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HSA Planning When Both Spouses Have A High-Deductible Health Plan (HDHP)

December 11, 2019 07:02 am 38 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

Since as early as 1960, our national health expenditures have been steadily increasing. The American Medical Association found Americans paid nearly $3.5 trillion on healthcare in 2017, and expenses continue to rise, with estimated increases in healthcare expenses by the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged at over 7% since 2016.

To address our country's rising healthcare expenses, the Medicare Modernization Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush in December, 2003. This law created Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to encourage individuals to enroll in High-Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs) in an effort to curb overall healthcare spending. In essence, HDHPs incentivize individuals to make healthcare decisions more carefully, with higher out-of-pocket requirements and lower premium expenses (which can often make up for the higher out-of-pocket requirements – especially for healthy individuals!).

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) offer a further incentive for HDHP enrollment, as they provide a very attractive 'triple-tax' set of potential benefits. The three potential benefits are: 1) tax-deductible contributions, 2) tax-deferred growth, and 3) tax-free withdrawals for qualified medical expenses (although withdrawals made for non-qualified expenses are not tax-free and incur a 20% penalty if made before age 65). After age 65, though, non-qualified withdrawals have no penalty, so the account virtually becomes an “enhanced” IRA which can be used for any purpose but without the requirement of taking annual RMDs.

As with other tax-preferenced savings accounts, there are contribution limits for HSAs, which are based on the type of HDHP coverage an account owner has. For family HDHPs, annual limits are $7,000 for 2019 ($7,100 for 2020), and for self-only HDHPs, limits are $3,500 for 2019 ($3,550 for 2020). Additionally, HSA owners age 55 and older are allowed to make an annual $1,000 catch-up contribution.

Financial advisors with clients who are married and have mixed health insurance coverage can help their clients understand their actual HSA contribution limits, as these limits depend on the type of plan each spouse has. For spouses covered by separate self-only HDHP plans, each can contribute up to the maximum, self-only limit to their respective HSAs, but they can’t make up for any contribution shortfalls of the other spouse.

Sometimes, one spouse might have self-only HDHP coverage and the other an "employee-and-children" family HDHP (which does not offer coverage for the employee's spouse). This can be cost-effective for couples with children, as family HDHPs sometime provide for “employee and children” coverage that is less expensive than family plans that include both spouses. In this situation, the spouse with self-only coverage is limited to the self-only HSA contribution amount, and the spouse with family coverage can contribute up to the family limit. But while the total between spouses cannot exceed the family limit, the spouse with the family plan can make up for any contribution shortfall of the spouse with self-only coverage.

In rare cases, both spouses may each opt for separate HSA-eligible family HDHPs through their employers (perhaps because of different in-network doctors offered by each plan). Again, the total contribution between spouses may not exceed the annual family limit, but in this situation, both spouses have the ability to compensate for any contribution shortfalls of the other, or to simply choose which spouse's HSA it makes sense to fund first.

Financial advisors who have married clients with HSAs, where at least one spouse is under age 65, can employ some strategies to maximize the value of their clients’ accounts. For example, it may behoove the couple to maximize contributions to the older spouse’s account first in order to reduce the potential exposure to the 20% penalty for non-qualified withdrawals, since the penalty will not apply to the age 65+ older spouse. In addition, using HSA funds from the younger spouse’s account to pay for qualified medical expenses will also result in more funds in the older spouse’s account, available for penalty-free withdrawals for non-qualified expenses.

Ultimately, the key point is that the unique triple-tax benefits of HSAs make them attractive savings vehicles that can be used for expenses beyond medical care (but penalty-free for non-qualified expenses only after age 65). Financial advisors can help their clients with different HDHP coverage options get the most value out of their HSAs by guiding them through their specific contribution rules and choosing how to coordinate withdrawals for qualified and non-qualified expenses from each account in the most tax-efficient manner.

#FASuccess Ep 154: (Re-)Igniting Your Advisor Marketing By Defining Client Avatars And Removing Impediments To Action, With Mary Beth Storjohann

December 10, 2019 07:11 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 154th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Mary Beth Storjohann. Mary Beth is the chief marketing officer for Abacus Wealth Partners, an independent RIA based in Santa Monica, California that oversees nearly $2.6 billion of assets under management for almost 1,700 clients.

What's unique about Mary Beth, though, is that up until very recently, she was the founder of her own independent advisory firm, Workable Wealth, and despite (in fact, because of) the successful growth of her solo practice, Mary Beth decided the best way to continue advancing her own personal mission of expanding her financial planning impact was to sell her firm and to take on a marketing leadership role in an even larger firm instead.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about what it means to be a chief marketing officer of a large independent advisory firm. How Mary Beth allocates a marketing budget of just 2.5% of revenue that still adds up to nearly half a million dollars to allocate for marketing purposes, the relative split of marketing dollars towards staff to help implement marketing strategies versus direct spending on sponsorships and advertising, and how Abacus's marketing team funnels all of its activity to a lead intake team, whose job is to screen all the firm's prospects to determine who is qualified and who should be referred out instead.

We also talk in-depth about how Mary Beth developed avatars for the firm's marketing, formerly defined marketing personas like builders, protectors, and changemakers that the firm uses to more clearly determine where they should be and not be targeting their marketing dollars, how the firm developed a brand style guide so all the advisors of the firm can communicate in a consistent manner when marketing, and why Mary Beth decided to remove the contact form from the Abacus website altogether and instead, just install an embedded scheduling app to let prospects instantly and immediately set up a time for an initial call with the firm.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Mary Beth shares her ideas about what any advisory firm regardless of size can do to better improve its marketing, given her own experience in both a very large advisory firm, and having previously worked as a solo practitioner. Why often the biggest improvement that advisory firms can make is simply removing the impediments they're unwittingly creating that may reduce their marketing effectiveness, and Mary Beth's philosophy that the long-term key to marketing is all about brand consistency, which means it's better to spend a small amount of marketing dollars in a very consistent manner for a long period of time than to spend a large amount of money in a very short period of time.

The Millionaire Sweet Spot: How Large Advisory Firms Are Scaling Advice For (Better) Profits and (Faster) Growth

December 9, 2019 04:08 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

Since the early days of the financial advisory business, revenue models have evolved to rely less on commissions and more on the recurring income stream generated from the AUM model. The result has been a shift away from an often-one-time sale of a product to an ongoing provision of financial planning and wealth management services. Naturally, AUM-based advisors have had to change how they spend their time, as firms increasingly required advisors to prioritize servicing clients on an ongoing basis (instead of on closing one-time sales of financial products).

Not only have changing business models influenced how advisors spend their time, but as the recently released InvestmentNews Adviser Compensation & Staffing Study reveals, the size of the advisor’s firm also influences how advisors allocate their (limited) hours. As while advisors who own solo practices are more likely to manage all (or most) of the business development and client servicing responsibilities, the larger a firm becomes, the more they rely on support staff to handle client service responsibilities (e.g., paraplanners and service advisors who have little, if any, business development responsibilities). Because with more support staff available to shoulder more of the client-service workload, lead advisors and practicing partners can devote more attention to business development, which ultimately results in higher profit margins. After all, having more affordable support staff manage client servicing is more operationally efficient than having higher-paid advisors deal with these responsibilities. The result is that larger firms tend to have extra capacity (as measured by the number of clients each advisor and support staff can service).

And notwithstanding the rise of the robo-advisor earlier this decade (which stimulated competitive fee compression among financial advisors and caused a dip in advisor productivity), the InvestmentNews study shows that productivity has actually bounced back and now even appears to outpace current trends in increasing revenue! Which suggests that as a firm’s client capacity increases, firms tend to move ‘downmarket’ and target clients that have less assets (versus targeting ultra-high-net-worth clients). As while highly affluent clients may result in more revenue per client, they may also be more labor-intensive for lead and senior advisors (as opposed to associate advisors and staff), which is why larger firms are servicing an increasing number of “mere millionaires”, who can be serviced with scale to a greater degree. Whereas with smaller firms, who don’t have the same ability to leverage economies of scale to successfully shift ‘downmarket’ and pursue smaller clients, the tendency is to maintain focus on larger clients as it has been traditionally in the past.

Ultimately, the key point is that emerging trends show larger advisory firms are shifting away from targeting highly affluent clients, and are instead aiming for smaller clients in the “millionaire sweet spot” – those clients who are still wealthy, but whose needs might not be so complex as to require senior-advisor-level service. And because these clients are generally less labor-intensive and price-sensitive as more highly affluent clients, they are a key factor for the rapid growth seen in many of today’s large firms. Solo advisory firms, on the other hand, lack the resources to implement economies of scale that larger firms are able to establish, and thus the most successful smaller firms flourish by continuing to target larger clients.

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Dec 7-8)

December 6, 2019 03:35 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the industry news that Schwab is tapping former TD Ameritrade RIA chief Tom Bradley to lead a new "Core" RIA support platform for RIAs under $100M on the Schwab platform, indicating both a shift of Schwab moving further "downmarket" to smaller and solo RIAs, and providing a strong signal to smaller TD Ameritrade RIAs that they will not be abandoned or kicked off the platform after the Schwabitrade merger closes. We also have articles about the recent uniform fiduciary rule proposed in Massachusetts, and a look at the new SEC advertising and testimonials rule that's been proposed by the SEC for the coming year.

From there, we have several investment-related articles, including a look at how advisors are increasingly using "alts" to diversify client portfolios but are disproportionately buying alts that are still highly correlated to markets (which make them more 'modifiers' than true 'diversifiers'), a simple five-point checklist to evaluate prospective investment strategies that an advisor may be considering, and tips on how best to retain clients through turbulent markets (hint, it's all about regular and timely communication, more so than the investment returns themselves!).

We also have a few articles on tax planning, including one on various year-end charitable planning strategies, a second on newly-updated IRS rules (via Revenue Ruling 2019-19) about how to handle retirement account checks that are sent but not cashed (to determine which year they are deemed "distributed" for both tax and especially RMD purposes), and a look at how year-end tax-loss harvesting is not really as valuable as many make it out to be.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of improving our own personal health: the first looks at how spending just 2 hours per week outdoors (even just taking periodic walks or sitting on benches outdoors throughout the week) can improve health; the second explores how those who have more green-ness - literally, in the form of plants or nature, even indoor in their own homes and offices - can improve health; and the last looks at all the simple health benefits that come from being kind, that literally release positive hormones in our bodies and that have a wide range of positive health effects (a good sign for being a financial planner in the business of helping our clients!).

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Kitces & Carl Ep 22: Simplifying Your Life By Building Habits And Kitces Travel Tips

December 5, 2019 07:03 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

Traveling can be an extremely taxing activity, and, especially now with the holidays in full swing, managing travel stress is a high priority for many people. Ironically, though, the source of much of this stress is not actually the travel itself – it’s often more about preparing to travel! Because in this day and age of abundant high-tech tools designed to make our lives easier and more efficient, it’s easy to instead become overwhelmed with all of the options available without knowing how to best select (and use!) the right set of tools to help us with our needs in the first place.

In our 22nd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards talk about some easy ways to cope with travel by taking a look at how Michael keeps his own travel routines as simple as possible.

With the fall season of financial advisor conferences finally slowing down, Michael discusses some of the key habits he uses to manage his own hectic travel schedule. From how he keeps multiple “Kitces-blue” shirts on hand (so he doesn’t need to spend time planning out different wardrobe styles!), to having at least two of everything else he needs to make his pre-travel preparation as simple as possible. And instead of using multiple tech tools that need to coordinate information between different apps and devices, he relies simply on Google Calendar to keep track of all of his travel information including flight schedules, lodging details, and meeting times. Perhaps most importantly, though, is how Michael prioritizes getting enough sleep every night, so that he can physically keep up with the demands of his workload, which involves juggling his roles in multiple businesses.

Ultimately, the key point is that travel doesn’t have to be complicated, and by creating easy habits for yourself and consciously minimizing the cognitive load required to set up (and remember) a good travel routine, neither does planning or preparing for travel. Identifying essential needs and developing simple and easy-to-follow systems to meet those needs, will make it easier to implement an efficient travel strategy without getting bogged down with overly complicated tech tools or elaborate processes.

Navigating Social Security’s “Government Pension Offset” (GPO) Rule For Retirees With Non-Covered Pensions

December 4, 2019 07:04 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

Social Security spousal and survivor benefits were created to provide some level of Social Security benefits to households that relied primarily on a single worker, as a means to both financially support households with stay-at-home spouses, and to ensure that an earner’s widow was not left in poverty after the primary worker passed away. The caveat, however, is that in the early years of Social Security, some government workers had the opportunity to participate in jobs that did not pay into Social Security (so-called “non-covered” jobs), and instead directly received a private pension… with the end result that, in addition to their pensions, they also ended out receiving Social Security spousal and survivor benefits as though they were a stay-at-home spouse, when in reality they were simply a working spouse in a non-covered job.

To address this concern, Congress passed the Government Pension Offset (GPO) rule over 40 years ago to more fairly determine how Social Security benefits would be received by such non-covered government workers to ensure they were not effectively “double-dipping” into government pension benefits as workers and spousal and survivor benefits intended primarily for non-workers. Today, the GPO affects more than 695,000 Social Security beneficiaries.

The core of the GPO rule is that workers who receive pensions from government jobs that did not participate in Social Security will face a reduction of spousal and survivor benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to based on the work records of their spouses (who worked in covered jobs that did pay into Social Security). Specifically, the GPO rule applies to individuals who meet three criteria: 1) worked at a federal, state or local government job where they did not pay Social Security taxes; 2) qualified for a pension from that job (that did not pay into Social Security); and 3) are eligible to receive spousal or survivor’s benefits from a spouse who did work in a job covered by Social Security.

For those who are affected, the GPO reduces spousal and survivor benefit amounts by 2/3 of the government pension benefit received from the non-covered employer. And if 2/3 of the retiree’s pension exceeded their spousal or survivor benefit altogether, the net result is that they will receive none of that Social Security benefit at all! Importantly, though, this rule applies only to the person who actually owns (i.e., originally earned) the non-covered pension. Which means that if a retiree inherits their spouse’s non-covered pension, their Social Security survivor benefits are not reduced because the pension was originally owned by and based on the work history of another.

In some cases, an individual may have pension benefits based on earnings from covered and non-covered employment (having switched jobs over the years between employers who both paid into the pension). In these situations, the GPO will reduce the individual’s benefits by 2/3 of the pension portion attributable only to non-covered employment. This non-covered pension portion is determined by multiplying the full amount of the pension benefit by the ratio of non-covered months of employment to the total months of employment contributing to the pension.

While the GPO is generally difficult to avoid, there are a couple of strategies that financial advisors can consider for their clients who may be impacted by the rule. The “Last-60-Months” exception says that the “GPO does not apply if an individual was covered by both the government retirement system and Social Security throughout his/her last 60 months of Federal, State, and local government service. The 60 months need not be consecutive.” Thus, if a worker leaves their current job under which they would have been subject to the GPO, finds new employment that is covered by Social Security and the government pension, and stays in that job (or another job that contributes to the government pension and that is covered by Social Security) for at least 60 months of service prior to retirement, the GPO rule would not affect their Social Security spousal or survivor benefit.

Alternatively, a government employee has the option of withdrawing from their pension altogether. For this strategy to avoid the GPO, the worker would need to withdraw all of their own contributions (with interest) from the plan, forfeiting any employer contributions (unlike most non-government pensions, many government pensions consist of both employee and employer contributions). This strategy should be considered carefully, as while the GPO impact on Social Security benefits would potentially be eliminated, so too would any pension benefits to which the individual was once entitled (and the loss of the pension itself may easily end out costing more than the otherwise foregone Social Security benefits would have been in the first place!).

Ultimately, the key point is that advisors should be aware of when and how the Government Pension Offset may affect their clients, and if their clients can use a strategy to mitigate the GPO’s impact on their benefits. While there are stirrings of legislative proposals to eliminate the GPO rule (along with the WEP), the population actually affected by these rules is relatively small (approximately 1% of all Social Security beneficiaries in 2018 were affected by the GPO). Thus, traction on any amendments to eliminate or modify these rules may be difficult, especially since there arguably are good policy reasons for it to exist (to avoid the implicit ‘double dipping’ of earning a non-covered pension as a worker and a spousal or survivor benefit nominally intended for non-working spouses). In the meantime, advisors can help their clients by understanding when the GPO needs to be factored into a client’s financial plan, especially given that the GPO can heavily (or fully) eliminate Social Security spousal or survivor benefits that they might have otherwise anticipated receiving!