Old Stocks, Lost Assets, and Costly Retirement Mistakes

So one of the things that people ask about is, I'm going into retirement and I got some stock from mom and dad that I've been hanging around.

It's IBM stock or GE stock from years and years ago.

They told me never to sell it, so I didn't.

And I got it and it's been going up, but I don't know if I should use it in retirement.

There are people that have old 401ks or they have old bonds and things like that.

They have old things that they wonder...

Can I use this? So, Mike, if somebody brings in their financial life to you and you look at some of this stuff, is it rip and tear? We just got to sell this and use the assets.

Or can you turn some of this and give some new life to it?

Well, it's actually kind of interesting because we do see some crazy stuff.

I had a client that had been filing tax returns since like 1945, and he had every tax return he had ever filed.

Wow.

The actual.

And back then, it wasn't like you made copies of stuff.

So he actually had done two copies, you know, to do.

And some of those tax returns from like 1940 to 1950, one page.

I mean, it was insane.

It was so cool to see it.

And they're all yellow and brittle because he's been holding on to them.

But, yeah, unfortunately, just like there's a lot of financial news clutter, people clutter their lives with a lot of paperwork and documents.

And worse than that, worse than that is that it's not that they have an old 401K or a stock that they inherited with mom, but they have two or three 401Ks because they've moved from two or three different jobs.

Mm-hmm.

And they've worked with three or four different advisors over the years.

And each one of those advisors supplied them, and I'm doing air quotes, supplied them with some sort of investment vehicle that they still have.

So really what they do is they come to us half the time with a hodgepodge of stuff, and they have no idea what it is.

And one of the cool things about the way we do our business is that we do want to see your tax return.