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Episode #643 - Decluttering For Retirement: How a Simpler Life Helps You Rock Retirement

INTRODUCTION: HOW DECLUTTERING HELPS RECLAIM YOUR ATTENTION IN A WORLD COMPETING FOR YOUR FOCUS

Roger: We live in an attention economy where trillion dollar companies and individual content creators compete every single day, really every moment for one thing, and that is your attention. And you know what? Mostly they win. There's one place where you have real control, and that's how you set up your life. What things you have around you, how your money is organized, and the people that you allow into your life.

Roger: So when we talk about decluttering, it's not just about getting organized. That's really just a side benefit. It's about reducing complexity. It's about making room for the things and the people that matter most to you. Or it's about making room so you can figure out what and who those things are. It's about getting your attention back and deciding for yourself what rocking retirement really looks like for you.

Roger: Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but you have the confidence to lean in and rock it, which means just creating a great life, a life where you can look back without much regret. In honor of today's show, I am wearing my resist the algorithms t-shirt. One nice thing about creating swag is I can just create t-shirts that I like, and resisting the algorithm is one of the things I try to do. We're going to talk a little bit about that in the opportunities today. So this is episode two of a four-part series on decluttering. We're going to talk about the opportunity that awaits you if you are willing to take the journey to make some decisions about the things and the people and how your money is organized. Some of the opportunities related to that. In addition to that, we're going to have a little bit of a retirement toolkit and talk about risk tolerance questionnaire from a question from a listener. We're going to have a rocking retirement in the wild message and get to some of your questions. So let's get this party started.

ROCKIN' RETIREMENT IN THE WILD

RICK SHARES HOW HE'S ENJOYED FIVE YEARS OF RETIREMENT WITHOUT FEELING PRESSURE TO CHASE A LARGER "PURPOSE," INSTEAD EMBRACING FREEDOM, READING, AND TRAVEL AFTER LEAVING BEHIND A STRESSFUL CORPORATE CAREER.

Roger: We're going to start with a rocking retirement in the wild story. Real quick one here. Rick says I tricked him. A few weeks ago we had Steve on with a story about not really feeling like he needed to have a purpose, that this purpose thing was overrated. So here's Rick's comments.

Roger: Amen Steve, I've been retired five years now and have enjoyed it completely with no real purpose. Roger, I have listened and enjoyed your podcast for years, but I always fast forwarded through your touchy feely, you can't live life without a purpose, segments. You actually tricked me into listening to this week's in the wild because it was the beginning of the podcast. Haha, I'm enjoying my retirement by reading and traveling after working a soul sucking job for a soul sucking corporation. I have no need or desire to find any meaning other than to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it.

Roger: Rick, I love it. I love it. I think that is a purpose, but I agree with you that purpose is overrated. It's not necessarily a prerequisite to rock retirement and you are a great case. And so is Steve and I stand corrected, which I stand in that spot many times. So thank you so much for sharing that.

RETIREMENT TOOLKIT

ROGER RESPONDS TO A LISTENER'S QUESTION ABOUT HOW RISK TOLERANCE SHOULD FIT INTO A THREE-BUCKET RETIREMENT STRATEGY.

Roger: All right, now let's get to a retirement toolbox and talk about the risk tolerance. This actually came up from a question from Jason, and it's pretty timely, Jason, because I've been having this discussion internally in the Retire Agile side just recently.

Roger: Hey Roger, I really have been enjoying your podcast. It offers a balanced approach to money and its purpose to us living our best life. My question I've been noodling on is, in a three bucket retirement strategy, short, intermediate, and long, how should overall asset allocation relate to risk tolerance? If my short and intermediate term buckets are fully funded to cover market volatility, does it make sense to target a traditional allocation like a 70-30, or is it reasonable for my portfolio to drift more equity heavy, maybe even 90-10, if the long-term bucket is invested for growth and near-term needs are already protected?

Roger: That's a great question, Jason. I'm going to answer it specifically, but I also want to set the table for what we're talking about with this risk tolerance framing. I think it's important to understand how some of these things develop so we understand whether they're useful or how they're useful in our retirement planning. So risk tolerance comes from a questionnaire that I'm guessing Jason has filled out. Probably all of us have in a 401k or with an advisor or maybe a robo type allocation structure. So where does this concept of risk tolerance come from? Well, it actually comes from modern portfolio theory of asset allocation. There's this optimized portfolio along the risk spectrum between risk and reward that's called the efficient frontier, meaning that mathematically, you can enter what the quote unquote right mix is of stocks and bonds and cash along this plot that would maximize return for a given level of risk measured by standard deviation or minimize risk for a given level of return. So we have this efficient frontier that's mapped out using asset allocation. That's what's happening internally in these asset allocation models. Well then, how do you determine where you need to fall on that perfect set of portfolios along that frontier? Well, we need to score how much risk you can tolerate in order to find the asset allocation that you should have. So in order to operationalize this and put a score to your risk tolerance, they needed to create this questionnaire that asked you questions and in the background it's scoring, okay, they answered this so that's a one, they answered that, that's a two, so they could calculate a score which they would plot along this efficient frontier in order to tell you what your portfolio should look like. So they had to operationalize this. What they came up with was this risk tolerance questionnaire that asked you a number of questions. You know how would you feel if the market went down by 20 percent? We've all had these types of questions. But the intent of that questionnaire, Jason, is to score you in the background in order to plot you along the most efficient portfolio based on what, quote unquote, your risk tolerance is. And that is how these things came about and widely used as asset allocation became the best practice in terms of portfolio construction for individuals.

Roger: Now the best practice in the industry is still to use these things, but it's more about, and this is in my opinion, after 30 years going down the rabbit hole on these things, more about CYA from a compliance perspective, because as an advisor, even if you're going directly self-directed or you're working with an advisor or robo advisor, they have a responsibility to make sure that you're invested prudently for who you are. And these risk tolerance questionnaires became a very simple way for them to demonstrate that your portfolio matches your risk tolerance and this is how we did it. And everybody does this. So it becomes: if I ever get sued, I can go, hey, I had him take a risk tolerance questionnaire and it matched. I did my job. That is essentially what they're used for now. So they become best practices really because of that, because of the fiduciary obligation.

Roger: Now that is not their only use. And this is where internally in Retire Agile we've been having this debate. Tanya makes a great point because I'm like, I don't like these questionnaires. I think they're just about CYA. I think they're not that helpful in determining what the portfolio should be. But Tanya makes a really good point. Her argument is: yeah, I get all of that, but it does help create conversation and that's something that I probably discount too much. It does help create conversation about how we might react during bad markets and making sure we're positioned. So it's a great teaching tool, but it doesn't really serve us in retirement as well, Jason, because that whole model of asset allocation wasn't designed for decumulation. It was designed for growing assets. And so now we're in this decumulation phase, but we still have this framing of these risk tolerance questionnaires.

Roger: As an aside, here's a funny thing, I think it's funny. If you think about the logic of a risk tolerance questionnaire, it asks you these questions, and then based on those questions it says, this is the maximum amount of risk that Jason could tolerate. In theory, because they're just questions, right? And so they plot that score along the efficient frontier and they choose a portfolio for Jason that is at his risk tolerance, because that would maximize return for a given level of risk. Okay, that seems very logical, right? Let's change the wording a little bit. We determine how many punches in the face Jason could tolerate. And we position him such that he's going to be in a portfolio, have experiences where it's likely or very possible that he's going to test that theory of how many punches he can actually tolerate. It sets you up to statistically likely experience your limit. So we're assuming that the grading of the limit is actually accurate. When we hear it in that phrase, like, well, I don't want to set myself up, I might be able to tolerate five punches to the face, but that doesn't mean I want to set myself up for it at some point in time without knowing when that's going to be. Why would I do that? Logic thread still follows, I believe. So anyway, I always thought that was funny.

ROGER OUTLINES WHY RETIREMENT PLANNING SHOULD FOCUS ON BUILDING ALLOCATIONS FROM THE GROUND UP BASED ON PURPOSE AND TIME HORIZON.

Roger: So Jason, to your question, we call it the pie cake, we can call it the three bucket strategy, whatever you want to call it, I don't care. We have to have an emergency fund. We want to have an income reserve to help protect against execution risk as well as sequence of return risk. And then we want to have a long-term portfolio. To your question, how does that fit into risk tolerance? I would say it doesn't. Because risk tolerance is when you're trying to grow assets, it's like a top-down approach to build a portfolio so you can just allow it to grow and try to ignore it. In retirement, I think the best practice is to build your allocation from the ground up. One: how much emergency funds do I need as a buffer for bad estimates and unexpected expenses or opportunities. Two: how much of an income reserve do I need to have so I can have clarity of how my life is going to work to the horizon of what I can imagine. And then three: how much is left over that I need to grow or want to grow for inflation risk, future spending, longevity, all those types of things.

Roger: Build it from that and then you know what happens Jason? The allocation becomes what it is. It reveals itself based on the purpose of the dollar to serve your life in retirement. So now to your question, if you've taken care of the emergency fund and the income reserve, that intermediate bucket, what should the allocation of that long-term portfolio be? I think it's reasonable, and this is going to depend on circumstances, it's reasonable for it to be 90 percent equities or even 100 percent equities. It's also reasonable for it to be 70 percent equities, 30 percent fixed income. You essentially are building a barbell, right? You're going to have a lot of liquidity on the near intermediate term, which allows you to have a lot more equity risk on the long term because you've managed one of the most important variables in equity risk, which is time. And so it's okay, Jason, if that portfolio is 90 percent equities. Fine. As long as your entire plan is feasible from a testing standpoint and you understand the ride that you'll be on. In fact, having that short and intermediate layers are going to set that longer term portfolio up for success because you're going to be a lot less stressed out about it because it's not money you need for the next five or so years.

Roger: So the way that you might look at it at the end of this exercise, Jason, is you want to look at what is the allocation of each one of those layers. My emergency fund would be cash. My income reserve would be either in a short-term bond ladder or something that's very short term and doesn't have a lot of risk to it. And then you would look at the allocation of the long-term portfolio by itself. You'd look at those individual layers, Jason. And then you could roll it all up into one aggregate allocation to see what the whole thing looks like. And that's totally appropriate. And now we have a purpose for every dollar and you can tweak that or optimize that to your taste based on how overfunded or constrained you are, based on your psychological makeup and how you have handled markets, based on a lot of different things. So I wouldn't get hung up on this risk tolerance questionnaire and what that framing looks like. Use it for educational purposes and conversational purposes, but don't worry about not fitting into a box based on a risk tolerance questionnaire.

Roger: Now, one caveat to that, Jason, might be that if you take one of those, and you and your spouse, if you're married, take one of those, and you're relatively conservative, that might help influence what that long-term portfolio looks like. So it will help inform that decision, but don't get caught up on those questionnaires. It's mainly for compliance, but they do have a role as a conversation starter in education. By the way, just inside baseball, Tanya and I have had this debate because she's used them in her practice and she uses them for educational tools. We had a debate of whether we're going to use them in our process. Where we came down was, and she's the chief compliance officer, so I want to defer to that because it is a compliance consideration, we use them in addition to deeper conversations. But the trade-off that I secured was when we talk about them internally, I get to have, I think it was 90 seconds, to just rant on them whenever I want, and then I have to shut up because they annoy me. But I get the logic of it from a training tool. Maybe I'm going to come around to that. All right, now we're going to get to the opportunity of entering the danger of decluttering and then we'll get to some of your questions.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

ROGER EXPLORES THE OPPORTUNITIES CREATED BY DECLUTTERING YOUR THINGS, INCLUDING REDUCING OVERWHELM, MAINTENANCE, AND FUTURE BURDENS ON LOVED ONES.

Roger: All right, today's segment of this month-long theme of decluttering, we're going to talk about the opportunity that awaits you, the why to do it, what benefits will you get from it? Next week we'll talk about the challenges. All right, so what is it? Well, it's not about the clutter. I mean, yeah, that is a benefit, decluttering your money, your relationships, all your stuff. Back in Texas, I'm looking at all my stuff to declutter. It's not just about that, it's really about right-sizing your life so you make room for the things and people that are important. Or if you don't know what those are, you make room to figure that out without being trapped by everything around you.

Roger: Now, so the opportunity, what are the high-level opportunities? It's really to help reduce anxiety. Because decluttering in these three domains will help reduce the cognitive load that you have to maintain to look at everything and manage everything, people and money and all that other stuff. So it reduces friction that can create that mental space to focus and to think. It's going to help you define who you are right now because you're moving away the echoes of past selves that bleed into all of your decision-making. So it's going to help clean up deferred decisions, set the table for thinking forward, and also making peace with the past. Some things we need to make peace with, some things we just need to reminisce or maybe grieve over a little bit. And then it's also going to open up the aperture to possibilities. Provide space to think forward. Those are big things.

Roger: All right, so we're just going to talk briefly about the three domains that we defined last week: things, money, and relationships. Okay, our things, what's the opportunity there? Well, the overwhelm of having everything around you and seeing it, the obligation to maintain it, to store it, to organize it, the friction of it getting in your way. You can't find the things that you want. The friction of just everything. I'm looking in my office and I have so much friction that mentally just comes into my head. I've got all these boxes over there. I've got to get rid of those. I just see it all the time.

Roger: Now we're all going to be at different levels. Some of us like clutter, some of us don't. It's not about having to be one way. It's about being intentional about that. The financial costs, right, of the house size that you have in order for all your stuff. The storage, the maintenance, maybe you have storage units. How big is the storage industry? You know, all the U-Haul storage places. That's money. And we always know that it's money, so we see it every month, but it's also cognitive load because we know it's over there, we know we need to clean that out, and it just sort of sits in the background. It's those little tadpole open loops swimming around in your head. That's how I think of open loops and things like this. There's just more things swimming around in your head, and we want to get most of those out of there because it's cluttered.

Roger: And then the other benefit or opportunity that waits in decluttering is the burden to others. I've walked this journey with my family. I've walked this journey with clients that have had to do this either with the passing of a spouse or parents or even a child. This is a burden that is left to someone else to clean up. And if you're here and you have children or you have loved ones, when you die, they're going to have to clean up all your stuff. And there's an opportunity to give a gift of organization, and this is true not just with things, but with money as well, to make their life easier during a very stressful time for them. There's this concept, I just randomly heard of it, so I searched it, called Swedish Death Cleaning, which is a decluttering method historically practiced in Sweden. It's a simple living practice encouraging people to get rid of belongings before they die so as to spare loved ones from having to manage it. That is a big opportunity. And for those of you that have older parents that you're walking that journey with, you may see an avalanche of things, deferred decisions that they're not willing to make now or willing to let go of, that is going to fall upon you. That's intimidating. This is a gift you can give someone.

ROGER DISCUSSES HOW SIMPLIFYING FINANCES CAN INCREASE CLARITY, REDUCE ANXIETY, AND CREATE GREATER CONFIDENCE IN RETIREMENT.

Roger: All right, second domain: money, the opportunities. The high level opportunity is to increase clarity because you have a tidy closet of all of your financial assets. That clarity will start to give you confidence. Okay, I have control over this. I understand what's going on. I know the purpose for every dollar. And that confidence will lead to comfort, and that comfort will lead to leaning into your life because you understand things, you have confidence you can control it, that makes you feel better, which allows you to lean into rocking retirement. You see the thread there? It's easy just to start at the money, but if you follow the thread, that's the big opportunity that awaits.

Roger: And that is reducing costs, consolidating. We have a client right now where we're consolidating a ton of different accounts. And we're reducing costs as a result of it. And once we build out a plan, we will reduce the clutter significantly. And that's going to bring a lot of clarity and peace. I know because I have done it so many times and we will have a purpose for every dollar. That brings a lot of joy and confidence and people have seen it too many times. And it becomes elegantly simple, which is very different than simplistic, you know, simplistic is just not well thought out. You go through this big hairball of complexity because you just add things and you want to be optimizing. But if you can come out the other side to elegant simplicity, that's pretty sophisticated, but it looks so simple and it brings you comfort.

Roger: You can reduce mistakes because the more elegantly simple your money is, the less risk of making a management mistake, of missing a deadline, or seeing an issue with a particular investment, or a particular account, or the investment firm that the account's with. The less you have and the more organized it is, the more you're going to be able to manage it so you don't miss something. You ever miss a toll bill? You miss a toll bill, it's one of those things, you didn't get your toll tag, you get a toll bill in the mail. That's annoying, but that's expensive. You miss that bill, they're going to charge you 40 bucks and they're not going to talk to you and they're not going to get rid of it. And if you miss it again, there's another 40 bucks and that just compounds. That's a very simple thing, but that can magnify when you're dealing with large amounts of money. Just get a toll tag, have it all on debit. Simplify, simplify, reduce mistakes.

Roger: Improve ease of management, not just for you, but for your spouse or partner if you have one. Increase clarity of purpose for every dollar. Decrease anxiety. I have a plan. I know why my money is in the place that it is. I know when I'm going to revisit it. And we've cleaned up all those deferred decisions. Like the example I'm using right now: this person had an advisor or two and they still have the managers that the advisor had and it was going well enough and it was a deferred decision. Simplify, simplify, simplify. That's the opportunity so you can get busy living.

ROGER EXPLAINS HOW DECLUTTERING RELATIONSHIPS AND OBLIGATIONS CAN CREATE SPACE FOR MORE INTENTIONAL CONNECTIONS.

Roger: All right, relationships, we'll hit on these briefly. If you're able to right-size your relationships, have the necessary endings with the few people or organizations or obligations you have, it's going to make room for you to foster new relationships that are serving where you're going, who you're becoming and who you are. And it's also going to make space to invest in the relationships that are serving you best. Pretty straightforward, very uncomfortable to do. Great book for this is Necessary Endings. This one can take a while because we're dealing with humans, right? And it's not that you don't want to be with someone, or you don't like them anymore, you can still move them out on the circle of intimacy to where you still check in on them, you know, once a month, once every year, whatever it is, but you don't have to have everybody as close as they've always been. We all have seasons of relationships.

ROGER HIGHLIGHTS THE IMPORTANCE OF REDUCING DIGITAL AND NEWS CLUTTER TO PROTECT YOUR ATTENTION AND MENTAL BANDWIDTH.

Roger: Now, one thing on relationships that I want to talk about that we didn't really mention last week on decluttering, the internet, news services, what you read every day. How much of that is serving you? I think that needs to be decluttered as well. I went through this probably four or five years ago where I don't read internet news. I read the Wall Street Journal. I receive the New Yorker. Off and on, I'll receive the Economist. I don't allow news feeds in my life for the most part. What do you allow to ping you? I think of my mother-in-law who is down the rabbit hole on watching news and unintentionally signed up for every notification that comes to her phone. And I've sat with her for hours and I can't imagine living that way cognitively, everything is a crisis.

Roger: Everything is something we need to talk about. And it's not just watching it on television or listening to it on the radio, literally, and this is the billion dollar attention business, it is pinging you via notifications in your phone over and over about the next big thing that you really need to worry about that happened all the way around the world that never is actually going to affect you personally. It is incessant. And it's so easy to sign up for those things, a lot like private equity, so easy to sign up for those notifications for all these services. And it's almost impossible to turn them off. So in this decluttering, when it comes to relationships, I would take a serious look at the inputs that you allow into your life, because that will create the narrative of how you think. It'll just seep into you. It's just like relationships, right? The Jim Rohn quote, you want to look at who you're going to be, look at the five people you hang out with most. It just seeps into you, and news and information is exactly the same way. So that's an area. So if you can declutter that, it can be uncomfortable, but you can have a lot more clarity and think for yourself and lean into things that are empowering you to rock retirement. Lot of opportunities here. Next week, we're going to talk about the challenges of this. And then the week after that, we're going to have an action plan with an expert to help you walk this journey on whatever level seems right for you. But for now, let's get to some of your questions.

LISTENER QUESTIONS

ROGER EXPLAINS HOW DONOR-ADVISED FUNDS CAN HELP SIMPLIFY A CLUTTERED BROKERAGE ACCOUNT WHILE IMPROVING TAX EFFICIENCY FOR CHARITABLE GIVING.

Roger: If you have a question for the show, you can go to askroger.me and enter a question. You leave an audio question, that's like the fast pass. We try to get those on because we love to hear your voice. All right, our first question is actually related to decluttering from Justin on the money domain.

Justin: I have a question about donor-advised funds as a way to clean up the clutter in a brokerage account. Today's episode about cleaning out our closets was timely because I was wondering about using a donor-advised fund as a way of cleaning up my cluttered brokerage account. I'm a high earner and regularly donate 40 to 50,000 cash per year to a charity. Because I started saving late, about 85 percent of my retirement savings is in my brokerage account. And because I started saving haphazardly, the account includes several individual stocks, random funds that generate dividends and capital gains. Does it make sense to transfer appreciated stock and inefficient funds to a donor-advised fund to distribute throughout the year and use the cash I would have donated to invest in funds that are part of my ideal asset allocation? I'm 51, plan to work for about four more years. The charities I donate to are 501C3s, but I don't think they accept direct stock donations. My brokerage account is at Fidelity.

Roger: Justin, great question. This is a very good tool for decluttering after-tax investment assets, and you're spot on. If you use a donor-advised fund, you can, in your case, I think it definitely makes sense. Don't donate cash. Donating cash works, but it's not near as efficient as donating a highly appreciated asset because you're going to get some tax benefit for the donation, but also you're going to avoid the capital gain and it's going to allow you to clean up those positions. So the way that you would operate this would likely be that each year, choose the assets that you're trying to declutter and start with the highly appreciated assets. It could be the individual stocks, or the inefficient mutual funds that likely have had a lot of gains, use those as your donation vehicle. Don't use cash. That's going to get them out of your account. What will happen in the donor-advised fund is that that will go into a fund and then separately you can go to the donor-advised fund and direct donations to the charities that you want in whatever amount that you want.

Roger: Now you're correct, they do need to be qualified charities, 501C3s. This is a very efficient way of doing it. Probably more efficient than going individually to the charities and trying to give them a mutual fund or give them a stock. Most will receive that, but as you say, you may have some that don't. A donor-advised fund is a good in-between because they would just send a check as a donation. And you're going to get the benefit of the donation upfront when you contribute the asset to the donor-advised fund. There are some, we've done toolboxes on donor-advised funds where we talk about some of the tax implications in terms of how much relative to whether you itemize and all that other stuff. But yeah, I would do this before I do cash. And then you're correct, then you can use your cash to replace that asset in your after-tax account into an investment that is more tidy, not so haphazard. Your ETF portfolio, whatever long-term portfolio you're building for yourself that likely will have less cost or tax deficiency, etc. Great way to do it. I love that idea.

Roger: Justin also adds on: is this juice worth the squeeze? Well, given that you're donating 40 to 50,000 per year cash, definitely. And then one opportunity from an optimization standpoint is that you can actually front load your donations. So you could maybe take two or three years, clean up a lot more, put it into the donor-advised fund and that fund will have a balance. Let's say you want to do 50,000 a year, you want to do three years' worth, now you have 150,000 in the donor-advised fund that will be invested. And then you can dole out that money over the next three years or for as long as you want. You're basically building a little simplified private foundation. And this could present the opportunity to batch your charitable giving into less years in order to take advantage of itemization and other things. So yeah, I think it's definitely worth the squeeze in your case.

ROGER ANSWERS A WIDOWER'S QUESTION ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY SURVIVOR BENEFITS, TIMING STRATEGIES, AND EARNINGS TEST CONSIDERATIONS.

Roger: Okay, let's get to one more question before we get to a smart sprint. This is from James.

Roger: My wife passed away at age 66 after a chronic illness. My question, which I can't seem to be able to find the answer to: am I entitled to Social Security survivor benefits? I turned 64 in November. I can maintain my lifestyle without a survivor benefit, but if it were possible to get the benefit and delay mine, it certainly would help. Certainly I will be hitting IRMAA when I transition to Medicare this coming November, since I will be single. I'm just curious, can I and should I access my survivor benefit?

Roger: So James, you are eligible for a survivor benefit based on her Social Security record. The fact that she was on SSDI means her primary insurance amount has already been determined, which is good in this case because that will be what your survivor benefit would be determined on. They've already determined that because she was on SSDI.

Roger: If you file for survivor benefit prior to your full retirement age, it will be reduced permanently, about 4.75 percent per year before your full retirement age, and subject to an earnings test. So it's perfectly reasonable for you to apply for her survivor benefit. If you apply now before your full retirement age, you just know it's going to be reduced up until the time you claim your own record. And if you have substantial other income, that survivor benefit is going to be subject to the earnings test, just like yours would be if you applied for Social Security before your full retirement age. So what counts towards that earnings test? W-2 income from an employer, net income from self-employment, bonuses, commissions, vacation pay, et cetera. What doesn't count towards your earnings test? Investment income, dividends, interest, capital gains, IRA or 401k distributions, pension payments, the Social Security benefits themselves, annuity payments, inherited gifts. So a lot of it will depend on what nature of income you might have if you claim Social Security benefits on the survivor.

Roger: So strategy from here, James, would be either to claim now and know that you're going to have this earnings test and determine: will it just take away all of that survivor benefit because you have so much earnings in the areas that it counts towards? Or wait until you're full retirement age, take the survivor benefit, there'll be no earnings test, so that will be the benefit based on her primary insurance amount, and then delay yours until age 70. I think that's totally reasonable.

SMART SPRINT

WRITE DOWN FOUR OR FIVE BENEFITS YOU HOPE TO GAIN FROM DECLUTTERING YOUR THINGS, FINANCES, RELATIONSHIPS, OR DIGITAL LIFE TO HELP STAY MOTIVATED THROUGH THE PROCESS.

Roger: All right, with that let's get to a smart sprint. On your marks, get set, and we're off to take a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, rock life. All right. Next seven days, here's what I want you to do. If you're thinking about this decluttering project or exercise, I want you to just take a moment and write down four or five benefits you would experience if you decluttered some of your things and began that journey, decluttered and simplified your money and organized that, and or decluttered some relationships and obligations. Once you think of those three domains, write out what are four or five of the benefits that you're going to receive if you do this. This is a really important exercise and literally write them down because that will help remind you of why you're doing this when you enter the danger and feel uncomfortable with all those deferred decisions. It will help give you some true north of why you're doing it.

Roger: So as an example, I've been on a health journey, a real intentional health journey since December. And it's something of tracking everything I eat, I'm tracking my exercises. I have a gentleman who is my nutritionist and coach and we interact. I did this exercise, I went and got the card, the side effects of why I'm doing this. I want to be stronger. I want to have less aches and pains. I want to have more energy. I want to look better. I want to be more alert and I want to be more engaged. And so I have this on a card that sits where I go to every single morning just to remind myself of why I'm doing this. So do a quick exercise if you're so inclined to define why you're doing this, and put that somewhere where you can see it, because that's going to help you take each little baby step.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

ROGER CONGRATULATES OUR PODCAST EDITOR, GRAHAM, ON GRADUATING FROM BAYLOR UNIVERSITY.

Roger: All right, that's all we have time for today. Next week we're going to talk about the challenges that we face when we are trying to declutter. It's important that we acknowledge those before we go though. I want to give a big shout out to Graham, who is the editor of this podcast. He's also my nephew and he's graduating from Baylor University this Friday. Awesome guy. He is halfway through his CFP. He's got a great job. He is a big time player making big time plays. Graham, we're all very proud of you. All right, everybody, have a great week.

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