No Plan B: A personal lesson about retirement readiness

Stephanie Hughes doesn’t want anyone, especially families, to face an unforeseen crisis when it comes time to retire. Her family’s own struggles, when she was in college, helped shape that view.

Hughes, CEO of the Wealth Management & Family Office at the firm Wiss & Co. LLP, said she’s teaching her daughter about money, saving, and thinking early about retirement. Dedicating a little bit of time now to educate others about retirement readiness can pay big dividends down the road.

This episode of the JofA podcast also highlights breaking news related to IRS details on withdrawing employee retention credit claims.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• More about Stephanie Hughes and the division of the firm Wiss of which she is CEO.
• The personal experience that helped shape Hughes and her view on financial planning, especially as it relates to transferring family wealth.
• How her family’s struggle led Hughes to a job that she says “became my passion.”
• Why retirement readiness is sometimes more challenging for women.
• The importance of early education when it comes to saving for retirement.
• The YouTube series that Hughes and other firm leaders have begun.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Hello. This is Neil Amato with the Journal of Accountancy. Thank you for listening to another episode of the JofA podcast. This episode has a focus on financial planning. It also features some important IRS updates related to the employee retention credit, news I will detail after the interview.

About a month ago, we ran a headline in our daily newsletter, CPA Letter, that said “Why women are often less prepared for retirement.” It cited survey data and other research with the reasons why, including the fact that women are more likely to be widowed and more likely to be an unpaid family caregiver. The guest on this episode, Stephanie Hughes from the firm Wiss, has a few things to say about women and retirement readiness. A past family financial event has shaped Hughes on a personal and professional level, helping fuel her passion for talking to others, including her own daughter, about the need to be retirement-ready. Here’s that conversation with Stephanie Hughes.

Stephanie, you’re the CEO of the Wiss Family Office. That’s, I guess, a fairly newly created office. What was the goal of creating the Wiss Family Office?

Stephanie Hughes: The goal was really to help business owners and their families with their personal wealth. Typically, as a business owner, besides your kids, your business is really your baby and you’re so focused on growing that baby. You put all of your energy into that baby that you could potentially neglect your own personal wealth and what that means. How to grow it, how to optimize your tax situation, how to hand that money down to the next generation.

That’s where we are focused at Wiss Family Office. We’re focused on really doing all things financial for these wealthy families so that they can pass as much money as possible down to the next generation, and really empower that next generation to have that financial freedom and basically increase their odds of innovating and creating that generational wealth as well.

Amato: Your bio references an event that, I guess, helped shape who you are, and it is related to dealing with wealth transition issues in your own family. What more can you tell me about that?

Hughes: My own personal experience growing up definitely helped shape my views on financial planning and wealth transition and the importance of planning really. My father was an entrepreneur. We came to the U.S. when I was very young. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. She typically handled the household spending, and my father handled the finances, which is typical when you have one parent who has income and the other parent stays home. We see this a lot today.

When my father got sick with cancer a little bit later on in my life, I was in college. He became unable to work and we realized there was no plan. There was no retirement plan. There was no insurance plan. There was no Plan B really. My father couldn’t work, and so the income stopped coming. His situation worsened and he wasn’t able to run his business any longer, and it was a terrible time for my family.

They had to sell all of the hard assets that they had, and it was very disruptive. It was disruptive to my mother. It was disruptive to my brother. It was disruptive to me. All I could think of was, “How do people go through this? What could have been done to help them really plan for this?” Turns out that they really had done nothing to prepare. That situation, in a way, really affected the way that I viewed money.

I used it to really help families afterward plan. As a result, I became very interested in the subject and later on went on to have a career in this, where I thought I could really save people from not having a plan. It became my purpose, and my passion, and to this day I love doing it.

Amato: Obviously, it is an issue that does present unique challenges, I think more to women than to men. Correct me if I’m wrong. Some recent research, I guess, backs that up, that women sometimes face it more when it comes to financial planning. Why do you think that happens? Do you have advice specifically tailored to daughters or moms about managing money, retirement, et cetera.

Hughes: Yes. Statistically, women tend to invest at a later point in life than men do. I think that that really does explain part of the reason that they’re behind in their own savings for retirement, unfortunately. My advice is to find a financial adviser or find a financial planning-based software that you can use, to really get ahead in your life and start investing early on. That’s my advice for young women who can afford to invest, who can afford not to spend their entire paycheck. Save a little bit every month and invest it, and grow that money over time.

Same advice for our daughters is teach them as much as they can learn. Teach them as much as you can about money and about the importance of saving their money and not spending it and putting it away and watching it grow. I certainly am teaching my daughter that.

Amato: I’m trying to do the same with mine. We’re always glad when they listen to us about anything, but especially on a topic like that.

Hughes: But you’ll be the little voice in her head, when she grows up, about this topic. It does — over time — it’ll hopefully pay off.

Amato: Now, Kelley O’Hara is an Olympic gold medalist, world champion for the U.S. national soccer team. I guess you and other Wiss executives have been working with her on a YouTube series. What are the basics of that series and what are the messages, the advice you’re trying to get across?

Hughes: It’s been really fun working with Kelley O’Hara. We created this series to just create some awareness around money, what to do with your money and how to save and very basic concepts so that people really just got started. Because as we talked about, women are left behind here, because they don’t start early enough. The goal here is to just really educate people who wouldn’t have had access to this information before so that they can create financial freedom for themselves by taking control of their own situation and learning the basics and not being afraid to start, but being educated enough to have some fundamental knowledge so that they feel comfortable with that first investment that they’re making.

Amato: Stephanie, we’ve just scratched the surface on this topic. There’s obviously plenty more that you could say. But anything in closing that you’d like to get across to end this conversation today?

Hughes: I’d like to say that the more you can educate yourself on how much to save and how to invest. You know, there’s so many great tools and index funds available to you so that you can do this. Don’t overcomplicate it, and just get started. If you have access to a 401(k) through your employer, definitely use that because typically your money goes in there pretax and your employer might match you. That’s free money, basically, that you’re not going to get anywhere else. Really, I would say that the goal here is to just empower people to just get started.

Amato: I think “get started,” even if you don’t truly know every single fund you invest in or every single percentage you should be using, just getting started doing something will help.

Hughes: Absolutely.

Amato: Well, Stephanie, thank you very much for being on the podcast. We appreciate you taking the time and the messages you’re passing on. Thanks again.

Hughes: Thanks for having me, Neil. Great to be here.

Amato: Again, that was Stephanie Hughes of Wiss. We were glad to have the opportunity to connect with her.

In other news, on Thursday, the IRS announced the details for the withdrawal process for employers that filed an employee retention credit claim and have concerns about the claim’s accuracy.

According to an IRS news release, the withdrawal option allows certain employers that filed an ERC claim but have not yet received a refund to withdraw their submission and avoid future repayment, interest, and penalties.

Employers that submitted an ERC claim that is still being processed can withdraw their claim and avoid the possibility of getting a refund for which they’re ineligible. The IRS said it created the withdrawal option to help those who were pressured or misled by ERC marketers into filing ineligible claims. The IRS said claims that are withdrawn will be treated as if they were never filed. The IRS said it will not impose penalties or interest.

We’ll have more on this story on journalofaccountancy.com. I’m Neil Amato. Thanks for listening to the JofA podcast.