transcript
Speech-to-text transcription can look a little quirky. Please excuse any grammar or spelling errors.
Episode #477 - Widowed In Retirement: Navigating Life Changes
Roger: "My dad always taught me that when there's an elephant in the room, introduce it."
-Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture.
INTRODUCTION
Hey there.
Welcome to the Retirement Answer Man Show. My name is Roger Whitney. This show is dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence to lean in and rock retirement because you’ve done the work. Excited to have you here, and we’re going to continue this going from two to one today.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
I have a couple of announcements and then I'll set the target for today, then we'll get going.
Announcement number one. In this coming weeks 6-Shot Saturday, we are starting our annual listener survey. You get to tell us what you like, what you don't like, how we can make this show better for you, and we have some simple questions. It'll all be anonymous. We have some fun questions too, and we will share the results of this once we close that listener survey. It's been the number one thing that has helped us iterate on the show. Check out that link in our 6-Shot Saturday email. If you're not signed up for our weekly email, you can do that at 6shotsaturday.com or rogerwhitney.com, and that way you can get a summary of the show and links to things that we talk about.
Second announcement is that we still have a position for a special Certified Financial Planner open at my firm, retireagile.com. It's going to be a chance for this person to do real retirement planning. They're going to be salaried, full-time, can work virtually from anywhere without ever having to prospect or do any of the things that a lot of advisors have to do. This is real retirement planning we're doing here, so you can either email me at roger@retireagile.com if you want the link to how to apply, or you can get that link in this week’s 6-Shot Saturday.
Okay, so today's show we have some targets here. We're going to talk about two to one, widowhood. We're going to talk about the emotional impacts that occur when this event happens.
We're going to bring on Mark Trautman, one of my favorite people who is a CFP®, wonderful man and is actually walking this journey right now. He's a few years into losing his wife.
Second target is we're going to answer your questions. We have some questions about Rosie and our retirement plan live, and some criticisms too, and questions about a number of other things.
The third target is that we are going to have Dr. Bobby Dubois on in our Bring It On segment to talk about energy and specifically sleep, how important it is, and some concrete steps you can take to experiment to improve your sleep. Then last target is we're going to have a Smart Sprint, talk about our pledge to you from a show perspective, and then go on with our day.
So, let's get going.
TWO TO ONE: WIDOWHOOD
All right. I'm really excited to get started on this journey of framing in what it means to go from two to one, whether you're dealing with it right now or. Likely it's going to be on your radar, or somebody you love's radar. I feel weird even saying I'm excited about it because it's sort of an icky topic.
But I am excited because as Mark, who you're going to meet in a moment, and I were talking about just before this, it's important. The more open we are about this, the more you, we can be proactive and manage a very human thing.
So, I want to bring on Mark Trautman. How are you doing, mark?
Mark: I'm doing great. How are you doing today?
Roger: Good. Now Mark and I met through, well retirement geekdom and podcasts, and he's a member of the club. He's a friend. He shares his wisdom. He has an extensive financial background. You were a portfolio manager at one point, right?
Mark: That's correct, yeah. I managed a mutual fund, small mutual funds, but yes, I did.
That was my career for 25 years.
Roger: And race cars?
Mark: Yeah, high performance driving, really.
Roger: Is that what they call it? Okay.
Mark: But yes, high performance driving of race cars. Yes.
Roger: And now lives in my favorite state and is an outdoorsman and he lost his wife. Mark, why don't you sort of set up who you are and the journey that you've been.
Mark: Yeah, so my wife and I were always interested in personal finance. We moved to Colorado in 2008 because we wanted to kind of live where we enjoyed playing. I was still working at the time, I was working out of the house, so that was great. I was able to do that. Then we have a daughter, so we wanted her to grow up kind of in a fun community.
We live in a very small town, Crested Butte, Colorado. It's tiny, everyone knows everyone kind of thing. Then in 2019, she was diagnosed with sarcoma. Initially it was just, oh, we'll remove this lump, and you'll go through some radiation and everything will be fine. This will just be an inconvenience. Then she was basically cleared after that process.
But then about six months later, it came back. It went to her brain and then she went through a number of surgeries and went through radiation, and again, was cleared and we thought, okay, now we're done. Then it came back again and ultimately it took her life. It was about a two-year ordeal of that, and I had already retired at that point.
We were both very happy that I could be a full-time caretaker and we don't have the services here in our little, small town. We had to go to Denver. We had to move basically to take care of her medical needs, and I was able to do that. So, there was a big kind of weight off my shoulders. I didn't have to worry about how I was going to deal with this from an employment standpoint. We could focus 100% on her situation. She was still working out of choice. It was really the way that we had healthcare. We had planned that she was going to retire at the end of 2019, but when she was diagnosed, she didn't want to change her health insurance situation. So, she continued to work, but ultimately they actually terminated her as a result of her not being able to go in the office, even though no one else was going in during COVID.
So that was kind of a sore point. Then we did go on COBRA, so we can talk about a whole bunch of stuff like that, but that's the gist of the journey, that two-year journey.
Roger: Okay, and how old were the two of you when you were going through.
Mark: I have to do some math. I am 57 now. That was almost two years ago, so that was 55. So, 53 basically, 53 and 54 is when it started.
Roger: And you were retired when the first diagnosis came or did you?
Mark: Yeah, I retired at 50.
Roger: Okay. Okay. Well, I appreciate your willingness to share this journey. You do this a lot and I know you have a heart for helping younger people on the financial journey, and I think you and I, or you're going to help me on a wisdom, what we want our kids to know at some point this year.
I appreciate you having the chat this entire month really on going through this. From my perspective, Mark, wickedly smart, not just in finances, but taxes. He has a CFP®, he doesn't practice, he just does this because he loves the financial world. He's one of the smartest guys I know. I ask him questions all the time because he usually knows the answers.
Mark: Keep going, I appreciate that.
Roger: So today, Mark, we're going to talk about the non-financial stuff because there's a lot of stuff going on here, and in your case, it sounds like you had a lot of start stops, right? This is like, oh, this is an inconvenience. It just shows the low resolution that even doctors have as they go through this and trying to navigate with patients.
It's hard to know that you're okay, because things just pop up all over the place. Let's talk about the “what” first, what do you lose when you lose a spouse? Obviously, you lose the person, but in your experience, what else do you lose?
Mark: I think it also depends on how your relationship was. So, the two of us met as teenagers, we were best friends. Then we got married. We had a child 10 years after we were married, so we had a long period of time of just the two of us, and we always did everything together. You mentioned driving cars on the racetrack. We both did that. It wasn't my passion; it was our passion and literally everything we did was always together.
So that was a big loss in that I felt like half of myself got cut off and I've lost half of who I am because it was us. It wasn't always me, and I've had to learn how to be me going forward, which has been very difficult. You don't realize how connected you are until you go through something like this.
For instance, a lot of our friends in local community were more her friends and my friends, and so that changed a lot. My friends, many of them were outside of the Crested Butte area, and I've had to kind of reinvent myself. We were both kind of in this financial independence community. We actually didn't get involved in that until, I would say 2019 actually, after she was initially diagnosed.
But now that is kind of my group of friends and family, I guess you would say. Actually, it was a very big support mechanism because many of those people in that community tends to be very helping and so forth. So not just from the financial side, but the personal side and people come visit and talk.
I've had to reinvent myself, I guess you would say, and that community has been beneficial for that. But that was one of the bigger aspects of financial side because of my background really wasn't as difficult. I do frequently think about if those roles were reversed and how hard it would be for her.
I constantly think about that and then now I'm thinking about, well, what happens if something happens to me, and my daughter has to inherit all of this stuff that I do?
Roger: It's not just the person, in your case it was your buddy, it was, WE go mountain biking, or WE go high performance driving. Did it take some transition of stopping using sure, WE'LL go.
Mark: I still find myself using the term we. The other day someone mentioned coming over and I'm like, yeah, our house is right here, and this is almost two years later. So, the we in our, as opposed, it still feels weird to say, well, my house or I, I frequently still use we. Just because of that. We were married for 31 years. We knew each other 10 years prior to that. So basically 40 years of my life and I'm 50, I'll be 57 now or 58. So vast majority of my life was always we.
Roger: Yeah. You also lost your identity, your routines, from the big things of what you go do, but also just from which one of us does the dishes, who takes out the garbage, all the things that you remember that she did, or you did for her. All those things just sort of get blown up.
Mark: Yeah, and I guess because of the transition, because it was a two-year period and towards the last six months, I was literally having to do everything. I had to kind of learn on the way. So, I learned how to do the dishes. I learned how to do the laundry. I'm still learning how to clean the house.
Roger: It looks good. I can see it. It looks good.
Mark: Well, you can see part of it. But yeah, a lot of those things that she did, we divided and conquered. And even just being a dad, my daughter and my wife were basically best friends. Now I'm stepping into that best friend role for her and that's been a good change, but a change, nonetheless.
Roger: What about your goals over the two years since she passed? Because you two, you were best friends, you had a vision for the future, you moved to Colorado as part of that vision, have your goals had to change as well?
Mark: We had similar goals. Part of it was moving to ski country because we used to ski in Vermont, and it rains a lot, and we didn't like that so we moved to Colorado where the snow is better. So, we were always doing things like that, but going forward, redefining goals, yeah, it's definitely been a change.
I'll have to think about, well what do I want going forward as opposed to what do we want going forward? I still think I'm kind of following in some of those same goal footsteps because they were both goals for both of us. We always had goals together. We never really had independent goals. It wasn't like, well, I'm going to go climb X Y Z mountain with my buddies and you're going to go with your girlfriends and go do this. It was always, we are going to do this. So many of my future goals are still the same goals. It's just that I'm going to be doing them by myself. That's been a challenge in itself. Kind of being willing to continue to do those goals on a solo basis has been a huge change, and initially it was extremely uncomfortable just because you're not used to doing things by yourself. In many cases it was because only two of us would be doing it. It wasn't like a group of us were going to be doing it.
So that's been a change, but I would say many of those goals are still on the table and I will just learn to do them myself, and I'm getting more comfortable doing that.
Roger: And you’re building the social network to be able to have others to share it.
Mark: Honestly, the club itself has been huge, I was not asked to say anything about the club or anything by any means, but it has been a massive advantage and I've met a lot of friends through the Rock Retirement Club, and we do things together and that has been a great help as well.
Roger: So that's what. What you lose is yourself and your identity, your goals, your routines, and that togetherness, right? You go from two to one and then you got to figure out how to transition to a new life that is well solo, at least initially.
So, the objective here is in dealing with this loss, I think the first step would be to process it, right? This is grieving process. And I read a good definition of grieving. We all know about the stages of grieving or that's what's typically talked about, but I love this, is that whole process says it allows you to maintain connections to what you lost while you assimilate in order to go forward.
It's that in between stage to create the memories while you figure out you’re footing on the forward path. That's essentially what grieving is.
Mark: Yeah, it's definitely a very large in between process I would say, and we have a group here called Living Journeys, which is a cancer support group. They've been very helpful with us during the cancer treatment period, but also afterwards.
She was also in hospice, and they have been great. So, if anyone goes through this and take advantage of those services that groups like hospice can provide, not just during the final days, but also afterwards. Then I would say that there's a number of books I've read for sure on the process and how other people have gone through this.
Frankly, actually, there's an individual who just wrote a book called Taking Stock. His name is Jordan Grumet, and he also goes by Doc G online. I actually went to a financial independence event where we actually sat next to each other the first day and this was literally a couple weeks after she passed away.
A friend of mine was speaking at one of these events and said, "I think it would be a great idea for you to just come along, get out, be with your friends and kind of family in this community." He sat down next to me, and it was the greatest thing because he was a hospice doctor, is a hospice doctor.
The grieving process is a long journey.
I'm two years from since she passed away and it's still a process, but it gets, I don't want to say it gets easier, but more manageable over time.
Roger: Yeah. I was actually perusing his book this morning in prep to talk along with a few others and we're going to create a bibliography. Nicole Mills, are you listening? We're going to create a bibliography and I have a number of resources, including his book that we'll share.
Mark: One of the things I would like to add in that respect is that when this happens, especially at a young age, you start to think about your own mortality. So, you start to go through a lot of these thoughts of, well, this could happen to me, and how do I live my best great life now? And not always be putting things off to the future and saying, well later I will do X, Y, Z.
You start to think more of like, maybe I need to do some of those things now as opposed to later.
Roger: Even if it's someone you know whose spouse dies, or even a friend that dies. In my journey, I've walked around death with others, whether it's clients or family members, more than I can think of, and there is the opportunity to alchemize it into living more fully yourself. Right. That's the good that can come out of the flower that can sprout from a big pile of junk.
Mark: Yeah. It does seem odd that there can be good that comes out of this, but I would agree that there are good things that can evolve from this process.
Roger: Then this grieving process, we think of the stages and I'm a practical guy. You can make a project out of this. Let me go through stage one and stage two and stage three. That's not really how it works.
Mark: Many people don't go through all the stages, and they certainly don't go through them in the same order as I've found it, especially as I've talked to other people who have walked this walk.
Roger: As you're interacting with someone, realizing that you don't have to be their project manager and identify stages, they're going to do it in their own unique way. I was reading this morning on the styles of Grief, Mark, and one was the intuitive style, and this is the style of, and this came from Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka, Grieving Beyond Gender.
It's the citation, but the intuitive griever has to tell the story. Either tell stories about the person or journal or be in groups and be outward about everything. That's how I always think of somebody that's grieving.
Every time I've gone through grief, whether it was from my mom or my sister or, or people close to me, I'm more the second version, which is the instrumental, which is more physical and cognitive ways of dealing with grief. Almost a little bit of a loner aspect.
Acting, analyzing, more likely just to go it all alone.
Mark: I was like that.
Roger: I thought so, and sometimes I felt, shouldn't I have cried more?
The point is, we have our own style and there's no playbook or timeline to do this. In your experience, well, how did you experience grief?
Mark: Well, because I'm kind of a planner, as you might expect, I kind of dove into the weeds of what do I need to do now? There are certain things that you do need to do right away, and certainly when we get to the financial side, there's a whole bunch of financial stuff that needs to get done, and I think it was just my way of processing. If I was busy, I wasn't just sitting there being terribly upset. Having something to do was a way of grieving for me. Of course, I was grieving emotionally at the same time, but I found that, especially at the outset, there's a lot of things that you just have to do in the first week or two and so forth as you would expect.
But even after that, it was more of like, oh, well, I need to change over this IRA to an inherited IRA, or all these things, and that's just the way my brain works. So that was a way to kind of get through this. Then later, I would say after all of those I knew kind of checklist items were done, that's when I started to explore, well, what does this look like for me?
I was reaching out to people who had walked this walk. There are people in this community that have dealt with the same thing. Being in a small community is beneficial because there are plenty of people that come share their experiences and help you realize that the way you grieve is the way you grieve.
You don't have to grieve like everyone else grieves. It will be a process. It will be a long process potentially. For me, I never had the anger. Some people have anger, like, why did this happen? One person wrote a book that he lost, his wife, very similar age, almost walked the same exact walk in our community.
I went to a book reading with him recently and one thing he said is that the larger your love, the larger your loss is. And it's almost like yin and yang, the two go together. And that's just how it works. So, when you start to realize that the reason you feel so bad is because you had this love that was so strong and that's just the opposite effect of what you had, and that's okay.
So that was very helpful to hear that. I was almost like, I know you got a tattoo recently, and I was like, oh, that would be an interesting tattoo, a yin and yang of love and loss. But it was very helpful. To realize that the reason you have these strong emotions from a grieving process is because of what you had together while she was alive.
I just focus on the memories. And the nice thing about like having an iPhone, you're always, photos pop up. And to me, they don't bring on a negative emotion, they bring on a positive. I'd look at it and say, instead of looking at it from a negative side, from the lost side, let's look at it from the side of, wow. It was great to have had that experience with her. So, you can always turn it around to a positive from a negative in some cases.
Roger: Tell me when you were triggered, or it was negative.
Mark: This is something that I've talked to other people. I still live in the same house. Sometimes you walk around, and you'll see, especially since she was sick for so long, the chair she would sit in under the blanket she would use.
It brings up difficult emotions. But then I try to turn it around to look at a picture and say, look at that great time we had. Instead, I tried to refocus that emotion to a positive of what we had. And again, kind of using this yin and yang and saying, you have this negative emotion because something triggered it. Let's think about how that could be a positive trigger. Turn it around to a positive trigger as opposed to wallowing in the negative.
Roger: The interesting thing about the yin and yang symbol is the little dot, right? So, if one is the positive reaction as say, as one part of the yin and yang, the little dot is going to represent the bad reaction.
There's always going to be a dose of that in there. The key is that to acknowledge. Where it's taking you and catch yourself and alchemize it essentially to flip the switch to not stuff it down necessarily, but to reframe it.
Mark: Accept those emotions when they occur because they're all going to occur.
You don't want to just completely try to wall them off because I think that's a dangerous place to be. Accept that you're having this negative emotion, understand it and then try to say, okay, how could I help this become a positive emotion from this negative experience?
Roger: It's a messy process to do that.
Mark: Yeah, and I've been told it will never go away. It's just you're going to be able to, I don't want to say manage it better, but that's probably one way of framing it. It becomes more accepting, and I look at it and say it's better to grieve and have had that period of time with her than to have never had that time with her.
Roger: We're talking about the death of a spouse here, and that's primarily what this series is focused on. We'll likely do future series on divorce and other types of loss. Loss of a child. I've walked with people who have lost a child. That's a whole different kind of grief. But the key here is grieving is it could be the loss of your job; it could be retiring.
You can grieve retirement. You can grieve breaking sentimental objects. So grieving isn't just necessarily for losing a spouse. It's just an important process. I would imagine, Mark, and you're walking this journey, so I want you to call me if this doesn't make sense. But the grieving process is solidifying the memory and then assimilating yourselves to move forward in positive ways, right?
As you go through the grieving process, which could take years, then it becomes reaffirm and recreate as the objective. Right? Who Mark is as Mark, not as a we, an identity and passions and social network you already hit on and your environment reclaiming the environment.
Yeah. It was you and your wife’s, but it's now yours. Where are you at in that process of reaffirming who Mark is and then recreating essentially your whole life as Mark.
Mark: Like you said, this can go in lockstep with retirement. Some of these same things happen when you retire. So, I was kind of starting to walk that journey to begin with.
I retired at the end of 2015, so the beginning of 2016, but she wasn't diagnosed until 2019. So, for three years I was trying to already figure out who am I going forward as an individual, although she was walking that with me, but she was working, so she wasn't really going through that process as much as I was.
As you said earlier, I teach a financial literacy class in the high school. I help people out in our community just with basic finance stuff that you and I know well, but many people don't. I was already starting to kind of lean into that new identity. Since she's passed away, I've just kind of continued along that path, but I've also expanded my network to include, for instance, I think I joined the Rock Retirement Club. Well, she was alive, so it was like 2019 or 2018.
Roger: I remember we had at least one Zoom meeting together. The three days.
Mark: Yeah. It was one of those breakout sessions, I think. Right.
Then really realizing that this community and the other communities that I'm involved with are so valuable, and I've really made good connections in those groups and selfishly trying to bring those groups together but that's a whole other mission. I think I was already starting to do that new identity because of retirement, and now because of the loss of my spouse, it just became even more important to continue that journey.
So, in one way, it was beneficial that I was already retired and working on this prior to her diagnosis.
Roger: You hit on something I want to ask about, and that is community.
When you're dealing with the loss of a spouse. We think of family for sure, right and you have a daughter and extended family. My intuition says a community separate from family is probably even more crucial because the community's not going through it with you.
Mark: Yeah, I've actually found, so my family lives on the east coast. I have a brother and my mother is still alive and they're on the east coast. Marge had four siblings. Three are sisters who all live in actually the same community my mother, my brother, do. One of those sisters has been very outgoing and we communicate regularly, and she's come out to visit multiple times, even after she passed away. So that's been helpful.
But the social community has been really more day to day and certainly, I mean, we all get comfortable with Zoom now, so it's kind of neat. Many of these people, pretty much all of them do not live near me, but we communicate at least weekly through various Zoom calls and so forth. So that actually has been beneficial.
It sounds weird to say technology has stepped in the place of some of these social connections, but again, it's in the interim. For instance, I'm going to visit some of these people this week, as a matter of fact in person.
But in many cases, we're doing conversations over Zoom and these are usually group conversations and I've been very open about what's going on. Then they've been very open to talk about it and support me because I'm not putting up this wall like, oh, don't talk to me about that, because it's a bad subject.
I've been very open, and I've found that to be beneficial because they understand where you're coming from, they know that you're comfortable talking about it, and then they're willing to add their support in, in the ways that they can.
So being open has been very helpful, I would say, as opposed to being closed and trying to ignore or be quiet or wall off those emotions.
Roger: Yeah, you live in a small town and that can be one of the most isolating places to be if you're grieving and a lot of people, I'm sure, feel isolated, but because of the community aspect of it and zoom, it's allowed you to be connected because not many people live near you.
Mark: Yeah. I do live at the end of the road.
Roger: You do. It's a beautiful end of the road there. We've hit on a lot of these obstacles, so we know what we lose a spouse. The objectives are to process via grieving and then to reaffirm and recreate who you are. Obviously, some of the obstacles are going to be basically the trappings of your old life, right?
Your identity as a spouse, your purpose as a lover, and a supporter of your spouse. A social network. The environment and being trapped. And I think another one I would add in there as an obstacle. Cause I've seen people do this, is not reaffirming and recreating and letting it define the rest of your life.
Mark: I agree a hundred percent. I've seen that people kind of wallow in the past as opposed to moving forward and we all need to move forward.
It's okay to move forward and accept the past and love the past, but if you constantly just stop time at that point in time, I think it's a dangerous place to be.
Roger: This can take years and I can see that depending on how you approach it, it becomes a spiral.
The way I've observed it is if you let it define you, it's a spiral down in that you're not going to be near as engaging to be around, over time. I think of a loved one, in-law that they got divorced and he was one of my best friends and he's let it define him for the last 10 years. I saw him just the other day and it's hard to be around him because he is still, there.
It becomes a spiral and you become more isolated potentially, whereas the opposite, it makes you, you know, the fact that you're open about it. For me anyway, two of the most uncomfortable situations to be in is to be with somebody who just had a big loss. It's an honor to be there, but it's still uncomfortable to navigate or to be at the bedside of somebody in the hospital because you're helpless. You don't know what to say and how to navigate it and it sounds like you did this, Mark. The more open you are about it and relaxed you are about it, the more comfortable you make people feel so they can actually be there for you.
Mark: Yeah, that's been my experience for sure.
Roger: The plan here is not to solve anything. We wanted to talk about the non-financial aspects today. Next week we're going to feel a lot more comfortable potentially, because we're going to talk about hard stuff, financial aspects of it. Here we can create definitive to-do lists and action items and punch lists.
That's a safer place.
Then the week after, we're going to try to provide you with some frameworks to manage through these things. I'm a big fan of having a framework to help navigate so you're not walking without any direction.
Then in the last week, we're going to have others that are walking this journey share some of their wisdom, so we get some perspective from widows and widowers and people that are on this journey that has some wisdom to share.
Anything we missed, Mark?
Mark: I don't think so. I think we covered a lot of the non-financial stuff. It's a tough topic, but I think you framed it great. Hopefully we covered a lot of the aspects of that.
Roger: Thank you for sharing your journey.
Mark: Absolutely.
LISTENER QUESTIONS
Now it's time to answer some of your questions on how to rock retirement. If you have a question for the show, go to rogerwhitney.com/askroger, and you can type in a question. You can leave an audio question, you can leave feedback if you just want to tell me something, whatever is you want, we'll try to answer it on the show and help you take a baby step towards rocking retirement.
QUESTION ONE
So today we're going to answer a few questions in comments, talk about a few comments related to our Retirement Plan Live series that ended in January with Rosie, and it was a little bit of a different one. It was a difficult one for Rosie, given what had happened in the markets and with inflation and some of the planning aspects of it.
I'm going to start with a scathing comment that wasn't sent to me directly. It was left as a review in Apple Podcasts where you can leave reviews for podcasts, and I read every review I get the good ones and the bad ones.
This one was titled, "Wow, did that just happen?" From Eureka Homesteader
Eureka says,
"The last retirement live event was disgraceful.
I don't know how you thought it was okay to drag that person through what was clearly a totally failed plan from the start and do so in public. Then you went straight into your sales pitch for your retirement club. You have clearly moved to the monetizing dark side along with your RRC elite who obsessed with the money counting and culture.
I used to like the podcast, but clearly the motivations have changed."
Ouch. Eureka is not happy.
A lot of things going on in this review, and a lot of this is going on with Eureka more than with me, but there are some nuggets in there that I wanted to pay attention to.
Number one was dragging Rosie through this process.
It's hard enough to have a retirement plan. You thought was feasible and was told that was feasible or not told it wasn't feasible. Then to have a series of events, some self-inflicted, some not, occur to be in the position where you have some serious choices to make. That can be hard enough in private.
Rosie raised her hand to do this openly with you and with me. She and I had conversations, and it wasn't a surprise of where her plan stood. She had already had meetings with her advisor and knew that the current feasibility was not that great. So, it wasn't like it was surprised on her. I don't want to be a reality TV type of thing.
Nothing is manufactured from that perspective.
Rosie wanted perspective and I am helping Rosie privately to navigate and reorganize based on where she's at.
But Rosie also had the generosity to do this for you and I, to help you and I be better in how we plan for things. I'm not going to say I dragged Rosie through anything because she and I had had a number of conversations and we did it as respectfully as possible.
She wanted to do this because she cared so much about you because she knows a lot of other people are in the same situation. So, I feel proud of it.
Secondly, on marketing the club.
We have a pledge at the end of the show now of what we stand for and what we don't. We're not going to talk about products for money, but we are going to try to create solutions to help empower you to rock retirement, which is our core purpose on everything, and the club is one of them. We want to tell you about it because we're proud of it. We think it can help certain people have a dramatic impact on how they plan for retirement and embrace and lean in in rock retirement.
So we're going to tell you about it and we're going to do it in a respectful, dignified way.
That's all I got to say about that, but I appreciate the review. It's a good reminder that we do need to be dignified in how we do everything and not use whatever situation it is in any kind of exploitative way. All right.
SECOND QUESTION
To bookend that scathing review, I want to share a message I got from Tom on Rosie's case study.
Tom says,
"I wanted to thank you for the recent podcast regarding Rosie and her retirement plan. I have listened to other podcasts regarding retirement, and they always seem to have on guests that are clearly in the upper 1% bracket of retirees, almost like a bragging party.
Can they retire? Gimme a break. I gained so much more insight into hearing Rosie's story, goals, and plans along with your evaluation and assessment. You are correct in that she was really bold and wonderful to put herself out there. For all of us, it has given me and my wife direction as we approach retirement.
Thanks again for all of your efforts. They're much appreciated."
So that's a bookend to Eurekas comment. The struggle in the retirement planning industry, and this is a broader thought, is how do you provide guidance for people that most need it, in creating a retirement plan and rocking retirement, how do you do that and have a viable economic model. Advice for the masses.
No one has figured this out. A lot of private equity money and venture capital money have been put towards trying to tackle this problem.
Because it's not just the financial planning tool. It's got to be coupled with literacy. It's got to be coupled with project management. It's got to be coupled with wisdom and coaching and it's very difficult to do that and make it an economically viable model.
I saw Vanguard just the other day, close their financial planning arm in Great Britain. They had launched a financial planning arm for a very nominal fee based on investments you could have access to a CFP®. They just closed that in Britain. I don't know if that is a sign of it still offered in the U.S. I believe.
This is hard to have a viable model when the typical retirement planner or certified financial planner that has experience is going to cost thousands and thousands of dollars. That's an issue. The Rock Retirement Club is part of my mission to have something that can give you almost all of that, except the specific one-on-one advice to get you 90% of the way there at a cost that I think is reasonable relative for what it is.
But this is an issue that the industry has not figured out, and it's an extremely important issue because then if we don't solve it, you just start to have an even wider spread between those that are having confidence to rock retirement and those are just trying to get by. I'm going to do my effort to try to figure that out in my way.
QUESTION THREE
Our next question, and this is actually a question, not a comment regarding the conversation with Rosie comes from Kathy and it is an audio question. So Kathy, you get big virtual hugs.
Kathy: Hi Roger. My name is Kathy and my husband just retired. I will follow suit in a few years. Thank you so much for helping Rosie during this start of 2023 in your retirement plan live sessions.
I just wanted to follow up on a question you posed to Rosie that intrigues me because it sounded like you had more to say on Wednesday night's live show. You asked Rosie whether she noticed that her advisor was taking her withdrawals proportionately out of each asset class. What else did you have to say about that?
Should it be proportionate? For example, and putting it into more personal terms with our own situation? If someone has a large liquid pool of funds for three to five years, as you recommend, I'm assuming one would perpetually replenish that large liquid pool as the funds are used. Should the replenishing distribution be taken proportionately?
Should the distribution be taken before a portfolio's rebalanced such that the asset class with the best performance is tapped for the distribution? What are your thoughts on strategy there? Since we are just entering the deaccumulation phase, we would like to optimize how we do this. When talking to our advisor, unless we heard her wrong, it seems like distributions would just be pulled proportionately from each asset class.
Thank you for your advice.
Roger: That is a wonderful question. When you are trying to figure this out in modeling, you have to make concrete decisions because whether it's the formula you put in your Excel program or in the software going to dynamically do it over a 30, 40-year period.
When in reality what's going to happen is these are going to become year by year decisions that you're going to iterate on, and each year might be a little bit different. So let me give you an example.
In Rosie's case, it appeared that they were literally selling investments proportionally to what they owned, so if they had 50% in equities, 10% in international equities and 40% in fixed income or bonds, every month to get Rosie hear, say, thousand dollars. They were selling the proportional amount from each one of those asset classes.
Think that is a horrible way to do it unless you are extremely overfunded, and you have such a cushion that you can handle a systematic withdrawal strategy. Most of us are not going to be overfunded. Most of us are going to be constrained, meaning that financially we may have enough, but we're not sure because of all of the future unknowns.
You are correct, Kathy, in one way to help solve for that is to create what I call a pie cake. You could call a bucket, I don't care, but you create a runway of liquidity so you can let your investment portfolio, the money that is at risk from a volatility standpoint, go up and down and it will have enough time that statistically you should have better results.
That is the pie cake, and you have that three to five years of liquidity that you mentioned, and that is essentially your payroll reserve to pay you your paycheck as the company of you, owner.
Your question. Well, what happens after year one when I've drained one year of that payroll reserve? Do I sell things proportionally to refill that? Do I rebalance before I sell, or do I sell and then rebalance? How does it work, then?
This is where the models fall apart from a long-term forecasting perspective. What you're going to do, Kathy, is you're going to refresh your entire plan of record, and the reason you're going to do that is, you had an estimate of what you were going to spend and the extraordinary things that might come in, whether it's travel or home repair, the reality may be very different than what you estimated.
Maybe you didn't estimate well, maybe your life changed in some way that caused it to not hit your target. Maybe you just changed your mind, and you have new estimates of how you're going to spend once you're actually in retirement. So, there's a lot of things going on that we forget about. So, when you refresh your plan, Kathy, what you're going to do is reassess what your spending targets are, recalculate what your liquidity bucket or pie cake, the income floor amount is for the next year and the year after and the year after. Then see what you have and reconcile that, and you're going to have, hey I have more than I expected because I didn't spend as much last year. Or because of inflation or spending decision changes, I have a deficit that I got to refigure. Maybe the markets went down, and you had high inflation and now ooh, I might have to add to this a little bit more.
You're going to go through that exercise and then you're going to look at your investment accounts. You're going to look at you’re after tax, your pre-tax, and your tax-free assets and determine where is the best place to replenish from given the tax brackets that you're in, what you're trying to solve for in the next year or so.
And I would make that part of your rebalancing because rebalancing. If you think about what it is, let's assume you're supposed to be 50 stocks and bonds, just as an example. In one year’s, time, assuming you don't touch the portfolio, one of those is going to do better than the other. Let's say stocks do better, so now it's 55% and you have 45% in bonds.
When you rebalance, what you do is bring it back to 50/50, which means you sell stocks to buy more bonds, which brings it back. If you incorporate this exercise in the discussion of, how do I build my pathway forward, you could also just simply sell stocks in this example to bring it back to 50/50, skim that money off to help replenish your cash flow income floor, so that I would do those in tandem, Kathy.
Now, if you were going through really bad markets, we don't necessarily have to replenish every single year. We have other choices available to us, and this is part of the reason you build it this way, in my opinion, is because it gives you other options. You can moderate some of your spending. You have your base, great life and then you have your wants, your more discretionary things.
If we're going through, say, a multi-year bear market where you're also getting hit with unexpected expenses, that's the time at going through this reassessment process that you're going to make some spending changes. I'm not going to buy filet, I'm going to buy hamburger. I'm not going to go to Europe, I'm going to go to Yosemite.
Which by doing that it will help extend that floor so you don't have to touch your at-risk assets when they're just taking a haircut through a multi-year bear market. The point of the exercise is that you do all of these together and you're going to refresh everything annually, because it's not just the fact that your income floor is going to be one year less, your whole life is going to change, sometimes drastically, sometimes mildly.
But you go through the exercise and incorporate all this together. So hopefully that gave you some clarity. We have ways. This is what we do in the club. We teach you how to do this systematically because it's never ending. It's a project that you'll continue to management. Excellent question. Thanks for leaving it via audio, Kathy.
QUESTION FOUR
Our next question related to Rosie was in regard to her HELOC.
This comes from Jim.
"Rosie stated that she had a HELOC, which is a home equity line of credit for about $55,000. My question is, what was her initial interest rate and is it fixed or variable? If it's variable, she has seen a significant increase since the initiation of loan, or has she?
If so, how has that affected her planning?"
You're smart to notice that Jim, so she had taken out a loan using a home equity line of credit to do so. I believe it was some home repairs on the house or improvements. Usually with a home equity line of credit, typically their variable in terms of their interest rate, you started an interest rate, and that interest rate can move up and down based on prevailing interest.
With a home equity line of credit, you can pay interest only. So usually when you make, say, a car payment, you're paying part principle and part interest. With a home equity line of credit, you can choose just to pay the interest on the loan and then at some point you have to start paying principle.
Jim pointed out, well, If she took that out two or three years ago, interest rates have risen significantly, meaning that the interest payment that she has to pay is likely getting bigger unless it was a fixed interest rate. That is true, Jim. That is a little bit of a time bomb out there that wasn't really factored in into the feasibility of the plan from a prioritization standpoint.
It's something to take notice of as you did. The bigger issues, at least initially, are getting to a feasible plan in terms of the spending goals in the near midterm and how the assets are allocated. And then as you're doing that, start to clean up what does this home equity line look like? Very good that you pointed that out.
QUESTION FIVE
Our last question is actually some feedback on the word huzzah!
Dan said,
"Roger, you talked about huzzah."
Maybe I got so excited I didn't actually define it. Dan did the work. I think I did, but maybe I didn't, Dan. I don't know.
But anyway, Dan has some more insight on huzzah, which is. My motto, I guess, huzzah. Let's listen to Dan's feedback on the word huzzah.
Dan: Hi Roger, this is Dan. On your February 15th podcast, you talked about the word huzzah and its definition. Well, you actually talked about where you heard it and its origins, but you never actually defined it. So, in my limited research I found it's a word shouted in celebration or victory. Soldiers would shout it before attacking, to build morale among themselves or to intimidate the enemy.
It's a great word, with lots of application to rocking life. Thank you for all that you and your team do.
Roger: Love it. Dan, and thank you so much for sharing more perspective. I love that, it's like a cry as you go forward. Huzzah! Bring on retirement, bring on inflation, bring on bear markets. We're ready for it. You can still have a great life.
Might be a little bit different than you thought. Thanks so much for sharing that, Dan.
Now we're going to go talk with Dr. Bobby Dubois in our Bring It On segment to talk about building your energy so you can show up and yell huzzah, and charge forward. Specifically, we're going to talk about sleep.
BRING IT ON WITH DR. BOBBY DUBOIS
All right. It's clear that you are the hero that you've been waiting for in order to rock retirement, so let's Bring It On. We're here with Dr. Bobby Dubois.
How are you doing, Bobby?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I'm doing great this morning!
Roger: We're sans intro music right now because I've had technological snafus all over the place, but I think this is a good way to start it since we're talking about sleep today.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly. Calm, mellow sleep.
Roger: Well, when I think about building energy in order to rock retirement, sleep doesn't seem like energetic., it seems like sleeping. Why is sleep so important?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Oh, it's a wonderful question. Basically, sleep determines how you're going to feel the next day. How much energy, how much alertness, how happy you are the next day, and sleep is a huge connector to living longer, having fewer heart attacks. Less likelihood of cognitive decline. There's a lot of studies that support this, and the sad fact is that we used to, as Americans, get a fair bit of sleep on average about 7.9 hours per night, but now we're down to 6.8 and a third of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep, which is sort of the demarcation for what is enough in most of these studies.
It's a terribly important topic, and the beauty is you can improve it. They're really tactical, tangible things that I think folks can work on.
Roger: Now sleep, the hours have gone down since, say the forties. My guess is, and I don't know if you have any data on this, but my guess is the quality of sleep has probably gone down a lot too with all the technology and the actually true sleep part of sleep.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think that's probably true. I can't cite a study on that, and we certainly didn't have Oura rings or whoops bands 30 years ago. I suspect that all the things that we're doing, which we'll talk about in a bit, interfere with both the length of sleep and the quality of that sleep.
Roger: Well, I'm excited about this topic because this has been an area of focus for me that I've been working on. I actually have an annual target this year related to sleep. So how should we think about sleep?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I'm a scientist and I like to study things in what better subject than yourself. Sleep is such a perfect example of how we can measure what's going on, try new things and see if it makes it better or worse.
Roger: Can I stop you for a second? I want to go back, of course, because I know that there are impacts to getting less sleep, and I want to make sure we talk about that and not go past that in terms of heart attacks and obesity and dementia, which is one that is very sensitive. I want to make sure we hit on that.
If we don't get enough sleep, say less than seven hours, what's the impact of the fact that we're not?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, there's the energy decrement issue, which we alluded to, but there's been a large number of studies. There was a very important British study that looked at people who got less than seven hours of sleep.
The numbers were bad. These people had a 20% higher risk of heart attack, 30% greater risk of obesity, and a 30% increased risk of dementia. It not only affects the quality of life, but the longevity and how healthier you're going to be. It's terribly important.
Roger: Yeah. I wanted to make sure we hit that.
So now let's talk about how to think about sleep.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: First thing to do is, is look at a baseline. What is my sleep length and quality now? Now if you've got an aura ring or a whoop band or your phone that collects some of this, that's a starting point. They provide some numbers on deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep, and that's fairly accurate, but I think the simple stuff you need to add to that. So how many hours of sleep do you get on average? How difficult is it for me to fall asleep? Does it happen in five to 10 minutes or is it 20 to 30 minutes, or is it longer than that? Do I get up at night and how often? And when I do get up at night, the important issue is how hard is it to fall back asleep?
How do I feel the next morning? Do I feel refreshed? Do I feel sleepy in the afternoon? Now, these are very simple questions. If you want to do it more formally. There are questionnaires you can get on the web. One is called the Leeds Sleep Evaluation questionnaire, but there's a lot of these.
The important thing is to just assess where you are because then you're going to get to try things to make it better.
That's what's so wonderful about this area. It's not a black box. It's a pretty open box about what helps.
Roger: In my exploration on this topic, Bobby, like how many hours of sleep do you get on average? I used to think of sleep. Oh, I went to bed at 10 o'clock and I woke up at six say, and I wear a whoop, and I've tried the aura and even Apple Watch and in my opinion of those things is they're accurate to a point. But most important is the same tool used consistently, because they're all going to be inaccurate, right.
But the one observation I had is if I go to bed at 10 and wake up at six, that is not eight hours of sleep. Right? Being in bed is not sleep, usually takes me a while and it's always interesting to see, oh yeah, I was in bed eight hours, but I only got seven hours and 15 minutes of actual sleep and making the connection that just being in bed is not actually sleeping per se.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yeah. It really should be. The time you turn off the lights and you close your eyes to when you look at the clock in the morning, you say, oh, I'm awake. Not how many minutes. You sit there trying to get yourself motivated to get out of bed.
It really is that bookend of eyes closed to eyes awake and that's the number.
Roger: Yeah. For me, I've found that to get the sleep that I need, I need to be in bed for nine hours, which is really difficult when you want to get up at say, five o’clock. You do the math, and you need to be in bed really early, much earlier than I'm normal.
That's actually the biggest thing that I struggle with.
Let me ask you a question on this. Let's assume you do that, right? You get nine hours in bed; you get the appropriate amount of sleep. Do you necessarily have to wake up refreshed?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I would look at it as averaging over the entire day. How do I feel?
Some people bounce out of bed in the morning, and some people are rather slow risers. So yes. If a half hour when you wake up, your kind of groggy you could say, well then I didn't sleep well. I would look at it for the entire day. Maybe the first 30 minutes weren't so good, but God, I felt great in the afternoon, in the evening, so I must have done something right.
I wouldn't get too bogged down on the 30 minutes, first 30 minutes of the day.
Roger: I think of you as a bouncer. Are you a bouncer? You bounce right up?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I can be, yes. But you know, I also sit in bed and reflect on the day and what I want to do.
Roger: That makes me feel better because I am groggy when I wake up.
I have this debate with myself of stay in bed a little bit, stay in bed. And what I found is I used it this morning at some point I go, okay, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and I just get up. Once I'm up, I'm great. It's just the getting up part that's the hardest part. The questionnaire or all these tools, I think are just data to help us be aware so we can be proactive on it.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly.
Roger: So why is sleep so important? Why would it help us in terms of our risk of obesity or risk of dementia, which is a big one, our heart attacks. What's so important about sleep?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, there's so many aspects of this, and we certainly don't have time to delve into all of it.
If folks are interested there's a wonderful book by Matthew Walker, sleep specialist, called Why We Sleep, and he goes through everything. So, if you really want to know about sleeping, it's not highly technical, but it's evidence-based. It's a really, really good read. I'll just touch on a couple things.
There are short-term memories and long-term memories, and there's a place in the brain called the hippocampus and think of it as the ram on your computer and if you leave your computer running for too long, you got to restart the darn thing because it just seems to be slowing down.
The hippocampus is where your short-term memories reside, and if you don't sleep or don't sleep enough, those short-term memories don't go to another part of the brain, the cortex, and become empty for your next day's new experiences so it gets clogged, and you'll have a harder time learning new things or remembering new things if you don't have that transference of the hippocampal memories to the cortical memories.
Similarly, it's been shown on numerous studies that if you learn a skill, well, I'm going to learn how to juggle and if you don't get a good night's sleep, you don't solidify that learning. It's a yet another reason. There's just a million of these things, but I thought I'd just touch on two of them because they're, you know, tasty tidbits of why it's important to sleep.
Roger: So what I heard is when you sleep, you go through the processing and cleaning cycle.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly.
Roger: I remember attending a presentation from a gentleman about this at the time. I don't know if he really had studies that he was citing, but the way he described it was even physiologically, your brain is going through the process that you described and when you interrupt that, consistently, you mess with, I don't know if it's the chemistry of the brain, but this is the part of dementia, and this is, what's the topic he was talking about.
By allowing your brain to go through this, essentially a cleaning cycle, it helps your brain be more functional, and perhaps that's part of the decrease in the risk of dementia. I don't know.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's the electrical part of sleep, which is, okay, we're going to transfer electrical impulses to your long-term memory. But there is a cleaning process. There are waste products that build up during the course of the day and there is a way of removing that from around the brain cells. That is something that happens during sleep as well. There's a lot we don't know, but that's some of the things we do know.
Roger: Every night I take out the mental trash. I love that. I can take out the trash. I'll take out the trash and then I'll go to bed. Take out the trash.
Getting to sleep is hard for a lot of different reasons. The probably the biggest one I can think of is just simply television and screens. What should we do to improve our ability to actually get to sleep?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: So, the beauty of this area is that there are things for all of us to work on to help our sleep.
Now, I can't guarantee you're going to then become a perfect sleeper. Some people are genetically different than others, but I think they're very tangible things that hurt our sleep and we want to avoid those. I'll walk through the six of those in a moment.
And then there are seven things that will help our sleep. We want to think about those, and as I keep saying, you're the laboratory test where you are now, try some of these things and either discarding, because they don't make any difference for you, or you have an epiphany, this really, really works. Okay.
So, what are some of the things that you want to avoid? Napping can be problematic, especially later in the day. Certainly, in the evening, you don't want to nap. If I'm going to nap, I do it before one in the afternoon or two or maybe three at the latest.
There is a buildup of a chemical called adenosine and that happens during the course of the day and that creates sleep pressure.
Oh darn. I just got to close my eyes and go. The problem is, is that if you take a nap, you reduce that sleep pressure, and so when it comes time to really go to sleep, it's maybe harder. Again, that's something that's testable. Some people can nap and it doesn't bother them, but certainly plenty do.
The chemicals we put in our body, so caffeine in the morning for me, I am so unbelievably sensitive to caffeine that a cup of coffee in the morning, I mean eight in the morning, will affect my ability to sleep at 9:30 at night.
Roger: Really?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: It does. Yes. Genetically that’s who I am and I love it and I occasionally will do it, and I pay the price.
So you need to test for yourself and again, cut out caffeine for a day or two, or just have it at eight in the morning, see if it makes a difference.
Roger: Wait a second here. We don't do extreme things here, Bobby. We're not cutting out caffeine for a day.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Just as a test, just as a test. For me, probably the worst disruptor from my sleep is alcohol.
Roger: Yeah.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Now I'm not talking about blacking out. I'm talking about one or two drinks. It'll affect my sleep. I'll wake up at two in the morning and I'll have a hard time getting back to sleep. I'll go to sleep very quickly, but I will wake up. So, for me, that's a biggie. And if I'm really wanting to sleep well, no alcohol.
Roger: That's a big one for me too. Just one glass of wine around seven. I notice it. I've definitely connected that dot.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: We feel great. We go to sleep beautifully, but the quality of the sleep gets messed up. Here's one that's interesting to experiment, and that is eating near bedtime. It's best to go to bed on an empty stomach or a sort of empty stomach.
If you're going to bed at 10, try to finish your dinner by six. At least experiment with that. Not on Saturday night when you're out with your wife at a fancy restaurant. But test it out. It really does seem to help people.
Roger: Yeah, that's actually a target for me. I am testing that this week.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Right. It's a great one.
Now look again, it may have no impact on you, Roger, in which case, eat whenever you want. But for some people it matters.
Roger: It's not so much the dinner, and this one's related to, I think the next one you're going to talk about, it's the snack after dinner, right? When you're watching tv, just, I mean, I'll have some chips and dip, right?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yeah. Just give it a go.
The one that's gotten the most attention is the distractions of social media, our computers, our cell phones, and some of it is just the stimulation of those devices. Some of it is the light that comes out of those devices that can disrupt your circadian rhythms, but for the last hour before you turn the lights off, try if you can, to not use those devices and best put them in the other room so you're not distracted when you go to sleep or when you wake up in the morning.
Roger: Let me ask you a question about that and so when we say those devices, when I go to my room to go to bed, I will read. I would think the device would be the iPhone as far as the blue light and such. But obviously a physical book is not the device, but with like a Kindle, would that still be considered a device, or do you have any thought on that?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I use a Kindle. I use the Ink one, whatever they call that. Yeah. It's pretty much like a book. It's not flashing light in your brain. So, for me, I haven't had any problems with it. Again, you can test it out. Yes. But other things that have the blue light and watching movies and all that stuff, that's just very stimulating for the brain.
So, I would try to cut it out again it's a test. The next one I don't drink a lot of fluids. Before bed and everybody's different. Maybe an hour before bed and maybe four hours before bed. But as we get older, and since this is a retiree biased audience, especially us guys, our prostates don't work quite the way they did when we were 20. So, and women too, I mean, we, everyone has potential problems.
If you're waking up in the middle of the night multiple times, often the stimulus to wake you up is the urge to urinate. Experiment with just trying to cut off the fluids again, it may not matter, in which case you're great. Then the last don't is don't struggle in bed.
If it's not happening after 20, 25 minutes, get out of bed, go in the other room, do something, read a little bit, and then try again. But I think if you struggle for a long time, you're just going to frustrate yourself, your adrenaline, cortisol, other things are not going in the right direction. Give up and then try again.
This is what I do. If I wake up at two in the morning, I'll give it 15 minutes to see if I can get back to sleep. Often, I can, but if I can't call it a night, get up for two hours, and then at four or five I'll come back to bed for two hours.
Roger: I have two questions around things to test. One is, what do you do if you, and again, we're all older and we have some miles on our bodies, when some type of chronic pain is introduced, and usually that gets elevated when we're the most relaxed and not distracted, whether it's a hip or a knee or a shoulder.
What strategies could we test to help those not disrupt our sleep?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Let me answer that question in two parts. The first part will be the things you should try to do to help your sleep. I would argue that I don't care how much pain you have, if I force you to be awake for three days, you'd fall right asleep.
Pain is a disruptor, but it is not an absolute "you can't sleep". If we can work on the good hygiene stuff, it might overpower the discomfort. I'll give you a personal one. I have a problem with my ear with the cartilage, and I have a lump and it breaks the skin down.
When I lie on my right ear, it hurts. Well, I went to the dermatologist, and he said, well, you know, there are these pillows that have holes in them where your ear goes. It made a huge difference. Now I can sleep with comfort. So, I'm not saying don't deal with the pain. If there's some, take some ibuprofen or something that might help or get a massage or a foam roll or something like that.
But let's get to the things you can do and that may be enough to not have the pain cause you the problem.
So, in the beginning of the day, try to get outdoors and get sunlight. You know, our sleep is determined in great part by a circadian rhythm. Melatonin at the end of the day, that helps us go to sleep, and in the beginning of the day, it's the cortisol level that kind of wakes us up, but the sunlight helps us.
So, try to get a little bit of sunlight, not through a window. Try to walk around outdoors.
Second. Exercise. It's remarkable. Exercise helps everything and there's a lot of studies showing it will help your sleep.
Doesn't have to be right before bed. In fact, it probably shouldn't be because that can be energizing, but anytime during the day, that's the second.
Third. We're going to talk about this in another month. More meditation or mind body activities, calming the mind during the day will help calm the mind at night.
You want to meditate right before bed? Sure. Give it a go. See if it helps.
Here's the one that's quirky and I didn't actually believe it made a huge difference until I started playing around with it, and that is going to bed at the same time every night. You might say, well, I'm going to go to bed at 9:30 at night.
Tomorrow I'm going out. It'll be 11 o'clock at night. I'll just sleep later. Now, you're not going to sleep later. You'll probably end up waking up at the same time.
Going to bed at the same time, plus or minus 15, 20, 30 minutes really can make a difference. Again, test it out if it doesn't matter to you, have at it.
But for some people like me, it's surprisingly important.
The next thing you can do, hot sauna, hot shower before bed.
Now we're going to get into the last one, which is having a cool bedroom. And you might say, well, it doesn't go into a shower or something hot screw that up? The answer is no, because when you're in a hot environment, your blood vessels dilate.
So it brings the heat to the surface, so you're actually getting rid of heat, and that can then help your body lower its temperature while you're sleeping. This one is really important, and I've played around with it. It makes huge difference for me, and it does for many, many people in studies, having a cool bedroom when the winter, we want a nice 73, 75, 78, 29 blankets.
Having your bedroom temperature below 70 is a huge helper to sleep and stay asleep in quality of sleep. Now, where I got into arguments with myself, and my wife is during the summer. I don't want to waste all that energy, but we do for the hours of sleep, we lower it below 70 and it makes a huge difference.
Give it a go again. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you, but it sure works for us.
Roger: I think they even have cooling blankets now.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly. You can try that if you don't want the whole room to be cool and then have a dark, quiet room without a lot of noises. I mean that's, your mother told you that a long time ago and that could be really, really helpful.
So the beauty is that there are 13 things you can try. Things to avoid, things to do, and it will help. I know it will help. Will it solve all your problems? Perhaps not, but it will help. Try them all and then tell me, Bobby none of them worked.
Roger: I'm going to throw another one into the mix, Bobby. As a married for 33 years, we have a sleep divorce.
It came about because I snore a little bit. She likes to read in bed. I like dark and we have a big dog that gets in the bed. So, we are very confident and comfortable in our marriage where I'm typically sleeping in a different room because I like it super dark and it helps me not get disturbed, and I think it helps.
It felt a little uncomfortable at first, but we're cool with it.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, you did the experiment and it worked. I mean, for me, I share some of the same things, so I wear earplugs and eye shades, so I duplicate. Yeah. You know what, some of that, yeah.
Roger: The key here that it sounds like, and that's what I love about how you approach things, is intentionality and agency.
Test it, right? If you're having issues or you want to improve it, test it. Test one thing.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly, and in a week, you'll know you don't have to do it for three months. You'll know pretty quickly on most of these things.
Roger: Yeah. The hot shower I tested; I switched my shower into evening because it definitely helps me relax.
I didn't realize that it actually pulled heat from your body. I didn't think of it from that perspective. Now what about. Supplements and medications like melatonin and things like that.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I wish there was a magic pill. So many people would be so relieved if there were. The problem is there isn't.
So, all the things you might try might or might not help how long you sleep, but they may make a mess out of the quality of your sleep. You might get more light sleep, but not deep sleep. You may mess with your REM sleep. Some people tout melatonin and for them it works and that's great. There is a very good website called examine.com, and they focus on supplements, nutritional kinds of things, and they summarize the evidence on sleep, on urination issues, on back pain, on all sorts of different things. Take a look at the sleep one if you're interested. Unfortunately, melatonin really hasn't been shown to make much of a difference.
If it helps for you, great and none of 'em really rise to the level that they work.
There's a lot of excitement about Ashwagandha and its effect on cortisol levels, and maybe five or 10 years we'll know it really does help. Some people try it. I wish it would work when you're traveling and you've got jet lag issues, melatonin can be helpful, but for routine use, probably doesn't, but take a look at the site. You'll read it and see what you think on this prescription side.
At some point we're going to get this figured out. The one drug that seems to be helpful for a lot of people is an old, one of the very first antidepressants called Trazodone. And the reason that it didn't stay in the mainstream as it made people feel drowsy, darn, well, let's just take it at night it'll help me feel drowsy. And for some people now, this requires you to go to the doctor. It can be helpful.
There is no magic pill. I wish there were.
Roger: When I think about sleep, I'm like, what is a simple thing that will decrease the odds of obesity? Decrease the odds of heart attacks, decrease the chances of dementia, fortified me with more energy to take on the day that doesn't cost me a dime. And I think of sleep as like a very obvious one.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: It is.
Roger: Where do we begin?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, 15 minutes ago we began with taking stock of where your sleep is today. Use the questions I mentioned. We could put in 6-Shot Saturday, look for the Leeds Questionnaire or any of the other sleep questionnaires and sort of see where you're at and then try to avoid some of the things that are in the avoid list and try to do some of the things that are in the do list and then test, see if it works.
As you said, this is free stuff, doesn't require the doctor and doctor visits and blood tests, and I'm convinced this will help people. Whether it solves the problem or not, I don't know.
I would say the thorniest one is people who wake up in the middle of the night and they have a hard time going back to sleep. That's the toughest one. If your difficulty is falling asleep. I'm really optimistic about all these things. Waking up in the middle of the night experiment. I mean, for me, alcohol does it. If I stop drinking alcohol, I won't wake up in the middle of the night. So, find your magic bullet and focus on it.
Roger: Yeah, that waking up in the middle of the night can be a big one. I know for me, alcohol for sure. For me it is. Open loops because I'm constantly thinking about, I'm a busy dude, right? And we're all busy. I'm thinking about all the things that I have to do or something that's annoying me, and I've actually had to, the thing I've been experimenting with is a mantra of sorts to distract my brain, so I don't just spiral into thinking about stuff forever.
That's been the biggest one for me. That's what I've been experimenting with so far it seems pretty good, is to have to get my brain off of all the stuff I have to do or need to do.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, here's one to think about or try. My wife and I have had this experience and it really does make a difference. One of the problems when you wake up in the middle of the night is you wake yourself up a sufficient amount if you're going to the bathroom or something that it becomes really difficult.
So, it's hard to know chicken or egg. Did I wake up because I have to urinate or did, I wake up and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I need to go to the toilet? What we have found is when we wake up in the middle of the night, and we say to ourselves, oh, I need to get out of bed and go to the toilet, which we know will wake us up. We tell ourselves maybe we really don't need to go to the toilet, and we go back to sleep and we actually didn't have to go to the toilet because going to the toilet really messes things up and then the monkey mind begins.
So, you might test out, you're not likely to wet the bed, so don't get worried about it.
Give it a test. Tell yourself, yeah, maybe I don't need to go to the toilet and a minute later you may be back asleep and you're fine. And then you don't have that problem of the stimulation of getting out of bed and going to the toilet and coming back. Worth trying.
Roger: The key is, we have a framework. Let's choose one thing and work on it. Thanks, Bobby.
Let's go set a smart sprint.
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
We're off to set a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.
All right. In the next seven days, I want you to use the recommended items to test and the recommended things to do and things to stop that Bobby mentioned and we'll actually have a PDF that we share in 6-Shot Saturday so you can see a quick bullet point of each one because he did a group meetup in the Rock Retirement Club and he prepared that so we're happy to share the PDF so you can see that.
Just use one of them to experiment so you can sleep better so you can have the energy to show up and exclaim huzzah!
ROCK RETIREMENT PLEDGE
Earlier on the show, I talked about the RAM Pledge, the Retirement Answer Man pledge, and this aligns with the strategic plan that we're creating as a firm, and I just wanted to share it with you again.
I'll do it every single week as we iterate on this.
Our core purpose for being, for doing this show and everything else we do is to empower people to rock retirement, empower you.
It's about you and your journey and your transition into and rocking retirement about you having hope.
This is our focus, and we want to do this with authenticity, with no pretense.
We want to be humble.
We want to be respectful and be exactly who we are.
We want to do this with curiosity.
We want to approach everything life with fresh eyes, and we want to hold our beliefs even firmly held beliefs up for examination so we can iterate on those beliefs or reconfirm them for ourselves.
We want you to do that.
We want to be free from big finance. We want to be free from talking about products for money free from any gimmicks.
We're just going to be what we are and we're always going to focus on you taking incremental action or expanding your perspective so you can take a little baby step to improving your journey.
I am all in. My team is all in. Let's go do this.
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