BI-WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

We all have our routines and there is a lot of research that says that those routines are helpful to the body and mind. Throughout my time in this business, my routines have been somewhat lacking and my schedule has been all over the place. However, we are working to get more consistency in that, to take advantage of some of those benefits of routines and to make sure our priorities in life are reflected in our schedule. Today I want to chat a little about changing routines up a bit, in order to give yourself a fresh perspective. Being stuck in our ways can also cause us to not be open to different activities and information, and we could be missing out.
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As you all know, I take in a lot of information through podcasts and books. About a week ago, I stumbled upon some new podcasts that I was interested in following, that focus on running a financial practice. At that time, I also realized that my backlog of podcasts is overwhelming and I truly don’t have the capacity to add more to my list. Therefore, I was faced with a choice; continue with the ones I have listened to for years, (which have been tremendous in helping us to gather ideas to improve our practice), or unfollow those podcasts and start listening to some new perspectives. I chose to change things up and listen to the new ones. After all, we can’t implement new and different ideas if we don’t change our inputs.
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Why do I think this is something I should be writing about? Well, I feel like it provides a little spark to life when you view things from a different perspective. Doing so might even open our eyes to our blind spots, which we all have, especially when we haven’t looked outside of our sphere for a long time. I realized that when I changed my list of podcasts last week, I felt refreshed. I like the idea of starting something new and I was excited to hit play. Was the information a whole lot different than what I had been listening to for years? Not necessarily, but it was different enough to make me feel a little more enthusiastic about listening to the next episode. I began to feel like it’s “time to make the donuts” again.
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There are several articles out there that discuss the benefits of taking on a fresh perspective, regarding different aspects of your life. Changing Perspectives: 9 Tips for a Fresh Outlook on Life, dives into some of these benefits; personal growth, enhanced problem-solving skills, stress reduction and some others. I don’t think it can hurt any of us to take a fresh look at things once in a while. It challenges us to rethink certain thoughts or activities, which is good for the brain. Also, sometimes we are simply stuck in a rut and need to shake things up a little. 30 ways to change your perspective and improve your life will give you some ideas on how you might do that. Finding joy in the little things, surrounding yourself with positive people, accepting the things you cannot control and finding a new hobby are just a few of those.
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Now, how can this apply to retirement? Well, for starters, one concept I’ve learned in this field is that retirement lasts a long time. This is a great thing, and despite what I hear, I do not believe that you are ever too old to change. What I don’t think we realize is just because we’re in the later part of our lives, we still have a ton of life left to live. Therefore, it's probably a great time to reflect and take a different look at our lives. You have the time to put in the work to make some real changes. Previously, work and kids likely left very little time to dedicate to a fresh, new look at life. In that stage, most of us are moving from one thing to the next. However, now you have a lot more flexibility to structure your day how you want it to be. That being said, maybe this is the first aspect to evaluate: Reflect on how you choose to spend your day. Could you change a few things up and do something different? You might be surprised at the positive effects.

For me, this little change in direction gave that small part of my life a boost. So I thought, why not be more open to looking at things differently once in a while to make sure I am where I want to be and make adjustments as needed? Maybe by doing this, even just once in a while, we might be able to break out of the old and not get so stuck in our ways.
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This is a tough time of year; football is done, it is freezing out, and every time we plan something, the weather says no. Spring fever is starting to hit and I’ve even begun my seed purchasing for the year. Just a few more weeks. More reflections from behind my desk later in the month...
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Trump’s Tariffs: What They Mean for Markert’s
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Market Watch: Stock Rally as Market Leadership Shifts

Greg Korn, CFP® President & Investment Advisor Representative

Toll Free: 833-788-0404

Fax: 814-357-9070

Important Disclosures Regarding Email Communications

Investment advisory services offered through Brookstone Capital Management, LLC (BCM), a registered investment advisor. BCM and Greg Korn DBA K Financial are independent of each other. Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents.

This past Fall was full of healthcare planning. Let’s just say it was a rather difficult year for most, due to the changes in Medicare rules and the significant increase in pricing for Marketplace insurance. With regards to Marketplace insurance, clients had to either increase the amount they paid per month, take on a significantly higher deductible or choose a new insurance company with a limited network. Needless to say, no one was particularly thrilled about their new choices. When I am dealing with these issues, meeting after meeting, and even evaluating our own options, it sends me into research mode, trying to understand the United States Healthcare system (which seems impossible). However, I do want to talk about some of the reasons we are paying higher costs for healthcare than any other country.
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Healthcare makes up around 17.3% of our Gross Domestic Product. For reference, in 1960, it was 5% of our GDP. Therefore, you can see that healthcare has become a massive part of our economy and is creating a ton of jobs throughout the country. Private insurance kind of took off when they began to give tax incentives to employers and employers became the major payor of private insurance, thus driving the country to have a reduced need for public insurance (Medicare & Medicaid). When health insurance costs were lower, it was more practical for employers to cover a majority of these costs. However, as the healthcare system grew faster than the rest of the economy, it became increasingly difficult for employers to cover all of the costs. This has created a problem, because we are used to having a majority of costs covered. Now, we are seeing less of our paychecks because of the increase in those health insurance premiums, making it frustrating for everyone. Unlike the U.S., other countries do not have to deal with such problems, as they have healthcare through a public system (which isn’t free because they pay for it in higher taxes), and if you can afford it, you can get your own private insurance on top of that.
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Part of the reason that insurance prices are so high, is because health insurance is unlike other types of insurance, which insure against random, infrequent and catastrophic events. What I mean is, your home and auto insurance don’t pay for your furnace cleanings or oil changes, and yet health insurance covers the majority of our costs to see our primary care and specialist doctors (for non-random, frequent and non-catastrophic events). Therefore, it makes more sense to start looking at our health insurance as a discount card. Since our insurance companies are covering the majority of the costs for those that are insured, in a sector of the economy that already has higher than average inflation each year, you can see how that can have a compounding effect, resulting in continually higher premiums. The use of insurance isn’t even spread out evenly; five percent of the insured create about 50 percent of the healthcare expenses and 20 percent of the insured create 85 percent of the overall healthcare costs. This leaves the other 80 percent, that don’t use the healthcare system as much, to get frustrated about the amount they are spending each month for something they rarely use.
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We are Americans and we believe in choices with immediate access. However, the best way to increase prices is to start adding tons of choices to a system that is growing faster than the rest of the economy. Just in the area I work, two new hospitals have been built: Penn Highlands in State College, and Geisinger, in the Williamsport area. Were they needed? I’m not sure, but because we want choices, it made sense to those companies to have a presence there. Those are massive infrastructure investments that do find their way down to us, in the form of increased healthcare costs, which again, leads to higher premiums to cover those increased costs.
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In this country, we are also the leaders and drivers in the world for innovation in procedures, devices, and drugs. Because of this, we pay a price. With other countries having major public health systems, they can control the pricing of new drugs and devices that come on the market. Basically, a country can say to the U.S. companies, if you want access to our market, this is what you are allowed to charge our consumers. As we know, that’s not how it goes here. New prescriptions have a huge cost when they first hit the market. We don’t have price control here because of a complicated system that includes Pharmacy Benefit Management in the middle of everything. Therefore, we are taking on a majority of the world's costs to improve human life and increase lifespan through drugs and devices. These drugs and devices make up a third of our healthcare costs and that is only going to increase due to the upcoming line of Biotech infused drugs.

This last one is on us. We have had an explosion in obesity and type 2 diabetes in the last 60 years. In the 1960s, 13% of adults were considered obese–now that number is around 43%. All of that extra weight puts a lot of demand on the body, which leads to more healthcare needs. Then, add in when I was born, in 1971, 1% of the US population had type 2 diabetes. That number is now up to 12%, today. We are not a healthy country and instead of living healthier, we are looking to pharmaceuticals to help change the trends. More money is flowing to create new drugs (see above) as a remedy. On top of that, the American diet looks to feed our country at the cheapest cost possible. It has resulted in much poorer overall health for us, again, leading to increased healthcare costs.
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Unfortunately, I don’t see anything stopping us from increasing the four trillion dollars we spend on healthcare each year. I also don't see any momentum behind a major overhaul to change how we want our healthcare to be. If any major overhaul did come along and reduce costs, it would likely result in many job losses, also, which would affect our economy negatively.
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I continue to try to find solid, affordable solutions for my clients. This has had a major impact on our family as well, and we had a problem finding decent options to turn to this year. What I've concluded is that we have to do everything in our power to live a very healthy life, if we want to keep our overall healthcare costs down.
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If you want to listen to a more in-depth conversation focused on our Healthcare system, check out this Podcast:
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Choices, costs and challenges in US healthcare: insurance intricacies, drug pricing, economic impacts and potential reforms

More thoughts from behind my desk in a couple of weeks…

Greg Korn, CFP® President & Investment Advisor Representative

Toll Free: 833-788-0404

Fax: 814-357-9070

Important Disclosures Regarding Email Communications

Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to get back on track and back to doing the work to help you live your best life in retirement. Remember, when we are planning for retirement, we are making important decisions that are going to affect the rest of our lives, with incomplete information. I say this all the time but it needs to be reinforced so that we can plan appropriately, but at the same time, leave flexibility in those plans. We do not know the future of your health, healthcare, the economy, tax rates, investment performance, inflation, and we definitely do not know how long you're going to live. These are only a few of the items that need to be addressed and I already have email ideas for the topics in bold, bouncing around in my head. Today we are going to tackle the topic of estimating how long you are going to live.

My father-in-law was giving me a hard time about quoting him in my last email, regarding his pessimism when it comes to his future life at 90 years old. Therefore, I figured I would pick on him some more, today. He's 59, so he’s in the process of planning for his time after he is done working. Well, fortunately (or maybe unfortunately, because I keep talking about him), he has someone around that deals with this every day and we get into some discussions at Sunday dinners. In thinking through his future, he was planning around the average life expectancy of a male in the US; 74.8 years old. However, he was underestimating his life expectancy because 74.8 takes into account males of all ages, including those that have already passed away. What you really need to be looking at, is what the life expectancy is for an individual of your gender and race that has already attained your same age. In his case, the average life expectancy of a white male, that is 59 today, is 80.8 years old. That’s a six year difference, which is a HUGE difference when you are planning your financial future.

In the planning process, we have to put a number on how many years we think we are going to live. No matter what information we include in our estimate, knowing an exact age that we will live to is truly impossible. However, we need a starting point to help guide us now, with our decision making. My default age for planning is 90 for males and 95 for females. (Through discussions regarding family history, we adjust those numbers, individually.) I generally like to overestimate, though, as underestimating can create problems with our financial plans. Now, I also like to use the American Academy of Actuaries USA Longevity Illustrator to give us another piece of the puzzle. It asks a few basic questions; age, gender, retirement age, smoking and health (poor, average, excellent), to give you the probability of living to a certain age. Using the Longevity Illustrator for my father-in-law, gives him a 55% chance of living to 85 years old and a 34% chance of living to 90 years old. That means that over half of the males alive in the U.S., that are 59 years old now, will live past 85, and who knows who will end up on which side of that number. Clearly, using the “average” alone, doesn’t give us the whole story. What is the probability that you will live past the average? As you can see, we really need to think through this when we are setting up long-term plans.

Now, add in another factor to consider; we spend more money in the first part of our retirement than we do in the later part of retirement. We’ve been dreaming of that day and (hopefully) developed some plans to do all the things we want to do, once our primary obligation is not showing up to work. Those plans usually require spending some of that money you have saved, which you know, I encourage. Here are two models as to how this plays out in real life: Retirement Spending Smile and Retirement Spending Stages.

Under the Retirement Spending Smile model, the thought is that you spend more money in the first part of retirement and that number decreases as you go through retirement. It will then rise again, later in life, as you are prone to dealing with more health problems. With the Retirement Spending Stages model, you have three different stages in retirement: The “go go” years, the “slow go” years and the “no go” years. These stages reflect how our bodies are changing throughout life and how those changes have an effect on your spending. I use this model (Retirement Spending Stages) in our Retirement Planning Software.

Maybe your life doesn’t play out like either one of those models. That’s okay. What we are trying to do here is get a general idea of how to think through these processes. Just remember, you want to be smart about the information you choose to use for the basis of your planning, so that the output will be as accurate as possible. Obviously, my father-in-law will have different spending allocations living to 75 years old versus living to 85 years old, and he wants to be mindful of that so that he doesn’t run out of money that is available to him. That is why it is so important to take the time at the beginning, to get the most realistic picture of your future, (with the understanding that it could be completely wrong and we won’t know if we made the right choice until well after the fact).

I am not a New Year’s resolution type of person. Instead, I like to make changes in my life throughout the year, when I realize something needs improvement. That being said, I keep telling Jill that “2025 Greg” is going to be awesome. She has seen this game before and doesn’t have high expectations, but it is fun to dream about how I am going to rock the year. Hopefully all of you have had an amazing start to 2025. More thoughts from behind my desk in a couple of weeks...

Brookstone Market Outlook

Greg Korn, CFP® President & Investment Advisor Representative

Toll Free: 833-788-0404

Fax: 814-357-9070

Important Disclosures Regarding Email Communications

NEWSLETTERS 2025

BI-WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Address

207 Main St
Ridgway, PA 15853

308 Walton Street, Suite 3
Philipsburg, PA 16866

214 W High St
Bellefonte, PA 16823

CONTACT US

Local: 814-248-3026

Toll Free: 833-788-0404

Fax: 814-357-9070

EMAIL

begin@kfi.life

NEWSLETTERS 2025

BI-WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Address

207 Main St Ridgway, PA 15853

308 Walton Street, Suite 3Philipsburg, PA 16866

214 W High StBellefonte, PA 16823

CONTACT US

Local: 814-248-3026

Toll Free: 833-788-0404

Fax: 814-357-9070

EMAIL

begin@kfi.life

207 Main St
Ridgway, PA 15853

308 Walton Street, Suite 3
Philipsburg, PA 16866

214 W High St
Bellefonte, PA 16823