I Dont Save For Retirement Anymore - 184

Alright, hey there, passive traders. This is Allen, coming to you with another episode of the Option Genius Podcast.

Today, I wanted to talk about something that has been a pretty cool milestone for me, something I'm very excited about, but it's not something I can really share with friends or family. But I thought that if I shared it with you, you guys would appreciate it. And there's also a human relations, human nature lesson as well.

And so, you know, it comes back to, like, is there ever a time, or is there something that you know to be maybe not true, right? It's like it goes against your common sense, but you still do it because you've just heard it done so many times, and so many people have said to do it, and it's just what everybody does. Yeah, you know, anything like that? And you just keep doing it.

I mean, I am known as the passive trading guy, right? And I preach it all the time that, hey, look, if you can get your money to make money for you as much as you spend every month, then you can essentially retire, right? So if your expenses are, say, $10,000 a month, and from your trading, you can make $10,000 a month, then you can retire. You don't have to work anymore. You've just replaced your income.

But I guess I don't follow that. I mean, I do, but I don't. And it goes back to, like, when I was very young, right after I got married, my wife was a big saver, and I, at that point, was not. And so she had savings. I had nothing. I was starting to trade. But her savings were really, really significant, and so I had to do something to show her that, look, we're going to be secure. I'm going to take care of you. And so I started putting money away in our Roth IRAs at that point, right?

So I'm putting the money away, and that's the thing to do, right? You put your money away, you put it in a retirement account, and you let it grow, and you let it compound, and then eventually you get old, and then you retire, and you don't have to worry about money, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Now, my goal all the time was to retire early, but I'm still plugging all this money away into the retirement account every year.

And then I started a company, and then the CPA told me, "Hey, you know, you should probably start a retirement account from the company. So the company pays money into your retirement account. For you, it's deductible. You'll save some money on your taxes." And I'm like, "Okay, that sounds good. I like saving money on taxes." So we started putting more money away. We started putting more money away, and it just kept going. And I didn't really think about it.

Now, I read a book recently. It's called Die With Zero, and that got me to think. And so recently, at the end of the year, I went and I looked at, you know, all my finances, the balance sheet, and the net worth, and assets, liabilities, all that stuff. And I'm looking at it, and I'm realizing that, look, in our retirement accounts, for me and my wife, we have a substantial amount of money, especially with last year, you know, the market going up 20%, the year before that the market was up 20%, and so it's grown a lot, and we have a substantial amount of money in our retirement accounts. Maybe I don't have to put any more money in there, I don't know.

So I took out my calculator, and I'm like, "Hey, this is going to be... let's see, right?" So I took the amount of money that I had, and let's call it "A," right? Just to make it simple, let's call it "A." And I said, "Okay, if I have this 'A' pile, right? I have 'A,' and that's the nest egg. Now, I'm going to retire at 65, let's just say, it's the number everybody uses, 65, want to retire, and I've got 17 years left. So if I have 'A,' and it grows at a decent rate of return, maybe 6, 7, 8, 9%, I don't know. You know, it varies. But if it grows at a decent rate of return, how much money am I going to have in my retirement account, my nest egg, in 17 years when I'm 65?"

I did the numbers. We did it at different percentages, and it's going to come out to a very big number, you know, let's call it "Y." So the future nest egg is "Y," alright? The current nest egg is "A."

Then I talked to my wife, and I'm saying, "Hey, babe, you know, 15 or 17 years from now, I'm going to be 65, you'll be a little younger. How much money do you think we can spend every month?" You know, we talked about it, we went over like, "Hey, you know, the kids will be grown. We're not really going to spend much money on