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Episode #584 - Is My Retirement Safe? Navigating Financial Security in Uncertain Times

“You must build up your life action by action and be content if each one achieves a goal as far as possible and no one can keep you from this.

But, you say, there will be external obstacles!

Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control and wisdom.”

-Marcus Aurelius

Roger: Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to lean in and rock it, to build that life, life up, action by action.

Today's show is going to be a little bit different. It is born from a number of conversations and interactions I've had with clients, rock retirement club members as well as people like you listening to the show that email me and reply to our Noodle email every Saturday, which you should sign up for, by the way. We're going to share some resources to help you on the topic we're going to talk about today. You can sign up for it at thenoodle.me, It's our weekly email where we give a summary of the show and share resources. If you hit reply, it actually comes directly to me. So, if you want to tell me something, that's an easy way to do it.

Anyway, we're going to do a deep dive on whether your retirement is safe and how to navigate financial security in uncertain times. It's going to be some wise words, hopefully from my experience, as well as practical steps you can take. Our intent is to help reframe how we're thinking about everything in the world today and how to take action that is productive for you. After that deep dive, we're going to share some rocking retirement in the wild stories from listeners taking action on creating a great retirement. Then I'm going to do something I don't do very often, but I think it might be helpful in this moment to tell you a little bit about myself and my origin story. Not something I’m super comfortable doing, but it's very easy to sound smart on the Internet or on, in front of a microphone. It's just super easy with AI. I want to give you some perspective of where I speak from and you can make the decision whether it's helpful for you or not. Then just like always, we will end with a smart sprint and a segment from my grandfather's journey in World War II. So, let's get this party started.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

All right, Deep dive on navigating retirement in uncertain times. Here's how we're going to approach this.

Number one, I'm going to set the stage. Two, we're going to talk about a little bit about some of the worries, some of the dangers that creep up when things are a little bit scary. Then we're going to go to the risks that are there if we act inappropriately. Once we do that, we're going to pivot to what you can do right now, to what you should do to have some control over your retirement plan and build up a life action by action with incremental progress, always.

Now, I think I need to give a warning here because we're going to talk about some things that are in the political realm. Yes, we are. When we have a retirement planner hat on, you shouldn't care about my political views, and honestly, in that realm, I don't care about yours. So, we're not going to talk about our opinions on things, but we're going to address some of the things happening in the political world right now and how they relate to us in retirement planning. Just be prepared for that.

All right, so let's set the stage first. For decades, 40, 50 years, as long as I can remember, national debt has been an issue. Budget deficit has been an issue. Trade deficit has been an issue. Immigration policy has been an issue. Wasting government funds has been an issue. The feasibility of Social Security long term has been an issue. Same with Medicare. The protocol seems to have been over the last 40, 50 years is that we talk about these things during election periods, our leaders say they're going to address them, and then once they're elected, maybe we take some incremental action, but nobody can agree on anything so we just go about the business of prosperity until the next election cycle where we talk about them again. That seems to be the protocol. We all know these things are issues that need to be dealt with that, like a cancer, have been growing at various rates over time. Well, this current administration that came in in January doesn't seem to want to play by that protocol. They appear to have a shock and awe protocol where they're not going to play by those rules anymore. They're going to reset and actually try to address them.

Now, let's assume for this moment that they are sincere in what they're doing, we don't need to get into that discussion. Let's assume they're sincere. They're using a shock and awe strategy with DOGE and tariffs and immigration policy, et cetera. There's a lot happening really quickly that it's very difficult to keep up with. On all these topics, my guess is that you have some opinions on immigration or DOGE or waste or tariffs or whatever. I have opinions. My guess is you may have some convictions about a few of those that you're passionate about. Myself as well, in our political lives, that's a great place to express those we support, candidates we communicate with, leaders we fund, causes we believe in to try to help create a better country, maybe even march at times, who knows? In the political realm that is our role.

But this is my point, when we have our retirement planner hat on, which I wear when I talk to you on the show or when I'm working with a client or teaching in the club, when I have my retirement hat on, what my opinions or convictions are in those realms really don't matter. That's not my role. My role is to help someone else build a great life action by action. From a retirement planning perspective, then my role isn't to put my opinions on what I think is going to happen or what should be done. That's not my place. When you put your retirement planner hat on, when you're thinking about your retirement plan and navigating, I would suggest to you that you should put aside those strong opinions and convictions as best you can so you can focus on building a great life step by step. When we let those things bleed into our retirement planning role, some really uncomfortable or bad things could happen. We essentially have a choice. As a retirement planner, every day is you can feel acted upon because all of this craziness is going on and the shock and all and the rules may have changed. Who knows how long this lasts. You may be feeling acted upon just like we would when we get cancer or we get ill or life happens to us. In the non-financial realm, you have a choice to make. You can feel like you're a victim and that you are powerless, or you can try to grasp what I can do to build up my life action by action, as Marcus Aurelius says, that's what I want to focus on.

The central question, I think when it comes to all the worries and uncertainty right now is, is this a means to a better end or the end of life economically and financially as we know it? That seems to be the central question about the shock and awe approach that's happening because the pace of change is frightening. That creates that fog that I've talked about, that comes in where we can't see the future near as well because all the rules seem to be changing and we don't know what speculation is, what is truth. Which just confuses the whole situation, which causes uncertainty, and markets go down and all sorts of things happen. So those are the worries.

So now what are the dangers that happen during this type of environment? Well, one of the dangers is that we bask and bathe in this worry, and it gets exacerbated by the media because they're incentivized to amplify fear and uncertainty. Essentially, the media and the Internet in general are a mechanism to amplify whatever we're feeling whether it's greed or fear. Right now, fear in worry is the main topic for a lot of us. So, the media and the Internet amplifies that to their ends to gain viewership and sometimes to sell product. That's a danger. We have to manage that. We have to limit that.

Another danger is we just have too much information. We're aware of way too much. I went to CNN.com, foxnews.com, Apple News, and Wall Street Journal to just peruse the headlines, and here's what I found in, like, five minutes. Children dying in Ukraine with photos. Hamas and Israel firing missiles back and forth at each other. I think the death toll is over 50,000. People at car dealerships burning cars and shooting dealerships. Town halls locally erupting. and caught on video. I saw a headline on one of the financial presses where it was like, there's a danger zone for retirees when the markets dip, experts say with exclamation points. We can watch murder trials all over the country with commentary. We are not equipped to absorb all of this that just keeps coming at us and coming at us, and it puts us on our heels and makes us fearful. That's the danger here.

Another danger for you and me, if we're near or in retirement, this can get exacerbated because retirement, this life change, is one of the top five stressors. Life heightens all of this worry about the future. We're losing some of our superpower to work and earn money, which feels powerful. We can dig our way out of it. We're losing that. That puts us on our heels a little bit. We’re facing the fact that, wow, like Roger here is 58 years old. I'm getting older. I'm feeling it, I'm seeing it in the mirror. I can see the future and not all my life is symmetrical. That's scary at my weaker moments. It puts us more at risk to these outside influences.

Lastly, this danger that comes from fear works with greed too. The hucksters are out there. Now, huckster isn't a bad word. It sort of has a bad connotation. But I looked it up. It's one who sells wares or provisions in the street. Okay, that's the definition. A peddler, a hawker, One who uses aggressive, showy, and sometimes devious methods to promote or sell a product. Yeah, I could see that. But a huckster is someone that just sells wares, usually in the street. Hucksters are dangerous to us when we're fearful or when we're greedy. I'll give you a couple of examples. The origin story of the financial services business is a distribution machine. We have huge financial firms that market either advice or an actual product, like mutual funds or insurance products, etc. They hire advisors, some that are advisors, some that are salesmen, some that have financial planning background, to distribute not just financial advice, but the products that are created. This is just the nature of it. I'm not even saying good or bad, but what happens when you have a factory? You respond to demand. I've seen this over and over again, not just in financial services, but financial planning.

In the 1990s, it was greed that was the dominant emotion. It wasn't fear, it was greed. We were a new economy. The Internet has been born. Technological revolution. Old rules don't apply. Making normal returns isn't good enough because I can make double, triple, quadruple returns in Internet stocks and technology. That was the craze that a lot of us, if you're my age, vintage, year or older, remember. What did the product production factory do? They created things like Munder NetNet, which was a mutual fund. I don't even know if it's still around or not. I did a little basic research just to get some numbers. I remember this fund. I probably owned it at one point. Well, first off, Munder NetNet was a mutual fund that focused solely on Internet and technology stocks in a very aggressive way. That's what it was. In 1997, a year after its inception, it had about 10 million in assets. And by the. By April of 2021, I believe it had up to 12 billion in assets. It had massive growth during the last throes of the Internet craze of the 90s and returned well over 50%, I believe. It was produced because people demanded it because they were greedy. The product market responded. Then when the Internet bubble blew up, I recall, I don't know if it was the first one, but I think I was working at UBS at the time. I recall the introduction of a principal protected mutual fund. It might have been the first of its kind, and, the pitch was, you put money into this fund, you will get upside return, but your money is safe if you hold it to maturity. I think it had a maturity date. It had some weird thing. I don't think it worked out very well, but it was produced because people weren't greedy anymore. They were fearful, and these hucksters are responding to demand. That's a danger for you and me, responding to people trying to sell us stuff that are trying to alleviate whatever we're worried about. So, the risk is acting on these dangers.

Let's go to risk for a second. As you navigate building a great life step by step, our risk is how we act on our worries and the dangers that exacerbate those worries. So, if we take two extremes, one is to just put our head in the sand. Everything will be fine. I don't need to pay attention to any of this. There's some value to that, but then that diminishes greatly over time. I saw this happen in the 90s where it was a new economy and people just said, I'm going to get 20% a year and I'll retire and take 10% of my portfolio every year to live on. The numbers just work. I did a spreadsheet. I know really smart people that did spreadsheets like that who actually retired. Then when the Internet bubble burst, they doubled down or ignored what was happening and they just kept taking the same kind of withdrawal rate. They had their heads in the sand and ended up in really bad situations due to a lot of bad choices, or lack of making any choice at all. Head in the sand is generally not a good strategy.

Now let's go to the other extreme, which is extreme action. Whoa. We start to let our convictions about what's going to happen in the future and our opinions bleed into our retirement planning realm. We act on the worst fears that we have. And I've had numerous personal instances of navigating with clients who make these types of actions. I saw this happen in 2008, coming out of 2008 and 09, the financial system almost blew up. Literally. There were clients that wanted to take extreme action, assuming that it didn't work out. What ends up happening if you follow that thought process is you end up painting yourself into a corner and you better be right, that the extreme outcome of the financial system as we know it actually blowing up happens. It has to happen. Not only does it have to happen, but your timing better be right too. Luckily, we were able to navigate away from extreme positions because a lot of people gave up on finance, gave up on markets, gave up on everything and missed out on the fact that there were a lot of vested interests in keeping the party going regardless of what made sense or not. We also saw this during COVID Global Pandemic Bear market. We saw this with Y2K to a lesser extent. This type of extreme decision making is not helpful either. Incremental action, where we have our planner hat on and we're trying to think logically so we can build step by step is how you get through this. We need to be nimble. I would argue we need to be agile and work off of what is actually true as much as we can and give ourselves a lot of flexibility.

All right, now let's pivot. Okay, great. Roger, you set it all up. What the heck do I do? That's really one of two questions that are the most important questions before the house. Am I okay? What should I do? We can talk about our opinions and our convictions and all the worries as much as we want, but at the end of the day, it comes down to am I okay? What should I do? Where should our focus be there? Well, I'm going to tell you first where our focus should not be. Your focus should not be on what's wrong or right. That has nothing to do with building a retirement plan you can have confidence in. It doesn't have anything to do with what our opinion of the future is and trying to predict how the dice are going to roll because this is not predictable. We're not going to focus there. What we're going to focus on is what you can do right now to improve your situation and to have some control over all of the uncertainty in our lives, external uncertainty and internal uncertainty. What can I do next? That's a loop we want to get into. Okay, this is where I'm at. What can I do, what risks and opportunities that are presenting itself? What are the most important ones? Okay, let me take action on that one and then celebrate the action and then go back through the loop again. Now what? Now what? Now what can I do? Now what can I do? Incremental improvement is where it's at when it comes to retirement planning. Not trying to be right and smart. Not painting ourselves into corners. That nimbleness, that agility that is going to help you build up your life action by action.

All right, so we're going to get to more specifics here, but we're going to do it for two different groups of people because this is literally what I try to talk about and teach on the show every week. So, we're going to first talk to the crowd of people that have a retirement plan of record. What should you do? Then we're going to talk to people that maybe haven't gotten around to it yet or haven't finished it yet. What should they do?

Okay, so first we're going to talk to people that have a retirement plan of record. What is that briefly? That is, they know who they are and what they want, and that is expressed in how much their base great life costs and what the discretionary spending wants are. They have that mapped out in some versions, knowing that it's imperfect. Secondly, they have organized their resources, their social capital, their human capital and their financial capital and have assessed that with the levels of resources they have given their spending over their lifetime. They've assessed that it's feasible using typical software like Monte Carlo scenario software or spreadsheets or something like that. They've assessed long term; this is a feasible path for me. Then lastly, they've built out a resilient plan where they have clarity on how they will pay for their life over my default is the next five years these things are in place. That's what we're talking about when you have a plan of record, which is always changing.

What do you do if you have this plan of record in place and you're worried about how all this plays out? Well, under vision, here's what I would suggest you do. Number one, reassess your base great life spending estimates. We're all on some scale of how detailed those are. Oh, this, this is just a guess for me. I have quickened data for 30 years. So right now, it is a good time to rekindle your campfire of confidence by, okay, here's what I need to spend. Let me put Eyes on that again. If you're married and you're the financial manager, have both of you put eyes on that again. This is what we say we want to spend and then look at your discretionary wants. The spice of life. Are these still relevant? Confirm those and update them. Now's a good time to refresh this if you're really worried. Anytime you're worried or facing a decision, it's good to go through this protocol. Once you have your spending estimates reviewed and updated, next it moves on to feasibility. Refresh your plan of record. Update all of the asset values of your social capital, Social Security, your pension, your human capital, part time work, if you're planning on doing that, et cetera, your financial capital, the current value of that and do your feasibility assessment using Monte Carlo or whatever tool you use or have used to build your plan of record. Oh, yeah, I'm still feasible. Once you've done that, let's move to resilience. Stress test that plan. What happens if the markets go down from here by 20% by 30%? How is the feasibility of my plan If I lose 20, 30% of my assets? Is my base great life and my wants still feasible or are my wants a little bit more iffy, but my base great life is still okay? Do some stress testing on that. Do it with Social Security if you're worried about that getting cut or means tested.

Next, under resiliency, reevaluate the minimum effective dose of risk you need to take. Now this is easily done with software. I don't know about Bolden, I haven't used that in a while. But I know in the software we're using the club and, in my practice, we can easily see if we're targeting a 60, 40 equities to bond portfolio. We can see well what happens if I have a portfolio that's 80% bonds? Is my plan still feasible even if I have much lower returns but is it more stable? It's good to stress test what is the minimum effective dose of risk from a market going up and down perspective that I need to take. It's not going to be perfect, but it'll give you a sense of maybe you're taking too much equity risk even though you don't have to. Not perfect, but it'll help tease out the discussion. A lot of times we think that we need to take risks because we need the returns. But in retirement what happens is that the consistency of returns becomes more important and the average rate of return becomes less important because of how sequence of returns happen. So, it's good to explore this next. Revisit your RISA profile, we'll have a link to it in The Noodle is a profile that tries to match your withdrawal strategy to who you are and what makes you comfortable. It's not perfect, but it helps you get informed about how you approach financial risk. Are you more optionality-based or more safety first based? Maybe you thought you were more optionality-based and you were comfortable with markets, but now that we're under stress, you're realizing maybe I was more safety first than I remembered. That can help you identify. Maybe you have a mismatched strategy related to what makes you comfortable and confident to retire. Good to revisit that.

Lastly and from a triage perspective, most importantly, and we talked about this, on you know, shows, I think in February is update your allocation study. Specifically, do you have enough liquidity in retirement or if you're close to retirement for those first years of retirement to fund your paycheck which pays for your life for at least five years. Do you know exactly where that money is going to come from and do you have confidence that it's not at risk of losing money in the markets? That goes a long way when you're under stress. So that is the protocol to refresh your confidence on your plan. As you go through this, you will identify maybe little baby action steps you can take to improve your plan. If you are really worried about the future from your opinion standpoint, well, you can take incremental action to maybe build out your income floor and go from five to six years or you can go from five to six years and lower some of your discretionary spending, which actually makes it seven years. Knowing that this is just a season of life and it’s temporary, helps you have more confidence. Those are the kinds of things you want to tease out as you follow the protocol. That is if you have a retirement plan of record fully implemented.

Now let's switch gears to those of you that don't have a retirement plan of record either fully implemented or any plan at all that is structured with the pillars of this is what I want my vision. Is it feasible and is it resilient? If this is the case and you're losing confidence in your plan or lack of a plan or plan that's not fleshed out as much. The key here is triage. Triage to give yourself time to do things a little bit more thoughtfully. Just think of an ED or an emergency department. What do they do when you come into the emergency Room. As we think of it, they do triage. Are you bleeding out or can you wait so we can prioritize who's most important? They triage you so they can figure out what's going on and what is most important. If you don't have a plan of record at all or if you don't have one that you have confidence in that either you built or a financial planner built, now is the time to do some triage to get some breathing room so you can have a little bit of confidence and calm so you can build out your retirement plan of record. The way triage works with retirement starts with liquidity. Start with your cash flow needs. So, assuming you're retired or even if you're working, build out a five year cash flow statement as best you can of the income that I have right now. If you're working, that's work income. If you're not working, maybe it's a pension, maybe it's Social Security or part time work. Maybe nothing. You may have nothing on the income end if you're retired and then compare that for the next five years to what your expected spending is for your base great life and your wants. If you don't have a plan of record, you might not have a good handle on these things. A way to frame that might be here is my fixed expenses and here are my discretionary expenses. Doesn't mean you have to go do a detailed budget but you had better get a sense of what you're spending over the next five years and whether you have enough income to cover it. Once you build out this five year cash flow statement, now you want to look at your income and say how comfortable I am, am I with those estimates? If you're working, I feel great about my job. Been here for years. They value me. I put my risk of losing my job at 5%. Okay, great. Have confidence in your income. But maybe you're in a position where, ooh yeah, when markets are down and with what's happening in the government, what's happening with the economy, my job's pretty expendable. My chance of losing a job is 80% or 70%. I don't know. Well then that makes you aware of whether you can count on this income. Make an assessment of those things. Maybe I need to build a bigger emergency fund or contingency fund because my job is more at risk now. I didn't think so last year, but now I'm a little bit more worried. Maybe that is a sign to build some more liquidity as a shock absorber in case you do get lose your job or if you're retired. You're assessing Social Security, you're sensing your pension, which is probably fine. I think they're probably fine except for rare cases on pensions. But maybe part time work isn't going to materialize like you thought. Make an assessment of that, look on the spending side and note where you could cut back a little bit, which will help manage the situation.

In the end, you want to make sure you have a contingency fund and you want to start building out an income floor. If you need money from your assets to fund the gap that isn't covered by income. Sure, it would have been nice to have done that before markets started to be wonky. Sometimes we can feel like we have missed the boat. I can't do that now. I have got to stay invested until markets come back. If that's what you're thinking, I would look at that thought process more closely. What happens if they just keep going down?

Number two, if you pull back the aperture and look at markets. Sure, we may be in correction territory right now, depending on what market you're looking at, whether it's the S&P or the NASDAQ, if you pull back the aperture to 3, 4, 5 years, you still had a really good run. If you want to feel more confident in your plan, maybe you can improve your liquidity right now, even though you didn't hit the top. Those are some basic things that you can do. If you don't have a plan of record, do the triage. So, none of these decisions that we walk through, whether you have a plan of record or don't have a plan of record, have nothing to do with what the government or companies are doing. They're searching for agency for you to take small actions to improve your lot. Once you find them, if things keep getting worse with markets or if the economy really goes into a recession, you want to incrementally make adjustments and be nimble, be agile, rather than make extreme decisions because we could be wrong. Things could go really well, and maybe this is exactly what we needed. Who knows? We don't have to have an opinion on that to build a great life action by action.

RETIREMENT IN THE WILD

Now it's time for Retirement in the Wild, actions that individuals just like you are taking to rock retirement.

AN ANONYMOUS RETIREMENT JOURNEY

Our first one comes from and I think I said it would be anonymous because I don't have their name here, says

“Hey Roger,

Just a short note to say a heartfelt thank you for your podcast a month ago on taking action now for a resilient retirement. I have a plan of record thanks to my work with you and all in the RRC. I initially had a plan in place with my financial advisors to shift the rest of my floor funding into safer investments as I'm retiring at the end of June. I reached out to them and they wanted to move the investments at the same time as the rest of the annual rebalancing that they normally do in April. After your podcast I asked them to move ASAP, which they did. So, I moved from probably an 80% equity to 20% bond ratio mixed, into secure short term bonds and Treasuries in mid-February. The upshot? My floor funding is now much more secure and I am not freaked out by the 7 to 10% drop in the market over the past few weeks.

Thank you for me and my husband's peace of mind. We recognize that more shocks will always come but wanted to thank you for encouragement to take action now.”

That is awesome to hear and I would say for those of you who may not have taken action, take action when it comes to the security of your retirement. Confidence is really important and having enough buffers to be able to react reasonably is worth it. It's not about optimizing returns anymore. It's about giving you confidence to retire. I'm so happy to read this and thank you for sharing your story.

NEW LISTENER NOTES ROGER’S PHILOSOPHY STILL RINGS TRUE

Our next quick one comes from a new listener who says,

“I found your podcast about a year ago and really enjoy your personality and all the great information.”

Well, thank you, that's nice to hear.

“I started listening to episodes from the beginning, kicking it back to 2014, such a long time ago.”

The 12/16/2014 episodes. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. I haven't listened to that in ages.

“There was one thing you said that really stood out to me. It was basically, stop watching the markets and live a good life. Your philosophy, although from 10 years ago, still rings true as we're watching the market take correction right now. I want to give you an attaboy for that.”

Well, thank you but it goes to taking action, and you did all the action. I'm just the encouragement, hopefully.

IS THERE AN INDEX OF EPISODES TO SEARCH?

We have one more and this comes from another new listener replied to me from the, from The Noodle, which you can subscribe to at thenoodle.me. We'll have a link to the resources I'm going to mention here. This person says,

“Happy Saturday. Is there a table of contents or index that would make it easier for me to search for through your podcast? I'm interested in finding agency. I'm currently having scary moments thinking about retiring early at age 56, but still possibly doing some work related to the golf industry.

Thank you, Dan.”

Dan, understandably so, is a little worried. Retirement by itself in normal times is worrisome. It's scary, but when things are in turmoil, even more so. I'm going to let Nichole answer this question in The Noodle this weekend. We'll have a link to a summary of a book called The Power of Agency that has a framework for finding agency. Also, if Nichole is able to find a link or two to some episodes related to that, she'll have links to those in The Noodle as well. Thanks so much for your question and your encouragement.

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

On your marks, get set, now it's time to take a little baby step you can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.

All right, I think we know what the smart sprint is in the next seven days. Take some of the action steps that we talked about.

Outside of the specific action steps of whether you have a feasible plan of record or not, probably one of the biggest action steps you take, if it's not those, is to start compartmentalizing your retirement planning so you have a process that focuses on agency and action rather than what is happening in the outside world. That's probably the number one thing that we could do to improve our decision making when it comes to retirement planning.

ROGER’S ORIGIN STORY

All right, now I want to share a little bit of my origin story and the reason I'm doing this. I don't really do this. I don't really have it much on the website. I hardly introduce myself at the beginning of the show. Maybe you've listened for a while and it rings true. But it's good, I think, sometimes to reveal this, but it's a little uncomfortable. I'm just going to try to give you some facts briefly.

From an education standpoint, I have a CFP®, a certified financial planner. I got that in 2000. I taught the retirement planning segment of the CFP® curriculum at University of Texas Arlington to CFP® certificates. I've taught the curriculum. I have a CIMA, which I got in the 2000s, which stands for Certified Investment Management Analyst. It's through a great organization that I volunteer at which is the Investment Wealth Institute. They have partnered with the Wharton Business School and a few other schools. It's basically about portfolio construction from an institutional level. Very detailed. I have something called the Certified Private Wealth Advisor, which is essentially a certification focused on serving the high net worth space and gets into a lot of tactical things. I have the Retirement Management Advisor Certification through the same institute. I like this institute because they do very academically rigorous certifications. that one is especially for retirement. I actually serve on the committee that has refreshed the entire curriculum for that. I've been blessed to take part in that. I've taught the concepts that we talk about here for over two decades. That's from an educational standpoint, my pedigree going back, you know, 20 plus years.

Now let's talk about practical experience, because theoretical experience through certifications and education and writing and thinking is really important, but I think it's also important to have practical experience. So, I'm going to give you a brief history of mine.

Man, it's been a long time ago. I think I went back and looked at finra.org under rokracheck to see when I was registered. I was registered as a broker on July 31, 1991. So, from 91 to 98, I worked for a very small brokerage house for too long, honestly. I traded technology stocks for retail clients. It was a crazy time. I didn't know what I was doing. I had mentors that were basically stock traders and that's how I learned. That became very unfulfilling internally, although it was very satisfying financially. In 1998 I moved to Paine Weber, which became UBS and I was there from 1998 to 2003. That's when I got a lot of my certifications and grew up in the business and thought that was how it should be done and quickly became disillusioned with the large financial institutions. Not that they're bad or that there are bad people there. It just wasn't for me. In 2003, I started an independent firm with two partners, originally called Whitney, Wetzel and Kouther. From 2003 to 2019 we built that firm up to, I don't know, 12, 13 people. Along the way I started the podcast and then in 2019 I helped that firm get acquired because I was leaving that firm to focus on my current firm, Agile Retirement Management, because I was focusing in on retirement. This has been my mastery journey for 20 plus years now. That's my pedigree from just a resume standpoint.

The reason I want to talk about that or at least help remind you or understand that so you can make a decision and understand where I come from in my opinion is I have a lot of practical experience in actually doing this day by day. I've been through the dot com bust when the NASDAQ lost about 78% from its peak. I've been through 2001 when the market was closed for about a week and we had a war. The Asian crisis in 1998, the global financial crisis in 2007, the european debt crisis in 2010, the global pandemic. During that entire time, I walked life with individual clients, navigating these, within the context of their individual plan for either growing assets or retiring or living in retirement, successfully walking hand in hand with them. Those are the external things that I've worked or have practical experience navigating with individuals. So that informs a lot of my opinions. I don't really care what a spreadsheet says or a theory says as much, or I have a better appreciation for life on the ground within those. But I think just as important from a perspective and practical experience standpoint, I've walked life with clients before and in retirement where there was a premature death of a loved one, whether it was a child or a spouse. I've walked that journey. I've walked the journey of people who had to financially and emotionally help their loved ones. I've walked the journey with clients that have gotten divorced, older, gray divorced. I've walked on journeys with clients that have had very amicable divorces as well as very messy divorces. I've walked life with late marriages where you have two things coming together. Unexpected layoffs, serious illnesses, investment mistakes, bad investments, overreaction, too much risk, Social Security decisions. All things that I've dealt with practically, either helping them navigate it or cleaning up things that have happened. I tell you this only to tell you that I have a great appreciation for the education, but a lot of my opinions are formed from actually doing this with individuals and seeing the messy part of managing as all this uncertainty unfolds. That's the perspective I try to bring or wisdom, hopefully from learning and being better at it to you to help you take little baby steps towards rocking retirement.

BONUS STORY

Okay, we're going to continue our segment on reading the flight log from my grandfather and the missions he flew in World War II in a B17 Flying Fortress. We are missions 33 and 34.

Before I read these missions though, I want to comment on something from our survey about someone that didn't really like me reading these in the sense of glorifying war and his role in it. I think that it’s important to address. These are celebrating his journey of doing this. My grandfather never actually talked about any of this stuff. He was very private about it. I don't know if he was proud of his service or not. I don't know how he felt and the connections he had to the bombs that were actually dropped that killed people. I don't think he found glory in any of this stuff. It's important to remember what's on the other end of this in any kind of conflict. I think that's a valid point and I appreciate somebody giving that perspective. I read this not to glorify war, but to share his experience as a participant in something he didn't really want to do. He wanted to be home with his newborn grandbaby, my mom, but did this in the service of his country.

Mission 34, August 22nd. Ship number 274. Sortie 22. This one's pretty short and sweet.

“Germany was our target today as usual. Went after an oil refinery. Target demolished. Flak was heavy and fairly accurate. Lucky Again, P-51s and 38s were escort. Carried 16250 pound bonds. Missions 7 hours 45 minutes. Altitude 27,600ft.”

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