June 18, 2025 • 46 mins
“Retirement isn’t about age, it’s about cash flow and choice.” Most Americans know they should be saving for retirement-but they don’t. Why??? This episode will explore the deeper reasons behind poor savings habits, including identity, culture and misinformation. Bonita & Paul will walk viewers through the most common traps, challenge traditional financial narratives, & offer practical tools to regain clarity & control over their financial future!
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Ask Good Questions is broadcast live Wednesdays at 6PM ET on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Ask Good Questions is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Ask Good Questions Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ask-good-questions--6441735/support.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests and not
those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We
make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
or products mentioned on air or on our web. No
liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio
or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should
be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing
(00:21):
W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to to Ask Good Questions Podcasts, broadcasting live every Wednesday,
six pm Eastern Time on W four CY Radio at
w four cy dot com. This week and every week,
we will reach for a higher purpose in money and light,
as well as a focus on health and wellnent. Now,
(00:49):
let's join your hosts, Banita Bell Anderson as together we
start with Asking Good Questions.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hello.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
This is Benita Bell Anderson, and thank you so much
for joining us on the Ask Good Questions podcast. We
have a phenomenal show today that will be important for
everyone that's listening, especially those that have not started saving yet.
So what I'd like to do is invite my guest
(01:22):
Paul Adams, to the Proverbial podcast stage.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Paul and I go way back to the dim past.
We were both working in the financial advising world, and
I don't even remember how we came across each other,
but anyway, we did, both of us in Washington State.
Speaker 5 (01:43):
At the time.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Paul, you're still in the Washington Washington state. I'm going
to tell him a little bit about you and then
you can fill him in a little bit more. He
is the founder and CEO of Sound Financial Group and
host of the More Than Commas podcast. We're going to
talk about that little bit more later. He's a seasoned
financial educator. I've always respected Paul. He's been someone that
(02:07):
I know helps successful individuals and families make evidence based decisions.
We're going to talk about that about money while avoiding
the cultural traps of lifestyle driven spending. So his firm
is built on the philosophy of dimensional fund advisors, which.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
Me as well.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
We have different paths as far as where we went
with our financial advising business. But tell us just a
little bit more about you and your life.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Well, I think one thing that's unique as we talk
about financial firm that really is different about us is
one we went location independent back in twenty seventeen, which
will lead a little bit in my personal life here
in a moment. And then we also chose to be
more like a design build architect, where anybody who engages
(03:03):
with us pays a feed or retain us for our
knowledge and our design abilities, and then they get a
separate choice if they want to implement with us, or
maybe they want to implement with their nephew that got
into the industry six months ago, and we are able
to work with them without them having concern that our
recommendations are going to be affected by the products, because
(03:25):
we don't care if they buy the products from our
firm and have us be the general contractor that builds
the building, or are they going to go do that
somewhere else or themselves, which we support. But we went
and became location independent because my family and I love camping.
We have in twenty seventeen through twenty twenty two, we
(03:48):
spent on average eighty two nights a year inside in
our RV traveling the country, and as an advisor, I
realized that I still wanted to serve my clients, not
just be lights out the whole time. So I designed
a way we could have the business where it doesn't
matter where our client is or where we are, you
(04:09):
where you are.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Well, you know, which is kind of you know, you
and I have had different paths but in some ways
very similar because I'm in Hawaii right now, Yeah, serving
the senior mission with my husband, but I can still
do my podcast and I'm still you know, in you know,
involved with my firm and keeping track on what's going on.
(04:33):
So yeah, So tell us a little bit about your family.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
So married now for going on this year will be
eighteen years. We have three great kids that by the
end of this year they'll be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and
they're all born in thirty months. That is to translate
that for anybody listening, that is five years without a
(04:58):
break from diapers. Everybody's still in diapers at some point
over five years. And you know, but on a fun
life front, and as I've listened to some of your shows,
it definitely takes a holistic approach to life, not just money.
So I thought you might appreciate this. My son got
(05:19):
his driver's permit, but the way it works here is
you kind of got to get registered for a course,
and there's several steps. Well, he didn't know they were
all completed. So when we went to church on Sunday,
I'm clearing some things out of my passenger seat where
he normally sits because he likes to ride with me.
And I got it all cleared out, and I hand
him a piece of paper and I said, a hold
(05:39):
on this. You're going to need it. Finished clearing out
the seat and put all the back seat's like, what
is this thing? And I handed it in the keys
and said it's your learner's permit, so get in the car.
As I got in the passenger seat and just taking
away any of the anxiety, any of the oh I'm
gonna be driving on the road, it was just no,
(06:00):
you've run a lot of equipment, you drive the side
by side around the property all the time. You're you're fine,
You're we're gonna go just at the gas station on
the way to church. I'm only gonna have you drive
the gas station. And he did it, and it was
like that that moment where you've got to introduce your
children to a new level of performance in some way,
(06:20):
being do so in a way that doesn't trigger any
of that like build up, and they just realize that
most things that are new that you do are just
not that hard to do. That most of the difficulties.
The stories we tell ourselves are the narratives leading up
to it.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Mm hmm, I'm with you.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
I've got grandchildren, Paul, that are getting their drivers permits.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Twenty three of them, right.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
Twenty three of four yees who would have thought so?
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Yeah, So there are several of them and they're like, Grandma,
I've got my driver's permit.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
And there's already been a couple of accidents, you know,
like whoops and so. But yeah, so it's a.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
New level of responsibility too. So yeah, anyway, but that's
a whole other topic. Today we're going to talk about
why people are not.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
Saving the way they should be.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
But before we get into our discussion, I have some statistics.
Most of this is from the Federal Reserve, which was
I was like, I didn't know the Federal Reserve did studies.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
But they have.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
So this is key statistics on the US retirement savings. Right,
twenty five percent of Americans have no retirement savings at all.
Thirty one percent feel very confident they'll have enough to
retire comfortably. That means that a whole sixty nine percent
don't feel confident. The median retirement savings for Americans age
(07:57):
fifty five to sixty four is only one hundred and
thirty four thousand, and there was a little comment on
that that amount would generate about five hundred dollars a
month in retirement assuming a four percent withdrawal rate. So
you know, however, but by age group, like I have
my my under thirty five clients I am proud of
(08:21):
because of course I've also been going, come on, let's
start savings. But the average under thirty five only has
about eleven thousand dollars saved, and then it gradually goes
up to the sixty seventy four year olds that only
have one hundred and sixty four thousand. So the statistic
(08:42):
goes into why forty percent of workers aren't even enrolled
in a retirement plan. Average four to one K balance
is only about one hundred and twelve five seventy two.
Forty five percent of baby boomers have no retirement savings whatsoever.
Thirty four percent of Gen xers say retirement isn't even
(09:02):
on their radar yet. And the biggest thing that has
upset me and I but in the end, I can't
do anything about it. I've tried, tried, tried, But a
lot of Americans will take money out of their for
one case, because of something that's going on in life.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Time. They get cashed out.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Yeah I know, and it's like, oh man, you need this,
and but they take those early withdrawals, incurring taxes and penalties,
and you know, it's just I.
Speaker 5 (09:34):
Just hate it when that happens. Why are they doing this?
Speaker 4 (09:39):
They're living paycheck to paycheck, They're increasing spending instead of
saving money when they get a raise. And there's they
also said lack of access to retirement plans.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
I seems like that shouldn't be the case, but I.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Call baloney sandwich.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Inability to access.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Yeah yeah, So, but what they're saying is especially prevalent
among part time, gig and self employed workers. So yeah,
you know, I've got a very talented nephew who's a
sign painter. He's never worked, he's been his own boss
(10:21):
his whole life.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
But has he saved not really, not really.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
So with those statistics in mind, let's start with the obvious.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
Why don't we Why.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Don't people say, for retirement, you know what they know
they should.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Right, Yeah, And I think it's a multifold thing if
we think about it in current terms. We have all
kinds of very productive feedback loops in our life. You know,
like when I was a little kid, if I poured
myself a cup of coffee, then I poured too long,
I'm gonna burn my hand. And I learned like, oh,
that's a pretty quick, you know, eight twelve second feedback loop.
(11:03):
And then you know, if if you're listening and you're
not a regular drinker, and you have three glasses a
wine tonight, you're gonna feel that tomorrow morning. You know,
if you talk too harshly or harshly at all your spouse,
you may quickly find out like all these things like bad.
If I eat too much food, I start gaining I
(11:23):
don't know why. I somehow get a free pass for
eight days, but by day ten, I gay ten pounds.
So that's a pretty good feedback loop. And that's the
relatively short timeline for all the feedback loops in our
life except money, because money not being a good steward
of it feels basically amazing for decades because look at
(11:47):
all the Instagram stuff I've got going, and I showed
off my new whatever, and look at the trip that
we went on and all of that stuff. It feels great. Now.
What is differing, and what none of us have really
adapted to yet, is we used to have the virtue
among the industrious of Brugality. And what I say by
(12:11):
industrious is people that were able to entrepreneur themselves into
an opportunity. They built a ranch, or they opened a bar,
a local newspaper, et cetera. They were building, you know,
our country early on. And these people building our country
if they had means in wealth, it just happened to
be that everybody could see it. We would know Bonnie
(12:33):
owns the bank, We would know I have ten thousand
head of cattle. We could have all that, so we
could walk around and hold as a virtue that we
restrained ourselves in what we would consume. And it made
sense because nobody questioned whether or not Paul Adams was
a success because of my ten thousand cattle. See it,
(12:54):
you could see it. But now now that same Paul
Adams drives because I don't care about this stuff. I
drive a twenty fifteen Ford. Explore that I have absolutely
done tremendous damage to dragging it behind my RV across
the country. And I don't care, but a lot of
(13:17):
people do. In fact, for many people, it's like an addiction.
And it's because we have this biological urge that like
a peacock shaking its tail feathers, you know, in impressing
the community of males and females around us. It's just
we're still we're still got biology, and so we're going
(13:42):
to want to buy the car by the house that
is quote unquote commiserate with our lifestyle. But we live
inside a society where commiserate with our lifestyle means spending
one hundred and five percent of your income, where what
we have to do to be financially successful is save
twenty percent percent of gross Yeah, and that has you
(14:04):
have to live a very very different lifestyle than all
of your compatriots who make a similar level of income
that aren't doing it, and they aren't like on average, statistically,
if you're somebody who's saving, everybody who care about around
you is probably not. And that's just because most people
(14:25):
aren't sitting aside an appropriate amount of money and are
making decisions based upon how their life looks today. Now
another thing that's developed. If we think about even a
middle class lifestyle today, that person has access to better
things in lifestyle than somebody who lived the richest in
the world two hundred years ago, no kidding, and we like,
(14:50):
but how much money would that person be saving if
they just lived the same lifestyle they lived two hundred
years ago, They'd be saving ninety percent of their income.
But we've all continued to level up our lifestyle and
instead of reflecting what do I want my life to
look like, what we do is we decide what our
life should look like. Is that over there?
Speaker 5 (15:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:13):
And you know at my church, I lead a Saturday
men's group that's two times a month, and I told
them I'm designing this workshop. We're about to get the
last session of this eight week course that I taught
to just minute my church about how to look differently
at their careers and in implementing some business practices I've
(15:34):
used to build this business. And one of the things
that I shared with them is I shared with them
how much I make a year, and they were all like, what.
And the only reason I shared that with him is
I said, you guys, I have built this incredible white
collar business so that I can walk into a room
(15:57):
and people think I'm there to fix the audience or
shoe a horse like nobody thinks I'm there to be
the financial mind in the room. And I'm perfectly fine
with that being my lifestyle. Sometimes that's really important and
identity to people, et cetera. I just set that aside
because I'm anchored in the life that I'm creating, not
(16:18):
in the life anybody else sees. And so when it
comes to people planning for money, one of the first
things they haven't done is any work in cultivating contentment
to say this is what I would like to see
my life be like. And then as your income goes
above it, you're able to hold because you built the
life you like. And now what the game you're playing
(16:42):
is to make the life you like permanent. And then
I'm going to go a little philosophical, just one moment more,
in that when people are working their way toward retirement,
they're carrying a debt. Now they don't think this way,
but they're carrying a debt that they owe to, say,
sixty five year old them. Now that debt is the
(17:06):
net present value of income for the rest of your life. However,
you and your advisor calculate that and when you roll
up to that birthday, do you have enough money to
pay that person and some huge amount like ninety five
percent of America won't and they're just going to keep you. Well.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
I've thinked about how I've had people come into my
office looking like a deer in the headlights because they're
sixty years old and oh crap, I've never done anything.
And it's like, you know, and I think both you
and I are like, whatever we could do to make people.
Speaker 5 (17:43):
Not do that be there?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, yep, because what they're not thinking about is when
you're funding your lifestyle, you're always funding two until the
point at which you reach financial independence is you have
to und your current lifestyle and then you have to
fund your lifestyle for the period of life when no
one's going to value your offer. Yeah. I think it
(18:08):
just at some point, you know, as I get more
and more gray hair in my beard, it it creates
different conversations. And we're created before and twenty years from
now there'll be even more different conversations about age and
health and what I want to be able to do
and what I want to be able to do is
(18:28):
is securely stable, to be able to end that on
my terms, with the level of lifestyle I want for
the rest of my life, and we want that for
all of our clients. Right.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
You made me when you were talking about the horse shoer.
I a literally my oldest daughters of that and we'd
spend the summers on her farm.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
In the Tri Cities.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
And I was one day holding a horse while the
horse while the failure was there shoeing, and he's asking
me if you know, he finds out I'm a financial advisor,
and he's asking me financial questions.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
And I'm looking at him, and I'm looking at his.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
Old truck, and I'm like, I don't want to make assumptions,
but I'm betting that he's probably hand in the mouth,
you know, but he's just you know, So let me.
Speaker 5 (19:21):
Ask you the next thing.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
There's something that you've said in the past, and that
is retirement isn't a math problem. It's a narrative problem.
So what the heck does that mean?
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Well, Okay, I'm going to go deep here, and I
hope the audience doesn't mind the dive. You see, I
don't I would assert that you cannot hear anything I'm saying, Benita,
you can't hear a thing I'm saying. And nobody in
the audience listening to me right now can hear anything
(19:52):
that I'm saying. Ever, and you and everybody in the audience,
none of us, including me, ever hear what anybody ever says. Okay, Now,
that little voice and everybody's head that said, I don't
know what Paul's talking about. I'm totally hearing right now.
That's that's actually the only voice any of us ever hear.
(20:16):
You see that little The way I draw a picture
of it sometimes is imagine like a little tiny stick
figure in your ear, or like maybe some cute dwarf
from a movie, but they're just real small and they
listen to the world, okay, and then they tell you
what was said. But that little thing we'll just call
(20:39):
your listening. That listening is influenced by your past, your traumas,
your dreams for the future, your wishes, want some preferences,
Like if you've ever had a conversation with your spouse
where it's like you said one thing and they heard
something else and there's some kind of friction upset You're like, wait,
what happened, and they've just didn't understand what you said.
(21:01):
That's because they're listening, didn't translate what you intended to say. Well,
we listen our entire environment. Every advertising commercial narrative set
around us, et cetera. Like how many people have you
heard say One of the biggest falsehoods about money that
(21:21):
I remember being set around my kitchen table like regular
is you know what, is probably just going to be
cheaper to get a new car than fix that one
the loney sandwich. Almost never is that the case unless
you you know, you bought some you know, Porsche or
something like that, it's super expensive to fix. But otherwise,
(21:42):
like normal cars, if you maintain the car properly, it's
a whole different world. Yeah, but the narrative is it's
cheaper to just get a new one. And you wouldn't
believe that when somebody holds that just to say, hey,
I'm support you. You've got enough money, you can do
it either way you want. Well, let me just walk
(22:03):
you through the math of what keeping your current car
is and you can feel the emotional bit of it
for people when I just even bring it up. And
then you can never have anybody around you give you
appropriate financial feedback when you make a bad decision. And
(22:24):
I'll give an example. One very very close friend of
mine went down to southern California to visit him. And
you know, my family and I have had this living
radically within our means mindset for quite some time. And
I go down to southern California. It picks me up
in a brand new, like sixty thousand dollars build out
of I think it was a Toyota Tundra, and I'm like, what,
(22:49):
what's with the new car? I mean, weren't we just
talking in a meeting a couple of weeks ago about
how great the philosophy is and it was like, well, yeah,
but I'm going to keep it ten years and that's
just it. And I just I said, well but if
you look at the time value of money, and then
it like I could tell the tone change, like I
was stepping near the third rail in a very good relationship.
(23:12):
And so what we unintentionally create is people around us
can even give us appropriate feedback, because once you buy
that car with that big loan or that creuddy lease
or whatever it is, you can't undo it. And the
people around you who love you who have enough compassion
for you don't beat you over the head about that
being a terrible decision. And so people have a hard
(23:35):
time learning. And now on top of that, everybody that
makes us an offer, almost nobody in our life as
an interest in us accumulating wealth. They just have an
interest in us buying the next bigger house, like different mortgage,
or this financial product or that financial product. And that's
so all of those things disrupt people's ability that those
(23:59):
narratives that what you might refer to as cultural common sense,
and then people don't learn basic money mechans. Like every
client fills out an application, we don't make an offer
to a client in a first meeting. We just share
our philosophy. Then if they want to they can fill
out an application. We set a different meeting to review
(24:20):
that for them. Because we don't work with every client.
We charge a fee up front, so we don't want
to offer a fee if we can't bring enough value.
So that's why this application. But on the application there's
a question Benita, and it says, do you know how
much capital work will be required for you to have
financial independence? Okay, Now, these are the people we work with.
(24:43):
On average, are between like two hundred and fifty thousand
and two million dollars a year of income. So these
are not unsophisticated people. How what percentage of them do
you think have a number?
Speaker 5 (24:55):
I'm I'm betting they don't.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, only five percent, and not all of them are
well thought out. Yeah, but think if this is the
biggest narrative break the convert which narrative break would be
a conversation somebody's not having. And the conversation people aren't
having is even an awareness of what where they're trying
to get to. Because if you don't, everybody when they
(25:20):
started working their first job at some point had a
tough day and say, at least I get to retire
one day. And we got out of bed every day,
We went to work forty hours a week, maybe worked
multiple jobs. We got ourselves educated, we built a career.
We did when all along the way we know we're
headed to retirement, we say, but we don't even have
it on a map. We don't have like a here's
(25:41):
a number to shoot for. And because we haven't taught
something as simple as that four percent distribution rule as
like a prerequisite, just simple math. It should be just
in high school math.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Well, how do you think how do you think our
culture rewards spending instead of savings?
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Mmmm? Well, if you've been on social media, you know
ever it's it's because it's the just look the posts
to get the greatest amount of likes. They're going to
be full vacations. They're going to be the cool new car,
the cool new piece of equipment, et cetera. Like there's
(26:23):
there's a very specific reason why I all of my
social media posts are business related because I don't want
I don't want encouragement from people who I don't know
to make decisions that they enjoyed pictures of me doing,
which probably meant it was expensive. So I just don't
(26:46):
post hardly at all the social media and I've taken
out that particular feedback loop that would encourage something like consumption, right.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
Right, Well, so where do they? So where do you
think money is going?
Speaker 4 (27:03):
You know, I'm guessing we've already talked about it. Money
is going to bigger, better lifestyles, I.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
You know, And let me ask you this.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
I think I feel.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
Okay, all right, but I'm feeling like, don't you think
too that it's part of it is just people wanting
to look good.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yes. In fact, yeah, have you read Morgan Household's book
The Philosophy of Money Psychology of Money?
Speaker 5 (27:31):
Sorry, no, I haven't read that one. I'll have to
go look it up.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
It is a great book. I that is my two
favorite financial books, if you don't count any of them
that I wrote, are Stop Acting Rich a Doctor I'm
as Stanley, and then The Psychology of Money. But in
one of the things they talk about in that book
(27:57):
is it is about looking good. But here's what I
would have everybody think about, because there is a certain
amount of public identity, like it like I probably shouldn't
drive a nineteen seventy three Pento, you know, like there
is probably a rust bucket standard. I should like keep safe.
I shouldn't look I shouldn't drive a car that looks unsafe,
because then that falls into people's judgment or judgment of
(28:20):
my judgment. So I don't want that. But aside from
people spinning it that way, what they're doing is it's
getting crowded out, not just on looking good, but then
the maintaining of those things. Yes, right, Like you get
the cool looking car, they charge more per labor to
work on that cool import car yep. And so they'll
(28:42):
make one decision up front, but then they'll make other
decisions that have maintenance. And like, we have a client
that bought two million dollars home in Florida that live
on the other side of the country, and that inflation
that's normal. It didn't. I mean, the mortgage is pretty
pricey because you got it after rates went up, but
(29:03):
you wouldn't believe how much the meaneness has gone up
on it. And it's just on the balance sheets. So
you can't say, I'm not going to maintain a two
million dollar asset. What do you do? Lower your return
plan contribution?
Speaker 5 (29:15):
Yeah, and so.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
They Yeah, the role of identity, I think is huge.
Can we craft? So I'm just thinking what we need
to do is encourage people to craft an identity that that.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Says I'm going to save, right. I mean it's like
it's like change. It's like it's a paradigm shift, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah. It's like, well, when you think of a narrative,
a movie is a script, and so we're just running
ripped in our head. You know, you had a past
guest that talked about, you know, changing people's programming, and
I think with money. It's very much the same in
that if what I realize is I have a strategy
(30:09):
to reach financial independence. Number One, I don't think people
should call it retirement because if we go back again
to the early nineteen hundreds or even in the founding
of our country, there's not a single business or spiritual
leader in this country whoever quote unquote retired. It might
have changed advocation. It wasn't until nineteen thirty five with
the advent of social security we started applying retirement to people.
(30:31):
Before that, it meant like I'm going to retire to
the den for the evening with my Scotch. I'm going
to retire this old plow. We're going to retire this
old horse that was usually not good for the horse.
But they would retire things. It wasn't anything you did
to a person. And then we started saying we retire.
(30:52):
But think about this for a moment. I mean, I
think it speaks so well to your continued involvement with
your planning, with the planning firm and with this podcast.
Is there's no biblical basis for retirement. I don't know
that there's even a a faith that's existed for over
five hundred years on this planet. That says you get
old and are useless. But that's why I've.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
Actually had people do that to me. I've had people
why aren't you retired. It's like, I don't want to retire.
I don't want I mean, that's in my mind. It's
like sitting on a on a deck rocking and a
rocking chair and declining, no.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well this is and this is this is what you
can do. That changes up the narrative for you and
starts to start. For lack of betters saying it, We're
going to inoculate them against bad narratives. And one thing
you say is like, no, I'm not retired. I'm financially independent.
There's a big difference. Think about the conversation you get
to have with somebody after you say that, or if
(31:56):
somebody's trying to convince us to buy a car that
we can't buy, Never say I can can't afford it.
Never say that, because the second I say I can't
afford it, I'm deciding to play by their rules. Instead,
I'm gonna say, I, oh man, that car is beautiful. Unfortunately,
would break strategy for us. Now if I say it's
going to break strategy for me, what's the next thing
(32:17):
the salesman has to say. He's gonna say what strategy?
It happens all the time, and I go, oh, let
me show you. And then it's like I'm running the
lines on the field for how this game is going
to be played. I don't have to enter into their
language at all because I'm just not going to break strategy.
Your friends say I don't want to go to Hawaii.
(32:38):
I'd love to go to Hawaii, but it's going to
break strategy for me. Well, what do you mean your strategy? Well,
my strategy is saved twenty percent of my gross income
every year because I want to have the choice to
be financially independent on my terms, not be financially independent
because the workforce ground me into it, right, and then
that changed. That changes even the relationship with your friend
(32:58):
when you come forward with strong narrative, because that's where
leadership I think happens is are people more encouraged and
ambitious about the future based upon what we said or
what they were thinking when we first showed up in
their life. And I think that even the listeners. If
you change somebody's language, it's not I can't afford it.
(33:19):
It's that I won't break strategy. Right, It's not that
I'm retired, it's that I'm financially independent and now I'm
doing what i want. Doesn't mean I'm not busy.
Speaker 5 (33:31):
That's for sure.
Speaker 4 (33:36):
So let's talk about this whole thing with lifestyle inflation.
Speaker 5 (33:40):
Somebody gets a raise.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
And they and they, and up goes the spending. How
do you how do you inoculate somebody against lifestyle inflation?
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Well, what they have to do first is cultivate contentment. See,
most people are living the life that they have now,
and not by any design, but by default because it's
what they could afford to. And they, by the way,
most people never even pause long enough with their spouse
to say, hey, what would we like just our regular lifestyle?
Look like, like, do we like it?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You know?
Speaker 3 (34:13):
As an example, maybe they've both been talking about redoing
the floors, and they've both been talking about because they
thought the other one wanted it, and it's like, no,
we don't care about the floors. Well save twenty thousand dollars, great,
but that's that's it. So we just got to get
on the same page about what we want our life
and lifestyle to look like currently, and then how do
we get as close to that while reserving for our
(34:35):
old age? I would contend, I'm happy to be challenged
put in the comments Bunny will point people over to me.
But what I would challenge is twenty percent of gross
is the minimum amount somebody should be saving. And there's
just a lot of life that you got to say
no to. One of my biggest mentors was helping a
(34:55):
woman with some mistate planning. She was unfortunately dying of
pancreatic cancer Huntington Beach, and he was about thirty five
at the time, about ten years younger than I am now.
And he said to the woman, he said, how did
you manage to accumulate ninety million dollars? You know? She
I mean she had a good business and stuff like that,
but I mean she just kept buying real estate and
(35:17):
even in her early years when she wasn't making that
much money. He said, how'd you do it? She says,
this was EO thousand or two thousand and five, And
she said, you know, honey, when I was your age,
we just didn't have as much to say no to,
(35:37):
and now we have to say no to so much.
Like back in when she was starting out, like, here's
the thing my mom and she was born in nineteen
forty five in Nebraska and did not have indoor plumbing
until she was ten. They had an out house. Yeah,
that is like if you pause and cultivate contentment, like
what would my lifestyle, what would this errand I'm running
(35:59):
look like one hundred years ago, one hundred and fifty
years ago, and put you in a position to realize
how incredibly wealthy we are in the history of mankind
on this planet, like unbelievably wealthy. And then that kind
of gives you some inoculation from that next advertisement for
the cool newer car. In fact, anything you might consider
doing on payments, what I want you to do is
(36:20):
take your net income for the month for you and
your spouse, divide it by the amount of hours that
you guys each have to work, and then realize how
many hours per month you've got to put in just
to pay that bill. And it's a lot, and people
aren't present to that, And it's it's that idea of
getting yourself out of the narrative enough to just do
(36:43):
some math, have your aims, have some standards, like I'm
going to set aside twenty percent, and it doesn't matter
if it's four or one. Carr like, just get the
money set aside, do in cash for two years, and
then go find an advisor. They'd be happy to meet you.
But it has to be based upon those principles, with
(37:03):
small bits of consistent action over long periods of time,
and the inoculation is not permanent. Once it's there, you
can so easily drift back. My wife and I have enjoyed,
by default, living so deeply within our means. We haven't
had to even look at a budget in two years,
and we've recently said, you know, we're going to get
back to the practice just because it's good practice.
Speaker 5 (37:28):
Well, let's turn a little bit, man. Time always flies
so much.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
We've kind of mentioned that we both work with a
company called Dimensional Fund Advisors, and I, you know.
Speaker 5 (37:45):
It was probably.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
Fifteen years ago that I even I was having I
was at a coffee shop with another advisor as I
was trying to figure out how to do this whole
independent thing, and he says, well, I work with Dimensional
Fund Advisors and I didn't even know about it.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
How is that?
Speaker 4 (38:06):
I mean, it's like a mindset and there's a we
call it evidence based investing.
Speaker 5 (38:14):
How is that different?
Speaker 4 (38:15):
What would you say, how is that approach different from
traditional financial advice that someone who's just doing mutual funds?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah, what would you say is so I'll give maybe
just a quick bullet list of some differences. So Dimensional
Fund Advisors, if you're listening, is probably the largest asset
management firm you've never heard of. The reason you've never
heard of them is they don't advertise. They were the
inceptor of one of the very first index funds, the
founders of Dimensional and what they took the slant of
(38:52):
while other companies like Oppenheimer Putnam were building large field
forces of wholesalers to go out and tell the story
and invite advisors to breakfast and lunch and dinner and
if you guys want more on that story, on more
than costs, yep, I got a whole. I've got a
whole talk I give called the Illusions of Investing that
talks about what an advisor goes through. And you don't
(39:15):
find Dimensional Funds because they don't do that kind of
advertising unless you start reading the academic journals on investing,
and those academic journals investing really discourage people from stock
picking and market timing, et cetera. Because it just doesn't
work and it's fundamentally speculation the asset managers doing with
our money. So what we decided to do by using
(39:37):
dimensional is they kind of just look at it as
we own everything that has a pretty good chance of
doing what the market's going to do. Stuff that's really
bad we don't own, but we own pretty much everything else.
So weise this.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
Harry Markowitz, who died I don't know, instituted it in
a few years ago, but he was doing his calculation
on a yellow pad, and like in the nineteen fifties. Yes,
but the thing that I remember Harry Marco would saying
long ago was Harry Marco which said, just buy the market.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (40:12):
It's like, I don't know how you know. So it's
like the average person could never do that, but.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
True, we pretty well can, and now we do. You know,
no clients all the time. Let's say you're back in
the nineteen nineties and you're like, do I buy Walmart
or Kmart? They're very close companies at that time. Well
one some asset managers say I'm picking Kmart because I'm
going to bet on them. But our type of asset
management is like we'd look and it would be both
(40:37):
of them have positive attributes for the future. Both of
them might work out. Well. Guess what when nobody goes
sprim market anymore because they're closed, where do they go Walmart?
Which means our portfolio is still getting the revenue, the profitability,
and the company enterprise value because the consumers are going
to spend money anyway. So all we have to do
is be everywhere in the market. And like our position.
(40:59):
Our portfolios have about fourteen thousand different positions because we're
not market timing. We're just scientifically holding and rebalancing a portfolio.
It's wildly deep, but unexciting. And yeah, we just coach
our clients science over and over getting to hold strategy.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Yeah, yeah, whole strategy. Don't break strategy, don't break straight.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
Hopefully people can remember that. Paul, we're running out of time.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
I want to hear a little bit about the more
than comments.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah more than Commas podcast? What what does that mean?
Speaker 5 (41:37):
Where did that come from?
Speaker 4 (41:39):
And you know the whole idea that wealth has to
mean more than the numbers.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Yeah, what you think about it? Most people in life,
when it comes to getting retirement is they got they
got to get above two commas, you know, and then
the billionaires talk about getting to three commas. But the
thing is that what's going to have us really enjoy
life in our independence and our time in our old
age is going to be more than just the commas
(42:05):
in our portfolio, and so that just gave By changing
our podcast name, it really gave us more latitude. We're
now over three hundred episodes. We've been on air since
twenty sixteen. People can go way way back in our stuff,
but the rebranding of it just gave us more license to.
Like the other day I recorded one of my shop
(42:25):
that's just the first seventy two hour preparedness at a
home in case of an emergency. It was right after
those big blackouts in Spain, right, So yeah, we'd love
to have anybody who's a subscriber. We're fun. We answer
all the comments and we love hearing suggestions. We get
a lot more downloads on podcasts, and we do YouTube,
but we I don't know, I like having my face
(42:47):
scene sometimes.
Speaker 4 (42:52):
Well I was going to tell you that, you know,
ten years, twenty years from now, you can apply for
a job with Santa Claus.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. Well. The beautiful thing
is my wife loves it. She says, keep growing it,
and I'll just keep letting it get a little longer,
but while keeping it groomed. And then one day my
wife is going to say that's it, and that's what
I'll stop. Because as far as how I address or
how I look, there's only one customer anymore, and that's
my wife.
Speaker 5 (43:17):
Yeah, that's right. Well, how would you sum this whole
thing up?
Speaker 4 (43:24):
Because we've got like a couple of minutes here, so
we need to you know, what are your partying thoughts?
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Parting words would be, if you want to be better
with money, start talking about money, and if you want
to be more affected with money, have more effective conversations
with money and control the narrative. Set a strategy for
yourself and then win things. Risk you coming off strategy,
talk with your spouse. Maybe it's okay to deviate, but
set a strategy. First. We're going to save X, we're
(43:50):
going to give X to the church, We're going to
spend this much on recreation. Just set a plan and
then get the money tucked aside. And you don't even
need to go talk to an advice right now. Uh,
there's probably advisors love to hear from you. But this
month you can intentionally say we're going to set aside
X and then do that and feel that win, and
then do that again next month, the next month, and
(44:12):
if you have more effective conversations with money, you're more
likely not only going to be better for you and
your family, but probably those closest to you are going
to increase their financial competence as well and actually give
you all a chance to have been financial independence together.
Because if you don't talk to the people in your
community about money, then you're going to successfully step off
(44:36):
into old age and they're not and they're not going
to be able to join you, and they're not going
to understand how you were able to do it and
why you didn't introduce them to your advisor. And that's
going to be a tough conversation. So I encourage people
to talk about money as much as you can to
the people that you love the most.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
Good advice And you're a good man, and you've got
very very important to you. You have lucky clients who
are there with you having you guide them.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 5 (45:09):
I want to thank you for being with us today.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Yeah, I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
Important for everybody needs to everybody needs to really take
this to heart.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Yep. And all they got to do is take a
little more to heart every day. You don't need to
be perfect today, just make a little progress financially today
and just like compounding returns, your habits will compound too.
Speaker 5 (45:33):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Yeah, Well with that, I think we've asked some pretty
good questions today, and I want to thank you again
for joining us and thanks for joining us on our podcast.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
So glad. I'm so glad I could be here and
thank you so much for the chance to have a
chat with your audience.
Speaker 5 (45:53):
All right, Okay, thanks for.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Today's episode is over, But we did ask good questions again,
didn't We don't miss out as we broadcast live every
Wednesday six pm Eastern Time on W FOURCY Radio at
W fourcy dot com. Joined Vanina Bellm. We're saying next
week for more conversations with experts on finances, retirement, behavioral
(46:21):
finance issues, health and wellness and more. Until then, remember
to ask good questions.
The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests and not
those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We
make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
or products mentioned on air or on our web. No
liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio
or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should
be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing
(00:21):
W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to to Ask Good Questions Podcasts, broadcasting live every Wednesday,
six pm Eastern Time on W four CY Radio at
w four cy dot com. This week and every week,
we will reach for a higher purpose in money and light,
as well as a focus on health and wellnent. Now,
(00:49):
let's join your hosts, Banita Bell Anderson as together we
start with Asking Good Questions.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hello.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
This is Benita Bell Anderson, and thank you so much
for joining us on the Ask Good Questions podcast. We
have a phenomenal show today that will be important for
everyone that's listening, especially those that have not started saving yet.
So what I'd like to do is invite my guest
(01:22):
Paul Adams, to the Proverbial podcast stage.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Paul and I go way back to the dim past.
We were both working in the financial advising world, and
I don't even remember how we came across each other,
but anyway, we did, both of us in Washington State.
Speaker 5 (01:43):
At the time.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Paul, you're still in the Washington Washington state. I'm going
to tell him a little bit about you and then
you can fill him in a little bit more. He
is the founder and CEO of Sound Financial Group and
host of the More Than Commas podcast. We're going to
talk about that little bit more later. He's a seasoned
financial educator. I've always respected Paul. He's been someone that
(02:07):
I know helps successful individuals and families make evidence based decisions.
We're going to talk about that about money while avoiding
the cultural traps of lifestyle driven spending. So his firm
is built on the philosophy of dimensional fund advisors, which.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
Me as well.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
We have different paths as far as where we went
with our financial advising business. But tell us just a
little bit more about you and your life.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Well, I think one thing that's unique as we talk
about financial firm that really is different about us is
one we went location independent back in twenty seventeen, which
will lead a little bit in my personal life here
in a moment. And then we also chose to be
more like a design build architect, where anybody who engages
(03:03):
with us pays a feed or retain us for our
knowledge and our design abilities, and then they get a
separate choice if they want to implement with us, or
maybe they want to implement with their nephew that got
into the industry six months ago, and we are able
to work with them without them having concern that our
recommendations are going to be affected by the products, because
(03:25):
we don't care if they buy the products from our
firm and have us be the general contractor that builds
the building, or are they going to go do that
somewhere else or themselves, which we support. But we went
and became location independent because my family and I love camping.
We have in twenty seventeen through twenty twenty two, we
(03:48):
spent on average eighty two nights a year inside in
our RV traveling the country, and as an advisor, I
realized that I still wanted to serve my clients, not
just be lights out the whole time. So I designed
a way we could have the business where it doesn't
matter where our client is or where we are, you
(04:09):
where you are.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Well, you know, which is kind of you know, you
and I have had different paths but in some ways
very similar because I'm in Hawaii right now, Yeah, serving
the senior mission with my husband, but I can still
do my podcast and I'm still you know, in you know,
involved with my firm and keeping track on what's going on.
(04:33):
So yeah, So tell us a little bit about your family.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
So married now for going on this year will be
eighteen years. We have three great kids that by the
end of this year they'll be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and
they're all born in thirty months. That is to translate
that for anybody listening, that is five years without a
(04:58):
break from diapers. Everybody's still in diapers at some point
over five years. And you know, but on a fun
life front, and as I've listened to some of your shows,
it definitely takes a holistic approach to life, not just money.
So I thought you might appreciate this. My son got
(05:19):
his driver's permit, but the way it works here is
you kind of got to get registered for a course,
and there's several steps. Well, he didn't know they were
all completed. So when we went to church on Sunday,
I'm clearing some things out of my passenger seat where
he normally sits because he likes to ride with me.
And I got it all cleared out, and I hand
him a piece of paper and I said, a hold
(05:39):
on this. You're going to need it. Finished clearing out
the seat and put all the back seat's like, what
is this thing? And I handed it in the keys
and said it's your learner's permit, so get in the car.
As I got in the passenger seat and just taking
away any of the anxiety, any of the oh I'm
gonna be driving on the road, it was just no,
(06:00):
you've run a lot of equipment, you drive the side
by side around the property all the time. You're you're fine,
You're we're gonna go just at the gas station on
the way to church. I'm only gonna have you drive
the gas station. And he did it, and it was
like that that moment where you've got to introduce your
children to a new level of performance in some way,
(06:20):
being do so in a way that doesn't trigger any
of that like build up, and they just realize that
most things that are new that you do are just
not that hard to do. That most of the difficulties.
The stories we tell ourselves are the narratives leading up
to it.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Mm hmm, I'm with you.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
I've got grandchildren, Paul, that are getting their drivers permits.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Twenty three of them, right.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
Twenty three of four yees who would have thought so?
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Yeah, So there are several of them and they're like, Grandma,
I've got my driver's permit.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
And there's already been a couple of accidents, you know,
like whoops and so. But yeah, so it's a.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
New level of responsibility too. So yeah, anyway, but that's
a whole other topic. Today we're going to talk about
why people are not.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
Saving the way they should be.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
But before we get into our discussion, I have some statistics.
Most of this is from the Federal Reserve, which was
I was like, I didn't know the Federal Reserve did studies.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
But they have.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
So this is key statistics on the US retirement savings. Right,
twenty five percent of Americans have no retirement savings at all.
Thirty one percent feel very confident they'll have enough to
retire comfortably. That means that a whole sixty nine percent
don't feel confident. The median retirement savings for Americans age
(07:57):
fifty five to sixty four is only one hundred and
thirty four thousand, and there was a little comment on
that that amount would generate about five hundred dollars a
month in retirement assuming a four percent withdrawal rate. So
you know, however, but by age group, like I have
my my under thirty five clients I am proud of
(08:21):
because of course I've also been going, come on, let's
start savings. But the average under thirty five only has
about eleven thousand dollars saved, and then it gradually goes
up to the sixty seventy four year olds that only
have one hundred and sixty four thousand. So the statistic
(08:42):
goes into why forty percent of workers aren't even enrolled
in a retirement plan. Average four to one K balance
is only about one hundred and twelve five seventy two.
Forty five percent of baby boomers have no retirement savings whatsoever.
Thirty four percent of Gen xers say retirement isn't even
(09:02):
on their radar yet. And the biggest thing that has
upset me and I but in the end, I can't
do anything about it. I've tried, tried, tried, But a
lot of Americans will take money out of their for
one case, because of something that's going on in life.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Time. They get cashed out.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Yeah I know, and it's like, oh man, you need this,
and but they take those early withdrawals, incurring taxes and penalties,
and you know, it's just I.
Speaker 5 (09:34):
Just hate it when that happens. Why are they doing this?
Speaker 4 (09:39):
They're living paycheck to paycheck, They're increasing spending instead of
saving money when they get a raise. And there's they
also said lack of access to retirement plans.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
I seems like that shouldn't be the case, but I.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Call baloney sandwich.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Inability to access.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Yeah yeah, So, but what they're saying is especially prevalent
among part time, gig and self employed workers. So yeah,
you know, I've got a very talented nephew who's a
sign painter. He's never worked, he's been his own boss
(10:21):
his whole life.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
But has he saved not really, not really.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
So with those statistics in mind, let's start with the obvious.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
Why don't we Why.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Don't people say, for retirement, you know what they know
they should.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Right, Yeah, And I think it's a multifold thing if
we think about it in current terms. We have all
kinds of very productive feedback loops in our life. You know,
like when I was a little kid, if I poured
myself a cup of coffee, then I poured too long,
I'm gonna burn my hand. And I learned like, oh,
that's a pretty quick, you know, eight twelve second feedback loop.
(11:03):
And then you know, if if you're listening and you're
not a regular drinker, and you have three glasses a
wine tonight, you're gonna feel that tomorrow morning. You know,
if you talk too harshly or harshly at all your spouse,
you may quickly find out like all these things like bad.
If I eat too much food, I start gaining I
(11:23):
don't know why. I somehow get a free pass for
eight days, but by day ten, I gay ten pounds.
So that's a pretty good feedback loop. And that's the
relatively short timeline for all the feedback loops in our
life except money, because money not being a good steward
of it feels basically amazing for decades because look at
(11:47):
all the Instagram stuff I've got going, and I showed
off my new whatever, and look at the trip that
we went on and all of that stuff. It feels great. Now.
What is differing, and what none of us have really
adapted to yet, is we used to have the virtue
among the industrious of Brugality. And what I say by
(12:11):
industrious is people that were able to entrepreneur themselves into
an opportunity. They built a ranch, or they opened a bar,
a local newspaper, et cetera. They were building, you know,
our country early on. And these people building our country
if they had means in wealth, it just happened to
be that everybody could see it. We would know Bonnie
(12:33):
owns the bank, We would know I have ten thousand
head of cattle. We could have all that, so we
could walk around and hold as a virtue that we
restrained ourselves in what we would consume. And it made
sense because nobody questioned whether or not Paul Adams was
a success because of my ten thousand cattle. See it,
(12:54):
you could see it. But now now that same Paul
Adams drives because I don't care about this stuff. I
drive a twenty fifteen Ford. Explore that I have absolutely
done tremendous damage to dragging it behind my RV across
the country. And I don't care, but a lot of
(13:17):
people do. In fact, for many people, it's like an addiction.
And it's because we have this biological urge that like
a peacock shaking its tail feathers, you know, in impressing
the community of males and females around us. It's just
we're still we're still got biology, and so we're going
(13:42):
to want to buy the car by the house that
is quote unquote commiserate with our lifestyle. But we live
inside a society where commiserate with our lifestyle means spending
one hundred and five percent of your income, where what
we have to do to be financially successful is save
twenty percent percent of gross Yeah, and that has you
(14:04):
have to live a very very different lifestyle than all
of your compatriots who make a similar level of income
that aren't doing it, and they aren't like on average, statistically,
if you're somebody who's saving, everybody who care about around
you is probably not. And that's just because most people
(14:25):
aren't sitting aside an appropriate amount of money and are
making decisions based upon how their life looks today. Now
another thing that's developed. If we think about even a
middle class lifestyle today, that person has access to better
things in lifestyle than somebody who lived the richest in
the world two hundred years ago, no kidding, and we like,
(14:50):
but how much money would that person be saving if
they just lived the same lifestyle they lived two hundred
years ago, They'd be saving ninety percent of their income.
But we've all continued to level up our lifestyle and
instead of reflecting what do I want my life to
look like, what we do is we decide what our
life should look like. Is that over there?
Speaker 5 (15:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:13):
And you know at my church, I lead a Saturday
men's group that's two times a month, and I told
them I'm designing this workshop. We're about to get the
last session of this eight week course that I taught
to just minute my church about how to look differently
at their careers and in implementing some business practices I've
(15:34):
used to build this business. And one of the things
that I shared with them is I shared with them
how much I make a year, and they were all like, what.
And the only reason I shared that with him is
I said, you guys, I have built this incredible white
collar business so that I can walk into a room
(15:57):
and people think I'm there to fix the audience or
shoe a horse like nobody thinks I'm there to be
the financial mind in the room. And I'm perfectly fine
with that being my lifestyle. Sometimes that's really important and
identity to people, et cetera. I just set that aside
because I'm anchored in the life that I'm creating, not
(16:18):
in the life anybody else sees. And so when it
comes to people planning for money, one of the first
things they haven't done is any work in cultivating contentment
to say this is what I would like to see
my life be like. And then as your income goes
above it, you're able to hold because you built the
life you like. And now what the game you're playing
(16:42):
is to make the life you like permanent. And then
I'm going to go a little philosophical, just one moment more,
in that when people are working their way toward retirement,
they're carrying a debt. Now they don't think this way,
but they're carrying a debt that they owe to, say,
sixty five year old them. Now that debt is the
(17:06):
net present value of income for the rest of your life. However,
you and your advisor calculate that and when you roll
up to that birthday, do you have enough money to
pay that person and some huge amount like ninety five
percent of America won't and they're just going to keep you. Well.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
I've thinked about how I've had people come into my
office looking like a deer in the headlights because they're
sixty years old and oh crap, I've never done anything.
And it's like, you know, and I think both you
and I are like, whatever we could do to make people.
Speaker 5 (17:43):
Not do that be there?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, yep, because what they're not thinking about is when
you're funding your lifestyle, you're always funding two until the
point at which you reach financial independence is you have
to und your current lifestyle and then you have to
fund your lifestyle for the period of life when no
one's going to value your offer. Yeah. I think it
(18:08):
just at some point, you know, as I get more
and more gray hair in my beard, it it creates
different conversations. And we're created before and twenty years from
now there'll be even more different conversations about age and
health and what I want to be able to do
and what I want to be able to do is
(18:28):
is securely stable, to be able to end that on
my terms, with the level of lifestyle I want for
the rest of my life, and we want that for
all of our clients. Right.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
You made me when you were talking about the horse shoer.
I a literally my oldest daughters of that and we'd
spend the summers on her farm.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
In the Tri Cities.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
And I was one day holding a horse while the
horse while the failure was there shoeing, and he's asking
me if you know, he finds out I'm a financial advisor,
and he's asking me financial questions.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
And I'm looking at him, and I'm looking at his.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
Old truck, and I'm like, I don't want to make assumptions,
but I'm betting that he's probably hand in the mouth,
you know, but he's just you know, So let me.
Speaker 5 (19:21):
Ask you the next thing.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
There's something that you've said in the past, and that
is retirement isn't a math problem. It's a narrative problem.
So what the heck does that mean?
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Well, Okay, I'm going to go deep here, and I
hope the audience doesn't mind the dive. You see, I
don't I would assert that you cannot hear anything I'm saying, Benita,
you can't hear a thing I'm saying. And nobody in
the audience listening to me right now can hear anything
(19:52):
that I'm saying. Ever, and you and everybody in the audience,
none of us, including me, ever hear what anybody ever says. Okay, Now,
that little voice and everybody's head that said, I don't
know what Paul's talking about. I'm totally hearing right now.
That's that's actually the only voice any of us ever hear.
(20:16):
You see that little The way I draw a picture
of it sometimes is imagine like a little tiny stick
figure in your ear, or like maybe some cute dwarf
from a movie, but they're just real small and they
listen to the world, okay, and then they tell you
what was said. But that little thing we'll just call
(20:39):
your listening. That listening is influenced by your past, your traumas,
your dreams for the future, your wishes, want some preferences,
Like if you've ever had a conversation with your spouse
where it's like you said one thing and they heard
something else and there's some kind of friction upset You're like, wait,
what happened, and they've just didn't understand what you said.
(21:01):
That's because they're listening, didn't translate what you intended to say. Well,
we listen our entire environment. Every advertising commercial narrative set
around us, et cetera. Like how many people have you
heard say One of the biggest falsehoods about money that
(21:21):
I remember being set around my kitchen table like regular
is you know what, is probably just going to be
cheaper to get a new car than fix that one
the loney sandwich. Almost never is that the case unless
you you know, you bought some you know, Porsche or
something like that, it's super expensive to fix. But otherwise,
(21:42):
like normal cars, if you maintain the car properly, it's
a whole different world. Yeah, but the narrative is it's
cheaper to just get a new one. And you wouldn't
believe that when somebody holds that just to say, hey,
I'm support you. You've got enough money, you can do
it either way you want. Well, let me just walk
(22:03):
you through the math of what keeping your current car
is and you can feel the emotional bit of it
for people when I just even bring it up. And
then you can never have anybody around you give you
appropriate financial feedback when you make a bad decision. And
(22:24):
I'll give an example. One very very close friend of
mine went down to southern California to visit him. And
you know, my family and I have had this living
radically within our means mindset for quite some time. And
I go down to southern California. It picks me up
in a brand new, like sixty thousand dollars build out
of I think it was a Toyota Tundra, and I'm like, what,
(22:49):
what's with the new car? I mean, weren't we just
talking in a meeting a couple of weeks ago about
how great the philosophy is and it was like, well, yeah,
but I'm going to keep it ten years and that's
just it. And I just I said, well but if
you look at the time value of money, and then
it like I could tell the tone change, like I
was stepping near the third rail in a very good relationship.
(23:12):
And so what we unintentionally create is people around us
can even give us appropriate feedback, because once you buy
that car with that big loan or that creuddy lease
or whatever it is, you can't undo it. And the
people around you who love you who have enough compassion
for you don't beat you over the head about that
being a terrible decision. And so people have a hard
(23:35):
time learning. And now on top of that, everybody that
makes us an offer, almost nobody in our life as
an interest in us accumulating wealth. They just have an
interest in us buying the next bigger house, like different mortgage,
or this financial product or that financial product. And that's
so all of those things disrupt people's ability that those
(23:59):
narratives that what you might refer to as cultural common sense,
and then people don't learn basic money mechans. Like every
client fills out an application, we don't make an offer
to a client in a first meeting. We just share
our philosophy. Then if they want to they can fill
out an application. We set a different meeting to review
(24:20):
that for them. Because we don't work with every client.
We charge a fee up front, so we don't want
to offer a fee if we can't bring enough value.
So that's why this application. But on the application there's
a question Benita, and it says, do you know how
much capital work will be required for you to have
financial independence? Okay, Now, these are the people we work with.
(24:43):
On average, are between like two hundred and fifty thousand
and two million dollars a year of income. So these
are not unsophisticated people. How what percentage of them do
you think have a number?
Speaker 5 (24:55):
I'm I'm betting they don't.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, only five percent, and not all of them are
well thought out. Yeah, but think if this is the
biggest narrative break the convert which narrative break would be
a conversation somebody's not having. And the conversation people aren't
having is even an awareness of what where they're trying
to get to. Because if you don't, everybody when they
(25:20):
started working their first job at some point had a
tough day and say, at least I get to retire
one day. And we got out of bed every day,
We went to work forty hours a week, maybe worked
multiple jobs. We got ourselves educated, we built a career.
We did when all along the way we know we're
headed to retirement, we say, but we don't even have
it on a map. We don't have like a here's
(25:41):
a number to shoot for. And because we haven't taught
something as simple as that four percent distribution rule as
like a prerequisite, just simple math. It should be just
in high school math.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Well, how do you think how do you think our
culture rewards spending instead of savings?
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Mmmm? Well, if you've been on social media, you know
ever it's it's because it's the just look the posts
to get the greatest amount of likes. They're going to
be full vacations. They're going to be the cool new car,
the cool new piece of equipment, et cetera. Like there's
(26:23):
there's a very specific reason why I all of my
social media posts are business related because I don't want
I don't want encouragement from people who I don't know
to make decisions that they enjoyed pictures of me doing,
which probably meant it was expensive. So I just don't
(26:46):
post hardly at all the social media and I've taken
out that particular feedback loop that would encourage something like consumption, right.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
Right, Well, so where do they? So where do you
think money is going?
Speaker 4 (27:03):
You know, I'm guessing we've already talked about it. Money
is going to bigger, better lifestyles, I.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
You know, And let me ask you this.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
I think I feel.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
Okay, all right, but I'm feeling like, don't you think
too that it's part of it is just people wanting
to look good.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yes. In fact, yeah, have you read Morgan Household's book
The Philosophy of Money Psychology of Money?
Speaker 5 (27:31):
Sorry, no, I haven't read that one. I'll have to
go look it up.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
It is a great book. I that is my two
favorite financial books, if you don't count any of them
that I wrote, are Stop Acting Rich a Doctor I'm
as Stanley, and then The Psychology of Money. But in
one of the things they talk about in that book
(27:57):
is it is about looking good. But here's what I
would have everybody think about, because there is a certain
amount of public identity, like it like I probably shouldn't
drive a nineteen seventy three Pento, you know, like there
is probably a rust bucket standard. I should like keep safe.
I shouldn't look I shouldn't drive a car that looks unsafe,
because then that falls into people's judgment or judgment of
(28:20):
my judgment. So I don't want that. But aside from
people spinning it that way, what they're doing is it's
getting crowded out, not just on looking good, but then
the maintaining of those things. Yes, right, Like you get
the cool looking car, they charge more per labor to
work on that cool import car yep. And so they'll
(28:42):
make one decision up front, but then they'll make other
decisions that have maintenance. And like, we have a client
that bought two million dollars home in Florida that live
on the other side of the country, and that inflation
that's normal. It didn't. I mean, the mortgage is pretty
pricey because you got it after rates went up, but
(29:03):
you wouldn't believe how much the meaneness has gone up
on it. And it's just on the balance sheets. So
you can't say, I'm not going to maintain a two
million dollar asset. What do you do? Lower your return
plan contribution?
Speaker 5 (29:15):
Yeah, and so.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
They Yeah, the role of identity, I think is huge.
Can we craft? So I'm just thinking what we need
to do is encourage people to craft an identity that that.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Says I'm going to save, right. I mean it's like
it's like change. It's like it's a paradigm shift, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah. It's like, well, when you think of a narrative,
a movie is a script, and so we're just running
ripped in our head. You know, you had a past
guest that talked about, you know, changing people's programming, and
I think with money. It's very much the same in
that if what I realize is I have a strategy
(30:09):
to reach financial independence. Number One, I don't think people
should call it retirement because if we go back again
to the early nineteen hundreds or even in the founding
of our country, there's not a single business or spiritual
leader in this country whoever quote unquote retired. It might
have changed advocation. It wasn't until nineteen thirty five with
the advent of social security we started applying retirement to people.
(30:31):
Before that, it meant like I'm going to retire to
the den for the evening with my Scotch. I'm going
to retire this old plow. We're going to retire this
old horse that was usually not good for the horse.
But they would retire things. It wasn't anything you did
to a person. And then we started saying we retire.
(30:52):
But think about this for a moment. I mean, I
think it speaks so well to your continued involvement with
your planning, with the planning firm and with this podcast.
Is there's no biblical basis for retirement. I don't know
that there's even a a faith that's existed for over
five hundred years on this planet. That says you get
old and are useless. But that's why I've.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
Actually had people do that to me. I've had people
why aren't you retired. It's like, I don't want to retire.
I don't want I mean, that's in my mind. It's
like sitting on a on a deck rocking and a
rocking chair and declining, no.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well this is and this is this is what you
can do. That changes up the narrative for you and
starts to start. For lack of betters saying it, We're
going to inoculate them against bad narratives. And one thing
you say is like, no, I'm not retired. I'm financially independent.
There's a big difference. Think about the conversation you get
to have with somebody after you say that, or if
(31:56):
somebody's trying to convince us to buy a car that
we can't buy, Never say I can can't afford it.
Never say that, because the second I say I can't
afford it, I'm deciding to play by their rules. Instead,
I'm gonna say, I, oh man, that car is beautiful. Unfortunately,
would break strategy for us. Now if I say it's
going to break strategy for me, what's the next thing
(32:17):
the salesman has to say. He's gonna say what strategy?
It happens all the time, and I go, oh, let
me show you. And then it's like I'm running the
lines on the field for how this game is going
to be played. I don't have to enter into their
language at all because I'm just not going to break strategy.
Your friends say I don't want to go to Hawaii.
(32:38):
I'd love to go to Hawaii, but it's going to
break strategy for me. Well, what do you mean your strategy? Well,
my strategy is saved twenty percent of my gross income
every year because I want to have the choice to
be financially independent on my terms, not be financially independent
because the workforce ground me into it, right, and then
that changed. That changes even the relationship with your friend
(32:58):
when you come forward with strong narrative, because that's where
leadership I think happens is are people more encouraged and
ambitious about the future based upon what we said or
what they were thinking when we first showed up in
their life. And I think that even the listeners. If
you change somebody's language, it's not I can't afford it.
(33:19):
It's that I won't break strategy. Right, It's not that
I'm retired, it's that I'm financially independent and now I'm
doing what i want. Doesn't mean I'm not busy.
Speaker 5 (33:31):
That's for sure.
Speaker 4 (33:36):
So let's talk about this whole thing with lifestyle inflation.
Speaker 5 (33:40):
Somebody gets a raise.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
And they and they, and up goes the spending. How
do you how do you inoculate somebody against lifestyle inflation?
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Well, what they have to do first is cultivate contentment. See,
most people are living the life that they have now,
and not by any design, but by default because it's
what they could afford to. And they, by the way,
most people never even pause long enough with their spouse
to say, hey, what would we like just our regular lifestyle?
Look like, like, do we like it?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You know?
Speaker 3 (34:13):
As an example, maybe they've both been talking about redoing
the floors, and they've both been talking about because they
thought the other one wanted it, and it's like, no,
we don't care about the floors. Well save twenty thousand dollars, great,
but that's that's it. So we just got to get
on the same page about what we want our life
and lifestyle to look like currently, and then how do
we get as close to that while reserving for our
(34:35):
old age? I would contend, I'm happy to be challenged
put in the comments Bunny will point people over to me.
But what I would challenge is twenty percent of gross
is the minimum amount somebody should be saving. And there's
just a lot of life that you got to say
no to. One of my biggest mentors was helping a
(34:55):
woman with some mistate planning. She was unfortunately dying of
pancreatic cancer Huntington Beach, and he was about thirty five
at the time, about ten years younger than I am now.
And he said to the woman, he said, how did
you manage to accumulate ninety million dollars? You know? She
I mean she had a good business and stuff like that,
but I mean she just kept buying real estate and
(35:17):
even in her early years when she wasn't making that
much money. He said, how'd you do it? She says,
this was EO thousand or two thousand and five, And
she said, you know, honey, when I was your age,
we just didn't have as much to say no to,
(35:37):
and now we have to say no to so much.
Like back in when she was starting out, like, here's
the thing my mom and she was born in nineteen
forty five in Nebraska and did not have indoor plumbing
until she was ten. They had an out house. Yeah,
that is like if you pause and cultivate contentment, like
what would my lifestyle, what would this errand I'm running
(35:59):
look like one hundred years ago, one hundred and fifty
years ago, and put you in a position to realize
how incredibly wealthy we are in the history of mankind
on this planet, like unbelievably wealthy. And then that kind
of gives you some inoculation from that next advertisement for
the cool newer car. In fact, anything you might consider
doing on payments, what I want you to do is
(36:20):
take your net income for the month for you and
your spouse, divide it by the amount of hours that
you guys each have to work, and then realize how
many hours per month you've got to put in just
to pay that bill. And it's a lot, and people
aren't present to that, And it's it's that idea of
getting yourself out of the narrative enough to just do
(36:43):
some math, have your aims, have some standards, like I'm
going to set aside twenty percent, and it doesn't matter
if it's four or one. Carr like, just get the
money set aside, do in cash for two years, and
then go find an advisor. They'd be happy to meet you.
But it has to be based upon those principles, with
(37:03):
small bits of consistent action over long periods of time,
and the inoculation is not permanent. Once it's there, you
can so easily drift back. My wife and I have enjoyed,
by default, living so deeply within our means. We haven't
had to even look at a budget in two years,
and we've recently said, you know, we're going to get
back to the practice just because it's good practice.
Speaker 5 (37:28):
Well, let's turn a little bit, man. Time always flies
so much.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
We've kind of mentioned that we both work with a
company called Dimensional Fund Advisors, and I, you know.
Speaker 5 (37:45):
It was probably.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
Fifteen years ago that I even I was having I
was at a coffee shop with another advisor as I
was trying to figure out how to do this whole
independent thing, and he says, well, I work with Dimensional
Fund Advisors and I didn't even know about it.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
How is that?
Speaker 4 (38:06):
I mean, it's like a mindset and there's a we
call it evidence based investing.
Speaker 5 (38:14):
How is that different?
Speaker 4 (38:15):
What would you say, how is that approach different from
traditional financial advice that someone who's just doing mutual funds?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah, what would you say is so I'll give maybe
just a quick bullet list of some differences. So Dimensional
Fund Advisors, if you're listening, is probably the largest asset
management firm you've never heard of. The reason you've never
heard of them is they don't advertise. They were the
inceptor of one of the very first index funds, the
founders of Dimensional and what they took the slant of
(38:52):
while other companies like Oppenheimer Putnam were building large field
forces of wholesalers to go out and tell the story
and invite advisors to breakfast and lunch and dinner and
if you guys want more on that story, on more
than costs, yep, I got a whole. I've got a
whole talk I give called the Illusions of Investing that
talks about what an advisor goes through. And you don't
(39:15):
find Dimensional Funds because they don't do that kind of
advertising unless you start reading the academic journals on investing,
and those academic journals investing really discourage people from stock
picking and market timing, et cetera. Because it just doesn't
work and it's fundamentally speculation the asset managers doing with
our money. So what we decided to do by using
(39:37):
dimensional is they kind of just look at it as
we own everything that has a pretty good chance of
doing what the market's going to do. Stuff that's really
bad we don't own, but we own pretty much everything else.
So weise this.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
Harry Markowitz, who died I don't know, instituted it in
a few years ago, but he was doing his calculation
on a yellow pad, and like in the nineteen fifties. Yes,
but the thing that I remember Harry Marco would saying
long ago was Harry Marco which said, just buy the market.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (40:12):
It's like, I don't know how you know. So it's
like the average person could never do that, but.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
True, we pretty well can, and now we do. You know,
no clients all the time. Let's say you're back in
the nineteen nineties and you're like, do I buy Walmart
or Kmart? They're very close companies at that time. Well
one some asset managers say I'm picking Kmart because I'm
going to bet on them. But our type of asset
management is like we'd look and it would be both
(40:37):
of them have positive attributes for the future. Both of
them might work out. Well. Guess what when nobody goes
sprim market anymore because they're closed, where do they go Walmart?
Which means our portfolio is still getting the revenue, the profitability,
and the company enterprise value because the consumers are going
to spend money anyway. So all we have to do
is be everywhere in the market. And like our position.
(40:59):
Our portfolios have about fourteen thousand different positions because we're
not market timing. We're just scientifically holding and rebalancing a portfolio.
It's wildly deep, but unexciting. And yeah, we just coach
our clients science over and over getting to hold strategy.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Yeah, yeah, whole strategy. Don't break strategy, don't break straight.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
Hopefully people can remember that. Paul, we're running out of time.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
I want to hear a little bit about the more
than comments.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah more than Commas podcast? What what does that mean?
Speaker 5 (41:37):
Where did that come from?
Speaker 4 (41:39):
And you know the whole idea that wealth has to
mean more than the numbers.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Yeah, what you think about it? Most people in life,
when it comes to getting retirement is they got they
got to get above two commas, you know, and then
the billionaires talk about getting to three commas. But the
thing is that what's going to have us really enjoy
life in our independence and our time in our old
age is going to be more than just the commas
(42:05):
in our portfolio, and so that just gave By changing
our podcast name, it really gave us more latitude. We're
now over three hundred episodes. We've been on air since
twenty sixteen. People can go way way back in our stuff,
but the rebranding of it just gave us more license to.
Like the other day I recorded one of my shop
(42:25):
that's just the first seventy two hour preparedness at a
home in case of an emergency. It was right after
those big blackouts in Spain, right, So yeah, we'd love
to have anybody who's a subscriber. We're fun. We answer
all the comments and we love hearing suggestions. We get
a lot more downloads on podcasts, and we do YouTube,
but we I don't know, I like having my face
(42:47):
scene sometimes.
Speaker 4 (42:52):
Well I was going to tell you that, you know,
ten years, twenty years from now, you can apply for
a job with Santa Claus.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. Well. The beautiful thing
is my wife loves it. She says, keep growing it,
and I'll just keep letting it get a little longer,
but while keeping it groomed. And then one day my
wife is going to say that's it, and that's what
I'll stop. Because as far as how I address or
how I look, there's only one customer anymore, and that's
my wife.
Speaker 5 (43:17):
Yeah, that's right. Well, how would you sum this whole
thing up?
Speaker 4 (43:24):
Because we've got like a couple of minutes here, so
we need to you know, what are your partying thoughts?
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Parting words would be, if you want to be better
with money, start talking about money, and if you want
to be more affected with money, have more effective conversations
with money and control the narrative. Set a strategy for
yourself and then win things. Risk you coming off strategy,
talk with your spouse. Maybe it's okay to deviate, but
set a strategy. First. We're going to save X, we're
(43:50):
going to give X to the church, We're going to
spend this much on recreation. Just set a plan and
then get the money tucked aside. And you don't even
need to go talk to an advice right now. Uh,
there's probably advisors love to hear from you. But this
month you can intentionally say we're going to set aside
X and then do that and feel that win, and
then do that again next month, the next month, and
(44:12):
if you have more effective conversations with money, you're more
likely not only going to be better for you and
your family, but probably those closest to you are going
to increase their financial competence as well and actually give
you all a chance to have been financial independence together.
Because if you don't talk to the people in your
community about money, then you're going to successfully step off
(44:36):
into old age and they're not and they're not going
to be able to join you, and they're not going
to understand how you were able to do it and
why you didn't introduce them to your advisor. And that's
going to be a tough conversation. So I encourage people
to talk about money as much as you can to
the people that you love the most.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
Good advice And you're a good man, and you've got
very very important to you. You have lucky clients who
are there with you having you guide them.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 5 (45:09):
I want to thank you for being with us today.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Yeah, I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
Important for everybody needs to everybody needs to really take
this to heart.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Yep. And all they got to do is take a
little more to heart every day. You don't need to
be perfect today, just make a little progress financially today
and just like compounding returns, your habits will compound too.
Speaker 5 (45:33):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Yeah, Well with that, I think we've asked some pretty
good questions today, and I want to thank you again
for joining us and thanks for joining us on our podcast.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
So glad. I'm so glad I could be here and
thank you so much for the chance to have a
chat with your audience.
Speaker 5 (45:53):
All right, Okay, thanks for.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Today's episode is over, But we did ask good questions again,
didn't We don't miss out as we broadcast live every
Wednesday six pm Eastern Time on W FOURCY Radio at
W fourcy dot com. Joined Vanina Bellm. We're saying next
week for more conversations with experts on finances, retirement, behavioral
(46:21):
finance issues, health and wellness and more. Until then, remember
to ask good questions.
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