Interview with Connie Pshigoda, Author of The Wise Woman's Almanac
Erik Bowman • April 13, 2020
Mastering Monday’s podcast that provides tools and ideas to help you live better. I’m your host, Erik Bowman, owner of Bowman and financial strategies were personalized. Financial Strategies help you achieve a fulfilling retirement.
00:29 There is no shortage of diet plans for any number of health concerns, weight loss, weight gain, muscle building, belly fat reduction, heart health, brain health, digestive health, and on and on. It goes. Your health and your body are unique to you. There is no one size fits all or no cookie cutter. Mold in your food choices should reflect that Connie Pshigoda, founder of wellness for all seasons, author of the award winning the wise
woman’s Almanac, a seasonal guide with recipes for new beginnings that never go out of season and wellness. Columnist for Shine magazine shares a seasonal approach to a healthy lifestyle. Her farming roots taught her how to best use available seasonal foods. Her education and career path include fitness and ballet instructor massage therapist for 24 years. Nutritional educator and author, all of which have provided Connie with a knowledge and understanding of the human anatomy and it’s nutritional needs are fast paced lifestyles often make it difficult to follow a dietary program. So Connie is simplistic. Seasonal
approach offers an easier and more sensible way to achieve or maintain vibrant health, whether eating out or at home. Connie is a wife, mother of two grown daughters and grandmother of two granddaughters, six and nine. She loves the outdoors especially playing in her yard and garden hiking and mother daughter, granddaughter events.
01:55 Well, today for my podcast I have Connie Pshigoda, the author of the wise woman’s Almanac, a seasonal guide with recipes for new beginnings that never go out of season. Connie, thank you for joining me today. My pleasure. Erik Thank you.
I read your book and although I know a lot of the topics and the title certainly insinuate the systems of focus for women, but
certainly many of the topics are going to apply to men as well. I just kinda wanted to get that on the table to all the listeners of the podcast today that there are definitely things to take away from it, but I wanted to start off with just the an overarching question because there there is a focus to some extent on cooking and recipes and seasonal eating, but then we’re going to dig into the more personal concepts of self development and
self inventory and I thought we might just start with maybe you could tell me exactly what is seasonal eating.
Connie: seasonal eating is just that eating and choosing foods that grow naturally and a particular environmental seasons, spring, summer, fall or winter, and obviously there’s not. In our Colorado climate, there’s not a lot growing in the wintertime, but springtime brings foods that are very cleansing, very
detoxing, very high in nutrients and that’s what our body needs. That time of year we’re. We’re getting rid of the residue and the
excess of heavy winter foods so the body is ready to refresh
with clean foods and I hear women say all the time about April
they say, oh, I would just killed. I have a Christmas Green Salad,
so our bodies intuitively know that they don’t want pot roast
and chicken pies and the heavy winter foods all year long. We
need that seasonal change. Summer comes along. We’ve got
gardens, we’ve got fresh produce, Sun ripened, vine ripened
foods that are that are very cooling in nature, which is what our
body needs to get us through the heat of the summer and the
fall foods that come along. As the garden comes to a close, you
think about those winter squashes, you think of the hard winter
root vegetables and our body needs the nutrient density lower
in calories, but they help keep the body warm in the winter, so
when we choose foods according to their season, we’re giving
our body exactly what it needs nutritionally in that season.
04:27 Oh, one of the challenges for many people is that when they go
to the grocery store, the same food is pretty much there all year
long, but I think a lot of people notice, for example, that
oranges are better at certain times of the season. How does
somebody work around the idea that everything is available all
the time at the grocery store to make sure they’re picking the
right foods for the right season?
04:48 Well, that is a difficult challenge for the consumer because it all
looks so enticing and when you walk into the produce section
and see all the colors and textures and know that the flavors are
different and just a little education of knowing what foods are
ripe in which season gives a lot of benefit to the consumer. Just
because blueberries are on the shelf in January does not
necessarily mean that’s what our body wants or needs in that
season.
05:17 Is it outlined in the book pretty clearly. For example, here are
the vegetables and foods you should be looking for in the fall
and in the summer and so on.
05:26 Yes, I do give what I called nature’s pantry. A list of foods
traditionally grown in those seasons. Some foods are grown
year round now. We’re traditionally, they were a seasonal food,
so again, just a little wisdom before you go to the grocery store
knowing what you’re looking for. Having your recipes in mind so
that you can make those choices and choose citrus in its season.
It’s more nutrient dense, it’s much more when it’s ripe in season
and not picked green and shipped out of season. So that helps
in the taste factor as well as recipe selection.
06:07 I think as I read the book that there are two distinct
components. There’s the cooking piece and the seasonal aspect
of food and then there’s really the self awareness, wellness and
well-being component, and you actually have many, um, or you
call them your turn, quote unquote, which are time for the
reader to do a self evaluation and actually right inside of this
book and start to annotate a different answers to questions that
you’ve posed. Can you tell me a little bit about why you
incorporated that into a book about seasonal eating?
Speaker 2: 06:44 I guess I’ve been around long enough to notice that the more
modern our world becomes, the further away we get from
nature and our ancestors were very closely related to the
nature around them. So they experienced that more closely
than what we experienced it. And we find ourselves in a one
size fits all brown paper bag lifestyle rather than embracing the
changes that come along environmentally and even
chronologically, I think women in their twenties or early thirties,
which could be considered the spring time of their life. They’re
perhaps going to college or graduated from college, but getting
careers there at that beginning season of their lives and as they
mature into the summer season, maybe they become more
established in their careers. Maybe they start their families. So
we have that seasonal aspect as well to consider. But I think just
taking a few minutes and slowing down the pace makes a huge
difference that we evaluate or that we assess where we are in
our particular time of life. I know a lot of women are not looking
forward to going into their sixties. I’m elated. I feel like I have
some new beginnings, but I’m not in the springtime of my life
because I’ve been there, done that so I can use the wisdom I
gained from those experiences and create new beginnings at
this time of my life. So I think just slowing down to look at
where am I right now and what does that look like for my
tomorrows.
08:28 Connie, can you describe just a little bit of how you chose the
approach of seasonal eating for a topic to write a book about?
08:37 You know Eric, this came about as a career choice quite by
surprise because I grew up that way. As a farm kid, you pretty
much live seasonally. You eat what’s grown in the field or in
your garden course. I had wonderful German grandmothers
who were great at canning and preserving what we grew in the
garden and I never dreamed that lifestyle would become a
career choice. Of course, the seasonal aspect is nothing new.
The ancient Chinese have followed that for thousands of years.
The eastern Indian Ayurvedic Culture has a three season
approach. Any of your indigenous groups, the, the native
Americans, the Amazon rain forest people, they all lived with
what was available seasonally and I think we’ve gotten away
from that with our prepackaged convenience foods. And please
don’t misunderstand. I love convenience, but I always ask at
what price. I don’t want to sacrifice vibrant health, I don’t want
to age any sooner than I have to because I’ve made poor food
choices, so eating seasonally, just for me, it makes it very
simple. I have my recipes organized by seasons and that just
gives me the opportunity to eat something fresh and new and
different every season. I don’t get stuck in the same ole, same
Ole, same ole recipe.
Speaker 1: 10:00 How do you actually catalog those recipes by season? What’s
your method for doing that?
10:05 Well, I’m a champion page terror outer of magazine, so when I
see a recipe that seems enticing, if it is a fruit or a recipe or it’s a
garden summer garden recipe, tomatoes or cucumbers or
summer squash, then I catalog those with. I’d have a notebook
that has four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter, and then I
just had my little clear plastic page and I stick that magazine
page in there. Or if a friend shares the recipe, I’ll tuck it in that
little plastic holder and then I can just go to the tab for
whatever season.
10:43 That’s smart. I know we have a. my wife Heidi does the same
thing. She pulls them out, but we don’t necessarily have a way
to keep them readily accessible. You end up getting a pile of
these papers, but you’re saying like a three ring binder with
clear folder type pages that you can put these magazine pull
outs or even a handwritten recipe that somebody gives you that
you can just put in there. That’s how you.
11:07 That’s ideal. Now please don’t misunderstand. I have stacks of
recipes in my office as well because I usually tear more pages
out. Then I get cataloged right away, but that makes it easier for
me and I tell people I can eat just about anything that I want to
eat. I just choose to eat seasonally and then I feel like I have a
variety. I don’t get tired of the same old foods and my body
doesn’t build up an allergic or sensitivity because I’m repeating
the same food choices over and over and over.
11:37 Does that actually occur that if you eat the same thing over and
over, it can cause issues?
11:41 I think some people with very sensitive systems may experience
that. I know not so much with with nature’s pantry foods,
garden foods, more so with your process foods or
11:57 I mean things in bagels. Every morning comes in a box. Yes.
12:00 That I think our body creates sensitivities and possibly allergies.
I’ve heard a number of people say, I used to eat this all the time
and now my body doesn’t like it or I’m allergic to it and I think
that we need the variety, so by choosing seasonal foods, you’re
giving your body a variety of the nutrients that it needs all year
long.
12:19 You’re defining current marketing from all the manufacturers of
food by eating seasonal vegetables and fruits because that’s
what they’re putting in front of you is something that’s in a box
that may have been manufactured six months ago and you have
access to it and you’re doing what? I guess what I hear you say
is historically doesn’t happen naturally. That that’s an unnatural
thing to have access to the same foods every single day of the
year.
12:46 That is true and I. I know that convenience is a wonderful thing
in many circumstances. However, the amazing human body
needs enzymes. It needs fiber, it needs antioxidants, it needs
vitamins and minerals that they can function in the bodies,
right?
13:09 Why don’t you dig in a little more on the thought starters. This
thought starters of the book are intended to help the readers
get in touch with their environment and how
13:19 they fit into that space or place. We often live on autopilot and
forget to engage, so taking the time to respond to these
questions or thoughts gives us a glimpse of our inner garden
and that’s where our feelings, our beliefs are rooted. I think it
helps to get things out of our heads and onto paper.
13:43 If somebody were to go through this whole book and read the
book and take part in all of the different interactive and selfinventory
and thought starters, what would you want
somebody to get out of the book if they’ve actually completed
thoroughly and took advantage of the time to sit down and
reflect? What would you want a woman to get out of this book?
14:05 First? I believe the interactive activities really allow us to slow
down. We get so caught up in the hurry up of living that we
frequently get stuck in the sameness we’re doing everything
that everybody else is doing or that the marketers tell us to do
with the commercials suggest and we forget that we are very
individualistic and my health is not your health and my health in
my twenties and thirties and forties is not the same health I
strive for today. So I think that just taking that time to be
interactive with yourself. Like you said, you’re. You’re asking
yourself the question, what have I eaten today? What, what are
my cravings or what? What do I really disliked? To many
Americans are mindless eaters. Sometimes we just have great
elbow action. We, we, we go from plate to mouth and we don’t
really think about why am I eating this?
15:06 What is my body telling me? Do I need this? Am I really hungry?
Am I sad? Am I mad? Am I glad I’m in a hurry? So stopping down
to answer these questions I think gives us a deeper look at what
I call our inner garden. How are we cultivating that? And the
first part of my book, I use a lot of my farming experiences,
watching my dad cultivate the soil and use soil conservation
methods to really get the soil ready to plant the crop. We need
to do the same thing with our bodies internally. So what I would
want the reader to take with them is just an awareness that
even though we see the same seasons on the calendar year
after year after year, the spring time can be very different as we
in Colorado, no, we can have a very sunny spring in April or we
could have a blizzard, but we have to adapt to that and I think
having that adaptability with our physiology just makes us
stronger mentally, spiritually, emotionally and physically
because ultimately I’m the one that puts that food in my mouth.
16:15 About a third of the way in your book page 51 to be exact. You
have one of your your turn sections and you asked the reader to
list three new habits that they want to cultivate this month. And
the title of that chapter is internal cultivation, developing
healthy habits. Can you talk a little bit about what you wanted
to accomplish or the message you’re trying to get across with
that?
16:40 I think we are all products of our habits, whether it’s financial
habits or health habits or relationship habits, but as more
specifically to eating. I again, I think we become mindless in our
fast paced world today. We just go with the flow when we don’t
stop and think, why am I doing this? Why am I eating this? And
I, for me personally, I don’t like to follow a list of to do’s, but I
read many years ago in a wellness book that if we would divide
our food choices by percentages and you’re a numbers man so
you understand percentages. If we divide our food choices into
percentages, we can cultivate what works well for our lifestyle,
Taxes shouldn’t take the biggest bite out of your nest egg
You’re listening to uncommon sense, a podcast by Bowman Financial Strategies. I’m your host, Erik Bowman, and thank you for joining me today. Hi everyone and thank you for joining me today. This is Erik Bowman, owner of Bowman Financial Strategies. Our topic today is required minimum distributions or more commonly known as RMDs. Erik: (00:32) To some of you, it may come as a shock that you cannot keep your retirement funds in your retirement account indefinitely. Generally speaking, you really must start taking withdrawals from your IRA, your simple IRA or your SEP IRA or even your qualified retirement plans such as a 401k or 403B when you reach 70 and a half. Roth IRAs by contrast do not require withdrawals until after the death of the owner. Your required minimum distribution or RMD is the minimum amount of taxable distribution that you must take out of your retirement account each year. Once you reach 70 and a half. Erik: (01:16) The RMD poses all sorts of conundrums for retirees, like how is it calculated? Who calculates it, when is it due? What happens if I don’t take it and what if I don’t want to take it? And the list goes on. Today I’m going to cover the basics of an RMD. Who does it apply to? Calculations and resources to further educate yourself and of course some potential strategies that may alleviate some of the challenges surrounding RMDs, namely taxes. Erik: (01:52) So let’s start from the beginning. When you turn 70 and a half, you are required to take an RMD from your retirement account, an IRA, for example, by April 1st of the following year. For all subsequent years, you must take the distribution by December 31st of that year. For example, if you turn 70 and a half in August of 2020 you must make your distribution by April 1st of 2021. If you choose to do that, you would also have to calculate your 2021 RMD and also take that in 2021. So in actuality, in the first year that you decided to take that RMD, you would actually have to take two distributions. Now you don’t have to delay until April 1st you can take your RMD in the year that you turn 70 and a half. Erik: (02:49) An exception to this rule applies to 401ks, also known as a qualified retirement plan, which is the terminology that’s used to describe an employer sponsored 401k, 403B, 401A, just to name a few. For these accounts, you must take an RMD by April 1st of the year following the year you turn 70 and a half or upon retirement, whichever is later. If you’re still gainfully employed for example, and you have an act of 401k and you’re 72 years old, you don’t have to take an RMD from that qualified plan that you have at that current employer, even though you’re older than 70 and a half. However, once you retire, those RMDs are due by April 1st following the year that you retire. And one really big caveat and a mistake that you do not want to make that is even if you are working and you’re older than 70 and a half, if you have an IRA in addition to your 401k, you still must take your required minimum distribution from that IRA. Don’t make that mistake and I’m going to be talking about the penalties the IRS can impose if you fail to take your RMDs. Erik: (04:07) here are a few other points that may save you some headaches and money in the future. If you have multiple qualified plans or multiple 401k’s, meaning maybe you’ve worked at previous employers and you have simply left your money behind at those various employers 401ks and you have not moved them into IRAs, you must calculate the RMD for each account individually and then take the distribution from each of those respective 401ks by the deadlines. By contrast though, if you have an IRA or multiple IRAs, you can calculate the required minimum distribution for each IRA individually. Add those together and take the total sum of those as a distribution from one of your IRAs. Now, depending on how you’re investing your assets, this may be a beneficial thing to do. It certainly seems a little bit simpler than making a distribution from multiple IRAs. Since 403B’s are considered qualified plans, you might think that the same rule applies. Erik: (05:09) However, it is a little bit different. If you have more than one 403B tax, sheltered annuity account, also known as a TSA, you can total the RMDs from each of those 403Bs and then take them from any one or more of the tax sheltered annuities. So I mentioned penalties a little bit earlier. So let’s gather round and chat about this one. Most people are aware that if you take money out of an IRA before 59 and a half, that you will pay a 10% penalty on that distribution in addition to the taxes. And that’s not fun and should be avoided in most cases. By comparison, if you fail to take your RMD on time, you will pay a whopping 50% penalty to the IRS. Yes, that’s a 5- 0% penalty. So if you were supposed to take $10,000 out and you failed to do that, by the respect of deadline, you would literally owe a $5,000 penalty to the IRS in addition to income tax on the total amount. The IRS wants their taxes and they will get them one way or another. So don’t let this rule catch you by surprise. Erik: (06:27) So let’s talk a little bit about the actual distributions themselves. You actually do have a couple of options. First, if you’ve calculated your RMD for the current year, you can actually opt to take the full calculated amount in one lump sum anytime up until December 31st of that year. The one exception, of course, is your first year of required minimum distributions. You do have until April 1st of the following year, but that is only for year one. Another option is you may also choose to take periodic distributions over the course of the year to meet your obligation. You also want to take into account income, cash flow and expenses to help guide you here. But there could be strategic and tactical reasons why you might want to spread that out on a monthly or quarterly basis over the course of that year as opposed to making one large lump sum distribution. It’s a little synonymous with the concept of dollar cost averaging when you’re buying into stocks and bonds and other investments that you get a better average share price potentially by buying in over time. Same on the way out when you’re making distributions from your IRA. It could be beneficial to take smaller amounts out over a 12 month period and in that case in, if there was a declining market, you may have actually saved yourself some principle over time. Erik: (07:56) Okay, now onto calculations. How do we determine how much you must withdraw each year? No surprise here. It’s not the same every year. It’s kind of complex and it totally depends on your unique situation. The IRS publishes a table called the uniform lifetime table. It’s table three on the IRA RMD distribution worksheet that’s available on our website on this podcast page. For example, your first IRA distribution for the year you turn 70 and a half, requires you to know your exact balance of your IRA or IRAs on December 31st of the prior year. You then take this balance and divided by 27.4. Seems like an odd number but it’s a joint life expectancy number. So by dividing that balance by 27.4 the answer to that equation is the exact amount you must make as required minimum distribution. You need to do this for every single retirement account you have unless one of the exceptions I mentioned or other exceptions that your financial professional mentions may apply to you. Erik: (09:06) In the next year, when you turn 71, you will take the prior year’s 1231 balance and divided by 26.5 and by the time you reach 114 yes, the table actually goes out to 115 and older, you will divide by 2.1. So 2.1 is the divisor for one 14 it drops down to 1.9 when you reach one 15 and stays there if you happen to live longer than that. But what you’ll notice is that each year that goes by, the lower number in this equation gets smaller and smaller, which means the amount of money you have to distribute from your account becomes a larger portion of that account every single year. Erik: (09:53) another exception that we see periodically, it’s not an everyday occurrence, but it could be your situation. So this is an exception to the rules on that table and that is if your spouse is the sole beneficiary of your IRA and he or she is more than 10 years younger than you in this case, the IRA utilizes another table for you to calculate your distribution. The IRS wants more money from you while you are alive so that when your IRA is left to your younger spouse, who by the way can usually take RMDs based on their age and spread that out over a longer period of time. Well, there’s going to be less money in that account to spread over a supposedly longer lifespan of your younger spouse. It’s just another way of the government saying, we would like to ensure that we get these tax dollars sooner than later, but don’t forget that it is a totally different calculation with a different bottom number on that fraction when you’re calculating your RMDs, if your spouse is more than 10 years younger than you. Now there are many, many other rules regarding RMDs. If you’re a 5% owner of a company for example, and you’re still working in that company and you have a 401k, you’re not allowed to continue to delay RMDs, passed 70 and a half. You actually still have to take them per the original rules, but just know that you really should be talking with your financial professional before you solidify any of your RMD calculations or distribution strategy. Erik: (11:30) So relating to strategies, the name of our company after all is Bowman Financial Strategies and we really try to look for opportunities to save our clients money, save them on taxes and just to be efficient when it comes to the distribution of their assets during the retirement stage of their life. So relating to strategies, one of the challenges to a moderately high net worth individual is that you may have a pretty substantial retirement account. When you turn 70 and a half, you’re going to be forced to take a large taxable distribution if that account has grown and you haven’t made any distributions up until then. So for example, if you have a $3 million IRA under current law, your distribution that’s required the year you turn 70 and a half is roughly $109,000. Imagine you began taking your social security benefits at age 64 because you wanted to get it while the getting was good, you are afraid it was going to run out. Erik: (12:26) And that’s a separate topic. So you don’t take any meaningful distributions from your IRA from age 64 to age 70 and a half. Now you find that not only is your social security payment forever reduced because you filed early, but now you’re forced taxation at 70 and a half, maybe significantly higher than it otherwise would’ve been. All this is to say that your social security filing strategy should include understanding how your retirement accounts will be impacted by RMDs and ultimately how much in taxes you may pay by appropriately timing your social security filing, potential Roth conversions and IRA distributions along with distributions from your non-qualified brokerage accounts and other income streams, you may be able to significantly lower your tax burden over the life of retirement. Erik: (13:20) Well, I’m afraid I only scratched the surface on RMDs and all of the moving parts and potential strategies. Suffice to say it is complex penalties can be onerous and there may be strategies available to you that could lower your taxes significantly under the right circumstances. If any of this information is compelling to you and you want to learn more, I would love to hear from you. You can email me at E R I K @bowmanfinancialstrategies.com. That’s E R I K @bowmanfinancialstrategies.com. You can call our office at (303) 222-8034 and just simply schedule an appointment to come on in, have a cup of coffee and allow us to perform some analysis for you. Thanks so much for your time and I hope you have a great day. Thank you for joining me for Uncommon Cents, the Bowman Financial Strategies financial education series. I’d love to hear your feedback on financial topics you would like to learn more about. Just drop me an email at Erik, that’s E R I K @bowmanfinancialstrategies.com or go to the Bowman Financial Strategies website and send me a note on our contact page. In addition, you can always search for topics of interest in my archive on our podcast page at www.bowmanfinancialstrategies.com/podcasts. Have a great day. Disclosure: (14:52) This communication does not constitute federal tax advice and may not be used as such. Please consult a qualified tax professional for tax advice or assistance. In addition, investment advisory services offered by ChangePath LLC, a registered investment advisor, Change Path and Bowman Financial Strategies are unaffiliated entities.