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Summary: In this video, Matt Hudak, AAMS®, CFP®, CEPA®, builds out a sample "Financial Architecture", which is a practical system for organizing your money so that it functions to support your goals. He explains it like a reverse budgeting approach that prioritizes directing income into the right financial "buckets," including cash reserves, debt repayment, retirement savings, flexible investment accounts, and charitable giving. By creating a clear structure for your cash flow, you can spend with confidence, reduce financial stress, and ensure your money is aligned with both your long-term goals and your everyday life.
2026.08.18 Podcast Episode 6
Matt Hudak: Hi, friends. I'm really excited today to talk to you about something that we do with most every one of our clients as they're getting going in their process. And then it really helps us to help them with their cash flow. It's a really effective way to think about budgeting. A lot of times when we're looking at how do you manage your expenses, how do you structure things, how do you set things up?
A problem that we run into is that most people aren't very effective at keeping track of their day to day expenses and keeping track of how to manage each category and all of the details of it. And Christa has done a phenomenal video talking about how you can do this well, how you can manage all of your expenses and understand what you're spending. (Watch that video here.)
But when we get to working with people day to day reality where we're not just simply trying to evaluate for a planning purpose what you're spending in a short term, managing it for the long term is a very difficult challenge for most people. So we've come up with through a lot of trial and error over the years, sort of a form of reverse budgeting.
And that's what we're going to talk about today. It's almost sort of similar to the pay it yourself first methods, if you've heard of that. But we like to call this establishing a financial architecture. And it looks at where you put your money, where you want it to go for the different goals that you have over the course of your lifetime, so that you can live the life that you want and be free to live that day to day.
When you have money in your bank account, it means that it's there for you to use because you've already put it where it needs to go and to the places that matter. And so everything left for you really functions well. So let's dive in. I'm going to get on my whiteboard. We'll spend a lot of time diagramming things out on camera here for you.
This is going to look very different in different contexts. So the example that we're going through, we'll try to make it universal and cover a lot of different pieces of it. Some may apply to you, some may not. As we're getting together and meeting, we're fleshing this out in real time together to collaborate and create something that works for your situation to expedite your actual cash flow management.
So let's dive in. First thing that we're going to do is we're going to create sort of a little timeline for our financial architecture here. And we're going to say this vertical dotted line is age 59.5. And there are a lot of different retirement ages. It’s really absurd. But I mean, Congress negotiates with itself to come up with all kinds of random ages, one of them being 59.5.
Some of you might have seen 66 in six months, or 65 and four months for your full retirement age for Social Security. You can't make this stuff up. But, well, somebody did in Congress. But there are a lot of different retirement ages, 65 is when you can take Medicare, but age 59.5 is for your retirement accounts. This is the age where you can draw without a 10% tax penalty on that withdrawal.
And there are some exceptions and there's some different tools and techniques to deal with that. But let's just say that at age 59.5, that's the age where you can access it, because barring some sort of extenuating circumstance, that's going to be your age. So we'll maybe do another video on that in the future on when you can draw and why and what are those exceptions to that age 59.5.
So you have your retirement accounts and we're going to work backwards here to the present. That's a terrible square. So I'm going to erase that and try again.
So you're going to have some retirement accounts. And if you come into our office and get to know us well, you'll learn that everything that I do, I can illustrate in a box. If you can't illustrate it in a square, it's not worth drawing. So you have your IRAs. We might also have 401k’s. You might have 403b's.
There are all kinds of different names for different retirement accounts that are in sort of this pretax category that we would say. So you put money in and then you don't pay tax on it when you put it in, or you get to deduct it on your taxes that year. And then when you withdraw the money, you pay taxes on it, and it grows tax deferred.
In these types of accounts, you also have Roth accounts which are very similar, but these are post-tax accounts. Your 401k’s often have a Roth option. You have a Roth IRA. And we'll do another video at some point to tell you which one makes sense for you. Basically, they're just flipped and turned over. So a Roth, you pay tax on the money now and then it grows without tax.
And then you don't have to pay tax on it when you pull it out. So it's tax free after that. Both of them makes sense in different circumstances. It's not that one is better than another they're just different. The Roth IRA, you can kind of have some circumstances where you can pull money out before your age, 59.5.
So that's kind of a neat tool when it works and makes sense for certain purposes. So these are the long-term funds. And as we're going we'll put some money in here. We'll show you how we get some money into these accounts for the long term. This we actually want to target in these retirement accounts how much you put in.
We don't want you over saving for retirement. And that's actually one of the biggest mistakes that we see people make when they're good savers. People who are struggling to save enough. We need to get lots of money into those retirement accounts for their security.
But when you have plenty and you have an abundance of resources, oftentimes we lock those up in things that are tax deferred for retirement. We get the tax benefits on them, but then we don't have them available for the things that we need in the interim. There are a lot of other goals that happen. Other than retirement, if you're familiar with our industry, you know that we sell products for three goals.
You know, death, retirement and college. And that's what we talk about in financial planning traditionally across the industry, because those are the things that the products are geared around. But you have a ton of life transitions that aren't involved in those in your financial plan needs to adapt and be flexible so that you can meet all of those different needs.
So we want to target enough in your retirement accounts that you have your basics covered, that you're stable, that you have that income set aside so that you're secure at that stage of life. But we don't want to over save there. So the other thing that we're going to do is we're going to jump over on our diagram to the other side of the spectrum.
You have your immediate needs because you've got to pay your bills and buy groceries and you need to eat and that matters. So you got your paychecks and those come in probably to your checking account most of the time. So you get you have a paycheck coming in. Maybe you have some emergency funds. Maybe you have a savings account.
And by the way, I'm not a huge fan of the term emergency fund. I think as a cash reserve is a better concept than an emergency fund because you don't want to put it in there and say, I cannot touch it ever, unless I'm on my deathbed and trying to figure a way out. Like it's really a reserve to smooth things out as time as you have, irregular expenses, things like that.
You don't want to touch it for random things, but if you need a new roof and you've got to make your deductible like you can, you can use it for that. It's not necessarily just for strict true emergencies. So I like the term cash reserves better than emergency fund for that reason. But your paycheck comes in and depending on where you're at and how you manage your resources, how practiced you are, how stable and comfortable you feel, this may or may not apply to you, but we really like to see people have a floor right in their checking account that's more than zero. You know, if you're having irregular expenses, you want to be able to have some slush fund in that checking account that you don't draw in there unless there's something irregular, so that you're not every single month pulling money in and out of that cash reserve fund. So we want to see maybe depends on who you are.
I'm going to use a round number and say $10,000 in here. And that may be for some of you that may be very far out of reach. For others of you, that might not be anywhere near enough, but we're going to pick some round numbers as we're going so that math is easy if we need it. So we might say $10,000 is the new floor.
So that's zero. And every time you go down, if you're spending one month and you hit $9,000 in your checking account, or $9,500 in your checking account, and we end up looking at that, you know, you've overspent that month more than what you earned. And that's one of the number one rules of finance is spending less than you earn and you'll be successful.
But when you're doing that, if you've spent more than you've earned, you just build that back up to $10,000 the next month or the next two months, or whatever that might be, rather than pulling from your emergency fund or even worse, having to put it on a credit card. Having enough cash is really, really important in your financial architecture and your overall stability, because if you don't, then you have to turn to sources that you don't want to go to for your basic needs, and it just builds up habits that are ineffective for your long-term wealth building.
So the next thing we're going to do on this diagram is we're going to add in some debt. And hopefully you don't have tons of debt. But debt is a tool. But it always mortgages the future. So we want to take it very seriously. When you have debt, we don't want to actively take out debt. That's not productive debt that's unsecured.
We don't want you to be overleveraged. If I use the term leverage, that means debt. Nobody that we encounter that has a significant amount of debt and leverage feels content in life and feels happy. Debt causes stress. It causes a lot of financial challenges. That doesn't mean it's always evil. It doesn't mean it's always bad. But we want to avoid it when we can and find other ways.
And when we do use it, we want to calculate it out and make sure that we're very, very strategic about it. But we want to make sure that we have a place on here to deal with any debt that you have. And then we're going to look at some other types of accounts on here, because, you know, you're going to put some of your paycheck because we're starting to build out a plan where we can put money where it needs to go.
So we're going to say, you know, your paycheck needs to start going into your checking account until you build up this floor. And then we're going to start to route money from your paycheck, maybe into this emergency fund. We'll set a goal, and we might split this out over time into some different, different percentages or different dollar amounts each month.
But we might set a goal in your emergency fund. And I'm going to say just to be random, $30,000. That's probably not a goal that we set, that we just try to tackle that straight away and get you to $30,000 before doing other things, because your financial goals are simultaneous, not sequential. And so we might say, once you get to a floor of 10,000 and $5,000, we'll just start to put a little bit of every paycheck into that emergency fund or that cash reserve fund.
But we're not going to go too crazy on that right away because there are other things to tackle. We're also going to put look at putting some money into your debt repayment. Might be mortgage, might be car payments, your credit cards. We figure out how to do that efficiently and how to maximize your ability to manage that debt well and to be effective in that. We want to pay that off.
Hopefully we want to pay that off eventually before you're retired, if you can. But it's also okay to have a mortgage in retirement. It's just a number that we have to figure out in different ways. But we want to be low debt, so we want to make sure we're figuring out how much can we put there. We'll talk more about how we come up with these numbers as we go.
Just bear with me here. So we're looking at that and then you've got your retirement savings. We want to decide how much do you actually need to save in retirement. So let's say your target is to have $1 million in retirement accounts.
We're going to look at that and say, well, in order to do that you have a certain amount that you need to save. Maybe that's $1,000 a month for that target. That might be a little bit more, might be a little bit less, could be a lot more depending on how close you are to that age. But let's say you want to get to $1 million.
So we're going to say let's shoot for that $1,000 a month. But maybe that's and that can come straight out of your paycheck and come out of your bank account happen automatically. It can happen at will. But, you know, people that do things automatically tend to be more effective and consistent. So when we're looking at that, it might be $1,000 a month, or you might be in a situation where you say, well, I don't have $1,000 a month of room, and the best that you can do is always the best that you can do.
So if you don't have $1,000 a month in your case, whatever that number might be, then we just say, well, where do we start? And we get something moving and we start building your habits of saving. And then we can adjust as time goes on. One of the biggest and most important things that we see people do is there's this big gap.
If you notice it, and I'm not, I'm just going to move my little tiny cursor here around. But this huge gap here where most of your life happens, if you can see that between here at your immediate needs, buying groceries and when you're able to start drawing on your earliest retirement assets, usually that's age 59.5. This is a massive time frame.
Depending on your age, this could be 30 some years for you. And what we want to do is we want to make sure that you have resources to buy homes, to pay for children's weddings, to save, for college, to move across the country to whatever it might be. There are so many different things to start a business.
There might to invest. Make a charitable contribution in your community to do something that you've dreamed about. This is massive and it's overlooked by most everyone that we encounter. Most people, even very, very successful individuals, don't realize that you can save in and invest in accounts like it was a retirement account without locking it up for retirement.
There are some different features of that we call these. You might see the technical term a brokerage account, but we just call these individual accounts, or joint accounts. So depending on whether you're married or how you have ownership of this. Ind.
And these function a lot like a bank account. They're not FDIC insured. They're SIPC insured there. You can invest in them instead of just having it invested in CDs or something like that, that the bank would go out and do or by making mortgages, making loans, which is what the bank is doing and paying interest. These accounts, you actually own things inside of them.
You can buy stocks and bonds and funds and all kinds of different things that are out there and different financial products in these accounts, and they're accessible instead of being taxed deferred, like your retirement accounts are these accounts, you can own things and you pay taxes on the profits of what you own in those accounts as you receive them.
Oftentimes, if you own things for a long period of time, a year or more, or if it's a you'll get long-term capital gains treatment, if it's a dividend you're looking at, if you had it for 60 days, you'll get the same long-term capital gains treatment on that, which is for most people in most situations, significantly tax advantaged.
In some cases, it's even taxed at a rate of 0%. So when we're looking at that, we want you saving here because you can put money, once you hit this $30,000, we might have you start to rout money here because you might want to buy a house. You might want to buy an investment property sometime, someday. And that might be something that you fund with money that's in this account.
It's hard to do that with the money in your IRAs and Roth IRAs. And you can. Yes, you can't own real estate in an IRA, but it's a very, very technical and often problematic process for people where you can get into a lot of trouble. So please call us if you're thinking about that or consult your tax professional on that.
And somebody that's an expert on the prohibited transaction rules with an IRA, so that you don't cause yourself a significant financial setback just by an accidental misstep. So we look at these brokerage accounts and you might have multiples. You might say, I want to save. Maybe you don't want to save for college, which is traditionally a 529 plan account.
A lot of people have heard that term. We can do those, but a lot of times people want to be engaged in saving for college outside of a college account because they might want to buy their help their kids by their first house instead, or start a business, or be more flexible with those funds than just setting aside for college.
So there might be one that we kind of informally title for kids. And these if you don't want to, if you don't want to use these for your kid right away because they're struggling in life or they have a challenge and you want to motivate them, you can hold that back. You can help, you can help them in different ways and be very flexible with that money.
And finally, you might see something on here that we might look at for our clients who give frequently. You might have what we call a donor advised fund, and there are other charitable vehicles. But we're going to keep it simple.
With these donor advised funds, you get to give to these like you give to a charity. You can invest these, but you can deploy out of them. You can use them to give them the funds to a charity anonymously. A lot of people like those features. But we might start to say, well, you know, you hit your target here, you have a home purchase goal.
So we're going to set some money that we're going to decide goes here. We're putting money everywhere it goes right out of your income stream, your cash flow stream. As soon as we can get that money out reasonably so that it's not sitting there because like me or anyone else, if the money's just sitting there, it gets spent.
It's just a law of human nature. And so with these donor advised funds, we can say, you know, give stock to them and accumulate some. Maybe you have a really high income here. Let's say you sold a property or a business or something like that that has a lot of taxes in one year. We can give a big chunk of that to a donor advised fund, or we can even give like fractional interests of those properties or businesses to the donor advised fund and save a ton in taxes that year.
And you can give that out over the next several years. So you can kind of pre give to the donor advised fund and then continue to give that to the organizations you care about at a pace that's appropriate for what you want to do for that organization. And you can get your kids involved in that. There's so many different ways that we can structure these on the savings side.
And then on the distribution side, you have a lot of different if you've done this right, you have a lot of different buckets that you can pull from. And you can be wildly tax efficient in retirement as well. When you're in that distribution phase and drawing on your assets for income. There are places on a financial architecture where we can put your real estate holdings, your business interests.
This just gives you kind of an idea of how we map it out. And what happens is at the end of the line, when we're all said and done, I'm going to make it pick a different color. Just for fun. Let's make it green for cash. Whatever's in here, when you've done this right and you've sent money right away, everything in here if I color this in, is all free for you to use.
It's available money. And what most people naturally do is they check their bank account. If there's an appropriate balance in there, they'll use it. And you're able to do that with this model, you're able to engage in a way that's just natural and how you're going to function just on a day to day basis, just as somebody who's just trying to spend less than they are and isn't super tuned into the details, but you're just going to be exceptionally functional for targeting each one of your goals over the course of your life.
So we're really excited to get to walk through this exercise with you. Building a financial architecture is actually really fun. I love doing it with clients and friends, and I just it's such a fun process to go through and iterate how you put your resources, where they reflect your values and your goals so that you can be effective.
Summary: Matt Hudak AAMS®, CFP®, CEPA®, Financial Advisor and Chief Investment Officer of CoCreate Financial, explains why the answer to whether you should roll over a 401(k) to an IRA (or a Roth 401(k) to a Roth IRA) is almost always yes, despite widespread internet misinformation driven by financial industry liability concerns and unresolved Department of Labor rollover regulation efforts stemming from Dodd-Frank. He compares 401(k)s as employer plans—limited investment menus, payroll-only contributions, vesting considerations, and stronger creditor protection—to IRAs, which offer far more flexibility, broader investment choices, consolidation of old accounts, and the ability to receive coordinated ongoing advice from a dedicated advisor. He notes potential downsides of IRAs if self-managed poorly, highlights myths about 401(k) fee advantages, and encourages viewers to evaluate rollovers in their specific context and seek professional guidance.
2026.05.08 Podcast Episode 3
Matt Hudak: Hi friends. We're going to talk about a really important question that a lot of people come to us with, and there's a lot of misinformation about it on the internet. The question is, should I roll over my 401(k) plan to an IRA? Or should I roll over my Roth 401(k) to a Roth IRA? What are the pros and cons? How do we unpack this? So we're going to dive in and talk about that in this video today.
My name is Matt Hudak. I'm the CEO of CoCreate Financial and really excited about this topic. When we look at this, a lot of the conversation, a lot of the information that you find online, has really centered around liability protection for the financial industry.
Back in 2012, when they enacted Dodd-Frank, they put in a directive for the Department of Labor to try to regulate rollovers, like they regulate the 401(k) plans even after they're outside of the employer plan. And this process of developing these regulations then has been caught up in court and in all kinds of different iterations of it that have been overturned, that have been thrown out, that have been really just not very functional. And so the industry as a whole has said, "we're going to say we're not going to give any advice on this. We're going to tell you it's better to leave it in the 401(k)," because that's the political risk that's on the firms to mitigate.
And they say, "I don't want to deal with violating a rule that doesn't exist yet." So they're more focused on that than really giving advice that's in the best interest of the person with a rollover, you.
So when we look at it, we want to look at a few different things. And we do need to evaluate this carefully in your context, but the short answer is almost always yes. You should roll over your 401(k) into an IRA. And there are a few reasons for that, but let's look at some of the differences and similarities before we dive into why you should.
One of the main differences with the 401(k) and the IRA is the 401(k) is an employer plan, and your IRA is your own plan, and that means a few things.
The IRA is very flexible. There's a lot that you can do in it. There's a lot you can do right. And in a lot of ways you can improve. There are a lot of ways that you can also go wrong and misstep in an IRA, especially if you're managing it on your own and, and you're not somebody that's built up the knowledge and experience with investing.
You can make a lot of unwise choices that maybe the 401(k) would prevent you from doing, but the 401(k) also, as an employer plan, has more limitations within it, and it has fewer different products that you can have. It also vests, which means that some of the money that your employers contributed as a matching contribution may or may not be yours yet while you're still working for the company.
Now, if you leave and roll over to an IRA while you're not fully vested yet, you might lose that vested amount. And then if you go back to work for that employer again, you might have to start over in that vesting schedule. And how that works is probably a great content for another video 'cause we don't have the time to dive into that here.
But when you're looking at that mix, you want to make sure that you're not planning to go back to the employer in the relatively near future because that could cause some problems to roll it over. If you're watching this video, you probably already know that you have to leave your employer in order to do that.
Or sometimes you might have that provision if you're getting ready to retire and you're in your sixties. You can sometimes roll over that balance to kind of get you started in the IRA and make your process of retiring more efficient. They call that an in-service distribution. And some plans offer that, some don't.
But within the 401(k) structure you have higher contribution limits, but you can only contribute through payroll. And the IRA, you don't have quite as high a contribution amount that you can make each year. But if you're not making the contribution to the 401(k) because you're not employed with that employer, you can't make that contribution anyway. So, the 401(k) has a higher limit of liability from creditors. So that you can't have a creditor when you owe money to someone, they can't come and collect that out of your 401(k).
In the IRA, you still have a million dollars of creditor protection. So it's still a substantial amount if we're looking at that IRA balance. But if there's a debt issue, we need to look at that and make sure that we're cognizant of what that looks like in our strategy for doing the rollover. Okay. So the biggest reasons to do this rollover really have to do with investments and advice. So when you're doing your research, you'll see online things about investment fees being different and maybe being less or negotiated down in the 401(k).
This is really just a myth. It depends on plan to plan. But often what we do see in 401(k)'s is that they have very low expense funds that are often low expense for a reason, they're subpar, their performance isn't great. And the quality of management is not very high. And the way that they get sales as a fund is to get them into 401(k) plans so that people have these limited choice menus and they'll buy these funds because it fits a category.
And a lot of times, employers or plan fiduciaries say well, I can meet my obligations by choosing something that's low cost, and they limit their search to things that tend to be low cost, and having a couple of things that are in a different investment mix, a different type of sector or, you know, something might be global, something might be small and aggressive or whatever.
And they pair a few things, but they tend to look at costs and other features of these funds. And we end up with these subpar mixes. They're just not portfolios that a professional investor would put together. They just aren't, and there's not enough choice within the 401(k) plans oftentimes to meet, even if they are good, to meet an investor's needs to meet one of our client's needs. So we're looking at saying, well, what do we do here? We want to be mostly in U.S. companies that pay dividends and there's not even an option in the 401(k) for that. Maybe we'll go with something that's the S&P500 index fund when we're investing in the 401(k) instead.
But then the S&P 500 index fund is not actually a diversified investment. It's 40% large cap tech stocks, which right now happen to be in a significant bubble as we're recording this. So that's actually a high risk momentum investment. And the 401(k) plans don't have the ability to account for those types of risks.
Whereas in the IRA, we can do a wide spectrum of things. Now, you don't want to go from a limited menu of investments that probably aren't going to get you into a lot of trouble. In your 401(k) plan to an IRA that you're managing and maybe doing highly speculative things like investing in Bitcoin.
Or there are some ways that you can own real estate in IRAs that have some pretty massive logistical drawbacks that create a pretty intense risk for you if you're not very very methodical in how you've evaluated that. So there are things that you can do again to misstep in these IRAs if you are not careful, if you're managing them yourselves, especially because if you're working with a professional, they should know the things that are going to cause problems and be aware of those and how to avoid those things. But within that spectrum, within an IRA, you can also own dividend yielding stocks. You can own tech stocks, you can own bonds, you can own individual bonds, you can have funds, you can have ETFs, you can have really any kind of investment that's out there in some form.
And there are a few things that are outside of that scope, but they're not mainstream types of investments that you can't own inside an IRA. So you have a lot of choice and a lot of ability to manage this in a way that works and you can hire professionals to get ongoing advice and to really have a financial plan that's coordinated to meet your needs.
Whereas in the 401(k), some of them do now have like a one 800 number where you can call a certified financial planner professional to get some advice on what you're thinking. But that person that you're calling doesn't really know your situation, like a financial advisor that you're hiring that's in your community, that's engaged with you, that knows your kids' names and knows how long you've been married, that understands the community, the type of neighborhood that you're in, where you're going, what your business looks like, that knows your tax situation, your estate plan.
So you don't really get the same kind of advice in a 401(k) that you can get outside of that 401(k) when you're working with a professional advisor that's dedicated to you and has an ongoing engagement. And then the other thing is with IRAs, you can roll over your 401(k) from the job that you just left into an IRA.
You can roll over the 401(k) from the job you left 10 years ago into the IRA and you can keep your investments consolidated. And sometimes you can even save in other types of buckets, like other types of accounts. We talk about these things like buckets here at our firm 'cause we like to be simple and speak in plain English, but you can put it into an account that you can save in parallel to the IRA too.
You can save where you can access it before retirement. So there are lots of different things you can do, but you can keep everything in one place. If you do these rollovers, and you're not going to walk into your retirement era in life or your next chapter and say, “I don't know where all my money is. I know I had this 401(k) from this old job, but I don't know how to find it.” That's a common thing. Or you'll be coming in and saying, I found this 401(k) from 30 years ago that I didn't know was just sitting in cash and could have quadrupled over the 30 years or whatever it would be in value. Again, that's not guaranteed, right.
Performance has risks and all of those things, having an investment grow, but you didn't realize that it was sitting there in cash or maybe even an unclaimed property somewhere. These are common things that we encounter with people is that they've lost assets from the past and it actually has a significant negative outcome for the client. When we see those things happen, in most cases, sometimes you find a hundred thousand dollars and you say, that's pretty sweet that I just realized I had this money that had been growing since I was 22. And that was like that, that's awesome. But that's the uncommon side of it.
More often it's things weren't managed appropriately because you forgot about them. And so keeping things consolidated, keeping things in a place where you can get professional advice really has a dramatic advantage. And most of the information that you see on, you know, the pros and cons of doing a rollover are really oriented around satisfying this regulatory burden and the liability that's been put on the financial industry to try to tell you you should keep money in the 401(k)s because they don't really want to say roll it over and then find out that they had some requirement that they didn't check on a form or something like that down the road. So there's really been really poor advice on this over the last 15 years or so. So I really want to encourage you to think about that. The fees are generally very similar.
Anything can be compared. It's apples and oranges. You might spend a little bit more on one side or the other in a specific context. But compare all these things, get advice, reach out to us. We're always happy to talk to you about the actual implications of your decision and what that means and help you make that decision from a really grounded, rooted, wise perspective. I'm excited to talk with you about this. Give us a call. We're always available to help you make these decisions. And excited. Take care.
