Transcription
I'm 62 years old, and if you're in your 40s or 50, I made this video specifically for you, where I'm going to share with you the five main things that I learned about life over the last 20 years, both just as a as a regular person, but also having been a financial advisor for over 20 years.
And and one of the most important things, and I hate to start off on a slightly negative note, but I think it's super important. And that is by the time you get to my age, you likely have fewer than 1,000 Saturdays left of healthy active time. And and so I think about that a lot. You have a lot more time than that, so be be, you know, start with the end in mind. By the time you're 60, where do you want to be? And a lot of folks are planning on being able to work until they're 65 years old. And and you know, we're all different. This isn't prescriptive. I'm not saying what you should do. I'm just sharing, you know, my thoughts on this, having gone through that journey. And one is, unfortunately, a lot of us are not going to have that opportunity. Um multiple studies have shown about half of us are going to have to retire before we wanted to retire. Maybe we have aging parents that that we need to take care of, or we have an adult child that needs help, or we get laid off. And we find out is, you know, ageism, unfortunately, is alive and well. And I think that latter part, we get laid off and it's hard to find a job. I think that's going to be amplified in the next several years because of artificial intelligence.
So that's the first one is just take advantage, I call this period of time from my mid-50s until whenever I lose my health, I hope that's a while, but I call that the youth of my senior years. So, I want to encourage you to take care of not just the youth of your senior years, but those years coming up to it. About 40% of all Americans do not use all the vacation that that we're entitled to. And we don't get much vacation here in the United States compared to other countries. So, if that's you, really, you know, use that vacation because later in life you might say, you know, I wish I had taken that trip. So, that's the first one.
The second point that I want to mention is for many people, it will never feel like we have enough to retire. So, be careful of that. The the goal posts are constantly changing. This is me putting on my financial advisor hat. Almost everybody I talked to when I first met with them and be, you know, talked about, "Okay, here you have put together a financial plan for them. Here's how much money it's going to take. This is what our goal is in order to be able to fund the lifestyle that's you you say that you want to have." And I was fortunate. I worked in the industry during 20 of the best years in the stock market. So, I looked like a genius, right? Um and and a lot of that had to do with the stock market which I was very up front with uh with my clients. And I the other thing I tell them is, you know, anything that can go up 20% a year can also go down 20% a year. So, be careful and we're going to come to that in a minute. But in regarding how much money you have, I mentioned the stock market and how it's done well because many of my clients had two, three, four times the amount of money that we said uh they were going to need to retire. But when you hit that, it's really common to to think, "You know what? I don't I do not feel I have enough and almost always people say I I feel like I need to have double what I have now. So be careful of that because it can unnecessarily delay your retirement. So that's the next one.
Um another one that's super important, you know, after working for 20, 30, 40 years and saving, you don't want to make a mistake that causes you to to go backwards uh and and lose a lot of the the traction and the ground that you've gained over 20, 30, 40 years. And the phrase that I say is avoid being a forced seller in a down market. And typically the way people in their 40s and 50s become a forced seller in a down market is they either have investments that go wrong. Maybe they're in real estate and they have to you know, they have to come up with money uh to to pay off the debt. Uh so people like real estate developers, I suspect many of you watching are not in that situation. The way most common people end up in this situation is they have an asset allocation that's too aggressive. And then the stock market goes down. And and oftentimes they make it worse when the stock market first starts going down. Maybe it's down 10 or 12% 15% and they buy the dip. They're oh, this is an opportunity. This is an opportunity. And what they don't realize ahead of time and part of my job was to help them with this is everybody's a hero until the stock market's down 20% and then we're all in this scary boat together on rough waters. I've got the Puget Sound here. They you know, all of a sudden they that gets whitecaps and that gets scary and we're all we're We're in this boat together and what once you're down 20% now, you know, you have to ride it out. You know, and I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know what's going to happen. Um, but I can tell you, you know, throughout history the stock market has recovered. And it's it's really about it's once the stock market's down that amount, be careful because often times it's too late to sell. The temptation is to say, you know, the market was here, it's now here. I'm going to sell here because I know it's going to go to here and then I'll get back in. And and that has destroyed many many people's retirements and I don't want to see that happen to you. So that's another one to be careful with.
I another one is just this this sense of needing security and certainty with your retirement plan. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world and one of the things if you work with a financial advisor, one of the things we'll tell you is, you know, what percent likelihood you have of being able to fund your retirement with the amount of money you have. So a financial advisor might say, well, you should work another three, four, five years cuz you only have an 80% likelihood of success or you know, you've got 70% or 90%. You know, a lot of us want to have 95, 96, 97%. I'm going to turn around now so the sun's not in my eyes. Um, but the reality is first off, let me tell you what it means to have a um, to have a 80% likelihood of success. It doesn't mean that um, you either succeed and live happily ever after or you're homeless and you live under the under a bridge. What it means is I'm going to use this example of 80%. It means you have an 80% likelihood of not having to change anything. That your your plan's going to work out just fine for you. And you have a 20% chance you're going to have to tweak things. Said another way, the way you go from 80% likelihood of success to 97% likelihood of success, you do that not in dollars, but in years of your life. You pay for that in years of your life. And that can take up five, six, seven, or more years of your life. If If you're 55 years old and your retirement advisor says you have an 80% likelihood of success, your question to him should be him or her should be, "Tell me more. How can we make this work? What happens if it doesn't work?" Because if you can retire at 55, you have a lot of healthy, active years in front And maybe the downside is, you know, instead of going to Europe every 4 years and buying a new car every 5 years, maybe you push that back. Uh maybe you don't take the kids on a Disney cruise. Maybe something like that. Or maybe you take a part-time job. So, it's super important to know these things. How do you know these things? You know these things You have to know it here, but you also have to know it here. To To know it here, I I think having a financial plan helps a lot. The gold standard is to work with a financial advisor. If you'd rather do it yourself, um uh down below is a link to the software that I like. I like this software. It's called Golden because it's powerful, it's easy to use, and it's affordable. There's no reason to build your own plan in Excel. And And now Golden comes with a really powerful AI feature that makes it super easy to ask what used to be complicated questions. So, if you sign up using this link here, you'll get a 2-week free trial. Pro tip, you can get a lot done in 2 weeks. Don't tell the guys at Bold and I said that. And again, using this link, you'll support the channel because I am an affiliate.
Um the other way you get there is you got to get there here. And getting there here, I think means working with a financial advisor. Somebody that has the experience of having helped guide hundreds of people into retirement. Uh many of you have complimented me and have reached out to me and said, "Hey, can you be my financial advisor?" Again, I worked in the industry for over 20 years, but you know what? I enjoy going for walks through the Puget Sound and spending time with my wife and our Labrador uh and doing retired people stuff. Uh so, unfortunately, the answer to that has been and still is no. Many of you have pushed back and said, "Well, can you refer me to somebody?" And to date, my answer for that is unfortunately no, I don't do that, but I am going to try something. I am going to start referring people to a financial advisory firm where you can call and see if they're the right match for you. If you'd like to know more about that, if you'd like uh to be somebody that I share uh a name of a financial advisory firm, you can call them and see if they're the right match. Sign up uh down below here. This will let me know to let uh to reach out to you and let you know when I'm offering the service. It'll be sometime later this year. I don't know how long I'm going to offer it for. It may be a few weeks, it may be a few months. Hopefully, it'll be a few years. Really, it just depends on, you know, can I live my retired life the way I want to live and still do this?
So, anyways, I I you enjoyed this video. If you did, there's another video where I talked specifically about why waiting to retire till 65 might be a big mistake. I'll see you in that video and enjoy your 40s and 50s. They pass by quickly. Bye-bye.