Today, we are taking questions from you!
We asked you what keeps you up at night and what’s been on your mind and you responded with some fantastic questions.
Some of the topics we explore in today’s episode include:
- Saving for retirement after you have maxed out your company plan (i.e. 401k, 457, 403b)
- Whole life insurance and why it’s probably not a good savings tool
- The power of the HSA (Health Savings Account)
- Bitcoin and cowboy accounts
- Buying versus renting a home
We love getting questions! If you have something on your mind, send it on over to us.
How to Listen to Today’s Episode
Episode Links & Resources:
0:43 – Welcome and topic setup
1:34 – [Karen from Del Mar] – What more should we be doing to save for retirement if we’ve maxed out our 401(k) contributions?
6:20 – Contributing the maximum amount to your HSA should be a priority. Pay for medical expenses out of pocket and use your HSA as a savings tool.
8:21 – [Nick from downtown San Diego] – Thoughts on cash value/whole life/permanent life insurance policy as a retirement savings vehicle.
13:54 – Pay Off Student Loan or Invest
14:04 – [Adam from La Jolla] – What are HSA’s (Health Savings Accounts) and how do they work?
14:08 – Podcast episode on traditional vs Roth
17:19 – [Catherine in Rancho Bernardo] – Is investing in Bitcoin a good investment?
20:58 – Read more about our thoughts on Bitcoin as an investment in this blog post.
21:11 – [Danielle from San Diego] – Thoughts on the real estate market and is it OK to keep renting?
27:34 – Real Estate as an investment has not performed all that well
28:46 – [Tom from Carlsbad] – Thoughts on disability insurance and is my employer-provided coverage enough?
32:36 – Our blog post about shopping for insurance
Episode Transcription
Your Questions Answered...Live!
Taylor Schulte: Just get in that habit of saving money. Don't get wrapped into these really expensive life insurance policies early on.
Welcome to Stay Wealthy San Diego. A show for successful professionals doing all the right things with their money and are ready to take their financial plan to the next level. I'm certified financial planner Taylor Schulte, and I'm here to teach you advanced financial planning strategies in plain English.
Taylor Schulte: Welcome to Stay Wealthy San Diego. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. The last couple of episodes we did, we asked you guys to send in your questions, comments, feedback, and thankfully we got a number of emails and a number of just really, really good questions.
So we thought we would read off those questions today and answer them live on today's podcast. Maybe they'll prompt some other questions and if you have some for us, please shoot us an email. We read and respond to every email. Even if we don't read your question on air, we do read them and we do respond to them. So shoot us an email at podcast@staywealthysandiego.com.
Jon: And don't be shy. There is no such thing as a stupid question, so send us what you got
Taylor Schulte: So we will get right into it. Karen from Del Mar emailed us and she said, my husband and I work full-time and have been really good about saving money. We have a rainy day fund in place and we contribute the maximum amount to our company retirement plans each year.
We've saved over a million dollars for retirement, good for her, but that's not going to allow us to maintain our lifestyle for a long period of time. I feel like we need to be doing more to save, but we can't put any more money in our 401ks because there's a maximum amount you can put in. So they're maxing out their 401ks, so I'm not sure what else to do.
Do you have suggestions? Is there a rule of thumb to follow? Well, I know how much you love rules of thumb.
Jon: Rules of thumb are just that probably not applicable to most people, but I think to answer her question, where else can I save money? That's kind of an easy one. There's a few options.
Firstly, there's individual retirement arrangement accounts short for IRA accounts, and for that you can put in 5,500 bucks each, or you can add another thousand if you're over age 50. So between the two of you, you can put in at least an additional 11,000 bucks a year. So that's one great option for saving more money.
Then there's always the health savings account. So if you're using a high deductible health plan, then you can put another 6,900 for 2018 into that account. And we've got an awesome blog post that we'll link in the show notes.
And then finally, plain vanilla taxable account. You can save money in a regular investment account, not receiving any particularly special tax treatment and save money in there. You don't necessarily have to get a tax break, a tax deferral when you put money in. You can still save money and have it grow and pay a little bit of taxes along the way.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, and if you do choose to invest in a taxable account, you can also take advantage of something called asset location. And you can certainly Google asset location, not allocation, but location. An asset location will help kind of guide you into what types of investments should be in certain types of accounts.
So there are some investments that are better in IRA or a 401k and other investments that are better for a taxable account. So you can kind of take it one step further and be really strategic and tactical about which investments you have and which accounts and start to take advantage of asset location.
It is a little bit of work, it’s probably going to take a spreadsheet to get it all to match up, but it's a really, really smart, tax-efficient way once you start saving outside of your company retirement accounts. Another one that we started to mention a lot is the mega backdoor Roth, and essentially once you max out your 401k at work, some employers actually allow you to make after-tax contributions on top of that traditional 401k contribution.
So you can contribute sometimes an additional $36,500 per year into that 401k. Now, you're not going to get the tax deduction, but your money's going to grow tax-deferred. So it's an easy way to just save more tax deferred dollars if your employer allows it.
So we want to ask our employers for a summary plan description, also known as an SPD, and that will tell you whether or not they allow for these after-tax contributions. Absolutely.
Jon: That is a great way to save more money.
Taylor Schulte: So I think if we had to sum it up, if you're maxing out your 401ks or 457 or 403B, whatever it is that you're contributing to in the workplace, if you're already maxing those out and you want to save additional dollars because you're probably going to need to, like Karen's figured out, your next step is to fund those IRA accounts.
And then if you've funded those IRA accounts, look into taxable investment accounts. That's just a traditional brokerage account that you can open pretty much anywhere. Schwab, Vanguard, TD Ameritrade, fidelity, name, a brokerage firm, and you can open up a taxable brokerage account.
And then maybe you take advantage of asset location and be really smart about what types of investments you put in your different types of accounts. And then I guess I failed to mention again, in summary, before you start to attack that stuff, you might ask your employer about the summary plan description and seeing if you can add after-tax money to your 401k.
Jon: Absolutely. And in terms of prioritizing, well, which account should I max out first? I would say start with the HSA, because that just receives the most fantastic tax treatment, and if your employer offers a health savings account, you want to use the employer's health savings account and not one that you shop on your own and make contributions outside of your paycheck.
Because if you use the employer's HSA, you save an extra 500 plus bucks on payroll taxes for a family, and that's not a small amount of money.
Taylor Schulte: Do you have any suggestions for if the employer doesn't offer the HSA, how someone should begin that search for an outside HSA?
Jon: Yeah. Well, when it comes to investing, one of the main rules is cost. You want to focus on low-cost investments. Now with HSAs, you always have to do a little bit of math because one, there's going to be the regular expense of the mutual funds, that's the expense ratio.
Then there's going to be administrative fees. And then also with HSAs, a lot of the time an HSA will have a cash minimum holding.
So the HSA will say, yes, you can invest with us, but you have to have at least a thousand dollars of cash with us or $2,000 of cash with us before you invest. So me being the giant nerd that I am, I looked at a ton of HSAs spreadsheet out at everything. And the verdict that I found is that for in more than one circumstance, lively is the best option. They have a very low monthly fee.
It's two 50 a month, and you can access TDs commission-free ETFs, which are TD Ameritrade. Yeah, TD Ameritrade, which are low-cost and they're commission-free. So I think for most people, the lively HSA is the best option for now. Again, that may change in a year. Lively is relatively new, but something may come out that's cheaper and lower cost than that.
Taylor Schulte: So if your employer doesn't have an HSA, go to Google, type in Lively HSA, do some research, make sure it's right for you, but that'd be a good place to start.
Jon: Yeah, lively is great because again, low fee, low-cost funds, commission-free funds, and there's no cash minimum that you have to have in there. So it's a pretty good setup.
Taylor Schulte: Awesome. Alright, Karen, great question. Thank you for sending that in. Next question comes from a gentleman named Nick. Nick is in the downtown area. He writes, I'm an attorney in my thirties making what I think is pretty good money. I haven't saved a whole lot for my future, but want to start? I'm sure he had some law school bills to pay off there.
Jon: Those can be huge.
Taylor Schulte: I was introduced to a financial advisor who works for a big insurance firm. I see where this is going, and he suggested that a cash value life insurance policy would be a smart place to begin saving for retirement. I have read mixed reviews on this type of insurance and I would love to get your thoughts.
Jon: Yeah, so great question. And we get this from a lot of people. I was approached by an insurance salesman and he says, this is the way I should save for my future. Do we think it's the way you should save for your future? Probably not.
If you're a lawyer and you're looking at a big chunk of student debt, that's one place may want to consider spending money to pay off that debt. If you want to be a little more aggressive, you can make smaller payments on that debt and then start putting money into more conventional retirement savings such as a 401k, such as an IRS such as an HSA or just a plane of vanilla taxable account.
That's where I would start saving money. And then only after you've maxed out all those options, and perhaps even if all your student loan is paid off, and if you're making 600K plus a year, then it may make sense to consider permanent life insurance policy. But until then, I would do all those other things first.
Taylor Schulte: I think it was you who had the analogy, it's like if you go to a car salesman, what do you think they're going to try and sell you? They're going to try to sell you a car. If you talk to an insurance salesman or a financial advisor who works for an insurance firm, what do you think they're going to try to sell you?
They're going to try to sell you insurance. Insurance pays high commissions. So that person is going to make a lot of money even off of a small policy. So it's an easy way for them to make a buck, and that's what they do. They're an insurance firm, that's what they're trained to sell.
Now, they might offer other investments, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, traditional things like that, but a lot of times they do lead with these insurance policies just because they're bread and butter.
So let's just break this down a little bit further. We come across this a lot, Jon, cash value life insurance policies that, I mean, the real reason for them, it's a life insurance policy, but the death benefit, the life insurance policy will pay out whenever you pass away.
Not a certain time period, not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now, but anytime you die, it's a permanent insurance policy. It'll pay out that death benefit.
So a lot of people that buy these cash value or also known as whole life policies, either they have a big estate issue or tax issue at death, or some of them just want to leave a legacy to their family and they're like, I don't care if I die when I'm 50 or 110, I want to make sure this life insurance policy pays out. So they purchase these rather expensive cash value life insurance policies.
Jon: Yeah. One thing you said I want to touch on is that these are called permanent life insurance policies, but some of them specifically the universal variation aren't permanent. They actually commit puku. They kill themselves over a long enough period of time.
That word commits puku. It's the ancient Japanese Samurai tradition of gutting yourself. If you've dishonored the clan or whatever it is, puku, they implode just because the fees eat up your investment in it and it runs out of money. So even though they're called permanent, they aren't necessarily permanent.
Now, you mentioned analogies. I can't help but mention our blog post that has an analogy in it about cash value life insurance, and it is, I want you to imagine that I'm going to sell you the coolest new car there is. Now this car, it's not just any car. This car comes with a built-in dishwasher.
Now, granted, yeah, it's going to be a little more expensive than your average car and maintenance is going to be more expensive as well. And yeah, it'll get bad gas mileage and it'll be really awkward to drive because there's a dishwasher in it. But just think of it, you can do your dishes while driving your car.
Now, of course, it's completely ridiculous. We don't need to combine our dishwasher with our automobile, and that's what permanent life insurance is. We're combining life insurance with investing, and those things don't really normally go together.
So again, unless you've maxed out all your other retirement accounts and you're in the highest tax bracket, permanent life insurance probably doesn't make sense for you.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, I love that analogy. Now that I have kids though, I'm thinking a dishwasher in my car might really come in handy.
Jon: Well, again, it's a narrow application, but it's going to apply to some people.
Taylor Schulte: So Nick, Jon made a good point earlier. If there is debt hanging over you, that's probably a place to start before you ever consider cash value life insurance. But if there's no debt saving in these traditional accounts is probably the better bet.
See if your employer has, if you work at a law firm, maybe there's a simple IRA or maybe a 401k plan that they have that you can partake in, if not just an IRA account or even a taxable investment account, probably a better place to start. You're in your thirties, you're making good money. Just get in that habit of saving money. Don't get wrapped into these really expensive life insurance policies early on.
Jon: Which reminded me, we've got a blog post we've got on another site, Minsky's site, pay off student loan or Invest. We'll make sure to include that in the show notes also.
Taylor Schulte: Great. Alright. Great question, Nick. Thank you very much. Next question is from Adam. Adam is up in La Jolla. Adam says, first thank you for the podcast episode you did on traditional retirement accounts versus Roth.
I've never been able to figure out the benefits of each and which one is right for me. And you guys were a huge help. Awesome. There's another type of account I can't quite figure out, and maybe you can help. I'm a scientist at a local biotech firm, and my company offers an HSA.
Okay, we just touched on this. An HSA is a health savings account. I've never taken advantage of it, mostly because I don't quite understand exactly what it is and how to use it properly. What do you think of these? Are they beneficial?
Jon: Yeah. As we mentioned earlier, HSAs are absolutely magical. They are an investment that gets the best tax treatment of any investment account out there. Quadruple tax advantage, money goes in, you get a tax break, money comes out for qualified medical expenses, tax-free money grows in it, tax-deferred, there's no taxes on the growth.
And then lastly, as I touched on earlier, if you use your employer's HHSA, the one they provide you and mining goes into it from paycheck deductions, then you're not paying payroll taxes. And for a family that's 500 plus bucks on tax savings. Now, that's why HSAs are so fantastic.
Let's talk about your question. How do I use it? Well put the max amount of money in there, and when you have a medical expense, don't take money out of the account. Instead, I want you to save the receipt, put it in Dropbox or Google Drive or hard copy in your filing cabinet somewhere, hold onto it.
And then after the money in there is compounded for a decade or two, now you have your receipt. You can actually take out money tax-free, but I want you to pay for metal expenses if you can, out of pocket with cash and just let that HSA account do its thing and let your money grow for you.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah. So the biggest mistake we see people make is they take part in this HSA plan. They put money into the HSA, but then they use the money in the HSA for their medical expenses. And the best use of the HSA is actually to put money in, invest that money into low cost funds, and then don't touch it.
Don't touch it for as long as possible. And maybe you're not diligent about saving receipts. Maybe you didn't save all your receipts. That's okay. When you're in retirement, you're probably going to have medical expenses and you can use that money in your HSA.
That's grown for a long period of time for medical expenses in retirement. So long story short, use the HSA as a savings tool, not a spending tool.
Jon: Absolutely. And I think part of the reason why people take money out of their HSA is probably because it's relatively newer to the senior, or at least less well-known compared to some of the other accounts out there like the FSA or the HRA, right?
The flexible spending account, the health reimbursement account, and those accounts have a use it or lose it provision, right? Money goes in, you have to use it on medical stuff. If it doesn't, then you lose it. But with the HSA, the money can grow there forever. So there's no user to lose it. You want to leave the money in there so it can grow.
Taylor Schulte: Alright, great question, Adam. Appreciate that. Our next question comes from Catherine. Catherine is in Rancho Bernardo. Catherine says, A friend of mine said he has been making a lot of money by investing in Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah. Maybe not as of late, but well now shorting it. Yeah, now he's short. Yeah, he timed it perfectly.
Okay. So her friend made a lot of money investing in Bitcoin. I've read some articles online and I don't quite understand what it is, but it seems like everyone thinks it will be something big in the future. Is investing in Bitcoin a smart idea? Do you think it is a good investment?
Jon: No, I don't. Next question.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, Bitcoin has grabbed a lot of the headlines lately, actually. I mean, Bitcoin took a huge fall recently, and you don't really see many articles on it these days. But last year we actually wrote, yeah, last year, 2017, we wrote an article on Bitcoin. Actually, Jon authored the article and it was published on kiplinger.com.
Kiplinger is a big personal finance site, and the article ended up being the most-read column on Kiplinger in 2017. So that's how much interest there is in this topic. So we're not surprised that people are hearing about it.
Jon: I’d be curious what sort of traffic the article is getting right now.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, it's probably completely died, but let's help her out a little bit. Why isn't investing in Bitcoin a smart idea?
Jon: Well, it's just something that we would consider speculative. It's something that's very, very risky. There's no track record. It's very volatile. It's just not the thing that you would put your money in for long-term growth, and then retire off of. Now, that's not to say you shouldn't put any money into it.
Now you can, but just think of it as money that you'd be happy to lose, right? This is your weekend in Vegas money. We tell clients that if they have an itch, if they want to invest in something fun or sexy or exciting like Bitcoin or marijuana stocks, or, gosh, I don't know, what's all the new rage nowadays?
Taylor Schulte: That's probably it. Now it's Ethereum.
Jon: Okay. Ethereum, yeah. Or any crypto. Just put as much money in as you can stand to lose. And maybe some people are really, really aggressive. We tell them the most you can stand to lose is no more than 5% of what you have to invest. And then if you lose that amount, then that's all you get. And if you do great with it, great.
Taylor Schulte: That's great too. Yeah, I mean, maybe you're not comfortable losing 5% of your investible assets. Myself, I wanted to go through the process and buy some Bitcoin just to learn and see what it was all about.
And I asked myself that very question, how much am I willing to lose here if Bitcoin crashes and goes to zero? And for me, it wasn't any more than a couple hundred dollars, and that certainly doesn't represent 5% of my investible assets. So for me, I am just not comfortable risking that much money on something.
Now, you could put some money into Bitcoin, Catherine, and it could do very well, and you could make some money, but it really is a coin toss, and it's such a new development. The track record is so short. I mean, even 10 years is a short time period. Absolutely. When we talk about investing in stocks and bonds, we're referencing academic research that goes back a hundred years, sometimes even further.
So for something this new, it is just impossible to draw a conclusion and say, yeah, Bitcoin's a great investment. But if you just have that itch, if you just want to learn, you want to be a part of the craze, maybe you open up this cowboy account and put a few bucks in there, but just go into it knowing that you could lose that money.
Jon: And of course, we have a blog post about this too, so we'll link that in the show notes.
Taylor Schulte: Lots of blog posts. Alright, Catherine, thank you for the question. Hopefully that helps. Yes, reference the show notes and we'll have some resources in there for you to continue reading on the subject.
Alright, our next question comes from Danielle. Danielle says, my husband and I have settled into our careers. We've paid off all of our debt. Great, and now we have a healthy six-figure income. We are looking to start a family soon and we want to buy a house, but real estate seems really expensive right now.
My husband believes there's nothing wrong with renting, but I was always told that buying real estate is a smart financial move. What do you think about the real estate market and is renting a bad idea?
Jon: I feel like you're so much better poised to answer this than I am.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, I don't know. I'm probably really biased. I've had some bad experiences in the real estate market. Maybe I'll answer the last question first, which was, is renting a bad idea? And my short answer is no. I think, yeah, it has been kind of ingrained into us that buying a home is the American dream and it's just what you're supposed to do.
You save money, you buy a home, you have kids and et cetera, but renting is not a bad idea at all. Renting provides flexibility. Maybe you want to try out some different neighborhoods first before you settle somewhere.
Maybe you have a job that's going to take you to a different city or a different state, and buying a home is expensive. You've got taxes. You've got interest on your loan, you've got mortgage origination fees, you've got realtor fees. It can be upwards of 6% every time you buy or sell.
Not many people really track the cost of home ownership. They say something like, oh, I bought this house for $500,000 and now it's worth a million dollars. But there's a lot of money that was spent in there during that time period. They own the home that they just don't account for.
So don't discount renting. I think renting's a great option. I think buying a home or when you should really get serious about thinking about buying is when you want stability in your life. Maybe you're starting a family or maybe you just love a certain neighborhood or you want to be near a certain thing, or you want to be near family or a certain school system. You just need that stability in your life. I think that's a time to really start thinking about buying. But I guess I'll end with this and say buying a home should have nothing to do with where the current market is.
Yes, real estate is expensive, especially here in San Diego. It's been going up for a long time now, but that doesn't mean that real estate can't keep going up. So maybe that million dollar home that you're looking at today, yeah, it feels really expensive, but that home could be $2 million five years from now. And then you're really kicking yourself.
So I say take the price out of it. We just don't know where real estate's going to go in the future. We're not going to pretend to know, but start to think more about, actually, I was playing golf the other day and a friend of mine said, Hey, I have a question for you. Should I buy a home? What do you think about buying a home? And my response was, why are you buying the home?
And he didn't quite have an answer for that, and that's totally okay, but that's the kind of question you should ask yourself. You and your husband sit down with a glass of wine and say, let's write down all the reasons why we're thinking of buying a home and start to work at it. From there, we just don't know where the market's going to go.
Jon: I love that. Why are you buying a home? That's an amazing, amazing point. Yeah. It goes back to buying a home, especially in SoCal. It's a lifestyle choice. It's certainly not an investment. It's you want a house, you want a yard space for your dog or for your 10 or 12 kids that you're going to have.
It's not necessarily a great opportunity to necessarily grow wealth. There's certainly a lot of other strategies out there. So I know when a lot of people ask about should I buy a home? They think of it as an investment. It's not necessarily the great investment.
If you're thinking about buying versus renting, since our callers from SoCal, if you look at what rent goes for in SoCal and what home prices are, it's actually a better deal to rent in this part of the country relative to Indiana, for example.
Just because relative to what a property costs buy out there, I mean, there are literally houses out there that cost $25,000. I'm not kidding. Look it up. They exist and then rent is going to be proportionally higher given how much that house is worth. So you're actually getting a deal when you rent and so Cal, just the way the markets are structured. I totally want to echo your point on flexibility.
You're living in one place and your office moves. Now, your commutes change. My wife and I we're going to experience that shortly. Now, fortunately, our offices are moving closer to where we live, but if it was the opposite, we'd have to say, hey, we have this house, we're locked into a 30-year at a great rate, a great 30-year mortgage. Do we want to move or not?
Now, if we were renting, we wouldn't have to think about it with that, which is great. What's the next place we're going to rent?
Taylor Schulte: I think one of the biggest pushbacks we hear on this kind of buy versus rent thing as well, I get a tax deduction on my mortgage. If I buy a house, I get a tax deduction. And I mean, that's a whole another rabbit hole. We don't need to go down right now, but one of the things that I think about when I hear that, we talked about this in our traditional verse, Roth 401k episode a couple episodes ago.
You get this tax deduction, but what do most people do with that tax break? It just disappears really. It's not like they take that tax deduction and then put it in a savings account and invest it wisely and use that money for education or retirement. It just kind of disappears. It feels good to know that they got a tax break. No one really knows where that money went.
Jon: And it's not really the best logic to, I'm going to spend this money. I've got a tax break. I'm like, okay, so you spent a thousand dollars, you're in the 22% tax bracket. You spent a thousand dollars and now you've got $220 off your taxes, so you lost $780. Does that make sense? Not the best strategy for building wealth I’d say.
Taylor Schulte: Again, you have to factor in the cost of home ownership. Sure, you might get a tax deduction, that's awesome, but there are extra costs that are involved with owning a home versus renting.
The last thing I wanted to echo your point about real estate as an investment, A lot of people view Southern California real estate as it only goes up, I'll definitely make money. I hear that all the time nationally, and we'll link to this article. I'm not making this up nationally. Real estate as an investment has barely, I'm talking residential real estate has barely kept up with cash in the bank. It really hasn't performed all that well.
If you want to invest in real estate, I would say one of two things. One, become an expert in buying houses, remodeling and flipping. There are certainly people out there that know how to work that market and make money doing that. It's a business for them.
Or two, you can consider a publicly traded real estate investment trust mutual fund. Just make sure it's low cost, also known as a REIT fund. That's an easy, cheap way to get access to the real estate market. Absolutely. But Danielle, to just answer your question, I would just ask yourself the question, why are we buying this home and take the cost of the home out of the picture, try to figure out where the market's going to go.
Just have a real conversation about what are your goals? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Where do you want to be in 20 years? Where are we buying this home? And just start to have that conversation with your husband and work at it from there. But there's nothing wrong with renting. There's nothing wrong with buying. There should just be a reason for it, and it should be part of your financial plan.
All right. Our last question comes from Tom. Tom is up in Carlsbad, and Tom said, I'm a working professional in my forties. I'm married. I have two kids and we own our home in Carlsbad. My insurance agent recently called me and suggested that I purchase disability insurance.
Awesome. We love this topic. I already have disability insurance through my employer, but she said, I'm still underinsured. I'm a little hesitant about buying more insurance and not sure if I'm getting honest advice. I would value your feedback if you have any.
Jon: Sure. Great question. Without looking at his policy, I don't know the answer. It is possible that he is underinsured. Most policies that we look at, you're going to be underinsured. Now, it's pretty great that your employer does offer a LTD policy, but they're usually not that great. The benefits don't last very long. They don't cover a big percentage of your salary.
Now, of course, there are exceptions. If you're an executive, usually executive plans are pretty good, but in order to figure out if he really is underinsured, I'd say go to an independent third party that isn't compensated by you buying a policy or not. That way you can actually get a real honest opinion on if you need more coverage.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, disability insurance is really, really important. It's also really expensive, so gear up before you start getting these quotes. But disability insurance is one of the biggest holes that we see in financial plans. Absolutely. People have a really hard time pulling the trigger on it.
Or like Jon is saying, people think because they have a policy through their employer that they're properly covered, and most employer-provided disability insurance just isn't enough. So it's a tough one. Again, because it's so important, it tends to be a little more expensive than people are comfortable with, but it's one of those things that you really, really need to find a way to get.
And Jonny, you've got some good analogies with disability insurance. Maybe you can explain why it's so important for a young working professional, especially someone in their forties and especially someone who's married with kids and owns a home.
Jon: Yeah, so Tom pop quiz, what is the most valuable thing that you own? Maybe you're going to say it's your house. Well, you'd be wrong if you say it's your 401k balance, you're probably also wrong. The most valuable thing that you own is yourself and the ability to work and all that money you're going to make over the next 10, 20, 30 years. Right?
It's the future income that you're going to generate through working. So because that's the most valuable thing that you have, it makes sense that we want to protect it. Now, you probably have an insurance policy on your home. You're protecting that, and that's nowhere near as valuable as the amount of money you're going to make over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
Now, especially if you're the sole breadwinner, if your wife is depending upon you for income, if your two kids are depending upon you for income, we need to replace that income in the event that you can't work for the next, again, 10, 20, 30 years, right? Maybe you're going to work one day and someone crashes into you and being a computer programmer, you can't type anymore. You need income to replace what you can no longer do.
Taylor Schulte: Yeah, no, great summary. So yes, Tom, your insurance agent is probably onto something here. Disability insurance is definitely something for you to look into, get a couple other opinions, get a couple other quotes. There are some unbiased people out there that can review the policy for you or provide some quotes. So definitely take a look at it and find a way to inject that into your financial plan.
Jon: And of course, we have a blog post on it, so we'll link in the show notes.
Taylor Schulte: Those are some really good questions. It's really fun stuff to dive into. We hope you like the format today. A little bit different. We just got some really good questions and thought we'd read them out loud and go through them.
So depending on the feedback we get from this episode, maybe we'll do this again. Maybe we'll sprinkle in a couple questions in each episode. I'm not sure. But if there's anything on your mind, anything keeping you up at night, you read an article, your neighbor told you something, we want to hear about it.
This stuff is really interesting to us. It makes us think. Yeah, we really enjoy it. So shoot us an email podcast at stay wealthy san diego.com and thank you very much for your support and for listening. We're really having a lot of fun here, and we look forward to talking with you in a couple weeks.
Jon: Absolutely. Keep those great questions coming. Guys. We want to hear from you.
Episode Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. This podcast is not engaged in rendering legal, financial, or other professional services.