Quantifying Value, Rollovers and Retirement, and Connecting the Dots with Steve Zuschin & Harry Bartle

Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast, WealthTech on Deck, the podcast where we talk to industry leaders about the future of digital and human advice. I’d like to start with some interesting statistics I recently came across. Four times as many people retired in 2020 versus 2019, according to Pew Research, and money in motion increased by over 350% in that same timeframe. And what we hear from advisors and their clients is they want to know, the clients who particularly want to know, what should I do with my rollover? And when should I take Social Security? Those are the first two questions as, as that money in motion is underway. So on our podcasts, we talk to leaders around the industry about what they’re up to. And today, I’m really pleased to talk with two of my colleagues. They spend a lot of time talking to people like themselves, people that are building and creating platforms, ecosystems, that will make a difference in helping advisors do a better job and help their clients get better outcomes. So they talk to industry leaders, they’re industry leaders themselves. So, Steve Zuschin is the EVP of Technology Adoption at LifeYield. And Harry Bartle is the EVP of Enterprise Sales. Harry and Steve, welcome. Good to have you guys on the podcast.

Harry Bartle: Thanks, Jack.

Steve Zuschin: Glad to be here. Thanks, Jack.

Jack Sharry: So, Harry, and Steve, there’s all sorts of issues that you deal with on a regular basis. Daily conversations with folks, opportunities. Talk a little bit about who you work with, name names, if you can. I know a lot of firms don’t like to have their names out loud, but you’re working with all the biggest names in the business around building these ecosystems and platforms. Let’s start, Harry, with you. Talk a little bit about what you do and who you do it with and what you’re hearing from the people you’re working with.

Harry Bartle: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jack. And this truly is the Coronavirus podcast 101 here, we’re about 40 feet apart the three of us and we’re all three in our in our separate offices, which is a little bit weird in being back in the office and not being in a room together. But it’s great. So let me, thanks again for for having us on, tell you a little bit about you know what I do, I work with some of the largest financial institutions, learning where their technology is heading. And then working with them on their roadmap on getting LifeYield, specifically asset location is usually a starting point, to be built into their front office capabilities that they’re working with. So we work with companies like Ameriprise, SEI, Morgan Stanley, you know, we have enterprise contracts with Merrill Lynch and some other you know, large enterprises. And really what what I’m seeing, if I can just kind of jump into it a little bit, is what we’re seeing is, you know, the middle and back office is still going to be outsourced. And they’re still going to go to the large software companies, the Broadridges, the Fiservs, etc. But what the trend that we’re seeing in the industry undoubtedly is they want to build and they want the client experience and the advisor experience to be controlled by them as a firm. And they’re, you know, partnering with all kinds of different technology vendors to API, those algorithms in, right. Risk, tax, AI, you know, planning simulations, you know, all of these different functionalities. They’re going and finding partners and accessing them via API and building technology, specifically household capability technologies, that the advisor and the client are going to experience and they’re going to control so that they don’t have to do a huge software implementation again, in the future. If they need to swap out a vendor, it’s swapping out one API for the other. There’s some work there. But it’s not the heavy lift of traditional software, where there’s a user interface and, you know, the getting rid of the old software and implementing the new one.

Jack Sharry: Great. Steve, before you talk a little bit about what to do and who you do it with. Might be useful to talk a little bit about your back… recent background where you built up our direct to advisor business. We have over 400 RIA firms that we have brought on board at LifeYield so you know that business well and talk a little bit about why we pivoted to put more of your attention on working with some of the… some of our biggest clients, some of the biggest clients in our industry.

Steve Zuschin: Yeah, thanks, Jack. And so yeah, I mean, you just said it. My background, I started with LifeYield to launch our direct to advisor channel. And the goal of that channel was to really take some of our technology and put it out into the… put it out into the world so we could close the loop and speak and work directly with financial advisors that are out there on the frontlines, meeting with their clients. And what we found is that advisors are looking for ways to communicate clarity and value to really show value that they’re adding to these relationships with their clients. They’re literally looking anyway that they can to quantify benefit that they’re adding to those relationships. So LifeYield was a, was a home run with advisors, and being able to communicate that. Most recently, what we found is that, as Harry had already discussed, is some of our larger clients that are moving towards this API based approach. So they are engaging with our technology, but they control the whole front end and user experience. They have long roadmaps, and they’re looking for the low hanging fruit. And one thing I would just add to what Harry said, that we’ve really discovered is that the table stakes are getting more and more sophisticated. It’s becoming harder and harder for these enterprises to provide platforms that meet the bare minimum of what an advisor needs to operate their business. I mean, they’re looking at multimillion dollar investments, multi year projects in order to provide that if they’re going to build it from the ground up themselves. So we’ve seen this massive shift in, in larger enterprises engaging with companies that have their niche specialty, like LifeYield around tax optimization. So I’m there to work with them on their roadmap, make sure that they’re getting the most and best use out of our technology. And, yeah.

Jack Sharry: Harry, I’m gonna come back to you because you’re, you’re setting up relationships with so many of the of the largest firms. For our audience, let me talk a little bit about what a platform might look like. And then why don’t you talk a little bit more about LifeYield’s role, how we work with others. And I’ll use the the Morgan Stanley platform just as a basis, a lot of people are aware of Wealth Desk and of GPS and some of the tools they have. But really the shift that we see, and Harry, please comment on this, is the shift is toward connecting the dots, all the different various elements of an ecosystem. So for our audience’s better understanding, that includes data. So that’s often data aggregation of some kind or another. That includes a plan in terms of determining where to go and how to go about it. We play the role of asset location, you can maybe expand on that and a little bit. That feeds into a proposal typically about how do you organize the accounts. This is all about household level management, multi account, and that meaning taxable tax qualified assets, and so on. Usually a scoring, what we’re finding that some of the work, we’re doing at Morgan Stanley includes a risk score and a tax score and a cost score, talk some more about that in a little bit. That leads on to some tax management, whether it’s rebalancing or harvesting. Again, if you’d expand on all this, I’m more than just sort of setting the framework for our audiences, a better understanding. That leads to income sourcing, in other words, what’s the optimal sequence of withdrawal down the road? So it’s data planning, proposal, ongoing management, and then withdrawal, to put it in a nutshell. But maybe you could expand on that, and what we’re seeing the trend around API connection, not only with us, but with other of the many vendors that are out there that help make these ecosystems go.

Harry Bartle: Yeah, it’s, you know, Morgan Stanley is a good example. But they are definitely way out ahead. Right. I mean, we’ve been working with them for five years now, right? And they’re still not done with their whole project. Right. So it is a multi year, large process to build the user experience for advisors and clients. And then not only to be able to do that, but then being able to connect to legacy software, right, single account rebalanacers, you know, how does all that work? And, you know, when I think about our role at LifeYield, it’s a single agnostic algorithm or API that does pretty much everything tax that you want it to do. Right? So that can be overwhelming for firms to hear. And they go, “Whoa, how do I do all of it?” And the realistic side is they start in one spot, right? Many of our partners have started in proposal, right, let’s build a household proposal that shows how to implement multiple accounts together, doesn’t have to be the entire household, you can have five accounts in this strategy and three accounts in this one, right. And then show where to hold what to maximize the best after tax rate or return, basic asset location functionality. Quantify that benefit of doing it this way versus the way that you were doing it before to be able to express to the client, “Here’s why householding is so important. It can mean 30 basis points of additional value annually, which equates out to this dollar amount over the next 10 years by having the same household allocation you had before but just implementing it smarter.” And then firms are obviously taking that proposal and making it implementable, connecting it to the back end and to the plumbing, right. And that’s usually where firms start. The other place that firms start is rebalancing, right? So, “Hey, I’m going to rebalance these accounts. I want to take asset location, I want to take householding into account, how do I household rebalance?” And again, we don’t have to get into the long winded answer of how LifeYield works, but we work in two ways. You can use us straight up as the rebalancing engine, or you can use us as an overlay, right? Tell my… each single account rebalancers how to implement in a household so they can still work in a silo and they can still implement, you know, in the best way when they’re rebalancing. So we work through the last, you know this best Jack, but since our inception in 2008, we’ve figured it out, right. We need to be able to work in both capacities. So all these firms are in different phases of where they are in their development of their household platform. Some haven’t even started, they’re way behind the eight ball, and they’re going to be in trouble in the future, probably unless they get going soon. But you know, everybody starts in a different capacity. And then the question is, okay, planning is kind of the, the cornerstone of sitting with clients on a regular basis. How do we connect planning to all this, right? How do we make planning, and then come back to it on an annual basis and show them how they’re doing in their plan, right. And we think we’ve found a solution for that too, where we can do a multi period analysis and actually take, you know, hey, this, here’s your withdrawal, down to the tax lot, the tax smart way to sell across these five accounts, and tie the planning income projections to real life, and how they’re doing over a multi period with tax bracket management, actual withdrawals down to the tax lot, tax smart withdrawals on an annual basis. So we’re gonna have that multi period analysis. You know, one of our firms is already doing it. They’re calling us and they’re doing the loop, but we’re going to be doing that loop. So all these firms are in different phases of connecting proposal, planning, rebalancing, withdrawals, and how do they all fit together? And you know, LifeYield’s role in that is we, we can work across all of it. But my job is to work with the firm to figure out, where do you start? Where’s your biggest need? And then what’s your second step, your third step, and your fourth step? And what’s the process gonna look like as we do this?

Jack Sharry: Great, great. That leads me to a question to you, Steve. One of things that is a challenge with all this, as Harry’s just described, it’s pretty technically involved, and a lot of words that probably some of our audience haven’t heard before, or don’t fully understand or appreciate No knock, just a new language where we’re moving toward. And that is, how do you manage a household, as we like to say, in a risk smart, task smart, cost smart way? And no one better at understanding that, and also an interesting role that we’ve wound up playing, unintended, but we’re happy to, to embrace it. And that is to play the role of kind of a consultant, we’re the only firm really out there that has sort of put, put these ecosystems together. And your role is to really play kind of a consultant to, not technically a consultant, but really, given our understanding of all this and how it’s all come together over the past 10 years that we’ve been building this sort of stuff. Talk a little bit about your role in terms of really advising firms about increasing adoption, about making it a more streamlined kind of approach, so that as they build, they’re building smarter and more effectively and and likely in sequence. So why dont you talk a little bit about that, if you would.

Steve Zuschin: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, Harry mentioned this earlier, but by engaging with different technology companies, like LifeYield, via API. When that all in one solution or that homegrown, proprietary platform, when the firm owns that user experience, and they leverage other technology companies like LifeYield, to execute, you know, on organizing their rebalancing process to be household focused. One of the major benefits there, Jack, is that when they control that user experience, they also get to control the user expectations. And let’s face it, most of these all in one solutions, their business is in providing a great user experience to their advisors. Without that, they don’t have a business. So they can do all the features in the world. But if their users can’t figure out how to use them, or optimize them, or if they constantly have to retrain every time, they, you know, switch a vendor, that becomes a massive problem for them. So being able to control that great user experience and provide exactly what the clients expect from their advisors and what advisors expect from the firms that support them, is going to be key. So the first thing you have to do is listen to the clients. What’s important, what’s important to them, right, and having great expectations around how much they’re going to be able to afford to spend and what their retirement income is going to look like is at front and center of most people’s minds as they approach retirement. What we’ve found is that while tax optimization asset location specifically can really help ramp up how many assets you’ll have when you reach retirement, there’s a lot more to tax optimization than just asset location. And we’ve mentioned it right, but we hear this a lot. I want to do tax optimization. Well, what does that mean? It’s like saying, I gotta go get a loaf of bread.

Harry Bartle: Yeah, you know, some people think of that as tax loss harvesting. Well now you just, that’s just one little piece of it. And a lot of people think that’s all there is to tax management.

Steve Zuschin: Right.

Harry Bartle: Right.

Steve Zuschin: Right. And what about tax gain harvesting, tax bracket management?

Harry Bartle: Well, we, our firm belief is that you coordinate the accounts in the right way and set your household up the right way, you won’t have as many opportunities to tax loss harvest, which guess what, that’s a good thing.

Steve Zuschin: Exactly. And you know, another big thing that’s what’s kind of put LifeYield’s stake in the ground is how do you take a coordinated withdrawal? Very few people enter retirement with one account, you know.

Jack Sharry: So, so guys, what I’d like to do on the, because that’s at the tail end, we’re still getting our audience up to speed on some of the stuff that’s… so you guys are down the road, I’m gonna pull us back, we’ll get to that toward the end. But maybe just to set up sort of the sequence because as you mentioned, Steve, I think, Harry, you mentioned it as well. And it usually starts with asset location, getting the right stuff in the right place. Just taking, taking advantage of the fact that you’re located the tax inefficient assets in your qualified account, your tax efficient essence in your taxable account. And it’s a lot more complicated than that. But that at least gives people a sense of a starting point. And one of the things I’d like to have you both comment, and Harry, maybe if you’d start with this. One of the things that, well, let me sort of identify some of the key levers of improved outcome, which are cost, risk, and tax. If you can manage cost, if you can manage tax, you can manage risk, you can improve outcome. One of things that we’ve learned, and you guys know this well, you talk about it every day. And that is that in order to talk about improved outcome, it’s like the tree that fell in the forest. If no one was there, did anyone hear it? We learned that you have to quantify the benefits. So, Harry, if you’d just start and then, Steve, love to hear your thoughts on scoring. How that came about, how… what we’re doing about it, how we connect to other capabilities beyond what we do here at LifeYield? But how do we help develop this ability to score outcome? And demonstrate to the client that improvement?

Harry Bartle: Yeah, Steve mentioned it before, right? It’s all about an advisor needs to show his client the benefits of whatever they’re doing, and how he’s adding value outside of performance, right? Because, you know, there’s not a lot of stock picking advisors anymore. It’s all about picking strategies and picking the correct strategies that match your risk profile. But then how do you, how do you express that to the client, right? Alright, so Riskalyze, right, did a kind of an industry changing thing where they put a risk number to things, right. And now we’re seeing this trend across the industry to put numbers to show where the clients are on whatever spectrum, right. Ours is the asset location or tax spectrum, the risk spectrum, all of these different pieces, you know, overall financial wellness scoring. And it’s important, because then the customer understands it, right? Let’s take asset location, for instance. If you do asset location, and most advisors do nowadays, I would always, whenever we talk to advisors, I will ask them the question, okay, if you’re doing asset location, and you’re not quantifying it, how often does that client come in and go, “Why does this account have this performance number and this account have this performance number?” right. Because the non qualified accounts are going to have lower performance numbers because they’re mostly fixed income, and through the roaring markets of the last 15 years, the qualified accounts are gonna have much higher returns. If you’re not showing what the benefit of doing it this way, is, you’re gonna have to answer that question every single time. But when you can sit down and have a household system that says, here’s the benefit you’ve gotten by coordinating these accounts over the last five years, to employ the best after tax rate of return. That does mean this account’s gonna have a lesser return, but this account has a greater return. The tax drag that would have happened over… across these accounts is this number. Right? So it’s all about quantifying and showing that benefit, so that the client understands you as an advisor expressing your value above and beyond performance. Right, ours is the tax piece, you know, risk companies will do the risk piece, everybody will do their own, own piece of it. But it’s all about quantifying that. And, you know, I don’t remember when I… the first time I said that tree in the forest thing, but I still say it every single time, right? If a tree falls in the forest, nobody’s there to hear it, did it actually make a noise? If you’re doing asset location, and you’re not quantifying the benefit, are you actually doing asset location Because your client doesn’t think that you are, they don’t know that you are.

Jack Sharry: So Steve, if you could expand on what Harry has said, and I want to introduce a new, another idea that we hear as kind of a buzz phrase about next best action. In order to determine the next best action, you have to quantify the variables of what you might do to improve outcome. Talk a little bit about that, some of the work that we’ve done in working with other firms actually to get at this next best action we have embedded in our software. But we’re also looking at how we can incorporate risk and cost and other variables that need to be considered in improving outcome and using a scoring system to do that.

Steve Zuschin: Yeah, absolutely. So this notion of next best action is kind of like a, it’s a holy grail. You hear a lot of people talking about it. Most of the time that I’ve dug a little bit deeper, you know, when I hear about the next best action, it’s really siloed, it has to do with one specific thing. And what we’ve tried to focus on at LifeYield and working with some of our partners, and you mentioned it before, Jack, so cost, risk, and tax. Why do we keep saying that? I mean, at LifeYield we believe that cost, risk, and tax are the only three things an advisory firm can control to improve a client’s outcomes. Us being focused on tax, we have to be considerate of all of the other potential actions an advisor can recommend to their client to help improve those outcomes over time. Now, if you can’t score those actions, if you can’t put them all on one spectrum, where you can actually compare them, you know, should my client use some of their cash flow to buy a life insurance policy, or to max out their contributions to a Roth IRA? Well, how do you determine which one is the next best action, right? So they all have to be included together in the analysis so that the advisor can truly understand the pros and cons of making the choices that they’re recommending, and how that will impact the client’s retirement down the road. What we’ve been able to do is coordinate with them to actually put a score and a number to taxes just so it can be evaluated.

Jack Sharry: So I mentioned as we kick this off, that there are four times as many people retiring as there were in 2020 versus 2019, and a 350% increase in money in motion. Harry I’m gonna, and Steve, I’m gonna ask a couple part question. If you guys would take it in turn, and, Harry, start with you. We have over 90,000 advisors that use our social security tool, and we find that they report, and these are some of the biggest firms in our industry, New York Life and Merrill, and so on and so on. Often, the first question is, “What do I do about security?” as they’re considering retirement. So if you could talk about that, and then Steve, if you’d follow up, the other big question we hear is about the rollover. And if you’d talk about that, some of the work that we’re doing there, so the two key questions, but, Harry, why don’t you kick it off? Then we’ll close it out with a conversation on income sourcing, we’ll ask you guys both to chime in. So, Harry, why don’t you kick it off?

Harry Bartle: Yeah. So I usually, there’s a great Nationwide study shown at Nationwide for their, for some of their marketing materials. But they did a great study where they pulled about 10,000 to their new retirees, and they asked them, “Hey, has your financial advisor showed you a proper filing strategy to file for Social Security?” And, it was 87% said they hadn’t had a proper filing strategy. And might not… might be 86 or 88, I forget the exact number, but it’s somewhere in the high 80s. They had… their advisor hadn’t shown them a proper filing strategy yet. And then of that percentage, they said, “Will you leave your advisor if they don’t?” And only 9% said they’d stay, right. So that’s a huge percentage of the population that is basically saying, “If you don’t show me a proper filing strategy, I’m going to find somebody who can.” And you know, then it gets to, alright, so how do you figure out a proper filing strategy, there’s so many moving parts to it. So what we’ve done, and I think the reason that we’ve gotten the adoption that we do, and the usage that we do from our social security tool, is we’ve boiled it down and taken the 1%, you know, crazy corners of Social Security filing strategies out of it, right, that’s… we’re not a solution for those. But for that 99%, we’ve really boiled it down to, you know, a few basic questions. And we can compare filing immediately to the best filing strategy for this couple. Right, or for this individual. And, you know, it’s our most Apple product, right, is by far the most user friendly product, you know, out of all the users we have, the number of support calls and questions that we get is almost nothing. We also have a direct to consumer version, and we still get almost no calls with, you know, whatever 50,000 direct to consumer users using the tool. And that’s because we’ve made it so simple and easy to understand. And, you know, quite simply, we found a lot of asset managers now are able to provide value to advisors by giving them access to it, which has been a huge home run for us. Again, a lot of our security usage is through, you know, enterprise customers, insurance companies, asset managers, you know, showing how to file the proper way, and then talking about how their strategies fit on top of that, in a lot of cases. So take, for instance, the way some of our insurance partners, Allianz, uses it. They’ll talk about, alright, now you have your your filing strategy that, that you’ve decided on, you walked through with your advisor, do you need more guaranteed income above that to hit your income floor, right? And they then show how their products and we’ve built a custom version for them that shows how some of those insurance products will fit and fill that second layer of income above Social Security to get to that minimum number. And maybe there’s a third layer, right? The third layer is this is what I’d like to have, right? Social Security’s giving me 77,000, I need 100. Right, so what kind of product can fill that gap? And then what I’d love to have is 130. So maybe there’s a strategy that fits to shoot for a little bit higher and get to that 130. So our Social Security is the basic filing. And then we also layer on top some basic planning aspects to having that conversation, which usually leads an individual to a full financial plan. We’ve had great success with that and, you know, I think adoption has been through the truck… through the roofs.

Jack Sharry: Well, again, Steve, I’m gonna ask you in a minute about rollovers because we have a similar kind of approach there where people are trying to figure out, “What do I do with my rollover? “Same on on Social Security, as Harry has just highlighted, tends to be the first question advisors hear, “What do I do about it?” And then as they get into it, and it’s resolved that oftentimes it’s suggested that they wait. And depending on who’s delivering it, they can make recommendations in terms of improving the outcome further, and we support that with software and so on. But you’re kind of getting people headed in the right direction where they start to feel more comfortable that they’re… it makes sense, because we show it in dollars and cents, we highlight the financial benefit to the investor and they start making better and more informed decisions. Steve, you’ve done some work. And we’re talking with a number of, of the leading firms on this idea of the other big question being, “What do I do with a rollover?” And talk a little bit about that, because there’s a very large firm, whose name will go unmentioned, in our industry, that takes the lion’s share of the rollover business. But that firm also sees a good chunk of that… those assets going out the door because there’s not a lot of value in between. And some of the things that you’ve been working on of late might be of interest to our listeners around showing how to pull accounts together and show how to improve outcomes. So why don’t you talk a little bit about that, if you would.

Steve Zuschin: Well, first, I’ll just mentioned, to piggyback off of what Harry was saying with Social Security, is none of these individual decisions happen in a vacuum. So each one needs to be personalized for the client. Without that personalization, it usually causes unintended consequences. So if you’re maximizing Social Security to get the most amount of money from the Social Security Administration, you, you can, that might cause you to have to work longer than you originally intended. Right. So having a good understanding of the financial picture, a rollover 401k is a big part of that. So generally, or traditionally, shall I say, the rollover 401k really isn’t up for grabs until someone goes to retire. What we’re seeing more and more often is people jump careers. So throughout their career, as they get closer and closer to retirement, there are more opportunities that these rollovers are up for grabs. Now, depending on their relationship with an advisor, sometimes that is, if the relationship is really good, it’s just an ask, it’s a no brainer that it’s going to become part of the household and that advisor is going to manage those assets and coordinate them. But what we also see, and as you just mentioned, if there’s no relationship there, we really need to be able to quantify and show the client, give them a reason that the rollover should be included and coordinated with the rest of their assets. Right? If I don’t have a clear picture of all of the assets that you have, and if I don’t have the ability to advise on those assets, and apply things like asset location, or a coordinated withdrawal strategy, well, our chances of having improved outcomes throughout retirement are extremely low. So all of those things play off of each other, depending on the stage of or the life stage that the client’s in, right. But that rollover becoming part of the household gives us the ability to apply some of these improved outcome strategies that we’ve defined, whether it has to do with taxes, coordinated withdrawals, applying the perfect Social Security filing strategy for them, all of those add up to one sum.

Jack Sharry: And, as you guys both know so well, when… we found with our Social Security tool, with a 90,000 or so advisors that use it, I mean, we had no idea we’d get that kind of applause, attention, or appreciation. In fact, two of the firms mentioned earlier, 98% of their advisors use the tool and regard it as their most useful tool in working with clients because it not only addresses a big client concern, but it also sets up future business. So, Harry, I want to move on with the same concept of what Steve just described, because we’re going that way with a rollover. That’s again, an important question. I think of a rollover as a commodity. What’s the reason I would go to firm A versus firm B, I think as you can coordinate accounts that would seem to be of benefit. We’ll talk some more about that, I’m sure. But, Harry, if you would talk a little bit about what we’re working on with regard to income sourcing, because that’s, it’s complicated. It’s challenging, it’s difficult, needs to include a few things. I’m gonna… Steve, I’m gonna… whatever Harry doesn’t cover, I’m going to ask you to cover as well. So why don’t you talk about where we see things going on the income sourcing front?

Harry Bartle: Yeah, if you think about an early part of financial planning that’s done with a client, whether that’s a new customer, or someone you’ve done a plan with several times through the years is, okay, let’s talk about what you’re going to have in retirement, right, and then project out what you’re going to take and how much you’re going to be able to take from that pool of assets through this number of years, call it 20 years. Everything’s done through like capital market assumptions and its categories and it’s all kind of assumption based upon how much you have in this pot. What it’s not taking into account is can I do it tax smart, right? What tax lots amd I actually selling, which accounts am I doing it from? When am I converting to Roth, what’s my bracket management through the years? So what we’ve come up with is something that’s going to marry that planning to real life. So we’re going to take the inputs that were done in the plan, right? The income tax bracket management, the Monte Carlo simulations, we’re then going to marry that with, okay, in year one, you’re taking $50,000, here’s the tax lots we’re going to sell in the portfolio, we’re going to do your non qualified, first, we’re going to save your qualified. Year three, we’re going to do a Roth conversion, right? But we’re doing it in real life, because we’re actually showing you what tax lots to sell along the way. Right. So we’re gonna marry the two and say, okay, now we’re not just going to give you a simulated plan that doesn’t actually look at your holdings, we’re going to do the sales in a Tax-Smart way. Come back, get the assumptions again, do this analysis over 20 years, multiperiod analysis. And what we’re seeing is that it’s going to show your money lasts longer, right. Because when we can withdraw the money in a Tax-Smart way, and show the actual withdrawals versus pro rata hypothetical, we’re marrying that planning to real life and showing a real income projection over 20 years, doing actual sales in the accounts in a Tax-Smart way, coming back, so that it’s still talking to planning but we’re marrying that to the to the real life, and showing how your assets will draw out when you’re selling out of what account, because we’re the ones that are gonna be able to tell you that, that’s part of our Tax-Smart overall management that we do across the platform. And we’re going to show you exactly how that income sourcing plays out, including when you’re selling out of which accounts, when you’re doing a Roth conversion, how Social Security plays into it. And we’re going to show that over some number of years. We actually have it almost live at one firm right now. You know, there’s a lot of the work is going to be done by the firms because they’re building the front end and the interface. They actually have it in ten advisors’ hands right now, and, and the feedback has been phenomenal at this point. But really what it does is it marries planning to real life, which you know, I couldn’t be more excited about selling something once we get a little bit farther along here. We’re already working with firms on selling it, but I think it’s going to explode across the industry because it answers that question, “Okay, now I’ve done my plan. How do I know how my plan is doing?” Right. So an advisor can go back and do this through the years and say, “Okay, now I’m 10 years through retirement, what did my plan say? And what does real life say?” And it marries planning to real life and shows how that plan is actually executing out. And I think that’s the really exciting thing. And I think that’s when we’re talking about the, the lifecycle of a platform, right, proposal, planning, rebalancing. This is another aspect of that, let’s show the… we can tell you what tax lots to sell across multiple accounts and if we’re going to sell out of your qualified, your non qualified, what tax lots within it, and then how does that project out? And how does that look compared to your plan/ We’re gonna marry those worlds, which I think is really exciting.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. When we wrap up, Steve, anything to add onto what Harry was saying about income sourcing or anything other topics we covered?

Steve Zuschin: Well, I’d just say that, you know, we talked about the rollover, we talked about Social Security filing strategies, different ways you can improve outcomes. I’ll just say that it’s no secret when people aim to retire, they consolidate their accounts. That’s not necessarily the pat on the back to the advisor who wins. It’s for simplicity in their life. It’s for clarity, right? It’s to unclutter their desk. And so whoever can go out there and hang a reason out that they should be the one that those accounts get consolidated with because they’re going to be able to improve outcomes and they’re able to show that, whether it’s through scoring, or quantifying in a dollar amount, they’re going to have much better odds of winning all the accounts and increasing their wallet share and having a great businesses as their clients live through retirement. So the sequence of withdrawals and what Harry was just talking about being able to implement a financial plan, being able to, on an ongoing basis, support your clients’ spending needs, right. Not because when they were 45, they told you they wanted 100 grand a year when they retired, because they actually have spending needs this year, and we need to sell some of their assets to produce cash. And having a system that’s connected to planning, which understands the lot, this position method from the custodian that the assets are at, that understands wash sales, that understands gain harvesting if they want to make charitable donations, right. All of these little tiny things will add up to you being able to win that business, get all the asset consolidation, and keep happy clients throughout their retirement.

Harry Bartle: And quantify it as they’re going through retirement and show how they’re doing.

Steve Zuschin: Yep.

Jack Sharry: Gentlemen, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. It’s been fun. I know it’s fun for you. It’s fun for me to be… to have a front row seat on how our industry is transforming to be, be a part of it. So I want to say thanks for spending the time and sharing your your wisdom. Thanks, guys.

Steve Zuschin: Thanks, Jack.

Harry Bartle: Thanks.