Coffee & Compounding

The Power Law of Collectibles: What Venture Capital Taught Me About My Card Collection

Drew Scott — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:03:39 GMT

I was 9 years old standing in Target, holding a pack of 2007 Topps Series 1 Baseball cards. Three bucks.

My mom probably thought she was buying me a distraction. She was actually buying me my first alternative investment.

I didn’t know that then. I just wanted a pack of cards. I did not have a thesis.

I had a three dollar bill and a desire to see what I would pull next.

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Most Bets Lose. That’s the Point.

Peter Thiel wrote in Zero to One that venture capital returns follow the power law.

Most investments in a VC fund fail. A few break even. One or two pay for every loss in the portfolio and then some.

Collectibles work the same way.

If you bought a full set of 1990 Marvel Impel cards back then, most of those cards are worth a couple bucks today. Maybe less.

The common hero, the random villain cards, the checklist inserts. They sit in a box. They don’t move.

But a PSA 10 Spider-Man from that same set? Around $1,425. From a $5 pack.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power law. One card carrying the weight of the entire box.

The Math Behind Every Winning Card

A venture capitalist might invest in 30 startups knowing 20 will fail outright, 8 will return modest money, and maybe 2 will return 50x or 100x. Those two winners make the fund.

Sports cards, comics, and collectibles follow the same distribution.

Most rookie cards from any draft class are worth less than the pack they came in within five years.

But the one kid who becomes a generational talent turns a $2 card into a $2,000 card. Or a $20,000 card. Or more.

Most comics from the 1990s speculation boom are worthless. Millions of copies, everyone treating them like investments, polybagged with holographic covers. But a clean copy of Amazing Spider-Man #300 (first Venom) from that same era? A CGC 9.8 has sold for over $7,000.

And the real grail, Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man appearance, 1962), sold for $3.6 million at Heritage Auctions.

The losers in your collection don’t matter if you hold the right winners long enough.

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Concentration Beats Diversification

Thiel’s point wasn’t just “some bets win big.” It was that the power law is so extreme, the single best investment in a fund outperforms all the others combined.

Not by a little. By orders of magnitude.

That means the strategy can’t be diversification for its own sake. In VC, you don’t spread $10 million across 100 companies equally and hope.

You make concentrated bets on things you believe have exponential upside, then you hold.

Same with collectibles. The guy who bought every base card from every set in 1993 and stored them in a closet has a closet full of cardboard.

The guy who spotted a raw Michael Jordan 1993 Topps Finest Refractor at a card shop and paid to get it graded? He’s sitting on an asset.

The skill isn’t buying more. It’s recognizing which pieces have the characteristics of exponential winners:

Low population counts — PSA 10s where only a handful exist
First appearances of characters or players who become culturally permanent
Key rookie cards from athletes with generational talent
Condition rarity — high grade copies of books that were read, not stored

That’s the same evaluation a VC does. Small supply, massive potential demand, something structurally different about this one.

The Estate Planning Blindspot

This is where collectibles investing and financial planning collide, and it’s the part nobody talks about.

You spend 30 years building a collection. You know what’s valuable. You know the PSA 10 Jordan card is worth $5,000 and the raw base cards are worth $0.50.

You know which long boxes have the keys and which ones are filler. You remember your cost basis because you remember what you paid.

Your family doesn’t know any of that.

When you die, your spouse or your kids inherit a collection they can’t evaluate. Without documentation, they’re walking into a few real problems:

They can’t tell the winners from the losers. That’s the power law problem again. 95% of the collection might be worth almost nothing. The 5% that carries real value is mixed in with everything else. Without a clear inventory, the exponential winners get sold in a garage sale box for $20. I’ve seen it happen.

Cost basis disappears. Buy a comic for $50 in 1985 and it’s worth $15,000 today, your heirs get a stepped-up basis at date-of-death value. But only if that value is documented. Without records, the IRS can challenge the valuation. Without receipts, your family can’t prove what was paid. That’s a tax dispute that costs more than the item was ever worth.

Estate valuation gets messy. The IRS expects fair market value for estate tax purposes. A collection with no appraisal and no inventory is a target. Overvalue it, the estate pays too much tax. Undervalue it, you’re inviting an audit.

Forced liquidation kills returns. If the estate needs liquidity and nobody knows what they’re holding, the whole collection gets dumped to a dealer at 30 to 50 cents on the dollar. The power law winners get liquidated right alongside the worthless base cards because nobody took the time to separate them.

A collection with no documentation is wealth your family will never find.

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Three Things Your Family Needs in Writing

If your collection is worth more than a few thousand dollars, here’s the plan.

An inventory with values. List the key pieces. Note the grade, the population count, the approximate market value, and where you’d sell it — Heritage, eBay, Goldin, a local dealer. Update it once a year. Your family doesn’t need to understand pop counts. They need to know which items to protect and which ones aren’t worth the effort.

A designated advisor or dealer. Name someone your family can call who understands the market. A trusted dealer, a consignment house, a fellow collector who knows values. Put their contact info in the document. Your spouse shouldn’t have to learn the difference between CGC and CBCS grading on the worst day of their life.

Integration with your estate plan. Your attorney should know the collection exists. If it’s significant, get a formal appraisal for estate tax purposes. Decide now whether specific pieces go to specific people. If your kid loves Marvel, maybe the Spider-Man keys go to them and the sports cards get sold. Make those calls now so nobody has to guess later.

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The Power Law Works Both Ways

In VC, the upside of getting it right is generational wealth from one company. The downside of getting it wrong is a total loss, but the fund survives because the winners cover it.

Collectibles work the same way on the upside. The $5 pack that produces a $100,000 Jordan card. The Amazing Fantasy #15 that goes from cover price to $3.6 million. The rookie card pulled from a blaster box that funds your kid’s first car.

But the downside carries an extra layer VC doesn’t have. If you die without a plan, your family can’t tell the rare parallel from the base checklist card.

The power law winners are invisible to someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at.

How you treat your collection today is how your family will be forced to treat it tomorrow.

The collection you spent decades building deserves thirty minutes of documentation.

Open a spreadsheet tonight. List your five best pieces. Note the grade, the value, and who should get first call. That’s the whole assignment for today.

See you next time, cheers!

Disclosures:

This blog contains general information that may not be suitable for everyone. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized investment advice. There is no guarantee that the views and opinions expressed in this blog will come to pass. Investing in the stock market involves gains and losses and may not be suitable for all investors. Information presented herein is subject to change without notice and should not be considered as a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Revolutionary Wealth LLC does not offer legal or tax advice. Please consult the appropriate professional regarding your individual circumstance. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Trust + IRA Planning After the SECURE Act: What Changed and What to Do About It

Drew Scott — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:03:29 GMT

What Is the SECURE Act and Why Does It Matter for Trusts?

The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act became law on January 1, 2020. Among several provisions, it eliminated the single most valuable tax-planning tool for inherited IRAs: the lifetime stretch.

Before 2020, a non-spouse beneficiary — your child, a trust, a grandchild — could inherit your IRA and stretch required minimum distributions (RMDs) over their own life expectancy. A 40-year-old inheriting a $1 million IRA might take small distributions over 40+ years, letting the bulk of the account continue growing tax-deferred.

The SECURE Act replaced the lifetime stretch with a 10-year rule. Now, most non-spouse beneficiaries must empty an inherited IRA within 10 years of the original owner’s death. No exceptions for trusts. No exceptions for large accounts.

That single change created a tax problem hiding inside thousands of estate plans across the country — including many in Arkansas.

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What Is the 10-Year Rule for Inherited IRAs?

Under the SECURE Act’s 10-year rule, most non-spouse beneficiaries must withdraw the entire balance of an inherited IRA by December 31 of the 10th year following the original account holder’s death.

There are limited exceptions. Eligible designated beneficiaries — surviving spouses, minor children (until they reach the age of majority), disabled or chronically ill individuals, and beneficiaries not more than 10 years younger than the deceased — can still use the stretch. Everyone else falls under the 10-year rule.

For individuals inheriting directly, this is manageable. You have flexibility in how much you withdraw each year, and distributions are taxed at your personal rate.

For trusts inheriting an IRA, the math gets ugly fast.

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Why Do Trust Tax Brackets Create a Problem?

Here is the core issue most estate plans miss:

A trust hits the top federal income tax bracket of 37% at roughly $16,000 of taxable income.

An individual does not reach the 37% bracket until their taxable income exceeds approximately $609,000.

Read that again. A trust pays the highest federal tax rate on income above $16,000. An individual does not pay that rate until $609,000.

When a trust is named as the IRA beneficiary and that trust is an accumulation trust — meaning it holds distributions inside the trust rather than passing them through to beneficiaries — every dollar of IRA income above that $16,000 threshold gets taxed at the maximum rate.

Under the old stretch rules, this was less painful. Small RMDs spread over decades might stay below the compressed bracket thresholds.

Under the 10-year rule, even a modest inherited IRA generates distributions well above $16,000 per year when the account must be emptied in a decade.

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What Is an Accumulation Trust vs. a Conduit Trust?

Two types of trusts commonly receive inherited IRAs:

Accumulation trust: The trustee has discretion over whether to distribute IRA withdrawals to the beneficiary or keep them inside the trust. This provides asset protection, creditor protection, and spending control. The tradeoff: any income retained inside the trust is taxed at the trust’s compressed rates.

Conduit trust: The trustee is required to pass all IRA distributions through to the beneficiary in the year they are received. Because the income flows to the individual beneficiary, it is taxed at the beneficiary’s individual rate — not the trust’s compressed rate. The tradeoff: you lose control. The money reaches the beneficiary directly.

Before 2020, accumulation trusts made sense for IRA planning because stretch distributions kept annual income modest. After the SECURE Act, accumulation trusts holding large inherited IRAs can generate significant income trapped at the 37% rate.

Who Has This Problem?

Here is the irony: the clients most affected by this change are the ones who planned most carefully.

They have the largest IRAs — often $500,000 to $2 million or more. They created trusts specifically to protect beneficiaries from spending problems, divorce exposure, creditor claims, or poor financial decision-making. They hired attorneys, paid for documents, and built an estate plan around rules that no longer exist.

If your trust was drafted before 2020, it was written for a stretch IRA world. That world ended.

How Much More Tax Does a Trust Pay? Case Studies

Let’s compare the tax impact of an individual inheriting an IRA directly versus an accumulation trust inheriting the same IRA, both under the 10-year rule.

For simplicity, we will assume level distributions over 10 years with no growth, and we will use 2024 federal brackets. State taxes would add to the burden. These are illustrative examples, not projections.

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Example 1: $500,000 Inherited IRA

Individual inheriting directly: $50,000 per year in distributions. Assuming this is the beneficiary’s only income and they take the standard deduction, effective federal tax rate is approximately 10-12%. Estimated annual federal tax: roughly $4,000-$5,500.

Accumulation trust: $50,000 per year retained inside the trust. The first ~$16,000 is taxed at lower rates. Everything above that hits 37%. Estimated annual federal tax: roughly $15,000-$16,000.

Difference over 10 years: approximately $100,000 in additional federal taxes paid by the trust.

Example 2: $1,000,000 Inherited IRA

Individual inheriting directly: $100,000 per year. Effective federal tax rate approximately 15-18%. Estimated annual federal tax: roughly $15,000-$17,000.

Accumulation trust: $100,000 per year retained inside the trust. Vast majority taxed at 37%. Estimated annual federal tax: roughly $33,000-$35,000.

Difference over 10 years: approximately $170,000-$180,000 in additional federal taxes.

Example 3: $2,000,000 Inherited IRA

Individual inheriting directly: $200,000 per year. Effective federal tax rate approximately 24-28%. Estimated annual federal tax: roughly $40,000-$45,000.

Accumulation trust: $200,000 per year retained inside the trust. Nearly all income above $16,000 taxed at 37%. Estimated annual federal tax: roughly $70,000-$72,000.

Difference over 10 years: approximately $260,000-$270,000 in additional federal taxes.

These numbers represent federal income tax only. Add Arkansas state income tax and the gap widen further.

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What Are the Two Main Strategies to Fix This?

If you have a trust named as an IRA beneficiary and you are still alive, you have options. Two strategies stand out.

Strategy 1: Roth Conversions During Your Lifetime

A Roth conversion moves money from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. You pay income tax on the converted amount in the year of conversion. After that, the money grows tax-free and comes out tax-free — for you and for your beneficiaries.

Here is why this matters for trust planning:

When a trust inherits a Roth IRA, the 10-year rule still applies. The trust must still empty the account within 10 years. But because Roth distributions are not taxable income, the trust’s compressed brackets are irrelevant.

No taxable income means no tax at 37%. The trust receives the distributions, controls them according to your wishes, and owes nothing to the IRS on those dollars.

The key is doing the conversions during your lifetime, ideally between ages 59½ and 72 (before RMDs begin). This is the window where many retirees and business owners have the most control over their taxable income. The sweet spot for conversions is filling up lower tax brackets — converting enough each year to stay below the 24% or 32% bracket rather than letting the trust pay 37% later.

For a business owner approaching retirement, this can be combined with other planning: timing the sale of a business, managing cash balance plan distributions, or coordinating with capital gains from investment accounts.

Strategy 2: Permanent Life Insurance Inside an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust (ILIT)

If Roth conversions alone cannot solve the problem — because the IRA is too large, the owner’s current income is too high, or the timeline is too short — permanent life insurance inside an ILIT is the second tool.

Here is how it works:

An irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) owns a permanent life insurance policy on the IRA owner’s life. The IRA owner makes gifts to the ILIT, which uses those gifts to pay premiums. When the owner dies, the death benefit pays to the ILIT income-tax-free.

The ILIT provides the same control features the original trust was designed for: spending protection, creditor protection, divorce protection. But because a life insurance death benefit is not taxable income, the trust’s compressed tax brackets do not apply.

This strategy effectively replaces some or all of the IRA with a vehicle that delivers dollars to your beneficiaries through a trust structure without triggering the 37% bracket.

The IRA still passes to beneficiaries — potentially directly, where the individual tax rates apply — while the ILIT handles the asset protection and control functions the trust was originally designed for.

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What Should You Do If Your Trust Was Drafted Before 2020?

If your estate plan was created before the SECURE Act, start here:

1. Review your IRA beneficiary designations. Confirm who (or what trust) is listed as the beneficiary on every retirement account. Your will does not control your IRA. The beneficiary designation form does.

2. Ask your attorney whether your trust is an accumulation trust or a conduit trust. This determines how inherited IRA distributions will be taxed.

3. Model the 10-year distribution schedule. Have your financial advisor run the numbers on what the trust will owe in taxes under the 10-year rule at current IRA balances. Use the worked examples above as a starting framework.

4. Evaluate Roth conversions. Determine how much you can convert each year without pushing into a bracket higher than what the trust would pay. In most cases, converting at 24% or even 32% is better than letting the trust pay 37%.

5. Assess whether life insurance fills a gap. If the IRA is large enough that Roth conversions alone will not fully address the problem, explore whether a permanent policy inside an ILIT makes sense.

6. Update your trust document. Even if the strategy does not change, the trust language may need to be revised to reflect the 10-year rule. Trusts drafted for the stretch world may contain provisions that no longer function as intended.

The Bottom Line

The SECURE Act did not eliminate trusts from IRA planning. It changed the math.

If you built your estate plan before 2020, the trust provisions you paid for were designed around a tax law that no longer exists. That does not mean your plan is broken. It means it needs to be re-examined in light of new rules.

The clients who feel this most are the ones who planned most carefully — the largest IRAs, the most protective trust language, the most thoughtful estate plans. Those are the plans worth updating.

You still have time to act. Roth conversions, life insurance, updated trust language — these are available tools.

The key is modeling the numbers before a death forces your beneficiaries into a 10-year window they did not plan for.

See you next time, cheers!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Maximizing your Social Security Benefits assumes foreknowledge of your date of death. If as an example you wait to claim a higher monthly benefit amount but predecease your average life expectancy, it would have been better to claim your benefits at an earlier age with reduced benefits.

Converting an employer plan account or Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA is a taxable event. Increased taxable income from the Roth IRA conversion may have several consequences including but not limited to, a need for additional tax withholding or estimated tax payments, the loss of certain tax deductions and credits, and higher taxes on Social Security benefits and higher Medicare premiums. Be sure to consult with a qualified tax advisor before making any decisions regarding your IRA.

Mutual Funds and Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) are sold by prospectus. Please consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses carefully before investing. The prospectus, which contains this and other information about the investment company, can be obtained from the Fund Company or your financial professional. Be sure to read the prospectus carefully before deciding whether to invest. An investment in the Fund involves risk, including possible loss of principal.

Indexed annuities are insurance contracts that, depending on the contract, may offer a guaranteed annual interest rate and some participation growth, if any, of a stock market index. Such contracts have substantial variation in terms, costs of guarantees and features and may cap participation or returns in significant ways. Any guarantees offered are backed by the financial strength of the insurance company. Surrender charges apply if not held to the end of the term. Withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income and, if taken prior to 59 ½, a 10% federal tax penalty. Investors are cautioned to carefully review an indexed annuity for its features, costs, risks, and how the variables are calculated. c) If this includes fixed and indexed annuities, you can add this combined version: Fixed Annuities are long term insurance contracts and there is a surrender charge imposed generally during the first 5 to 7 years that you own the annuity contract. Indexed annuities are insurance contracts that, depending on the contract, may offer a guaranteed annual interest rate and some participation growth, if any, of a stock market index. Such contracts have substantial variation in terms, costs of guarantees and features and may cap participation or returns in significant ways. Investors are cautioned to carefully review an indexed annuity for its features, costs, risks, and how the variables are calculated. Any guarantees offered are backed by the financial strength of the insurance company. Surrender charges apply if not held to the end of the term. Withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income and, if taken prior to 59 ½, a 10% federal tax penalty.

The projections or other information generated by Monte Carlo analysis tools regarding the likelihood of various investment outcomes are hypothetical in nature, are based on assumptions that you provide which could prove to be inaccurate over time, do not reflect actual investment results, and are not guarantees of future results, but they can be complemented with additional calculators and tax planning tools. Results may vary with each use and over time.

Securities and investment advisory services offered through Integrity Alliance, LLC, Member SIPC. Integrity Wealth is a marketing name for Integrity Alliance, LLC. Revolutionary Wealth LLC, is not affiliated with Integrity Wealth.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

The Roth Conversions + QCD Strategy Retirees Keep Overlooking

Drew Scott — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:03:05 GMT

If you’re between 59 and 67, sitting on a large traditional IRA, and you already give to charity every year — there’s a tax strategy hiding in plain sight that most advisors never connect the dots on.

It pairs two separate tools — Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) and Roth conversions — into a single coordinated strategy that can save you tens of thousands of dollars over a retirement.

This isn’t a loophole. It’s not aggressive. It’s just smart sequencing.

Let me walk you through exactly how it works, who it’s for, and why 2026 makes the timing especially relevant.

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What Is a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD)?

A Qualified Charitable Distribution is a direct transfer from your IRA to a qualified charity. The key word is direct — the money goes straight from your IRA custodian to the charity. It never passes through your hands and never shows up as income on your tax return.

The core rules:

You must be age 70½ or older to make a QCD
The 2026 limit is $111,000 per person ($222,000 for a married couple filing jointly)
The distribution must go directly from the IRA to the charity — not to you first
QCDs satisfy your Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) for the year
QCDs come from traditional IRAs (not employer plans like 401(k)s while still employed)
The charity must be a 501(c)(3) — donor-advised funds and private foundations do not qualify

What makes QCDs powerful is what they don’t do. A QCD does not increase your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). That single fact triggers a cascade of downstream benefits:

No increase to Medicare IRMAA surcharges
No increase to the taxable percentage of Social Security benefits
No inflation of your AGI that could limit other deductions or credits
No state income tax impact (in states that follow federal AGI)

Compare that to the traditional approach: take the RMD as income, report it on your return, then claim a charitable deduction. Even if the math nets out similarly on paper, the AGI impact is completely different — and AGI drives dozens of calculations across your tax return.

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What Is a Roth Conversion?

A Roth conversion moves money from a traditional IRA (pre-tax) into a Roth IRA (after-tax). You pay income tax on the converted amount in the year you convert, but from that point forward, the money grows tax-free and comes out tax-free — for you and your heirs.

Why convert at all?

The answer comes down to one question: Will your tax rate be higher later, or lower now?

If you can convert during a window when your income is temporarily lower — say, between retirement and age 72 when RMDs begin — you can fill up lower tax brackets with converted dollars and permanently remove that money from the traditional IRA (and from future RMDs).

The goal isn’t to convert everything. The goal is to convert strategically — filling bracket space that would otherwise go unused.

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Why IRAs Are the Worst Asset to Leave Your Heirs

This is the part most people don’t think about until it’s too late.

Before the SECURE Act of 2019, a non-spouse beneficiary who inherited an IRA could stretch distributions over their own lifetime. A 35-year-old inheriting a $1 million IRA could take small distributions over 45+ years, letting the bulk of the account continue growing tax-deferred.

The SECURE Act changed that. Now, most non-spouse beneficiaries must empty an inherited IRA within 10 years of the original owner’s death. No more lifetime stretch.

Here’s why that matters: your children are likely to inherit your IRA during their peak earning years — ages 45 to 65 — when they’re already in the 32% or 37% federal tax bracket. Forcing them to liquidate a large inherited IRA on top of their existing income can push them into even higher effective rates.

A $1 million traditional IRA left to a child earning $250,000 per year doesn’t transfer $1 million in value. After federal and state taxes over that 10-year liquidation window, the actual after-tax inheritance might be $600,000 to $680,000.

IRAs are the worst asset to leave to heirs. But they’re the best asset to give to charity. Charities pay zero tax on IRA distributions. Every dollar you give via QCD transfers at full value. That’s the insight that makes this pairing strategy work.

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The Pairing Strategy: QCDs + Roth Conversions

Here’s where the two tools come together.

Step 1: Use QCDs to satisfy your charitable giving goals.

If you’re already giving $20,000, $50,000, or $100,000 per year to charity, route those gifts through QCDs instead of writing checks from your bank account. The charity gets the same amount. But your AGI drops by the full QCD amount because that income never appears on your return.

Step 2: Use the freed-up bracket space for Roth conversions.

The QCD just removed income from your AGI. That creates room — room in lower tax brackets that you can now fill with Roth conversion income. You’re converting at a lower marginal rate than you would have if the charitable distribution had hit your AGI first.

The net effect: Your charitable goals are met tax-free. Your Roth conversion happens at a lower tax rate. Your future RMDs are reduced (because both the QCD and the conversion shrink your traditional IRA balance). And your heirs inherit Roth dollars — tax-free — instead of traditional IRA dollars that would be taxed at their peak rates.

Case Study #1: Married Couple, Moderate Income

Profile: Married couple, both 72. Combined Social Security: $55,000. Pension: $30,000. RMD from combined IRAs: $80,000. They give $30,000/year to their church and local food bank.

Without the pairing strategy:

They take the $80,000 RMD as taxable income
Total gross income: $165,000
They claim a $30,000 charitable deduction (assuming they itemize)
Taxable income after standard deduction: roughly $135,000
AGI: $165,000 — this is the number that drives IRMAA, Social Security taxation, and other calculations

With the pairing strategy:

They direct $30,000 of their RMD as a QCD to their charities
Remaining taxable RMD: $50,000
Total gross income: $135,000
AGI: $135,000 — a $30,000 reduction
They now have room in the 22% bracket (which tops out at approximately $190,750 for married filing jointly in 2025) to convert an additional $30,000-$55,000 from their traditional IRA to Roth
The conversion fills bracket space at 22% instead of pushing into 24%

The result: Same charitable impact. Lower AGI. Lower IRMAA risk. And $30,000-$55,000 moved to Roth at a 22% rate — money their children will eventually inherit tax-free instead of at 32-37%.

Case Study #2: Single Retiree, Higher Income

Profile: Single, age 71. Social Security: $38,000. Pension: $45,000. RMD: $60,000. She gives $25,000/year to a university scholarship fund and her church.

Without the pairing strategy:

Total gross income: $143,000
AGI: $143,000
She’s at risk of IRMAA surcharges (the first IRMAA threshold for single filers is $106,000 in MAGI)
She’s also above the threshold where up to 85% of Social Security becomes taxable

With the pairing strategy:

She directs $25,000 of her RMD as a QCD
Remaining taxable RMD: $35,000
Total gross income: $118,000
AGI: $118,000 — still above the IRMAA threshold, but she now has room to convert $15,000-$20,000 to Roth within the 22% bracket without pushing deeper into 24%
Over 10 years, that’s $150,000-$200,000 moved to Roth at favorable rates

The result: She’s still giving the same $25,000 to charity. But her AGI is $25,000 lower, her IRMAA exposure is reduced, and she’s systematically converting IRA dollars to Roth at rates well below what her heirs would pay.

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Case Study #3: Business Owner Transitioning to Retirement

Profile: Single, age 66. Sold his business two years ago. Now living on investment income of $80,000 and taking early IRA distributions of $40,000. Traditional IRA balance: $1.8 million. He gives $50,000/year to a community foundation.

He isn’t yet 70½, so he can’t use QCDs today. But here’s the planning opportunity:

Right now (ages 66-70): He is in a low-income window. No RMDs yet. He can do aggressive Roth conversions, filling the 22% and 24% brackets — potentially converting $80,000-$120,000 per year at blended rates under 24%.

Starting at age 70½: He begins using QCDs for his $50,000 in annual charitable giving. This keeps his AGI low as RMDs begin, and he continues moderate Roth conversions in the freed bracket space.

By age 80: His traditional IRA balance has been significantly reduced. His RMDs are smaller. His Roth IRA has grown substantially — all tax-free to his heirs. And he’s given over $500,000 to charity over the decade without any of it inflating his AGI.

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The 2026 Charitable Deduction Changes and Why QCDs Matter More

Starting in 2026, Congress has introduced a new above-the-line charitable deduction for taxpayers who don’t itemize: $1,000 for single filers, $2,000 for joint filers.

On the surface, that sounds helpful. But the fine print matters:

Higher earners are capped at a 35% rate on the deduction value
There’s a 0.5% AGI floor — only gifts above that floor count
The deduction amount is modest — $1,000 or $2,000 doesn’t move the needle for someone giving $20,000+

For larger charitable givers, this new deduction is almost irrelevant. QCDs sidestep all of these limitations entirely. There’s no percentage-of-AGI cap on QCDs. No floor. No rate limitation. The income simply never exists on your return.

If you’re giving more than a few thousand dollars per year to charity and you’re over 70½, QCDs remain the cleanest, most efficient way to give — regardless of what the deduction rules look like.

The TCJA Rate Backdrop: Why Timing Matters Now

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) rate structure — with its wider brackets and lower marginal rates — is “permanent” following the 2025 legislative session. This means the 22% and 24% brackets that make Roth conversions attractive at moderate income levels are expected to persist.

However, tax law is never truly permanent. Future legislation could narrow brackets, raise rates, or change the rules around Roth accounts. The current rate environment represents a known quantity — and known quantities are what good planning is built on.

The combination of favorable conversion rates, rising QCD limits (indexed to inflation), and the SECURE Act’s 10-year rule for inherited IRAs makes the next 5-10 years a particularly strong window for this pairing strategy.

It’s Not Rocket Science, Just Revolutionary

The QCD + Roth conversion pairing strategy isn’t complicated. It’s just intentional.

You’re already giving to charity. Route those gifts through QCDs so they never hit your AGI.

Then use the bracket space you freed up to convert traditional IRA dollars to Roth — at lower rates, for tax-free growth, and for a cleaner inheritance for your family.

The tools exist. The math works. The window is open.

The only question is whether your current plan is using them together.

Hopefully this helps, see you next time!

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I do a QCD if I’m still working?
You must be 70½ or older. If you’re still working and contributing to an employer plan, your employer plan isn’t eligible for QCDs — but your traditional IRA is, as long as you’ve reached the age threshold.

Does a QCD count toward my RMD?
Yes. QCDs satisfy your Required Minimum Distribution for the year, up to the QCD limit ($111,000 per person in 2026).

Can I do a QCD to a donor-advised fund?
No. QCDs must go to operating 501(c)(3) charities. Donor-advised funds, private foundations, and supporting organizations are excluded.

How much should I convert to Roth each year?
There’s no universal answer. The right amount depends on your current income, your tax bracket, your projected future income, your state tax situation, and your estate planning goals. The principle is to fill bracket space that would otherwise go unused — not to convert so much that you push into a higher bracket than necessary.

What if I’m not 70½ yet?
If you’re between 59½ and 70½, focus on Roth conversions during your low-income window before RMDs begin. Once you reach 70½, add QCDs to the strategy.

Is there a downside to Roth conversions?
You’re paying tax now on money you could defer. If your tax rate in retirement will genuinely be lower than today’s rate, conversion may not help. But for most people with significant traditional IRA balances, the combination of rising RMDs, the SECURE Act’s 10-year rule, and potential future rate changes makes conversion worth serious consideration.

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

Same Income. Same RMDs. A 46% Higher Tax Bill.

Drew Scott — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:03:09 GMT

What Is the Widow’s Penalty?

The Widow’s Penalty is the sharp, often unexpected tax increase that hits a surviving spouse after their partner dies. It happens because the survivor keeps the same income but loses the wider tax brackets that come with filing as Married Filing Jointly.

Here is the simplest way to understand it:

A married couple earning $400,000 files jointly and sits in the 24% federal tax bracket. One spouse dies. The survivor still earns $400,000 — same RMDs, same Social Security, same investment income — but now files as Single. That same income pushes them into the 35% bracket.

Same dollars. 46% higher tax rate.

That is the Widow’s Penalty.

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Why Does This Happen?

The U.S. tax code gives married couples filing jointly significantly wider tax brackets than single filers.

When one spouse dies, the surviving spouse can still file jointly for the year of death, but beginning the following year, they must file as Single (or Head of Household if they have dependents).

The income does not shrink proportionally. In most retirement households, the surviving spouse inherits the deceased spouse’s IRA, keeps receiving Social Security (either their own or the higher survivor benefit), and continues drawing from the same investment portfolio.

All of that income now gets taxed at compressed single-filer rates.

What Does the Widow’s Penalty Look Like at Different Income Levels?

Example 1: $200,000 in Taxable Income

Married Filing Jointly:

The 22% bracket covers income up to $201,050 (2026 thresholds)
Federal tax: approximately $34,600
Effective rate: approximately 17.3%

Single Filer:

The 32% bracket kicks in at $197,300
Federal tax: approximately $42,200
Effective rate: approximately 21.1%

Tax increase: roughly $7,600 per year — a 22% jump in the tax bill on identical income.

Example 2: $400,000 in Taxable Income

Married Filing Jointly:

Most income taxed at 24%, with the top portion in 32%
Federal tax: approximately $76,200
Effective rate: approximately 19.1%

Single Filer:

Income stretches into the 35% bracket
Federal tax: approximately $104,100
Effective rate: approximately 26.0%

Tax increase: roughly $27,900 per year — a 37% jump in the tax bill.

Example 3: $600,000+ in Taxable Income

Married Filing Jointly:

Top income taxed at 35%
Federal tax: approximately $148,600
Effective rate: approximately 24.8%

Single Filer:

Income pushes well into the 37% bracket (which starts at $626,350 for single filers vs. $751,600 for MFJ)
Federal tax: approximately $193,400
Effective rate: approximately 32.2%

Tax increase: roughly $44,800 per year — a 30% jump in the tax bill.

These are federal numbers only. State income taxes, where applicable, add another layer.

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What Other Costs Does the Widow’s Penalty Trigger?

Higher income does not just mean a bigger IRS check. It cascades into at least three other areas most people never plan for.

1. Medicare IRMAA Surcharges

Medicare Part B and Part D premiums are income-tested. If your Modified Adjusted Gross Income exceeds certain thresholds, you pay Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amounts (IRMAA) — premium surcharges on top of the standard Medicare premium.

Here is where it gets painful for surviving spouses:

2026 IRMAA Thresholds (approximate):

A married couple with $400,000 in MAGI filing jointly may sit in a lower IRMAA tier or avoid surcharges entirely under the MFJ thresholds. The surviving spouse filing single at the same income level can jump two or three IRMAA tiers overnight.

At the $200,000 – $500,000 single-filer tier, that is an extra $407 per month for Part B alone — nearly $5,000 per year in Medicare surcharges that did not exist before.

2. Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT)

The 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax applies to the lesser of your net investment income or the amount by which your MAGI exceeds:

$250,000 for Married Filing Jointly
$200,000 for Single filers

A married couple earning $400,000 with $150,000 in net investment income pays NIIT on the amount over $250,000. That is $150,000 × 3.8% = $5,700.

The surviving spouse filing single with the same numbers pays NIIT on the amount over $200,000. That is $200,000 × 3.8% = $7,600.

Same income. Same investments. An extra $1,900 in NIIT — on top of everything else.

At higher income levels, the NIIT gap widens further because the single-filer threshold is $50,000 lower than MFJ.

3. Social Security Taxation

Up to 85% of Social Security benefits become taxable once your combined income exceeds:

$44,000 for Married Filing Jointly
$34,000 for Single filers

Most retirees with any meaningful retirement income already have 85% of their Social Security taxed at joint thresholds. But the compressed single-filer brackets mean those Social Security dollars are now taxed at a higher marginal rate.

A surviving spouse whose Social Security was taxed at 22% or 24% as part of a joint return may now see those same dollars taxed at 32% or 35% as a single filer. The benefit amount did not change. The tax on it did.

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What Is the Total Damage?

For a surviving spouse at $400,000 in income, the combined annual cost of the Widow’s Penalty can look like this:

Federal income tax increase: ~$27,900
Medicare IRMAA surcharges: ~$5,000+
Additional NIIT: ~$1,900
Higher tax rate on Social Security: varies, often $2,000 – $5,000+

Potential total annual cost: $35,000 to $40,000 or more — every single year.

Over a 20-year retirement, that is $700,000 to $800,000 in additional taxes and surcharges that could have been reduced or avoided with planning.

How Do You Plan for the Widow’s Penalty?

The single most powerful tool available is Roth conversions — specifically, strategic Roth conversions completed while both spouses are alive and can still file jointly.

Why Roth Conversions Work Here

When you convert traditional IRA funds to a Roth IRA, you pay income tax on the converted amount in the year of conversion. The funds then grow tax-free, and qualified withdrawals are tax-free for life.

Here is the key: the year a spouse dies, the surviving spouse can still file a joint return for that tax year. That means you still have access to the wider Married Filing Jointly brackets — one last time.

Strategic move: Execute Roth conversions on the final joint return, filling up the lower MFJ brackets. Yes, the tax bill is larger upfront. But every dollar converted to Roth is a dollar the surviving spouse will never pay single-filer rates on.

The Math on the Final Joint Return

A couple at $400,000 in income has room in the MFJ 24% bracket up to approximately $394,300 (2026). They could convert additional IRA funds at 24% or 32% on the final joint return.

If those same dollars stayed in a traditional IRA, the surviving spouse would pay 35% on them as a single filer the following year. That is an immediate 3% to 11% tax savings on every dollar converted — locked in permanently.

Over $200,000 in strategic conversions on the final joint return, that savings is $6,000 to $22,000 in the first year alone. And the converted Roth funds never generate taxable RMDs, never trigger IRMAA surcharges, and never push Social Security into higher taxation.

Roth Conversions Before Death

You do not have to wait for the final joint return. In fact, the most effective approach starts years earlier.

Couples between 59 and 67 are often in a unique window: they may have retired or reduced earned income, but RMDs have not started yet. This creates a “gap” where taxable income is lower than it will be in the future.

Filling that gap with Roth conversions each year — converting up to the top of a target bracket — systematically reduces the traditional IRA balance that will later generate RMDs for the surviving spouse.

Less in the traditional IRA means smaller RMDs. Smaller RMDs mean lower AGI. Lower AGI means lower IRMAA, less NIIT exposure, and less Social Security taxation.

The Widow’s Penalty shrinks every year you execute this strategy.

Why 80% of Widows Change Advisors

Here is a number that should concern every financial advisor and every married couple: 80% of widows change financial advisors within the first year after their husband or wife’s death.

The reasons vary. Sometimes the advisor only built a relationship with one spouse. Sometimes the surviving spouse feels unheard or overwhelmed. Sometimes the planning simply was not there — and the first tax bill as a single filer reveals it.

If your current plan does not account for the Widow’s Penalty, it is not a complete plan. The conversation about what happens to your taxes when one spouse dies should happen while both spouses are at the table, not after one is gone.

If you’ve been following my content for any amount of time, you know that my firm Revolutionary Wealth specializes in working with widows. It’s the number one group of clients that refer us to their friends and family the most because of the work we do.

If you’re a widow looking for help navigating this new season of life, click the button below to start a Fiduciary Planning Conversation.

Start a Fiduciary Planning Conversation

What Should You Do Now?

If you are a married couple between 59 and 67:
Ask your advisor to model what your tax picture looks like as a single filer. Not just the bracket change — the full cascade: IRMAA, NIIT, Social Security taxation, state taxes. If they have not brought this up, bring it up yourself.

If you are already a surviving spouse:
The damage may already be done for this tax year, but planning forward still matters. Roth conversions, charitable strategies like Qualified Charitable Distributions, and careful withdrawal sequencing can reduce the ongoing penalty year over year.

Hopefully this helps, see you next time!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

Marvel Sold Spider-Man for $7M. It's Now Worth $9 Billion.

Drew Scott — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:03:43 GMT

Spider-Man just broke the all-time domestic opening weekend record.

$360 million. One weekend. One character.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day beat Avengers: Endgame, a movie that featured dozens of Marvel characters, a decade of buildup, and arguably the most anticipated film in history.

And it did it with a single character that Marvel sold to Sony for roughly $7 million in 1999.

Let that sit for a second. $7 million. For the character that just generated $360 million in three days.

That transaction tells you everything you need to know about what happens when a business owner sells their most valuable asset without understanding what it is actually worth.

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Marvel’s Collapse

In the early 1990s, Marvel was riding high.

The comic book speculator boom had collectors buying multiple copies of every issue, convinced they were investing in the next Action Comics #1. Marvel leaned into it.

They printed variant covers, holographic editions, and limited runs designed to create artificial scarcity.

Then they made the mistake that kills a lot of businesses: they confused a revenue spike for a new baseline.

Marvel expanded aggressively. They acquired trading card companies, sticker companies, and a distribution network. They took on massive debt to fund acquisitions that had nothing to do with their core business, which was creating characters and stories that people loved.

When the speculator bubble burst in 1993, the entire comic book market collapsed. Retailers went under. Distributors folded. And Marvel, now bloated with debt from all those acquisitions, filed for bankruptcy on December 27, 1996.

The company owed over $693 million. Over one-third of employees were laid off.

Marvel had created some of the most recognizable characters on the planet and nearly destroyed itself by chasing revenue in every direction except the one that mattered.

The Fire Sale

When you are bankrupt and desperate, you sell whatever someone will buy.

Marvel started licensing its characters to Hollywood studios for what now looks like pocket change.

Fox acquired the film rights to the X-Men for $2.6 million in 1993. The X-Men franchise has since grossed over $6 billion worldwide.

Sony locked up Spider-Man for roughly $7 million in 1999. The Spider-Man films have generated over $9 billion in global box office revenue. Brand New Day alone may clear $2 billion before it leaves theaters.

Other characters went to other studios. Blade. The Fantastic Four. Hulk distribution rights to Universal. Daredevil and Ghost Rider to Fox. Punisher to Lionsgate.

Marvel took the cash because they needed it to survive. But the terms of those deals meant that as long as the studios kept making films, they kept the rights. Marvel had sold its crown jewels on terms that gave someone else the upside forever.

This is exactly what happens when a business owner sells under pressure without understanding the long-term value of what they are giving away.

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The Bet That Changed Everything

Here is where the story gets remarkable, and where the real business lesson lives.

By the mid-2000s, Marvel had reorganized out of bankruptcy. They still had their comic book publishing. They still had merchandise licensing. And they still had the film rights to a handful of characters that no studio had bothered to buy.

Iron Man. Captain America. Thor. Black Widow. Hawkeye. The characters that, at the time, most people outside of comic book readers had never heard of.

Marvel looked at what they had left and made a decision that most people thought was insane.

Instead of licensing those remaining characters to a studio for a safe upfront fee, they decided to make the movies themselves. Marvel Studios secured a $525 million credit facility from Merrill Lynch, putting up the film rights to ten of their remaining characters as collateral.

If the first movie flopped, Marvel would lose those characters too. They would have nothing left.

The first movie was Iron Man. May 2008. Robert Downey Jr. A character that general audiences did not know, played by an actor that Hollywood had written off.

It grossed $585 million worldwide.

Marvel proved that the value was never in any single character. The value was in the system. The storytelling. The universe. The ability to connect characters across films in ways no studio had ever attempted.

They took the B-list characters that nobody wanted to buy and built the most valuable entertainment franchise in history.

Disney Pays $4 Billion

One year after Iron Man, Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009.

Think about those numbers together.

Fox paid $2.6 million for the X-Men. Sony paid $7 million for Spider-Man. Disney paid $4 billion for everything that was left.

Why? Because Disney was not buying characters. They were buying a system, a universe that had proven it could turn any character into a billion-dollar property.

The MCU has since generated over $30 billion in worldwide box office alone. That does not include merchandise, theme parks, streaming content, or licensing.

Disney’s $4 billion investment has returned more than seven times over in box office revenue alone, and the machine is still running.

What Business Owners Can Learn from This

Marvel’s story is not just an entertainment history lesson. It is a business valuation case study.

Know what your core asset actually is. Marvel nearly destroyed itself by diversifying into trading cards, stickers, and distribution. The core asset was always the characters and the stories. Everything else was a distraction. If you own a business, the first question is: what is the thing that actually drives the value? Not the revenue. The value.

Do not sell under pressure without understanding what you are giving away. Marvel sold Spider-Man for $7 million because they were desperate. That character is now worth billions. Business owners who sell during a downturn, a health scare, or a partnership dispute almost always leave money on the table. Sometimes generational money.

The value is in the system, not the individual pieces. Disney did not pay $4 billion for Iron Man or Captain America. They paid for the interconnected universe, the production system, the storytelling engine that could take any character and turn it into a global franchise. If your business depends entirely on you, on one product, or on one client, the market will price it accordingly.

Bet on what you have, not what you lost. After losing Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, Marvel could have accepted its fate as a licensing company collecting small royalty checks. Instead, they bet $525 million on the characters nobody else wanted. Most business owners, after losing a major client or a key employee, play defense. The ones who win are the ones who look at what they still have and go all in.

Timing matters more than most people think. Marvel could not have made Iron Man in 1998. The technology was not there, the market was not ready, and the company was not stable enough to take the risk. They waited until the conditions were right, built the team, secured the financing, and executed. In business, knowing when to act is often more important than knowing what to do.

Sony paid $7 million for Spider-Man. That character just put up $360 million in a single weekend.

The question is not whether your business is valuable. The question is whether you know exactly how valuable it is, and whether you are building it or giving it away.

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This is not Spider-Man’s rookie card, but it depicts a villain in Brand New Day.

The Spider-Man Rookie Card

This brings me to something I have been talking about in the collectibles space.

Spider-Man’s rookie card. Total PSA graded population across all grades: 350.

That is it. 350 copies graded in existence.

Meanwhile, Pokémon cards with population counts of 6,000 are trading at the same price or higher.

Spider-Man is one of the most recognizable characters in the history of pop culture. Sixty-plus years of comics, films, merchandise, and media. An IP that has generated tens of billions of dollars. And the total graded population of his rookie card is 350.

The gap between cultural significance and collectible market pricing is enormous right now.

At some point, someone who grew up watching every Marvel movie is going to ask: “Is there a Spider-Man rookie card? What does that cost?”

That moment has not happened at scale yet. But with Brand New Day breaking every record in sight, it is getting closer.

The same pattern that made Marvel’s IP undervalued in the 1990s is showing up in the collectibles market today. People are not seeing the asset clearly yet.

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

See you next time, cheers!

Disclosures:

The 2026 Senior Bonus Deduction

Drew Scott — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:01:25 GMT

Congress doesn’t often hand retirees free money. In 2025, they did.

It’s called the Senior Bonus Deduction, tucked into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Pub. L. 119-21, §70103), and it’s worth up to $6,000 per person age 65 or older.

Most of what’s been written about it stops at that number. That’s not enough.

The real value depends on your income, your filing status, and how you plan around it over the next four years.

Grab your mug, pull up a chair. Let’s get into what actually matters here.

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A New Deduction, Not the Same Old One

The Senior Bonus Deduction is a new above-the-line deduction of up to $6,000 for taxpayers age 65 and older.

It was created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025.

“Above the line” is the part everyone skips past, and it’s the part that matters most.

This deduction is claimed on Schedule 1-A (Additional Deductions), which means it reduces your adjusted gross income directly.

You don’t need to itemize to get it. Standard deduction takers and itemizers both qualify.

Married filing jointly, both spouses 65 or older? The combined maximum is $12,000.

Four Years. Not Forever. One Filing Status Is Completely Locked Out.

The deduction applies for tax years 2025 through 2028. It expires after December 31, 2028, unless Congress extends it.

That’s a four-year window to plan around. Not a decade. Four years.

You must be 65 or older during the tax year to qualify. Single filers, head of household filers, and married filing jointly filers are all eligible.

Married filing separately filers are not. Doesn’t matter what your income is. You’re excluded, full stop.

Where the Deduction Starts Disappearing

The deduction phases out based on your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI). For every $1,000 of MAGI above the threshold, you lose $60 of the deduction.

Single and head of household filers: Phase-out begins at $75,000 MAGI. Fully gone at $175,000.

Married filing jointly: Phase-out begins at $150,000 MAGI. Fully gone at $250,000.

Here’s the math in plain terms. A single filer with $100,000 in MAGI is $25,000 over the $75,000 threshold. That’s 25 x $60, or $1,500 gone. Their $6,000 deduction drops to $4,500.

A married couple filing jointly with $200,000 in MAGI is $50,000 over the $150,000 threshold. That’s 50 x $60, or $3,000 gone per person. Each spouse’s deduction drops from $6,000 to $3,000.

Combined: $6,000 instead of $12,000. Half the benefit, gone, just from where the income landed.

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Two Age-Based Breaks, Not One

This is where most people get lost, so slow down here.

There are now two separate age-based tax benefits, and they run independently of each other.

The existing age add-on under IRC §63(f) has been around for years. It adds $2,000 to the standard deduction for single filers 65+, or $1,600 per person for married filers 65+. It only helps if you take the standard deduction.

The new Senior Bonus Deduction is a separate $6,000 above-the-line deduction. It works whether you itemize or take the standard deduction.

Both apply at the same time.

Take a married couple, both 65+, MAGI under the phase-out:

Standard deduction (2025): $32,300

Existing age add-on: $1,600 x 2 = $3,200

New Senior Bonus Deduction: $6,000 x 2 = $12,000

Total: $47,500 in deductions

That’s $15,200 in age-based deductions stacked on top of the standard deduction.

At a 22% marginal rate, that’s $3,344 in real tax savings, just from being 65 or older.

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Itemizers Finally Get Their Cut

Before this law, age-based deductions only helped people who took the standard deduction.

If you itemized because of state income taxes, mortgage interest, or charitable giving, the §63(f) add-on did nothing for you. Zero.

The Senior Bonus Deduction fixes that. Because it sits above the line, it lowers your AGI before you even get to the standard-vs-itemize decision.

Itemizers get an age-based break for the first time.

Take a 67-year-old itemizer with $90,000 in MAGI. Claim the full $6,000 deduction and AGI drops to $84,000.

That lower number flows into everything downstream: taxable income, IRMAA, Social Security taxation, and eligibility for other income-tested benefits.

The Roth Conversion Math Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s the part almost every article on this topic skips completely.

Roth conversions add to your MAGI. Convert enough to push past $75,000 (single) or $150,000 (joint), and this deduction starts eroding at $60 per $1,000.

So the real planning question isn’t “should I convert.” It’s “how much can I convert and still keep the full deduction.”

Say a married couple, both 66, has $120,000 in pension and Social Security income counted as MAGI. Their phase-out threshold is $150,000. That means they can convert up to $30,000 from a traditional IRA to a Roth and still claim the full $12,000 deduction.

Convert $50,000 instead, and MAGI hits $170,000. That’s $20,000 over the threshold, which costs $20 x $60, or $1,200 per person. $2,400 combined. The deduction drops from $12,000 to $9,600.

Is the bigger conversion still worth it? Depends on the bracket and the time horizon. But you should know that tradeoff before you convert, not after the return is filed and it’s too late to undo it.

This deduction also buys more room before two other thresholds you don’t want to trip.

IRMAA thresholds, where Medicare Part B and Part D premiums jump at specific MAGI levels. A lower AGI gives more space to convert before triggering a surcharge.
Social Security taxation thresholds, where up to 85% of your benefits become taxable above certain income levels. Shaving $6,000 or $12,000 off AGI can keep more of that check tax-free.

If you’ve been following my content for any amount of time, you know that my firm Revolutionary Wealth handles these conversations and planning with elite precision, skill, and seasoned expertise.

If you want to fully maximize your window of opportunity to convert dollars while leveraging this deduction, without the stress of doing it correctly, click the button below to start a Fiduciary Planning Conversation.

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The Clock Is Already Running

Four years. 2025 through 2028. That’s it.

If you’re exploring running a multi-year Roth conversion strategy, these four years just got more valuable. The Senior Bonus Deduction creates room in your taxable income, and a conversion fills that room back up at a known tax cost.

That’s a planning window with a hard expiration date stamped on it.

Someone with $500,000 in a traditional IRA, converting $30,000 a year for four years while preserving the full deduction, moves $120,000 into tax-free growth. The deduction offsets part of the cost of getting it there.

After 2028, the math changes unless Congress acts.

CHEAT SHEET

What: Above-the-line deduction, up to $6,000 per person, age 65+

When: Tax years 2025 through 2028

Where to claim it: Schedule 1-A (Additional Deductions)

Who qualifies: Single, head of household, married filing jointly, all age 65+. Married filing separately is excluded, no exceptions.

Joint maximum: $12,000, both spouses 65+

Phase-out (single/HOH): Starts at $75,000 MAGI, gone at $175,000

Phase-out (MFJ): Starts at $150,000 MAGI, gone at $250,000

Phase-out rate: $60 per $1,000 of MAGI over the threshold

Stacks with: The existing §63(f) age add-on ($2,000 single / $1,600 per person married)

Does NOT require: Itemizing. Works with the standard deduction or itemized deductions.

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

The Gambler's Fallacy Is Hiding In Your Local Card Shop

Drew Scott — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:03:58 GMT

Every collector remembers the feeling before the last pack. Heart rate up a little.

Already spending the money in your head. That feeling has a name, and it’s not “market analysis.”

It’s the same feeling a slot machine is engineered to produce, and once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

So I ran the numbers. Not the vibes. The actual math behind breaking a box versus playing a casino game versus buying a specific card because the data told you to.

The answer surprised me, and it’s probably going to bother some people in the comments.

The Odds Are Printed. You Just Never Read Them.

Every hobby box has odds printed right on the box, the same way a slot machine has a payout table nobody reads before they sit down.

A standard hobby box might carry something like 1:46 odds on a rookie autograph. Buy the premium tier of the same product, and the odds might jump to 1:2. Chase the single best autograph in a different release, and you’re looking at something closer to 1 in 96,027.

Now compare that to Vegas. A slot machine’s house edge typically runs 2% to 10%, with most machines sitting in the 4% to 5% range. That means for every dollar you feed the machine, you get back somewhere between 90 and 98 cents on average.

Blackjack, played with correct basic strategy, gets the house edge down under 1%, sometimes as low as 0.28%. Roulette sits around 5.26%.

Here’s the part that stings. Hobby consensus has long held that if you break even at half your box cost back in cards, you had a good day. Read that again.

A slot machine gives you 95 cents back on the dollar. A well-known hobby rule of thumb says a box giving you 50 cents back on the dollar is a win. That’s not better odds than Vegas.

That’s a casino floor with no regulator, no audited payout table, and a house edge that can run ten times worse than the slots.

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The Gambler’s Fallacy Lives in Every Card Shop

If you’ve ever broken four boxes with nothing and told yourself the fifth one is “due,” you already know what the gambler’s fallacy feels like from the inside.

The math does not care what happened in your last box. Each box is an independent event, exactly like each spin of a roulette wheel.

The autograph odds printed on box five are identical to the odds printed on box one, no matter how empty boxes two through four came up. A roulette player who bets on red after five blacks in a row is making the same mental error as a collector who buys a sixth box because they feel “overdue.”

The wheel has no memory. Neither does the case of boxes at your local shop.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between a feeling and a fact. Feelings tell you a hit is coming.

Math tells you the odds reset to zero every single time you pull the trigger on a new box.

What Investing In Cards Actually Looks Like

Here’s where it flips. Buying a specific card because of what the data says is a completely different activity than opening a box and hoping.

When you buy a graded single off the secondary market, you can check the PSA or SGC population report and know exactly how many exist in that grade.

You can look at the player’s actual on-field performance trend instead of guessing. You can pull ninety days of sold comps and see the real price, not the price someone is hoping for in an active listing.

None of that information exists inside a sealed box.

That’s the whole distinction. Box breaking is a fixed game where the printed odds cannot be moved by research, effort, or skill.

Buying a specific asset based on population data, performance trends, and real market comps is a game where information gives you an actual edge.

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The Three-Question Test Before You Buy

Before your next purchase, run it through this filter.

The Repeatable Test. If you made this exact decision 100 times, would you expect to come out ahead on average, or does it only work if you get lucky once? Box breaking fails this test by design. A specific card bought below its data-backed value passes it.

The Population Report Test. Do you actually know how many copies exist in that grade, or are you just buying because the auction looks exciting? If you can’t answer that question with a number, you’re gambling, not investing.

The Walk-Away Test. If you never open another pack again, does your strategy still make money? An investor and operator’s answer is yes.

A box breaker’s answer is no, because the profit only exists the moment a wrapper comes off if it falls their way.

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Your Next Move

You don’t need to swear off box breaks forever. Plenty of collectors do it purely for the entertainment, the same way plenty of people enjoy a weekend in Vegas without confusing it for a retirement plan.

The mistake is calling it investing when it’s actually entertainment with a printed house edge worse than the casino down the street.

Before you buy your next box, spend ten minutes pulling the population report on the chase card you’re actually hoping to hit. Check what a raw or graded copy of that exact card is already selling for on the secondary market.

Compare that number to what the box costs. That ten minutes of math will tell you, before you rip a single wrapper, whether you’re about to invest or about to gamble.

How you do anything is how you do everything, and that includes whether you let a printed house edge decide your hobby budget or whether you decide it yourself.

See you next time, cheers!

Disclosures:

Asset protection plans should be developed and implemented well before problems arise. Due to the fraudulent transfer laws, asset transfers that occur close in proximity to the filing of a lawsuit or bankruptcy can be interpreted by the court as a fraudulent transfer. Proper structuring of these assets is imperative please seek proper legal and tax advice prior to engaging in re-titling/structuring of any assets. Please note that laws are subject to change and can have an impact on your asset protection strategy.

Why "You're All Set" Is the Most Expensive Advice in Retirement

Drew Scott — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:02:50 GMT

A referral called our office last spring. A couple, both 64, both freshly retired from the same company after 30 years each.

They had done everything the books told them to do. They maxed their 401(k)s every year. They never touched the accounts early.

They ended up with $1.9 million sitting in pre-tax retirement accounts and a paid-off house. On paper, they had won.

Then the husband said something that stuck with me. He told me their advisor said they were “all set” and to just relax until Social Security and required distributions kicked in.

So that was the plan. Coast for a few years. Sit still. Enjoy the quiet.

I asked them one question. What is your taxable income going to be this year, now that the paychecks stopped and Social Security hasn’t started?

He looked at his wife. Neither of them knew. The answer, once we ran it, was about $38,000.

Two people with nearly two million dollars in retirement accounts were about to spend the next several years in one of the lowest tax brackets of their entire adult lives.

And they were planning to do nothing with it.

That gap has a name in our office. We call them the trough years, the low-income stretch between your last paycheck and the day the government forces money back into your income. Most people spend those years relaxing.

The ones who understand what is happening use them to move a fortune out of the government’s reach through a Roth conversion, legally, permanently, and on sale.

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The Window Nobody Tells You About

Here is the setup almost every retiree walks into.

You retire somewhere between 62 and 66. Your income falls off a cliff because the W-2 stopped. But you delay Social Security to let it grow, ideally to 70.

And required minimum distributions, the forced withdrawals from your pre-tax accounts, do not start until age 73 or 75 under current law.

So, you get a stretch. Call it ages 62 to 72, where your reported income is low, sometimes shockingly low, before the two biggest income sources of your retirement come roaring back online at nearly the same time.

That stretch is the single most valuable tax planning window of your life. It is also the most wasted.

Because it feels like a break. You just spent 40 years grinding. Nobody wants to think about taxes during the one calm stretch they finally earned. So, they coast.

And while they coast, the tax meter on their pre-tax accounts keeps running in the background, growing a bill that comes due later at a much worse rate.

A dollar you convert cheaply today is a dollar the government can never tax again.

A dollar you leave sitting is a dollar they get to tax at whatever rate they decide, whenever they decide, for the rest of your life and into your spouse’s.

What Actually Happens If You Wait

Let me show you the couple’s number the other way.

That $1.9 million, left alone, grows. Say it reaches $2.6 million by the time RMDs start at 75. The IRS forces them to pull roughly 3.8% out that first year.

That is about $99,000, on top of two Social Security checks now running at full size. Their income doesn’t drift up. It leaps.

They go from a couple living on $38,000 to a couple reporting well over $150,000, and every dollar of that gets taxed at the rate that stacks on top. '

The forced withdrawals grow every single year after that. Revolutionary Wealth has a blunt name for it. The tax bomb. This is the part the “you’re all set” advice never mentions.

Then there is the part nobody wants to say out loud. 63% of women outlive their husbands. When one spouse dies, the survivor files as single the very next year. The standard deduction is cut roughly in half and the tax brackets compress hard, so the same income gets taxed far more.

I have watched widows get pushed into a higher bracket the year after losing their husband, while grieving, simply because nobody moved money when the moving was cheap.

The government has quietly made itself your largest business partner. You just never signed the paperwork.

The Roth conversion window is your one clean chance to buy that partner out at a discount.

How the Conversion Actually Works

A Roth conversion is simple in mechanics and powerful in effect. You move money from a tax-deferred account, a traditional IRA, an old 401(k), a SEP, or a SIMPLE, into a Roth IRA.

The amount you move is added to your taxable income and taxed as ordinary income that year. From that point forward, the money grows tax-free, qualified withdrawals come out tax-free, and it is never subject to required minimum distributions.

Not for you. Not for your spouse. Not for the kids who inherit it.

A few facts that surprise people. There is no income limit on a conversion. The phase-outs that block high earners from contributing to a Roth do not apply here.

There is also no dollar cap. You can convert $10,000 or $10 million. And the conversion itself carries no early withdrawal penalty after age 59 1/2.

The whole game is the rate you pay on the way in.

During your working years, converting is usually a bad deal. You are already in a high bracket, so you would be volunteering to pay tax at your worst rate.

That is why you don’t hear about this at 45. Maybe a friend swore it saved him a fortune at a dinner party here in Bentonville, and maybe for him it did. Context is everything.

But in the trough years, the math flips completely. You have room underneath the top of a low bracket, sometimes a lot of room, and you can fill it with converted dollars taxed at 10%, 12%, or into the low 20s, instead of the 30%-plus those same dollars would trigger later once RMDs and Social Security stack on top.

You are not avoiding the tax. You are choosing to pay it in the cheapest years you will ever have. That is the whole thing.

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Filling the Bracket, Not Blowing Past It

The mistake people make when they finally hear about this is going too big. They convert the whole account in one year, spike their income into the 32% or 35% bracket, and hand most of the benefit right back.

Converting a $1 million IRA in a single year can generate roughly $380,000 in tax at the top rates. That is not strategy. That is a bonfire.

The real approach is partial conversions, filling one bracket at a time.

Take our couple at $38,000 of income. The top of the 12% bracket for a married couple sits just under $97,000 of taxable income in 2026.

That leaves them close to $50,000 of room they could fill with converted dollars taxed at only 12%. Do that every year from 64 to 72, and they move somewhere near $450,000 out of the pre-tax account at a bracket they may never see again, all before RMDs ever begin.

That is not a small tweak. That is close to a quarter of their entire pre-tax balance relocated to a tax-free account, on sale, in years they were planning to spend doing nothing.

The 2026 federal brackets, 10, 12, 22, 24, 32, 35, and 37 percent, were preserved by recent law. That is exactly why so many pre-retirees are choosing to lock in today’s known rates while they can.

Nobody can promise you what the brackets look like in ten years. You can act on the ones in front of you now.

You are the CEO of your wealth. This is one of the few decisions where you, and not the market, control the outcome.

The market decides your return. You decide your tax rate.

Pull the right lever at the right time and it changes the arithmetic of your entire retirement.

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The Bonus Window: A Down Market

There is a second window that opens without warning, and it is the one seasoned planners get quietly excited about. A market drop.

When the market falls and your traditional IRA balance shrinks on paper, the tax cost of converting shrinks right along with it. You pay tax on the smaller, beaten-down number, and the recovery happens inside the Roth where it grows back tax-free.

You are buying the same shares out of the government’s reach at a discount, at the exact moment everyone else is panicking.

Most people freeze when the market drops. A planner sees a coupon. That is the difference.

Two Things to Know Before You Hit Convert

First, it is permanent. Under current law there are no take-backs. The old recharacterization move, where you could undo a conversion, is gone.

Once the year closes, the taxable income is locked in. That is why you run the numbers before you convert, not after.

Second, the five-year rule. Each conversion starts its own five-year clock. Wait the five years, and the earnings come out tax-free and penalty-free.

It rarely trips up someone converting in their early 60s for money they won’t touch for decades, but you should know the clock exists before you start it.

If you are nervous, you need to work with seasoned professionals like our team at Revolutionary Wealth who do Roth conversions as our specialty.

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Your Window Has an Expiration Date

The hardest part of this to accept is that the window closes on its own schedule, not yours.

Every year you spend in the trough doing nothing is a year of cheap conversion space gone forever. You cannot get it back.

When Social Security turns on and RMDs begin, the low brackets fill up with income you no longer control, and the discount disappears.

I told that couple the truth. The “you’re all set” advice was not wrong about their savings. They did save beautifully.

It was wrong about their taxes, because it treated the calmest years of their financial life as a time to rest instead of the most important years to act.

The real goal is not the lowest tax bill this year. It is the lowest effective tax rate across your whole life and your heirs’ lives combined.

They are converting now. One bracket at a time.

If you are anywhere in that stretch between your last paycheck and your first RMD, here is what to do in the next ten minutes.

Pull up last year’s tax return and find your taxable income on the line before deductions. Then look up the top of your current tax bracket. The gap between those two numbers is your window, in dollars, for this year.

That number is what the government is offering you, right now, at a discount.

See you next time!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

Three Leaks Quietly Draining Every Business Owner's Exit

Drew Scott — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:01:05 GMT

Building a business and keeping what you build are two completely different skill sets.

Most owners spend twenty years mastering the first one and zero minutes learning the second, then wonder why the number on the closing statement is so much smaller than the number they had in their head.

The cold hard fact of life is that there are owners and there are others. You already crossed that line the day you signed the first lease, hired the first employee, or wrote the first check to yourself instead of an employer.

Nobody hands you the second set of skills when you do. You have to go get them, usually the hard way.

Grab your mug, pull up a chair.

Here are the three places I see business owners quietly lose the most money, and none of them show up on a P&L.

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Leak One: The Sale You Never Structured

Most owners think the exit happens on the day they sign the papers. It actually happens years before that, in every decision that determines how the sale gets taxed.

An asset sale and a stock sale are not the same transaction wearing different clothes. One can leave you with ordinary income tax rates on a chunk of the proceeds. The other can qualify for capital gains treatment on the whole thing.

The difference between those two outcomes on a seven-figure sale is not a rounding error. It’s often a down payment on a second life.

Then there’s the installment sale, the tool almost nobody brings up until it’s too late to use it.

Structuring the payout over several years instead of taking it all in one lump sum can keep you out of the top bracket entirely, spreading the tax bill the same way you’d spread a hot pan of coffee instead of gulping it in one go.

A dollar lost in taxes on your exit is a dollar gone forever. You only get to sell this business once.

Leak Two: Running It Like It’s Still Day One

Here’s the part that stings a little. You optimized your product, your hiring, your marketing, your ops.

Most owners never once optimized the entity itself.

Are you still running as a sole proprietor or a straight S-corp with no retirement structure built in, five years after the business could clearly support one?

A cash balance plan can shelter six figures a year for a high-earning owner, and most business owners have never heard their CPA say those three words together.

That’s not a knock on your CPA. Most CPAs file returns. Very few of them build plans.

I’m not very bright, but I know enough to ask the question every year instead of assuming last year’s structure still fits this year’s revenue.

Businesses grow in stages. Tax structures don’t grow on their own. Somebody has to go move them.

If you’ve never had this conversation with your advisor, that’s the flag.

Subscribe now if you want more of these before your next tax filing instead of after.

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Leak Three: No Plan for the Business Itself

This is the leak nobody wants to talk about because it requires admitting the business might outlive your ability to run it, or you might not outlive the business.

If something happens to you tomorrow, does your business have a next chapter or a fire sale?

Most owners have an estate plan for their house and their brokerage account and completely forgot the business is usually the single largest asset they own.

No buy-sell agreement. No key person coverage. No successor identified, trained, or even aware they’re the successor.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how a business built over twenty years gets liquidated in twenty days by a family that never wanted to run it and a buyer who knows exactly how motivated they are to sell.

Solve Three Problems with One Plan

Here’s the part I actually enjoy explaining.

These three leaks don’t require three separate fixes bolted on at three separate times.

A coordinated exit plan, a properly structured retirement and entity setup, and a succession plan for the business work together.

Structuring the sale well often depends on the entity work being done years earlier.

The succession plan protects the value you’re trying to structure a sale around in the first place.

Solve two, three, sometimes four problems with one coordinated plan instead of patching each leak separately as it springs.

Your Next Move

You don’t need to solve all three leaks this month. You need to know which one is actually leaking first.

Pull up your entity structure and your last sale-readiness conversation, if you’ve ever had one. If you haven’t, that’s your answer.

Call your CPA or advisor this week and ask directly: “If I sold this business next year, how would the proceeds actually be taxed, and who runs this if I can’t?”

You are the CEO of your wealth, and that includes the business sitting at the center of it.

How you do anything is how you do everything, and that includes whether you plan the exit or let the exit plan you.

Next week I’ll walk through how these pieces actually get sequenced, starting with the entity work that has to happen before the sale conversation makes sense.

See you soon, cheers!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

The Pre-Retirement Tax Strategy That Can Save Six Figures

Drew Scott — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:05:18 GMT

The IRS is your silent business partner.

It owns a piece of every dollar sitting in your 401(k) and your traditional IRA, and here’s the part nobody tells you at the plan enrollment meeting.

It gets to decide when it collects, not you.

Most people don’t figure that out until they’re 73 years old and the government forces their hand.

Grab your mug, pull up a chair.

This one is going to save some of you six figures, if you catch the window before it closes.

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The Tax Bill You Haven’t Paid Yet

Every dollar you put into a traditional 401(k) or IRA got a tax deduction on the way in. That felt great at the time. What it actually did was create a liability, not a windfall.

You didn’t avoid the tax. You postponed it, and you let the government decide the rate later.

Here’s the part that surprises people. That balance doesn’t just sit there waiting patiently. It grows, and the tax bill grows right alongside it.

By the time you’re in your 70s, you’re often sitting on more pretax money than you ever put in, which means a bigger bill than you ever agreed to.

A dollar lost in taxes is a dollar gone forever. And the government has never once apologized for taking more than its share.

The Wrong Fix: Wait and See

Most pre-retirees do nothing about this. Not because they’re lazy, because nobody ever told them there was a window to act.

The default plan is simple. Work, save, retire, and let the required minimum distributions sort it out when the IRS says it’s time.

Here’s why that backfires. At 73, the government requires you to start pulling money out of those accounts whether you need the income or not.

Not a suggestion. A mandate, calculated by a formula, and taxed as ordinary income the year it comes out.

That forced withdrawal does three things at once, and none of them are good.

It stacks on top of Social Security, pushing more of your benefit into taxable territory.
It can trigger IRMAA, the surcharge that quietly raises your Medicare premiums the moment your income crosses a threshold you didn’t know existed.
Often it pushes retirees into a higher bracket than the one they were actually planning around, at the exact moment they have the least ability to do anything about it.

Waiting isn’t neutral.

Waiting is a decision; you just don’t get to see the bill until it’s too late to negotiate.

The Right Tool: Your Gap Years

Here’s the window almost nobody uses.

The years between when you stop earning a paycheck and when RMDs kick in at 73 or 75, and often before you claim Social Security, your taxable income drops. Sometimes it drops a lot.

That’s not a problem. That’s an opportunity with an expiration date.

During those gap years, you can convert traditional IRA dollars into a Roth IRA on purpose, paying tax now while your bracket is low, instead of later when RMDs and Social Security stack up and force you into a higher one.

You’re not avoiding the tax. You’re choosing the rate.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the entire strategy. Fill up the lower brackets on your own terms, every year, during the window when your income has the most room in it.

Time for a refill. If you’ve never heard your CPA or advisor mention this window by name, that’s worth asking about directly.

Subscribe now if you want to catch every strategy like this one before the window closes on you.

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What Six Figures Actually Looks Like

Let’s run the math on a simple example. Say you’re sitting on $800,000 in a traditional IRA at 63, freshly retired, no W-2 income yet.

Left alone, that balance keeps growing, and by 75 you could be facing RMDs in the six figures annually, taxed at 24% to 32%, on top of IRMAA surcharges and a bigger chunk of Social Security getting taxed.

Now instead, during those gap years, you convert roughly $60,000 to $80,000 a year into a Roth, deliberately filling up the 12% and 22% brackets instead of letting the IRS fill up your 24% and 32% brackets for you later.

Run that for five to twelve years and you’ve moved a meaningful chunk of that balance into tax-free territory, paid at a rate less than half of what you’d have paid on autopilot.

Over a 20-to-30-year retirement, that rate difference alone is where the six figures live.

Not from a clever investment. From choosing when you pay a bill you already owed.

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One Move, Three Problems Solved

I say this often because it’s true every time I see it play out. The best planning tools solve two, three, sometimes four problems at once.

The gap year conversion is one of those.

It lowers your future RMDs, because you’ve already moved money out of the account the IRS forces you to draw from. It reduces how much of your Social Security benefit gets taxed, because your other taxable income is lower in retirement.

It keeps you further from the IRMAA cliffs that quietly raise your Medicare premiums.

And it leaves your heirs a Roth account instead of a traditional IRA, which means the money they inherit comes to them tax-free instead of as a bill with their name on it.

You are the CEO of your wealth. Nobody at the IRS is going to call you up and offer you this window.

It closes the day RMDs start, whether you used it or not.

Your Next Move

This isn’t a strategy you run on your own with a napkin and a tax table.

The bracket math, the IRMAA thresholds, and the sequencing of which accounts to convert first all depend on your specific numbers and getting it wrong can cost you as much as doing nothing at all.

That’s exactly what we build with clients at Revolutionary Wealth. If you’re within the age range of 59-67 and you want to know what your actual gap years look like, schedule a time below with our team and we’ll map out your conversion window before it closes.

How you do anything is how you do everything, and that includes whether you let the IRS set your tax rate or you do.

Next week I’ll walk through the specific bracket math and IRMAA thresholds so you can see how this gets built.

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Up and to the Right

Since 1928, the S&P 500 has finished positive 73% of the time. The longer you’re in the market, the more the numbers are in your favor.

Created with TradingView

Holding Periods:

1 year - 73% chance of being positive

5 years - 87% chance of being positive

10 years - 94% chance of being positive

15 years - 99%+ chance of being positive

20 years - 100% chance of being positive

If you’re under 67 reading this, you have a very high probability of having your wealth be worth the same or more by the age of 73.

You have an extremely high probability of having your wealth being worth the same or more the next thirty years. THIS IS FACTORING MARKET DOWNTURNS AND CORRECTIONS!!!!

Turn off the news, they are lying to you. “Things have never been worse.”

95%+ of you receiving these emails are over 60. You know good and well it’s been worse before.

Plan like the you have a loaded hand of cards in your favor. The game is yours to lose.

Cheers!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

AI & Analog #2: Touching Nostalgia

Drew Scott — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:02:24 GMT

There’s a lot of things about the past that we romanticize. We tend to make things look or sound better than they actually were.

The world before the internet was simple. But as a kid who grew up in the country and had dial-up most of his childhood, I wouldn’t say it was better.

My mom used to say, “I could’ve bagged those groceries faster than the lady at the checkout” walking out of Walmart. Walmart said during COVID, "hold my beer.”

It turns out, we actually were better at bagging our own groceries. Having groceries delivered to your home? Better than we could have imagined.

I do miss the importance of the Walmart greeter though. They were like valet to the local lower to middle class country club. Always elderly and always smiling like the old Walmart “Always Low Prices” sticker they would give you.

These are experiences that my children will most likely never have, and I think about it often. It doesn’t make their childhood necessarily better or worse.

The only way we can take them back, is by touching nostalgia.

The Smell of Grandma’s House

I’m a 90s kid so I can’t speak for the 80s. But do you ever walk in a building or open an old box and smell that 90s smell?

It’s like teleporting through your nostrils back to the 90s. Riding around in your father or grandpa’s old truck. Your grandmother’s house when you would go over to visit.

The smell is not a good one, but man does it make you feel good inside. It reminds me of two things; watching football at my grandmother’s house on a Sunday and riding around with my Pa in his old red truck with lap seatbelts.

Every time I catch a whiff of that smell, it stops me in my tracks. It takes me back to the early days of my childhood. The smell is like a bookmark in time that I can timestamp anything before or after it.

My wife often says there’s no way I remember 9/11. I remember 9/11 vividly even though I was in pre-school. Part of me feels like it’s because I can draw the line on that 90s smell and trace memories before or after it.

Secret Wars 1984

This week I received issues #1-12 of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars in the mail. I won the entire lot on an eBay auction.

To say I’m a Marvel fanatic is an understatement. This comic book series has always been on my list to own because it’s so iconic. For those unaware, Marvel is kicking off this storyline in theaters with Spider-Man Brand New Day in just a few weeks.

Spider-Man Brand New Day, Avengers Doomsday, Avengers Secret Wars, possibly an Avengers Secret Wars Part 2.

How does comic nerd cope with all of this cinema delight? Buy comics!!!

Opening the package, I could smell the nostalgia before I could see it. By the time I had the bubble wrap off, I was back in the 90s. It literally smelled just like my grandmother’s house.

They aren’t in particularly great condition which makes me love them even more. I know that there’s a very high chance that someone discovered these comics at their parents’ house and just moved on from them without a thought.

After I was done thumbing through them for a few minutes, my hands smelled like the 90s. It was truly touching nostalgia.

For those in the sports card collector community reading this, I would encourage you to circle back to some of this IP that you loved as a child.

He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers, TMNT, DC, Marvel, you name it. All of these gems are untapped and overlooked. You can touch the nostalgia for a fraction of card prices today with stories to share.

Maybe it goes up in value. At the very least, it’s on outlet to detach from the pace of today’s hobby and center yourself on something with meaning to your life and childhood that can be shared with others.

How I’m Utilizing AI This Week

This week I started using the Claude Chrome extension on my computer which allows it to click around and view areas that I give it permission to explore and give feedback on.

I put Claude to work on analyzing our AI visibility metrics, keywords, and my YouTube. In 45 minutes of work, Claude created a 7 pages report on what needs to happen or be adjusted based on our metrics and goals.

This was not an exercise that I gave free reign and took everything Claude gave me at face value. It would come back with observations and recommendations; I would give a different angle. Constantly analyzing back and forth.

AI still did 90% of the work. But my intuition and practical experience is the 10% that makes everything connect and come together.

How I Went Analog This Week

We visited the local Rogers, AR farmer’s market. Fresh sourdough bagels, the Asiago was fantastic. Farm fresh tomato, lettuce, and green beans. Local Colombian coffee that may be the best Colombian I’ve ever had.

I finished the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell in the time that I would have normally been on my phone putting my daughter to sleep.

Grilling out and swimming in the lake with the kids.

I don’t miss my iPhone when I don’t have it. In fact, by the time I put it up, I am ready for a break. It’s like I was yearning for this in my life.

You have to listen to your body and mind. When it’s screaming at you to take a break, it’s time to listen.

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Robles Colombian Coffee

I mentioned grabbing a bag of Colombian coffee at the farmer’s market.

Guys, I have to give Robles Colombian Coffee a shoutout. They are local to Northwest Arkansas, and it is so, so good.

I bought their Garnet, a medium roast with notes of chocolate, almond, and caramel. It is dangerously good!!! I’ve said many times in this newsletter that I’m a medium roast, Costa Rican coffee guy.

This truly rivals a lot of the medium roasts I’ve had and just might become a daily staple of mine. You can check them out on Instagram @RoblesColombianCoffee.

I’m grateful for your attention, cheers!

Disclosures:

1031 Exchange Collectibles: The Myth, Debunked

Drew Scott — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:02:25 GMT

I get some version of this question on almost every call with a serious collector.

“If I trade my card for one of equal value, that’s not really a sale, right? No taxes on a trade.”

I understand exactly where it comes from. Real estate investors have used 1031 exchanges for decades to defer capital gains by swapping one property for another. It is one of the most well-known tax strategies in the country.

So, when a collector hears the phrase “like-kind exchange,” it makes sense that they would want the same treatment for a card, a coin, or a piece of art.

Here is the honest answer.

You cannot 1031 exchange a collectible. Not a card, not a coin, not a bottle of wine, not a piece of art. That door closed in 2018, and it is not coming back.

Watch me explain the 1031 Exchange rule and the IRS definition behind trading.

What Changed in 2018

Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Section 1031 covered a wide range of property. Real estate, yes, but also equipment, vehicles, artwork, and other tangible personal property. If you traded one item for a like-kind item, the gain could be deferred, the same way real estate investors defer gains today.

The 2018 law rewrote Section 1031 down to one category. Real property only. Effective January 1, 2018, every other type of like-kind exchange was eliminated.

Not limited. Not restricted. Eliminated.

That means the trade at the card show, the coin swap with another collector, the art-for-art exchange between two galleries, all of it is a taxable event now. Full stop.

A dollar of gain is a dollar of gain the moment you let go of the asset, whether cash changes hands or not.

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Why the Myth Still Circulates

Most of the confusion comes from three places.

Old information. A lot of the “collectibles as an asset class” content online was written before 2018, or by people who never updated it after the law changed. Read enough of it and you will still find 1031 exchanges mentioned as a collector strategy. It has not been true for seven years.

Real estate crossover. Plenty of collectors also own investment property. They hear “like-kind exchange” at a real estate meetup, assume the same rule applies across every asset they hold, and never think to check whether collectibles got carved out.

The trade itself feels different than a sale. Handing a dealer $400 for a card feels like a purchase. Handing over a card you paid $400 for, in exchange for a different card worth $400, feels like a wash. No cash moved. Nothing to tax, right?

Wrong. The IRS does not care that cash did not change hands. A trade is two sales happening at once. You disposed of an asset at its fair market value, and that is what triggers the gain.

Time for a refill before we get into the math on that.

How a “Even Trade” Actually Gets Taxed

Say you own a card with a cost basis of $2,000. You trade it straight across for a different card, also worth $10,000 on the current market.

No cash changed hands. It felt like a lateral move.

The IRS sees it as this: you sold your $2,000-basis card for $10,000 in fair market value, recognized an $8,000 gain, and used the proceeds to immediately buy a new card.

Your new card’s basis is $10,000, the price you effectively paid for it. The $8,000 gain gets taxed at the 28% collectibles rate, the same rate we’ve covered before on outright sales. That’s $2,240 owed on a transaction where you never touched a dollar.

The trade feels free. The tax bill is not.

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Why This Rule Exists

It is worth understanding the logic, even if you do not love the outcome.

Congress built 1031 exchanges to encourage capital to stay deployed in productive real estate rather than sitting idle after a sale.

A farmer sells land, buys different land, keeps farming. A landlord sells a duplex, buys an apartment building, keeps housing tenants.

The deferral supports ongoing economic activity, not personal enjoyment.

Collectibles never fit that logic cleanly. A card collection is not a productive asset generating rent or crops. When Congress needed to raise revenue and simplify the tax code in 2017, personal property was the easiest category to cut.

Real estate had a bigger lobby. Collectibles did not.

That is the reality. Not a loophole waiting to be found. A closed door.

What Collectors Can Actually Do Instead

None of this means you are stuck paying 28% on every dollar with no options. It means the option has to be a real one, not a workaround that used to exist.

Sell in a lower-income year. The 28% rate is a flat rate. If your ordinary income tax rate is below 28% in a given year, it’s worth stimulating enough sales to be deemed a dealer where the sale is ordinary income instead of a capital gain.

A partial retirement year, a year between business sales, any year your taxable income drops, is worth timing a sale around.

Donate the appreciated item directly. Give the card, the coin, or the painting itself to a qualified charity instead of selling it and donating cash. You get to deduct the fair market value, and you never recognize the capital gain on the appreciation.

You will need a qualified appraisal for anything of real value, and the deduction is generally capped at 30% of your adjusted gross income for this type of donation.

But for collectors who already give, this is the closest thing to a deferral tool left on the table.

Offset gains with losses in the same tax year. If you are selling one appreciated piece, look at the rest of your collection. Anything you would sell at a loss anyway can offset the gain, dollar for dollar, in the same year.

Gift strategically, with eyes open. Gifting an appreciated collectible to a family member in a lower tax bracket can shift future gain to their rate instead of yours.

Watch the kiddie tax rules if the recipient is a minor and understand that your basis carries over to them. This is a long-game move, not a same-year fix.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the actual toolkit. Smaller than a 1031 exchange. Still real.

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The Number to Remember

1031 exchanges have applied to real property only since January 1, 2018.

Collectibles have not qualified for like-kind deferral in over eight years, no matter how the trade is structured.

Every trade, every swap, every “not really a sale” handshake at a card show is a taxable event at fair market value. The rate on the gain if you’re not deemed a dealer is 28%, the same as an outright sale.

Grab your mug, pull up a chair, and run the basis math before your next trade, not after.

The IRS already assumes you did the sale. Make sure you did the math too.

Disclosures:

How to Build a Paycheck for Life

Drew Scott — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:04:20 GMT

If you’re 65 this year, there’s a real chance one of you is still cashing a check in 2057. Not a rounding error of a chance. A genuine one.

A healthy 65-year-old couple today has a meaningful shot at one spouse living into their mid-90s, which means the money doesn’t need to last ten years or even twenty. It might need to last thirty-two.

Most people don’t plan for that number. They plan for a savings number instead: hit $1.5 million, hit $2 million, feel safe based off a guessed percentage that is comfortable to spend.

Here’s the problem with a savings number. It tells you what you have. It doesn’t tell you what you can spend on a Tuesday in March of 2043 without running out before you run out of years.

Those are two completely different questions, and almost nobody in Bentonville, or anywhere else, gets a straight answer to the second one until they sit down and actually build it.

That’s what this is. Not a savings goal. A paycheck.

One that shows up whether the market is up 20% or down 20%, whether you’re 66 or 96.

Watch me explain the time horizon strategy that protects you from market timing or living longer than you expect.

A Savings Number Isn’t a Plan. A Paycheck Is.

A retirement income plan takes everything you’ve built, your 401(k), your IRA, your brokerage account, maybe an income annuity, and it converts it into a monthly number alongside Social Security, a pension if you have one, and any guaranteed income you set up on purpose.

Then it maps that monthly number against what you actually spend. That’s the shift.

A savings plan asks, “how will I have.” An income plan asks, “how much comes in every month, from where, and for how long.” Those two plans can have the exact same balance sheet and produce completely different retirements.

A real income plan has to answer for five things at once: outliving your money, a bad market hitting at the wrong time, inflation quietly shrinking what a dollar buys over three decades, healthcare and long-term care costs, and taxes that don’t stop just because the paycheck did.

Miss any one of those five and the other four don’t matter much.

At Revolutionary Wealth, when we build one of these for a client in their early sixties, we stress-test it out to age 95 to 100.

Not because we expect every client to get there. Because the plan has to work even if they do.

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How Long Are You Actually Planning For?

Before you touch a single number, decide how long the money has to last. Not the average. The tail end.

Plan for the version of you that’s still around at 95, because if you plan for the average and the average is wrong in your favor, you’re the one who runs short at 89.

Then get honest about two categories of spending.

Essentials: housing, food, Medicare premiums, basic transportation, property taxes.

Discretionary: travel, hobbies, the grandkids, dining out.

A couple here in Northwest Arkansas might land around $50,000 a year in essentials and another $30,000 in the stuff that makes retirement worth having.

Don’t stop there. Lumpy expenses are what actually wreck a good plan. A roof. A new vehicle every eight or ten years. A move to something smaller in your late seventies.

Those aren’t monthly line items, so people forget to plan for them, and then they show up as a surprise that has to come from somewhere.

Every Dollar Needs a Job Description

Very few retirees live off one paycheck replacement. You’re combining several, and each one has a different job to do.

Social Security is the floor almost everyone stands on. The average monthly benefit runs around $1,759.67, and when you claim, at 62, at full retirement age, or at 70, permanently changes that number.

A pension, if you’re one of the roughly 15% of workers who still has one, is worth protecting like the asset it is. Then there’s the 401(k) and IRA money, the taxable brokerage account, and for some, a business or rental property still throwing off income.

For higher-net-worth households, the less obvious pieces matter just as much: a whole life policy with real cash value sitting in it, deferred comp, stock options, or the proceeds sitting on the other side of a business sale.

Split all of it into two buckets.

Guaranteed: Social Security, a pension, any income annuities you own.

Everything else: market-dependent.

Know exactly what your guaranteed number is before you decide what the market needs to cover, because that guaranteed number is the one that doesn’t care what the S&P did last Tuesday.

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The Time Horizon Strategy That Protects You from Bad Timing

Here’s the risk nobody warns you about loudly enough: a bad market in your first five years of retirement can do permanent damage that the same bad market in year twenty never would.

It’s called sequence-of-returns risk, and it’s broken more good plans than bad investment picks ever have.

The old rule of thumb, the 4% rule, says withdraw 4% of the portfolio in year one, adjust for inflation every year after, and you’d have had roughly a 95% success rate over 30 years historically.

Recent analysis pushes that closer to 3.3% to 4% depending on how conservative you want to be in today’s environment. Either way, the number isn’t the point. The point is having a rule at all, instead of guessing every December.

A simple three-bucket structure does the heavy lifting:

Short-term (1-2 years): cash, cash alternatives, and money markets covering this year’s and next year’s living expenses.

Mid-term (3-8 years): High-quality bonds, registered-indexed linked annuities with a 15 to 20% buffer and no cap, or structured notes. Built for stability when stocks are having a bad decade.

Long-term (9+ years): equities and real assets, the growth engine that has to outpace inflation over the next 20 or 30 years.

Then sequence the withdrawals with taxes in mind too: taxable accounts first for flexibility, tax-deferred accounts next in a managed order, and let Roth money grow untouched as long as possible for the later years or for whoever inherits it.

Required Minimum Distributions start at 73 or 75, and under SECURE 2.0, income annuities held inside an IRA can now be aggregated with your other IRAs for that calculation, which matters more than most people realize when they’re deciding how to title an annuity.

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Guarantee the Bills. Let the Market Handle the Vacations.

This is the single highest leverage move in the whole plan: cover your essential expenses with income that isn’t subject to a bad Tuesday in the market.

Everything discretionary can ride the market’s ups and downs. The mortgage, the Medicare premium, and the groceries cannot.

Run the gap math. If essentials run $50,000 a year and Social Security plus a pension covers $35,000 of it, there’s a $15,000 annual hole.

That’s exactly the gap an income annuity is built to close, using fixed income annuities, immediate or deferred, or a fixed annuity with a guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit, so the lights stay on regardless of what the market does that year.

None of this is free. You give up liquidity on whatever you annuitize. Some of these decisions are close to irrevocable, so read the guarantees and understand the claims-paying ability of the insurance company behind the contract before you sign anything.

Optional riders, inflation adjustments, a death benefit, joint-and-survivor income, all add cost.

As a general boundary, we rarely see it make sense to put more than 30% of liquid investable assets into lifetime income annuities. This is exactly the kind of decision that should run through a fiduciary, not a product pitch.

Another great alternative to income annuities is income paying structured notes. You receive most of the benefits of an annuity but you’re receiving the guarantees from someone besides an insurance carrier.

The pro and con of structured notes is that they have less strings attached and have an earlier point that they mature, i.e. become more liquid.

The con is that because they are more flexible, it gives the institution on the other side more liquidity as well. Many times, the structured notes with the highest income yields can be called similar to a bond. So, you’re less likely to be able to just set it and forget it like you can with an annuity.

Ultimately, it comes down to your situation and what a financial plan reveals benefits you the most long-term.

Inflation and Healthcare Are Playing the Long Game Too

A dollar today doesn’t need to lose much value per year to lose half its buying power over a 30-year retirement. It just needs time, and time is the one thing a 32-year retirement has plenty of.

Keep real growth exposure in the plan, U.S. and global equities, real assets like REITs, and where it fits, an annuity option with a cost-of-living adjustment built in. The instinct to get conservative the day you retire is understandable and, for money you won’t touch for 20 years, usually wrong.

Healthcare is its own separate fight. Not long ago, average per-person healthcare spending in retirement was running well north of $12,000 a year, and Medicare was never built to cover all of it.

Here’s where the real numbers sit right now: Medicare Part B runs about $202.90 a month, Part D adds roughly $34.50 on average, and the Part A deductible per benefit period sits at $1,736. Higher earners get hit with IRMAA surcharges on top of all of it.

If you built an HSA balance before 65, that money comes out tax-free for qualified medical expenses, which makes it one of the most underused tools sitting in most retirement accounts.

Long-term care is the piece people avoid thinking about the longest. Traditional LTC insurance, hybrid life and LTC policies, or self-funding out of assets and cash value, each one changes the rest of the income plan differently.

Pick one on purpose. Don’t let the absence of a decision become the decision.

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Taxes Don’t Retire When You Do

Every dollar of income has a tax bill attached to it, and the accounts matter.

Traditional 401(k) and IRA withdrawals get taxed as ordinary income. Qualified Roth withdrawals come out tax-free. Taxable brokerage accounts get hit with capital gains and dividend taxes.

Social Security itself can become partially taxable depending on your other income, a detail that catches a lot of otherwise well-prepared retirees off guard.

The years before RMDs start are the highest-leverage tax years most people will ever see. Fill the lower brackets deliberately with IRA withdrawals or Roth conversions before RMDs force a bigger number on you at 73 or 75.

Harvest capital gains in taxable accounts while you control the timing. None of this replaces a real conversation with a tax advisor before you move real money.

And don’t stop the tax plan at your own lifetime. Under the SECURE Act’s 10-year rule, most non-spouse heirs have to empty an inherited IRA within ten years of inheriting it.

This changes how beneficiary designations on IRAs and annuities should be structured for anyone leaving real money behind.

Stress-Test It, Then Actually Update It

A plan built once and never touched again isn’t a plan. It’s a snapshot of the day you built it.

Run the bad scenarios on purpose: a 20% market drop in your first five years, inflation running hot for three or four years straight, a Social Security policy change, a major health event for one spouse.

Then decide in advance what you’ll actually do about each one. Cut discretionary travel spending in a down year. Pause large gifts to kids or grandkids if assets fall below a line you set ahead of time. Lower the withdrawal rate temporarily during an extended downturn instead of guessing under pressure.

Review it at least once a year, and again after anything major: a market shock, a health change, the sale of a business, a new tax law.

We run these structured review sessions with clients across Bentonville and around the country for exactly this reason.

The plan isn’t the document. The plan is the habit of updating the document.

The One Thing to Do This Week

Add up your essential annual expenses. Add up your guaranteed income, Social Security, any pension, anything already annuitized.

Subtract the second number from the first.

That gap is the real number. It’s more useful than your total net worth, more useful than your portfolio’s return last year, and it’s the one number almost nobody has actually written down.

Everything in this article exists to help you close it.

Hopefully this helps, cheers!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

AI & Analog #1: Back from the Future

Drew Scott — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 11:02:07 GMT

I took my kids to see Toy Story 5 on the Fourth of July.

Not fifteen minutes into the movie, I had a reaction I was not expecting. The premise is that kids have drifted away from playing with toys and into screens, that tech is quietly taking over childhood.

I sat there thinking about how careful we’ve been. We don’t hand our kids iPads. We hand them books in the car. We’ve done a good job.

Then the thought that actually landed: when I picture myself on the couch at home, mindlessly pulling out my phone out of boredom, half-watching, half-scrolling.

That’s me. Not my kids. Me.

I am a huge believer that AI is a net positive for society which is counterculture to what you see on the news. We are using it aggressively in our business, and I am about to spend the rest of this newsletter telling you why that’s a good thing.

But sitting in that theater, I realized I can’t preach the upside of technology to you every week while quietly modeling the exact behavior I don’t want my four-year-old picking up.

So, I’m making a change. I’m simultaneously going deeper with advanced technology to give me the space to be present in real life with those I love the most.

This is the first edition of a new series I’m calling AI and Analog. Each week I’ll explore my journey living in the extremes.

Go All in on Both Ends at Once

Here’s the barbell I’m building my life around right now: go as deep as possible into AI on the business side and go as far away from screens as possible on the personal side.

Not a middle ground. Both extremes, on purpose.

I am not retreating from AI. I’ve said it to clients for months and I’ll say it here: AI is making planning cheaper, faster, and more accessible for the people I work with, and I am not interested in sitting this out.

Every Sunday, this is where I’ll show you exactly what we’re building with it, the good and the genuinely useful, not the hype. I’ll also share with you the positive things developing from AI that the news would never dare make you aware of.

But I don’t want to wake up one day, blink, and find my kids are out of the house while I was watching my own life on a screen instead of living it. I’ve pictured that moment.

Me, older, watching old videos of my kids when they were small, and remembering that I was there physically and absent everywhere else.

That image is what moved me, not a productivity hack.

The Flip Phone

One dramatic move this week: I walked into Verizon and bought a flip phone.

It took eighteen minutes to activate. I hadn’t seen a SIM card go into a phone in almost fifteen years. The guy checking me out, after looking at what I was buying, was doing the math on why a grown man with an iPhone in his pocket was also buying a flip phone. I told him why.

His face lit up with joy, almost like he could feel a longing for himself to disconnect and go back.

Here’s the plan. Every evening and every weekend, the iPhone goes in a cubby. Not on silent next to me. Away.

If someone needs me, they call the flip phone. When I get bored, the old habit was to reach for the phone. The new habit is a book, or my kids, or actually being outside instead of narrating my life to an app.

My kids are four and a half, two and a half, and almost six months old. That window doesn’t stay open.

Time is the one asset that we all can’t get back.

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What Changed Since My Last Flip Phone

The last time I carried a flip phone was 2011. I asked myself what’s actually changed since then, and the honest answer is almost everything.

Here’s the timeline, because I think most of us have lived through it too gradually to notice how radical it’s been.

2011, where things stood:

- The iPhone 4S had just launched. Siri was brand new and, frankly, not very good yet.

- 4G was barely rolling out. Most of us were still on 3G.

- IBM’s Watson had just beaten two Jeopardy champions, and that was the AI headline of the year.

- No Uber in most cities. No Apple Watch. No AirPods. No Alexa. No Instagram Stories. TikTok didn’t exist.

- Streaming was still fighting cable for relevance. Netflix was mostly still mailing DVDs.

What happened between then and now:

- 2012: The deep learning breakthrough that quietly kicked off the modern AI era. Almost nobody outside a research lab noticed at the time.

- 2014-2016: Alexa, Google Home, and voice assistants moved into millions of living rooms. AlphaGo beat the world’s best Go player, a game experts said computers wouldn’t crack for another decade.

- 2015-2016: The Apple Watch and AirPods arrived and made wearable tech normal instead of niche.

- 2018-2020: The GPT models started appearing, each one bigger and more capable, mostly invisible to anyone outside the tech world.

- November 2022: ChatGPT launched and hit 100 million users faster than any consumer product in history. That’s the month AI stopped being a research topic and became a kitchen-table conversation.

- 2023-2026: Generative AI went from novelty to infrastructure. Image generation, voice, video, and now autonomous AI agents that can run real workflows without a person clicking every button.

Fifteen years ago, Siri could barely set a timer. Today, we all have AI systems regulating and running our devices whether we realize it or not.

That’s not a joke, and it’s not slowing down. It’s the reason I’m not backing away from AI even as I back away from my phone. Those are two different problems.

One is a tool getting radically more capable. The other is a habit that has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with me reaching for it out of boredom instead of intention.

How I’m Utilizing AI This Week

This week I bought a Bee-Link SER9 Pro AMD Ryzen™ 7 H 255 with Open Claw pre-installed. It’s the AI that will manage my AI, literally.

I use eight AI tools to operate our business and grow our brand. This sounds insane but I’m accomplishing so much in one day with all these various tools, that I need to delegate them.

It’s intentionally separated from any client or personal information on purpose. Going deep on AI does not mean being careless with what it touches.

AI helps build our brand and routine back-office work, allowing me to be present and hands on with our clients and team members.

Most importantly, supporting AI allows Revolutionary Wealth to serve our clients 4x faster and for half the cost of other financial advisors because we aren’t wasting time and money.

I get more done in half a day than most advisors get done in a week, period. When I client calls, I typically answer immediately. At the very least, they hear from me within a matter of minutes or hours.

Saving money is making money, Revolutionary Wealth takes the time and money we save with technology and pass those savings on to our clients instead of pocketing the difference.

How I Went Analog This Week

A trip to the park after work, coloring at the kitchen table before bed.

I enjoyed a nice dinner with a friend without my cell phone, just my flip phone.

When I put my daughter down at night, the thirty or forty minutes she takes to fall asleep used to be an educational YouTube video or reading articles on my phone.

Now it’s a physical book in my hands. Just me, learning something, holding actual pages.

None of this is complicated. It’s not a system or a five-step framework.

It’s a phone in a cubby and a book instead of a screen. That’s the whole thing.

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My children and I’s kitchen table drawing turned into a comic book. AI and Analog :)

What You Can Do This Week

Pick one window. Tonight, tomorrow night, whatever’s realistic.

Put your phone somewhere out of reach for two hours. Not on silent next to you. Physically somewhere else.

Notice how many times you reach for it anyway. That number will tell you more than this article ever could.

I’ll be back every Sunday with what we’re building on the AI side of the business, and what I’m experiencing and learning on the analog side of my life. Both halves of the barbell, every week.

Grab your mugs and pull up a chair. This is going to be fun.

Disclosures:

The Tax Rule That Decides Whether Your Collection Passes Down Tax-Free

Drew Scott — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:01:08 GMT

A father called our office a while back. He had spent thirty years building a card collection.

Vintage stuff, a few graded gems, the kind of collection that takes a lifetime to put together. He wanted to start handing pieces of it to his adult kids now, while he could still see them enjoy it.

It’s a generous instinct. It’s also the single most expensive mistake I see collectors make when they think about passing down what they’ve built.

Watch me visually summarize today’s article.

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The Gift That Costs Your Kids More Than It Saves

Here’s what nobody tells you at the moment the gift happens. When you give an appreciated asset to your kids while you’re alive, they don’t just inherit the card.

They inherit your cost basis, meaning the original price you paid, decades ago, for tax purposes.

That card you bought for $400 in 1998 and is worth $12,000 today? If you gift it now, your kid’s basis is still $400. When they eventually sell it, they owe capital gains tax on $11,600 of appreciation.

Every dollar of growth you watched happen over thirty years becomes their tax bill, not yours.

Wait until it passes through your estate instead, and something completely different happens.

What Cost Basis Actually Means

Cost basis is simply what the IRS considers you to have “paid” for an asset. It’s the number capital gains tax gets calculated against when you sell.

Buy a card for $185. Sell it for $350. Your gain is $165, and that’s what gets taxed. Cost basis is the anchor point every future tax calculation swings from.

Gift an asset during your lifetime, and your basis carries over to whoever receives it, untouched.

Leave that same asset in your estate instead, and at your death the basis resets, or “steps up,” to the fair market value on the date you died.

Decades of appreciation simply vanish for tax purposes. Not deferred. Erased.

That’s the entire secret. Not a loophole. A basic mechanic of how inherited property has worked in the tax code for decades.

Most parents have simply never had anyone explain it to them in the context of a card collection instead of a house or a brokerage account.

The Collectibles Wrinkle

Here’s where it gets more expensive if you get it wrong. Collectibles don’t get taxed like stocks when they’re sold at a gain.

Long-term capital gains on a stock top out around 20% for most sellers.

Long-term gains on collectibles, cards, memorabilia, coins, art, are capped at a flat 28% federal rate, regardless of your income bracket.

So, the same mistake that costs a stock investor is worse for a collector. Gift the card during your life, and your kid inherits both the carryover basis and the 28% collectibles rate on all thirty years of growth.

Let it pass through your estate instead, and the step-up erases the gain before that 28% rate ever has anything to apply to.

Two separate tax problems. One planning decision solves both.

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Why Gifting While Living Backfires

The instinct to gift early comes from a good place. Parents want to see their kids enjoy the collection.

They’ve heard vague advice about “getting assets out of the estate” to avoid estate tax, advice that made sense for a different generation with a different exemption amount.

For almost every collector reading this, estate tax isn’t the actual risk. The federal estate tax exemption is well into eight figures per person.

The real risk isn’t the IRS taxing the transfer. It’s the IRS taxing the sale, at 28%, on money your kids never should have owed in the first place.

Gifting during life doesn’t dodge that tax. It hands the entire bill to the next generation and removes the one thing that would have made it disappear.

What This Looks Like With a $185 Card

I bought my first big card purchase, a Shohei Ohtani rookie, for $185. Two months later I sold it for $350.

On a quick flip like that, the math is simple and the tax bill is small either way.

Stretch that same story across thirty years instead of two months, and the numbers change completely. A card worth $185 that appreciates to $40,000 over three decades has a $39,815 gain sitting inside it.

Gift that card, and your kid owes 28% of $39,815, or about $11,148, whenever they sell.

Let your estate pass it to them instead, and their basis steps up to $40,000 the day you die. They could sell it the next morning for exactly that price and owe nothing.

Same card. Same thirty years. An $11,148 difference.

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AI & Analog #1: Back from the Future

It took me approximately eighteen minutes to buy my $100 flip phone at Verizon this week. I’m not sure I’ve purchased a phone this fast, ever?

Tonight, I’m starting “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John Maxwell while my daughter falls asleep instead of being on my phone.

Simultaneously, I’m about to buy a supercomputer.

I can’t wait to share my first week with you as I’m living in the extremes of a barbell effect. Insane, life changing AI applications in business; back to real life with my family.

Sunday morning, be ready to follow along with your coffee in hand.

Cheers!

Disclosures:

Why the Order You Withdraw Retirement Money In Matters More Than the Amount

Drew Scott — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:00:41 GMT

A couple sat across from me a few months ago. Both had just turned 62. Both had done everything the financial industry told them to do for thirty years.

Maxed the 401(k). Never touched it early. Left it alone to compound.

Their combined pre-tax balance was $1.6 million. Their taxable brokerage account held about $180,000.

The husband said something I hear almost every week: “We’re trying not to touch the IRA. We want it to keep growing.”

I understood the instinct. I told him it was the single most expensive piece of advice he had ever followed without checking the math.

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The Advice That Sounds Right and Costs a Fortune

“Leave the retirement accounts alone as long as you can” is not bad advice.

It is incomplete advice, and incomplete advice is how good savers end up with a tax problem instead of a retirement.

Here is the part almost nobody explains: the years between 59 and 67 are usually the cheapest income years a retiree will ever see again.

Paychecks have stopped or slowed. Social Security has not started. Required Minimum Distributions do not begin until 73 or 75.

For a short stretch, you control your taxable income more completely than at almost any other point in your life.

Most people spend those years withdrawing nothing from their IRA and spending down their taxable brokerage account instead, because it feels like the tax-smart move.

It is the missed opportunity, literally, of a lifetime.

Watch me explain how the sequence should work and summarize this article, on a whiteboard.

What “Leaving It Alone” Actually Costs

Every year that money sits in a traditional IRA, it compounds. So does the IRS’s share of it.

You own the balance. The IRS owns a percentage of it, and that percentage does not shrink by waiting.

The couple in my office had thirteen years until RMDs would start. If their $1.6 million grew at a conservative 6% and they touched none of it, they would arrive at 75 with a balance north of $3 million.

Their first Required Minimum Distribution, taxed entirely as ordinary income, would land somewhere around $113,000. Add Social Security. Add whatever was left in the brokerage account.

They would spend their first year of mandatory withdrawals in a higher bracket than most of their working career.

They had never run that projection. Almost nobody does, because the RMD feels like a problem for a future version of themselves to solve.

The Opportunity Almost Everyone Misses

Conventional order: Social Security first, taxable brokerage second, IRA and 401(k) last, because “it’s already tax-deferred, why rush it.”

Pulling from a taxable account, which is capital gains instead of ordinary income, between 59-67 is a great strategy. It keeps your taxable income low during this period of time, possible even zero.

What most pre-retirees or retirees miss however, is that it’s a phenomenal opportunity so show some income and pay some tax at a lower rate while they are in control.

That is not the natural instinct. It sounds backwards the first time a client hears it. But the goal in these years is not to avoid touching the IRA.

The goal is to convert it deliberately, on your own terms, at today’s known tax rates, before the IRS sets the withdrawal amount for you at 73 or 75.

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Filling the Bracket, Not Just Meeting the Need

The mechanic is simple. Every year, calculate the top of your current tax bracket. Withdraw or convert from the IRA up to that ceiling, even if you do not need the cash to live on.

If the money is not needed for spending, it moves into a Roth, where it will never be taxed again and never generates a mandatory withdrawal.

For a married couple in the 22% bracket in 2026, that ceiling sits at $211,400 of taxable income. Every dollar withdrawn or converted below that line costs less than 22 cents because you’re effective tax rate will not be 22%.

Compare that to waiting until 75, when the same dollar could be taxed at 24% or higher once RMDs, Social Security, and Medicare surcharges stack on top of each other.

The couple I mentioned started a six-year plan. Converting roughly $85,000 a year, filling their bracket precisely, paying the tax now while the rate was known and controllable.

By the time RMDs arrive, their projected pre-tax balance will be closer to $1.1 million instead of $3 million. Their mandatory withdrawal drops from six figures to something closer to $41,000.

Same couple. Same savings. Completely different tax bill for the rest of their life.

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Why 65 Complicates the Math

Medicare enrollment lands in the middle of this window, and it changes the calculation. Medicare uses your tax return from two years prior to set your Part B and Part D premiums.

A large conversion at 63 can trigger a higher Medicare premium at 65, even though the conversion itself happened two years earlier.

This is the part that trips up people who try to do this math on their own. The right conversion amount is not just about the current year’s bracket. It is about what that number does to a Medicare premium calculation that will not show up on a bill until two years later.

Filling the bracket without checking the IRMAA thresholds first can quietly erase a chunk of the tax savings the conversion was supposed to create.

The One Thing to Do This Week

Pull your most recent tax return. Find your taxable income line. Find the ceiling of your current tax bracket. Subtract one from the other.

That gap is the room you have this year to withdraw or convert from your IRA at today’s known rate, before RMDs, Social Security, and Medicare start making the decision for you.

That single number is where every conversation like this one actually starts.

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Roth Conversion Math in Detail

If you’re serious about considering Roth conversions, I would highly recommend that you go back and read one of my previous articles discussing the math behind Roth conversions from our planning work at Revolutionary Wealth.

When it makes sense, who gets the most out of the strategy, and also when you should avoid them.

Here’s the best part, it’s based on real life experience from Revolutionary Wealth actually helping people convert money from their IRA to Roth IRA.

Zero fluff, zero theory, all real numbers from real planning. Check it out.

Are you a visual learner? Check out my video Roth Conversions: The 4 Factors Most Advisor Never Bring Up

AI & Analog

Starting Sunday, July 12th, I’m going to start sharing a new personal journey. Two extremes, my life.

I’ve been a huge proponent of using and adopting AI for a while now. Our firm and I have already seen the exponential benefits of applying it to our business and lives. My belief is that I’m just getting started and I’m only going to dive deeper.

On the other extreme, I often have this image of being shown a replay of my life when I’m older (kind of like the movie Click with Adam Sandler) and I’m being shown that I’m just sitting on my phone when my kids are growing and changing in front of me.

That visualization I have haunts me, I actually think about it pretty often. I’m also willing to admit that I tend to pull my phone out from boredom more than I’d like to admit.

In response to that, I’m going completely dark on screens in front of my kids when I get home from work and the weekends.

I’m going to start carrying a flip phone!! I’ll get home and put the phone in a cubby until the kids are asleep or the weekend is over. The hope is that I can expand this time more and more.

This will break me or it will change my life. We will find out together and you’ll get to read my documented journey, every Sunday.

I appreciate your attention, cheers!

Thanks for reading Coffee & Compounding! This post is free, share it with someone who needs the information.

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

The Retirement Account That Lets You Contribute $270,000 a Year

Drew Scott — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:03:51 GMT

About six months ago I got a referral call.

A business owner, 53 years old, running his own company and billing somewhere around $410,000 a year. A mutual connection had sent him over — someone who had been through a similar process with us and had plenty of good things to say.

This consultant had been doing all the right things. He had a SEP IRA. He was maxing it out every year. He kept his books clean. He paid his quarterlies on time. He had no bad habits to point to.

And still, every April, he was writing a six-figure check to the IRS.

He said it plainly: “I just want to save as much in taxes as possible. I feel like I’m doing everything right and it’s still not enough.”

He was right. He was doing the right things. He just hadn’t been told about the bigger tool.

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The Problem With “Maxing Out”

If you’re self-employed and earning well into six figures, you’ve probably heard of two retirement vehicles: the SEP IRA and the Solo 401(k).

These are solid, legitimate tools. I use them with clients. I’m not here to dismiss them.

But here’s the number nobody leads with: the SEP IRA caps annual contributions at $70,000. The Solo 401(k) caps at roughly $69,000. At a $390,000 income, maxing out your SEP IRA still leaves $320,000 sitting in taxable income.

At the federal bracket that income hits, the effective rate pushes past 22%.

You did the right thing. You maxed your plan. And you still owed more in taxes than most Americans bring home in a year.

A dollar lost in taxes is a dollar gone forever.

The “max out your SEP IRA” advice is not wrong. It’s just incomplete. There’s a much larger vehicle available, and most CPAs and most advisors never bring it up.

Watch me visually explain today’s article.

The Plan Most People Haven’t Heard Of

I started my career at 19 and spent the first seven years growing my business collaborating with some of the top advisors across the country. Cash balance plans were never mentioned.

They’re not on most advisors’ shelves. They’re only designed properly with independent advisors working with actuarial partners and high-income clients — which means most people, at most firms, never encounter them.

Here’s the short version: a cash balance plan is a type of defined benefit pension plan. IRS-approved. Actuary-designed. Completely legitimate. Built specifically so high-income earners can contribute far beyond the limits of a 401(k) or SEP IRA.

How much more?

For this client — 53 years old, $390,000 in income — the annual contribution limit calculated out to $270,000 per year.

Every dollar of that reduces taxable income. Dollar for dollar. Same mechanics as a traditional 401(k), just at a completely different scale.

Running the numbers, we projected tax savings of approximately $110,000 per year. Not $10,000. Not $20,000. Six figures. Every year.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what it looks like when the right tool meets the right income level.

How the Plan Actually Works

A cash balance plan runs on a 5-year planning window. Before anything moves, a third-party actuarial firm designs the plan based on your age, your income, and the tax code.

Their job is to make sure the plan stays compliant — that you’re getting the deductions you’re entitled to without breaking anything in the process.

The annual contribution limit is not invented. It comes from actuarial tables. Age-based, income-based, plan-specific. For this client: $270,000 per year.

For someone younger or at a different income level, that number shifts.

Inside the plan, the money grows conservatively. We target around 5% to 6% annually.

Here’s why: if the account grows too aggressively, the excess creates an excise tax, and now you’ve traded one problem for another. The plan is built for deductibility and savings capacity, not speculation.

Don’t let that conservative growth rate fool you. When you’re contributing 4 to 5 times more than a SEP IRA allows, the dollar volume overwhelms the growth rate differential.

Over five years, this client’s investment account is projected to reach approximately $1.4 million.

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The Two-for-One Layer

This is where the plan gets more interesting.

Cash balance plans can hold life insurance inside them — specifically designed policies tied to the plan, each with their own structure. The reason this matters: life insurance is a tax-free asset.

In this client’s case, the $270,000 annual contribution splits roughly $175,000 into the investment account and $95,000 into the life insurance policy inside the plan.

The policy builds tax-free cash value. The death benefit passes to beneficiaries tax-free. Both are funded on a tax-deductible basis.

That is the two-for-one this plan is designed around.

At the end of five years — or ten, or whenever the plan converts — the options open up. The investment account rolls into an IRA and, over time, works through Roth conversions into a tax-free environment.

The life insurance policy either continues for the death benefit or converts into an annuity. Either way, the distributions come out tax-free as long as we buy the policy out of the plan using a grantor trust.

I will write a separate article in the future detailing the unique tax arbitrage that exists by deducting the premiums and then swapping it out of the plan with a grantor trust.

We are not just solving this year’s tax bill. We are building a tax-free structure for the next 30 years.

One note for the practical question that comes up: if you already have life insurance through a separate relationship, the plan can still be structured primarily as an investment account.

You would still be contributing over $200,000 per year toward the plan. The flexibility is there.

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What Happens When Life Changes

Every client asks some version of this: what if income goes up or income drops?

The plan can be amended. If income jumps and you want to contribute more, we go back to the actuaries and redesign it upward. If income drops and the contribution target becomes a strain, we restructure downward.

If something unexpected happens overnight, there is a path to prevent the plan from creating new problems.

None of these adjustments are simple — the actuaries earn their fee — but the plan is not a rigid five-year lockup.

At the end of the window, we renew, convert, or restructure. The strategy evolves with your situation.

The Math Side by Side

Here is the comparison I keep coming back to in these conversations.

Self-employed, $390,000 income, SEP IRA maxed:

- Annual contribution: $70,000

- Taxable income remaining: $320,000

- Estimated tax savings from the contribution: roughly $26,000

Self-employed, $390,000 income, cash balance plan:

- Annual contribution: $270,000

- Taxable income remaining: $120,000

- Estimated tax savings: approximately $110,000

The difference is $84,000 per year. Every year. Kept in your pocket rather than handed to the IRS.

Over five years, that is more than $420,000 in additional tax savings — on top of contributing $1.25 million more into a growing, tax-deferred account.

You cannot get there with a SEP IRA.

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Who This Is Actually For

Cash balance plans are not for everyone.

They make sense for self-employed individuals or business owners earning at least $100,000 and realistically $200,000 or more for the math to move the needle. Below that threshold, the plan cost and compliance requirements eat into the benefit.

You also need an income structure where consistent contributions over five years are realistic. This works best when you can commit to a floor. The plan can be amended, but it is designed around multi-year discipline.

If you are a W-2 employee: this is not your vehicle. The plan requires self-employment or business ownership income. If you have a W2 income and some type of self-employment or ownership income, this could be your vehicle.

But if you are a consultant, a contractor, an independent professional, a business owner — pulling $200,000 or more in 1099 income — and you are still watching six-figure tax bills show up every April, knowing that you maxed your SEP IRA and still couldn’t outrun it?

This exists. It works. Most people just haven’t been told about it.

Why Revolutionary Wealth for Cash Balance Planning

Most advisors do not have an actuarial relationship set up to design these plans. Most CPAs will tell you the SEP IRA is the ceiling because that is the tool they know how to file.

Neither one is wrong to reach for what is familiar. They just are not set up to go further.

Revolutionary Wealth exists because I got tired of watching business owners max out a SEP IRA and still write a six-figure check every April.

Cash balance plans are not a side offering for us. They are one of the core tools we build around for business owners earning $200,000 or more, alongside MSO structures and life insurance layered inside the plan itself.

Solve two, three, sometimes four different tax problems with one vehicle.

We coordinate directly with the actuarial firm on your behalf, structure the life insurance layer if it fits your situation, and revisit the plan every year as your income changes. This is not a form we fill out once and forget about.

If a SEP IRA has stopped moving the needle for you, this is the conversation to have next.

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Why I Have Conviction in this Planning

When I sit down with a business owner over the age of fifty, I hear the same line repeatedly. There’s a common sense of shame in their voice every time they say it.

“I haven’t been able to put away as much as I’d have liked for retirement.”

The truth is they have nothing to be ashamed of. They’ve put all of their money back into their business, they’ve raised and educated their children, and they’ve unknowingly done their best to reduce taxes year by year.

Cash balance plans are their golden ticket opportunity. They can make up a lifetime of retirement savings over a five-year period.

Had they gone the traditional route and maxed a 401(k) for thirty years, they’d have roughly $1.8 million. They can get extremely close or way beyond that number saving anywhere from $1 million to $5 million over a five-year period.

Meanwhile, they still have their business as a retirement asset that they were able to go all-in on for that extended period of time.

Cash balance planning with Revolutionary Wealth allows for business owners to diversify their balance sheet and reduce their tax liability at a time when it matters most to them.

Saving money is making money, see you next time.

Cheers!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

How to Know If Your Fiduciary Financial Advisor Is Actually Working for You

Drew Scott — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:03:40 GMT

A few weeks ago, a business contact asked me for a favor.

His father’s girlfriend is 61 years old. She’s retiring from the postal service in August.

A group that specifically works with retiring postal employees had come in, sat down with her, and presented what they called a complete financial plan.

He handed me the packet. Fifty-plus pages. Charts, risk tolerance questionnaires, investment allocations, projection graphs showing her living comfortably well into her nineties.

He said, “Before she signs anything, will you look at this?”

I started reading. By the third page, I knew exactly where this was headed.

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“Fee-Only” and “Fiduciary” Are Not the Same Thing

The first page of the presentation identified the firm as fee-only. That’s a term most people associate with trust. No commissions. No products being pushed for a kickback. Just an advisor being paid directly by the client, acting in their interest.

Here’s what fee-only actually means.

It means no commissions on securities products. Stocks, ETFs, mutual funds — they can’t earn a commission on those. But fee-only says nothing about insurance products.

Fixed indexed annuities are classified differently. A fee-only advisor can recommend an annuity and receive compensation on it without violating their fee-only status.

And sure enough, three pages in, there it was.

Of her $625,000 in retirement savings, $300,000 was going into a fixed indexed annuity projecting a 3.3% rate of return. The other $325,000 would go into their advisory account, where they assumed a 7% rate of return.

Their annual fee: 1.8% on the advisory account.

Here’s the math on that design. She has a $27,000 per year gap between her pension, her Social Security, and the $87,000 she wants to live on in retirement.

Under this plan, she pulls that $27,000 from the annuity first. The advisory account sits untouched and growing.

Meanwhile, the advisor earns 1.8% per year on $325,000 — roughly $5,850 in year one — compounding upward for fifteen years while she never touches that account.

She takes from the account that doesn’t grow their fee that they make $21,000 in commission in year one. They earn on the account she never touches.

That’s not a conflict of interest — according to how the word “fiduciary” gets applied.

It is however the exact opposite of being a fiduciary and putting the client’s interests before their own.

Watch me explain the difference between a fiduciary and a non-fiduciary financial advisor.

The Word Fiduciary Has Become Marketing

I want to be careful here, because this conversation gets oversimplified fast.

Being a fiduciary does carry a legal standard. You’re required to act in the client’s best interest. The problem is that “best interest” has a wide lane.

You can design a plan that is technically legal, technically fiduciary, and still primarily serve your own compensation structure. The plan I was holding was a textbook example.

And here’s the other side of that coin: there are fiduciaries who refuse to use annuities on principle and who are still costing their clients enormous amounts of money through poor tax planning or failure to stress test a retirement against bad market sequences. Not selling an annuity doesn’t make you a good planner.

The question is never: is this advisor a fiduciary?

The question is: does this plan look like it was designed for the client or for the advisor?

What Was Missing from Her Plan

I read the entire presentation. Cover to cover.

Here’s what I did not find.

Not one word about income taxes. Not one mention of Roth conversion strategy. No analysis of how her pension and Social Security interact to determine what tax bracket she’ll be in when Required Minimum Distributions begin at 75.

No modeling of what her Medicare premiums look like at different income levels. Zero tax risk analysis.

She is 61, retiring in August. She has more than a decade before RMDs kick in. She has a gap period before Social Security where partial Roth conversions could permanently reduce her tax burden in retirement.

Her pension creates a baseline income that changes how every other dollar she withdraws gets taxed.

All of that was invisible in this plan.

What they gave her instead was an investment allocation and a projection line that assumed markets cooperate, income stays smooth, and nothing surprises her for the next 25 years.

A dollar lost to unnecessary taxes is a dollar gone forever. And this plan hadn’t thought about that once.

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Why Sequence of Returns Risk Changes Everything

Here’s what concerns me most when I see a retirement plan that doesn’t stress test.

Sequence of returns risk is the idea that the order in which you experience market returns matters more than the average return itself.

If markets drop 30% in the first two years of your retirement while you’re pulling $27,000 a year from your portfolio, you’ve sold assets at the worst possible price. The compounding works against you from that point forward. You may never recover the ground you lost.

A 7% average return over 20 years sounds solid on paper. But if years one through three are negative and you’re withdrawing the entire time, that same 7% average can still result in a depleted portfolio.

The plan I was holding assumed a straight 7% return on $325,000 for fifteen years. No dip scenario. No stress. No preparation for the sequence that actually shows up.

When I ran her numbers through a down market in years one through three — not a crash, just a normal rough start — the plan failed. She ran out of money.

That’s what happens when a plan isn’t built to last. It works perfectly in the projections. It doesn’t work in the real world.

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What Stress-Tested, Tax-Integrated Planning Actually Looks Like

When my firm Revolutionary Wealth rebuilt her plan, we ran it through multiple scenarios. Down market in years one through three. Flat market for five years. Average market.

Different Social Security timing. Partial Roth conversions during the window before RMDs begin.

Annuity included. Annuity excluded. Different annuity structures with different sequencing.

I looked at all of her income sources together — pension, Social Security, savings — and mapped out which accounts to draw from first and in what amounts to keep her in the lowest possible tax bracket over 30 years.

That is what tax-integrated retirement planning means. It’s not just investment management. It’s sequencing every dollar to minimize what goes to the IRS and maximize how long the rest lasts.

Her best outcome did include an annuity. Not the one they pitched. Not structured the way they structured it. But there is a version of this plan where a portion in an annuity protects her against the worst-case sequence and gives her a guaranteed income floor to build around.

The difference between the right annuity design and the wrong one isn’t always the product.

It’s who benefits from the way it’s used.

The Number That Matters

Over the course of her retirement, the redesigned plan adds over $600,000 in value compared to what she was about to sign.

The recommendations cut her fees in half versus what she was previously recommended.

And she can still retire in August like she planned.

That’s what a second opinion can do. The previously recommended plan was built around their compensation model first and her retirement second.

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The Real Difference Between a Fiduciary and Someone Who Says They Are One

It is not the products they use or refuse to use.

A fiduciary who avoids annuities on principle but never addresses tax risk is still leaving money on the table.

A fiduciary who uses annuities inside a stress-tested, tax-integrated, client-first plan can be one of the best decisions you make. The vehicle doesn’t determine the outcome. The design does.

What separates a real fiduciary from someone who uses the label is method. It’s whether the plan was built to answer one question: in every scenario, across every market cycle, is this client going to be okay?

Before you sign any retirement plan, ask your advisor to show you five things.

A down market scenario in your first three years of retirement, and what happens to your income when it hits. Sequence of returns risk is the biggest threat most new retirees never see coming.

A tax strategy — not an investment strategy, a tax strategy — showing how withdrawals from each account affect your tax bracket, your Medicare premiums, and how much of your Social Security becomes taxable.

The plan run with and without the specific products they’re recommending, so you can see the difference in outcomes and understand what each one costs you.

The fee schedule modeled against your portfolio over 20 years, so you know what you’re actually paying over time, not just per year.

A projection that runs to age 95, stress tested against a bad early sequence.

If they can’t show you those five things, you don’t have a fiduciary designed financial plan.

You have a sales pitch.

What Revolutionary Wealth Is

I founded Revolutionary Wealth in Bentonville, Arkansas based on eight years of client feedback of what our clients said they wanted as an experience.

Down to earth, cost-effective advice from professionals with retirement planning experience, not theory.
Tax planning that helps them plan ahead of what’s coming, not just when they go to file.
The ability to setup an estate plan cost effectively without an attorney billing and upselling them at every turn, only to never speak with their other advisors or truly coordinate their assets.
Advisors who aren’t going to retire before they do and work instead of golfing three days a week.

Revolutionary Wealth is a fiduciary firm. Legally, that means we’re required to act in your interest. Practically, it means every plan we build gets stress-tested across multiple market scenarios, every income source gets mapped against its actual tax consequence, and no product goes in the design because of what it pays us.

Our fees are significantly below 1.8%.

We work primarily with pre-retirees and retirees, ages 59 to 67. That window before RMDs begin is the most leveraged financial period of your life.

Partial Roth conversions. Social Security timing. Sequencing withdrawals to keep you in the lowest tax bracket you can manage for as long as possible.

That’s not an investment strategy with a tax line item attached. That’s a plan.

We’re based in Bentonville and work with clients across the country.

If you’ve already got a plan, bring it. The first conversation is just a conversation.

We’ll tell you honestly what we see.

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Standing Before the Long Green Table

A few years ago, I read the leadership book “The Wisdom of the Bullfrog” by Admiral William McRaven. Towards the end of the book, page 177 to be exact, are words that have forever stuck with me.

Admiral McRaven writes, ““Can you stand before the long green table?” Can you justify to reasonable men and women, sitting in judgment of your decisions, that the actions you are taking are moral, legal, and ethical and conform to the goals and objectives of the organization? If not, you should reconsider your actions.”

The truth is that anyone in a fiduciary capacity is truly operating in a high-stakes environment. Attorneys, physicians, CPAs, and some financial advisors are all held to a high-stakes standard.

The problem is all of these professions, not just financial advisors, gloss over the importance of the nature of their work due to routines and the mundane. The longer one tends to do it the more they lose sight of just how high stakes their role really is.

I’m human and I make mistakes just like everyone else. I don’t always professionally get it right, but I try my best. Most days I succeed, but many days I fail.

But every day and with every client, I see myself standing before that long green table. Their family, my family, God, and any advisor who could come behind my work sitting around the table judging my decisions and questioning the action I am about to take.

I do not fear much in life, but I deeply fear what could come from intentionally doing someone wrong. Life is too short to mistreat others for a short-sighted gain.

It’s easy to say that my exams, credentials, and experience make me a fiduciary but if I’m being honest, it’s sitting in front of that long green table.

See you next time, cheers!

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.

Same Card. Same Sale. Two Completely Different Tax Bills.

Drew Scott — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:04:18 GMT

A collector I know spent most of his adult life buying and holding. Not flipping. Not dealing. Buying things that he loved and filing them away.

He found a specific card at a show in 2001. Paid $400 for it. Put it in a top loader, filed it away, and mostly forgot it existed. Twenty-three years later, his son mentioned it. They pulled it out, looked it up, and saw a number neither of them expected.

It was worth $100,000.

He decided to sell. He had owned it for more than two decades. He knew about capital gains. He had sold stocks before, understood the rates, and budgeted mentally for somewhere around $15,000 to $20,000 in taxes.

He didn’t realize what the IRS does differently with collectibles.

He wrote a check for $28,000.

Watch me visually summarize this article if you don’t feel like reading.

The Rate That Does Not Get Announced at Card Shows

We covered the 28% collectibles rate in a recent issue. The short version: sports cards, coins, stamps, art, and most physical collectibles are not treated as standard capital gains assets. The IRS has a separate category under Section 1(h)(5), and the maximum long-term rate for that category is 28%.

Stocks top out at 20% for long-term gains. For most middle-income investors the rate is 15%. Collectibles do not get those rates.

When I first started working with serious collectors, I made the same assumption most of them do. Capital gains are capital gains. Finding out otherwise changed how I approach every planning conversation before a sale.

For the collector with the $400 card, the math was straightforward and painful. His basis was $400. His sale price was $100,000. His gain was $99,600. At 28%, his tax was $27,888.

He had nothing to offset it with. No expenses to deduct. No business entity to run costs through. Every dollar of appreciation was fully exposed.

That is the pure collector’s tax position. Hold an asset for decades, sell it, pay 28% on the gain with no mechanism to reduce the taxable number.

Now Take a Different Collector

A card dealer operates the same market. Different rules.

He buys collections, grades select pieces, and moves inventory through eBay, conventions, and private buyers. He has been doing this for six years. He has an LLC, a dedicated business bank account, and a spreadsheet tracking every card that comes in and goes out.

He acquires the same card — same market value, same sale price of $100,000.

His income from that sale is not a capital gain.

Because he is in the business of buying and selling, the IRS treats the proceeds as ordinary business income. That sounds worse on the surface. Ordinary income rates are higher. Thirty-seven percent at the top end. Most people hear “ordinary income” and assume they would pay more.

Most people would be wrong.

Ordinary income from a business comes with something the pure collector does not have.

Deductions.

The Math That Changes the Conversation

Here is how the dealer’s $100,000 sale actually looks on paper.

He paid $65,000 for the card. That is his cost of goods. His gross profit is $35,000.

Over the course of the year, he also paid:

$1,400 in grading fees across PSA and BGS submissions.

$900 in shipping, packaging, and insurance on purchases and sales.

$1,200 in show table and convention fees.

$1,800 in storage for his inventory.

$900 in business insurance on his collection.

Total deductible business expenses for the year: $6,200.

Net taxable income from that transaction: $28,800.

At a 24% federal income rate, his tax on the sale is $6,912.

The pure collector paid $28,000 on a $100,000 sale.

The dealer paid $6,912 on the same $100,000 sale.

Same card. Same market. Same gross number on the sale receipt.

The collector’s 28% rate applied to a $99,600 gain. The dealer’s 24% rate applied to a $28,800 net profit. The rate does not tell the whole story. The deductible base is what determines the actual check.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between holding a collection and running a business.

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What Dealers Can Deduct

If your buying and selling activity qualifies as a trade or business under the IRS standard, here is what can come off your taxable income before the rate is applied:

Cost of goods sold. The price you paid for every card, coin, or piece you sell. Your first and largest deduction.

Grading and authentication fees. PSA, BGS, SGC, PCGS, NGC, CGC. Every submission you send out.

Shipping. Packaging, postage, and insurance in transit, both when acquiring inventory and when fulfilling sales.

Show and convention costs. Table fees, booth rental, and the direct travel costs for events where you are operating as a seller.

Storage. A dedicated unit, or the pro-rated share of space used exclusively for inventory.

Business insurance. Coverage for your inventory against loss, theft, or damage.

Professional services. Accounting, tax preparation, and any legal fees related to the business.

Business phone and internet. The portion of those costs tied to your buying and selling activity.

Photography and listing costs. Equipment or subscription services used specifically for cataloging and marketing inventory.

None of these exist for the pure collector. Every dollar of appreciation hits the full 28% rate. The dealer’s number comes down substantially before the rate is ever applied.

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How the IRS Decides Which One You Are

The IRS does not take your word for it. They look at the facts of your activity.

Frequency and regularity of sales. Whether you carry on the activity in a businesslike manner. Whether you maintain separate records and a dedicated business account. How much time you spend on it. Whether you depend on the income. Whether you have had profitable years. Whether there is a genuine profit motive beyond personal enjoyment.

You do not need a brick-and-mortar store. Consistent eBay sales, regular convention presence, and maintained inventory with documented cost-of-goods tracking can support dealer classification. The IRS is looking for evidence of a trade or business, not a collector who occasionally sells when the price feels right.

The line that matters: are you doing this to generate income as a trade, or are you building a collection that you sell from when the opportunity presents itself?

If you are on the trade side, ordinary income treatment applies. So do business deductions.

If you are on the collector side, capital gains treatment applies. At 28%, with nothing to offset it.

The Self-Employment Tax Reality

There is a cost to dealer classification worth addressing directly.

Self-employment income is subject to self-employment tax in addition to federal income tax. In 2025 that rate is 15.3% on net earnings up to $168,600, then 2.9% above. Half of the SE tax is deductible, which softens it, but the number is real and needs to be accounted for.

For a dealer with high net income and no business structure, the combined effect of ordinary income rates plus self-employment tax can end up close to or above what a collector would pay at 28%.

That is why the structure conversation matters as much as the classification.

A card shop or active dealer operating as an S-corporation can pay its owner a reasonable salary and distribute remaining profit as a shareholder distribution. Only the salary portion is subject to self-employment tax. The distribution is not. The business still deducts all the same expenses. The SE tax burden comes down meaningfully.

For dealers doing serious volume, the entity structure is not an afterthought. It is where a significant amount of the planning happens.

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What the Pure Collector Can Do

If you are a collector — not a dealer — and you are sitting on items with significant appreciation, a few options exist before you sell.

Installment sales. Spreading a large gain across multiple tax years keeps annual income lower and can reduce the effective rate in each year. On a $100,000 gain, splitting the recognition over three years changes the bracket math.

Donate appreciated collectibles directly to a qualified charity. Donating an item rather than selling it and donating the proceeds lets you deduct the fair market value without recognizing the capital gain.

There are limits — your deduction for tangible personal property donated to a public charity is generally capped at 30% of adjusted gross income — and you need a qualified appraisal. But for collectors who already give to charity and are holding highly appreciated items, the numbers are worth running.

Time the sale around income. The 28% collectibles rate is a ceiling, not a floor. If your ordinary income rate drops below 28% in a given year — a partial retirement year, a year when you sell a business at a loss, or any year when your taxable income is meaningfully lower — your collectibles gain may be taxed at your effective rate rather than the full 28%. A $100,000 gain in a 22% income year is taxed at 22%, not 28.

The $28,000 check was not the only possible outcome. It was the outcome of not having the conversation before he listed the card.

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The Number to Take Out of This

Two people can sell the same card for the same price and write two very different checks.

One never tracked expenses, never structured a business, and held for personal enjoyment. He pays 28% on every dollar of gain.

The other ran it as a trade, tracked every cost, and structured appropriately. He pays his ordinary rate on a net number that deductions already brought down.

The rate is 28% for collectors. But the rate is only half the equation.

Grab your mug. Pull up what you are holding. And before the next big sale — whether you are a lifelong collector or a dealer running volume — make sure the person advising you knows the difference between a long-term hold and a business transaction.

The IRS already does.

Disclosures:

Three Tax Traps Waiting in Retirement (And How to Outmaneuver Them)

Drew Scott — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:03:37 GMT

A referral came in not long ago. Husband and wife, both recently retired, both feeling good about where they stood. They had followed the playbook their entire working lives.

Maxed the 401(k). Captured the employer match. Reinvested dividends. Did everything the financial media told them to do.

Their combined pre-tax balance was $1.4 million.

They sat across from me and the husband said, “We were told retirement means lower taxes. Less income, lower bracket.” He said it like a man who had been waiting to hear someone confirm it.

He stopped waiting about twenty minutes later.

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The Promise Was Half Correct

The logic is not wrong. It is incomplete. And incomplete plans have a way of becoming expensive surprises.

Here is what most people hear: contribute pre-tax, let the money compound tax-deferred, pull it out in retirement when income drops, pay a lower rate.

Simple, elegant, works perfectly on a whiteboard.

Here is what the whiteboard left out: the IRS does not let you leave that money alone forever. At age 73 or 75, three separate tax events arrive at your door. Most people never planned for any of them.

I will be the first to admit that the first time I ran the full math on all three at once, I checked my numbers twice. I was certain I had made an error.

I had not.

Watch me perfectly explain how the process actually works and summarize this article, on a whiteboard.

RMDs: The Withdrawal You Did Not Choose

Required Minimum Distributions are the government collecting what they have been patient about for decades. Every dollar sitting in a traditional IRA or 401(k) entered the account tax-free. The IRS extended credit. At 73 or 75, they call it in.

The IRS takes your December 31st account balance from the prior year and divides it by a life expectancy factor from their Uniform Lifetime Table.

You do not negotiate the amount. You do not delay it. You do not opt out.

If you fail to take the required distribution, the penalty is 25% of the amount you were supposed to withdraw.

On a $1.4 million balance, the first RMD is roughly $51,000. It hits as ordinary income. Same rate as a paycheck from a job.

The couple in my office was 63 when we sat down. With standard compounding through age 73, their $1.4 million was projected to be closer to $2.1 million. Their first RMD was going to be nearly $77,000.

They had never run that number. Nobody had ever asked them to.

The RMD does not hold steady either. The account keeps compounding. The life expectancy factor keeps shrinking.

The mandatory withdrawal grows every year, whether you need the income or not.

IRMAA: The Medicare Surcharge Nobody Warned You About

Layer in Medicare.

The standard Medicare Part B premium in 2026 runs about $185 per month. Most people know that number. What most people do not know is that Medicare uses your tax return from two years prior to calculate what you actually pay.

Cross an income threshold and your premium jumps. The program is called IRMAA, Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount, and it is one of the least-discussed costs in retirement planning.

For a married couple in 2026, the first IRMAA surcharge kicks in above $212,000 of modified adjusted gross income. That number can feel distant until you add $77,000 in RMDs to $36,000 in combined Social Security, some dividend income, and maybe some part-time consulting. The ceiling arrives faster than the projections suggested.

The tiers stack quickly. And because the calculation uses income from two years prior, by the time you see the higher premium on your bill, the year that triggered it is already closed. The planning has to happen before the income does.

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Social Security: 85 Cents on the Dollar, Taxable

Most people know Social Security exists. Most people do not know that up to 85% of it is taxable.

The threshold that determines how much of your benefit gets taxed has not been adjusted for inflation since 1993. That year, Congress set $44,000 of combined income as the level above which married couples owe tax on 85% of their Social Security benefit.

That threshold is still $44,000 today.

If you and your spouse collect $36,000 in combined Social Security and receive $77,000 in RMDs, your combined income is $113,000. Every dollar of your Social Security benefit that can legally be taxed will be.

The rule has never been indexed to inflation. It was never designed to be.

Three income streams. Three tax events. None of them were in the plan you made at 47.

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“I’ll Just Take Less Out”

This is the first response I hear when people start doing the math.

The problem is that with RMDs, less is not an option. The IRS sets the withdrawal amount. You take it, or you pay the 25% penalty on what you skipped. Taking out less only works if the pre-tax balance is smaller.

That is the actual fix. Not managing the withdrawal at 73 or 75. Managing the account balance before 73 or 75.

That is where the three-bucket strategy comes in.

Bucket One: Taxable

Your brokerage or savings account. Money that has already been taxed, invested, and is now subject to capital gains rates when sold.

Capital gains rates run lower than ordinary income rates in almost every scenario. For married couples filing jointly in 2026, if your total taxable income stays below approximately $98,900, your long-term capital gains rate is 0%.

Zero. Nothing owed on the growth.

Above that threshold, most retirees land in the 15% capital gains bracket. Still meaningfully lower than the ordinary income rate on the same dollar.

The taxable bucket does not generate RMDs. It does not create a mandatory income event.

Used correctly, it produces income the IRS collects very little from. It is the most flexible pool of retirement money you can hold.

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Bucket Two: Tax-Deferred

Your traditional IRA, 401(k), SEP-IRA, and anything else pre-tax. Every dollar coming out is ordinary income.

The strategy is not to minimize withdrawals from this bucket. It is to size withdrawals to fill exactly the space the tax code already gives you for free.

In 2026, a married couple filing jointly over 60 has a standard deduction of roughly $32,200. That is income you can receive without owing a dollar in federal income tax. If your RMDs stay at or below that number, the government-mandated withdrawal becomes tax-free income by default.

There is a second tool available inside this bucket for anyone who gives to charity: the Qualified Charitable Distribution, or QCD. If you are over 70½, you can send up to $108,000 per year directly from your IRA to a qualified charity. It counts toward your RMD.

It does not count as income on your return. You satisfy the withdrawal requirement, avoid the income event, and get the full charitable benefit without needing to itemize.

The tax-deferred bucket is not the problem. An oversized tax-deferred bucket is.

The goal is to manage it down to a size where RMDs stay within the standard deduction, and strategic giving handles the rest.

Bucket Three: Tax-Free

Your Roth IRA or Roth 401(k). Contributions were made after tax. Growth is tax-free. Qualified withdrawals are tax-free. No required minimum distributions during your lifetime.

This bucket handles everything the other two cannot cover at a low rate. Major one-time expenses. Healthcare costs. Income you need beyond what the standard deduction absorbs. Legacy assets for your heirs, who inherit a tax-free account rather than a deferred tax liability.

Roth withdrawals do not show up as income on your tax return. They do not count toward the IRMAA calculation. They do not affect how much of your Social Security gets taxed.

The larger this bucket, the more control you hold over your total retirement tax picture.

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The Window That Closes at 73 or 75

The best time to build the Roth bucket is before RMDs start forcing income on you whether you need it or not.

For most pre-retirees, the years between 60 and 75 are the lowest-income years in a long time. Careers are winding down. Social Security has not started. RMDs have not kicked in. Income is often manageable and, for once in a career, controllable.

That window is where Roth conversions are most powerful.

A Roth conversion takes money from a pre-tax account, pays the tax at today’s rate, and moves it into a Roth where it grows and distributes tax-free permanently.

You are buying out the IRS’s ownership stake in your pre-tax accounts before they get to set the price at 73 or 75.

The most effective conversions happen in layers. Each year you convert enough to fill the lower tax brackets without crossing into the next tier.

If you are in the 22% bracket, you convert to the ceiling of the 22% bracket. You stop there, repeat the following year, and keep reducing the pre-tax balance year by year.

A smaller pre-tax balance means smaller RMDs. Smaller RMDs mean lower IRMAA exposure, less Social Security taxation, and more room to pull from the 0% capital gains window in the taxable bucket. All three problems shrink when the pre-tax balance does.

The three buckets work together. The Roth conversion strategy is how you rebalance between them.

PSA: Nothing is ever once-size-fits-all. Feel free to read my previous article about how someone who came to me after following internet advice lost six figures doing Roth conversions.

What Happened with the Couple

We built a seven-year Roth conversion plan. Annual conversions between $90,000 and $120,000, timed to stay within their bracket ceiling and below the IRMAA threshold triggers.

By the time RMDs arrived, their projected pre-tax balance had come down by roughly $630,000.

That $630,000 is now in a Roth. No mandatory withdrawal schedule attached to it. No ordinary income tax on distributions. No IRMAA calculation to worry about. And when they pass it to their kids, the heirs inherit a tax-free account rather than a deferred tax liability.

Three problems. One coordinated strategy. All of them smaller than they would have been without the plan.

That is what solving two, three, sometimes four different tax problems with one vehicle looks like.

If You’re New Here, Grab a Seat

My name is Drew Scott. If this is the first time something of mine has landed in your inbox or you need a refresher, here’s the short version of who I am and why I write this.

I run two firms. Revolutionary Wealth is our financial planning and wealth management practice. Blueprint Business and Tax Advisors handles tax strategy, estate planning, and business consulting for business owners who are buying, selling, or trying to structure their way to keeping more of what they build.

The clients I spend most of my time with are pre-retirees in their late 50s and 60s, retirees navigating the distribution phase, and business owners earning north of $200,000 who have realized that the person managing their investments and the person filing their taxes have never once sat in the same room together.

Coffee and Compounding is where I write about what I see every week in real planning conversations. Not theory.

The actual math, the actual tools, and the actual mistakes that show up over and over again in people who did everything right and still ended up surprised.

The article above is a good example of what this newsletter is. No fluff. Just the strategies that matter for people who are serious about what they keep, not just what they earn.

I appreciate your attention, see you in a few days. Cheers!

Thanks for reading Coffee & Compounding! This post is free, share it with someone who needs the information.

Disclosures:

Not associated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration, Medicare or any other government agency.

Tax and Legal services provided are separate from the Securities or Advisory services offered through Revolutionary Wealth LLC.