Good evening.

You've got more than money.

You've got Jean Dickerson, you got Megan.

Smile.

You have a host of characters this evening as we offer you a very special edition of More Than Money.

We have a live studio audience.

Are.

I spoke to him briefly before the show.

Their semi live studio audience.

Some of them are actually quite lively.

That's a lovely thing.

And they will be enjoying our show production this evening while you're enjoying it.

Several weeks in advance.

And as I always do, because baseball season is coming up and I usually place a wager two since you're two weeks ahead of us, if you could email me the results from today's games, that would be fantastic.

Just a thought.

So if you're just joining us for the very first time, welcome.

We do not require a doctor's, excuse.

You can join us at any point.

If you've been referred by someone who's a loyal listener, we appreciate that very, very much.

If you're just trying to figure out what more than money actually does, join the club.

We're seven seasons in.

I'm not sure we've figured it out.

Exactly, because the term more than money is very open ended, and it's intended to be when we talk about financial issues, of course, we talk about investments in retirement, social security, estate planning, executor, executors, executrix is sounds rude.

It really isn't.

Bottom line is that whatever dollar sign connects to your life, that's important, of course, but your life is far more important.

The impact on you, the impact on the people that you care about is far more important.

And that's the more part.

And in generally generally, we will offer, our audience the opportunity to send us, questions.

You can certainly still do that.

Jean, at ask mtm.com.

No problem with that whatsoever.

We won't be answering questions tonight.

This is show and it's companion show that will follow next week.

Is an opportunity for us to explore a broad topic, which is family, generational wealth, the opportunity to have impact across maybe grandparents, parents, children, any combination of the above.

And, to that end, we are enlisting the, the assistance of a fair number of very, very brave folks to explain some of the key concepts, some strategy drills, as we sometimes call them, inappropriate.

But then you'll get the idea.

So, megs, where do we begin this evening?

Well, excited to introduce so much of our team tonight.

Our first member is going to be Mark Bell Sack.

And he's a senior family wealth advisor with MTM.

Welcome.

Mark.

Let's get you all right.

You're already got a woo.

That guy was kind of nice.

This is great.

Totally unexpected.

And it was my wife.

That's kind of in the way.

What the heck?

Sir, you actually inspired the whole idea of of generational wealth.

But actually, if you're going to have generational wealth, you have to have wealth that actually survives from generation to generation.

One of the key issues that lots of our clients, lots of our audience is concerned about is protecting the investments.

How do you do that?

So I've been doing this for 32 years, not 780.

And an approach to investing in the traditional sense has always been stocks, bonds, cash stocks have allowed you the opportunity to grow outpace inflation.

Bonds were they're designed to offset the risk that's inherent with stocks.

And then cash is cash.

The challenge is, is that there's a misconception of whether you want to grow your money or you want to protect your money.

And there's only two baskets.

And so as the industry has evolved, tools have come in place where you can actually do both.

So protecting your investments.

There's a new classification of investments offered ETFs, defined outcome funds, which are a little complicated but give you the opportunity to participate should your underlying benchmark do well.

But it also provides a level of downside protection.

So in recent days the stock market's been a little volatile right.

When I say recent days, I mean, the last 780 years, the market has been volatile.

So what you're saying is that this might smooth out the ride a bit.

It will smooth out the ride.

I don't want to get overly complicated.

But bonds, traditionally, you get what you get.

It's a debt obligation.

So there isn't much opportunity for upside.

It won't see so much volatility.

But 2022 is a great example that it can see some pretty severe volatility.

2022 the market dropped how much.

So the S&P was down about 19.5%.

High yield bonds were down roughly 11 or 12%.

Intermediate term corporate bonds down between 7 and 9.

So if you're retired January 1st of 2020 your your life had some anxiety.

Say that's a toughie unless you employed some of these tools.

Exactly.

And the way that this component has evolved, some provide an outstanding income stream which is not directly correlated to interest rates.

That's another challenge with bonds, is that interest rates come down.

Your potential for generating income comes down also.

So the income stream from these investments is tied entirely to the options market.

Which volatility is an options best friend.

So you can generate in some cases 789 plus percent income in a current environment where CDs are three three and a quarter, three and a half, right.

That's pretty impressive.

It is.

It gives us at least the shot that in decidedly down turn decidedly negative, results in the market that we don't have to feel all that pain.

What it does is it takes a lot of pressure off of the equity side to have to perform.

Okay, good.

The cap with bonds is typically think about your best case scenario 6 to 8%.

Maybe if the market's doing well and you have an opportunity to participate, maybe you can take some of that risk off the table, not be allocated as heavily with equities because you're getting a lot more support from your non-equity component.

Right?

What that does is it's a great deal of peace of mind for clients.

You can still achieve your required returns with the highest level of probability, and you can sleep at night without anxiety.

Right.

Mark, thank you so much again, sir.

Appreciate that.

Yeah.

So, Yes.

Next up we have, Mikayla Scarpelli.

She is a family wealth advisor associate with MTM.

Welcome home.

We're training our audience while we're working.

That's okay.

That's fantastic.

So welcome.

Deep breath.

It's nerve racking being up here, pretending all of you aren't looking at me right now.

That's.

That's a very good mental approach to this.

First of all, welcome to our More Than money team.

Happy to be here.

And, your contributions are already being shot dramatically.

So that's fantastic.

But your first it isn't your first job.

But when we're talking to young folks, particularly about their first job, what are some key financial things they should be thinking about?

Sure.

I like to think of something that, you know, kind of helped me, when you get your first job, it's not about restricting yourself.

It's about giving your money direction, knowing where to put money, where it's going to go.

Before you decide where your money should go, you need to understand where it's already going.

Kind of understand, you know, where is my 400?

Where is the money in my 401 K going?

And that leads me into my next topic.

Okay.

We're A1K that we kind of touched on before.

You have a 401 k option.

Your employer is offering to match it.

Why are you not contributing?

Do it for yourself.

One quote that stuck with me, that I discovered recently, was that time is the one asset you can't replenish.

You can, you know, always earn more money later, but you can't recreate years of growth, that you didn't give to yourself in the beginning.

And your investments, starting small today is far more powerful than waiting until you're ready.

There is never a right time to be ready to invest your money.

And I think that that speaks volumes in itself.

It truly does.

Your, your mental approach makes perfect sense.

A lot of young folks your age, are not thinking that way.

How does a financial advisor get in there and reorder how they're thinking?

Right, right.

I think that, you know, we live in a world where it's become so expensive to do anything.

And I think that a lot of younger people, including myself, use that as a, a shoulder to lean on to say, you know, I, I don't have the money to invest because it all needs to go to my bills.

It all needs to go to, you know, a doctor's appointment, whatever it may be.

Give yourself the opportunity to put that money aside so that come hardship, maybe down the road, you have that money available for you.

So put that aside first.

Yes, absolutely.

Well done, well done.

You must thank this young lady from Paris.

Thank you.

I saw you nodding.

She said some great stuff.

Some really good stuff.

Yeah, we're off to a good start.

And let's see if we can keep it rolling.

Rolling.

Next up is Darryl Okin.

He is also a family wealth advisor with MTM.

Welcome.

How's it going, sir?

One of the newest.

Yeah, really new opportunities for folks who want to help, but particularly little ones.

The Trump account.

Yeah, the Trump account.

As part of the, one big beautiful bill or B3 is some people like to call it, is the, Trump account, that, the government's going to set up for all of our young folks and, the, it's really in two different parts.

The best part of it is for folks that, for children who are born, this year and will in 2025 through 2028, the government's actually going to give you $1,000 and, that's real money.

We talked about the time value of money.

If you just took the thousand dollars and just, just did nothing else by the time they were, would it be able to have that money and use it?

That could be $15,000.

Now, they don't have to do anything and there's $15,000 tax free.

So, it's not nothing.

If you do a little bit and just put some money into it.

And over the over those 17 years, you could actually get to, three quarters of $1 million, just by putting in the extra five positions.

Is this tax sheltered?

Yes it is, yes it is.

So, you don't you don't pay any taxes on it.

As you go.

So as you earn that money, it's tax free.

And then when you take it out, yes, there's tax implications.

But you now have, you now have a pile of money that, you can do a lot of things with.

So it's not just educational oriented.

It can be anything.

You can literally make that your down payment for your for your house, buy a car, books, college, whatever you want to do.

So a lot of folks have five, 29 plans.

A lot of folks have college planning.

But the idea of the government is talking about the Trump account is maybe designed for helping, bridge that gap where they can get their first house down payment on the House.

The government is going to give free money for a certain time frame, but anybody can then contribute.

Anybody can contribute to it.

Any anybody who is, 0 to 18 years old can actually have a Trump account.

But yes, that's that's correct.

When does it start?

It starts in, July, July 4th of this year.

And, that's that's interesting.

It's not coincidental.

Also, do you know the form that you have to use?

Of course you do.

Absolutely not.

I thought he was a tax guy for him.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So it's, form 4 or 5, four, seven, which I don't think that's a coincidental either 4 or 5.

Four.

Got it.

So, that's that's the form you have to use.

You can do it through your tax return, or you can sign up through, Trump accounts, dot gov and fill that form out and you can get your Trump account outstanding.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Trump account.

Yeah that's pretty cool I didn't know about that.

Honestly.

That's wickedly cool because some folks have it maybe thousand bucks.

Maybe.

That's like priming the pump.

Get some started, make some interested.

6 or 7 years old kids are gone.

Hi, how's my Trump account doing?

All right.

That'd be kind of fun.

Yeah, and you can teach him from there.

Hey, it's invested in the stock market.

It's.

And and that kind of what, information.

Maybe it sparks something.

Maybe bridging the gap so that more people, more people can be financially independent.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

Where do we go next?

We go to Alyssa Young, also a family wealth advisor with MTM.

Hi.

Hello.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She always never ends.

Welcome.

Thank you.

This is, this idea that that actually came from Melissa of of of giving us this framework to think about family wealth.

It's pretty important stuff.

Very.

And and there's lots of different, objectives, goals from folks, grandparents, parents, grandchildren, lots of different goals.

But there's, there's one that almost everybody who's retired catches their attention in retirement income and more specifically protected income.

Okay.

And the concept there, we just talked about babies and saving for babies.

The concept is once you stop working, if you want to stop working ever.

Some people maybe don't.

That's okay.

If you want to stop going to work, and you still want to be able to put food on the table and pay your bills, you want to make sure that you've saved up enough to cover those expenses and not run out of money.

That's everyone's biggest fear in retirement.

When it comes to money, right?

You don't want to outlive it.

So there's a couple things you can do to reduce that anxiety so that you can sleep at night and not be tremendously concerned about what's happening in the stock market, so you can generate protected income a couple of different ways.

One example would be maximizing your social Security.

So Social Security is Social Security.

Well not really all right.

That's the right one.

It's more complicated than you might think.

A lot of strategy involved in when do I claim when does my spouse claim.

Right.

And so if you can time it right and figure out, okay, this social Security is I'm picking it at the optimal time for us.

And that's going to help cover those bills and create part of your income floor.

So you got your basic needs covered.

Your Social Security might not do it all.

You might not be fortunate enough to have a pension.

You're going to have a pension.

Probably not.

So if you don't have that paycheck that just comes in magically into your bank account every month, you might be concerned.

And so another strategy to complement the social Security might be to create your own pension in the form of an annuity, an income annuity.

Sure.

Yeah.

So that's something else we can talk about carving out a piece of your retirement assets to create cash flow.

And in retirement is a cash flow really the deal?

It really is the deal.

Yeah.

You know, if you want to just make sure you can live your life, do the things you want to do and not have that stress of, I don't want to have to go back to work.

Yeah.

What if.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if you can, have a piece of your money that you've saved up all your working life working for you in the form of a just an automatic deposit that comes into the bank.

The rest of your money is like a slush fund.

And that's where you've got, okay, there's an emergency expense.

You know, the the, heat pump broke or I want to take my family on a vacation, you know, all the kids and grandkids, you need a new car and and do it confidently because you know that all my bills are paid.

I'm happy.

I'm healthy, independent of what I may spend out of that.

That piece of it.

So it almost sounds like you're setting this up to be like like a paycheck.

Like it gets direct deposit to the bank account and life is grand.

Yeah, you build your own retirement paycheck and you don't have to stress as much.

Some moving parts.

Sure, they should meet with a financial advisor.

Yes.

This stuff's not just plain vanilla pick.

You know, pick something off the shelf, not a do it yourself.

No, no, it should be customized.

And that's, something that you can help with.

Sure is outstanding.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

You're not going to have a pension?

No.

And most people are not.

Yeah.

When when, I'm looking back to to generation before me.

The greatest generation, World War two generation.

They all had lots, tons and tons of them had pensions.

And then it just melted away.

So you're not going to have a pension.

So when Alyssa talks about creating a an income stream that you can't outlive, that in essence is going to be your pension if you choose to save that money.

Right.

You better choose.

I'm think I will.

She convinced me.

Very good, very good.

Who's next?

Next up is Gavin Kersh, and he's also a family wealth advisor.

Associate.

Let's welcome Gavin.

Welcome, sir.

Happy to be here.

Are you really?

I am, believe it or not.

Yes.

Excellent, excellent.

You might want to tell your face I thought you were walking to the gallows.

I wasn't sure they're not today.

Welcome, welcome.

Thank you.

Again.

This is, our attempt to give people, at whatever level they find themselves in the family, and lots of folks find themselves.

Gosh, I can be a grandparent and a son or a daughter.

I can be a parent like you find yourself in lots of different, roles within a family.

But one of the things that, challenging for a lot of people to absorb are the ideas around gifting.

Lots of folks, tons of folks are very generous, but doing it correctly, that might be a bit of a challenge.

Yeah.

To continue the conversation about generational wealth.

Gifting is commonly a misunderstood topic, I think.

And what do I mean by that?

Four things I want to touch on.

Some people have a certain ideology of how many people can I gift money to?

They may think that there's a legal limit.

There's not.

You can give it to as many people as you like if you see that to be fit.

Additionally, they may think it can only be family members.

Again, not true.

You can give it to anybody you see fit.

There's really not many limitations when it comes to gifting.

Of course, there are some when it comes to the assets that you can gift many different things.

You can do cash, stocks, bonds, collectibles.

Of course you have to consider the tax implications on those things, but your hands are not really tied.

Lastly, just a little tidbit when it comes to medical bills or tuition gifting.

Yeah, those are unlimited.

So that's a little thing to throw in there that works out well.

Yeah.

So annual gifts.

What's the current annual gift limit.

So as of 2025 the annual gift limit is $19,000 per person.

So if you have four grandkids, if you are so inclined to give each of them, each of them $19,000 in a given year, you can do so.

And if you're married, you can double that up.

That's right.

So you can give away an awful lot of money to ungrateful, I mean, to young people who feel entitled to get your money.

That's right.

And of course, if if it's not, an annual gift which doesn't even require paperwork.

What's for a married couple?

What's the lifetime limit of gifting right now?

Without anyone paying tax unlimited, it's 30 million bucks.

30 million?

Yeah, it's a pretty substantial sum of money.

No, it's not nothing.

Thank you, sir, we appreciate it.

Thanks again.

I think we have one more.

We do.

Last but not least, we have John Weimer, family wealth advisor.

John.

My friend.

Also happy to be here.

I'm glad.

I know you didn't look like you're going to the gallows.

No, no.

Today.

Fantastic.

Just so that folks gives have some context about why you might be, a near expert in the, issue of planning for college.

You have how many children have four children, and their ages are the oldest is six.

Next is for the next or twins.

And they're about 20 months.

And there are folks right in the audience right now wincing, going, whoa, dude.

Well, my wife does all the work.

I was going to say and saying prayers for your wife.

So that's that's a beautiful thing.

Saving for college.

Gosh, you got four.

So it's going to be you need to take every advantage you can.

Where do you start?

A great place to start would be a 529 college savings plan.

Okay.

The best way I could explain it is almost like a Roth IRA for education.

Oh, so the money goes in after tax your contributions, but then it grows tax free.

And as long as it's used for higher education expenses, it comes out tax free as well.

And if you live in Pennsylvania and there are certain other states that allow, state tax deduction on your contributions.

So that's a bonus.

On the state tax side.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

College, a lot of folks these days, myself included, even though I am incredibly well-educated, they're saying college.

I'm not really sure.

That's what I'm really hoping for for my kids.

529 College really?

Well, now there's tons and tons of flexibility with what you can use the funds for, so you can definitely use it for private public school for your degree, to your degree community college.

You can also use it for trade school, vocational school.

So you know, culinary cosmetology.

You can use it even for K through 12.

Private school.

So it doesn't have to be college anymore.

That's fantastic.

How about for folks who are, professionals and they have to do continuing ed for the rest of their lives?

Is 529 work there?

You can use it for that as well.

Okay.

So, we're not, we're not stuffy.

We're not arrogant here saying, hey, it could be preschool, it could be a Christian school, it could be, high school.

It can be so many different kinds.

And yet you still get tax advantages.

That's right.

And the worst case scenario, in my opinion, would be it can turn into a Roth IRA for your children or grandchild.

Okay, let me stop here.

Right there.

We got an educational program.

But what you're saying is, if I'm hearing you correctly and I know I am, because we talked about this, somebody, starts at 529.

The child is is two years old, right?

Eight, 20 months and and, how do we know at 18 that they're going to want to go to college?

Maybe they want to go to the military.

Maybe they want to start their own company.

Maybe.

And years ago, it meant, now what?

And now what is very different?

What is now what?

So what?

The recent secure 2.0 act as of 2024, if the account, the 529 account is open at least 15 years and it's not used, then you can rollover those funds into a Roth IRA for the beneficiary.

There are some stipulations in place for the annual limits and a lifetime amount that you can do that for, but that's the like I said, I think the worst case scenario, the total limitation right this moment, I think it's going to change is about 35,000 bucks.

That's right.

And if you do some simple math using the magic of the rule of 20 of 70 to 35 grand compounding for 30 or 40 years, that young person is going to be very, very happy with you.

Absolutely.

Well said, sir.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you to John.

Was there any one thing that jumped out at you is kind of I mean, they covered so much stuff that was really, really important.

That was great information for everybody.

Like, audience oldest to young.

Yeah.

Wherever you might find yourself.

Yeah.

I think just me listening to all that, I think just kind of shows you're never too young to learn about this stuff.

And it's important to everybody.

It really is.

And the impact.

Where are we talking about money?

Are we talking about millions?

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

But that's not the real impact.

It's it's forgive me.

It's more than money.

It's more money.

You're going to have that.

That's the confidence that that, that comes from learning, making mistakes.

Oh gosh.

I invest in that.

And it stinks.

And I got to change shift gears or hey, I thought I was going to go to college.

I'm not.

I'm going to start a business or I'm going to be a plumber.

Plumbers.

Can you find a good plumber anymore?

Goodness.

Whoa.

Fantastic.

For there's there's so much going on here that's exciting.

Oh, gosh.

I wish we had a second show that we could.

Oh, darn.

I should have thought about that in advance.

I well, wait a second, I, I think we can make that happen.

So for all of you that are watching and you're saying, wow, that was pretty good.

Buckle in.

Or at least DVR, because our next show next week will be a continuation of lots more generational ideas for your family wealth, and hopefully something that you're going to want to pay close attention to.

Pad and pen makes a great deal of sense to to grab some notes.

If you are interested in topics not covered, send me an email Jean and ask mtm.com Jeannie at ask mtm.com.

And we're happy to respond to every single question.

Back to you.

And maybe, just maybe, if you're lucky, you'll hear your question asked and answered on a future edition of More Than Money, as we'll be back here next week for another show of more than month to night.