On The Green: When Your Money Finally Meets Your Purpose

Episode 7 You're listening to the Retirement Life Podcast, a place where we help you cast a vision for your retirement and take the next steps to live it. I'm Tony Hall here with my co-host Rc Arseneau. And each episode, we'll bring [music] you real stories, honest conversations, and practical ideas to help you build a retirement that's meaningful and life-giving. Let's jump in. Well, welcome back to the Retirement Life podcast. I'm your host, Tony Hall, here with my co-host, Rc Arseneau. Uh, and today we're wrapping up a three-part series on one of the most important and often intimidating parts of retirement, which is finances. And so, uh, to kind of catch us up, RC, in part one, we explored the long game, investing, staying steady through the ups and downs of, uh, preparing for retirement. Last episode, we focused on the short game, uh, which is more of a fragile, high stakes time just before we get to retirement. And and now we made it to the green, which is retirement. Um, which sounds wonderful. It's the place that, you know, you've worked so hard your whole life to get to. Tell us where we're headed here. Yeah, you've you've been working your entire career to get to the green. And now imagine you've you've made it. The ball's on the green. You you walk up to the green. You grab your putter out of the bag and you get over the ball and and you're getting ready to take this putt and you look up and realize there's no flag. You you look around, it's just grass. You don't even know what what are you doing here? Like what what are you aiming for? And this is this is what I think happens to a lot of retirees is they they finally make it to what they thought was the goal only to realize that once they get there now they don't know what their goal is. The flag keeps moving and and this is about the why. This is why the why matters so much even to your finances. So you need to be able to identify this why so you know how to activate your money to support that. That's great. Okay. So set the stage for us. What what does it mean or what does it look like to be on the green and look at retirement planning with purpose? Yeah. So being on the green for our conversation means you've reached this point that you can live on the assets that you've saved regardless of what that looks like. Maybe maybe you fully retired. Maybe you've decided to keep working, but you don't need to. Or maybe you just work part-time. But the point is, you can you can quit working if you want to. Okay? You don't need to keep saving money. The accumulation phase is fully behind you. And now the question is, what are you aiming for? And like I said, most people think that this was the goal the whole time. But without having a defined target here on the green, you with no purpose, you don't know your values or your legacy, you're at risk of feeling aimless. Yeah. So, you're you're you're saying it's it's more about sec or or not as much about security, which I think all of us want that, right? Absolutely. We want to know that we're in a safe, secure position. You're saying it's not so much about that, but more about direction. Yeah, that's right. It's understanding that money it was never the destination. It wasn't about saving enough money. It's about how is how do we use this tool to actually live my best retirement life. So imagine if if in the long game um just imagine all the work you did that finally got you here. I mean if you're a contractor how many nails did you have to nail in a 2x4 that finally got you here? or you know if you delivered mail for a living, how many letters did you stuff into a a post box that actually got you to this point? So you've gone through all this hard work, this good hard work to actually get you here and you don't want to squander it. So now you show up, you've got these accounts that have money in them because you thought that was the goal. But here's the thing about money is money just sitting in an an account has zero value. Think about that. I mean, we think that money is the most valuable, but it has no value until you exchange it for something that has value to you. That's it's it's our decision to activate it by trading it for something is what gives it value. We have that control. So some people they end up having plenty of money but they decide that they don't want to trade it for anything or or they just have fear or indecision about whether or not they can because maybe there's something else they want to do and trade it for, you know, later. And so there's a there's a lot of uncertainty about trading this money for value once they hit retirement. I I love that picture of like how many nails did you nail in? How many letters did you deliver over the course of this career? Uh is so good. And I think what you're getting at is we're we're looking beyond surviving retirement or even just living in retirement. We we want to we want to do the hard work to know what do we value? What's valuable to us? And I can see why people skip this step. I mean, we spend 30 to 40 years working, saving, investing, like Yeah. nailing nails, delivering envelopes, and and it's it's natural to think once we get on the green, we did it. Like, we've arrived. This is the goal. Just getting on the green, now we have freedom. Um, so how do you apply some financial strategy to this? Yeah. So, this is when it can get tricky. Um, so here's here's something to consider. You know, most retirees by the time they've made it to retirement, in my experience, they they probably are not living on a budget, per se. Most of the time they've kind of figured their lives out. They figured their grooves out, at least for survival. And so, um, oftentimes a conversation that I'll have, um, with someone is not necessarily creating a budget, but think of your expenses as maybe one of two buckets. either your essentials or your non-essentials or like your lifestyle. And essentials are going to be things, you know, like you think they would be. It's it's having a house. It's having food and clothing, right? These are the things that matter. These are the things that that you need to make sure you have regardless of what the stock market does or your investments do moving forward. Okay. The other bucket, the non-essentials or the lifestyle bucket. This is the buck that you can invest in a way that that says, "Hey, when when things are doing great, I've got a little more money to live the kind of life I want to live, right? Or when it pulls back, then that's where I can pull back. I don't have to pull it out of my essentials, you know, per se." So, you want to cover your essentials ideally with some type of guaranteed income, you know, social security, pensions, that that type of thing. Maybe annuities. Your lifestyle is a bucket. That's when we can do things like the bucket plan that we talked about in the short game. That's the kind of strategy that you can integrate in to take care of your lifestyle and this will create together stability in your plan. So the goal here is if I can get to the place where I know that my essentials are taken care of, I don't have to worry about that. I don't need to worry about how I'm going to make those main things happen. that I do feel less stress, more freedom to be able to make decisions on, you know, things that I choose to do or trips that I want to go on. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And a lot of these planning concepts do go beyond the scope of just an average investor or average investing. you you have to know um that the choices that you're making are not going to harm the longevity of your plan because longevity is one of the risks you've have to navigate when we're on the green. So, but here's the thing. It's worth the work to work with an advisor, put together a solid plan because if you have a plan, the decisions become easier and you're going to sleep better at night. Clarity is essential when you're on the green. Okay, RC. So, you know, for those listening, talk to me about the DIYers, right? The do-it-yourselfers, the ones who, you know, maybe they've created spreadsheets or they've used an online retirement tool to to give calculations of of what they need or what they're doing and and all of that. What do they need to know that maybe they don't know right now? or or what advice would you have for them? Um maybe are there blind spots in in in what they're doing that that they need to be aware of? Yeah. No, that's that's a great question. So, I know a lot of folks if they are DIYers, they can go online and find these calculators, these retirement calculators, and and it'll be something like, hey, if you save this much a month or a year and you get this much um return, here's what your accounts are going to be worth, right? And there are some blind spots with these, but the most important thing is is understanding what question can these calculators answer. And maybe even more importantly, what questions are they not answering? I'll give you an example. These calculators that are just going to to spit out like a spreadsheet version of you're putting in this much and you get this much return, you know, over a year. Um, here's the question that can answer. It can tell you, am I going the right direction, right? Am I saving enough that my accounts are growing? But here's here's what it cannot answer. It cannot tell you, am I retiring at the right time? Should I take my social security at 62 or wait until 67? It it can't tell you if you need to adjust your expenses in real time. And this is this I think people feel this because this is when you see a lot of the comments online that people are fearful because I think they know that to answer those questions is really beyond the scope of that tool. But that's the most type of tool that's most commonly available. So, I think the blind spot um just to be aware of is that this type of DIY tool really isn't taking the full scope of all that you need to be considering in this super important part of your plan. Well, just a real practical question. How do I know if I have enough money to retire? Because, you know, I see on these comments on group retirement boards that would just say just do it. I mean, just just go for it. you you're going to figure out the money. Um you don't need a ton of money or you only live once. And honestly, that sounds wonderful. I mean, that sounds like, okay, this sounds fun. This sounds like, yeah, let's just go for it. But I I think that does affect a lot of people, you know, you know, like don't wait until something bad happens and and you can't do what you want. So, just go and go and go and do it. It it sounds great in theory, but what would you say to that, especially to retiring early? Yeah, I this goes a little bit back to our conversation even in the short game, but um you know, if you're if you're looking for your financial advice from the the internet, the sound the boards that are out there, um I would give you caution to that, right? Because they don't know you. They don't know enough about you to actually give you advice on what choices you need to make. And and to even go back to what we talked about in the in the short game, you know, just because something worked out well for person A doesn't mean that that same plan will work out well for person B. Because the studies show even like we talked about timing, they show that even one person that retires in one year can actually live out their lives and have plenty of money for their age expectancy. Run those same numbers with someone who retires just one year later and that person may run totally out of money and it just a matter of timing. Everything else was the same. Well, they they can't they can't speak to that. So, look, if you have these kinds of concerns that you're reaching out to the internet and asking for financial advice, again, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but this is a good time to consider who is on your planning team. And if you're having these kinds of questions, it's not worth the risk to just take the advice off the internet. Start a relationship with an adviser, the correct adviser for you, whether it's a coach or a, you know, a wealth adviser. Get in relationship with someone that really can learn enough about you to give you specific advice that is beneficial to you, not the generic advice on the internet. Yeah, that's helpful. Well, to kind of switch gears a little bit here, we we we have this course, Unwrapping Retirement, that was created to help people discover what is important to them in retirement. So, how do you connect your retirement plan that you create in unwrapping retirement with your financial plan? Yeah, this is this is a great question. So, I'll give it for instance. Um, you know, with with in unwrapping retirement, so much of what we're trying to to pull out and unpack is what matters most to us. And I know even for Dena and I when we went through this experience together, if you would have asked us five years ago what we expected our essentials bucket to hold once we get to retirement, it it would be mostly surviving retirement kind of stuff. We'd want to make sure that we were eating, had a place to, you know, live, that kind of thing. But after going through the work of really digging into what matters most, that changed for us what our essentials were because we we gave oursel enough space to truly um just embrace the idea that so many things can be essential. Things about our our self-care, our health, things that had to do with some of our desires to continue learning. And and when you go through the work of doing that and then you can apply your money in a way that you know you can chase after those things that matter, it it unlocks you to be free to spend some money on that that health thing or that hobby, you know, learning the new language, making, you know, that trip. And you don't worry and fear that you're, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. Yeah, that makes sense. It's great. Yeah. Let's let's let's kind of bring the series together here. So, the long game we talked about in the first episode of this is building wealth and then the short game is is um protecting it as you approach retirement. And and then today we're talking about being on the green, which what you're saying is aligning it with purpose. That's absolutely right. Yeah. Look, this retirement game, it's just too big to wing it. and and you really do need to understand which game you're playing. Set that defined target. Um and because even even a perfectly funded plan can feel empty if we haven't set this target. So that's what we're shooting for. That's awesome. Well, if this series has sparked ideas for you, share it with a friend or or a couple maybe who's thinking about retirement. And if you're ready to define your own green uh we would invite you to visit the retirement.life uh to learn about unwrapping retirement. Yeah. Yeah. And and remember it's never too early or too late to start shaping this retirement, you know, to a retirement that really is rich in your purpose and your connection and joy. Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks for joining us in this threepart journey um about finances. Be sure to like and subscribe uh so you don't miss out on future podcasts and then follow us on Facebook uh at the retirement life. But until next time, keep dreaming, keep planning, and keep living this season with hope. This podcast is intended for general information, educational, entertainment purposes, and is not intended to provide financial, legal, medical, health, or lifestyle advice. Individuals should seek their own advice [music] from a qualified professional. It is not an endorsement of any particular product, service, or organization. The opinions and views expressed [music] on this podcast are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the retirement life. The retirement life and Arseneau Financial are separate entities. This podcast is not to be considered a solicitation for investment or financial planning services through Arseneau Financial LLC.