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Ep 06: These truths about investment fees might surprise you


Investment fees might seem small, but they can quietly shape your long-term outcomes in big ways. In this episode, we break down the different types of fees, how they impact your retirement, and what you can do to make smarter, more cost-effective investment decisions.

Episode Transcript

Intro/Closing: 0:03
Welcome to the Real Talk Retirement Show, where we explore the financial side of retirement and beyond. Whether you’re currently retired or planning for the future, we offer real, relatable conversations about money and personal finances. Most importantly, we dive into all these topics using Real Talk. Now, let’s get real about your money and your retirement. Now, let’s get real about your money and your retirement.

Brian Graff: 0:29
Okay, we are back with another episode of the Real Talk Retirement Show. We are Brian Graff and Tracy Burke from Conrad Siegel, on an absolutely beautiful day at the end of May here in central Pennsylvania, can’t help but be in a good mood. How are we feeling today, Tracy?

Tracy Burke:
Doing great today, thanks, Brian.

Brian Graff: 0:50
Yeah, you bet. Oh, today, everybody, we have a topic that we’re going to cover that I wouldn’t call it glamorous, Tracy, you know I don’t think people are going to tune in today expecting a comedy show from you and I. You know, although that’s probably a good thing anyway, I don’t think anybody wants to hear our dad jokes, right? So maybe that’s not a bad thing. But today we’re going to be talking about something again, maybe not glamorous, but something that we feel is really, really important which is really understanding the true impact of fees and expenses when it comes to investing. So, again, really important. Glad you tuned in and we are going to kind of dive right into this discussion today. And because it is a little bit of a, you know, again not super exciting, beautiful topic, let’s start by painting a picture, telling a little bit of a story. You know, in one of our earlier episodes of the Real Talk Retirement Show, we had some listeners comment on how much they enjoyed our references to Jimmy Buffett playing tribute to the late great crooner, right.

Brian Graff: 1:50
And what we’re going to do today, then, is we’re going to start off by going back to Margaritaville on that beautiful summer morning, getting ready to set sail on this gorgeous wooden sailboat that we built right. So imagine, we built this beautiful wooden sailboat, which represents our investment portfolio, right, and that sailboat we’re on it now and we’re gliding across the ocean towards the island of our financial goals. Okay, stay with me here. Now. The wind, right, that’s behind us. We’ll call that the market growth, as we relate it back to investments. That wind, or that market growth, is propelling us forward. And the sturdy sails on our vessel, right, those are our contributions, the money we’re putting in to our retirement plans. That’s what’s really helping us gain momentum. Okay, now everything is going great. We’re traveling full speed ahead towards retirement.

Brian Graff: 2:43
And now imagine these little, small holes start appearing in the hull of our ship right, each little hole represents an expense, such as an investment fee or a management fee, and you know, individually they seem minor, like look a little hole in our ship, right, but over time, the more of those little holes that go in there, the more water that slowly starts seeping into our boat and eventually our progress is slowed down quite a bit, right, and if left unchecked, whether we’re talking about holes or expenses in our retirement portfolios, you know, those expenses can compound and they can force us to bail out more and more water over time, reducing our investment returns, right, instead of just simply focusing on moving forward.

Brian Graff: 3:26
So you know, again, instead of just smooth sailing into retirement, these expenses or these holes in our ship make it much more difficult and inhibit us from reaching our goals. Okay, now, this was just a fun little story to go back to Margaritaville, really, just to make a point, right? But, Tracy, when we think about this analogy and just expenses in general, how much of an impact do they really have on our investment portfolio?

Tracy Burke: 3:51
Well, the short answer is it can be a really huge impact. Brian right, and again, it’s not something that we put a lot of effort into or think about, or a lot of investors don’t. Here at our firm, we do spend, as the investment advisor, a lot of attention to this topic, but again, if you’re not conscious about those fees and investments expenses can really make a huge impact. So I want to start with an example. This was a study that a professor from Utah State University named Craig Israelson did a couple of months ago, and the study basically comes out with the following parameters so imagine somebody has an IRA and it’s worth a million dollars and it’s invested 60% in stocks and the other 40% in bonds and, like a lot of investments, 401ks in particular, a mix of mutual funds and ETFs. But in this case this investor worked with a financial advisor. So all in total, expenses were right around 1.5%, which somebody that works with an advisor, the statistics are that’s probably a pretty typical or average all-in expenses.

Tracy Burke: 5:00
So if those expenses were actually reduced by one-third, so instead of one and a half percent, if they were now only one percent total all-in, that would result in additional annual retirement income of $700 more every single month for the rest of that person’s life. So again, having reduced expenses will make a big difference and if you think $700 more a month, I think everybody probably agree. You know most investors would love to have that additional income. That’s almost $8,400 additional per year of additional expenses, or additional income, just to you know, in terms of reducing expenses, if you’re able to do so. So costs do matter and of course we’re going to talk about, you know, what to look for and how to try to reduce those costs as we continue, Brian. But again, so with that sort of setting the table a little bit here, let’s jump into what are some of these expenses that we often see in investment portfolios.

Brian Graff: 6:13
Yeah, absolutely, Tracy. Boy, that is, so going back to your earlier statement, just the difference between 1.5% fee and a 1% fee to have an $8,300 a year potential reduction in your income is really crazy. Most people see those numbers. I pay 1%, I pay one and a half. You would never think on the surface that it’s that impactful. Yeah, so thanks for again setting that stage for us, Tracy. So really, as we’re going through things today, we’re going to talk about three main types of expenses or fees and, for those listening, that are in workplace retirement plans. There are many similarities to these fees and we will try and point them out as we go along. But the first main fee we want to talk about is the fee that we would pay to an advisor or the fee that we’re paying for advice with our portfolio, and I think we want to start by saying that you know, the cost of good advice is certainly worth it if it’s reasonable. So I guess we’ll start by asking that question, Tracy what is reasonable?

Tracy Burke: 7:11
Yeah, and the cost of advice, especially if you’re working with an advisor, personal financial advisor typically the industry average somewhere right around 1%. Sometimes it’s a little bit higher than that, but generally one percent is that rule of thumb. But of course, like other things you pay for, it really depends on what you get right. You know, if you’re paying one percent, maybe you’re getting some great advice, maybe you’re not getting a lot of attention and maybe you know it’s not worth it. The other thing to keep in mind the cost of advice, it often depends on the dollar amount you’re investing as well. Most advisors have what they refer to as break points. So the more money, the percentage goes down. While the dollar amount would continue to go up, the percentage of assets goes down as well. So, sort of as you alluded to Brian, it can be certainly worth the cost of good advice. But I know you’ve done some research and looked at some studies of is good advice worth it?

Brian Graff: 8:16
Yeah, and those studies say that it is, Tracy. We looked at a study done by Fidelity a name that I think everybody’s familiar with and they stated at the end of that study that financial advice can add between one and a half to 4% in your returns over extended period. That’s a pretty significant gain. And to kind of back that up, we looked at a different study done by our friends at Vanguard and they stated that advisors can add up to, or even exceed, 3% in net returns. So you know again, according to some of these trusted organizations, it looks like advice certainly can be worth it if you know you pick the right advisor and the fees aren’t excessive.

Tracy Burke: 8:58
Yeah. So good advice obviously can be worth it from there. But it reminds me, you know, uh, sitting down with, with many investors over many years, I’ve heard, you know, folks that have said the phrase you know well, I don’t pay my advisor or my my advisor doesn’t charge a fee right and of course, you know, it just makes me smile sometimes, maybe not externally, but inside, and I’m always thinking, and sometimes I do say well, you know, are they a nonprofit? You know, wow that advisor is just working out of the goodness of their heart.

Brian Graff: 9:30
Right, nothing in life is free. Tracy, come on.

Tracy Burke: 9:32
Exactly, yeah, and you know we’ll get into some of the hidden costs and some of the other type of things. And really often what we’re referring to with that phrase is, you know, advisor working on commission, where where the money’s technically not coming out of your account directly but indirectly it is. But again, a good advisor is always going to fully disclose all the cost, not only just what they’re charging but whatever you’re invested in, and we’ll dig into that momentarily. And again, as Brian indicated, for those in workplace retirement plans, there’s sometimes differences from working with a personal financial advisor, but there is a cost of advice in almost every 401k or workplace retirement plan as well, because most employers hire a firm to provide advice on the plan menu. So the investments that you have to choose from, and a lot of times they package them together and give you easy options. Now, of course, the good news in 401k, that cost is not that 1% generalized cost that I said that many advisors charge, but it nonetheless and it’s typically less than that because there’s more scale to it, but there is a cost to the plan, so it’s important to think about. So the cost of advice is the first of three items that we want our listeners to be aware of today, Brian.

Brian Graff: 10:57
Excellent. So we’ll go right into the second type of fee that we want you to be aware of, and that is the fees that are charged directly from the investments themselves. So, as you probably know, every type of packaged investment we’ll call it has some sort of cost associated with it that you probably aren’t going to see on a statement. So, when you think about a packaged investment, we’re typically talking about funds, whether it’s a mutual fund or an ETF very common in your 401k plans or when you’re working with a trusted advisor. And then, within those funds, we have two separate categories. We have what we would call actively managed funds and we have passively managed funds, and they definitely have different fee structures. Tell us a little bit more about the fees associated with each of those categories, Tracy.

Tracy Burke: 11:49
Yeah. So let’s start with actively managed, and it is what it sounds like. It’s a fund manager, the company, whether it’s a Fidelity Vanguard, any of those other providers that are out there that are actively managing that fund. That means they’re actively picking stocks and trying to outperform the market. So because of that active management, they have to have more folks on their team, more researchers, more traders, most likely, and because they have more people working on that fund, that’s going to drive up the expenses right. So they have more salaries and everything else. So actively managed funds inherently have a higher expense ratio. Plus, because there’s a lot of active trading, a lot more active trading right, they’re jumping in and out. There’s going to be trading costs that are going to maybe diminish some of those returns in the fund as well. So that’s the active side.

Tracy Burke: 12:41
On the other side of the spectrum is that index or that really passive type of mentality that’s really tracking an index and the teams that are running those are certainly less in number. So the cost of an index or passive fund has a very low. What we refer to as an expense ratio and that’s the terminology that we use in the industry, that the expenses of those funds we refer to as the expense ratio. So again, that expense ratio in an index fund is very low comparatively. Plus there’s not a lot of trading costs in and out of the positions because they’re not trying to actively time individual stocks or whatever it might be.

Tracy Burke: 13:33
So what are some of those, those average, or what are the? What’s a typical expense ratio? So Morningstar, which is an organization that sort of, gathers tons of financial market data and anybody can go out to Morningstarcom and find this information. But the average actively managed fund in what we refer to as the large cap blend category, that’s similar to the S&P 500 index which a lot of folks are aware of, right? So a fund that’s trying to track against the S&P 500 index, the typical expense ratio right now is 0.8%. So sometimes we say that’s 80 basis points, where the index, the typical index fund, the average index fund, an S&P 500 index fund, so to speak, can be out there for right around four basis points, 0.04%.

Brian Graff: 14:30
Yeah, sometimes it’s good to put, like an example to that, a real numbers to it, Tracy. So you know 0.8% versus 0.04, sometimes hard to wrap your brain around that but if you think about in terms of dollars, when you think about the actively managed fund charging that, you know 80 basis points, that 0.8%, that’s essentially $8. You’re paying in fees for every $1,000 you have invested, whereas you think about that passively managed fund, like Tracy said, maybe charging 0.04%, that’s essentially 40 cents on every $1,000 that you have invested, usually an annual charge. So $8 versus 40 cents is really a huge gap and especially when you multiply that by many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Tracy Burke: 15:14
Yeah, absolutely can make a big difference. And the other thing that comes to mind when we’re comparing that 80 basis points versus the four, well, modern math tells us that’s a 76 basis point difference. Right, that’s just slightly over three quarters of 1% difference. So just to equalize that actively managed fund has to outperform the index by 76 basis points just to equalize that additional expense. So that’s often a tough bar to get over. But again, passive investing, or that index investing, that’s certainly becoming more popular over time.

Tracy Burke: 15:52
And here’s another way to think about it as coffee drinkers, a lot of people will. Sometimes they’ll make a cup of coffee at home or they’ll go out and buy a cup of coffee. So just ballparking, maybe at home, when you get all the supplies, maybe it comes down to cost you a quarter or 25 cents to make a cup of coffee at home. Or you could drive by Starbucks and go and pay 20 times that amount, you know, which would be $5 in that example, 25 cents versus five bucks. And some people will say, hey, it’s worth paying 20 times more. And a lot of, I think people, especially if you’re thinking a little bit more budget conscious will think, hey, if I can do this for, you know, one twentieth of that cost. That would make a lot of sense.

Brian Graff: 16:46
Yeah, that’s a good analogy, Tracy. It’s almost like the opposite of this get what you pay for concept, right? So when you think about hotels, right, let’s just compare a Super 8 hotel or motel, whatever it would be considered, versus the Ritz-Carlton, right? We’ll be very extreme in our examples and there’s nothing wrong with a Super 8 motel, right? I mean, you may get a very good night’s sleep there, just like you would at the Ritz-Carlton, but I think we all know you’re going to pay a heck of a lot more at the Ritz Carlton and you know, maybe or maybe not it’s worth it for you for the same amount of sleep.

Brian Graff: 17:17
So you know, with hotels, you know, you know what you’re getting when you pay a price. But with investments, usually over the long term, cheaper is better, okay. So I think that’s kind of interesting to think about that. And you know, when we go back to the whole, the fee part, what you’re paying for being invested in those funds. Those fees are often a very good predictor of fund performance. Dimensional Fund Advisors DFA did a study showing that lower expense funds so again, typically we’re talking about those passively managed index funds they perform better than higher expense funds over periods of 10, 15, and 20 years.

Tracy Burke: 17:56
And often by pretty significant margins too, which was interesting to see. So what are higher expense investments? We’re talking about that. Investments sometimes carry higher expenses and maybe lower is better, and annuities sometimes fall in that category. There are some good annuities. There are some less good annuities. The less good annuities often have 2%, 3%, 4% of annual fees.

Tracy Burke: 18:25
Some alternative investments, whether it’s hedge funds or some things that are outside of a typical stock or bond type of an investment, some things that are outside of a typical stock or bond type of an investment, reits, that’s, real estate investment trusts, especially some of the private REITs that are out there. They can get pretty expensive and, just like some mutual funds, there’s some what we refer to as high load or high expense mutual funds. So again, there’s just some examples that are out there and just being aware of it and part of it, some of these costs and we’ll talk about this, I think, in a little bit can be hidden. So just being aware of what those expenses are pretty important. So that’s the second item that we wanted to cover, Brian. Let’s move on to the third one. What’s that look like?

Brian Graff: 19:08
Yeah. So the third type of expense we want to talk about is the fee that we all pay to our custodian right, and a custodian is basically that platform where someone holds our money, for example, like a Charles Schwab, a Fidelity. You know those custodians that are holding our money the bank, if you will they’re making money as well. Paying them include, you know, transaction fees, maybe commissions, markups, spreads, sales loads, purchase and redemption fees and just overall regular trading fees. And you know if you and you and your advisor, if you’re working with advisor or if you’re trading frequently, that often leads to hired fees, right, more more trading costs. You know custodians make more money with more trading. So they like that you’re going in there and moving your money around and you know, to us it’s kind of a bit like gambling at a casino.

Brian Graff: 19:59
The house is going to get paid, no matter what. In this case the house is the custodian. So, going back to our mention of workplace retirement plans your typical 401k, 403b plans similarly there’s going to be a custodian associated with that plan. So a custodial fee will apply. But there’s also, on top of that, something that we call a record keeping fee which is paid to the firm that is administering your workplace retirement plan. You know they send statements, they track your activity, contributions, distributions. Typically they have a website that they’re maintaining on your behalf. So, in addition to custodial fees, those of you in your 401k are also probably paying record-keeping fees as well.

Tracy Burke: 20:40
Yeah, and if I can say, Brian, you know, unfortunately not all of these fees are transparent. Right, some are visible but many are hidden. And you know, the financial services industry is definitely, you know, definitely known for those hidden fees. And if we think, looking on a statement, you’re rarely, if ever, going to see an investment expense Whether it’s that expense ratio that we just talked about it’s usually never going to be listed on a statement. So sometimes you have to dig a little bit deeper, look some other places. So sometimes you have to dig a little bit deeper, look some other places. Advisor and transaction fees often will be sitting there on statements but it’s really tucked away in a fine print and sometimes you have to look really hard to find where that is. As we think, through investors working with all the variety of advisors out there, I guess you know the question is how many advisors are probably out there transparently showing fees?

Brain Graff: 21:42
I’m going to say probably very few, Tracy, unfortunately. I will say, though, that Conrad Siegel, the company Tracy and I are with, we are a fiduciary, and it is our job to, it is our role, to make sure we’re always fully disclosing all those fees to you. We think that is truly important, that transparency, and we even have a page dedicated in reports to our clients. So, hopefully, if you’re working with a different advisor, you’re getting that same level of service and fee exposure as well. And again, when it comes to your 401k plans, it’s something I know with our clients we disclose on our statements, and that is probably more of an actual requirement, though those are policed, maybe a little bit more than what you’re going to experience through an individual advisor.

Brain Graff: 22:24
But look for fees on your statements, read your annual disclosures just to make sure you know, as we keep saying, you know exactly what you’re paying for disclosures, just to make sure you know, as we keep saying, you know exactly what you’re paying for, you know what you’re getting and what the costs are for those services. And if you’re not sure, call your provider directly and ask them hey, what am I paying, what are the different services, what are the charges, and then you can really evaluate if you’re paying too much, just the right amount, or maybe even you feel like you’re getting away and you got a a really good experience going on a little cheaper on the cheaper side. So uncovering expenses, Tracy, you know how do you really know what they are?

Tracy Burke: 23:01
Yeah, and just very quickly going through each of those three type expense we talked about, starting with the cost of advice. Right, if you’re working with a personal financial advisor, that should be disclosed has to be disclosed on an advisory agreement that you have with them so you can take a look there. And if you’re not sure, just ask. And you should be fully aware what are the fees you’re paying for the cost of advice. And, as you indicated, Brian, here at Conrad Siegel we include a page in our reports with clients and same story on the employer retirement plan side For the plans that we administer on that side. We fully disclose those, as should be.

Tracy Burke: 23:44
On the investment side again, this is where I alluded to. Those are pretty hidden. So the investment expenses are pretty hidden. We’ve all gotten likely in the mail, and maybe now more so via email. But what’s called a prospectus, right, every investment like a fund, a mutual fund or ETF, they send it out on an annual basis. Now, you know it’s nobody’s probably sat there and read a prospectus cover to cover. Or do you do that on Friday nights, Brian?

Brian Graff: 24:11
Is that your activity or I was just going to say, Tracy, I never have read one from cover to cover. I think there was one time I was struggling to get to sleep and having a little sleeping issues. I opened up a prospectus and I was gone by page two. So yeah, that’s something we recommend everybody does.

Tracy Burke: 24:25
Yeah, and of course, everybody has better things to do than read their prospectus. But I referenced this a little while ago, morningstarcom, a website you can type in the ticker. So the ticker, that’s the typically three, four, five character symbol for each investment that’s out there and you can see what the expenses are there. Also, if you’re working with an advisor, ask what the expenses of the investments are that you’re in and, again, like we said, that’s something we regularly do for our clients. And then the third area, that custodial or the transaction costs that could be out there. If you get trade confirmations or, obviously, the statement, those costs in terms of many of those should be on there if there is a true trading cost. But there are many that are hidden as well and, Brian, you referenced a couple, like they refer to costs that the custodian often gets spreads, markups, commissions, some of those type of things. They’re hidden. So, again, ask for full disclosure to whoever you’re working with. What are your all-in expenses? That’s super important.

Brain Graff: 25:37
Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about industry standards of fees. So for a person working directly with an advisor maybe they have an IRA or other type of investment portfolio with their advisor the total all-in cost average is roughly about 1.8% on a million-dollar portfolio and usually less for higher amounts. You’re going to get some discount there and when you break down that 1.8%, typically it’s about 1% that you’d be paying to directly to the advisor and about another 0.8 for those fund expenses that we talked about. And I think the most important thing when you’re working with an advisor is to make sure you’re getting good value and they’re doing good work for you and they’re really helping you minimize the fund expenses as much as they possibly can.

Tracy Burke: 25:27
Yeah. So, Brian, the bottom line is costs matter, right? We’ve just spent a little time talking and breaking it down. So as we sort of finish up here, I want to finish with another example to sort of put this in real action. So let’s imagine you have $100,000 invested right now and say for the next 30 years you don’t touch it. And I realize that might not be super realistic because you might be taking money out or you’re putting money in. But let’s just say, for this example, $100,000 for the next 30 years, no money in, no money out, and you get an 8% gross rate of return Before expenses. You’re getting 8% return a year and then that compounds as time goes on. So if your plan, if you’re all in expenses, are 1%, so instead that 8% annual gross return, the net return, meaning net after fees, is now seven percent, at the end of 30 years you’re going to end with seven hundred and sixty thousand dollars. You start with one hundred thousand. After 30 years of one percent expenses, you’re going to end with seven hundred sixty thousand dollars. So not bad right If those expenses are now two percent, which is a little bit above the average that you just mentioned, which is about 1.8%, but say you have 2% of expenses.

Tracy Burke: 27:47
Now, all of a sudden you’re going to take a 25% haircut from that $760,000 figure. With 1% expenses Now, you’re only going to have $570,000 after that 30-year period of time. So a 25% reduction. Now there are people that have 3% of annual expenses and a lot of those people have no idea that they have that. That’s another 25% reduction from the 2% target that I just referenced there as well. So if you have 3% expenses now, you’re going to end up with $430,000 instead of $760,000 if you have 1% of expenses. So I know I threw a lot of numbers out there, but the bottom line is the higher those expenses, it makes a big difference.

Brian Graff: 28:39
So, again, costs matter. It’s crazy, Tracy, yeah, you think about that the that a hundred thousand dollar initial investment, the person who paid 3%, probably unknowingly ending up with 430,000, may think that their advisor did an okay job for them, not realizing they maybe gave away over $300,000 of a portfolio growth. So it’s, it’s. It’s crazy, and it’s so important to be well-informed upfront when you start your advisory relationship. For sure.

Brian Graff: 29:05
Well, Tracy, as we always do, we’ve been talking a lot. Let’s wrap things up. Let’s condense this and talk about what we think are the most important action items for our listeners today, and these are going to be pretty simple. I think they’re probably pretty obvious. But number one action item is know what you are paying for. I’m sorry, fee transparency is extremely important. Be informed, know what you’re paying and if you’re not sure, like we said a few times already, ask your advisor. Ask your advisor questions like what are the fees specifically that I’m paying related to my accounts? How do you, mr Advisor, miss Advisor, how do you get paid? Right, so what are all those fees that I’m paying related to my accounts? How do you, mr Advisor, miss Advisor, how do you get paid? So what are all those fees that I’m paying? So that’s action item number one know the cost of your investments.

Tracy Burke: 29:49
Yeah, and then I would say the second action item is to build on top of that and focus on minimizing those costs, now that hopefully you have a better understanding of what those costs are and maybe they are very reasonable. But, as we said earlier, make sure the cost of the advice is worth it, the advisor cost. Try to invest in lower cost investments because, again, lower cost typically does better than over the longer time. And again ask the advisor questions hey, is there anything I can do to reduce some of the fees that I have after you know what those fees are? Or how do the fees that I’m in you know what I’m invested? How do they compare to something else? What are other alternatives? So, as we think through that fee component, you know that becomes the bottom line and it’s important to invest wisely by minimizing investments expenses.

Brian Graff: 30:43
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay, Trace. Well, listen. By the way, it’s good to have you back. We gave Tracy episode number five off. We invited our colleague Dave Lytle in to talk about the market. I think Tracy was probably renegotiating his podcast contract, but I’m not going to say that’s for sure, Tracy. Any comments on that? No comment, okay, anyway, I’m really happy that you’re back with us and I want to just wrap things up by reminding our listeners to please reach out to us with any questions that you may have about today’s podcast or anything investment related in general. You can reach us at podcast at conradsegal.com, and we are here and happy to help. And please, as always, if you liked what you heard today, if you’re enjoying the content, share it with your friends, family members, give us a five-star review if you’re so inclined and, most importantly, remember to subscribe if you haven’t already. Until next time, everybody, stay safe and stay invested.

Intro/Closing: 36:35
Thank you for tuning into today’s show. The Real Talk Retirement Show is created and produced by Conrad Siegel, an advisory firm that specializes in helping people prepare for retirement and beyond. If you want to learn more about our work or meet the team, you can visit conradsegel.com. Information on this show is for educational purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment tax or legal advice. Before making decisions, you should consult with the appropriate professionals for advice that is specific to your situation.