What Millionaire Retirees Fear Most (But Rarely Talk About)
Big Picture Retirement®
Devin Carroll
4.7 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For many affluent retirees, the biggest financial fear isn't market volatility or rising taxes. It's this simple question: What happens if I'm not the one here to manage the plan? In this episode, we talk about a deeply personal concern shared by countless couples.
When one spouse manages the investment strategy, the tax planning, and the long-term vision, the other is often left trusting that everything will work out. That trust may work fine today, but what if something changes tomorrow? What if the surviving spouse is left with a complex financial plan they don't fully understand?
Devin shares his own story, including the moment he realized his wife might struggle to carry on the plan they had built together. From that fear came action; a series of steps to make sure she would not only inherit assets, but also confidence and clarity. You'll hear about the simple, practical moves you can make to protect the person you love, including how to start the conversation, what to document, and how to choose someone you both trust.
This episode is a must-listen if you've ever thought, I just want to make sure my spouse will be okay if something happens to me.
Although this show does not provide specific tax, legal, or financial advice, you can engage Devin or John through their individual firms.
📍Contact Devin's team at https://carrolladvisory.co/podcast1
📍Contact John's team at https://www.rossandshoalmire.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Big Picture Retirement Show does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice. |
| 0:04.3 | Listeners are encouraged to seek out their own advisors in these areas. |
| 0:10.7 | Hey, everyone, welcome to the Big Picture Retirement Show. |
| 0:13.5 | I'm your host, Devon. |
| 0:14.6 | Join today by my co-host, John Ross. |
| 0:17.3 | Howdy. |
| 0:18.2 | John, if you look at the top fears of retirees, you know what the number one is? What's that? The fear of running out of money. Well, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Now, that, though, is not the fear that a lot of my clients, and I would suspect, a lot of our listeners have. For most of them, they've been good savers. You know, they've, |
| 0:38.0 | they've worked a job or they've owned a business and they've just consistently put money back. |
| 0:42.7 | And they've probably already used Bolden or the Empower tool or one of these other basic |
| 0:47.8 | retirement planning tools that has showed them that, oh, well, it looks like we've got plenty of |
| 0:52.3 | money to retire. That's right. You know, and we can lower those rates of return and let's do a little stress testing here |
| 0:58.5 | and see what would happen. |
| 0:59.7 | And, you know, probability of success is still at 85%. |
| 1:03.7 | So I think we're fine on that. |
| 1:05.6 | So that fear of running out of money is not one of the big fears that my clients and our listeners, I don't think, |
| 1:12.7 | experience. They do have some other fears, though. And I did a poll in my YouTube channel. And I think |
| 1:18.3 | it had a couple thousand responses. And then as we started to parse through the data, it's pretty |
| 1:22.9 | interesting what actually their number one fear is that keeps them up at night. So part of it initially is, hey, how do I do this and be tax efficient? I don't want to pay too much in taxes. That's one of my big fears, right? Sure. I want to do this in an optimal way. Now that I know I have enough money, Devin, and I know that I'm not going to run out of money unless there's multiple Black Swan events. I want to make sure that I'm not going to overpay in taxes. |
| 1:46.4 | That's a little planning. You put a little planning into it. You show them a few strategies and you say, |
| 1:51.3 | here's what we're going to do every year. We're going to get this realligned in our annual alignment |
| 1:54.9 | meetings, so forth. And boom, that fear is vanquished, right? |
| 1:59.7 | Poof. |
... |
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