Do you hate the thought of working past 55 or 60 do you hate not being able to live the life you deserve today? Do you hate not knowing what your financial future looks like? It's time to stop doing what you hate. Here's your host, Mr. Harold Green.
00:19 Hello. Hi everybody. This is Harold Green of bright tree financial group and it is time to stop doing what you hate. Today's show - Getting old costs money. That's right. Getting old costs money. It's not cheap. It's extremely expensive in some cases, depending on where you live. But before I get into that, I want to tell you guys a quick story. This morning I was getting up and getting ready for work or whatnot. Went to the gym, worked out, got in my car and came back home and realized that my seat was a little sweaty, so I needed to wipe it down. So grabbed a towel out of the trunk, sprayed some cleaner on it, wiped the seat down. I was kind of stretched in an awkward position and so got to see clean guidance. I got my shower and everything like that and got dressed and just got dressed, eye strain, my neck.
01:10 Weird. Huh? You guys seen that? That TV show? I forgot what it was, but the guys putting on a shirt and he just ah, you know, hurt his neck. Just just putting on a shirt. And one of the funny things about aging is you start to get the aches and pains and different things like that. But I want to talk to you guys today about how to avoid the financial aches and pains of aging. And so I was raised by my grandparents. I don't know if I told you guys the story, but my mom had me when she was about 21 years old. She went off to college, ended up getting pregnant and came back home, had me and then went back to school, finished school, I think it was for nursing or something like that. And so being partially raised by my grandparents was really cool because I was like the baby in the house again.
01:52 And so I got spoiled beyond belief. I had some older aunties and uncles that were about 15 years older than me, but I was kinda like the baby and so everybody gave me everything I wanted, which innocence was cool. But then again it was not. So, you know, as my grandparents got older, I saw firsthand the effects and the toll that aging and getting older it can take on you. And so some of it was good, but some of it was not so good because there were some things that my grandfather set up that could have been done better to help the family. He had a ton of land and so he kinda didn't believe in trust and things like that. So he went and changed the deed on his property so that when he passed away, all of his kids got the property. Then when that kid passes away, all their kids are entitled to the property.
02:43 So I want to talk to you guys today about some of the things that you're going to need to do to prepare yourself or getting older and also to help your family as they age. I created a program a while back called rapid that will help you with just that thing. It is a financial planning process. And so in that financial planning process, we have cashflow management, cash reserve systems, income generation. You guys can go to my website, retire now, retire wilde.com download the game changer form, download the brochure, get in contact with me and I will talk to you about that rapid retire planning process. But getting old isn't cheap and so are you guys ready? Okay, let's get into some of the things that you have to watch out for, for yourself and your parents as you age. All right, here we go.
03:33 One, two, three. Let's get it. Okay, so one of the things I want to talk about is the financial plan for senior citizens. A lot of people, they do not have financial plans. They simply, they're old school. They believe in paying off their house, getting out of debt. They have their pensions to live on and so on and so forth. But one of the things I see is I see people amass a huge amount of money and those funds are not protected. A lot of people don't have trust due to the fact that trust costs money and you know a good estate planning attorney, I know I started my trust when I was 35 years old. The funny thing is is the attorney said, what are you, what are you here for you, you only 35 and I said, you know, I plan on being wealthy someday.
04:19 So I want to learn about trust, I want to learn about all the different things I can do to protect my wealth. And the sooner I get started, the better off I think I am. So I set up a trust for myself. I set up a trust from a life and because she's not a United States citizen, we had to add special terms in that trust so that my trustee would be my son because foreign nationals cannot inherit American property unless they are a United States citizen. So I have a very complicated trust set up for myself. Did it when I was 35 years old. So we, we're putting things in that trust, but it was, I think it was about $4,000 for each one of us to set up the kind of trust that we did. There are some good estate planning attorneys out there, and so I would, I would seriously, seriously beg of you to go get your trust set up, find a good one that you don't have to have a super duper expensive trust, but inside that trust, some things you want to look for is the advanced healthcare directive, your power of attorney, different things like that.
05:17 You want those things in that trust your will and so on and so forth. And begin now to understand how these things work so that when you amass your wealth, you understand the position to put that wealth in an order to pass it on to the next generation. One of the biggest mistakes I see seniors making is they end up putting all their kids on the house. And to me, I think that's a big mistake because they say, well, my kids aren't going to fight when I'm dead. I've seen that happen more times than not that kids do have disagreements. And what it stems from is it's outside influences influencing that, that that kid and red cars too, what they should do about their portion of the in that trust. And so there's more hands involved, there's more opinions involved and so it can get extremely messy.
06:04 And so what I encourage them to do is put their assets in a position so that most of their money is not tied up in the house. In other words, cash is easier to split than a house and IRA's easier to split than our house. Stocks are easier to split than a house. And also if the kids do end up selling the house, it could be at a bad time, it could be in a depressed market and things of that nature. So when you're, when you're setting up your financial future, you definitely want to make sure that I trust as part of your long term financial plan. The next thing that we have to think about as long term care. This is a big one. There's several different ways you can get your long term care paid for. There are a variety of life insurance policies that have long term care riders and if you're in a state where that is allowed, I would highly suggest you look into some sort of a whole life insurance policy where they have a rider on there where they have living benefits and so on and so forth.
07:02 That will help cover part of your long term care without you actually having to seek out a long term care plan. Sometimes you can have an employer that offers long term care and so if you work for the federal government, I think they have one of the best long term care plans I've ever seen in my entire life. It covers the the worker, it can cover their spouse and the price is not that much depending on your age, so I would definitely look into that, but long term care is a big one. Sometimes you can get away with self-insuring, but you would have to build that into your long term care financial plan. You may pick up a couple of pieces of real estate to generate income to cover your care or you can sell those assets in the future to cover your long term care. But it is one of the biggest things that I'm going to ask you to take a look at.
07:50 Now, you may be young, you may be in your forties like me and you may say, Hey, I, what do I need with this long term care? Well, truth be told there's like three, I think three out of five people will have some kind of need for longterm care, whether it's adult day care or skilled nursing facilities or anything like that. We just never know. So it's always better safe than sorry to make sure you have some kind of long term care strategy built into your plan. I've seen some people say, Harold, well my wife is just going to take care of me because she's a nurse. And so on and so forth. Well, yes and no. Sometimes I've seen that. I see that work, but then you have to understand, caregivers can run into burnout and they need a break from giving you care. And so those kinds of things are going to have to be considered as well.
08:39 Okay. The next thing I want to talk about is daily life and lifestyle in retirement. It's one of the biggest shortfalls people do not save for in regards to planning for their retirement. They look at what they need on a day to day basis. And I call that the basic necessities life life in such as food, housing, medical and transportation. But they don't look at the extra stuff. You know, maybe the remodeling of the house, maybe travel, maybe vacations. I'm sure they think about it a little bit, but they are always short when it comes to funding, those types of big ticket items. And you never know how you're going to fill in retirement as well. And so one of the things I always tell my clients is, you know, when you get older and you retire, you want to be in a position where you can enjoy your life while you're still able to get around.
09:33 You want to be able to enjoy your life so that you don't have any regrets and you want to make sure that you build into your financial plan, that kind of money that you need for the travel. They get together as the gifts and so on and so forth. The lunches and the dinners and the hobbies and the activities and you want to make sure that you add inflation on top of that because I use a rate of around three to 4% for your leisure inflation numbers for your travel and so on and so forth that your hobbies and things like that because they will rise and sometimes they rise faster than other types of things like the basic necessities, food and so on and so forth. The other, the other one that rises really quick as medical, if you don't have a great medical plan or if you're on Medicare, then you, you pretty much got it made, but anyone else who retire sooner, then they're eligible for Medicare.
10:28 Then your, your, your costs are gonna rise extremely fast right now for a family of I a, a family of three here in Hawaii or for the family plan, it can be as high as $2,000 or so depending on who you get the covers through. That's almost as much as some people's mortgages further their homes. Okay. So definitely add those inflation numbers in there on top of that and make sure that you have that plan set up. One of the other things we'll look at as we get older is whether or not we're going to age in place or we're going to downsize that, you know, that property that we bought and moved to somewhere like Florida or Arizona. Later on in another show. I'm going to talk to you guys about retiring in a foreign country and what that could potentially look like or your retirement situation.
11:17 I've kind of thought about where I want to go and we're planning our situation as well to partially retire in a foreign country, in parsley here in the United States. But you got to think about what it looks like if you are going to age in place that in order to outfit your home with the different types of things that you need, the showers, the hand rolls and so on and so forth. The ADA compliance stuff, if you end up in a wheelchair or Walker, we don't know. But you have to kind of think about planning those types of things in to your longterm financial plan to make sure you're, you're going to be able to be okay. And the other thing I see people do is they think about maybe moving in with the kids and adding onto the kids home or the kids move back in with you and then you build a bigger house for that.
12:06 I've seen that work as well. And so those are some of the things you definitely want to be kicking around and have conversations with your kids about that and make sure that you are saving and making adjustments in your financial plan to take care of that. The next thing. And probably one of the last things I want to talk about is elder care abuse. I worked with quite a bit of senior citizens and I think my oldest is about 90, 90 years of age right now. And then after that of 88 or so, and it's, it's really, it's really close to my heart because I was raised by my grandparents and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for where seniors in and making sure that they were okay because my grandmother, when she was in the final stages of her life or so she was on dialysis and she had to go three times a week and she needed help and with the different tubes and things of that nature.
13:01 So after school I would go and help grandma and make sure that she was okay help grandpop's a lot with the different things that he had to do as well. And so, and that's before I ended up joining the military and moving away. But my senior clients, they come in and one of the saddest things I see is I see their finances and disarray or not properly managed to the extent that that they could be. I'll see them with certain types of assets that be the, it's no longer in their best interest. And I'll say, you know, mr Mrs. Jones, why do you have this blank plan or this type of asset? And they'll look at me and they'll say, you know, we don't know why we bought it. We have no idea why we, why we have the stuff we can't get out.
13:49 We're stuck in it. Somebody sold it to us and it was a friend of a friend or a family member, somebody we knew, somebody sold us this stuff because, you know, we, we believed in them and we thought it was good. We thought it was good to have. But now looking back on it, it was, it was probably not in our best interest and we probably shouldn't, we probably shouldn't have it anymore. And one of the tough things I have to bring up is do your kids know what's going on with your situation? And they'll say, no, we didn't. We didn't tell them anything. And we don't plan on telling them because maybe you know, they have their own lives and we didn't want to worry them about our situation. And, and my thing is, it's kind of like this, I look at this a little bit backwards when the, when the parents come in of high school, seniors and juniors and they can't afford college, I'll ask them, Hey, did you tell your kids what you can and can't afford?
14:39 And they'll say, no, we didn't tell them because we don't want to worry him. The same thing goes here with senior parents or senior citizens who have kids that are going to be responsible for their finances down the road. And I think it's good to sit down and have a family meeting and to talk about how these things are going to be handled. Because if you don't, these parents are going to be susceptible to the elder care, the ed or elder care issues with the fraud and so on and so forth. Right now in the United States, fraud is a 36 point $5 billion issue. Every single year, 36 point $5 billion. Why? First of all, praying on our elderly is just straight all wrong. Okay. It's just wrong. And so we have to figure out how to protect our parents and our, our our older people from things of this nature.
15:35 And I have some, some cases and things where I have some parents and basically their kids could care less what's going on with their situation. And I think that's a little bit, I think that's a little bit sad, but I think if you're an older person, you definitely want to make sure that your kids are involved. I guess to the largest extent you'd want them to be involved and to, to let them know as much as you need them to know in order to help to protect you from these various types of situations. And sometimes letting go can be really hard. Some seniors, they want to remain independent as much as they can. But one of the things, people that you got to understand is that as you get older, sometimes your decision making is not as best as it can be. So every time that I have senior citizens come in that are advanced in age, I make sure that they have their kids there or somebody there to, to understand what we're doing, why we're doing it.
16:36 I always make sure they have some sort of trust set up if at all possible. And to make sure that the attorneys are involved, we want to make sure everyone is involved to protect what we've built for this family so that they can pass it on to the next generation in the best possible manner. And so I think that's a very, very big one. So kids, if you're out there or if you're out there and you have older parents and they haven't told you anything, I think you may want to go and talk to them about their situation and you have to find a way to bring it up so that you don't make anyone feel bad and you want to make sure that you're not putting yourself out there as like you know, I want to see what you got so I know what I have when you die kind of thing.
17:18 And so that's, nobody really thinks that way. But sometimes it can come across like that to older parents and maybe that's why they don't want to share what's going on. Because they didn't want to cause family tension and so on and so forth. But I think at least get one person involved so that you know, one sibling involved so that somebody knows what's going on and they're sharing the information and so on and so forth. Family dynamics can get very tough at times. And so again, you just want to make sure that this stuff is done and the best way possible. And so getting old does, it does suck sometimes and it's not cheap. We can get old or we can age gracefully with honor and dignity. And then it's very important to me. And so if you're out there and you haven't figured this stuff out for yourself yet, I want you to go to my website, retire now, retire wild.com go to my rapid retire section, go check out that program, download that brochure, fill out the game changer form.
18:24 Submit that form to me and I'll be in touch with you to make sure that you're going to be taken care of to make sure that you don't end up in a position that you absolutely hate when you get older. Okay, so just a little disclosure for you here about the rapid retire program, the rapid retire program, there is no guarantee that you'll be in a position to retire seven to 10 years sooner or any specific period. And results of the program will vary as far as your investments are concerned. All investments, including real estate, are speculative in nature and involve substantial risk of loss. And so I encourage you to invest carefully. I also encourage you to get personal advice from your professional investment advisor and to make independent investigations before acting on information that we publish. And so again, I think you folks who are listening in until next time, one, two, three as skidded
19:19 This is the podcast factory.com.
