Why Your Stomach and Your Calculator Disagree on Retirement Risk
Episode 39
Why Your Stomach and Your Calculator Disagree on Retirement Risk
Published on June 17th, 2026
Episode Summary
Episode 39 of Retirement Tax Matters breaks down the difference between emotional risk tolerance and risk capacity for high-net-worth retirees in the $2M–$8M range. Using recent client inquiries regarding the high-profile SpaceX IPO as a real-world backdrop, the episode defines emotional risk tolerance as a subjective, psychological response to short-term market volatility that varies significantly by individual and is not always dependent on net worth. Conversely, risk capacity is introduced as an evaluation of exactly how much market fluctuation a retirement plan can safely withstand without material compromise to lifestyle spending or long-term retirement security. The discussion highlights how advanced asset location strategies can bridge this gap, demonstrating how retirees with more risk capacity can optimize tax-smart investing by taking higher equity risk within tax-free Roth IRAs while taking less risk in their traditional pre-tax retirement accounts. Finally, Garrett reveals how the firm thinks through their clients' risk tolerance and risk capacities. Ultimately, this framework illustrates how balancing both dimensions allows high-net-worth retirees between $2M–$8M to confidently evaluate speculative market opportunities, optimize their legacy, and feel more peace of mind to enjoy their wealth.
Key Tax Planning Questions
Question 1: Why is my portfolio doing so bad compared to the market?
I have heard different versions of this comment many times over the years. It usually comes up when someone watches the evening news, looks at their own investment accounts, and notices a wide gap between the television headlines and their actual performance. Naturally, people don't complain when their portfolio is up big and the rest of the world is struggling. But when the media is talking about the S&P 500 ripping to all-time highs and you login to your portal to see your account has only grown by a few percentage points, it creates a lot of frustration and immediate second-guessing.
Most of the time, this happens because a retiree has offloaded the day-to-day management of their portfolio to an investment professional or a model strategy without fully connecting their personal asset mix to their real-world returns. When you first started working with an advisor, you probably filled out a standard risk tolerance questionnaire that communicated you wanted to be a conservative investor. Based on those boxes, your professional established a lower equity allocation. The point here is that the amount of volatility you experience is directly linked to that questionnaire or the last conversation you had with your advisor. If the market turned around tomorrow and dropped by thirty percent, you might feel a little better about your lower risk allocation.
However, we also have to look closely at the asset allocation itself. If your portfolio is filled with active bets or concentrated positions rather than being broadly diversified across different company sizes and global industries, your returns will naturally stray from the major indices. For example, if you were light on domestic technology companies over the past decade, your portfolio would underperform the broader market headlines even if you were holding one hundred percent stocks.
Experiencing a permanent mismatch between what you expect from your portfolio and what you actually realize is a stressful experience, and it is easily one of the most common reasons investors decide to move their accounts and find a new financial advisor.
Question 2: I'm retired, how much should I have in equities?
When I first came into the industry, one rule of thumb I remember hearing was that investors should have your age in bonds. Under that rule, a 65-year-old retiree would be recommended to hold 65% of their portfolio in bonds. While I appreciate that rules of thumb are helpful for people like Dave Ramsey who have to give direct, generalized advice to 100,000 listeners at a time, that approach falls flat when applying it to any specific client household I’m working with. As a tax-return driven financial planner, it seems silly to base a multi-million dollar retirement strategy on an arbitrary number (your age) that ignores your health, your income needs, and your personal psychology. For the $2M–$8M retiree, we have to look past the generic rules and evaluate risk on a two-dimensional level: risk tolerance and risk capacity.
On one side, we try to gauge your pscyhological risk tolerance by looking at your actual investment history. How did you react during the Great Financial Crisis in 2009 or the Pandemic of 2020? Did you stay invested, did you adjust, or did you go entirely to cash? Labeling an accurate risk tolerance for a client is difficult, though the extremes are easy to spot. It is simple to identify the retiree who says they do not care about growth as long as they never see their balance drop, just as it is easy to spot the investor who wants to make speculative bets because they know they have more than enough to get by. Most high-net-worth retirees I’m working with fall somewhere in the middle. Walking the tightrope of retirement usually means the pain of losing money stings a bit more than the joy of making a little extra. That is why your feelings about the market must be cross-referenced with your capacity to take risk.
Risk capacity attempts to capture how much risk/volatility your plan can handle without impacting your retirement lifestyle. I recently worked with a married couple in their 80s who executed a Roth conversion of over $200,000 in a single year. Their pensions and Social Security cover their minimal spending needs, and they barely touch their portfolio except for their annual charitable giving through QCDs. Because they are prioritizing this Roth money for the next generation, they have a 15 to 20 year timeline for that specific account. While the old rule of thumb says an 80-year-old should have 80% of their money in bonds, their actual allocation is flipped: they hold about 75% in equities and 25% in safe fixed income. Their psychological tolerance for risk hasn't changed, but their structural capacity to take risk is incredibly high because they simply won't miss the money if the market drops tomorrow. When you start viewing your portfolio as different pots of money with different jobs, it can make better sense to take more equity risk inside a tax-free Roth IRA while keeping your pre-tax traditional IRA much more conservative.
Question 3: Tim retired a little earlier than he expected at age 59, and his wife, Diane, is 58 and retiring in 2 more years at age 60 so she can qualify for full retirement from her county pension. Tim has a 401k that has grown to $3M, Diane has a $500K 403(b), and they also accumulated a $1M taxable brokerage account with a basis of $650k. Between Diane's salary, some portfolio withdrawals from the taxable brokerage account, and the Rule of 55 on the $3M 401k, Tim thinks he has the opportunity to do some Roth conversions until they file for Social Security in 6-8 years. Tim and Diane's gross income need in retirement is approximately $150k, and they feel like they probably have more than they need. Diane also comes from a wealthy family and is expecting to inherit a significant amount at their passing as she is the only child. Tim and Diane have always invested pretty aggressively and now find themselves wondering: should they reduce risk now that they are retired?
If I met Tim and Diane and they were interested in becoming clients of our firm, one of the first things I would have them do is take a standard risk tolerance questionnaire. I would be interested to see how they answer an assortment of questions, such as choosing their preferred portfolio behavior if they invested $250,000 over a 5-year timeline. While I agree that having this questionnaire on file is a good piece of information, by no means is it wholly actionable on its own. For me, a quiz is just one critical but small piece of the puzzle when trying to solve the difficult question of how much risk Tim and Diane should take with their investment portfolio now that Tim is retiring. Even with this specific scenario in front of me, I am hesitant to give a simple recommendation.
On one hand, Tim and Diane are walking into a very secure retirement. Having a high net worth paired with a relatively low income need is a true superpower for weathering the possibilities and market ups and downs that will be thrown their way. As a financial planner, these types of clients are fun to work with because winning might mean total asset preservation, or winning might mean growing aggressively because you have so much margin built in between. At the same time, it can be really difficult to know what the right answer is from a pure risk perspective. Their emotional risk tolerance is important, but it pales a bit compared to their actual risk capacity. If they feel like they have already won the game, they could take a very conservative risk profile, such as keeping 30% in equities and 70% in fixed income, and they probably could make their retirement goals work out well. However, because their income need is low relative to their assets, they also have the complete flexibility to flip that risk allocation to 70% equities and 30% fixed income. Doing so would allow them to comfortably meet their needs while historically ending up with significantly more money than they anticipate given past market returns.
Inheritances are always difficult to count on. For most clients, I try to steer conversations away from depending on an inheritance to live out the retirement they expect. Parents can fall into a long-term care expense situation quickly, a surviving parent could get remarried unexpectedly, or a parent could change their mind and want to spend that money while they are alive. A lot of unexpected events you think won't happen…can happen. Despite those risks, there are also scenarios, a lot like Diane's, where it almost seems silly to turn a blind eye toward a highly probable, significant inheritance. You will find different financial planners who believe different things here, but I land on trying to get a clear feel for my clients values, how they describe their family dynamics, and factoring in the parents current net worth alongside her status as an only child. While it might not totally rewrite my investment recommendations today, it will factor into the risk capacity component when designing a proper risk-matched portfolio.
Finally, a major area not brought up in this initial client profile is whether any children are in the mix, the charitable inclination of the couple, and what exactly they want to see happen to these funds at their passing. I would also want to talk through their long-term care plan for handling extended care costs and determine if they already have a solid long-term care insurance policy in place.
Full Episode Transcript
Adam: Good morning, and welcome to Retirement Tax Matters. I'm Adam Reed. This is Garrett Crawford, our resident CFP® professional. How are we doing this morning, Garrett?
Garrett: Doing pretty good. Back for another round, and I had one thought and actually a couple of things that you aren't necessarily ready for.
Adam: Uh-oh...
Garrett: We're almost 40 podcasts in. The other day somebody referred to an old episode of ours. I clicked in and I was looking at this office and our studio here before we did anything to it. It had yellow walls. We didn't know what we were doing, and we've really upgraded since then. But I've got to think there's at least one person out there that has wondered, "What is this bleached-out picture behind us?"
Adam: We've noticed, too. On rainy days, we have windows all across here, and you can kinda make it out. But on a bright day, it's just a big white blank sheet.
Garrett: And it's like... I'm sure people wonder what in the world that is. You'll have to trust me on this, but it's the first Form 1040 from 1913. It's a tax return. It's not very complicated. You basically put in your gross income, your deductions, dividends, amount of income which normal tax has been deducted and withheld at the source, and an exemption amount. You calculate it and you sign the bottom of it—it is a simple one-pager. In honor of that, I have a trivia question for you that I did not prep you for.
Adam: Uh-oh. Here we go.
Garrett: We talk about how long the tax code is in 2026, thousands and thousands of pages. I think I read this morning—don't count me wrong, CPAs and tax preparers—but I think I read something like 7,000 pages is our current IRS tax code. Back in 1913, what would you guess the IRS tax code would've been?
Adam: My dad, who's a CPA, calls that job security. Since you're asking, it's either closer to that than I would think or it's like nothing. I doubt it's right in the middle. Let's guess 3,500.
Garrett: Let's go 17 pages.
Adam: Oh, very, very close. It was 27 pages. I got the seven right! I was looking at it this morning and it seemed like there were varying responses online. I saw one source that said four, one that said 10, and somebody that said 27. I decided we better take the 27. I found a paper from Wolters Kluwer, which is an accounting resource, and it noted that the text of the 16th Amendment combined with the text of the United States Revenue Act of 1913 is generally considered to be the original tax code. Combined, these documents were approximately 27 pages in length. And this is my favorite part: the pages measured six by nine inches, so not that standard eight and a half by 11 stuff. It was smaller in size, so maybe that's where some of the confusion comes from.
Adam: Averages down to about 10 standard pages. Maybe one day we'll get a better copy or figure out how to make that look better on camera. You did float the idea the other day of replacing it with a Monet painting, and then we looked up the prices. I said if you're Googling cheapest Monet, you probably don't need to be owning a Monet. So we vetoed that for now.
Garrett: That's our historical lesson on our blank picture on the wall.
Adam: It is a good segue. If we're trying to become billionaires and make all this money, we have been talking with a lot of clients this past week about the SpaceX IPO, if you've been following the headlines.
Garrett: I've heard something about that, yeah.
Adam: If you want your money to go to the Moon or to Mars, SpaceX is looking like an option. One of the things that we've been talking a lot about with clients regarding the SpaceX IPO—and keep in mind we work primarily with retirees and people landing the plane, though we work with some clients' kids, grandkids, or HENRYs who are high earners, not rich yet—but a big chunk of our audience are retirees. We've got them dialed in. When opportunities like this come along to swing for the fences, we have to get into the weeds of your risk capacity versus your risk tolerance. A lot of people have heard of risk tolerance—how you feel as things go up and down. But tell me more about risk capacity, what that means, and how we help people think through that in their retirement portfolios.
Garrett: Yeah, and it's nothing like... I'm not calling SpaceX a get-rich-quick scheme because I honestly have no idea. Part of today's conversation is realizing that we are still learning this podcast medium. Ideally, we probably would have released this episode a week ago because the IPO for SpaceX is tomorrow. We always release these one episode behind. We don't want to spend a bunch of our time saying SpaceX is going to the Moon or it's going to drop to zero, because by the time this podcast comes out, that will have already materialized to some extent. This isn't necessarily about SpaceX, but SpaceX is a great jumping-off point for this conversation. In 2013, I came into the industry. The industry was shifting from an investment sales world to an investment planning world. In my 13 years of doing this, it has evolved from investment planning to comprehensive financial planning. To this day, you have artifacts and remnants of the past that continue forward. A big part of our industry has always been a compliance requirement, which is that we need to get a risk tolerance questionnaire on file. We have regulators that will come in and ask why we made a specific recommendation, and if you don't have a risk tolerance questionnaire on file, they'll ask how you knew they were aggressive investors, or balanced, or conservative. They want us to prove that the investment recommendation was good. And so, the risk tolerance questionnaire was born.
Garrett: As financial planners and advisors—and I'm a part of a couple of professional groups online—I think most of us have a bit of an aversion to standard risk tolerance questionnaires. The reason is that we're working with humans, not machines. When the market returns are great, somebody will say they want to be all in. For the past 10 to 13 years, the market has generally gone up and to the right. When you come off a year of a 25% or 30% return, you're feeling pretty good about taking equity risk. I have seen that for my entire career, that people are more stock-heavy than they've ever been. There are reasons for that. Interest rates were historically low on fixed income, so there was really nowhere else to go. Generally speaking, I would say most of our clients have an appetite for more risk because they've seen how they've been rewarded for it over the past decade. But risk tolerance questionnaires have their place, they just aren't enough. When we talk about risk tolerance, the way that I view it is it's your psychological response to seeing your investment accounts go up and down.
Adam: So it's very subjective. It depends on the person. Even a couple could have very different views of risk tolerance.
Garrett: Even you and I can have different views of risk tolerance. I may be okay with a 30% downturn, while you may be good with a 60% downturn. The issue with a purely psychological response is that it doesn't really matter how much money you have. It's your aversion, your greed, or your desire to make more money versus your aversion to logging into schwab.com, seeing your accounts are down 15% year-to-date, and how that makes you feel. Oftentimes we don't truly know how we're going to respond in a down market because the circumstances are always different. I remember being in college and being completely oblivious to the Great Financial Crisis; it wasn't until I got into the industry that I realized the magnitude of what happened. But you remember the Great Financial Crisis. You remember how you felt. A lot of you were still working back then, threw money back into the market, and it probably went okay. But COVID was a very different market event because the world was shutting down, people were going home, and everyone was remote working for a virus. Is it real? Is it not real? How long is this going to last? Even if you made it through the Great Financial Crisis okay, the pandemic might have scared you in different ways. I saw that firsthand as my first big market downturn, where people who previously said they had a high appetite for risk and wanted to be 100% stocks or 85% stocks in their 60s called us and changed their minds during that contraction. A risk tolerance questionnaire has its limits. Am I discounting them? Absolutely not. Understanding how people have responded in past market events—their aversion to losing money or their desire to chase returns at the risk of losing principal—is a critical psychological observation. But some of that is learned about ourselves over time and not necessarily something you can predict in a simple test. That is what we call risk tolerance, and we might assign a risk tolerance score to our clients in that way.
Garrett: The second part is what we call risk capacity. I just don't hear it talked about as often. This is completely separate from psychological behavior. As a neutral third party looking at your finances as a financial planner, or if you are looking at your own finances, risk capacity is how much risk you could technically take and still fulfill all of your financial goals. An extreme example I like to use involves people like Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos who have more money than we can fathom. They actually might not like risk emotionally. Warren Buffett might not want to see his net worth drop by 60%, even though he has hundreds of billions in cash last time I checked. Warren Buffett has an abundance of wealth, yet his emotional risk tolerance might be low because he simply doesn't like losing money and wants to insulate himself. But his risk capacity—his actual ability to take risk—is massive. He could lose 99% of his net worth and still live a perfectly good life, and knowing him, he'd probably start another business and make it all back. Risk capacity is not psychological. It's how much risk you could endure and still put food on the table, make sure your house is paid for, maintain zero debt, and stay in control of your lifestyle. Warren Buffett is an extreme case, but if we dial it back to our target audience—someone between $2 million and $8 million—a person who has $2 million and needs every bit of that money to sustain their retirement lifestyle might have a very high emotional risk tolerance, but their capacity to take that risk is actually very small. If they hit a massive downturn, it directly threatens their baseline security.
Garrett: On the other side, let's say we have an $8 million retiree that's living on $120,000. They've got Social Security, maybe a pension, and they're only pulling out an RMD or maybe $50,000 to $60,000 in investment income. They may be emotionally averse to risk and might not want to see their account drop by 20%, but if they have $8 million and it drops by 20%, they still have plenty of money to sustain every single goal. That's what we're talking about this morning: risk tolerance as a psychological disposition versus risk capacity as a structural reality. This SpaceX conversation we've been having over the past month highlights the fear of loss versus the attitude of wanting to maximize gains. The question becomes: how much do you want to invest in something that is highly volatile? For clients who have a large risk capacity, that becomes an open conversation. For clients that have a low risk capacity, the conversation has to be that we could do that, but it might jeopardize your long-term sustainable income. We are not anti-IPO investing, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out, but capacity changes the entire tone of the conversation.
Adam: Tying it back into SpaceX, that's why this conversation makes so much sense. Almost everyone that reached out to us had a higher risk tolerance. Little Aunt Sue who stuffs her money under the mattress wasn't calling about the IPO. It was the higher risk tolerance people who called in, and that's why we steered the conversation toward looking at their overall financial plan to see if it fits. Could this be a grand slam using funds you hadn't planned to use anyway, which jumps the legacy footprint for your kids? Or are we squeezing every last drop out of the fruit just to hit the income you need? If it's the latter, this doesn't make sense for you. That's why the risk capacity conversation is so important. We had four or five people reach out with pretty similar risk tolerances, but vastly different risk capacities, which completely shifted how we handled the conversation with them.
Garrett: Yeah, I totally agree.
Adam: That's a good segue. We do tax-return-driven financial planning. We love to help people navigate Roth conversions, QCDs, and all kinds of different strategies. We've got a year-end tax planning checklist that sits right behind Garrett here, and it's linked in the description below whether you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watching on YouTube. Go check it out. It is worth throwing your email address in there to get the weekly content updates, case studies, and instructions on how to evaluate tax-return-driven financial planning on your own. One of the really unique things about risk capacity is the conversation we have with clients in this $2 million to $8 million space where we can look at different pockets of money and assign different risk capacities to them.
Garrett: Yeah, absolutely.
Adam: Perfect. So maybe there's some IRA money that we're living off of that needs one level of insulation, and maybe we have some Roth funds that we aren't planning to touch during our lifetime. How do you judge risk capacity for different pockets of money and earmark them for different purposes?
Garrett: Regardless of the situation, having a neutral third party you can speak your mind to—someone who can help you wade through choices—is important. Risk capacity and risk tolerance are hard things to figure out about ourselves. Risk tolerance is intuitive; people have done a hundred risk tolerance questionnaires in their lifetimes as investors. But this idea of risk capacity completely changes the paradigm of how you invest. I've had a couple of longer-term clients this week where the penny has dropped a bit on this concept. This happens for clients that have greater risk capacity and realize they aren't going to spend all of their money. They are becoming convinced that the market works over the long term, even as we recognize we are in a long bull market over the past 10 to 15 years and are due for a pullback at some point. But they believe that if they have a 10-year, 20-year, or 25-year runway, the market is going to do its work.
Garrett: All of a sudden, let's say a couple has $4 million saved. Maybe $2.5 million is in a traditional IRA, $500,000 is in a brokerage account, and they've got $1 million in a Roth IRA that they've systematically converted over time. Let's say they're a balanced investor. From a risk tolerance perspective, they feel comfortable saying that if the market goes down 40%, they'd be fine with a 20% drop in their own accounts. If the market goes up 40%, they're okay only getting a 20% gain. They feel secure with that stereotypical 50/50 retiree portfolio. But what if we knew that out of that $4 million, the accounts are going to grow over time, and a significant portion is going to be left over for a surviving spouse or children down the road? What if we recognized that while their emotional risk tolerance is balanced, their structural risk capacity is exceptionally high? When people start thinking this way, they stop treating the $4 million as a single monolithic block. They start asking: what if I took more equity risk with the money I never expect to spend? The Roth IRA becomes a really appealing asset class to take more equity risk if you have a 10-year timeline or more. I did this yesterday with a client; we increased the equity risk inside the Roth IRA—where things grow entirely tax-free for the long term—while simultaneously lowering the equity risk inside the traditional IRA. If we average it all out across the entire household, we still land exactly at their balanced emotional comfort level, but we're intentionally leveraging the long-term capacity of the Roth IRA. If the Roth drops 40% in a bad year, that's okay, because we have a 15 or 20-year timeline before it's accessed, and if it passes to kids, they get an additional 10 years of tax-free growth after that. I'm having more conversations with clients about recognizing where there is excess in your portfolio, especially in the Roth IRA, and optimizing that pocket for higher growth if you don't need the income.
Adam: The question then begs: how do we do this? How do we look at our risk capacity? Risk tolerance is intuitive—how do I feel, am I sick to my stomach thinking about a 20% drop, or do I just keep letting it roll? How would you advise a do-it-yourselfer at home, or even someone wanting to work with us, to evaluate their risk capacity so they can implement it accurately?
Garrett: I think about this all the time. If you call us up or are evaluating a current advisor, our process for evaluating risk is very different from what traditional firms use. Clients who came on board two years ago have a very different experience than somebody that came on board 10 years ago because the way we extract this information has completely shifted. I remember when I started at Providence, we used a standard 10-question risk tolerance questionnaire. It was so predictable. Option A was the most conservative—keep it all in the bank or stuff it in a mattress. Option D was "I don't care if I lose half of it, I want to make as much money as possible."
Adam: And the two choices in the middle were almost identical. You wonder why those two are even options on the page.
Garrett: The investor quickly realizes that if they select A, they get a low score, and if they select D, they get a 100. We used that for years, but coming out of engineering school, I kept thinking there has to be a better way to assess risk than a 10-question multiple-choice form. This should be a deep discussion about past habits, historical actions during market crashes, and specific lifestyle goals. We did that for a long time, and then we tried out an in-depth risk tolerance software. It was an extended 20-question process that took about 25 minutes to fill out, analyzing different components of risk appetite and how you feel when accounts drop. I would get back a 10-page report, but I was still left asking: so what? From a planning perspective, it was hard to justify the final allocation based entirely on that output. It has been an evolution, and I eventually realized there was actually some wisdom in keeping the intake short, simple, and moving the real work to the planning phase.
Adam: I love our clients and our listeners, but if we send someone a book report of multiple-choice questions, they're going to push it to the side. They are hiring us to lead the process, not to give them homework on questions they might not fully understand.
Garrett: Exactly, that's the wild card. The people who hire us want us to listen to their situation and build an appropriate model, rather than having the entire investment strategy driven by a computerized test. So, in 2026, we are back to a simpler 10-question questionnaire that clients can fill out on their phone in about 60 seconds. We keep that on file for compliance and compliance tracking, and it's a helpful barometer if a major life event like a retirement or divorce occurs.
Garrett: But once I get that score back, I answer an additional set of structural questions behind the scenes that the client never sees. I am adding a second dimension to the calculation by evaluating their actual financial capacity. Are they retired? Do they have $5 million but live very frugally? What is the actual safety net behind this family? Do they have an upcoming inheritance, or are they gifting money out? I answer five to seven structural questions as an advisor to attach a clear risk capacity score of low, medium, or high. This creates a two-dimensional matrix. You might have a client with a high emotional risk tolerance score of 75, but my analysis shows they have a low structural risk capacity. If I go into a review meeting with that data, it completely changes the conversation because I know we have to guard against the stomach overriding the reality of the spreadsheet.
Adam: It makes me think of a mower analogy. If we have any country boys listening who cut their own grass, or if you bought one of those big zero-turn lawnmowers for retirement, you've got the two control handles. If you push both forward together, you move straight ahead. When you are cutting around a tree stump, sometimes you lean harder on one handle than the other. If a client has all the risk capacity in the world but low emotional tolerance—they just want to sleep at night and don't care about squeezing every last dollar out of the portfolio—we lean heavily on their risk tolerance handle to keep them comfortable. But if a client wants to put it all on black and risk it all, we have to pull back on that handle because their structural risk capacity shows that a bad year could put them in a very sticky situation. Risk tolerance and risk capacity aren't in competition; they are the two handles that work together to guide the portfolio down the field.
Garrett: Coming in with a lawnmower analogy! Look at that.
Adam: It's summertime, you have to get out there. I have young kids, so I finally learned why men love to mow—it's to get out of the house in the quiet for an hour. But the zero-turn handles show exactly how tolerance and capacity work together to hit investment goals.
Garrett: Sometimes as financial planners, we play the role of the wet blanket coming in to tell you why an investment doesn't fit your plan. But other times, we get to be the ones who give you the green light to go enjoy your wealth. If a qualified client calls about the SpaceX IPO and wants to invest $50,000 or $100,000, and their risk capacity is high, we can look at the data and say that is not going to change your long-term security. Go right ahead. I've told clients before: your spreadsheet shows you could comfortably buy four Corvettes right now, so why are you only buying one? Part of our job is providing a dose of reality when capacity is low, but the other part is granting permission to spend and be generous when capacity is abundant. That is why I love this profession.
Adam: Absolutely. I appreciate these conversations because the wealth psychology fills in the gray areas around the technical tax planning we do every week. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Don't forget to download the year-end tax planning checklist in the description below. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts—we just launched video functionality over there, so it's essentially like YouTube directly inside the Apple Podcasts app. We appreciate you following along and helping us share this advanced planning message with more high-net-worth families. Have a great week. I'm Adam Reed. This is Garrett Crawford. We're Retirement Tax Matters.
Garrett: See you next time.