Episode 18: Cracking the Code: A Retirement Roadmap for Educators and Academics
What happens when the most educated people in the room have no idea what's in their own retirement accounts?
Retirement planning for educators looks nothing like it does for everyone else. Between layered 403(b) contracts, fixed annuities with strict liquidity rules, and pensions that interact with Social Security in unexpected ways, the complexity is real… and largely underserved.
Kevin Roche, Certified Financial Planner and founder of Authenticity Financial, worked inside TIAA before going independent. He now specializes in helping educators untangle their retirement accounts, understand what they actually own, and build a tax-efficient strategy for the long term.
Listen in as Kevin breaks down how TIAA Traditional's liquidity restrictions work, why the timing of your pension and Social Security elections changes your tax picture for life, and how to turn the gap between retirement and age 70 into a powerful planning opportunity.
What You’ll Learn:
Why 403(b) plans are far more complex than a standard 401(k).
How TIAA Traditional's six versions differ and why liquidity rules matter.
What the 5-, 8-, and 10-year payout schedules mean for your flexibility.
How pensions and Social Security timing change your tax picture for life.
What the "low tax corridor" is and how to use it strategically.
Why 457 plans are an underutilized tool for higher-earning educators.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“Going to a financial planner is like going to a doctor. If you wait until there's a crisis, you're probably going to get bad news. You’ve got to go when you think you don't need it, and that's when you're going to make sure you probably are in good shape.” - Kevin Roche
“It's almost like when you first sit down to create a puzzle. You’ve got to dump all the pieces out, and then you lay them all out… look for the corners and the edges, and you start putting them together.” - Kevin Roche
“It's not just about managing income, it's about managing taxes as well. It's about managing investments.” - Kevin Roche
Resources:
Kevin Roche: LinkedIn | Farther Financial | Email
About Our Guest:
Kevin Roche, CFP® is the founder of Authenticity Financial, with nearly 20 years of experience helping over 1,000 clients deal with complex retirement strategies. He has worked in both analytical and client-facing roles, including time inside TIAA, giving him a deep understanding of educator retirement plans and the ability to explain them in plain language. Kevin specializes in holistic financial planning that covers investments, tax strategy, estate planning, and income planning, with a focus on bringing clarity and confidence to every stage of the retirement journey.
Connect with Us:
If you're ready to stop avoiding your finances and start building the future you deserve, schedule a free call with me at pelicanfinancialplanning.com and let’s create your personalized financial plan together.
And if you want ongoing guidance, clarity, and confidence as you grow your wealth, subscribe to our newsletter for financial insights delivered right to your inbox.
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Read the Transcript:
Kevin Roche: Going to a financial planner is like going to a doctor. If you wait until there's a crisis, you're probably gonna get bad news. You gotta go when you think you don't need it, and that's when you're gonna make sure you probably are in good shape.
Welcome to The Wealth Development Studio. I'm your host, Genevieve George, Senior Financial Advisor and Founder of Pelican Financial Planning & Wealth. Our goal for this episode is to provide clarity about today's financial topic, inspire you to be brave with your questions, and gain confidence in your financial future. So take a deep breath, grab your favorite cup of coffee, and step into the studio. Your dose of financial empowerment begins now.
Genevieve George: If you have ever stared at a TIAA or other educator retirement statement and wondered whether your money was actually yours, whether you can move it, you're not alone. Educators and academics are some of the most underserved people in financial planning, partly because their retirement world looks different from everyone else's.
Between 403(b), 401(a) plans, defined benefit pensions, sometimes 457s, and the TIAA traditional, which has its own unique liquidity rules and everything that goes into it, there's a lot to untangle. So today we're getting into all of it. My guest has spent years advising inside institutions and then worked inside TIAA before going independent.
Now he runs a specialized practice with a focus on this population of individuals. Please welcome Kevin Roche. I'm so excited to have you here. How are you today?
Kevin Roche: Hi. Thank you. I'm doing well. How about yourself?
Genevieve George: I'm doing great. So I'm just so thrilled to have you. I think this is such an area, I've worked on it in the past and not to your level of niche area of your practice, but it is so different.
You sit down with somebody in the education system and their statements look different, their options are different. Maybe just kind of talk to us about where you saw a need and how you ended up developing this specialization around that need.
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great place to start off.
So I was always very surprised by just the level of complexity that goes into some of these retirement plans. Many 403(b)s have multiple versions of what are called contracts. So these are sub-accounts. And you could have somebody who's been at the same institution their entire career and have four or five different versions of the same 403(b) with different investments and different rules and different nuances.
And that level of complexity to many folks is overwhelming. All of my clients are more educated than me because they're all PhDs. None of them feel confident in the understanding of their 403(b) accounts. Fixed annuity which is referred to as a pension often component, and also just the different layers of contracts within their 403(b)s.
So helping to, I think, simplify that is really kind of the core of what I do.
Genevieve George: And it does take a lot of effort there too because while one 401(k) between two different companies is slightly different, the nature of how it works is very much similar from one company to another. But you're saying with these different layers and different contracts within the institution, it can be very confusing.
Kevin Roche: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I often give the analogy of one of those Russian nesting dolls where you've got one doll inside of another doll inside of another. And the first doll, the outside wrapper, is the IRS rules, right? The rules around how 403(b)s can be constructed.
Then the next wrapper is the custodian, whether it's TIAA, or Fidelity, or Vanguard. And then the next one is the institution itself, right? University of San Francisco versus University of Stanford have completely different retirement options and rules because they're negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
And then at the core of this is the individual. And you could have two professors at the same institution who have wildly different portfolios when they happen to join the institution and which contracts they have as a result of that. So it's layers and layers of the complexity on top of each other that creates these kind of unique challenges for folks.
What I'm about to say, it almost sounds cliché, but I very much believe in education. And by that, I mean educating my clients. So the first thing that I do with folks before I even ask them whether they want to become a client is to help them understand what they have. Now, that's really key.
And so usually most of our conversations start with a review of their accounts and their statements and walking through these in often case very dense stacks of papers where they may think they have one account, in reality they've got four. And we'll break it down and we'll look at these and I'll explain what do these distinctions mean.
What makes the TIAA traditional group retirement annuity different from the TIAA traditional group supplemental plan annuity, right? How do those products have distinct nuances that make them different? And really the goal here is for the client to feel empowered enough that they can then make a decision about what to do with these investments because it's almost like when you first sit down to create a puzzle, you gotta dump all the pieces out, and then you lay them all out and you figure out how all the pieces kind of, look for the corners and the edges, and you start putting them together.
And so that key first step is to look at all the pieces and figure out where do we wanna focus. And I think education is critical to that. It's helping these folks understand the basics, and then we get into the more complex planning from there. But it all starts with the basics.
Genevieve George: And when you say basics you're breaking it down truly to this is how it works, this is how contributions are being made, whether they're mine or from my employer, and whether they can be rolled over or have to stay where they are. Like, really the first step basics is what you're talking about?
Kevin Roche: Absolutely. Yeah. So let's get into some of those distinctions. So you've got the employer versus employee contributions, and typically those are gonna go into two separate accounts. So you'll have the defined contribution plan and got the voluntary contribution plan. Between those different accounts, in many cases they have different investment options.
Really, the kind of the big one the most common question I get has to do with the fixed annuity option, which at TIAA is called TIAA Traditional. And where a lot of folks get confused is there's actually six different variations of TIAA Traditional. Now, three of those are fully liquid, meaning that you can move it into different investments, you can roll it out, you can do whatever you want with it.
Genevieve George: They act a little bit more like a traditional investment strategy.
Kevin Roche: Exactly. And I would analogize it to almost like a stable value fund or a money market fund, where it's getting a fixed rate of return. That rate of return, even though it's fixed for the amount that you put in at that period of time, that rate of return can vary for new contributions, so that adjusts kind of what your average rate of return is.
But the liquid ones I think are typically that's gonna be for the voluntary contributions. Those are the ones that you can do something with easily, right? The other ones, the non-liquid ones, those are ones where there is a pretty defined set of rules as to how you can access this money. And I don't mean it just as in withdrawing, but if you wanna reallocate it somewhere else, if you want to invest in something different, it isn't as simple as just saying, "Sell this down by 10% and add it somewhere else."
You have to go through kind of a process, and it typically involves kind of thinking years down the road in order to free up that capital. So step number one is helping folks understand how much do you have in these different contracts, and it's not uncommon for people to have three to four of these types of contracts.
Genevieve George: And they maybe don't know that, right? Like they just—
Kevin Roche: Right
Genevieve George: —set it up and that's just where their deferrals were going and…
Kevin Roche: That’s exactly it.
Genevieve George: Until they sit down with Kevin, they're not sure what's going on.
Kevin Roche: You think about it this way, if you weren't a financial professional and you're focusing on whatever your expertise is, you meet with your HR person once a year and they say, "Put as much as you can in your retirement plan," you do that.
You're doing the right thing. And they say, "Well, set it to your risk tolerance." You do that as well. You don't necessarily think about the nuances of, well, how much of this is going into each sub-investment. And so that has an impact. But then what you also generally aren't aware of is that periodically the school and the custodian are gonna renegotiate these contracts.
And so when that happens, it in some cases replaces the old investments, in other cases creates a new contract. So you may have been contributing to the old one for years and years, and you may even have a good understanding of what you're contributing to, but then a new one comes in, and you may not even realize it.
Now your contributions get rerouted to that, and it's put into a new contract, which has a new set of rules.
So I met with somebody just yesterday who had been with her institution for 30 years, and she had four different types of contracts. And I explained to her one of them has a five-year liquidity schedule, another has an eight-year liquidity schedule, another has a 10-year liquidity schedule, and one of them's fully liquid.
So based upon that, we have to have four different strategies for what we're going to do with this one investment.
Genevieve George: And using that as an example with these different liquidity structures, that plays into her longer term financial planning, right?
Kevin Roche: Absolutely.
Genevieve George: Yeah. And it might guide where you tell her to put her new contributions if she has control over that, right?
Kevin Roche: That's precisely right. So, it all kind of starts with kind of getting that lay of the land, understanding where you're at before you can figure out where do we need to go going forward.
Genevieve George: Right. I love that. Now, when we talk about educators, we're often talking about like this 403(b) plan, which is something that they can contribute to and all that, but then sometimes they also have a pension.
So, maybe talk to me about how you analyze that and help people understand that from a cash flow standpoint, as you're doing longer term planning. This person you said from yesterday, 30 years with the same institution, so she may have a little bit left before she retires, but a pension would change what those numbers are, right?
Kevin Roche: Well, yeah, absolutely. So a pension is pretty uncommon in private sector jobs these days.
Genevieve George: Right.
Kevin Roche: My grandparents have one. I don't have one. You probably don't.
Genevieve George: Me neither.
Kevin Roche: But you still see it in public sector jobs or public institutions. So you think like the government pensions, or in this case, public schools.
So when I think of a pension, I think of it as, again, it depends on the rules, but in most cases it's like a supplement to Social Security. So when we think about Social Security, we know we're gonna get this paycheck every month for the remainder of our lifetime, and it depends upon how much we've paid into it and when we access it, right?
Those are the two big variables. And it's the same sort of concept of a pension. Depending upon how much you've paid into it and when you decide to start drawing from it, that'll impact how much you're gonna get. In most cases, most pensions have some sort of cost-of-living adjustment. Not all of them, but often.
When I think about it in financial planning, this gives us another income stream that both provides for expenses, which is great, but also creates income taxes.
So if I'm speaking with a client who's looking at retiring, let's say they're 65, I'll explain to them, Social Security becomes your full retirement age, basically becomes fully vested, as I like to call it at 67, and then you can wait until 70 to get the maximum Social Security payout.
That deferral period between 67 and 70, let's say you retire during that point in time, what do you do for income? Well, you could tap Social Security, you could tap your pension, but the problem is you're gonna get a smaller number, and it's irreversible, but also now you have income taxes coming from this income source that you can't change.
And so your taxes are gonna be set at this level and increase over time for the rest of your life. Whereas if you defer those, and say you've got a 403(b) pot that you can draw from in the interim, you can control what your taxes look like for that period between when you retire and when you hit age 70.
So that low tax corridor, as I like to call it, that period between retirement and hitting maximum threshold for Social Security, that's when you can start to do some creative things like Roth conversions, for instance. Or drawing down your qualified, your 403(b), even though you may not necessarily need it because you're trying to reduce what your required minimum distributions are about.
So all of this, the timing of when we start our pension, correlates to when we want to set our taxes at this higher level. And if we have other income sources we can draw from in the interim, that gives us flexibility to really try to be strategic about our taxes longer term.
Genevieve George: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really utilizing that… What did you call it? The window? What did you call that window?
Kevin Roche: The low tax corridor.
Genevieve George: Low tax corridor. I like that.
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Yeah.
Genevieve George: That is great. And I have worked with some teachers in the past where they were a part of a pension program with their school system that disqualified them from Social Security.
And so how common is that with the group that you're looking at and working with? Do you see that as sometimes it's both, you have Social Security and this pension? But in other times, rely solely on that pension. You're disqualified from Social Security.
Kevin Roche: So what you're referring to is either the Windfall Elimination Provision or if you're a government employee, the GPO, the Government Pension Offset. If you were subject to the Windfall or the WEP the WEP as we refer to it, that’s no longer something that's going to truncate your Social Security. It used to be if you had this pension that you were receiving from a public institution, that institution typically didn't pay into Social Security, and so it was seen as double-dipping to be able to get both.
But I believe as part of the budget bill that was passed last year, that was removed. So for folks going forward, they can take that, that both incomes and not have to worry about it.
Genevieve George: But if they haven't been paying into it, if they're not on record as paying into Social Security because of the way it was set up previously, they have to make up those credits, right?
Kevin Roche: They do. So they're gonna get a reduced amount, but in the case with the Windfall Elimination Provision, you could have paid into it, you could have had the full benefit, and then you still would get a truncated Social Security amount because of that rule, that offset.
So now imagine you work for 10 years in the private sector and then you go to work for a school and you get that pension. In the old rule, those 10 years, even though you were qualified for Social Security, it, would be reduced because of the offset. Now you would get to have both.
Genevieve George: You get to have both, but you have to have paid in for your credits.
Kevin Roche: Correct, yes. You gotta pay in. Okay. That's always the catch.
Genevieve George: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And let's circle back to that TIAA Traditional for a minute there. I feel like that's one that comes up, like, where I've seen it in the past in people's statements and it really does it becomes confusing.
And you touched on it already with the different liquidity periods, but can you just break down a little bit more on, w- can you do in-service rollovers or it's fully you have to wait to a certain date?
Kevin Roche: Yeah, so unfortunately, it's pretty rigid in the rules. In most cases, and the reason I always kind of hedge it is because there's always some exception to the rule, institutions can negotiate this with TIAA.
So 9 out of 10 won't do this, but there's always that one that does. In most cases, you're gonna have to wait until 59 and a half before you can do any sort of, in-service rollovers. After that, depending upon what the contract type is what's going to dictate the rules. So I mentioned there's six of them.
And three are liquid, three are not. Of the three that are liquid, those are pretty straightforward. Those you can move it to another investment. You could roll it out into an IRA. You could access it and draw on it, take money out, do an in-service distribution if you wanted to. For the three that are not liquid, those you can't, at least for the majority of the assets.
You can typically take out a... On the most liquid of the non-liquid, that's the five-year schedule, you can take out one-fifth per year, so 20%. And you have to set up what they call a transfer payout annuity. So it's a recurring payment every year.
And once you elect to do this, by the way, it's irreversible.
So it's a permanent decision. So, an example being…
Genevieve George: Make sure you're putting a lot of thought and understanding all the pros and cons before you trigger that…
Kevin Roche: Oh, absolutely ...
Genevieve George: …irreversible five-year payout.
Kevin Roche: Right. Right. And the five year's the shortest. The 10 year's the longest. So it goes five year, eight year, 10 year.
Imagine that you're looking at retirement, you're several years down the road. You've got, say, the 10-year restricted annuity, and it's called a retirement annuity, by the way. It has a little code that says RA. And you want to access this money. Let's say you've got a third of your net worth in this.
Well, your options are going to be either you wait until retirement, and then you can decide at retirement date or later whether you want to annuitize it. And you can either do a lifetime annuity, you can do a fixed payout annuity of 10 years or greater. You can do a joint lifetime for your spouse as well.
You can leave it until required minimum distributions become an issue, and then you can take the required minimum out. They'll allow you to do that. You can do what's called an interest only, where you scrape the interest off the top, and typically the interest on this is gonna be somewhere between about 3% to 5%, depending upon what prevailing rates are.
Or you can do the transfer payout option, and that transfer payout, in some cases you have to wait until retirement. In some cases, you can do it pre-retirement if you're over 59 and a half. It depends on the institution. Most are gonna make you wait until retirement. But then what you'd elect to do is you're going to say every year for the next 10 years, give me one tenth of this until I've completely exhausted it.
And in a lot of cases, folks aren't just taking this as a straight payout. They're taking this as a rollover into an IRA. So imagine you had a third of your wealth in this. That means there's a third of your portfolio that you can't really draw—
Genevieve George: Touch. Yeah.
Kevin Roche: Right. Let's say interest rates go up and you're stuck at 3%.
That's not great, right? I saw this happen in 2022 when rates went up, and folks were stuck at 3%, 3.5% when they could be getting 5%, 5.5%, but they're stuck in this investment. Let's say you wanna be more aggressive with your portfolio, where the market last year is up almost 18%.
Genevieve George: And you're stuck at 3%, 3.5%.
Kevin Roche: And you're stuck at 3% and 3.5%, right. There's nothing you can do. Right. And so this is a common problem I see folks run into where they aren't aware of the restrictions of this investment. In many cases, they're not even aware that they're investing in this.
They're going with the risk tolerance allocation, which then has a portion being allocated to this fixed investment as part of their QDIA, the qualified default investment allocation.
And then it isn't until they're on the verge of retirement that they realize that a third of their portfolio is basically unavailable to them unless they wanna take it out in these little tiny incremental amounts.
Genevieve George: Right. Wow. Yeah, so it's really important to understand what you have and how it works, right? And with everything that we do, but very specifically to these educators because there are some components that are, I don't wanna call them permanent, but semi-permanent.
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Yeah. I'd say restrictive, right?
Genevieve George: Yeah.
Kevin Roche: There are some people that love the annuity component. There are some people that say, "Hey, this is great. I can never outlive my money because I'm gonna be getting X amount every year for the rest of my life." And for them, it's a good option. The problem is that many people don't understand what they're in.
And so it's almost as if you're taking medicine or vitamins or some sort of prescription without realizing what are the side effects.
Genevieve George: Right.
Kevin Roche: What are the pros and cons?
Genevieve George: And it sounds like that annuity option was put in place for a reason, right? There are people that are really gonna benefit from that.
Kevin Roche: Absolutely.
Genevieve George: Having that guaranteed annuity income once they're in retirement. So there was a purpose. I don't wanna make it sound like it's all bad, but it's a matter of balancing that with what your goals are. Because if there are things in retirement where you need liquidity, you not have it all locked up in illiquidity, right?
Kevin Roche: That's exactly right. Yeah. For folks that have or are comfortable living in a fixed budget, it's great. For folks that have variances in expenses, it can be really challenging.
Genevieve George: Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you breaking that down, and I feel like that's really important for people to understand.
I'm curious if you see 457 plans. Is that something that you see as an option that sometimes people miss?
Kevin Roche: Occasionally. I think I see it more often with folks that are in the administration. So not so much the professors, but the deans. They tend to have the 457 option.
Genevieve George: The higher earners within the institution.
Kevin Roche: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I even remember there was one institution in particular that elected not to do it, even though the folks were asking for it, because they felt it created an inequality amongst the staff. So they're not as common. 403(b) is pretty ubiquitous. 457 is more kind of, eh, it's a case-by-case.
Genevieve George: Okay. And when you see it as an option, that dean as your teacher or as your client, are you encouraging them to participate in that?
Kevin Roche: Yeah, absolutely.
Genevieve George: I'm just… it’s case by case, of course.
Kevin Roche: It's case by case, but I think that in, I'm a big advocate of thinking... the phrase I like to use is when we're thinking about our income and our financial planning, our taxes, we want to think about playing chess, not checkers.
And so thinking through, well, how are things going to benefit you down the road? And in a lot of cases, if you're a high earner, in theory, you're earning more now while you're still working than you will be when you retire. So let's take advantage of some of that tax deferral, right? Let's take advantage of trying to push down what our taxes look like when we're in our highest earning years, and then when we get into those lower tax years, that low tax corridor, the years between when you retire and when you hit maximum social security age, let's then start drawing money out of our qualified funds at a lower tax rate.
Versus if I were to take it all and put it in after-tax money now, I'm not getting that tax benefit, and I'm probably paying a higher tax rate than I would be later in life.
Genevieve George: Well, and I would think that you're probably very often having to look at, we're talking about the educator and their plans, but well, I'm assuming from talking to you that you're talking to maybe both spouses if the person happens to be married. And that 457 plan and extra added deferral option is not something everybody has.
And so if the spouse happens to be a high earner, there is an option to say, "Okay, educator spouse, please go contribute to this, and we'll just use the spouse's additional earnings to offset that deferred income," because there is an opportunity there that I don't have in the private sector.
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you say that.
Genevieve George: You sometimes do, but…
Kevin Roche: I met with a couple last week that they're not married yet, and they're debating whether to get married, and there's a big income disparity, and the gal makes considerably more than the guy does. And she's saying, "I wish my taxes could come down."
I said, "Well, let me explain kind of the benefits of marriage." Not to get overly romantic here, but you could save a lot of money in your taxes.
Genevieve George: Definitely get married because your tax money…
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Yeah. And I was explaining that to her, and she’s like “Really? So he could put money away, too?" And I said, "Yes, absolutely, because it's a joint income taxes, and your tax bracket is gonna be much greater. So it's basically as if were taking this and dividing it by two." So there's a lot of benefit to knowing what your spouse is doing with their retirement plan and how you can, as a couple, take advantage of all of the bells and whistles.
Genevieve George: And I often find myself, we're trying to solve multiple problems, right? So we're in our higher earning years, so it helps to have these tax deferrals, 'cause if that same couple that you're talking about happens to have a rental property or something else creating income, they may not have that corridor of lower income taxes, right?
Kevin Roche: Yeah. I try to basically think all, as far down the road as we can, and develop a road map and say, "If this is the end destination we want to get to, what does ideal look like? Let's work backwards from there. How can we accomplish that? How can we make sure that we're gonna have the highest probability of being there?"
And it's not just about managing income, it's about managing taxes as well. It's about managing investments. And when we think about pension component, one of the benefits of that of having a fixed pension is you're not as reliant on the rest of the portfolio for income. That means you can take more risk with the rest of the portfolio.
So you could be more aggressively allocated. You could get more growth in these other investments because you're not drawing on them as significantly for income, 'cause you've got this other income source. And we could say, "Hey, let's be really strategic and let's draw down on our savings or our after-tax portfolio, and not our retirement portfolio, so now we're in a much lower tax bracket and we can do something like Roth conversions up to a certain tax bracket.”
And I'll actually model this out to say, if we were to maximize our Roth conversions up to the top of 22% tax bracket, and later in life, because of RMDs, we would've been bumping up into, say, in a much higher bracket all, maybe all the way up to the 35%. Well, will this bring that down? Will it flatten that curve?
Will it reduce the amount of taxes we pay over our lifetime because we're taking advantage of the years when we're in these low tax bracket periods of time that we're never gonna have again, rather than deferring everything until later, or just trying to say, "How can I minimize my taxes this year?" It's about minimizing your taxes over your lifetime.
And all of this weaves in together with income, with investments, with estate planning as well.
Genevieve George: Yeah.
Kevin Roche: All of these pieces.
Genevieve George: Yeah. The whole plan. The whole puzzle.
Kevin Roche: The whole thing. The whole thing. Yes.
Genevieve George: We just put all the pieces out on the table. We gotta bring them all together.
Kevin Roche: That's right. That's right. That's right.
Genevieve George: And just to come full circle on that. We spend a lot of time, I use TIAA as the option to talk about, but of course, there's other institutions that these educators work with. But we focus a lot on that around educators. But I think that these plans, very similar structure, also exists in the nonprofit space, research, government affiliated companies.
I know the government itself is utilizing the TSP program, which is a whole nother animal. But there are a lot of non-educator institutions also utilizing TIAA or similar structure. Do you run into that type of client as well?
Kevin Roche: Oh, yeah. All the time. Schools are where I kind of started my upbringing in financial planning.
But when you start to get more and more involved with universities, you see all of these offshoots to that. In that there are nonprofits that are often involved with universities. There are spouses of professors who perhaps work for an endowment, or you see a lot of governmental overlap with universities as well or hospitals.
UC San Francisco has a fantastic hospital that is part of a public hospital retirement plan. Yeah. So a lot of those are similar. In fact, very similar, but slightly different. And things like 401(k) accounts tend to be very similar to 403(b)s, and they tend to have similar type of investment, similar types of structures.
You don't see as much of the restrictive fixed annuity components, but they're still there. It's just not as prevalent, I've found, in some of those. But you still come across it. So I would say I would take all of those different types of groups and put them into the same bucket of thinking about with retirement, in respect to retirement planning, understanding your options.
Because they are going to all be distinct from a 401(k).
Genevieve George: Yeah. Yeah. That's wonderful. And so how have you seen your practice evolve? I'd love to hear, you actually worked inside TIAA, and then you went independent to making this area of the market an area that you wanted to serve. How have you seen that evolve over your time?
Kevin Roche: Yeah. I think TIAA was a great place to learn. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of really intelligent people, both within the organization and amongst the clients. They gave me a lot of exposure to different institutions, to really kind of hands-on working with faculty that are getting ready to retire.
And it was a great place to learn, but I felt like I had kind of grown as much as I could within the organization, and what I really wanted to do was holistic financial planning. And what TIAA focuses on is just the investment part of retirement planning. Things like…
Genevieve George: And just that one piece of it too, right? If you're meeting with a professor, you're talking about that one account their whole life. Yeah.
Kevin Roche: That's it. That's it. Exactly. And, I had many clients who had questions about things like taxes, estate planning, insurance. We can't talk about estate planning. You're gonna need to contact an estate attorney.
Here's a referral. And I felt like this is something I could do better, frankly, on my own. And so I went and I got my certified financial planner's designation. I spent years studying to get to the point where I felt confident being able to advise folks on these things. And when I went independent, my pitch, for lack of a better term, is, "Hey, I do everything I was doing before, except now it's inclusive of all these other areas you need help with as well."
And so I typically will start with education, but then I'll include education about taxes, education about estate planning, education about insurance, education about real estate, all of these other areas that are important to folks' lives that are not just tangential, but very much involved with investments, but it is not exclusive in the investments.
The investments are a means to an end, and I help them figure out what those ends are, and then we try to connect all those dots.
Genevieve George: I love that. And you have said that several times, and I think you and I align a lot on this is you lead with education. And I know you've said that you do that in your client engagements.
You wanna make sure they understand what they have, how it's working, what their goals are, and how do we get all these pieces to talk to each other and work towards those goals. But I think you also do some education that you put out on a regular basis as well, just to keep people informed of what's going on in the markets and other planning topics.
Can you talk to us about that?
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to. So I write a weekly newsletter, and so I typically break it into several different pieces. There's just a quick update on what happened in the markets this past week. What happened in the stock market, what happened in the bond market, what were the major headlines that moved the markets, and what were my thoughts on those?
And in some cases recently I've been talking about the war in Iran and oil prices, how that has impacted things. Last week I was talking about earnings at, let's say Meta, why Meta was down 9% after hours. But then I'll have another piece that has to do with personal finance. In a lot of cases, it's something that a client has asked me recently. So I had one client who asked me, "What happens if the dollar is no longer the global reserve currency? How does this affect me?”
And he was really concerned about this. And I said, "This is a great question." And so I spent some time researching that, and I wrote up a piece about how does that work. What is the global reserve currency? Why is the dollar this? And how is this evolving over time, and how does this affect you, right?
Several months ago, when we were getting ready for tax season, I wrote a bit about how income taxes and capital gain taxes are different.
Back around the end of the year, I did a whole piece on tax loss harvesting, and how it's year-end, take a look at what you have in losses, what you have in gains.
Try to net that out as much as you can. And this is not advice, it's education only. But the purpose of this is taking topics that clients have brought up that I think are interesting, I hope other people find interesting. And then trying to share it with people and say, "Hey, here's a little bit of knowledge that you might find useful."
And then lastly, I just recently started partnering with this group called the Longevity Science Foundation. And this is a non-profit, a research grant funnel. So people can funnel their charitable donation to specific research projects, and they have a whole wealth of information on different research studies.
And so I'm going through each week and publishing a summary of different research studies. Things like women's health or the benefits of coffee, tea, and red wine. All sorts of different health-related things because at the end of the day, if you don't have your health, you don't have anything, right?
And I feel like that's an important little piece of value add I can share with folks, is that this is helpful information. And if you want to contribute to these causes, here's a group that can help funnel your money to the projects you care about.
Genevieve George: That's incredible. Yeah. So I love that. So you're just taking information and just trying to put good information out there so people can make more informed financial decisions about what's in their own life.
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Absolutely.
Genevieve George: First question related to that, how do people receive your newsletter? How can we get them to receive your newsletter?
Kevin Roche: Yeah. Great question. I wish I had a better method than this. So a lot of it is word of mouth. If you're a client of mine, you're on the newsletter list.
If you've ever reached out to me and said, "Hey, I want to learn more," you're on the newsletter list. I have a website that is very much in its infancy, so I'm gonna plug it here for a second, but whoever's listening to this, don't judge me on this. I'm still building it out.
Genevieve George: It’s good content. It's fine. It doesn't matter what the website looks like.
Kevin Roche: Yeah. No, that's it. Right now it is literally nothing more than a repository of newsletter. That's it. There's gonna be more to it, but for the moment, this is where if you want to read my past newsletters or you want to sign up for future ones, go to authenticity.financial.com.
So that's the name of my practice, is Authenticity Financial, and the website is authenticity.financial.com, and you can subscribe through the website, and you can look at past newsletters there as well.
Genevieve George: And so now I want to read your newsletters, and I'm feeling like that's really good information, but now I want to talk to you. How do I talk to you?
Kevin Roche: Yeah. It's really easy. Every newsletter has a little link at the bottom with my calendar. If you want to click on it, you can click that to book a time. Or I'm an approachable guy. Just hit reply on the newsletter. Yeah. It's that easy.
Genevieve George: I mean we met networking, so I can definitely attest to you being approachable and fun to be around, so.
Kevin Roche: Yeah.
Genevieve George: It'd be good to have a conversation with you. Is there anything else you want to share or you want people to take away from this, particularly your niche market in the educator space?
Kevin Roche: Understand what you are invested in and understand what your plan is. Don't wait until you get ready to retire to figure out how retirement's gonna work for you.
It's never too soon to put together a plan. It's never too soon to educate yourself. And if you don't know where to start, you're more than welcome to reach out to me. I'm happy to help people understand things, and don't feel like you're gonna get a sales pitch out of me for this. My whole process is about us coming to an agreement together as to where the value is and how you can improve things.
But the first step is you got to understand where you're at.
Genevieve George: Yeah. I love that. And I just love the way that you approach that, and you're just trying to share more information. And I particularly enjoyed what you said, “Don't wait.” Don't wait to figure out where you're at and what your plan is. I firmly believe that there is an advisor and a planner for everybody at every level.
And it may not be you or I, but we can at least help make sure you're pointed in the right direction and just go out there and do take a look at where you really are at. Yeah. And don't wait is a huge, yeah, I say that a lot. There's no reason to wait. If we wait for perfection, we'll just run out of time.
Kevin Roche: Going to a financial planner is like going to a doctor. If you wait until there's a crisis, you're probably gonna get bad news.
Genevieve George: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin Roche: You gotta go when you think you don't need it, and that's when you're gonna make sure you probably are in good shape.
Genevieve George: Yeah. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Kevin.
I appreciate it so much, and I'm looking forward to hearing more and reading your newsletter.
Kevin Roche: Thank you, Gen. I appreciate it as well. Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.
That's it for today's episode of The Wealth Development Studio. Remember, financial clarity is powerful. Do you need help with your financial plan? Go to pelicanfinancialplanning.com to schedule a call with me. Until next time.
