(audience applauding) Okay, well it's great to see so many people still hanging in here Sunday morning. I wanna give a special shout out to all of our first time Boglehead attendees. It's been so exciting to talk to so many of you over the last two days. I think the first timers, like all the rest of us, probably will go home feeling, I hope, that a lot of your core Boglehead principles have been reaffirmed and probably, hopefully, there are some things that you've been prompted to think about or question that maybe you hadn't focused on and probably a to-do list.

I definitely have a to-do list. So I hope it's been a great experience for you. For this panel, we have another wonderful panel. I'm proud to have Christine Benz and Mike Piper and John Luskin to serve with them on the board of the Bogle Center. We're thrilled to have Carolyn McClanahan here for her first Bogleheads Conference and a special welcome to Harry Sitt, who is here for his first Bogleheads Conference.

Harry runs the popular blog, The Finance Buff. He has written two books. He's been a speaker to our San Jose and Sacramento Bogleheads Chapters. As at the other session, so just going from your left to right, Mike Piper, Carolyn McClanahan, Christine Benz, Harry Sitt, and John Luskin. (audience applauds) As at our other sessions, we'll encourage you to put questions on cards.

Alan Roth will be going around at some point. He's in the back. So we'd love to have your questions. So we're gonna talk about a variety of financial planning topics in this session, including planning for retirement. We'll talk some about lessons from Christine's wonderful new book, How to Retire.

Before we get there, Carolyn, I wanna ask you about something you had said in preparing for this panel. You said you would, quote, "Love to talk about "how we need to quit this unhealthy focus on retirement." What do you mean by that? - Yeah, amen to that. You know, retirement was invented in the 1930s when Social Security came into being.

They picked the age of 65 for retirement. Life expectancy at that time was 65. If you made it to 65, you had about a half a chance of living to 72. So people did not live very long in retirement. Most people died before retirement. And as an emergency room doctor, I saw a lot of bad things.

You know, people die before their time or have just these horrible events or illnesses happen that forever change their trajectory of life. And I just think we're so messed up in this country about how hard we work for this endgame of retirement when we need to enjoy life along the way.

And so in our practice, the number one question, I have a whole talk I do around this at conferences, it's called Are You Happy Now? And so the number one thing we do with clients is are you happy now, and if not, why? Kills me when I get somebody who's like 50 and they say, "I hate my job, I wanna quit at 55." Well, that's the wrong goal, you know, 'cause work gives a sense of purpose.

You're not meant to live on your money for 30 years without, and give up your safest asset, both psychologically and financially, and that's your human capital, your ability to contribute to society. So we focus on trying to get people to work less when they're young and enjoy life more along the way and plan on working longer so you have that psychological and financial safety, but plus it also helps reduce your risk of dementia and cognitive decline as you age.

- I just wanna follow up on that, and so it's funny that you're saying we talk too much about retirement, I just finished a book on retirement. (all laughing) But I could not agree more. In fact, in the book, Laura Karstensen, who's a researcher at Stanford, says something that really sticks with me.

She says, "Work is good for us, "the way we work is all wrong." That people are just crawling to the finish line, completely burned out. We know some people die right after they retire, and so I could not echo Carolyn's sentiment more that being thoughtful about what you want from your work life, picking up on Jordan Grumet's idea of creating addition by subtraction, like take note of your calendar as you go through your weeks if you're still working.

If you look ahead and you see, okay, oh God, yeah, that day, those things that fill you with dread, if you're in good standing with your employer, see if you can't find your way to do less of those things. So for me, it was managing people, it was meetings, those were things kind of in my stop doing list, and I wanted to do more writing on my own, I wanted to work on a book, and so just be really thoughtful about observing what's working for you about work.

Maybe nothing is, and you need to do something completely different, but maybe there are some kernels there, and try to see if you can't bring them forward in your work life. Try to find better balance, certainly, to just make sure that you are enjoying work as you're going along.

- Yeah, I agree. I call myself a part-time self-employed, so to me, that's a very good arrangement. I work on what I want to work on, I control my own hours, so then that's a good transition versus working full-time 100% and then retire 100%. - And I know, Harry, you have said, you've written about priorities also, and one of the things, you know, this is a crowd of people, many of whom are very into investing, put a lot of energy into personal finance.

You've suggested maybe we don't have to be quite so obsessive about that, right, as Paula would say, right? - Yes, I'm very big on reducing stress and anxiety, maybe just because I'm naturally an anxious person. So if, also, news media tend to sell on fear of making mistakes, making you anxious, create the impression that there are landmines left and right everywhere, that you're gonna make a mistake.

So if you feel anxious and overwhelmed, I would suggest that you take a step back and evaluate where you are. Are you on solid ground, you're 90% there, or are you fighting between failure and success? The financial planning moves tend to be on the side of improving things. They make good things, good situation better.

I was in Mike's presentation yesterday, so he pointed out that Roth conversions increase your bequest to your heirs, but they don't raise your financial security. So if you're already 90% there, you're all for improving, that's great, that's all we're here for. But if you make your plan contingent on making all the expert moves on knowing how much international small cap value or real estate or Bitcoin in your portfolio, claiming social security at the right age, having the right order of withdrawals from your accounts, having the well-calibrated Roth convergence, I would say that's probably not a good plan because those are too fragile.

They count on everything has to line up perfectly for you to succeed. I'd rather see a plan that's naively counting on target date fund, claiming social security at the full retirement age, withdrawing from my accounts proportionally and not doing any Roth conversion. If my plan is successful based on those seemingly suboptimal moves, then I know I'm good no matter what.

Then I can pick and choose at my own leisure at here and there, learn things. Everything can only improve from here. So then I'm less conscious, I'm more confident. - And Harry, you had said about simplifying. Give us a couple of examples of things at the margin that I could let go of and not feel like I absolutely have to optimize.

- Sure. I did a presentation for Sacramento San Jose chapters in June, so I did lots of simplifications move here. So for myself, I use one bank account for everything, so checking and saving all in one pot. So I don't move money across different accounts. I use one credit card for all my purchases.

I don't use one card for this, another card for that. I use one broker for 95% of all my investments between Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, pick one. They're all pretty much the same. For as much as I love iBonds, I sold a lot of my iBonds. I just use a TIPS fund.

I wrote a book on TIPS. I know how a TIPS ladder works. I know the difference between a fund and a ladder, but I just use a fund, so. - Yeah, I wanna add to that just real quick. You're gonna be great to work with as you age and get cognitive decline.

So simplicity is so important, right? It's so important for when you can no longer do it for people to be able to take over for you, so that's beautiful. - And I know, Carolyn, you talk also about resiliency. So what do you mean by that when you say that that's a focus that you work on with clients?

What does that mean? - So to me, you can never predict what's going to happen, and I talk about complex adaptive system science, and that's basically we don't know what we don't know. And our goal in our practice is not for people to have this endgame of a certain amount of money at a certain time.

It's to make sure that they have enough savings, emergency funds, and that they're saving enough for the future that no matter what life throws them, they're gonna be resilient and ready for that. And that's, you look at the studies on regret, and our number, the other thing we try to get people to do is is there anything, if you didn't do it, you'd have regret?

And so when people have less regret and something bad happens, they're actually more resilient and able to weather that bad thing happening more easily. So focusing on gratitude builds resiliency. Focusing on relationships build resiliency. So it's more than just money. It's making certain you're living fully in the moment so when the world falls apart that you're gonna have less regret and be better able to weather it.

And one thing I always say to people, and you talked about anxiety. For me, I always ask myself, when something bad has happened, she's heard me say this before and people gross out, will I be able to wipe my butt? Because if you can wipe your butt, it means your brain works, your hands work, and that you're gonna get through this.

So just step back and think, is this really the worst case? And most of the time it's not. And when you can recognize that, it lets you be able to weather whatever's happening a little bit better. - Related to being able to weather tough times, what are some of the financial things that bogal heads should be doing that maybe they aren't doing?

Do you wanna address that, John? - Yeah, I really like what Harry is doing in simplifying his finances because I think one thing that folks often ignore when choosing the more complicated approach, having multiple accounts to get a signup bonus or chasing the highest yield, is that assuming there's no downside to that strategy.

And there is a downside, it's complexity. And if you don't do what you need to do right, then you might just shoot yourself in the foot and not get the benefit of all that complexity in the first place. And then to speak to the theme of Paula Pant, yes, you can afford anything but not everything.

So if you're using your energy to chase the highest yield on a savings account or a CD, that means you're not doing something else. Human energy, time, attention is limited. So you can only do a few things well. Are you gonna do it to chase the highest yield or are you gonna do it to make sure your estate planning is done?

A lot of time folks come to me when working with me and they wanna talk about how to manage taxes when selling the concentrated Apple stock position. And I understand that can be an important point to them, but that can be so largely irrelevant if they haven't done something like their estate planning, have enough umbrella insurance, for example.

So yes, we love investing, it's so sexy and interesting and we hate taxes and we wanna manage those, but often they're not always the most important thing that we can be thinking about. - Right, so this goes to what Paula was saying about the areas we may be avoidant of.

And sometimes they are emotionally difficult too. Some of the things you have to wrestle with in making your estate planning documents, all the dire scenarios you have to talk about and things you have to think about. - Yeah, just one thing to add. Financial planning is a broad field, but on Bogleheads we spend 95% of the time talking about investing, which is one piece of it.

And the other 5% is taxes, that's what we talk about. We spend almost no time talking about estate planning or insurance, even though those are so critical. And that happens all the time. People come to me and they wanna do this deep dive on Roth conversions and it's well, we can do that, but there's six other things that are such high priority and you don't have these boxes checked off yet.

And basic estate planning documents, you don't have disability insurance, but you're still definitely not financially independent. I mean, whatever it is, there's so much more to financial planning than your asset allocation. And on Bogleheads, we just spend so much time talking about just a few things. - I couldn't agree more, Mike.

And I have this conversation all the time with individuals who say, I need a financial advisor. And so I'll listen to them and I'll be like, kind of sounds like you need a financial planner, especially when I'm moving in Boglehead circles. And I have to say, it's kind of a tough sell about why they're so focused on the investment piece.

They have questions there and they really underrate the financial planning piece. So I would say, if you go into it, my guess is many of you probably need financial planning more than you need investment advice. You may need both. And sort of the counter to that is, if you're meeting advisors and their main selling point is I'm gonna do this, this, and this for your portfolio and they're not talking about financial planning, they're serving you in a very limited way.

And many advisors still style themselves in this fashion. And if they're charging you a very low fee to do that investment piece, that's one thing. But many of them are charging the full 1% AUM for something that looks to me an awful lot like just sort of investment management and they're ignoring the financial planning piece or might be doing a few things around the margin.

So just find there's a mismatch in terms of what people think they need and what I believe they need. And I think they need more financial planning. - And the one thing I wanna really add to me, the most important question you have to ask yourself is what is the goal of your money?

The money is the tool, it should not be the object. And I've talked, I have loved this conference and so many of you have come up and talked to me and I can tell you most of you don't really know the goal for your money. And when you understand what you need, why you need it, then it makes it much easier to create a financial plan that actually serves you well to create a great life for yourself 'cause that's what you're trying to do.

- Yeah, just echoing one thing Christine said about financial planning versus investment management. Literally I checked in on the forum Thursday night very recently and there was a post discussing John actually, discussing John and Rick and someone said, well, I just don't see how John could possibly do anything better and beat a Vanguard Balanced Index Fund and how that would be worth the fees.

And it's like, you're exactly missing the point. The fact that you think that that is what a financial planner does is try to beat a Vanguard Balanced Fund tells me that there's almost for sure some things in your financial planning picture that you're not looking at and that you actually would benefit from working with John or somebody else.

- I think we'll shift to retirement a little bit. So I will say I am partway through Christine's wonderful book. I am reading it just as Jonathan Clements says in the introduction with a pen. I am underlying quite a lot. So Christine, I want to ask you to share with us some of the lessons in the book, either things that resonate with you personally or lessons you think don't get enough attention.

- Yeah, thanks, Karen. So the book, people may be surprised, is not all financial. It's about half or maybe more non-financial. So it's a lot about having a vision for retirement, picking up on Jordan Grumman, the idea of having purpose. If you got purpose through work, just making sure that you're having something else that gives you purpose when and if you retire from work.

The book I should explain for people who don't know, each chapter is an interview about how to do some aspect of retirement planning. And the contributors are well-represented at this conference. So Jordan Grumman does a discussion with me, Mike Piper, Carolyn McClanahan, Mike on taxes, Carolyn on healthcare. But we do cover a lot of non-financial ground because I have to say, as I've kind of moved along in my life, I feel like I've got the financial piece well in hand.

Like there are always things I could do better. But the allocation that makes, that is just more important to me at this life stage is my time on earth allocations. Like what decisions am I making with this precious life? I have a friend right now who is about my age, dying in hospice with ovarian cancer.

So, and a healthy, aggressively healthy person. And so these things can just come up and very quickly turn everything around. So that's what I wanted the book to be is sort of like you have this wonderful life, what will you do to maximize however many years you have left?

And so that was something I wanted to bring out loud and clear. So we talk about relationships, purpose certainly, perhaps the role of working in some fashion longer. Scott Burns, who was our speaker last night, night said something to me. He's not in the book, but he said something to me in another conversation.

He had tried to retire and he said, he was stocking shelves in the food pantry. And he said, even though he enjoyed that work, he said, I took a step back and realized that my highest, best use in this world was probably not stocking food pantry shelves. Even though I liked meeting people and I wanted to continue to do it, it was probably going back to some version of my life's work.

The work that he did with financial education in his column. And so I guess for me, that's something I've been thinking about and I would urge all of you to think about. Is there an aspect of your work or maybe something that you didn't explore in your work that you wanna carry forward later in life?

I'm hoping people will come away with some impetus to think through those things. - One of the things that many people talk about as they're thinking about retirement is where they wanna live. So I know, Harry, you had shared that you've lived in five houses in three states in the last six years after leaving your full-time job in California.

Tell us a little bit about that adventure and lessons you've learned along the way. - Sure. I worked in San Jose, California for about 20 years. Quit my job in 2018. We moved to Nevada, Reno, Nevada in 2020, right before the pandemic. Moved again in 2021 to our current place, Midway, Utah, about one hour east of Salt Lake City.

Out of all those moves, I think my biggest takeaway is, A, you don't have to move. (audience laughing) News media publish a lot of lists, best places to retire in America. They create the impression that everybody has to move or everybody's supposed to move. If you have your family, you have your kids grow up in the area, they're still there.

You have your network, you have your activities. Don't have to move. If you do move, I would say, have a strong non-financial reason for your move. You want to move closer to your family or for us, it's activities. We like skiing and hiking, so we picked Reno, Nevada for skiing and hiking near Lake Tahoe area.

And then we found a better place in Midway, Utah, and that's where we currently are. Don't move for financial reasons. Don't move because of cost of living or taxes. So when we moved to Nevada, people say, "Hey, you moved to Nevada, no state tax. "You must have saved a lot of taxes." The first year that we moved there, we saved $1,000 in California state tax.

So, and then we moved to Utah. Utah's state taxes are higher than California state taxes because it's a flat rate versus progressive. So move because you like somewhere, some activities there. Don't move because of cost of living or taxes. Living comes first before costs. - I have two important points to that.

A lot of people want to move to where their kids are. A high percentage of kids move after you move to where they are. And so be careful about that. The second thing, I have seen this over and over. Think about healthcare where you move. Do not retire in rural areas.

Rural areas are struggling with good healthcare. If you need long-term care, long-term care services, it's almost impossible to get. So be very careful that wherever you do move, that you know there's a good healthcare community there and people that are gonna help you as you age. - I guess it depends on your age.

I'm in my 50s. So I trust whatever illness I have, anywhere in a good-sized metropolitan area, doctors can treat me. But if I develop some rare disease, I have to live close to a Mayo Clinic or a Cleveland Clinic or that sort of caliber of medical facilities. Yeah, definitely that's a consideration.

- My book has a chapter on housing and I talked to Mark Miller about all the different dimensions of housing, including home equity and potentially unlacking home equity. But Mark made a really astute point about downsizing, like getting into a more age-appropriate home, sort of separate from the relocation decision.

And his point was like, there's never a better time than just when you're embarking on retirement. You'll never be more in the driver's seat with the decision-making about where, how that move gets executed, how your possessions get disposed of. And his point, I mean, many of us have been through this with older parents passing away where you're in charge of cleaning out a very large and full house.

It's not a great gift to get from your parents, I will say. So if you can kind of get in front of that decision-making and that process, I think that that redounds to the benefit of everyone's well-being, yours and your family members. - I wanna remind everyone, if you have questions, please write them on the little pieces of paper.

Alan is walking around and he'll gather them up for us. I wanted to turn the conversation a bit to charitable giving. So we've talked about some tax strategies related to charitable giving, that it can be efficient to leave tax-deferred IRAs to charities or give appreciated securities to a donor-advised fund for later granting.

And I'm wondering just in sort of a bigger picture way, are there conversations that you have with clients or questions that we should be asking ourselves about how charitable giving fits into our goals? - At the risk of getting into the investing section, I can see charitable giving as an opportunity to clean up one's portfolio.

A lot of times folks will come to me with some stuff they bought themselves or maybe some old employer stock, or often it's gonna be that 1% advisor portfolio that they've fired the advisor and now they're left with this dumpster fire of an investment portfolio. And so that can be a good time to prioritize getting rid of those things in a tax-efficient manner, giving it to a donor-advised fund, et cetera.

- Yeah, I'm not QCD ages yet. So before QCD, donor-advised fund is probably the best vehicle. But I would suggest if you use a donor-advised fund, use it more as a pass-through. Don't hold money there. Donate to donor-advised funds and then disperse the money right away. - I sort of disagree with that.

It depends on the situation. I mean, we've had clients with long-time donor-advised funds that are invested and it's been fun for them that they've grown. That pie that they're giving to charity and they're giving along the way. But like I talked about the golden age of tax planning and retirement from 60 to 70 yesterday and we'll do a nice lump sum of appreciated stock, cleaning up portfolio like you said, that we know what their charitable intentions are for the next 10 years.

And now we've been able to do other nice things like get rid of other appreciated stock or do Roth conversions or IRA distributions. So it can, yes, there is a fee with having a charitable gift fund, but it's not that high. I mean, well, fidelity is what we use and it's not that high to have that.

And so, I mean, every situation's different. And so just make sure that you're thinking through both short-term and long-term about what your goals are charitably and doing it in the most tax-efficient manner. - I will say, I kind of agree with Harry though. I do not understand why the fees are so high.

If I'm putting some plain vanilla security in there like employer stock from a large company, why am I having this, is it 50 basis points or something drag on? I don't understand what the fees are about. So, you know, when you give money to, when you put it into fidelity charitable, the fees are not 50 basis points.

It's actually a lot lower. The reason the fees are there is because they have to check and make sure the charities are qualified charities. So it's more, it's a logistical thing. Your stock is going to be sold and that's going to be invested in a diversified portfolio. So, you know, there's a fee for that.

I don't think it's, I mean, let me, I think fidelity's 35 basis points. So it's not, and it goes down. So it's not that high, but that's what you pay for, for that tax efficiency. - A thing I didn't know about donor advised funds until became the treasurer of a nonprofit organization, Schwab Charitable, they don't have direct deposit.

They just send you a check every time. What the heck? (all laughing) - Yeah. Fidelity Vanguard. Yeah. It's just, anyway, small little tidbit. I love donor advised funds. One thing I do like to point out, because some people, financial services companies, promote them as this tax strategy. They are helpful, but they are an administrative tool.

Like any tax savings you would have had from donating to a donor advised fund, it's exactly, literally precisely the same as if you just donated to some other charity. They're helpful from an administrative point of view, because you can do, like we were just talking about, where you can donate some all at once, get some tax savings right now, and then spread that out over some years, or useful if you want to keep yourself anonymous so you don't end up on mailing lists.

Also convenient if you have your Vanguard account and Vanguard charitable account, so you can just add your appreciated stock to the charitable fund, whereas not every organization is set up for you to give them shares of stock. So lots of administrative benefits, but it's just the same thing from a tax point of view.

And I'm gonna add one thing to that. I find that when clients set up a charitable giving fund, and I don't know, I only use Fidelity, I haven't used any other ones, it's so easy to give away money, so they become more charitable, which is, for a lot of our clients, it's a good thing.

And I actually have a Fidelity donor advised fund, and I get on there, and it keeps this big list of all the shares, it's like, oh, I gotta give money to them, and you just go cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. And so I don't know whether that's good or bad. If you have a client with spending issues, it's bad, but if you have a client that needs to be more charitable, it's a good thing.

- I'm gonna turn to a different topic. So we're hearing every day, cyber frauds, data breaches, all sorts of scams out there. Are there steps that people should take to protect themselves? Asking for a friend, should I finally do those credit freezes that people talk about? - Yes. - Yes, awesome.

Any other steps I should be doing besides that? - Yeah, freeze your credit, freeze your spouse's credit, freeze your kid's credit. Gosh, be very suspicious of any text messages you get. Don't click on any links on any text messages. If a financial institution calls you or texts you and says there's an issue, do not respond via that medium.

Say, thank you for the information, hang up, and then go to the website and contact them via the website, via the phone number that's on the website. Moreover, do not Google an organization's phone number, 'cause that is a common scam now. The scammers are getting really good at SEO.

So if you're looking for a financial institution's phone number, and you failed a Vanguard or whatever, and you Google it as opposed to going to the site directly, the search tools may pull from a scammer's website, and then you'll be connected directly to a scammer. So always connect with the organization directly on your own, even if that organization supposedly reaches out to you.

- I would find having fewer accounts or fewer institutions help. So if I get a scam message saying my Chase account has some problems, I don't have a Chase account. So if I only have one account, then those messages will tend to have less effect. In this realm, I find usually brokers have better security than banks, because they deal with large sum of money.

So that's why I use a broker account for my cash flow. - One piece of feedback we had on this conference is that this would be a good future session. So I have taken that away, how to protect yourself, you know, all dimensions of your financial life from fraudsters.

I think that would be a great next session. Couple things I would add. Password manager is a really good practice. If you haven't set one up, it's a little bit of a pain to set it up, but once it's up and running, it's not too difficult. And then I just wanted to mention, we did for our podcast a conversation with Kathy Stokes, who is director of fraud prevention for AARP.

And I asked, so where is sort of the epicenter of financial fraud right now? And her answer was very clear, crypto, crypto, crypto. And she said that there is so much scamming going on in the crypto space. So for those of you who are crypto curious, after Matt Hogan and Rick Ferry talked yesterday, just really be on your guard in that space.

Not everyone is out to scam people in the crypto space, but I think scams are alive and well there, and it's certainly less regulated, so you just need to be super careful. - One thing I wanna add, not that I'm pushing financial advisors, but we get, as an independent RIA, we sometimes get people calling us, trying to impersonate a client to try to get money.

And we know every client, and it's interesting, the stories we get told, but we catch it right away. We have people try to email us when they've hacked into a client's email, email us pretending they're a client, but we know our clients so well, and we have processes in place to call the client.

And then as soon as we recognize that a client's been compromised, we freeze everything. We notify the custodian. So that is, especially as you get older, the scams are getting hard, just amazing what they do. So that is one benefit as you get older and maybe facing some cognitive decline of working with an advisor.

Again, not that I'm pushing, but it's another layer of help. - So we've talked some, Carolyn talked yesterday about getting a less involved spouse more involved in the finances. Mike did a great session on that last year. Harry, when we spoke before this session, he said something that really resonated for me 'cause it would be like the kind of thing that I would be guilty of.

Just writing down a complex system really doesn't help. So tell us some more things that would be helpful in getting a less financially involved spouse ready to be more involved if necessary. - Sure, I read Mike's excellent book "After the Death of Your Spouse" or something like that. My biggest impression from reading the book is it's a little late by that time.

So you wanna get your spouse involved or partner, get them on the same page, keeping them informed. Part of the battle is just know what you have. So Mike talks a lot in the book about how to find out where you have your accounts. It's a little late there.

You don't wanna leave a detective worker for your spouse after you die. So it's better to keep your spouse informed. And the best way to do that is while you're still here. And from my writing, a lot of people talk about having a death binder or a letter of instructions.

To me, that's less helpful because whenever I write something, I always forget some basic because the knowledge level is different. So what you deem, of course, assumptions, you have a lot of assumptions when you write down things, a lot of things that you didn't realize that's needed for your spouse to understand.

So if you make your system simple, then you can involve your spouse right now. Then you don't have to write that instruction. Or better yet, have your spouse write down your system. And then he or she is writing in his or her own notes and language, and then he or she knows what should be written down.

- Well, that's why we also have clients do yearly, what we call yearly audits with the spouse of them sitting down and going through things. And we always say, make your spouse pay the bills, make your spouse look at the investments, make sure they can log into everything. And just taking, it takes an hour or two each year to make sure that they're doing it.

And like I talked about yesterday, make sure they know how to get into your phone, that you don't just have a thumbprint on there that use the same similar passwords so you guys know how to get into each other's phones. So there's lots you can do, it just, you have to be intentional about doing it, and it saves a ton of anguish when something actually happens.

- So I want to segue into a related question from the audience. If one spouse is the bogal head and the other is less financially savvy, what should I look for in a financial planner to help guide my spouse after I'm gone? - I think it's, to a very significant extent, the same things that you would just look for in a financial planner normally.

Is this a human being whom I trust? Do they have the levels and areas of expertise that are applicable to us? Because again, financial planning is a broad field, and so the financial planning that somebody needs in their 60s is different from in their 40s, and it's different, again, from in their 80s.

So do I trust this person? Do they have the areas of expertise that I need? And is the way that I would be compensating them something that makes sense to me and that I can afford? - Do they have your same investment philosophy? That's key. - And Rick Ferry once made the point that I've often thought about, which is take that next step and introduce them preemptively if you've identified the person.

Just make sure that they click, that your spouse is comfortable sharing information with that person. Does he or she address the spouse who's not engaged? All that interpersonal stuff I think is very important to do a check on just to make sure that the spouse has that comfort level.

- I wanna echo that point by both Rick and Christine and add it to not just your financial advisor, your financial planner, but your tax professional, your estate planning attorney as well. Any other trusted parties who your spouse is gonna turn to in that worst case? - I don't have a financial advisor.

So I go back to simplicity. If I make my system simple enough, maybe my wife doesn't need a financial advisor. So last year I had my wife do our taxes. She opened up TurboTax. I was sitting by her side. She went through all the steps. She wrote down the notes and then she actually clicked the button to file the taxes.

So treat it like training a new hire. Then make sure that she understands. (audience laughing) - So okay, so I had a client, I have a client. Her husband was a CPA and he had colon cancer. They were not clients at the time. And he said you cannot hire a financial advisor 'cause you can't trust him.

I have done this financial plan for you. He had like this life, they were in their 50s, they had this life plan and she was a smart woman but she just wasn't into investments. And then the year after he died, that's when the stock market fell apart and she was so upset and stressed because she didn't know how to deal with it.

So a friend of hers talked her into coming to us. So you can't control your spouse from the grave and it's great to me that you're doing that but still if they don't have the interest or inclination and they're gonna get old at some point and need help, it's really good to make sure you have some sort of backup whether it's a savvy family member or an advisor but you can't control from the grave.

So don't try to teach them everything and think they're gonna do it 'cause the plan's not gonna work out like you expect. - Okay, another question. My parents are 80, they have a funded trust, a binder with all their financial home information, their wills. As they age and begin to decline mentally, what should I do to protect their financial legacy?

Should they add me as a fiduciary? Should I get alerts on their accounts? What should I do? - Well, you know, this is my love of mine to work. So this needs to be a gradual process. You know, especially for do-it-yourselfers, taking care of your money is a sense of purpose to you.

And so you don't wanna rip that from your parents away immediately. You want to make it, so we first start off with financial transparency, not just with one person but with the entire family so that there's nobody worrying that somebody's trying to take advantage of other people. And then as they have issues, then you start having that look behind.

And so whether they're logging into your accounts, you know, we use an e-money portal where everything gets scraped and is in one financial portal that the surrogate can look through to make sure everything looks good. And then you might still let them write, if they become more declining, let them write the bills but don't let them send them in.

You check the bills before they get turned in. The same with the tax return. You know, to me, at that point, maybe you should be getting an outside accountant. And you've gotta make sure that you have that power of attorney document. It depends on the estate issues. It's easier to become a joint account holder for that checking account where the bills are paid, even though that child who's the surrogate is gonna get that money.

If you don't have joint accounts, then somebody dies and that account gets frozen. And so, you know, there's pros and cons of joint account versus using a power of attorney, but you've got to figure out what's right for you, but make it a gradual process. And what ends up happening with a lot of older people is once they feel comfortable with whoever's taking over, they're like, "God, I'm happy not doing this." And then they just let the child take over.

And, but again, you wanna keep transparency the whole way. As we talked about yesterday, 90% of financial fraud is actually perpetrated by people who are close to you. So that's why it's important to have transparency and multiple people involved. - Carolyn, I have a question for you about that.

When my parents were declining, I had full trading authority on all of their accounts. Is that recommended or is that, and again, it depends on the relationship, but is that risky? - Risky in what way? - Risky in that you have to have complete and utter trust in that person you've given that authority to.

- Well, and so ideally, you've got to trust somebody as you age. So first off, it's important for everybody to be clear on their investment policy. I see so many families not having an investment policy statement. How is my money gonna be invested? And so if you have a younger child who has a different investment philosophy than you, that is dangerous.

If you have multiple children that one person's doing it and the other ones don't know, that can cause some issues. So you've got to trust in somebody. And if you don't trust them from the beginning, and that's also why it's good to let this happen while your brain is still there so you can watch that surrogate in action and feel comfortable with what they're doing so that when you are losing it, you know they're gonna do the right thing.

- I think we're gonna circle back to a couple of things, a little bit more in the investment space. From your point of view, this is very different, from your point of view, what's the true difference between Fidelity and Vanguard? Yes, Fidelity is privately owned, but is that a reason to move my entire Fidelity portfolio to Vanguard?

- No, no, not at all. To me, as an individual DIY investor, the differences are very minimal. They all have the ability to build a low-cost, diversified, simple portfolio. Like Rick said yesterday, at some of the firms, you'll maybe get more incoming sales contact. As Bogleheads, hopefully you know, that, you know, opt out, basically.

But no, they're all very, very fine in terms of almost all of the stuff that matters, really. - Well, and the one thing, you just have to think of, they're both supermarkets. You can pretty much buy anything you want there, so you can buy all the low-cost ETFs and stuff, and so it doesn't really matter.

They're the supermarkets. So to me, you have to look at what's giving the better client service, and they all, I've been around so long, they all rotate when they stink, you know? And so, and when you are, you know, working with them and they stink, you complain, and a lot of times they fix it.

You know, so for us, we use Fidelity, 'cause they've done a good job. Vanguard has gone through periods where they do a good job, doesn't, but Fidelity's done that, too. So you just gotta look at the platform, what's comfortable to you, who's giving you the better service. - If you're using a 60% stock, 40% bond portfolio, it's gotten you to your number for a comfortable, confident retirement, does it make sense to be more aggressive with stocks?

Say, go up to 70% to try and earn more wealth? - Well, I'll be real quick. It's like, what is, I said this earlier, what is the goal for your money? If you have a goal of trying to grow it, to leave it to your kids, and you wanna take that risk that you're gonna either leave them more or you're gonna leave them less, then you can become more risky.

But you gotta make sure you understand what are your goals for your money, do you have enough for yourself first, how much risk do you wanna take psychologically and financially for those goals? That should drive that decision. - Okay, I like when we agree. (audience laughing) - I think one mistake that I see folks make a lot when it comes to that stock-bond-mix decision is looking at only the amount of risks they're taking in that decision.

For example, hey, retirement's well-funded, so I wanna invest more aggressively in stocks. Okay, yes, maybe it makes sense to take risks there, but think holistically about all the risks in your life and if you wanna be taking risks in all those other places. So often what I see, for example, is okay, yes, I'm fully funded for retirement, I'm gonna invest in more stock funds compared to bond funds for that reason, and again, that might be reasonable, but also consider do you have a aggressive overweight relative to international, because that's more risk.

Are you holding a bunch of concentrated employer stock 'cause you don't wanna sell it 'cause of taxes? Okay, that's more risk there. Do you have additional money in a non-qualified deferred comp plan of that same company? That's more risk yet. Have you decided to self-fund for long-term care insurance?

That's more risk there. So if deciding to be aggressive in the portfolio aspect of your life, look at everything holistically and decide should I also be aggressive in all these other places too? - Just to follow up on that real quick. So at the time when people feel like, eh, yay, I'm fully funded, they're also, you're also getting older, right, as the years go by, and so that may, as you get closer to needing the money, and of course it gets to Carolyn's point about what is the goal, but if your goal is to retire, you, you know, your portfolio may be larger, you can spare more, but you also do need to de-risk.

I would say this is the main thing I encounter when I talk to older adults about their portfolios. It is a tough sell getting people to de-risk appropriately, and you guys would know about this as well, but it, stocks have been great, and it is very difficult to encourage people to step away from them.

Bonds haven't made an especially great case for themselves over the past decade, but I do think, you know, as you get close to drawdown, you need more bonds, you need more cash, you still need stocks, but you, you really do need that balance at that life stage more than ever.

- Is there an advantage to converting Vanguard Mutual Fund shares to their ETF equivalents? - There can be an advantage if you're holding them in Fidelity accounts, converting them to ETFs allow you to buy Vanguard ETFs at no fee. Fidelity does charge a fee if you buy Vanguard Mutual Funds.

They don't charge fees on selling, they only charge fees on buying. - Okay, I think we are gonna wrap up here. Thank you all for so many great questions. Thank you to our panel. (audience applauding) (audience cheering) you