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Episode #535 - How Much Money Do I Really Need to Retire
Roger: The show is a proud member of the Retirement Podcast Network.
Today's show is dedicated to you, not just surviving retirement, but having the confidence because you're doing the work to really lean in and rock retirement.
Hey, hey, Roger Whitney here. By day, I am a practicing retirement planner with over 30 years’ experience walking life with clients and actually doing this stuff and over the last 10 years on this show, you and I have been noodling on how we improve our retirement planning process so we can have confidence and get on with really rocking life.
Today on the show, we're going to try to answer the question, how much money do I really need in retirement from Janice. That's the title question. As part of that, we're going to build some fundamental understanding, which is what is a feasible plan of record, which is going to be incorporated in answering Janice's question.
In addition to that, we're going to answer some of your other questions regarding retirement planning. and talk about the books that I finished in March. If you enjoy the show, you're going to love our 6-Shot Saturday email, where we give a summary of the show. You can listen to the show right from the email, as well as links to some of the resources that we might mention so you can be proactive in your journey towards rocking retirement. With that, let's get on to answering the question, how much money do you really need?
HOW MUCH DO I REALLY NEED TO RETIRE?
Janice: Hi, I have a question on how much money you really need in retirement. I mean, what is the benchmark amount? What do you need to take into consideration? I can't find it on the website, so I'm trying to ask you.
I'm about five years out. I'm a few years older than my husband, and we're trying to figure out what makes sense. Do you save for retirement now? Do you enjoy your life because you never know what's going to happen tomorrow? Do you try to do tax deferred so you don't pay? We live in a high tax state and we're getting taxed to resell our house and get something smaller for the next five to seven years before we probably move out of state. I mean, it's like, I don't know what makes sense. What is the right amount?
Then when I see what it really takes to get to that dollar amount, it's a little scary. I don't know how much information you need, but hopefully that'll give you something to help me with.
Appreciate that. Thanks. Bye.
Roger: Janice, that is a wonderfully articulated question because there are so many considerations that it gets overwhelming.
Where do I start? What do I do? You brought up so many different topics that are important, but they're all over the place. It can get really overwhelming. So, what is the benchmark for knowing how much you need?
Well, we'll start with the normal heuristic that we hear when it comes to retirement planning, which is the 4 percent rule.
Meaning that you can sustain withdrawing roughly 4 percent inflation adjusted from your assets with not too much fear of running out of money. So, if we do that math reverse, let's assume you needed 100, 000 in spending per year. Well, that would be 2. 5 million in financial assets or investments, which would equal 4 percent of 100, 000 a year, would be inflation adjusted over time, would be the amount that you need.
These heuristics are very good when you are very far away from retirement. It gives you a bogey to shoot for, and I think that's important, and people have pointed that out to me. But as you get closer to retirement, and you're within five years, Janice, these heuristics become much less meaningful.
The short answer is, and you're not going to like me for this, it's a complex problem, and you're not going to know how much exactly you need. In order to get to a place where you can have confidence that you can actually pull the trigger or where you should focus your efforts, it's much more important that you go through your own process so you can organize this and focus on the right things.
Otherwise, it's just scatter shooting everywhere. So, I'm going to walk through a process to get to a feasible plan of record, which is the initial target that you want to get to in your retirement planning. The way we're going to do this, Janice, is not go from the outside in of these heuristics, but actually build it from the bottom up internally for you and your husband. This is the process that I would suggest that you follow.
Now, if you have not seen any of the Retirement Plan Live case studies that have done, we'll have links to some of those in 6-Shot Saturday, where you can visually listen during the series and actually see the results of a feasibility test in order to get to a feasible plan of record. So, we will give you an example of the conversations. Then you can see the output and maybe some of the negotiations to get to a feasible plan of record. You could follow along doing this on your own. So that would be if you're a visual learner and you want to see it in action, but I want to talk through it here, okay.
Here are the steps that I want you to take. It's very important that we don't look at the whole elephant here, we just take one little baby step at a time so we don't get overwhelmed or sidetracked with things that might seem important because we got to get the fundamentals down first.
Okay, so step one decides the date that you're going to retire you say five years from now So let's assume that it's five years from now.
I'm going to assume you're 55 I don't know if you mentioned how old you were so we're going to assume you're going to retire at 60 and let's assume you and your husband are as well. So, decide when you're going to retire.
Then you're going to have to set a time of when you think you'll pass away. We typically will use 94 for a female and 92 for a male, which are beyond the normal life expectancy tables. So, you want to determine first the date that you're going to retire, and the date that you think each of you will likely pass.
Next, you're going to want to make sure you use an inflation number on your assumption. So, let's just keep it easy and just use 3%.
Now we have got to get to what does Janet and her husband want. First is that retirement date. When do you want to retire?
The next thing we need to ask is, what is the base great life for Janice and her husband? How much does that cost? You may have a lot of Quicken data or financial data because you do a lot of budgeting and, wow, I have averages for the last two years. You may not do any budgeting at all. So, you need to start where you're at. So, you can do it from the bottom up, which is literally build a budget, building block by building block. This is what I pay for my mortgage. This is what I pay for real estate. This is what I pay for gas. That's a bottom-up approach of getting to this number. Takes a little bit more work on the front end.
The top-down approach is going to be a swag. Sophisticated, wildly awesome guess. The one way you can do that from the top down is just look at your last six months of account statements and on average, what do you need to spend every single month to live the life of Janice and her husband? I prefer this method at the beginning because we don't want to get too bogged down in details. We can refine these later on. So, start with that. So, let's assume you do a top down and you say, and we spend 10, 000 a month.
Okay, so that means you are going to spend 120, 000 a year, net of taxes. And you're going to assume that you need that every single year, from the time that you're 60 until the time that both of you pass, and that will be adjusted for inflation and taxes will be calculated in the background. Now we know how much it costs for a base great life. I like to add health care on top of that. So, let's just assume that's another 10, 000 a year. So, it's 130, 000 a year for the rest of both of your lives. This is very one dimensional at the moment.
Now we have a number for how much you guys need to spend. Just to have a base great life, which would include, you know, very light travel. eating out. I wouldn't say that, you know, it's going to have some spice, but not the extras. So now we have a base great life number of what you think you need. Version one, because you're going to refine this later on, but not right now.
Then you want to add, well, what are some spicy things I want to add on top of my base great life? These discretionary things. In retirement, that might be, I like to travel. And in retirement, we want to travel more. So, we're going to travel and we think that's going to cost us 12, 000 a year, and we'll likely do that for 15 years. So now we have a discretionary expense on top of the base great life that adds some spice. Maybe it's, you want to buy an RV and you're going to do that in seven years, so put the date and what you expect that RV to cost as a swag, maybe you're going to gift to your children.
You want to start to stack these discretionary desires or wants and try to determine when they're going to start, when they're going to end, and how much they're going to be. And the easiest way to do this, by the way, Janice, is software. For the feasible plan of record, which we're defining for the fundamentals as well, the easiest place to do this, in my experience, is software, because it's very easy to manipulate quickly.
There's a lot of great retirement software out there. If on the consumer end, the one I would suggest using is new retirement, newretirement.com. They have a free version and a paid version where you can walk through this journey of building all these various goals. Essentially what you're building here, Janice, is a timeline of your spending. Inflation adjusted over the time from retirement to when you pass. So, you're building the spending part of the cash flow model. So now that we have the spending part done, Janice, and do this quickly with a swag, because we're not trying to get too precise here because we don't want to get bogged down.
Now you have to say, well, how am I going to pay for this? Well, there's three sources that you're going to have to pay for this life once you retire from your full-time work, because that's covered it for years.
The first source, Janice, is what we call social capital. And unlike the social sciences, we mean guaranteed payments.
The most common form of social capital is going to be social security. Right? You've been paying into that for years, most likely. So, you want to have an estimate of what your social security payment's going to be and the year that it's going to start. In our example, if you retire at age 60, you're likely not going to begin social security until 67. With software, you can enter that in there and it can actually help you do the estimate of what that payment will be and that payment will be inflation adjusted. So, let's assume that it's 50, 000 a year is what your social security is going to be for you and your husband. Well, that means If you're spending 130, 000 for your base grade life, 50, 000 of it will be covered by Social Security. They both are inflation adjusted. So, we still don't have 80, 000 covered by any income. So, in addition to Social Security, if you have pensions, you would enter your pensions here and map out the cash flows. I'm going to get 10, 000 a month or 10, 000 a year for the rest of my life, and that's going to help pay for this base grade life.
You want to map out your social capital. Again, software is very good for doing this. If you're a spreadsheet geek. You can build a massive spreadsheet to map out the timing of your income to match the timing of your spending over the span of your retirement. Software is easier. Once you have that mapped out, that will help pay for life.
The next source is what we call human capital. The money that you're going to earn doing something. So, you may leave full time work but have rental income. Or you may leave full time work and decide to work part time. Well, that money can go towards helping pay for life, maybe just for the first few years when you're working part time and it ends later, but you want to map that out because that is going to help carry the load.
The last resource that you have is what we call financial capital, and this is the one we always think about. Money, right? My 401k, my Roth IRA, my savings. This money is going to have to fill the gap that your social capital and your human capital doesn't pay, right? Because you don't have this full-time job anymore.
This is where you're going to harvest the money that you save to help supplement your life. So here, you're going to list out all of your investment accounts, your 401ks, your saving accounts, your Roth IRAs, et cetera. Since you're five years from retirement, you can add in, well, in the first five years, I'm contributing more to these accounts, so that will build more, hopefully.
Then at retirement, that saving stops, and then you have what you have, absent any growth. So, you want to list these out, and software's wonderful for this.
Then the last thing you want to consider here, Janice, is there any extraordinary things that are going to come in later in life? Like an inheritance is a common one. Well, five years from now, I have some pretty good clarity that I'm going to get 200, 000 from my great uncle. Well, then you'd want to put that into the plan that you're going to have this inflow of that amount whenever you reasonably estimate that he might pass and you get that money because that can help add to your resources.
The important thing to focus on here is the process in which you build it and just following each baby step along the way and not getting too bogged down in the details.
Once you have all your spending, all your income, and your resources listed, the last thing that you're going to want to determine is, well, what rate of return might I get on my assets going forward? That's going to be determined by your model portfolio that you use. If you're in a super conservative portfolio, it might be 4 percent a year. If you're in a very aggressive portfolio, it might be 8 percent a year. You're going to want to determine some standard portfolio that you use in the software to determine your rate of return over time.
For me, in the feasible stage, I always use a return related to a 60/40 allocation. If you're using software, it will calculate that for you, and if you're using software, and this is the value of software over spreadsheets for normal non geeks, is that it will also consider that you don't actually get the average return every single year, right? We know that. We get bad markets where we lose money. We get good markets when we make money. So, software can easily model that. So, when it's telling you whether your plan is feasible, it's giving you a percentage of how often out of good markets and bad markets, were you able to sustain this over the scope of your life? So, you want to choose a model portfolio if you're using software. I recommend something in between.
Once you have all of this entered, you run your initial feasibility test, Janice, to see, do I have enough resources to pay for the spending that my husband and I want to spend? If you're using software, it'll probably come out in the verbiage of a confidence number or success ratio, etc. Usually that's anywhere from 0 to 100 is the scale. Usually, 75 and over is considered successful or constrained, but feasible. Anything under 75 percent as a confidence number is what we would call underfunded, and anything over 90 percent is going to be what we would call overfunded. This would be the initial feasibility test.
This is going to give you a sense. Janice, on the trajectory that you're on, and whether it's feasible or not. That's the first step that we want to take. If it's not feasible, or really constrained to where you don't really feel confident about it, then you have the scaffolding to create a what if scenario to explore different kinds of decisions. You mentioned a few of them.
Well, should I save in tax deferred accounts? Well, once you have your initial feasibility test, you can create a what if scenario showing more savings in tax deferred and see how that impacts the results. You mentioned you're in a high tax state. Well, you could model what if we sold our house Move to a new house in a low tax state. Does that impact our results? Because the software typically will dynamically manage not just the federal tax rate, but the state tax rate. What if we downsize? Well, you can model that. What if we downsize our house and move to a low tax state? How does that improve our results? So, you can start to explore these alternate pathways to get to a plan that is feasible from a long-term perspective, so you can have more confidence that you're not on a fool's journey that has no chance of being sustainable.
This exercise of negotiating with yourself, Janice, also helps you answer the question, should I save more now or should I just enjoy life more now? Because you can create different scenarios to solve for what's most important to you So let's talk about a couple examples there.
Let's assume you run initial feasibility test and it's underfunded and you got to solve for that Well, maybe you could save more money, right? If you listen to the mini case study last week It wasn't even an option. The mountain was too high to climb for that particular individual given the stage of life and her earnings potential. That ship had sailed. So, she had to redefine the problem of there's no way I can save enough, so I need to figure out how do I build a life I don't want to retire from. In that journey what she did is she reorganized her life Acknowledging that she will likely work for a lot longer, but the work she's doing is different than what she was doing, which gave her a lot of time freedom, and more peace and less stress in her life. So, some of this is how you define that.
But you can create a scenario of what's most important to you, Janice. Is your deal breaker, I have to retire in five years, I'm not working a minute after that, my birthday on that year. Well, if that's your deal breaker, Janice, then the negotiation becomes, what things might I have to do differently in order to accomplish the thing that's most important to me?
That may mean you have to save more. It may mean that you have fewer of the extras in retirement, or you work part time in order to get out of full-time work in five years. Whereas another person might be, I love my work, I just want to be able to travel more. So, for them, if they're a carbon copy of you except for their preferences and life situation, they may be willing to work three more years and save more and maybe take more investment risk in order to get more confidence they can have a higher travel budget now and in retirement.
You can't get to that point, Janice, until you go through the initial feasibility pillar to see what trajectory you're on in version 1, that gives you the scaffolding to start to negotiate with yourself. I think software is the best way to do this phase. When we talk about resilience, because a feasible plan means that, yeah, this looks like a good trajectory given all of these assumptions. But it doesn't answer the question of, well, what happens if a big storm comes? It doesn't solve that. That is something that's really important. That's a resilient plan of record, but that's after you get to a feasible plan that focuses on what you care about most.
My suggestion would be to go through this in little baby steps. Either in a spreadsheet or using new retirement software or some other software to get to that first version to know what kind of trajectory you're on.
One last thing I'll say here is perhaps you do this and you realize, wow, we're way overfunded. That may allow you to retire earlier or save less money now so you don't over save and miss life right now because you thought you were behind the eight ball.
Once you build the scaffolding, this all gets a lot easier. But when you're thinking about it in a scattershot way, it's all these things are just floating out there and you don't know where to start and it's easy to get distracted. That's why process is so important in this, Janice. Hopefully, that gave you at least a pathway to get to a feasible plan to start answering some of these questions.
So now let's move on and answer some other questions related to rocking retirement.
LISTENER QUESTIONS
If you have a question for the show, you can go to askroger.me and enter an audio question like Janice did or type in a question. You can actually just type in anything you want and say howdy to us. So, you can go to askroger.me.
A COMMENT ON THE FIRE MOVEMENT
Let's get to our first question. Related to the FIRE movement, this is actually a little bit of feedback.
We did a series in February on FIRE, which is the Financially Independent Retire Early Movement. We had Kevin Sebesta from the club who was our guide. This came from Linda who likes the FIRE movement.
She said,
"I was so excited to hear about the FIRE movement series. However, I was disappointed as you really showed your bias against the FIRE movement, even when something positive was mentioned, you found a way to say the negative.
Come on, you sounded like an old man! These people are smart, they are capable, adaptable, curious, and don't go into early retirement with their eyes closed. In fact, I would argue they are more prepared than the majority of normal aged adults."
Well, thanks for the feedback, Linda, and I am not, I don't have a bias against the FIRE movement.
I love the concept of financial independence. I think that's critical. I think that's the big benefit from the movement.
Now the retire early part misnomer, right? Retire early. You're right. Many people do find work to supplement their quote unquote retirement, whether they're normal retirees or retiring early. I didn't mean to sound like a stick in the mud.
I think it's a great movement because they're being intentional in planning and realizing the value of time. The value of creating a great life now, whereas I think traditionally baby boomers more my generation didn't have that perspective, and we were taught to do the opposite, which is sacrifice, sacrifice, and you'll be okay later on.
I actually have a lot of respect for it. So hopefully you found some value in it. Maybe I was playing the devil's advocate a little bit. I don't know.
HOW TO CHANGE ADVISORS
Our next question comes from John on how to change advisors.
John says,
"Hello, Roger. The podcast has really changed my view on the advice we are getting from our advisor.
We met with ours last night and we left feeling that he does not really go beyond portfolio management. They use the Money Guide Pro software. It showed 99 percent probability will be successful, but there seems to be no decumulation plan. We can't get him to consider a real bond, a MIGA ladder, anything that so many planners seem to advocate.
He seems to be very heuristic in his views and wants to just transfer more outside investments under their management. We are thinking we need to change advisors but find this hard to do. I'm planning to talk to a fee only planner in our area. Your thoughts?
Thank you for your weekly show a lot of great information."
Well, thanks for sharing your experience, John.
I have a lot of thoughts on this recently and again this is just from my perspective and I’ve had a lot of conversations before and they generally go like this recently.
We have an advisor or a planner. We really like them. They've helped us a lot, but they don't focus on Retirement or decumulation and they'll run scenarios, you talked about 99 percent probability, which is getting to a feasible plan of record, but then when we talk about decumulation, or how do we actually take the money, how do we actually manage taxes, it becomes much less clear. Their attitude seems to be, well, we'll figure it out year by year.
That sounds like your experience, John, and I think the experience of many, because our industry has been trained for 30 years in accumulating assets and gathering assets is the general business model of the AUM structure of more assets under management.
But when it comes to retirement, we have the tools of Money Guide Pro, as you mentioned, or New Retirement, or other great retirement calculators, and so we can do this probability analysis to give some confidence as to whether we're on a safe trajectory from a feasible standpoint. But I would say the vast majority don't go the next level of how we actually make this resilient in building a pie cake, building a contingency fund and an income floor, and knowing exactly how we're going to pay for our life via an income floor or guaranteed income via annuities or whatever else. They don't do anything related to tax planning and understand IRMA. That's normal, John, you're in a normal situation here.
I think if you're paying asset management fees, and it's all about here's a feasible plan using software, and it's focused on portfolio management, you're probably paying too much in fees, because those things are table stakes everywhere. Portfolio management is not worth the money when it's about retirement planning and software to determine a feasible plan is easily done without a planner. It's about the guidance in the decumulation and all of the details around how this actually works. Because if you have a feasible plan, but you have no confidence that it's resilient so if something happens sideways in the world that you're going to be okay, you're not going to feel comfortable retiring.
It actually can be dangerous. If we go back to the Rosie example of our Retirement Plan Live series a year and a half ago, she had a feasible plan going into retirement using software similar to what you mentioned. A bear market happened and her plan became not feasible because the bear market hit and no work was done to make it resilient so it could absorb the impact of something bad happened. So, if you're paying a normal asset management fee and you're focused on decumulation, you should search for another advisor.
Then you say, but finding this is hard, and it is.
Places to look. That is what our firm does, Agile Retirement Management. Andy Pankow, you have Benjamin Brant, you have Taylor Schulte, you have Tanya Nichols, people that we've highlighted on the show, all focus on retirement planning. Andy has a list of fees only planners at Tenon Financial that you can go interview that are more hourly based if you're looking for that structure.
I think actually it's easier for you to find more than ever before because you can go listen and get to know people before you even interact with them to see who actually looks at this as a craft, because you're in a much more powerful position than you were in the past.
But if you're interviewing local people, John, my suggestion would be is grab our worksheet on how to find an advisor, how to choose an advisor, and we'll put a link to this in 6-Shot Saturday, which is essentially a list of interview questions, some homework to do before you go to the interview and questions you should ask during the interview. What you'll want to do as you're interviewing these people, John, is get specifics on the process that they use and always ask the next question when they describe it to you to get to specifics because we all sort of sound the same on the surface. It's when you ask the next question and the next question, do you realize who has really thought this through? Who has, thinks of this as a craft, and who is a little bit shallower? So, we'll have a link to that, so that maybe will help you with your search, John.
HOW TO GET INTO THE DECUMULATION STATE OF MIND
Our next question is around how to get into the decumulation state of mind.
Melissa: Good evening, Roger. I wanted to ask you a question about how to get oneself in the deaccumulation phase versus shifting from the accumulation stage.
Thank you very much for what you do. Listen to you every week and been a long-time listener. Thank you.
Roger: Wonderful question, Melissa. The answer is it's a journey.
Most people that struggle with decumulation or spending their money and not growing their money generally are really good accumulators. If that's you, Melissa, you've been doing that for decades.
Building the muscles of accumulation and the positive feedback loop associated with denying yourself and saving for the future, Melissa, and then they find themselves in retirement and they have ample resources, but they're so overbuilt in the positive feedback loop of accumulation that they can't get out of it. It's a journey, is how you do it, Melissa. It's a journey, not a solution.
We just recently had Daniel Crosby on, where we talked about how we mentally think about these things to get over frugality.
We had Michael Easter talking about how we're hardwired to feel safe, in a scarcity loop. Actually, the world manipulates us a little bit because of our natural wiring of always feeling like we have scarce resources.
So one is, it's just how you are mentally. That's just how we're wired.
Number two is, if you've been a really good accumulator, you've really had well developed muscles in accumulation and denying yourself. Just like a bodybuilder, all they do is chest and arms and back and everything else and ignore their legs, when they start to do leg exercises, it's really uncomfortable. It's painful. They would much rather go pop out some bench presses.
For you, spending a little money on myself is a little hard. I would much rather see my accounts go up. It takes a process and it being hard and uncomfortable as part of the journey and reminding yourself of that. That's the first thing I want to say, Melissa is, yeah, it's going to be hard and that's okay. It doesn't mean that's not a worthwhile pursuit.
How do you have confidence to be able to spend money?
Well, I think having a feasible, resilient plan of record where you actually see how it's going to happen is critical because it will help give you that confidence so you don't feel like you're winging it or you're spending now and really hurting your older self. One way of doing that is in a resilient plan of record, we'll get to this on another show no doubt, is you're building, you're prefunding the next five years of spending and what we have found is prefunding spending helps us get over some of our psychological hiccups and actually doing things.
As an example, let's assume you want to go on a cruise in two years. Well, if you prefund it now, essentially prepay it, you could do that directly with the cruise company, or you could build an income floor that prepays for that cruise two, three years from now. When it gets time to do the cruise, you've already paid for it. So, it almost feels like it's free. And studies have shown that this prepayment of things psychologically helps us. I know it helps me, but I've already paid for something. Once it comes up, I forgot about it and it feels like a free trip to me. That's one way is to build a fun bucket.
Kevin Sebesta is wonderful of having a, what do you call it, Kevin? A fun check, or he has this amount that he'll put, and I might be butchering this a little bit, Kevin, sorry. So, if it's December of 2024, he'll put money in an account. That's labeled fun bucket and his job over the next year is to spend it all and it's already spent in that fun bucket so he can just write checks against it and he knows that money is going away anyway. That's another form of prepayment and you could put this into the model of a feasible resilient plan so you can see that it's okay.
Then the last thing that's coming to mind as I think about this, Melissa, is to start with the easy things. Start small, right? If you're a bodybuilder with, you know, big upper body, no legs, don't throw a lot of plates on there and try to spend on a huge round the world trip.
Maybe you just hire somebody to clean your house. Something small. Maybe you buy a little bit higher priced bottle of wine. You don't have to go crazy on this because of the journey. The point of the journey, and remember this, Melissa, because it's not about spending money. That's sneaky to me. It's about using the resources you created to enhance your life in whatever's most meaningful for you, and don't get to the end of life, having too much money, and start to have regrets.
Give yourself some grace, just take some baby steps.
FEEDBACK ON THE MICHAEL KITCES INTERVIEW
Before we get to the books that I read in March, I want to share two pieces of feedback I got related to the Michael Kitsis interview on the state of retirement planning.
I did not get any critical feedback due to the quality of the audio, though it made me cringe listening to it. So, I just want to apologize for that. I had two pieces of feedback, which I just thought were always helpful and instructive, but still sort of funny.
The first one was from, I don't know who I have, who it's from, I didn't get the names here,
" I enjoyed your podcast with Michael Kitces, but it seemed that you barely let him talk.
In my opinion, when you have guests, perhaps they should do the majority of the talking with you, feeding them questions. I hope you take this constructively, otherwise I enjoy the show."
I totally take it constructively. Thank you for that. Literally, like the same day, I got this bit of feedback.
"Whoa, always enjoy your podcast, and this guy is pretty good, but he can't stop talking to the point it is rude that he can't hear you trying to participate in the conversation, painful and annoying to listen to. I found myself focusing more on his control than content."
I just thought it was funny because I got them both the same day. I'm like, they're totally opposite.
Generally, when I have guests on the show, I am interested in their perspective on things, but I'm also not wanting people to have talking points. It's a balance of peeling away the wisdom and bringing it to light and challenging where they need to be challenged and it's hard to do sometimes.
I just thought that was fun. Feedback is always appreciated and always taken constructively, thank you so much.
BOOKS I READ IN MARCH
Before we get to our Smart Sprint, I wanted to share since this is popular with many the books that I read in March. March was an interesting month for reading. I finished three books.
Number one was Gulag Archipelago, which is about the gulags in Russia in the 20th century. It was a hard read. One, the style of the writing was very hard. The topic of the pain of the gulags and people's experiences in the gulags was very painful. I read an abridged version via audiobook and even the abridged version was over 20 hours.
It had some first-hand accounts and a lot of secondhand accounts of people that lived the life in these gulags and what they went through, and it was painful to read and hear. Not a lot of feedback on it, although it's just amazing, one, how cruel people can be, especially in crowds, and two, how resilient people can be and how much more agency they have when they're going through such trauma. It was pretty incredible.
Second book I read was Tai Pan by James Cavell. I've been watching the Shogun series on Hulu, which I really am enjoying, so I got back into reading all the James Cavell books. I read them, I think, when I was in my 20s. Really good books, long, a little uncomfortable with some of the racial imitation of language, etc. in the audiobook, but I understand.
The last book I read was called The Soul of an Octopus, and a lot of people have been reading this. I'm like, oh, maybe I should read that, and it was a beautifully written book. about a person who started to volunteer and go to an aquarium and develop an understanding of the complexity of an octopus in terms of their capabilities and I guess their mental state.
A lot of humanizations of octopuses, a lot of detail. I didn't realize they were such complex creatures. Probably the biggest takeaway I had from this was just the fact that this person was interested in that and was able to go into an aquarium. I think this was up in the east and begin to volunteer and hear about other people that were volunteering just because they really dig hanging out with aquatic animals. That made me think of you and I, and if we have an interest in something, we can go create relationships with people that are working at the aquarium or work at the zoo and maybe volunteer there and get behind the scenes and really start to understand it. I think there's a lot more opportunities for that in everyday life than we realize.
Those are the books I read in March. I'll let you know what's going on in April. Now let's go set a Smart Sprint.
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
On your marks, get set,
and we're off to set a little baby step you can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.
All right. In the next seven days, I challenge you to revisit briefly your feasible plan of record and how resilient it is. We're coming up on an election this year. Markets are a little crazy. Always the new cycle is crazy. Rebuild that campfire of confidence in your plan by reviewing it.
We're debating whether we like this phrase, campfire of confidence, but this is a good exercise that should only take you 10 or 15 minutes if you have a plan that you've put together. Just revisit it and say, well, how resilient is this plan if we have a bad year or two? Is it going to totally throw me off track? Or is there something I can do now while markets are at all-time highs to maybe make it a little bit more resilient?
CONCLUSION
I'm recording this on Friday. You're hearing this on Wednesday. I will be on the road coming back from Colorado after closing on a townhome that we purchased there.
Now, for you long time listeners, you know that I have architectural plans and decided not to build. Still got that stuff. You're wondering why I bought a town home. So perhaps we'll explore this from a planning perspective, because it's amazing, all the twists and turns that have happened.
Wish me safe driving. I will be listening to an audio book of some sort and thinking about coming back to you to chat about rocking retirement.
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.