Her Honest Money Talk with Hazel Secco

About Her Honest Money Talk with Hazel Secco

Align Your Retirement is the retirement podcast for women in their 40s and 50s who've done a lot right with their money — and know retirement is too important to wing. If you're the CFO of your household — whether you're married, single, divorced, or widowed — you already know the voices: "I'll run the real numbers after Q4." "My 401(k) is fine — I check it." "I'll handle Social Security timing when I'm closer." "The inherited IRA can sit in cash until I figure out the 10-year rule." Every one of those voices is quietly moving your retirement date. Each episode is a direct, specific conversation about one retirement decision that costs more than it needs to when you carry it alone — Social Security timing, Roth conversion windows, sequence-of-returns risk, tax-efficient drawdowns, pension elections, asset location, the inherited IRA, healthcare before Medicare. The decisions. The tradeoffs. The numbers. From a fiduciary who runs these with clients every week. Hosted by Hazel Secco, CFP®, CDFA®, founder of Align Financial Solutions — a fee-only, fiduciary firm built for women in their 40s and 50s. Serving clients virtually across the U.S. from Hoboken, NJ — the mile-square city just across the Hudson from NYC. Two ways to go deeper: 📋 Retirement Readiness Assessment — free, self-paced, 5 minutes. Link in every show note. 📞 Align Call — 15 minutes with Hazel. One conversation. No pitch. You'll leave knowing where you stand.

Publisher

Hazel Secco, CFP®, CDFA®

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Aug 2023

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   I Tested 4 Roth Conversion Strategies on a $2M IRA for a Single Woman

   Send us Fan Mail Much of the Roth conversion guidance out there is built on married couple numbers. If you're single, or expect to be, those numbers can be off by about half. In this episode, I model four Roth conversion strategies on a $2 million IRA for Joanne, a hypothetical 65-year-old single woman: convert everything, convert nothing, convert half, and a banded approach that converts up to the Medicare line each year. The aggressive strategy came out $605,000 behind doing nothing. The ba...

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   $2 Million vs. $5 Million: Why 2.5x the Savings Buys Only 1.7x the Income

   Send us Fan Mail Two couples, identical in every way except one detail: Paul and Linda have $2 million saved, and Richard and Susan have $5 million. In this episode I run both through the same retirement to show what actually lands in the bank each month after tax, what happens when the husband dies and she files alone, and what the daughters keep after inheriting the IRA. The $5 million household ends up with $21,414 a month against $12,377. That's 2.5 times the portfolio for 1.7 times the i...

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   Why a $3M Nest Egg Can Mean Higher Taxes in Retirement

   Send us Fan Mail Margaret saved $3 million, and every dollar sits in a 401(k) and a rollover IRA. It's enough money. The problem: at 75, she'll pay about $16,400 more in federal tax than she did in her final working year, with no salary at all. And by then, she no longer controls how much comes out. In this episode, I walk through exactly how that happens, with today's tax rules held constant so you can see the mechanism clearly. What we cover: Why your final working year is taxed less than y...

Reach and audience

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Contact Her Honest Money Talk with Hazel Secco

Guest appearances

Books guests

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