So this is our financial planning experts panel. I'm delighted to have four people here who have been with us in other sessions already during the conference, Mike Piper, Alan Roth, Anne Garcia, and John Luskin. Please look at their bios on the website. Look at their websites. There is so much wonderful information.

I wanted to start with Mike earlier today did a session that was intended for the less involved spouses in our couples to tell them about what they most need to do in financial planning. And there were so many people in this room, and that was very early on our third day together, which I think is a testament to how much value there is there.

So I wanted to just start by asking Mike to give us a quick synopsis of his message for the less involved spouses, and therefore the related message for those of you who are the more involved spouse in the family finances. Sure. The very short summary, since I know that most of you are here for that, is that obviously those of us who are the financial manager for the household, we want the other person to be ready if they have to take over that responsibility at some point.

That's one of the most common questions I receive. And so encouraging them to, the way my spouse and I do it, is just a once a month money talk, and it's not all of our personal finances, just one topic at a time. This month we talk about this. Next month we talk about that.

So it doesn't take forever. It's not a big thing to try to get them to do. And it gets easier over time because, of course, you know, next time you talk about life insurance, there's not much that's different than last time you talked about it. And the other important point is that getting that input from your partner, even if they're not the one who does most of the financial planning, is super, super valuable because they're going to be able to relate other things going on in your life that maybe you haven't thought about and haven't included in your financial planning.

And so it's going to be valuable to you. And if you can encourage them to take on that role of oversight, is what I call it. They're the oversight committee. Encouraging them to take on that role, that, from what I've seen, can help get them involved in a way that they might not be if it's just you teaching them stuff, I guess is what I would say.

I'll just start off by saying I'm glad you didn't call those gatherings the money date because that has always kind of made me cringe. I wanted to ask you, I will start with Mike, but I think probably this goes for the whole panel, is when you talk with people, what are the gaps you often find that you think people, couples, need to address?

It's going to vary, obviously, depending on life stage and so on, but the one I always mention every year is disability insurance, just because it's critically important, right? For some reason, people know that life insurance is important, but don't always know that disability insurance is important. And so you'd be surprised, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but there's lots of people who just don't have that coverage, even though they're very much dependent on their income from work.

And so that's the number one thing that I see, they simply don't have coverage in that area. I know when I talked to John before the conference, and he was saying when he does his planning, he will often start off by highlighting some areas for urgent action. And I think it's really interesting, when we talk about investing, is that's the part of personal finance that often seems urgent and timely, because the markets did something today, and interest rates are where they are, and things are always changing, but he was saying that the urgent list is typically not investing, so why don't you tell us what those tend to be?

Yeah, so disability insurance is usually going to be on that list, at least if you're pre retiree, life insurance is also going to be a big one that's on that list. Doing your estate planning, and then as well as the formal estate planning, meet with an estate attorney, create the will, the advanced healthcare directive, the power of attorney, et cetera, you want to create an informal estate planning document, and this is something that can actually be put together in the process of the meetings that Mike mentioned, you just want to create a resource for each other, especially that non-involved spouse, but then also your trusted party, so that contingent attorney, in fact, that's the person you entrust on your power of attorney document to handle your finances when you're not able to.

Having that resource, that emergency letter, listing out, hey, here's the professionals I'm working with, here's where all my accounts are, how to access them, here's my different insurance policies, putting that stuff together makes way more of a difference than whether you have a tips fund, or a bond ladder, or anything else.

Personal insurance as well, that's something that always makes page one urgent and important projects for the documents that I put together when working with folks. Investments rarely ever make it on that list. Maybe if they've got a really concentrated stock position, maybe if they're invested really aggressively, but otherwise, investing is just not going to be an important and urgent project for most folks.

Alan, Jeff? All of these areas are incredibly important, and I won't work with a client unless both spouses are going to be involved, but my clients also tend to be, I would argue, better than most financial planners, and what I look at is people tend to be overinsured. For instance, the doctor at 63 years old that has disability, they've been paying the same rate for 30 years, and guess what?

If they became disabled today, they'd have a three, six-month waiting period and only collect about a year. You want to look at insurance. Are you adequately insured? Insurance companies are not not-for-profits. Even mutuals have to make a profit, so don't buy insurance you don't need. I don't have my iPhone insured, for instance.

I don't have collision on my car. I have an umbrella. Ann, you had shared that your twins recently graduated from college and that they are both gainfully employed, so congratulations on that. I'd like to talk about, for people who are at that stage in life, early 20s, first jobs, what are the lessons that you would share with those individuals, or it could be with people here who want to help their children or their grandchildren.

What should people at that stage be doing to get their financial lives off to a solid start? Yeah, we're very much in the thick of that right now in my family. I think one of the things that young adults need to pay a lot more attention to than they maybe already think is their credit score.

I always tell young adults that your credit score is like your GPA of your adult life. It's equally important. Having good credit will save you so much money over time, and also they need to understand that credit scores have nothing to do with your income. You can have a very high income and a very low credit score, but good credit is built through using credit.

One way that parents can help their young adults to build credit is by adding them as an authorized user on your credit card. That doesn't mean giving them a credit card, but it does mean that your good credit gets reported to their credit history. It's kind of a free way that you can help your kids build credit.

I talk to so many young adults who can't get a credit card with more than a $500 credit limit, which does not even buy you an airfare. They're regularly going home after a night out and making a credit card payment. Credit scores are an important thing for young adults to think about.

Emergency savings are another frequently overlooked area, and so I've been encouraging my kids to put 10 percent of their income into a savings account until they build it up to a certain level. Then, of course, once you get a job, taking advantage of all your benefits. If your employer offers a 401(k) match, think of that match as part of your salary, and the way you earn that part of your salary is contributing to your 401(k).

That's kind of the three-legged stool, emergency savings, long-term savings, and paying attention to credit. Anyone else have other things they want to emphasize for an early career? Just get in the habit of savings. When I was a kid, we didn't have a total stock index fund with a 0.03 percent expense ratio.

It helps the simplicity. You can keep that simplicity for the rest of your lives. I can't get to simplicity because of tax ramifications I have. Do it on an automated basis. You get used to, by the way—when Michelle Singletary's kids were talking about how the portfolio went down, it hurts a whole lot less when you're young and have less investment capital and more human capital than it does later on.

Get into the habit. Harness inertia. Give part of your raises to yourself in terms of savings. Have it automatically taken to the 401(k). Never miss the employer match, et cetera. It's a great time for young people in financial planning right now. To talk a little bit more about credit, Clark Howard, he has a great resource on freezing your credit, so that's going to be an important part of maintaining a good credit score.

Just Google "Clark Howard credit freeze," and that can give you a resource on going down that path if you guys haven't already frozen your credit. I know one of the other things Clark mentioned was about the Roth IRAs for young adults and early on offering a match from the bank of mom and dad.

That is something I did. Again, it's a way to introduce that habit. I know, Ann, you had also said about setting up Roth IRAs early, right? Yeah. I was going to say, one of the best things you can do is set up a Roth IRA while your kid's a teenager, because then you can set it up as a custodial account, and you don't have to wait for them to do it.

Once they turn 18, they have to do it themselves. If you've ever been the parent of an 18-year-old, you might know that that is hard. It's not just that it's hard for them to do, it's just that they have no concept of thinking of things. I think Michelle's family is that rare group where her young adult kids are actually thinking long-term with their money.

Most 18-year-olds don't do it that way. If you can get that set up while they're 16, when they have their first paycheck and get some money into it and get it invested, that is a tremendous gift to give your kids, because then that means that account is there and ready and waiting for them when they get to the point where they have the money to do it themselves.

Let me say what I forgot to say starting off, that Rick Ferry is walking around collecting questions, so please share your questions with us. In this session, we're going to try and stay on the non-investing parts of personal finance, so I know there are still a gazillion questions out there about tips and bond ladders, but I think we're going to not go there.

We're going to try and do everything else. It's interesting. We're talking about these different themes throughout the conference. One theme is starting off right early in your financial life, and then another theme we've talked about is a bit later on when many people have gotten to a strong financial position moving forward from there.

Alan, you wrote a piece earlier this year entitled "How to Get Clients to Spend More Money." Tell us about that. Did anyone here frugal like me? We were frugal because we were afraid of running out of money, and we needed to build a portfolio. The thought of spending it down is incredibly scary.

Even though likely we have more than enough, a Japan could happen, hyperinflation. I'm going to use an example of somebody who is extreme, me. How to spend more money? The first thing I did is—I'm really sorry, but I built a tips ladder. Bill mentioned he counts his tips at night.

$1,076, that's what I have. Between that tips ladder and Social Security, which I've delayed, of course, I've got a six-figure income coming in, and that is a license to spend. Number two is reframing. Clark Howard, for years, has been telling me, "Get a Tesla. It's so much fun." Eventually, the prices of Tesla got down into the 40s, but I couldn't buy it.

I said, "Clark, I love my Chevy Volt." What I did is I had to reframe it from a hedonistic to a utilitarian decision that I live in Colorado. I will drive is important. It's got more safety features, etc. Then a third way, there are other ways, but I use our dysfunctional political system.

In other words, I tell the client that they have to spend a certain amount of money each year. If they don't make it, they have to donate the rest of it to political candidates they hate the most. They'll spend it. In a similar vein, Mike published a new book earlier this year called More Than Enough, geared to people who have gotten to that point in their lives that they have enough financial resources.

Tell us about some of the key messaging that you want to share with that audience. There's the spending topic, which we've been talking about all along, the different ways to get yourself to spend more, and then the giving side of it. To me, that's the more exciting side. If somebody is having a hard time spending, try giving.

Some people have a similarly challenging time giving, so start with something small if it makes you uncomfortable. Every time, basically, it feels good, and then it's not so hard to do more. This can be giving to your loved ones, of course, or giving to charity. Giving to your loved ones, the message I always try to hammer home for people in this More Than Enough category is that just actuarially speaking, given the age at which most people have kids, by the time your kids inherit what's left of the portfolio, they're probably already retired or just about there, and so they get this big inheritance, and it might not really impact their lives.

It might not make their lives that much better at all, really, and so if that's a thing that you can do the math and you can look in your family and you can say, "Yeah, that might be where this is headed," then take a different path. Start to make some gifts to them earlier.

Your gifts, even when they're smaller, are so impactful, so helping your grandkids, for instance, finish school without any student loans, the impact on them is enormous, not just in terms of their financial well-being, but their emotional well-being. You were hearing that from Michelle's kids yesterday, that when they look at their peers, their peers are stressed about those student loans, and that is a burden that you could save your loved ones from, or the first home down payment.

Those are the two examples I always give, but there's other examples. Pay for a trip with your family. That is some of the best spending that people could ever do, because it's memories that they'll have with you, so spending on your family, or charitable giving, and there's all sorts of tax planning things that we can get into there, but that's kind of a whole other thing.

I was going to say, we always try to give people some low-barrier spending goals to get started, because it's very normal that it's hard for people to go from saving to spending, and so it might be hard to say, "It's okay for you to take a trip to Europe and bring the grandkids along." It might be easier for them to, say, plan a nice dinner out every month with their family, so you can try taking those low-barrier steps, and then work your way up from there as well.

Work your way up to the Tesla. Coming back to people who don't have enough today, I'd like to talk about how you advise people to balance saving for multiple goals, like, for instance, for college and retirement. What do you tell people, Aileen? The conventional wisdom is save for retirement, not for college, because there's loans for college and not for retirement, and that's why we have a trillion-plus dollars in outstanding student loan debt.

I do think when you have big goals, you need to save for both. One of the ways I've found people are most successful saving is that rather than giving yourself a spending budget, give yourself a savings budget, because when you have a savings budget and you hit that target, you feel successful.

When you have a spending budget and you hit that target, you feel deprived. If you can set that budget for yourself and hit it, that's a great thing. My rule of thumb for balancing the two is if you're not saving for retirement, don't save for college. If you're saving for retirement but not maxing out, then only 10% of what you save for retirement should go to college or any other goal that you're trying to save for.

If you want to save more for other things, bump up your retirement savings rate in order to bump up those other savings rates as well. Everything is available at every conceivable cost, including college. You can go to college for $0.00. You can go to college for half a million dollars.

Just make sure that whatever that goal is besides retirement, you're creating pathways that are acceptable to you. >> I'd like to ask you a question that came up earlier this morning in Mike's session, which was about education funding. What would you tell people who were interested in ROTC or joining the military as a route to pay for education?

>> My dad went to college on ROTC. That was part of my upbringing and my life. I think it's a great pathway for students to do. Of course, there is the military service obligation once you graduate, but any way that someone else pays for your college tends to have some sort of obligation to it, whether it's a merit scholarship that you need to get a certain GPA, whether it's a student loan that you have to repay, whether it's ROTC where you have a service element to it.

I think one of the considerations with ROTC is what does the ROTC course load look like and does that leave you enough room in your schedule to pursue the major that you want to pursue? That would be, to me, kind of the one consideration about it. >> One other thing we've talked about a lot over the last few days is how a lot of us accumulate a lot of complexity in our financial lives as the years go by and the value of trying to simplify, and so we've referred briefly in a few places to trying to simplify the number of accounts you have and the number of specific investments, and I wondered if the panel could just talk a little bit more about any specific advice you have in that area or other kinds of simplifying that we should be thinking about.

>> You know, I'm a hypocrite. For a living, I help people move towards simplicity, but my own portfolio is complex as heck. New products come out, like the BlackRock tips funds, and, you know, I have to buy them to be able to write about them, the Intelligent Portfolio, lots of different things.

The tips ladder is complex to create, but it's simple once you've done it. So certainly within the tax-deferred, tax-free account, you can get to simplicity, but you have to do a cost-benefit analysis on the taxable account on moving towards simplicity, but, yes, I wish my own portfolio were a lot simpler.

There weren't total stock funds out there when I started. I think about that human energy, time, and attention is limited. This is something that Paul Pant talks about a lot. You can afford anything but not everything. So even if you have all the money in the world, your time is still limited.

So going back to the list of really boring but really important financial planning projects that folks will have on their list, again, life insurance, disability insurance, umbrella insurance, long-term care insurance, doing your estate planning, creating an emergency letter, super boring but super important. So if your time is limited, which it is, that's to say you can be here in this conference room right now, you can be on the phone with your insurance company right now buying umbrella insurance, or you can be creating an emergency letter right now, or you can do one of those things right now.

You can't do all three at the same time. So if you keep your investment simple, it leaves you more time, more energy, more focus to do the much more important, albeit much more boring, other financial planning projects on your to-do list. Last night Clark Howard had mentioned that one of his biggest concerns is scams as a risk to everyone, and I'm thinking, you know, scams come in every flavor, and then we have I.D.

theft, and we have medical I.D. theft, and probably many things I've never even heard of. So I'm wondering if there are any particular strategies that you recommend to help people stay safe or protect their money. And John briefly mentioned the credit freezes, and, like, when do you recommend that?

Who should do that? You want to do a credit freeze immediately, and you want to do it as early as possible for your kids. I know it varies state by state insofar as how early you can do a credit freeze for your children, but you want to get that done as soon as possible.

Open your credit. It's free. It takes a few minutes. You do it online. It's a really easy way to protect your credit, your family's credit. But only if I'm not going to be taking out new debt of any kind, right? Yeah. If you're opening up a new bank account, a new line of credit, absolutely.

The other thing that we always recommend is that you check your credit on an ongoing basis, and you can do that at annualcreditreport.com. You're entitled to one free credit report from each credit bureau every year, so every four months you can get one of your credit reports. And that shows you all of your credit activity.

It shows you what accounts are open, what accounts you've closed. If you're someone like me with a common last name, you will see lots and lots of interesting things there. And that's your opportunity to identify these things early and get them dealt with. Scams are everywhere, and they're getting worse.

And AI is going to make it even worse, I think. You know, I'm 66 now. I'm getting to the target age of these scams. So, you know, I would just say make sure before you do anything, you're discussing it with another loved one. Don't just send money in. Anything that looks too good to be true, guess what?

But yeah, it's getting harder and harder and worse and worse. These scams are everywhere and proliferating. There's also just some, you know, basic online safety practices, I guess. Whenever you receive an email or a text or a phone call, really, from somebody saying they're from Bank of America or Vanguard or wherever you have assets or any other financial relationship, don't reply.

Don't click on their link. Don't call them back. Instead, you know, go to Bank of America's website and sign in, you know, through the way that you know is trusted, and then see if, you know, there is an alert there or whatever this thing was supposedly about. Don't reply, because there's a huge chance that this isn't Bank of America contacting you.

Okay. Yeah, the unfortunate truth is, as we get older, we're not as sharp as we used to be. And that's why doing that estate planning, finding those trusted parties, that attorney in fact, that successor attorney in fact, the person you trust to manage your finances when you're not able to, is going to be a really important part of financial success in the future.

To share a little bit of a heartbreaking story, there's one person that I worked with. Their parent, they had cognitive impairment. The family wasn't quite aware of that yet, because they were hiding it quite well, which is something that folks with cognitive impairment do. They get really good at hiding it, or even able to fool medical professionals.

I believe it's Cameron Huddleston talks about this in her book, "How to Talk to Your Parents" about their finances. And this person, they were making political donations, forgetting they were making them, and then making them again. And it was to the tune of five figures. So again, putting together that power of attorney document, appointing the attorney in fact that you trust, bringing them into your finances sooner rather than later, that can help you set up yourself for success.

- Sounds good. I think we're gonna go to some audience questions now. First question. What types of disability insurance do you feel are necessary for a working professional? Long term, short term, or both? - Generally both, is the short answer. Lots of disabilities last longer than a short term policy will pay benefits.

So if you have a long career, or you're planning on a long career still, long term disability is generally what you need. Social security is long term disability, but it's hard to qualify. The benefits are very limited. So a long term policy is necessary. - I would add to the long term disability, most employers provide long term disability.

If that's your only source of long term disability coverage, it's important to review that policy because employer long term disability is generally designed to cover illnesses as opposed to actual not being able to work for the remainder of your life. So typically there's a limit to coverage. They're assuming you might get a cancer diagnosis where you're going through chemo and radiation and unable to work for some finite period of time.

And it's possible that you could have a ski accident and be unable to work for much longer than your employer disability covers. So just make sure that you review that policy if that's where you think your long term disability is coming from. - Yeah, Anne's absolutely right. Usually that workplace policy is not going to protect you in that worst case.

That worst case is you're disabled now through the rest of your life. You're no longer able to work another day. There's a lot of really fine print in a disability insurance contract. That's going to determine if that policy is any good. And again, the one that you get from your employer is not any good and the employer doesn't really want to spend $1,000 generally per employee in a high quality long term disability insurance policy, which means you've got to go out and purchase a high quality one yourself looking for that very important fine print in that contract.

So own occupation definition till age 65, that's an important clause. Having an inflation adjustment, a COLA rider on that policy, that's going to be important. Social disability provision, residual disability provision, these are all the really important bits of fine print that you want a high quality long term disability insurance policy to have.

Good news, we did a Bogleheads Live podcast episode on this, so check that out. We go over all the fine print in that episode of what you want in your high quality long term disability insurance policy. - Thank you. - I'm just going to say long term. You need both, but long term disability is far more devastating.

So you want to have that, but you also don't want to let inertia take over and you want to reduce it or cancel it when you no longer need it. - Another insurance question. Is there a rule of thumb to use in determining the right amount of umbrella liability coverage?

For instance, should it cover 100% of my net worth or what amount is too much? - There's an old rule of thumb that says you should have your net worth in umbrella insurance and I've researched it as far as I can tell. It was invented by an insurance salesperson.

You can have $100 million net worth, knock a school bus off a cliff, it gets sued for 200 million. So I just think you want to be reasonable. If you drive fast sports cars, do extreme sports that could injure someone else, you probably need more. You also want to look at how much of your net worth is in a risk of protected 401k sorts of thing.

So be reasonable. Umbrella insurance, it's cheap. It's cheap because the likelihood of needing it is low, but the consequences are very high. - I'm always thinking about that worst case and so I certainly like the net worth rule of thumb, but for really young folks, that net worth rule of thumb doesn't really apply because their biggest asset, bless you, isn't what they're worth today, but it's their future earnings.

So think about someone who perhaps they're working at a tech company, they're earning maybe $300,000 a year, but they're in their mid-20s, maybe early 30s. They don't have a huge net worth, but they have millions of dollars of future income ahead of them. So to be a little conservative, maybe get a little bit extra umbrella insurance.

It is very inexpensive for the coverage that it provides. - Thank you. - You can increase the umbrella over time, though. - Here's a different kind of a question. Do you think financial planners have some responsibility to encourage healthy living for their clients, or is that discussion overstepping the bounds?

After all, why plan for a long retirement if the client's lifestyle or habits would greatly shorten it? - I'm a financial advisor, not a life advisor. And when you think of it, if you eat poorly, don't exercise, it's actually good for your financial plan because you're less likely to outlive your money.

There's no flaw in my logic, is there? We want our clients to live as long as their money, so some we should encourage to have healthy lifestyles, and some we should encourage to have an extra piece of cake at dinner. - What's your advice for a single person with no family to decumulate?

How should they approach that? Decumulate, sorry if I didn't say that right. - I don't think it's particularly different than for a married couple with kids and grandkids. We're still looking at the question of what asset allocation do we want to have through retirement, which accounts are we going to spend from.

Really the one thing that strikes me immediately is that there's one complicating factor that we don't have to worry about, which is for a married couple when we're trying to figure out what account to spend from, one of the factors is if we spend from tax deferred, what tax rate will we pay now, and how does that compare to the tax rate that we would pay later if the money comes out of the account later.

For a married couple, there's going to be a later period that includes only one of the spouses filing as single, which often means that there's going to be a period with higher tax rates later. That's just a thing we don't have to worry about for a single person. Also for a single person, the question is who is the bequest going to?

It's more likely in that case that if it's a single person without kids that it's going to a charity, which would mean that Roth conversions become a lot less advantageous during retirement because the "later tax rate" on a lot of these dollars is going to be 0% because the traditional IRA dollars are going to go to a charity, but that's not necessarily the case.

Obviously plenty of people who are unmarried and don't have kids aren't leaving the money to charity. They're leaving it to nieces and nephews or somebody else. Thank you. Question for Anne. If you have your house paid for and you pay cash for cars, why do you need a credit score?

Well, things could change. You could decide you want that vacation house, and mortgage rates being as high as they are, you would want to get the best possible rate. I think life is unpredictable. We can think we're going down one path and we end up going down another. Why would you do things that wouldn't make things as easy as possible for you?

Having a good credit score is something that makes things really easy for you. The way you have a good credit score is you pay your bills on time. Even if you're not using a credit card, most utility bills get reported to the credit bureaus. People with better credit scores don't pay deposits for certain services that people with bad credit scores do.

I think your credit score is something that benefits you over the course of your lifetime regardless of where you are with debt. Can I just add insurance companies can charge more for people with lower credit scores because they have proven that claims are higher? There are other things, even if you're not utilizing that credit, such as, as you mentioned, the deposit, that keeping a high credit score is important.

Sometimes an employer can also check your credit score as part of the job application process, so lots of benefits just keeping that score high. Here's an interesting question. What have you changed your opinion about over time? We'll take that in the financial planning space, not your taste in music or whatever else.

Something you've changed your thinking on. Certainly, not to talk about investing, but keeping the investments as simple as possible because, again, that's going to free you up to do those other much more important projects. When putting together an investment plan, there's always the option to add complexity, but I think when adding that complexity, there can be a lot of uncertainty if there's really value in doing that.

Quote Jack Bogle, "When there are multiple solutions to a single problem, choose the simplest one." Yeah, I would second the vote for complexity. I think that we as advisors tend to think people come to us wanting this really complicated stuff that they can't figure out on their own. I think over time, I've realized people come to us because they want to live their best life now and in the future.

One of the things that we've added to our planning projects is at the end of every topic that we discuss, we show a matrix of the time versus money of the different strategies that we're recommending. We talk our clients through which ones make the most sense for them to do because, yeah, you can do so many things to squeeze a little extra juice out of your dollar, but for many people that's not really necessary.

There are some people who just like action for action's sake, and they'll go and do all that stuff, but I think simplicity is something that I've come to cherish. I've changed my view on safe spin rates. I was very, very conservative. Christine just left, darn it. I wrote a piece a little over a year ago why I disagree with Morningstar's new higher safe spin rates, and about a month ago I sent an apology to everyone that I'm wrong because what happened, our real interest rates went from minus 1.6 percent to 2.55 percent on those instruments that I'm not allowed to mention.

But by the way, ibonds.com and tipslider.com are just best places to get data for that thing I'm not allowed to mention. This one maybe feels obvious, but early in my 20s, coming out of school, and soon thereafter was the financial crisis a few years after, and for me that was not scary at all.

That was a buying spree, and it felt so obvious, and early in this era I just had this idea because my risk tolerance is very high. It must be a mistake. Anyone without a high risk tolerance must not get it, and it sounds so dumb to me now just having met more people and seen more people's life circumstances, but I sincerely believed that, that if you're not 100 percent stocks, you're just a wuss, and that's what everyone should be if they could do it.

And if you have a hard time doing it, maybe you just need somebody to talk you into doing it, and that's what's going to get the job done, and it's just not right. I don't know, it sounds obvious again, but that's what I thought early on. I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about how you think about home ownership in financial planning.

I don't consider it an investment, but the home is the one thing you can enjoy and generally goes up in value, so certainly if one's going to buy a home and stay there for a long time, I think it's a very good thing to do. The one thing I do is when I look at safe spin rates, I don't include furniture or cars or things like that, but I do include a discounted value of the home, because later on, one could downsize, one could, in my opinion, last resort—sorry, Wade's not here—take out a reverse mortgage.

So I would count that as part of the safe spin rate. Yeah, I would say there's—home ownership plays a different role at different points in your life. One of the great things for retirees is having a fixed housing cost, which home ownership provides in a way that renting doesn't, and like you said, your home is kind of your insurance policy.

It could cover long-term care, it could cover all kinds of things. On the other hand, I don't think that we should be rushing young people to buy homes. I keep hearing this from my family, I grew up in California, that's where my family all is. My kids both have jobs in the Midwest, and my parents are like, "Oh, they'll be able to buy homes." And I was like, "No, no, back off." Not so fast on that, because there's an opportunity cost of home ownership, which is that you're giving up flexibility, you're giving up the opportunity to move for better opportunities.

So I think that home ownership is maybe something to start thinking about when you have young children and you want to be locked into a school district, and be at a point to start building equity. But there doesn't need to be a rush to buy your first home. Yeah, enthusiastically agree with that point.

Because people say rent is throwing away money, and okay, fine, but then property tax is throwing away money, and homeowners insurance being more expensive than renters. There's things you're paying for when you own a home. And the thing that I think often gets missed is that when people go from renting to owning, they don't just go from renting to owning, they also dramatically upgrade, almost every time.

In my entire personal life, I can't think of a single person I know who, when they went from renting to the first home that they bought, every single one of them, it was bigger, it was nicer, it was in a nicer area, or whatever. And so the financial decision, then, is not just renting versus owning, it's and you've stepped up your quality of living, or whether that actually improves your quality of life is another thing, but the costs associated go up, and not just because of the renting versus owning shift.

Not to mention the to-do lists of things that go with that house. Yeah, when you rent, things go wrong in multiples of $100, and when you own, they go wrong in multiples of $1,000. Okay, I think we're going to wrap up here because we've run out of time. Thank you for so many great questions.

I want to thank our panelists. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.