transcript
Speech-to-text transcription can look a little quirky. Please excuse any grammar or spelling errors.
Episode #485 - The 8 Pillars Of Rocking Retirement: How To Build A Retirement You Can Rock
Roger: It's worth repeating. Phil Stut says that "You'll never be exonerated from three things, uncertainty, pain, or the need to do work."
I could noodle on that quote for a lifetime.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to The Retirement Answer Man Show. My name is Roger Whitney. I am your host, and this is the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to do the work so you can have the confidence to lead in and actually rock retirement, to just go live boldly.
So, we're at a five-week month and in May what we're going to do is a foundational theme. If you've been listening to the show for a little while, this is going to reaffirm a lot of what you've heard and maybe expand your understanding.
If you're newer to the show, this is a great place to start because we're going to talk about the eight pillars that you need to have in place in order to have that confidence to rock retirement. The eight things for financial, for non-financial that you really need to be working on.
We're going to start today with retirement planning. What is the process you use in order to work on the foundation that you need to have? We're going to talk about that and next week we're going to tackle the first two in the financial realm.
So that's what the month list is going to look like. As always going to be answering your questions as well and doing a Bring It On segment so we can hit a good mix of topics. Before we get started, two things.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Number one is May 11th. The Rock Retirement Club is opening to new members, and I would love to invite you to join on May 11th and the May 13th, that's a Thursday night and Saturday afternoon we're going to have a live open house. You can come hang out with me live, and we're going to talk about the five pillars in the financial realm that you should have in place. We're going to share with you a template of a retirement plan summary, very similar to your retirement policy statement that you can actually use.
In addition, I'm going to outline what the club has to offer you in terms of the education to think about how to build your plan, the tools to actually build your retirement plan of record, and then the group coaching and the community to help you execute and walk this journey. We've put everything together and we think the club can be a key component of you having this confidence to rock retirement.
So, we want to invite you to attend. If you want to check that out, go to livewithroger.com and you can register. If for some reason you can't attend live, you can register, and we will email out a replay of it.
Second announcement. Since it's the beginning of the month, it's become a little bit of a tradition to talk briefly about the books that I completed last month. That's April.
The first book was Unreasonable Hospitality. This is the story of the restaurant, 11 Madison Park, "EMP" they've referred to in the book. The story of the chef and the co-owner that took it from a ho hum restaurant to, I think at one point it was the top restaurant in the world, and they did that by creating great menus in food, but also by doing and practicing unreasonable hospitality.
So, they talk about what hospitality is, how do you provide it, how do you surprise people by creating, not just events, but memories. It's a wonderful book, especially if you're a business owner, but even if you're not, it's a good book that sparks some creativity of how you can up your game to help create memories because people don't remember events or things. They remember specific parts of events or things, and if you can accentuate and create a memory, that just takes it to a whole different level. So, love that book for sure.
The second book I read was called The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, who is a famous music producer. I did this as an audio book. He has an amazing voice.
He's very zen and philosophical. I've loved everything I've consumed from him and seen him in interviews. The book, The Creative Act was good. I won't say it was great. It had a lot about the creative act and how to mentally put yourself in that mode. It just didn't really hit what I thought it would do, but still worth doing because he is an incredible creator.
The third book I read was Tiger, A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. I love true stories that read like fiction where they're just really dramatic, and this one took place not that long ago, maybe 23 years ago, and it takes place in the area between Russia, China, and Korea, this sort of no man's land where the Siberian tiger is and the community there and it goes into the community. It goes into the economic part; it goes into the history of the region and of tigers in that region.
But the story is organized around a wilderness man who was hunted, and I guess devoured or killed by a tiger. In that area, Russia has what's called like the tiger squad, which is sort of like the police and they go and investigate any interactions between humans and these large tigers.
It tells the story of the investigation and weaves in a lot of the history of that region. Very interesting. An area and subject I know very little about. So definitely enjoyed that.
The fourth book I read was a collection of essays by Wendell Berry called What Are People For
Wendell Berry, I don't know if he's still alive or not, but he's a modern-day writer. He lives in the northern Kentucky area in coal mining country. He would be what, I guess I would call an off the grid kind of dude. He doesn't believe in modern technology. I think one of his essays was he'll never buy a computer.
He writes a lot about environmentalism and the exploitation of rural areas by urban areas. That's in the farming realm, obviously in coal mining and industry, but also in religion and just the conflict and some of the downsides of urban capitalism and what it does to the rural areas.
Very well thought out essays, don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but it helped expand my view in that area. Secondly, he is just an amazing writer. Just reading his command of the English language and how he writes is just beautiful to read. So, it is definitely worth doing. I bought his complete works as a result of it, because I need to study this, not just the subject, but the writing.
The last book I read was really a reread in preparation for a book study we did in the Rock Retirement Club, which is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It talks about how to be intentional about building habits. I would couple that book a good pairing would be Tiny Habits with BJ Fog.
Habits are really critical in retirement, in life in general because essentially your identity is the sum of your habits. The etymology around the word "identity" essentially means repeated beingness. It's your habits that make you. So, we should probably be a little bit more intentional around our habits.
So those are the books that I've read. I'm reading some good books this month, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut because we have a lot to do.
THE GROUNDWORK
Today. We're going to lay the foundation of Retirement Planning. What is the process that should be used in order to create a plan that you can have confidence in?
To do that, I want to talk about the challenge of retirement. Before that, though, I want to give you at least some perspective of my journey to this point that will help you understand where I'm coming from, my preferences, my biases, and how I approach this subject, and I think that's important.
So, I've been a practicing financial advisor for over 30 years. For over 20 years, I have been a certified financial planner. I have advanced certifications in retirement management and high net worth advising for sure. For a period of time, I taught the retirement planning section of the Certified Financial Planner candidate program at University of Texas Arlington teaching financial planners.
In addition to that, I've started two different advisory firms, hired and trained advisors. But all along that, the common thread is I've always worked directly with individual clients walking this journey and managing through good times and bad times, bear markets and bull markets, et cetera.
So, I definitely have a bias from that perspective of actually doing this nonstop, and to this day, I work individually with clients. I'm not a theorist, I'm not a researcher. I'm actually doing this stuff, and so I have some biases, but I also have some preferences coming from that perspective. So, I think that's just important for you to understand. I don't talk about that stuff a lot in terms of what I do.
All right. So, the retirement challenge. What is the challenge you're facing, whether you're retired currently or getting ready to retire? We could talk about when can I retire? How much could I spend? Can I travel? All sorts of things like that, but it comes down to two things for me.
Number one is how do I live a life without regret? So, when I'm done with this journey and I'm at the end of my life, looking back, I can say, I didn't leave anything on the table. I don't have regrets. So, regret minimalization, I think is the essence of it.
Another essence is going to be how do I squeeze out as much juice as I can from a life perspective before I'm too old to squeeze anymore?
I think those are the essence of what the issue before the house is as you approach managing your retirement, and there's this balancing act that we have to do, that you have to do because you are not a spreadsheet, right?
Today is all that you have. Carpe Punctum, seize the moment, not just the day. I say that because today, you're probably relatively healthy, you're engaged, you're ready to live because you've been working for decades.
You have things that you want to do, whether that's make memories or grandchildren, pursue hobbies or travel. At whatever stage of life, you are right now, you're probably looking at it at least if you're over 50, that, hey man, I only got a window here. I have a shorter window. If I'm 60 years old. Yeah, I may live to 90 or a hundred, but you know what? My window is much tighter of when I "will be active" because I can't guarantee that I'm not going to have Alzheimer's or dementia or some other illness or just mobility and the ability to move around and do things.
So even if you might have a 30, 40-year timeframe from a planning perspective, you know all you have is today and you want to make the most of today because you might not have the chance later on.
So that's one end of the equation, but on the other end is, okay, great I want to really take advantage of this early part of retirement, but I have to be a good steward. I have\ to take care of my 80, my 90, my 100-year-old self. Or if you're married, I got to make sure my spouse is okay. We can't just blow it all and have fun today, and then one of us dies and the other one runs out of money.
I want to age as healthily as I can so I can expand this active stage as long as I can. I don't want to be a burden to others. I don't want to have could've, would've, should'ves. So, I always think of this as a seesaw teeter-totter. We know what those are because we're old enough. Where on one end is you want to have an amazing life today and live without regret, but on the other end, you got to make sure that your 80- or 90-year-old self is okay as well, and you're standing on the middle of that teeter-totter trying to balance between those two things.
That's the issue that we're all dealing with in some form or another. So, the question is, how do we do that? Because if you are in a position where you are financially well off, that probably means that you are really good at denying yourself and being an accumulator, and without a framework where you can feel confident that your future self is going to be okay, you will probably deny experiences and things early on just to be safe. What will end up happening, potentially, is that you'll get to your mid-seventies or whatever age and look back and say, oh wow, I am going to be okay later on, I could have spent more. Now regret comes in.
This is the challenge that you're facing, and this is the modern retirement because fewer of us have pensions, we're living longer, we're going to be active for longer. We have to self-manage all this mess of stuff that we're trying to balance in between. Most likely, without a proper framework, you're going to deny yourself.
Coupled with that is when you do retire and you give up that spending superpower, it's very easy to lose optimism and hope about the future because your income feels like power. You can work your way out of mistakes. You're adding to your investments, you're growing your assets. You have something to do every day. When you retire, you can't earn your way out of mistakes. You're not saving anymore. In fact, you're spending. So psychologically we feel in a much more vulnerable position, and we're looking forward at all the risks that we've talked about, and you think about all the time in terms of retirement. We're not seeing that we're necessarily going to have a better future because of the economy or because of health.
The second thing we're not seeing is I don't have much I can do about this. I don't have any agency to positively impact them. It's hard to see a great future and I don't know what I can do about it anyway.
Then lastly, it's very difficult to find pathways even if we could find an agency. That's a toxic mix that if we don't approach it in the right way, can rob and degrade or erode our spirit.
Now what's the problem with traditional retirement planning? I have to be careful here because I am all about creating what should be, not tearing down what is.
It's easy to criticize what is, that's easy, that's somewhat lazy. Better to go create what should be, and that's where I tend to focus. But there are some fundamental things we have to think about when we look at how traditional financial planning and retirement planning works.
A couple of the problems are, number one, money is the driver of life decisions within traditional retirement planning.
Non-financial tasks take a backseat to investments and spreadsheets. People talk about the personal side, but they talk about it as this side dish and not the main dish.
I recall being on the Longview podcast on Morningstar, and I'm talking about some of the non-financial pillars, and one of the hosts in an innocent way says, oh yeah, that's softer stuff.
He didn't mean it in a bad way, and I think I stopped and talked about that for a second. We tend to treat the softer side stuff as a side dish to the money and the investments. The reason we do that is because people that execute retirement planning or financial planning in general are generally financial people, and that's how they're trained.
That's what they want to focus on, and it's much safer than the "softer side". Even the behavioral aspect, the humanness part of financial planning, is called behavioral finance. It's always focused on how we behave relative to finances.
So traditional planning works to scale your life to investment management, what the money says it can provide within a spreadsheet. The planning approach is designed by people that are building businesses that have to scale to some extent. It's hard to do that when it's not confined within an SOP or a spreadsheet. It's a closed system.
What do I mean by that? When traditional financial planning occurs in retirement planning, it's a closed system in its approach, like say a chess game where there's a defined board, that's the spreadsheet, and there are defined moves and finite options within a net present value. Do I have enough money to pay for my forecasted spending?
That's why we get things like very finite options and 4% rule and things like that because it's being treated as a closed system and your life has to fit into the system. That corrals your life within the border of the spreadsheet and a scalable process which ends up focusing on investments and investment products because that's the financial incentive that retirement planners and financial planners have.
That's all fine and good, but none of that should really matter to you because you're not worried about scalable practice.
You're worried about your one iteration of a life that you are going to try to live. Yes, the finances are important. We're going to talk about those four pillars, but they are subservient to the non-financial pillars, which is your life, creating a life that you can look back without regret and finding your balance on that teeter-totter.
That's the problem with how traditional retirement planning is done. It's a closed system that's focused on spreadsheets and your life isn't a spreadsheet, never has been.
If our lives were spreadsheets, we'd never have children. Remember when they used to talk about how much a child costs?
If you have a child, it's $700,000 over its lifetime. So, if you have four of them, what does that mean? Well, if you did that in a spreadsheet, you likely wouldn't have kids.
We don't live that way, and the process is too focused on a closed system and finances. Doesn't mean it doesn't have to be there, but it has to be part of a bigger whole.
Okay, so enough talking about the problems with retirement planning. I'm putting that soapbox away. So how do we go about having a process to work on these eight pillars that we're going to talk about this month?
Well, let's go back to a word that we've talked about before, hope. Hope is not a strategy, but it's an important concept within retirement, and there are three things that you need to have to have hope.
Number one, you need to have a process that can help you envision a future that you're excited about. That would be fun, wouldn't it? A future that you’re excited about, whether you're 50 years old, 60 years old, or 70 years old. If you want to have hope, you better be excited about the future.
Second, you need to have agency, so you feel like you have some control to work towards that exciting future. You need to have agency, things that you can actually do, feel like you have your hands on the wheel and you're not just being told, don't worry, it'll be fine. That robs you of your agency and you can't do that. So, the process is going to need to help you envision a better future, give you agency so you have control.
apply to, in order to have hope, you need to have pathways where you can actually apply your agency in order to work towards a better future.
So those are the three components of hope and any process that you're going to use needs to give you some level of those things otherwise you're not going to be that excited about it and you're not going to have confidence that you can work towards a better future financially or non-financially.
Where I have come to in my 30 plus years of doing this with clients and teaching this to advisors as well as members of the club, and you on the show for the last nine years, is using a project management approach that mirrors agile project management, which is how software develops.
So, in the old days, they used to develop software in what was called a waterfall method, which I sort of liken to the traditional retirement planning method of this huge bloated process where you think you're going to figure out the entire project in a deterministic fashion and then just execute.
That's like you trying to figure out the rest of your life within a spreadsheet and then just think, okay, I have it figured out in this memorialized document. I don't have to think about it anymore.
Life doesn't work that way. It's too fluid. Whereas agile project management, which is how most modern things are developed, is more of an iterative fashion.
You have a sense of where you want to go. Then you keep reassessing, what the most important things to work on are in order to walk that pathway, knowing that you may have to pivot because of risks that pop up or opportunities that pop up that will allow the end project to be similar to maybe what you thought of, but gives it the flexibility to evolve in a very uncertain world.
That's a very high-level understanding of it. In agile retirement management, taking this project management approach, you are the project, and you want to fully integrate the four pillars of a great life from a non-financial perspective with the four pillars of a great financial life where they're fully integrated.
So, you're going to treat your life like a project to manage, not a problem to be solved. What are some things that you need to do in order to approach your retirement this way?
Well, one is you got to truly accept a few things. Go back to Phil Stubs. You are going to always live with uncertainty.
You're not going to eliminate it.
You're going to always have pain and struggle. Not all the time, but it's always going to be there. You're not going to be able to eliminate it and you're always going to need to do some work. So don't try to avoid those things. Embrace the reality of that so you can focus your time on leaning in and constantly doing the work and managing the uncertainty and dealing with the pain and the consequences, and then iterating from there.
This frees us from chasing rainbows, thinking that we can predict the future, whether that's the market or your spending or the economy or interest rates, we can stop chasing that rainbow because you can't predict it because it's fundamentally unknowable. It allows us to realize that we're always going to have to do work, so we won't fall for products and solutions that give the promise of, hey, you no longer have to be in pain, or you no longer have to do any work. Because if you buy X, Y, Z products, it solves all your needs. It frees us from a lot of those sales pitches because there's plenty of people that are going to sell us products that will either say they're going to solve our uncertainty, that they're going to take away the pain, or that we won't have to do any work and worry anymore.
It's going to free us. If we truly accept those three things as unsolvable, now we can get down to the business of creating a process to manage and navigate rather than chasing rainbows. It's going to allow us to focus on managing uncertainty. It's going to focus on creating a vision and then finding our agency, what can we do to execute. Choosing pathways and managing the process. That's what we're going to do. That's what an agile process will do for you, and it's going to be something that's going to give you a vision, agency, and pathways.
What you'll do within an agile framework is not try to do it all at once because retirement planning is overwhelming, long term care, health term healthcare shock, Irma, social Security, RMDs, new tax law. My daughter needs money for this or that.
It's so overwhelming that we can freeze and deny our life because we don't feel like we can figure it all out. If you use an agile approach, it's going to force you to accept that uncertainty, but it's also going to help you prioritize what the most important things you need to do are.
That old Stephen Covey concept of putting the big rocks in first, that's what these pillars are. They're the big rocks that you need to do first so you can create a feasible plan of record that's resilient and then you can optimize it. There are similar pillars on the non-financial side, so you can take incremental action on the most important priorities, and also so you can create margin financially and personally, so that you can absorb the unexpected. Because if you create too optimized of a system, it can be rigid and break really quickly. So we want to make sure we have financial and non-financial margin so we have some optionality.
Then as you work on implementing the most important things first, you'll continually poke around at what's changing, not just in the markets, but in your life. What risks and what opportunities are there, and which ones should I address first?
This is what an agile structure will do, and this is how our masterclass in the club is structured to help you put those big rocks in place and help you start to get into a rhythm of making incremental decisions that fully integrate your life with your money.
All right, so that's step one. Next week we're going to talk about the first two financial pillars, but for now, let's move on and answer some of your questions.
LISTENER QUESTIONS
Now's time to answer your questions. If you have a question for the show, you can go to rogerwhitney.com/askroger and type in your question, leave an audio question if you're moved to, and we'll try our best to get it on the show. Also, I got to remind you that if we reference a worksheet, or like the books that I mentioned on the show in our 6-Shot Saturday email, we're going to share links to a lot of the things I mentioned.
If you're not getting that weekly email that comes out Saturday morning, you can sign up for that at rogerwhitney.com or 6-shotsaturday.com, and that way you can get links easily for some of the things I'm talking about here.
QUESTION ONE
Our first question comes from Matt related to the Rock Retirement Club.
Matt says,
"Hey, I'm a newish fan of the show.
I discovered it after your interview on the Long View and your guest appearances on Stacking Benjamins and have been enjoying the case study episodes along with my spouse in 2023."
Well, welcome to the show Matt and Spouse.
"We are both educators in targeting retirement in 10 years and we're really enjoying nerding out on this stuff.
I heard you mention the RRC and said somebody could shoot you a quick email if they had a question."
Which you definitely can do, and you did and wanted to know would it be right for you.
"Here's my question. My in-laws are retired, but unfortunately my father-in-law concentrated all of the decisions and mechanisms solo.
He has now lost the ability to coherently communicate due to progressive disease. My mother-in-law has been doing her best to keep on top of the day-to-day but is now working with my spouse on creating systems that are hers, that are simplified and that are doable. We don't have any sense about the plan they were working on and the bank asset manager that had been working with her has not been particularly helpful. So finally, I'm getting to my question. Would the RRC be appropriate for my spouse and I to join on behalf of helping my mother-in-law? She is not technologically adept enough to do this, but I think it's a great way to do it. She is putting a great deal of trust in us to help."
That's a great question, Matt, and I like that you are searching for a framework in order to help her make decisions rather than just intuiting things to do.
That's a good question. Would this help you help her? I think it would. I think it would because you would go through the masterclass, which is a framework for decision making around all the topics that we talk about.
Now for her, you might do more triage to, when you're facing a specific decision, look for a framework either within the course in the club, or within the community, or our resource center that has lots of decision trees. I think it's definitely a safe place where you can have adult conversations and ask questions as you're dealing with specific issues, whether it's related to you and your wife or your in-laws. I definitely think a hundred percent that, and it's hard to find those safe places. Many people in the club have dealt with similar issues. Either they're dealing with them now or they have dealt with them, and that's one reason why our motto is "Walk with the wise and become wise". So I think it definitely could be of assistance.
QUESTION TWO
Our next question is from Jake. Hey Jake, how are you doing buddy?
He says,
"Hey Roger, I listened to your podcast today. Long story short, they are always informative and welcome additions to my knowledge base."
Well, that's good to hear.
"Anyway, you mentioned some results of the 1600-person survey recently completed. I was wondering when and where I might be able to access those results? Obviously personal information redacted. I was a participant in that survey."
That's a great question. We started to share some of those details, Jake, the April 5th episode, I think that was 481 and shared a few throughout the month. I talked with my team. In the Rock Retirement Club, we have some infographics on the website of the club members, and we're going to do the exact same thing for the podcast audience. We won't share any specific information obviously, but we'll share a lot of the demographics as a group so we can get an idea of who our cohort is.
As for the timeline on that, I am a reformed over promiser, well, working to be reformed I'm a little pickled in that area, but we're working on that and we definitely plan to have some graphics on our website to give that to you, and you'll ultimately find that on the homepage of roger whitney.com.
QUESTION THREE
All right, our next question is actually asking for a book recommendation.
Oh, excuse me. They're actually giving a book recommendation. Awesome. So, this question comes from Andrew.
Andrew says,
"Hey, I was just listening to the latest podcast and could not help sending along a book recommendation. Lots of studies on stress, long-term stress, and the body's reactions over time and short-term.
You asked if the body's reaction to stress is the same as being caused by a lion. Quick answer, yes, and you can check out the book if you have any more questions. It's an easy read and has a body of research behind it. It's by Robert Sapolsky, and it's called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, the Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping.
Thanks so much, Andrew, for sharing a book recommendation. I will put it on my list and maybe some other people will as well. Related to this topic, Andrew, in this idea of hope, needing a vision for a future that's inspiring, agency and pathways. What I have found from a stress perspective is we're all going to have stress when we have spending shocks or market downturns. There's always going to be some stress there, but it's going to be exacerbated significantly if we don't have clarity on our plan and realize that we actually have some agency. If we feel helpless and all we're being told is, don't worry, it will work out. The long-term numbers say that you're okay. If that's all that we're being told, whether it's by an advisor or ourselves, we're going to be stressed.
Having agency, that's why we feel more comfortable having our hands on the wheel rather than sitting in the back seat. Similar concept. So, this agency part is really important to have in whatever process you're using.
QUESTION FOUR
All right. Our next question comes from Jennifer. She is struggling with switching to the de accumulation mode.
Jennifer says,
"I am a new listener to your podcast, and I am already addicted."
Welcome
"Roger and the team provide such incredible, important information, but in an entertaining way."
Well, good.
"So, here's the question. Roger has mentioned being overfunded in retirement in terms of spending plans and the challenge of frugality. How can someone test their plan to determine if they are. Indeed overfunded?"
So, Jennifer gives some background.
"My spouse and I are retired. My spouse is 75, but I retired early and I'm 58. I'm someone that is incredibly challenged with transitioning from saving to spending. Our plan is at 99% Monte Carlo over confidence number, but I'm still only able to get myself to spend half of what our plan is set at.
I'm trying to convince myself that our fund is overfunded, and we can spend more. I would greatly appreciate some insight."
Jennifer, you are not alone. First off, this is a big issue in transitioning from accumulator to de accumulator because the best accumulator is like someone that they work out chest and back and arms and they've been doing it for decades.
They're really good at accumulating. It feels good when they do it. They like the way that it looks when they see their accounts go up and everything. Then are we supposed to just simply switch and start doing legs all the time and not seeing the results and feeling weak in that area? It doesn't feel comfortable.
You are very normal in that sense. That is one reason why I think a more agile, iterative way can help you with that, because the fact is you are not going to overcome that. We talk about this term of being pickled. If you are a cucumber, you can be a cucumber. But if you are worried about the future and used to accumulation, it's like being pickled.
You can't go back to feeling comfortable spending, right? Just like a pickle can't go back to being a cucumber. You're always going to be this way. You're never going to be exonerated from uncertainty, from pain, or a need to work the problem. This 99% confidence number in your Monte Carlo really means nothing.
It just says at this point in time, given a zillion assumptions, you are on a safe course, but a lot of things can change tomorrow, which would change that number potentially.
So, I say that to say this, you can still use this to help you manage your pickled-ness by taking small, incremental actions of, let's say you want to spend more, let's say you want to pay first class for a flight, let's just use that as an example. That is an easier decision to make in the short, near term because it doesn't sign you up for having to do it every single time. So, the more you close the aperture from a 30-year horizon down to this year, what can Jennifer do this year, to overcome some of this frugality?
Make it a tiny thing just on this trip, I'm going to pay for business or first class. You can easily not do that ever again. That one decision isn't going to destroy the plan.
Whereas if you are trying to make a macro decision of doing it every year for the rest of your life, then maybe that one's a little bit scarier, but you could do it this year.
You could hire someone to do the lawn, because you could always get rid of them. It's really easy. You just make a phone call. They don't do it again. They stop charging you.
I would focus first on overcoming this frugality, Jennifer, by spending a little bit of money incrementally on things that will decrease the resistance in your life from doing the things that you really like to do.
This is why I use these two examples. Spending money on a lawn service or on a cleaning service. We have a lawn service; we don't have a cleaning service. Feels like an extravagance. It took me a lot to get a lawn service, but it frees my time so I can create this podcast or go ride my bike.
If I didn't spend on the lawn service, I might not get the podcast out, I might not be able to ride my bike. So, spend some money that is going to give you more time.
First class or business class ticket as an example. Let's say you're going to Europe. My wife and I are going to Amsterdam. We're flying to Amsterdam, flying out of Zurich later this year. We're flying business class. I was able to use a lot of points that made it easier. But the point is that's a long flight.
If you fly coach, when you get there, you're not going to be as well rested. It's probably going to cost you at least a day on either end of the trip to un-pretzel yourself from coach. Whereas if you fly first class or business class knowing that you're overfunded and you can easily afford it, if you are willing, it's actually going to buy you time.
You're going to have a much more pleasant flight. You're going to arrive and leave more refreshed, which is going to allow you to be more present in order to make more memories, et cetera.
So, I would focus on those types of things first, Jennifer, and realize this isn't going to be, I have fixed it and I am done. Do it year by year. Do it quarter by quarter. That's going to feel a lot more approachable than trying to just solve the problem of being frugal.
I'm going to warn you, if you don't do that, you are very likely, given what you've told me, are going to end up getting to 75 or 80 yourself and say, wow, I'm going to have more money than I ever thought and you're going to say, man, I should have flown first class. I should have got that lawn service. Given the differential in age of your spouse, the two of us should have spent more time rather than me cleaning the house or doing whatever. You're going to risk having a lot of regrets, and that should scare the heck out of you.
You should think about that. What would your 75-year-old self say to you? What would that person tell you to do?
These are some of the things you can do to try to start to overcome some of this frugality. Which has really served you well, by the way. With that, let's move on to the Bring It On segment and talk about building energy.
BRING IT ON WITH DR. BOBBY DUBOIS
All right let's Bring It On and focus on mastering the non-financial domain of our retirement and to focus on, I think this is the foundation of everything, energy we're going to bring on Dr. Bobby Dubois. Hey, Bobby. How are you doing?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: I'm doing very well, thank you.
Roger: Good. We've been building this toolkit, which has been nice.
Well, we've been talking about the toolkit. It'll be interesting to see what we can create from it. But what are we going to add to the box today?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, today we're going to talk about exposure to heat and cold, which will add another tool to the other ones we've talked about, which is exercise, getting good sleep, getting proper nutrition and mind body activities.
So, this is just another thing we can do to work on our energy and to help us be the best we can be to rock retirement.
Roger: So why would I want to do that, because I live in a environmentally controlled 75-ish degree house. Why do I want to try to be cold and hot?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, we didn't invent this concept. This has been going on for thousands of years and just because of course, as a scientist, just because it's been around a long time doesn't mean that it works, or it passed the test of time.
Yes, it's been around. That doesn't necessarily mean it works, and of course we'll have to talk about the science. But there are real benefits that have been measured related to both exposure to heat and exposure to cold. We'll get into the science, but I believe it's just another thing in addition to meditation or yoga or eating well, getting some exercise, getting to bed early and sleeping well.
It's just another thing that I think psychically can lower our blood pressure and help us to feel happier and even perhaps more important, live longer, have less likelihood of a heart attack, dementia. These have been demonstrated and I think not only are they fun to do, to some extent, of course they have some discomfort associated with it, but they can be a real benefit for us.
Roger: So, as we explore hot and cold, where should we start? You said there's a long history of, I guess, sauna. I think of heat and cold, I guess. I think of people jumping in frozen lakes. It's been going on for a long time?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yes, it has been going on a long time, several thousand years in both cases. So, sauna, and actually the word sauna comes from the Finnish language, and the fins sort of began doing stuff like this about 2000 years ago, and the traditional way was build fire, put rocks in fire. Put hot stones in a enclosed spot, climb in and start sweating, and way back when it was done for sort of relaxation and pleasure, it was sort of a social activity.
I mean, it was so important among the fins that even in World War II where they're in bunkers, people are shooting at them, they built mobile saunas and it was something that they believed and needed to be a part of their life.
But it's not unique to the fins. I mean, sweat baths have been in many, many other cultures, ancient Rome, Greece, Native Americans. There's a really interesting data point statistic, and it will be very important when we start to talk about the science. There are about five and a half million people living in Finland, and they reportedly have over 3 million saunas.
Roger: Whoa.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: It's everywhere and everybody does it, and that's what's going to turn out to be really important as we study the benefits in a scientific way.
Roger: So, let's define what we mean by hot and cold.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Okay. Before I define, I want to sort of give you the background on cold. Cold's been around for a very, very long time.
Obviously, there's been snow forever, but it was also used by the ancient Greeks several thousand-year BC as well. Again, relaxation and socialization.
What is a little different about the history of cold exposure is that from the early days, even back in the days of Hippocrates fourth century B.C., cold was felt to be medicinally beneficial.
Whether it was treating fevers, which sounds pretty obvious, or it's related to an ailment in your arm or your leg, it was felt that the cold had medicinal qualities, and so that's been very important for thousands of years people have thought these can benefit you.
So, defining terms, so heat, heat exposure traditionally in our era is either a sauna or a steam bath.
The typical one most people think of is a conventional sauna, which has this heater in the middle of a room, and it has rocks in it, and you might throw some water on top of it. Typically, it's about 160 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Very low humidity, about 10 to 20%, and typically people sit in there for five to 20 minutes a session, and they may do it once a week.
They may do it once a month, they may do it 5, 6, 7 times a week. So, I think that's one is pretty well understood, right?
Cold exposure is a little bit different, so it is a little harder to come by. Some people just do full showers. Some people take ice and toss it in their bathtub. There was a rather humorous article in the Wall Street Journal today on the various ways people go about working with cold and ice baths and such in their home.
You can also purchase a tank, a cold plunge tank. You can build one yourself out of a chest freezer. Some people go to these CO2 cryo places. Those sessions tend to be much shorter. So, two to five minutes, typically 50-to-60-degree water is what most people do. Again, it can be every day, it can be once a week, it can be however often you want to do it.
Roger: As I've toyed with this, two to five minutes sounds like an eternity, even with turning my shower too cold. 30 seconds seems like a long time just in my brief experimentation with this.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: It can feel that way. Now a shower, and I haven't done that cold shower thing for a while, because we do have a cold plunged tank.
In the cold plunge tank, your skin gets numb because you're being surrounded with the cold water. In a shower, depending upon if you're moving around or whatever, you may not quite get the same degree of numbness so it might actually even be more uncomfortable. But if you have a bathtub, just go and buy 10, 20 pounds of ice, throw it in, see what you think.
Roger: All right. Let's get into the science of this, you’re going to have to convince me to be this uncomfortable, whether it’s hot or cold. Other than it, you know, it definitely is invigorating. You feel it afterwards a lot, at least I did in my little experimentation. But there's benefits to this, I assume?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: There are benefits and as you know from our prior discussions, to me, theory is all very well and good, but if there isn't evidence to support it and evidence that we actually think is credible, then I'm not going to get very excited about it.
There are a couple of different studies that were done in Finland that really show substantial long-term benefits of saunas.
Now, most of the research has been done in traditional saunas. There are the newer ones called infrared saunas. Not as much research there. Steam baths have been around forever, but again, not as much science examination of it. But there was a Finnish study that looked at heart disease. They took a group of middle-aged folks in their sort of forties, fifties, up to sixty, and they followed them for 20 years, which is a really, really, really long study.
And this first study looked at the risk of sudden cardiac death. And they've asked people, well, how often do you do Asana? Some people did it once a week. Some people did it a couple times a week. Some people did it just about every day. The people who did it once a week had about a 10% risk of cardiac death. The people who did it two to three times a week had less than an 8% chance of risk, and the people who did it four to seven times a week had a 5% risk of sudden cardiac death. So, 50% reduction. Stopping smoking doesn't even get you 50% reduction. Good nutrition doesn't get you 50% reduction and exercise doesn't quite get you 50% reduction.
So, this was huge.
Then they looked at it in a slightly different way. It wasn't how often you were in there, but how many minutes you sat in the sauna and again, if you were there for less than 10 minutes, there was 7% reduction in sudden death. But if you were in there 10 to 19 minutes, which is fairly typical, there was a 50% reduction in risk of sudden death, and they also showed overall mortality and all cause cardiac mortality reduced as well.
So, this was a pretty remarkable study.
Roger: A couple things that come to mind when you're saying that Bobby is when you have such an extreme result from a study, it's sort of one of those too good to be true. I'm assuming these types of things you have to be able to replicate, right? Is this benefit really just sort of a one-off, or is this really what it's telling us?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: To my knowledge, there are no long-term randomized trials. There have been short things that looked at things like blood pressure, and in a study that looked at this, they found significant reductions in blood pressure and risk of hypertension. So that kind of gives you, well, perhaps that's what's going on.
It's helping your blood pressure, and then cardiac heart disease is less common. Because there are no randomized trials, we then have to look more clearly at the epidemiologic evidence.
Okay, so there's a chicken and egg problem. Maybe the people who are healthy do saunas, and they don't have heart disease and the people who are sick can't make it into the sauna or the gym and they're going to drop dead anyways, and it has nothing to do with the sauna.
So, you always have what are called confounders. One of the ways of trying to feel more comfortable, this is a real phenomenon, is what's called the dose response effect. So, when you see that not only people who do it do better than people who don't do sauna, but the more days per week you do it, gives you added belief that it could probably be real.
The other data point I suggested was the more minutes they did, the better off they were.
So again, randomized trials are what we want, we don't got it. So, the question is, do we believe this or not?
I am quite intrigued by it. I mean, there's also another study, you say corroborating studies. Now this study also a big study also done in Finland, also 20 years, looked at dementia risk and they again, adjusted for confounders.
So, did you drink alcohol? Were you overweight? What was your blood pressure? Did you smoke? Did you have diabetes? How old were you? So, they adjusted for that, and again, they found that for people who did sauna four to seven times a week, they had a 66% reduction in dementia. And people who did it once a week had about a 20% reduction.
Now let me come back to the point I raised earlier. You always run the risk that the people who do this behavior are healthy.
So, when people thought hormones for menopause reduced heart disease. In the end, it turned out not to be the case because it was an artifact of the early years of hormone therapy that the women who went on it were preventive focused and they went to their doctor and they read from the magazines, and so they got on the bandwagon early.
So, when they looked at the epidemiologic studies, they said, oh my god, it works. Of course, in the end, we found it didn't work.
That's why the Fin situation is so important because it isn't rich people do it, educated people do it, poor people don't, uneducated people don't. Pretty much everybody has a, a sauna in Finland or has access to a sauna.
I mean, every apartment building has it. You sign up for it and everybody does it.
So, it's probably not an artifact of education or other things. It's probably real, and so, because it also makes you feel better when you get out, I've been doing it for a while and I really, really enjoy it.
Roger: I imagine it comes to, what's the downside of doing it? We have some strong indications that there's a lot of benefit to it. I think this is the equation or the calculus we do with a lot of this stuff, Bobby, as a layperson, is it doesn't cost me that much in effort and there's indications. There's all this great upside. So worst case I take something that doesn't work for me, but the best case is it really helps me improve my health, so why not try it or why not do it? Does that make sense?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yeah. And like any other activity, you do want to talk to your doctor and make sure that everything is good with you before you jump in an ice bath or spend a lot of time in a sauna. So, there are safety issues to at least be aware of. By and large, it's very, very safe. But there are those people that need to be a bit more cautious.
I guess the downside is that most people don't have a sauna or a cold plunge down the hall, so they have to go somewhere. Now what I would sort of suggest to people is most gyms have saunas, or you could certainly join a gym that has a sauna.
You can try it out. You pay a $15 daily fee and go into the sauna. Try it a few times, and then you might want to buy one, and they're not $200, but they're not $20,000. They're in the thousand, $2,000 range. But try it out. Try it out a couple of times, see how you feel, and we'll get into it a little bit later on, how do we measure this in ourselves?
That's the direction I would go.
Roger: Yeah, probably the most approachable way. Okay, so let's switch to cold.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Like a lot of people, I hate the cold. I don't have a huge amount of body fat, so when I'm outdoors and it's cold, I just do not like it at all. So for me, this was a tough one to get going with.
Now the cold exposure has been around for thousands of years, as I said, but the science behind it is quite new. If people are interested, you can read about Wim Hoff, who's sort of the iceman, who buries himself in ice, and he's also had a variety of scientific experiments done on him.
What we know about cold exposure is that there are near term effects that are very measurable in your blood, and they suggest what the long-term benefits may well be.
So, for example, if you expose people to cold exposure, cold plunge, whatever it might be, a whole series of very important hormones, double, triple, quadruple quintuple in amounts in your brain and body, dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline. These are really important hormones that frankly make you happy.
That's why people do cocaine and various other things.
When I get out of a cold plunge or when I'm in it towards the latter parts of it, I'm in a very floaty, euphoric state. That's been measured. What's also been measured is a conversion of the bad fat we have. White fat is the cosmetic stuff we don't like, and brown fat, which burns calories, and these types of benefits happen for one, two minutes, three minutes, a few times a week.
But again, we've got sort of short-term observations. We don't yet have the long-term, so that's where we are. I'm not going to oversell it. I think people who do it feel a whole lot better. There have been studies with questionnaires about mood and anxiety and the cold stuff really seems to work.
What we don't yet know is the cardiac and the other things.
Roger: I had never heard of white and brown fat until now. That was the first time I had ever heard of those two different fats. We don't need to get into that, but maybe that's something we explore later.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: There's a third one just to add to the list, which is called visceral fat, and that's actually the one that's really bad.
Roger: I've heard of that one.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: But we can talk about that another day.
Roger: So, I recall doing a triathlon maybe 15 years ago now, and it was wetsuit legal, and I didn't have a wetsuit, and it was in the sixties, I want to say sixties, fifties. I jumped in and started swimming. So, I was doing activity as well, but I hyperventilated.
I had to get on a kayak and calm myself down. My heart rate just went through the roof. So, I imagine that's one thing that cold does is it makes your heart rate jump significantly.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yeah. There's something called a diving reflex. It's in our reptilian brain.
It's not like I'm a scaredy cat. It actually just happens. With acclimation to what you're doing, you can sort of override that, but your basic inner wiring is going to cause that to happen. So not a surprise, happens to all of us and gradually you can address it.
Roger: I've experienced a slight of that even just going from regular shower to going cold for 30 seconds. It's a shock.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yeah, it is a shock.
Roger: Obviously all these things check with your doctor because there are things to consider before you try things. What experiments have you done on yourself? Cause I know that you've done them.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Absolutely. So, we've been actively doing both sauna and cold plunge for a couple of years at this point. Some people like to combine them, sauna then cold plunge. Some people do sauna, cold plunge back to the sauna.
I believe, and again, this is based on theory, not on strict science. I believe the benefit of the cold plunge is not necessarily when you're in the cold plunge, it is when you get out.
What you don't want to do, at least in my belief, is jump into a hot sauna or drink hot tea. I think you want to allow your body to gradually bring your temperature back to where it was, and it's that process that I believe brings the benefits and brings the happiness and various other things.
So, I don't do sauna, cold plunge, sauna. I will do sauna then cold plunge. I tried doing this before bed because some people swear by sauna right before bed. In our sleep discussion we talked about hot shower and other things because it allows your body ultimately to cool off while you're sleeping, which helps your sleep.
What I found was when I did sauna and cold plunge and then jumped into bed, I was so happy and awake. I couldn't go to sleep. So now I will do the sauna near bed or whatever, but I will do the cold plunge in the morning because I found for me, the cold plunge wakes me up and I don't really want to do that right before bed.
It makes me happy, but it is hard to sleep.
Roger: Okay. One question I had for you was about inflammation. Cause I think of athletes, I see the football player sitting in the cold plunge essentially to help their muscles and we didn't really talk from that perspective. Do you have any insight on that? Maybe that's not part of what we're talking about here.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: There's been lots and lots of discussion around this. There's been studies around this. People swear by it. I played tennis, my elbow is really sore, and I stuck it in nice bath, and it felt better. Certainly, the cold plunge, if you have things like back pain, it really does help. It breaks up some of the discomfort and it does feel better.
There was an interesting study on winter swimmers. There are people that are crazy, and they go swimming in the winter, and they measured the number of antioxidants in their blood, which is an inflammatory protector, and they were markedly increased. So, there is at least some data suggesting that it could actually affect inflammation and that could relate to cancer or could relate to heart disease.
So, there may be these long-term benefits that we don't quite know yet but could turn out to be really important.
Roger: What I like about these types of things is that there's science behind them, but they're not medication and they're things that from a cost perspective, medications can be critical, but for a cost potential benefit standpoint, doing natural things that promote your sleep or anti-inflammatory or improve your mood, it seems like a no-brainer.
So, what would be the next step that someone should do to explore this?
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, if I've kind of piqued your interest, hopefully I have, and let Roger or me know if you do try any of these. Step one is just to make sure it's safe for you. Again, if you have heart disease or you have other things that could be problematic, it is always good to talk to your doctor.
Next, I would pick your flavor. Are you interested in exploring heat exposure, cold exposure, or some combination thereof? Find a practical way to do it. If it's a sauna and your gym doesn't have it, then maybe pay the $15 daily rate to one down the street that does give it a try three or four times.
That's not a huge financial expenditure.
If you're not a member of a gym, you could try it out again with daily rates, and most gyms have daily rates, so that's what I would do.
The cold plunge, I don't know how many people have bathtubs nowadays. Everybody switched to showers, but if you have a bathtub, pretty easy to go to the local market, get a couple of 10-pound bags of ice, dump it in, stick your turkey thermometer in it, and see what the temperature is and dive right on in.
Or a cold shower, that's another option. Obviously if it's wintertime, if you happen to have a swimming pool or there is a swimming pool, you can always jump right in.
So as always, you want to assess a baseline. I'm going to do this cold or hot for the following purpose, mood, sleep, whatever it is you are thinking in the near term.
Obviously, you can't test your risk of a heart attack or dementia over 30 years. That's a little hard to assess. But there could be a near term measurable, and we talked about them in prior ones. There were questionnaires on sleep, questionnaires on mood, and a variety of other things. So, measure a baseline, try it out for a month.
You don't have to try it out for a year. You try it out for two weeks, try it out for a week, and then do the same reassessment. My guess is you'll know pretty soon whether there are near-term benefits, and then the long-term benefits, you either believe the science or you don't and if you stick with it, then potentially those long-term benefits will be yours as well.
Roger: Even trying it out for a week or a month. Really any of these things, Bobby, where I have noticed, not necessarily on hot and cold, is I'm paying attention. I think that's the key part of what you always talk about is pay attention. Whether it's just writing a couple notes in a journal or what, however you want to do it, but when you try it, where I've always had the biggest insight is when I stop because you sort of naturally feel good, but if you're paying attention, it just sort of goes with the flow. But then when you stop and it's like, oh, why am I not feeling it? Oh, I stopped that a month or two ago. For me to obviously exercise always. When I stop exercising, it takes a while to remember, oh, this is why I'm not feeling like I usually do. I’m not doing that anymore.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Then when you restart, whatever that is, if you feel better, then it reaffirms that that's really what it is. The placebo effect is not likely to go on and off like a yo-yo or a light switch. So, if you start something, you feel better, you stop it, you feel worse, you start it again, you feel better, that starts to become significantly more believable.
Again, that's the end of one trial that we've sort of talked about in the past.
Roger: Bobby, thanks so much for adding another tool for us to experiment with to improve our energy.
Dr. Bobby Dubois: Oh, my great pleasure!
TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT
On your marks! Get set!
Now we're off to set a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.
All right, in the next seven days, here's what I want you to do. I want you to get a piece of paper out and I want you to write down what your planning process is.
What are the big rocks and in what order are those big rocks, your big pillars for how you're either going to get to retirement and make those decisions?
Or if you're in retirement, how do you make decisions and what are the things that are most important that you continue to iterate on?
I want you to write that out. If you work with an advisor, ask them what it is. If they're guiding that process and they should be able to articulate it and probably have documents that explain it very clearly.
I want you to understand the process to see if it's a closed system that's only focused on the money and only paying lip service to the non-financial stuff. Or if it's a more agile system where you feel like you have agency, you can think creatively to apply that agency and you have a structure that will help you always think about a better future.
I want you to identify your process that's either going to reaffirm what you have or help examine how you're approaching things.
ROCK RETIREMENT PLEDGE
So today in our affirmation understanding of show's purpose is, I'm going to do it a little bit differently because we are getting ready for our retreat as a company, and I'm going to tell you some of our core beliefs, our purpose and our mission as an entity, so you get understanding where we're coming from.
This may be of interest to you, may not.
All right. Our core values, and this is the standard we hold ourselves up against.
Number one is stewardship. We recognize that we have been entrusted with someone's lifelong savings goals and dreams. We embrace our duty to serve others responsibly and with care. That includes you as a listener.
Even though we're not managing your life, we're helping coach you and empower you to do so. We take that seriously.
Two. Collaboration. Magic happens when great people work together.
Three, the golden rule. We treat everyone we interact with as we ourselves would like to be treated.
Number four, positive outlook. We focus on solutions.
Five, fun. We take our work very seriously, I really do. But not ourselves. We bring a sense of play to all that we do.
Next one, DWWSWWD. We always strive to do what we say we will do. Strive, fall down, but we strive.
Then lastly, authentic. The greatest gift we can give the world is to be all of who we are.
So, our purpose as an entity, and really this all focuses on the podcast too, we exist to empower you to rock retirement, and our mission, aligned with that purpose, is to establish the most comprehensive retirement planning ecosystem that fully integrates life, money, and agile project management.
There's more to it, but for now, that's what we're here to do and we're all in with you. So, let's go do that.
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance references, historical and does not guarantee future results.
All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.