To Dream the Impossible Dream - Beating the Stock Market

A few years ago after reviewing some portfolios for clients that tried their hand in stock market trading it was obvious to me that they were gambling as if they were at the roulette table in Vegas. As someone who has worked for a billionaire and observed the asset class relative to stock, the investments were safe blue chip stocks, bonds, Treasuries and Index funds because it is next to impossible to beat the market.  I then wrote my first book The 3 Secret Pillars of Wealth that discusses the fundamentals of what is an investment and what to look for every-time you start to consider an investment.  Benjamin Graham who was the mentor of Warren Buffet stated an investment was something that preserved principal and provided and adequate return.

In the book we also discuss John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Investments, views on investing and trying to beat the market. Mr. Bogle’s academic research proved that virtually no one could consistently beat the market over long stretches (like the 35 years we have to invest for retirement). The best you could hope for was to meet the market, which gave you returns that weren’t half bad. in my book we recount the research of looking at 355 mutual funds over the 35 years and that only 3 of them did anything compelling and that was in line with what the S&P 500 did. Hence, the idea is that going forward how would the average person who works uncover those 3 funds out of the masses; you can’t is the answer.

To this end, Mr. Bogle said we need to invest in a broad swath of stocks and bonds through low-cost index funds and forget about your portfolio. Spend your time living your life instead of researching stocks and bonds. That’s much more fun than sweating over investments anyway. If you’re going to research anything it would be real estate and starting your own business as other assets.

The other pundit of the idea that almost no one beats the market is Terrance Odean, a Berkeley professor who proved Bogle’s theory from another perspective. The more you trade, the more you lose, Odean discovered by examining the real-life portfolios and trading patterns of thousands of investors. His paper, Boys Will Be Boys, is a must-read for anyone who is trying to retire in comfort and not run out of money and for those who think they’re going to outsmart the stock market. You know the guys who have a super large screen in their office and they seem to be following the market and making trades. What they are really doing is creating taxes with capital gains and many of them short term which costs more, all for what?

Steady and consistent gets to the finish line if we remember what Aesop tried to teach us in the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. The best way to invest with success is to get base hits and not try to get a home run all the time. If we look at baseball, a home run is great but really you accomplish more if you get a base hit and move it one base at a time to home plate; this is better than striking out.

James Burns, Esq.

Survival of the Smartest in Retirement

An estimated 47 percent of Americans born between 1948 and 1954 may not be able to afford basic expenses and uninsured health-care costs through retirement, according to the Washington-based Employee Benefit Research Institute. EBRI has a database of 24 million 401(k) participants and 20 million Individual Retirement Accounts.

“The risk of outliving one’s assets in retirement, or longevity risk, has been placed squarely on the shoulders of workers,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor Phyllis Borzi said in testimony for the hearing. The life expectancy of a 65-year- old U.S. male is 82, and 85 for a 65-year-old female, according to the Social Security Administration.

There are solutions for guaranteed income contracts for life which makes sense to add to your planning. This provides predictability on outcome rather than riding the roller coaster of the market.

James Burns, Esq.

Health (scare) Care Reform and an Insidious Tax it Releases

The new Health care reform bill includes a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income including annuities, and possibly income recognized from the surrender or sale of life insurance.

Many clients have asked how to get out of annuities they don’t need to minimize a potential huge tax hit. This is only if you don’t think you’ll need this income as we can move it to an insurance policy that is free of the tax, leaves a legacy and still provide some income for you and your family.

This strategy spreads out potential tax payments over a 7-year period and moves funds from an existing annuity where funds are trapped and destined for taxes to efficiently transfer your wealth through life Insurance.

The benefit to you is that you keep more of what you earned and leave more to your family who should be the recipients of all your hard work.

Don’t fail to plan or get information on how this might affect you as the outcome could be disastrous.

James Burns

“How to Save Your IRA from Destruction”

If you have an IRA and you’re concerned about how to pass it on to your loved ones, an approach of naming a trust as the designated beneficiary has several benefits over directly naming the beneficiaries. The issues that can affect the named beneficiary to name a few are they could be a minor, they might not be careful with money, or they may have marital or creditor issues, and could be disabled to the extent the inheritance would affect their governmental benefits. Next, if the beneficiary dies before distribution, the alternate beneficiaries may not be accurate. Another condition we often see is the beneficiary may purposely or accidentally withdraw monies from the IRA causing adverse tax consequences. Additionally naming the client’s revocable living trust as the beneficiary, even with the appropriate language that extends payout called “conduit provisions” may create issues with the age of beneficiaries in order to “stretch-out” the required minimum distributions.

However, in 2005, the IRS issued Private Letter Ruling 200537044 (the “PLR”) that approved a new type of revocable trust created solely to be the beneficiary of an IRA account. As a result of this PLR, it is now possible for you to create an individual trust known as an IRA Beneficiary Trust® which provides maximum protection and flexibility for your retirement investments.

This IRA Beneficiary Trust® insures that your beneficiaries will extend (“stretch-out”) their taxable Minimum Required Distributions (MRDs) on the IRA over a much longer period of time. By using this trust, the age of each beneficiary becomes the effective age for that beneficiary’s required minimum distribution. As an effect, the IRAs can continue to compound for many years free of income-tax and may literally grow to be worth millions of dollars! This type of trust goes by many names and has also been called an IRA trust, an IRA Inheritance Trust, a standalone IRA trust, an IRA stretch trust or an IRA protection trust.When your loved one/s inherit your IRA fund and they keep the funds in the IRA over their lives and only take the minimum required distributions each year (the “stretch-out”), the amount of money that can accumulate and be paid to them should be massive in comparison to taking the monies directly and facing the immediate tax on them. For example, assume you have a $150,000 IRA account; we will also further assume you have two different ages (10 and 25) for your beneficiaries and presume that the account averages an annualized 7% return. First, for the beneficiary who is age 35[i] and inherits IRA proceeds upon your departure, the total benefit is $1,212,165 of after-tax benefit as opposed to $663,496 for taking the proceeds directly without the stretch-out. For the 10 year old beneficiary,[ii] they will receive approximately $4,589,236 after-tax benefit as opposed to $2,641,198 which is what they would receive lacking the stretch-out because of the immediate taxes due when they receive your funds directly.

Therefore, you can see that this wealth amassing strategy only works if the beneficiaries hold the inherited funds inside the IRA account. If a beneficiary takes all of the funds out of the IRA account (referred to as a “blow-out” because it blows the stretch-out), this wealth accumulation technique is lost. One great reason to create an IRA Beneficiary Trust® is to preserve the stretch-out and prevent a blow-out. Unfortunately, we see this blow-out too often and it jeopardizes wealth that must be saved. Many times your beneficiaries will not be aware of the tax rules and their distribution choices, so they’ll withdraw from the IRA funds at the first opportunity or do a forbidden rollover. Even if you hope that your children or beneficiaries will do the right thing by keeping the funds in the IRA account for their lives to “stretch-out” payments, they may expose it to numerous threats and hope is not a planning strategy as I’ve indicated in my book “The 3 Secret Pillars of Wealth.”

Some of the threats come in the form of a divorce where your beneficiary’s spouse could seek half of the inherited IRA if they live in a community property state. The divorce rate is out of control and a huge numbers of inherited money has become a target for the ex-spouse. Even though inherited property is considered separate property it may become the only thing available and because divorces can be very costly and last for years, your beneficiary may succumb to the pressures of long and nasty divorce litigation and be willing to surrender a large portion of the IRA account just to settle the divorce.

If you have a reasonable IRA you want to pass down or don’t think you’ll need to live on your IRA you absolutely should be thinking about this strategy.

Untaxingly,

James Burns, Esq.

Tax Free Income for Life

I’ve been working on my new program which is going to be essential as Congress is likely to shift the entire marginal tax rate making your deferred plan (IRA or 401(k)) obsolete. You’ll want to take a look at our two vehicle system to build up tax-free.

One of the vehicles is the Solo-401(k) ROTH self-directed plan. This vehicles does not have income limitations on the $165,000 for a couple filing jointly the way the ROTH IRA does. It is designed for solo-practitioners, those without employees or contractors or part-time people.

Since it is ROTH you pay your taxes up front but never pay again on the build-up or when you take monies out in the future. Traditional deferred plans allow you to defer taxes but get hammered when you retire if you are in a higher tax bracket and without tax deductions to offset which is uniformly the case for a retiree.

You can contribute up to 25% of compensation and additional catch-up is available for those 50 or older. A $41,000 annual limit applies and is indexed in the future up to 2010 unless the new regime changes things when they are sworn in as President and one could be higher than the other. A cap of $205,000 on compensation  was in force as of 2004 and is indexed up to 2010. The benefit is that you can set aside more tax-free money in the solo-401(k) ROTH than other plan choices and if it is self-directed, you do have to remain victim to what the market provides as you can have numerous choices for guranteed returns that are not connected to the market at all.

Remember this is just one half of a dynamic duo that provides for tax-free income for life. You’ll want to examine the seld-directed arena so that you’re not held to just mutual funds and other market connected investments that are roller coaster driven because they are up and down according to whimsical financial and political events.

If you have questions or are looking to set one up or need information on the “Dynamic Duo” you can find our e-book “Tax Free Income for Life” available on the website.

Untaxingly,

James Burns