Tax Day Prep: Simple Tips to Maximize Your Qualified Accounts

Tax Day Prep: Simple Tips to Maximize Your Qualified Accounts

OWAIZ DADABHOY: Alright, there’s the title there. And so, what we are really going to be talking about is, you know, you might already have existing qualified accounts. And qualified accounts are those that help you in a tax-beneficial way. So, you know, think about retirement accounts. Think about education accounts. Think about health savings accounts. And so, what you may have done, though, is you may have allowed those to not be funded in the proper way every year. Or you may not have started up a particular one that you can really get benefits from. You know, when you start to look at what happens with taxes, you’ll find pretty quickly that we are getting taxed at every single step. Right? From when you get paid and what the employer has to pay all the way down to when you get the money, and you make your first purchase. And then, when you make the first purchase, the business also pays tax. And then it just keeps going around in a circle, so, what we want to do is—in the right way—try to minimize what we have to pay in taxes by taking into consideration what the government has prepared for us. So, now I’m going to pass it over to Monem Salam, who will talk about the beginnings of what we are going to do here today.

MONEM SALAM: Thank you so much, Owaiz for doing that. We did want to wish everybody a Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Kareem to everybody. Hope all the fastings are going well and may Allah accept all of the deeds that we do during this month.

OWAIZ DADABHOY: Alright, so what we are going to talk about today is, as you can see, why you should save and invest... investing according to Islamic principles. Investing for college. Retirement. And the Amana Funds. And Monem Salam, who has already spoken, is Executive Vice President of Saturna Capital. He’s also Portfolio Manager of the Amana Income and Developing World Funds. So, you know, if you have some questions specifically about the Funds, this is the time to put those in the chat group. I’m also presenting to you. Every time that we come on, I’m usually on. I’m the Director of Islamic Investing here and the manager of our team that is situated in different parts of the country. So, you know, this here, Tax Day, is going to be on April 18. Usually, it’s on the 15 of April but sometimes it can change just depending on what day that lands on. So, you know, if you have not opened up a particular account... now think about the ones I’m going to talk to you about, right? When I talk to you about the different accounts that are qualified and you want to take advantage of those tax benefits, potentially. What you want to do is open up your account—if you have not done so—before April 18 if possible. But let’s say you go online to amanafunds.com and open up an account and it’s like the 17 or 18 and you’re trying to do this for 2021 and you indicate that on the application—so you can get the tax benefits for this year—you’re going to want to make sure that you follow everything particularly well because you won’t have time for failure. So, for example, let’s say you open up the account on April 18 and, you know, you have not sent in everything that we need, or you are opening up an individual account but the checking account is a joint account... that’s going to have a fail. And so, then it might not capture for the 18. The best thing to do is, if you like what you hear today and you want to make a decision about it, get it started today or tomorrow so you have enough time to make up for any issues that come up. So, there are many reasons to save. You want to save to buy a home because, if you want to go buy a $400,000 home, you might want 5% down, minimum, and so, you have to save for that, right? But if you’re buying a million-dollar home and you want 5%, that’s 50 grand. You’re definitely going to have to save for that. Hajj these days costs over $10,000 per person in most cases, unless you’re very fortunate and find a great deal out there. And then obviously, children’s education, retirement, and health savings. And we’re going to talk very specifically about those last three because this is where you can get the qualified accounts that benefit for tax purposes, right? So, the Health Savings Account is where we are starting today. And the reason we are starting with the Health Savings Account is it’s the triple tax advantaged account. And, you know, the benefit of this is when you put the money in, if you have a high deductible health insurance plan, you will get a tax deduction for that. When the money is invested and you’re receiving dividends if there are any capital gains... if there’s anything like that... you don’t pay any taxes on that. In a normal, regular investment account you would pay tax every year. And finally, when you are withdrawing the money and you have some type of health cost—whether it’s medical, dental, or vision—if you’re pulling out the money at that time, you will not pay a dime in taxes. So, that’s why it’s triple tax advantaged. The only one around like that. Some of you may have the HSA plan with us, the Health Savings Account, but you may not be funding it. So, if you fund it now, go online, you fund it, you select 2021, and you can put it onto your taxes this year if you haven’t filed already. And let’s say you put in $5,000. You’re going to get a percentage of that back, through the IRS, right? Because of the deduction. So, if you have not fully funded it, try to do that or at much as you can. Some of the money is going to come back to you. If you have not started this account at all, look into... call your health insurance plan and find out whether they have a health savings option and if you’re qualified for that. And you can open up and account with us or through your employer. And you know, there are a few different benefits here. One is that you’re getting these tax benefits. The other is that whatever money you’re putting in, you can invest it in the Amana Funds. And when you do that, you can grow this money over time, right? Just, depending on whatever returns you’re getting. Now we’re going to talk about investing for college. I’m hoping there are going to be some questions about HSAs because that’s one that I’m really passionate about. Some of you may have children that are going to college now and what you probably would do is you would talk to anyone that you could, that you love, and friends and family that have young children. You would tell them to get started early to save. And the reason you would do that to save for college is because the cost of college has been going up over time. So, if you went to college in 1991-92, you may have paid $19,000 or so for a four-year private college but now, that cost is doubled, right? And now everyone is really starting to see what inflation is all about. When we would talk about inflation before, you had to really explain it, but now people are fully aware of what inflation is like at 7%, 6% inflation rates. The fillet of fish that you’re buying at McDonald’s is going up in price. The French fries. The milk. The eggs. The home. Everything. And so, if you have money set aside for college education, you can’t save that for 18 years and say, “I have $50,000 for education,” and hope that they’ll still be able to go to that high priced college.” You’re going to have to grow the money to beat inflation. That’s the idea, here. And in 2019, the average student that was coming out of college was coming out with almost $30,000, so before they can go get their first car or think about buying a home, they have to think about their monthly debt. So, they’re going to have to start paying this once... at some point... after they exit college. So, how do we combat this? So, remember this $30,000 number. We’re going to come back to this. And Monem is now going to talk about various planning alternatives for college education.

MONEM SALAM: Thanks for that, Owaiz. You know, I think there are a lot of different options that are available. The one thing that we did always start with are the state-sponsored 529 plans. And the reason why we do that... there aren’t very many halal options that are out there. However, if we didn’t put this slide on here and talk a little bit about them, inevitably we’d get a question about them and what they are and those types of things. So, this makes it easy for us to talk about them and get all the questions answered. So, basically here, it’s state-sponsored so it’s basically one per state. The contribution limits that are there vary from different state to state. However, they are higher than what we’re going to talk about next which is the Education Savings Account. So, you can put quite a bit of money in there. For example, for 2022, it was %16,000, for the gift tax, that you can do. And then, the next one is the Education Savings Account. And that is a good alternative to the 529 plan because... and if there’s nothing else you get from this webinar—hopefully you get more than this—is as long as you have choices in what you can invest, then you can keep your money halal. And so, in an education account, what happens is the money that you put in...right?... after you put it in, it’s going to be going in after tax but then it grows on a tax-free basis. And then, when you take it out for educational purposes, that’s also tax-free. But when you put it in as cash, then you decide. You open up a brokerage account or a mutual fund account and you decide exactly what you’re going to do with that money. There are limits, however. This one, in this particular case, it’s $2,000 per year, per child. And so, if you have three children, you can put $2,000 for each of them. And you can start doing this when they are born and you have to stop when they turn 18 but you can keep the money in their growing until they turn 30, by which time you have to be able to take the money out of the account. Okay? And there are cutoffs, so if you are in a higher income tax bracket then you’re not going to be contribute to an Education Savings Account. But not to worry! There is one more alternative that you have. So, going to the next one, that’s the Universal Gift to Minor. Sometimes in states it’s called a UTMA: Universal Transfer to Minor. And this is basically an account that’s in the name of your child and because they’re not adults, you have to basically act as a guardian for them, a custodian. So, it’s going to be in their name, and you have to be the custodian. And when you’re giving it to them, there are going to be gift taxes that apply and so keep that in mind. So, it’s, you know, for 2021, it’s $15,000 and then for this year, 2022, it’s $16,000. Right? And then, if both you and your spouse are going to be putting it in, you can just double that number. But really, in this type of account, anybody can give money. The child’s grandparents can give money. Aunts and uncles. Those type of things. The other thing is that the UGMA, it allows you to be able to use the money for anything in regard to the child. It doesn’t only have to be education. If they end up getting good scholarships, you can use it later on for a down payment on the house that Owaiz was talking about earlier. Or you can use it for paying for a wedding. It’s very flexible in what you use it for as long as it’s used for the child. 

OWAIZ DADABHOY: Yeah, and you have the Education Savings Account, if you qualify for that. You can put in $2,000 per year on that one. But you could also open up the minor account here, the Uniform Gift to Minor Account. You can do both, or if you don’t qualify for the other one, put the money here. Now, we’re going to talk about... the fact that we talked about this debt being at $30,000 when a child comes out of college. How can we combat that? So, if you start off when your child is just born, you get their social security number, you open up their... let’s call it the Education Savings Account. You put in $83 a month. Why $83 a month? It’s $1,000 a year. So, in this example, it’s $1,000 a year, put in monthly, at a 7% average annual rate of return. That is the assumption that we are using. So, once the child is three years old, your $3,000 that you’ve contributed over those three years would now be almost $3,200 and you would not be that thrilled yet because really, not much has happened, right? But once the child is 18 years of age, you can see what the power of compounding does. Your $18,000 you’ve put in over the course of 18 years has no become $34,458 in this particular assumption. And this is what we were talking about in the beginning, when we were disclosing to you that whatever numbers we talk to you about... this particular one is just an assumption. You know, you could come up with an Education Savings Account calculator, if your child is five years old and you figure out, you know, you want to save until they’re 18 and figure out how much you would have by that time, by using one of those calculators. I’ll stop here for a second and also mention that in my opinion, it is better to contribute on a monthly basis than an annual basis. And the reason for that, there’s a few: one is if you’re buying on a monthly basis you’re buying at different levels of the market. So, with your $83 a month, you are buying either more shares or the same number of shares, etc., depending on the price. So, if you’re buying the shares, you know, two shares a month, and the price goes down, now you’re buying two and a half shares. So, that’s a better situation there. The other thing is you may forget to make a contribution if you’re doing it annually. Now, let’s go back to this slide. We talked about $1,000 a year but you can actually put in $2,000 a year, into the Education Savings Account, so you can get close to $70,000 for education. This is empowering to your young one because once they become 13, 14, 15, you can start telling them that you have this education account for them, and, you know, start writing the applications for different schools and you have the money to make this happen for them. Going back up to this slide, you know, you could not have this debt when the child comes out and give them a winning start to get their first car and buy their first home and what not. Alright, we’ve put together this resource list. Amana Mutual Funds actually has some sponsorships or scholarships, excuse me, at ISNA.net and at islamicscholarshipfund.org. So, if you look at those two websites, you can apply for different scholarships for your child. And then, we have some government websites, here. The next four of those are government websites. And then, there’s acceducate.org, which is the same as acontinuouscharity.org. This one is a non-interest loan, so it's basically, you know, you borrow $10,000 for school or $5,000 for school... once you get out of school then you start to pay it back without interest. And so, when the money comes back into A Continuous Charity, then can give the money to the next child and the cycle can continue. Alright, we do have many different types of accounts that you can choose from, as you can see here. We talked about the Health Savings Account, Education Savings Account, the UGMA... we haven’t talked about some of the other ones and that’s what we’re going to start doing now. So, you know, you have to start early on retirement, as well, because if you start a little bit later, you’re not going to have as great of success, unless you put in a lot more money. Right? And I’m going to show you a graph that will really explain that to you. Some of you have pension plans, which are contributed by your employer and you’re going to have a monthly income stream, or you could have a lump sum distribution and roll that over into a retirement account with us, et cetera. But you know, what usually you need to do is come up with your own income, because you may not have a pension plan through your employer, and you may not have enough in Social Security. So, you’re going to need to save on your own. So, we’re going to figure that out, right? But if I asked you to guess... how much you think the average American is receiving in Social Security this year, per month, you probably would give me a number that is over what it actually is. There are roughly 40 million Americans receiving retirement Social Security income, and the average check is $1,616 per month. I can tell you, here in Southern California, I realize home prices are a little bit higher than some areas. You know, if you wanted a one-bedroom apartment, you might be fortunate to find it for $1,600 a month. Usually, two bedrooms are going for $1,900-$2,100 a month. And homes are going for $3,000 and above. Right? That’s the minimum. So, imagine if you have this income. You still have to pay for food. You still have to pay for whatever other costs that you have: utilities and you want to go for a trip or something like that. So, what you may say to me is, “Well, I’m going to have my home completely paid off and I will buy a car before retirement, and it will be paid off.” People are living until their mid 80s and 90s, right? If somebody passes away at 70, you really question why they passed away so soon. Did they have some kind of disease? What happened, right? Did they have some kind of accident? Because people are living so long these days. So, you have to plan for a longer retirement. If you do that, the car that you have is going to become very old at some point. You’re going to need to replace it. The home that you own completely, free and clear, you’re still going to pay property tax on that. So, imagine what that is, and that’s an increasing amount. Every year it usually goes up, right? And you’re going to have to pay homeowners insurance and other insurances as well. So, you can check what your Social Security benefits might be at SSA.gov to get an example of it, but we’re going to talk to you about some of the specifics here after we give you a graph, right? What you can do is you can either invest in a 401(k) plan at work. That’s one option. At the same time, you can open up an IRA account—traditional or Roth. Monem is going to go through that in a little bit. Health Savings Accounts. Individual stocks. You know, if you’re educated enough to do that. Mutual Funds like the Amana Funds. Real estate. So, there are other options. The ones that are in a different color here: annuities, bonds, and CDs, those are based on interest, so if you’re investing according to Islamic principles, you would avoid those. So, we’re going to show you another example here. If you put in $1,000 a year, $83 a month, into your retirement account, whether it’s your 401(k) or your IRA account, at an assumed rate of return of 7%, and you’re 25 years of age. If you do that, just put in $1,000 a year for 40 years, until you’re 65, you’ve put in $40,000 and the power of compounding has gotten you to $218,000. But if you wait just ten years and you only put in $30,000 for retirement over those 30 years. So, you put in $10,000 less than the first person, you’re going to end up with over $117,000 less than that first person. Even though you only missed $10,000 worth of contributions, there. And if you’re 45, you’re only going to get to $43,000. But the good news is, you know, most of us can put a little bit more money in, right? So, if you can put in $5,500 a year at an assumed rate of 7%, you know, if you’re 25 and you’re doing this, that’s about $230 a payroll, something like that. $230 a payroll, from age 25 until 65, you end up with $1.2 million at an assumed rate of return of 7%. But if you don’t contribute for just the first ten years, you’ve missed out on contributing $55,000 but it’s going to cost you over $600,000 in total returns. So, you can see that the money that you put in initially, because of the power of compounding, is going to make a big difference. The good news is when you’re 45 compared to when you’re 25, hopefully you’re making a lot more money at that point and you don’t need to contribute just $5,500. You can just ramp up the numbers to try to get to your million or $2 million goal. And this you can do by going to retirement savings calculator on Google or your favorite browser and pulling up one that you can put in what your age is, how much you have saved right now, and it will calculate how much you need to put in on a monthly basis to retire at the time you want to. The good news about getting to a million bucks, let’s say, is if you’re still receiving a 7% rate of return, all the way through, for as long as you have this, you can pull out 7% or less per year and still maintain your million dollars. So, even if you do live until you’re 95 or 110, everything else being equal, you’re receiving that 7% rate of return and you’re pulling out less than that every year. You’re going to have, basically, an endowment for the rest of your life. So, you want to get this to the largest possible number so you can pull out the right amount for yourself. So, let’s say you’re getting $1,600 per month in Social Security, and you can pull out $70,000 from your million-dollar retirement account. You’ve added quite a bit, right? You’ve basically quadrupled what your income is going to be every year, because of your retirement account. Monem is going to talk to you about traditional and Roth IRAs.

MONEM SALAM: So, we’re talking about investments and how you make them for your retirement and Hamdullah, the government has set up different types of plans that can not only help you save but also save immediately sometimes, saving on taxes either now or taxes when you begin to take it out later in your retirement. So, the first one which is a traditional IRA, allows you to save the taxes now. Right? And so, that’s why it’s called tax-deductible. So, let’s supposing you’re making $100,000 and you put in $6,000, you would only have to pay income tax on $94,000. That’s what the tax deductibility is. And if you’re above the age of 50, then you can put in an additional $1,000 into the account for that. The money, after you put it in, as I mentioned to you, saves on taxes immediately, and as the money is growing it’s growing tax free, right? And when you take the money out is when you’re going to be beginning to pay income tax on that, on the distribution that you make. So, for example if you took all of it out at the same time, then you would obviously owe a lot of taxes, but you can piecemeal it on monthly, quarterly, sometimes if you don’t need it, you don’t have to take it out until you’re 72 and a half, so you have a little bit of flexibility in being able to do that. Also, a thing to keep in mind is if you take the money out prior to what the IRS considers retirement, which is 59 and a half, there could be a 10% penalty. Now, there are reasons why the 10% penalty would be waived. You know, like first-time purchase of a house, major medical expenses, disability, education is one of them. You can take it out for that. However, two things happen when you’re thinking about that, right? One is you are going to pay taxes on it when you take it out. And the second thing is you want to be careful because you’re going to be dipping into your own retirement to pay for your children’s education. So, if you already saved for those, you might not need to do that at all. Traditional IRAs are very, very easy to set up. Very, very low administration. And then when you put the money in as cash, you can decide what you want to do with that. The second one, let’s kind of think of this as the flipside of it or the mirror image, and that is a Roth IRA. A Roth IRA, if you remember traditional was, you put the money in and you save taxes, and in the Roth one, you’re putting in contributions that are after tax. You already paid the taxes on it. The amount you can put in, excuse me, $6,000 and the $1,000 catch up is exactly the same. In this particular case, the money still grows tax-free, but the key point is that when you take the money out in distributions, when you’re above the age of 59 and a half, then the money comes out income tax free. There are no income taxes on it, which is a huge benefit. Right? Again, same as the traditional, however if you’re below 59 and a half, there will be a 10% penalty except for the reasons that I mentioned earlier. You can take the money out for that. Again, very simple administration, very few expenses if any, and because it’s self-directed, you’re the one deciding to do it. You can keep the money halal also. Now, that being said, those are the kind of individual plans. The next one we want to go over is going to be talking about, the next few of them, are going to be employer plans. These are plans that are going to be set up by your employer and they allow you to be able to contribute to it and—sometimes, not always—many times they will contribute like a matching contribution to you. So, you can help to increase your savings for retirement when your employer is doing that. So, again, this is established by them. They are going to set up some type of limits. There might be some kind of vesting schedule. They’re going to say how much they’ll be contributing. Sometimes, employers say like 2% of your salary up to a certain percentage, those types of things. Those are the ones that the employer decides. And, you know, the employer generally pays the expenses for them, right? The unfortunate part of this, from a halal perspective, is that the plan sponsor, which is the company, is going to be able to set the investment choices that are there and obviously, they probably wouldn’t have, you know, halal in mind when they’re doing it, so there are going to be very few, if any, options that are out there. That being said, I will say that a lot of employers now are offering a brokerage option within a 401(k) and if you do that opportunity, definitely take advantage of it, because through that option, you should be able to, again, choose the investments that you make and then you can choose to make it halal. The second thing you can do is you can always go to your employer, and you can tell them, “Hey, I would like to have the Amama Funds on the platform for religious purposes,” or those type of things. And so, they will either allow that, or if they don’t for whatever reason, then you can go to them and say, “Okay well if you’re not going to allow that, at least allow the brokerage option so that I have a choice in the investments that I’m making,” okay? So, that’s kind of from that perspective. You know, contribution limits are higher because the government really wants you to save more for your retirement plan, so they are tax deductible. You do have a Roth option in the 401(k) also, but those are limited. Not everybody has those. But the traditional 401(k) is going to be tax-deductible, meaning you’re saving income tax right now. Right? The contribution limits for last year were $19,500, now they’ve gone up by a thousand dollars to $20,500, and there are also catch-up provisions if you’re above the age of 50, right? Age 50 or above. Again, the same thing as the traditional IRA. The money is going to grow for you on a tax-free basis, but when you take the money out, you will have to pay income tax on it. There are some employers that will allow you to borrow money from your 401(k) and if they do that, then they charge you an interest rate. Don’t worry about it because you’re only paying yourself, in which case it would not be haram. And as I mentioned to you earlier, there are Roth options within the employer plans also. Now, sometimes what happens is that employers don’t offer these plans and so, or you might be a self-employed person, or you might be a business owner. And so, there are other plans that are available. As a business owner you can set up a 401(k) for your employees or, Owaiz if you go to the next slide, we can talk about a couple of different options that are there, as well. 

OWAIZ DADABHOY: I’m going to circle back to something here to give you a quick example. So, let’s say you did get to $1.2 million in retirement. If you chose the traditional option, you would have been taking the tax benefit all the way along this line, right? And so, when you start withdrawing money at retirement, whenever that is, after 59 and a half, if it’s a traditional IRA or a traditional 401(k), you’re going to be paying taxes on whatever you withdraw at that time. So, important to keep in mind. Now, let’s say you had chosen the Roth option. Roth IRA or Roth 401(k) or both. You would not have been taking the tax break every year, as Monem so eloquently mentioned. At the end, when you start pulling out the money, you don’t pay any tax because you didn’t take a tax benefit along the way. You put in after-tax money, so if you pull out $50,000 or $70,000 a year, that’s going to be tax-free. Something very important to keep in mind. I started by 401(k) when I was 19. They didn’t have the Roth option. If they did, I’d have a bank of money that I could withdraw without taxes. Now, I’m having to go back and add a Roth option in my 401(k) to do so, so there will be two options for me to withdraw from. I’m suggesting this because I think a lot of you are in the same boat. You may have started a traditional 401(k) and now there’s a Roth option. You may want to consider that so that then, in any particular year, when you’re retired, you can pull out money based on, you know, your tax bracket that year. Right? So, you don’t get taxed as much as possible by the government there. And then, the other point here that we want to quickly mention is, you may be stuck in this thing where you’re putting in $6,000 per year but you turned 50 and you don’t know that you can put in an additional thousand. You can go to amanafunds.com, log into your account, and contribute some more money. Monem mentioned that we have, you know, these employer plans that you can get a brokerage account from the company that you work at. We have a list of about 50 of those companies that we know of, but there are probably hundreds of them. One other point here, Saturna Capital does manage 401(k) plans. We manage around 300 of them, or so. Some very large, some even smaller. Clinics, etc. So, if you are a business owner, we can talk to you about starting up a 401(k) for your business so you can have it for yourself and your employees. We have cash balance plans, as well. But in some cases, as Monem was alluding to, we may want to talk to you about a SIMPLE IRA. In fact, we will talk to you about a SIMPLE IRA when we’re talking about a 401(k). There’s much less cost in this particular one. Some of the benefits are not the same. For example, you can only put in $14,000 in 2022 versus $20,500. In this one, you will match your employees, so the match is between 2% and 3% based on the specifics, as you can see here. So, you know, if you come to us and you tell us, “Look, I’m an employer, I want to start up a plan,” we’ll walk you through both of them and then have you decide which one makes more sense for you. The important thing to know is that there are options for you and your business. In some states, like in California where I live, there is now a requirement that if you’re an employer you must have a retirement account open for your employees and if you’re going to have an employer... you know, if you have, let’s say more than 5 employees you’re going to have to do that by June 30. So, check with what your state is, if you’re an employer, otherwise you’ll start to have fees from the government. We’re going to skip over the SEP IRA today but just know that there’s this option as well. If fits a smaller number of people, but if you do come to us, we’ll talk to you about that as well. Now, you may have questions from Monem at this portion of it at the end, if you’re asking questions of the chat group at the end, here. Right now, we do have four different types of funds to be able to assist you with your, you know, your investments for the long term and mid-term. The Developing World Fund was started in 2009, actually. So, this particular Fund was 2009. The Amana Growth Fund started in 1994. The Income Fund, which is only dividend paying companies, started in 1986. And the Participation Fund, which only invests in sukuk, which are... you can call them bond-equivalents. It’s not as simple as that. But let’s call it a bond equivalent. So, for Muslims in particular that want to have fixed-income type investing, we created this way back in 2015. Now, the way to figure out whether you should invest in one, two, three, or four of these is to go to our website, amanafunds.com, and go down about midway and select the Amana Fund Selector. You’ll be asked a series of questions which should take about five minutes, and at the end it will make a recommendation to you based on your answers or what you should invest in. So, we recommend that you go there, even if you’re... you know, you’re an existing customer of ours, I would recommend that you take five minutes and go do that. We do want to talk about risk. We’re almost closing up and we’re going to take your questions. Each one of the Funds has a different kind of risk. You know, you’re going to have the Participation Fund which is just about every single sukuk is overseas and, you know, it’s going to be in the Middle East, Bahrain, Malaysia... Bahrain is in the Middle East, but that’s one of the hubs there for sukuk. Developing World Fund is all going to be Emerging Markets. We do have some other holdings that are North American if they have more than 50% of their sales coming from the emerging markets. And of course, the Income Fund and Growth Fund have their own types of risks associated with them, so always invest with caution. If you’re someone that gets nervous with... let’s say you have a $10,000 investment and it goes down to $9,990 and you’re already getting nervous and you’re having trouble sleeping at night, your stomach is starting to flutter, you know, you may want to consider what type of investments or maybe lack of investments... maybe cash. But you know, go to the Fund Selector, as I mentioned, so you can figure out what might be comfortable for you. What kind of risk you can take. Monem, why don’t you talk a little bit about your Halal Money Matters podcast.

MONEM SALAM: Yeah, thank you. We started this, I think we’re on the 18th or so episode now and myself and my co-host, Chris Patton, we kind of just talk about everything money in a halal way. So, there are some pretty interesting topics. The last one that we did was on all things inflation. So, that was an interesting one we did. Others that we’ve done: we have done one on zakat, we’ve done one on the economics of Ramadan. Last year’s Ramadan. So, do check them out, we’ve got a lot of hopefully good information. You can go directly to our website and listen there, or you can go to Apple Podcasts or Google Play, and you can do that. So, if you do like it, please do, you know, comment, and also spread the word for a lot of people that might be able to benefit from it.

OWAIZ DADABHOY: I had fun doing one of them early on so thank you for inviting me to that one. Folks, go check that one out, and I know the more recent ones are very interesting. Cryptocurrency and a lot of different subjects. I really like those podcasts. If you want to find our past webinars on the website, you can go to amanafunds.com and search for our webinars or you can just google it: “Amana Mutual Funds webinars” and it will take you right to that page. These are contact... there’s contact information here if you want to contact any one of us on the team. So, if you have question for me or anyone on my team, you can email us, and we’ll be happy to get back to you. So, you know, at this point, I want to thank everyone for joining and, you know, we’ll have another one again next month. And so, thank you very much for joining.  

[music outro]

[Disclosure Reading]:

Please consider an investment’s objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. To obtain this and other important information, which you should carefully consider before investing, about the Amana Funds in a free prospectus or summary prospectus, please visit www.amanafunds.com or call 1-800-728-8762.