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Welcome to the latest edition of the Healy Wealth Management newsletter, your monthly guide to navigating the financial complexities of life.
Let us know your thoughts. And if there’s something that could benefit a friend or family member, please send it their way.
It’s THE item this Christmas.
Today’s scramble to buy a Labubu is the perfect illustration of how excitement, fear of missing out, and a ticking clock can push us to irrational extremes.
In the short video below, John Healy explores the commonalities of Labubus, tulip bulbs, artificial intelligence, and today’s markets – and how understanding the psychology behind manias is critical for successful investing.
If you’re wondering whether today’s market enthusiasm for AI is grounded in reality or drifting toward hype, this is a timely perspective.
Why did the invisible man turn down a job offer?
Scroll through TikTok long enough and you will eventually hear the same confident advice: take Social Security at 62, invest the checks in the stock market, and you will come out ahead versus waiting to claim later. This advice sounds sophisticated. But it’s deeply flawed.
Social Security is not an investment account. It’s insurance. Specifically, it is government-backed, inflation-adjusted, lifetime income designed to protect against the risk most retirees underestimate: living longer than their savings.
When bloggers argue for claiming early and investing the benefits, they focus on hypothetical market returns and “lifetime dollars received.” That framing misses the real issue. Retirement success is not about winning a spreadsheet comparison. It is about reliable income that shows up every month for as long as you live, regardless of markets, headlines, or health.
Delaying Social Security increases your benefit by roughly 8 percent per year between full retirement age and 70. That increase is guaranteed. It is adjusted for inflation. It lasts for life. There is no market portfolio that can replicate those characteristics without taking risk. Replacing a higher guaranteed benefit with market volatility introduces sequence-of-returns risk at exactly the wrong stage of life.
Ironically, the TikTok argument often claims that good health and strong family longevity make early claiming smarter. The opposite is true. The longer you are likely to live, the more valuable guaranteed lifetime income becomes. Social Security is longevity insurance. If you expect a long retirement, insuring that risk matters more, not less.
For married couples, the stakes are even higher. The higher earner’s Social Security benefit often becomes the survivor benefit. Claiming early permanently reduces the income of the surviving spouse, sometimes decades into the future.
There are situations where claiming early makes sense. Poor health. Short life expectancy. Immediate cash flow needs. But taking Social Security early to “invest it” is not a strategy. It is speculation layered on top of giving up one of the strongest guarantees in personal finance.
There is a place for investing, and there is a place for insurance. Markets are powerful tools for growth, but they come with risk and uncertainty. Social Security exists to remove risk, not to compete with a portfolio. TikTok bloggers are irresponsibly blurring this distinction – with retirees being the ones likely to suffer.
We elves try to stick to the four main food groups:
Candy
Candy Canes
Candy Corns
and Syrup!
Almost everything we manage today lives online. Financial accounts, bills, tax records, medical portals, photo libraries, subscriptions, and even estate documents themselves are accessed through usernames, passwords, and two-factor authentication. Yet many estate plans still assume a paper-based world that no longer exists.
After a death, executors quickly learn that legal authority and practical access are not the same thing. A will or power of attorney may clearly appoint an executor, but that does not mean they can log in, retrieve statements, identify accounts, or shut down services. Once a platform is notified of the death, access is often frozen until its internal process is completed, which can take weeks.
The continuation of automatic bill payments is usually just an administrative headache, not wrongdoing. But the risk of actual fraud arises when accounts sit unmonitored. Well-documented by major law firms, estates are vulnerable to post-death identity misuse, account takeover attempts through compromised email, and scams targeting grieving families. The longer digital assets are inaccessible, the greater the exposure.
Modern estate planning must bridge this gap. It is not just about who inherits. It is about whether your executor can act quickly, securely, and efficiently to get the job done in today’s digital world.
This requires that you address both authority AND access as follows:
While we do not draft estate documents, we regularly review them through the lens of what your executor – often a spouse, child, or close family member – will actually face.
The goal is simple: reduce stress at a time when families can least afford it. Legal documents matter, but without operational access, even the best estate plan can stall when it is needed most.
If you want to be sure your plan minimizes confusion, delays, and unnecessary friction for the people you care about most, we would welcome the conversation.
“Burnout isn’t about doing too much.
It’s about doing too little of what matters.
We don’t break from effort.
We break from emptiness.”
– Daniel Pink paraphrasing Victor Frankel
Answer:
He couldn’t see himself working there.