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.

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

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

John. Howdy.

John, you've dealt with a lot of federal agencies, right? I've way too many. So you deal with the Veterans Administration. You do, what's some of the others that... Well, you know, I mean, I started out as a tax attorney. That was my... Oh, oh. You know, and so I got to deal with our friends at the Internal Revenue Service. I realized relatively quickly that I did not want to do tax law in large part because of the

Internal Revenue Service. You had to deal with those people. Yeah. But yeah, you know,

on any given day, I'm dealing with state Medicaid agencies, you know, state health and human

services. Yep. I'm dealing with Medicare, dealing with Veterans Administration, dealing with any number of government

agencies, even ones that you wouldn't necessarily think of as they would relate to estate

planning and stuff.

But yeah, we deal with them all the time.

Yeah.

All the time.

One thing that you'll see with most of them that I've dealt with at least, and I think this

is probably your experience as well, is that you can't always just take what the folks are saying there as the end story,

as the truth, as the way it has to be.

Oh, man, I give speeches, and I often will say that the absolute worst place to get advice

related to a government benefit or government service is from the agency

that administers that service. And I always use the same example. I had a young lady and she

had come to me and her mother was had gotten a little bit older. Her mother had nothing. I mean,

just nothing. She was a renter.

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