How Financial Plans Help Navigate Volatile Markets and Create Peace of Mind with Kyle Britton – Ep 080

In times like these, when there’s market volatility and financial insecurity, it’s more important than ever to have a financial plan to know that you can weather the storm and wild swings in the markets. It’s the difference between having a plan vs just having a portfolio.

In today’s episode, Derek Gregoire is joined by SHP Financial’s Lead Advisor, Kyle Britton, to discuss how they’re helping their clients navigate the emotions of investing during bear markets. While many people would assume that the phones are ringing off the hook with clients filled with panic, you’ll hear why that might be the exception rather than the rule because of the methods SHP Financial uses to build comprehensive financial plans that help their clients prepare for these very moments.

In this conversation, they discussed how SHP helps clients determine their risk score and how they stress test portfolios to demonstrate the outcomes of down years. They’ll explain what sequence of returns risk means and how important it is for investors to understand it as they approach retirement. They’ll also discuss how bear markets create opportunities for those who have time on their side to weather the storm and take full advantage when the recovery happens.

In this podcast interview, you’ll learn:

• What sequence of returns risk is and how SHP helps to calculate risk in your portfolio
• The benefits of using tools like Riskalyze to analyze the risk in your portfolio.
• How the news and media can make market volatility feel worse than it is by leaning on the chaos and negativity.
• The three bucket strategy that SHP uses to protect your annual income and long-term growth investments.
• How quickly market recoveries happen and the opportunities that bear markets can create.

Inspiring Quotes

•  ”It’s insane to risk what you have in order to obtain what you don’t need.” – Warren Buffett

•  ”The upside and the good years is not worth the risk and the downside, especially if you’re getting close to or in retirement.” – Derek Gregoire

•  ”When market volatility comes, it creates opportunity.” – Derek Gregoire

•  ”We are so confident through this process, it’s because we have a plan in place.” – Kyle Britton

•  ”We just want to make sure that you’re gonna be okay in the event something happens. And we need to have that plan in place, that’s really the most important thing.” – Kyle Britton

Interview Resources

• Riskalyze
• Warren Buffett
• Social Security Administration

[INTERVIEW]

Derek Gregoire: Welcome everyone to another edition of the SHP Retirement Road Map. I’m Derek Gregoire, joined by Kyle Britton. Kyle is one of our lead advisors here at SHP Financial, works under Team Keith. So, he drew the short straw there. Sorry, you got Keith on, instead of working with myself and Matt, but…

Kyle Britton: It’s not so bad.

Derek Gregoire: But welcome to the podcast.

Kyle Britton: Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be on with you today, of course.

Derek Gregoire: So, for all the years that we’ve talked about what we do here at SHP Financial and what we do here is more for you as a listener or a client, really just trying to provide some good, solid advice. And we talk about the importance of planning over just a portfolio, right? Everyone thinks a portfolio is, they think, what’s your plan? Well, I saved $1 million, $2 million. I have a 401(k). Well, that means nothing what you actually plan that goes along with it, and even though we talk about income planning and tax planning and healthcare, estate, right?

Investment planning is more than just a portfolio, right? Having a portfolio is not an investment plan. That’s one piece of an investment plan. And so, over the last– who knows? As we release this particular podcast and show, there’s weeks the market’s up, weeks the market’s down. But we know so far in 2025, it’s been a pretty volatile year. And Kyle talking off air, we were saying how like, I think most of the folks that went through ‘01 and ’08, at that time, well, I know for a fact unless something drastically changed in how they spent, they probably had a lot less money then. And so, sometimes they forget because that was– even 2000, 2003 was over 20 years ago. 2008, was that 15 years ago, 16 years ago, 17 years ago? Geez. Oh, my gosh.

And then now, people that have had more money recently because the market from ’08 has boomed all the way till now, basically, have gone through 2020 during COVID, where the market just snapped back in a month. And then we had 2022 where the market snapped back the following year. So, I think everyone’s kind of like, oh, well, even if the market goes down, I’ll recover in no time. However, we’ve seen many years in being in the finance world, and since 2002 and 2001, we’ve seen different markets that don’t always recover so quickly. You know what I mean? So, I guess, when it comes to your talking to a client and someone that’s coming in, how do you talk about that in general? Because people have short-term memories on that subject.

Kyle Britton: Yeah. So, I think the biggest thing, and we stress this all the time, is the importance of having a plan in place and not just the portfolio. So, one of the things we wanted to talk about today was really just going beyond the portfolio, right? You used a great example right there. It’s like COVID, the market fell off a cliff 25%, 30%, and I feel like two weeks later, it was just right back up to where it was prior to that. And even in 2022, the market sold off, which was kind of an anomaly because we had the stock market down 20%, 30%. Yeah, that was really, I mean, some stocks like the Mag 7, some of those stocks were down 50% that year. But you look at the year after that, they were up almost 100%, had fully recovered. So, it’s really a matter of like, what if we saw something like 2008 or 2001, 2002 or something different that we really haven’t seen before? Like, how does that impact a portfolio? How does that impact you in retirement? If you’re retiring or you’re already retired, what’s the impact of that?

Derek Gregoire: More importantly, people always say, well, like people that on the outside world don’t know what we do exactly because you must be getting a ton of calls. Clients must be freaking out and I don’t want to sound like that guy, “Nope, we don’t get any calls,” but really, I think our clients, our average client is much more hedged than I would say the other firms that may be out there or just in terms of the market in general. So, maybe, I always say in a good year when the market’s up 25%, maybe they’re not making as much as that. But in the down year when it’s down 30%, we definitely can’t have our clients anywhere near down as that. And that trade-off is there because as we talked about, I think we should talk about first the risk or if we can explain what sequence of returns is because sequence of returns risk is a very major risk if you’re getting ready to retire. And if you retired in 2000 and you were just pulling money out. People don’t remember the market was down in 2000, 2001, and 2002. We all know what happened in between all that. There was a lot of chaos in that, in those times as well. That’s three years of negative markets.

Imagine retiring in 2000, you’re pulling money out. You didn’t have a plan. And by the way, I can share stories because I was an intern in college back in 2000, 2001. During the 9/11 attacks, I was an intern and I was working for a firm that didn’t have this plan in place and it was chaos. So, if you can explain sequence of returns risk, what that means.

Kyle Britton: Yeah. So, if I could just take one step back before we get there, so one of the things that we use for the families we work with or a prospective client comes in, we use this software called Riskalyze. So, Riskalyze, what it allows us to do, it allows us to quantify a portfolio and how much risks somebody has in that portfolio. So, we look at risks on a scale of 1 to 100. Think about it almost as like a speed limit sign. One is cash risk free. You’re kind of going one mile an hour in the slow lane. You got people in Boston honking at you, telling you to go faster. And then you’ve got the other side of the spectrum, which is 100, 100 is your Tesla stock, Bitcoin, Nvidia, the high flyers, right? It’s the companies that everybody wants to be invested in, in the 23s, in the 24s when they’re up 100%, right? But the reality is we just don’t see that every year.

So, one of the first things we look at when people come in is we want to quantify where their portfolio’s at. A lot of times, somebody will say, oh, I’m conservative, or, oh, I’m moderate, but what exactly does that mean? That kind of means something different to everybody. We’ll have some people come in and they’ll say, oh, I’m conservative, but they’re invested in the S&P 500.

Derek Gregoire: It’s like a 75 risk score.

Kyle Britton: Yeah, exactly.

Derek Gregoire: What that means too, is the higher the risk is, so in a risk score of 1, which is like cash savings, your upside might be 4%, your downside’s 0%. If you’re in a 99 or 100, I think it’s 99 at the top, maybe I could be wrong, I’ve never seen 100, I don’t think.

Kyle Britton: You get there if you try hard enough.

Derek Gregoire: So, if you look at, if you own all Nvidia stock and you’re a 99, 100 risk score, you can make, like you said, 50%, 100% in a good year and lose 50%, 100% in a bad, like the spectrum to, the standard deviation from positive to negative is so drastic. And obviously, as you know, if you’re getting ready to get to retirement, if you’ve saved up enough where you’ve won the retirement game and you have enough money, or if you’re already retired, those are times you have to make sure your risk score matches where you should be at that age. And everyone says, like you said, we’ve had a client say, I’m conservative. And then we look at their risk and it’s like a 75.

Kyle Britton: Exactly.

Derek Gregoire: Conservative should be like 30 to 35. Not a risk score of a 75. So, that’s a good point, Kyle. The first thing you should know is what risk number are you?

Kyle Britton: Yeah. It takes a lot of time to put that risk score together. I’ll give you a quick example. We had a gentleman we met with two weeks ago. He has about $2.5 million spread between multiple IRAs and Roth IRAs. It took about two hours to implement all of his funds into the Riskalyze program that we used to quantify his risk. And his risk score ended up being a 65 and he thought he was much more on the conservative side. So, what that actually allows us to show the clients, the families that we work with is, hey, we’ll stress test your portfolio. In a good year in the market, this is what it’s going to do. And in a bad year in the market, like a 2022 or a 2008, this is how much risks you could potentially end up losing, which I think sometimes, people will sit there and their eyes almost pop out of their head. They had no idea they had that much risk in their portfolio.

Derek Gregoire: I mean, for years, I’ve said the same couple lines and I’ll say them again because I tell clients our new protect families that are referred to us or coming from radio or podcasts, I said, I’ve done this since 2001, 2002 since I started in the business. We started the company in ‘03, and I said, over the years, I’m much more comfortable saying, this is just an example, obviously, but hey, you know what? I’ll sit across someone any day and say, “Hey, the market was up 30% in year up ‘22.” If they want to get mad at that, that’s fine. I’ll take the heat. 22 is a great year. I’d much rather be mad at that than to be mad because the market’s down 30 and so are they. It’s like I’ll much rather give up some of the upside to take away a lot of the downside because you need– and the other thing too, like Warren Buffett said, it’s insane to risk what you have in order to obtain what you don’t need.

So, if you’ve won the retirement game and you and I know sports, if you have a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter with a minute to go, you’re not throwing the ball down the field, you’re running the ball, running the clock out, you’re just doing like, so, and boring portfolios is equals an exciting retirement. An exciting portfolio, it can be a boring retirement because you might not end up on the right side of the spectrum if your sequence of returns risk comes into play at the wrong time.

Kyle Britton: Exactly.

Derek Gregoire: So, back to that example.

Kyle Britton: Yep. Yeah, so I think a good example for that in terms of sequence of returns, somebody my age or Derek’s age, we’re a little bit on the younger side. We probably have a number of years to go until retirement. It doesn’t necessarily matter what happens to us this year, next year, even the year after. If the market sells off 30%, 40%, 50%…

Derek Gregoire: It’s actually better.

Kyle Britton: It is better, right? Like, we’re not overly concerned. We’re buying more. It’s actually helping us in the long run. However, somebody that’s retired or they’re heading to retirement in the next couple of years, that’s probably not going to make you feel pretty comfortable, I’d say, right? So, let’s just use the example of somebody that has a million-dollar portfolio. You have a million-dollar portfolio. You’re collecting about $5,000 a month in Social Security and pension income, about 50 grand a year. We’re just kind of ballparking these numbers here.

Derek Gregoire: Let’s say you need another 50 grand on top of that.

Kyle Britton: Yeah, great example. So, you need $50,000, and we’re not really looking at taxes in this conversation at all, right? So, let’s say we saw 2022 happen. Stock market was down 20%, 25%, 30% if you’re invested in the Nasdaq, the aggregate bond index was down what about 15% that year, right? So, that was kind of anomaly in the market. So, that million-dollar portfolio, even if you’re invested in like a 60/40 portfolio or even a 50/50, you could have been down 20%, right? So, your million dollars is now worth $800,000.

Derek Gregoire: Minus the 50 you took out.

Kyle Britton: Minus the 50 you took out, which brings you to $750,000. So, now we enter 2023, which is obviously a good year in the market, but let’s say we didn’t see a good year in the market. Let’s say we had another bear year or another downturn in the market. Well, 2023 comes around, you’re still taking those vacations with your family. You’re still gifting to the kids and the grandkids. What do you need that year?

Derek Gregoire: Same thing.

Kyle Britton: You still need that $50,000, right? So, that 750 now comes down to $700,000. How does that shape the long-term longevity of your portfolio?

Derek Gregoire: And that’s only one year of loss. Let’s say the second year is down the same. Now, you’re down to $500,000. So, you’re two years into retirement, your money’s cut in half. Two things, one, now $50,000, instead of being 5% of a million is now 10% of your portfolio you still need. And number two, because I lived through it in 2008, if they’re in that mess, they’re not going to keep the investments like they are. They’re not going to have the courage, I mean, imagine the fear that you cut– you worked your entire life and you happen to retire during a bad market. And the sequence of returns during your first couple years is negative and your portfolio is cut in half in a year. And that’s in two years. And that’s devastating.

And by the way, in 2008, I remember, Kyle’s on Keith’s team. My partner Keith, we were in a meeting. Someone came in from like a workshop. This is back in 2008. They’re still a client today. They came in with like, I think it was like $1.5 million. We built the entire plan out conservative, right before the crash, obviously. And everything was great. And they said, “Oh, my advisor said, no, it’s too conservative. We don’t want to do this.” So, that $1.52 million came in like six months later and be like, we need to do something. We have under a million bucks now. And now, we don’t know what to do. And so, when you hit that scenario, even though everyone says long term, everyone says, oh, don’t worry, it’s so hard not to freeze because you’re panicking because you didn’t have a plan in place.

So, the whole thing we’re trying to talk about is not to scare anyone, but I’ve lived this, I started as an intern in ’01. And 2002, I started a small company. In 2003, we started this company. So, that was 22 years ago. I’ve seen a lot of markets and I’ve seen people come in that weren’t clients, that didn’t have plans set up that were like, oh, my gosh, we could have set this up so much better. And by the last story is 2001, obviously, I remember I was in my last year of school of college, a finance major. I remember I was in a marketing class when 9/11 took place. We got dismissed and we all watched as the horrible events unfolded that day.

And I was interning at a huge firm. Everyone knows the name. It’s a big, big practice. And I would go into Springfield. I was at Amherst, went to Springfield every day, and take the elevator up to like the 10th floor, this nice building. All the advisors were working there. And I remember during that time, the advisors that we were working with, I was working with one or two– one in particular. And then he had a guy underneath him and that’s who I was doing like work for as an intern.

And I would take calls sometimes and we got a call. And I remember him saying, this is kind of bad looking back. He’s like, “Hey, if anyone calls, I’m not here.” Because the market got– not only after 9/11, the market got slammed. People were freaking out. People were calling. And he’s like, “Don’t, I’m not here.”

Kyle Britton: That’s a good advisor. That’s somebody you want to work with.

Derek Gregoire: This is how I’m trying to learn the business. So, I’m like, okay, how am I going to take these calls? And I remember this woman called a couple times and she goes, I forget the guy’s name, I’m not going to even– if I remembered it, I wouldn’t say it, but she goes, call him Joe, “Is Joe there?” And I’m like, “No, Joe’s not here.” And she’s like, “I’m sure he is Derek.” She’s like, “I know you’re interning,” but she’s like, I forget the exact words, but something like, my husband and I worked our entire life. My husband was supposed to retire in the next year or so, and we just got our portfolio cut in half. Like, what do we do?

And I remember sitting there as like an intern and like a 22-year-old, 21, I think I was 21 actually at the time. And like, oh, my goodness, this is what I want to do for my career. You have to deal with this. And like, what if that was my parents’ money? You know what I mean? So, you start thinking like– so luckily, I got into the field and learned how not to go about it because that risk wasn’t worth taking.

Kyle Britton: Exactly.

Derek Gregoire: The upside and the good years folks is not worth the risk and the downside, especially if you’re getting close to or in retirement. And that’s why we look at our clients. If you can go through a basic, so now we understand first, step one, know your risk number, right? We can help quantify that for you. Your risk number is a scale of 1 to 99 or 100, as Kyle says, we have to debate that. We’ll see. But anyways, if you’re getting close to or in retirement, most of our clients are like 30 to 40. I’d say most of them. Some are more, some are less.

Kyle Britton: Some want to take more.

Derek Gregoire: That’s like the average.

Kyle Britton: Right.

Derek Gregoire: And so, number one, know your risk number. Number two, have a plan, an investment plan so that if there is what’s called sequence of returns risk, which is basically having to draw money out in the worst period of the market, especially early on in retirement, it can be devastating long term. So, have a plan. So, I guess maybe, Kyle, you can share a little bit about our investment philosophy of how we recommend building out plans on the investment side for our clients.

Kyle Britton: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s funny, one of the things that you mentioned was so many people must be reaching out to you saying, “Hey, you have clients calling in and freaking out.” And yeah, we definitely get a couple of people here and there that I would say almost get caught up in the news more than anything.

Derek Gregoire: Oh, 100%.

Kyle Britton: I don’t want to go down a political rabbit hole. But you turn on the news and the market’s falling off a cliff. And let’s be real, the S&P 15% down this year, 20% of the Nasdaq, like that’s pretty steep.

Derek Gregoire: It’s come back a little bit.

Kyle Britton: Yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s probably down to 10 right now.

Derek Gregoire: Off its high, it’s probably down 10, 15, but off the year, it’s probably only 5 to 10 maybe.

Kyle Britton: Which is not bad.

Derek Gregoire: No, but people see the flashing signs.

Kyle Britton: Exactly.

Derek Gregoire: The news knows how to sell chaos. People watch, oh, I got to watch this. And they see flashing signs. So, you’re right. I got a couple calls. People are like, I’m like, did you look at your portfolio or just the news? Well, I haven’t looked at them. I’m like, I know you’re down like less than 1%.

Kyle Britton: Exactly.

Derek Gregoire: Really?

Kyle Britton: Yep.

Derek Gregoire: I’m like, yeah, we have you– oh, I didn’t realize that. The only client calls, I got a couple of those, and then people that wanted to buy, which is exactly what…

Kyle Britton: Opportunity, right? Yeah, I mean, to be honest, like I’ve been so confident throughout this process. So many friends and family members, hey are you freaking out? Or your client’s freaking out? And it’s like, no. Like, we are so confident through this process. It’s because we have a plan in place. And to kind of step back and speak to that, so we really believe in having a methodology and investment philosophy that encompasses having money designated for safety, having money designated towards income, and having money designated towards growth.

Now, what exactly does that mean, right? So, let’s kind of focus on the safety bucket first. So, safety would really be, like your money market, money in the bank, money that’s in cash, really no risk, money that’s liquid that you can kind of get your hands on at any point.

Derek Gregoire: Treasury CDs can kind of fall in that.

Kyle Britton: Yeah, yeah, very conservative investments. On that scale, 1 to 99, that would be a 1, right? No risk at all. So, example of that I always give people, hey, your car breaks or the hot boiler breaks in your house. You got 10,000, 15,000 bucks, you can go and tap that and just pay that off right there, right? That kind of gives you the peace of mind. I call it the sleep good number at night knowing, hey, you’re laying your head down on the pillow. What do you need to kind of help you sleep at night?

Derek Gregoire: Some people need $100,000 in that bucket, some need $500,000, some need $10,000.

Kyle Britton: It’s so different.

Derek Gregoire: It’s just something. This is money you can get your hands on quick for an emergency.

Kyle Britton: Exactly. And then moving on to the second bucket, so the second bucket is the income bucket. And this is really the bucket that’s designed to protect your lifestyle or enhance your lifestyle more than anything, right? We know you need 5,600, 10,000 bucks net income a month. How are we going to generate that from your portfolio to make sure that, well, regardless of what’s going on down in Wall Street, down in Washington or around the world, we know that you’re going to be okay regardless of what’s happening, right? We’re able to send you that income for the next 12. 18, 24 months depending on whatever’s going on in the stock market because if the stock market’s down 15% or 20%, we don’t want to have to sell off investments that have to send you income in retirement. Like, that kind of goes back to that example we were using with that person with a million dollars previously. That could really harm your long-term portfolio.

Derek Gregoire: Some clients, depending on the client, we might build 5 to 10 years’ worth of income in that income bucket where they know that they have enough conservative money for 5, 10 years plus and it’s almost like as if they’re still working. Even though they’re retired, they have the income coming in. So, the last portion you’re looking at, which is the growth portion that has time to run its course.

Kyle Britton: Exactly. Yep. And that segues us into the growth bucket. So, the growth bucket would be your investments like stocks, ETFs, index funds, mutual funds. This is more your long-term bucket, 7, 10, 10-plus years down the road, inflation is real, longevity is real. Clients that come in and they’re 60, 65, 70 years old, there’s a probability you could be here for another 15, 20, 25 years down the road, right? I mean, inflation is a real thing. We’ve kind of went through that the last couple of years, but that’s more your long-term bucket. When the market’s going down like it did in COVID or in ‘22 or even right now, we’re not using that to fund income in retirement. We’re setting that down the side for, hey, you know, a year, like 2023 takes place or 2024 when the market was up, 20-plus percent.

Derek Gregoire: We can shift some over to income.

Kyle Britton: Exactly. Let’s take some chips off the table. Let’s replenish your income bucket. Make sure you have enough money and safety to make sure you’re going to be okay to be able to do the things you want to do, right?

Derek Gregoire: Yeah. But that’s the thing is I think when you look at that plan, no client ever comes to us and says, “Hey, Derek, Kyle, thank you so much for that income bucket or the growth bucket and/or the–” but they understand the methodology of the fact that, okay, we have plenty of years to weather out storms and we plan for this. The storms are going to come, like when you have a boat, you plan for the storms. You don’t go out that day or you have coverings or whatever it is. Like, you just plan ahead. If everything’s unprotected and there’s no plan in place, those storms can really take you out.

But if you have a plan in place, you know, okay, I have my short-term money covered for my roof leaks, car breaks down, I have my income needs to travel, to pay my bills, to whatever it is you want to do. And then I have my long-term growth bucket where, hey, we don’t need this money maybe for 10 years, so we can let it ride out the storms. And when the market’s down, we’re not loving it because we still feel some of the losses there, but it’s not money.

Two things are happening. One, it’s not money they’re relying on, so we just wait until it comes back. And two, because we have the safety and income built out, it hedges their overall risk score. Even if that, maybe the growth portion is a 60 or it could be a 50, 60, 70, right, right? But their whole portfolio might be a 30 or 40 or 50 because not everything’s in that bucket. We have plenty of other assets to cover.

Kyle Britton: Yeah. And just to jump and add to that, it’s funny because it almost seems like we’re approaching this from more of a conservative point of view. And obviously, we do want some assets that are designated in the conservative bucket, which would be more your safety and income bucket. A lot of our clients in ‘23 and ‘24, they were double digits, 12%, 15%, 18%, some of them 20%, right? It’s like we can take that risk, but what’s the risk capacity that you can really take? We’re okay with doing that, but we just want to make sure that you’re going to be okay. In the event something happens, like we need to have that plan that’s put in place, that’s really the most important thing. Bar none.

Derek Gregoire: Well, think of like, even like we talked about this year, sometimes when market volatility comes, it creates opportunity, right? So, inside of SHP, not just around, we’re just talking about investment planning. And by the way, just so you listeners all know, we have an investment committee with two CFAs, analysts. My partner Matt heads it up, but they’re just doing a ton of work within these models and they do a tremendous job of managing these models on behalf of our clients. But then when things are down, there’s things that we can do. So, some people that had like a little security bucket in like CDs, treasuries, hey, when the market was down 15%, maybe we flip that to something a little more aggressive. They can take a little bit. Maybe we do some Roth conversions in downturn.

Kyle Britton: Yep, we’ve been doing a ton of those start of the year.

Derek Gregoire: And then the recovery happens tax free when it happens. You’re not going to time it perfect, but you can get a discount and have the recovery happen tax free. We’ve been doing a lot. There’s so many strategies that we won’t get into our CFP, our head CFP, Alina does a tremendous work. Sometimes, there’d be like six pages per client of just planning. Because now, like you mentioned, okay, we’re not going to get too far down this rabbit hole, but now that you have your investment, let’s say, all right, we have your risk score intact, we have your investment plan intact, we have your income bucket kicking out the proper income. What are the threats to that?

Well, what if taxes go up and all your money’s in IRA accounts? You know what I mean? Then how do we do? What are some plans we can do long term to reduce taxes? What if you need healthcare? What’s your estate and legacy plan? So, there’s so much more beyond here at SHP Financial that we do for our clients, but in terms of the market volatility, the first thing that you need is a plan, right?

So, a lot of people that we met for the first time, they have a portfolio collection of investments, maybe a 401(k), IRAs, brokerage accounts, right? But they don’t know, what does it mean? And then if you want to make a decision, right, let’s say you want to make a decision, can I travel with my family once a year? Can I take my entire kids and grandkids on a special trip every three to five years? Well, if you don’t, and how do you make those decisions unless you have a plan, right? But if you have an actual…

Kyle Britton: You’re just winging it.

Derek Gregoire: You’re winging it.

Kyle Britton: Yeah.

Derek Gregoire: But if you have an actual plan, like our clients have a portal they log into that tracks, not only all their accounts in one spot, but their goals, right? Their income goals, their expenses and so forth. So, if we want to project out going forward, okay, well what if we buy a house versus not buying a house? What if we travel this much versus this much? Sometimes we look in the future and they say, if we do this, you’re probably only going to leave the kids $2 million. And they say, that’s too much. Or some people say, I want to leave them $5 million. It’s not our money. We’re trying to leave, not that I agree with leaving, like, I always tell my clients my goal is for them to make sure it’s all about them first and whatever’s left is passed on.

But some people have different opinions. And they’d rather do less now and leave more. Some people want to be able to do the same now, but also gift to their kids and grandkids while they’re alive and well so that they can see the fruits of their labor and see the kids and grandkids enjoying it. Each person has their own goals, but it has to start. Each and every person needs to have their own specific plan.

Kyle Britton: Exactly. It’s all about having a plan. It’s how do you make confident decisions without having a plan? It’s like you’re really winging it. And it’s interesting because if you look at the internet nowadays with how much information is out there, it’s such a blessing, but it’s such a curse. There’s so much information.

The 60/40 portfolio, the 50/50 portfolio, sequence of returns, doesn’t annuity make sense for me? How do I start drawing from my portfolio, our bonds, there’s so much information out there. But if you’re not in this on a day-to-day basis, because in retirement, like, let’s be realistic, what do people want to be doing?

Derek Gregoire: Not this.

Kyle Britton: No. They want to be…

Derek Gregoire: Well, the most.

Kyle Britton: Yeah. There are some people that spend a lot of time in this, and we work with them closely too, but let’s be…

Derek Gregoire: But even they can’t cover everything.

Kyle Britton: Exactly.

Derek Gregoire: But I can’t cover everything. We have a different team. We have a portfolio team doing the portfolios. We have a planning team helping us on the planning side. I always joke around, like, even if you think you’re the best, a lot of people will come to us. Let’s say the husband or the wife are the ones doing most of the ongoing, like some people just focus on finance more than the other.

Kyle Britton: Yeah. There’s usually one.

Derek Gregoire: There’s usually one. And sometimes, I like doing this, but if anything happens to me my wife or husband, what are they going to do? We want a firm that they can trust ahead of time. But then they start meeting and they say, wow, I thought I was doing everything. I was really just picking a couple of stocks and mutual funds and some index fund that targets the entire market. But that’s like one-fiftieth of a plan, right? Are you keeping up with congress, tax law changes, RMD ages, inherited IRA, Roth conversions, QCDs, tax-loss harvesting, debts, the estate planning trust, how to link your– like there’s so many things. Healthcare, I covered like 10, there’s probably 100.

There’s so many things that our team’s constantly looking at as things evolve that unless if you are retired and you want to dedicate more than a full-time job to researching all this, then maybe that’s their hobby and you probably don’t need any help. And to me or a lot of people listening, saying, “Hey, I might have a–” like, I have a portfolio and I have an advisor, but I don’t get to hear any of this. I just hear, hey, I made money and lost money and stayed the course. That’s not a plan either. Like, you have to have an actual plan that’s specific to you.

So, Kyle, this was great. I think for those people listening and those folks listening, thank you for your time. Hopefully, it opens your eyes. We’re not trying to scare anyone, but at the same time, we’re so passionate about the planning side at SHP Financial. We’ve been doing it since 2002. And if you’re listening and you’re like, man, I don’t know if I have this plan, Derek or Kyle, like, I don’t know, I have a bunch of portfolio stocks, but I don’t even know what it means, just give us a ring or check out our website and see if it makes sense to come in. Easy way to do that is SHPFinancial.com. There’s a ton of content on there you can get as well, but it’s very easy, SHPFinancial.com and go from there. Kyle, thank you so much for your time, my friend. Great job as always, and we’ll talk to everyone very soon here on the SHP Retirement Road Map.

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