Do you have insurance on your retirement plan? Why not? You insure everything else, your cars, your home, health insurance, life insurance, and yet your retirement plan is the most expensive purchase that you’re ever going to make. So why not have insurance on it? It might just be because you’re not quite sure how to insure it, and that’s what we’re gonna spend our time talking about today.

Thank you for joining us. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. My name is Anthony Saccaro. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income. Really glad that you’re here. And if you’d like to make sure that your retirement plan is gonna hold up no matter what happens, you’re gonna wanna stick around because that’s exactly what we’re going to cover.

And of course, as we always do, we’re gonna answer a few of your listener questions along the way. If you wanna insure your retirement plan, you have to break it down into various components. You don’t just insure your retirement plan as a whole, but you’ve gotta look at the different pieces of your plan and ask yourself, “Where are the risks?

What parts of your plan need to be insured, and what parts of your plan might be okay on their own?” And there are no shortage of risks to think about. There’s longevity risk, there’s sequence of returns risk, there’s inflation risk, there’s healthcare risk, and any one of these risks on its own could wipe out your entire retirement.

And I’m gonna spend some time with you today talking about these risks and what you can do to ensure that you prepare for them properly. One of the biggest risks to your retirement is longevity risk. Many people overestimate their mortality, and they underestimate how long they’re going to live. With modern advances in medicine and the way many of you are taking care of yourselves these days, there’s a meaningful chance that one half of a couple that’s over sixty-five years old today is gonna make it into their nineties.

When it comes to retirement planning, though, the traditional planning approach makes an assumption that your life expectancy is going to be average. Well, average simply means that half of you are going to live shorter than that time, and the other half of you are gonna live longer than the average. If your plan is based on averages, though, and you beat the averages, what’s that gonna do for your plan?

I can tell you from experience that many retirees’ plans have failed because they’ve lived longer than they thought they would, and their plan never accounted for that. Longevity risk is the number one risk in retirement, and it’s silent and very expensive. Now that you have a better understanding of this risk, you’re probably wondering how do you insure against it?

Well, at Providence Financial, we build retirement plans based on worst case scenario, not based on averages. What’s really kind of interesting and maybe even ironic is that the best case scenario for your life is the worst case scenario for your retirement plan. Most of you wanna live a long, healthy life, right?

The longer you live, the better. And yet when it comes to your money, the longer you live, the worse it is and the more exposed to longevity risk you become. If you plan for the worst case scenario, though, for your money, a long, healthy life, then you’ll be fine because you’ve planned for the worst case.

This way, if you beat the averages, you won’t have to worry about running out of money because you already planned on the worst case scenario. This is why investing for income is so important and why it’s a common topic right here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show. The success of your retirement’s gonna depend on your income.

If you have income insurance, then you know that you’re gonna be okay no matter how long you live. If this all makes sense but you wanna learn more, I’ve got something for you. We’ve put together a short animated video that talks about the concept of investing for income. It’s only seven or eight minutes, but you’ll learn a lot because it’s pretty powerful, and it’s fun to watch because it is animated.

And if you’d like it, I’ll email it to you. You just have to let us know that you want it, and you can do that easily by going to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Again, that’s providencefinancialradio.com/video. Leave us your information and we’ll email it right on over, and you’ll be able to watch it and learn what you need to know about the idea of investing for income to make sure that you have enough insurance so that you don’t have to worry about running out of money.

One more time, to get this free animated video emailed to you, just go to providencefinancialradio.com/video and you’ll have it in your inbox shortly.

I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us wherever you might be. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. We’re taking some time in our show today to talk about ensuring your retirement plan. We just uncovered some ideas about how to make sure that you never have to worry about running out of money before you run out of life.

That is to say that you plan for the worst case scenario instead of the averages. It would now be appropriate to shift to another type of risk that many of your retirement plans have that you want to insure against as well, and that is sequence of returns risk. What if the market crashes the year that you’re going to retire or right after you retire?

How’s that going to affect you? How do you make sure that that doesn’t happen to you or that if the market does crash, it doesn’t throw your retirement off? One of our listeners, Mark, wrote in a question that’s right on topic, and he’s from Valencia, and here’s his question: “I’m retiring in about 18 months, and I keep hearing about sequence risk.

How do I actually know if I have protection against it, and what should I ask my advisor?” That’s a fantastic question, and I’m glad that you’re thinking about it because most people miss this risk completely, sequence of returns. It’s really important to understand that timing matters more in retirement than when you’re in the accumulation phase of life.

Sequence of returns is that risk. Many of you no doubtedly follow the rule of four percent. It’s a simple rule. It’s been followed for many decades. It simply states that if you’re invested for growth, you can withdraw four percent a year from your portfolio, and the theory is that you should never have to worry about running out of money.

What happens, though, if you’re withdrawing four percent and we have a major market crash and your portfolio gets cut by thirty or forty or fifty percent? We can’t say that that’s not possible, and with this AI bubble that we’re in, a lot of people and professionals are really worried about that. If you’re gonna insure against this risk, then just like we talked about with longevity risk, the way to insure against it is to make sure that you plan for the worst case scenario.

What if the market and your portfolio crashes by fifty percent? We can’t say it’s not possible. It’s happened twice in the last twenty-five years. If it were to happen again, the worst case scenario, how would your retirement and your portfolio hold up, or would it? The way to protect against this is pretty simple.

Develop a plan that’s going to withhold that kind of a worst case scenario drop. If you have a plan that accounts for something like that happening, you’ll be fine because you have a plan. On the other hand, if your plan is that you just hope that it will never happen, you don’t think it’s gonna happen and it does, you could be in real trouble.

If you’re withdrawing four percent a year from your portfolio and that worst case fifty percent drop happens, all of a sudden, those withdrawals are no longer four percent, they’re eight percent, and your portfolio won’t be able to sustain it. You’re gonna be on a fast track to running out of money before you run out of life just because the worst case scenario happened if you haven’t planned for it I’m fully aware that a few of you are in such a good position in retirement to where if the worst-case scenario happened, your lifestyle wouldn’t be affected at all.

You wouldn’t like it. No one likes the idea of losing half their portfolio, but it wouldn’t affect your lifestyle. I also know from experience that most of you are not in that situation, and if the worst-case scenario were to happen, your retirement might very well be at risk. You might have to go back to work, or you might have to cut back on the spending and all the fun things you planned on doing in retirement.

And I don’t know about you, but here at Providence Financial, cutting back on your retirement or having to go back to work is not a part of the playbook that we set up for anybody. If you’re sitting there listening, realizing that you’ve never really considered that angle, setting up your retirement to account for worst-case scenario, but it makes sense to you and you’d like to learn more about how to do that, well, that’s one of the reasons that I wrote my book, More Life Than Money, which is an Amazon number one bestseller, and you’re gonna wanna read it because I talk about market risk and I talk about the worst-case scenario and how to ensure that if it happens, your retirement will still be on track.

I wanna send you More Life Than Money absolutely free of charge just for being a loyal listener of the Providence Financial Retirement show, and all you need to do to get your copy is go to providencefinancialradio.com/book. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/book. Leave us your information, and in a few short days, a brand-new copy of More Life Than Money will show up right on your doorstep, and you’ll be able to learn what you need to know to avoid the sequence of returns risk and make sure that no matter what happens, you’ll be okay.

To get your free copy of More Life Than Money, go to providencefinancialradio.com/book. Again, that’s providencefinancialradio.com/book, and you’ll have it shortly

Thank you for staying with us. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. My name is Anthony Saccaro. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income. Really glad that you’ve joined us today because we’re talking about ensuring your retirement.

Up to now, we’ve covered ensuring against longevity risk and sequence of returns risk, but there’s a few other risks that need to be addressed as well, and the next risk that we’re gonna have a discussion about is inflation risk. I probably don’t have to tell you that inflation is high at the moment because of everything that’s going on in Iran and energy prices and tariffs and everything else that’s happening politically.

You’re already feeling it from your pocketbook. I find, though, that many retirees underestimate this risk, inflation risk. You realize that the average retiree needs about fifty percent more income every ten years just to maintain their lifestyle? That’s a pretty significant increase in income. If you don’t plan for that or have an income adjustment built into your portfolio, you’re gonna find that your lifestyle starts getting crimped year in and year out.

And ten years down the road, after it might be too late, you may wish that you’d have actually thought about this when doing your retirement plan. Inflation has been looked at as the invisible tax, and many of you think that your portfolio is inflation-proof because you own some stocks, but that may not be true.

When you study the history of the stock market like we have here at Providence Financial, you begin to see that it’s not uncommon for there to be ten or fifteen or even twenty-year periods where the market bounces around like a yo-yo but has no growth Knowing that this is true, if we go into another decade of no growth or very little growth in the stock market, how is that a good inflation hedge?

Many of you and many financial advisors are hiding behind the average return of the stock market. On general, we can say truthfully that the stock market average is eight to ten percent a year. What many of you are failing to realize, though, is that this average is a result of a decade or two of no growth, followed by a decade or two of really good growth.

And when you average out the no-growth years with the double-digit growth years, then the average comes to eight to ten percent. It’s also important to realize that those no-growth decades and those good growth decades alternate back and forth. Even if you go back the last twenty-five years, you go back to the year two thousand, if you chart out from two thousand to two thousand and thirteen, it looks like a big W.

Two drops, two recoveries, but no growth for thirteen years. That was how the century started. For the last thirteen years, though, the market has had somewhere around sixteen percent or so of growth each year. When you take those two back-to-back thirteen-year periods, first thirteen years no growth, second thirteen years sixteen percent plus growth, and you average them, you’re right back into eight to ten percent average return.

And it’s not like this is an anomaly. This is what’s happened with the stock market and how the market works over the last two hundred years. A lot of economists and a lot of other financial professionals are worried about the next ten years, though. If there are bad decades followed by good decades, and we’ve already had a bad decade, and now we’ve had a good decade, if they truly repeat, is it possible that the next decade is a period of no growth in the stock market?

Of course, the answer is yes, and I would add that it might be more probable even than possible. If you’re cannibalizing your portfolio to get the income and the market doesn’t grow while you’re making withdrawals, what’s gonna be the end result? Yeah, you’re gonna be in a position to have to worry about running out of money before you run out of life, and that’s what you wanna insure against.

So how do you do that? Plan for it. We know it’s happened. There’s a great possibility, even probability, that in the rest of your lifetime it’s gonna happen again. If you haven’t planned for it, that could be devastating. If you plan for it, though, once again, the worst-case scenario, then you’re gonna be just fine.

Averages have a way of smoothing things out. It makes it sound better. When you set up your retirement plan, if you plan on an eight percent average return, you’re gonna feel good, and it looks good on paper. But if the next decade or so is not average, if it’s flat, then you can throw that sheet of paper out the window.

This is exactly why investing for income becomes so powerful because if you have your income insured like we’ve already talked about, you’re gonna be fine even in that worst-case scenario, even if the market doesn’t grow for the next 10 years, as is possible. How do you invest for income, though? To answer that question, you’re gonna wanna get our free video that talks about the idea of investing for income.

We’re making it available to you absolutely free of charge, and we’ll email it over to you with no cost and no obligation. You just have to let us know that you want it, and you can do that easily by going to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Again, go to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Leave us your information, and in a short time you’ll have that video show up right in your inbox.

All you gotta do is press play, and you’ll be able to watch it. To get your free animated video about income investing, go to providencefinancialradio.com and we’ll get it right out. I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us here for the Providence Financial Retirement Show.

Really glad that you’ve decided to join us. We’re spending our time together today talking about this concept of ensuring your retirement. How do you make sure that no matter what happens, your retirement’s not going to be devastated? That’s where we’re spending our time today. This leads us to our next risk, which really could wipe out your retirement if you haven’t insured against it.

That risk is healthcare and long-term care. This is one of the biggest retirement expenses that very few of you have planned for. I believe that one of the reasons that so few of you have planned for a long-term care expense has to do with the fact that you’re probably not aware of the odds of needing some type of long-term care in your lifetime.

You realize that if you’re a couple over age 65 years old There’s a sixty percent chance or so that one of you is gonna need long-term care before you both pass away, and if you get over the age of eighty years old, that statistic rises to around fifty percent. Think about that. One out of every two people over the age of eighty years old are going to need some type of long-term care.

If you need it for an extended period of time, as some of you will, it could wipe out your entire savings. When you combine that with longevity risk, which we already talked about, that could be absolutely devastating to your entire retirement plan. Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse than being over eighty years old, spending down all your principal for long-term care, and not knowing whether or not you’re gonna have enough to make it.

Long-term care is very expensive. It wouldn’t be unfathomable to think that it could be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars or two hundred thousand dollars per year. And the question you have to ask yourself is, if you had to come up with that type of extra income each year unplanned for, could your portfolio and could your retirement plan withstand it?

The answer for most of you is no. What you probably really wanna know is, how do you insure against it? And so far, with the various types of insuring against your retirement that we’ve talked about, it’s really just planning for worst-case scenario. But when it comes to long-term care, we could be talking about literal insurance, long-term care insurance.

Many of you I know have poo-pooed long-term care insurance because it’s very expensive and it’s use it or lose it. You might pay into it for a couple decades, and then you pass away in your sleep one night, and you never got any use out of it, and that’s also another reason why many of you have never considered getting it.

The good news, though, is that long-term care insurance has evolved. There are long-term care insurance policies today that are much more affordable than you think, and also combine long-term care insurance with life insurance. If you never use it for long-term care, there’s gonna be a tax-free death benefit that goes to your beneficiaries.

Which simply means that you’re gonna get some use out of it, whether or not it’s for long-term care or whether or not it’s because you pass away. We don’t know for sure that you’re gonna need long-term care insurance, but we’re pretty sure that you’re gonna die at some point. And regardless of which happens, this type of policy will pay, and they really are much more attractive.

If this has caught your attention and you’d like to learn more, in my book, More Life Than Money, I wrote an entire chapter about this type of insurance, long-term care insurance that will pay you whether or not you need long-term care or you just simply pass away. I wanna send you More Life Than Money absolutely free of charge, so you can read this chapter and protect yourself against this very expensive risk.

To get your free copy of More Life Than Money, all you need to do is go to providencefinancialradio.com/book. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/book. Leave us your information, and we will get out a brand-new copy of More Life Than Money to you right away. You’ll have it in just a few days. One more time, go to providencefinancialradio.com/book, and you’ll have it in a few days.

I’m Anthony Saccaro, and you’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income. If you’ve been with us for the entire show, you know that we’ve been talking about how to insure your retirement. We’ve already vetted out some of the more common risks: longevity risk, sequence-of-returns risk.

We talked about long-term care risk in the last segment. But now we’re gonna change our attention to income, the risk of running out of money before you run out of life. How do you get insurance to make sure that that doesn’t happen? Well, the answer is pretty simple. You need to have some type of guaranteed income floors that make sure that you never have to worry about running out of income, because the success or failure of your retirement’s gonna be all dependent about one thing.

What is that? Of course, income. If you’re drawing down your portfolio following the rule of 4%, and as a result, you’re cannibalizing your principal, you could have to worry about running out of money before you run out of life. You can’t keep selling principal indefinitely and have the reassurance that you’ll always have enough.

That’s just impossible. On the other hand, if you have your income secured from other sources, or you’ve got your portfolio in a position to be giving you income regardless of what the market does, then you’re gonna be in good shape, and you’ll never have to worry about running out of income. Developing that income floor and making sure that you’ll have enough income for the rest of your life no matter what happens is really the key secret to making sure that you don’t have to worry about running out of money before you run out of life.

That’s why income insurance is so important. Some of you no doubtedly have enough income without even having to worry about your portfolio or get income from your portfolio at all. You have Social Security, you might have rental income, you might have a pension income, and if you can live on all of these sources of income, and they’ll be inflation-adjusted for the rest of your life, you never need your portfolio to help supplement that retirement gap, that income gap, then you’re in great shape, and you’re one step ahead of everybody else.

For most of you, though, I know that’s not the case. Your retirement income sources outside of your portfolio are not enough to sustain the type of retirement that you want. This means that you’re gonna need some income from your portfolio. Here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show, I believe that there’s a right way and a wrong way to get this income that you need.

The wrong way is to sell assets every month to pay your bills and do all the fun stuff you wanna do. As long as you’re selling assets each month, you’re always gonna be in a race against time, hoping that you pass away before your assets do. The interesting thing, though, is that this is what most advisors teach.

The traditional thinking is you follow the rule of 4%, you just sell the assets that you need every year, and you’re gonna be okay. And in the good decades, they’re right. But what about in the bad decades where the market has no growth? It’s those decades that you wanna insure against How exactly do you do that though?

That’s where dividends and interest comes into play. When you’re living off of your dividends and interest, you’re not having to cannibalize your principal at all, which means that theoretically, your principal’s gonna last forever. This is probably a new concept to many of you, so let me give you a quick analogy to just share how it works.

Imagine that you live in a cabin somewhere and it gets really cold in the winter, and you have a pile of wood that you can use to put in the wood-burning furnace and keep your cabin warm. Every time you throw another log in the fire, you have one less log, and when you throw that last log in the fire, you’re gonna spend the rest of your winters really cold.

You have already spent all the fuel. If you’re cannibalizing your principal by following the rule of four percent, that’s the position that you’re in. What’s the alternative, though? Imagine now that you put a solar panel on that same cabin. Would you ever have to worry about heating your cabin again? No, because solar is a renewable resource.

You know that as long as the sun comes out, you’re always going to have heat, and that’s exactly how spending interest and dividends works. It’s really like a solar panel for your portfolio. Not only will you be in a mathematical position to never have to worry about running out of money, but you’ll also be in a mental position to never have to worry about running out of money either.

When you’re spending down your principal, there’s a fear factor, always wondering whether or not you have enough. Are there gonna be enough logs to last you the rest of your life? When you’re spending interest and dividends, though, that fear goes away and it turns into peace of mind. When you have solar panel-type insurance on your portfolio, you’re gonna find that you sleep much better because you know that you have enough income to last the rest of your life.

You’re not hoping that you have enough income to last the rest of your life. And the mental component of retirement is often underestimated. If you’d like to learn more about how you can stop burning logs to get the income you need and have a solar panel-proof portfolio, you’re gonna wanna watch a video that I created.

The video is all about how to turn your portfolio into an income stream that you never have to worry about outspending. I’ll email it to you absolutely free of charge, and you just have to let us know that you want it, which you can do by going to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/video.

Leave us your information and you’ll have that video show up right in your inbox within just a short time. Go to providencefinancialradio.com/video to claim your free video about income investing. I’m Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us here. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show.

I’m really glad that you decided to tune in. We’re spending our time together talking about how to ensure your retirement or various components of your retirement. We’ve already talked about some ways to protect against longevity risk, sequence of returns risk, long-term care. We just talked about ensuring your income to make sure that you never have to worry about running out of money before you run out of life.

We’re now gonna change our attention and start talking about tax insurance. How do you insure against your future tax bills? One of the ways is to make sure that you’re withdrawing from your portfolio in a tax efficient manner. I’ve often seen people that need money from their portfolio take from their taxable accounts first, because that’s tax efficient, at least for the year that they’re in.

But long term, when that taxable account runs out, now you’re gonna have to turn all of the rest of your income to your retirement accounts, and that is not tax efficient. You have to make sure that where you withdraw your money from is as tax efficient as possible. It’s gotta be done from the right accounts at the right time.

Another area where I often see people do it wrong has to do with required minimum distributions. If you have a pre-tax retirement account, you’re gonna get to a point in time, either 73 years old or 75 years old, where the government’s gonna force you to start taking withdrawals from your portfolio. You have no choice.

Even if you don’t need the money, they’re gonna force you to make the withdrawals so that they can get their taxes. You’re gonna have to pay ordinary income tax on all of those withdrawals. If you don’t do anything about that, you don’t do any type of planning, usually you’ll wind up paying a whole lot more tax than you have to.

Despite this, though, I find that a lot of people just wait. They wait until their RMD age hits, and then they start taking their withdrawals, and they don’t do anything proactive to make sure that they can be as tax efficient as possible. This is one of the reasons why Roth IRA conversions become so powerful.

When you do a Roth conversion, you’ve decided to pay the tax now so that the rest of your retirement can be tax-free, and I kinda look at that as tax insurance. You pay the insurance fee up front in the form of the taxes that you’re gonna pay when you do the conversions, but now your Roth IRAs are gonna grow tax-free forever.

And when you need that additional income from those Roths, they will come out tax-free. If you’re smart and you’ve already done Roth conversions, then when taxes go up in the future, as is likely based on the almost $40 trillion of debt that the government’s in, because you bought this insurance, you’re gonna be immune to those tax raises And for many of you, it’s definitely something worth considering.

If doing a Roth conversion is something that you wanna look into further, you’re gonna wanna get our commission report that talks only about Roth conversions, and I’m gonna give it to you absolutely free of charge. You’ll learn more specifically what a Roth conversion is, how it works. You’ll learn about the IRMA tax, which is the tax on Medicare that could be affected if you do a Roth conversion, and you’ll also learn who Roth conversions are not right for.

I wanna send you this report free of charge, and in order to get it, all you need to do is go to providencefinancialradio.com/report. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/report, and we’ll email it to you, and you’ll learn everything you need to know about Roth conversions to see if it’s something you wanna consider.

To claim your free report, go to providencefinancialradio.com/report, and we’ll get it right out. But I know you’re gonna be glad you read it

Thank you for staying with us. I’m Anthony Saccaro. You’re listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show. We’re spending our entire show today talking about how to insure the various components of your retirement plan so that you know you have a retirement that you can count on and not a retirement that is exposed to a lot of different risks.

If you’ve been with us, you’ve already discovered how to insure against sequence of returns, longevity risk, long-term care insurance, tax insurance, and we even talked about insuring your income so you have income you know you can count on, not income that you hope you can count on. I wanna turn to the page, though, and talk about asset protection.

If you get sued or if you get into some type of an accident and you’re liable for someone else’s injury, that could be very expensive The fallout could even be worse than a market crash if you wind up having to give a good chunk of your portfolio to someone else because you caused some injury to them.

There are several ways to do this. You can set up LLCs or you could set up different type of trusts, and they will definitely give you some creditor protection. For most of you, though, you don’t really need to go through all this legal expense and all the complication just to protect yourself from creditors.

There is one thing, though, that you can do that’s very inexpensive, and yet I believe every single one of you should have, and that is umbrella insurance. Just in case you’re not familiar with what umbrella insurance is, it’s a separate policy that will give you liability protection over and above any other liability protection that you currently have.

And for most of you, this is gonna include your auto insurance and your homeowners insurance, both of which have some type of liability component built in. The challenge is that if someone sues you today, your auto and homeowners policy may not be enough to cover the liability. Think about auto insurance for a minute.

If you get into an auto accident and it’s your fault because of whatever happened, maybe you were looking at the phone. I know none of you would ever do that. Or maybe there was just a bee flying around in your car or something, and it caused you to hit someone else and hurt them. What are they likely to do?

Are they likely to just forget about it, or are they probably gonna sue you? You know the answer to that. If they do sue you, your auto insurance might not cover you to the limit of the amount that you owe them. Even if you max out an auto insurance policy today, the maximum coverage you’d get for a one-person injury might only be a quarter million dollars or three hundred thousand dollars.

Lawsuits today, though, when someone gets hurt, oftentimes are for millions of dollars. If you wind up owing a million dollars to someone and your insurance writes them a check for three hundred thousand dollars, you still owe them seven hundred thousand dollars. Where’s that gonna come from? If you don’t have an umbrella insurance policy, it’s going to come from your pocket, from your investments.

If you find yourself in this unfortunate situation, your assets could be wiped out lickety-split, just like that Unfortunately, it just takes one mistake, one mistake that could change the trajectory of the rest of your life. This is where umbrella insurance comes into play, though. The minimum insurance policy you can get is for right around one million dollars, and for most of you, that’s gonna be enough.

But this extra one million dollars of liability protection is gonna be added onto, over and above the liability protection that is offered by your homeowners insurance and your auto insurance. Now, if you hurt someone and you owe them a million dollars because that’s what the court said that you had to pay them, the auto insurance company is gonna pay the three hundred thousand dollars or whatever your maximum limit is, and your umbrella insurance, they’re gonna be responsible for the rest of it, and that’s where the asset protection comes into play.

Now, I’m not a property and casualty agent, so at Providence Financial, we don’t sell this type of insurance. That’s not why I’m talking about it. But we do help our clients protect their assets, and if you don’t have an umbrella insurance policy, this is something that you absolutely need to look into.

It’s also very inexpensive. A typical umbrella policy for a million dollars probably shouldn’t cost you more than three to five hundred dollars a year. I have five million dollars of umbrella on my life, and I don’t think I spend more than maybe fifteen hundred bucks a year. And if I’m ever in an accident, or if one of my employees ever causes injury to someone else that I’m responsible for, I’ve got five million dollars of coverage that will help protect me.

Talk about peace of mind. And for only fifteen hundred bucks a year, I don’t know why I would not do that. And the same is true for you. For several hundred bucks a year, you can have that one million dollars of extra coverage just for that added peace of mind I’d highly recommend contacting whoever your insurance agent is that handles your auto and homeowners insurance and ask them how much it is and just sign up for it.

You’ll have coverage the same day. I’m Anthony Saccaro. Throughout this show, we’ve been talking about how to insure your retirement, and having an umbrella insurance is certainly one component of that that you need to have. But there are many risks when it comes to your retirement, and we’ve talked about some of them here, but because of time constraints, we haven’t been able to talk about all of them.

If you’d like to know what these other risks are, though, at Providence Financial, we’ve identified seven risks that could wipe out your retirement if you’re not aware of them and if you don’t insure against them. This is why we created an animated video that talks about what these seven retirement risks are.

If you’d like to get that video, I wanna email it to you absolutely free of charge. You just have to ask for it, which you can do by going to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/video. In just a short time, this short animated video will show up in your inbox, and you’ll learn what these retirement risks are so that you can protect yourself and insure yourself against them.

To claim your free animated video, go to providencefinancialradio.com/video and you’ll have it shortly. Thank you for taking time out of your day to join us here on the Providence Financial Retirement show. We’ve been talking about ensuring your retirement to make sure that you don’t have to wonder whether or not you’ll be okay.

We’ve already talked about a lot of different risks of retirement, and I now wanna take some time and have a discussion with you about what the ramifications are when it comes to another risk, and that risk is that one spouse passes away prematurely. Widows or widowers often face a twenty or thirty percent income drop after the first spouse passes away.

It’s a lifestyle shock that often catches people off guard. To add salt to the wound, you also lose the joint filing status when it comes to your tax returns, which means that your taxes are gonna go up, and I call this the widow’s penalty. You lose income, and your taxes go up at the same time. This is gonna take us to our final listener question of the day, and it comes from Jennifer in Ventura, and her question is this: “My husband passed away two years ago, and I’m getting his Social Security benefit now, but a friend told me I might have been entitled to something more if we had filed differently before he passed away.

Is it too late, and how would I even know what we should have done?” Jennifer, thank you for taking the time to write in that question. Social Security has a survivor’s benefit that most of you are aware of, but many of you fail to take into consideration when actually filing for your Social Security. The survivor’s benefit’s simple.

It simply says that when one spouse passes away, the surviving spouse is gonna be able to keep the larger of the two benefits, and that’s good, but the flip side of that is that this means that the surviving spouse is gonna lose the smaller benefit. That’s where that income drop comes in. If you haven’t planned for that, then the surviving spouse might be in a much more stressful situation when the first spouse passes away than otherwise necessary.

Let me share with you, though, something that I know a lot of people haven’t considered when it comes to filing for Social Security. You’re probably aware that you can file as soon as sixty-two years old, or you can wait until seventy, and of course, at seventy you’re gonna get a much greater amount. It wouldn’t be uncommon for a person to wait until seventy to get double the amount that they would have gotten had they have filed at sixty-two.

If you’re the breadwinner spouse, it may very well make sense to wait until seventy for the survivor’s benefit because you know that if you pass away first, then your surviving spouse will get your income, and if you wait until seventy to file, they’re going to get a lot more than had you have filed at an earlier age.

And in some regards, you can really look at waiting until 70 to file for Social Security as an income insurance for your surviving spouse. This is something that most people have never thought of when they’re trying to decide when to file for Social Security, but it’s an absolutely critical part of the equation.

Of course, this is just one of the Social Security benefits. There are other things you need to know as well. There’s the spousal benefits. There are different divorce benefits. There’s even a working penalty that says that if you’re under full retirement age and you make too much money, Social Security is gonna penalize you for working, and they’re gonna wanna take some of the Social Security back if you filed early.

I found that most people just make a hasty decision when it comes to Social Security, and yet you’re probably starting to realize that there’s a lot more to that decision than you may have thought of before. That’s one of the reasons that in my book, More Life Than Money, I designated an entire chapter to Social Security.

That’s all I talk about, all the different benefits and some of the things you need to think about before you ever put pen to paper and file that application. I wanna send you More Life Than Money free of charge, and to get it, all you need to do is go to providencefinancialradio.com/book. Again, that’s providencefinancialradio.com/book.

We’ll send you, absolutely free, a brand-new hardcover copy of my Amazon number one bestselling book, More Life Than Money. You’ll learn everything you need to know about Social Security, along with some of the other more common mistakes that I’ve seen retirees make and how to avoid them. I know you’re gonna learn something from it.

Just go to providencefinancialradio.com/book, and we will get it right out. I’m Anthony Saccaro, and I certainly hope you’ve enjoyed the show. We’ve been talking about this idea of ensuring your retirement. Thank you for joining us for today’s Providence Financial Retirement show. Have a great week, everyone.

God bless.