IRMAA Explained: The Hidden Medicare Surcharge That Costs Retirees Thousands | Ideas by Mike™ EP60

IRMAA is a tax. It's a surcharge based on the income you make. So if you're in your 50s and you're starting to look at what is my retirement going to look like, you should start looking at then. But when the problem hits, that's going to be 2 years before your retirement hits. So if you're looking at 65, you're looking at 63 for that, for that kind of goalpost on when you should really be looking at how this is going to affect me moving forward.

There's a line in the tax code that decides what you pay for Medicare. Not your health, not your age, a line. And if you cross it by $1, $1, 1 cent, it can cost you and your spouse $3,000 per year when you're in retirement. Most people find out about it in a letter in November, 2 years later. My guest today built the certification that teaches financial professionals how to see it coming. That's next on the Ideas by Mike podcast. IRMAA, Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount. It's a surcharge stacked on Medicare Part B and Part Part D premium is when income clears a threshold or a cliff, as we're going to talk about on the podcast today. A standard 2026 Part B premium is $202.90 a month. At the top tier, it's $689, almost $690. That's roughly a difference of $8,280 a year before you even get to drug coverage. The age 63, that's when this starts becoming a calculation that should be in your financial plan. And there's no exception based off your income today unless a qualifying life event occurred. Guys, this is retirement planning. It's what's involved in the One of a Kind Financial Plan. And the Ideas by Mike podcast today has found an expert, Mark Anisi, who worked in search engine optimization, heard a problem, came to the party a little bit early, but boy, his expertise is right on time now. Mark, I just told my audience, that the surprise starts at 63, not 65. Did I undersell it or oversell it? And what's the earliest age you should start thinking about modeling this?

Yeah, so I really think the best time to start thinking about modeling this is as early as possible. It's the same thing as a tax. You know, IRMAA is a tax. It's a surcharge based on the income you make. So if you're in your 50s and you're starting to look at what is my retirement going to look like, you should start looking at then. But when the rubber really hits the road, when the problem hits, that's going to be 2 years before your retirement hits. So if you're looking at 65, you're looking at 63 for that kind of goalpost on when you should really be looking at how this is going to affect me moving forward.

Mark, that's a great answer. And, but now I want us to go back a little bit, right? Because you are an expert in IRMAA planning, Social Security planning. And you've done this, right? But most people who do this generally are in the financial advisory world. They were maybe at a Wall Street firm, they were, and then they went independent. Those who are educating this have had a story in their life, but you spent 13 years building a search engine optimization company.

Yeah.

And then you got into Medicare surcharges. What was the moment that, that pivot happened?

Yeah, so I started the SEO company at the best time of the year, which was a recession in 2007. So figured, you know, why not? After going through that, I was presented with an opportunity to learn this information. That was about 12 years ago. At that time, my background was in kind of marketing, was in software development. You know, Microsoft paid my bills for years and we had come up with this whole information. And we decided to start going out and knocking on doors and we knocked on doors like T. Rowe Price, Jackson National, all those larger companies. The problem we had, it was like trying to sell a fax machine in 1978. No one cared and no one knew what it was. So we were like 7 years ahead of the curve.

And here we are today, right? Peak 65, right? And a data analyst would've seen this coming. Which I think by trade you would consider yourself like a data analyst.

Ish, yeah.

You're a technologist by trade. Matter of fact, not just a technologist, Six Sigma certified, interactive director roles line your past resume. When you first looked at IRMAA, did you see a policy problem or a data problem?

It wasn't a policy problem. It was definitely a cohesion of data problem, right? So you had a little bit of data over here in CMS, a little over here in Social Security Administration. No one was putting those things together and actually seeing what was going on. The other piece of that was when this was starting to kind of come together, the surcharges and the penalties were so small, they were negligible.

Hmm.

So people, advisors looking at people's Social Security, that Medicare surcharge was so small, it was negligible. And when you add in things like, and we'll get into this a little bit later, inflation rates, that's when it really, the hurt really starts happening down the road.

So the Beantown, Boston is a serious financial town, like a serious, like I just had the opportunity earlier this year to spend some time at Loomis Sayles. I actually did one of those duck tours, you know, those duck boat tours.

Yeah. Great.

I mean, I, I was, that was wild. But how have you been viewed in the Boston community as like the Irma guy? I mean, has this been something that, that people that you talk to have said, you know, you're missing something? Has people closed the doors? You, you, you talked about the experience maybe where you were a little bit too early to the ballgame on this.

Yeah.

But what has been the overall reaction?

Yeah, that's a great question. So number one, Boston, if you're in it, it's Bova's Bakery, not Mike's and Modern Bakery. Best cannolis. So anyway, get a little plug for them. What we did find again is earlier on, people really weren't listening because they didn't believe it was going to happen. And they also didn't understand how bad the surcharges were going to get. Fast forward 10, 12 years, Now people, I mean, the whole industry's talking about it now. So when you look at how I'm viewed locally, to be quite honest, it was more nationally where the recognition came before locally. You know, I have some really good friends out there, you know, Heather Schreiber, who's, you know, an amazing woman, super smart, knows her stuff, you know, people like that that are really kind of carrying the torch of this, which gave me kind of more of a persona on the national stage than on the local stage.

Now, you said you were early to the party.

Yeah.

And now you're getting on national stage and you actually have a certification. So what's the reaction to maybe people who remember you knocking on their doors 7, 8, 9 years ago? Are they still in denial? Are they embarrassed that they didn't listen? Or now is the urgency setting in?

Yeah, so that's a great question. You know, when you're dealing with human nature, right, you kind of don't know what you don't know. And I do have people that come back around like, hey, you know, thank you for introducing me to this. Sorry I didn't get on it earlier. Can you help me now? Right. And obviously open arms, right? You know, we want people to make sure they're helping their clients the most they can. But yeah, it's really, people are a lot more interested now. Like you see every kind of major software out there has some sort of IRMAA calculation. There's IRMAA seminars going on. over the place. I do enjoy kind of sitting back every now and then going, oh yeah, we saw this earlier and it's good to see now that everybody's grasping onto it.

So Mark, in this kind of first segment here, you gave a shout out to some cannoli places in Boston.

Yeah.

What were those again? Just to make sure, because I don't want our listeners, I mean, we're talking about Irma, so we need a little bit of sweet treat here just to make sure that they know what those are. What are those places again?

So we have Mike's Bakery and Modern Bakery. That's the 2 everybody talks about. But for the, for the actual Boston-type bakery, you need to go to Bova's Bakery. The reason is food's great.

Okay.

And they're annoyed that you're even there trying to buy things from them. So it's a great Boston experience.

Oh yeah. Every, every town has a, has its ethos, right?

Oh yeah.

Boston, a town where they get annoyed. I'd never heard it called like that before, but maybe that's because it's the Red Sox and how many years between championships. Who knows?

Absolutely. And this year again.

All right, so now let's talk about the mission. Okay? You, I mean, you gave us a history of like your, from search engine optimization to actually becoming, right? an expert on this now, right? On the IRMAA. When the IRMAA Certified Planner, you know, is the first of its kind certification out there, what was broken about the industry before this was built?

There was just a general lack of awareness, and that awareness kind of played into why. Once you kind of got both over both of those obstacles, then it became the how. And really people had a very difficult time grabbing onto the how. Again, this is 10 years ago, right? So, you know, we built the first software about 8 or 9 years ago. And what had happened is when we built that, it was like, here's your solution. This is what you do. And they didn't understand why, right?

Right.

And that is actually why we ended up building the IRMAA Certified Planner designation because that gave them the why. And the understanding of how this works, why this works. And then it's like, well, now that you have the why and the education, now you also have the way to illustrate it.

Do you know what is getting ready to celebrate its 30th birthday in the financial industry? No. The Roth IRA.

Oh yeah. Timely.

And most people don't think about this, right? I mean, you're demonstrating a point here. That the industry, the financial industry doesn't see what's coming because they're so in the presence. They're trying to choose between Pepsi and Coke or Nvidia or SK Hynix or whatever the stock is. That's not a recommendation, guys, to go buy something. But they get so trapped in the present, they don't look out to the future. They don't forecast. But I want you to tell me, if you don't mind, tell me about the Medicare and Social Security stress test. Because it's something that you guys have put together for IRMAA-certified advisors that I think would be of interest to both the advisors who listen to us, but also clients and prospects who are facing this battle right now.

Yeah. So getting back to the complexity of the information, any advisor knows that if they don't understand the information, it's hard to model. It's going to be very difficult for them to explain it then to their clients. The clients are not going to have full confidence in what the advisor's talking about if it's not very easily conveyed.

Hmm.

So what we did is we created the ERMIS stress test. And what that does is takes a look at the person's retirement plan and then says, okay, we just have a couple metrics for you. One, how high, like 1 out of 100, how high are you on that score? The higher the score, the worst shape you're in. That's built up by a bracket metric, how many brackets you go into, timing, how long you're in it, conversion or controllability, how long or what you can do to actually change it and how quickly you get into it. So it just looks at those things and it spits out how much you're going to be owing in IRMAA alone, how many years you're going to be in it. And the last piece, which is something that people overlook, is how much of Medicare and IRMAA take over your Social Security benefit. Because most clients don't understand that the number they see in their gross from their Social Security report, that's not what lands in their bank account. What lands in their bank account is after taxes, after IRMAA, and after Medicare.

Right. So federal employees are a huge part of, uh, like the client base at One Oak Financial, the company I founded, but they're also a huge part of a lot of the advisors who listen to this podcast and actually the folks here. So when they have a federal pension, right? When they have Social Security, when they have withdrawals, RMDs, required minimum distributions, and maybe even like some survivor and then the widow's penalty, is that population— we always talked about, we always talk about susceptible populations to certain things, right? And we normally use that in like the healthcare world. Like during COVID nursing homes were susceptible populations actually getting COVID, right? Because they were closed. Is that group like federal employees or maybe a little bit more broadly, people with pensions, are they more susceptible to having IRMAA issues?

Okay, so that's a great question. It all comes down to what does the rest of their retirement look like, right? But it also there's certain things that happen along the way that you may not have a pension. Let's say you're single, right? And your pension is $90,000 a year and your first bracket is $109,000. You're not hitting IRMAA.

Right.

But what happens if you're single and you're in your 70s and you want to downsize your home? You're now selling that home right now. Anybody who's retiring right now, they bought the home for $30,000 and now it's worth $1 million. You only have $250,000 of a deduction. That remaining money, that's modified adjusted gross income. So now they're going to hit that simply because they decided my home's too big for me.

Wow. And let's close out the mission part here of like about why Mark did this, right? And I want you to think about Mark 10 years from now.

Yeah.

What do you hope changes about the average 63-year-old in America by that time? Somebody who's 53 right now, who's going to be 63. I turned 50 this year.

Yeah.

And so I'm really thinking about this for myself. Yeah. But what do you hope changes based off what you're out talking about?

So it's already starting to change, and I love seeing that where this is becoming a basic part of the conversation between a client and an advisor, right? You know, 5 years ago it was not, 3 years ago it really started. You know, what I really would love to see is people being educated at a younger age and being able to plan a better way. You look at things, and I'm not going to do any product recommendations, but there's products out there that if you start younger, like my son's 22 years old and I'm putting him in an IUL because there's a whole bunch of reasons for that.

Right.

And it's something that I wish I had done when I was younger. Right. So I hope that that type of information trickles down so people 10 years from now are in just sitting in much, a much better situation and not being surprised.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. All right, let's get now, as we kind of, you know, we're about, I don't know, 16, 17, who knows how the final production of this is going to turn out, but 16, 17, 18, 19 minutes into the podcast. But I do believe This next part is what's going to be replayed over and over again for this podcast. And so just as a reminder, guys, this is Mark Anisi and he created IRMAA Certified Advisors, the certification that advisors are running to now to understand this so they can give you great knowledge and great advice. This was also going back to the first part of this podcast, if you missed it, It was something that he brought to market 7, 8, 10 years ago and nobody really paid attention to him. And now they are. And so the one-size-fits-all world only really of financial services only focuses on what's in front of them. We're talking about somebody who saw this coming right now. And this is why I think this section's going to be replayed because we're going to get a little technical here.

Yeah.

And so I think my engineering clients, my architecture clients, my people who want to understand this, we're talking to one of the truly experts in the industry on IRMAA. Okay. And so I'm going to ask you something and some people are going to skip this section, but others are going to love it. Can you define MAGI for M-A-G-I, not the other one? I don't want you to do the political thing. MAGI for IRMAA purposes. And what's in it that surprises people? And is it true that tax-exempt municipal bonds interest actually count?

Yeah. So modified adjusted gross income, right? That's basically, well, it was, they've changed the tax returns every single year. So I don't know what lines they're on this year, but it's drawn out right there. So you're right about the tax bonds. The other things we see, which people don't understand, is your taxable portion of your Social Security, RMDs, any wages you get there. You know, pensions are completely taxable. Roth, anything that comes out of Roth non-taxable is not part of modified adjusted gross. So anything like, you know, interest or stuff like that is going to influence that as well as we talked about in the previous section, Sale of a home, sale of a business, sale of a boat, you know, anything like that is falling, going to fall in that modified adjusted gross.

So wait a minute, let me get this right for a second, because earlier in the show I said Roth IRAs are getting ready to turn 30 years old.

Yeah.

And can you imagine like 30 years of compounded growth of a Roth IRA and the impact of that on IRMAA? So they've been around for 30 years, but the one-size-fits-all world of financial advising didn't lean into that very hard when they did not see 30 years later what the impact of Irma could be. Is, are, are, am I reading that right?

Yeah. And again, you know, we talked a little bit about this where the train on that track was so small when, you know, these started looking at it, it was a negligible piece. And looking back now, hindsight's always 20/20. It's like, man, you know, I really should have Either looked at that or, um, you know, had some of my clients at 59 and a half do that conversion or some other, you know, non-taxable vehicle.

So let me ask you that. Go ahead. So let me ask you that part. You just mentioned the word conversion, right? 2 ways to get money inside of a Roth: contributions, conversions. Conversions have also become a very hot marketing campaign for financial firms now, just like IRMAA has. Does a Roth conversion count as income for IRMAA?

It does not. There is one caveat that I'd like to add though. If you're someone either recommending a conversion or wanting to do a conversion, note that when you're doing that conversion, that's going to actually create more modified adjusted gross income doing a conversion out of like a 401 into one of those. So if you are 63, 64, 65, And now you see this problem and you want to do a conversion, that conversion money will actually impact your modified adjusted gross and could trigger IRMAA itself simply because you're doing a conversion.

Oh, great. Um, now Social Security benefits themselves.

Yeah.

They, they feed into the calculation and that, that, uh, and that raises Medicare premiums. Explain that like circular nature. Of like how the government has structured like a benefit that increases the cost of another benefit in the future.

Yeah, we can do a whole nother episode on this. So you have your taxable portion of your Social Security that is considered modified adjusted gross. Here is the problem though. You also, let's say you have your Social Security benefit, you have $1,000 a month, 85% of that is taxed. You have $850 of taxable income. Now, when you have your Medicare deducted from your Social Security benefit and then your IRMAA deducted from your Social Security benefit, that net, let's say that net is $800. The government isn't taxing 85% of that net now after Medicare and IRMAA, they're taxing 85% of the gross.

Hmm.

So, you know, you said that circular nature, it's like that That number's there. The money comes out for the Medicare and IRMAA, but they're still taxing 85% of that gross benefit. And there are some kind of loopholes and caveats there. If you are under the first level of IRMAA, under that $109,000 for a single person, there's something called the Hold Harmless Act. And that basically means if you're making $1,000 a month this year and Medicare takes out $200, your net is $800. Next year, if you're making $1,000 a month, but Medicare and IRMAA are $300, which means you net out $700, the Hold Harmless Act only applying to Part B will pin you at that higher $800 amount. So it's basically holding you harmless for any inflation in Medicare.

So let me—

it's only under that.

Yeah.

All right.

So let me, because this is so technical, right? And this is why I think people listen back to this to try to hear some things, right? Let me just, let me confirm a couple things and let you put this in your own words. Let's talk about pairing actual year income earned when IRMAA is calculated, right? So somebody that has, that is looking at premiums, let's say they're 62 now.

Yeah.

And they're looking at paying premiums at 65. What What income tax year would the government look at?

So they're 60, you said they're 63 now?

Yeah.

65 in 2 years.

63 in 3 years.

They're looking at, if they retire in 2 years, they're looking at this year for their income pairing. So one of the things we also talk about, you know, when you're later on in your career, you're probably making the most money you've made in your career. So if you're 63 years old, making $125,000 a year, your premiums when you're 65 and retire are based on your income you're making right now.

Right. Well, what if somebody, what if somebody amends a tax return?

You can amend it and then you can file for an appeal. The other thing that typically happens is when you do an appeal, IRMAA will allow you, or Medicare, the Centers for Medicare will allow you to do an appeal for a change of life event, right?

Right.

So when you're 65 years old and your income is $125,000, 2 years prior, you just say, hey, listen, this is a change of life event. So I'm going to file this appeal, which means I'm not going to pay IRMAA for those pieces. And there's different change of life events. Something that's not a change of life event is the sale, again, the sale of a home, a sale of a rental property. You can't do an appeal off of that. These are things like loss of a job, change of tax status, change of employment status, You know, death of a spouse, things like that are the ones that can really get you that appeal.

Let me just throw a couple of other of these technical things at you for a second. Yeah. Because again, because I think technically we could do a 2-hour of it.

Yeah. Right. Unfortunately we could.

Yeah.

Right.

The cliff.

Yeah. Can you explain the cliff?

Yeah. So when you look at tax brackets, tax brackets mostly are progressive. Yeah. When you are working with IRMAA brackets, it is $1 over will earn you the complete surcharge. So you make $1 over, you make $109,001, you now own the entire surcharge for that bracket. It's not progressive.

What are the biggest costs? This by far and away could be one of the biggest costs when it comes to to somebody's retirement if they are, if they are, if they're not planning for it. Why do you think it's, and this is more of an opinion, so, and I'm putting this in the technical side, but I think, you know, some people's opinions as good as the paper it's written on, but you're an expert in this, right? So your opinion matters something here. Why do you think the system is so complicated?

Just like the tax system, right?

Yeah.

You know, they make it more complicated so there's less ways of getting out of it. I think that whoever created this paradigm for Medicare and IRMAA, it really was a genius on how it all worked together and how it was kind of under the radar for quite a long time. You know, when you look at, personally for me, again, totally just opinion, we're talking about the loss of the Social Security fund coming up, right? Maybe in 2032 you might get a 22% discount or reduction in your benefit. Well, if I'm getting $1,000 a month gross benefit, Medicare and IRMAA come out, so I'm not getting $1,000 gross benefit. Then there's taxes coming out of it. Well, there's less money possibly coming out of that fund to help bring that down. So I think that it's just one of those things that you get that the government just tries to I don't know, I guess fund things that need to be funded and making it complicated to understand it.

So I'm glad you said like, this was like, maybe there was some genius in this, but genius for who?

Genius for them. Well, not for us.

Not for us. You know, the interesting part about it too, it makes me think about something else, right? In the 1970s, I didn't realize we were going to do as much history today on the podcast, but the 1970s is when the 401 was created. It was created in 1977. And do you know what the act was called that basically created ERISA, which is the 401? Do you know what the act was called?

Actually, I don't.

It was called the Tax Revenue Act of 1977. It wasn't called like a tax reduction, which we thought about for so many years. I mean, the reason IRMAA is a problem is because we have so much deferred income, right? That's the biggest problem. And then the last question on this technical side here is, What do you think the single most common modeling error advisors make when they look at this?

Across the board, it's planning on the gross income of Social Security as opposed to the net.

Wow. That's so good. That's so good. As we close out the podcast today, right, the tax code is full of loopholes, instructors. And I mean, we could, you know, everybody says the rich take advantage of the tax code, right? They get in there and they look at this, but IRMAA, right? Are there loopholes inside of IRMAA planning?

I think the loopholes would come down to really the strategies, right? They're not so much loopholes. They're just knowing the planning pieces. We talked about IRMAA appeals. You know, that's not really a loophole, but it's a thing you should know, right? If you don't know about that, the government's just not going to give you the reduction. They're going to wait for you to ask for it. So knowing when to apply those IRMAA appeals, that's a, you know, a tax loophole on it. Knowing how to use vehicles like IULs or Roth conversions or just Roth products in general. Yeah, loopholes, but it's just good planning, right?

Right.

So if you are dealing with someone that just does good planning and understands this, You kind of get the loopholes by default.

I pulled up a list of life-changing events when it comes to like these. And so the life-changing events, marriage, divorce or annulment, death of a spouse, work stoppage, work reduction, loss of income-producing property, loss of pension income, receipt of an employer settlement payment. Which is the most commonly overlooked?

I would say it's at the front of the funnel, which is life life-changing event, which would be your retirement. Oh, and the other one would be—

Explain that one to me because I'm glad you did that because I actually had a question next and said, like, retirement itself is a work stoppage.

Yeah.

And most people don't think of it like that. So explain to me, like, you quit, you stop working at 64, life-changing event. How does someone who retires at 64 go about getting a lower modified adjusted gross income? So a potentially lower IRMAA piece?

Well, they wouldn't, again, it's a 2-year look back, right? Right. So when that life-changing event happens, you're just kind of going to take that one. It is what it is. But that's when that, the life-changing event will start pushing getting that IRMAA appeal, right? And people miss that because number one, they're going to get their Social Security benefit and they're going to look at it and go, Where's all, where'd all the money go?

Right.

And they're not going to know that there's something they can do about it. And that's kind of where they really miss the boat the first time. The second time they miss the boat is if you have a married couple that, you know, one of them unfortunately passes away at that time, you know, later on in life, there's a lot going on, a lot of balls in the air anyway, and they miss it a second time for the life-changing event.

Wow.

Wow.

That's something else. I've got a, uh, uh, just a practical question for you, right? Uh, IRMAA, should it be, should it be appealed in person or via mail? Or how would, how would you advise, like, you know, um, just an individual retiree who wants to appeal? Is there an in-person process? Is there—

Yeah. Don't do it by mail. Don't do it by phone. You know, you really want to talk to someone. It's like anything, right? If you're on hold for your Netflix account, no one's going to listen to you. But if you're sitting in front of them, they're probably going to do a better job on it. And this is something we talk about with other people as well. It also kind of benefits on how it hinges on how good the person is you're talking to at the Social Security Administration or the offices.

Coach me through the doubt till I'm back in Before we, uh, before we went live with actually recording here, we talked about something called income smoothing. Can you, can you, can you talk about income smoothing a little bit?

Yeah. So again, I'm kind of a data geek and I've done it in building the software and doing just thousands and thousands of these retirement plans. We did, you know, step over a couple of things, which was there are different ways to solve this. Again, we talked about non-taxable income. There's also ways of The biggest problem people have are the RMDs, and they kick in and you cannot control those, right? They're, you're going to take it whether you like it or not. If you start taking more money at the beginning of your retirement, which tamps down the actual growing balance of that 401, that will also tamp down what your RMDs are, Which could help bring people below those IRMAA levels.

Amazing. All right, let's close up here a little bit. We're going to close up shop on this podcast. Hey, Mark, you've been absolutely amazing. All right, so I've got a, I've just got a couple quick hitters, right?

Yeah.

For our, for our audience. If the, if my, if the listeners remember one figure from this episode, what is it?

It's do planning for that retirement, for that retirement year of 65. Talk to an advisor, figure out what those numbers are going to look like and figure out what your strategy is going to be when you retire to do some sort of appeal if it's warranted.

What is one question somebody can ask their current advisor to see if they're handling IRMAA well?

What's the impact of my taxable income on my Medicare and IRMAA surcharges?

What is— guys, we're going to repeat that one again. Pause, come back, whatever. Say that question one more time.

What is the impact of my taxable income on my Medicare and IRMAA surcharges during retirement? Super simple question and it'll tell you a lot.

What's an idea? This is called the Ideas by Mike podcast. What's one idea you want to leave in someone's head about IRMAA?

That it needs to be paid attention to. That's the biggest thing. It's just not something you brush under the rug and something I'll deal with later, or I'll defer this conversation. Have it now. The idea is to have it now and either make sure, one, you know what's going to happen and you're okay with it, or you know what's going to happen and you're going to make a change.

Guys, we have been joined by a trillion expert, right? Not only he's been— he's an expert in multiple fields, right? But he saw something coming. down the road, Irma, a dozen or so years ago. And he tried to bring awareness to it, to the industry. The industry ignored him for a good bit of time. And revenge is sweet though, isn't it, Mark? Right.

It's not even a revenge thing. I just love when people understand and can be helped. And that's really what it comes down to.

You've built something really cool that helps advisors. Right. And so if you don't mind, just in your own words, as opposed to my words, talk about the certification a little bit, the IRMAA certification and what an advisor who has that has done to earn it.

Yeah. Just like all the other certifications, once you dive down into one of the topics, you really become a fluent expert in what you're doing. And that's the reason that it was created. We merged our certification with the NSSA because it was a really good handshake. to do that, where people were now learning the Social Security piece as well as the IRMAA piece on it. So that would kind of be the biggest thing with that.

And now talk about the software that you've built that those advisors use.

Yeah, so we would have advisors just coming to us saying, listen, how do I build this? How do I easily understand it and easily explain it? And the software we built does, it started out as IRMAA, planning, and it's now full-blown planning with an IRMAA edge to it. Roth conversion pieces, the IRMAA lookbacks, the IRMAA illustrations, and what it does to a Social Security benefit. So we wanted to make sure that we were flattening a tech stack. I mean, Mike, you know, everybody and their uncle who's an advisor has 13 pieces of software in their tech stack, and each one does one.

Right.

So we did We built that to really bring that down in size. So it does a lot of things in one place, and it does the biggest thing, which is it makes it easy for the advisor to explain it to the client. Once the client sees how easy they can explain it, they're building confidence.

Maybe you are listening to this podcast today toward the end of 2026. And you haven't had an IRMAA calculation run for you, I would invite you just to reach out to our office.

Yeah.

Just see kind of where you stand before you make decisions. Maybe you're finding this further into the future. You're finding this in 2027 or 2028, because it's the beautiful thing about podcasts is it lives. It speaks into the future what we said in the past. And if you're doing there, we invite you to do the same thing. Reach out to us, One Oak Financial, has cheat sheets. We have calculators. We're looking hard into Mark's program to be able to talk to our clients directly about this. IRMAA's a problem. It's not going to get better soon.

Yeah.

And so Mark Onisi, thank you for providing your technical expertise, telling us your story, telling us the mission, and then just giving us things to look forward Because this is a problem that many retirees are facing today. Don't forget, folks, to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform. This has been though for educational purposes only. Do not make any changes to your financial situation without first talking to a qualified tax, investment, or financial planning expert. Again, this has been the Ideas by Mike podcast. Thank you, Mark.

Mike, thanks you. Take care.

Educate, coach. That has been the Ideas by Mike podcast. I am an investment advisor representative with Advisory Alpha LLC. Ideas by Mike doing business as One Oak Financial is an unaffiliated entity of Advisory Alpha LLC. Nothing we said today construes. True advice, but is done for educational purposes only.

Do not use this content today to make any investment or financial planning decisions. Consult with a licensed financial professional. To reach out to One Oak Financial, go to www.oneoakfinancial.com. That's oneoakfinancial.com. And, uh, and get to know us and then reach out for your complimentary call. If you've missed past episodes of the Ideas by Mike podcast. It's available on all major platforms and our YouTube channel, which is 1.Oak Financial, 1.Oak Financial YouTube channel.

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