HCM Wealth Advisors Blog

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One piece of good news is that the age restriction limiting people from contributing to traditional IRAs after age 70 ½ has been repealed. Contributions to Roth IRAs by qualifying taxpayers were already allowed. This is a windfall, particularly to people working later in life, as they may continue contributing potentially tax-deductible contributions and letting it grow tax-deferred, until withdrawn. If an investor has earned income, they are allowed to contribute to their IRA. This provides more flexibility in planning to better optimize their after-tax returns and retirement income.

Wealth management is the most comprehensive type of financial planning services. It is the process of coordinating your family’s investment, tax, estate, insurance, and retirement plans to effectively build your family’s wealth. Clients are able to access these comprehensive services to meet their needs whether that falls under managing estate or business taxes, financial needs for retirement, advising charitable funds, or investing taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free assets related to personal wealth.

Cognitive Biases are our brain’s natural way of helping us simplify our decision-making process. While often they are the result of ways in which our brains have adapted to make us more efficient, they can be detrimental as well, especially to our investments. Learn how our brains can trick us, what those tricks are, and how to account for them in your investments.

Nearly half of all Americans worry about running out of money in retirement; it’s not surprising then, that the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that people who retired with more than $500,000 in savings on average were often afraid to spend it. Therefore, they still had about 88% their retirement nest egg left 18 years after retirement. More often than not, they were worrying about things that never happened. This means they struggled on a tight budget during, what should have been, the best years of their life.

Most of you have probably heard about the SECURE (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement) Act. It was signed into law before Christmas and went into effect the first of this year. It contains some valuable elements that will help those saving for retirement, but it also did damage to some of the strategies used in long-term family wealth planning. We’d like to talk about a change that could alter literally every financial plan in existence up to now and change the way plans are crafted in the future. If you think we’re being hyperbolic, well… we’re not alone. The Director of Retirement Research at Carson Wealth said “[t]his is nothing short of a disaster for trust planning…”. A Marketwatch article contains the quote “[the Secure Act] is a complete disaster from a planning perspective…”. So what’s so bad in this bill? Well, nothing less than the death of the Stretch IRA.