Podcast Episode – Is Your Adult Child Financially Clueless?

On this edition of Ask KT & Suze Anything, Suze answers your questions about Roths in higher tax bracket, going from two incomes down to one, lack of financial education and so much more!

Listen to Podcast Episode:

---

Podcast Transcript:

Suze: November 27th, 2025. Welcome everybody to the Women and Money podcast, and everybody, do you hear me? Everybody. That means everybody smart enough to listen, even Colo.

KT: Somebody wanted to wish Suze and I a very happy Thanksgiving.

Colo: Happy Thanksgiving KT and Suze.

Suze: And everybody that loves you. Do you know how many people love you on this podcast,

KT: But they’re still making their famous stuffing together, and then Colo’s gonna go to his brother Faber’s house and visit with, yeah. Maria and Annie, his wife is coming and her..

Colo: My wife is coming to town

KT: And wait there’s there’s one more super addition to the family. Who is it?

Colo: Leah, my niece.

KT: How old is she?

Colo: She’s only like 15 days old.

Suze: Wow. So anyway. We love you, Colo. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well, to Annie, to your entire family. Anything else you want to say before you go?

Colo: Yes, I wish everybody a happy, a super spectacular Thanksgiving to everybody.

Suze: Ah, thank you, sweetheart. There you go. All right, now. It’s always so nice to have him in the studio with us, isn’t it? OK, there you go. But it’s kind of funny. You want to know what happened before he came in? Everybody, go on, KT. Tell him you smelled him.

KT: Wait, I didn’t let him in the studio or near Suze in case he smelled like anything sweat, um, chemicals from cleaning things, whatever it is.

Suze: Because our studio is really really small.

KT: So I said really, let me smell you, and he looked at me and then he leaned down and he smelled me. I said, no, no, no, you don’t smell bad. I just wanna make sure you’re not around any chemicals.

Suze: So anyway, so that’s when you know you truly love somebody. All right, KT, what do you have for us today?

KT: My first question is from Annie. She said, Love, love, love your podcast. I started on my investment journey thanks to your Suze Orman show years ago. So grateful for all your sage and easy to understand advice. And here’s the question: Does investing in a Roth 401k not make sense at a certain tax bracket?

Suze: Really? Listen, everybody, I don’t care what tax bracket you’re in. I don’t care actually what your CPA says to you. I don’t care what anybody says to you.

I find it very difficult to find any situation where a Roth doesn’t make sense, even if you are two years away from retirement. Just saying, now, obviously, sometimes when you’re older and everything, you have to look at your income because of Medicare Part B and all of that stuff. However, in this situation, you’re still working.

Do a Roth 401k. Next KT.

KT: So Suze, I’m just gonna be pretty gentle because it’s Thanksgiving with a few very lightweight questions and short ones because I’ve got something coming up that you all might wanna stay tuned to listen to. All right, so my next question is, Suze KT, I’m finishing up my documents but just wanted to confirm for the revocable trust. I’m supposed to be the settlor and the trustee? Or do I name someone else as the trustee?

Suze: Now they’re talking about in this question the must-have documents, right? And the must-have documents are a living revocable trust, a will, an advance directive, and durable power of attorney for health care, as well as a financial power of attorney. When it comes to the living revocable trust:

The person that creates the trust is known as the trustor or the settlor. It’s your trust. You created it. The trustee is the person who makes all the decisions about what you want to do in that trust. Normally the trustor or settlor and the trustee are the same person.

So absolutely you need to be those two. All right.

KT: All right.

Suze: By the way, if you’re interested in the must-have documents, go to must-havedocs.com and that’s where you can currently get them. I think they’re $99. Listen to me, everybody, they are going to change sometime next year in terms of their price, and you are getting $2,500 worth of state of the art documents. You can share it with all of your family members, meaning you can have $2,500 worth of state of the art documents. Your sisters, your brothers, your nieces, whoever it is, they also can, they all get their own password. They all create their own site, so you should take advantage of it while you can.

And KT, I just have to say this as well, if you’re looking for a one year certificate right now, I would have all of you go to myalliant.com, because I think rates are gonna drop shortly, and you can still all get a one year certificate for 4.10% APR and for those of you who have $75,000 or more, you will get 4.15 APR. You might want to check it out cause I have a feeling it’s gonna change. All right, go on.

KT: This is gonna be a real gobbly kind of podcast, gobble, gobble, gobble. So, from Donna.

KT: Suze, I wanted to ask…

Suze: What kind of podcast do you think this is gonna be today?

KT: A gobble, gobble, gobble podcast, Suze. I got a gobbling going on.

Suze: I thought you were gonna say this is gonna be a podcast stuffed with incredible financial advice. Get it? Yes, that too. Do you know people are still writing in wanting to know the recipe…

KT: The recipe.

Suze: It’s somewhere.

KT: We posted it a million times, I think it’s on the wall.

Suze: Yeah, look on the Women and Money Community app, scroll all the way down and it’s there somewhere. All right, KT.

KT: So this is from Donna. I wanted to ask you a quick question regarding something Fidelity sent to me. Fidelity asked if I wanted to make extra income by lending out securities I already own. Is this safe and should I consider it? I never heard this before. That’s why I picked it.

Suze: Shame on Fidelity.

KT: Oh, she’s turning red. Everybody, like that turkey in the oven.

Suze: Do turkeys turn red?

KT: Yeah, they get golden red… bronze.

Suze: All right, so listen, in almost every single case, the answer is absolutely not. And why is that?

Because you are lending out your stocks, your ETFs, whatever it may be, and therefore they are no longer number one protected by SIPC. That’s where you are protected in case something happens to brokerage firms. You’re giving up your rights to vote. You may not get the same tax treatment and the extra income that they’re offering you so that they can lend out your certificates so other people can short them, do all these things with them.

The extra income is so small it’s not worth it, and the added risk for very little reward, I don’t think so. Therefore, just stick with owning your certificates outright. The mere fact you don’t even know what that means says no. And again, shame on you, Fidelity, without explaining everything to everybody. Go on.

KT: All right. The next question is from Sharon.

KT: Suze, I picked this one because this question, it’s just one line, but it’s a question almost everyone should be asking that it pertains to ready? from Sharon: Suze, how can you protect going from two incomes to one income?

Suze: Do you all remember back in 2008, if you were watching the Suze Orman Show back then, I was saying to all of you, you need to practice living on one income even though both of you may be working. Take one of your incomes and put it away and just see, can you make it on one income, because back then it was very probable one of you was going to lose your job because we were actually in a depression, in my opinion, back then.

The same holds true right now, Sharon. You can’t necessarily protect yourself from going from two incomes to one. What you can do is, number one, control what your income is spent on. And if I were you, why don’t you play one income? See what it’s like. See what would happen if one of you did die. One of you lost your job, because death is actually different, I’m sorry to say, than losing a job. When you lose a job, you still might get your Social Security. When you lose a job, you still may have something coming in. You have the ability to get another one, even if it’s, you know, a few dollars an hour, whatever it is. When death occurs, it’s gone.

So possibly you’ve lost a Social Security check, you’ve lost a pension, possibly all kinds of things can be lost. Therefore, practice now what happens if it were death and practice now what it would be if it was just simply retirement or one of you lost a job.

If it’s disability, by the way, you can always get a disability policy because 1 out of 4 people can become disabled and all of a sudden you’ve lost that income, but you can protect against that by purchasing a disability policy. So there are things you can do, but the best thing you can do is get a grip on what will one income pay for and if your expenses are too much, how do you cut your expenses if you can’t afford your home. All right, now maybe you downsize, whatever it is, but if you plan for all of that, then you’ve protected yourself from the what ifs of life. Next question, KT.

KT: OK, as I said, short and sweet, this is from Gwen. What are your thoughts on real estate at the moment?

Suze: Not great, to tell you the truth, KT.

There used to come a time where owning a home was the American dream, and that was when interest rates were lower, insurance was lower, property taxes were lower, and truthfully across the board expenses were lower, and it just made sense. I have to tell you, it doesn’t make sense now for a whole lot of people. Why?

Mortgage rates are still high. Prices of real estate—still high. Inflation is still high, and when I mean by inflation, I’m not talking about what everybody says the inflation rate is, I’m talking about your own personal inflation, what it costs for you to live. To shop, to eat, to do anything. I get that gasoline prices have gone down, but there is more to living than just gasoline prices.

But the real thing that concerns me truthfully is the insurance it takes to insure your home and what that is going to cost you. And sometimes it just doesn’t make sense because in many places in the United States, your property insurance might even be more than your mortgage payment.

Is your job secure? Many of you in the federal government thought your jobs were secure, and then all of a sudden you also didn’t get back pay. And now is your mortgage in jeopardy?

So, you have to know, is you purchasing a home, real estate, wise for you in your particular situation? Can your situation change? Do you have at least a 12-month emergency fund, besides 20% to put down? Can you afford increases in insurance, property tax, and everything? Do you have the money to maintain the home? So, it depends.

Also, I know that I’m going on on this, KT, but you’re the one who asked the question, right, is that Mother Nature is seriously concerning me. There isn’t a time that I turn on the television and I don’t see rains, floods, all these things happening in Texas, Southern California being deluged by once again water, fire here, dust storms here, all kinds of things, right? Tornadoes.

And so Mother Nature is a serious concern to me and therefore it should be to you as well, just something to think about. All right.

KT: Yeah, real estate’s really tricky.

Suze: Fires. Think about fires in the Los Angeles area

KT: And hurricanes.

Suze: And how many emails we have gotten saying the insurance company KT isn’t paying them. Their insurance company canceled them right before the fire. They had $900,000 and the insurance company only gave them $500,000. They don’t know what to do, so… I don’t love real estate as much as I once did. All right, go on.

KT: Suze, I agree, real estate’s really tricky these days. So if you don’t buy a home, or you can’t buy a home, what do you do?

Suze: Um, I have to tell you, you rent, and I know that a lot of you are like, oh, but I can’t find an apartment. Apartments are so expensive. I’m paying somebody else to own something outright. The most important thing you can do is be realistic.

What can you afford and what can you not? And don’t feel like you’re a failure if you do rent. Some of the wealthiest people I know have only rented.

Just think about it, OK.

KT: My next question is again back to federal employees because I think they deserve a little more TLC these days. Um, this is from Kelly. She said, Suze, what should federal workers be doing about this new Roth in-plan conversion option? Do it now? Wait till we are retired to convert money in our traditional to the Roth? She said, I’ve heard answers from too many people. I only trust you.

Suze: Good, because you know, KT, remember a few podcasts ago you asked me why do they have to check to see if they can transfer right from a traditional 401k to a Roth, and I said not all companies allowed it. Well, guess what? Federal government didn’t really allow it. You could have a Roth TSP, but you couldn’t transfer from a traditional TSP to a Roth TSP. Starting 2026. You’re gonna be able to. So here’s the thing.

I want all of you to listen to me right now about the stocks. Many things are down considerably. So if there’s ever a time to convert to a Roth, now is the time. Forget the TSP for just one second. You’re in a traditional IRA. And you own Palantir, IONQ, Ibit, all of those stocks. Now is the time to convert to a Roth if you can, because those prices are down considerably, because they’re down considerably. Your taxes will be less.

And therefore that’s how you make your money make more money. You convert half this year maybe, half next year, but if your portfolio is down, now is the time to convert if you were thinking about converting. Again back to Kelly and this question.

Convert, convert. The key is how much do you convert, given I don’t know a lot about your circumstance. Convert amounts so you don’t go into a higher tax bracket number one.

If you can and you don’t have a lot in the TSP convert as much as you can while it’s probably down if you invested in certain government funds that may be down and do that. Absolutely convert. Do not wait until you are retired. If you are retired and you are converting, you will then be making one of the biggest mistakes out there, and the reason is—what will that do to your income in regards to the Medicare B premium? You have to think about that, and maybe I’ll talk about that more on Sunday’s podcast. All right, KT next.

KT: OK, Suze, this is what I’ve been holding back on this particular question. It’s a little complicated, but it’s a fascinating story and I think many of the listeners may relate to it. This is from a stepmom who said, Hi, Suze and KT. My husband and I recently discovered that his 42 year old daughter is financially clueless.

Suze: That should be the name of this podcast.

KT: Financially Clueless. All right, she has shown a strong desire to learn and improve her financial situation. And we’re both deeply concerned about her well-being and are seeking your expert advice. So she said last week we discovered she does not know how to budget, understand bank statements, or balance her checking.

Suze: Wait, before you go on, how do you think they discovered that? What do you think happened to them that made them discover that she didn’t know how to do any of that?

KT: They somehow got involved with her money and—you’ll see, you’re right.

Suze: How do you discover that, people?

KT: So anyway, the stepdaughter moved from her mom’s home in Alabama to their California home in 2022. They allowed her to stay with them, Suze, for a year while she searched for a job and her own apartment.

Suze: Mistake.

KT: So the stepmom was able to find her a great job. And since she had no credit history, no credit card, and no rental history…

Suze: Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t tell me.

KT: Bingo, bingo. Husband had to co-sign the lease.

Suze: Well, there we talk about who’s financially clueless. All right.

KT: Recently he’s been receiving notices that his daughter’s payment was late.

Suze: Wait, wait, stop. That’s how they knew that she didn’t know how to do anything because it finally affected them. Ugh. Go on.

KT: Wait a minute. And, on the last time her check bounced. My husband and I went to her apartment to discuss this in person. We could not understand why this was happening, so ready Suze? Turned out she wasn’t checking her bank account balance. She kept swiping her ATM card for purchases and paying bills without verifying if there was enough money in her account to cover them.

This is the part that’s really sad. She blew through a $100,000 inheritance. Given her current financial situation, she could greatly benefit from a structured financial education.

Suze: Oh, you think that’s it? You think a structured financial education is going to solve this problem? Go on KT.

KT: So then she said, Could you…

Suze: I thought today was supposed to be Thanksgiving and nice and easy.

KT: But this, this is an interesting story. Suze. Could you recommend a spreadsheet and product suitable for someone new to manage finances? All right, and it’s signed “Bonus mom.”

Suze: Here’s the “bonus” mom that you’re about to get, OK. You’re not going to fix this by giving somebody a structured spreadsheet. You’re going to fix this by understanding that you are still contributing to the problem, and the problem began when you had to co-sign for her. Listen, she is 42 years old.

Somehow she had a $100,000 inheritance. Why did you have to co-sign for her? Did you not know that she had already blown that $100,000 inheritance? Cause if she had a $100,000 inheritance and she had shown that to some landlord and maybe paid the entire rent up front for a year, your husband wouldn’t have had to co-sign for her. The biggest mistake you will ever make in life when it comes to your children is when you co-sign for them. You think you’re helping them. If a bank won’t give them a loan, you are not going to be the bank, do you hear me? Unless you can afford to be the bank. Don’t ever do it.

You, my dear Bonus Mom, you have to look at your own actions and what did you and your husband do to enable her to live in the life of financial la la land, cause that’s where she is living. No spreadsheet, nothing will ever get to her. Except her having her checks bounce, her losing her car, your husband’s credit has already been ruined because she’s missed payments and now is bouncing checks. You’re going to have to have her live in reality, even if that means she has to move in with a friend, with somebody. I don’t care what it means, but you cannot save her.

KT, what is my favorite saying about helping?

KT: When is helping hurting and when is hurting…

Suze: Helping?

You have to be a warrior here and not turn your back on this battlefield, and this battlefield is all about getting a 42-year-old to live in financial reality, and you want to know why she doesn’t live in financial reality? Cause Daddy is always going to save her. She may think you may always save her. Maybe her mom may always save her. Her inheritance saved her. Everything has saved her. Now she has to become strong enough and save herself. You never go up in a situation like this until you have hit rock bottom.

KT: Wow, Suze, that’s a little harsh.

Suze: Why?

KT: It’s Thanksgiving.

Suze: No, yeah, Bonus Mom should be thankful that this is harsh because if she really wants to help her stepdaughter, let her stepdaughter hear what I just said and let me be the one who is harsh. And stepdaughter, if you are ever going to listen to this, nobody knows more about money in my opinion than me. To help you… sometimes you need to get a little dose of reality. And that was your dose. All right, KT, next.

KT: It is Thanksgiving, and I’ve got to give a little bit of love here.

Suze: But listen, it’s only Thanksgiving today. Most of the people listen to this podcast a few days from now. They’ll already forget it and they’ll already…

KT: On that last one, let the daughter listen. That is gonna be the best thankful. Yeah, it’s like that’s gonna be the best thanks you can give.

Suze: You have to stop trying to help her through typical means, a spreadsheet? A spreadsheet. What’s that gonna do to her? Nothing. She’s gonna forget to enter all the numbers. All right, go on.

KT: All right, so this one, I think, is a very, very sweet and very heartwarming question. Ready? What… this is from Kim. She said, What is the financial benefits of being married? Love the question. Wait, I’m soon to be 68 and my 72-year-old sweetheart and I want to get married.

I love this, Suze, she said, I have a house worth half a million dollars where we currently live, a Roth and an IRA with a total of about $1.3 million. He also has a house and investments worth closer to $2 million. We don’t have any joint accounts regarding our finances, and Suze, do we need a prenup? She said, I can’t imagine us splitting up just like you and KT, but who knows what can happen.

Suze: I first want to take on marriage, KT, because especially for the gay and lesbian couples that are out there that currently still have the right to be married, it is so, so important. And it’s not just a right for gay and lesbian couples, it’s a right for every single person out there. And let me just go through a list of all the advantages of getting married…

Suze: And the thing that I am absolutely most thankful for in my life, more than anything, more than my health, anything—

Suze: Is you.

KT: Oh, Suze. Don’t make me cry.

Suze: Oh, KT… now she’s crying. Oh, here she goes. Oh.

KT: We’re so lucky,

Suze: So lucky, aren’t we?

KT: We really are so blessed. People always tell us how blessed we are, and we tell each other all the time. So happy Thanksgiving and be blessed, be grateful.

KT: And always remember this, people first…

Suze: Then money…

KT: Then money, then things.

Suze: All right, stay safe, everybody. Bye bye.