New Capital Management

Most people treat Social Security as a personal question. When should I claim, 62, full retirement age, or hold out until 70? For a single person, that is close to the whole picture. For a married couple, it is about half of it.

When two people have each earned a benefit, the timing of one spouse's decision reaches directly into the other's income, both while you are living together and through the years one of you may eventually spend alone. The higher earner's claiming age can significantly affect the Social Security benefit available to the surviving spouse. That single rule quietly drives much of the logic, and it is the piece most often missed when each spouse decides in isolation.

No answer fits every couple. But there is a right way to approach the question: together, with a full view of how it connects to taxes, withdrawals, and the rest of the plan. Jaycee Smalley walks through it here.

https://www.newcapitalmgmt.com/news/social-security-timing-married-couples

Labor Day started as a tribute to the people whose work built the country, and it has become the long weekend that marks the unofficial close of summer. Both meanings are worth holding onto.

If you are still working, the day is a fair moment to ask what all of it is ultimately for. Most people are not building wealth to watch a number climb. They are building toward a version of life in which work becomes optional, and the years that follow are spent with the people and places that matter to them. If you are already retired, the holiday is a chance to enjoy exactly what you spent a career earning.

From all of us at New Capital Management, we hope you spend the day well, with the people you would choose to spend it with.

When a couple sits down with an advisor for the first time, they expect the conversation to be about numbers, the balances, the returns, the allocations. Those matter. But in Leonard Golub's experience, numbers are rarely the right place to start, because they explain the how of a plan without ever touching the why beneath it.

Leonard wrote about this for Rethinking65, a national publication read across the advisory profession. The piece works through what happens when partners are quietly out of sync, why what looks like a money fight is often a difference over security, purpose, or family, and why real planning starts with discovery rather than with decisions about account balances.

There's a client story in it we think many couples will recognize, about a lake house, a dream of travel, and two people who assumed they had to choose. Worth a read if money conversations at your house tend to circle the same drain.

https://rethinking65.com/when-client-couples-are-out-of-sync/

The highest compliment in this work is a client who introduces us to the people they care about. Thank you to the families who have trusted us, and trusted us enough to send others our way.

Most households with meaningful assets have a CPA, many have an estate attorney, and some have an insurance professional. What is often missing is someone whose job is to see how it all fits together.

A tax decision made on its own can quietly undo an estate strategy, and a portfolio change can create a tax bill nobody anticipated. Each professional may be doing good work within their own lane, but without coordination the pieces can still pull against each other.

That coordinating role is a large part of what our advisory relationship provides. We work directly with your attorney, your accountant, and other professionals so that decisions get made with the full picture in view rather than one corner of it. https://www.newcapitalmgmt.com/advisory

The word fiduciary is used often in the financial services industry. It's usually defined in legal or regulatory terms—as an obligation to act in a client's best interest.

But perhaps the more important question isn't what a fiduciary is.

It's what being a fiduciary actually looks like in practice.

At New Capital Management, we believe fiduciary is more than a designation. It's a responsibility built on trust, one that begins with understanding our clients before making recommendations and continues through every conversation and every decision that follows.

In our latest article, we explore the philosophy behind fiduciary, why trust has been at the heart of the advisor-client relationship for centuries, and how that principle continues to shape the way we serve our clients today.

Read the full article: https://www.newcapitalmgmt.com/news/what-does-a-fiduciary-financial-advisor-do

What Does a Fiduciary Financial Advisor Do? — The New Capital Journal — New Capital Management What does a fiduciary financial advisor really do? Learn why fiduciary is more than a legal standard and how trust shapes every relationship at New Capital Management.

The Social Security Act was signed on August 14, 1935. Ninety-one years later, deciding when to claim remains one of the more consequential retirement choices a couple makes, and one of the more commonly made in isolation.

For married couples, it is really one decision made twice. Claiming early permanently reduces the monthly benefit while waiting increases it, and the higher earner's claiming age also sets the survivor benefit that the other spouse may be living on for years, sometimes decades, after the first death.

That last part gets overlooked, in part because it requires a conversation most couples would rather postpone. It is worth having anyway, well before either of you is standing at a deadline, and worth having together rather than each of you working it out alone.