Do I Need a Financial Advisor with Jim Tucker

george grombacher 0:00
Come on

warm leopard. This is George G and the time is right welcome today’s guest struggle powerful Jim Tucker. Jim, are you ready to do this? I am ready. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to have you on. Jim is a CFP. He is a CRPS. He’s an MBA, and he is a wealth advisor with Tucker Bria wealth strategies. Jim excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do. Fantastic. Well, I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I consider myself a lifetime admissions mistake. I have an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a MBA from Harvard. I even though I got in possibly a through a crazy means. I think I use the time well, and and I’m now able to pass that along to other people. I am married with two boys who are in their early 20s. So I went through the teenage years relatively unscathed as a parent. And that’s, I guess, what is hoped hoped for, and really have had a wide ranging professional career in both traditional means with commercial banking, investment banking, being part of a a couple of startups. And then in early 2000s, I transitioned over to becoming a financial adviser because I always like to say, it was much easier just asking people for money than doing a business plan, plan and asking people for money, which I did as an entrepreneur, so So asking people for their money is a great profession. I really have enjoyed it. Nice. I appreciate that. So are you still a Duke supporter? Are you tied in with with with with Duke still? And if so, feelings on Coach K’s retirement? Well, thank you. So So yes, I was a swimmer, I was an athlete at Duke. So I actually came in at roughly the same time that Coach K came in, I got two experiences one in 13, first ACC season, and then I experienced everything that’s happened since then. So very much, sort of by accident, living here now in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but have have come in and have had great opportunity to stay involved with the Duke community. And what I can share with you is that I’m excited for John Shire to come in. It’s never good to go right after the goat. But hopefully, this will be a great opportunity for Duke and for John, I’d certainly appreciate that. So

Jim Tucker 2:45
not dissimilar you as a financial advisor coaching and helping people to to reach their their financial potential. But some folks don’t necessarily work with financial advisors. And the vast majority or majority of the people here that I’d say will not ever worked with it work with an advisor. So they’re, so they’re sort of DIY in it. How how do you think about that? Well, that’s great. I think, in many cases, it’s perfectly fine to do it yourself. I what I’m always curious about is when people say financial advisors cost you money, I don’t see many people who need you know, a, an arm repaired or health, deciding to do their own medical care themselves. So it’s appropriate at times to hire someone and pay them to do to do or help you, coach you, as you said, Georgia, with your financial and wealth advisory needs. Now, before I get there, I’d like to sort of talk about foundations. So there are certain foundations that everyone needs to have, irrespective of whether you use a financial advisor a professional or whether you do it yourself. The first is really to go ahead and look at your budgeting. So as Dave Ramsey says, make sure that the month doesn’t run out that your cash doesn’t run out before your money does. We’re here talking on April 26. So hopefully you still have some money to handle the last few days of April. The other piece is insurance. Insurance is nothing more than protecting against

a catastrophic event. I like to think of insurance and the catastrophic events, starting with HDL so HDL, everyone knows and cholesterol is a good cholesterol. So HDL in the insurance world is

is health insurance, disability insurance and life insurance. You know, health insurance, obviously medical insurance, disability insurance is the one type of insurance folks short term disability and long term disability, that it’s really cost prohibitive to go out and get it yourself for most individuals, pretty much everyone, if you have disability insurance, it comes through your employer. And then of course life insurance, protecting against the catastrophic event. I’ll talk a little bit about the importance of Term Life Insurance for many people a little bit later on. And then the second part of the foundation and insurance is what I call who, ah, that’s home umbrella and auto. Home Insurance. Obviously, people know that and if you are still renting, get renter’s insurance is very inexpensive to protect your personal belongings. umbrella insurance is probably the one that many people may not know, after auto insurance. umbrella insurance basically protects you beyond just the other types of insurances you have. So having two teenage boys that that’s obviously a good time when they start driving to have to have some some additional coverage. And what typically happens with insurance companies is that they require you to up your auto insurance first, before you get your umbrella insurance. And that’s because many personal liability events come from a car accident. So just understand, if you’re not familiar with umbrella insurance, that that is something that you’ll be asked to raise your auto insurance first, potentially, and then get an umbrella insurance watch for 1,000,002 million $3 million, it’s just a K of coverage is just a couple $100. So well worth it. Okay, so that’s sort of the background on foundations. Now, let me switch over to a when should you use a financial advisor, a number of my clients have come to me, because they just plain didn’t have the time to do it themselves. You know, for the most part, if you don’t have the time to do it yourself if your financial life is bothering you. And that’s not a function of complexity, if it’s just bothering you, and you need someone, a professional to come in and look at what you do, and how you’re on track. Hopefully, that’s that’s the time to reach out for a financial advisor. So basically, if you don’t have the time you don’t have the interest, you’re concerned that you don’t are comfortable doing it yourself. There are other times when I’m just going to share that, you probably need to get a financial advisor and I call these some of the mistakes that people who are starting out and or are young, in growing their wealth is if you haven’t if you don’t have a plan for retirement savings. So basically anyone who’s young, and even into your 40s and 50s, you want to have a Roth retirement account. And that’s usually either through your 401 K at work through your employer, or also you can set that up individually.

If you have not started to save for retirement, that’s when you may want to get a financial advisor. And then secondly, if you’ve ever gone to cash when the market has scared you, that’s a time to find a financial adviser. I like to say at Tucker Bria that our job is to be unemotional investors when the market is going crazy, sort of like it is right now. And so if you’re someone who likes to go to cash, because you’re nervous, that is absolutely a time to possibly look for a financial adviser professional. And then I’m gonna get on a soapbox here, George, so you’ll push me off if it’s not a good thing to do. But if you’ve ever bought life insurance, other than term life insurance, as you’ve started your family and started to need insurance coverage, that that that HDL that life insurance piece of there, if you’ve been convinced to take whole life insurance or anything other than term insurance, that would be a time to find a financial advisor and you mentioned I’m a CFP, Certified Financial Planner. And those are the individuals who can help are typically are the ones who can help you with identifying a lot of things beyond just investments. But the reason that I’m such a proponent of Term Life insurance is because all like all insurance is to protect against a catastrophic event. Nothing more, nothing less. So if you know someone who is 42 and they have an untimely death, the catastrophic event is not that they didn’t save enough for Retirement, it’s that they potentially died without having the largest and maximizing the death benefit for their family. So basically, any time an insurance professional says to you that you want to have a savings component in your life insurance, that’s where I step back. And I say that’s not appropriate for most people. Because the catastrophic event of dying early is not that you haven’t saved enough for your retirement. It’s a you haven’t maximized the death benefit that’s available to your surviving spouse, to your kids. That to pay off the mortgage, all those things. And so with that, you know, just again, to summarize, you want to find a financial professional financial adviser who has the right credentials. And I believe that certified financial planner, the CFP credential is fast becoming the weed out credential. You want to find them if you’re too busy, or if you’re uncertain and certainly have, if you’ve fallen into one of the fairly common mistakes that I went over.

george grombacher 11:14
I appreciate all that, and certainly does make sense. Something that really stuck out for me, as you’re sharing that was we need to be interested in order to do a good job. And it’s okay to not be interested in doing every aspect of our financial lives. Right? Because it is, and there is a lot of complexity. And I think, sometimes we think, Okay, well, I can handle all of my money stuff. But But I think it’s really important to be honest and say, Do I really want to spend the time that it’s going to take to do this?

Jim Tucker 11:51
All right, so I have very limited trade abilities, like I can’t put in a floor, I can’t barely change a light bulb. So I know my weakness, I what I say is I have strengths in other areas. And I’m perfectly happy to pay an electrician to pay someone to lay a tile floor, because I just don’t want to be the one doing it myself partly because of time and partly because of skill level. So absolutely. You know, don’t be upset that you’re not comfortable or not able to do it. But then when you get in front of financial, a financial professional, if they make you feel stupid, get to the door as quickly as possible. What I always like to say to clients and prospects is that if you don’t understand something, I’m saying, that’s my fault. And I have to be much clearer to take what can be a complex idea and make it easily understandable translated into English, as all industries have their financial, in our case, the financial language to make an turn into English. And if you don’t understand something, then it is my fault as the financial professional that I did not explain it clearly.

george grombacher 13:16
I think that that’s well said. Do you think that that that almost presumed I don’t want somebody to think that I don’t know what I’m doing or that I’m dumb stops them from approaching a financial professional?

Jim Tucker 13:32
Well, I haven’t seen that George as much as I’ve seen an clients come to me after they’ve been with another individual or another, someone who was going to help them. And they’ve made one of those mistakes. So they didn’t want to feel stupid when someone told them to get an annuity even though they didn’t understand it. When, you know, I asked a lot of times what was the thinking behind getting a whole life insurance product where you only had $300,000 of death benefit coverage when you could have gotten a term insurance policy where you might have had a million dollars of coverage. So so those are for the same dollars. So those are the types of things I think that it’s very much a function of getting in with the wrong, the wrong, professional. If you go to an insurance professional for your financial advising, you’re going to be sold insurance. That’s what they do. If you go to a CFP, who is more holistic handles investments and insurance and other things such as I do with Tucker Bria. Then you really have someone who’s not wedded to only one product or type of solution type of strategy for what you’re trying to accomplish.

george grombacher 14:56
What do you like about what is it about the Roth option that The you prefer or like?

Jim Tucker 15:04
Sure, so, and I will do a caveat that here’s where very competent tax professional CFPs and financial advisors are wired differently. CFPs are absolutely, we are and I might have said CFP and CPA, but, but CPAs the tax professionals are wired to save their clients taxes in the current tax year. As a CFP, my objective is to look beyond the current tax year. And I’ll share one story and the difference, let me just sort of before I share the story, step back and say that what a Roth IRA is, is where you put in after tax dollars into an account. And then as it grows over time, when you take the money out, that money is tax free. Whereas if you put money and save in a traditional IRA, or traditional 401k, then you’re putting in money pre tax, and then when you take the money out, it’s taxed. So with that, that’s where the CPA believes, hey, put money in the traditional IRA, you save your taxes this year. And then as the as the financial professional, the CFP, I step back and say, Okay, I have sat down with a 78 year old widow, she had a 500,000, roughly a $500,000. Traditional IRA. I told her when I was younger, and not as diplomatic as I would be now, young in the profession, I said, Well, you realized that $500,000 account is really only worth $375,000, because of the taxes have to come out, the look on her face was panicked, quite frankly. And so I try and avoid those, or anticipate those in retirement, making sure you know what your account value is actually worth. Now you don’t, it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing, I truly believe that you can have, say half in a Roth and half in a traditional IRA or 401 K, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. And that’s one of the things when you go to your employer, and most employers today permit the Roth savings option. That was not always the case, it’s probably been available for maybe eight or nine years now. And probably in the last three to five, most employers now offer a Roth 401 K option in addition to a traditional 401k option, which is basically a pre tax option with traditional or an after tax option with the Roth. And so go to your HR department figure out and again, it’s not an all or nothing you can do you know, 50% in the traditional 50% in the Roth, or any combination that you choose,

george grombacher 18:09
like it, I appreciate it, Jim, people are ready for that difference making tip, what do you have for them?

Jim Tucker 18:15
Okay, great. Well, I have two. So the first is really continuing on the 401 K option is don’t allow the complexity to get in the way of investing. I love the set it and forget it options that you have in in a 401 K plan. A lot of plans have what are referred to as the retirement target date funds. Those are good, I don’t like them, as well as the Asset Allocation Fund, where you basically decide, okay, I’m a moderate investor, I’m an aggressive investor. And then you find that asset allocation, one fund that might be invested 80% in the stock market and 20% in cash and bonds or 60%, in stocks, 40% in cash and bonds. So the set and forget option allows you to go off and do other things that you’re good at and not have to worry about oh, do I need to make a change in my 401 K investing, you can do it once and you literally can set it and forget it. Then for the more maybe the individuals, your listeners who have more savings, a little bit more complexity, start researching direct indexing, as a way to reduce your taxable investment. issues that come up around tax time. So basically direct investing in taxable accounts is a way to create tax losses while you’re still growing your your investments so set and forget and direct indexing. Well,

george grombacher 19:55
I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets a come up. Jim, thank you so much for coming on at work. People learn more about you and how can they engage with you.

Jim Tucker 20:03
The easiest way is to go to our website it’s Tucker bria.com. That’s T as in Tom you see KR B as in boy RS and Robert eyes in India a is an apple.com. There, you will have a link to my YouTube channel creating family wealth, as well as some articles that I’ve written and have been picked up by various publications around the country. So, again, George, thank you so much for your time, and for allowing me to come on.

george grombacher 20:33
Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did, show, Jim, your appreciation and share today show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, go to Tucker bria.com to UC KERBRI a.com. And then find Jim’s YouTube channel as well and check out the articles that he has written and get in touch. Thanks again, Jim. I appreciate it. Have a great day. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

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