Time for another episode of Mr. Stillman's Opus. I am Ben George alongside Jon Stillman. Jon, how are we? I'm looking forward to today's episode because I want to dive into your athletic past.
Oh, interesting. See what we can learn. This is usually on you, but you're putting the ball on my court, huh?
You will. See what you did there? Indeed, with a topic of sports. And you're a sports guy. I'm a sports guy.
And we always try to take unique angles at financial planning and investing and retirement planning to try to make a little more sense of it for you. So today we're using the sport of tennis. You play tennis?
I don't. I did when I was in elementary school. Were you any good? Well, so I played at this little club near my house, not a country club, but just a tennis club. And so they had like the youth leagues that we played in. And so they decided they took like all 20 guys and 20 girls that played in our club and the pro ranked us before we went out to play against other clubs. And so that way, you know, our number one would play the other places number one and all that. Well, the first ranking came out for our club and I'll be danged if I wasn't the number one boy.
Like I was in, I don't know, fifth grade at the time. So like I wasn't even mentally competing with other people this whole time. But it just turned out the pros said, all right, you're our best one. So I was like, all right, I was feeling really good about myself. Well, so then we go up and we start playing all these country clubs.
And so I'm our number one playing the number one from Lake Hickory Country Club and stuff. And it was ugly. I had girls that would beat me and I'd barely score a point against them.
It was it was bad. But hey, I was number one for us. Yeah, the number one ranked junior at the tennis club. That's impressive. You should put that on the resume.
Well, that's the website. But do you have any tennis in your past? You seem like more of a country club sport guy like that, more than like having lined up at defensive end or something. Here's the thing, like I've I would say that I'm pretty athletic in the sense that I can kind of pick up anything and be pretty good at it. I'm not great at anything.
Right. I'm not a pro at anything. But I can usually hold my own in most anything. But tennis was one of the one things that I just could not control. I just could not control the speed and the trajectory of that ball to get it just to clear the net and then drop down their side. And serving was always frustrating to me. So great exercise.
One of the toughest physically running back and forth. But I think I just quick is I just wasn't good. I was just competitive and frustrated with trying. Well, and I'm actually terrible at tennis now because I quit playing in middle school because I was so focused on basketball. And then years later, I get back on the tennis court. Well, in the meantime, I started playing a lot of ping pong and it just completely changed my swing. And so I get on the tennis court and I'm hitting the ball like four feet.
It's not going anywhere because I was so used to playing ping pong. So I did play golf. So I did spend some time at the country club growing up. So the pool, that sort of thing.
It was fun. But the reason we're talking tennis is because today is all about tennis and how it relates to financial planning. You might think this is a bit of a stretch, but we did come up with three different items that we're going to make a comparison with today. So before we get started, let me remind you. John Stillman, president and founder of Rosewood Wealth Management, find him online at rosewoodwealthmanagement.com.
Call or text him as well. Eight hundred five four five two nine nine one. And check out his blog, The Financial Bee. What was the what was one of the recent headlines you used that was that got some attention? Was it something commie related? Yeah, the commies are gone. The commies are gone. How can you turn away from that content?
And he has it right there on his website, rosewoodwealthmanagement.com. All right. Today's topic, tennis. I'm going to throw out a couple scenarios or a couple items about tennis strategy, just the way the game is played.
And you're going to tell me how it relates to finance. So this is going to be tough for you, John, I think, even with your tennis background. All right. The court is different in singles than it is in doubles. Yeah. Well, the court's the same. You're just using different lines. Right. So you get the the wider the doubles alley that you get to use when you're playing doubles.
You know, there's people in the way. So we need more space to work with. So if we want to think about this in a financial planning context, let's think about singles versus doubles as it relates to people. OK, so a single individual planning for retirement versus a married couple heading into retirement. And the rules are basically the same. Just like in tennis, the rules in singles and doubles are the same. The scoring is the same. Everything's the same. It's just the court's a little different.
Right. And so same thing in retirement planning. The rules are the same in that we're trying to plan for the same stuff, like guarding against the fear of running out of money and making sure that we're not selling low or buying high in our portfolio. Want to make sure that we're taking the right amount of risk, that we're doing our income planning the right way and making sure that we have the paychecks coming in in retirement that we know you're going to want. But the court is a little different for single people versus married couples.
So what do I mean by that? Well, as an example, tax planning for a couple might be different than tax planning for a single person just because of the way the tax brackets are structured. You know, married filing jointly versus a single filer. So if you have a single person who lives on basically $50,000 a year of income, well, that's good. They're basically in the lowest tax bracket. Well, a married couple gets double that amount of income and still stays in the lowest tax bracket.
They can have $100,000 gross income and still be in that 12% bracket. Well, but think about a married couple with $100,000 coming in. It's a lot easier to make that lifestyle work because your expenses don't double just because you're a couple, but your opportunity to have income and stay in that same tax bracket does double. So the tax planning is a lot different for a single person than it is for a married couple.
On the other hand, single people might have an advantage on some things like, for instance, long term care planning. So if you think about a married couple, if one of the two spouses needs long term care, well, the other spouse is still living at home, so we can't sell the house out from under them to help pay for the care. That spouse living at home still needs income.
They still have to live their life. We have to find a way to pay for that spouse who needs care without bankrupting the remaining spouse. But if you're single and you need nursing home care, well, there's a lot of stuff on the table. All of your income can go toward that. Your Social Security, any pensions, any retirement income streams you have coming in, plus all of your investable assets can go toward your care.
Your home can be sold to pay for your care. So it's a lot easier for a single person to address those expenses than it is for a married couple in a lot of cases. So again, the rules are the same. It's just the lines on the court are a little bit different for single people versus couples. I like that. You did a good job explaining that.
It makes a lot of sense to me. Next up is the playing surface. Now, when you think of tennis, if you haven't played a lot of tennis, there's different courts. There's hard court. You got your grass.
You got your clay courts. They're all different. And certain players play differently on that.
So tell me how that relates to finance. All right. Well, let's think about our surfaces, right? So you're grass players. So Pete Sampras was great on grass in the 90s. He won Wimbledon, it seems like, every year. Steffie Graf was really good on grass. Roger Federer is basically good everywhere, but he was really good on grass.
All three of those people I named, I think, by the way, won Wimbledon seven times each. So they're all good on grass. I've never actually played on a grass court that I can think of, by the way. And I've only played on clay a few times, didn't much care for it. But so clay, which is what they have at the French Open, Rafael Nadal is really good on clay. Bjorn Borg back in the day was really good on clay. And Federer is good on everything, too.
So he would also be good on clay. But Nadal specifically, I would say, is best on clay compared to other surfaces. Yeah, I think Federer won maybe once, I think, maybe twice the French Open. He did get it once to get the Grand Slam, but Nadal's dominated. So, and then you have guys like Agassi, Jimmy Connors, they were much better on hard courts than any other surfaces, which is weird. Because when I was a kid, I had a poster in my room of Agassi playing at Wimbledon, and it said, mowing the lawn was the caption on it. But now that I think about it, he wasn't that great on grass. You really were a tennis guy growing up.
Yeah, well, for like four years. So, you know, Agassi, Jimmy Connors, good American boys, right? Even though Agassi has long hair, Persian ethnicity.
But, you know, they grew up in America. They play on hard courts, right? Jimmy Connors won a lot of games on hard courts, never great on other surfaces.
So, as you said, different players did well on different surfaces. Financial advisors are not that much different. Some of us excel in different areas. So, as an example, you might have advisors who truly specialize in retirement income planning. That's really my sweet spot.
That's my bread and butter. The overwhelming majority of my clients are 55 and up. They're either retired or getting close to it. Now, in the last couple of years, we've expanded that a lot more and have started working with basically, you know, the children of those clients, people in their 20s and 30s who are, you know, just getting started out, getting out of debt and getting started with their investments. But, you know, when I first started in this business years ago, I was working almost exclusively with retirees and pre-retirees, which is a much different skill set, say, from somebody who specializes in something like real estate investing. Or let's say you want to do a lot of trading.
You want to be messing with options, you know, puts and calls and doing a lot of day trading. Well, we're not going to do that kind of stuff here because for my average client, they're not trying to get rich. They're trying to make sure that they're never going to be poor.
It's much more of a priority for them. And so you have to understand what it is you're looking for with an advisor and then find somebody who's playing surface strength fits what you need. So can we call you the Roger Federer of retirement planning? Is that fair? I don't know why not. Okay, good enough.
All right. Last topic, how tennis relates to finance. When you're playing a game of tennis, holding serve is important. That's how you can kind of control the game or at least control your half of those points.
So how does that relate? And this applies to tennis players who are good. For me, when I was serving, it wasn't particularly an advantage.
Just score where you can. It was just, if I was serving, it was just an added chance that I could double fault, right? So I wasn't necessarily one who was able to capitalize on the fact that I was serving. But if you look at people who are actually good at tennis that are pros, more often than not, they win when they're serving. And that's important because when you're serving, you're setting the tone for that point for that game. You're sort of in control of the point because they're serving so hard. The person who's returning the serve is immediately back on their heels.
And it's like that person is the server is always in the driver's seat. And so if somebody breaks serve, meaning they win a game when they weren't serving, usually that gives them a leg up. Because, you know, if you're serving and you win and I'm serving and I win and we go back and forth and we're each winning games when we're serving and it's four to four and then suddenly you break my serve, well now you're up a game and you're serving again.
You're about to go up two games, most likely. So very important that you hold serve and break serve when you can really puts you in the driver's seat. So in the financial realm, what does this mean? Well, we want to control the things we can control. We want to focus on doing the best we can with the stuff that's truly in our control and not spend a lot of time losing sleep over the things we can't control. So you can't control what the stock market does.
That's out of your realm of control. You can't control how much risk you take. So let's focus on what a stock market downturn might do to your overall plan.
If you're 35, it doesn't matter. If anything, it's a buying opportunity for you. If you're 65 and you're retiring in a year or two, well, we can't afford for you to lose 35% of your assets.
We need that money for income. And so let's understand where you are and let's control the risk accordingly because we can't control the stock market. There are tons of other things you can't control. You can't control inflation. You can't control legislation that might affect tax increases down the road. But you can control where you save money. You can control whether you put money in a Roth versus in a traditional IRA so that when you retire and you're taking money out of a Roth, it don't matter what the tax rates are because you're not paying tax on that money anyway. So focus on the things you can control and make the best decisions that way instead of worrying about everything else and trying to just constantly react to things going on around you that you can't control. Take control of the things you can. Hold serve when it comes to your financial plan. Well, John and his team can help you hold serve on your retirement game of tennis as well.
They can do so over at Rosewood Wealth Management online at rosewoodwealthmanagement.com, also by phone or by text at 800-545-2991. And don't forget the blog, The Financial Bee. We'll have some show notes on this stuff as well. So check that out.
And don't forget, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. Well, John, I will have to say that you did indeed ace this episode. Well, let's see what you did there.
And hopefully this episode truly added value to your life and wasn't just some racket in the background. Indeed. You can get more puns like this by subscribing to this podcast, Mr. Stillman's Opus on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks for joining us. For John Stillman, I'm Ben George. We'll talk to you next time here on Mr. Stillman's Opus.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-11-27 03:12:53 / 2023-11-27 03:19:28 / 7