INTERVIEW ‘HOW TO GET EVERYTHING YOU CAN OUT OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE because of COVID-19. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with taxes. The third thing about taxes is, you don’t think with those trillions of dollars to bail our economy out that we aren’t going to have some tax changes? Of course we are. We’re going to have tax changes regardless of who the president is. We do have an election this year. So, I think that one of the things that we ought to be discussing in these three-, five-, six-minute vignettes is those tax law changes. These are the things to talk about. One of the things that create a lot of interest are some of our higher net worth clients realizing that they might want to take advantage of these years where they don’t have to take RMDs out and maybe it brings them down into a different tax bracket, and they want to use that bracket capacity to Roth convert. And second is, once they hit 70 years of age, they can distribute their qualified dollars to the charitable annual giving that they’re doing as a direct transfer to the charity from the IRA. And it’s twofold. No. 1, it meets the RMD requirements in the years that it’s required to be taken. And then it reduces those dollars in the qualified account over time, lowering RMDs each year thereafter. So, even if we’re doing a lot of Roth conversions, we’re always leaving some qualified assets in there for the direct charitable giving that we still want to use tax efficiently. Now that law could change. It’s been on the books awhile, and still there’s a whole bunch to talk about with regard to tax. FELDMAN: What are some other subjects? CLOKE: The second item that we discuss in our vignettes is the market. And again, keeping in sync with the compliance issues, I think that there’s a whole lot that could be happening. I always like to say that the earthquake occurred earlier this year and the tsunami has not yet shown up, in terms of the economic outcome. Even before COVID-19, we had a year and a half of the longest run of the bull market that we’ve ever had, and we’re certainly due for a correction. We’ve been warning clients about it for a couple of years. And then we saw this 10
30%, 35% decline, and then an immediate recovery, and everybody’s kind of shaking their head and going, “Wow, how can that be?” And with all the news, is that real? Well, probably not. I don’t want to get to the place where I’m giving advice in your magazine. But I will say that we need to be talking about the “what is.” We need to be seeking out all of our clients who have money in securities.
a much younger age than you think. And those are all topics for vignettes that you can discuss. Then finally, what about those clients who are retiring in 2020 and in ’21? There are specific things they need to be doing with their portfolio in regard to risk tolerance. That’s very low-hanging fruit. So, there’s a whole bunch here that we can talk about and create these very small vi-
“I’ve spoken on thousands of platforms over the 15 years I’ve been speaking. And as a result, that’s just gotten me a lot of footage on the internet.”
And we need to be retesting, reasking the allocations risk tolerance question: “Before we go into this phase, are we allocated appropriately? Would you change your mind based on your age from the last time we did it?” There’s a whole bunch that we could do around asset allocation and market volatility that may or may not occur in the future. That’s an easy low-hanging fruit. And then the third one is we’ve helped advisors understand for a long time that we shouldn’t be talking to our clients a month before they retire, six months before they retire, even a year before they retire. We have an entire process that gets people in that conversation 10 years before they retire. And if they’re really astute clients, we can get them as early as 15 years before retirement. But you can start talking about retirement to clients at
InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » October 2020
gnettes on topics. Post them on social media, get some attention, obviously, if you’ve got a website, a Facebook page. We have a Facebook page. I’m not real active on it. We have a marketing person on our team who tries to manage that to some degree. But you can do a whole bunch with these short video vignettes and some social media presence. And then you reutilize that. So, if you’re on LinkedIn, you repost something you put on your Facebook page to LinkedIn. Maybe repost it in a tweet. And maybe it’s getting a little coaching from folks who are really experts on how they do social media, and the space to those to help with websites. But if you’ve been one of those who stuck their head in the sand and haven’t addressed this, now’s the time to put a little revenue toward that and spend a little effort on that, and it will pay big dividends.