#43 Stop Watching the Market and Create a Great Life [Podcast]

Stop watching the market and comparing your investment performance to some benchmark. Everyone does it (even most advisors) but does it really help you create a great life??? Of course it doesn't. So stop. Stop worrying about "keeping up with the market" and get down to the important work of creating a great life.

INVEST WISELY Segment

Most of us know we should stop watching the market. Month to month movements typically mean little to the ultimate achievement of our life plan. Still the media, as well as the financial planning industry, keeps comparing our portfolios to some benchmark. How are we not supposed to think in comparative terms?

We need to stop!

If you are investing without measuring your success to goals you actually care about, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Comparative investing is a loser's game. It can:

create a never good enough mindset
cause you to over trade and chase investments
make you susceptible to product sales pitches
cause you to take too much investment risk (for no reason)
increase your stress
cause you to become disillusioned with investing

Last week, I asked a recently retired couple what they wanted. Did they want to keep up with the market or have confidence that they could maintain their lifestyle? You guessed it, they didn't care about the market, they cared about their life. Smart ones, they are.

PLAN WELL Segment

During working years a lot of our purpose comes from our job, but once we stop working nothing will automatically replace it. Unless we are intentional and planful, retirement can feel like a big let down.

John Knowlton, CFP®, just launched beerandpeanuts.net to help you avoid this big letdown. He's created resources in 3 areas that research has shown are critical to a healthy retirement:

Purpose (a reason to get out of bed)
Meaning (what if leisure isn't enough?)
Social contact (people to connect with)

Listen to our great conversation for key insights into how to create your own fulfilling retirement.

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Sign up below for free updates on this special month long event.

[spoiler]

The Retirement Answer Man Episode #43

Are you sacrificing the only life you have so that you can take care of your tomorrow? Or are you living too well today and not even worried about tomorrow? How do you find that balance between living well today without sacrificing your tomorrow? That is the mission of the Retirement Answer Man podcast.

Thank you so much for joining me! My name is Roger Whitney. I am the Retirement Answer Man and I’m so happy to have you here today.

In our Invest Wisely segment today, I’m going to challenge you to stop watching the benchmarks in the markets and go focus on creating a great life. I’m going to implore you to do that.

In our Plan Well segment, I’m going to ask you another question. I’m going to ask you, when you retire, will you be drinking beer and eating peanuts by 10:00 am? Are you going to be so bored after a couple of months of retirement that you’re just, “Okay, by 10:00 am I’m sitting in my sofa, drinking beer, eating peanuts”?

I have a great conversation with John Knowlton, a CFP® and a super smart guy, about how to find meaning in retirement and it’s something that we don’t think about a lot. I’m excited about today’s show.

I’m also excited about this announcement. I want to announce to you the Retirement Plan Live sequence that I’m launching in January. This is really cool. I’m excited about this.

What this is, over three weeks, you’re going to have the opportunity to listen in as I walk with someone through a retirement plan process. In week one, you’ll be able to hear my conversation with an actual individual – they’re not a client of mine – they’re someone I don’t know. I met them and we decided to do this project together.

Week one, you’re going to be able to be a fly on the wall and listen to me facilitate helping this person to find their retirement goals for he and his wife. We’ll call him Carl in this. You’re going to be able to sit there and listen to the entire conversation and have your own worksheets so you can work through some of your retirement goals as well.

In the following week on the podcast, you’re going to hear Carl and I talk about his cash flow and his net worth or the resources he has to provide for his goal. You’re going to be able to listen to all of that detail just like you were sitting in on this retirement plan meeting. Now, obviously, we changed the name and a few figures to protect his identity.

In week three, you’re going to sit in on the meeting where we talk about some of the risks in retirement in terms of long term care and dying prematurely and having estate planning conversations.

You’ll be able to sit in in each step of the process.

Here’s the really cool thing. In the end of January, we’re going to have a webinar where you can log in and not only listen but watch on a screen share as I present the results of our analysis for Carl and he finds out for the first time whether he’ll be able to achieve his retirement plan goals. You’ll actually be able to be in on the meeting and see the presentation with myself and Carl. Hopefully, this will provide you a first-hand glimpse of how a retirement planning process can work and how you should frame some of these issues. Hopefully, that will help you plan well and invest wisely for your retirement.

I’m really excited about this Retirement Plan Live project. If you’d like to receive free reminders along with worksheets that you can use in each step of the process, just go to rogerwhitney.com, register for the Retirement Answer Library, and not only will you get access to over twenty worksheets and checklists you can use, but I will send you email updates as Retirement Plan Live launches in January, and you’ll get email reminders along with worksheets that you can use in each week as we go through January. This is pretty exciting.

If you want updates on that, just go to rogerwhitney.com.

All right! Well, before we get started, let’s have that all-important disclosure, and that is only you know your entire financial situation. Whether you’re listening to my podcast, any other podcast, or reading something on the internet, you better think about it as helpful hints and education because we don’t know anything about you so you don’t take advice from us. Instead, consult with the people that do know you, and that could be your tax advisor, your legal advisor, or your financial planner. That’s just not a great legal disclosure, that’s a fundamental principle of planning well in your life.

With that, let’s move to our Invest Wisely segment. I’m going to challenge you. I’m almost going to get out on a soapbox. I get a little passionate about this. I’m going to challenge you to stop watching benchmarks and go focus on creating a great life.

Now, I think you’ve been trained – our industry, I know, has been trained – to talk about benchmarks. “How did we do relative to the S&P 500?” “How did we do relative to bonds?” Pick your poison. I think we need to stop watching benchmarks. I think we’ve created something that’s not healthy if you’re truly trying to create your own best life.

What do I mean by that? I was in a conversation with a client about a week ago. I went to their home, and it was a husband and wife, and the wife had been retired for four months now. First off, I want to give you a quote that she gave me, because she was in a high stress position when she was working, and we’re sitting there and she goes, “You know, Roger, I think I was born to be retired.” Just the way she said it, she had so much peace. You could see, feel the peace in heart. She was just relaxed and you could see. Even her husband was saying you could see it in her face. She was relaxed because she felt comfortable. She felt confident that they can maintain their lifestyle and she didn’t feel like she was putting her family at risk which is a beautiful thing.

Well, later in that meeting, as we’re working through the details and really dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s because the husband’s going to be retiring in a year or so, we have a conversation about how the investments are doing and extremely diversified – we’re very prudent in how we invest in our practice anyway, or we work to be – and this year the S&P 500 has done extremely well. I mean, much better than any index for the most part, broad index. Really, it’s just a subset of the S&P that has done so well, but it skews people’s perception of how the markets are doing because they hear the S&P 500’s doing great.

When they look at their diversified portfolio which doesn’t keep up with the S&P 500, but then it’s not supposed to, they end up comparing themselves and start wondering, “Well, why don’t I get that?” and that’s all they hear all day on the market updates – what the S&P is doing or the Dow Jones is doing – so what ends up happening is you end up feeling inferior. “Well, I coulda, shoulda, mighta had that! Why didn’t we have that?” Well, if we had a crystal ball and we could always get to the right spot, that would be a good question, but there isn’t one. It’s about controlling risks.

I want to talk a little bit about the dangers of benchmarking which is truly a common practice, not just with clients but it’s really driven by most advisors. They always talk about how they did relative to something – some kind of benchmark.

The first danger is comparative investing is a loser’s game. It causes fear and greed to drive decisions. In fact, study after study has shown – when they look at flows to different investment classes of assets – that investors typically are buying the assets that did well in the last period of time and selling the investments that did the worst in the last period of time. That proves out, time and time again, that people chase what already did well because they want to get that return, and we talked a little bit about this before that comparative investing ends up being a loser’s game because you chase your tail as you’re following what had just done well.

I’m going to say it right here. If you’re investing without tying the purpose of investing to some greater goal, you’re really setting yourself up for disappointment because investing in and of itself can be a very frustrating game. It’s much better to tie the purpose of your investing, say, to maintain your lifestyle and have that be your benchmark.

The second danger of watching benchmarks rather than focusing on creating a great life is it creates a mindset of it’s never good enough. If you only need an average five percent return to reach all of the goals that you can dream of and you get a seven percent return but whatever index you’re tracking gets a ten percent return, you’re going to feel gypped. You’re going to feel like, “Man, I wasn’t good enough. Yeah, I got seven, that’s nice, but I could have gotten ten,” and that is always going to happen because that’s just the nature of things and, just like if you’re an athlete and you’re fast and you’re quick and you’re strong, well, there’s always going to be somebody faster, quicker, stronger.

If all you’re doing is looking around and saying, “Yeah, but that guy has that, that guy has that. I could have had that. Why didn’t I do that?” that prevents you from creating your own best self. Just like it does in life when you compare yourself to others, if you’re comparing yourself too much to benchmarks or too much to what your neighbor said he did, that’s going to give you stress and give you that never-good-enough mindset.

Lastly, it can cause you to overtrade and chase investments. Again, we’ve seen this in industry studies that that’s exactly what happens and what’s interesting is advisors have as much of a problem with this as the clients because they want to please and they typically focus on tying to benchmarks so they want to be, “Yes! We beat the S&P!” or whatever index that they’re talking about so advisors end up falling into this cycle just as much as clients do and end up overtrading the account which creates tax issues and transactional cost issues. Again, it’s that running around in circles mentality.

Over time, what happens as you go through this cycle of chasing investments and always feeling like you’re behind the eight-ball? Eventually, that can cause you to believe the whole system is rigged and you just walk away which is, I think, what happens a lot is they’re like, whether they hire someone or they do it themselves, they think they’re being prudent, they’re listening to everything on the media that talks about what just did well or what’s going to do well and they chase these things. And then, over time, they get disillusioned and they walk away and say, “Well, it was rigged,” when, in fact, they were set up for failure by tying their evaluation of how they’re doing to their benchmark to some arbitrary benchmark rather than tying, achieving some greater purpose in their life because that is a much better benchmark to have if you’re trying to invest wisely.

What do I mean by that? Well, I always take the approach – and this is the approach I just talked to this client about who was talking about the general markets – the minimum effective dose to get the job done. Think about medicine for a second. If I have a sinus infection – which I get almost annually – you go to the doctor, you need antibiotics. He prescribes some antibiotics for you and you take the dosage that is needed to get rid of the infection. You don’t take more; you take the minimum effective dose to achieve the job that’s at hand. In the medical analogy, if I have a sinus infection, they assign a drug and an appropriate dosage of that drug to achieve eradicating that infection. If I take more of that drug, it doesn’t do me any good, it doesn’t improve the quality of my life. In fact, it may give me increased risk of major side effects, right?

Well, think of that analogy when we think of structuring our portfolio to serve some greater good or need in our life of creating a great retirement, of creating a great income, or of creating a great legacy. You personally get to choose what that great life is. Once you choose that, now it becomes, well, how do we determine what that minimum effective dose is?

In the context of investment management, if you’re going to invest wisely, if you could achieve your definition of an awesome life without taking any investment risk – just by having it all in cash – that might be the best plan. I don’t know. I’ve had clients where that was actually the case. You could argue, “Maybe they weren’t dreaming big enough?” but they were dreaming big enough for them.

In that particular instance, there was no payoff to investing and taking on investment risk if we think of that as the drug or the issue or the uncertainty that we’re dealing with. There was no payoff to investing and taking on the potential volatility of whatever markets you invested in because it didn’t matter to their lifestyle. All that would have happened is they would have introduced side effects of investing which is volatility and possible loss. It would have introduced cost and, even if it was successful, they would just end up with a bigger pile of money which isn’t necessarily a better life.

If you think of it from that standpoint, you always want to start off with, “Could I achieve everything I care about if I took zero investment risk?” and 99 percent of the time, “No, you can’t.” You need to take some investment risk to achieve that lifestyle or that particular goal that you’ve defined in that goal conversation. Then, the issue becomes, “Well, how much risk do I need to take to position me to possibly achieve the goals that I care about more?” That would seem to me to be the most logical way of approaching it. If I have a sinus infection and I want to get rid of it, how much dosage of drug do I need to get me to eradicate this infection without overdosing myself? I think the same approach works with investment risk. How much investment risk do I need to take on so I can be positioned to achieve what I care about most?

It doesn’t matter whether you can tolerate more investment risk if it doesn’t mean anything to you and that’s how I described it to this client. We can focus on trying to keep up with, say, the S&P 500 or the markets. But, through my analysis, we don’t need to take on that investment risk so you need to make a decision.

Do you want to feel good about yourself because you’re keeping up with the markets but introduce all these possible side effects of market losses and volatility in your portfolio? Or do you want to take enough investment risk to position you to achieve what you care about most and forget the rest?

In my mind, that’s much more powerful because beating a benchmark makes no difference in your life. If you can focus your investment portfolio and benchmark it to whether you can achieve your goals, that’s pretty cool because, ultimately, that’s what we care about – that lifestyle we’re trying to live or the giving that we’re trying to do or the legacy we’re trying to leave – so why don’t we benchmark to that? Who cares what the S&P does or some arbitrary index? Does that make sense? Did I beat that to death? I don’t know. Well, regardless, that’s how I’m feeling right now.

In our Plan Well segment, I have a great conversation on beer and peanuts. John Knowlton, CFP®, he’s the founding partner of Oak Point Financial Group and he launched a website called beerandpeanuts.net and that came from a conversation he had with a client who had just recently retired that caused him to launch this site because he realizes there are three really important things that you need in retirement once you get there to really have a fulfilling life. So, rather than spoil it, I’m just going to play our conversation with John and I’ll have links to some of the resources he talks about in the show notes.

ROGER: Now, you just launched this beerandpeanuts.net and you’re a financial advisor like I am and you’re helping people on that journey to retirement. What is this all about?

JOHN: Well, thanks for asking, Roger, and I appreciate the opportunity for the interview. “Beer and Peanuts” is kind of a catchy name, if I have to say so myself, and it comes from an experience that I had.

A number of years ago, I had a client who wanted to retire at age 58 and so he came to me asking for help figuring out the financial aspect. How much money did he need to have saved? How should he invest his 401k and his pension roll-over and things like that?

ROGER: All the normal stuff that we deal with, right?

JOHN: Absolutely, routine. How do financial advisors work? We figure out the money. You know, make them do the budget. How much is it going to cost for you to live once you retire? All those things.

So, I did that work for him and, frankly, he and his wife did their job, too. They saved the money that I suggested to them. They invested the way I suggested. They paid off their mortgage. And so, age 58 comes, he retires, feels great, we have a party, and I feel like I’ve done really good work as well. I helped this guy and his wife reach their goal.

ROGER: And that’s really a great feeling, isn’t it? You feel like, “Wow! They’re there and they’re excited and it’s going to work!”

JOHN: Absolutely! It’s like the fulfillment of our work. You know, in every job, I’m sure it’s true that there’s frustrating moments and it’s really neat to have those satisfying moments when you feel like, “Hey, we accomplished something here together.” So, it felt awesome.

ROGER: What happened then?

JOHN: Yeah, you could tell there’s a “but” coming, right? So, the “but” came six months later. Our service model is we see our clients at least twice a year or at least we talk to them. He came in in February – this is six months after he retired.

ROGER: So, still the honeymoon phase?

JOHN: It’s supposed to be the honeymoon, yeah. So, he retired in the summertime in Michigan which is glorious. They lived on a lake. Michigan’s glorious in the summer; it’s depressing and cold and gray in the winter.

ROGER: That’s why I live in Texas now, John.

JOHN: Yeah, I know you abandoned the Great Lake State.

But he came in in February and he just was somber. You know, here I was, expecting to continue the party, but he was down and he said, “John, there’s days I’ve done everything I can think to do and, by 10:00 in the morning, I’m drinking beer and eating peanuts.”

ROGER: There you go – beer and peanuts.

JOHN: Here’s the beer and peanuts, and it really hit me like a ton of bricks that I’d done a real good job on the numbers and I’d helped them figure out their money, but I’d really failed to help him be planful and thoughtful about what the money is for and what would they do every day and how would they have an experience that’s meaningful and a life of significance. It really changed how I work.

ROGER: That’s the thing. You and I have been doing this for a very long time and we’re practitioners. I mean, we’re pretty geeky. You’re geekier than I am, I’m going to tell you that right now. But we think about the numbers. We think about the numbers and the clients are focused on the numbers and they forget the whole purpose of life after you retire – that whole “you’re losing the meaning of work and everything else,” right?

JOHN: Well, that’s exactly right. A lot of times, we experience what I call the “vice.” You know, this is true, especially for people who are near the end of their career, they’re probably in a higher pressure job, they may have risen to a position with lots of responsibilities, or even if they haven’t, they’d just been doing the same old grind for thirty years. And so, one jaw of the vice is the pressure from work or the mundane routine of work – that’s one jaw of the vice. The other jaw is all these desires and pent up demand. “You know, I’d really like to spend more time with my grandkids. I’ve really wanted to restore this car but I don’t have time to because of work.”

So, you’ve got these two jaws of the vice pushing on you and so people really are often looking to escape the vice – you know, get out of those jaws – and I get that. I understand. The problem is, once you get out of the vice and the pressure is off, you’ve got another twenty or thirty years to live and we need to make sure that that is meaningful as well.

ROGER: And a lot of that is, we’re in retirement planning – and tell me if you’ve experienced this, too – basically, what you’re saying is they’re running away from something rather than running towards something when they’re thinking about retirement?

JOHN: I think that’s true for a lot of people, yes. “I want to get away from work,” or the job or the pressure. At the same time, there are some people who are really drawn towards retirement and they’re thinking about leisure, they’re thinking about travel, they’re thinking about having fun, and then the problem for them comes, just like this guy who moved to the lake. It’s really fun in the summer, but it just doesn’t satisfy all year round. I mean, you can only go boating when there’s open water, you know?

ROGER: Yeah.

JOHN: It’s not as fun as a lifestyle. So, there’s things that we do when we’re working that are really great vacations and really great breaks from work, but they’re ultimately not satisfying as a lifestyle.

ROGER: And, even if you have a lot of pent up projects built up, a lot of honeydews – and I’ve seen this with clients – they only last you so long and it may last six months, it may last a year, but then, all of a sudden, you know, “There’s nothing else in the house to fix. There’s nothing to be handy on. Now, what do I do?”

JOHN: Well, yeah, and that leads into something that we call the tourney of the trivial. In other words, when all the important stuff is done, well, you’ve still got 168 hours a week to fill up. And so, you’ll see guys spending six hours mowing their grass when it should be a 90-minute job. I’ve seen guys with a ruler, measuring the grass to make sure that it’s the same length on both sides of the yard.

ROGER: Seriously?

JOHN: I’ve got pictures of it. There is actually a company that makes a turf gauge for just such a thing – measuring the length of the grass.

ROGER: It sounds a little like my father-in-law who worked for GM for thirty-plus years. He’s been retired for a while but, I mean, he literally goes up and down the neighborhood and fixes… He’s like the handyman of the neighborhood because he just loves it. It fills his days.

JOHN: And so, we’ve come to realize that everybody needs to have purpose, meaning, and social contact throughout their life and, while we’re working, we get that from work. What I mean by purpose, Roger, is having something to do, structuring your time. And so, your father-in-law, that’s his purpose; he goes around fixes stuff.

ROGER: So, on your website, beerandpeanuts.net, and you have it spelled out that way, let’s start with purpose and go through each one of these real quick. You show purpose and basically it’s a reason to get out of bed. How do you deal with that or how do you think about that when you’re getting ready to retire?

JOHN: Right. I’m glad you asked, “How do you think about it?” Most people don’t.

ROGER: Yeah.

JOHN: In fact, you know, they’re just trying to get out of the vice. And so, what we’re really trying to encourage people to do is be thoughtful and be planful about it. And so, we actually have some worksheets on our website that people can download and it will ask you questions about, ”What do you do now with your time?” and it lays out, “All right, I spend so much time on leisure, so much time on work, so much time on community and civic things,” and then, once you stop working, there’s going to be a pretty big hole – 40 hours, 50 hours a week, maybe more with commuting.

And so, first thing we want people to do is recognize that there’s going to be a big gap.

ROGER: Right.

JOHN: Once you’ve got that recognition, then you can have a thoughtful discussion about, “All right, what am I going to do that will structure my time?” and I really encourage people to have recurring things. If it’s a Tuesday morning optimist club or a Thursday rotary or whatever it is, something that recurs – and multiple things that recur – throughout the week or a month that help to structure your time – going to church or synagogue – these kinds of things really help to build your week out so that you’re not just kind of drifting through time.

ROGER: One that I like on your website that you can click on the actual Purpose button and it talks about the regular and reoccurring things, and then the occasional things like doctors, and then the mundane things like the grass and grocery shopping. I like the income-producing aspect and I think this is a powerful one for a lot of people because a lot of people have hobbies.

My wife has developed the hobby of fixing up old furniture and stripping it and repainting it and putting tiles and doing all this stuff, and that’s something that gives her some joy outside of work, and those types of things can actually become income-producing so you’re working more on your own terms in retirement, and that can mean a lot of things, not just from a psychological aspect like you’re talking about, but from a cash flow aspect of just having a little bit of money coming in by doing something you actually love.

JOHN: Oh, yeah, I love this idea. For a lot of retirees, one of the things they’re trying to get away from is being told when and where to be, five or six days a week, and I totally understand that. And so, I really encourage people to look for flexible types of work situations.

My dad will sub for parapros. He doesn’t want to be a teacher again where he’s in charge of the classroom, but paraprofessionals at schools can do small group reading assignments and things like that. The scheduling software allows him to say, “I’m going to be in Florida for two months so don’t call,” and, “I’m available these days but not these,” and there’s lots of jobs that have that kind of flexibility and, like your wife’s hobby, she can work on it when she wants to and not do it when she’s tired of it. So, I really like those flexible things, but they also can give you some structure to your day, and the money doesn’t hurt either.

ROGER: That’s right. Now, your next tab is Meaning.

JOHN: Right.

ROGER: So, talk a little bit about what that means in terms of having meaning in retirement.

JOHN: Yeah, meaning in life, really, is about how do we find significance in the things that we do? While mowing grass might give you something to do, it’s not super significant. And so, significance really is kind of a psychological piece, but it involves having some recognition for the things you do, some exchange of value where you both give and receive, and so we get that from work, but once the work goes away or we stop going to work, there’s nothing that will automatically fill that gap. And so, things like volunteering can provide that, taking care of other people or organizations, taking care of grandchildren or children, taking care of other people – these are activities that are able to provide us with some significance and meaning because they involve other people and we get thank-yous and we get recognized for what we’ve done, and those are just really important.

ROGER: Basically, what it boils down to is we want to feel needed, right?

JOHN: Well, that’s a great way to say it, Roger. Yeah.

ROGER: We all have that need in some way. I think we all do, right?

JOHN: That’s right.

ROGER: Yeah, cool. Now, on the last tab, the Social Contact, and this is one I think people underestimate a lot as well of what can happen when you leave those networks of work. Why don’t you talk about that one a little bit?

JOHN: Yeah, social contact is pretty self-explanatory. In other words, we know what it means to interact with other people. But we fail to recognize how much we interact with people at work, and I realize most of us aren’t going out to dinner with our colleagues on a regular basis, some of us have to be dragged to the annual Christmas party, but just think about how much you talk to people about projects, about staff meetings, or even just about the Dallas Cowboys when you’re standing around the coffee pot.

ROGER: Or the Detroit Lions.

JOHN: Well, this year, it’s worth talking about that! But one way to really kind of put this in perspective is to just try to think of somebody that you used to work closely with who no longer works there – wherever you’re working, they’re not there anymore – and how often do you talk to them? Very rarely.

ROGER: Yeah, they almost leave your circle, right?

JOHN: Absolutely, yeah. Even if you do get together with them, it takes a lot of effort, right? Because you’re busy working and they’re working somewhere else or they’re retired and your schedules are just out of synch. Even the most introverted person who gets all their energy from being alone still has a need for that interaction, that social interaction, and it’s a really big deal, especially for men because we’re not great at forming relationships – we’re not as good, typically, as women are.

ROGER: And we get grumpier as we get older.

JOHN: Well, I’m not sure which is the cause and which is the effect here.

ROGER: Good point!

JOHN: It could be that, because we’re not planful about making sure we have social contact, we get grumpy.

ROGER: Maybe that’s the reason.

JOHN: It’s depressing. So, we’ve actually got a podcast and I’ve written a piece about how to make friends in retirement. I mean, it sounds really kind of corny and hokey but, if you don’t have friends, you’re going to be grumpy.

ROGER: Now, you have the solution to these three things or these three areas and you call it a cycle. Can you tell me what that is real quickly?

JOHN: Yeah. So, the people who seem to have the most satisfying experience in retirement tend to go through a cycle of travel and leisure. I just want to be clear, I’m not against travel and leisure, I like it. But they go through a cycle of travel and leisure, volunteerism, and part-time jobs, and kind of just cycle through it at various different times, and that really seems to give people the purpose, meaning, and social contact that makes retirement fun, rewarding, and something to look forward to.

ROGER: Awesome. I love the website. It’s beerandpeanuts.net and the tagline is great – “What if leisure isn’t enough?” I think a lot of people can relate to that and the three things that you identified. I definitely see it in my practice a lot. So, if you have an interest in learning more about the resources that John’s put together, you can go to beerandpeanuts.net – I love the name.

John, thanks so much for talking with me today.

JOHN: Hey, my pleasure, Roger. I appreciate it.

ROGER: Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the Retirement Answer Man podcast.

If you would like information on the Retirement Plan Live project that’s launching in January, just go to rogerwhitney.com and fill out your first name and your email and I will give you updates on each conversation as they come out and worksheets that you can use as we go through this Retirement Plan Life together.

Until next week, this is Roger Whitney, hoping that you plan well and invest wisely.