From the Desk of Dale Crossley and Evan Shear 

We hope your 2025 is off to a great start! To kick off the year on the right foot, we’re diving into key topics like annual reviews, estate planning, effective communication, and a few fun health tips on what else – the benefits of dancing! After all, we firmly believe that financial health and your emotional and physical health are interconnected. Financial freedom reduces stress, and good overall health promotes longevity so you can enjoy a long, happy retirement!

CrossleyShear Annual Reviews

An annual review with our clients is required to help you look deeper at your current investment portfolio. The review process will guide you through ensuring that your portfolio aligns with your investment goals. It will also help you consider your desired risk levels and any recent life changes that might have affected those objectives in the last year. Your participation is essential so we can understand your evolving financial needs and continue to provide you with the highest degree of service and support.

Please don't hesitate to contact us or schedule your review meeting here at your earliest convenience.

A Fresh Start—Is Your Estate Plan Up to Date?

The new year is also a great time to update your estate plan. Estate planning addresses the distribution of assets to key beneficiaries in the event of your demise. Of course, a person's assets and the needs of their beneficiaries often change over time. Keeping your estate plan up-to-date and keeping your beneficiaries informed is essential.

Make sure your named beneficiaries are up to date on the details of your estate plan, update your assets, and adapt your plan to your family's evolving needs.

Reminder: Compliance-Approved Texting Available – But Not for Financial Orders

As a reminder, we have compliance-approved numbers for texting, making it easier to stay in touch with your advisor. However, for security and regulatory reasons, financial orders cannot be accepted via text, email, or voicemail.

Orders can only be placed in person or over the phone.

Please continue using the designated compliance-approved numbers below for texting:

Dale Crossley Private Wealth Advisor | Branch Manager, RJFS: 321.455.0440

Evan Shear CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® | Branch Manager, RJFS: 407.638.8675

Catalina Mejia-Hensel Financial Advisor: 321.340.6700

Shaun Jones Financial Advisor: 321.359.7709

We appreciate your cooperation in keeping our communications secure and compliant!

Dance Your Way to a Healthier, Happier 2025

If you want 2025 to be even better than 2024, prioritizing your health is a great place to start. When you feel your best, you have more energy, focus, and clarity to enjoy and optimize the year ahead. One simple yet powerful way to enhance both your physical and mental well-being? Dancing.

Dancing is a fun and effective way to boost cardiovascular health, improve flexibility, and even enhance the quality of your sleep. Studies show that dancing helps reduce stress, elevate mood, and promote deeper, more restorative rest by releasing endorphins and lowering cortisol levels. Just a few minutes of movement each day can help you feel more refreshed, energized, and ready to take on new challenges.

At CrossleyShear, we believe in overall wellness—financial, physical, and emotional. Just as small, consistent steps can improve your health, they also lead to financial confidence and well-being. Whether you're dancing to relieve stress or setting financial goals for the future, simple, sustainable actions can help you create a more balanced and fulfilling life.

If financial stress keeps you up at night, we’re here to help you develop a strategy that allows you to focus on what matters most—your well-being and the life you’ve built. Let’s make 2025 a great year together—one step (or dance) at a time!

Any opinions are those of CrossleyShear Wealth Management and not necessarily those of Raymond James. The information has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but we do not guarantee that the foregoing material is accurate or complete. Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors. Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website's users and/or members.

There is no guarantee that these statements, opinions or forecasts provided herein will prove to be correct. All opinions are as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Document shredding and food drive

Clean out your cabinets and drawers of those old documents and bring them to be safely shredded, on site, by the professionals of Shred it™ and enjoy some good food and live music!

When: May 31st

Where: Outside of the Merritt Island office 2395 N. Courtenay Parkway

Time: 11:00am-2:00pm

Please consider bringing a non-perishable food item for our Food Drive to benefit Harvest Time International

Please Donate:

Low sodium canned vegetables - Canned meats - Canned soups - Boxed oatmeal or grits - Canola or olive oil - Peanut butter - Nuts - No sugar added fruit cups - Canned beans - Granola/Protein bars - Pasta - Beans - Rice - Dry powdered milk

Questions please contact

Karin@crossleyshear.com or call 321-452-0061

Raymond James is not affiliated with Harvest Time International, Shred-it, or 4th Street Fillin Station.

Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors. Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website’s users and/or members. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional.

No timing needed

Help overcome market timing and loss aversion with dollar-cost averaging.

Dollar-cost averaging — regularly investing money in the market — is an age-old strategy for mitigating investment price risk. Commonly applied by 401(k) plan savers, it could also be a useful strategy for experienced investors with larger sums, especially during periods of uncertainty or when emotional reluctance is high.

Dollar-cost averaging: the theory behind the practice

Dollar-cost averaging involves regularly investing a consistent amount of money to purchase a specific asset, or group of assets, regardless of their price. For example, an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan is set up this way. With each paycheck, you invest a regular percentage of your earnings in defined assets, generally mutual funds, that you have previously selected.

This strategy helps prevent you from stressing over decisions on when to invest in the market. With the regular-investment approach, you don’t focus on whether the asset you’re purchasing is at a good price for purchase. Rather than try to time the market, you buy it each week or month or whatever the interval is.

The theory underpinning this strategy is that asset prices will go up and down in unpredictable ways, and if you buy shares regularly, the average share price you pay – that is, the dollar-cost average – won’t be too high. When prices are lower, your money will buy more shares than the same amount will buy when prices are higher, bringing down your price-per-share cost. This, in turn, can help reduce the impact of market volatility on your portfolio.

Potential benefits and limitations of dollar-cost averaging

In addition to the theoretical benefit of avoiding an overly high purchase price, dollar-cost averaging presents other potential benefits.

For relatively early savers, regularly investing in the market builds the investing habit and may help you feel more at ease with investing in general.

For those with large cash balances, it can be a way to invest – or reinvest. Cash tends to lose value over time due to inflation. Especially as interest rates go down, cutting into your cash’s return potential, dollar-cost averaging can help address the emotional challenge of loss aversion, which often has the potential to lead to inaction.

However, dollar cost averaging could also leave some returns on the table when markets are rallying, and it does not mitigate some other investment risks.

Another approach: lump-sum investing

Given that time in the market is often an advantage, investing all your money at once could be more effective than investing it incrementally over time. This all-in approach is known as lump-sum investing.

Lump-sum investing can be an effective strategy given certain market conditions. For example, in a rising market, particular assets will rise in price on average, so investing a lump sum at the outset can enable you to acquire more shares, and therefore more value, compared to investing fixed amounts over time.

But if you invest all your money at once, and the price drops, you may suffer losses that could persist for a few years or longer. Under these conditions, dollar-cost averaging would lead to owning more shares.

With dollar-cost averaging, you can avoid the risk that you’ve mistimed the market.

Choosing the right strategy for you

There’s no one-size-fits all answer when it comes to your investment strategy. Whether dollar-cost averaging is the right strategy for your investment goals depends on multiple factors, including the time horizon to your financial goal, your available cash, market conditions, and investment opportunities.

Your financial advisor can help you weigh these different considerations and make a choice that feels right for you.

There is no assurance any investment strategy will be successful. Investing involves risk including the possible loss of capital. Dollar cost averaging does not assure a profit and does not protect against loss. It involves continuous investment regardless of fluctuating price levels of such securities. Investors should consider their financial ability to continue purchases through periods of low-price levels..

Sources: forbes.com; cnbc.com; etrade.com; ndvr.com; aarp.org

Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors. Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website’s users and/or members. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional.

Through the back door to bigger retirement savings

“Backdoor” strategies let you enjoy the benefits of a Roth while getting around some of the limitations.

For people looking to build a balanced retirement savings portfolio, a Roth IRA can serve as a great companion to an employer plan such as a 401(k). But if you earn too much money, you may not qualify to invest fully – or at all – in a Roth IRA. And no matter how much you earn, you may find that contribution limits prevent you from building as fat a fund as you’d like.

Fortunately, there are “backdoor” strategies that may help you get around these limitations. Here’s what you need to know.

Backdoor Roth IRA
Once your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) tops $161,000 for single filers or $240,000 if married and filing jointly, the IRS begins phasing out your ability to invest directly in a Roth IRA.

But you can contribute after-tax dollars to a traditional IRA, then shortly thereafter convert those funds to a Roth IRA. Because there are no income limits restricting your ability to put after-tax dollars in a regular IRA, you can use this backdoor strategy to build a Roth IRA no matter how much you earn.

You can’t go through this backdoor if you own any IRAs with any pretax dollars in them. The reasons for that are complicated, but it all boils down to two IRS rules (the pro rata rule and the aggregation rule). Consulting your financial advisor and tax professional prior to doing a backdoor Roth is a smart move, to ensure that you’re following every rule.

Mega backdoor Roth IRA
If your problem is not how much you earn but the size of contribution limits, there’s a mega backdoor strategy that could help boost your savings.

For 2024, the limits on how much you can contribute to an IRA are $7,000, or $8,000 if you’re over 50. A mega backdoor strategy may empower you to put away much more than that.

Your current employer must offer a 401(k) or 403(b) plan, and you must pay into it. Whichever of those plans you use must also allow employees to make after-tax contributions into the plan, which count above and beyond employee elective deferral limits.

This is simplest to achieve if your employer offers a Roth option attached to its retirement plans, one that supports in-plan conversions to the Roth – that’s your mega backdoor to a bigger retirement fund.

There are plan-specific limits on how much you may contribute in after-tax dollars to convert into the Roth, and are other rules affecting whether you can apply a backdoor strategy and how big a fund you can build. Again, a chat with your financial and tax advisors is an essential step in any backdoor plan.

Pros of backdoor Roth IRAs:

• You may still be able to fund a Roth IRA even if your income is above IRS limits.
• If you have access to an employer plan with a Roth feature, you may be able to save more than the usual IRA limits.
• Because the money going into the Roth has already been taxed, you can take tax-free distributions in retirement.

Cons of backdoor Roth IRAs:

• Not everyone will be eligible to apply a backdoor or mega backdoor approach.
• Typically, only high earners benefit.
• Both require careful planning with a tax professional.

Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional. Unless certain criteria are met, Roth IRA owners must be 59 1/2 or older and have held the IRA for five years before tax-free withdrawals are permitted. Additionally, each converted amount may be subject to its own five-year holding period. Converting a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA has tax implications. Investors should consult a tax advisor before deciding to do a conversion.

Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors. Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website’s users and/or members. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional.

The 10-year rule for retirement accounts: How new guidelines could impact your IRA beneficiaries

In 2020, The SECURE Act changed the IRA inheritance landscape – terrain that would shift again in 2022 with the passage of the SECURE Act 2.0. Over the summer, that new ground was firmed up as the IRS finalized regulations that will go into effect January 1, 2025. Here’s a look at the rules and how they could impact your wealth and wealth transfer planning.

One of the biggest changes brought by the original SECURE Act was the introduction of the “10-year rule” for designated beneficiaries, which sought to stem the amount of time inherited money could grow tax-free.

Implemented in January 2020, the 10-year rule requires most non-spouse beneficiaries to withdraw the entire balance of an inherited IRA within 10 years. It also set parameters around timing, distributions and beneficiary categories.

SECURE Act 1.0:
Required with some exceptions, that the entire balance of an inherited retirement account be distributed within 10 years of the owner’s death; raised the age when RMDs must be taken:

RMDs begin at 72 for those born between July 1, 1949 and 1950.

SECURE Act 2.0:
Maintained the 10-year rule; further raised the age at which RMDs must be taken:

RMDs begin at 73 for those born between 1951 and 1959 and at 75 for those born after 1960.

Key guidelines

Required minimum distributions (RMDs)
The minimum amount that must be withdrawn from a retirement account each year after the account owner reaches the designated age.

Required beginning date (RBD)
The date by/on which the first RMD must be taken. This date is April 1 of the year after an IRA owner reaches their applicable RMD start age (currently 73).

Eligible designated beneficiaries (EDBs)
Beneficiaries who may take distributions over their life expectancy – but may also choose to apply the 10-year rule, depending on their situation, including:

• Spouses
• Individuals not more than 10 years younger than the retirement plan account or IRA owner (this includes an individual older than the IRA owner)
• Minor children of the retirement plan account or IRA owner only (note: these must be children of the account owner – not a grandchild, niece, nephew, etc. – and after they reach age 21, the account must be depleted within 10 years)
• Disabled individuals
• Chronically ill individuals

Non-eligible designated beneficiaries (NEDBs)
Beneficiaries who are subject to the 10-year rule, including:

• Those not falling into any of the above groups, who inherited from someone who died before their RBD.
• Those not falling into any of the above groups, who inherited from someone who died after their RBD.

“The changes will have the biggest impact for beneficiaries of larger accounts, further exacerbated if those beneficiaries are successful themselves and taxed at higher rates. This compressed time period could force distributions into higher taxer brackets,” said Jim Kidney, CPA®, CPWA®, who supervises the financial planning consulting practice at Raymond James. “Before the 10-year rule, the ‘stretch IRA’ strategy enabled inheritors to spread distributions – and the tax impact – across their life expectancies.”

While that possibility is much more limited now, there are alternative strategies for maximizing IRA funds in line with current regulations.

Considerations for IRA owners

Roth conversion
Converting a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA before an account owner reaches their RBD can keep those converted dollars at a lower tax bracket compared to if they were forced to take it as an RMD from the Traditional IRA later. Furthermore, the converted dollars and associated earnings will be tax free to the owner and ultimately to a beneficiary, provided several conditions are met.

Life insurance
A somewhat more involved planning strategy is to consider using distributions from a pre-tax retirement account to purchase life insurance, allowing the policy holder to name as beneficiary the same person they intended to inherit their retirement account.

Considerations for IRA beneficiaries

Inheritance circumstances
The finer points of how a beneficiary inherits an account will impact how the 10-year rule is applied and how RMDs are managed.

If the account owner dies before their RBD:

A non-eligible beneficiary will need to deplete the account by December 31 of the tenth year following the owner’s death but will not have to take RMDs.

If the account owner dies after their RBD:

A non-eligible designated beneficiary will need to take RMDs in years one through nine, with a final distribution in year 10. This RMD requirement is generally based on the single life expectancy of the beneficiary.

Missed RMDs
Because final guidance regarding the 10-year rule has been shared four years after the rule’s introduction, some beneficiaries could have needed to take RMDs in the intervening period. In many of these cases, the IRS is issuing waivers for missed RMDs. This waiver only applies to non-eligible designated beneficiaries under the 10-year rule who inherited from an IRA owner who died after their RBD.

Distribution timing
For beneficiaries in high tax brackets, it’s important to weigh strategic timing options for distribution. For example, if a beneficiary plans to retire five years after inheriting, it may be most efficient to take minimum distributions while they’re still working and increase payments to deplete the account in their first five years of retirement.

While this rule is settled, the climate is sure to change again, inviting new tax and financial planning implications. To keep your footing, work closely with your financial advisor and, when appropriate, experienced estate planning and tax professionals.

This material is being provided for information purposes only and is not a complete description, nor is it a recommendation. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal advice. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional. Withdrawals from tax-deferred accounts may be subject to income taxes, and prior to age 59.5 a 10% federal penalty tax may apply.

Rolling from a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA may involve additional taxation. When converted to a Roth, you pay federal income taxes on the converted amount, but no further taxes in the future. Unless certain criteria are met, Roth IRA owners must be 59½ or older and have held the IRA for five years before tax-free withdrawals are permitted. Each converted amount is subject to its own five-year holding period, unless the owner is 59.5 or older.

Investments & Wealth Institute™ (The Institute) is the owner of the certification marks “CPWA®” and “Certified Private Wealth Advisor®.” Use of CPWA and/or Certified Private Wealth Advisor signifies that the user has successfully completed The Institute’s initial and ongoing credentialing requirements for investment management professionals.

Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors. Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website’s users and/or members. Raymond James does not provide tax or legal services. Please discuss these matters with the appropriate professional.