Key Takeaways
- Most people spend six or seven minutes a year on their benefits, then repeat last year’s picks. [00:01:34]
- The HSA is the only triple-tax-advantaged account, and it can be invested and rolled over from year to year. [00:04:57]
- Pairing group and individual life insurance usually beats relying on either one alone. [00:10:32]
- Employees, executives, and entrepreneurs each play a different game with their workplace plans. [00:14:11]
- Focus your energy on what you control: your savings rate, asset allocation, and asset location. [00:19:07]
About This Webinar
Most people give more thought to choosing a streaming plan than to workplace benefits planning. The average employee spends about 6 or 7 minutes a year selecting benefits, often carrying over last year’s choices without a second look. Those choices shape how much you keep, how you’re protected, and what compounds over a career that can run forty years or longer.
This session covers the decisions hiding within a benefits portal and those just outside it. It is built for younger high earners, early-career professionals, and entrepreneurs who design plans rather than just enroll in them. The throughline is the one we return to with every client: clarity, comfort, and confidence in the decisions you make.
Where workplace benefits planning starts: your health plan
Health coverage is where the alphabet soup begins, and it sets up which tax-advantaged accounts you can use later. Ben Tuscai and Jack Dwyer walk through the various benefits, outlining the major differences.
Preferred Provider Organization (PPO)
The higher-cost, higher-flexibility option. You can see specialists and doctors across networks with little friction, which suits anyone who wants to keep a particular doctor. You pay more for that freedom.
Health Maintenance Organization (HMO)
The lower-cost trade. Premiums are lower, but you stay in a network and usually need a referral to see a specialist. If you’re healthy and don’t mind the guardrails, the savings can be worth it.
High-Deductible Health Plan (HDHP)
Low premiums in exchange for higher out-of-pocket costs when you need care. It fits someone relatively healthy who is comfortable carrying more risk, and it is the gateway to a Health Savings Account.
Health Savings Account (HSA)
The only triple-tax-advantaged account there is. Contributions can avoid FICA, federal, and state taxes; the balance grows tax-free; and withdrawals for qualified medical expenses are tax-free. Above the threshold you set, it can be invested, and any unspent amount rolls over year to year. One caution: an HSA inherited by anyone other than a spouse becomes taxable in the year of death, so it needs planning.
Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
Same pre-tax treatment as an HSA, with two differences. You can’t invest the balance, and it is generally use-it-or-lose-it within the plan year. Useful for predictable costs, not for long-term saving.
Dependent Care FSA
Covers childcare and adult care costs, such as daycare or summer camp, with pre-tax dollars. The money doesn’t grow and is use-it-or-lose-it, but the contribution limit recently increased, making it more useful for families.
Life insurance, group and individual
The point of life insurance is to transfer risk from your family to an insurer for a premium. An individual policy lets you set the term and coverage and usually requires health screening. A group policy through your employer is capped at a multiple of your salary, can get pricier as you age, and may or may not be portable when you leave. Pairing the two often beats relying on either alone, since coverage that fits a couple can fall short once a second or third child arrives. The principle is coordination: insurance should rhyme with the investment portfolio, which should rhyme with the estate plan.
Retirement plans and the employer match
Whether it is a 401(k), a 403(b), or a SEP or SIMPLE IRA, the mechanics rhyme. You can contribute Roth dollars, paying tax now so the money comes out tax-free later, or pre-tax dollars, deferring the tax until you draw it down. The feature worth your attention is the employer match. A dollar-for-dollar match means your contribution is met by your employer up to a limit, so capturing the full match is usually the first move in workplace benefits planning. Read the vesting schedule, though. Some employers make the match yours immediately, others phase it in over years, so leaving early can forfeit part of it. Your own contributions are always yours.
Employee, executive, entrepreneur
The same plan looks different depending on where you sit. An employee works within the plan in place. An executive often has more influence, plus long-term incentive plans on top, such as stock options or restricted stock units, all of which need to be coordinated. An entrepreneur is designing the plan itself, weighing a solo 401(k) against a traditional one, and setting a match that attracts and keeps talent. Knowing which seat you’re in changes the questions you should ask.
Asset allocation, asset location, and what you can control
Two ideas travel together. Asset allocation is how you spread money across asset classes, which smooths the ride because they do not all move in step. Asset location is the tax bucket each asset sits in. Holding everything pre-tax is not a failure, but a balance across pre-tax, Roth, and an HSA gives you more flexibility later, including Roth dollars that come out tax-free with no required minimum distributions. Underneath it is the behavioral finance side of the work: you cannot change tax policy or market returns, so spend your energy on your savings rate, your allocation, and your location instead.
Human capital and financial capital
One more lens. Human capital is the sum of your future earnings, while financial capital is what you have already invested. Early in a career, financial capital is scarce, but human capital is abundant, with earning years still ahead. Over time, the work converts some of that earning power into financial capital, so total wealth keeps climbing, and the same thinking scales across generations as wealth passes down.
What good workplace benefits planning looks like
Open enrollment is confusing by design, and it is easier to get right with someone looking over your shoulder. Whether you are early in your career, navigating executive compensation, or building a plan for your own company, this is the kind of long-term financial planning we do every day. Start the conversation, and we will walk through your situation together. We will share the recording, and you can find the rest of our insights whenever you want a closer look.
Transcript
[00:00.4]
Okay, so, welcome to our second financial planning quarterly webinar of 2026. I’m Matt Zeigler. Sunpointe President Jack Dwyer is with me. How we doing today? Outstanding. I like outstanding VP of, financial planning,
[00:16.1]
Mr. Ben Tuscai. Bunny T, how you doing? Bunny T is good. Today we’re talking about benefits at work, how and where to save in those programs, balancing human capital and investment capital over time, because it does evolve over time. That’s a real thing.
[00:35.4]
And what clarity, comfort and confidence look like in practice. The chat is open. If you have questions, you can post them there. You can also email them in. If we have time at the end, we’ll try to address what we’ve got. And that being said, Ben, let’s go to work, as in HR and benefits work.
[00:52.8]
So kick us off. We talk to a lot of people about this over the course of the year. Yeah, I mean, many of us, head off into corporate America and receive very little assistance or education in choosing benefits that are going to have a direct impact on our lives.
[01:09.5]
Like HR departments at large do a good job of providing, like, broad based education. But what you need that fits into your particular life, that’s a little bit more complex, and that’s not an area that you can usually get a lot of help with.
[01:25.6]
And that’s for those just heading off into the workforce, those of us that are already in the workforce. I think the stat is about, six minutes is the average that somebody spends, or seven minutes is the average that somebody spends on their benefits every year that they select, which is objectively too low.
[01:42.6]
There’s a lot of us out there that just click next and say, hey, what happened last year is good enough for, for, the, for the next year as well. Looking at all of these areas, we’re going to dive into a bunch of different things here. Well, I am one to say that six minutes is five minutes too many and the way that it feels in many of those portals.
[02:02.6]
But as I know, all things boil down to life and death and taxes. But before we get to the life and death part, let’s, let’s focus on a little bit with some of the taxes, some of the programs are that are available and emphasize the, the living part. Talk to me about health insurance, AKA when we’re not dying, that money that we’re setting aside, health insurance is.
[02:23.4]
This is the big one, right? I mean, this is where the Alphabet soup starts. You could see, you know, PPOs, HMOs, HDHPs. It’s Alphabet soup. Don’t fall asleep on us yet. We’re, I promise we’ll make this as interesting as possible, but just for some broad based education here, ppo, Preferred Provider Organization.
[02:43.7]
This is, it’s a higher cost option. This is good for somebody that likes to choose their doctors. If you have somebody in one network, maybe if you’re here, local to us in Pennsylvania, you like a, UPenn doctor and you like somebody at Einstein that allows you to choose a specialist or doctors at each individual place and not have to worry about a network as much you’re going to pay a little bit more for it, but it gives you that flexibility.
[03:10.2]
An HMO is a health maintenance organization. it’s a lower cost option, but you have to abide by the networks that are already in place. You’re also going to typically need a referral if you need to go out and see a specialist. So there’s some additional hurdles in place, but you have a lower cost option there.
[03:27.1]
So if you’re healthy and you don’t really care, hmo, Could be a good selection for you. The last one on here for our acronym is HDHP or a High Deductible Health Plan. Again, good for somebody that’s relatively healthy because it’s low cost, higher out of pocket expenses.
[03:43.7]
So if you’re healthy and you’re okay taking the risk, where if you’re going to need medical care, you’re going to accept some of that risk, that’s, that’s good for the High Deductible health plan. So under all of these acronyms, and there are so many acronyms in this, we also have the benefit accounts tied to this HSA and fsa.
[04:04.6]
Ben, have I ever explained to you the way that I remember these two, which is embarrassing to admit or say out loud? No. But now you’re recorded and you’re gonna have to say it. I am on the record now as admitting to this. So HSA I always thought of is as happy because the money doesn’t go away at the end of the year. And FSA was. Oh, fudge. Yeah.
[04:23.0]
Because I’ve been there with the FSA when you’re like, oh, I’ve sent this money away, I’m good. And then you’re scrambling to get the new pair of glasses or whatever in December 20th. So talk to me through these. Yeah, we’re. Let’s start on the right side There with the HSA and fsa.
[04:40.0]
If three acronyms wasn’t enough on the first screen, let’s add two more in here. Or let’s add three more because there’s another FSA is here as well. So the high deductible health plan is the prerequisite to getting access to a health savings account. The health savings account on, on your far right is the only triple tax advantaged account.
[05:01.7]
So if you contribute directly out of your paycheck, you will avoid paying FICA tax. So 7.65% your federal and your state tax, it grows tax free and it comes out tax free for qualified medical expenses. One of the best aspects of these accounts is it can be invested so you contribute to it.
[05:22.1]
Typically you, you want to withhold, you know, maybe whatever your deductible is, or maybe it’s a thousand or two thousand dollars. Each HSA has their own parameters, but above that mark, you could start to invest that money and take advantage of market appreciation and compound interest. The FSA is, is going to be similar in the fashion that you could put the money in pre fica, federal and state tax.
[05:45.7]
Those benefits remain the same, but you cannot invest it. So if you put in $3,000 a year, $3,000 is what’s going to be there, accessible to you. It’s also a use it or lose it. As Matt just said, before I started talking there, fsa, use it or lose it.
[06:01.7]
HSA is going to roll from year to year. Yeah, I love the idea HSAs because I try and max out as much as I can and then not spend it necessarily every year because I figure I’m not living the healthiest lifestyle. So in retirement I expect to have a fair number of health care bills and we’ll be able to use, I’d say since I’ve been saving an HSA only one year, we had medical bills high enough that I was like, I should spend some out of that.
[06:30.1]
Otherwise trying to let it ride to spend when I’m older and even more decrepit. Using it later is, is, is a great strategy. I always tell people like the, the purpose of the HSA is to use for healthcare costs. There’s we, we love over optimization in our lives today.
[06:47.5]
If you need to use it for medical expenses, it’s not like you’re making a bad decision. You know, great if we could have it in retirement, but Jack, you’re doing it the perfect way. But also as you were, you know, talking about there, using it for qualified Medical expenses throughout the year. That has really expanded in 2020 and 2023 to allow you to use it on over the counter medications.
[07:10.3]
The one caveat that I’m going to point out, with an hsa, nothing is perfect, especially in finance. There’s always a downside. The downside to HSAs is if you were to inherit it. So for an example, if my dad passed away and he had a $50,000 HSA and he named me as a beneficiary, I can’t just take that 50,000 and put it in my own HSA.
[07:33.9]
It’s immediately taxable in the day, in the year that he passes away. That’s for non spouses. So in that scenario, if my dad passed away and gave it to my mom, she could inherit it as her own hsa. Anybody else that inherits that HSA is going to pay tax. So you can see how it creates some, some tax complications there.
[07:52.6]
If the proper planning is not done. And then just really quick, if we move to the left side of the screen, Dependent care fsa. So this is for a flex spending account that you can use for your children or adult care expenses. So think about summer camp daycare.
[08:10.1]
Just like the fsa, it’s going to go in pre tax. The money’s not going to grow. And it does have a use it or lose it function. But this was put in place for, those of us with younger kids or even adult care programs are qualified there. And that maximum actually was just moved up to 7,500 per year.
[08:28.8]
So a pretty big move of recently for the dependent care plans. All right, so I’m putting health benefits to the side now we’re ready for it. The rare financial planning category where it’s quite literally a matter of life and death. Let’s talk about life insurance. Ben. Yeah, this is.
[08:46.1]
Ideally, we don’t use these policies. We would rather use the health insurance. We don’t want to use the life insurance. But remember, the purpose of life insurance is we’re transferring risk from ourselves onto an insurance company and paying them a premium for it. So an individual policy, you get to set the parameters.
[09:05.6]
What’s the term? Is it going to cover you for 10, 20, 30 years? Maybe your whole life? Is how much is it going to cover? Those are the things that you have customization with over. It does typically require health screening. Some companies today say, okay, if it’s under $2 million, we’ll just collect medical records from public data sources and we’ll issue you a policy and go through underwriting.
[09:28.9]
That way some will actually have somebody come out to your house and actually do a health screening with you in person. That’s individual policies. Group policies are through, typically through your company. It’s capped at multiples, of your salary or your income.
[09:45.1]
So maybe it’s if you make $100,000 a year, 3x salary, you get $300,000 of coverage. As your salary goes up, so does the coverage. The premiums aren’t guaranteed in this scenario though. As you move from age bracket to age bracket, maybe from the 30 to 39 to 40 to 49, the premium starts to go up because you’re getting older.
[10:06.0]
So that’s a little bit of a drawback there. The last thing is your group policy. There’s something in there called portability. How many years can you take it with you after you leave the company or retire? Sometimes it’s you can at all, sometimes it’s 10 years. Things to take into consideration the way that this actually works from a planning perspective.
[10:26.9]
And that’s the reason the word with is in that little blue circle in the middle of the screen there. We typically find that pairing an individual policy with a group policy is the better outcome. And part of our role here as planners and advisors at Sunpoint is coordinating with independent insurance brokers.
[10:46.8]
I work with one family that had great coverage through their company and their group policy covered all of their needs. But as they went to having a second child and a third child, the risk in the event that something happened to the husband or wife started to become elevated.
[11:03.0]
We needed to add in an individual term policy. So just adding those two things together, these things should all rhyme together. I know Matt, Jack and I have talked about this a lot. Insurance should, rhyme with the investment portfolio, should rhyme with the estate plan and, and so have you. So that’s how we like to think about it.
[11:19.5]
Just within insurance by itself as well. So now we’re going to move on to retirement plans and whether that’s the tax deferred reality, the deductible versus the non deductible. If you have a match, if you don’t have a match, if you have profit sharing, if you have safe harbor plans, plural.
[11:36.7]
We spend a lot of time, we get a lot of questions that are confused about what these benefits are. Ben takes the plans. Yeah, so these are the retirement plans. It’s a little bit different. I’m going to focus on screen here.
[11:51.8]
It’s the 401k. If you work at a non profit, maybe it’s a 403b. If you work at a smaller company, it might be a SEP IRA or a simple IRA, something like that. But we’ll focus on the 401k just for ease of conversation. Today, powerful savings tool. And contributions are up to you.
[12:09.1]
You get to make them after tax. Roth. So you pay your tax now, grows tax free and comes out tax free in retirement. Assuming legislation stays the same or pre tax, you could put the money in before you pay tax, it grows tax deferred and then you owe income tax at some later point down the road.
[12:27.7]
But one of the most valuable features to it is the employer match. As you see on the screen here. The example is the employee puts in 3%. The employer says, I will match 100% up to 3%. There is no other investment out there that could give you a better rate of return then 100% immediately.
[12:47.1]
So you put in 3%, your employer gives you 3%, 100% rate, of return there. The one again, there’s always caveats with these things. The one caveat is you have to pay attention to what’s called a vesting schedule. So some companies say, hey, there’s no vesting schedule. When we do the match.
[13:06.1]
It’s your money, it’s all your money right away. Some companies like to create somewhat of like an incentive plan for you to stay. It might sound like, okay, we have a five year vesting period. So every year over the five years, you’re awarded 20% of that match. It all resides in your account.
[13:22.1]
But if you leave before you’ve been there for five years, you do forfeit some of that money. Your contributions are always 100% yours. But the vesting schedule is an area that you should just pay some attention to when you’re contributing to a 401.
[13:38.1]
So I don’t want to overlook this part of the detail. We’re talking about employees here and people who work for a company. But at some point we do a lot of work with both executives or they have other plans available to them sometimes that regular employees don’t. And then entrepreneurs who actually build and set these plans and think about how do we optimize for our family or our situation, the work workers versus like the work family versus the people at home.
[14:04.8]
Talk a little bit through those three layers of employee, executive and entrepreneur. So employees, you know, I’ve never had, any employer reach out to me and say, hey Ben, what do you think about our 401k plan? Should we add all these features on or what should we do Differently.
[14:22.7]
So as an employee, you just accept the benefit. This is the plan that’s in place and you deal with those parameters. Sure, you might be able to voice your opinion during some surveys at the end of the year, but it’s largely not your decision. The executives that we work with, sure, they’re accepting of the benefit, they probably have more influence on those benefits.
[14:40.9]
But they also have something known as long term incentive plans in place at many companies. So it might be incentive stock options, it might be restricted stock units or phantom shares of the company. That’s how they start to have a different level of benefit that we need to coordinate and plan around.
[14:59.9]
But that’s at the executive level. And then the entrepreneurs that Matt mentioned before, they’re thinking about plan design and that’s where we’re helping them decide is, is it the solo 401k? Is it a traditional 401k? What should we set up for the match to incentivize employees and try to incentivize, know, employees to stay with the company and draw in more talented individuals.
[15:22.3]
And then of course, the entrepreneur is our client. How do we make sure that they’re cashing in on all the benefit that’s available to them? So a lot of this is a balancing act. And whether you’re an employee, an executive or an entrepreneur, those sound and look a little bit different for each of those. Jack, you’ve both given and paid for a lot of education in your personal life.
[15:42.4]
I know this to be true. Start us here with investment education for later generations. How you lead these conversations. Yeah, good point. Like lights almost at the end of the tunnel. I’m down to one more year of tuition for each of the twins. I hope. I think everybody’s on schedule to graduate on time. So.
[16:00.4]
But to Ben’s point about contributing to the 401k from a top down level, how can you figure out how much you can contribute? Like, is it just enough to match or can you put some in our Roth ira? So when I do this kind of education for everybody from sixth graders to 50 year olds, we start with budgeting and spending and to our recommendation is to the extent that you can save 20% of your income, for the future, that’s a great idea.
[16:31.4]
And then once you put the Money in the 401k or IRA, what are you going to do with it? So that’s where we talk people about investments and diversification across asset classes. So the chart here on the right is just a risk return scatter plot of expected Return versus expected volatility.
[16:52.2]
So we talk through which combination of those makes the best sense because they’re not perfectly correlated. Having a combination of different asset classes usually leads to a smoother ride and, you know, better way to get there. And then when I always say talking to your kids about this, whether you know a lot about it or connecting somebody else, that knows a lot about it, is important because there’s not as much education in schools, and you can do this kind of education with kids very young without ever talking about portfolio values, but still giving them the overview of kind of how investment works.
[17:32.1]
So I want to talk about clarity, comfort and confidence and how we actually help provide that to clients and families as life and markets evolve. Yeah, one of the biggest things I see is people stressing out. So that’s why I love our clarity, comfort, confidence tagline.
[17:52.4]
Just trying to, to get. To focus on the right things. And not to make it religious, but I really like the Serenity prayer, which goes, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can. And the last point’s really important.
[18:10.0]
The wisdom to know the difference. So no matter what amount you worry about it, you can’t individually change tax policy or what market returns are going to be. So spend a lot less time freaking out about that.
[18:25.5]
Yeah, some clients, even with a fair amount of good training we do with them, that might stress, out whenever the market’s down more than a couple of percent, even though it’s up about 30% over the past year for the S P500. But really take a deep breath and we monitor things like valuation changes in case we want to tilt towards a particular asset class.
[18:48.2]
But set those things aside because, good reminder, since 1980, the S&P has been down on average 14.2% at any time during the year, but still has ended up positive in 35 out of the past 46 years.
[19:04.0]
So don’t worry too much about that because you can’t control it. However, you do have some control over employment earnings, your length of employment and life expectancy. So especially for the young kids, congratulations. You got another 40 to 60 years to work.
[19:19.0]
But take good care of your health so you don’t have to spend all your HSA early, in your life. then the things you really can control, that I, you know, try to talk to people the most about are spending versus savings. Is the biggest one just making sure you’re doing that savings, asset allocation that we, we mentioned how you’re allocated against different asset classes Ben mentioned is going to talk a little more about asset location too.
[19:48.0]
So if you can just focus on those things, you’ll make your life quite a bit easier. Focus one more second with me on the focus for education across multiple generations. Because you sit in the unique seat where you’re into G3 and G4 and the communication strategies with them.
[20:06.8]
How do you talk about that? Yeah, depending on what the family’s goal is, you know, whether they’re really saving for their retirement and spending it with a private client or a family office time horizon much might be much longer than even their lifespan because the kids are expected to inherit the assets.
[20:27.1]
But especially in the context of this presentation for younger people, you have a long time horizon because hopefully you’re saving Money today at 2225 for retirement. That’s 40 plus years away. So if you need some money for a new house purchase or the new car purchase, you don’t necessarily want to plow all that into stocks.
[20:46.7]
But to the extent that you have a long time horizon you definitely can be, you can see in the box there little smaller type. But stocks have returned more than double bonds annual basis over the years.
[21:02.8]
So being more heavily weighted towards stocks is good. But as I mentioned the short term they can be a lot more volatile. So in any one year over history stocks have been down 37% or up 52. So having a lot of money tied up there I need right away is not great.
[21:22.2]
But if your time Horizons out to 10 years there’s only been a couple of rolling periods like during the global financial crisis where 10 year returns have been negative for the S P 500 and no 20 year time periods. So the extent that you can, can do that, stay diversified and you know as much in these kind of as you can tolerate makes it a lot easier.
[21:46.1]
So Ben, I’m flipping this back to you to extend the talk about time horizon. See what I did there little thing. This is basically the cousin much like to Jack Serenity Prayer that this is the serenity now to Serenity Prayer in that we can’t just talk about what’s on this slide which is asset allocation without also talking about asset location.
[22:08.5]
Explain that concept Right when we’ve talked about this before we talked about you know, calendar cash flow balance sheet and we have a surplus of cash flow whether it’s via contributions on a periodic basis. When you get your paycheck to your pre tax 401k like choosing what goes where starts to become Important.
[22:29.2]
And so as I mentioned before, that pre tax 401k, we’re going to take the deduction today, we’re going to grow tax deferred and we’re going to, we’re going to have to pay our taxes in the future. And that’s not inherently bad. Too much of it is inherently bad.
[22:45.5]
We work with many clients that start to come to work with Sunpoint and say, okay, we have multiple million dollars and it’s all tied up in a pre tax retirement account. That’s not a bad thing. You still saved and have multiple million dollars. That’s a, that’s a positive.
[23:02.0]
However, what could we have done over your working years to maybe get some money into a Roth where we pay tax in the year that we’re investing the money, it’s then going to grow tax free and come out tax free in the future. So getting that balance correctly and sometimes it’s not always, oh, it’s too late, but the Roth money coming out tax free as a benefit, it also doesn’t have a required minimum distribution.
[23:26.8]
So it doesn’t have the IRS still with their hand in the pot saying, well, a piece of that pie is still mine. So this balance of the equation is what we’re looking for. And then like in asset allocation, it’s good to be a little diversified, have some in each pot. Right? That’s what exactly what we’re looking for.
[23:42.9]
And, and then of course that Jack mentioned earlier of like the health savings account, we know that most of us are going to have health care costs in retirement. If we can have money that goes in pre tax, grows tax deferred and comes out tax free for things that we know we’re going to have to pay for anyway.
[23:59.8]
That’s something else. That’s another one of those pieces to the pie that we’re not saying we should have 50% of our, our money tied up in something like a health savings account, but it should serve a purpose to cover expenses. And as we think back through the budgeting exercise that Jack just went through.
[24:16.6]
Yeah, this slide reminds me a story Kelly likes to tell is one Christmas Eve I sat the kids down, it was like, hey, here’s how you’re going to have to learn about Roth iras. Because it was coming up to the end of the year and I wanted them to contribute their earned income for the year to Roth because when you’re young and you know, at a very low or zero tax rate, contributing to Roth makes great sense because then you grow tax deferred.
[24:44.5]
And take it out tax free. So great idea to start there at the Roth. Early on it’s. Go ahead Matt, you have one. I was just gonna say, speaking of, you know, kids, I also say, hey, children are the future.
[25:02.0]
Teach them well and let them lead the way. Just when I’m copying off of Whitney Houston. But we, we like to talk about human capital also in this case at the family level, thinking about what we’re really trying to accomplish with our money.
[25:20.3]
I think of it as the what and the investment kind of the how we get there. But what’s important if we’re working on family engagement, meaning increased education or maintaining relationships among family members, to me those are the important things that we’re just using the money as a means to get there.
[25:44.3]
One of the coolest kind of stories I can recall with a family who really put their money into action, into thinking about their values and a, neat experience for their kids was this particular family adventure is one of the things they’re seeking and trying to pass onto their kids.
[26:01.0]
So they did an awesome couple of week trip with like 12 members across three generations. Where, you know, it definitely wasn’t staying in nice hotels. They were doing tough stuffs out in the world, really being adventuresome.
[26:18.0]
But it not only strengthened the bonds across generations, but also instilled that sense of gener or of adventure in the family members. I love that from the higher generation level, bring it down to that younger generational perspective of how young people can think about their own human capital even inside of a framework like that.
[26:39.3]
Yeah, great question. So unlike at the family level, at the personal level, I think about human capital is the sum of all future earnings versus financial capital is what we’ve invested in things like stocks, bonds, real estate, sports.
[26:59.9]
So as this chart demonstrates, for most of us when we’re young, just starting off our careers, we don’t have all that much saved in financial capital. Even though Ben’s going to get everybody out there saving early to start accumulating. But on the other hand, when you’re young, as I mentioned, sorry if people are sad about working for 40 plus years, you have a lot of potential earnings out in front of you.
[27:25.4]
So that, that’s great potentiality. But as you get older, someone like me who hopefully only has 10 or 20, maybe 30 years left to work, hopefully, you’ve, we’ve accumulated some financial capital to keep that total wealth line climbing over time.
[27:45.1]
I’m going to pause here. I know we’re about to be up on time. But just a reminder, if you had any questions, we’re going to take a look at the chat. We’ll respond, we’ll send emails, we’ll set some calls. This presentation, this conversation today, really, really, really for the young or younger higher earners, people just figuring out how to optimize for their workplace plan and benefits.
[28:08.6]
If that’s you, if you know someone like this, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re thinking about how you want to optimize it for yourself or for the younger people out there, this is what we do at Sunpoint. We have these conversations on the regular. Send us a message, send this presentation. We’re going to share this recording with anybody who’s on this call.
[28:27.1]
Links, will go up on the website. This is a great one to share because these enrollment periods, these benefit plans, they’re confusing, they’re not straightforward. It helps to have someone over your shoulder looking into this. So, all that being said, get in touch.
[28:42.3]
We’re here to help. Clarity, comfort and confidence, that’s our goal. We believe it leads to better outcomes. Ben and Jack, thank you both for joining me today. Reach out, people. We love talking about this stuff. See you in a quarter. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Ben.
