now you know I'm a huge fan of keeping things really simple.
Jacob:But most of the time we confuse simple with easy. Simple is not easy. In fact, I'd say it's probably harder. And here's a couple different quotes from people way smarter than I am regarding this particular topic. Here's a quote from Mark Twain.
Jacob:He says, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. And here's another one from the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. He says, If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Now, these quotes are quite the paradox. We equate more time with more stuff.
Jacob:So the paradox here is that they're taking more time to make something less or make it smaller. And so typically in our minds, we think the longer amount of time it takes us to do something, the larger it should be. So these two men, they're saying that more time should equal less stuff. Think of it this way. I could record podcasts for you to listen to and find value in.
Jacob:I could make every episode an hour long and kind of ramble my way through it. But what's the problem here? Just because it's longer does not mean it's more valuable. So planning out what I say on these podcasts as I do and creating a guide for myself to go by to make sure I stay on track and give you only the things that you really need to know as efficiently as I can. That's important rather than having just the longest podcast, right?
Jacob:We want to make sure we get everything we need in the least amount of time. So efficiency is important. So less is not necessarily easier. In fact, it's probably harder. It's harder to condense an idea down to a few words rather than speak a thousand words.
Jacob:Now, I get it, I can definitely improve here and probably ramble a little less, but the point remains true. My goal is to share the ideas and tips with you as quickly as I can without sacrificing the value of what I'm trying to share with you. So here I am rambling about not rambling, but hopefully that makes sense. Now, how does this idea of simplicity apply to your retirement plan? Well, think this plays into the power of having a One Page Plan.
Jacob:It's a distilled, concise set of steps and objectives that will help you make your decisions. So the keyword here is guide. These are not your decisions necessarily. They can be, but most of the time, the items we list on these One Page Plans are ideas and things that we need to evaluate. We're not trying to solve all of your retirement issues or questions right now in this One Page Plan.
Jacob:The idea is we have to identify what problems could come up based on your specific situation, your age, your family, what you're trying to accomplish, all those things and say, because of X, Y, and Z reason, we need to pay attention to Roth conversions between the age of 60 and 65. Because of this reason, we might need to delay your social security to 67 or 68 or 69 or 70. And so these are things that are saying, hey, here's things to think about. That's the purpose of the One Page Plan. It's not to say, hey, you must do $100,000 in conversions for the next four years, or you must take your social security at 68 for this particular reason.
Jacob:Because the reality is if you've got any gap of time between right now whenever you're creating the plan and whenever you actually go to execute those things, the problem is that you're going to run into, hey, the plan that we made today is going to be stale by the time we get to that point in time in the future. So what this is hopefully trying to do is give you ideas around what you should evaluate, not so much what you should do. So it's really just a way to identify the most pressing items and concerns that are for you specifically. So what should a One Page Plan look like? That might be one of the questions you have.
Jacob:Hey, Jacob, I understand maybe what you're talking about here, but what does this look like in action or what should be included on this plan? Well, it's really just a bulleted list of things to do or ideas on a piece of paper. It's really nothing fancy at all. Now, here are the things that I like to include on my One Page Plan for my clients. The first thing is goals and objectives.
Jacob:What's important to you? Why do you want to retire? What are you going to do in retirement? Is saving taxes, is that something that's important to you as well? What about leaving a legacy or inheritance for your kids or grandkids?
Jacob:What about giving money to charity or giving your time to charity and serving in different ways? Find out what the things are that are important to you in terms of your life, but also your money. Write those down in a little short section and say, hey, these are my goals and my objectives. Now it doesn't have to be a fancy or long list. It just has to say, hey, here's what's really important to me.
Jacob:Here's why my money is important to me. Here's the things that I want to do with my money. It's not about necessarily having more, it's more about how can I use this effectively? The second thing that I'd like to include is what are your questions and concerns? You know, maybe I don't know when to take Social Security.
Jacob:I'm not sure how to give to a charity or church effectively. Effectively. Or maybe I do want to leave a legacy for my kids one day. How do I make sure I do that in the most tax efficient manner? But also I've got questions about what if they're not ready to receive that much money?
Jacob:How do I make sure they get it at the right times or in certain amounts? And then the next part of this is we want to build out what I call mini plans. These are the individual subsets of plans for each different kind of topic along the way. Now these are not comprehensive in any capacity, but these are the different mini plans that I like to have included on this One Page Plan. The first one is your purpose plan.
Jacob:What's your why? Why are you retiring? What are you gonna do in retirement? You have to have a vision for how you're gonna spend your days because one of the struggles that a lot of retirees face is they're done working after forty years of work and they just stop cold turkey and then they don't know what to do whenever they get to that point and have unlimited time or unlimited capacity. Right, so we've got to have a plan for how we're going to spend our time and what we're going to do every single day.
Jacob:The second mini plan is an income plan. Remember, I like to do a three bucket income strategy. I like to say I have a certain amount of money in cash, bonds, CDs, treasuries, whatever fixed income products you want to use, and then also stocks. I like to do this out over a certain time period, and so if you go back and listen, I've got an episode on this, go check it out. It should be also linked down in the description below if you can't find it.
Jacob:But it's basically you're building out an income plan based on your specific income needs. What are your base living expenses? What is your discretionary spending? How much are you wanting to spend on a monthly basis? Once we figure out how much you're gonna be spending every single month in retirement, number one, can answer, hey, is retirement possible, first of all, but then also is, are we able to retire the way that we want to retire?
Jacob:So that three bucket income plan, that's important to build in. Now having an income plan and then saying I wanna take Social Security at X date, here's why. Just kind of bullet these things out and say here's my initial ideas and we can change or improve those ideas you know, down the road as we come to those different points in time. The third mini plan is your investment plan. Now the reason I like to list this one after the income plan is because going back to the three bucket strategy, we wanna make sure we have our plan for income before we identify how we want to invest.
Jacob:A lot of people say I'm gonna have a sixtyforty portfolio in retirement because that's just the general rule of thumb, but it's not necessarily right for you. Everyone has a different risk capacity, like what we need to take in terms of how much risk we should be taking in retirement, And if your income is fixed, meaning you have a pension, Social Security, anything else that comes in and you don't need to take any money out of your portfolio, well, means you can be fairly aggressive because you're not actually needing to pull assets out of your portfolio every single month, which means now you have an increased amount of risk that you can take. So that's an advantage perhaps to you, but that's not the case for everyone. Some people have to take everything they need from their portfolio, which means they have to make sure that they accommodate that correctly, and that's where that three bucket strategy or that income plan helps inform the investment plan. So we have to have the income plan before we develop the investment plan.
Jacob:If we don't have the first one, we can't do the second one effectively. And then that leads us to the third kind of part of this trio, which is a tax plan, right? We're going be investing our money, we need to know how we're going to do that from a tax efficient manner. We need to say, do we have three different account types? Do we have a Roth IRA?
Jacob:Do we have a traditional IRA or any sort of tax deferred accounts? But then also do we have a taxable brokerage account? If we've got all three of those account types, we've got to make sure that we use asset location correctly, meaning we want to have certain investment types in each of those accounts to match the account taxation correctly so that we're not paying any additional taxes every single year or in the future that we otherwise could have avoided. So having a tax plan, understanding, you know, when to do Roth conversions, you know, when to how should we be investing our money effectively and lowering our tax bill every single year. Those are just a couple things to include there on the tax side of things.
Jacob:But just make sure that you have a plan for your taxes, you know, maybe if I can do all my conversions before I take Social Security, that means that I'm not going to have very much tax on Social Security in the future, assuming very little other income, right? Also, can think about tax loss harvesting, but perhaps even more importantly, tax gain harvesting. All these things kind of wrap up into a tax plan and say here's some of the ideas, here's why we want to do this and why we perhaps should not do this other thing. And remember, these are all specific things to your situation. The next mini plan that I have listed here is a risk or insurance plan.
Jacob:Now I like to say riskinsurance because whenever we think about insurance, sometimes people are like, I don't want buy insurance. Well, insurance is not the solution to all of your risk, right? So a few things to consider here. Medicare at 65. So you're going to get Part A and Part B, but what about Medigap versus Medicare Advantage?
Jacob:We have to do an analysis there. We've got to figure out what's the best solution for you specifically and why one might be better for you individually compared to your friend or your family or your neighbor or whoever you're talking to about this. You might end up choosing different plans. Also, we've got to think about long term care insurance, if that's something that we necessarily need or even perhaps want. I'm a fan of self insuring if and when possible, meaning you would use your own assets or equity in your real estate to provide income for yourself if you ever have to go into a long term care facility or have any sort of end of life care.
Jacob:So I like to self insure rather than pay for insurance, something that you may never need and it's really expensive. If you do want insurance, obviously please go get it. I'm not saying don't get insurance from a long term care perspective, but just know that there are different options outside of just buying a long term care policy, and you perhaps could self insure if you have the assets to do so. And the final mini plan, which might be one of the most important here, is gonna be an estate plan. A lot of people ignore this and just kind of defer this into the future because they don't see the value in it.
Jacob:But I work with people all the time and I see the negative effects of not having estate plan. And if you ask anyone who's kind of gone through dispersing an estate and kind of figuring out where all the assets go and who gets what, every single time you would probably hear them say, You need an estate plan, you probably need a trust. Make sure you have all of your healthcare and POAs and directives all lined up, that way your family doesn't have to make those decisions for you kind of in the dark. Have it all written down, have it all laid out to say, here's what's gonna happen with my money, my assets, my life, everything that I've done, here's who's gonna get it, here's when they're gonna get it, here's how much they're gonna get. So if you can do that while you're alive right now, it saves your family a lot of he said, she said in the future and you get to just say, hey, here's what the document says, therefore execute the document.
Jacob:So an estate plan is huge to have and a lot of people I find do not have that or if they do have one, it's ten, twenty years old. So make sure you get that updated and kind of list out the things here on your One Page Plan that you need to check on and update under this Estate Plan section. So those are the primary kind of sections of this One Page Plan that I'd like to build out. Now, a couple of things that I could add on here depending on the situation is going to be the three buckets Income Plan that I talked about before. And then also want to list out next steps like what we need to do right now today over the next three months to get started on these items.
Jacob:What do we need to do to simplify your accounts? Do we need to consolidate them to one custodian and get all of your different IRAs or Roth IRAs or old four zero one ks's rolled over, transferred into the appropriate account types and simplify your overall nest egg, your overall net worth, and really make it understandable for you. So the last section there would be the next steps. And you know, sometimes this overflows onto a second page, but don't really get hung up on how long the list goes. The principle really remains the same.
Jacob:Create a short list of the most important things that will set the direction of your retirement. And there's really no set amount of time in terms of how long this is gonna take. It could take you a day, it could take you a week, or even perhaps a month to really just dive in and digest what's important to you and why you're trying build out this plan. So the hard part is doing the work. Now once you come out the other side of this and actually have these things listed out on a piece of paper, you're going to have a peace of mind and a confidence about your retirement and the possibility of it that you probably wouldn't have gotten any other way.
Jacob:Right? I could send you a financial plan that's got 40 pages in it, but just because it's longer and more detailed does not help you have confidence, right? And I found that one of the biggest ingredients in all of retirement and a successful retirement is confidence. It's not so much knowing everything. It's not so much making sure you have all the I's dotted and all the T's crossed.
Jacob:What the problem is is a lot of people would end up not retiring simply because they don't have the confidence to do it. So if we can increase your confidence rather than give you all of the different things you need to know and all the different nuances figure everything out and kind of try to create certainty as best we can. Certainty will not get you to where you're trying to go because there's no way to be certain about anything. What we're really trying to do is we're trying to set the direction of your retirement. Here's the way we need to go, and we're going to figure out what to do each step of the way as we kind of come to them.
Jacob:And what you'll find whenever you do that is then you'll have the confidence to actually pull that plug, go retire, enjoy retirement, and make sure that you're covering all these things that I've mentioned here on this One Page Plan. You're evaluating them each step of the way to make sure you do the best thing for your unique situation. So here's what I want to do. I want to show you what an example One Page Plan looks like and how I build these. And you can do whatever you would like with this sample.
Jacob:You can take it and kind of model your own after it. Or what I'd like to offer you here as we go into 2024 and say, I want to give you something as you kind of go on this journey of this new year, I'd like to be able to create this One Page Plan with you and for you. So obviously remember this is a condensed version. It's not everything that you need to know. What this does though is hopefully send you an idea or list of all the things that you need to do in retirement.
Jacob:Now to do this, I'm giving you a little bit of behind the scenes really quickly because this is what I go through when someone comes to me and wants to hire me as their advisor. We go through the same One Page Plan process. We create their One Page Plan to help set the direction of what they're trying to do and how we're going to accomplish this together. Now, do I like to do this before someone comes to me and actually starts paying me? Well, I like to show the ideas and the ways that I can help someone before they ever begin paying me.
Jacob:I think it's hard enough for you as the consumer to really understand which advisors are good or really know what they can even do for you. And that's why I like to show this. That way you can get a good and proper assessment of me and how I work for my clients before you ever start paying me. So here's the offer. Reach out to me by sending me an email and just let me know, hey, I want a sample of that One-Page Plan.
Jacob:And also include in there, let me know if you would or would not like me to help you create yours. If you want help creating yours, we can schedule some time to go through that process together, and by the end of that, you can take your One Page Plan and implement it yourself, or you might be like, Hey Jacob, I don't wanna have to figure all this out on my own. I don't wanna do this myself. Then we can talk about what it looks like to work together moving forward. So that's my offer for you here in 2024.
Jacob:Go ahead, send me an email. Let me know at least that you'd like to see a copy of that One Page Plan template, or even further if you'd like for me to help you build that with you. As always, my goal here is to provide the most value to you. And if this will be valuable to you, reach out, let me know. Happy to walk through this with you and share kind of what this process looks like.
Jacob:And if nothing else, I hope that you learned today that simple is more powerful than chaotic, and that having a one page plan will give you peace of mind and set the direction for your retirement. So I'm gonna leave you with this one thought, kind of wrap everything up. Simplicity leads to clarity, clarity leads to confidence, and confidence leads to action. Thanks for listening and I hope that 2024 is one of the best years yet for you. I look forward to being right back here with you next week.
Jacob:Hey, it's Jacob again and I wanted to extend a quick offer to If you have a question and you would like to have it answered here on the show, please email me at jacobretirementanswers dot net. And I'd love to answer that question for you right here on the show. Also, I wanted to remind you that nothing discussed in today's episode is meant to be financial, legal, or tax advice. Retirement Answers is for educational purposes only. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode.
Jacob:I look forward to talking with you again next week.
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