Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today on the show, we're going to dig into a piece of pending legislation

in the United States Congress and use it to bring out a couple of practical examples that I think

will be helpful to you and to me as we try to think about some practical financial planning tools and our own portfolios and as we try to discern the future.

I think it's an illustrative example and so I'm ready to use it as a teaching

a teaching point for you. The specific piece of legislation that I'm referring to

is something called the Secure Act, the technical name for this legislation is in the House of Representatives H.R. 1994, setting every

community up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019. There is a corresponding

Senate version of this legislation called the Retirement Enhancement

Savings Act, but usually this is being referred to as the Secure Act.

For context, I'm recording this podcast on Monday, July 15, 2019. As things stand currently, this bill 2015-2019.

As things stand currently, this bill is not yet the law of the land.

What I, this bill was passed, the House version of this bill was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 23 in a vote of 417 to 3. So an overwhelmingly,

an overwhelming vote almost unanimous of 417 to three in favor of the House bill.

Now the normal process, it's my understanding, the normal process for this was going to be that the Senate would try to pass its own bill called the Retirement Enhancement Savings Act and then try to bring any gaps or discrepancies between the House version and the Senate bill together in conference.

However, it's my understanding that a little bit, because of the overwhelming nature of the House vote

the leaders of the United States Senate decided to go ahead and just try to

use a legislative maneuver called Hotlining and hotline the Secure Act which basically means to a just simply pass it through the house through this hotlining process.

Now if, so this would only work if no senators object to it under the idea of unanimous consent.

If any senators object to the House version of the bill,

then it has to go on hold and it has to be debated and further changes brought in in some way.

At the moment, it seems as though one senator is publicly causing problems for this bill,

...