Do It Yourself. No one loves your money as much as you love your money.

You've got a lot of homework to do. The good news is you are retired and have time to do it. Knowledge is power. Trust no one. Learn from everyone.
YouTube.com will give you access to a lot of junk and some real gems. You should be able to tell the difference. Search some of the following terms on the internet and at YouTube.com.

Homework assignment: Research the following terms, bucket retirement strategy, index mutual fund, ETF, RMD, IRMAA, Roth conversion, widow's tax trap, fiduciary and eldercare attorney.
If you achieve a full understanding of these terms you will be well ahead of the average retiree. Also, it will spur you to investigate other retirement issues. You will learn a lot along the way.

One guy that I like is a guy at YouTube.com Heritage Wealth Planning. Warning, you will have to get past some of his political rants, he has some very valuable retirement planning content. He also does fee only planning and is a fiduciary. He used to work at USAA doing planning. He wrote a book that you can get at Amazon.com called the Tax Bomb in Your Retirement. It's worth reading. Once you get the concept, you are off to the races.

Like I said, knowledge is power. Even the knowledgeable had to learn it somewhere.

Jean Ann Dorrell is the woman for you! Helping seniors use and enjoy their retirement mony while paying less taxes is almost her mission statement.
Search for her facebook page by typing "Senior Financial Security" in the search bar or go to: Jean Ann Dorrell - Certified Estate Planner, Estate & Retirement Advisor, Owner & Founder of Senior Financial Security, Inc.

I hope you know that the changes coming in 2022 that make every bank transaction you make worth over $10,000 in total annually will be under scrutiny by the IRS/Federal government. They had wanted it to be a $600 threshold but got a lot of push back, so they are "considering" changing it to $10,000.

Yes, this includes all savings and investments. The only earnings that are exempt are social security and wages (but no one knows how they will determine what are "wages"). If I were you I'd spend my money on home improvements or purchase assets like real estate, gold, jewels, art etc. They might eventually come after those, too, but for now they are looking at banking transactions (and cryptocurrency too, they're not let off the hook either).

On a piece of paper write down the left side your expense categories: Mortgage, Food, Amenities Fee , Entertainment, Car, Property Tax, Income Tax, Donations, etc.

Then make four columns one for each quarter of the year and enter the amounts known from the prior year or estimated. Add up the totals for each quarter. This is the amount of money you need for that quarter.

Then on another page list your income sources including RMD down the left side for each quarter and compute the totals. If the income is less than expenses you will need to withdraw from savings. Plan one quarter ahead for withdrawals.

Withdraw from taxable accounts first starting with the shortest maturity (money markets) then non-taxable accounts. A good portfolio would be 30% in an S&P Index fund, 50% in CDs and 20% in money market accounts.

AARP has some free software and pamphlets on budgeting. Vanguard also has some planning tools. But I would not trust any person to have control of our money post Madoff.

jewelry is a bad investment
 

Don't think that jewelry is a good investment. We settled my step mother's estate a few years ago and she had MANY rings and necklaces with diamonds and other precious stones. We had them all appraised by a jeweler. After the family bought what we wanted we took the rest to the jeweler. They wanted to pluck out all of the sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, tanzanite and rubies and give us the value of the weight of the gold only. Unless you have major stones of over a carat or more they are not interested and even those do not hold as much value as you might wish. I found receipts for many of the rings and it was shocking and sad to have them melted down but we did not want to pay the estate for more than we really wanted so that is what happened.

Thanks for the jewelry update as I have not sold any jewelry in awhile. I'm surprised at the attitude as emeralds are very costly and coveted as well as other precious stones. My mother had a large, yellow Topaz ring and it was worth a lot because they are hard to come by nowadays as everyone sells the less expensive citrine or even yellow zircon, and passes it off as Topaz. I was just making a point about putting your money in assets rather than leaving it in the bank to get scrutinized by the IRS.

usually your kids are experts on spending.

Whatever you do, make sure your advisor has a fiduciary role, which means they are responsible to you and not their company. You should Google this term to understand what it means better. There are three people to talk to a CPA, a tax lawyer, and of course an investment advisor that is related to a stock brokerage company and definitely not an insurance broker . Well many people say you can do it yourself, and of course you should educate yourself as best you can, there are many intricacies of tax laws to concern yourself with that you may not know or learn about in Reading.

Is everyone May understand your situation is totally different than anyone else's and only you can decide best for yourself. I will say that retirement is not as expensive as you are thinking especially if you're not one to take vacations and spend on new cars every year. You can certainly get by very reasonably even in The villages with the uprising housing costs. Good luck and enjoy your retirement

PARADY Financial
 

We highly recommend you sit down with PARADY Financial, across from Colony shopping center @ no cost or pressure to you! We feel this is 1 of another blessings in moving to The Villages! They offer classes & learning sessions to make sure you understand what you are doing & can make the right decisions before investing! Sometimes this takes weeks or months for some people to decide as you question what they offer is too good to be true! There are no fees ever & they immediately saved me $3000/yr as Edward Jones was charging me in fees, unknown to me as I didn’t see the hidden fees! Anyhow, they review what you have & want in your future, & to make it last till approximate death. Everyone is extremely helpful, friendly, and really get to know u personally……as Greg says we become family! They have their own tax services, accountants, Greg, as well as lawyers who can help & meet with you! PARADY was a big part of our social life as well……….till Covid hit! Dinners, entertainment, golf outings, & a short film presentation were offered twice a month for clients to bring friends to see if they might like to meet with their consultants for more info. PARADY supports so many local organizations like Veterans, Cancer, Alzheimer's, Food pantry, School supplies, Women shelters, After school programs, etc, by having functions for the clients where we can gather for fun, food, drinks, entertainment & make a donation to these organizations, which are tax write offs! You owe it to your future to make an appt as you have nothing to lose and should you join, you will have peace of mind knowing your money is safe and future secure! We even received a several thousand dollars bonus for signing up……they paid us! Tell them Jan and Suchy sent you! Can’t say enough about this business and how they have improved our lives!

I'm working on spending my kids inheritance.

Wow!

- All kinds of free dinners and
outings.
- Support lots of local
charities.
- "... they paid us!"

And "no fees ever".

SMH

:bigbow:

Fiduciary: A Salesperson who Promises Not to Steal Your Moneyhh
 

Everyone in the Financial Community these days is a fiduciary. It has become a meaningless term. Sure, it's necessary condition - but far from sufficient. CFPs are not far behind.

Good financial planning is spending your last dime with your last breath.

Because you have been handling your own investment decisions, it could be that it will not be easy for you to turn over those decisions to someone else. And it does not sound like you want to do that anyway. I understand. (I speak from experience.)

As I am sure you well know, the bull market has been running since 2009, with a short dip in 2020. Therefore, any advisor should be able to claim terrific returns over time. But if you have been in the market for decades — which you probably have — you know that no matter that the famous philosopher Mick Jagger says, “Time Is On My Side” — well, at this point in life -- it most certainly is not -- so if you have been trusting your own investment decisions for a long time, you might want to continue doing just that — with a backup plan, just in case.

BUT, for the advice you need on what to take, from where, and when to do it, I would suggest a good CPA, perhaps one who is also approaching retirement.

That is what we did. He advised spending taxable money first and letting tax-deferred accounts continue to grow. We also went ahead and took SS earlier rather than later — and that also protected the tax-deferred accounts. (*We have never regretted that decision but that does not mean others should do the same thing. The SS decision has to be completely individual.)

Eventually though, the time comes to pay the piper with the RMD. If the retirement accounts have grown enough to throw Medicare costs over the threshold into IRMAA, then you need to do more math to see what it’s worth to cross that threshold. It could be that it is worth it to understand what using a QCD for part of your RMD can do to keep your Medicare premium down.

IRMAA can sneak up on you. As I understand it (and I am not an accountant) a really aggravating thing about IRMAA is that if you cross that AGI threshold by even a few dollars, IRMAA shows up and takes a big gulp. It is not like tax brackets.

The IRMAA threshold is high and not a lot of retirees will be concerned about it, but with more than a decade’s growth of the market, people might find themselves sitting on a big RMD — year after year. For some, there might be no way around IRMAA, but I include it here because long-time, successful investors, in particular, need to be aware.

After retirement but before the RMD, we put our employee retirement accounts into IRAs. We also began doing conversions to Roth when the tax bracket made it sensible to work those in. There are times when it can make sense to go ahead and take a tax hit before you have to.

I had a wonderful accountant through those decision-making years, but he is no longer with us. I miss him. He used to talk about “trying to free your money from its prison” when we commiserated about the eventual tax hits on retirement accounts and how to best navigate those.

After all these paragraphs I just wrote — (sigh) — I should have just said sit down with a CPA who is about your age. (The reason I say the age thing is because our last two CPAs were in the same boat as us, but now a whippersnapper has taken over the business and I have had to teach him a couple of things — like how the methods of doing a QCD can vary depending on where the accounts are held.)

Boomer