Stephanie McCul…:       00:06                Welcome to Take Back Retirement, the show for women 50 and better facing a financial future on their own. I’m Stephanie McCullough. And along with my fellow financial planner, Kevin Gaines, we’re going to tackle the myths and mysteries of quote unquote retirement, so you can make wise decisions toward a sustainable financial future. Through conversations and interviews. You’ll get the information and motivation you need to move forward with confidence, and we’ll be sure to have some fun along the way. We’re so glad you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Stephanie McCul…:       00:41                Only 12% of women feel highly knowledgeable about long-term care and only 27% have a plan to fund it. Despite the fact that fully 50% of women expect to require it. What the heck is long-term care and why should we care?

Stephanie McCul…:       01:00                Coming to you semi live from the beautiful Westlakes Office Park in suburban Philadelphia, this is Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines of Sofia Financial and American Financial Management Group. Say, ‘hello,’ Kevin.

Kevin Gaines:                01:10                Hello Kevin.

Stephanie McCul…:       01:11                So, for many years we have worked with a family that has really kind of what I tend to think of as a common long-term care story. So, we’ll call them Patricia and Carl. When the couple was in their sixties, Carl got sick. It was kind of early Alzheimer’s and then full-blown Alzheimer’s and Patricia really was insistent on keeping him at home. She saw it as a point of pride that she was the caregiver. She felt it was her obligation to take the best possible care of him that she could. And this went on for quite a few years, right Kevin?

Kevin Gaines:                01:49                Yeah, I think he was about seven years, bedridden seven years.

Stephanie McCul…:       01:55                Ugh.

Kevin Gaines:                01:55                So, there was a year or two before that, that they were trying to deal with it and get some of their affairs in order to make it easier for her because he knew he was not going to be much help for much longer because he was healthy otherwise.

Stephanie McCul…:       02:07                Ugh.

Kevin Gaines:                02:07                So yeah, he was bedridden for seven years.

Stephanie McCul…:       02:11                In their home.

Kevin Gaines:                02:11                In their home. And primarily the only thing wrong with him was his mind, unfortunately.

Stephanie McCul…:       02:18                And then the kids finally insisted that mom get some help, right?

Kevin Gaines:                02:21                Yes. And she was even resistant to that and over time eventually she came to realize how much easier it made her life. And the realization that she couldn’t do it all.

Stephanie McCul…:       02:35                So, they had helpers coming into the house, but at the same time, if I recall, her health was not in the best of shape, right? Towards those latter years.

Kevin Gaines:                02:43                Well, yeah. Going into this, her health was poorer than his.

Stephanie McCul…:       02:48                That’s right.

Kevin Gaines:                02:48                And then within like the last two, maybe even three years of his life, she started exhibiting signs that later got diagnosed as dementia.

Stephanie McCul…:       03:00                So, this is the situation. Then Carl passes away. So, now here’s Patricia, a widow living alone with health issues and dementia. So, what was the sequence of events?

Kevin Gaines:                03:10                So, what happens here, and the thing is, this is a good family relationship. There wasn’t a lot of rivalry or bickering or anything along those lines, but neither kid lived close by. They had their own lives, they had their own careers. They weren’t around that they could come in every day. So, they would get reports from the home health aides that were helping their mom. And eventually the conversation was, ‘we can’t do this anymore. She has progressed to a point that this is beyond our skill level of what we can do.’ So they moved her into a facility where she has from all reports, been very happy and been very content, because this is a memory care facility.

Stephanie McCul…:       04:00                They’re specialists.

Kevin Gaines:                04:00                So, they are set up for this situation. And it’s worked very well for her. And even through COVID, she’s had a fairly good experience, all things considered. But it’s a tough story. A lot of pain points, a lot of stress.

Stephanie McCul…:       04:19                Yeah. Yeah. The two adult kids negotiating amongst themselves, negotiating with mom, and we’ve had front row seats, right? Been advisors to them along the way. And it’s been rough. I’m sure each of our listeners knows of some family, if not their own, who’s gone through some type of story like this. So, what we wanted to focus on today is this idea of long-term care. And I thought about it because my clients often say to me ‘I think I need that long-term health care thing,’ or they kind of have a mushy idea of what it is. So, it’s important to point out when we talk about long-term care, this is not about medical care. It’s not doctors, hospitals, treatments, or medicines. This is not health insurance. It’s assistance with personal tasks, personal, what they call activities of daily living, the stuff you need to do to just exist.

Kevin Gaines:                05:17                Think of long-term care as kind of, think of the Aflac duck. You may probably have seen the commercials on TV, Aflac, it’s this insurance that helps you if you’re out on disability, but it doesn’t cover your medical bills. And they spend a lot of time talking about that. This is not what we do. We help you with all the other stuff. Long-term care is all the other stuff. It’s not the doctor and the nursing and things along those lines, but it is getting you bathed, helping you keep care of bodily functions, cooking, cleaning, just the basic stuff that keeps you safe.

Stephanie McCul…:       05:58                And it’s often referred to as custodial care, right? Or even unskilled care. The person providing the care doesn’t have to have any special training or have gone to medical school. This is just like Kevin said, helping you getting in and out of the shower, helping you get dressed. So, it can be just a couple hours a day. Someone coming in to check on the person. It can be up to 24/7, like we saw in Patricia and Carl’s case. Often what’s referred to, I mentioned these activities of daily living. They’re called the ADL’s and there’s six of them, sometimes seven. But often the trigger for needing care, especially in the insurance world, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes, but they talk about if you need help with two of these activities of daily living. And I wrote them down because I can never remember all six off the top of my head.

Kevin Gaines:                06:43                [laughter]

Stephanie McCul…:       06:43                Bathing dressing, eating, transferring, which means getting out of bed into a chair, getting from a chair to the next room, toileting, going to the bathroom, and continence. And then the other one, of course, is cognitive decline, as we saw in the case of our clients, Patricia and Carl, to the point where you need supervision. So, I’m imagining everyone listening has seen a situation where someone has needed this type of help.

Kevin Gaines:                07:10                Right. And if you think back a couple episodes when we were talking to Cathy Sikorski, she’s a lawyer, but there was a lot of good content in there talking about elder law. But the more compelling part of that episode was what she went through personally, as a caregiver. What’d she say eight times, if I remember correctly?

Stephanie McCul…:       07:34                Yep.

Kevin Gaines:                07:34                She’s a lawyer, she’s not a doctor. So going back to the, just helping you get through your day type stuff, she’s done it. She’s happy doing it. But yeah. There’s no medical training there.

Stephanie McCul…:       07:47                Right. Exactly. So, the statistics about this are really kind of startling. I saw one that said 40% of individuals aged 65 and up will need long-term care at some point in their lives. And if you take that to the 75-year-olds and higher, 60% of people are going to need some kind of care for some level of time.

Kevin Gaines:                08:09                Right.

Stephanie McCul…:       08:09                And then it really does hit women more than men because women end up alone, right? 70% of women aged 75 or older, 70% are widowed, divorced, or never married, compared to only 30% of men. So, that difference in marital status is important because if a woman is living alone, there’s no one in the house to help. Because in the first case, you have a little bit of trouble getting out of bed in the morning and moving around. That person you live with helps you out.

Stephanie McCul…:       08:43                But if you live alone, there’s no one to turn to. So that makes it tough. And then women spend a longer time in a disabled state at the end of their lives. And more than 70% of nursing home residents are women. And three fourths of assisted living communities are women. We always know statistically, the women live longer. So, this is why we really wanted to make sure we had an episode kind of digging into the basics of what long-term care is.

Kevin Gaines:                09:15                And what it is not.

Stephanie McCul…:       09:18                So, here’s another misconception, Kevin, that people often hit. ‘Doesn’t the government pay for this? Doesn’t Medicare cover it?’

Kevin Gaines:                09:24                Well, here’s the thing. In a word: no.

Stephanie McCul…:       09:28                Exactly.

Kevin Gaines:                09:29                And there is a lot of confusion and this gets back to the point we’ve made for the most of this episode so far, which is, we’re not talking about medical assistance.

Stephanie McCul…:       09:38                Yep.

Kevin Gaines:                09:38                There is common confusion. ‘Oh, but Medicare’s got this thing to help you.’ Medicare has 90 days, skilled nursing. Skilled nursing is not helping you with the groceries. That’s not skilled nursing that’s medical.

Stephanie McCul…:       09:52                And it’s only if you’ve been in the hospital for three days ahead of time. It’s a very limited set of circumstances that they will pay and they’ll pay it for a short time if you meet those situations.

Kevin Gaines:                10:04                Right.

Stephanie McCul…:       10:04                Now, there’s another government program you may have heard of called Medicaid and Medicaid does cover long-term care. However, Medicaid is for poor people. So, you have to become a poor people before you can qualify for Medicaid to cover your expenses. And Kevin, didn’t we see some large percentage of nursing home residents are actually being funded by Medicaid?

Kevin Gaines:                10:28                Yeah. And I think the stats a couple years old, but there’s no reason to think it’s changed much. Six out of 10 residents are covered under Medicaid.

Stephanie McCul…:       10:38                Yep. Which means they have met the qualifications and the qualifications are really strict. I think it’s state by state, but it’s something like if you have more than $2,000 of assets to your name, and there’s also a very low income limit, you do not qualify.

Kevin Gaines:                10:56                Yeah. And here’s the thing. If you’re married, yes, there are some provisions to account for the fact. So, you don’t have to spend as much because your spouse is healthy or something. But there’s still a big spend-down required for a lot of people.

Stephanie McCul…:       11:09                Yeah.

Kevin Gaines:                11:09                And it’s tough that you’ve spent your life building this nest egg to have comfortable retirement. And we’ve used the illustration of talking about mental decline, but you could need long-term care for any reason.

Stephanie McCul…:       11:26                Yes.

Kevin Gaines:                11:26                And it’s not a permanent thing either.

Stephanie McCul…:       11:28                Not necessarily permanent.

Kevin Gaines:                11:28                Which is a big point to understand. Right. Once you start getting it, it may stop in six months, 18 months, depending on what the issue is.

Stephanie McCul…:       11:39                Yeah. My grandmother had her hip replaced. She needed help for quite a few months. And then she was independent again.

Kevin Gaines:                11:46                Right. But you think of that situation, you have to either use your own assets or spend down the assets so Medicaid can kick in and then say two years later, you don’t need it anymore. Now what type of situation are you in?

Stephanie McCul…:       11:59                Right. Because your assets are gone.

Kevin Gaines:                11:59                So, there’s a lot of different ways this can play out.

Stephanie McCul…:       12:04                The story that really gets me is my friend Phyllis. And she told me this about her mother. So, her mother was maybe in her early eighties and things were going well. But then as time went on, her body was breaking down. She didn’t have the ability after a while to get around. Her mind was still sharp as a tack. But she needed that help. She couldn’t afford it. So she had to spend down her money. Now, Phyllis’s mom grew up in the post-war period. She’s like super frugal, can stretch a dollar around the block, super proud of that situation. So, when Phyllis and their advisors explained to her that to qualify for government assistance for this payment, she had to spend down all her money to $2,000, she nearly had a conniption. She’s like, ‘what the heck? What are you talking about? That’s not me. I don’t spend down my money. I save my money.’ So, that mental stress was almost as bad as the physical stuff she was going through.

Kevin Gaines:                13:04                Unfortunately, this is one of these topics where there’s not too many endings of the stories that everybody’s going to be smiling and saying, ‘oh, okay, well at least it worked…’ And here’s the thing, you don’t picture this in your retirement. However you picture your retirement, I’m willing to bet most of us are not picturing this situation. We know it’s going to happen, but…

Stephanie McCul…:       13:30                I have a lot of women that this is the big fear. This is the big fear. ‘What if I’m on my own and I need help?’ That’s scary.

Kevin Gaines:                13:37                Yeah. But that gets to the stat that you were saying is, people know what’s going to happen, but they’re not doing much preparation for it.

Stephanie McCul…:       13:45                Right. How do we think you should prepare? The first thing to think about is, okay, if you’re going to need help, who would help you? Maybe you’ve got a spouse and that would be your first order of business is that the spouse would help. Or you’ve got adult kids nearby. Or you’ve got a very good friend who lives nearby, who happens to be a nurse. One of my clients has that. Maybe you’ve got a roommate. Think that through. Who in the first instance, would you call on to provide some help?

Kevin Gaines:                14:13                So, once you figure out, or at least have a suspicion of who’s going to help you, and key point is make sure they know they’re your plan.

Stephanie McCul…:       14:22                [laughter]

Kevin Gaines:                14:22                We’ve had more than a couple of conversations where I think, again, going back to the Cathy Sikorski episode, she tells a story of the mother saying, ‘yeah, my daughter’s going to keep care of me.’ And the daughter turns around and goes ‘how?’ I don’t remember the details but it was just, they had never had that conversation.

Stephanie McCul…:       14:39                Yeah.

Kevin Gaines:                14:39                So, that’s really important. So, in addition to having that conversation with the people that are going to be helping you, that are your plan, you do want to have a backup plan. Because frankly, before Carl was diagnosed, the plan was he was going to keep care of her because her health wasn’t necessarily that great.

Kevin Gaines:                15:00                But then all of a sudden, like that, roles switched. Now, fortunately her health was good enough that she was able to manage everything, but that’s not necessarily always going to be the case.

Stephanie McCul…:       15:12                Yeah. You can’t always predict.

Kevin Gaines:                15:13                Or if you both get sick at the same time.

Stephanie McCul…:       15:15                Yeah. That happens too.

Kevin Gaines:                15:17                Anyway, once you get that figured out, then you’ve got to figure out where you are going to be. A bigger conversation of aging in place versus moving to a community. But in specific situations, is your house configured to handle this? Or are you going to need to go to a nursing home or rehabilitation facility or something along those lines?

Stephanie McCul…:       15:38                And there’s even an interim option, which is, let’s say adult kids who live nearby are going to be helping out. There’s something called adult daycare, which sounds unappealing. But they have, say, adult day centers where you can go for the daytime, have trained people watching over and making sure everything’s okay. And then when your kids get off work, they can pick back up and take the night shift. So, that’s kind of the interim option.

Kevin Gaines:                16:03                Right.

Stephanie McCul…:       16:03                Some people feel super strongly. ‘I am never leaving this house. If I need care, it has to happen here.’ And others, I’ve talked to people who feel just as strongly the opposite. They’re like, ‘heck no, I don’t want to be home. I want to be with professional supervision and in a place where people have my back.’

Kevin Gaines:                16:20                And speaking to the kids here, even if you haven’t had this conversation with your parents or they don’t want to have the conversation, which I can tell you from personal experience, very personal experience is a very real possibility.

Stephanie McCul…:       16:34                [laughter]

Kevin Gaines:                16:34                At least have a plan in your mind of, if something happens with mom or dad, ‘what am I going to do?’ Or talk with your siblings. What are we going to do? Does somebody have a place where they can go? Does somebody have an extra room or rooms in their house where they can take them for a few months or something along those lines?

Stephanie McCul…:       16:53                Right. One of our coworkers is going through this right now.

Kevin Gaines:                16:56                Yeah. It’s not only the person who’s going to need the care’s responsibility to think of this.

Stephanie McCul…:       17:02                Correct. I agree. All right. So, the next thing that really gets people is ‘what does this cost? What are we talking about?’ You think medical costs are so high, but guess what. Care costs are high, too. There’s a couple of different databases where you can go. The one I turn to is Genworth, which is a company that used to provide long-term care insurance. Genworth cost of care. So, on a national basis in 2020, and kind of a median cost for a private room in a nursing home for one year, $105,000. And guess what. That’s gone up 3.5% in the past year. Inflation is around, we’re trying to get to 2% inflation. So, the costs are raising, going up faster. Now, let’s say you don’t need a private room in a nursing home, remember nursing home is like full on 24/7 care, but a semi-private room is still $93,000 a year. Assisted living on average, $51,000 a year. That adult daycare that I mentioned is about $19,000. And then if you have people coming into your home, and I think the average here is like 44 hours a week, that’s $54,000, almost $55,000 a year. And that’s actually gone up faster than the nursing homes. That’s gone up about 4.3% in the past year. So, we’re talking some big numbers and you don’t know how long these situations are going to last. We mentioned Carl, right? His body was healthy. His mind was not. Seven years. That’s a long time.

Kevin Gaines:                18:30                And another statistic just because, why not. For people who need long-term care, about a third of your long-term care expenditures you’re still paying out of pocket for the average person, regardless of financial situation, that works out to be the average. So, there’s still going to be some personal financial hit to you on this.

Stephanie McCul…:       18:53                You mean, even if you’re on Medicaid?

Kevin Gaines:                18:55                Even if you’re on Medicaid. Before the Medicaid kicks in, there’s going to be expenses and things along those lines.

Stephanie McCul…:       19:00                Right. So, what are the different ways people pay for this stuff? There are different strategies. Okay. Let’s say something happens. Let’s say it’s mom and dad. And you’re helping oversee things. All of a sudden, one of them needs expensive care. How do you pay for it? What do you look for? Are you going to sell some assets? Something that they’ve got, is it going to be sold? The classic example is selling a home to move into a retirement community. But if you want to stay in your home, that’s not something you’re selling, then. Do you have other investments? What is it going to be? Then there’s long-term care insurance. Did your parents buy it? Do they have it? Is it in good standing? And if there is insurance, you have to know what does it cover. What are the triggers? When does it kick in? There’s usually a waiting period. And how much is it going to cover? There’s always a cap on how much the insurance is going to cover it. Very often the care could cost more than that, but hey, at least it’s something.

Kevin Gaines:                19:52                Think of it this way. So, your care has to be paid for somehow. So it’s either going to be your money or somebody else’s money. Whether that’s the insurance company’s money or a GoFundMe site or the government’s money, it’s somebody else’s money or your own. And it does get complicated and confusing at times trying to figure out which direction to go. Because, we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about Medicaid specifically. As we’ve explored with social security and IRAs, that’s something that sounds really simple, but could end up being a whole podcast series in itself. But understand you sit there evaluating your finances and it’s tough, but you’re going to make a decision of, ‘am I going to face the fact that I’m going to be on Medicaid and how do I get there in the least stressful way, or am I going to be able to, or are my parents going to be able to handle this on their own or mostly on their own?’ And these are not simple conversations.

Stephanie McCul…:       20:58                Yeah. So, because a lot of people ask me about it and because I am licensed in it and I’ve done a lot of research on it, I’m going to spend like two minutes on long-term care insurance. Again, we’ll probably do another episode on that in more detail — and reach out if you have specific questions — but in general, anytime you’re buying insurance, what you’re doing is transferring some of the financial risk of a certain outcome to another entity, to the insurance company. So, traditional long-term care insurance. Think of it kind of like your homeowners. You pay every year. You hope you never need it, right? But that’s money you have to pay out. It’s an expense that you must have every single year. Now, I just got a claim because a tree fell on my garage. So I used my homeowners insurance for the first time actually in like 26 years.

Stephanie McCul…:       21:46                But traditional long-term care insurance, you pay the premium every year. There’s every possibility that you might die peacefully in your sleep one day never needing the care. So, people say it’s ‘use it or lose it.’ Well, that’s the ideal scenario. You don’t want to need care, right? But if you needed care, you pay your premiums. You could pay your premiums for a month and need care and you’ll get the full benefit of the policy. You could pay up to age 98 and then need care, right? So, you pay your premium and then those who need care, get the benefit. Those who don’t, don’t get the benefit. A lot of people didn’t like this. And to be honest my brief history of long-term care insurance, the insurance companies got it wrong. They totally did not price the product correctly.

Stephanie McCul…:       22:35                So, you might hear nightmare stories, right? I’ve got clients who have old policies. The prices have gone up like six times and sometimes 40% in a single year. Because that’s the insurance company saying, ‘you know what? More people need this care than we thought. And they need it for a longer time than we expected. So, our actuaries who run all the numbers and do the odds, they got it wrong.’ So, that’s the wrap on long-term care insurance. Number one, you might pay for it and never need it. And number two, the prices could go up. So, the insurance companies being ever creative and looking for profit, came up with what they call hybrid policies or asset-based policies or life insurance with a long-term care kicker, whatever you might call it. This addresses a couple issues. It’s a life insurance policy. So, if you die peacefully in your sleep, one night, sometimes the money you put in, sometimes more than the money you put in goes to your beneficiaries, whoever you’ve named on the policy.

Stephanie McCul…:       23:28                But if you need long-term care during your lifetime, you get out either the death benefit or sometimes several times the death benefit during your lifetime for care. So, that’s kind of ‘use it or use it’ as opposed to ‘use it or lose it.’ I could go on and on. That’s my little brief summary of long-term care insurance. Here’s the key thing. If you’ve got an old policy or if your parents have a policy or your aunt Sue, and you’re going to be the one helping her out, understand what you’ve got. Call up the company, call the agent who sold it, ask all the questions because the worst scenario would be if there’s a policy that no one knew about. Dad bought a policy. Dad didn’t tell anybody. Dad needed care. We didn’t get the benefit that he was entitled to. So again, back to these conversations. Talk to your family members, talk to your loved ones, make sure you know the wishes and what’s available

Kevin Gaines:                24:21                And it’s not just a binary knowing you had the policy or didn’t have the policy. It’s also important to understand the terms because there’s a lot of different qualifiers involved. And I’ve come across more than one situation where people were paying for stuff out of pocket while they were actually eligible to use their policy to cover those particular expenses. But they didn’t understand the policy or forgot the details. Or again, it was their parents’ policy so they weren’t there. But the bottom line is they didn’t understand all the qualifiers and weren’t able to take full advantage of the protection that existed.

Stephanie McCul…:       25:00                And let me just say, it’s completely understandable if you don’t understand it because they make these things super complicated. You could understand it when you buy it. And five years later, heck 15 years later, who’s going to remember all the details of that? But it’s perfectly fine, right? I always say you don’t have to know all the answers. You need to know the questions to ask and have the guts to ask them. Ask the questions. On every statement there’s an 800 number. Call up. And this is another case where if you’re calling on your behalf of your parents, you need to be an authorized person so that the insurance company will talk to you. So you either have to have your parent on the phone or have that power of attorney. But yeah, ask the questions, find out when does it kick in? What are the triggers? Often there’s a benefit trigger. There could be a waiting period. We can do a whole ‘nother episode on questions to ask about a policy. That might be a good one.

Kevin Gaines:                25:50                Yeah, that could be interesting because a lot of people…you don’t know what you don’t know.

Stephanie McCul…:       25:55                Right. But they can be very valuable if used correctly. Hey, every asset that you got, you want to use it to the best of its ability for what it’s made for. So, that’s why you’ve got to understand. And this is often what we do with our clients. We take the full inventory, understand all they have and then help them understand how the different pieces work together.

Kevin Gaines:                26:17                And at the end of the day, long-term care planning is not simple. And a lot of people get stuck making decisions before they have all the facts. I kind of think of, there’s three groups when it comes to long-term care. There are the people that know they’re going to be on Medicaid. So, they don’t even try. They’re living on social security. They might have a small little retirement account. But they know they’re not going to have the assets to self fund long-term care. So, they know Medicaid is their plan. Then you have the super wealthy. They know they’re going to be able to self-fund. That’s not an issue.

Stephanie McCul…:       26:56                Like Jeff Bezos?

Kevin Gaines:                26:56                Jeff Bezos can do it. No problem. Maybe he has a policy for the hell of it, but he doesn’t need it. But then there’s the rest of us. Go back to Seinfeld. Festivus. Festivus for the rest of us. This is where it can get messy, confusing, and frankly, stressful of ‘how much do I want to set aside?’ Or ‘how many steps do I want to take to make all these arrangements? Versus am I just going to have to say, I can’t do it and end up on Medicaid?’ It’s not easy, these conversations. We know that.

Stephanie McCul…:       27:32                And I don’t want to make it sound ‘all or nothing,’ right? If you have one or two conversations with your parents or your spouse, you’re better off than if you didn’t have any. All positive motion is worthwhile. So, it’s not like, ‘oh, here’s the 7,500 things I have to do. And if I don’t do all of them, I’m a failure.’ No. If you get through seven, you’re so much better off. So, our purpose is not to stress you out in these podcasts and give you 75 more things to do in your life. But at the same time, having the knowledge, getting a little bit more up to speed on what might be coming down the road, we think is helpful.

Kevin Gaines:                28:10                Yeah. It’s again, going back to the old NBC slogan, ‘the more, you know.’

Stephanie McCul…:       28:14                The more you know. Thanks for being with us. We’ll talk to you next time. It’s goodbye from me.

Kevin Gaines:                28:20                And it’s goodbye from her.

Stephanie McCul…:       28:24                Be sure to subscribe to the show and please share it with your friends. Show notes and more information available at TakeBackRetirement.com. Huge thanks for the original music by the one and only Raymond Loewy through New Math in New York. See you next time.

Disclaimer:                   28:38                Investment advice offered through Private Advisor Group, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Private Advisor Group, American Financial Management Group, and Sofia Financial are separate entities. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual security. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you consult your financial advisor prior to investing. This information is not intended to be substitute for individualized tax advice. Please consult your tax advisor regarding your specific situation.