And good evening, you've got more than money, you've got Jeanne Dickerson, your host, your personal financial adviser for the next half an hour.

I'm all yours for better or for worse.

I'm all yours.

Happy to be with you.

So many of you have sent us wonderful emails.

We're going to cover a few of those this evening.

As you might expect, we get far more than we can possibly put into a very short show, but we answer every single one.

So if you have a question about anything in your financial life, your retirement, perhaps 401ks, IRAS, estate wills and trusts, Social Security businesses starting running and liquidating businesses, send those emails to me, Jean and ask MTM and E and ask MTM, and we're happy to serve you.

One of the most common questions we get, we get it so often that instead of having a lesser read that to you, I'm just going to tell you what's going on.

The required minimum distribution question is one that's very prevalent for folks who are in their late sixties and early seventies because they have become aware that there are rules that they must follow to get money out of their IRAs and their 401ks.

And those rules are very stringent.

Either you follow them correctly and life is grand or you don't.

And the IRS not only wants their taxes, but they're going to penalize you painfully.

If you are supposed to take ten thousand out and you didn't, you're going to pay your income tax, maybe two thousand dollars, and you're going to pay a penalty of half of the ten thousand.

On top of the two.

So you should have taken out ten.

You say to the IRS, I forgot and they say, no problem.

Send us a check for seven thousand bucks.

That's just dreadful, so we've got to be aware that there are rules to follow if you are already taking your RMDs, you're probably on track, likely nothing there to be worried about.

But if you are just in this, what soon to be new year of twenty twenty two?

If the year twenty twenty two you turn seventy two.

It is a critical year for you if you have money in an IRA or a four one K. You must be aware of your required minimum distribution amounts.

Timing and options.

Things that you can do in order to get that money out.

Things that you absolutely cannot do.

And interestingly enough, ways that you could get that money out.

Anybody listening?

And not pay income tax.

Nah, we're not talking about tax evasion, we're talking about tax avoidance, playing the game by the rules.

You may find that there are some rules that would be very advantageous to you and end up with you paying far less in income taxes than you might have feared.

Make sure that you understand the rules, and if you're not clear that you do, make sure that you're being guided by either a tax adviser or a financial adviser who does know the rules very, very well because there are lots of them that can be very, very confusing, and you need to follow them precisely so that the IRS has no interest in you whatsoever.

But we have interest in you, and let's go to the emails that we have tonight.

We're talking to Alissa.

Alissa, how do we start?

We're going to start with something a little different.

This one's not an email.

This is a news report, and I'd love to get your feedback.

Gen Xers are on deck for retirement, but there's still time to make a few good or bad moves that could change everything in their golden years.

Self-made millionaire sales guru Grant Cardone thinks one of the good moves is to go Orman opposite and stop contributing to their 401ks right away.

That advice runs contrary to everything.

Gen Xers have been told their whole lives about saving for retirement, but Corden made his bones on bold ideas.

He said to CNBC, Why would I go to work, have my employer give me another six thousand dollars a year and then take that money and send it off to Wall Street, where I can't even touch it for 30 years?

Cardon insists that neither the Gen Xers nor anyone else can save their way to financial freedom.

Instead, he wants them to earn their way to their goals by taking that savings and investing it in a business or some other wealth generator.

What do you think, Gene?

Oh.

This is so sad.

There are people in this world that are so desperate for attention that they will say things.

That if they truly believe are true, they are woefully misguided.

And if they don't believe they're true and they're saying them just to get attention, they're so insecure that that's a shame.

Their self esteem esteem is really, really little.

I don't know which of those applies to Grant Cardon.

I am very familiar that Grant Cardone is a self-proclaimed sales guru.

Claims to be the number one sales sales trainer in America has sold tons of books on sales training.

You get my emphasis.

Did you hear anything in there about number one financial adviser, sharpest self-proclaimed guru in financial?

Well, apparently he's trying to be.

Apparently, that's an area that he feels he can break into, or at the very least, get people's attention by saying things that are in the news report.

It's referred to as bold, could have been called outrageous, could have been called controversial.

What it should have been called was ridiculous, misleading, inaccurate, totally incorrect.

That's what it should have been called.

And this should never have received PR attention in any way, shape or form.

Cnbc should be embarrassed.

Now, let's be clear, Suze Orman has made her bones on being bold and being on PBS quite often.

And she has her own approach to things, not all of which I agree with.

Maybe half.

But to be fair, in this particular case, if he says Susie is wrong, that people should not use their 4:1 case, Grant Cardone doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

Not a clue.

Or he doesn't care.

You'll decide for one case, he says, that your employer will take your money and send it off to Wall Street.

Wrong, incorrect.

Not even misleading.

Simply an error in statement.

Intentional or otherwise, it's simply wrong.

Your four one K contributions are not taken by your employer anywhere you decide where they are invested.

It's part of the structure of the four one K. So if you decide investing in Wall Street, whatever that may mean, he doesn't even know what that means.

Wall Street if you decide that's in your best interest, either on your own volition or with the advice of a financial adviser, so be it if you decide I don't want to be any part of Wall Street, I want all my money invested in CDs.

I want all my money invested in corporate bonds.

I want all my money out of Wall Street.

You can absolutely do that as well.

You can use, gosh, dozens and dozens and dozens of different types of investments.

Your employer doesn't choose.

You do.

So his fundamental statement is.

It's steaming a little, and I wish they would stay away.

It's that smelly.

Bottom line is his second statement of no one can get financially independent by saving and are more than money world headquarters in the Holy Lands.

We are honored to serve hundreds of clients who have become financially independent, saving and predominantly the platform they saved with was there for one K in their IRAs, so his you can't become financially free is wrong.

Your employer takes your money and sends it off.

Someplace else is wrong.

I don't know where he got six thousand bucks.

I think he picked that out of thin air.

Maximum for somebody 50 and over is now twenty six thousand folks that are under twenty thousand bucks.

You can save a ton of money.

Tax deductibility or tax deferred and end up with a wonderfully well provided for financially free retirement.

I would suggest that Grant Cardone figure out a different way to promote himself as a sales guru and leave the financial advisory world to the financial advisors.

Just a suggestion.

That was a little snarky.

Alissa, do we have something far more pleasant?

Absolutely.

Here's an email question.

My mom passed away earlier this year and left me just over sixty five thousand dollars in a Roth IRA.

I'm forty eight and I have a great job and don't need the money right now.

Can I leave it in the Roth and then give it to my kids when I die?

Will they get the income?

Will they get the money income tax free to?

Well, I said is there's something more pleasant we start out with her mom, passed away, we feel that's not necessarily more pleasant and our condolences go to her and it was just recently.

So that's a very difficult time to be making these kinds of decisions.

But we understand what her intentions are.

She's forty eight.

She has good income, doesn't need the money as we speak.

The IRS says that if you inherit an IRA in this case, a Roth IRA, you must take the money out by the end of the 10th year following the date of the decedents passing.

So she's got 10 years to move sixty five thousand now.

Interestingly enough, that's roughly six thousand five hundred a year if she wanted to do it year by year, and that's roughly the amount that she can put into an IRA, a Roth IRA.

So if she has the intention of getting this money to her children tax free, she can't leave it where it is because she'll only be fifty eight when it has to come out completely.

And even if she did, we hope pray to God not.

But if she were to pass away beforehand, it would go to the children, but it would not be tax free.

They don't get to leave it in their tax free for generations and generations, but she might consider moving pieces of it year by year out of the current inherited Roth IRA into her own Roth IRA, which could then add her passing, go to her children and they would pay no income tax.

So it's a two step process to get her where she wants to be.

Now some folks are saying Gene, yeah, 10 percent, but it's going to grow.

You're not going to get the whole amount out by the end of 10 years.

That's very possible.

You're absolutely right.

If she's involved in a 401K program, her limit now, currently about twenty thousand, she may or may not be filling that up.

Let's assume she's not.

Let's say she's putting ten thousand in a year.

She can move ten thousand from the sixty five into the Roth portion of her 401k, and by the end of six and a half years have moved all of that into a Roth 401k, and that can go to her children tax free.

So again, a multi step process to make it as complicated as possible.

It might actually involve both a Roth IRA and a Roth 401K.

It depends on her employment situation and what she has available to use, but don't give up hope that as many people have already been told, you got to take the money out, you've got to spend it.

It's just the way it is.

Nothing can be done.

Not true.

Not true at all.

Make sure you're sitting with a competent financial adviser or in and or a trusted tax adviser to make sure you understand exactly what the impact is on your situation first and then you can design the strategy to get the money to your children if if that comes to it.

Forty eight, you might be with this 50 or 60 more years.

Your kids might be retired by the time you access them or they access your money.

That's the best plan right there.

Just live another 60 years, it'll take care of itself.

Let's go back to Alyssa.

Let's see what our next challenge is on tonight's more than money.

Recently, I watched your MTM show and someone asked a Social Security question, I may have misinterpreted something, so I'd like clarification on your answer.

I believe you said if someone waits until 70 to collect Social Security and then dies, their spouse will only collect what they would have received at full retirement age, not the extended benefit.

I did the research before delaying, and my understanding is as follows the rules are different for survivor benefits.

A widow or widower whose spouse waited until 70 to file for Social Security is entitled to the full amount that deceased was getting, including the delayed retirement credits so long as the surviving spouse has reached full retirement age.

Please let me know.

Thank you.

Interesting question.

Social Security questions are always interesting.

A lot of folks are under the mistaken impression Social Security is what it is.

You retire, they send you checks.

There's nothing you can do about it.

You can't increase them, you can't decrease them.

It just is what it is.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are blessed and our more than money world headquarters that we have as one of our partners, Mr. Mark Baisakhi, he is a Social Security and Medicare expert extraordinaire, worked in the Social Security system for nearly 40 years.

His wife worked in the system for 40 years.

Unbelievable amounts of background and knowledge that they bring to the table.

And the bottom line is they counsel with our clients, help them design their Social Security strategies for just these kinds of situations.

So we're making sure we understand how Social Security works in in to the greatest extent possible in all the various permutations of what could happen.

Would we all like to have the maximum amount of Social Security for 30 or 40 years?

The answer is sure.

The way you would get that is you would wait until age 70 when your benefit has been maximized.

That's the age at which you can no longer get more benefits, so to speak at your maximum benefit and then live 30 or 40 more years ideal.

How do you know that's going to happen?

Well, you don't.

No one is psychic psychotic.

Guilty as charged psychic, not so much crystal ball.

Really fuzzy.

You don't know that you've made that proper decision until the day that you are ascending to the great reward and then you can look back and go.

Nailed it.

Or, Oh, I wanted to get maximum Social Security at age 70.

And sadly, that bus caught me at age sixty nine, 11 months and 30 days.

I never got a penny out of my Social Security.

Now that's an interesting Segway to this gentleman's question about survivor benefits.

And he is quite right.

Survivor benefits are very different than living benefits.

Living benefits say if I retire at age 70, that's my maximum for my wife's.

My spouse's benefit, spousal benefit.

I say wife could be wife, could be husband, could be both.

It's it's whoever is the lower compensated partner in the marriage.

My spouse's benefit is 50 percent of my normal retirement age benefit.

If you are at the maximum level at age sixty seven ish, you're going to get a little over three thousand a month.

If you wait until age 70 ish, you're going to get closer to 4000 a month.

But your spouse as a living benefit as long as he or she is above normal retirement age.

Sixty seven ish will get half of my three thousand or so, fifteen hundred.

They will not get half of my age 70.

My four thousand.

Unless.

I pass away and then survivor benefits get stepped up to whatever my benefit was the day I died.

So my spouse, if I collect at age 70 and I'm collecting four thousand one hundred a month and I die forty one hundred will be her survivor benefit.

Does that help?

I hope it helps.

That's that's the the the rules, any misunderstandings, make sure you shoot me an email jean and ask TMZ.com, GNC and ask and TMZ.com, and we'll clarify that for you.

And if you're interested in having a discussion with a real live Social Security expert, just let us know.

Same email address what connects you up with Mark Bozak?

There's no charge for that service.

We have found it is so invaluable for our clients, and as far as I'm concerned, every single person who's in our more than money audience is a client of mine.

We're giving you as much advice as we can, even though you're not paying for it directly.

You're supporting Channel Thirty Nine and that helps.

And that's fantastic.

Bottom line is that if you'd like to meet with Marc, he meets with folks in our Our World headquarters.

He meets with folks on the phone, by email, by Zoom.

So there's no excuse for not having all the good information that you need to make the best possible decisions for you and your family around Social Security.

Something other than Social Security.

I think we can do that.

Here's an email that's not about Social Security.

It says we have three children with three wonderful spouses.

Only one couple has children.

Our primary beneficiaries in our financial accounts at Fidelity are each other, and the secondary beneficiaries are our kids.

While we have the option of checking in slurpees for the one couple with children, we would prefer to have all three spouses get their share.

Should one of our children predecessor's us because the beneficiary designation is clean and avoids probate?

How do we make this happen?

Well, the last observation is one hundred percent correct beneficiary designations.

Lots of folks are not aware of this.

Beneficiary designations are clean.

It's a good word.

They're very effective, they're very cost effective and they're very efficient.

They get money from one place after someone passes to the hands of the beneficiaries very quickly and they bypass probate and they bypass the will.

That last part is what surprises a lot of folks, they don't understand the bypassing the well part.

I'll give you a very simple example this gentleman and his wife, they have an IRA, it's worth a hundred thousand.

It's the only thing they have in this world.

In their will, it says that they would like to give each of their children ten thousand.

They would like to give each of their grandchildren ten thousand as well.

I, if I'm going by memory, there's three grandchildren, so that would be a total of sixty thousand in bequests on their IRA.

They name themselves each other as mirror beneficiaries and their children as contingent beneficiaries at their passing.

The children will split the IRA.

The grandchildren will get nothing.

Because there's nothing going into the will beneficiaries, whether they be IRAs annuities for one case four or three B's life insurance contracts, wherever there's a beneficiary designation that is handled first and whatever is attended to in the will is handled.

Second.

So this gentleman's interest is very, very cool indeed.

What are the odds that they married all three of their children off to three wonderful spouses?

You have your own family.

You know that in every family, there's at least one.

My family multiples.

They line up.

Bottom line is you are blessed.

Your family has been blessed and your instinct to protect the spouses of your children.

It's wonderful.

Now Pierce therapy is indeed says If I'm dying, if I die, it goes to my children.

It doesn't go anywhere else.

There's two ways that I think you're going to find yourself comforted in terms of how you set this up.

You would set each of your children up as the contingent beneficiary should one of your children predeceased you.

Yes, you would want to go in and change that contingent beneficiary so that it would go to their spouse.

So again, Jane and and Jimi are married.

Jane passes away.

You put Jimi in as the contingent beneficiary rather than the grandchildren.

If you forget, it is most likely the case that if Jane is gone, her estate flows to her husband anyway.

So it's not going to go directly to the children.

It will go to her husband as long as you're not using the term per slurpees per child.

It just Latin of some type Latin, Greek, Irish.

I don't know.

You'll figure it out.

Bottom line is that it can be done rather easily.

Make sure you work with your custodian to make sure it's clean and clear.

And if you have any questions at all about whether they've done it correctly, make sure that you share that with your estate planning attorney and he or she will clean it up for sure.

Melissa, one last quick one.

Sure.

This one's short.

With interest rates so low at the bank, why wouldn't someone just invest in stocks with dividends?

Wow.

Yes, we have a pattern in the last few weeks short questions, complicated answers.

Interest rates in the banks?

Yes, dreadfully low zero point zero.

You've never seen so many zeros before they get to a numeral.

So it's very frustrating.

Dividends on well-known companies large, profitable, low debt reliable have been around and continue to pay dividends for years and years and years.

Somewhere between two and three percent is a good average.

So why wouldn't you take money?

We've got 50 grand in the bank.

We're making nothing.

We got our quarterly statement.

We've got a dollar 30.

That's embarrassing.

Why not take that over to the stock market, where over the course of a year we're going to get a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred dollars instead of five?

Well, the word risk has to be in there somewhere.

This is the quintessential example of apples to kumquats.

It is not only not apples to apples.

I'm not sure it's in the same species.

Yes, they're both investments of a fashion, but a bank account is extremely safe, has FDIC insurance or other types of insurance that gives you a tremendous amount of confidence that even if the bank goes kablooey, your money is still there.

When we turn that money into an investment in the stock market, the guarantees that come over are, let me think it's just none.

There are no guarantees.

That doesn't even seem to apply.

Are there options that you might have for investing and get higher rates of return without dreadful amounts of risk?

The answer is sure, and there are some relatively new options that are very, very interesting that allow you to invest in the stock market, but actually set a limit as to how far down you will feel pain if the stock market goes down.

One of the most interesting ones that we've seen lately is you can invest in the S&P five hundred and if it drops more than if it drops up to thirty five percent, your account only goes down.

Five.

Now, that's fascinating in two thousand eight, the time that most of you look back on with dread and with cold sweats, that was horrible.

The stock market that year went down thirty four percent.

If you had gone down in that year, five percent, you would have been a genius.

That is available to you.

It doesn't make it equivalent to the bank.

It doesn't eliminate the risk.

It simply doesn't.

But if you have money in the bank, that the only reason it's there is, you don't know where else to go, and you would like to make a better rate of return with an acceptable level of risk than perhaps these new types of buffered investments would be interesting to you.

It has to fit you.

But remember, try, try, try to not compare apples to kumquats when you're making your financial decisions.

It doesn't usually work.

Speaking of not usually working, it doesn't work if I go way over time on our more than money shows, we just have seconds left in this edition of more than money.

We are so very thankful for you.

You are continuing week after week to make us very visible in the Lehigh Valley and beyond PBS thirty nine and our partnership has been so very wonderful for us and for so many of you, as we've been able to help and serve you in so very many ways.

If you have a question whether it's retirement income tax issues, estate planning, Social Security issues, how to improve your investment returns or just maybe just improve your peace of mind and your ability to sleep better at night.

Send those to us so that we can answer those.

Not all will appear on future shows.

Simply not enough time, but we'll answer every single question directly from our more than money world headquarters.

Send me that email Jean at Ask MTM Geeni and ask MTM.

And thank you so much for your time this evening.

We'll see you next time on more than money.