The Big Picture Retirement Show does not provide specific tax, legal, or financial advice.

Listeners are encouraged to seek out their own advisors in these areas.

Hey everyone and welcome to the Big Picture Retirement Show, where we deliver insight on what you need to know for a meaningful retirement.

If you are planning for or living in retirement, this is the show for you. Hey, I'm Devin. Join again today by my co-host, John Ross. Hey, John.

Howdy. All right. Today's listener questions. All right. Beth and no seatbelt. Always put your mask on those people

are assisting another customer or a child. One of our favorite periods, because we just get to

go through these questions and look at them and decide which ones have brought a pill.

Today we've got a couple of doozies. All right. I like to be challenged. And when I give speeches out there,

I always say, you know, see if you can ask me a question. I don't have an answer to. Oh, no. So I do the wrong. I do the other thing. So at the end of my presentations, I'll say, okay, does anyone have any questions or just one role? No hard questions. But someone always asks me a hard question, and then I have to get back to them.

All right, so Wanda wants to know this.

She said, hey, I'm thinking about adding my son to my checking account, but my financial planner told me that I shouldn't. Now, that's all the information she gave. She didn't say why her financial planner told her this. But John, in my office, I get this all the time. Someone will come in and they'll say, Devin, I'm going to put my kids on my account. And they'll have a long list of reasons why they should. And some of them sound really good. Yeah, this is a terrible, terrible idea. Awful, right? Absolutely. I see you shaking your head. Absolutely. I I know what I know what you're going to say now.

This is this is a terrible, terrible plan. And very common. There's this concept that once you get up

into a certain age, that, you know, you start recognizing that your own frailties and you realize

that maybe somebody else is going to need to assist you. And it seems logical to go down

to your bank and add your kids as a co-owner on that account so that they will be able to write

checks and make withdrawals and make deposits and deal with that account so that if you become incapacitated, they won't have any problems. Makes sense to me. Now, I'll give you a personal story and then I'll give you a much bigger story. All right. The personal story was we had a lady who had called the office. She was in a panic. Absolute panic. And the reason she was in a panic is because she, like so many

other people, had decided, you know what, I've reached an age where I need to get my son on my account.

And so she went down and talked to the bank and they said, oh yeah, no problem. We can put your son

on the account. She got all of his information, which of course included his name and birthday

and social security number and all the kind of stuff

that the banks require to add another co-owner.

They put all of that information,

...