Ross Anderson
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 7 Jul
Ross Anderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And they'll have to show that to you on how the contract will hold up or if it ends up crashing and burning, which I think will help you make a good decision on whether to keep it.
So if it runs out of money or it requires you to put in a whole bunch of money later in life to keep it alive, I would say that probably doesn't make sense for you, right? We don't want to be in a spot where we're trying to pay for retirement and now we've got this life insurance contract that's on life support and now you're having to make payments to the insurance company.
which is just going to add to your spending burden in retirement. We'd much rather be spending money on fun things and exciting things that you're doing overseas rather than having to buy insurance that you didn't really need at that point.
Yeah, so it's really because of the mechanism that we're talking about. The reason that it's tax-free is that you're borrowing against your own asset, right? All borrowing is tax-free. If you go and you buy a home and you get a mortgage and they send you a big check, basically, or they really send it to whoever you're buying the home from.
But when you borrow money, they don't tax you on that borrowed money. So the same way that you could borrow against an investment portfolio if you were doing a portfolio-supported loan, that's tax-free too. And so I think that these get sold on the... dream of this is tax-free. And there's other ways to achieve kind of similar things.
A Roth IRA, if you wait until you're 59 and a half, is going to be tax-free growth, tax-free withdrawals. And so you've got other access points to things that are tax-free. But because these things can get complicated, they're difficult to understand.
I would only reach for a permanent life insurance contract in really, really specific situations where we do have a lot of legacy goals and we want to really overfund this thing. So to me, I'm not hearing alignment in the tool versus what you're trying to do with it.
Yeah.
Yeah, so just as we've been talking about here today, I think the first question is how secure of a position are you in? Ellen has done a great job of creating really a battleship full of cash that she can go to war with if she needs to. And so even if there is job uncertainty or an interruption there, I think she's put herself in an incredibly strong place. Not everybody's in that position.
So if you are concerned about the economy affecting your job and you're not in a place where you could live more than weeks or a couple months without an infusion of cash from somewhere, to me, that represents a risk. And so even though I want to treat economic uncertainty as a spot to go harder at my investments, I want to add cash.
I want to be a harder saver when things look like they're opportunistic. I would caution anybody to do that and certainly don't put yourself at a higher level of risk if that's the position that you're in. So having enough money to live on is always job number one.
To me, the big question is going to be timing and taxes. So number one on the timing, and again, we talked about this just a bit, which is when do I have easy access to my accounts? If you retire after the age of 55, you can typically touch your 401k accounts that were with an employer. After 59 and a half, you generally have easy access to all of your IRA accounts or Roth IRA accounts.
But if we're thinking about anything before that, or we're thinking about needing to buy a home, then we got to go, well, where's that money going to come from? Is it going to come from me selling my current residence and taking that equity out and then using it to rebuy something? Or do I really need to save specifically for that goal?
So I really think of that as the kind of timing and where the money is going to need to come from. We need to kind of map that out. The second big piece is always going to be taxes. You do need to understand how international taxes work. And that is a highly, highly specialized area of expertise where... Every single country might be different.
And so knowing how the taxes are going to interact, I would find a blog that is dedicated to exactly the country you're thinking about and find an expat community in that country. Because I think that's going to be your best resource for either finding a really good CPA to work with or hearing the experiences of other people that have moved to the exact place that you've gone.
so to me that's going to be the the trick is how do the taxes work for an expat that is living abroad in that specific country because it's not the same everywhere that you go most cases you're going to get a situation where you are paying some international taxes and then you still have to file in the us as well and again that's going to be a specialized knowledge base where
Nobody knows all of that stuff for every country. So having a really strong advisory team, I think, is critical to making sure you get that tax filing right and not getting yourself into hot water when you do it.
So I'm going to give you an annoying answer first, which is that if your time horizon is long enough, it's always a good time to buy stocks. I know that's annoying to hear. That's something that advisors generally believe. But if we think that the market's going to go up, and it tends to, if we look at the last about 45 years, it goes up 74% of the time.
three out of four years, essentially, the market goes up. And so by being a long-term investor, we're putting those odds on our side. And that tends to be my position at any given time.
If you're within three to five years of spending the money, that's when I think it's not a good time to be buying stocks because that's when you're needing to create some safety and have that capital ready to be accessed, right? So if we're getting close to needing the money, that's when stocks stop being a good idea.
Showing 41–60 of 73 · page 3 of 4
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