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Episode #596 - How to Quality Check Your Retirement Plan

Roger: So you and your financial planner have counted the cost of all the different goals you have. You've entered those, you've entered all of your resources into a retirement planning tool or spreadsheet, and it gives you the results of whether you can achieve those and whether they're feasible or not. Well, how do you know you can trust it?

Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence to lean in and rock it because you're doing the right work.

This show is actually spurred from a conversation we had in the club where a member said, roger, we've entered all of our goals, our base great life, all the discretionary wants we have, and some wishes, and we've entered all of our assets and did a feasibility assessment, and it's a lot better than we thought it was. So maybe I can retire now. But the problem is, how do I know I can trust I did it right? That is a normal question and feeling by people that are doing retirement planning, even if they have a planner doing it, how do they know it was all done correctly? How can they put some confidence that they didn't put garbage in?

So we got garbage out and we're making life decisions about this stuff, right? So that's a normal feeling and it makes sense when it's an unfamiliar domain for you. But the truth is, this is my professional nightmare, that we build a plan. A client is dealing with a major decision, and we walk through it with the client, they make the decision. Then I wake up in the middle of the night, it's like, wait a second, I think I forgot something. I go back and check and it's different. That's a nightmare. So professionals can do this too. About five, six years ago, I actually had this happen to me. I was doing flat fee plans at the time. I created a flat fee plan, we had the reallocation plan, we had the cash flow plan of how they were going to pay for their paycheck. We have the meeting; it all makes sense. I send them everything for them to review it, and I get an email a day or two later saying Hey, Roger, you know, love the work that you did, but we saw something. I need some clarification. You have us taking all of this money out for our paycheck from so and so's IRA, but so and so is 57. Won't they have a 10% penalty if we do it that way? Honest question, obvious question. I read it, my stomach drops. I go revisit everything with fresh eyes. Being very critical. I realize I made a mistake. I overlooked something extremely obvious and had based subsequent decisions on that error. That's a rookie mistake. I should have known better. I followed my protocol. I went and cried in the corner for a little bit. Then I catastrophized my life. Then I picked myself up and said, okay, what do we do? One, we acknowledge the error and come to them with pathways to mitigate the error in the planning. As this train has already left the building, we have a meeting with the client. I came to them with two or three different options of how we could make this work. I looked at 72T, I had the calculations all figured out, and they correctly said, you know what, Roger, I think we're going to step away. They had lost confidence in my judgment, and rightly so. They made the right choice. We refunded them their money because it was a flat fee plan and did my best to transition away from them, to get them to a safe place. You want to talk about embarrassing; that's a rookie mistake. I was 25 years in the business. This can happen to professionals. Even if you're working with a professional, they're not perfect. As a result, we have leaned into something called productive paranoia, which goes into how do you check a retirement plan? So we're going to review that today in our practical planning segment.

In addition to that, we're going to share another retirement story from one of my favorite humans, Scott, how he has really leaned into international travel. Then we'll also have a resource or two to share some travel ideas in the U.S. So let's get this party started.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

So how do you quality check your plan so you can one, avoid unforced errors and have more confidence in the data and the feedback it's giving you.

Well, I want to start with a concept that comes from a book called Great by Choice by Jim Collins, which is a wonderful book. This is a concept that I live daily as I've learned my lessons, and that is called productive paranoia.

Now, paranoia is actually like a medical condition. Usually you're afraid of other people acting upon you. But being productively paranoid can be powerful in quality checking your plan and seeing around corners. In his book, which even though it's a business book, there's a lot of parallels between that and retirement plan and even his first book, Good to Great, Wonderful Books.

There are three main components of productive paranoia.

Number one is hypervigilance constantly scanning for threats or errors even when things are going well, assume conditions can change without warning, and always asking, what could go wrong? What did I enter wrong? Let me recheck these things. Hypervigilance is a productive way.

Second main component is building buffers and shock absorbers into your plan, essentially creating safety of margins when you need them. In business, that does mean maintaining cash reserves, avoiding excessive debts, etc. In retirement planning, it's a lot of maintaining ample cash reserves and having buffers in some of your estimates on your health care spending or so forth.

Number three is zooming out to see the big picture. When you are doing retirement planning or any kind of planning, you can start with, okay, this is where we want to go. You have a clear understanding of your vision. But then you start to go down in the weeds. You start to go into; do I reallocate this stock or that stock? Do I do a Roth conversion? Let me look at IRMAA details. It's very easy to lose the big picture. So you got to make sure you rise back up and see the big picture to make sure you're not missing something obvious.

There are examples of disasters that have happened by seasoned pros and airlines and other domains where they failed to see the big picture. So we want to practice productive paranoia.

Let's talk about how to quality check a retirement plan. So let's start off with establishing what is the intent of the exercise? The intent of the exercise is to quality check our inputs and results to assure the plan is analyzing what we intended it to analyze. So that's what we're trying to accomplish here. And this is really important because when we're doing retirement planning, we're generally thinking about long time frames, 20, 30, maybe 40 years. Little differences can have a significant impact. I mean, if you just take a simple example, let's say you're traveling 1,000 miles and you're going at say 200 miles an hour. If you're one degree off course for that entire journey, you're going to be 17 and a half miles away from your intended destination. So you're not going to get to where you want to get to. If you're 2 degrees off for the entire time, you can double that. You'll be 35 miles away from where you intended to go. So little errors compounded over time can have big difference in a retirement plan. I'm on track to not run out of money, but my plan is consistently off course with me not realizing it could cause you to run out of money. That's why it's important. It's also important to avoid unforced errors.

Let's talk about some of the most common unforced errors.

Number one is spending goals are not based on reality either because you don't know enough about what your actual spending is. You assume you spend $120,000 per year, but in reality you spend $100,000 per year consistently. That could cause you at the end to have way more money than you intended when you're older. Conversely, if you assume you spend $120,000 a year, but you actually spend 130 or $40,000 a year consistently, and you never identify that what you're modeling is actually not what you're doing, you could end up running out of money when you're older. Now this seems obvious, but this happens all the time, especially, actually in both directions. But we tend to be more optimistic about what we spend. Think of a credit card. If you use a credit card, normally when I open up my credit card statement, I'm like, holy cow, did we spend that much? It didn't feel like we spent that much. But when you look at all the line items, they're all very reasonable and generally not very big, but they add up to a lot more than you expected. So this is a very normal thing to happen.

Second unforced error is double counting goals, meaning we have a base great life of 120,000, and then we have a healthcare goal separately, but we've forgotten that we included the health care in the base great life goal, or we included travel, et cetera. So double counting goals can be a problem. Another error is errors in timing. You intend to enter a big vacation every three years, and in reality you entered it every year. Unless you catch this, it's going to change the results.

Another unforced error, which is a little bit more nuanced, is letting your aspirational goals influence more important goals or near term goals. So this is one example, a really simple example of this is assuming that you want to leave an estate at the end of your life. So if you put a goal in, I want to leave a million dollars at the end of my life, and you put that into your goals. Well, that is a big carry for a retirement plan. And it could cause you to see results that may force you to work an extra year or sacrifice on some near term goals to create experiences. Because you have this long term goal that is important, but it's more aspirational so you end up letting the tail wag the dog and not seeing how those numbers work out.

Another common error is over or underestimating income. and Kevin Lyles will hit on this periodically when he's on the show is assuming that you're going to earn income in retirement can have a positive impact on the results. But if it's theoretical and it doesn't actually materialize, we have got a problem. I've had clients where they have continually said we're going to earn this much income. After two or three years of them not earning that income or anywhere close to it, we had to have a serious conversation of, hey, this is going to influence the plan. We can't assume you're going to have income that doesn't actually materialize. In terms of Kevin Lyles, he makes, he makes a really good point of, hey, you can assume you will, but their circumstances may work against you in terms of being able to have the income that you desire. So those are some of the common errors.

Now what are some of the obstacles to quality checking your plan and what causes these errors? One is overconfident assumptions. We tend to do that on income and spending and returns. Overconfidence is something that just happens naturally. Overconfidence in our ability to double check our inputs and calculations. Our mind, even if we're very numbers oriented, can play tricks on us when we're reading something. We'll talk about that cognitive dissonance when we're projecting numbers and they don't show us what we want. So instead of accepting this, we unconsciously adjust inputs in order to get to the result we want. Oh, I'll just earn 10,000 more for the next three, four years. That'll solve it. Rather than just simply being realistic. Then last obstacle that we have to manage is just complexity overwhelm. I think that's what that plus not zooming out is what bit me in the behind when I had my worst professional failure, which was I was so caught up in other things I failed to see the big picture. So those are the obstacles.

Now let's get to practical matters. How do we quality check a retirement plan? so we need to have a process to quality check the inputs and the outputs of the retirement plan that you created. The method that we're going to use is something called metacognition, which essentially means thinking about your thinking, pulling yourself out of your head, giving yourself perspective, like you're sitting in the balcony and observing how you made decisions.

Here's a couple good practical examples of this in action. Troy and Aaron on our team do a lot of the backend analysis for client questions, problems or opportunities. Oftentimes what they'll do is they'll create what we call a loom video, which is a service where they'll screen, share and talk through the intent or the issue that is being faced. They'll comment step by step through the analysis and the results and their recommendation based on the situation. They do this for a couple of reasons, and we've had discussions about this.

Number one is to share it with me. So I'm in the loop. I can speak into it and I can suggest alternate pathways or edits or can bless it. But the other reason that they do this is because they're doing this work by themselves on a computer. They're in their own head and it allows them to teach this or explain it to someone else. That helps them observe how they had thought. Oftentimes they can catch things that they might have missed as they were just working on their computer. another great example is this podcast. I originally started this podcast as a method for me to think in a more organized way with items that I was dealing with in my practice related to retirement planning or a client question, etc. By outlining it for myself and then articulating it, in this case to you, it helped me improve my process and my thinking. These are examples of metacognition.

Now in your life, you have probably experienced this. All of us have probably had a friend come up to us and say, hey, I have this issue I have to deal with. And they just tell you everything about the issue. While they're telling you about the issue, they actually start to discover and tell you about the solution. They say thanks so much for the conversation. You were such a big help and you didn't say a word, and you look at it, it's like, okay, what did I do? That is an example of metacognition. How are you going to do this with your retirement plan? Well, you want to think out loud. So literally, verbally speaking, all of this stuff and asking yourself questions.

In software development, they call this rubber ducking. I learned this from Aaron on our team. They literally, you want to explain each component of your retirement plan to an inanimate object. Now you could also use your spouse or a friend to explain, especially if they're non-financial managers and they're not into this as much as you are. That's even better because then they're going to have a, a, very elementary perspective on it. But absent having that spouse or friend that you can explain this to out loud, you literally want to get an inanimate object. You can get a rubber ducky. You could get a dog like Sherlock, you could explain it to a bird outside your window, but you want to verbally walk through, step by step, your plan. Start with explaining the big picture to this object. What is it you're trying to accomplish with this plan? How is it going to help you achieve it? Explain that in elementary terms to this object.

Next, go through the inputs of your plan line by line and explain out loud each component of it and what it does. So as an example, I am planning on spending $120,000 a year, every year, from the date of my retirement until I pass. This will fund my base great life, which includes basic spending, utilities, basic eating out and basic travel. Next, I am going to spend this much money on my health care benefits, and this is what it will be prior to Medicare and then when I'm on Medicare. Here are my estimates for part B, part D and my medigap insurance. This is in addition to the 120,000 of my base great life. This is how long it will go.

One last example. I plan on doing a big trip every other year that will cost $30,000 and that will happen three times over a nine year period. I want you to look at what you entered in the software, and on your spreadsheet as you're explaining it out loud. So you're reading what it says specifically, not just mentally saying it, because that will help you say, oh, wait a second, I didn't mean that for three times, I meant that for two times. It will help you identify errors in what you've entered as your goal. So you want to do this very intentionally, reading what you actually input out loud to your rubber ducky. What does this do? This helps you slow down. It helps you use natural language because you're talking to your rubber ducky. It doesn't know anything about retirement planning. So it helps you explain it in real terms and gets you out of reading what you input. Because what happens when you're just simply reading what you input? Your mind misses things. It misses the spelling. Oftentimes writers will read out loud what they wrote to see how it flows and whether it makes sense. So you want to do this with every single goal, talking to your rubber ducky out loud and reading specifically every part of what you entered. You want to do this with your income flow, whether it's your Social Security. I'm going to start Social Security at age 67, and my estimate is $2,500 a month. That's going to continue for the rest of my life and have this inflation on it. I plan on working and earning $25,000 a year from the time I retire for three years, and that means it's going to end in 2028. I plan on getting this inheritance in 2040, although we can't pick the date. And my estimate ON that is $400,000 or whatever you want to read them specifically. Now, once you have done this step by step, you're just having a conversation with a rubber ducky. Have fun with it. And if you're able to do this with a friend, walk through it and they go, oh, really? You're going to do that? This will help you identify; did I start this on the right date? Did I end this on the right date? Is that the amount? Am I double counting somewhere? It'll help you identify these things. Once you have done that, and let's say you're using retirement planning software like what we use in the club or Bolden or something, the next thing you want to do after you've done that, you want to open up the cash flow table. So a cash flow table in software shows you year by year, every income source, when they start and when they stop, and the amount year by year, and every spending amount year by year, when they start, when they stop, in the amount from the date you retire all the way to when you assume the plan is going to end and you want to do the same thing with that. The reason you want to do this is because you're doing it again, but you're looking at it in a different context. You can also identify, oh, wait a second, I have that starting in 2026. I meant for it to start in 2027 because you're going to see it in a different way. Visually, this is a good way to walk through quality checking your plan. Use metacognition, because if you're just reading it, you're going to make a million little shortcuts you don't even realize you're making.

Now, what is another tactic in addition to this, and I like this tactic, actually is run it through a parallel or another system. So if you are using a spreadsheet to plan out your retirement, go sign up for a retirement calculator. If you're in you know, if you're not within the club, go to Bolden, put it all in Bolden. If you're in Bolden and you're in the club, run it both ways because the software they're going to have different results, which is frustrating because they're all going to have a lot of different assumptions underneath. But if you run it in another software, you can quality check, you have to enter it all again, right? So that's good. But although the results won't be identical, they should be within a reasonable range of each other, which can give you independent verification that you've entered them correctly. This is the process that we use to go through quality checking our work so we never have that embarrassing failure. But in your life, when you're building your retirement plan, this is important because you're making life decisions. When you take your pension, you can't really revoke that when you retire, it is hard to go back. Even if you're working with a retirement planner, I suggest you do this or do it with them because they can make mistakes too, because they're human and this is a very complex set of data and problems that you're working on.

That would be how I would suggest you quality check your retirement plan. With that said, let's move on and get into Scott's travel story. We're going to talk to Scott, who is a great guy, travels internationally and has really built some community around his long term experiences.

Before we get to Scott's story, I want to give one perspective that was emailed to me from Larry, I love this perspective, and I want to suggest a website to explore interesting places to go in the United States. I have a client, Larry and Deborah, who I've known for years. They are wonderful humans and they have been traveling the country for many years in an RV. They are some of the most intentional United States travelers that I've met. They go to very interesting places and whenever I have a conversation with them, I have to prepare myself because the first 15 minutes are, we did this, we did this, we saw this, look at this experience. They're constantly emailing us photos and things. They're just wonderful and it wears me out just listening to them. They have a blog called Free Range Fun Hogs, freerangefunhogs.com, where they post some of the places they've gone with video and photos. It's really fun to have a bird's eye view on their journey, but it's also a great pick list to some very interesting out of the way places that you might explore. So check that out. We'll have a link to that in our weekly email, the Noodle.

I'm just going to read his email.

“We are very much alike, Roger. About the same age, similar interest, curious, always seeking understanding. We both feel awake in life's simple pleasures, whether it's a game night or with family or finding the sweet, flowing single track. Oh, in mountain bike trails that constantly put a big grin on her face.”

Oh, we just found a new one here in Salida, and it does put a grin on your face. I'm glad that I'm not young and fearless anymore because I'd be in trouble.

“We are both blessed with resources to travel anywhere we like. The challenge is separating the hype. This is the meat of it. I think the challenge is separating the hype from what our heart and soul truly desire when it comes to travel.”

I love that phrase, Larry. It's part of establishing a list of values you speak so much about.

For me, planning travel is like buying a new car. What car would I buy if nobody could see me in it or know that I own it? Would we still want to travel to exotic locations if we couldn't tell anyone about it? Humbly or not so humbly brag about it. Where do we want to go just for us, even if nobody wanted to know. I love that concept. Larry, what is it that we want? Larry shared an article that we're going to share in The Noodle about some problems with travel. How to travel wrong. I forget the exact title, but it is a good reminder or just a challenge to make sure we're doing this for ourselves. So we'll share that article in The Noodle.

Larry, love the perspective. Can't wait to ride some single track with you if you ever come through Salida. With that said, let's get to our conversation with Scott.

INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT

All right here with my good buddy Scott. Scott, how are you doing, buddy?

Scott: I am doing very well. Very well indeed.

Roger: Now, when I thought of travel and profiling individuals that are traveling in retirement that I think are doing it really well and with a lot of substance to it, you came to mind, obviously, and probably I should tell the story. To set this up. My wife and I and my longest friend and his wife did a trip, I guess, two years ago, three years ago now, probably three years ago, we did a Viking cruise down the Rhine river. I shared in the club that, we were going to be in Switzerland, and I was just going to do these hotels and. You, Scott, pinged me and said, dude, don't do that.

Scott: Well, that's not actually true. We had breakfast.

Roger: Oh, okay. Yeah. where you live.

Scott: In Bluebell. Yes, we had breakfast because you were doing a meetup and you were using the facility I live in. At breakfast you said, oh, I'm doing this Ryan Cruise. Then finishing up with three days in Switzerland. I said, where are you going to be? You said, Zurich. I said, “Well, the whole time. You said, well, yeah, I got some Marriott points. I said, you can use them in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can use them in Australia, whatever. But, then I showed you a picture of where in my opinion, you really should go.

Roger: Okay. You see, it's like an old married couple. Correct me on everything because I have my own. But you totally change the trip. That conversation at that breakfast restaurant, which I recall now, I connect the dots after the fact. You totally changed the trip. Do we not want to disclose the location? Are we trying to protect this location?

Scott: Yeah, let's protect this location.

Roger: It was a beautiful mountain area in Switzerland that you wouldn't know about unless you met somebody that had gone there. You gave us a recommendation. You helped us with some of the logistical thinking about places to go, and it totally changed the trip. Otherwise, we would have been in Zurich for three or four days doing car trips, just trying to figure it out. I want to thank you for that publicly. Not that I haven't before. You're very well, but that goes to travel now. You have found this place. How did you find this place to begin with? Why has this become so special for you?

Scott: Well, you know, so it. As much as I'd love to keep it a hidden gem, you know, it's a Rick Steves recommendation from 15, 20 years ago. My wife and I were looking to go, and my parents had been to Switzerland, and so we said, all right, well, let's kind of, you know, find a place in Switzerland, use Rick Steves and kind of combined that. I forget if it was with Italy or, you know, some other, some other thing, and we just spent two or three days there. Then every other time we went back to Europe, which, let's say was every two to three years, over a ten year period, we always made sure we included two, three or four days in this place. I mean, it was, it was our happy place. Then later on she got ill and I thought, oh, what would be better than spending two or three weeks there instead of just those two or three days? Because every time we left we wished we had more. And COVID kind of cut into the ability to do that. Then after that she was a little too ill to travel. Now I go there for two months every summer and just invite friends and family and whatnot to join me for a week. I get to share this place that we loved. You saw my passion in just the five minutes I was talking to you at breakfast about it, or who knows, it might have been 20, because I do tend to go on.

Roger: How did it feel going there without your wife who had passed?

Scott: You know, the first group of people that I was there with that first week, two years ago, was her best friend and her husband who is also a very dear friend. It was just warm. I'm trying to think 98 of the people or whatever, because I've done this two, two years, eight weeks at a time. Everybody has known her. and so it's nice to just share it with all the people that she's known and loved.

Roger: I don't know if this makes sense or not, but as you're saying that it makes me feel like when you're there, you feel like you're with her because it was such a special spot for the two of you.

Scott: Her ashes are spread there. I was standing next to somebody, I think the year after, so last year. This person said, you know, I was, I was just standing within earshot of this person and this man said to his wife, honey, when I die, I want you to spread my ashes right here. I took a couple steps over and I said, excuse me, but I have to tell you, you've picked the perfect spot.

Roger: I think currently the plan is that when I pass, my kids have to carry my ashes up to the peak of Mt. Whitney and spread them. which is probably illegal, by the way. but I wanted to have them go on an adventure and be outside.

Scott: Have you ever been to that spot?

Roger: I have.

Scott: Okay.

Roger: Yeah, the infamous, like 99 switchbacks as you're going up or something. You have done a lot of travel. We were talking about this beforehand with people in groups and solo. What does each way of travel provide for you? Just briefly on each one.

Scott: Yeah. So you had mentioned in a text earlier something about I kind of get to see anew, but by hosting different people, I get to see anew. I think there's maybe a couple of ways to look at that, but with a group having people come to this place that I and my wife loved, there's kind of two examples.

One was a dear neighborhood friend from when our son was like 0 to 5 and their daughter was 0 to 5. We lived together. They had a second daughter who was a little younger, who we didn't know quite well because it wasn't my son's kind of similar age buddy. They came and said, hey, can we bring our younger daughter? I said, well, hey, that'd be great. I hadn't seen her in probably 20 years. The only way to get to this place where I am is via gondola. It's a car free village up, at 5,000ft elevation. There was a huge event there. They had to stand online for two hours in the sun waiting for this gondola because there were just hundreds of people in line. And I thought, oh, she's going to kill me. Like, you know. She got off the gondola and I gave her a hug and I stepped back and I thought, okay, like, tell me, tell me how mad you are, and the first words out of her mouth were, “This place is surreal” and it just like melted me because I was like, yes. You know, even after standing in, she gets it. She had just flown from California, just landed and took a train, even after all that, she could see that.

The other example was, my, my brother and his two kids, and one of the significant others came. Are you familiar with Rose Thorn Bud?

Roger: No.

Scott: Okay. Neither was I. It might be a younger generation thing, I'm not sure, but it is a group activity where you name, what was the rose? What was the beautiful thing of this week? What was the thorn? What could you have done better? Then bud is something kind of futuristic, you know, like hey what, what might this bring in the future?

Roger: I like that.

Scott: I think, I think and so my nieces significant other said hey, why don't we do you know, rose thorn bud? Then they explained it to me and when they came to me, what was your rose? It was the fact that each one of your roses was something different but that was exactly why I wanted you to experience this place. What I was hoping they would just love independently. Each one loves something differently. But it was just spectacular to be able to share that with them and you know, and just have that, see that, that excitement and joy and so that you obviously get with a group. I don't plan single travel much because it sounds lonely, but I've had many opportunities including driving out to Alaska for the Alaska cruise all the way from Pennsylvania.

Roger: Right.

Scott: I ended up with two cruises to go to both two Alaskan cruises and, but stopped along the way and saw family, but had weeks of time alone. I just love being able to, you know, I chatted second ago with you about taking the inflatable kayak out on a national park, lake at sunrise and watching the mist come up. And you know, and just, and I'll be honest, my wife and I traveled really well, but if I had to get her up for something like that, it would have been a debate, you know, it would have been, well, why are we going to do that, is it going to be worth it, etc. One benefit for me of traveling alone is you know, whatever, whatever I, whatever idea I come up with and you know, nobody else may want to sit for an hour waiting for, you know, the perfect lighting on the sun or whatever. I enjoy taking pictures. So there are lots of aspects of that which I like.

Roger: So question. You were married for a long time. That's a statement.

Scott: 30 years.

Roger: That's not a question, it's a statement. You had the rhythm of travel and you had a life together. From a travel perspective, it doesn't sound like your life contracted from travel when now you were faced with doing it on your own or with others. Why do you think that is?

Scott: Well, so you know, I mentioned I'm not prone to plan single travel. It was in fact this, you know, I mentioned these neighborhood friends that came to Switzerland and the daughter came up and said, you know, this is surreal. It was that couple that invited me to an Alaska cruise that was two weeks before the RRC Alaska cruise. So that's how I ended up on two Alaska cruises in the same month. but there was probably a year, I'm guessing, of not much travel because, okay, I don't have a built in travel partner but Switzerland has allowed me to say, hey, I have one. Let me show you some pictures and convince you that it's worth your while. But that has created some additional travel opportunities because you know, as people realize, hey, we can travel well together, it's like, hey, we're about to go do this. Would you like to join us? I think my travel was slightly interrupted, but I was pretty proactive with letting people know, hey, you know, if there's ever a third wheel that's welcome, I'm interested. My sister and brother in law just invited me to join them for a month in Europe. I just got back and part of the large part of their agenda was Croatia and Slovenia. I thought Croatian, Slovenia, that's not on my bucket list. But there was no way I was going to turn down an opportunity to spend time with people, go explore new places. Once I started looking, I thought, wow, I'm glad you guys wanted to go to Slovenia, Croatia.

Roger: So question about that, because I've had this comment from others of really feeling not intimidated or a little worried about being, as you say, the third wheel as a single person, even when they're invited. Did you have any of that or did you just do it anyway? What would you say?

Scott: The first Alaska cruise, my friends were inviting me to a group that was already, you know, a neighborhood group of theirs where they currently lived. So it wasn't just the two of them and me, which, you know, might have, might have crossed my mind. My sister and brother in law, we've traveled, you know, a fair amount in other ways together. I was very comfortable with that. In fact with my sister and brother in law, I said, hey, today I'm, you know, I know the plan was to go to this place or that place. I'm going to hang back and do something different. Which, you know, gave them the opportunity to kind of have some of their own space. Hey, dinner tonight. Why don't you guys go do that? I'm going to just have some leftovers or whatever. I think there's kind of some easy ways to be a third wheel and be in the way, let's say, the whole time. But if you're doing things with people that you enjoy, then hopefully that's not a thing.

Roger: Now, about a year or two ago, I'm always bad with these timelines. I received a text, and in that text there was a video. In that video there were you and two people that we know dancing around singing the Sound of Music.

Scott: Yes, sir.

Roger: I think you met them through the club.

Scott: I think, he had said to you he was going to Switzerland, and you said, I really think you should talk to Scott.

Roger: Okay, so.

Scott: He reached out and said, hey, Roger told me that you might be a good source of information. He then was able to join because I had already planned a group of about eight RRC members to come for a week. They were able to join us for three of those days because they were finishing a cruise.

Roger: I'm really interested in that aspect of things. Not necessarily the club part of it, but the fact that there can be these micro communities where we feel comfortable enough to people. It's hard to go travel with somebody you don't really know that well.

Scott: I only knew her for six hours probably because she wasn't feeling well the night before. I mean, I literally had kind of just met her, but you had told me that, you know what, you're going to enjoy her. She is someone whose personality comes through. I have video of almost everybody who's been with me doing largely that and because there is one place on a hike that you emerge from the woods and you just naturally ring out, “The hills are alive with the Sound of Music”. I think I heard her do that, maybe under her breath or something, and I said, okay, you're the one. I've already figured out who's going to do this video.

Roger: Loud and proud, baby. Come on.

Scott: She was completely on board.

Roger: I think there's something special about finding some network where you can set the table and invite people. If you feel like you have the same spirit, it's a lot more comfortable than you think for some to accept those invitations, even if there isn't a deeper relationship, especially if you have a community, whether it's a book club or a church or something like our community or whatever to.

You're a wonderful host. You were asking me before, Roger, what are you doing in 26? I'm going to let you know I got these dates, so you naturally do that. It's a little intimidating actually to be offered that because it feels like an imposition. You know, you could feel like a third wheel. I think a lot of that is the head trash in our heads when understanding that these things are really invitations.

Scott: I do often include those invitations with a fairly lengthy PowerPoint to make it clear that I've thought this through.

Roger: You are a planner.

Scott: I mean it's a three bedroom, two bathroom condo, so everybody has space, but not a ton of space.

Roger: You know people now, you're semi local, which is beautiful. That's one thing I love about where I'm at in Colorado is you start to know people and yeah, we can play host and we love to play host.

Scott: On my four week trip, I finished one week in Switzerland. The last three nights were where I love to go and I threw my back out the day before. So a lot of hiking and other activities weren't really in the mix. But I loved the fact that I could hang around. I ended up having meals with some people to kind of say thank you. Because, for instance, during this RRC trip last summer, it was Stacy's birthday and she had a friend with her and her friend said to this host at the chalet that we had rented, hey, do you know where I can get a cake? She said, no problem, I'll take care of it. Well, she pretty much baked a cake and decorated this gorgeous cake. That's the kind of thing that, that she does. I've known her for a little while and when you read the reviews of people that stay with her, they all say she's amazing. I just wanted to say, hey, you know, I'd love to take you out to lunch and say thank you for everything you did for us. I know that you do so much for everybody, but it was great to be able to pause and spend time with some wait staff that I've gotten to see and know. I really enjoyed three days of kind of just hanging out in town and not being active with visitors.

Roger: I have one last question for you. well, I always say I always number the questions. I have two questions for you.

Number one is if you're talking to someone who is single for whatever reason, choice, widow, happenstance, whatever, or is a little bit intimidated by accepting invitations, what kind of counsel would you give them to embrace travel if they want to?

Scott: So just in general, a single. I love the idea and I flirted with the idea and, and kind of welcomed the idea of just joining, let's say a Rick Steves tour, if there's one that potentially is maybe single, but that maybe has other connotations, but just joining a tour because it's going to give you things to do and you're likely going to find people that you identify with and that way it's not strictly, oh, I'm going to go to Paris for three days, in London for two days, and whatever. But you've got a camaraderie and, and you know, and those tour groups, when they do it right, they try to build that community of 10, 20 people.

Roger: That's sort of like the camp effect. Remember the kids at camp, you're all just sort of there together and it creates a community.

Scott: For an invitation, it's like, well, hey, if somebody's bothered to ask you just, you know, think about, put everything else aside. Would I want to do it?

Roger: Then trust them at their word.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, unless maybe it was literally kind of a semi coerced.

Roger: Okay. Really, my last question. I heard this the other day. Related to a town in Colorado. I forget. I think it might have been just somebody I didn't even know they were standing next to me, is that oftentimes when you live in a place like where I live here in Salida, the things that are special about that place, you overlook and you go other places to get special things and which I think is just must, be a psychological thing that happens. There seems to be a real drive to travel as a retirement goal. Just speaking for yourself, what is it that it gives you drive? Not surface level, but if you can go a layer deeper.

Scott: All right let's see if I can.

I enjoy experiencing just new and different things, be it like a beautiful manmade Mount Saint Michel in France or, any of the old cities that are still kind of still standing and just cobblestone and all that stuff. I love those things; be it castles or whatever.

Roger: What do you think it is about those things?

Scott: Well, you know, it's because usually they're in some pretty picturesque places and there is the, you know, somebody, you know, unfortunately, maybe, maybe not voluntary labor, but, you know, somebody's, you know, created these things and figured out how to make these things. I'm not a history person, I'm not a museum person, so I'm not usually traveling for that kind of stuff. But there was, there was a trip where my wife and my son went to Berlin and Prague and Budapest. In Vienna and I think one other old city. By the time we got to Vienna, my wife and son looked at me and said, do we have to stay here or can we go to the Alps now? We had a Marriott that we could cancel the last night of what we had planned and we escaped to the Alps. So I mean, I love the beauty in nature, you know, be it lakes or rivers or mountains or whatever. I love beautiful, interesting, unique things, be it manmade or whatever, which to me is not amazingly deep, but the ability to do it with friends and family and because I assume it's kind of a given, but anybody you spend time with.

I've heard you say you and Shauna, hey, we had dinner with this new couple and okay, that was a one and a half, two and a half hour thing, then you see them three weeks later. But to be able to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with somebody for five days in a row and share these experiences, to me that is a very special aspect for me for travel, which isn't necessarily there if you're traveling with your travel buddy that you see all the time. That's not necessarily part of that recipe.

Roger: Scott, thanks for sharing your wisdom. I hope that someone listening is encouraged and motivated to go lean into their life. So I appreciate you sharing your wisdom.

Scott: You bet. Hey, great talking to you.

TODAY’S PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

Roger: On your marks, get set and we're off to take a little baby step that we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.

All right, your task in the next seven days, or when it fits your schedule, doesn't have to be the next seven days, is to go through some exercise to quality check your plan of record to assure you're modeling what you meant to model using some of the tools that we talked about.

BONUS

Okay, my friends, we are. Now to the last entry from my grandfather's journal from his time in World War II flying B-17s in Italy. September 24th.

Listen to the timeline of how long it took to get home.

“September 24th, 1944. Oh, happy day. Left for some depot to await shipment home 8:30am M today. I arrived in refinery depot in Maples at 11:00am on September 24th. Stayed in depot awaiting shipment till October 9th. Left Naples on, the 10th. Arrived in New York October 20th at 8:30pm. Went to Camp Kilmer the 25th, where we waited shipment to our reflective reception centers. Left camp Kilmer on the 25th of October and arrived in Fort Sheridan on October 27th. We were given discharge papers on the 28th and arrived home on the 29th of October. Am I happy? Are you kidding?”

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