5 Financial Questions We Hear Most
Knoxville Financial Q&A Episode 1 | 5 Financial Questions We Hear Most
March 18, 2026
Making good financial decisions often starts with asking the right questions. Should you contribute to your employer's 401(k) or save outside of work? How should you think about the investment choices available inside a workplace retirement plan? What does it mean when a financial advisor is a fiduciary? And is the life insurance provided by your employer enough?
In the first episode of the Knoxville Financial Q&A Show, Paul Ragone and Brian discuss several of the questions they frequently hear when meeting with people for the first time.
The conversation covers the importance of understanding a 401(k) employer match, the role of target-date and age-based funds, and why retirement savings outside of an employer-sponsored plan may also be worth considering. They also discuss what being a fiduciary means, some of the limitations of relying exclusively on employer-provided life insurance, and what someone can expect when meeting with Integrity Wealth Services for an initial conversation.
These questions may seem unrelated, but they share a common theme: financial planning involves looking beyond any single account, investment, or benefit and understanding how the different pieces of your financial life work together.
Watch Episode 1 of the Knoxville Financial Q&A Show above as Paul and Brian answer some of the financial questions they hear most often from individuals and families in the Knoxville area.
Transcript
All right, everybody. This is episode one of Knoxville Financial Q&A. We're your host. I'm Paul. I'm Brian. The purpose of this show is to answer your financial questions. So, since this is episode one, we don't really have any questions yet because nobody knew we were actually doing this. So, what we decided to do for this first episode was to answer the questions that we most frequently get asked when new potential clients come into our office. So, with that said, Brian, what's one of the questions that you get asked most often from new potential clients?
One of the questions I get asked most often is probably should I take advantage of my 401k at my work or should I open up or invest outside of work? One of the things that I always try to talk to them about is say, you know, 401k match, if you get a match, you know, what are the fees? Does the company pay for the fees? What are your investment options at investment vehicles provided by the 401k? But, um, you know, the biggest thing is just match. You know, if a company matches, if it's a dollar for dollar match up to like 5% per se, the idea there is every dollar, if you put in 5%, they're giving you 5%. That's a 100% rate of return that you can't really find anywhere else in the world. So, taking advantage of any employee um employer match is really probably the number one thing that I would say yes, take advantage of a 401k. Should you invest outside of work? Always, but if it's a question of one or the other, take the match.
Speaking of 401k’s, one of the questions that I see all the time, and I'm sure Brian does too, when people come in, they want to discuss their current 401k allocations. And the reality is there's not many to choose from anymore. So, you have probably noticed in your own 401k, if you have one, that you don't have any many choices anymore. They're all sort of age-based or target-based funds. Let's talk a minute for how we got there. It was 2008 basically and the market crashed. Everybody's 401k’s just sort of depleted. And what ended up happening is people pulled out of the market at the wrong time. They didn't stay in it or they were really close to retirement and they shouldn't have been that aggressively invested anyway. Part of that problem was because the market was doing well before that and everybody sort of got greedy, right? Comfortable. Yep. And so what happened was a lot of the employers, the employees rather, ended up turning around and suing the employers who were providing the 401k benefit to them because there was no financial guidance. And that led to the creation of target-based or age-based funds because it sort of um takes the employer off the hook a little bit. It makes it easy. There's a fund manager who's doing all the allocations based on uh the date you're supposed to retire. My problem with the age-based funds is what you're planning for is not the date you're retiring. It's you should really plan for the date you might die, which I know is hard to predict, but you want your money to last a lot longer than the date you're going to retire. So, I'm not a big fan of of age-based funds. I don't know about you, Brian, but I, you know, back in the days when you had a lot of 401k choices and you had you can put together a decent allocation, 401k’s tended to to do better in my opinion. So, with that said, like I said, I'm not a I'm not a big fan of the the age based funds or the target based funds and um, but it's just the norm in in 401k’s nowadays. And so, you know, part of rolling over a 401k that we can help with is putting together a portfolio that's properly diversified for your life expectancy rather than when you're going to retire.
Yeah. And my my next question would be kind of like a followup to kind of what I said earlier, which was, you know, should I have a retirement plan outside of work? You know, I think a lot of people mistake their work plans for their only plan instead of thinking along the lines of supplemental everything, you know, all your belongings when you leave your job or whatever you whatever job you have, you typically take those with you. Why would you not take your money? I think there's a there's an idea of, well, my work takes care of me. If you just go have a plan, Roth IRA, traditional IRA, or things outside of work, you have vehicles to move that money into and they're already established. You're already contributing to them. We're also getting to an age where, I'm sure you'd agree with this, you know, we're getting to this day and age where the the 401k matches aren't significant. We don't have pensions. We don't have all that other stuff. So, you know, having that program that you contribute to, that investment vehicle outside of whether it's retirement or external investments in general, having that plan outside of work is just icing on the cake. I think that's the second most asked question for me.
Another question that we get all the time is um are you a fiduciary? And the answer to that question is yes. Both Brian and I are fiduciaries. But I always follow that up with um how much I hate that word and the meaning behind it. Sure, it's a it's a legal term where it puts us in a position where we have to put your interest ahead of ours, but the reality is if we weren't doing that, we would have no clients. And so what I don't like is when other advisers use it sort of as as a marketing ploy almost um you know stating that they're this fiduciary and they're going to take care of you the best they can and all that. We're already doing that with or without that word. We do have that on our website though just because that's what people search for. And so if we want to show up in your Google search for us um we have to have fiduciary on our website. So yeah, we are fiduciaries, but don't put too much weight into that. Just find an adviser, if it's not us, that always puts your best interest ahead of theirs, regardless of using that word or not. Any thoughts?
No, that's pretty much spot on. The the next question that I probably get asked the most is and this falls right in line with having the supplemental program outside of work or having a you know the work should be supplemental to your plans outside of work which is should I have life insurance? If you look at like group life insurance at work a lot of people don't realize um that their benefit is age based for in five year increments. So it gets more and more and more expensive. Um it's also based on the health and wellness of the overall group that they're insuring. Uh so if there's a lot of very old people there or a lot of very unhealthy people there, the the costs are usually based on that. Um and the other as aspect of that is it's if you leave that job or if they choose not to offer it anymore and you're out of luck. Um especially if you have any health problems or have any health problems arise while you're working. So yeah, my general recommendation is almost always have some form of life insurance outside of work. I think the uh in the age of social media, I think the the the most heartbreaking thing is seeing some young people pass away and have these GoFundMe’s set up and it's, you know, when they could have had a very cheap term policy that that covers some of the basic needs. It's just heartbreaking. You know, take care of your family. It's the number one thing to do. At least that's what I would say.
Yeah, totally. And I will say that, you know, a lot of new clients that come in or potential new clients, I think there's some hesitancy maybe before they book an appointment because they're un unsure of how we're going to charge them or what they need to pay. And um, so Brian and I meet with a lot of clients together and we provide a lot of education even in the first meeting. That's one of the things that we're really proud of is the amount of education that we do provide for our clients, whether they're clients or not. We just want to put everybody in the best possible position for financial success. But, you know, we might go through an hour meeting and provide all kinds of information and they might, you know, you can see them um pull out their checkbook or something like that and say, you know, what do I owe you? And just so you guys know, that's not what we do. We don't charge for an initial consultation. In fact, we don't charge where you have to write us a check for anything. So basically how we get paid is by managing your assets and getting a fee from that, a percentage of that. It doesn't come out of your pocket. So if one of the reasons you might be hesitant to call us is because you're worried that you have to pay us for something, you don't. We're here to provide information to you and um and just do the right thing. So, don't let that hold you back, put it that way.
All right, guys. So, again, this was only episode one. We don't really know exactly how this show is going to end up going, what direction it's going to go in, but we do have the premise of we want your questions. We want to answer your questions and the best way to do that would be on our website which is iws.one not .com.There's a contact us section at the bottom or you can just email us atinfo@iws.one and just make the subject “Question”. That'll basically guide the direction of this show in the future. Um, you know, we again, this being episode one, we hope to improve. We hope to make the format a lot better and just get better with experience over time. We do plan on adding a sign back here. We're, you know, we put this studio together pretty quickly and, uh, we kind of like it. It came out good, we think, but it's going to get better and so will the production and everything else. So, don't be hesitant to ask. We we really want to um provide value to you guys.
So with that said, thanks for watching. Um please ask us questions. We want to answer them. And if you would like to schedule an appointment with us, again, the website is the best place to do it. We have an online calendar, but our office number is also 865-342-7766. So, with that said, signing off. Signing off. Thanks for watching, guys.