How can you do a better job planning for your retirement (and not just financially)? Are you anxious about transitioning into the next phase of your life? We’re happy to welcome retirement planning expert Veronica McCain to share some actionable advice to put you in a better position to retire well.
Plus, in today’s headline, do you feel like your expenses always come in over budget? Have your credit card balances increased over the last year? You’re not alone, says Veronica Dagher of the Wall Street Journal. We’ll jump in and try to leave Stackers with best practices to keep your expenses in check. You’ll be amazed by the career advice from our TikTok Minute, and we help Jim with a question about how to divvy up his 401(k) contributions.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at StackingBenjamins.com/201.
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Why It’s Now Easier to Underestimate Your Expenses and Overspend (Wall Street Journal)
Our TikTok Minute
Veronica McCain
Big thanks to Veronica McCain for joining us today. To learn more about Veronica, visit Savvy Retirement Coach. Grab yourself a copy of the book My Retirement, My Way: A Workbook for the Newly Retired to Create Meaning, Set Goals, and Find Happiness
Doug’s Trivia
- If you’re evaluating hotels as an investor, what is the difference between these statistics: Average Daily Rate (ADR) vs. Average Published Rate (APR)?
Need life insurance? You could be insured in 20 minutes or less and build your family’s safety net for the future. Use StackingBenjamins.com/HavenLife to calculate how much you need and apply.
- Jim from Wisconsin wants to know what portion of his 401(k) contributions should go toward the Roth 401(k) option.
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurances to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Our Best Financial Tips For Graduates
Episode Transcript:
Well, gentlemen, the first thing I do when I wake up, uh, Monday morning is, uh, see you guys. And that kind of,
no,
I do have a tendency to get kind of relaxed, but I see you guys and that kind of ruins everything. And then I realize that the men and women are armed forces kept us safe the entire weekend.
And I get this nice warm fuzzy and I realize that even though I’ve gotta spend the next hour with you, raise my glass. M 22 Men, women of our Armed Forces on behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union, and the men and women make podcast mom’s basement. Here’s to our troops. Let’s go stacks and Benjamins together.
Cheers. Number
five, appreciate you.
So you’ll pick me up tonight at 7 45. Oh, well,
no, I got a few things to, to take care of first, but what, why don’t we make it quarter to eight?
Stop it. Okay. 7 45.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. Ets loves Stacking Benjamins show.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor,, Doug, and good news. Today’s all about getting your way, which is my favorite. Here to help us work out our goals and find happiness. We welcome retirement coach Veronica McCain. For our TikTok minute, we’ll discuss tips on getting your vocab right to succeed in the corporate world in our headlines.
Why is it that instead of money at the end of the month, the month seems to go too many days for our wallet, we’ll share an explanation from one popular publication. Plus we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to Lucky Stacking. Benjamins listener. Who wants to know what percentage to put into his Roth ira?
And then I’ll share some heartbreaking trivia. And now two guys who like to color way outside the lines, the Philistines, it’s Joe and,
and a happy Monday to you. Stackers. Nice, open Doug, you know, given your history. I think that was fantastic. We got a great show today. Wait, fantastic show. Wait, Veronica McCain is here.
I can’t let that go. What do you, what do you mean given my history? I am flawless. Day after day show after show.
Let what go.
I don’t know what we’re talking
about, Veronica, given my history, great open, given my history. Veronica
McCain is here today. She is a retirement coach. And, uh, og, we don’t get enough time to talk about just retirement, so I’m, I’m super happy we get to do that.
Sweet. I’m gonna retire after this marathon recording episodes of podcasts for the last freaking week and a half, so you can go on vacation.
So I, yeah, but I Thai people hear this. I’ve had a wonderful vacation in Spain, which meant that, uh, that yeah, we’ve been talking to each other a fair amount lately. However, we got a fantastic show today. Not only Veronica McCain, we got a fantastic TikTok minute. Super happy you’re here. But Doug, maybe we do need to have an intervention because well just listen to this.
Does that help?
Not even a little
Oh, no. I would think given your history, that that would’ve helped a lot. There’s that phrase again. Let’s get this show moving. Hello darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street journey, the.
Oh gee, sorry. The Wall Street Journal. The Wall
Street Journal. Are they like the Ohio State of newspapers?
Forgot to put the emphasis in the right place and they get angry. Those Buckeyes? No, it’s the Ohio State. I thought it was just, oh, no, no, no. It’s the, this is from the personal finance section. It’s written by our friend Veronica Dagger.
A Veronica writes, why it’s now easier to underestimate your expenses and overspend. Let’s dive in. Veronica writes, many people have a gap between what they think they spend and what they actually spend. This gaps widen recently as the financial and psychological effects of higher prices further strain, people’s budgets elevate inflation is rippled through wallets for more than a year.
Now, some have cut back while others have increased their spending to keep up credit card balances. Were staying relatively flat for a while, but have jumped higher recently. Oh gee, you and I, let’s take it from here. I think that this is a year where it’s crucial to have your finger on the pulse of what your expenses are.
You know, you hear people joke about eggs, you hear people joke about the grocery store. Of course, for a while there you saw the gas pump. That seems to have leveled off at least where you and I live. But I think if you don’t have your finger on the pulse, you’re just gonna have less money at the end of every month.
Well, the,
the availability of credit cards and accumulating that consumer debt really makes it easy to continue to live the life that you wanna live, even if the cost of living has increased a little bit because you don’t feel the pain of that right away. You know, it’s like that kind of slow death by a thousand paper cuts type of thing.
It’s like you have a little bit of a balance that carries over. Then you have a little bit more of a balance that carries over and a little bit more of a balance that carries over. And so that’s a really good, really good signal, I think, is if you, if you go month to month and you’re not paying off your.
Visa bill every single month, or if you had been and now you’re not. Yeah. That’s a good trigger to go like, whoa, what changed here? Big warning sign, because that’ll snowball pretty
quickly. Listen to this statistic, just to tell you how many people are not paying off their credit cards. Veronica writes, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average household’s credit card balance was $9,990.
Up 9% from a year earlier, 9% higher. That’s huge. That’s a big number according to WalletHub customer finance website. Meanwhile, the average credit card interest rate of course, rose with Sky, right? Yeah. Uh, to a record high of about 20% last week according to bank rate. Those are some, there’s some big downsides for not tracking your expenses.
Yeah.
Thinking about the math on that real quick, it’s like, okay, $10,000 at 20%, you’re spending 150, a hundred, you know, $200 a month of interest. That’s not going to pay that off. If you think, okay, well I make 80 grand after taxes, bringing home, you know, 60 after taxes and health insurance and 401ks and all that sort of stuff, that’s a solid chunk of your annual budget.
That’s just going to interest payments. You know, that doesn’t really accomplish anything for you. So if you’re one of those people that that balance is increased on, I think it’s really important to figure out how to
tighten. I think one way, if you have an accountability partner, a spouse, a friend that you’re working with, I really think this can be way easier than people think that it is.
Cheryl and I just have a weekly meeting. We meet for 20 minutes. It’s over wine or over pancakes, depending on what time of day it is. It’s not complicated. We just look through it, og and I think it can be that simple. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t have to be, you know, you’re using what you know. I love the Tiller Money app.
I think it’s fantastic how it takes a spreadsheet and downloads everything every day, and you’ve got whatever numbers you want. You can plug those into your spreadsheet and get it so you can slice and dice However you. I like the Cube app as well. We of course, have lots of fans who use y A as a great budgeting tool, but it’s not really, it doesn’t even have to be that hard.
It just has to be having just a finger on, on the pulse, like where, where’s our money actually going? Well,
again, like if you can catch it early and you have an idea of where it’s going off the rails of smidge, it’s easier to fix. You know, if you have that conversation once every week or every couple of weeks, or you know, once a month and have a spending plan and say, well, I think our electric bill is gonna be $300 a month.
Then you get to the end of the month and the bill was really 400. If you have checked in on that, you have the opportunity to say, okay, well we have to do something different now. You know, we can’t forever spend a hundred dollars more than we make. We have to kind of solve for that somewhere in there. So, Just that communication I think is super important.
Like you said,
you know, it might have been you who mentioned it years ago, og, it could have been Paula Pant, but you know, a lot of people feel handcuffed when they feel like the advice is look at your budget every month and decide all the details that you’re, you’re spending on. And I think that’s one of the things that intimidates people or just is a huge downer against budgets.
I don’t think you have to do it forever and ever. I honestly think you do it for the, you set up a budget, we use whatever template you wanna use, make your own or use some of the ones that Joe mentioned. And then you check in on it for, let’s say the first six months or eight months, however long it takes you to establish habits for just the way you live, just the normal everyday stuff.
And then once you’ve sort of curtailed yourself from essentially taking out a loan to buy that pair of pants or that whatever that thing is you think you need, uh, I don’t think you need to check in on that budget that often. I think it’s, I mean, honestly I’m checking in on mine every maybe six months to
a year.
I think that, I think the big point here, Doug, with inflation having gone up as quick as it did, the point is to have these early warning trip wires that if you’re not gonna check it, that’s fine, but you gotta have a trip wire that alerts you, then that stuff is real and it’s different than it was three months ago cuz to Oh G’s point, if you don’t catch it.
This gets beyond you. I mean, Wells Fargo’s, uh, PR team finally getting, getting ahead of the story here and got themself in this piece. Listen to this, I like this. Money grows much faster than most people expect because interest is earned. Non-interest says Michael Lear, head of Wells Fargo and company’s advice and planning center.
It’s great quote. A similar concept though applies to inflation. Prices rise and if inflation remains high, prices continue to grow On top of already inflated prices leaving people off guard. People get constantly surprised that their money isn’t going as far as they thought it would, and in fact, the cost of eating out and going for drinks continues to take Dina Lyon aback.
Even though the 36 year old married mother of one’s dining out and ordering in far less than she did a year ago, some prices still give her sticker shock. She says The difference between cooking at home, about $10 for nice pasta and quick sauce from canned tomatoes versus Italian takeout. For now, 50 bucks is astronomical.
Said Miss Lion, who lives in Brooklyn. I think those trip wires are, are what you, if you’re not gonna set it up, Doug. Well, let me ask you this. I mean, given your history with money, how exactly do you set up your own trip wires?
Uh, it’s, it’s, uh, I mean, so we have focused all of our discretionary spending on one credit card, so I only have to look in one place and I have a rough idea of what.
What is the grin on OGs face right now as I’m telling this story? I don’t, that makes me uncomfortable. I’m
trying to be, I’m trying to, it’s, it’s, I’m trying to inclusive,
I’m trying to fix your RBF love. I don’t like that. I feel like he knows where this is going. I don’t. Anyway, we, we focused all of our spending on one credit card.
I have a rough idea every month of what that, that number should look like at the end of the month. And if it’s significantly higher, I kinda raise an eyebrow and then I start scrolling through transactions and realize, okay, those are all legit time to cut it back. That’s my
trip. Right. But you know, then where to cut.
Well then I start to, it’s usually, uh, the same thing for probably 90% of Americans, Amazon.
But, uh, Amazon could be
anything though. I know that’s such a brilliant way for them to disguise what you’re buying that it just says Amazon. Yeah. Right, because you’re like, There’s no way. I spent $41,000 on Amazon last year.
Yeah, you did. Like, well, what did I buy? Wouldn’t you like to know? Right,
right. I bought Fruit Loops and a backhoe. Exactly.
But yeah, then I just dig in a little bit if, if the number is significantly higher. Usually when that has happened, it’s because of a couple of big purchases, and I know right where it was, and, um, I know that that big purchase isn’t gonna happen again the next month. It’s u that for me, that’s usually what it is.
It’s not the trickle effect of Amazon. It’s usually some big, some big bill I had. But, uh, yeah, that’s, that’s my trip wire.
Yeah. I just know that given your history that we really need to make sure. That, um, people hear the story, that they know that you
are harshing on me today. What is happening?
What am I doing?
I’m not, I
don’t giving up to you, giving your history. What then you, you, yeah. You harshed on my open. What is going on?
I don’t, I’m just saying that given your history. There we go again. I think we need, we need to make sure that people hear the story. Like it’s a, it’s a great tale. Hey, uh, speaking of a great tale, it’s time for a TikTok minute.
This is the part of the show where we either have some brilliance from the people at TikTok or we have hashtag brilliance from those very same people. Uh, Doug, which one do you think we got?
This one’s legit. It’s solid. Yeah. Well, more solid than my backdrop, which just about fell over.
I love it how people are about to see, they’re about to see all the canned goods.
You’re in the basement when you’re, when your professional backdrop goes. Bye-bye. I think you’re correct, Doug, because OG today what we’re gonna talk about, Is how to succeed in corporate life. How to, how to figure out the right things to say. Let’s listen. One of the most important skills you’ll need to learn if you wanna be successful in the corporate world is how to speak like an absolute
And a great way to do this is just to totally ignore the basic principles of English grammar. So first, take a random noun and then change it into a verb. So a word like idea becomes ideate. Then take that new verb and turn it back into a noun. So ideate becomes ideation. Then take that noun and change it back into a verb.
So ideation becomes ideation in. Finally, take the new verb and change it into a meaningless seven word cluster. an all hands blue sky ideation in session. Then sit back and wait to be promoted for more. That’s all you gotta do. Then, then immediately. That’s pretty funny. After your blue sky ideation session, you’re, you’re good.
That’s pretty funny.
Brilliant. Joe, tell ’em some of the, we’ve got some of that same kind of corporate phraseology here that, that just develops organically.
Just happens. We have, we’ve come up with our own lexicon here. Uh, og we need to talk to you over by the canned peaches. We say that you’re getting canned.
First time Doug got canned. He thought it was a big deal. Oh God,
remember that? Yeah. It was, uh, I had joy. I mean, uh, tears in my eyes
and when it’s nice outside. So, you know, we want to leave the basement. We, uh, meet up by the close line, which we call Doug, getting hung out to dry. There it is. Yeah, we, we didn’t need the M bump.
This is serious work, og. We’re all trying to get promoted here. Hey, coming up as a woman that I don’t think we need to promote a lot because when it comes to retirement planning, people take it way too cavalierly, og, you know this better than most people spend more time planning their family vacations than they do planning their retirement, which shows why so many people are not successful at retirement planning.
Well, Veronica McCain worked a full career and then realized that as a second career, which we may talk about as well, she was going to become a certified professional retirement coach and a charter retirement planning counselor. After 31 years, a public service work decided, you know what time to do that other thing that I’ve really, really wanted to do.
So she founded Savvy Retirement Coach with the mission to provide holistic retirement planning concepts focused on self. Health and wealth, and we’re gonna talk to Veronica here in a second about doing a better job planning retirement, but Doug to get there. I think you’ve got some history. Well,
I, I, I think of it as trivia.
You call it history.
Tomato. Tomato. Well, given your history of doing the trivia, I think we should just have the trivia now.
There is some massive punchline coming. I can tell. I don’t know what it is, but Okay, fine. Here’s the trivia. Joe. Hey, there’s stackers. I’m Joe’s. Bob’s neighbor Duggan. Did you know that on this day in 1956, heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley became a number one hit?
The smash hit was written by the queen mother of Nashville, may Boen Axton and Tommy Durden. Axton played a recording of Heartbreak Hotel for Elvis at a disc jockey convention in Nashville, and the rest is history. So since we’re on the topic of hotels, I got some hopefully not heartbreaking hotel trivia for you.
My question is, if you are evaluating hotels as an investor, what is the difference between these statistics average daily? ADR versus average published rate or a p r. I’ll be back right after I asked Joe’s mom to celebrate Elvis by making me a peanut butter and banana sandwich while I tee up Heartbreak Hotel on my Walkman.
Hey there, stackers. I’m pouting. Lip Curler and Hunka Hunka. Vernon Love Joe’s. mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we are commemorating the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, becoming a number one hit on this day in 1956 with some hotel related trivia. So my question was, if you’re evaluating hotels as an investor, what is the difference between these statistics?
Average daily rate versus average published rate in maybe our most thrilling trivia question yet, try to stay awake. Non-hotel investors, the average published rate is, believe it or not, this is gonna be amazing. Are you ready? I could just settle down cuz I know the excitement is building. It’s the amount a hotel asks for rooms while the average daily rate.
Are you ready for this? I know you’ve been waiting by your device all day. Just trying to figure out what this definition is. That is the amount they’re actually getting paid for the rooms. If you’re a hotel investor, this is the opposite of boring because if those numbers are closed together, it means the hotel is in demand.
And if they’re far apart, you know, maybe not so much. Maybe I should suggest our writing team retires. So speaking of retirement, let’s help you get there permanently. It’s time to learn how to create your retirement your way With Veronica McCain
and I’m super happy she’s here at the card table with us.
Veronica McCain joins us. How are you?
Doing good. Doing good.
How about yourself? Well, I’m happy now that you’re here because we’re about to talk, if this goes according to plan, we’re, we’re about to talk about all the things that you and I think people should talk about during retirement, but often kind of gloss over cuz they’re, you know, just, and don’t get me wrong, we’re gonna talk about the money too, but it’s about more than money, but as a way to get there, Veronica, I’ve always believed that if you want advice, it’s helpful to get it from somebody who’s kind of walked that path.
Right? When I was a financial planner, had been one in a long time, but when I was, the fact that I worked with 200 families and I’d seen retirement over and over and over again, should get people a little bit of comfort that, yes, you wanna do this once. I’ve done it a bajillion times, but, but I had not at that point ever retired.
You have actually retired. Tell me about that. Do you remember the countdown to your retirement? Oh
yeah, definitely. I mean, I remember when I was working, you do, you know, you do the usual countdown on your calendar, kind of xing out the days until it actually hits and then that when that day comes, I think you get a overwhelming emotions because then I realize, you know, I’m leaving my work.
And my work was not just work for me. I actually had, you know, work family. What did you do? By the way? I worked for the federal government. So I was a associate director over several various departments within an agency, a very small agency, about 300 people. But um, because you’re a small agency, you kinda have to sometimes do a lot, so oversaw a lot of different departments.
Yeah.
So you have this flood of emotions. Were the emotions about loss, were they about excite? I I, I don’t know. Is it all the above? Is it purpose? Yeah, I kinda
had an idea sort of what I wanted to do. So I kind of knew what path I was gonna take. Once I retired, knew I was gonna go into some type of coaching field, didn’t know exactly what way I was gonna go with it.
At first, I thought maybe more in the executive coaching. But then as I thought about that more, it kind of gave me flashbacks for work. So then I decided to get into more of the, the retirement because people were asking me so many questions about, you know, well what do you do? And once you retire, how do you feel your days?
And that kind of thing. So, um, you know, as I was approaching looking into the coaching area, I did look at retirement coaching and I said, oh, this’ll be an interesting field to pursue because I like to motivate people and have people get excited about their goals and what they wanna do in life. And I like the, kind of the financial side as well.
So, um, you know, that’s why I decided to kind of lean more toward their retirement coaching. But getting back to when. That final day came. Yeah, I think it was when I had the actual retirement. You know, sometimes at work they give you a retirement, uh, party and you see everybody and they’re like, uh, say something, say something.
And then when I got up to say something, all of a sudden I started feeling like I was gonna cry. Oh, yeah. So I was looking at, yeah, I was looking out at everybody and I was like, wow, I’m, you know, this is, this is really the end. Um, even though I had something, you know, like I said to look forward to going through, I didn’t expect that emotion to come over me like that, but it did.
And I think a lot of people experience that when the final day comes of their retirement.
There is like a, I don’t know, I mean, this is morbid, but there is like a death. I mean, you’re, it is, it is your last cake, right? Right. You, you’ve been to see other people’s cake, but all of a sudden you realize this is your last slice.
Yeah, it is. That, that’s exactly what it is. It’s kind of, you know, that you’re gonna. Try to keep in contact with the people that you work with and, and try to have some type of relationship. But it does change. It really does, because you just, you know, everything usually that you talk about with people at work is work related stuff.
And over time when you retire, that kind of goes by the wayside with you. So
do you feel like we’re too cavalier about that, about that process, about the, uh, you know, the fact that we’re gonna have these emotions, we just think, oh, I’ll deal with it when I get there.
Yeah. I think a lot of people are just so caught up in, I’m gonna be retired.
I’m gonna be retired, I can do whatever I want. It’s so exciting or whatever. So, yeah, I think you don’t really. Feel like that you’re gonna have those type of emotions. I think you just feel like you’re gonna go to this next chapter in your life and it’s gonna be, oh, this, this burst of excitement. And it is, I’m not saying that you’re not gonna have it, but I do think there’s also a period of, of where you kind of adjust, uh, to, you know, what you’ve left behind and your job and your identity and all that and went with that and then going forward, pursuing what, what you have to look forward to in retirement.
So it’s kind of a mixed bag. Those first couple of years.
You tell your own story, but you also tell stories of a few other people in the workbook. One is a woman named Susan. Susan seems a little lost. Veronica, do you remember Susan’s story? Can you tell our stackers about Susan?
Yeah. I think if you, uh, correct this, Susan is the one who the days and the walls were kind of closing in on her.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. She was the one person in the book that I talk about, and the people that I talk about in the book are actual people that I coach at different names of
scenarios, but names change to protect the guilty. Yeah.
Yeah. She was kind of diverse. And then this is a, this is a lot like when you’re working, you, you’re kind of looking forward to those days that you have off where you can kind of do some things that you wanna do, but then when you retire and it’s every day, it gets a little daunting.
If you really don’t have an idea of what you’re going to be doing to fill your days, your day to day life, I think is the hardest thing that most people struggle with when they retire. They have some huge aspirations maybe of traveling or doing that, but once they’re sitting in their house on a day-to-day basis and, and the, you know, walls of, you know, house is kind of quiet and not a lot going on, you don’t have that routine of going to work anymore.
It’s kinda like, what do I do on a day-to-day kind of thing? And that’s kind of challenging. But
what Veronica separates your workbook from a lot of the retirement discussions I’ve seen is that you take this day-to-day and challenge all of us to think really bigger about our life. Like I got this feeling even in the beginning pages as you’re telling this story that, well, let me just quote you.
You wrote a big void needs to be filled in retirement, but it should not be filled just with things to keep you busy. Like this is not just a march to the grave, this is a whole different piece of your life. And it shouldn’t just be about rearranging the salt and pepper shaker every day, or you know, figuring out that the dog needs to go for a walk.
Like you challenge us to think a lot bigger about this period.
Exactly. It is an exciting time for you to think bigger about your life because it’s probably the first time in your life that you are actually able to. Do what you wanna do on your own schedule and hopefully have the finances to do that.
So I think it’s more than just trying to fill your days with just the stuff to do. And I think a lot of times when you first retire, if you don’t really have an idea of what path you’re gonna go down, once you retire, that’s what you start doing. You start trying to just, okay, let me do this, do this, and do that.
And you’re not feeling, you’re still not feeling fulfilled. So I’m hoping in the workbook I give you exercises to help you because people struggle with like, what does this mean? Purpose, meaning fulfillment or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Those are, I think, sometimes big words that we use, but I hopefully going through some of the exercises in the book, you will be able to figure that out by going through the exercises and in trying to say, okay, well, what do I really wanna look for as far as my next chapter in my life of what I wanna pursue and what I wanna do more than just these little small things that are keeping you
busy.
I get, uh, coaching from a group called Strategic Coach. Longtime Stackers have heard me talk about them before, but we have, uh, we have a workbook similar to yours with these big questions about leadership and about coaching. But you do the same thing here with retirement. And this is not guys, this is not a long workbook, but if you’re doing this right, it may take you months to fill this stuff out.
Cuz I could see myself Veronica peeling off maybe two pages and really, because the thought that goes into each page of this is really the important part. Well, let me give everybody some of the tips from the book that you have early on cuz you have. Workbook pieces, and then you have some tips. Here’s some tips early on for when you first get to retirement to kind of send you on this path while you’re filling out the workbook schedule.
Activities you enjoyed during, when you took time off from work, journal, and reflect on your expectations of yourself as a retired person. I love that word expectations, by the way. Read books and articles, listen to podcasts, and a variety of topics to discover what most interests you now, and volunteer for different organizations to discover how you most enjoy helping people and helping, helping out it.
It feels to me, Veronica, like you’re challenging people also to don’t be afraid to explore, like go, go try stuff expecting that it might not be a fit.
Exactly. That’s exactly right, Joe. I want people to not be kind of trapped into thinking. They have to have everything planned out to just go out and just do things that they find intriguing or that interest them, and then from there they can determine what.
They wanna continue to pursue what they don’t wanna continue to pursue. But don’t, don’t limit yourself on what you, what you think you should be doing or how you should be doing it. This is a time for you to be adventurous and explore a, you know, different avenues and things that, um, interest you. And a lot of times that’s kind of a hard thing to do for people because they’ve lived this kind of structured life up to this point with work and all that.
And to try to say, oh, just go out here and do whatever, you know, try to figure it out. It can be a little intimidating, like, oh, whatever, what? Yeah. Yeah. So I’m hoping that, you know, the, the exercise in the book gives you clue, you know, kind of cues to, okay, these are some things, volunteering, doing some other things that, you know, that you thought about what maybe when you were younger and didn’t pursue, kind of go back to those times of, of those thoughts and, and try to figure out if there’s.
You know, things that you wanna pursue now. So yeah,
it’s, it, it’s funny because I, I really went through this crisis where I felt like not, not just as a lot of stuff, not interest me, but, but I’m like, okay, I want to get involved in my community. I wanna get involved in an organization, but, but which ones? I don’t, this is gonna sound very horrible, Veronica, but I just didn’t, I just didn’t care about any of them.
And then I realized that it wasn’t about that I needed to just go get involved. And when I found out, and ultimately at first it was the arthritis foundation I got involved with, I found out about juvenile, a arthritis. I found out about all of these things happening in the arthritis community. I got involved in walking trails around town, and I realized how walking trails, uh, not only your healthy living, but beautify a city, but they’re also very inexpensive ways for cities to raise property values.
Like I learned it by exploring exactly what you’re saying to do in the
book. Exactly. That sounds so great, Joe, cuz that’s exactly what I’m hoping people will do once they start retiring. Just like you said you did, you just started going out and doing things and as you started doing those things, you learned so much and it got your interest even more into whatever activities you were pursuing.
The one thing that people have to realize when they retire, you have to be, just to be intentional, you have to go out and do it. It’s not gonna come to you. Yeah. And a lot of times I think, you know, when I’m working, uh, coaching with clients, they’re like, well, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m like, well, you gotta go out and try.
You can’t, it’s not gonna come to you. You’ve got to go out there and pursue it. And once you do, and when you know, you will see, oh, okay, this doesn’t interest me or this doesn’t interest me, but you’ve gotta go out there and
do it. Can we talk about that, what you just said about you kind of kicking people in the butt and, and kicking ’em out the door to go, you know, like my mom used to say, don’t come back inside until that light turns on.
You know, we, we, we back when kids went outside. Maybe I’m dating myself there, right? But you end almost every chapter of this workbook with who are gonna be your accountability partners. It seems to me like accountability partners are a big piece of this. Tell me about how, how do you find these people?
Veronica, maybe just before you.
Yeah. And sometimes they know who they can be. They can be trusted friends and, and people that you know. I think sometimes there are people that are asking you questions about yourself and are intrigued about you as an individual. But you do have to find sometimes an accountability person because in retirement there’s nothing pushing you to do anything.
And if you don’t, sometimes have somebody that you can hold accountable. And if you can’t find someone within your, your network, I would advise you to look for a coach, cuz that’s what they can be as well pursue. Look, um, for a retirement coach or a life coach or, or someone in that field cuz they can be your accountability partner.
But if you’re finding that you’re struggling trying to get stuff done and you’re not really getting out there and you’re bored and you’re restless and you wanna up get some pickup in your life, you definitely need to look into getting somebody to be accountable and help you because I even have.
Coaches that I work with and I’m a coach. Yeah, yeah. Help me. So it’s just something that, just, like I said, it helps you keep you accountable to someone, keep you motivated to do things.
I think that kind of like you, Veronica, I just get this feeling that, uh, with my coach, if I say it out loud to Mary Lou, it means I gotta go do it.
Like, then if somebody tells you, or if you tell your coach, then you, then you have to go do it. I wanna stick with this theme of, uh, friends and family a little bit, because those might be some of the people you’re bouncing stuff off of. But you also say if you’re having trouble finding your sense of purpose, that friends and family might be a good outlet.
What do, do you ask them questions about? You and what you wanted to like an outside per, tell me about that.
Yeah, and that’s what I found for me. That’s why I said I want, you know, I knew I wanted to go into coaching. I wasn’t really sure which way I wanted to go. And the reason why I decided to be a retirement coach is because friends and stuff were saying you’re good at, you know, coaching and talking about this retirement stuff or whatever.
And I like, you should do something, you know, with that. And that’s why I pursue becoming a retirement coach. But I think oftentimes friends and family see things within you that you don’t even see. They recognize talents and things that you have that you’re like, oh, okay, you’re right. I do enjoy that. You kind of brush it off and maybe not pay attention to where they might be.
And I think when you’re listening to your friends and family, you have a tendency because you trust them to listen to their guidance a little bit, maybe more than somebody else that doesn’t really know you. So I say always lean into your friends and families to help you. If you are trying to figure out, maybe, you know, some things you might wanna do, they might say, well, you’re good at organizing, or You’re good at accounting, or You’re good at this, or whatever.
And they might give you some cues to help you figure out where that next chapter is gonna be in your life in retirement. So definitely, uh, look for
them for that. I like the fact that you go through a lot of this first about, about purpose and value and meaning before you get to the money in chapter two because your chapter two then really is structured around, okay, now that you know that we can focus on spending money where it’s important and saving money where it’s not.
And hopefully I have an idea there. You start off with some good tips. You talk about traveling, a lot of people in retirement wanna travel. Uh, you say to be a conscientious traveler. What is, what does that mean?
Travel have a idea. I know, uh, you know, and this maybe came from my own experience, everybody always says when they retire they wanna travel and then all of a sudden they just start going places and not really thinking of where they really wanna go and why they wanna go there.
I kind of had to regroup cuz when I first retired I kinda. I think everybody says that you go through that. I just wanna get out and go, go, go, go, go. Right? And you’re just going everywhere, but you’re spending money going everywhere. And so you wanna kind of maybe reel that back in. It’s okay to have that little brief period of doing that, but you wanna reel that back in and really think about, you know, where is it?
Where do I really wanna go? Why do I wanna go there? What do I wanna experience? Once I get there, make sure you’re spending your travel dollars on things that are valued to you and make yourself more conscious of the type of traveler you’re doing. I know I did a lot of girlfriend getaway travels, you know, spa and all that, and that’s great, but I really wanna, I wanna explore the world.
That’s what I really want. I want bigger trips and so, you know, you need to just be conscious of what your goal is far as your traveling and, and where you, what you wanna see and make sure you’re, you know, you’re putting your money into that type of travel versus just doing things with your growth. Just go,
yeah.
Yeah. What I really like that you shine a light on is now that you’re retired, you can really lean into off season. And one thing that’s not in your workbook that I love about off season that Cheryl and I have found, cuz she has a somewhat flexible job and I could travel whenever man off season, you get more of the local experience because the places aren’t full of a bunch of tourists.
People are more likely to be able to linger and talk to you. Like off season is great, but to your point, you save, you save a bunch of money there.
Exactly, and I travel now. That’s all I do is try to travel off season. Cuz just like you say, as far as you wanna make sure with your dollars that you’re spending ’em in a, a conscientious way as far as when you’re traveling too.
Going off season, I feel like there’s, retirees is the best time for you to travel cuz you really get a feel for everything without the crowds and like you said, the pricing is better, you’re able to enjoy it in a, in a different way than if you go doing, um, when it’s crowdy. And more people are, are places that you wanna go, so
yeah, no, a much better experience too.
You get a better room, you get upgrade rooms sometimes and yes. What are some other ways that new retirees and people that are stackers that maybe are, are getting close to retirement can think about areas where they might be able to save money besides on discount or off season?
At first, I would just look in your budget overall of what you, you know, you have developed as far as your, I think everybody should be tracking their costs before they retire and, and coming up with a overall budget, um, what they think their retirement’s gonna be.
But some of the things you can look at is cars, you know, and your insurance and, and things of that nature. Look at that to see if there’s ways you can save on that once you retire. There’s also lots of discounts and stuff like we were talking about off seasons, but also if you kind of pursue looking, you know, like you wanna go to parks or whatever, whatever your, um, interest might be, looking for ways you can get discounts on things of that nature.
And just be aware of any ways you can save money with traveling. It’s just a lot of different ways out there too, for other things as well.
Two big ones. I really like that you had, uh, if you’ve got two vehicles, you might be able to go to one. You know, think about what you think about transportation, evaluate your life insurance.
Do you need it anymore? Are you financially solving enough where maybe you could get rid of that. And then a medical one, which I really liked was, Hey, this medical thing’s gonna get expensive, stay healthy, which also gets you outta the house. I feel like Veronica, again, you’re kicking people’s butt outta the.
I definitely with the medical and the exercising and now that you’ve got all this time, you definitely can get a nice physical routine into your everyday life. Just simple walking. I know I take morning walks every morning, not just for exercise, but for meditation purposes for me as well. But yeah. Um, we all know the medical cost is a big expense when you retire, and we also know that you get more sedentary in your way.
You’re. Active as you were when you were working. So I do recommend that you do have a physical fitness routine for yourself when you retire, to keep yourself healthy so you can reduce those medical costs. Cause a lot of the medical costs is stuff you can prevent. Yeah, yeah. And things that you could be doing to prevent, you know, you get, but you gotta start early, you know, early on in your retirement and start doing things to keep yourself healthy.
You know, when we go to the doctors at a certain age, we’re all getting those, oh, you’re close. You know, borderline, there’s borderline that. And so time for you to really, you know, we’re at that point you can do things within your health to keep yourself more healthy. So, yeah.
Yeah, definitely. I look at a hamburger now and my cholesterol goes up.
I just look at it. I don’t know how that medically happens, but it’s crazy. Yeah, it is.
We all, we all know that feeling
with people that own their house, you have a section of your workbook to go through. Renovations on your house and thinking about your housing situation, this is the number one area in our budget, our house.
What are some of those key considerations about our housing we should be thinking about? Yeah,
a lot of people, like, especially if they wanna stay in their houses, should look at as far as their, as I call, aging in place in their houses, and look how well their house is gonna be able to support them once they start aging.
And look at, you know, I have a checklist in there of things that you should look at as far as your stairs and your appliances and just repairs and stuff that you might need to do to your house as you start getting older. Those kind of costs, if you’re not prepared for them, can recovered on your retirement budget.
So if you know that this is where you wanna stay, if your house is where you wanna stay, then you definitely need to look at it like, you know, like even the showers grab bars and um, steps. Oh yeah, you have steps. You know, if, if that’s gonna work as you get older. I know. With my husband. He had had an accident, he couldn’t go up the steps, you know, we, so we had to kind of make, you know, do downstairs.
But it made me start thinking, you know, as we age, how, you know, we’re not able to go up the steps. How are we gonna do it? Cause we don’t have a bedroom on our main level. So those are the things that you need to really think about if you’re gonna decide to stay in your house. So what you need to do, and kind of come up with a plan so it doesn’t all hit you at once.
Cuz sometimes it does, you know, unfortunately. Yeah. One
advert and it’ll be unexpected. Like your husband’s too. I, I mean, there’s no, you know, Tuesday everything’s fine. Wednesday the game’s changed.
Exactly. And you need to kind of be thinking about that. Especially like I said, if you’re playing on staying in your house, what your game plan is, and start trying to figure out how you can get your house accessible so that as you age, it’ll, it’ll still suit you.
Yes.
You talk about moving and about, a lot of people of course think about moving when they retire. And you also talk about friendships. And I’m glad that you coupled the two of those together because one thing I’ve always thought, and now I know we’re here to interview you, Veronica. But I’m gonna pontificate for just a second.
No problem. Because I feel like people think of moving way too. We talked about being too cavalier with this whole thing. This especially to me, is an area where people are too cavalier. I’m just gonna move closer to my kids. And what you find is that your kids are really busy. They got a bunch of stuff going on.
You become a full-time babysitter, but you don’t end up interacting with them in the way that they want. And all of these close friendships that you developed over the last 30, 40 years. I’m a guy who lived for a decade in Texarkana. I moved away to Detroit for two years and Veronica, we came back. And not because I have family here in quotes, because all my friends are here, I see some of my friends as my friends are getting older.
You know, I find them getting vacation houses that are far away and we’re, we never get to see them anymore. And I feel like this loneliness, this isolation that we put ourselves into, because we think it’s great, like. I feel like you were way too cavalier about that. But anyway, I will shut up. I’m gonna get off my step stool.
What
do you think? Do
you,
did you said an Aja. That is exactly what people do. They’re very cavalier. They have this idea of, oh, I’m gonna live here and it’s gonna be this great, but they have no social connections there. Yes. Or I’m gonna go near the grandkids and the grandkids are getting older. The grandkids are gonna grow up.
They’re not gonna be forever be little kids. They’re gonna grow up, have their own things, or even if they’re already older, they’re, you know, have their own activities and stuff to do. So that’s why in the, in the workbook I give a checklist, you know, just even ask them, you know, sometimes when you say, I wanna move, whether do they want you there?
Or you know, or is it something that they see as, oh yeah, we want you close by. And I say, Don’t let your only connections be your kids, your grandkids, or your kids. You know, you need to have other social connections outside of them. Cuz a lot of people say, I’m moving closer for the children, and that might not work out.
So yeah, it’s one of those things that I think everybody has this. Idea of how
it’s going to be. Yeah. This grandiose kind of idea, right? It’s very, yeah. It’s so not true.
So not true. And that’s why hopefully when you go through the workbook and you look through the checklist and if you do the exercises that are focused on that, you’ll have a clearer perspective, um, of whether that’s a great move for you or not, whether it’s gonna work for you as you retire.
Because I think it’s harder once you get there to try to move back. So, oh,
agree. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you talked about how as a retiree now, you know, you’re not forced to get up and go to work. You don’t have to now lead the charge like you did in your career, Veronica, with your department, with your agency. Time management then becomes really important then for retirees if you’re gonna get what value you want outta life.
So you talk about morning routine, daytime routine, idea week. Again accountability partners. But, but I wanted to end by talking about this time management system for retirees. You call it, uh, post sec, p o s E C. Can you walk us through that?
One of the things that people struggle with the most, and I kind of alluded to that before, is you had a routine when you were going to work, once you retired.
That routine is no more. And I find a lot of times with new retirees, especially, that’s where they feel the most lost, is there’s no structure to the day anymore. They’re kind of all, uh, you know, all over the place and don’t know how they can spend. Time sometimes just milling around, not doing anything or whatever.
So I want you to, I, you know, sometimes when I tell people, you know, structure, they kind of, you know, like, that’s why I’m not working anymore. I don’t wanna, I like that. Yeah.
Well, easy,
easy there. Here you all try to put me back at work with descriptors. One afternoon routine. This is the whole purpose of retirement.
I thought for me to just kinda mill around and not do anything, but I thought, we find that when people do that, they get very bored. So I just ask that you just think of your days and more, how am I gonna start my mornings? How am I gonna get up in the morning, get started, and, and get going through the day?
I think once you get that startup in the morning of what you’re gonna do, it kind of guides you through the rest of the day. But you do need to think about how am I gonna just get my day started? You know, when you don’t have an alarm clock to get you going every morning. So, yes.
The workbook is my Retirement My Way.
It’s a workbook for the newly retired. It’s funny, the way that you go through goal setting, like a 30 year old would just reminds me the purpose is important no matter, no matter where you’re at in life. And uh, the book’s available everywhere, correct? Yes it is. Yes it is. Yes. Well, thanks so much Veronica, for helping our stackers get successful with their retirement.
It’s funny, we talked to a guy, Wes Moss in Atlanta about uh, his book What the Happiest Retirees Know, and it’s so funny how it lines up so well. Like if you read that and do your workbook, you’re gonna implement this and you’re more likely to be one of those happy retirees. So thanks for this work.
No, thank you.
Thanks for having me. This is Daryl from
Pennsylvania. When I’m not busy arguing with a four year old, I’m Stacking Benjamins.
No
daddy. Oh gee, I love that we can talk to Veronica for over 25 minutes and, uh, the concept of asset allocation doesn’t even come up. Didn’t make it, doesn’t make the cut. We’re so busy talking about what about my
efficient frontier?
It’s all gonna change. I mean, not the efficient frontier, but just your emotional landscape. I totally agree with her. You see it all the time. You go through this, this metamorphosis when you hit retirement and even get close to it, that I think most people are way too way. I guess they’re not expecting,
it’s a whole different world.
I mean, if, if you’ve been successful in your entire life, this is the transition. I mean, just inside the money concept, not, not all the other stuff that she was talking about. Right. Time and energy and all that sort of stuff, but just the money piece of it, transitioning from being a good saver your entire life to being a good spender for the rest of your life in and of itself is a difficult
change.
So hard to make that switch. And it’s even harder when you don’t really know what you want. Yeah. You’re much more likely to just hold onto the money and the thing that you underestimate is time. You don’t have forever to decide what you wanna do. Yeah.
Would you rather have Charlie Munger’s money at, uh, 90 or his wisdom at, uh, or, you know, what is he a hundred or something like that?
Yeah, his, his, you wanna trade places with him, basically? No. Nobody would trade places with Charlie Munger right now for all the money in the
world. Well, what if Charlie Munger likes what he’s. I
understand that. I’m just saying like, nobody would trade places with him because of the time, you know, because he’s 90 something.
Oh, I got it. Like he’s got billions of dollars. Yeah. So it’s not, it’s not necessarily always about the
money. I see
what you mean. But you, so you, so to Joe’s point, you’d end up with a really, really happy last two years of your life.
Yeah, that’s right. Well, it’s our, it’s our friend, uh, doc G’s book about hospice, you know?
Yeah. About these people who spent their whole life chasing dollar bills or people who spent zero time chasing dollar bills. They spent all their time going, no, I don’t need any money. And then they realized if it would’ve had some, I could’ve had better family time. That’s a good book. Hey, let’s throw out Haven Lifeline and tackle some of life’s most important questions.
Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency, Doug, they put what you value first. I,
I tell you what? Uh, white breasted nut hatches,
white breasted nut hatches. Yeah. What
is that? That’s a bird. And it’s also a realization that you’ve become old because one day you’re joy riding your frat brothers brand new car to Florida.
When all he thought was you were like driving around the block and you’re like, we’re going to Florida, and the next day you’re getting out your bird ID app because some bird shows up outside your window. What is that?
At least it’s an app and not a book.
Uh, true. But uh, and then I also spotted a fairly rare for my area, a brown merger.
Both of those are fantastic names for birds, and I saw ’em both this
morning. Doug had a brown merger after about a Mexican food last night.
I knew you were gonna do it. I specifically threw that out there to see if you had the willpower to resist the poop joke and you
couldn’t do it. Which one? I could not do it.
But you know, you know number one thing OG, is it’s an app on his phone, but the thing that makes him proudest is that it’s his most used app on his phone. Like he gets that report from Apple and they’re like, you open that bird app a lot. Well, thank you. Next to his, uh, walking Step counter app and the one that monitors his blood pressure.
He’s, he’s
all set the continuous glucose monitor, blood pressure number of steps, and the New Balance app. I don’t see a problem with any of this to order new shoes every six months
given his history, anything could happen. Hey, uh, speaking of anything happening, we should, uh, go ahead and throw out the Haven Lifeline because the answer to that question, Doug was your loved ones in your time with a Bird app.
It’s why they’ve made buying quality term life insurance. Actually, simple. More time to catch the brown. A merger beep beeping out of the hole. I can’t,
that’s the one you’re latching onto. I thought for sure we were gonna go to town with a white breasted nut hatch because those two things, it’s like one begets the other white breasted nut hatch.
And
are there nests like right next to each other, like one’s just above the other one? Oh, is the nut Hatch one here and then
just below it is the emerges. Well, I will say that the brown emerge is primarily on the bottom. They are on the, they’re ground oriented birds. What the hell? They work at the base of trees.
All podcast
in my house, wrong to a stop. Just grinded to a complete stop.
You wanna hear the noise the brown emerge Makes.
Hey, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash haven life. Now please go there and then fast forward this 15 seconds to get us out of this bird discussion. Their application simple, getting us to covers decision.
Their parent company, mass Mutual is more than 160. Years old, so you know that they’ve done this before. Hey, uh, today
we, we,
I, I love Karen Repine, our showrunners notes for us. This is, uh, Jim from Wisconsin calling in and Karen says Jim from Wisconsin. A real person, not Doug.
Thanks.
We actually have a real Wisconsinite here. Is that, is it Wisconsinite or is it just Cheesehead? Do you just say Cheesehead?
Yeah, I think that’s the preferred term. It’s in their state constitution. Hey,
Jim.
Hey guys. Jim here, and I actually
am from Wisconsin. I have a question about what percentage to contribute to my traditional 401K versus my Roth 401k.
I’m five to seven
years away from retirement and maxing out my four oh contributions. I read
somewhere that when you have saved six times your
annual income, you should move all your future contributions to the
Roth option. What’s the
thought process in deciding
how much to put where? I’ll be looking for that shirt.
Thanks, Jim. Thanks for the call. Thanks by the way, for proving that you’re really from Wisconsin. Uh, Burton from Minnesota needs to learn from Jim. He’s gotta put some Midwest on that. Uh, yeah, I don’t know, Burton, if you’re listening from last week, take a note from Jim.
That was a good effort. Jim, I’ll give you that.
I mean, you made a, you made an attempt, but you made an attempt
that didn’t. You don’t think Jim really talks like that. That is not a Wisconsin accent. Oh, not as good as yours was. Is that what you’re saying? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Not as good as the interloper. Yeah. Jim, thanks for the call.
Oh, gee, have you heard this, uh, rule of thumb that he’s using six times? Nope. Six times what? Six times something. I’ve never heard that, Jim. Six times something.
Yeah, I’ve never heard it. Yeah. The answer to when should I put money in a Roth 401k versus a regular 401k is largely determined by your ability to pay the taxes today.
You know, you think about it, if you’re making a hundred grand and you’re contributing the maximum to your four , you’re putting $22,000 in your 401K this year, which if it’s pre-tax, is gonna lower your taxable income to 78,000 before your deductions and all that other sort of stuff, that roughly is gonna save you maybe four or $5,000 in federal taxes because of that contribution, not including any state taxes.
If you switch to the Roth, Then that deduction doesn’t appear in your w2. So you effectively are gonna have a four or $5,000 additional tax withholding throughout the year. So it’s, you know, back to our discussion at the beginning of today, your budget’s gonna be affected by, call it 400 bucks a month. If you can afford that, if you can fold that into your budget and not go into credit card debt, or not have to borrow more money for cars or student, you know, like if you can deal with it, then obviously it’s better to pay your taxes today.
Well, not obviously, but it makes most sense, I think, to pay your taxes today because it’s a known thing. You know, in the future all of that money becomes tax-free forever and there’s no, there’s no government requirements of withdrawals, there’s no government requirements of those distributions that you have to take once you are retired.
So, and all the Roth side is way, way, way better. But it comes at a cost, which is. At that 500 bucks a month or, well, and
I, I think, I would think og, you know, he talked about doing the Roth later in the pre-tax earlier. I would think that to pay that cost and to make it even more worth it because of the fact that you are prepaying the tax, you need those assets to grow much, much, much more.
So I would think that at, at the very least, flipping that around and doing the Roth first makes more sense. Yeah. Like the further you are away, do the Roth don’t, don’t do pretax first and then switch to Roth. I would do Roth as early as I can and switch to pretax. I mean, if I’m choosing one or the other, which you and I know this, most people that listen to this don’t, we haven’t had this discussion in a long time.
We don’t think either one of these is right. We think you should be doing some of each because you don’t know what the future’s going to hold. But certainly a Roth first approach versus the other way around, what does that make more sense?
If you’re thinking about it from the kind of historical context of your earnings, you’re gonna make the least amount of money early in your career and the most amount of money on the back end, right?
Like usually that’s how it works. You, your income continues to increase throughout your career. So if you have to pay your taxes, I would rather pay them at a lower rate if possible. Versus when I’m 50 and I’m making $200,000 a year. Maybe that’s the time to use the pre-tax bucket because of the fact that most 401ks come with company matches and those matches are also pre-tax.
I think that if you can start out doing a Roth early in your career and continue to do it through your entire career, you’ll end up with a good enough balance of Roth 401k and pretext because of the company matching contributions being pretax. But if you’re really trying to optimize tax brackets and that sort of thing, you can kind of manipulate it as you get toward those higher tax brackets.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that we’re taking a very big guess at what tax rates are the day you withdraw the money. How do we know whether or not this worked pre-tax versus Roth? Well, if you put the money in a Roth 401K and you take it out in the future, you’re betting that today’s tax rates are better than tomorrow’s tax rates.
You’re saying I’d rather pay taxes today than in the future because the future I think are gonna be higher. That’s what you’re saying. And the vice versa is also true. If you put the money in pre-tax today, you’re saying, I think I can take this money out at a better tax rate in the future, then I can pay it today.
So I’m, you know, I’m at a high tax bracket today. I think I’ll be in a lower tax bracket in the future. The only way that you know whether or not you’re right is after you know that you’re right, because we don’t have the chart that says What are tax rates in 2037? Because if we did, then we would be able to calculate it and say with certainty this is a better choice based on the circumstances.
All we’re saying is I think I might have a lower tax rate in the future, or I think tax rates might be higher in the future. The one thing that I can say is that if Congress doesn’t change any of the rules, Roth contributions, Roth growth and earnings are a hundred percent tax free forever. So I don’t care what the tax rates are in 20 years from now when I take the money out because it’s tax free.
Yeah. If I’m gonna lean, I’m leaning toward pay the taxes today, be done with it. That’s ED slots approach too, by the way. Which is to say, you got the cash today, pay it today so that you don’t look at your IRA and go, I’ve got a million bucks in my ira. And it’s like, no you don’t. You have 500,000 in your ira.
Cuz half of it is for the
government. Doug. I think this is really important, uh, stuff for you. I mean, given your history with taxes, And
I have no history with taxes, so I’m good. Well, maybe that’s the point. You gotta earn something to pay taxes.
Maybe that’s the point. Big thanks to you Jim, for the call.
If you would like to call and ask a question, you know what? We will send you a Haven Life. Stacking Benjamins greatest money show on Earth Circus T-shirt. And Jim from Wisconsin. Really from Wisconsin is getting one sent his way. Stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail. Gets you the shirt and we’re happy, very happy to send it to Jim as I stare right at Doug.
As I say that, I don’t know why I’m staring at Doug as I say that to Jim.
Well, he sounds hideous.
What are you talking about?
Well, it just sounds crazy. I mean, it’s like a fictitious thing, right? This Jim, it’s like the the State Farm guy. Who are you talking to? I don’t, I think
like Jim, I think somebody’s having a tough day there.
Og. Well, before we say goodbye today, time for our community calendar, man. We’ve got a great week over on the Stacking Deed Show, where Crystal Hammond and Alan Corey dive into real estate. Alexy Edwards is a guy who helps, uh, uh, has helped a lot of people in the southeast part of the United States get out of intergenerational poverty through real estate.
Teaches ’em real estate, helps ’em learn how to buy houses, how learn to do it in a responsible way. He’s gonna be their guest on tomorrow Show over on Stacking Deeds. Of course, our other sister show, the Earnin Invest podcast. Doc G always has guests who dive deep into a lot, into some, some topic that is, uh, always exciting and a fantastic.
A fantastic discussion. He has a friend of ours, Fritz from the Retirement Manifesto, coming up on Thursday. Fritz is a guy who retired young, documented his retirement and OG to Veronica’s point earlier. In today’s show, uh, Fritz has really done it right. This guy is so busy, but now doing that second career, I think he serves on a couple of boards.
He volunteers in the city of Asheville in a couple different capacities. One is working with animals. He’s always out in his wood shop. This guy has so much going on. He’s not sitting there wondering what he’s gonna do. So if you’re interested more in, in retirement, Fritz will be over on earn invest, of course, here on Wednesday, the draft, the N F L draft is Thursday.
So we’ve got Rob Welch. He and a former N F L player wrote a book together about going pro with your money. We’re gonna talk Wednesday about no matter what you’re trying to go pro in. How do the pros treat their money? A lot of pro players about to get a big payday on Thursday, and uh, as we already know, a lot of ’em don’t do the right thing with that Sudden money og it goes in the wrong place.
That’s what’s coming up this week. Thanks so much for hanging out with us today. If you’re somebody that’s my kind of person and will leave a review for people that they only know via podcast, or maybe you’ve hung out with us on one of our social media channels, please leave a review of the show that helps us so much, helps new stackers realize what they’re getting into.
A little different take on money than maybe some of the other shows out there. Thanks to everybody who’s done that, mom puts those on her refrigerator. If you’re not here though, to hang out with us on social media, you’re not here just for Doug’s trivia. You’re here because of the fact that you’re worried about the economy, you’re worried about your money and and how it works together.
And as a lot of those fears begin to ramp up for people, you might be feeling anxious to make some moves in your finances. What I’d like you to do instead is check out this free guide that OG and his team have put together that’ll help you plan more and panic less no matter what the market does. It is some great insights on what you should be doing and smart questions to ask yourself so that you make financial decisions your future self will.
Thank you for head to stacky Benjamins dot com slash guide. That’s stacky Benjamins dot com slash guide to get that free guide from og. All right, that is what’s going on in the community, man. A lot of takeaways today, but Doug, what are the top three? Well
Joe first take some advice from our guest, Veronica McCain, and create your own unique roadmap to retirement.
Second, take a memo from our TikTok minute to up your vocab game and excel above the competition. I’m sure you’ll get promoted in no time, but the big lesson turns out five times in a row is the limit to singing Heartbreak Hotel at the top of your lungs. After that, Joe’s mom starts to get irritable and make threats.
Now that I think about it probably was the hip thrusting.
Thanks to Veronica McCain for joining us today. You can find her book, my Retirement My Way, a workbook for the newly retired to create meaning set goals, and find happiness wherever finer books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is The Property of SB Podcast’s llc, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
Our producer is Karen Repine. This show was written by Lacy Langford, who’s also the host of the Military Money Show. With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the earnin Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the four 11 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Tina Eichenberg makes the video version of this show. Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now.
Why don’t chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngin are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. So say hello. When you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement.
Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know this. Show us for entertainment purposes only before making any financial decisions. Speak with a real financial. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Welcome the after show. This is, uh, the part of the show that doesn’t exist if you’re new here. What happens in the after show stays in the after show, Doug G getting back to your clothes. I think that singing Heartbreak Hotel at the top of your lungs, just, you know, given your history might not be, might not be great.
Well,
since my baby left, Find a new place to dwell
down at the end, A
lonely street called,
speaking of, speaking of Doug’s history. Um, yeah, there’s unfortunately OG a doctor out there who has violated HIPAA rules and, um, got us audio from Doug’s latest, uh, therapy session. And, uh, well, I thought that as long as they broke the rule and we did, and we should probably play it.
Look
at the look on og. Can’t wait for this. He is so excited
about this. Well, I think this is bad. I think doctors shouldn’t be doing this, but as long as they have, let’s No, this is, this is Doug’s latest, uh, therapy session.
You
what?
I just can’t stop thinking about waffles. You had waffles for dinner and you had waffles for breakfast. So we’re going to eat something
else. Oh,
I, I can’t, why can’t I stop about waffles?
I don’t know. No.
Sounds like you’re obsessed now. You’re really crying.
Pretty good there. Now everybody is thinking about waff.
Like that brain worm is in there and you’re gonna be thinking about it now for the rest of the
day. Well, I think I, I mean, I, I really think that, uh, you shouldn’t be thinking about waffles given your history.
You’re begging for me to ask. I, I’ve resisted this whole time. I’m not gonna ask, I’m not gonna ask why you keep harping on my
history.
So, OG and I saw this, uh, this video that these guys said that, that if you really just wanna mess with somebody, just end as many sentences possible when you talk to them with, given your history. Just say it over and over. Yeah. And see what happens. And watch them watch Doug unravel the entire show. They melt.
It
is surgically effective. Like, that’s just been driving me crazy.
I said it to Alyssa, I don’t even remember what it was about, but I just. You know, she was like brushing her teeth or something and said, well, you know, given your history. And she’s like, what is that supposed to mean?
Like, totally like based on the mirror, you know, just totally like, and round everything to a halt, just like you said. Yeah.
I think that is a bad marital move. I said this
will work well
with Doug. I would not, yeah, I would not do that right before bed cuz you are not sleeping that night
stackers. Uh, you may or may not wanna try that.
Your results may vary, but ours, ours, I thought today were pretty good. Doug, uh, Doug didn’t know what the
hell was going on actually. Now that I know, it’s actually more impressive that you found a way to dodge my question. The whole, the whole episode, you know, given your history. Of course. Yeah. I’m not, not enjoying your company anymore.
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