Today, on the Market Call Show, we're discussing the importance of authenticity in financial planning.
Using a great Rush analogy, we look at how sequencing returns impacts the longevity of your portfolio , and we talk about strategies to navigate varied markets.
Most of us are concerned with peace of mind in retirement, and having enough to do everything we want to do, so taking a personalized approach to planning that considers both flexibility and fixed income is key to achieving the retirement we want.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
- In this episode, we explore how to craft a lasting retirement plan, with insights from Louis Llanes, Senior Vice President at Farther Wealth Management.
- We discuss the impact of the sequence of returns on the longevity of retirement funds and share strategies to manage varying market conditions effectively.
- Understanding one's financial personality is emphasized, with references to Carl Jung and Tom Basso, to help make more informed and personalized investment decisions.
- We examine the trade-offs between probability-based investing and a safety-first approach, as well as the balance between flexibility and a fixed income.
- Essential retirement strategies, including optimizing withdrawal rates, portfolio diversification, and long-term care planning, are covered in detail.
- The episode introduces the concept of bucketing strategies, alternative investments, and the importance of tax management in securing one's financial future.
- We delve into the importance of asset allocation and how different asset classes perform under various economic conditions, emphasizing the need for diversification.
- Strategies for managing healthcare costs and avoiding common financial surprises are discussed to help ensure peace of mind in retirement.
- Listeners are encouraged to join upcoming monthly webinars for more in-depth discussions on retirement planning topics.
- The episode concludes with gratitude to Tom Basso for his valuable insights and mentorship, and an invitation to tune in to future episodes for expert advice on retirement planning.
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Louis: So good, I'm glad we're here. Thank you for coming. Really, the webinar thing was really brought to my attention by really request, because I get a lot of questions about preparing your portfolio for retirement and I wanted to make available what the most common problems that I've been running across with individual investors and some of the pitfalls that they've run into and, some ways, provide some resources for you for ways for you to kind of overcome some of those challenges and not have those roadblocks initially at all as you're preparing for retirement. So that's really the purpose of this webinar.
For those of you who may not know much about me, I'm Luis Llanos. I'm a Senior Vice President, wealth Management for Farther Wealth Management, so my company, wealth and Investments, recently merged with Farther, and so I'm now a shareholder of Farther and I'm the investment management committee. We managed just under $3 billion right now, and we have a wide variety of different types of clients. I'm a charter financial analyst charter smart market condition been managing money for over 25 years Gosh, it's actually close to 30 years now and so that's really a little bit about me. So I really want to dive in.
Since we're running late on time, so let me share my screen and we can go from there. Sure, let's see. All right, you should be able to see my presentation. Can you see my presentation? Anybody Not hearing from anybody? Yes, you can see my presentation. Okay, perfect, all right.
So let me just start off with a little bit of a kind of a question for you or a little story. So I was thinking about what is the biggest thing that I guess determines people's success when they are preparing for retirement and they actually do retire and they start living off their portfolio. And it got me thinking about just a common success factor that most people have, and I thought about some people that I have followed. On the right there that's a band called Rush, one of my favorite bands. They started out, you know, trying to do what all the producers told them they should do. They, you know, the producers said they should try to sound like Led Zeppelin or they should do certain things and be make your song short. And they just decided that you know, that wasn't us. And they did their own thing and they had a. They had an initial flop, trying to do what everybody else told them to do, and then they just said look, we're just going to be who we are. They made an album called 2112 and they exploded because they knew who they were and they, they were authentic as to who they are, and, of course, you know some of these other people and since we don't have a lot of time.
I won't go into all the stories, but each one of these famous people. One of the things that they determined was I'm going to be myself, I'm going to understand myself and I'm going to. I know I'm going to be making trade offs, like there's no perfect answer, but if I'm true to myself, I can live with the trade-offs and I can have a successful outcome, and that's really the you know what I wanted to talk about, because that is about the same situation that people have with retirement planning or investing in general. There's always a trade-off, trade-off between one ideal objective that you may have off, between one ideal objective that you may have and then something else may, you know, be affected because of that. You know, carl Jung said that he who looks outside dreams, but he who looks inside awakens, and that's very, very true. So I know Tom Basso is on this call and I've learned from him as a successful investor that he talks a lot about.
Hey, I need to be understanding what my situation is and I need to do what's right for me. What is right for me may not necessarily be what's right for somebody else, and every time you do that, there's going to be a trade-off, and the biggest trade-off when it comes to preparing your portfolio for retirement tends to be this desire for certainty. In other words, I want to know exactly what my income is going to be, what my return is going to be versus what my lifetime total retirement income could be and my terminating estate wealth. So the more certainty you have you know what you're going to get the less return you're going to make and therefore you're probably going to have less lifetime income and you'll probably pass on less wealth to your heirs. So that's just one example of the types of trade-offs that you have.
So I want to talk first about understanding yourself, because everything goes from goes from there. It starts with that, and I'm going to just talk about some a series of trade-offs that everybody faces when they're doing their portfolio for retirement. And then I'm going to stop for questions, and you can, you can answer. You know I can hopefully answer some of your questions, and then we'll move on to the next topic. Okay, the first one is probability-based versus safety first. So probability-based means that I'm investing in a way and taking my income from a portfolio that's diversified across a lot of different investments stocks, bonds, real estate, alternatives knowing that I'm going to have some ups and downs in that portfolio, but I'm okay doing that and my I know my return is more variable, but I'm likely to have a higher rate of return over the long run. On the other end of the spectrum is the safety first, which is I want to know contractually what I'm going to have as an income level.
That would be like pensions, annuities, lifetime income protection, holding government bonds to maturity. Basically, you are not affected by capital gains fluctuations. So those are the extremes. Most people fall somewhere in between there. So that would be your first trade off. And then the next trade off has to do with your desire for optionality or having the ability to be flexible. Like, if you really value being flexible, you want to have the ability to make changes for favorable economic conditions or any change in your situation. Then that would be one type of mindset and I tend to be more of an optionality mindset person. Other people are not that way. They like more of a commitment, a desire for some dedicated source of income. There you're really looking for some kind of a specified long-term solution and a lot of people feel more satisfaction with that because there's less decision-making, there's more you know, maybe their family members would have less burden as well, and you tend to kind of set it and forget it. Those are two extremes. So those two trade-offs that I mentioned, those tend to be the biggest, most important trade-offs.
Now I'm going to talk about a couple more trade-offs that I want you to think about that may affect you. One would have to do with accumulation versus distribution, and I'm not talking about, I'm talking about during retirement. So some people they would opt out to have more stable of an income stream, knowing that they're going to have a lower rate of return and they're probably going to distribute less money to their heirs, so they're willing to change their standard of living for that predictability. The other would be somebody who says you know, I want potential variability, I'm okay with variability, and then I'm okay giving more to my heirs. So, as you can see, these are all related. Like, how important is it for you for that money to be for your benefit versus your heirs? And people are different. So this next trade-off has to do with with time. So some people they want to have some earmarked assets that are designed for perpetuity, meaning the rest of your life, and other people feel more comfortable having some kind of reserve, whether it be cash reserve or dedicated bond funding for a specific amount of time Some people prefer to have.
Some form of their mind is just designed that I want to have things in buckets. There are some mental problems with that way of thinking, but some people are just naturally wired Now with each one of these ways of thinking. There are some potential pitfalls to them, but it's important for you to know as a human being where you fit naturally in these types of way of thinking. So the other is front-loading versus back-loading. So if you're worried about longevity risk which is basically saying I'm a little bit afraid that I might outlive my money that's a big concern for many people Then you're probably going to have a different way of spending than somebody who's not so much worried about that. So if you have a low concern for longevity risk, then you're more inclined to front load spend in the early years. So you're early in retirement you're going to spend more and then maybe later you'll spend less. That's usually what people think, but we tend to spend more throughout retirement because of inflation. But that's another issue. The other is high concern over longevity risk. That means that you're going to spend less, you're probably going to want to conserve more so that you have more in later years.
So now what I want to do is bring this to something that's practical, that you can actually use and at the end, stick around, because at the end I'm going to give you a way that you could actually make an assessment for yourself to understand where you fit. Okay, so this what I did is I took those first two trade-offs and put them in a little matrix here and so if you're that investor who is a safety first investor, that you want that knowable income and you're okay with commitment, then that's kind of like an income protection type strategy. And on the other side, if you're kind of a probability investor and you want that high optionality, then you're more of a total return type of investor. If you look at this matrix here, I come about right here Mostly a total return investor and mostly optional. But I'm not super aggressive on it like some people are. But you have your own place that you will naturally set, and sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone to do what's right for you, to be a little bit out of your natural state, which which can be difficult at times, but it's important to do so.
The other two are a little bit less intuitive. If you are high optionality, meaning you want a lot of flexibility, but you also are a safety first person, then you're more of a time segmented investor, which would mean I'm going to put some buckets together, I'm going to maybe cash match a percentage of my portfolio bond laddering, or I might put an annuity for something. I'm going to bucket things out for my early years, et cetera, et cetera, and that's one way of going about it. That can be suboptimal as well, you know so that, but but it can fit your psychological needs and it's important to do that so that you don't like bail at the wrong time, which is worse than not getting your your, your own psychological profile down.
So the last category is one that is actually less common, a little bit harder to understand, but basically you want to have a lot of you're into the probability base. In other words, you believe that maybe the markets are going to go up over the longterm, so you want exposure to that, but you also want some. You know you're able to make a commitment. You're okay making a longterm commitment. So there, you'll probably want to make some kind of a contractual agreement where you are, or some type of a strategy where you're managing your risk on the downside, but in a contractual way, not like with stop losses and things like that, but in a contractual way, knowing that you're not going to have as much upside. So this is a smaller representation of the population, at least that I have run into but there is a certain percentage of the population that really values that. So the question is is what's your preferred strategy? Well, there's a, there's a test that you could take. It's called a RISA R-I-S-A is it is the name of it and I can help you guys and I'll show you how I can help you guys actually take one for free and that you can kind of know who you are right there, all right, so I'm going to dive into the investment management side more, who you are right there, all right. So I'm going to dive into the investment management side more.
So the biggest question a lot of people ask is how long will my money last? I think, and it doesn't matter how rich you are. I mean, I had a conversation with a client of ours that has $40 million in asset center management and he's wondering about how long his money is going to last. So it's a very interesting problem, but it's a very serious problem and I think one of the things that people forget and this is one of the things that I've noticed just with individual investors you might have a portfolio, say, you have a couple million dollars put away. You're like I don't know if that's enough. I don't know, should I retire now? Should I retire later?
One of the first things that you need to think about is the fact that the order of your returns matter when you have good years, bad years, et cetera, matters If you have bad years earlier in your retirement career. If you will, then your money won't last as long than if you have, you know, bad years later. So it's important to know that you could have the exact same return stream and simply shuffle the timing around of that return stream, and how long your money lasts will be affected by it. So there's ways that you can mitigate this problem and I'm going to talk a little bit about that, but I just want to do a quick illustration to show this. So let's say investor A and investor B both have the same return year by year in terms of not in the order of the sequence, but the actual returns that they have every year is the same. It's just different orders. So investor one he has a big decline early down 15% in the portfolio in those first two years and then the rest of the years. You can see he runs out of money a lot faster than investor B, who had that same 15% return loss. But it was later on and that makes a big difference into how long your money lasts, I should say so.
The next point on this has to do with your withdrawal rate. Let me just define what the withdrawal rate is. The withdrawal rate is the percentage of your portfolio that you're going to be spending from each year on average. So let's say, if you have a million dollars and you spend $50,000 of it, that's a 5% withdrawal rate from your portfolio, 50,000 divided by a million dollars. So the point on that is that if you have a lower withdrawal rate, naturally you have more resilience in your portfolio, because one of the problems with the sequence of return risk once you start taking money out of your portfolio. You have what's called reverse dollar cost averaging. The math is reversed. So volatility in the portfolio the more volatility you have in your portfolio, the less long your portfolio will last, even if you have the same average return. So you can have the same average return with less volatility and your money will last longer. So the key is lower your volatility overall or have some other strategy that you're dealing with so that you're not having to pull money out of your portfolio your total return portfolio, when your returns are not as strong as they, when you're going through a lower return period, which everybody has.
So what are the strategies to deal with this? Well, there's a bunch of different strategies that you can deal with. This is a little table you can't read. I did that on purpose just to make the point that there's a lot of ways that you could deal with it, and it really requires a detailed analysis of your specific situation, of what the appropriate strategy is, and it starts off with knowing yourself. So, but one strategy could be you could just simply have higher cash reserves and you rely on those higher cash reserves. Maybe you have two or three years worth of your expenses set aside in T-bills or short-term bond ladder for three years short-term bond ladder, something like that and then you just let your you try to maximize your return per unit of risk.
That's how I like to invest. I like to have, you know, some, a cushion, a buffer, if you will, and then really try to maximize my return per unit of risk. But not everybody feels comfortable with that. Some people want to just have some kind of a, some kind of annuity payment or set up something like that that they can deal with those earlier years. Or they may want to bucket, you know, set up a strategy where they have the knowable rate of return in the first five years of their retirement and then the rest of that portfolio is earmarked for total return. There's different ways that you could deal with that, but it's important to have a strategy and have a mechanism that you're going to use to deal with this risk. The simplest one is bigger cash buffer, dedicated funding in your earlier years. And then the second part of the strategy has all to do with how you construct your total return portfolio, which is your portfolio that you're trying to maximize your return per unit of risk. So hopefully that makes sense and I'm going to move in. I'm going to go through this next section here and then I'll stop for questions again.
So let's talk about how you put together your total return portfolio. It's really important that you have different environments really accounted for in your portfolio. In order to do that, there's really two main things that affect the capital markets. One would be the inflation rate and the other would be the growth pattern in the market. So this is a table that I got from Ray Dalio, who is a brilliant hedge fund manager. It's a variation of some stuff that he's put together, but when you look at scenarios and asset class returns, the best way to kind of overcome and have an all-weather portfolio which is a term that Tom Basso uses, that Ray Dalio uses it is a way of having different return streams that are non-correlated, and that's the best solution for that. You may have 10 to 15 different return streams that may not be asset classes, it could be just different return streams or strategies. So in order to do that, you have to understand why you're doing that and then also look at what types of assets do well in different environments.
So now, before I get into this table, I also want to make a caveat or point here that some people don't believe in prediction. They say let's just follow what the markets are saying. Whatever the markets are saying, they're right, we're going to follow that and that's a great heuristic on average, because predicting is very difficult. Other people say I'm going to be running non-diversified strategies and I'm going to be running them all the time, but I'm going to construct them in a way where they can deal with the environment, all these different types of environments, and there's less decision-making on the timing part of it. I'm just going to do as best as possible in each type of strategy, if that makes sense. So just to break this down, just give you some examples If you have low growth in the economy GDP growth is not doing very well but you have a lot of inflation, that's not a great scenario.
But if you're in that scenario low growth, high inflation then gold, commodities tips, real assets tend to do well and a lot of people avoid commodities. A lot of people avoid those types of assets, but they actually do really well during these periods of time or they can do well. So if you have high growth, for example, and low inflation, that's what we've experienced for a pretty good amount of time and people have gotten used to that. But the truth of the matter is we don't get that all the time and we need to prepare for any of these environments. But if you have high growth, low inflation, stocks are going to do well, real estate's going to do well, corporate bonds do well, private equity does well. There's, you know, lots of things.
Do well your traditional asset classes. Now, during these periods of time, this is when people get lulled into believing that that's the way it always is and that's when people get hurt. So twice in my career I can remember, and I think we're kind of in a period right now where everybody, when you start hearing everybody say it's better to just index, just buy the S&P 500 and you're going to be fine, that's usually a sign of some really rough times coming ahead. The last time I remember, during the dot-com bubble, we had the same environment. Everybody's like, hey, I'm just going to call Vanguard or whoever I'm going to call up and buy the index fund S&P 500. And then we had a massive decline in the market and people truthfully, people don't stick with that, and so it's important to understand that. But when we're thinking about diversification, I like to think of it in terms of a hierarchy.
You have asset classes that you need to be sure that they're non-correlated, and then you also have strategy or your approach that you're dealing with. You know what is it. Is it a value approach? Is it a momentum approach? Is it a breakout approach? Is it what is it? Is it a counter trend approach? The reason why that's important is because they tend to perform it. You can have the exact same asset class, but if you have a different approach, it will have a different return pattern. The other has to do with security selection. Is it bottom up, is it top down? What is the method that you're using and how you're constructing your securities within the asset classes? So you know you want to diversify all of those and you know we can get into we don't have time since we're running a little bit late but there's a lot of different asset classes you could be looking at.
One thing I would point out that is really a lot of people are not participating in which they might should be, would be all of the private asset classes, like private debt, private equity. Those strategies have a lower correlation and a lot of people are ignoring them and if you are an accredited investor, a qualified purchaser, they could be a good addition to your portfolio. So now getting into this diversification, there's like remember we talked about trade-offs. We've been talking about trade-offs this whole time. Here you have to come up with the trade-offs that you could live with.
But one of the things with about a diversified portfolio that really I've noticed over the years it's interesting is that people will always have a little bit of angst with a diversified portfolio. So, for example, in 2000, 2002, dot-com bubble blows up. Like I told you we were just talking about how everybody was feeling good just before this period and said you should buy the S&P 500. Those investors went down 40% in the following you know, following period. Right that, those two years, a diversified portfolio. If you were not you know, I'm just using a relatively passive diversified portfolio for illustration here they were down 15% and pretty much everybody says I lost money. The people who were indexing really lost a lot of money. Or if you were buying those growth stocks that everybody was in love with and you just held on to them and didn't have a risk management protocol, you really got hurt. And then that's you know. But you were a winner in the diversified portfolio there.
The next period I wanted to highlight was 2003 to 2007. S&p was up, strong up 82%. Diversification worked very well during that period of time. Diversified stock bond portfolio was up 87% during that time and it actually outperformed, and partially because bonds did very well and everything was just lockstep working well. And then we had the financial crisis and the stock market went down and everything went down. Diversification type strategies you know these are not hedged and they're not, you know, long short. This is just a long, lonely, diversified portfolio to show you, for example, and you know. Then you feel like, for example, and then you feel like, oh well, I lost money. Then we had a big, rip-roaring bull market.
I'd like to point out that in 2009, when most people should have been buying equities, nobody wanted to buy equities. That's typical of how things work and that's why having some part of your portfolio in a value-oriented strategy is really important, in my view, because that really does help in periods of time when there's a lot of excessive fear or when people are getting too overly optimistic about the market. Value keeps you more level-headed and will help you not get killed when those growth stocks, or whatever those stocks that are doing well, do collapse. Growth stocks, or whatever those stocks that are doing well, do collapse. So, but to make a point, there is you make, you made money, but this is the thing. This is probably the like the, the biggest devil of diversification. That hurts people, I think, when you make money but you don't make as much money.
So during this period of time, 09 to 2019, the S&P 500 was up 351%. Diversified portfolio was up only 220%. Right, and you're like I didn't make as much money. And then you're thinking, well, maybe I should be just putting more money in the S&P 500. Maybe I should be getting more aggressive with my strategy, and people get outsider their comfort zone and their risk profile and they don't recognize that and then they get hurt and that's exactly what happened in 2020. Then it's I don't, then I lost money.
So you have to be careful with your emotions and I'm going to bring up Tom Basso again. I'm glad he's on this call, because one of the things that Tom really has mentioned is like staying level-headed is really important and have you know. If you're feeling over exuberant, bring yourself down. If you're feeling like like you know, really in the down in the gutter, you need to bring yourself up and have discipline in your strategy, knowing that your strategy over the longterm works and being adaptive to what, what you need to be doing, being aware, but you know, just to bottom line this, during all of this period of time, if you had put all your money in the S&P 500, you made just about the same amount of money as a diversified portfolio, but you had a smoother ride and you could even smooth this out even more. I'm using this just with a traditional. I'm making this illustration just with a traditional stock bond diversified portfolio long only. So I guess my point here is that when you're thinking about preparing your retirement portfolio, remind yourself you have to have a way to remind yourself that diversification always has a little bit of angst to it, but it's important because you need to keep your volatility down so that you could have a good outcome over the long run.
All right, I'm going to talk a little bit about alternatives. I really touched on this already, but you know private equity. You know I would consider some of the stuff that Tom Basso does to be alternative type strategies trend following long short stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies that would be one type of alternative, asset class private debt and there's other types of hedge funds, those non correlated assets. When you put them together in a portfolio, really can help your, your diversification and your give you. You're not really sacrificing return, but you're definitely lowering your risk. So that's, that's where that's that sits and there's. You know a lot of people will tell you like 90% of your variation in your portfolio is due to your overall asset allocation and your strategy. That's generally two. It doesn't tell you what your direction is going to be, whether it's up or down, but your asset allocation is going to determine to a high degree as to how much variability you're going to have in your portfolio. So it's important to get that metric right for you so that you're comfortable with your overall volatility of your portfolio.
Okay, so one of the biggest things that is an issue in the real world is taxes. I would say and I've kind of put this presentation in the order of importance in my mind First you want to make sure you understand yourself and what type of strategy you tend towards. Then you want to go into and you want to make sure that you have the right diversification for your total return portfolio, whatever type of portfolio you are going to fall into, and then you're going to want to make sure that you're doing this in a way with taxes right. You want to make sure your taxes are not going to be killing you alive and it's it's such a big part of it.
In the real world, what we see is people get eaten alive by taxes, especially if they followed what certified financial planners had been telling them to do for years and years. You know, I remember when I first got in this business, you know the last 30 years or so, that the kind of the common thought was max out your 401k plan, max out all your tax deferred money. You know, do certain things and then you get this big bucket of qualified money which is you know that every dollar you pull out of that is going to be taxed when you take that income. And they don't have enough money in other types of things, and a lot of people wind up retiring in that scenario. And then there's a big problem with taxes after that. And then you find out that that money does not last as long, so your withdrawal rate has to increase if your taxes are going to be higher. So it's important and there's a lot of different things you could do for taxes, but it's important to have a tax management strategy.
So when you're preparing for retirement so I'm talking about getting ready to do it you know it's good to say, okay, what steps do I need to make right now so that I'm going to be in an ideal situation, or as ideal as possible, so that taxes are not going to hurt so bad? But if you look at third party research, it looks like about 2% of people's return is taken out by taxes. Well, a lot of people think, well, 2% is not that big of a deal. But when you compound that over 30 years it is a big deal. And especially if you have your withdrawal rate increases because of taxes, then you have that sequence of returns problem which actually exacerbates that. So, because you don't invest in a straight line unless you buy CDs or T-bills. So that's important to know. So Maybe you need to do some Roth conversions. Maybe you need to put more money away, not in your 401ks and IRAs before you retire. Maybe you should be putting money away in other tax managed strategies where there's replacement strategies, tax lost, harvard sting and things like that that you're doing.
So there's a trade-off a lot of times between maximizing your total return on a nominal basis, not considering taxes, versus after-tax. So, like, for example, some of the stuff that Tom is talking about sometimes could be, you might actually have a suboptimal after-tax rate of return. If it's in a taxable account, you might have to adjust that. But if you're taking losses judiciously, sometimes it can work itself out, because you're letting your winners run, you hold them longer and then you're taking more shorter-term losses and then they kind of work themselves out. But that's not always the case. So maximizing after-tax rate of return is an art, and the more money you have, the more moving parts there are.
If you have, for example, stock that you got from your company, that could be a big determinant of what you should do. There's a lot of different types of stock you could get. You can get incentive options. You could get an NSO, non-qualified stock or restricted stock units. All of these have different tax rules and there's different. You know there's alternative minimum tax. So there's these types of things need to be looked at the more complex your situation is, because the goal is to maximize your after-tax return per unit of risk and to also to have you in a situation where your investment style is right for you. So right now I'm kind of focusing just on the total return portion of your portfolio. So it's a little bit complicated, but I wanted to bring this up because it is such an important part of your situation.
Now I'm going to go into an area that nobody really likes to talk about, but I really want to talk about. That's healthcare costs. Because I wrote an article, because I was talking to a friend of mine and he was saying you know, he's an author, a very successful author, and he said you know, I want you to just think about all the common things that your clients have been experiencing that were surprises or things that they could have avoided, and what are the most common. And so I wrote a white paper called the 10 Most Common Avoidable Surprises that Derail Executives Planning for Retirement. They could have fixed this, but they didn't. They were surprised by it and I would say the number one thing would be the healthcare Healthcare.
People are surprised with how much they're going to need for healthcare. So I'm just going to kind of get away from the investments for a minute and talk a little bit about healthcare, because that's going to determine how much money you're really going to need and what kind of withdrawal rate you can take. So most people know you have Medicare and you have Medicaid. So Medicare covers people who are 65 years or older. Generally, if you've worked for 10 years you're covered. And what does it cover? It covers hospital insurance, medical insurance. You could buy supplemental insurance that will cover prescriptions, et cetera. So that cost is going to be there. So it should be explicit in your planning, knowing that it's going to be there, and I'm going to talk about what some of the average costs have been. Then you have Medicaid. Medicaid is really an income-based strategy Basically, if you are doing really well, if you're considered quote-unquote wealthy, generally, medicaid is not going to be available to you. So it's really for people in financial need for the most part, and it's also related to the state-by-state criteria. So depending on what state you're in, you're going to have different rules.
So we don't have time to go into all the intricacies of this, but part of your planning should be what is my health care situation going to be and what does that mean for my withdrawal rate? So when you're establishing your strategy, having that in place. So let's just talk about what are the costs these days? So Fidelity has a study they do every year where they go and they call it the retiree health care cost estimate study. They just did one, august 8th of this year, and what they do is they try to estimate what the average person is likely to spend when they retire at age 65 in today's dollars. And right now, per person, a 65-year-old will spend $165,000 just on ancillary healthcare costs in today's dollars. So it goes up with inflation. And it's important to note that that's for one person. So if you're a married couple, that usually equates to about $330,000 for a married couple, for a married couple. So that should be explicit into your plan and you should understand that. You know what. What is it, by the way, these costs are covering? It's like your out-of-pocket prescription drug costs, medicare part B premiums, if you have them, or part D, and then all of your like co-payments, co-insurance. So even if you have insurance, obviously you have these costs. So that's not even you know considering.
You know other things that could be come down the pike and, and actually the biggest thing that people forget that they could avoid is they don't think about long-term care is also not in this. So a lot of people do need long-term care and long-term care, you know, is there's a few different types of long-term care, but basically there's. You know, there's assisted living. Let me see if I can grab that slide here. We don't have time to go to that other slide, yeah, you have assisted living, you have home healthcare, you have nursing home and you know I've watched clients go through various stages of life and what their costs have been, and it can put burdens on your family, things like that. So you really need to kind of think that through. If you, if you have adequate resources, if you have, if you're doing really well, you know, with your net worth and you could just self fund all of this and it's not an issue. But if you don't, then it's something that you should consider. You know how? How am I going to deal with that?
So the average length of time a man needs long-term care is 2.7 years. So the average length of time a woman needs it is 3.7 years. So women live longer. They tend to need long-term care for a longer period of time. Their healthcare costs are generally more expensive for long-term care. So what are the daily costs? So I looked at like where our clients are mostly and what the daily costs are and just made an average of it. So most of our clients are in Colorado, texas, california, wyoming, new Jersey, florida and their average assisted living daily cost is $170 per day for assisted living. So that's someone helping you For home healthcare, it's $168. Somebody helping you in your home and if you have a nursing home, it's $334 a day. So if you multiply that out times, you know two or three years, whatever that number you want to assume. If you could take the average 2.7 years and 3.7, then that should be a contingent that you have in there and there's different ways that you could deal with it. We don't sell insurance or anything like that, but it's something that should be a contingent that you have in there and there's different ways that you could deal with it. We don't sell insurance or anything like that, but it's something that should be taken care of if insurance is appropriate.
If you're self-funding, you don't need insurance. Insurance could be an option. You don't need insurance, but the other people might need insurance. If you need insurance, there's like four or five different main types. They could be traditional insurance and you know, basically you pay a premium. If you don't use it, you lose your premiums, so that would be the negative. But you get more care, you get more comprehensive coverage If you do use it. There's hybrid types. There's different types of hybrid where you have a life insurance policy where, if you don't use. If you don't need long-term care, that life insurance policy will pay the entire death benefit to your heirs tax-free. If you do need it, they give you an accelerated death benefit while you're alive and you can use that money for long-term care. And that works really well for people who have resources and they want to pass money to their heirs, but they also want to have something set aside for long-term care. Just in case there's other different things that you could look at, those are the two main ones that are used.
Main point here is to make sure you have that in your plan. Don't get derailed by that. And in order to do all this, you really need a retirement needs analysis. Really, basically, what you need is to go through the details of each one of those. So how much do you need to retire to become financially independent?
Basically, a 3% withdrawal rate is appropriate as a starting point. Some people say it's overly conservative, but for the average person who has a 30-year retirement, then a 3% withdrawal rate will generally be safe for your portfolio and then, going up with inflation, it'll take care of inflation for you. It gives you some room for volatility and things like that. That's a good place to start. So if you wanted to just use a rule of thumb, you could take the income amount that you think you're going to need today, total spending including paying for taxes and everything else, and then you divide that by 0.03. And that should be the amount of money that you have. That's really a rough figure because it doesn't have all the taxes and other things put in place, whatever's particular to you.
But in order to get a real analysis of it, there's a lot of considerations that you need to go through, like, for example, your asset, your tax planning, your estate planning, all that stuff. To get it right for you, do a retirement needs analysis and do a forecast, and we have certified financial planners that do that work for us. I'm in the investment side and the wealth management side of the business, but this is something I highly recommend doing so that you can get the right picture for you, get an idea about what type of investor you are, you know, and go through a process where you know you, you know what we do is, we meet one-on-one with you and then we'll talk about your situation, your goals. I'd help you identify and prioritize those goals, get systematic about it and do an inside analysis so that we can look at the details of what it is that you are in a situation now, what your situation is now, what your strengths are, what your gaps are, and evaluate different scenarios for you to see which scenario is better for you. And a design advantage to say, okay, now you've got a design that's right for you. And then the ongoing management of your assets in the plan and then to do regular reviews to make sure that you're on track. So that is a general service that my firm does. So if you have any need for that, you just let us know.
But I wanted to give you tools so that you can start thinking about what it is that you should do to prepare your portfolio. We could literally each section, we could dive so deep into it, but I wanted to just give you an overview of everything. So now I want to give you some resources as we start wrapping up. I want to give you guys each and one of you an opportunity to get a copy a free copy of my Financial Freedom Blueprint book and, along with a white paper, the 10 Avoidable Surprises that Derail Executives Planning for Retirement. And then also I'll send you an email right where you can give us your address and we can mail that book out to you a signed copy, and then also we'll give you a link on how you could take that risk assessment to figure out what type of investor you are, if that's something you want to do. And then we'll also give you a scheduling link. If you want to have a retirement needs analysis, you could schedule a Zoom call with us and do that. And I also want to invite you to listen to my podcast, the Market Call Show. You could go to pathtorealwealthcom and get information about that.
So that's basically all I have today. I apologize for the delay that we had earlier and hopefully we'll get it right. I'm going to be doing these various types of topics every month, once a month, mainly so that I can answer as many questions as I can to people the most common questions that we've been getting. So thank you very much for joining and hopefully, if you would like to come to some of the other webinars I'm doing, you could do that and we will send you out an email. And, tom Basso, I want to thank you for all of your input too. I appreciate the. You know your perspective on things and you've been a great mentor and learner for me as well.