I'm A 3rd Gen Advisor. Here's What I Tell Every Client At 62

Get started on your retirement strategy here: https://www.demarsfinancial.com/start-here?utm_source=Youtube&utm_medium=Videolink&utm_campaign=46203

📋 The Retire Once Guide (free) — find out whether you're actually ready to pull the trigger:  https://www.demarsfinancial.com/retire-once-guide

Most retirement advice was built to help you grow your money. Almost none of it was built to help you actually use it.

Taylor is a third-generation financial advisor, and after watching this industry change from the inside since his grandfather started his firm in 1975, here's what he's learned: the word "financial advisor" can mean three completely different jobs, all wearing the same business card. One sells products. One manages a portfolio. Only one actually plans your retirement. And at 62, that difference can quietly cost you a real piece of what you spent a lifetime building, plus the part no statement will ever show you.

In this episode, he breaks down how the industry got stuck optimizing the wrong half of retirement, the three ways that gap costs you, and four questions you can use to tell whether your plan is actually built for this part of your life, whether you have an advisor, you're shopping for one, or you're doing it all yourself.

Chapters
0:00 — The questions no one's answering at 62
1:18 — Why "financial advisor" tells you almost nothing
2:07 — When the job was just selling products
3:01 — The rise of the portfolio (and "fee-only")
5:06 — The meeting that changed how Taylor sees this work
6:33 — The job retirement actually requires
7:55 — Cost #1: The years you can't get back
9:58 — Cost #2: Money, but no plan to use it
11:28 — Cost #3: The plan only one spouse understands
13:06 — The fix: reverse the order
14:02 — 4 questions to pressure-test any plan
15:10 — What to do next

Resources:

Website:  https://www.demarsfinancial.com/

Phone: (509) 536-9556

Schedule an introduction call with Taylor: https://bit.ly/demarspodcast

Check out Taylor's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorMadeRetirement

Taylor's Newsletter: https://demars-financial-group.kit.com/827c64fe0e

Disclaimer: Since we don't know your specific situation, none of this information should be construed as tax, legal, financial, insurance, financial advice, or other advice and may be outdated or inaccurate. It is your responsibility to verify all information yourself. This content is prepared for entertainment purposes only. If you need advice, please contact a qualified CPA, attorney, insurance agent, financial advisor, or the appropriate professional for the subject you would like help with. Demars Financial Group, LLC or its members cannot be held liable for any use or misuse of this content. Advisory services offered through Demars Financial Group LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor. Demars Financial Group is not affiliated with LPL Financial.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today's content is pulled from Taylor's YouTube channel. If you want to watch the video version or catch more great content, subscribe by clicking the link in today's show description. Welcome to Taylor Made Retirement, where we explore what it takes to build a retirement that works for your money and your life with third generation certified financial planner Taylor DeMars.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

If you're around 62 and trying to figure out retirement, you've probably run into a strange problem. You can't find satisfactory answers to the questions that matter now. Because for most of your working life, the goal was simple. Save, invest, and let it grow. But retirement brings harder questions. When do you stop working? How do you turn your portfolio into a paycheck? When should you take Social Security? Or how do you avoid unnecessary taxes? And nobody likes to think about what happens to the person that's left when one of you is gone. These decisions all arrive at once. And when you ask the questions that are keeping you awake, the answer is often you're fine. And that confusion isn't in your head. I'm a third-generation financial advisor, and my family has watched this industry change from the inside since my grandfather started it in 1975. And here's what I've learned from that perspective. This industry got very good at helping you build wealth, but it doesn't do the same to help you use it. I call that yesterday's playbook, a model built for accumulation that starts falling short at the moment that your life shifts into retirement. I'll show you why so much retirement advice falls short the moment you stop saving and start living on your money, and the three ways that gap may be costing you right now. And a simple set of questions that can help you tell whether the help you have is actually built for this phase of life. But first, let me start with that confusion because it isn't by accident. Think about a doctor. A cardiologist's title tells you exactly what they're trained to do. Financial advisor doesn't. That title might describe someone selling maybe a product or picking investments or maybe they're coordinating your entire retirement, which are three different jobs, although they're all on the same identical business card. This has happened because my industry changed how it sold and how it got paid much faster than what it's changed, its definition of the job. The products and the fee structure evolved, but the question of what an advisor is actually for never caught up. So to understand why retirement advice still falls short, you need to understand the two jobs the industry was originally built to do and the third job that retirement now demands of you. So for context, when my grandfather started this firm in 1975, the dominant job was selling financial products, whole life insurance, mutual funds with a commission built in. That doesn't make every commission-based product bad, but it naturally organizes an entire conversation around a transaction. That era created a lot of the distrust that people still today feel towards advisors. For a long stretch, advisor really did mean salesperson. And unfortunately, those salespeople haven't disappeared. Right now, at some of the biggest names in this industry, there are people whose actual role is to sell you a product and call it advice. My grandfather worked with the best tools that he had available to him at the time, but he knew that it was more than that and needed to be centered around the relationship, not the next sale. So he kept pushing his career past the limits of that model. And frankly, it's because the industry started in that product first phase that we're still cleaning up the confusion today. That belief is what pulled our firm towards the second version of the job. Because by the 1990s and 2000s, the job changed. Pensions were disappearing. The 401k took over, and suddenly millions of people were holding their own retirement money with no idea what to do with it. So the job shifted from selling people a product to just managing their investments. So instead of being paid a commission, they would charge an ongoing fee, usually a percentage of the money that they managed. You hear that called assets under management. And this is when the term everyone repeats was ushered in. Fee only. Fee only means the advisor is paid by your fees, not by commissions on products. And that idea makes sense because it, in theory, protects you from the one thing that era before was still operating on. But here's the distinction almost nobody makes. How an advisor gets paid tells you about their incentives, but it tells you almost nothing about what actual work they do. Here's how slippery those labels can be. By strict definition, personally, I'm not considered fee only. I retain an insurance license despite never having sold an annuity, but I have it so that I can become the agent of record on annuities that my clients were sold, but their advice their former advisor never helps them with anymore because, well, they already got paid. Meanwhile, someone who is fee only may be doing very little for their clients beyond managing investments, leaving out things like tax planning and holistic planning out of the picture. So fee only tells you how the check that's written, not whether someone's coordinating your whole retirement. Because look at what even the portfolio job, when done honestly, organizes itself around. The investments it can see and manage. And that leaves a long list of things unmeasured. How you turn those accounts into a paycheck, when to take Social Security, which account to spend first so you don't overpay in taxes, how you bridge the gap until retirement from Medicare, how much you can truly spend without fear, what happens to your spouse that you leave behind. You can tell none of that fits on a portfolio statement. So for a lot of advisors, it just simply doesn't get done, even though they charge the same as an advisor who does. Now, let me get personal for a minute and tell you when this became real for me. I actually began my career at a large financial company where the term financial advisor mostly meant selling life insurance. Because I had such a sour taste in my mouth from that pressure in that environment, I nearly left the industry. However, a mentor advised me that I should give it one more shot and intern with my dad. And within the first few weeks, I had a meeting that changed everything about how I perceived this work. I was shadowing a meeting where a man came to see my dad and told us he had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had just months left to live. He hadn't told anyone besides his wife yet. And he wasn't there to talk with us about investment returns or which fund to pick. He was there because he needed to know that his wife would be okay and that he trusted my dad to help him figure out how. Now, I was brand new in that room, and the weight of that environment floored me. A man was handing my father the most important thing he had left, the security of the person he loved most in the last few months of his life. We took care of his wife after he passed, and we still take care of her to this day. And here's what that taught me. The portfolio wasn't his real problem. What he needed was someone to coordinate the decisions, prepare continuity, and help his wife turn what he had built into security for the one person he cared about most. A good portfolio can be one piece of a good retirement plan, but it can't be the sole substitute for one. I will never forget that experience. And it gave me the drive to join the family business and continue to make a life-changing impact on our clients' lives. So, what does this mean for you here, now in 2026? At age 62, the question no longer needs to be, how should my money be invested? It's still part of it, but it's not the organizing question anymore. The real question becomes, how do all these decisions work together so the money actually supports the life and protects the household? And that's a different job. The uncomfortable truth is that this third job hasn't become the standard. The product job still exists and the portfolio job still exists. And this third job exists too, but many times people are wearing all three titles at once. And that's why you unfortunately can't trust the title financial advisor at face value. You need to be able to see the actual work. And before I show you the questions that help you have an insight into that, I need to show you what it costs people when this job isn't done right. Because the cost is bigger and quieter than almost anyone recognizes. Because what our family has watched across generations of clients at this firm is that the gap between managing a portfolio and planning retirement has a real price. Most people never see it because they're just moving forward, following the math and doing what they're told. But these three places quietly cost people who don't make the match. So let me walk you through all three. The first cost shows up even before you retire. It's the quiet pull towards the one more year. And here's why that pull is so strong. Almost every number in a financial planning software or a spreadsheet that you track gets better the longer you work. Another year of income, another year of contributions, one less year of withdrawals, and one fewer year of retirement to fund. You continue to run it again, the software will usually show that waiting improves the score. One more work, yes, can absolutely potentially improve the plan on paper, but it doesn't automatically make the right decision. The model can calculate what the extra year adds financially, but not calculate the value of the year that you're exchanging for it, such as your health, your energy, the years that your body can still do the things you've been waiting to do. So but to the software program, those factors don't exist. So it'll quietly vote wait every single time. Now I have a client I'll call Rick who was 62 and retired from being an operations director at a manufacturing company. He loves riding motorcycles. And for years he had talked about making that one big trip, the Pacific Coast Highway from top to bottom. But his back isn't what it used to be, and nor were his knees. And a couple of his riding buddies older than him have already hung up their helmets for good. So Rick's plan used to be saying, well, I'm just going to trudge along and make it to 65, mostly to bridge the cost of health insurance pre-Medicare. Depending on where you might live and the coverage available, that bridge can run tens of thousands of dollars a year, which is a real expense. But what the plan never put on the page is that those are three of the last good years that his body has for the trip. The plan measured the insurance gap, but not what he was trading for it. If this is already making you question what your plan actually measures, there's a link in the description to talk with me directly. But stay with me because the next two costs matter just as much. One affects the money once you have it, and the other affects the person who may someday have to manage it without you. This second cost shows up right after you retire. And it's the one people are least prepared for because it's a completely different skill than the one that got them there in the first place. Again, for 30 years, your job was accumulation, make the pile bigger, save, invest, grow. But the day that you retire, the job flips. You have to turn a stack of accounts, a tangle of tax rules, several income sources, and a lifespan that nobody can predict into a steady paycheck. That's a different skill set. So here's what I see all the time. A couple retires with plenty of money and a high success score on their plan. And so on paper, they're in great shape. But no one really builds them a sequence withdrawal strategy. So they just default to whatever feels simplest, which usually means spending their taxable account down and leaving their retirement accounts alone, because that's how they save the most taxes. However, you fast forward a decade later, that tax-deferred balance they've been kicking down the road is getting larger and larger, making requirement of a distribution stack on top of their social security, and they may be pushed 10, 20, even 30% more in taxes than they needed to, with the window to proactively attack their tax bill far behind them. That's not a portfolio problem, it's a coordination problem. Because accumulation asks one question: how do I make the pile bigger? Deaccumulation asks the harder one, how do I unwind this into a reliable lifestyle without handing the for a fortune to the IRS that you don't have to? And the third cost is one that nobody wants to talk about until it's too late. And in my opinion, it's the deepest of the three. Because in a lot of married households, one spouse handles the money and the other trusts them to. And that works fine right up until the moment it doesn't. Because a plan that only one person understands is a single point of failure. The day that person is gone or simply can't manage it anymore, the whole thing falls to the one who was never brought in. This brings to mind a client of ours, I'll call Margaret, who's in her mid-80s. She was an educator for over 30 years and is passionate about being able to fund scholarships at the local community college here. Her household had built a comfortable nest egg into seven figures. But when it came to talking about investing or taxes, she locks up. Her husband had handled all of it before he died. He understood the accounts, the strategy, the decisions. And yeah, she sat in the meetings and nodded along, but she was never looped into the conversation. So when her husband passed, she inherited not only the money, but a plan she didn't understand and a lifetime of decisions she was never a part of. Unfortunately, at the exact moment she was grieving the one person that handled it at all. Now, Margaret's money is fully intact, but the plan had failed her at that moment because she inherited the complexity without the confidence or the context or the control to handle it. That's the real cost, not poverty. The loss of agency over life that she helped build. Now, if you're the one that runs the numbers in your house, this is the part that is probably worth sitting with. Because a plan that only you can operate isn't a household retirement plan, it's the single point of failure. Now, I promise you a set of questions to help tell whether your help that you're using is built for this part of your life. But first, you should know the shift that they all come from. Because most of the industry and advice out there runs in just one order, talking about your portfolio first, then how to build a plan to supplement it, and how you get your life to work around it. We flip that. We want to have your life be prioritized first, building the plan second, and then how that applies to your portfolio. Life first means defining what these years are for. For example, we like to ask our clients if the next five to 10 years turned out to be the healthiest you have left, what would you do with them? Plan second means coordinating your income, taxes, social security, healthcare to support that vision without running out of money before you die. Portfolio third means how do you actually apply all this strategy into the investments that fund the plan? The portfolio should be the engine, not the destination. So, how can you actually tell whether the help you have actually does all this? Well, four questions should get you started. They'll work whether you have an advisor, you're shopping for one, or whether you're doing it all on your own. So, question one, how are you paying for help? Is it commission? Is it fee-only, etc.? This will tell you about incentives, but not yet about what planning actually gets done. Because two, you want to ask, what is being done to coordinate beyond just my investments? A portfolio review is not a retirement plan. And third question, what is the plan to transition from saving for retirement to living on it? This requires a real sequence, not just saying, hey, we'll figure it out as we go. If the steps can't be described in plain English, they don't exist. And four, could either spouse run this plan alone? Because if only one of you can explain it, the plan has a single point of failure. Now, zoom out against all four of these questions, against whatever you're working with, and you'll know pretty soon whether you're using yesterday's playbook or something built for the life you actually want to live going forward. If any of this resonated with you, the next step isn't to check whether your portfolio is up or down this quarter. It's to run these questions against whatever plan you have and see what the gaps are. So to help you, I created a retire once guide in the description that you can get for free that will tell you whether you're ready to pull the trigger. You can see that link in the description. And if you're ready to go a step further and get professional, personalized help to retire, you can scan the QR code on screen or use the link in the description to book a call with me directly. We don't hand you off to someone else. We'll talk about where you are, what you're trying to build, and whether our process fits your situation.