Friday, Hayes ran the show. Thank you, and get ready for the next one.
September 5, 2026
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Show Notes
Eddie and Betty's Conversation
Welcome to The American Retirement Advisor podcast. I'm Betty, and Eddie's here with me in the studio today, which is always a good thing because we have a lot to get into. Today's episode is a little different from our usual format, and I think in the best possible way. We're talking about something that happened in person, in a room full of real retirees and people getting close to retirement, and the reason I wanted to spend a full episode on it is because what came out of that room touches almost every question we hear from listeners. We're going off a piece written by Ian Schaeffer, the COO of American Retirement Advisors, and it's basically his account of a recent Fiscal Fridays show. And Eddie, when I read through it, I kept thinking, this is exactly the kind of thing people should know is available to them.
Thanks, Betty. And yeah, I read the same piece and had the same reaction. There's a lot in there. It's part behind-the-scenes, part genuine thank-you letter, and part a summary of some of the most common retirement questions people actually bring into a room when they're not trying to impress anyone. Which is really what makes it worth talking through.
So let's start at the beginning for listeners who haven't heard of Fiscal Fridays. What is it?
It's a live retirement show held in the Scottsdale studio. David Schaeffer hosts it, he sits down with a guest, and then the floor opens up to a room full of real people with real questions. Ian makes a point of saying there's no script. And that's not just a nice detail, that's the whole format. Somebody in the audience says the thing they've been sitting on for a year, and the people on stage take it seriously.
And I think that's rarer than it sounds. A lot of these events have a very curated feel, where the questions are almost as polished as the answers. This sounds like the opposite of that.
That tracks completely. And what came out of this particular show is proof of that. We'll get to those in a bit because some of them are things I know our listeners have been wrestling with too. But first Ian spends some time talking about what made this specific Friday different, and it's a story worth telling.
Right, because apparently someone new was running the show.
Hayes Clement. He came in over the summer to revamp the firm's online presence, and this was the first time he was fully in charge of Fiscal Fridays as director and producer. The cameras, the lights, the pace of the room, the run of show. All of it, start to finish, was his call.
And Ian writes about what that felt like from his perspective, which I found really honest. Because handing something you built to somebody else is genuinely hard.
He says exactly that. He knows where every wire runs, his words, and part of him was braced to jump in. But he didn't need to. He says the room was warmer, the show was tighter, and the people in the seats got more of what they came for, which was to be heard. And he says he couldn't be prouder of Hayes.
That phrase stayed with me. Because that's not a small thing when you're talking about retirement. People walk into these rooms carrying real weight.
They do. And the way the show opened actually illustrates that perfectly. David started with a short film that his own family had put together, three generations in one room getting pictures taken. Ian says David had never seen it before. And David put it on the screen and told the audience, this is not a commercial, this is my people, and they are the reason this company exists.
That's a strong way to open. It sets a tone that this is personal, not transactional.
And then he did something clever. He asked everyone born in Arizona to raise their hand. One hand went up. The whole rest of the room was transplants. Which tells you a lot about who's in these shows. These are people who moved to Arizona, often later in life, often leaving family behind in other states.
And then he asked who had grandkids, and then whose grandkids lived the farthest away.
Florida, Indiana, Georgia, Puerto Vallarta, California. Indiana won. And the prize was an Easy Eddie plushie, which Ian says got a bigger laugh than anything that was actually planned for the show.
I love that it was unplanned. You can't manufacture that kind of warmth.
No, you can't. But here's what David did next that is really the pivot point of the whole opening. Without changing his tone at all, he asked the room, do you have a plan for those grandkids? The kind that puts your worries and their fears to rest?
That's a gentle question that lands with a lot of weight. Because a minute ago everyone was laughing about plush toys and grandkids in Indiana, and then suddenly you're being asked whether you've actually protected them.
Then he went further. He put it to the room: who had become a caregiver, for a parent, a sibling, even a pet. And Ian says hands went up all over the room. His point was that these stories, these moments of unexpected responsibility, are the exact reason the firm has an inheritance planning practice.
It reframes what that phrase even means. Most people hear it and think estate taxes or wealthy families. But what David was describing is something almost everyone in that room had experienced, which is stepping into a caregiving role you didn't fully plan for.
Right. And the panel they had on stage was built to cover the full range of what that means. Their guest was Greg Frantz, who's been helping Arizona families with Medicare for more than twenty-five years. He and David were branch managers across town from each other about twenty years ago. And when David left to start American Retirement Advisors, Greg kept doing what he does.
And Greg brought his own clients to this show, which Ian points out is a generous thing for an agent to do.
That says a lot about him. Greg's own words were that he didn't want his people in the ozone on the things he doesn't do. Which is such a practical, professional thing to say. He knows Medicare. He's not going to pretend he knows retirement income planning at the same depth. So he brought them somewhere they could get those other questions answered.
That kind of professional honesty is actually one of the things that builds real trust with clients. You're not pretending to be everything to everyone.
And the rest of the panel backed him up with the specialties he was deferring to. Kyle Jacobs on retirement income planning. Jason Tweet on inheritance planning and generational wealth. And then there's Mr. Edge, who Ian describes as someone who spent thirty-five years inside the machine and can tell you why it's built the way it is.
I want to pause on that description for a second because I think it's really meaningful for listeners. There are people who can recite the rules, and there are people who understand why the rules exist. That's a different kind of knowledge.
And Ian adds, almost as an aside, that Mr. Edge also showed up early to open the room and set everybody's seat. Which tells you something about the kind of person he is. Thirty-five years of experience and he's setting up chairs.
David also apparently surprised the whole panel with a lightning-round quiz nobody had seen ahead of time.
Ian says that's exactly the kind of thing David thinks is funny. And I think it's also strategically smart. If your team can handle an unscripted quiz in front of a live audience, it tells the room something real about how well they actually know this material.
So then the questions started coming in, and this is the part I really want to spend time on because Ian summarizes several of them and they're genuinely the questions people carry around for years. The first one was, is an online will good enough?
And apparently that question opened up what Ian calls the clearest five minutes on wills, trusts, and probate he's heard in a while. He doesn't quote the answer verbatim, but the way he frames it suggests the answer was nuanced, not a simple yes or no.
Which is usually the right one when it comes to legal documents, right? It depends on your situation.
Almost always. And the interesting thing about that question is why people ask it. They want to know if the easier, cheaper path is sufficient. Which is a totally reasonable thing to want to know. But the answer involves understanding what a will does, what a trust does, and what probate is and what it costs, not just in money but in time and privacy. Those distinctions matter a lot depending on what you're trying to accomplish. The specifics there are really a conversation for one of our advisors, because the right answer genuinely varies from family to family.
And it probably shifts a lot based on the size of the estate, the states involved, whether there are minor children or complicated family situations.
All of that. So it was a five-minute answer to a question a lot of people think has a ten-second answer. That's the value of a room like that.
The next one I suspect came from a headline somebody saw and got worried about. Someone asked whether drug plans were really going to cost eight times more next year.
And the panel's answer was no. And then they explained what the law actually did. Ian doesn't detail the full explanation in the piece, but the important thing is that the panel distinguished between a scary headline and the actual policy change. Because those two things are often very different, and that gap is where a lot of retirement anxiety lives.
Eight times more is a number that would genuinely frighten someone on a fixed income. If you're budgeting for retirement and you see a headline like that, it's not irrational to panic. It's completely understandable.
And that's exactly why having someone in the room who knows the actual law matters so much. Greg has spent over two decades on Medicare. He's not guessing at this. He knows what the law did and didn't do.
Then the question about what everyone enrolled should review every single year. And the answer, according to the panel, was your prescription drug plan.
Which surprises a lot of people. Once you're enrolled in something, the instinct is to leave it alone. But drug formularies change. Prices change. The plan that was right for you last year might not be the right plan this year, especially if your medications have changed.
And most people don't know that reviewing it is even an option, or that there's a window to make changes.
Right, and the timing and mechanics of when you can do that, the exact rules around it, I'd honestly write that down as a question for our team at American Retirement Advisors, because getting it wrong can cost you. But the core message from the panel is clear: your prescription drug plan is not a set-it-and-forget-it decision.
And then the final question Ian highlights is about required withdrawals, the mandatory distributions from retirement accounts. Someone wanted to know at what age those start now.
And the panel's answer was: it depends on when you were born. Which is the accurate answer. The rules have changed, and depending on your birth year, the starting age is different. The panel walked through it, Ian says, but he doesn't lay out the full breakdown in the piece.
That's actually a question I think a lot of our listeners have been confused about, because the rules did change and there's been a lot of back and forth about it.
It's genuinely one of the most common points of confusion we hear about. And the frustrating thing is that the answer isn't one number anymore. So if a listener is trying to figure out their specific starting age for required withdrawals, that's a conversation worth having with an advisor who can look at your birth year and your account types and give you the actual answer for your situation.
What I keep noticing about all four of those questions is that none of them are obscure. They're the kind of thing that keeps someone up at night, or that they've been meaning to look up for months and just haven't gotten around to.
And they tend to stay unasked because people either feel like they should already know the answer, or they don't know who to ask, or they ask Google and get an answer that's technically accurate but doesn't account for their specific situation.
A room full of specialists and a format where there's no such thing as a dumb question is a pretty powerful combination.
That's the whole design of the show. And I think the transplant point David surfaced at the opening actually points to why that matters. These are people who left their home states, often leaving family and longtime advisors behind, and they're rebuilding their support network in a new place during one of the most financially complex phases of their lives.
That's a really lonely position to be in, actually. You're in a new city, you're close to or in retirement, and you're trying to figure out if the people you're working with now really know your situation.
And then you walk into a room where someone asks whose grandkids live the farthest away and gives away a plushie, and suddenly it's not intimidating anymore. That's not accidental. That's a deliberate choice about how to create an environment where people will actually ask the questions they came with.
Ian also wraps up the piece with some practical logistics, and I want to make sure we cover those because they're useful. The full episode from this show is coming to YouTube, he says within the next week or two from when he wrote it.
And past episodes are already up on the Fiscal Fridays page of the website. So if you're curious what the format actually looks like, or if you want to hear the full conversation about any of these questions we talked about today, it's there.
And the next live show is coming. The date isn't set yet, but Ian says the people on the list hear first when it is. So if you want to be in the room for the next one, you go to americanretirementadvisors.com/fiscal-fridays and put your name on the list.
And he notes that if you came through Greg Frantz, his page is also there. So that access point is available too.
What I appreciate about the way Ian wrote this is that it's not a sales piece. It's a thank-you letter. He's thanking Hayes for stepping up, thanking Greg for bringing his clients, thanking David for hosting, thanking Kyle and Jason and Mr. Edge for being there, and thanking the audience for showing up on a Friday morning.
And that tone tells you something. A firm that writes a public thank-you to the person who set up the chairs is a firm that understands that the experience in the room, not just the expertise, is what makes people feel safe enough to ask their real questions.
And cheeseburgers. Ian mentions that afterward everyone walked around the corner for cheeseburgers, on Greg.
Which is a very Greg thing to do based on everything else Ian says about him.
So let's bring this back to what I want our listeners to actually take from today's episode. If you've been sitting on a Medicare question, a question about your will or your trust, a question about required withdrawals or your drug plan, or any version of the do-I-have-a-plan-for-my-grandkids question that David asked that room, that question deserves a real answer in a real conversation.
And the Fiscal Fridays format is specifically designed for that. No script, no dumb questions, a panel of people with different specialties in the room at the same time. You can show up with the question you got from a scary headline and leave with an actual answer.
Whether it's a live show or a one-on-one conversation with an advisor, the point is the same. Get it out of your head and into a room where someone can actually address it. Don't let it sit for another year.
And if you want to see what the live show experience looks like before you commit to walking in the door, the past episodes are on the website. Watch one. Get a feel for it. And then you know where to go to get yourself on that list for the next one.
Ian ends the piece by saying the next show is coming, and that bringing your questions is the whole ticket. I think that's the right way to leave you today too. Whatever you've been chewing on, whatever question you've been meaning to ask, that's your ticket in. We gave you the list link a little earlier in the show, so go find it, get your name on there, and bring that question with you. Thanks for listening today, and we'll see you on the podcast.