Hey John, before we jump into the show, several months ago, you told me that you had bought the Amazon Alexa. No, it's the Amazon Echo. That's what it's called. The Echo. And so you were telling me how cool it was. It could do all this neat stuff. And so I decided to order one myself. Oh, yeah. My wife's an early adopter on most technology. And so, yeah, we had pre-ordered when they just announced it. Oh, wow. So yeah, we've had one since it came out.

Well, so after listening to you talk about... And so, yeah, we had pre-ordered when they just announced it. Oh, wow. So, yeah, we've had one since it came out.

Well, so after listening to you talk about it and talk about how fantastic it was, I decided it's time to order one for myself. So I got one. I set it up in my kitchen, and we absolutely love it. It's fantastic. Oh, yeah. No, we've now expanded to where we have one in almost every room,

including at my office and in our individual offices and stuff. Yeah. So the other day,

I ordered an extra one to put just in my office here so I could listen to stuff in the downtime

when I'm working and stuff like that because it's so much easier to listen to stuff on the Alexa

than it is to go out online and find it or anything like that. In addition, it'll do all of this other stuff too, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, we've even gotten to where we'll order stuff off the Amazon and things just with the basically by asking for it. Oh, I know. It's crazy. You just tell Alexa to order something and it does. Some of the other things that it will do, though, is I know people who turn their lights on and off with this thing. Sure. With those enabled little plug-in things that you use, they adjust their thermostats with it. Yep. Karen, my wife, she uses it to build a shopping list. And then when she goes to the store, everything that she just told Alexa to add to her shopping list is right there in her out. Yeah, they're a neat little tool. Yeah, it's fantastic. One of the other things that it will do is it'll pull up the episodes of our podcast. That's right. So I actually listen to our podcast quite often in the mornings before anyone ends up. I'm in there listening to it,

figuring out how we can improve it. But there's going to be a little bit more in the show

later on about how you can get your own echo because we're going to give one away.

That's right. Fantastic. Everybody needs one of these.

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. I'm

Devin. And with me, again, as he always is, John. Hey, John. Howdy.

Back today for some more listener questions. Exciting stuff. Yeah, it's a good stuff. We get to

get to find out what you want to know about. Know that you really exist out there, and you're not just little numbers on our downloading charts. Yeah, that's right. We find out what you really want to ask and you really want to know. So good stuff. All right. Before we get started, let me remind our listeners, if you want to read the ebook that you and I wrote, you can go to big pictureretirement.net forward slash steps, and it's a free download. So there's no reason not to go to it. That's right. It's free, and if you don't like it, we will give you your money back. That is a guarantee. That's right. You don't even have to print it out before you read it, so there's no commitment.

No, that's exactly right. It's good stuff. Okay, so our first question today comes from Rob, and he's wanting to know something about sending his IRA contributions or IRA distributions, rather,

to a charity. Yeah, I mean, it's not quite clear whether he's talking about doing that right now or we're doing it, naming a charity as a beneficiary when he dies or what. But this brought up a couple of things that I thought were important to talk about. And so I hope I'm ultimately getting to Robert's core questions here. And I think we will, regardless of what exactly he was intending. We don't know that his name is Robert. He said Rob. It could be short for Robin, and he's just embarrassed to that name. I guess that's possible. Okay. Rob, we'll call you Rob from now on. Okay. Yeah. Let's go. Let's go with Rob. All right. Rob. All right. So anyway, Rob, several years ago, they passed kind of a one-time deal where people could take money out of their

IRA tax-free as long as it went directly from the IRA to a charity right and this was a new

concept you know typically if you're pulling money out of an IRA that's going to be a taxable

distribution right and so this was the first time they had done this It kind of went back and forth for a couple of years. It came in. It went away. It came in. And a lot of times when they pass these laws, they'll put built-in expiration dates on them. So they'll say, here's this new thing you can do for two years. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, they have now made this law

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