retirement accounts Archives - Bankers Anonymous

August 15, 2019August 15, 2019

Improving Retirement, Reducing Aristocracy

I’m a fan of tax-advantaged retirement accounts, like IRAs and 401(k)s. I’m also a fan of reasonable federal legislation to periodically update these accounts to make them attractive, available, and useful as retirement savings tools, while still serving society’s best interests.

The Democratic-controlled House passed The Setting Every Community Up For Retirement Enhancement and Savings (SECURE) Act in May 2019. It’s a bi-partisan bill, with the Republican Senate expected to approve it sometime this year, possibly with minor modifications. The Republican President is expected to sign it into law. It’s almost as if we have a real functioning government and cooperation on an important issue, people! This is exciting!

The SECURE Act provides a bunch of incremental improvements to retirement fund rules and most of the changes are investor-friendly – in the sense that they make IRA rules more generous and more advantageous for investing in one’s retirement.

I’ll list below some of the small, but good, improvements for investors below, but after that I want to highlight the only part of the proposed bill that is actually less generous to investors. The fact that it is less generous is good, in my opinion, although many of you savers and investors might disagree with me.

Incremental Improvements

But first, I’ll highlight the goodies for investors, if and when the bill passes.

You can make contributions up until any age into a Traditional IRA, rather than having to cease contributions at age 70.5.
The age for starting Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) would increase from 70.5 to 72.
Small businesses could form multi-company groups to offer 401(k) plans, to share and therefore reduce administrative costs.
Part-time workers could participate in 401(k) plans

These are all incremental but each increases incentives to save and invest over the long run in a tax advantaged way.

There are a few other proposed provisions – some regarding 529 accounts and others requiring disclosure on 401(k) plans about how much income could be derived from account balances if annuitized.

One of the proposals in the SECURE Act limits something called the ‘stretch IRA.’ I like the stretch IRA personally, but hate it philosophically – so limiting it strikes me in opposite ways.

On the personal side, if there’s a way to reduce taxes and build wealth, I may want to do it myself and I usually tend to tell other people about it. This is a case of: It shouldn’t exist, but since it does exist you should take advantage of it if you can. I’ve previously written about the joys and opportunities of the stretch IRA in my book on personal finance and on my blog.

On the philosophical side, however, the stretch IRA rubs me the wrong way. I mean that from a “societal good” perspective. The principle of the thing, like much of tax reform around inheritance over the last thirty-five years, tends to aggravate one of our great societal problems already: wealth inequality.

Here are the basics of a stretch IRA, which the SECURE Act, as currently passed by the House, limits.

The image that comes to mind with Trust Fund kids

Heirs who inherit an IRA are required to withdraw a certain amount money every year based on their own expected lifetime. They have to take out an amount calculated as the account value divided by their expected remaining life (as determined by an IRS table.) An 18 year-old, with an expected remaining life of 65 years, for example, who inherits $100,000 from Grandma’s IRA, would be required to withdraw around 1.5% of her account as income this year. Or $1,538 – because that’s $100,000 divided by 65.

Importantly for the ‘stretch’ theory, however, she could leave the remaining amount in the account to grow, tax-advantaged, into the future. Each year, the heiress would only be forced to withdraw a small amount. Based on her long remaining life and small withdrawals, her inherited stretch IRA account, under most scenarios, would grow until approximately her own retirement age. Carefully done, that’s nearly 5 decades of tax-advantaged inheritance, a growing account, and a rising annual income from the account.

I say, old chap, that sound delightfully like the good old days of the English aristocracy.

With careful planning, this could produce millions of tax-advantaged income over the young heiresses lifetime. The larger the original inheritance, obviously, the larger the advantage. The traditional key to a stretch IRA is to leave funds to young heirs, who can take advantage of the rules of required minimum distributions, based on a long ‘expected life.’

The limit proposed by the House version of the SECURE Act is that inherited IRAs would have to be fully withdrawn within 10 years, curtailing the ‘stretch’ previously enjoyed by young heirs.

Fighting the Aristocracy

So what’s my big problem with the “stretch IRA?”

Simply this: Children don’t deserve free money. Intergenerational wealth transfers merit careful limits. My particular American preference for a democratic world makes me think aristocratic societies – in which inherited wealth creates lifetime comfort for a fortunate few – are bad. The stretch IRA was one small piece of a larger intergenerational wealth-transfer industry. So I applaud the SECURE Act’s attack on it, or for limiting it to just 10 years, on these philosophical grounds.

Finally – were I a betting man about this part of the SECURE Act, I’d bet against the right thing happening. I am a complete Washington outsider, but I do have a cynic’s instinct for who funds Congressional campaigns. There’s a particularly high correlation – regardless of party – between people who fund Congressional campaigns and people who understand and can benefit from tax-advantaged intergenerational wealth transfers.

The history of tax and estate legislation regarding wealth transfers for the last 35 years – regardless of the party in Congress – appears to me an unrelenting move toward favoring the establishment of intergenerational wealth. So, I personally wouldn’t bet on this small step against the American aristocracy surviving in the Senate this year.

But, we can hope. So far, it’s still in the bill.

Please see related posts:

The Magical Roth IRA

So I guess we all like Trust Fund Kids, right?

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March 14, 2018

Fees in 401(k)s

“Yes, hello? Is this the Human Resources Department? Yes, I’d like to file a complaint about the retirement plan offered here. No, I don’t work actually here. But still, hear me out…”

Today is my day to complain about the (somewhat) hidden costs of employer-sponsored retirement plans. These plans come in a variety of flavors like 401(k), 403(b), SIMPLE IRA, and SEP-IRA, and hopefully you have one of these available at your job.

And by the way, if you take away from today’s column that I don’t like these plans, then you missed the point. Mostly I love them. Economists and astrophysicists all agree: the only free lunch ever discovered in the known universe is employer-sponsored retirement plans with matching funds.

Unfortunately, in plans I’ve reviewed, employees often pay far too much in management fees. That overpayment is especially egregious when compared to fees that employees could pay for investments outside of their retirement plans.

There’s been a revolution over the past 10 years in lowering the costs of fund management fees. But you would not know that revolution had ever occurred, based on the plans I reviewed recently.

Here’s the crux of the problem, I think. Many plan sponsors, the companies that actually offer investments to employees, offer their service to employers for free or nearly free. Now you’re probably thinking, free sounds good. Free is the opposite of a problem. But hold on.

Free to the employer often translates into expensive to the employee. What I mean by that is that plan sponsors have to be paid some way or another for their services. If the employer gets the retirement service plan for free, then the employee probably ends up paying that much more.

A few examples best illustrate this problem.

I recently completed a consulting gig for a public entity in Texas that employs less than 100 people. The plan sponsor for their 401(a) plan, a professional and reputable non-profit, charges no money directly to the public entity. Which, again, sounds nice at first.

Employees, however, always pay 0.55% in extra fees dedicated to the plan sponsor, in management fund costs, on top of their regular fund management fees, which are somewhat high to begin with. Enrollment in this retirement plan is mandatory, as employees are ineligible for Social Security and no longer eligible to enroll in a pension. Employees in other words are captive to paying significantly higher fees with their retirement money than they otherwise would pay outside of their retirement accounts.

What is the effect of this 0.55% that employees pay rather than employers? Employees of this public entity have approximately $14 million under management, meaning the plan sponsor earns $77,000 per year for their 0.55% fees on funds charged to employees. That’s the one-year cost.

Indulge me in a little more math, however, so we can calculate costs in a more sophisticated way.

As funds grow over time, so too do the fees. Over ten years, at an assumed growth rate of 6% in the fund value, the fees will total $124 thousand per year and $989 thousand cumulatively.

Over 30 years, the total fees would be $5.5 million.

But that still understates the costs of paying fees with retirement money. Since fees are charged from within the accounts, the retirement accounts end up growing more slowly.

And that’s the real problem! The funds grow to a value $11.6 million less over 30 years than they would have if these fees were paid from outside the accounts. The real “cost” of the fees – as measured by this slower growth – is therefore nearly twice the amount paid to the sponsor, by my reckoning.

This problem is not limited to the public sector. A few years back I helped a friend set up an employer-sponsored SIMPLE IRA plan available to all employees of her 12-person company. I was excited for her all the way through the process until realized the bad news: The plan sponsor charges way too much to employees for the funds in the plan. A US large cap fund, a very plain vanilla offering, charges 1.64 percent per year. A US small cap fund, similarly basic, charges 1.84 percent. Depending on what you compare it to, that’s between 2 and 10 times too much in fees. There are no low-cost funds at all, because a management fee between 0.45 percent and 0.55 percent, as well as a distribution/service fee of 0.25 percent, gets tacked on to every single fund.

For my friend’s SIMPLE IRA plan, the impairment on wealth would be even higher than that public sector plan, since her employees pay around 0.75 percent extra, rather than 0.55 percent.

I’m not entirely opposed to fees in finance. The big problem in this case is two-fold. First, it’s inefficient to pay fees from within retirement accounts, compared to paying fees from outside retirement accounts, as an employer could offer to do. Second, it seems contrary to the spirit of a retirement benefit program that all costs are borne by employees. I understand why it happens, but that won’t stop me from complaining.

Were I an employee of either that government entity or my friend’s small business, I’d be annoyed about these charges. Plan sponsors don’t work for free but I’d wish that my employer had volunteered to pay those fees, rather than making them payable with my own retirement money. Some employers do, and some don’t. Do you know if yours does?

Finally, what is a financially-savvy person to do?

First, as an employee, definitely still participate in your employer-sponsored plan to the maximum level available, given your resources.

erin_brockovich — Be the Erin Brockovich of your employer-sponsored retirement plan

Second, be a squeaky-wheel when it comes to costs in your employer-sponsored plan. Maybe even contact your human resources department and ask about the fees. This likely will affect absolutely zero things in the real world, but will at least give you that nice moral superiority feeling. If you managed to actually affect change at your job, well then, you would be the Erin Brockovich of retirement plans to your fellow colleagues.

Finally, if you are a business owner, executive, or board member overseeing the employer-sponsored plan of an organization, know that you actually might be able to affect change. And not spare change either, but rather substantial, life-altering amounts of money for people’s retirements. It’s far more efficient to your company and your employees if you pay those plan sponsor fees at the employer level. Also, it’s the right thing to do, as a benefit to employees.

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May 9, 2016May 13, 2016

Forget Buy Low Sell High

Once upon a time – a little over a year ago – I helped a friend start an employee retirement program for her business, and that made both her and me feel very good. Building the long-term financial health of employees – in a tax-advantaged way – has to be one of the most rewarding activities a greedy capitalist can do.

More recently, one of those employees checked with me about market volatility during the first part of the year. I happened to be stopping by their office. She happened to be worried about the fact that despite making contributions over the previous 6 months, her account hadn’t grown at all. With the market dropping so much, and so often, she wondered, shouldn’t she maybe stop her contributions for a bit? Just, you know, until the market settled down. I don’t think she wanted to sell her holdings, just cease the payroll contributions. For a bit.

I waited theatrically until my jaw fully bounced from the concrete before closing it.

“What?!” I stage-whisper-shouted, so that everyone else would hear.

My reaction gave her all the answer she needed about what I thought of her idea. Hopefully I looked so alarmed that all her colleagues took note and put away any thoughts of market-timing their tax-advantaged retirement account contributions.

Still, her question deserves a more fleshed-out response than my mock shock.

A contrarian truth

Her logic came from a perfectly sound interpretation of the well-known investing cliché ‘Buy low, sell high.’ The market is going down, she’s thinking, so let me wait until the bottom to resume buying, at the lows.

I recently read a very good case for why ‘Buy low sell high’ is “the worst financial advice of all time.” As you may already know, I’ve got a soft spot for crazy-sounding contrarian opinions that reveal an underlying wisdom.

Why should we not try to “buy low and sell high?”

I mean, yes of course, there is mathematical logic to purchasing with the smallest number of dollars and selling with the largest number of dollars. We end up with more dollars. But that increasing-dollars thing is not in fact what generally happens when we attempt to “buy low and sell high.”

Adopting the idea that we are responsible for picking the lows and highs logically leads to trying to time the market. We might see the market value of our investments drop and think it’s better to sell before it drops more. Or we might stop contributing to our retirement account, until we’ve ‘hit the bottom.’ Or, we could attempt to load up on some investment because it dropped 25 percent, or whatever.

In fact, much of the financial-infotainment-industrial-complex is built on this false premise that we should attempt to ‘buy low and sell high.’ The attempt to figure out highs and lows in a peripatetic market seemingly justifies tuning in to the trash fire that comprises most of television’s investment programming.

Bad Results

What happens when you falsely believe it’s your job to “buy low and sell high?” A whole bunch of bad things happen, such as:

You trade more often than you should, incurring higher transaction costs than necessary.
You trade more often than you should, incurring punishing tax rates.
You buy things because they’ve gone down in price, even though they can continue to go down much further.
You sell things that have gone up in price, even though they may be worth far more in the future than they are today.
You leave money for too long in low-risk/low-return assets like bonds or cash or money markets waiting for the right low-point when you can buy, forgetting that that low point only happens when the financial apocalypse seems upon us, and it would seem madness to invest in risky markets then.

Instead, Do Nothing

My friend the anxious employee – hopefully – will stop paying attention to the value of her investment account any more often than, say, once a year. She’s 30-years old right now, which means she will likely have this money locked away in the market for 30 to 50 more years. A 10 percent drop, a 20 percent drop – heck a 35 percent drop – in the value of her account means nothing compared to what she will earn in the long run if she stays the course, investing they way she should.

At a 6 percent return for thirty years, she will make nearly 6 times her current money. At a 6 percent return for fifty years, she will make more than 18 times her money. That 6 percent return doesn’t come in the form of steadiness, but rather stomach-churning downdrafts and breathless upswings, and everything in between. Big temptations, each one, to try to buy low and sell high.

Earning multiples on your retirement money will work best if she resists the urge to “buy low and sell high,” or any other timing-based behaviors, like halting contributions when the market gets volatile.

Instead of “Buy low and sell high,” a better mantra would be “automate retirement contributions and then: do nothing.”

See related post:

How To Invest

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March 30, 2015April 1, 2015

Ask An Ex-Banker: The Magical Roth IRA

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News.

Dear Michael,

Next January, when I receive the proceeds for a house I’m selling, I’m considering converting 70K from my TIAAF-CREF Traditional IRA into a Roth IRA, and paying taxes to do that that. I could then make my 7 grandchildren the beneficiaries and plan to not spend any of the Roth IRA myself unless I was desperate. I am 72 years old now, and my seven grandchildren range in age from 4 to 18. Could you make a spreadsheet to show me – and them – how nice that would be for them if I died at 90 and they received tax free income until they are all age 72 themselves?

Thanks,
Julie from Massachusetts

Dear Julie,

Thanks for your question. You’ve highlighted one of the cool and little-discussed features of the Roth IRA, a potentially magical low-cost estate-planning tool for passing on tax-free income to young heirs.

The Roth IRA magic I’m about to describe happens because of three features unique to Roth IRAs.

First – unlike a traditional IRA – all withdrawals from an inherited Roth IRA are tax free to the beneficiary. Roth IRAs, we recall, require income taxes to be paid up front, either when a contribution is made, or in the case of Julie, when an existing Traditional IRA converts to a Roth IRA.

Second – also unlike a traditional IRA – you are not required to make any withdrawals from your Roth IRA in your own lifetime. If you can manage to survive without pulling out money from your Roth – as Julie referenced in her question – then you can leave that much more money for your heirs.

Third – heirs can withdraw money slowly enough from their inherited Roth IRA that their little nest egg can actually grow over time. The IRS has a schedule for inherited IRAs that shows how to calculate just how slowly money may be withdrawn.

By exactly how much money will the grandchildren benefit, and how does it all work?

tax_free_inheritance — Tax Free Inheritance!

The total value

I’ll take Julie’s example and run through the numbers, but let me hit you with the punch-line first:

Julie’s nest egg would produce nearly $1.2 million of tax free income for her grandchildren.

Here’s some fine print on that punchline: $1.2 Million of tax-free income assumes Julie starts with $70,000 next year; She dies at age 90; all of her grandchildren take only their minimum distributions until they turn 72; the accounts earn 6% per year; and each grandchild receives the total remaining value of their inherited Roth IRAs at age 72.

If I keep all of those above assumptions, except I dial down the annual return to a more conservative 3% return per year, her grandchildren receive $273,054 in total tax free income.

But what about the following?
If I dial up the annual return to a more optimistic 10% per year, her grandchildren would receive a total of $9.2 million in tax free income. ¹

Now that I have your attention, how does the Roth IRA achieve this magic trick?

The magic happens over two phases, Julie’s life, and her grandchildren’s lives.

Julie’s Life

Traditional IRAs ² require an owner to withdraw a portion of their retirement account as income every year after age 70.5. The IRS publishes a list for IRA owners age 70.5 and older about their required minimum distribution, roughly determined by the retiree’s expected remaining lifespan.

According to the IRS, A 72-year old like Julie would be required to divide the value of her IRA by 25.6 (the same divisor goes for all 72 year-olds), and take at least that amount out of her traditional IRA as income. ³

With a $70,000 Traditional IRA, Julie must withdraw at least $2,734.38 at age 72, (because that’s $70,000 divided by 25.6).
With a $70,000 Roth IRA, however, she is not required to withdraw anything.

If Julie is able to survive on rice and beans (and Social Security, and other savings) without drawing from her Roth IRA, the account will certainly grow for the next 18 years. At a 6% annual growth rate, her Roth IRA would reach $188,494 when she reaches age 90. At which point we assume each of 7 grandchildren inherits a Roth IRA worth $26,928 (because that’s $188,494 divided 7 ways).

The grandchildren’s lives

An inherited Roth IRA requires an heir to make minimum withdrawals, but in small amounts determined by the age of the heir. The minimum withdrawal amount is determined by the value of the Roth IRA divided by the expected lifespan of the heir.

The key here to the Roth IRA magic is that Julie’s grandchildren are relatively young, and the IRS allows young people with a long expected lifespan to withdraw money from inherited IRAs quite slowly.

So slowly, in fact, that each grandchild’s account is likely to grow over time, under reasonable annual return assumptions.

The eldest grandchild
Julie’s eldest grandchild, now age 18, would be aged 36 when Julie is 90. The grandchild could elect to take the inherited $26,928 all at once, but would be advised not to do so.

Instead, she should allow the account to grow over time, kicking off a growing amount of tax free income per year over the course of her lifetime.

At age 36, the eldest grandchild has an expected remaining life of 47.5 years, so could elect to take the minimum of tax free income of $555 (because that’s $26,928 divided by 47.5).

With that minimum withdrawal, assuming a 6% return, the account will grow each year. Withdrawals will increase each year as well, up to $4,136 when she is 72 years old, when the account will be worth $67,424.

The youngest grandchild
For the youngest grandchild, the deal is even sweeter. She would inherit $26,928 at age 23. Her original minimum withdrawal of tax free income would be $448 (that’s $26,928 divided by her expected remaining lifespan of 60.1 years). Minimum withdrawals would grow up to as much as $7,090 by age 72, at which point the account would be worth $109,903.

The younger the heir, the higher the potential for maximizing this Roth IRA magic, which can produce tax free income for life, long after the original retiree has passed.

In the most optimistic scenario, if markets return over the next 100 years at the rate they have in the past 100 years (a key “if”) Julie’s conversion of her relatively modest $70K Traditional IRA into a Roth IRA would produce close to $10 million in future tax free income for her grandchildren.

Please see related posts:

The Magical Roth IRA

Estate Tax – My Problems With It

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Incidentally, even though past performance is not indicative of future results, the S&P500 (including reinvestment of dividends) has earned 11.7% over the past 40 years. ↩
Just like other retirement accounts such as 401Ks and 403bs ↩
As a retiree ages and her remaining lifetime shortens, the IRS requires the retiree to divide by a smaller number, leading to higher distributions. A 90 year old must divide her traditional IRA account value by 11.4 for example, so would have to take out a minimum of $6,140 on a $70,000 account (because that’s $70,000 divided by 11.4). ↩

September 29, 2014September 29, 2014

529 Accounts v. Retirement Accounts

A version of this post appeared today in the San Antonio Express News.

People who give financial advice – like me – can be so annoyingly contradictory sometimes.
Some friends of mine with young kids – like me – asked me recently to look over their investment plans, and to give them my opinion on what they were already doing, as well as what they should do next.

They had already embarked on an automatic-deduction investment plan with their financial planner, and they also had an available $5,000, and they wanted to know where to invest it next.
They were doing something I had been urging my fellow parents to do – funding 529 educational savings accounts for their two girls – so, naturally, I told them it was all wrong.

Let me back up and explain.

I already wrote about the panic attack I experienced when I visited a useful College Board website to calculate the future cost of college. At the present rate of tuition increases, in ten years from now college tuition will cost the equivalent of checking your little darlings into a 5-Star Hotel in the fanciest building in Dubai.

Seven_Star_Hotel_College — Here’s the 7-Star hotel you will send your child to

For. Four. Years.

(*All prices here are my best estimates, using round numbers. Actual results may vary. Always read less than six financial columns in any 24-hour period. If headaches persist, please call your doctor.)
The only way to deal with that impending college tuition catastrophe, of course, is to start eating rice and beans today and send your surplus savings into a college savings account like a State-sponsored 529 Account. 529 Accounts, as you probably already know, typically offer tax-advantages for education savings and investments.

My rice-and-beans-and-529-account advice still holds if you can do it, provided one other condition is already met, which I’ll tell you about in a moment.

So like I said, my friends had set up their 529 account contributions in the name of their 9- and 11-year old girls, complete with automatic deductions.

The problem, however, is that they planned to contribute to these 529 accounts before they maxed out their IRA contributions and 401K contributions.
You see, there’s a clear “order of operations” when it comes to tax-advantaged investment accounts, and it goes like this:

1. Personal IRA – up to $5,500 this year (And more if you’re older than 50)
2. Employee 401K – up to $17,500 this year (and more if your employer matches)
3. 529 Education accounts, or other savings accounts for health or medical expenses

So, I told my friends they have to first contribute $5,500 each to an IRA this year, then make sure they have filled up their 401K bucket to the max. Then – and only then – should they direct any surplus to their girls’ 529 account. Their existing financial advisor had not made this order of operations clear.

Dubai_hotel — If they don’t get into the Seven Star hotel, Try the Six Star hotel in Dubai

Why do I insist they fund IRAs and 401Ks before funding a 529 account?
At least four factors make IRAs and 401Ks a better target for initial investment than 529 accounts.

First, both IRAs and 401Ks offer federal income tax savings on contributions, whereas 529 accounts do not. State-by-state legislation created 529 accounts, and in some states a 529 account offers state income tax relief. Since we all live in Texas, which has no state income tax, their Texas-based 529 account has no income tax advantage. So right off the bat, IRAs and 401Ks beat 529s by somewhere between 20% and 39.5%, depending on your marginal income tax bracket. But even outside of Texas, state income tax relief from 529s pales in comparison to the federal income tax relief of IRAs and 401Ks.

Second, while both a comfortable retirement and a four years college require big chunks of cash, as parents we get the opportunity (misfortune? punishment?) to borrow money for college, but not for retirement.

The student loan industry – all $1 trillion of debt and counting! – stands ready and willing to lend your little darlings what they need to check into Hotel Dubai University (Fight Fiercely Sand Dunes!) at pretty low interest rates too. I know of no similar program to lend to retirees, except halfway-predatory programs like reverse mortgages.

Next, 401K plans often come with an employer match, one of the few real-life examples of free money here on planet Earth.

Finally, compound interest – the secret sauce to the long-term growth of money – works best over the longest time periods. For my friends, they can watch their investments compound for 30 to 40 more years in their retirement accounts, versus merely 10 to 15 years in the 529 accounts for their girls. Always choose the longer time horizon when it comes to investing.

Of course, we know the best option is to fund them all and not have to pick and choose. For my friends, and for most of us, however, we need to choose, and that means picking our investment vehicles in the right order.

In sum: first retirement accounts, then college accounts. Ok? Ok.

By the way, some clever readers will urge maxing-out the 401K first, before the IRA, to take advantage of any employer match. That’s good advice, it just so happens that my friends don’t have 401Ks at their jobs now, so I told them to max out the IRAs first, then pressure the boss to start a 401K plan second, and then fund their 529 accounts third.

Here’s the TL:DR – Place the mask over your own face first, before placing it over your child. Now, just, apply that to investments.