March 1 2024
March 2024: A Note from Actuary and Author Peter Neuwirth, FSA, FCA — I invite you to tune in for this month’s episode of my podcast and video show, Silver Divorce, where for 30 minutes, we unpack ways you can simplify the painful process of getting divorced in your senior years.
Meet our guest: Barry Sacks, PhD, JD, Reverse Mortgage/Retirement Portfolio Longevity Expert and co-founder of Neuwirth Associates Consulting
This month’s topic: The current state of affairs in Silver Divorce
Click here to watch our video interview on SilverDivorce.tv.
About our guest: Barry H. Sacks Ph.D. earned his Ph.D. in semiconductor physics from M.I.T., and then taught at U.C. Berkeley. He earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and is a Certified Specialist in Taxation Law from the California Board of Legal Specialization. After spending 35 years as an ERISA attorney specializing in qualified retirement plans, he used his breadth of skills to discover a role for a reverse mortgage to help make a retirement portfolio last longer. Barry now has a law practice providing exceptional services to tax professionals in “Offers in Compromise” for retirees living on 401(k) accounts or securities portfolios. With his brother, Professor Stephen Sacks, Barry published the pioneering research paper modeling a strategy that uses reverse mortgage credit lines to mitigate the effects of adverse investment returns in retirement accounts (Journal of Financial Planning, February 2012). A sequel to this paper expanding the range of applications of the strategy was co-authored by Peter Neuwirth, F.S.A., and Stephen Sacks. Read all about it. While developing his model for reverse mortgages in retirement income planning, Barry became aware of the particular needs of retirees and soon-to-be retirees in the process of divorce. These needs are particularly concerning in cases where the retirement savings are divided between the parties or where one of the parties has received most of the retirement savings but not much of the home equity value: Read more here. Barry is a frequent speaker on those subjects, live and in webinars, to financial planning groups, estate planning and trust attorneys’ and accountants’ groups, reverse mortgage lenders’ groups, and graduate tax seminars at law and business schools. He lives in San Francisco and Sonoma, except when traveling faraway exotic places.
About Neuwirth Associates Consulting: Founded by Peter Neuwirth, FSA, FCA, and Barry Sacks, PhD, JD, Neuwirth Associates Consulting is dedicated to the proposition that the actuarial perspective is critical for addressing many of the most significant problems that individuals face as they navigate through the current economic environment and grapple with the risks and challenges associated with utilizing their assets to live on for the rest of their lives. Neuwirth Associates Consulting provides analysis and technical support to CFPs, CPAs, family lawyers, loan officers, investment advisors, and Retirement Plan sponsors in the areas of retirement planning, asset division in divorce, and Life Insurance/Annuity product analysis. Our focus is on developing specific strategies and risk mitigation techniques that will enable our clients to solve their clients’ problems in a cost- and tax-efficient manner. For more than 40 years, Pete and Barry have each provided cutting-edge actuarial and tax consulting to some of the largest organizations in the world. Since 2017, they have collaborated on groundbreaking research focusing on using different asset classes (e.g., reverse mortgages) to manage risks during the “decumulation” phase of life. Beginning in 2023, Neuwirth Associates also began to provide insight, advice, analysis, and education to family lawyers and CFPs regarding complex asset division problems among older high-net-worth couples getting divorced (aka: Silver Divorce).
Learn more at NeuwirthAssociates.consulting
Learn about actuary and author Peter Neuwirth: www.PeterNeuwirth.com • Listen to our podcasts on PeterNeuwirthRadio.com • Watch all of our episodes: www.PeterNeuwirth.tv
