Most People Retire Differently Than They Planned. Here’s How to Prepare (SB1826)

Retirement expert Jamie Hopkins has spent 20 years helping people plan for retirement, and his most counterintuitive advice stops most savers cold: in the final years before you retire, putting more money away might actually be hurting you. This week he joins Joe and OG to explain why, and what to do instead.

In this episode:

Why financially prepared retirees still end up miserable, how to practice spending before you retire, the home bias that quietly tanks your portfolio and your quality of life at the same time, and what to actually do with all that home equity when the time comes.

Biggest takeaways:

The last three to five years of extra contributions barely move the needle on your retirement portfolio. Working six months longer matters more. So does learning to spend. Take that money and actually use it, so you’re not hitting retirement having never practiced.

Retirement isn’t a math problem, it’s an identity problem. The people who struggle most aren’t broke. They never figured out where their purpose and community would come from once work disappeared.

Over half of Americans are forced into retirement earlier than expected. You need a plan for that scenario now, not when it happens.

Resources mentioned:

Jamie Hopkins’ Retirement Sketchbook wherever books are sold

The Stacking Benjamins scorecard: stackingbenjamins.com/scorecard

The Vault: stackingbenjamins.com/vault

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://stackingbenjamins.com/how-to-plan-for-a-happier-retirement-1826

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

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Doug’s Trivia

• Before Hank Aaron broke the all time home run record in 1974, which iconic baseball player had held the record?

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Join Us Friday!

Tune in on Friday when we tackle the problem of what to do when you’re over 40 and don’t have anything in retirement savings.

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Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: You Don’t Need a Huge Income to Build Real Wealth (SB1825)

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] opener: Hi, Milton. What’s happening? 

[00:00:02] opener: I, I was, I, I didn’t receive my paycheck this week. 

[00:00:05] opener: Um, you’re gonna have to talk to payroll about that. 

[00:00:10] opener: I did. And, and they said, Mel, 

[00:00:11] opener: we’re gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs, so if you could just go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there. 

[00:00:21] opener: But 

[00:00:21] opener: that would be terrific.

[00:00:23] opener: I, I, I was okay. I could stay. Excuse me. I believe you have my stapler.

[00:00:34] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement at the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:00:49] Doug: I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and grab your art pencils or maybe just a regular one because today we are sketching out your retirement with retirement expert Jamie Hopkins. Want a plan for a happier, more fulfilling retirement? We have some tips I’m fairly certain you haven’t heard before in our headline segment.

[00:01:08] Doug: We’ll continue the retirement discussion with OG filling in the gaps so that you can also get advice from the guy who does this every day. And speaking of every day, halfway through, we’ll turn it over to the guy who’s the trivia expert three days a week. Me, I know you’ll get today’s question. Right.

[00:01:26] Doug: Well, I mean, mate, there’s a chance, right? There’s a chance. And now two guys who were right when they said yes, a stock market downturn is coming. It’s Joe and oh, ju ju

[00:01:42] Joe: Stock market downturn is coming. Doug, like, uh, winter is coming and Game of Thrones. Winter is coming. It’s 

[00:01:46] Doug: gonna happen, man. 

[00:01:48] Joe: It’s gonna happen. We’re here, out there. We predicted it. We’ve been predicting it this whole time. Hey everybody, welcome to the stack, you Benjamin show. Super happy you’re here with us on a Wednesday.

[00:01:59] Joe: We do, Doug, have a great show. Jamie Hopkins, your retirement sketchbook. Oh, gee’s. Coming in hot today, by the way. He will be here after the interview. 

[00:02:07] Doug: I think he always comes in hot. 

[00:02:10] Joe: We are. We’re gonna talk saving, investing, planning, spending your legacy. It’s really thorough. Jamie Hopkins back on the show in 2019.

[00:02:21] Joe: It’s been a long time since Jamie’s been here. 

[00:02:23] Doug: Yeah, I knew the name sounded familiar. 2019. That’s six to seven years ago. Are you kidding me? 

[00:02:30] Joe: I know. Wow. It’s been been way, way, way too long. So if you’re somebody that is wondering about what I really need to know about retirement, uh, Jamie has so many lessons.

[00:02:42] Joe: He’s a guy who’s been there with so many different people. He used to work at the American College, a place where people get their degree in certified financial planning. They become a chartered financial advisor. They help people so much. And now he’s the CEO of Bryn Mawr Trust Advisors. And he’s also the founder of the Finserv Foundation, and he’s joining us So.

[00:03:05] Joe: Cannot wait. Today’s show, by the way, brought to you by the letter WW for winning with retirement or for wealth building or even warm weather on the way. 

[00:03:19] Doug: I just saw a Muppet, like in my mind, I just saw a Muppet like the count. This like by 

[00:03:24] Joe: WI 

[00:03:28] Doug: guess he would be a number. Well, the count would do a number.

[00:03:31] Joe: He would be, yeah. Yeah. So we gotta do the letters, we have to do the letters. Because he did all the numbers. We also announced it at our event last week. By the way, if you missed a a couple weeks ago now, geez. Time flies. Our event where we watched the retirement Plan movie had a great discussion with Tom and Don.

[00:03:48] Joe: We announced that we’re working with a team at Array and now at Budget Simple, who helped? Millions of people just like you put your money in the vault. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash vault. They call it The Vault. Not only does it lock down your identity, put a wall between you and those lists where they sell your info.

[00:04:05] Joe: Dump out unwanted subscriptions. Protect your credit. We announce that the Vault very soon because of the Fine People. Budget, simple is now. Going to be a net worth tracker and budget tracker. Super sleek. I’m excited to get the word about this one. Stop. Swiss Army knife built by pros, not by Doug. 

[00:04:24] Doug: You’re lashing out.

[00:04:25] Doug: That was so unnecessary. 

[00:04:27] Joe: Well, just, I, I mean I’m sure you can build a nice app, but I know some probably build, I’ve got some friends that have built some apps and, uh, yeah, not so much. Stack your Benjamins dot com slash vault. Gets you there. Go today. Set up your privacy credit stuff. I 

[00:04:39] Doug: got a circular saw last year.

[00:04:41] Doug: I can build stuff. 

[00:04:44] Joe: He’s gonna build the, build the app with this circular, saw some 

[00:04:46] Doug: Philips head screws. 

[00:04:48] Joe: What more do you need to know everybody? Not built by Doug coming up, Jamie Hopkins. But first we actually do have a couple sponsors who help us keep on keeping on. We’re gonna hear from them so that we can make sure that people like Jamie Hopkins help us with retirement.

[00:05:04] Joe: Jamie and I coming up next.

[00:05:14] Joe: And I am super happy we got this gentleman back in mom’s basement. Jamie Hopkins is back. It’s been too long, man. 

[00:05:19] Jamie: Yeah, it’s great to see you, Joe. And yeah, I couldn’t believe it’s been as long, what’d you say? Six or seven years since I’ve been on. But, uh, it’s great to see you 

[00:05:26] Joe: 2019. And it feels like yesterday you and I were talking about mortgages and kind of planning strategies around debt, but I think this is a, this is a bigger thing.

[00:05:36] Joe: We’re, we’re slightly bigger. I saw a stat of yours that over 40% of people never really envision their retirement while they’re saving for it. Which kind of sounds Jamie like, we’re planning a road trip without picking a destination first. Why do we do that? And is, is winging it actually, as dangerous as it sounds, 

[00:05:58] Jamie: I think winging it is as dangerous as it sounds.

[00:06:01] Jamie: Part of it though is not the money part. It’s a really interesting thing. I actually see people financially kind of wing it and they just, you know, they’re saving in their retirement plans and they, they kind of have enough saved. The part that they really struggle with then is they get to retirement.

[00:06:16] Jamie: They have no idea what to do. They don’t know how to fill their days. Their meaning came from their job. Their community was the people they worked with or the friends of their kids’ parents and all that kind of disappears when you retire. And you see this really interesting dichotomy in retirement, kind of similar to our K shaped economy curve, is most people in retirement get happier.

[00:06:39] Jamie: They actually say it’s the best part of my life ever. But you also have this subset that actually goes into depression, and it’s mostly tied to, they don’t have strong community circles. They don’t have purpose for meaning, they’re not engaged in activities. And actually single individuals, uh, non-married individuals are more likely to fall into that too, because you’re losing some social connection point.

[00:06:59] Jamie: So that’s the group that I really worry about. You haven’t envisioned the future. You don’t know what you’re gonna do. You don’t know where your joy and social connection is gonna come from, how you’re gonna spend your time. And so if you’re missing that right, you are not gonna have a happy retirement.

[00:07:11] Jamie: We have people with very little money that stay super engaged with charities and their friend circles, and they’re happy in retirement. They don’t have a lot of money. They’re happy. And so I’m always like, that’s okay. Right? Like, I could be broken, happy, and that’s fine. I don’t wanna be rich and unhappy.

[00:07:27] Joe: Right. When do I start envisioning this though, Jamie? Do I start thinking about this? I’m in my thirties and my forties. Do I begin? Uh, you know, 10 days before probably that, 

[00:07:37] Jamie: yeah, 10 days before is probably a little too close. But you know, when you’re in your thirties, I, I honestly, I don’t think a lot of people can really get a good grasp of what 30 years from today, 40 years from today is gonna look like.

[00:07:51] Jamie: You could have inclinations of it. Um, but even for me, right? I’ve been in the retirement planning space for 20 years now. It’s hard for me when I think back. Mid early thirties to actually envision what retirement would look like for me. I had some thoughts, but like AI wasn’t a thing then. But yeah, like I thought I was just gonna sit around and write books and, uh, do artwork and for whatever reason, you know, fast forward 15 years and now AI’s apparently gonna do that for us.

[00:08:17] Jamie: So I gotta re-envision what that looks like. So I think that’s really hard, but the values you wanna have later in life, you can spend time on that. I know that I care a lot about the environment and so that notion of like giving back, I, I pick up trash when I’m in the streets by my house because I, I don’t want our neighborhood to have trash on the streets.

[00:08:36] Jamie: That element of me though is probably not gonna change. Right. That core. Caring part about the world. My give back elements for, you know, food and hunger and clean water, I don’t expect those to change. So I do think about my retirement in the ways that I’m gonna give back and be active. And those have stayed pretty consistent.

[00:08:54] Jamie: But like where I live or who will, you know, hopefully who I’ll be with will be similar. I think some of those things on the day to day can be complex. So I usually tell people, if you’re further away, think about like the values you hold and how you want them to show up in your future. So if you wanna be an explorer, and that’s part of who you are.

[00:09:12] Jamie: That future, you know, it’s actually bigger than a goal. It’s an aspiration. That aspiration to be an explorer, what does that mean for you? And then how can you take small steps today to be closer to that explorer? That could be a particular vacation or travel trip or road trip like you talked about, without having to fully embrace the explorer mindset.

[00:09:31] Joe: Almost like we’re just thinking about the bigger themes in life rather than the the granular activity that I’m gonna go see. This particular thing you call retirement, you coined this word, I think you coined this word, rewire. 

[00:09:44] Jamie: Yeah. 

[00:09:45] Joe: Right. Which I love because it isn’t about the math, it’s about identity.

[00:09:50] Joe: What actually has to be rewired when somebody retires. 

[00:09:53] Jamie: Yeah, that was a fun word too. So that was my first book and I did trademark that term, you know, I guess that’s close to, yeah, probably 18 years ago or something. Now when I trademarked that, 

I 

[00:10:02] Joe: should have said tm, uh, on that. Then Jamie, 

[00:10:04] Jamie: uh, yeah, my whole purpose actually the, I’ll, I’ll do the trademark thing ’cause it’s always an interesting story.

[00:10:09] Jamie: I just didn’t want somebody else to go trademark and then tell me I couldn’t use it. Like, I didn’t wanna run a business off of it, but I just, I didn’t want some corporation to grab it and be like, well, you can’t talk. We, we have this now. 

[00:10:21] Joe: Right. 

[00:10:22] Jamie: So 

[00:10:22] Joe: Rewire Ment brought to you by Merrill Lynch. 

[00:10:24] Jamie: Right. And that’s exactly what would’ve happened.

[00:10:26] Jamie: I was actually sitting at a bar eating a cheeseburger with my friend John, and the first version of that book was something about like 25 different retirement risks. And I was like, this is so boring. There’s gotta be something better. So we just started like talking and he’s like, well, then he started asking me all these questions, well, like what really happens in retirement?

[00:10:43] Jamie: And I was. Telling them that you have to like change the whole way you view your life. Both the spending, how you spend your time, your mindset about like spending is bad has to go away. You gotta figure out how to free up your days, you gotta get your paycheck from your work. And it was like you really have to rewire your brain on how you view money and time and relationships.

[00:11:03] Jamie: And so then when it was like, well how do we get rewire in retirement? And then it just kind of flew into that. And uh, you know, it was kind of based on some research we were doing back then at American College of Financial Services, which is still ongoing. It’s a great research project about retirement income literacy in the United States.

[00:11:21] Jamie: And what we see is people who get near retirement actually demonstrate a good deal of. You know, financial literacy, we kind of talk like America’s not financially literate. It’s true in mass, but when you look at 65 year olds, they’re actually financially literate at that point. Like they do gain this knowledge as they move through their life.

[00:11:38] Jamie: But the interesting part is they know nothing about retirement. They’re very financially literate. You ask ’em retirement income questions and their literacy, it falls into the forties of, uh, a test score out of a hundred. Like it’s abysmal. But the reason is they haven’t lived through it yet. So they approach the retirement world just like they did saving, but they’re really flipped on their heads, like sequence of returns risk, which I know you talk about on show many, many times doesn’t, doesn’t really come into play when you’re saving for retirement.

[00:12:05] Jamie: Like technically it’s there, but it’s not something you deal with. It’s not really a risk. So all these things get flipped on its head when you get to retirement. And I, that’s kind of where that notion of retirement changing the way we think about retirement comes from. 

[00:12:18] Joe: When, when I go to these, uh, financial independence, retire early events or just financial independence events, you see the breakout sessions, the breakout.

[00:12:26] Joe: That’s always packed, Jamie. ’cause these are filled with savers. People have saved their whole life. The breakout that’s packed is the one about how do I turn myself into a spender? How do I rewire that one little thing? You’ve been a saver your whole life. Now you have to spend, how does somebody make that switch without feeling like they’re doing something wrong or feeling this sense of loss?

[00:12:47] Jamie: Yeah. And I, I have a term I use SNS savings, not spending. And that’s what we’re taught our entire life is save. And if you just keep saving, you’ll be fine eventually. And that’s compounding and automation and it works. And then we get to retirement, we say, just kidding, you don’t need to save anymore. And you know how spend, and 

[00:13:04] Joe: it was all a sham.

[00:13:05] Jamie: Yeah. Now you 

[00:13:05] Joe: gotta spend, 

[00:13:06] Jamie: yeah, we’ve told you for 45 years that spending is bad and saving is good. You get to retirement. And uh, and then we haven’t automated any of it for you either. So not only like is it not automated and there’s no framework, but like you have to figure it out. And it really does fall on the individual today.

[00:13:20] Jamie: So you see in the US spending data is that, uh, people underspending in retirement, interestingly enough of, of people who have saved, right? Like people that don’t have the fortune to accumulate wealth, that’s a different story. But for people who are savers, they underspend in retirement. And I think there’s a couple reasons.

[00:13:37] Jamie: One is seeing their portfolios decline feels like a loss. That is a very hard emotional thing to overcome because for 45 years we trained you that if you saw the portfolio go down, it was losing money, right? The markets were bad or you were taking money out to cover debt. Something not good was going on, but in retirement, seeing it come down might be a really good thing.

[00:13:58] Jamie: So in the book, uh, the new book, uh, your Retirement sketchbook, one of the things I talk about in there is actually test driving retirement by teaching yourself to spend before you retire. And so that can actually be stopping to save, say, three to five years before retirement. And maybe you’re putting $15,000 a year away in your 401k.

[00:14:18] Jamie: And I actually recommended people stop, stop doing that. Take that money and spend it. Buy a car, go on a vacation, do something else. So you get this notion of spending what should be your retirement money earlier on. The reality is the last three to five years of saving 10 or 15 grand more does not move the needle on your retirement portfolio.

[00:14:38] Jamie: It just doesn’t, right? Like working six months longer is more important than saving 10 grand for five more years. So even if you spend that money and you enjoy yourself a little bit better, and maybe you do work six months longer, that’s gonna have a bigger impact on the longevity of your retirement portfolio.

[00:14:54] Jamie: And also it teaches you to spend that money. I even go so far to say, maybe a year or two before you actually take some withdrawals from your 401k or IRA, just to see what it’s like. Now you gotta be careful there because I don’t want you to bump up to a new tax bracket and over kind of spend. But sometimes I’ve even told people, you’re saving 15 grand a year.

[00:15:14] Jamie: You don’t need anymore in your, you know, your IRA, uh, maybe both spouses are saving. Put the money in, but also take an equal amount out to just see what are withdrawals. Like what does it feel like to take money out of these kind of, you know, they’re almost like holy grails, right? Like we put ’em over here and all the rules said don’t touch ’em ever.

[00:15:32] Jamie: And then all of a sudden we’re allowed to now go play with this thing and just get that experience of taking money out and even getting your 10 99 R form. What does that look like now that you have a different tax form you have to deal with? And I think that’s useful to do before you lose your whole community and job and other income sources.

[00:15:51] Joe: Is there ever a time when people feel like, okay, I’ve successfully made the shift, or should our stackers just be comfortable always feeling a little uncomfortable with this? 

[00:16:00] Jamie: I, I think it’s healthy to always feel a little bit uncomfortable. I think if you talk to like great performers, if you talk to great athletes and great rock stars and everybody, there should always be a little bit of that healthy anxiety before you get on stage.

[00:16:15] Jamie: It shouldn’t ever go all the way away because that usually means you don’t care anymore. Hmm. It maybe it’s a little bit more of excitement. A little bit of I’m concerned and for most people. The people listening to this show, there should be a little bit of that there and that’s okay. That kind of keeps us in check because you know, if you don’t have that and we took away all those feelings and emotions, right?

[00:16:35] Jamie: We could just spend all of it in one year. That’s a bad thing, right? So you should have a little bit of that, but enough to give yourself permission to spend. I’m also a big fan of having some secure income sources, whether it’s social security, a pension annuity, a bond ladder. Because when you see people with more of a floor, what then they say is like, I can spend that amount.

[00:16:55] Jamie: It’s some of the benefits of like having long-term care insurance. I’ve never met anybody who is like, I don’t wanna spend the long-term care insurance money. Right? But they will choose not to spend their own savings. It’s different then giving yourself in both of those cases, permission to spend I think is very healthy.

[00:17:10] Jamie: But a little bit of anxiety is okay. Um, I think it’s a healthy for our decision making and, uh, structure in life about not overdoing things. 

[00:17:19] Joe: I wanna circle back to long-term care in a little bit, because as you already know, this is kind of the Achilles heel of any retirement. Mm-hmm. But before we get there, I wanna bring up this idea of biases.

[00:17:31] Joe: You know, we’re biased towards saving, not spending. You point out that our biases are even bigger than that. What’s funny is I just interviewed these wonderful researchers for a project they did called Stock Market Maestros, where they were looking at these top investors, these professional investors, and the big thing these investors have to do, Jamie, is they have to guard against their bias.

[00:17:55] Joe: They have to do it. What I love is that you do this on a wider level with retirement, like we have these biases when it comes to our retirement. What are some of the common biases that you see that. Might sabotage a healthy, happy retirement. 

[00:18:10] Jamie: Yeah, and I, I’ll walk through a couple of these and we’ll start with one that relates actually to the investor world is home bias.

[00:18:17] Jamie: Uh, home bias is an interesting one. Uh, if people aren’t familiar with it, but you tend to overly invest in things near you and you know, things that you’re aware of. And across the United States this plays out. It both plays out on the, like a global scale that US investors tend to be overweight US investments, which great for Americans, we’ve outperformed, so congrats.

[00:18:39] Jamie: But this happens in all other countries too. They tend to overweight to their own economy and companies from their country, which does not always work out well. But in the United States, which has been super interesting, is that East coast. People, I don’t know what, I don’t know what happens in Texas, but East Coast people tend, actually, I do know what happens in Texas, that was a lie, but East Coast people tend to overweight financial companies.

[00:19:02] Jamie: So when you look at our investments across the board, were overweighted financial. When you get to the West coast, people tend to overweight tech, which is interesting because for the past 15 years, west coast investors have outperformed East coast investors because tech investments have outperformed financial companies.

[00:19:18] Jamie: Now, when you get to Texas, in middle of the country, like Omaha, kind of straight down south, you all tend to overweight energy sector, so you’re bigger into oil, gas, et cetera. You get these home biases on our investing, which does impact our portfolios, which is very interesting. 

[00:19:33] Joe: It’s actually funny you say that, Jamie, because I was the Channel seven money man in Detroit for nine years.

[00:19:39] Joe: Back when I was a financial planner, everybody had automotive stocks. Yeah. Like everybody in Detroit had automotive stocks in their, even if they didn’t work in the industry, they had automotive in their portfolio. 

[00:19:48] Jamie: Yeah. And, and why is this important for retirement? There’s a very interesting thing on this and, uh, we had a, I, I think actually actually David Blanchet, if I get this right, he had some research on this years ago.

[00:20:00] Jamie: Well, the reason that this is an issue for retirees is one, their portfolios aren’t as diversified as they should be. That’s number one. Number two is they often still live and retire in the town that they worked in. So, Joe, using your example, you live and work in Detroit. You retire in Detroit, you’re overweighted into GM and different, you know, motor vehicle companies, and then they have a downturn.

[00:20:24] Jamie: And what happens? Your home value drops. Your portfolio drops, your enjoyment of life drops because the quality of the town actually erodes. Now, Detroit bounced back, but in Pennsylvania what we had for a long time was all the steel towns and the steel companies went away and those towns went from these thriving, beautiful mansions where all the wealthiest people in the country live to run down places where you drive through some of those towns in Pennsylvania now.

[00:20:51] Jamie: And it is really like a bygone error that just disappeared. Like it is amazing ’cause you see these places and architecturally they’re beautiful and there’s nothing left in the town. When steel went away and your houses, your investment and the quality of life all went away because this was the lifeblood of that town.

[00:21:07] Jamie: And so. Especially in areas that are very centric to one industry, that is a real retirement risk and bias that you have towards what you know, that you know, diversifying is an important thing from your portfolio and income sources for those different areas. And it’s not one that people think about how like my investment, my quality of life and my house and retirement might actually all be correlated in an environment like that.

[00:21:33] Joe: Speaking of investments, you lay out the different places where we can invest like our 4 0 1 Ks, our IRAs, HSAs, and begin sketching how these things are gonna work together to create this retirement engine for us. You detail some recent, uh, changes, secure 2.0 and how Secure 2.0 has really, you know, it’s changed the game a little bit.

[00:21:52] Joe: Jamie, as you point out, like student loan matching is an example Yeah. Is something that we, we didn’t really see much anymore is becoming more prevalent. What are some other things that Secure 2.0 has done for us that might make our retirement game better? 

[00:22:07] Jamie: Well, I’ll go back. Uh, I’d say a bit of a broader policy conversation that’s been going on since probably 2016.

[00:22:14] Jamie: And you go to Tax Cut and Job Act, secure Act 1.0, secure Act 2.0 and the big beautiful bill and one, actually there’s three themes that flow through all that. One is tax cuts across the board. Most of these provisions have been about reducing taxes for about a decade now. Now that’s having its own other challenge, right?

[00:22:34] Jamie: As we are seeing the deficit grow to levels. We’ve never seen it this year and there’s concern about that, but that has been a purposeful policy. You know, we have been cutting taxes for a decade now that has good and bad to it. That’s more of a, I’d say, a bit of a political philosophy. The next part is from a retirement savings One is we did wanna broaden out the ability for people to contribute to retirement plans.

[00:22:57] Jamie: And so when you look at 2017 to now, we’ve removed some limitations to contribute for your instances, right? You can get a match from your employer if you’re paying off debt for student loans. We also had this, uh, you know, 5 29 to Roth rollover vehicle, which is another way that. Could get money to a retirement savings vehicle.

[00:23:17] Jamie: We reduced down the cost for startup plans, giving bigger tax credits for small business owners. Um, we gave some really good incentives for the 1 99 cap a provision, which everyone’s gonna be like, well that’s a lot of jargon, but it’s a small business pass through deduction, which was one of the more powerful features of tax Cut and Job Act.

[00:23:36] Jamie: But that shifted a lot of importance on using 4 0 1 Ks and cash balance plans and some types of pension plans out there back into the market. So we did have a very big encouragement to go save in retirement plans over the last decade. The third part that came out of this was very interesting is we add a lot of ways to take your money out of these plants at the same time.

[00:24:00] Jamie: And there was a, a lot of news, I’d say in the last couple months about how 2025 more people took out kind of like pre-retirement money out of the retirement plans. Yeah. Before. And I was like, well. That’s been the policy changes for almost a decade now of giving hardship, withdrawals and, uh, what’s the disaster relief access points if you’re in a disaster relief area, a natural disaster, you can get access to these.

[00:24:27] Jamie: We opened up that door and the reality is that was a policy decision and so now more money is coming out. But I’m like, that should be expected. If we open up the door and then write, the air conditioning goes outside, we say, how’d the air conditioning get outside? And you’re like, well, you open up the door, like 

[00:24:41] Joe: you leave the lid off the cookie jar, Doug’s gonna go grab a couple of chocolate chips.

[00:24:45] Joe: Yeah. 

[00:24:45] Jamie: Yeah. And so that’s kind of where we are today. But those have been three big policy decisions. This one’s an interesting one. One, if you don’t mind me adding one thing, it’s tangentially related here, but we’ve also had a policy decision to kind of reduce down charitable giving at the same time, and that’s been kind of a counter thing to this, is charitable giving right now is about as expensive as it’s ever been.

[00:25:09] Jamie: You know, for my life and your life, we’ve got these floors, we’ve capped the upside of it, you know, at the 35% tax bracket. And that has been a big change too, that we will probably see over the next two years fairly significant declines in charitable giving. And we have seen a decline since 2017, like adjusted run rate of charitable giving as we made the number of people that would benefit from giving to charity decline with those rules.

[00:25:36] Jamie: But that’s again, like that’s been purposeful policies, not by accident, right? We’ve tried to move money away from charities to corporations in the last decade, but that’s something for retirees to think about, to use qualified charitable distributions, which on the flip side are more valuable than they’ve ever been today.

[00:25:54] Jamie: Like that, that while we reduced the other ways to give to charity, that one in turn actually became more valuable. So we kind of saw this shift to retirement assets being better charitable devices than ever before. 

[00:26:06] Joe: I wanna do just a quick lightning round about some of, I’m gonna call them some of your, uh, spicy topics, okay.

[00:26:12] Joe: In the book. Alright. Uh, you mentioned home bias already, which I thought was one of the spicy topics, but just very briefly, let’s go through these ESG and sustainable investing. This has gone from hot to controversial. How should a normal investor think about ESG without getting caught up in the headlines?

[00:26:29] Jamie: Yeah, I mean, ESG became very politicized in the United States. If you look globally, I mean, this is the framework for most investing outside of the United States. Even the big companies here, BlackRock, et cetera, it’s done very well elsewhere. I think everybody should care about the sustainability of companies.

[00:26:45] Jamie: If you look at performance of companies, it’s do they take care of their community, their people, and their stakeholders. Companies that do all three of them perform the best long term. So like to me, this caring about sustainability is important. It might not be ESG. I think that term got destroyed here.

[00:27:02] Jamie: It’s probably should go away. But value-based investing to me is important. What do you care about? There’s people who want Christian funds, there’s people who want clean energy funds, and those are more aligned with your values and where you put your money on what you care about. And I think that is important.

[00:27:20] Joe: Annuities. These might be the most, whether you love ’em or you hate ’em, I think they’re the most misunderstood. 

[00:27:25] Jamie: Oh yeah. 

[00:27:26] Joe: Product. Where do they actually fit? 

[00:27:28] Jamie: So the challenge with annuities, to your point of being misunderstood, is every company that creates an annuity gives it a new name of Secure plus universal.

[00:27:37] Jamie: You know, and you have no idea what that means, right? Like, I mean, they all have these funny, secure, universal, whatever, plus, or you know, plus plus. I think there is one that’s called like Plus plus. And you’re like, I, what is, I don’t know what that is. And they come up with these very weird names to try to differentiate in the market.

[00:27:54] Jamie: I usually think of annuities. There’s like four buckets of them. So you have these RI A and FIAs that are indexed to mostly S and P and other indexes. Those have been very popular and grown a lot the last couple years. They’re kind of 

[00:28:07] Joe: RI a. What’s a ri a? 

[00:28:09] Jamie: Yeah. Registered index, linked annuity. Those are the fastest growing annuities out there, and essentially you’re linking it to an s and p 500 for your performance and kind of putting a, that’s 

[00:28:18] Joe: an equity, like just an equity index annuity.

[00:28:20] Jamie: Yeah. Similar to an equity index annuity. Those have really, really grown. What has never really taken off to the way academics thought is our SPS and Diaz, so our actual income annuity, so a single premium income annuity, like this is where all the academics spend all their time on these and they love them, and then like the sales are just like this, like they just never took off and deferred income annuities, I think that’s a really hard sell because you’re gonna.

[00:28:47] Jamie: Drop a money a bunch of money in, but you’re not gonna get income for years when you think about the human condition. We’re not great at deferring out right benefits into the future. Like we’re really bad at that. So like foundationally, that’s a hard product to get people to buy into. Academically and functionally it’s an excellent product because of the way mortality tables and like pooled funding for deferred income works.

[00:29:09] Jamie: It’s a fantastic product. From an economic perspective, it’s really hard to get people to buy it. My concern though, with annuities is often, the fact I use this phrase is that they’re underutilized and oversold. So what I see annuity salespeople doing is selling them as a solution for everything, and they’re not, I’m not a big fan of using them as like an equity offset.

[00:29:31] Jamie: I think you should be in the markets instead of using that kind of equity gain strategy. I do think annuities are fantastic for providing lifetime income and it, it can be a way to layer on top of your other resources. But that takes me back, topis and Diaz, which just haven’t been that popular, but what they do when you look at people who buy ’em, here’s the flip side.

[00:29:53] Jamie: It’s like people who buy annuities. And use ’em for income, like love them. The like satisfaction rate for people using income annuities is like, I mean, it’s more like than Apple. It’s more like than Disney. So you look at all these other products and things out there, but people who use income annuities love ’em because they get this payment that shows up in the mail and it provides for their basic needs.

[00:30:15] Jamie: The other annuity side, I think people buy ’em and don’t really understand ’em that well, and they’re, they’re not actually as satisfied because when it’s sold for everything, you’re not really sure how you’re supposed to use it or when, but those are actually the ones that sell because they sell ’em for everything.

[00:30:29] Jamie: And then the ones that make a lot of sense don’t get utilized enough. So we have this bit of an issue and, and I’ve been very critical of the marketing of the annuity world. I’ve tried to help some companies with their marketing materials in the past and some of their strategies, but, uh, one person, you know, I, I’ve not made a dent in that and I think it’s still poorly done today.

[00:30:49] Joe: I went to a, uh, symposium at MIT on this very topic, and they had annuity companies like Lincoln Financial and, and some of the other big boys. And then they had, uh, regular people and they had media people like people like you, me, and it was interesting to see the huge disconnect, Jamie, the things that the annuity companies were selling versus what the average person was telling them.

[00:31:14] Joe: Like the MIT folks were trying to get everybody to talk, and it was so frustrating because the average person would say. I love an income stream and the annuity salespeople were like, well, but you’re gonna like all this other crap. We wanna, we wanna layer on top of it. Life insurance and retirement. I think a lot of people think, okay, I’m retired.

[00:31:34] Joe: I have enough to live on. I don’t need my life insurance anymore. True or false? 

[00:31:37] Jamie: Yeah, false. You know, you’re right. This is probably one of the biggest misunderstood things. Life insurance, even a term might be convertible and you should at least look at it. You might not need it, but you might wanna convert it to a permanent policy in retirement.

[00:31:50] Jamie: Couple things, you can sometimes get cash value, which you can use and withdraw from in retirement tax free. Some of them have loan provisions, some of them can be converted to policies. You know, a 10 35 exchange over to a policy which is a tax free exchange of an existing policy to a policy with a long-term care rider on it, which could be a way for you to get some long-term care coverage when you might not be insurable for direct long-term care anymore.

[00:32:16] Jamie: So that’s a good one. I will say when we talk with spouses, it’s more often the mom, but it’s not only the case where the mom wants to leave a certain amount for the kids and liquidity. It’s like, you know, some type of benefit. And this takes that off the table, right? Like you just don’t have to worry about like hoarding onto your IRA and 401k to leave some legacy amount for your kids.

[00:32:37] Jamie: So if you have a permanent policy, you just know that they’re gonna get one and a half million dollars and you don’t have to worry about, you can spend everything else on yourself then in retirement. So if that becomes a core desired need, it is an efficient way to fund a legacy benefit. It’s tax free.

[00:32:53] Jamie: It’s one of the best ways to fund a legacy, right? I mean, it really is the best way to fund a legacy if that’s not a desire. There are times when you should drop your policy. You should give it up. You should surrender it for the cash value. And I do always recommend that if you are near retirement and have a policy and maybe it’s continued premium payment, you should check the secondary market before you just go back and surrender it.

[00:33:15] Jamie: Very few people look at that. It’s not always better, but there are times where the secondary market will pay you more for that policy then giving it back to the insurance carrier will pay you for it. And so you should just always be looking like, where can I get the most money for this? Somebody uh, used this analogy with me before, it’s like buying a house and then only trying to sell it back to the builder versus taking it to the market.

[00:33:38] Jamie: And I was like, where do you think you’re gonna get more money? You’ll get more money on the open market. It’s not always the case, but it is a good analogy. 

[00:33:46] Joe: Yeah. The number of times I’ve seen people let the policy lapse or they take out the cash value versus selling it back without even looking at that, I think that’s an important point.

[00:33:57] Joe: I love that you brought long-term care. I said we need to circle back to it. I think Jamie now is the time. You know, this is the CFPs conundrum, and I think if you’re the average person going into retirement, you ask any pro, like, what do you think about long-term care? And they’re like, oh man. Oh man. How do we begin picking that luck?

[00:34:16] Jamie: I often tell people I don’t believe that we are facing a retirement crisis in the United States. Uh, Americans are adaptable. We figure out ways to deal with things. I talked about it earlier. Retirees are happier than the general population. So if you call that a crisis, like that’s your definition. I, I don’t view happier people as a crisis.

[00:34:34] Jamie: The caveat to that is individuals do face crises in retirement, and the biggest one that I worry about from a financial and care standpoint is this long-term care issue. It is happening in kind of a couple different ways. The first one is our families have gotten smaller and more dispersed. We have relied historically across the world on family members providing long-term care.

[00:34:58] Jamie: We don’t have great systems of long-term care providers across the world or our country. We rely on unpaid relatives. Our kids. Our spouses and as our families get smaller, we don’t have enough caregivers. And as we get divorced more frequently in post 65, we don’t have spouses to take this off. And we have not saved enough money to cover these third party caregivers where this is running, you know, a hundred thousand dollars plus a year, two, three years in long-term care.

[00:35:27] Jamie: And the first spouse has wiped out all of their savings. And this is a very scary thing. There are some states now where the majority of their state budget. Medicaid, which is really our long-term care costs. That is scary. Where the majority of a state budget is now going to essentially long-term care costs.

[00:35:46] Jamie: That is not a good place to be. We don’t have products that have caught on and function well for the mass market. So long-term care insurance, if you can afford it, you got it. You probably should keep it. It’s usually a good, you know, it’s, it’s been one of those things you probably should keep it. It’s been a good product from that standpoint.

[00:36:03] Jamie: A little bit of these hybrid life insurance, long-term care, and interestingly enough, that is probably the best product design out there from a risk mitigation on both sides. From an actuarial, they kind of offset risks, which has been very interesting. But we’re still talking about like a per 1% of the population that has these in place.

[00:36:22] Jamie: So this remains today the biggest. Unfunded liability for retirement that’s out there with no good solutions coming down the door. The federal government’s put together long-term care commissions before, and basically if you look at like the stuff they’ve put out, they don’t have solutions. These are the smartest people and they’re like, oh, well like allow for more at home care.

[00:36:41] Jamie: Like 

[00:36:43] Joe: Right, thank you. 

[00:36:44] Jamie: That’s our smartest idea that we have. Which is a good idea, but like, you know, this is not gonna solve the problem. 

[00:36:53] Joe: It does sound like a little bit of pandering. ’cause I don’t remember a client relationship I ever had back when I was a planner. When somebody’s like, you know, I really want the facility over staying at home.

[00:37:01] Joe: Like, if I could get that facility, that would be great. Nobody wants to begin there 

[00:37:05] Jamie: except for me. Interestingly. So my grandfather went through an aging in place, one with the long-term care, right? Like the continued care retirement community. And I’ve told everybody since I watched him go through, my grandmother passed away first and then he was in there and I’m like, that’s where I wanna be.

[00:37:21] Jamie: Yeah. That was the best setup. That’s funny that I can imagine 

[00:37:24] Joe: the misconceptions people have and I love that they had a TV show recently that brought it out with, uh, Ted Danson. Yeah. Where he goes into this, you know, as a detective and then he figures out, this is a great place. I wanna, I wanna be here.

[00:37:38] Joe: Pretty, pretty awesome. Uh, I wanna talk about curve balls in our planning because you bring up a couple interesting nuances with planning our retirement. 54% of people retire at a different time than they expected, not by choice. 52% of us just over one in two. Are forced into retirement. How do we prepare for something that we can’t predict?

[00:38:00] Joe: How do we make sure that the, uh, life preservers there when I need it? 

[00:38:04] Jamie: Yeah. I, I usually say this is preparing for the known unknowns. Uh, we don’t know when this is gonna happen, but it’s just as likely as not that we’re gonna be forced into retirement, um, as, as that we’re gonna get to pick our own retirement date.

[00:38:17] Jamie: And so the point of that is you need a plan for early retirement. When I’m on radio shows like, you, you did this forever. And I get callers that call in and talk to me. It’s mostly, I was doing great. We had a plan. I got laid off. Yeah, my husband got laid off three months later and now we don’t know how to make it.

[00:38:34] Jamie: That is a reality of the world. It’s gonna happen. And I think with AI and disruption to the market coming, we’re gonna see more of that in the next couple years. We have to start planning for what that looks like. We don’t have a magic, uh, time machine that goes back in time says I could have saved more in the past.

[00:38:50] Jamie: What that means is we have to think about what part-time work could I do if I got laid off right? How do I cut expenditures if I get laid off and quickly? So I’ve gotta turn off subscriptions month one, right? I can’t have seven streaming services. I might just have to deal with it for a bit, right? And read the news and go to Yahoo and walk outside and, you know, do normal things we did before the internet.

[00:39:14] Jamie: It’s 

[00:39:15] Joe: crazy talk Jamie. 

[00:39:16] Jamie: I know. Um, when you hear that, you’re like, well, you can’t do I need Netflix. And you don’t need Netflix, right? And if that is a five-year thing, you need to give up to save $5,000. You need to do it. And you need to know ahead of time what are the things you’re willing to cut back on and do it right away.

[00:39:33] Jamie: ’cause when you let that stuff trickle through, that, like that expenditure side is what you’re gonna have more control over. So you have to have a plan for how you will change your lifestyle if you get pushed into early retirement. 

[00:39:45] Joe: On the other side when we can retire whenever we want to. I love this idea.

[00:39:50] Joe: And Christine Ben, who, uh, endorsed your book, wonderful Woman at Morningstar, she really likes this idea of a phased retirement. And I love that you bring up this idea of a phased retirement. What are the real pros and cons of maybe dipping our foot in the retirement pool before we jump in with both feet?

[00:40:08] Jamie: My favorite thing about phased retirement is the potential to work longer. And so that is actually what you see with phased retirement is as people scale back, they become like able to manage that new balance of work and life better. Because when you’re just running a hundred miles an hour all the time at work, you just feel like, I can’t do this anymore at 68.

[00:40:31] Jamie: And a lot of people just then go cold Turkey and you’re like, there’s no in between. It’s I’m gonna work. To the last day, but when you can phase it out, and often that might be moving to a different role, going part-time, changing some of your job duties, quitting and being rehired back into a new role that are retiring and being hired back to a new role.

[00:40:50] Jamie: Those are all ways this works. What you see is not very many companies in the United States have formal phased retirement programs in place. So the scary part becomes people don’t want to ask their boss, their managers, their companies about this. They don’t even broach the conversation. I tell people all the time, go talk to your company, ask them about this and you could do it earlier.

[00:41:11] Jamie: So they’re not thinking, Hey, like Joe’s getting ready to retire next year. Why is he asking me about this? Right. Do it early and understand what have they done in the past for people. I do it all the time with the people who work for, you know, our firm at Wisfis and Primar Trust. I’ve got two people retiring this summer and then going part-time and I love that.

[00:41:29] Jamie: And if I can keep them around their institutional knowledge and they can, you know, come back. Actually, funny enough, I had somebody who retired last summer, uh, my COO, and he’s gonna come back and. Do some stuff again in May. ’cause he’s bored, of course, wants to be engaged. But I left that open for him when he said he wanted to retire.

[00:41:46] Jamie: I was like, look, see how you feel and if in six months you want to come back and do something, like reach out. And he did. We got coffee and we’re gonna figure something out for him in May. I think that’s really important. But not every company’s gonna be like that. There are companies that will not work with you on this, but figure that out ahead of time so you’re not fearful of it.

[00:42:04] Jamie: When you walk in the room and be like thinking about retiring and they’re like, okay, see you later. We’re excited to replace you, but do it. See what other people have done. Does the company have a history of allowing people to have phased retirements? Those are all good markers. Before you jump into it, 

[00:42:18] Joe: how is this whole retirement planning different for single people than for, uh, people in a committed relationship or married?

[00:42:26] Jamie: The partnership in retirement, whatever you want to call that in today’s world, right? Uh, co-living and all different types of that. You get to share expenses, and when you share expenses, retirement is less expensive. You think about housing being a big one. And if you both need separate apartments or both need separate houses, you basically double the cost and that’s gonna be your single biggest retirement expense is housing, healthcare, and taxes.

[00:42:52] Jamie: Those are the three biggest American expenses in retirement. Taxes don’t change a whole lot. Right? Healthcare though, back to our other point. If you have somebody with you, you actually can help each other on some of these things that otherwise you might have to fully outsource for long-term care, even basic healthcare things.

[00:43:09] Jamie: And then housing is a big one. The other thing is when you have people with two income sources, say social security, that can be beneficial. ’cause you’ve got two floors now covering some basic expenditures and when one of them passes away and now you’re a single widowed individual or widower, right? You lost one of those two benefits and you probably didn’t lose much of the expenses.

[00:43:31] Jamie: So what you see is that individual retirement is more expensive, on average, more likely to be isolated and depressed and more likely to run outta money. That is the group. And if you looked at then 2025, there was a spike in, uh, seniors, uh, living in poverty, which we had a really nice like. Decade long decline of that.

[00:43:51] Jamie: And we had a bit of a jump back up in 2025, but when you dive into that data, it’s mostly in the single individuals. It was not couples that moved up. It was majority driven by single individuals moving up. ’cause you think about inflation costs going up and these other income sources aren’t keeping up with that.

[00:44:08] Jamie: So you got this widening out where the expenses and not a lot of income and that puts them in a really challenging space. And especially when you talk about long-term care, then there’s nobody to help out at the home. 

[00:44:19] Joe: Yeah. It’s such a different journey for everyone. Part of that’s magic. Part of it’s frustrating.

[00:44:25] Joe: And to go back to the beginning, man, if you’re winging it and you’re about there, I think it’s gonna be a difficult transition. But you know what, I think Jamie, today, you were able to help our stackers a ton. Thank you so much. Believe it or not. Jamie and co-author Bonnie t Trico have written a book on this topic.

[00:44:43] Joe: I know that you guys find that shocking, but, but you have sketched out all of this stuff. In fact, it’s funny you call it a retirement sketchbook, but I don’t think there’s a stone unturned. I mean, we’ve been talking now for 40 minutes, Jamie, and we have barely begun to dive into the stuff that you go into, like 125 retirement planning lessons from financial experts.

[00:45:06] Joe: What surprised you when you were writing this book? 

[00:45:08] Jamie: That there are more than 125. Yeah. When we outlined it, we ended up, I think 175 and cut back. The other thing is the book was written to be kind of like this conversation, right? We called it snackable that you could pick it up and choose four or five of them.

[00:45:26] Jamie: It’s really not written to be read from, you know, page one to whatever it is, 280 pages or something. There are 125 sketches in here. So we drew this out. Most people are visual learners and almost nothing in our space is visual. It’s all been boiled down to spreadsheets and Monte Carlo analysis, but not for how real Americans people learn.

[00:45:47] Jamie: So we wanted to make it snackable a little bit more fun and with drawings. ’cause people are always like, wait, does this book have drawings in it? Uh, they always joke about that. I’m like, in fact it does have 125 drawings. And then they’re like, oh, I might like this one then. 

[00:46:00] Joe: Well, and who is your artist?

[00:46:01] Joe: Because I love the drawings. 

[00:46:03] Jamie: Yeah, so she was phenomenal. We actually interviewed a bunch of artists, interestingly enough, we tried to, her name’s Grace and um, we tried to use AI like 18 months ago and it like couldn’t spell back then, right? You try to do stuff and it’s come a long way. Uh, but we also made that decision to make it humans and we wanted a actual artist to do it.

[00:46:23] Jamie: I did about 10 of these and they took me like six months and we were like, we’ll never finish this book. So then we had to go get an artist. Uh, but Grace was phenomenal. It was also really fun ’cause she doesn’t come from this space. She does, uh, hallmark cards. Interestingly enough, we had to like explain the concepts to her.

[00:46:42] Jamie: So building the drawings was, does this actually help her understand them? And so like, it was a great way to do it versus finding somebody that knew the space. 

[00:46:51] Joe: It’s like having a, like having an alpha reader for your book. 

[00:46:55] Jamie: Yes. 

[00:46:55] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Your retirement sketchbook. And it’s available as of last week everywhere, right?

[00:47:01] Jamie: Yeah, everywhere. 

[00:47:03] Joe: Jamie, thank you so much for helping us, uh, man. Retirement. It can be such a fun journey. And I think you hopefully just made it a lot more fun for a lot of our stackers. 

[00:47:12] Jamie: Yeah. Well, Joe, thanks for having me on. And stackers, thanks for listening. 

[00:47:15] Joe: We’ll see you again. Hopefully not next time, seven years from now.

[00:47:18] Joe: Let’s do this again sooner.

[00:47:24] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and it’s time for you to hit a home run on today’s trivia. You got this. It’s today’s date, but it’s back in 1974, and Hank Aaron steps up to bat. Nearly as well as I would’ve done it. I’m just saying. Anyway, he drives the ball over the fence. That’s right.

[00:47:44] Doug: Between Hank Aaron and me, we’ve now hit 715 Major League Homers, breaking the record set long, long before by a guy they said must have been a witch because he cursed a city when he left, who had held the longtime record for home runs before Aaron and me, I’ll be back with the answer I’m pulling for you to know right after I go find out what secret sauce turns an IRA into a Roth extra butter maybe.

[00:48:12] Doug: It’s probably extra butter fixes everything.

[00:48:21] Doug: Hey there, stacker. I’m Roth. IRA lover and guy who’s always looking for better saving ideas. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. It turns out that the secret sauce in a Roth is that you don’t claim it as a tax break today. Like a great pie. It’s great out of the oven and the equivalent of fat free, tax free. Okay, I’m seeing the similarity here.

[00:48:42] Doug: You also gotta put it in a container that says Roth. Just ask your brokerage. They’ll provide it. Pretty awesome, right? Also awesome is the fact that between Hank Aaron and I, we have 715 home runs, although he’s done the heavy lifting so far hitting exactly 715 of those. My time is right around the corner.

[00:49:03] Doug: But we jointly, we emphasis on the, we jointly broke the record for the most back in 1974. Prior to us, that record had been held for what felt like forever by what iconic baseball player. I’ll give you another clue. Not only was the baseball player cursed, but his departure from Boston to New York seemed to place a curse on the whole city of Boston.

[00:49:26] Doug: That player was none other than Babe Roth. Uh uh, sorry, babe Ruth. And it took Boston 86 years to break that curse. True story. Boston also broke another curse this year. The city has been cursed since its founding without having a Benjamin’s after dark group occurs. Finally lifted last month by some intrepid stacker in New England.

[00:49:49] Doug: You can join them tonight if you’re near Hannah’s Brewing in Melrose at 6:00 PM. And now two guys who are about to help you hit a home run with all this gold from Jamie Hopkins. It’s Joe and og. 

[00:50:04] Joe: Big thanks to Jamie for joining us and you know this idea OG again, that we just can’t wing retirement that may sketching this out.

[00:50:12] OG: Just, just wing it. 

[00:50:12] Doug: It’s fine. Everybody makes such a big deal about it. I know, 

[00:50:16] Joe: you know, he talked about a few important points, but I want to dig into a couple more from his retirement sketchbook. There’s obviously so much here that we need to talk about when it comes to retirement, but one area we didn’t do was this idea of paycheck replacement, crafting your own custom paycheck with all the different income sources.

[00:50:37] Joe: Like how do you guys help people think about that? Og, if you’re helping somebody draw a map of, all right, do I withdraw from this account first? Do I withdraw from this? Do I go ahead and take social security early? Like how do I put all those things together to make a new paycheck? 

[00:50:51] OG: Yeah, we wing it. 

[00:50:53] Doug: Yeah.

[00:50:53] Doug: You know how I, I mean, I’ve crafted my paychecks with a photocopier, like a really high quality photocopier. Yeah. 

[00:50:58] OG: And you 

[00:50:59] Joe: put a big number on it. 

[00:51:00] OG: A really big 

[00:51:01] Joe: number. 

[00:51:01] OG: Wasn’t that the, the check forger guy in the uh, yeah. 

[00:51:04] Doug: Catch me if you can. 

[00:51:05] OG: DiCaprio movie. 

[00:51:06] Doug: Yeah. 

[00:51:06] OG: You know, the interesting thing about cash flow in retirement or as you’re getting close to retirement is everybody wants to have the exact prescription, but in reality it changes year to year.

[00:51:16] OG: It really largely depends on what’s going on in the rest of your world and like kinda your behavior. Some people, this came up a couple of years ago, some people feel constrained. By getting a check at $10,000 deposited in their account every the first of every month as a paycheck because they go, well, you know, the first three months we spend in Florida in this wintertime, and then budget’s like 12 or 13,000.

[00:51:39] OG: But in the summertime it’s more like seven or eight. So that’s how we make it up. But I feel constrained in January, February. Like, why should you? Right? It’s all your money. So some people prefer, Hey, I’ll take all my cash on Jan one and then I’ll choose how to spend it throughout the year. Some people can’t be trusted with that amount of money and like need to have the constraint of like, here’s your money for January.

[00:52:01] OG: And you know, they’re like, it’s the 20th I’m out. And, and you go, that’s too bad. You know, we’ll see you in the first, you have to customize it for who you are, what’s going on in your world, and, uh, kind of know yourself a little bit. And the other part about like social security and IRAs and, you know, Roth distributions and stuff.

[00:52:20] OG: This all matters from a tax standpoint year to year. Where are you falling in terms, you know, one year you had a bunch of capital gains and dividends. But you gotta be careful of IRA withdrawals. ’cause now that’s gonna have a bigger impact to potentially Medicare premiums or, you know, your Roth conversion strategy is gonna blow up because, you know, you thought you’re in the 12% bracket and really you’re in the 22% bracket now because you had.

[00:52:44] OG: There’s always the risk of like surprise income and you go, well, surprise income’s great. Unless you’ve already planned out your tax strategy pretty close, and then all of a sudden you win a scratch off or you inherit it, you know you’ve got an inherited IRA to deal with 

[00:52:59] Doug: God. I hate when that happens. 

[00:53:01] OG: I know that’s so bad.

[00:53:01] Joe: It is a good problem to have, but man, if you handle that wrong, you could end up, 

[00:53:05] OG: well. I mean, you end up paying forfeiting a bunch of it, 40% taxes instead of 20 just by being off by a digit or two. There is no way to say, okay, I’m 50, this is my retirement income strategy when I’m 65. I think you gotta plan out 65 when you’re 64 and you have a pretty good idea what 66 and 67 might look like, but remain flexible as those years come up because you don’t know what’s really gonna happen.

[00:53:28] Joe: That is an important point. You know, those first couple years of retirement, like Jamie was talking about, you’re really gonna set the needle on what your spending looks like. Taking just a little bit more time to be conscious of. Do I value this? Is this really what I want my income stream to be? Because, you know, OG you’ve been in this situation before.

[00:53:45] Joe: Somebody decides to take a little more, they don’t end up spending it, but they get addicted to, or they do spend it, but they spend it on stupid stuff. They get addicted to this additional spending they don’t really care about. And then when bad things happen, and they were too close to the quote, safe withdrawal line, right?

[00:54:00] Joe: The the point where it looks like they’re gonna maybe run outta money, man, it’s harder to cut back later than it is to set the tone right away. 

[00:54:07] OG: I think there’s two different things here that you’re talking about. One is taking money out because you’re, you know, using the $10,000 number. It’s like, well, that’s my budget.

[00:54:14] OG: That’s what the plan says. I’m gonna take 10,000 out. And then you finish the year with 30 grand in your savings account. Well, you really only needed to take 90 out. One 20 and you go, well, what does that matter? It’s all my money. Well, what it matters is where those buckets are. So you just converted long-term money to short-term money or short-term money to now money, and you didn’t need to.

[00:54:35] OG: That money could have stayed in those further buckets. And if you compound that over periods of time, it’s no different than somebody who’s in their forties that goes, I don’t need to deal with my RSUs right now. I mean, it’s 500 shares, who cares? And then 10 years later they go, oh crap. I have all this company stock.

[00:54:49] OG: It’s at a low basis. I paid some taxes on some of it, but I can’t remember a which. And my company’s doing really well and I wanna sell some of it, but now I’m gonna pay this big tax bill. Also. I’m 50. And so they’re paying me a bunch of money and giving me more stock. And so all these things compete at the same time.

[00:55:04] OG: If you don’t have a plan for it going into it, or at least, um. You know, reconciliation, maybe on the backend, you know, you can say, Hey, this is my plan for the year, but in September or October you better look and say, am I gonna keep doing this in 2027 or can I knock this down to eight or do I need to increase it to 12?

[00:55:21] OG: ’cause I racked up some credit card bills. ’cause I spent more than I thought. The other piece of it was, I mean, that you were talking about was spending, I mean, spending is fun. Okay. 

[00:55:32] Joe: Don’t ask, do I value this? Ask how can I make this valuable? 

[00:55:36] OG: How can I, how can I make it feel valuable in the short run? How do I get the dopamine without the dopamine?

[00:55:41] Joe: That’s right. 

[00:55:42] OG: And if you understand psychology, a little bit of that, I was talking with a friend of mine about this, this bike race. Right. You know, so we’re doing this bike thing, everybody knows about it by now. One of my friends said, you gotta be careful with telling people too much. And I was like, why?

[00:55:56] OG: It’s like accountability. And he goes. That’s not the issue. The issue is every time you tell somebody what do, what do people say? Every time I’ve said it to you guys, oh hey. Oh my gosh. Oh wow, you’re amazing. Hey, you’re training for that. Wow. I could never do that. You’re such an amazing guy. You must be an impeccable physical athlete.

[00:56:13] OG: Doug’s on mute, so we don’t have to listen to what he’s saying. No, which is, but man, 

[00:56:15] Joe: he’s blabbering away. 

[00:56:16] OG: You know? He is just running his mouth. 

[00:56:18] Doug: The first thing outta most of our mouths, whether it’s to your face or not, is dude, you’re gonna die. 

[00:56:22] OG: Well, that’s not what people say, but my point is, I think 

[00:56:26] Joe: both.

[00:56:26] Joe: It doesn’t have to be either or. It’s this is amazing and you’re gonna die. 

[00:56:30] OG: Yeah. So you’re getting that excitement, that dopamine hit of the success without having to have the success. You know, because what’s the backend? Your brain goes, man, I got a lot of love for not doing anything. Just saying I was gonna do it.

[00:56:42] OG: So what? What is it gonna be on the backend? Like, oh yeah, you did the thing. You said, okay, cool. Well, if I don’t do it, what are you gonna say? Ah, okay. You know, there’s not as much paint. You gotta be careful with 

[00:56:52] Doug: that. I knew it. I knew he wasn’t gonna do it. That’s what I’m 

[00:56:54] OG: gonna say. You gotta be careful with the spending piece too, because.

[00:56:57] OG: You, you get that addiction of like, I like this. It’s a hack to that is just put in your shopping cart, 

[00:57:04] Joe: you get the hit. 

[00:57:05] OG: Putting it in the shopping cart is the same thing in your brain. 

[00:57:08] Joe: I’ve done that. I used to always buy the funny t-shirt when I was way younger. Like in my twenties I’d buy the funny t-shirt or the, and now 

[00:57:13] OG: you find, now you buy funny bowling shirts 

[00:57:15] Joe: and that.

[00:57:16] Joe: That’s right. And then later on I buy the funny towel at the kitchen store, whatever. Now I take a picture of them because you get the same exact dopamine hit. 

[00:57:25] OG: Yeah, that’s a great strategy. Yeah. Take a picture of it. 

[00:57:26] Joe: Take a picture of it, share it with everybody. 

[00:57:28] OG: Look at this cool thing. Oh my God. That’s really funny, Joe.

[00:57:31] Joe: Right. 

[00:57:32] OG: And then you don’t have to have a crappy t-shirt that’s gonna get a hole in 

[00:57:34] Joe: it. Yeah. Or a dish towel that I, that I truly don’t need. ’cause I got 5 million of. But 

[00:57:38] Doug: your wife will never let you put hanging in your kitchen. 

[00:57:40] Joe: That’s right. Uh, the one I saw in northwest Arkansas when we did a little weekend jaunt there recently was, I think I chose the wrong day.

[00:57:49] Joe: See? Thought that was pretty damn funny. ’cause I feel like that a lot of days. So what I’m hearing you say to wrap this up is, number one, there’s know yourself. Do I set a monthly check amount? Or number two, do I give myself a lump and then I spend as it comes? There’s a lot of know yourself there. There’s also a lot of knowing what’s going on in your budget, which goes back to what Jamie said is that you can’t really wing it.

[00:58:11] Joe: You gotta gotta have a a roadmap of really where you’re going. ’cause look at how this affects your withdrawal strategy. And then second, I can see just a really easy spreadsheet of what’s the taxability, where all this income’s coming from, and look at a couple years into the future, what collateral damage might this cause if I do or don’t take it out of this pot now, am I gonna make things harder for myself in the future by taking it from here versus another place?

[00:58:37] Joe: Don’t just think about today. There was one more area I wanted to ask you about, which was this whole thing about if we have a 30 year mortgage and we get to retirement and it’s gone, or even less than a 30 year mortgage, and now I’m sitting on all this equity in my house. You think about this og Jamie writes in his book, when Used Wisely, home Equity is more than just square footage, is financial fuel that can turn a struggling retirement into a thriving one.

[00:59:02] Joe: Where do you look at this on the RiskMeter of going, you know what? I wanna stay in my house, but I got all this equity in it. You hear Fran Tarkenton talking about reverse mortgages online. Yeah. Not only did he throw a football, 

[00:59:16] OG: I was gonna say there’s like 2% of our audience that knows who the hell Fran Tarkenton is at this point.

[00:59:22] OG: I’m like, you gotta go maybe Joe Montana, Steve Young. 

[00:59:25] Joe: Did they do it too? Did they do Tom 

[00:59:26] OG: Brady? 

[00:59:27] Joe: Did they do reverse mortgage commercials? 

[00:59:28] OG: No, but they’re, no, they’re going to, 

[00:59:30] Joe: uh, Tom Selleck did some right? 

[00:59:33] OG: Tom Selleck. 

[00:59:34] Joe: It’s in their future. Yeah. The fonts. Yeah. Maybe they know Tom Selleck. It’s always an old guy.

[00:59:37] OG: Yeah, it was Wilfred Brimley for a long time. 

[00:59:41] Doug: Well, diabetes, 

[00:59:41] OG: my god. Uh, the diabetes, you know, so where do is your question, where do reverse mortgages or how to access all equity? 

[00:59:48] Joe: Well, I think you really have three choices, right? The way I look at it, you’ve got smart refinancing, whatever smart might be. So ask about that reverse mortgage or, you know, even though I don’t want to just bite the bullet and downsize to free up equity.

[01:00:04] OG: Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, money is money, right? And if you’ve got a million bucks in your checking account, a million bucks in your stock account, or a million bucks in equity in your house, your balance sheet says a million dollars. So one side of the equation is the net worth, right? Do you actually have the money to get through your retirement?

[01:00:23] OG: The other piece is the liquidity of it. I was listening to a, uh, podcast episode with, um, who’s the Shark Tank guy? Kevin? Kevin O’Leary. 

[01:00:31] Joe: Kevin O’Leary. Yeah. A 

[01:00:32] OG: little controversial. 

[01:00:33] Joe: A little cocky. Yeah. 

[01:00:34] OG: Oh yeah. No, but he earned it, right? So 

[01:00:36] Joe: sure, 

[01:00:36] OG: Elise allegedly has earned it. I have not verified it independently, but he was on the stage of the Oscars or whatever, so, uh, or on the red carpet.

[01:00:45] OG: He does wear two watches, though, which just immediately, like, it just takes a, you know, step down in my book. The whole concept of what he was talking about in the show was about, uh, liquidity. And you can have a $5 million net worth in your business, which you don’t need cash. You’re still broke, right? If you can’t raise money, you can’t pay your bills.

[01:01:03] OG: Who cares what your net worth is? Net worth, both of these matter. I think if you look at it in, you know, objectively, if you have a big net worth but no liquidity, that is pretty crappy. That doesn’t get you anything. You know, like you famously said, Joe, many times you can’t carve off a piece of the bathroom, you know, to go to the grocery store.

[01:01:23] OG: So I think the real answer is where are we at in the liquidity step, like liquidity, liquidity process, and what’s realistic? I don’t like the idea of refinancing. First of all, the bank’s not gonna refinance any of your debt if you don’t have any liquidity. If you don’t have cashflow, they don’t give a crap.

[01:01:40] OG: You could have a $25 billion net worth if you don’t have payments or ability to make payments. They’re like, we’re not giving you any money. So we don’t fool yourself into thinking, I’ll just get a home equity loan, or something like that. If you don’t have any cash, I would say that the order, I would prefer you to sell the house.

[01:01:56] OG: It’s cleaner, it’s a lower transaction cost. Over time, you’re gonna get more money out of the deal, and now you have this lump sum of deployable liquidity that you can do with it as you please. If you are absolutely tied to the house, then you know the reverse mortgage can be an option, but you just have to go into it eyes wide open.

[01:02:16] OG: It’s a lot less expensive than it used to be because it’s more popular. So it used to be really cost prohibitive internally. You know, that’s, the sales process was easy, but really the nuts and bolts of it was a very expensive. Product. It’s gotten less expensive. It’s gotten more regulated, but I still think, look, I think all three of us have moved a family member to a different house.

[01:02:39] OG: Is that, is that somewhat true? I think, 

[01:02:41] Joe: yeah. 

[01:02:42] OG: The three weeks around the move suck and then they live at a new place and it’s fine. Shelter has heat and cooling and water and electricity, you know, so. I’m probably a really bad consigliere on this ’cause I would look at it very matter of factly. 

I 

[01:03:03] Joe: know 

[01:03:03] OG: you’re very Take mom out of the house and put her ass in an apartment.

[01:03:07] Doug: Yep. I’ve gotten that speech from OG before. 

[01:03:10] OG: You know? And she got a million bucks in her bank account. Now she can do, she can go on vacation, do her stuff. 

[01:03:15] Doug: She doesn’t wanna go og. Well that’s what the zip ties are for Doug. No. 

[01:03:21] OG: Have you laid her down in a rug and rolled her ass up and thrown her in the back of the suburban?

So 

[01:03:25] Joe: much tenderness. 

[01:03:26] OG: We’re going on a field trip. It comes from a position of love. You know, I’d love for you to have liquidity and be able to go do the stuff you actually want to do or spend money on the things that you wanna do. And this goes back to from an estate planning standpoint, like what are you doing for the next generation if that’s something that’s important to you.

[01:03:43] OG: You’re giving ’em a house. Like what the hell do they want your house for? They’d rather have you be at their kids’ game or be able to travel for the holidays and, you know, come down and visit. Or if you’re gonna gimme 20 grand, I’d rather you gimme the 20 grand a day where I can use it for my kids’ college versus 30 years from now when I gotta like, go through probate to sell your house.

[01:04:03] OG: Take a crappy offer. ’cause it’s a house that’s 50 years old, hasn’t been updated. 

[01:04:08] Joe: Yeah. And I know stackers for a lot of you, this is not an issue that you’re dealing with yourself, but talking 

[01:04:13] OG: about well, you’re fixing too. And, and it’s a real thing. And it’s, it’s a lot more emotional than I’m making it, obviously.

[01:04:18] OG: I mean, when we moved mom out of the house into the condo, it was a, it was, it sucked. 

[01:04:24] Joe: That’s a hundred percent why I wanted to bring it up now because it’s coming in all of our futures. It is. It is coming. 

[01:04:29] OG: But she’s doing great where she is, that’s the other side of that is now I’m four years down the line and she doesn’t say like my old house ever.

[01:04:38] OG: She says, I’m at home. Where she is 

[01:04:41] Joe: takes a little while and then she loves it. Yeah, and it may be the same for you too, I mean, in your own retirement, when you decide that moving is that option. I love what you said about the reverse mortgages because while they have been better regulated, I think you wanna consult some pros.

[01:04:56] OG: Yeah. It’s not a DIY project. 

[01:04:58] Joe: Not at all. 

[01:04:59] OG: And definitely not a, I’ll just call Tom Selleck on the, I got his number. It’s 808 5 2 5 5 8 2. 

[01:05:05] Joe: Yeah. Hey, 

[01:05:05] OG: Tom. Hey Tom. What’s up? 

[01:05:07] Joe: Wait, this 

[01:05:08] OG: is Tom. Trust you. You’re on, you’re on Blue Bloods. Yeah. You’re like a police captain. So 

[01:05:12] Joe: that means you’re an expert in this area.

[01:05:14] OG: Yes. You’re a commissioner of the NYPD, so you would never steer me wrong. 

[01:05:19] Doug: You used to live the high life in Hawaii. 

[01:05:21] Joe: That’s right. You drove a Ferrari. 

[01:05:23] OG: I remember one time I had a, had a, had a client meeting when I was a leader at Ameriprise. I was working with a new advisor. The client had a big complicated insurance policy through New York Life and we were simplifying it and replacing it with a 20 year term policy that was way less expensive and obviously ’cause it wasn’t permanent and, and, and, you know, freed up some cash flow to be able to do some IRA contributions, like all this other sort of stuff, all this ancillary, you don’t need the a thousand dollars a month insurance plan that you were sold, right?

[01:05:55] OG: So we do this whole pitch, the whole thing, and we get to the end and the, the, the client says, wait, do you want me to get rid of the New York Life policy? We’re like, yeah. And the client goes, well, but it’s New York Life. It’s the company you keep. I, it was literally an LOL moment where I was like, oh my God, did you just recite the marketing line back to me?

[01:06:24] OG: Wow. Did that work? Yes. I guess they put some energy into that, into that branding process. They did a good job. 

[01:06:29] Joe: That is pretty good. 

[01:06:30] OG: It’s like somebody going, uh, William Deva said gold is a really good idea. Oh, he did, did he? 

[01:06:35] Joe: Well, it’s difficult then og because you have to then work with them through that.

[01:06:38] Joe: ’cause nobody knows. I mean, you say that stuff, you know these marketing lines, we hear them over and over and over and you don’t hear yourself saying it back. You’re like, no, wait a minute. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah. Guess guess why that’s so brilliant is because that’s what they told you. 

[01:06:52] OG: Yes. 

[01:06:53] Joe: Ah, we will link to, uh, Jamie’s Retirement Sketchbook.

[01:06:57] Joe: Such good work, Jamie and Bonnie on the show notes. Interesting man in the 

[01:07:01] OG: world.com. 

[01:07:02] Joe: Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Time to venture out onto the back porch. I wanna say thank you to everybody who. Stop by Paula and my first live show at Texas a and m. It was so much fun. Glad that you could be there with us 

[01:07:17] OG: based on the feedback.

[01:07:18] OG: Likely your only live show at Texas a and m. 

[01:07:21] Joe: Oh, hey. 

[01:07:22] OG: Wow. 

[01:07:23] Joe: And now the restraining order goes into effects. Should I, should I say we apologize for, you should wear pants, Joe. Oh, we apologize for all of that. 

[01:07:32] OG: Kidding, of course. It was 

[01:07:33] Joe: amazing. Doug was hiding in the rafters and, uh, having polo there and Jay Davis and um, of course a local credit union, red River Credit Union, underwrites this whole thing.

[01:07:43] Joe: So gotta say a big thanks to them for allowing us to do this. And it appears actually, oh, thanks 

[01:07:47] OG: for the invite, by the way. Appreciate it. 

[01:07:49] Joe: Well, here’s the deal. Yeah. We had, we had so many people on stage. ’cause people asked about you. I didn’t have a chance to tell you this, but having Jay on stage, Paula on stage, so we’re not gonna have all those people on stage in future.

[01:08:00] Joe: There’s only 

[01:08:00] OG: so many, so much space for my big head. I am, 

[01:08:02] Joe: there’s only, 

[01:08:04] OG: I 

[01:08:04] Joe: take, I 

[01:08:05] OG: take up two seats. 

[01:08:06] Joe: Hopefully we do this every quarter. And, uh, if you’re local or you want to come join us from wherever you are, uh, the next time, hopefully we get OG on the stage with us. Another thing we had, by the way, and Doug, I’m just, I’m just railroading this, I’m taking over your back porch, Doug.

It’s 

[01:08:21] Doug: all you, man. Yep. Look at me. I’m the captain Now 

[01:08:25] Joe: we got some more votes, OG on what your new segment is all about. 

[01:08:29] Doug: Mm-hmm. 

[01:08:29] Joe: What the new title should be, analytics. Alytic. Okay, 

[01:08:36] OG: put that one down. 

[01:08:38] Doug: It’s potential. His eyebrows did not raise. There was no sparkle in his eye when you said that Joe 

[01:08:42] Joe: did not get it.

[01:08:43] Doug: What’s next? 

[01:08:44] Joe: I like analytics. I think that, uh, basic training is still my favorite. Still the one, the one that I like the 

[01:08:49] OG: most. Yeah. We’ll, uh, we’ll keep working on it. This is a test market. We are testing this for a little while, and then, uh, we’ll have it, I think we’ll have it named by season two. If we’re invited back for season two, we’ll have it named by them.

[01:09:00] Joe: We do have good news coming up on this too. This is also gonna be a YouTube series, so if you want to revisit those in their entirety by themselves, and we have some great graphics that work you through all of the points that OG and Anna talked about. That’s gonna be coming soon on our YouTube page. So go to youtube.com/ Stacking.

[01:09:17] Joe: Benjamins, sign up for our YouTube page. I know that our video last week got a really big response. The one about if you’re not getting into debt, you’re probably falling behind. That made quite a splash. Speaking of, I got several notes that morning. I’m gonna point to the one from Drew, and Drew said The debt skit on the April one show was hilarious.

[01:09:40] Joe: I thought you’d all lost your mind. And I was in the process of, on following the show on iHeart when Doug revealed the gag. Well played Drew in Misawa Japan listening all the way from Japan, you 

[01:09:55] OG: know, that Doug revealed it. Like what’s the, I don’t know. 

[01:09:58] Joe: How did Doug reveal it? Did you reveal it? Did you give it away, Doug?

[01:10:01] Doug: I, 

[01:10:01] OG: I think he said it like in the credits. He said something about its, I don’t, I don’t 

[01:10:04] Doug: remember spoiling the fun. 

[01:10:06] OG: You did. You did. I, I, I do remember you saying it. And I thought we should have just let this hang for a while longer. Yeah. Maybe a day or two. But at the risk of unfollowing having a bunch of people unfollow us that we’ve 

[01:10:16] Doug: got, I feel like I’ve done you a service men 

[01:10:18] Joe: giving up all the secrets of the universe.

[01:10:20] Joe: Doug. Doug, 

[01:10:22] Doug: I mean, really? Come on. You listen to an episode of anything on April 1st. That’s on you, man. If you’re gonna unsubscribe from anything you see or hear, 

[01:10:31] Joe: especially Drew, we were coming right out of, we were coming right out of the trivia about the roots of April Fool’s Day, like where that comes from.

[01:10:40] Joe: A lot of fun. And I’m glad that you wrote and we, we received several others. That was the first one I got though of many. And it, and it cracked me up. People saying, oh, it was too early for that. And I didn’t see that at first. And other people just agreeing with me when I told them this was our most important work maybe of, of all time.

[01:10:56] Joe: And if you didn’t watch all the way to the end to see our outtakes, you, you definitely wanna watch the outtakes. ’cause we had trouble keeping it together. That whole episode. All right. Last thing I’ve got before we turn it over to Doug is this. If you are somebody who’s here, because you really wanna know where you stand, on a scale of one to 10, how do you stand with your money?

[01:11:15] Joe: Well, oh, Gina’s team have created a scorecard. You can go through, answer a few questions, and you’ll get your scorecard and exactly how OGs team thinks you’re doing. It’s Stacking Benjamins dot com slash scorecard gets you that, and then that gives you a good starting spot to see as you’re improving over time.

[01:11:30] Joe: How can you do from there? Big thanks for hanging out with us today. I hope that if you know somebody who’s getting close to retirement, this whole discussion with Jamie and then with OG later on about some of the really big things you need to think about for your retirement, absolutely love those and some of these tips or places, frankly, I’d never heard before.

[01:11:50] Joe: Oh gee, I’d never heard before this. You know that last year before you retire, that money. Is it gonna be better spent trying to turn yourself a little bit more into a spender and starting to get used to opening up the floodgates a little bit and feeling what it’s gonna feel like to instead of a saver be a spender, uh, versus money that you probably, if you’ve done a good job of saving, we’ll never use if you just.

[01:12:15] Joe: Lop it in. So if like me, you know, somebody that hasn’t heard stuff like that and they’re getting ready to retire, send them the episode. Okay, that’s gonna do it for today. Doug, what are the big three things on our to-do list today? 

[01:12:27] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from Jamie Hopkins. Spend more time and money experimenting with retirement as we’ve reminded you many times.

[01:12:37] Doug: Gather as much data as you can and all data is good data. Second, how about more retirement advice? Winging the what am I gonna do part of retirement. By creating a budget, you’ll better handle your money and your spending pattern, which can help you avoid unnecessary taxes and plan, which investments will best fuel your adventures.

[01:12:59] Doug: So start sketching today. Put the big lesson. Speaking of Sketch, Joe’s mom has some sketchy retirement dreams. Me fixing the spare bathroom. Yeah, that’s a retirement dream for one of us, ma. Thanks to Jamie Hopkins for joining us today. You’ll find his retirement sketchbook wherever books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com.

[01:13:26] Doug: This show is the Property of SB podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello and oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.

[01:13:52] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.