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Episode #476 - How to Rock Retirement on Your Own

There are some memories that always are fresh in our mind regardless of how long ago they happened. I can recall being in the home by myself, sitting in a chair holding my mother's hand when she exhaled for the last time. At that moment, her husband, my stepfather, his life changed forever.

INTRODUCTION

Shauna and I have been married for almost 33 years.

It's almost certain that at some point in our lives, one of us is going to deal with a change of losing the other.

Welcome to the Retirement Answer Man Show. My name is Roger Whitney. I am your host. This is the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement but having the confidence to lean in because you're doing the work to rock retirement, even if you lose a spouse.

The theme for this entire month is going to be going from two to one focused on what happens when you lose a spouse, to death. Some of this will apply perhaps if you lose a spouse to divorce, and that may be a theme in the future. But this month we're going to focus on having to walk and rock retirement by yourself when that wasn't your intention.

To help us we're going to have some guides, some people just like you that have had to walk this journey and are walking this journey to help us navigate this. I have not had to personally, hope to not have to do it for a very, very long time, just like, I hope the same for you, but this happens. This is life, and so here's how we're going to approach it.

This can happen at any time, either before retirement, in early retirement, or later in life. Those are going to have different themes based on how that happens. When you lose somebody, we have to acknowledge you're losing more than just your spouse, your partner, your lover, your friend. You're really losing two things, aren't you?

You're losing that person for sure, and but you're also losing yourself in many ways. The structure of how you had envisioned your life, you're losing the dreams that the two of you had, the routines that you had set up. The social network in many ways is going to change. So, it's not just a single loss of the person.

Think about all of these aspects, not just simply the financial aspects of planning, but we're going to address those as well. Our mindset, I think that we need to have, as we discuss this throughout the month is going to be having to going from "this sucks" to doing the work and maybe defining what that work is, getting to this horrible thing happened, but I will still have a great life and ultimately alchemizing this event that happened or will happen to one of you, to bring good from it. For yourself, for the people you love and for the world, rather than other pathways that you have likely witnessed, I know I have in working with clients and in my network of people that have had these things happen, where they let it define their entire life and never alchemized it into something positive, and it was a permanent state that dominated the rest of their life.

I've seen this and I've walked this with clients through my 30 years and I've seen it personally and no doubt you have as well. We're going to have a mindset of how do we alchemize this, honor it, process it, but alchemize it into still being able to rock retirement, differently than we imagined.

So that's the mindset that we're going to focus on this month. Let's set some targets that we want to try to hit during these five weeks.

Number one is we want to understand impacts. We have the non-financial impacts that are going to have to be navigated. We're going to talk about those in next week’s episode.

The week after we're going to talk about the financial impacts, the practical retirement planning impacts of losing a spouse.

Another target is going to be assess things that we need to consider. Now that we've acknowledged this and see all these impacts, how do we start organizing this so we can take some baby steps to move forward.

In the fourth week, it's time to develop an action plan.

What is the triage that needs to happen immediately after a spouse dies? How do we navigate this storm financially and non-financially?

Secondly, how do we develop the roadmap to sail into a new future after we've gone through the grieving process and navigated the financial storm as well?

In the last week, because this is a five-week month, so we have some time here, is going to be hearing wisdom from people that are walking this journey.

They are honoring you and I by being willing to share their journey so we can realize that, hey, we wouldn't be alone in this.

So that's the plan. We're going to try to do it with respect and it's a sad topic to talk about, but it's an important one that we need to keep in mind, even if it never happens, it has some implications into how you plan to rock retirement.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

With that, let's move on to some announcements. Then we'll get to answering some of your questions. So that's the setup of where we're going to go this month.

Some quick announcements that I want to share.

Number one is we have transcripts for the show now. Yeah, we never done that. Well, maybe years ago.

Go to rogerwhitney.com, if you go to the show notes for each episode, you'll start to see written transcripts that are edited. If you process by reading and you want to maybe grab some things, it'll be much easier for you to do that. We're excited about that.

Second announcement is we are looking for an amazing retirement planner, a CFP, to join my team at Retire Agile that wants to work remotely. In a full-time position, never have to get into the business of retirement, just can-do planning and love on people. We'll have a link in the show notes where you can apply for that, or you can email me at roger@retireagile.com and I'll get you the right link.

Lastly, since it's the beginning of the month, I wanted to talk about the books that I finished last month in February.

It was a little bit of a practical month from my reading perspective, I read Be 2.0 that's Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, a Jim Collins book where it revisited a book that he wrote with his mentor. It's about project management and strategic planning from a business perspective.

The second book that I finished, which is related to that is a book called Traction, the Entrepreneurial Operating System by Gino Wickman, which is again about strategic planning on a more practical sense of having a system for how you not just have a strategic plan but manage the strategies and then the tactics so you can get into a rhythm.

And the reason I read these two books is that I am on a mission. We have a target to have a refreshed strategic plan in place prior to my company retreat where we can present the vision, and reaffirm the core values that we have. We refresh those as well as talk about the strategies and have a tighter way of managing and achieving what we want to achieve.

From our perspective, and this actually impacts you if you listen to the show or in the club or interact with us in any way because our vision, our purpose for being is empowering you to rock retirement, empowering you to be able to integrate your life and all the life aspects and the money to result in you living a life that you look back at the end of life and you're really proud of, and you minimize those regrets.

We want to build an ecosystem that hasn't been seen before that allows you and empowers you to do that. So that's exciting.

That's why I read those books because we're working on that strategic plan. Some of you have sent me some emails, because I've spoken about this with some of your experience in strategic planning and thank you so much.

I read every email I get, and I get the tips. It's difficult to reply to everybody but thank you for helping us on this. The last book I read is Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabrielle Oettingen.

It's a great book about how positive thinking isn't enough. Essentially in positive thinking, and if you're our vintage of human, we remember when there was this big movement of if you just close your eyes and you imagine the future, you will manifest it. There was this trend of just manifesting through positive thinking that a lot of us saw probably in the eighties or so. This comes from a scientific perspective of does that really work?

The short answer is no, it doesn't. You have to hold that up and do some mental contrasting to look at it in reality so you can acknowledge the obstacles that might be in the way. So, you can develop a plan to overcome the obstacles or decide, hey, these obstacles represent a journey I don't want to go on.

This helps filter these potential goals that you have. Great book. We did a book study on it in the Rock Retirement Club, so that was very helpful. So those are the three books that I read this month.

Now I'll give you a TV series if you like. TV series like because I have two actually that I would suggest.

One is, and this is an MGM streaming thing, so everything's a streaming thing now, isn't it? It's called SAS Rogue Heroes, and it's about the founding of the SAS in World War II. That's like the British Special Air Service, I believe. Fantastic series. I'm actually reading that book right now, so we'll talk about that.

The word that comes to mind to me when I watch that series, has that great dry British humor, is audacious which is a fun word, audacious. David Sterling and Jock Luz, the two architects of the SAS, they were audacious in some good ways. Maybe we need some more audacity in our lives. So that's what I'm watching now.

The second one is on Apple TV, which is called Shrinking with Harrison Ford, and I think it's Jason Siegel. Wonderful, just a warm, funny, thoughtful series. So those would be the two that I would check out if you like TV, but for now, let's move on and answer your listener questions because those are important.

LISTENER QUESTIONS

All right. If you have a question for the show, you can go to rogerwhitney.com/askroger and leave an audio question, would be my preference, or you can type your question in and we'll do our best to answer these on the show.

QUESTION ONE

Our first question comes from Beth on Roth conversions.

"Hey, Roger, always enjoy your podcast.

On your last episode, a 60-year-old gentleman asked about the opportunity cost of Roth conversions in comparison to future growth of these assets if left in a traditional IRA. I also am 60 years old struggling with the same scenario. I'm still thinking my particular situation through, but would the opportunity cost issue be eliminated if I just simply paid cash for the tax burden. I was considering just simply converting funds for my traditional IRA to my Roth, and then paying with cash the taxes, that way there would be no drop in my retirement assets.

Thanks so much for the podcast."

Beth, great question. I'll clarify, when you make a Roth conversion, you're taking a pre-tax asset, let's say it's an IRA, you're essentially withdrawing the money and you're given the option to put it into a Roth IRA, and then there's a tax liability because the money that you're moving over, let's say it's $10,000, there's a tax liability, and then it goes into the Roth. You basically are prepaying your taxes on that 10,000 and then that 10,000 can grow forever.

So just make sure everybody knows what we're talking about here.

The IRS gives you two ways of paying that tax on that conversion. One is you can pay the tax from the assets, or in this case from the $10,000 that you're converting over, or you can just simply pay the tax from your bank account and have the whole 10,000 go into the Roth IRA.

Beth's question is, does that opportunity cost go away if I just simply use cash in my after-tax investments? Not necessarily, because you're still have the opportunity cost. Let's use the example. Let's say it's $10,000. You're converting it to a Roth. You decide to pay the $1,200 tax bill out of your checking account.

There is still opportunity cost, Beth, because now that $1,200 is not in your checking account, which means you can't use that to fund your life, pay down debt, invest, give away, so forth. There is still an element of opportunity cost there. The calculus in doing a Roth conversion is not going to be exact.

This is a judgment call where you're playing multiple probabilities. It's not nearly as simple as we think it can be with a spreadsheet or even with Monte Carlo scenarios or what have you. You're not going to know what the best answer is until it's already done, and you look backwards in time. That's just the truth of it.

Anybody that says, yes, you should do this you're silly if you don't, is being disingenuous. They don't know, they have false certainty.

You're going to have to think through this and just simply make a judgment call and you can do long-term judgment calls of, this is going to be my Roth conversion strategy over the next 10 years because I'll be in a low tax bracket and I'm going to do this each year for the next 10 years.

It's healthy to do that type of strategic planning, but ultimately, it's going to come down to Beth, a year by year decision. Do I feel comfortable doing this Roth conversion this year? Then what is the most efficient way this year to pay the tax because of everything else going on in your life.

There's still definitely going to be an opportunity cost there. When you're doing this type of strategic planning, it's extremely important to remember that this is in the optimization phase of a planning process. The stages of a healthy planning process, is going to be what's your vision? Then getting to a feasible vision relative to the assets that you have, making that feasible vision plan, resilient, and then trying to optimize it.

These decisions shouldn't have a material impact on you being able to rock retirement. This is just trying to add some bling to the planning. These are going to be the decisions of, if I take this purse rather than this purse, or I wear these shoes rather than these shoes, would it enhance my journey by the shoe choice, to put it in perspective.

I'm not saying it can't have a monetarily important impact of perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars long term. It definitely could, but that's an enhancement of an already great journey that you're on. You always want to ask yourself, what are you trying to solve for in doing a Roth conversion. Am I trying to decrease my required minimum distributions later on, so I have a potentially lower tax burden. Something to consider in this optimization question. It could also be, I'm trying to pass assets to my family, and I'd rather pass them Roth assets than traditional IRA assets because they won't have the tax bill.

You always want to get back to what are you trying to solve for. It's okay to do this long-term strategic planning because it's going to end up being a year by year decision. But back to your original point here, Beth, is you're still going to have an opportunity cost because tax burden is still going to have to be paid. In my example, if it's $1,200 on that $10,000 Roth conversion, you will not have that $1,200 anymore in your after tax assets.

There will be some opportunity cost and you'll just have to assess how important that is relative to what you're trying to solve for. So hopefully that gives you some conceptual way of thinking of the opportunity cost question.

QUESTION TWO

A next question from Bob, which is related. Which is sort of cool. So, Bob is debating between raw conversions, verse capital gains.

"Roger,

Love the podcast. My wife and I are a year into retirement, 66 and 65. Between social security and a small pension and a rental property or income, it's about $7,000 a month. I have 2 million in an IRA, about 1.5 million in after tax investments, stocks, bonds, mutual funds. My question is, If I should be focused on Roth conversions or taking capital gains up to the maximum income of my tax bracket, my thoughts are probably cannot take enough money out of my IRA for conversions to make a difference in RMDs.

Given the uncertainty of our government, is it better to take advantage of the current capital gain tax structure?"

Now, very related question here. Again, this is an optimization question and I'm glad you're considering both because they both can be valuable in optimizing your tax strategy long term. So obviously you first want to have a feasible and a resilient plan of record.

In this analysis, and it's likely you've already done this, but you want to identify if I don't do any Roth conversions or draw money from my IRAs, my pre-tax assets, because that's an option too, what will my required minimum distributions be at that age? And that could be 60 or what now? 73 and 75 depending on your birthday.

I would estimate what the RMDs would be if you don't touch your IRAs or pre-tax assets. It's good to know that because then you can get some color into, is that going to throw me up into a higher tax bracket later in life where I have absolutely no flexibility? You want to estimate that.

You also want to look at how much room do you have between your taxable income year by year, now that you're retired, between your pension, et cetera, before you get to IRMAA surcharges on your Medicare, do you have room to be able to realize income and not get into an IRMAA Medicare surcharge situation.

Then you have the current special treatment of long-term capital gains, which are currently taxed at a lower rate and are factored into the modified adjusted gross income. I'm telling you some things that you may already know, but I want to make sure we all think about this.

The advantages of doing Roth conversions now are you're going to permanently reduce your required minimum distributions, and you are going to allow your after-tax assets to grow and assuming have more capital gains, which will have a preferential treatment.

The advantages of harvesting capital gains are you're going to take advantage of the long-term capital gains on lower tax. You're going to be able to diversify your portfolio since you mentioned that you have a lot in the company that you used to work for, so you're going to be able to increase your diversification in those assets. That could be a big one because you say you have what, one and a half million in after tax accounts.

If you're talking, I have a million dollars in X, Y, Z company. That is a very concentrated position and that is probably very undue risk that you're taking regardless of how awesome the company is. That is a risk that is very easily taken away by diversification, and that's the idea of diversification, is you try to take away all the risks that you don't have to take. Why take the risk if you have to?

The hard part is depending on the company, it probably has been very good to you, right? It's a great company. They've given me great dividends. Look at this growth I've had. This thing has made my retirement in some ways, and there's a lot of affection for that in respect the fact that. Man, it wasn't General Electric, it was Apple or whatever it was.

It could be hard to do that diversification because of that, plus the tax bill. But that's the thing that stands out a little bit to me, Bob, is make sure that you're not overly concentrated in this one company, because it doesn't matter how great the company is.

Let's look at Apple, let's look at Amazon. Amazing companies. How did they do last year? Almost any tech company. How did they do last year? Nvidia? Amazing technology. Semiconductors, how did they do last year? That's the risk that you have when you're so concentrated. I just want to put a little bold on this, Bob, to make sure you're not overly under diversified, because great companies can still go down and your retirement is your outcome.

If you have a plan of record, Bob, you can run different scenarios and the answer might be somewhere in between. and you're going to just have to make a judgment call on this and you're not going to get it right. Don't put so much pressure on getting it right. It's just a matter of thinking through it in an organized way.

I think from a hierarchy decision, I would say if you're over diversified and you have a significant portion of your retirement assets in the one company, that's a number one, deal with that. If you have room to draw within IRMAA and your tax bracket, I would say, draw from your retirement assets and or do Roth conversions, especially if your after tax portfolio is diversified.

So those are some, at least some guidelines I can give you. You're not going to get it right, just try to be thoughtful about it.

QUESTION THREE

Our next question comes from Rick.

Rick says,

"Hey, I've been listening for your podcast for years. I love them."

Rick. That makes me feel good because you've been listening to them for years, so it means that there's enough new things and perspectives that's helping you on your journey.

That said, if you get what you need from the podcast and you never listen again, I am thrilled. I just want you to rock retirement.

"The early ones like creating a retirement paycheck was great and exactly what I needed at the time, so simple. Now, I could use some advice and thoughts about the time period between 62 and 72 with a pension, but also using investments for an annual paycheck requirement while considering how to deal with traditional Roth IRA conversions and inherited IRAs to avoid overpaying tax now and when my RMDs are required. Thanks for the information you've provided."

You're welcome. All right. Rick, since you've been listening to the podcast for years, you have some structure of a pie cake that made your retirement resilient, because you have a runway of liquidity on the near term.

Now we're talking about optimization. How do you balance where to create your paycheck from traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, inherited IRAs when you're figuring in taxes. That's one reason why I love Andy Panko's focus and why he does tax meetups in the Rock Retirement Club all the time because this is important.

Taxes is a big area where you can optimize things and like all of this, it's not black and white, which is frustrating as we talked with Bob a minute ago and you want to map it out. The first thing you want to think about in this equation, Rick, when you're trying to figure out how do I fill the gap between 62 and 72, when those RMDs, probably 73 or 75 now with Secure 2.0, how do I fill the gap that isn't being covered by my other income sources? You want to think from a lifetime tax management perspective and in retirement, this is critical and it's not a way that we have thought about things when it comes to tax management for most of our lives. You talk to most CPAs, at least in my experience, it's about how do I save tax this year? What can I do this year to reduce my tax bill?

In retirement it becomes very different because it's a lifetime tax bill that you're managing. It's important to realize if that's the case, that you're not going to avoid tax. It's really just a timing issue of when you decide to realize the tax. That subtle shift can help lower some of that angst to paying tax today.

Yeah. I'm always going to pay the tax, so it's really do I move it forward? Where do I pay the tax from my perspective? This will help you in filling that bucket. The default when we build a resilient plan of record, Rick, is you drain your after-tax assets, then you go to your tax-deferred assets and then you go to your tax-free assets.

That's the default before you optimize. When you're optimizing this Rick, then you're going to say, okay, that's the default, my suggestion would be build a five-year cash flow estimate, and then you can identify areas where, hey, I don't have a lot of income in year three. Maybe I do something there.

Now it's identifying what my future RMDs look like if I follow this default. Simple spreadsheet will do that. Then second, in what years do I have an opportunity to what we call fill up the tax brackets, meaning that tax brackets are incremental. Rough numbers here, if you use a standard deduction and you're married, anything right around $102,000, $105,000, you will pay 12% in federal income taxes.

The next bracket, any incremental dollar, over the top of the 12% bracket, you pay 22%. That's a big jump, 12 to 22. If we assume it's a $102,000, and I'm just making that number up, it's in the general range. If in year two, say, Rick, you look at your income sources and say, I'm only going to make $50,000 this year in a real low tax bracket, and you see that and you realize, but I could earn, I could choose to realize income of say, $60,000, another $50,000, and how to only pay 12% on that income I chose to realize, and whoa, well, how do I choose to realize income in retirement? Well, one way would be to do a Roth conversion for $50,000.

Another way would be to take $50,000 from the IRA to help fund the gap to make your paycheck, Rick. In your case it might be to drain the inherited IRAs first to help fill that gap between 62 and 72 as you frame it. You just want to work through it, and you can map this out. This is what we do in the pie cake structure because we have you build a five-year income floor, which we've talked about and we've done on various episodes and webinars, and then you can figure out how to position your assets to fund those paychecks

. You just have to go through the process, Rick, and you're not going to get it right, but just the fact that you're being thoughtful about it and you're building out a cash flow model where you can see the opportunities is going to get you 90% of the way there.

The effort for the other 10% of certainty, which you'll never actually get, is probably not worth it.

The other aspect of this that comes into play, Rick, is just your view on tax policy. We know we're that we're without any changes, we're going to revert to the old tax code in 2026. We will move up these tax brackets quicker.

It's just some of your views on that and plus some of the things that we talked about with Bob beforehand. You do want to just map it out and know exactly how you're going to pay for your life for at least the next five years, and as you have already realized, you have options other than just draining your after-tax assets.

With that, let's move on to our Bring It On segment. Are you ready to bring it on? Well, you're the hero you've been waiting for. So, let's go.

BRING IT ON WITH KEVIN LYLES

Roger: Kevin Lyles, coach of the Rock Retirement Club is going to bring it, on mindset today. Kevin, sit down, stop dancing. Let's talk about mindset, buddy. What are we going to go into today?

Kevin: Today I want to talk about finding meaning and purpose in our lives and in our retirement.

Roger: Okay. My first reaction when I hear that is, it sounds, I want to say fufu.

It's not fufu, but it just sounds "meaning and purpose". It sounds like I'm sitting on top of a mountain, cross-legged. Is that how we're going to approach this? Because you're a high-powered attorney, I can't imagine you doing that. So, what does it mean?

Kevin: When I first studied this in retirement coaching, I had the same reaction as you, and yet we know a lot of people really struggle in retirement with these concepts, and I want to try to make it easier to think about for them and bring it down to where it is a very important aspect of retirement.

It's a very important aspect of life. During our careers, frankly, our careers give us a pretty strong purpose for most of us. That's why we don't think about a 30-year-old struggling with finding meaning and purpose, although we do hear of those people who are burned out in their careers and want something different, right?

But in retirement, you have to create your own purpose.

Roger: You could even go farther back because starting in school age, you have structure and purpose of every day.

Kevin: Exactly. Your life has pretty much been planned for you, for certainly your school years. It your parents have most to do with your life, where you live, what you do, but then you go to school, the same thing, and then your careers.

Now you've hit 60 years old, 70 years old whenever you retire, and you've got none of that. So, you're completely the architect of your own life. That's why thinking about meaning and purpose is important.

Roger: Then you face the paradox of choice. Which is you have all the options, which really is very stressful.

Kevin: It can be, and we talk about freedom, retirement brings you so much freedom, but you have to choose to use that freedom and you have to think about it the right way. Which is why we're doing this in our mindset segment this month.

I think meaning is a very internal concept. It's something that is important to you.

It brings satisfaction or pleasure.

Roger: Can you give me an example?

Kevin: Yeah. It's not sitting in front of a TV show that you like that will bring you temporary pleasure, right? But that's like a diet of only cotton candy. You're going to be left very unsatisfied if you just watch TV. Meaning is something that allows you to use your unique gifts and talents that you have, to be appreciated and to feel useful.

I think that's the essence of meaning. It is something that makes you feel useful to either those people who are important to you, maybe strangers? Maybe you're seeking publicity and you just want to be famous, but you want to feel useful. Often when we retire, we don't feel useful anymore. When we go to work, they pay us to do what we're doing, so we must be useful to them.

When you're retired, you need that same sense of satisfaction of usefulness.

Roger: I want to get your perspective on something around this if I can. Because I know Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, is one of your favorite books. I know that. I was reading a discussion. The other day, or a comparison between Frankl and Freud.

I'm going to butcher this a little bit, but Freud would argue that we're driven by pleasure and this is a retirement play. And Frankl made the counter of no, it is meaning that is really what drives us and when we don't have meaning in our lives, we distract ourselves with pleasure.

You talked about watching TV, at the core, we need to have meant in our lives, and if we don't have it, we're going to just pursue pleasures and distractions as a substitute.

Kevin: Yeah. I love that concept of it being a distraction. That's what we will see. And a lot of retiree’s report, they do this, they sit in front of a TV and binge watch.

Maybe it's their favorite comedy. Whatever it is that is a distraction. But I think when we seek meaning we get pleasure, and we get meaningful pleasure. I guess we can't use the term meaningful to define meaning, but it really is a sense that our lives are on target, that we're in sync with ourselves, with our own personal values, that we're in balance.

Our lives are in balance. We know what we're doing matters.

Roger: Then happiness and contentment are a byproduct of pursuing meaning.

Kevin: Yes, exactly. I think you end up with contentment, with happiness, with pleasure when you do it. There are other temporary ways as we discuss watching TV, eating cotton candy, whatever, but those are distractions.

There's nothing wrong with distractions in our life.

They just can't form the core of our life, we're left wanting.

So that's what I mean by meaning. It's that internal concept. It's what's important to you.

Purpose then, this we're going to have to go deeper, Roger, because purpose is more an external concept. It involves looking outside yourself and feeling how you can make a difference to the world, to the people, the places around you.

That's what purpose is. It's the focus of your life. It's where the full measure of your energy is directed. Not the full measure, that's not a good way to say it. A major part of your focus and energy are directed. That's your purpose in life. That's what you're all about. Next month we're going to talk about identity, and these concepts are very related because the purpose helps form your identity.

Roger: All right, let me go to purpose for a second. I want to play devil's advocate a little bit here. That is, dude, Kevin, I just got done working 40 years. I don't want to change the world in the community. I just want to relax and love on my family and play golf. When I hear purpose, it sounds grandiose, and I don't have any grandiose plans outside of just being a great husband or a great mother or grandmother or golfer.

Kevin: That's fine, I think what’s required here, is that you be completely honest with yourself and if being a great golfer, being a great husband will keep you satisfied and happy, that's a wonderful purpose.

In other words, it doesn't have to be grandiose. It can be, I want to pass along the values, the stories to my grandchildren. That's a wonderful purpose to have, and we talk about purpose, and when we talk about it as a grandiose thing, it sounds like you can only have one purpose. That's not true. You can have multiple purposes in life.

So, most of us have a couple of central purposes, two or three maybe. You can have several, but you've got to be honest with yourself and decide is that enough? You've talked about clients before who are bored, and maybe the reason they're bored is they don't have enough purpose. Maybe they don't feel like their life has any meaning.

 Pursuing meaningful activities, activities that are important to you, will help drive your purpose. It will help you find your purpose.

Roger: So, if you think of changing the world, the way you change the world, if you follow the string down, it goes to your interaction with one person. Actually, it goes one more level down to changing how you interact with yourself, changing how you interact a person, which changes how the community works, which change how the county works, it works up. It is literally micro, it's not these grandiose things.

Let me share a goal that I have this year related to this. If that's okay, because I think this sort of hits the point. One of my goals this year is to level up my relationships with my core friends so that our children and grandchildren will want to model their life after mine.

That's a big goal. That is a high bar.

Kevin: That's pretty deep. Roger.

Roger: There's some stuff in here. There's some gray matter in here.

Kevin: Yeah. And if we examine it and sort of boil that down or peel away the layers of that, you're trying to set a good example for your children and grandchildren, right?

When you get to it, you're going to do that by improving the relationships you have with your friends. But what is the purpose? The purpose is being a good role model for your children and grandchildren. You've combined meaning and purpose, and I think that's the key in retirement is choosing activities that combine those two things.

You're doing an activity i.e. you are building stronger relationships with your friends. That is meaningful to you, that gives you pleasure, but you're using those activities in pursuit of a grander purpose to be a role model. I think we're done here, Roger. That was perfect.

Roger: I read my purpose every day, and mine is actually very non-specific.

So, I'm looking at it right now. My purpose is to understand and fully actualize my talents for the glory of God. I read that every day. I have all these abilities and I just want to see how far I can stretch them as essentially my purpose. I think that's not as specific as we've been talking, but not bad.

Kevin: I like that. So, let's give our listeners a call to action. I want you this month to create your own purpose or mission statement. To do that, I want you to answer three questions. What do I want to do? So, think of all the activities that you find meaningful that allow you to use your unique gifts and talents, and just come up with a list.

What do I want to do in retirement? Second, who do I want to do it for? And it's fine. Some of them, even most of them are mostly about you. That's okay, but I'm sure you also have some other people. Or it could be a place, maybe you want to improve your community or an organization that you really feel passionate about.

Who do you want to do these things for? In Roger's case, he found he wanted to improve relationships with his friends and strengthen those. Who was he doing that for? He was doing it for himself. He gets pleasure out of doing that, but he was also doing it for his children and grandchildren. He wanted to be a role model.

So, who do you want to do it for? And then finally, what is the result you want to create? And this is where it can be grand. This can be a really important thing, or it can just be important to you. Doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, but what result do you want to get from doing that? In Roger's case, he wanted to model.

Proper behavior for his children and grandchildren. What's the value you want to create? Maybe you want to cure cancer. Maybe that's the result you're trying to create with your activities of fundraising. Maybe you want to clean up your local community. We had a hurricane here. We've been out and we've been picking up some trash that's in the vegetation here. That's something we're doing.

Create goals that are measurable, so you know what you're doing. Those smart goals Roger's talked about before, and you'll have your purpose. Or your mission statement, I think that will help you find meaning and purpose in retirement.

Roger: Also, you're writing in pencils.

This is a journey, right?

Kevin: Great point, great point. You can redo this exercise every year, every three months, every five years, you're going to evolve as a person and your purpose and mission statement will evolve with you.

On your marks, get set.

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

And we're off to set a little baby step you can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life. I want you to spend some time thinking about your mindset. Kevin and I had a great chat.

What is it that you can do in the next seven days to just, tweak your mindset a little bit about how to approach things. Or in the next seven days, if you're not focused on mindset, what is it you can do financially in the next seven days to think about how I manage lifetime tax when I think about withdrawals like Rick and Bob, rather than always trying to avoid tax today.

ROCK RETIREMENT PLEDGE

As we've been doing, we have our pledge to you when it comes to this show, and we're serious about it, and we go over that every week. I do this partly for myself, to remind myself while we're here, we are focused on you and your journey and the transition into rocking retirement.

We want you to have a goal.

We want you to have agency.

We want you to have pathways. This is why we're here.

We want to be authentic with no pretense.

We want to be humble and very respectful.

We want to be really, really curious in helping empower you to rock retirement by approaching things with fresh eyes, like we're going to do with going from two to one and holding up our beliefs for examination.

So, we can adjust them or have firmer conviction. And we're going to do all of this where we're free from big finance. We're not going to talk about products for money, free from gimmicks.

We're just trying to be honest here and be authentic, and we're always focused on you taking incremental action or expanding your perspective.

I am all in on. So, let's go do this.

END

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