Election Season Tax Policies (Ep 101)

In this episode, we dive into the heated discussions around election-season tax proposals with a special focus on how they could impact your financial future. From eliminating taxes on Social Security and overtime to controversial ideas like taxing unrealized capital gains, we’ll explore who stands to benefit and if reality matches the shiny brochure of the presentation of these ideas. We’ll also examine the implications of lifting payroll tax caps, expanding the Child Tax Credit, and the fairness of the tax system.

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Transcript - The following transcript was generated by a robot, so please excuse any typos or inaccuracies.

Brian Doe 0:00

It's election season, and you need to be informed about current proposed tax policies, and today, on make the dough rise, we will look at the proposals coming from major candidates, who they benefit, who they harm, and what's really behind them. So stay tuned.

Speaker 1 0:21

It's time to make the dough rise. The financial podcast with Brian doe,

Walter Storholt 0:29

back again on make the dough rise. Walter storholt here alongside Brian doe, of course, the person to turn to if you've got questions about finances, preparing for retirement, all sorts of good stuff like that. More than two decades of experience as a practicing, Certified Financial Planner, since 2013 Brian is, of course, based in Greensboro, Georgia, serving the lake country and beyond. You can find us [email protected] Brian, it's great to talk to you, and I was very glad to hear as we chatted right before we started recording today, that you are not too impacted too heavily by hurricane Helene, even though, boy, it really did a number on Georgia and some other states in the southeast.

Brian Doe 1:10

Yeah, I have watched a lot of hurricanes come in over the years. My grandparents lived down on the Florida Panhandle, so I have monitored and watched many of them come in and go. But this one, the I went right over Greensboro, just to the east of it. And I'll tell you what, 60 miles difference made all the impact, because we were not impacted badly here, but my in laws over in Augusta, boy, they got hammered. They've got four huge trees down on their house. The powers out. There's gas shortages and all that kind of stuff. So done what we can to help them out and do get resources to the area. We shipped a bunch of gas cans down there the other day to give people fuel for their generators and things like that. So hopefully the power will be coming back on soon. Yeah,

Walter Storholt 2:03

the destruction gets a lot of focus in the news as obviously it's going to, I mean, it's disrupting lives and causing problems and people losing their lives and livelihoods and homes and all of those kinds of things. But just to spin a little bit of positive out of it, I do enjoy seeing everyone coming out of the woodwork to help in these times. And I don't know, especially maybe as we we're gonna be talking a little election season and tax policies, more specifically, on the show today, as you, as you tease this. But I don't know, in this season of political division, I mean, it's nice to at least see folks rallying together with one another and helping out. And hopefully that mentality will persist for as long as possible, and folks can remember that we're all neighbors, and we all right together, right indeed. So yeah, if anybody's struggling through these hurricane recovery times, best of luck to you and hope everything goes smoothly, getting back on your feet and all that. Well, let's dive in, Brian and talk about some of this stuff. We've got election season tax policies on the mind today, looking at kind of what candidates are talking about. But this isn't just an episode for this season, right? This is some of the things we're gonna talk about here are gonna be pretty applicable for for a while, some of the policies and at least ideas and conversations here,

Brian Doe 3:26

the planning around these issues are, you know, I mean, it's a omnipresent issue, but because it's election season, and as we're recording this, we're about a month away from the actual election, so a lot of ideas are being bantered about, and a lot of promises being made, and I just thought I would break all of that, all of the policies thrown out there, but the ones that really impact individuals, retirees, and just say, what? What's the viability of these? Are these feasible strategies? Who would it be be impacting. Who do they pretend it impacts? And then who does it actually impact? So think I've got a good little list here, and I don't know if I'm not trying to sway anybody's vote, but never hurts to be informed. So here let's, let's take a look at

Walter Storholt 4:14

these. Yeah, fill us up with some great information. Where do you want to start? Well, no

Brian Doe 4:18

taxes on Social Security, and Social Security and Social Security good

Walter Storholt 4:21

place to start when we're talking election and exactly it. And I

Brian Doe 4:25

think every election Social Security and the funding of Social Security and the viability of it always comes up, but the one that's getting a lot of air time and promises is, oh, well, we'll eliminate taxes on Social Security. And so if you have listened in the past, obviously you would or may have heard that Social Security benefits used to be tax free, and it was in the 80s, when the Social Security system was on the verge of bankruptcy that they even brought in the idea of social security benefits being taxed and. And it had to do more with a income threshold, right? So it's politically unpopular to cut Social Security benefits like that. Would that? Would you're not going to get elected if your campaign promise is, hey, I want to cut your Social Security benefits. But it was Reagan and Tip O'Neill, and they came to a compromise that they would refund replenish the Social Security system as long as above certain income thresholds, the benefits would be taxed. Well, those thresholds were set back in the 80s, when the number that they set was on an inflation adjusted basis, it would have been a lot more substantial income at the time. Well, they didn't adjust those for inflation. So today, if you make as a joint couple less than $32,000 per year, your Social Security benefits are already not taxed. But above that number, they do become begin to be taxed at 50% and I think it's up to 44,000 as much as 85% of your benefit is taxable. So I've come up with a few scenarios to show you who might be most impacted adversely. And I think the promise here is that the people who may be just getting by on, you know, purely a Social Security income and and are low income, trying to get more benefit to them, give them some tax relief. I think that's how people perceive this, this promise or this proposal. And like I said, if your only benefit is Social Security, you're not paying tax on it. Because even if you had two, let's say you had a couple, and they were each getting maybe 20 to $30,000 a year of Social Security benefit, not even that high, but I'm just gonna, I'm gonna pick the more generous numbers as a case. Well, the way they calculate how much of your Social Security benefit is taxed is a formula that includes all your other sources of income plus half of your Social Security benefit. Well, if all of your other sources of income are zero and you had a 4050, $60,000, Social Security benefit between a married couple, you would not go over the threshold of any social security being taxable. So the idea that this is going to help poorer and low fixed income, uh, households. It's a myth that they would not benefit in any way because they're already not being taxed. Does that make sense?

Walter Storholt 7:52

Yes, so that doesn't really change their situation at all. Right.

Brian Doe 7:55

So now, now let's add a little another little scenario to that, and let's say you had a married couple that were each getting $25,000 a year of Social Security benefit, and they had saved a little bit of money, they got a couple $100,000 maybe, maybe it's buried in the backyard and Mason jars, or maybe they've been smart and they've they've put it in some municipal bonds, And they're earning $7,000 a year of tax free interest. So now, if we go back to the Social Security calculation for determining taxability, it would be half of your Social Security benefit plus your tax free interest that you're earning. So tax free interest gets included in the calculation for what they call provisional income, or the taxability of Social Security. All right, so in this case, you've got $50,000 of Social Security benefit. Well, half of that is 25,000 and if you had $7,000 worth of municipal bond income, you add that together and you get 32,000 and so in that situation, you have still zero tax, and you could access the principal, you could sell the municipal bonds and spend that principal down, and there's no taxable event there. If there's no capital gains, if it's money buried in mason jars in the backyard, you can go pluck that out and spend it. So having money outside of retirement accounts where it's accessible and there's not a tax a capital gains tax consequence, you could have now $57,000 of income coming in, no taxes being paid on it, and you've got all of that to spend with me. So far with you? Yep, all right, great. So now let's apply this to the good saver, the person who, you know, they read Money Magazine coming up. They participated in their company, 401, K plan. They got the match. Maybe they, you know, stuck some money into a traditional IRA on the side here. There, and over time that IRA balance, let's say they saved, you know, pretty aggressively there, and maybe had a million dollars in retirement accounts. And that could be a combination of spouses. It doesn't have to all be in one but let's say there's a million dollar Ira balance, and you have not taken any withdrawals up till age 73 when required minimum distributions kick in. Well again, if you had the 50,000 of Social Security income, the $7,000 worth of municipal bond income, and you've been paying no tax, now, boom, all of a sudden, the formula hits where you have to take distribution from your IRA. And for simplicity, I said, let's, let's, let's do $50,000 so all of a sudden, you've gone from a situation of paying no tax to now having $50,000 of of taxable income because it's coming out of an IRA. Well, in that situation, you now have to look at half of your Social Security, plus your municipal bond income, plus 100% of that IRA distribution, and now that that combination comes out to $87,500 and so 38,300 $8,300 of your Social Security benefit now gets categorized as taxable income. So in a world where there is no tax on Social Security, that $50,000 Ira would come out, you'd apply your standard deduction of 30,750 and you would be left with just shy of $20,000 of taxable income and about a $2,000 tax but because of current law, this Good saver is going to also have to add $38,300 to their taxable income column because of the social security benefit. And so instead of 19,250 to be precise, of taxable income, they're going to have $57,550 of taxable income. So in this one situation, the person who might only have to pay a couple $1,000 of taxes is now going to get hit with $6,400 worth of taxes, because that Social Security benefit, a portion of it gets pulled into the taxable income category. I don't know how well that example translated to radio, but the point is, there's a trap there. And once you cross a certain threshold and have different types of income, you may think you've done all the right things, but you go realize some capital gains. You have any kind of maybe you had a piece of real estate that you sold, and you've got gains there, or you have to start taking distributions from your IRA, that person is going to get penalized pretty substantially or disproportionately, because it takes their effective rate like they may be in the 12% tax bracket for their income level, but because, as you pull dollars out of the into the taxable Social Security column, their effective rate on the next $1,000 is actually Over 22% so it's a it's a large penalty for that person who was good saver, let their IRA balance build up, and now they're taking required minimum distributions. And then maybe the final example is, let's say you've got somebody who has dividends and capital gains, and they got some rental properties with rental incomes. And you know, they have a couple $100,000 of of income, or 150 200 $250,000 just just making up numbers here, that person is paying tax on 85% of their Social Security benefit. And so if they eliminate taxes on all social security, right? I mean that they may have different income levels or things that they would propose on this, but let's just take the extreme. If they eliminated taxes on Social Security completely, the real beneficiaries are higher income retirees, and that's not the I don't think that's the intent. Certainly Nobody that I know would be unhappy with not having to pay tax on their social security. But the idea that that's going to, you know, give additional tax revenues to keep Social Security viable, that it's going to benefit people who you know truly need the money. It's not. It really actually benefits. It's more affluent investors, and I would say it disproportionately penalizes the the average saver, or good saver that did put significant or have built up a decent amount into a retirement account. Well,

Walter Storholt 15:14

that is some excellent reading between the lines. I wonder, I don't know. I wonder if we'll notice a theme here where all of these no taxes, things that have been promised or talked about and proposed, end up kind of having this backfiring feel to them. Brian, I see next on your list is the no taxes on overtime, which got a lot of attention and eyeballs and ears when it was kind of first bantered about a little bit. What about the impacts there are we heading down the same road as the social security issues, or a little bit different here? Yeah,

Brian Doe 15:45

in fact, I'll just lump these two together, because they're, they're a lot the same in, in my opinion, is no taxes on overtime and no taxes on tips. Okay? I understand the sentiment. You know, this is people, servers and valets and different people that are working on tips they don't have a good base salary. A lot of times those jobs don't have benefits. And so you're wanting to help the people that are really out there hustling and working and trying to keep track of tips and properly reporting them, and the IRS is giving them a hard time about it. It would simplify their lives, and it would give them more pocket money, and you would kind of eliminate some of the gray market cash, and are they actually reporting? And you would eliminate some of the enforcement issues with the IRS of trying to figure out if people were truly, accurately reporting their tips and all that kind of stuff, and overtime too. If you're working weekends and extra hours, you know that again, I understand. If you're in an hourly job and you're putting in extra time, maybe it's the, you know, retail workers at holiday time, or you're spending your vacations at the you know, on the job, benefiting those people that that put in the the more difficult hours is the intent. But how are you going to enforce that? How are you going to actually keep track of that? And you're selectively benefiting one group. So if you don't happen to work for tips, and you work at a, you know, hourly job or a salaried position and you don't have tips, how is that really fair to everybody? I would I would favor a more broad, you know, expansion of the tax brackets, or a reduction of the tax rates or something like that, that that benefits everybody at certain income levels. And then the other problem is you be you have an incentive to game the system. So let's say, for example, I am a accountant or an attorney or maybe a financial planner or something like that, and I am running my income through payroll, as you know, just a normal 40 hour work week. But what if I said, Well, you know what? Maybe I will take, you know, Mondays and Tuesdays off, and I'll just work on the weekends and and instead of working 40 hours one week, I'll take one week off and I'll work 80 hours the other week. Do I get to count then my overtime and my holiday pay as as the overtime, you know? And so it's a it creates an incentive to game the system. And how are you going to enforce that and police that, right? And so it just becomes, it sounds great. I get how it appeals to a certain block of potential voters, and getting them more people that need and maybe deserve to have a little extra money, but enforcing it, policing it, it actually just becomes more convoluted, and basically, in my opinion, falls apart when you actually go to do the implementation, and then you will have some sneaky people out there trying to game the system and say, Oh yeah, you know, I work one week on one week off. And so it's, you know, over 40 hours. I get overtime, and I get weekend pay and holiday I'll just work on the holidays. And for me, hey, Labor Day is a terrible day to be out on the lake. I'd rather be out there the day after Labor Day when everybody's gone. So I'll just come into the office, do my work on the holidays, pay myself overtime, and go enjoy the lake when the crowd's gone. I'm joking. Obviously I'm not, you know, advocating anybody do that. But that that becomes the flaw in the system,

Walter Storholt 19:55

yeah, and it makes, it makes sense that there are some issues there kind of. Ethical angle, I guess. And I don't know, are we incentivizing the wrong thing there? It might sound a little bit like the concern to me,

Brian Doe 20:08

yeah, and selectively rewarding certain groups over others. Let's come up with something that actually would benefit everybody.

Walter Storholt 20:15

Yeah, all right. Next one on the list is no taxes on unrealized capital gains, and this one has a lot of people, I think, very concerned if this was to actually come to fruition, because if I haven't realized those gains,

Brian Doe 20:29

right? So first of all, let me say this is probably the dumbest idea I have ever heard, and anybody that is proposing this clearly does not understand how business works. I mean, you can't have any understanding of capital creation, business growth, investing and then proposing unrealized attacks on unrealized capital gains. So where is the sentiment aimed here? Well, everybody has villainized your Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos and, you know, Bill Gates and the people that have become billionaires, and they're holding company stock that's highly appreciated, maybe the company has moved into a situation where it's paying dividends, and so they're they have plenty of income from preferential dividends, and they can go borrow against the appreciated stock and just let that sit there as collateral and get a step up in basis down the road. I know where the animosity comes from towards those people, because it does look like it's an unfair system, but if it's unfair, then just change the tax code right, make it so that they don't get a step up in basis, or that you can't borrow against those and you have to sell them and realize them. There's, there's things that you could do, but that really tinkers with the system. And I don't know why you would want to stop people from borrowing. And you know, there's, there's interest that's being paid. There's all kinds of downstream positives to having these, these capital bases out there. But, you know, people are envious of that. They accuse people of hoarding wealth, when in fact, they've actually created tons of wealth. Jeff Bezos, I think he made the point that if Amazon's a trillion dollar company, and he's, he's got 100 billion, well, he's created $900 billion of wealth for other people, and that that is no not an insignificant contribution to society. Why do we need to go penalizing people who've actually innovated created more efficient systems, better ways of doing things. Maybe it's unfair that it is a winner take all, or a concentrated accumulation of wealth, for those that come up with the ideas, but you know that that's what spurs people to do this kind of stuff in the first place. But now let's, let's move from the sentiment to the implementation of that. Okay, so I have $100 million capital gain in my Tesla stock. Well, if you're going to charge me, what 20% plus a 3.8% Obamacare surcharge, I don't know how the state taxes are going to factor into this, but let's just keep it simple and say it was 20% so now I have to come up with $20 million to pay taxes on that unrealized gain. Well, if you've built that up as a business, or you're holding equity stakes in a company, you're not sitting on an extra $20 million of cash. That's that's the buildings and the intellectual capital and the future, the value of future revenue that's reflected in the stock price. To charge people a tax on that would force them now they've got to come up with $20 million on this 100 million dollar gain. And what's going to happen? They're going to have to either go sell shares to get that, which is going to drive the market down. If all these people with gains have to liquidate their positions, and it reduces the capital base that's there, because you have to assume that there's somebody else that has the $20 million to buy it from them, turn that over to the federal government, and you've also then sold so you have realized capital gains. And how are they going to tax that, or give you a credit for that? It just, it becomes a, just kind of a ridiculous idea, in my opinion, because on the flip side, let's say that I have a ten million loss, right? So last year, my stocks and my real estate and everything went up ten million I sent you, you know, sold off some. Sent you a couple million dollars on the the gains, unrealized gains. And now this year, they go down in value, so let's say backed up another 10 million. Are they going to send me a check then for all my unrealized losses? No, I'm sure they're not. And now we're also talking

Walter Storholt 25:13

about interesting motivations in gaming the system that would get wild.

Brian Doe 25:17

Well, exactly. And so this goes back to the other issue of how are you going to actually track and administer this? So it's complex enough. Now, when you sell a stock or have a real estate transaction, does a 1099 get generated? Like there's a really good system in place for tracking realized gains and losses. You pay the tax on the net of those, you get a little bit of carry forward against ordinary income if you have excess losses or and not not any gains, like we've got a good old system working if you go try to accelerate the government's collection of those taxes, which is all that this really is keeping up with that. How are you going to report on that? If the value goes down, look at GE stock. It went up, up up. If everybody had been paying taxes on their unrealized gains, and then all of a sudden the stock collapses, are you going to get a big fat check now as a reimbursement for all those taxes on unrealized gains that you had paid. I mean, it's the it's the craziest idea. And their their band aid on this is, oh well, this is only for people with $100 million or or more in net worth. So again, you can see back to the sediment, who they're aiming this at. But if you remember the alternative minimum tax, that was something that came on the scene to tax people who were getting highly compensated with stock and options and things like that. And very quickly, over time, that alternative minimum crept down to where it was impacting, you know, average earners, and there was nothing Alternative Minimum about it. It was an alternative maximum, and you paid the extra whether you liked it or not. There was no alternative to it,

Walter Storholt 27:15

yeah. So, yeah, this easily creeped down in the same way.

Brian Doe 27:19

And this will creep right? So they set it at 100 million. Everybody like, oh, yeah, yeah. Tax those people. They've got tons of money. And then over time, well, let's take it down to 50 million. Let's take it down to 20 million. Let's take it down to a million. Well, pretty soon, everybody's being impacted. And, you know, it just becomes impossible to keep track of, yeah.

Walter Storholt 27:39

And now imagine the government entity that has to be created and managed to try to enforce it and track it and figure it all out, on top of convoluting everything

Brian Doe 27:49

else. And the other idea that I hear people try to argue is, oh, well, we already do this. It's called property taxes. That's ridiculous, because you're not necessarily having a gain in your house, it's more of a use tax. If you're going to be part of a community, you've got roads and infrastructure and things that the city puts in place and schools that they provide, like that. That's a benefit that comes from owning a piece of property in a community. So the property tax to try to compare that to a unrealized gain taxes, again, people that are just bad at business, yeah,

Walter Storholt 28:28

I agree with you that it would disincentivize a lot of positive action and and kind of similar to that over time and tip concern maybe incentivize, you know, underhandedness and all sorts of other loophole finding. So fix, fix what's on the books now and make that simpler, rather than adding more problems to the equation.

Brian Doe 28:49

Yeah, all of these add more complexity.

Walter Storholt 28:51

All right, I see you've got a few other things on your list. Would you like to hit the child tax credit? I know payroll taxes was something you wanted to bring up as well.

Brian Doe 28:59

Yeah? So the child tax credit, if you again, if you've listened to past podcast, I am all for anything that incentivizes people to have families and children. We need more

Walter Storholt 29:10

baby population increase. Believe it. Right,

Brian Doe 29:13

right. People are not having children. They're not buying houses. You if you're going to have a consumer driven economy, you have to have consumers, and so we need, we need young people that are building houses and buying furniture and clothes and cribs and all the toys and all the stuff that you do with kids. That really is what makes the economy go and that's where you're going to get your future payors for all the systems that we've put in place like Social Security and Medicare. So I am a huge fan of the Child Tax Credit, not just because I have two children that would still qualify for it, but really, for anybody that means test it if you want, and they do it, it phases out at about, I think, 400 to 440,000 Dollars per year. So there are some people that lose it, but heck yeah, give, give five, 610, $1,000 tax credits, or even just, you know, not even just tax credits, just give them kind of like the earned income credit. Just pay them some money to have extra funds for for having children. I support that 100%

Walter Storholt 30:21

easy enough to see why on that one, what about payroll taxes? So

Brian Doe 30:25

payroll taxes are the one that I like, because it is fair. It's like a flat tax. Everyone pays the same amount, but remember, payroll taxes are different than income taxes. Payroll Taxes are those taxes that go directly to fund social security and Medicare, and how much you earn and pay determines how much benefit you qualify for. All right, so your first roughly $160,000 that you earn w2 income you would pay FICA and Medicare taxes on that Medicare, you continue to pay up above 100 the 160,000 rate. But the way the current Social Security benefit formula is written for every dollar I pay into Social Security, it increases my Social Security benefit a little bit. My first $900 that I earn, $900 a month that I earn, gives me the most increase in my social security benefit. Then there's some break points where it gets down to like 15% of each additional dollar paid goes to increasing your Social Security benefit. But if they're proposing, and I haven't heard this one as aggressively as I was a few years ago, so that might not be part of this election cycle, but the talk is, well, let's lift the cap on income for FICA taxes and use that to fund social security. Well, all of a sudden, people making 160,000 and above. Well, again, they're the bet. They're the evil people. They're the high earners that we don't want to benefit. Give more benefit to we want to take tax from well, if you take tax from them again under our current code, you're going to dramatically increase their Social Security benefit in the future. So it's kind of one of those situations where you would heavily you're already penalizing higher earners by putting them in a higher income tax bracket. Now if you apply this, you know, FICA tax on all of their wages, that's a, you know, six in a 6.2 for employees, but if you're the employer as well, if you own the company, is 12.4% tax on all of your income. That is brutal. And then having people up in the 3035, 37% tax brackets as well, I think that would really crimp the incentive to earn higher and, you know, might cause a lot of people to say, Yeah, I'm earning enough. I'm gonna take the rest of the year. Remember the old Reagan story, he got paid, right? We could pay like 500,000 a movie, or 250,000 a movie. And so he would do two movies a year, and then he would take the rest of the year off because the tax rate was 90 something percent. So there was truly no incentive to work. Yeah,

Walter Storholt 33:31

yeah. Not. It worked for him, but not, probably a great strategy for pretty much everybody else in this in the country. So,

Brian Doe 33:38

yeah, yeah. So it has a big disincentive system on the top so I don't think that's the best one. So all the talk about fair share, and everybody they need to pay their fair share. I went and pulled some numbers to look at what percentage of taxes are paid by different segments of the Are

Walter Storholt 34:02

you saying you fact checked? Is that what you Is that what you did? Brian, I have

Brian Doe 34:05

fact checked this. Yeah. And, and if you look at the top 1% of earners that the most villainized, oh, they don't pay their fair share. No, they, they pay 31% of federal taxes. So 1% of the population is paying 31% of the taxes. The breakdown of total revenues for the government. Individual Income Taxes account for 54% of revenues. Payroll taxes account for 30 so again, that payroll tax everybody pays, but it is incorporated into a future benefit that you're going to get, and it's a pay as you go system. We've got to keep that going. The individual income tax is where these numbers come out, where the top quintile earns 50. 53% of pre tax income, but they pay 68% of taxes. So if I applied this to the top two quintiles, they the top 40% they earn 74% of taxes, but they pay 8060, 7080, 86% of all taxes. There's not that much room to push this system to get top earners to pay their fair share. They're paying disproportionately larger shares. They're earning more, and their take home is more, but 40% of the population is paying 86% of the taxes. That's that's the Pareto distribution we've talked about, boy,

Walter Storholt 35:41

I love episodes like this, where we get to learn Brian a lot about kind of this, behind the scenes, the inner workings. We get a little bit of the why things are the way they are. We get to see what the headline is. Of some of these takeaways, some of these different proposals and ideas, but then really break down. All right, what does this really mean in real life, and and, man, I really appreciate that, because I just feel like anybody who listens to this is going to learn a little bit about how the system works, why things are the way they are, but probably also bring up a bunch of questions are, how did we get here? And why are things that complicated?

Brian Doe 36:19

It's a band aid on a band aid, and eventually you just need to get back down to pull

Walter Storholt 36:23

band aids off, not keep adding the band aid, find the wound and go back and let's stitch it up. Yeah, like that. We need stitches, not band aids. That's the takeaway. Well, excellent. This is the kind of planning Brian's doing all the time with your individual financial plans. As an example. It's taking these macro conversations, these big ideas, and making sure that the right principles, the planning, looking at the future, what's coming down the pike. Do you have a plan that's built to withstand these things? How do the adjustments that are made in politics, in the economy, in the larger global scheme of things, going to trickle down to your individual situation. So you need a plan that's built to weather the various storms, the various whims and changes of the market. And that's what Brian's working and helping clients with pretty much on a daily basis in the offices there at living worth Wealth Advisors. And so if you are looking to take a little bit more control over your finances and your future, whether it be planning for retirement or just making sure you're getting better and better prepped for that day when it arrives. But you're not quite sure where to start. Well, Brian doe knows those good starting points. He's a tenured Certified Financial Planner with more than 20 years of experience, and he can be your trusted partner in the planning process. Don't forget, as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER professional, if you're new to that term and terminology and new to that world, it means that he meets the highest standards of training ethics and always puts your best interests first. It's a really important designation in the financial world and landscape, and so we like to highlight that here on the show, you can take advantage of a complimentary 15 minute call with Brian. It's a great way to dip your toe in the water, see if you'd be a good fit to work with one another and find out how Brian might be able to help your situation. Kind of just get an early picture of where you are in the retirement planning process, where some planning gaps might be, and how Brian can help get a 15 minute call on the books, talk about your goals and prepare for that more secure financial future. You can take advantage of that opportunity two ways, one by calling 706451 9800 706451 9800 or just go to livingworth.com and click book a call. We've got a link to that in the description of today's show as well. And you can book a call right from your smartphone or computer and have that 15 minute introductory conversation. Well, Brian, great breakdown on today's episode. Really appreciate the insight, and I look forward to seeing what you have on tap for us next time around.

Brian Doe 38:48

Yeah, this one was fun to look into. I'll come up with something good for next time some good

Walter Storholt 38:52

fact checking on today's episode. There you go. I like it. All right, folks, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time right back here on make the dough rise you. Music.

Speaker 2 39:09

Make the dough rise is brought to you by living worth Wealth Advisors with a central office in Greensboro, Georgia, but serving the lake country and beyond. The podcast is available on Apple podcasts Spotify and all your favorite podcasting apps, subscribe today and never miss an episode. Just search for make the dough rise with Brian doe You can also visit make the dough rise.com to listen to recent episodes. If you'd like to contact the show or schedule a complimentary financial review with Brian and the team, just go to make the DOE rise.com and get in touch through the website or call, 706-451-9800, thanks for listening to make the dough rise.

Ben George 39:48

Investment Advisory services offered through Main Street financial solutions LLC, information provided is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment tax or legal advice. Information is obtained from sources that are deemed to be relied. Rule, but their accurateness and completeness cannot be guaranteed.

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