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Episode #522 - Retirement Plan Live Mature Marriage - Shared Goals
Roger: The show is a proud member of the Retirement Podcast Network.
So next week is my birthday, the 22nd, I'm going to be 57 years old. I am determined to embrace and be excited about every single new year.
Hey there. Welcome to Retirement Answer Man show, Roger Whitney here. This is the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement but have the confidence because you're doing the work to lean in and really rock retirement.
Yeah. 57. It's closer to 60. When I get a little whiny about my age, all I need to do is talk to some clients or friends that are in their 70s or 80s and they just tell me to shut up and go enjoy my life. I'm determined, one, not to talk about my health as I get older, and two, is to embrace the process, the journey. I'm just determined to do that. I don't want to get sour about it.
Next week for my birthday, I will actually be in Costa Rica with Dr. Bobby DuBois. We're doing a rucking adventure of undetermined challenges that involve carrying weight for miles in the jungle, swimming in the ocean. It's supposed to be really, really hard without having the risk of dying. I'm glad I'm going to have a doctor with me. I'm excited that Bobby's going with me. We'll still have the show. Don't worry about that.
Today on the show, we are going to bring Mark and Mary together and talk about their goals, what their values are, and what are the goals that they have together so we can start to cast a vision for the future for the two of them.
Then we're going to have an update from a former Retirement Plan Live case study, Lori and Bruce, on how they're doing in their journey where they were our case study back in October of 2017. Wow, that's a long time ago. That's what that's like six, seven years ago. We'll have links to their episode so if you want to revisit their story in our 6-Shot Saturday email, and if you like the podcast, you're going to love 6-Shot Saturday email, where we share links to interesting things or resources that we mentioned on the show, as well as have a quick summary. It just arrives in your inbox every Saturday morning so you can read it with a cup of coffee and go about rocking your life.
That's what we're going to do today.
Now, two quick announcements before we get started. Number one is to make sure you sign up for the results meetup or webinar on February 1st. At 7:00 PM Central where we are going to have Mark and Mary live, and we're going to do two things. We're going to talk with them and walk through the framework for their proposed retirement plan of record and we're going to invite you to join the Rock Retirement Club and participate in building using the tools we provide a feasible plan of record so you can get answers to those most important retirement questions. You can do that at livewithroger.com.
Just as an aside, because we have capacity, if you are looking to build a retirement plan or work on an ongoing basis with a retirement planner, we are currently accepting clients at retireagile.com.
So, with that, let's move on and bring Mark and Mary together and talk about their values and goals.
RETIREMENT PLAN LIVE
Here we are in the third segment of our Retirement Plan Live case study with Mark and Mary. We got to hear their backstory the last two weeks, and today we're going to explore what is their vision for rocking retirement and what goals do they have for that vision in this very early marriage? They've been married like 13 months, but we're going to have to do this in a little bit different way than we anticipated.
In my initial prep with Mark and Mary, I saw signs that you probably saw in hearing their stories about their different opinions on managing money and their approach to planning. Mark is very analytical. He spent years building a very sophisticated spreadsheet that he uses as the hub of his decision making and he's used his engineering background to do that. Mary is a professional that comes from a very different angle of a little less numbers driven and more intuitive driven, although she's a professional female in the healthcare industry. We have two different approaches there.
We heard Mark wants to combine assets and have family assets. He thinks that is the correct approach. Mary is coming from, again, a single mother, single her entire life, a lot of autonomy, never had to ask somebody about making decisions. She's saying, well, we should probably move slower on combining our money, if at all, and losing that autonomy that she's had over the decades of her life seems very different.
They come from very different positions when it comes to how to integrate and manage money. In my conversation with them, I definitely saw this, and I asked them individually and together, are you sure this is the right vehicle, this public case study, to work through these issues? Both of them said, hey, we trust you, we see the process, we've listened to this, and we think that walking through it intentionally and discussing this money stuff Is one, we think it will help us resolve the conflicts around money management and combination of assets and two, and they both articulate this, we think this could be very helpful to other people that are walking this same journey.
Well over the holidays and early January, we had some things on the schedule to have the conversation for today and the rest of the conversations, and they got canceled a couple times, had a couple brief conversations where it was clear a lot of things were coming to a head personally for the two of them.
I think part of that was the intentional conversations that I was having with them and some things that came up over the holidays related to money and communication, and it became clear this is not the right vehicle for them to work through the issues that they're trying to work through in creating a great life marriage.
I totally agree.
So, all that to say, they will not be participating in the rest of Retirement Plan Live. We're going to have to make some lemonade out of these lemons, and I think for them, they discovered they weren't on the same page about money. They had had conversations prior to marriage, so they knew these were there, but they never resolved them prior to marriage, which is not uncommon in marriage. You're in the courtship stage. You're in the honeymoon stage of the relationship. It's easy to see that, hey, we'll just figure this out together.
From my end, I've had training as a coach. I've had 30 years of working through money and life discussions with people, some of them very intimate and rough, but I'm not a counselor. Before they get to the money part, I think having someone that is a professional counselor walk through this. It's much better than me doing it, because that's not my expertise.
Now, my thoughts on this, before we get to what we're going to do with Retirement Plan Live, when we have discussions about money, and this is a little bit what the last episode of this series is going to be, is how do we have these conversations and what are different ways to combine money, is listening and hearing are very different and very hard to do for a lot of us, and so we have to have some structure around that, and we'll explore that in the last episode.
The second one, this is true with life in general, is having uncomfortable little conversations, which is hard, especially when you're in honeymoon mode of courting and dating, because you're so enjoying each other, we're just going to make it work. Having those little uncomfortable little conversations sort of kills the vibe when you're all just having fun and enjoying each other. But having those little uncomfortable little conversations can help avoid much bigger conversations later on. Easy to say, it makes sense, really hard to do. So, Mark and Mary will not be participating with us.
Now we're blessed that they agreed that I could use the conversations that we had and that I could use some of my knowledge of their personal situation because it's anonymous for them to help in building the rest of the case study without them.
I want to thank them for that, and I also want to send them my best wishes and prayers that they can navigate this together because they definitely like each other. They just have some things that they need to work out.
All right. So, what's the plan for the rest of Retirement Plan Live? What's the lemonade?
Well, we're going to use some of the context that they shared with us, and we're just going to start to build today, who are they and what are their values and goals for retirement?
If we think about Mark, let's just profile Mark briefly. Mark is 57. He's a kind, analytical, organized guy. He's an aeronautical engineer. When Mark filled out the Values Worksheet, which is the beginning of a thread, so when we think of the beginning of this organized process, the top of the thread is your values. What values do you have that, when you are living them out, represent most of who you are? So, Mark came back and his values were perseverance, marriage, stability, relationships, well-being, adventure, comfort, gratitude, communication, and variety.
He went through a worksheet, we will share a values worksheet in our 6-Shot Saturday email, so you can maybe complete this and have your spouse, if you're married, complete it. It's an interesting thing to do where you complete it on your own, and there's some areas to say why these values are important to you. I'm not going to share theirs, but there's areas to say why these things are important to you. It's an interesting exercise to complete yours and then swap it with your partner or your spouse. and read it and then have conversation to understand each other a little bit better. So, we're going to have that worksheet, if you're not signed up for 6-Shot Saturday, that's our weekly email, which is fantastic, where we share links to resources so you can follow along and take your baby steps. So, you can sign up for that at rogerwhitney.com.
That's Mark.
Now, Mary, she's 57, never been married, grown child, very close to her son, quote unquote, my world.
She's a professional woman, always managed her own money, always had control of life and finances. This is a new marriage. This is an interesting thing that I had in a conversation with Mary is that because she's 57 and never been married and a fully formed human, as much as we all can be, when she was approaching getting married, she thought she could move fast because she was mature, she was financially secure, and she trusted her judgment.
I thought that was an interesting comment and we talked about that because I was married when I was 23 and we moved relatively quickly. I mean, we knew each other for two years, but she thought she could move fast because she was older. As we were talking, actually, as you're older and approaching a marriage, it might actually be better to move more slowly.
You know, when I was young and Shauna was young, from a financial perspective, we weren't fully formed individuals as adults. Getting married, it was easy to join finances because we didn't have any. Everything was always ours and we didn't have a lot of separate goals or things outside of us getting together and being all in together.
When you're later in life, you have separate goals, you have separate resources. You're more ingrained in the agency and the way you like things done. When you get married later in life, you give up or have to alter a lot of those things. So actually, as you get older, you should maybe move a lot slower in marriage.
I thought that was interesting.
She's creative. She doesn't really lean into analytics and she articulated her aspirations to have productive conversations. I think that was one thing in our conversation. She didn't feel like they could have productive conversations. They were in a loop on how those conversations were working, and she didn't want to have to talk about money all the time. She had a big issue with combining income and assets, whereas Mark wanted to.
Now, Mary's values were intentionality, laughter, family, joy, trust, honesty, freedom, health, courage, friendship, fun, and passion. What I find interesting about her goals or values relative to his values, is there's a lot of common themes in there that they could combine and have as our values? They sound very similar from a value standpoint.
There's some of these other things that they have to work through that are creating roadblocks to having these productive conversations that she desired.
I think it's important to start at the beginning of the yellow brick road or the thread of what are your values? What do you want your life to represent? Because your goals should be representative of your values. Your goals are expressing the things that you value most. You want those to be congruent. That's why it's a good place to start there.
Now, this can be very difficult for very analytical folks, because they just want to get to the numbers. Even in the retirement masterclass, we start with values and goals and some very non quantitative discussions and exercises and it really frustrates the analytical people because I just want to get to the numbers. Then as you build that yellow brick road or thread out, you get to the resources and the analytical part, so it gets a lot more quantitative, which frustrates the people that aren't quantitative.
Both are important, but you have to begin with the end in mind is what kind of life do I want to create that represents who I am on both sides and you have to bring those together in a marriage.
Those are the values and now we're going to go through the goals that Mark and Mary had that represent the values that they espoused.
When we get to this, this is going to be me inferring a lot of this. They did not share specific goals. The value worksheet they went through, they did not share specific goals together. So, I'm inferring this. I just want to make that clear.
When we think about goals, and this is true, especially in a later life marriage, but true in my marriage, and we've been married 33 years. There is a difference, right? Mary has her goals. Mark has his goals. They have their goals, right? No different with Shauna and me. But they're bringing more separateness than Shauna and me, right? Every individual, marriage or not, has their own goals, and then you have our goals. You have to tease those out.
So, with Mark and Mary, their base great life spending is, and I'm just inferring this, 125, 000 per year after tax. That represents Mark and Mary living a life with basic travel, basic eating out, etc. It's going to cost them about 125, 000 together. Then they have their health care, right? Mark and Mary have their own health care, just like Shauna and I do. That's going to be added on top of that. While Mark's employed 13, 000 a year, when they're both retired before Medicare, it's going to be closer to 30, 000 a year. We're just using some basic assumptions in here that's built into software. That's an important thing when you're building out your goals. Just swag it. Sophisticated wildly awesome guess.
Don't get too bogged down in what my healthcare is going to be after I retire. Just do some basic estimates. You can dial it in as you color in the outline. If you try to color in the outline too early, what can happen is you get too detail oriented and you lose momentum. We use estimates based off of databases that's built into the software.
Those are their basic living expenses in retirement. 125, 000 a year, net of taxes, plus healthcare. Now, when are they going to retire?
They both articulate this. Mary would prefer to retire as soon as possible, right? We always want to start with ideal. Actually, I think she said 2025. We'll call that as soon as possible. Mary said, in a perfect world, I would like to retire as soon as possible. So, we put her retirement date in 2025 when she's 58 years old. Now, Mark, and he did articulate this. He wants to retire in five years. So that would put him of age. He said 2029 is when he wants to retire.
We have two different goals here in an early or late marriage. Which is fine, but now think about that. If Mary is able to retire in less than a year, she's not going to have income. So, is she going to go to her assets? Or is she going to use Mark's income to cover those basic expenses? In a long-term marriage, it’s sort of a given, all of our money all of our income but in this case, they're just married 13 months. If Mary leaves work in a year who is going to fill the gap for Mary's lack of income? Is it Mark? Is she going to pull it from her resources?
This is some of those little discussions which can be a little uncomfortable that have to be figured out so there's not any misunderstanding and we're going to talk about how to do that in the last episode, but it's just one of those things you got to think about right?
Now in the desire category or the want category, they both have a desire for travel. We have a joint goal of go-go travel of 20, 000 a year. That's their goal. They have a big trip of 15, 000 a year done every three years as their goal. That's our goal, right? Then another discretionary goal is Mark's child's wedding. And I'm inferring these. We're going to assume Mark's child gets married in 2027. He's estimating that's going to be 15, 000, and Mary's child is going to get married in 2029, and she sees that as a 30, 000 wedding.
She has a different vision. She comes from a big family. So, Mark's child is 15. Hers is going to be 30 as an estimate. Again, we come to, okay, is this our goal? Or is this something Mary has to take care of on her own because it's her child that's an adult child coming to the marriage and the same thing for Mark?
You can see how these things need to be figured out.
Then another goal that is in the want category is Mark's child is going through a period of life where he is figuring out the next direction in life and needs some financial support while he figures that out. This is actually the fact. This is part of what came up over the holidays.
Mark is supporting his son. I don't know by how much and helping them financially, for a short period of time, and I think I'm using an estimate of let's assume Mark thinks he's going to support his son or supplement his son 15, 000 a year while his son makes this career transition or whatever. Again, I don't know the facts about this.
Okay, that's something that sits on Mark. What if Mary doesn't agree with that? What if Mary thinks that the son should figure it out on his own. Maybe they just think differently. She sees the son not taking action. What if Mary doesn't agree with that goal? Is it our goal? Or should this be a Mark goal that comes out of his resources?
You can see how this has to be figured out otherwise it can create conflict.
If in this instance, Mark wants to combine all the assets and combine all the income, right? That's his preference. Well, by doing that and having this, oh, but I want to give my son this amount of money every year to help support whatever transition the son's going in, but if Mary doesn't agree with that and now it's all our money. Does Mary have a say in that? How does that get worked through? I actually think this is part of the issue that was brought up in my private conversations with them.
We want to think of these goals as our goals, and then, in this case, Mark's goals and Mary's goals. Good to identify them, especially early on, so you can have conversations about how this will actually work. That can lead to, well, what happens five years from now if my son needs something, or I want to start gifting to my son, but you don't believe in gifting to children, so you don't want to give to your son.
That can help spur some of these discussions, so you can create some rules around that. I have a lot of experience in this working with, directly with clients, I can think of three or four that I'm working with right now. In one of them, we actually had a meeting where we created a framework. What happens if this happens? Who's going to pay for it? How are we going to navigate that and document it to some extent to remind everybody what they agreed to so we didn't have any surprises.
Now, can you avoid those surprises? No, you can't.
These are the goals for Mark and Mary that we have to solve for. Some are his, some are hers, some are theirs.
Next week, what we're going to do is build out their financial resources, what his resources are. What her resources are, and if they have any of their resources to work through what is feasible, because at the end of this, we need to get to a feasible plan for the two of them.
That's what we're going to do next week.
Then the week after that, we're going to have some discussion about how do we handle if one person's bringing a ton more assets than the other? How do we handle cash flow? How do we have healthy conversations around this? But you can see where some of this gets a little bit more complicated. It's not insurmountable.
The couples I'm thinking of that I work with that got married later in life, they're all very happy and have very different situations on asset levels and income and desires. And they've worked through it, and they're having great lives. They're rocking retirement. This is not insurmountable. I think in this case with Mark and Mary, there were more foundational communication issues that need to be worked through so they can have healthy conversations about all of this.
We're going to work through this together so we can all walk this journey with a little bit more wisdom, and with a framework to, well, rock retirement.
CATCHING UP WITH LORI FROM THE 2017 RETIREMENT PLAN LIVE
Now it's time to catch up with the subject of a case study we did in 2017, which is, wow, that's like six, seven years ago now.
Lori and Bruce. Hey, Lori, how are you doing?
Lori: I'm well. How are you, Roger?
Roger: I am well. It's hard to believe it's been so long.
Lori: I know I had to look at the date a couple times. I can't believe I've been listening to you for this long.
Roger: I'm sorry! So, way back then, you were 60, I believe, and Bruce was just turning 62 and you were close to retirement. So why don't we start there?
Lori: I thought I was. I am still working. I've really cut back and over the years I've just really cut back every year on the things I do and now I'm only doing website maintenance and maybe building some websites for very special people because I don't want to do a lot of it. I've cut back on everything else. In fact, at the end of this year, I'm also closing down my S corporation, and I'm going to be a sole proprietor, because I think I don't want to have to have all of the paperwork and things you have to do with an S Corp when I'm not making that much anymore.
Roger: Back then you had retired from your “career” career, but you had your own business where you were setting up websites on WordPress and doing things remotely. Back then you said that I'll do this for three or four years, so it's still going on six years later.
Lori: It is. It is.
Roger: So why did you continue? I'm just curious. Was it money or was it the people or the interest?
Lori: It's the interest mainly and plus there was a big change in WordPress, maybe four or five years ago, and my clients really needed to be updated to the new version of WordPress. Not this year, but last year was my year where I just redid everybody's website with new software. I wanted to get them all lined up with that. Then I thought, well, I really resisted wanting to learn this new software. I thought, why do I want to learn something new when I'm not going to be doing this for that much longer? But I did, and I'm glad I did. I mean, I would rather have learned maybe something else, but it was good for my clients. It was a good decision.
That's what I decided. That's all I'm doing. I just met with a client yesterday and said, I'm not going to do this one little piece for you anymore going forward. I'm just going to focus on this. I've really cut down on only the things that I enjoy doing.
Roger: Is part of the decision of, I enjoy doing it, I enjoy the people, so why would I stop as long as it's not interfering with life?
Lori: It's not something, I mean, if somebody's website goes offline, yeah, that's bad. And if I was going to take a long trip, I would get someone to watch that for me, but there's nothing all that demanding about what I'm doing right now. I like my clients. They're long-term clients. I've had a lot of them for 10 years. I'm just not ready to leave them. We've got a WordPress meetup group here, and I like meeting with them once a month. They're like younger people, but it's fun. I enjoy it.
Roger: Bruce was getting ready to retire. So, how's Bruce doing?
Lori: He did retire. His job was a really physically demanding job. He retired the next year, and he's not working for anybody or doing anything on the side, some volunteering, and he loves that. I think that would drive me nuts, but he loves that. He's got some hobbies. He likes to work with deer skins, any kind of roadkill. People say, hey, I saw a raccoon over here you want to go get it. Something like that. People will bring him things. So, he loves that.
Now we just moved when we did our last retirement plan and he's got his own shop. It's not attached to the house. So, he can go out there and deal with that dead stuff, and I don't have to smell it.
Roger: He's not had an issue finding what to do every day.
Lori: In the winter when it gets really cold, I think he does because then he kind of sits at his computer and I think he gets tired of that. But sometimes I wish he had a little more to do at that time of the year. But otherwise, he keeps pretty busy and he's pretty content with what he's doing.
Roger: If I recall, there was a hobby that he had that was an odd one. I forgot the name of it.
Lori: Aquaponics. Yeah, I looked back at our worksheets and he was going to get into that. But then he decided he didn't want to, and the shop he had wouldn't really accommodate it all that well. We already have three outbuildings on our property. We didn't want to build another one. So, we just kind of decided to let that go.
Roger: So, he went from aquaponics to roadkill.
Lori: Yeah.
Roger: Okay. Okay. I see the thread there. But I guess that's part of it though, isn't it? Of you just have to be doing something and moving forward, and you'll pivot in ways you can't even imagine.
Lori: Right. Yeah, and I look at a worksheet and the things that we wrote down and there's some that's the same and then there's some that's a lot different because, you know, like I said, we discussed, I'm not retired and I thought I would be.
Roger: Yeah, well, you're not working full time. So, you're sort of in the middle. You're pre tired. We like to call it around here.
When you look back at those worksheets from 6 years ago and the plan that you had in place, has it changed much?
Lori: Oh, some. I knew when you did the Medicare part that we were going to be on Advantage plans and we wouldn't spend that much on that. Our spending has gone up. I mean, we're both on Medicare now. I started the beginning of this year, which was really close to my FRA, and he started his when he was 64. So, we really only need about 1, 000 a month out of our savings to have a great life as you call it and there's some extra things we might want to do and we feel like we have the cash there to do it, but the plan is pretty much the same.
We've used some of our savings over the years since he retired and I've not worked with a big income, but everything's worked out pretty well and I still like to go back and look at your plan and kind of compare things.
Roger: Okay, from a social security standpoint we've gotten to at least closer if not in full retirement age.
What was the decision that you guys made there so far?
Lori: Well, because last year I thought, you know, this will be a big income year for me because I'm doing all these websites and I was charging more for them the second time around. I thought, I don't need to pull it out now, but I'd always planned. I would do it around my FRA, and this was the year to do it. This year wasn't going to be an in big income year for me, and I thought this is the right time.
Roger: Okay. Now roughly, I'm just going to get right to the chase here. I remember this was sort of the, it caused a little bit of a kerfuffle. That's one of my favorite words right now after people listen to it of how they could have a base great life on that, was essentially the thread of it. I forget what the exact number was.
So roughly, what do you guys spend now a year for this base great life?
Lori: Well, now I recall back then when we were looking at the numbers and I said, when we're both on social security, I'm getting a big raise and we did. So, with that, and then the money we both bring in, because he does have a little kind of side business.
Roger: There's a big demand for roadkill. I get that.
Lori: Aside from that. So now actually been tracking our spending since August of 2021, and we're spending like 5000 a month now to us I couldn't believe we're spending that much money, but we're doing things too. We're doing stuff on the house. One of the things we were going to do was a deck, a new deck and we did that. Like I've heard you say on the podcast, there's always something that comes up every month. It seems like there's always something that comes up with it. Like I just had a big maintenance on my car. Just, it was scheduled and it's a lot of money to do a big maintenance plan on your car.
It's just always something.
Roger: There really is. So, 60, 000 a year. Does that cover, obviously your base living, does it cover a lot of these, "there's something"?
Lori: Oh, it covers all of that. Yeah, or if we didn't have all the extra stuff a month, we could live on less than 3, 500 a month. I'm leaving out, like property tax, that's a one time a year thing, and insurance, that's a one time a year thing. But I mean, you have to pay for it, but, and I guess you ought to count it in, but that's pretty much what we're doing.
Roger: Okay. I'll ask the question that probably someone is thinking, how can you not live on rice and beans and have fun on that?
Lori: Oh, we live really well, as far as our meals are concerned, seeing 60, 000 a year sounds like a lot to me and it probably doesn't to anybody else. But you know, now we've had inflation the past couple of years and all of that. I'm a bargain shopper. I love to go to the grocery stores and find things, especially meat. I got a prime rib half off. So, we had great prime rib for 25. two meals, so that'd be like 13 each. It was regularly a $50 piece of meat. I love doing stuff like that. And I've got time to make things. You know, I make soups and stews and Christmas cookies. I do a lot of baking and things like that, but I don't feel like I really skimp.
I'm trying to spend actually a little more money because why not? You know, if I want to go out for lunch or if I want to stop and get something instead of waiting to have lunch at home, I should do that. It's hard to do because I'm just not used to it, but I am trying to relax up a little bit and spend a little bit more, maybe a couple hundred dollars. That's not a lot to a lot of people, but to me. Spending a couple hundred dollars more a month on just fun, maybe eating out lunches with friends or whatever.
Roger: Is it fair to say if you're driving home and you're hungry that your default is to wait till I get home, not just to pull into the drive thru?
Lori: Right.
Roger: So, yes, right. I imagine that's just sort of that's the default. That's just a lot of micro decisions that add up. Do you have Amazon Prime?
Lori: Yes.
Roger: Okay. Big pulls from there to purchase things?
Lori: Oh, yeah. I buy a lot from there. I try to check prices around and then before I decide because I'd rather buy locally but the price difference is just so much that I go with Amazon.
Roger: Yeah, that's a hard one. I was thinking of that recently because I like books and I typically buy them on Amazon and then I switched to Barnes and Noble just because it feels more local, right? Then I'm going to two local bookstores. There's only two in the area. I mean, 20, 30-mile area and my preference would be to buy from them even if it's slower, but price wise, it's like, I don't know where the difference is because I definitely would prefer to do that.
But sometimes it's hard.
Lori: Yeah, it is.
Roger: Okay. So here we are I guess 66, 67, close to that. Tell me about the future in your mind.
Lori: I was talking to Bruce about that. I said, what are we going to say about our future? He said just tell them we're living a great life so .We had some plans to do travel, but then we had a big European river cruise planned for the spring of 2020 Well, you know what happened there and so we just have not planned any big travel and I don't really feel like it's that important to me like it was before when I was younger, I just really wanted to go to a lot of places. Now it doesn't hold as much of an appeal as it did before and I have gotten into a new hobby. I got a show dog in July of this year and so I've been learning to show we did this like 40 years ago, we had our 1st show dog and then we got out of it and then. We went to a show in town and met this guy that I had known. He used to groom another dog of mine and he said, you need a show dog. You need a show dog.
Now I have a show dog, and she's actually in Orlando at the Eukanuba national competition or something with him this week. She's finished as a Grand Champion already, so I'm not sure how much more showing I'll want to do.
If it's just travel around here, then I'd probably do it. But big trips like that, it's a lot. And there's a lot that goes along with showing a dog.
Roger: Our neighbors have a show dog and yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. It's like having a horse a little bit. It's a job.
Lori: That's what he does full time is all of that.
Roger: So, what else did Bruce suggest that you tell us?
Lori: That's about it. He's pretty general. So, I have a grandchild now in the last year. So, they live about an hour and a half away from us and we're actually going down this weekend to see them. We've tried to make time every month or so to go and see her, and that's been very rewarding. I wish they were closer, and everybody says that. You always wish they were in town with you. So that's happened.
Roger: Okay, that's a big one. That's a big one.
Lori: They'll probably keep this around here.
Roger: So back when we first talked, you were getting ready to retire, and Bruce was too. To someone that's getting ready to retire in the next year or two, that's nervous about, how do I figure this all out? What about the world and all the uncertainty? What would you say to them?
Lori: I actually talked to a lot of people about it. People have gotten to know that I've listened to a lot of retirement podcasts and things about social security, Medicare, now that I've had to go through it, they come to me and ask me, and I said, you got to think of more than just these numbers. You need to, like everybody said, like you all say, and I've heard another podcast, you retire to something and not from something. You need to really think about what you're going to do with your time and that's part of the reason I haven't completely retired because I still don't know what I'm going to do with all my time.
Now. I did start with an e-bike. I've got an e-bike and it's great. I even upgraded my bike at the beginning of the year. So that's something I really enjoy doing and there's some great trails and I love that, but Bruce doesn't want to bite. So, I just mainly do it on my own, but for other people, they just really need to think about what they're going to do.
A friend of mine retired and he's RVing full time, but he's kind of bored at times because you can have, like people say, you have fun, you have your honeymoon period. They've done it for a little over a year now. What do you do now? I mean, they still go places, but there's a lot of time in the day to fill and you can't be hiking and everything.
Roger: What do you tell them? What do you tell them when you're talking to your friend and he says, well, I'm kind of bored or you're talking to somebody who really doesn't have a clue. What's your suggestion?
Lori: Well, we never really got that deep into it. They don't ask me specifics, but I think you have to look back at what you've enjoyed in your past.
What hobbies did you have in your past? Do you want to develop those more? Maybe read some books, listen to some podcasts. But people don't like to do that as much as I do, I think. I think that's what they need to do. I just keep thinking, oh, you got to go listen to this podcast. You ought to read this book and they're different. I guess they want to do it their own way or figure it out.
Roger: I'm the same way. But I think you'd have to do it your own way.
Lori: You do.
Roger: My suggestion is always. Just try something just start moving in some direction because you're not going to whiteboard it or journal it, usually you stumble into it by doing other things that you realize aren't what you want, right?
That's how Bruce got into roadkill. He didn't whiteboard. Hey, I'm hanging on this roadkill thing because it's fun. Just stumbled into it through a very odd I forget the name of it already the other one that he was doing, aquaponics to roadkill. So, you just have to keep moving forward.
Lori, thank you so much for your update. I'm happy to hear that you two are rocking it and you're happy.
Lori: Yeah, we are. I heard Emma say, when I was listening to that, you know, she loves retirement and I will, when I get there, but I love what I'm doing now, and that’s what's important.
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
Roger: On your marks, get set,
and 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 know last week we talked about you having your annual meeting, which I think is a great idea. This would be a good time and this is actually an agenda in the annual meeting to revisit what your goals are, because if you've already set them and have a plan in place, it's easy to just sort of look over them and not really reexamine whether they're relevant to where you want to go now. When you set those goals, maybe it was a year or two, or three ago. They were meaningful, but you're a different person now.
You're a different version of who you are and your spouse is a different version of who they are. If you're married. Reevaluate those goals and make sure that's still the direction you want to walk. Because if it's not, now's the time to adjust them so you can realign your decision making to what's important to you now.
CONCLUSION
If you haven't already, I want to suggest that you check out our YouTube channel, Retirement Answer Man on YouTube. We'll have a link to that in 6-Shot Saturday. We're releasing weekly videos now, and I'm just finding my voice and my style there right now. We're releasing a lot of the conversations, the joint conversations that we're having, so we can have some graphics involved, but going forward, we're going to do more nuanced content that is very helpful in a video format to be able to demonstrate things and concepts.
Definitely check out our YouTube channel, Retirement Answer Man, and subscribe so you can get access to those.
Have a wonderful week.
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance references are historical and do not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax, or financial advisor before making any decisions.