Physical health and financial health have a lot of overlap. When one is not optimal, the other can suffer.
How much should you have before you can “safely” retire? Should I be aggressive or conservative in my investments now? How can I invest in companies that represent my interests and principles?
Because women live, on average, a couple of years longer than men, and because women generally come to retirement with less in the bank, retirement planning is really important. Yet many women avoid taking the time to truly plan so they can enjoy a comfortable, stable retirement income.
If you’re like us, just the thought of planning for retirement can bring you out in a sweat.
So when you shower, make sure to use soap gentle enough for your everywhere.
Interview With Jenifer Sapel From Utor Wealth
We asked Jenifer Sapel, CEO of Utor Wealth, to join us for a conversation on how women can protect their financial health “ and independence “ as they age.
Prefer to watch the webinar? You can access it on Gennev’s YouTube channel. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a webinar.
“
“
You can find the slides Jenifer referenced here.
RESOURCES REFERENCED:
- https://www.morningstar.com/start-investing/classroom
- https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/
- https://www.genworth.com/aging-and-you/finances/cost-of-care.html
- https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Women-Next-Door-Businesswomen/dp/0740755706
- https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Money-Transforming-Your-Relationship/dp/0393353974/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=soul+of+money&qid=1595545525&s=books&sr=1-2
- https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Badass-Making-Money/dp/0735222975
- https://mightydeposits.com/
- https://utorwealth.com/
- https://utorwealth.com/pod-cast/
TRANSCRIPT
Jill Angelo, Gennev CEO
All right. Well, welcome to our weekly webinar series. This is the generic weekly webinars series, and I’m excited to be with you today. I’m Jill Angelo, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Gennev, a virtual menopause clinic for women in midlife. And today’s topic is a little bit different. Typically we come to you with specific health related topics around women’s midlife health. And this time we’re going to talk about money because I think financially we all want to be healthy. And I think money stress and or joy plays a lot into our health. And so I’m delighted today to have Jenifer Sapel, the founder and CEO of Luther wealth with us. So welcome Jenifer.
Jenifer Sapel, President & CEO, Utor Wealth
Thank you, Jill. I’m really happy to be here. I love the work that you guys are doing around women’s health.
Jill
Thank you. Well, I think more and more health and wealth, you know, especially as we go into our second half of life they kind of start to merge as topics and because you’re caring about both and you also start to become more intentional about it as a woman and as a man. And I, I just, this is such a huge topic. So a couple of housekeeping items before we jump into the real crux of all of our information today are the meat of the topic is what I was going to say. First and foremost we’re Gennev online clinic for women in menopause. Check us out if you haven’t used our telehealth services, health and wellness products for your symptom relief and or just the education and community, which is what we’re doing here. And throughout this webinar, we will take questions.
So if you’re joining us on zoom on the webinar itself please go ahead and submit them via the chat or the Q &a feature. And if you’re joining us on Facebook live, just put them, put them right in the Facebook live, and we’ll make sure to get your questions answered. I’ve got those coming in to us today. So again I am here with Jenifer Sapel, the founder and CEO of Utor wealth. She has really dedicated her background in wealth management to now helping specifically, I think mostly women manage our wealth in the second half of life. So Jennifer, tell us a little bit about couture and, and what led you to do what you’re doing.
Jenifer
I’m happy to. Yeah, thank you. So I’ve been a financial advisor for 16 years now, and it wasn’t until maybe three or four years ago where I really started to embrace that. Being a woman is different and it’s different in every aspect and it’s different financially. So it’s just been in the last three or four years where I’ve really, really focused in, on being a woman. And I’m a new mother. I have a two year old and a four month old. And so that adds a whole nother kind of layer of complexity. And so founded couture after 14 years of being in the business with a big company, founded couture and Utor is literally Latin for enjoy. And so much of the conversation around money. And I think so much of our anxiety around money is that because it’s finite and because it’s measurable because it’s quantitative because we can actually like keep score with it.
There’s this, there’s this desire or this kind of pressure to feel like there’s something that’s right or wrong. There’s a right or wrong answer. And that’s not really the case. So that’s kind of led this, the shift for me, we are a comprehensive financial planning firm. So what that means is when we engage with a client, our, our objective is to help them be financially organized and give them a framework for financial decisions and give them advice for financial decisions. We also offer services with investment management and then some insurance brokering. So life insurance, longterm care, disability insurance, but the overall objective is to help people use money as a tool in their life to live the life that they enjoy. And all of us define that a little bit differently.
Jill
You know, one thing you mentioned besides I’m totally going to come back to, what’s different about it for women. And I think some of those things are parents, but one thing that you mentioned that really caught my attention was there’s no right or wrong answer. And I know personally in my own wealth management, I’ve wanted someone to just tell me what to do. I want the right or wrong answer versus, well, what kind of life do you want to lead? And we don’t really think about that. Like, how do you pull that out of people? Or how do you address the, know that people who just want guidance or want an answer? They want to be told what to do?
Jenifer
Well, there’s, there’s a couple of things there. Again, if you frame money as a tool, it it’s a tool in your life. So you are the user of the tool. So think about any other tool you have, right. And like you know, your toothbrushes, a tool at some point in your life, it was awkward learning how to use a toothbrush. Right. but you’re the one who, you know, you learn how to do it. You got through that awkward phase and you’re the one who decides ultimately like, well, you know, am I going to brush right when I get up or, you know, like you decide how you’re going to fit it into your overall life, same with any other kind of tool, right? Like your car is a tool. You’re, you know, I like kitchen gadgets. Those are my, you know, when I first, when I first got my, my what’s the new pressure cooker, right.
I was terrified of my Instapot. And the first time I used it. Right. but how I use it is different from how my friend uses it. And it’s just fine because this is like, this is what I want out of it. So this is how I do it. A great example financially is you know, should I pay down my mortgage or not? So the answer to that is if you, if you want to make the ultimate, like if you want your sheet and that’s like, what you’re worth when you compile everything that you own, and you take out everything you own, if you, Oh, if you want your balance sheet number to be as big as possible, if that’s your objective, then the answer is no, you shouldn’t pay off your mortgage. But if your objective is, I want to just feel better about it at night. I want to, like, I want to just know that my house was paid off and that I don’t have a mortgage anymore. And just have that peace of mind and security at night, if that’s your objective, then by all means back your mortgage. So that’s just one of many examples of like, there isn’t really a right answer for anybody. It’s what is the right answer for you? Does that answer your question?
Jill
Totally. Well, and I think your ability to lead someone like me down a path of, you know, what, there’s multiple paths and helping me understand how to think about the paths is just really valuable cause that, that certainly doesn’t come to me intuitively. And that’s, that’s something that, you know, in ways of framing it in terms of different options that’s where I think your role becomes just really, really important with women and men. Well, let’s, let’s get back to that point around. It’s just different. It’s different for women. Share a little bit more about what you, what you mean there.
Jenifer
So like financial principles are the same but how we experience our lives are different. So the, the oversimplified answer to our finance is different for men than they are for women. Particularly around retirement is that most for the, for most women, we arrive at retirement with less money and we live longer. So those are two huge differences and have huge financial implications for, you know, what, what options are available to you and what kind of lifestyle do you want to live. Of course, we get to retirement with less money for many reasons, but the wage gap is one of them. It’s often women who are, are taking career pauses for unpaid work. So if they’re caregiving for children or for aging parents or for anybody else you know, there’s the, the, we don’t necessarily negotiate or ask for more raises.
So those are all contributing factors to arriving at retirement, along with a lot more. We can, we don’t need to talk about all of them today. We can do that. We could have a whole separate webcast just on that. But then living, living longer, you know, and, and as we sit here today, our life expectancy is two and a half years longer than men. That gaps actually shortening and they, the actuaries, the guests there is as women enter the workplace and work that same number of hours and things like that as men, we are seeing that as a detriment to our life expectancy.
Jill
Interesting. That’s fascinating what stress does.
Jenifer
It is well and financial implications distress. You started, you started with that. People who have pensions live longer. So if you have a pension, if you have a retirement source of income, that is a steady paycheck, right. That you can rely on those people live longer than people without pensions. And then people with more means. So if you have if you have more wealth and more means those people also live longer than, than people with less. So there are, I mean, they are, or you started this whole webcast with that. They are completely tied your health and your wealth.
Jill
Yeah. They’re tied together. Oh, that’s well I know Jennifer, you have a couple of slides to share and I think you’ve done a nice job just in terms of showcasing this life, you know, this roadmap of life. And so why don’t you go ahead and share those and talk us through it a little bit because you know, it’s yeah. If you think about lifespan this isn’t always something like, in terms of planning, I don’t naturally go here. But talk a little bit about this in some of the shifts or changes that you’re seeing. Cause you already called out a couple around women’s life expectancy and men’s life expectancy coming closer together. That’s fascinating.
Jenifer
Yeah. So you can see the financial life stages. So what, we’re, what I’m showing here from age zero to two age, 120 this line with this, this line represents is your wealth. So again, that’s a what is your net worth? What’s your, what’s your, what’s your balance sheet, say your personal balance sheet say, and most of us, right. We, we start working out of high school or out of college and some of us, you know, start from zero and some of us start from a heavy debt load from college. But in our working years, over the course of time, we accumulate, right. And we grow assets and we grow wealth. And then you can see there’s this at the top of the Hill, there’s a preservation stage. So if you’re within 10 years of retirement, this is what we call into your preservation stage.
It’s important in this time that you’re doing things that are going to keep your wealth and your net worth relatively safe, right? So you, you have to do some risk management here. And the reason this is a critical time for risk management is that you’re, you still are at a point where you have a long life expectancy ahead of you, right? So there’s still, if you’re, if you’re 50, you still could have 40 years ahead of you or 50 years ahead of you. And you’re at, you know, kind of peak wealth earnings. So this is a time to think about preservation. I think, you know, with, with the work you guys doing, right, your body changes and your, you know, your health and wellness leading up to this time. And what it looks like after this time are very different. Same is true for your financial life. There’s two major, major phases in your financial life. One is accumulating wealth, and then the other is at some point using that wealth to replace your income. And we call that in the financial world, we call that distribution, but now we’re taking the wealth and using it for our living expenses and not necessarily having to work anymore. The answer, your question.
Jill
Yeah, I think that’s great. And I think your, even your corollary to health and wealth you know, like, like we say, on the health side now is we’re kicking off the second half of life, you know, women in midlife. And so what we do now really is risk mitigation too, in terms of future chronic issues or whatever, the more that we take care of ourselves during this menopause timeframe or these hormonal shifts it totally plays out in the long run and, and it’s, it’s so parallel with the financial health of your life as well.
Jenifer
Right. It really is. And you, so you gave kind of a specific example, just a quick example here is, you know, market corrections during these times, we have to remember how the math works on on investments. But if you’re, if you’re, if you have a hundred thousand dollars in the market declined by 25%, so your a hundred thousand dollars drop to $75,000 that’s a 25% decline to get back to a hundred thousand dollars. It isn’t a 25% increase we need to see in the market. It’s a 33% increase we need to see in the market. So that’s why this, this stage, right, this is risk mitigation stage. That’s why you can accept fewer fluctuations during this period of your life. Then you can, you know, if you’ve got another 10 years or so to be invested.
Jill
Yeah. It’s incredible.
Jenifer
Yeah. And then you had mentioned let’s see, I think our next, some kind of critical decision points during this time. So from the age of 50 to 70 and a half the top three on this chart are all regarding social security. So the earliest you are you can draw social security is 62. And if you choose to draw it at 62, you’re going to take a reduced benefit. You’re not going to get as much out of social security as you could, if you were to delay and then you can, you can delay social security until age 70. So you’ll get your maximum amount available to you on a monthly basis. If you wait to take your social security payment until age 70, you can see the big age, 65 kind of in the middle there again, this is where our two worlds intersect.
Medicare becomes available age 65. So if you’re thinking about stopping work before age 65, then part of your plan has to include, am I going to get healthcare coverage? Right? Cause most of us are covered through our employer. And so if we were retired from our employer and we’re not yet eligible for Medicare, then that’s something you need to factor into your, to your expenses. And then the bottom three are around taking withdrawals from, from retirement accounts. So something that I’ll just note here quickly is if you, again, if you plan on being away from work between age 50 and 59 and a half, you could have money in 401ks or 403 B’s depending on what kind of employer you’re you’re with that inside of that plan, they allow you to take money out of it without penalties. If you roll that money into an IRA, an IRA, the TAC, the IRS says you can’t take money out of out of an IRA until you’re 59 and a half. So just be careful that you just kind of caution caution, if you’re planning on 50 55 and 59 and a half, you may have some options inside of your 401k that you won’t have in an IRA.l
Jill
In terms of having flexibility of taking that money out and using it to subsidize your life.
Jenfier
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Jill
Great. That’s great. Well, good. Well, I’m gonna I’ve got one, a couple of questions for you in particular, Jennifer, that I wanna, you know really kind of dive into. And, and so, you know, you talked about the differences for women versus men and how are, you know, the, the rate of earning is different, unfortunately pay instill in an equitable between men and women. But can you also, can you kind of go into, what do we, what are mistakes that women commonly make? What, what do we, what did we get wrong? Whether it’s along the trajectory or, or even in these critical decision points down the road?
Jenifer
Great question. I think two, two that I really, really want to highlight one is that we ignore or defer you know, so that could look like I really should pay more attention to my financial life. I’ll get around to it right next year, right. Or next month, or once this happens or once I get a raise, right? There’s all kinds of conditions as to this is what I’m going to sit down and be serious about my financial life. So if you’re ignoring it, that’s a mistake. If you’re deferring it a hundred percent, this is a huge mistake for women. Most women still and millennials at the same rate as baby boomers and gen Xers are deferring major financial decisions, particularly investing to partners.
Jill
Why is that? Do you know, like what’s the psychology? I do it, I’m guilty of it. So, you know, I’m just put myself out there.
Jenifer
All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing and being vulnerable. I, I, if I had to guess, I I don’t know, and I don’t know if there’s actual science about this, but if I have to guess, I would say it’s for two reasons, one it’s in our socialization. So Starling bank out of the university or not university, a United Kingdom, did a, did a research on media messages for men and for women and media messages for women around money are very, very different than media messages for men. So what they found was 93% of articles geared towards women that had to do with money were telling women how to scrimp and save, right? So like how not to spend so much money. So it’s implying right that our, our w that’s that’s the only area of finance we need help with, right.
Is how to save money, how to clip coupons, that kind of thing. 70% of articles geared towards men talk about investing. So there’s a cultural you know, and social kind of machine, like there’s some conditioning going on where the expectation of us to, you know, to be able to invest or talk about money with confidence. Isn’t the same as for women as it is for men. The other thing is that that women have a time deficit for us, you know, again, caregiving and unpaid work falls disproportionately to women than it does for men. So like when you’re, when you’re at capacity, you’re tired and you’ve got a lot on your plate. Like the last thing you want to do is learn a skill that you don’t particularly have an interest in you know, and add that to your plate. So those would be my guesses. I think they’re pretty good guesses, but those would be my guesses. Do they resonate with you?
Jill
Totally do. Yeah, they do. You know, I am very much a and even you just, when I think about just the, the right things to do, you know, infrastructure of life insurance, you know, paying bills, et cetera I know how to do it. I’m certainly capable, but, you know, my husband just kind of takes charge of it and I run my own business and I do it for my business, but, and I probably even think about it different with my company than I would if I, you know, I dunno, you know, I wonder even when you said you were talking about saving and clipping coupons and being frugal or making your money really stretch I know sometimes I’d put that mindset towards even my company versus thinking big and investing and going for it, you know? And it’s just, yeah, it’s a, it’s a risk, a risk aversion or an aversion to risk or mitigating risk in such a way that I’m sure in some ways it’s healthy and in other ways it holds us back.
Jenifer
Yeah. Yes, you’re right on both of those friends and even if, and even with even if you’re deferring. So I don’t want to say that, you know, that even in your particular situation, that what you guys have going on, isn’t isn’t unhealthy necessarily. You know, we, we, if you’re partnered with somebody, you split household chores, right? I mean, some people do yard work and some people don’t and some people do housework, some people don’t, so that’s perfectly fine. So even if you have a healthy relationship and somebody else is is taking care of, of the financial life, what I will say is it’s critical that at least once a year, if not twice a year, or once a quarter, it doesn’t necessarily have to be any more than that, but at least once a year, you sit down together and audit, right?
So that is where is every account and how is every account invested and pull a credit report. And I say this because I’ve seen it personally, eight out of 10 women at some point will have sole responsibility for their financial life. So even if they are deferring at some point 80% of the time, you will, you will need you will have to take over the reins. So know where all the bank accounts are, have like some kind of rough balance of where they are. And too high of a percentage of women are surprised when that happens. So, you know what I’ve personally seen our surprise, I didn’t know there was a tax lien on the business, right? That it’s still an obligation that I’m going to have to pay. So at least once a year, make sure that you’re taking inventory and that you’re running credit reports, and you’re kind of getting on the same page. And if, for the day to day decisions, if you’re still dividing, dividing the work there that’s okay.
Jill
That’s great. Well, why don’t you go ahead and take the SlideShare down and I’m gonna keep diving into some questions here, Jenifer. And if found any of these questions, it makes sense to show an image. I know you’ve got some additional visuals let’s, let’s definitely go back. But one, one question that came in or that we wanted to address was you know, I don’t have a million dollars in the bank or my 401k will I ever be able to retire comfortably? So let’s talk about, you know, if a person has deferred saving kind of altogether, like you talked about when you hit, like, I think remembering that that bell curve 50 ish, or, you know, you want to start to preserve your wealth. What if you haven’t really been preserving it? What’s your advice for starting to save or think a little bit more, or, or take money that you have saved and actually start investing it, maybe you haven’t invested it much of at all. Cause you have deferred that till a point when you would need to do it.
Jenifer
Yeah. So start, start now and start small. We are better humans. We’re, we’re better at doing if we automate it. So what I would say is like, if you’re behind and you need to, you need to play catch up a little bit, then put it on your calendar where, you know, you’re saving 1% more, right? So 1% of your income and if, and the more you can automate it, the better it is. So if that means you’re doing an uptick in a 401k or four, three B contribution with your employer then great, most of America builds wealth that way because of the automation, right? So if that’s the easiest way to do it, do it that way. If you can set up an automatic transfer, direct deposit into a separate account that isn’t going to go into the checking and ultimately be spent however you can automate it.
Great. And I, you know, take it 1% at a time, if you can increase by 1% every three months, every six months, even every year, you’re going to be better off the only way, right. To, to get yourself in a better position for retirement is ultimately to save and invest more so. And that’s kind of what you just mentioned Jill, right? One is make sure that you’re saving more of your income and investing more of your income. Two is how right, how you’re saving and investing. And that is get, like, you got to get off the sidelines. You’ve gotta be invested in something that’s going to at least keep up with inflation can be sitting in a, in a savings account. And there, there’s not a whole lot of tricks to investing either. You just gotta be in a, in a well diversified portfolio. And there’s, there’s a couple different ways that you can go about finding that.
Jil l
How about you know, just we’re in interesting times right now, where unemployment’s at a super high rate and, you know, a lot of people have lost their jobs. And you let’s say you have been saving a small, you know, as much as you can. What’s been your advice, if any, to clients who have lost their employment and maybe need to rely on their savings more for a period of time, any guidance around how you dip into that maybe before, when, before you thought you would need to. Cause I think a lot of, lot of people are in that boat right now.
Jenifer
Yeah, yeah. And if you’re in that boat, you’re not alone. A lot of people, a lot of people are in that boat. The first thing I’ll tell you is one of the most empowering things you can do for your financial life, whether you’re in that situation or not like anybody, one of the most empowering things you can do is sit down and review every single expense from last month. You know? So just so take June and review and categorize every single transaction that left your any of your bank accounts. If you haven’t done that in a while, you will find, you will find subscriptions that you forgot that you were subscribed to, you will find like you’re just going to find things that if you haven’t been paying attention to it that are there and available and, and relatively easy ways for you to adjust.
So that’s, you know, number one a lot of people avoid doing that because they think they have to judge every single transaction, good or bad, like, Oh, I did good here. I did bad here. And I’d say like throw judgment out the window. This is a treat for yourself. This is you empowering yourself and gaining knowledge over your situation. So resist the urge to judge good or bad, just kind of categorize, just kind of take inventory. The second thing is if you’re having to draw from accounts, if it’s a savings account, you know, again, you’re controlling your expenses is really the most empowering thing you can do. But if it’s the same account, I wouldn’t so much worry about you know, how to take it or when to take it. Things like that. The mistake that I see people making is if they’re having to take out of retirement accounts, so a 401k or an IRA or things like that I’ll hear things like, you know, well, I have this old 401k from a job three jobs ago and there’s $15,000 in it.
So I’m just going to cash it out and stick it in my bank account, you know, and in case I need it over the course of the next couple months, don’t do that instead, just take out every month, just the amount you need every month, right? Because if you’re taking money out of those accounts early, you’re gonna have to pay taxes on all of that money. If it’s money, you haven’t paid taxes on, I’m already under normal circumstances, you pay a 10% penalty that the cares act gives you some relief there. But even with that relief, if something changes next month, if you know, if a vaccine comes out next month, you know, none of us know we’re all in kind of unchartered territory. And you’re back to work or you’re able to pivot, or, or you find a different opportunity a month or two earlier than you thought, then you were foregoing. Any of the growth that account could have, could have achieved for you by just like cashing it all out at once. So take what you need, just take what you need to get by each month as you need it to get by.
Jill
Hmm. That’s great. That’s you know, I that’s, it’s when you break things down into like little bits like that, it’s much more, I don’t know, achievable, or you feel like you have a little bit more control over it, otherwise it can be just really be overwhelming, you know, especially when you think about saving or how much should I be living on or whatever. It’s amazing how just the little steps can just make it more comfortable and like, yep. I can do this and you break it down and you start working at it. So, yeah. How about this question? What if I’ve already retired? Is it too late to plan now or to change the plan?
Jenifer
Never, it’s never too late. Never, ever, ever. No. So the, so, you know, ultimately there’s there for, in a financial world there’s really only kind of two major components. One is your balance sheet. So that’s just kind of like, what do you own and where is it and how is it, how is it situated and how is it invested? And the other is cashflow and cashflow is how much you bringing in on a monthly basis and how much is going out on a monthly basis. We think about these things, right? Jill, you were saying earlier, you think about them in terms of business. But we hardly ever apply those same principles to our personal financial life. But if you’re sitting here retired today, you still have there’s,