Retire at 65? Think Again. – Episode 675

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[00:00] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome back to the podcast. This is part two when we’re talking about the R word. Retirement. Yes, I know. Everyone’s gonna be like, why are you guys so mad about retirement? I just want to do nothing. Why are you opposed to that? If you’re listening on an audio, Kim just shook her head. Why are you trying to strangle me saying, no, no, this is not a time to do nothing? You know, every now and then there is probably every listener that has actually had a day of doing nothing. I have maybe one every ten years. And I’m telling you, it’s not a fun feeling. You feel yucky. And you don’t feel the rejuvenation that you thought you were gonna feel. There’s nothing wrong with taking a couple hours.

[00:56] Obviously, if you’re not feeling well, that’s a whole different issue. But if you’re feeling well and you’re mentally and physically capable and you have a day of doing nothing, pay attention to how you feel at the end of that day. And think about that being every day. Yeah, not good. But I’m gonna pull from the Kim memory bank, the Kim library. And it’s this. And you said something, oh, this is probably three months ago on the podcast. And it stuck with me. It’s like you put a sticky note in my brain. It was really good. And you said you were going through some challenges. And you were working through them. It was during the time that a big storm had gone through Texas. And this is what you said. You said, I gave myself

[01:44] permission to be upset from walking from the house to the barn to go feed the animals. But once I got to the barn, I knew I needed to change my mind and my state. Why that versus wallowing it for a while? Why not? Because when you feel yucky and then you let yourself feel yucky and you’re okay with feeling yucky and the minutes creep by, all you’re doing is making it worse. It’s one of those arenas of life where ripping off the bandaid, drawing a hard line and saying thus far and no farther is so important. And I’m a big fan of the two minutes or the five minutes or whatever it is that you need to wallow in misery, feel sorry for yourself, cry, scream, do whatever it is that you need to do. But then as

[02:40] a human being, you will feel so much better if you will draw that line, cross over it, do not go back, and enable and create and cajole yourself to get your chin up and look forward and go back to making progress. Because us human beings were put on this earth to serve and to make progress. Progress is the law of God. That’s a quote, a sentence from a late 1800s writer. And so we want to be in progress, and that’s so important and when we’re not working, it’s hard to be in progress. When we’re being lazy, it’s hard to be in progress. And again, Todd and I on last night was, Monday night, it happened to be a long weekend but that’s irrelevant. We watched a three hour movie. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about

[03:40] is wallowing in self-pity for hours because something happened that you didn’t like and just circling in the muck and not getting yourself out of it mentally. Sometimes it requires physically getting yourself out of it as well. And then emotionally, right? Like all the things. You just, you cannot feel good if you let yourself wallow in that. Absolutely. 100%. I love that. Progress is the law of God. Okay, you said something and I wanted to hit the inverse. I’m going to hit the opposite of it before we get into retirement conversation, which is this. If we give ourselves a starting and a finish line of the amount of time that we can say, okay, I’ll go through this, but no more. What about the start and finish

[04:32] line of service? Because retirement means being taken out of service. And if you’re not feeling good, maybe is there a start and finish line on a daily basis of service? What does that look like, Kim? That’s a very interesting question. So I’m going to put forth the idea that if you are retired or you’re thinking about retirement, you really look closely at how you spend your time. Because if you believe as I do that we were put on this earth to serve, I believe that you’ll be happier when you are serving. So this morning, Dan Sullivan, strategic coach, had a two-hour session that he does. There are 10x check-in calls and I attend one every month, give or take. And he brought forth a very old word

[05:20] and it’s agency. Agency is a little step above responsibility. So yes, we want to take responsibility for our own thought, right? But agency is what says not only do I take responsibility for my thought, but also my actions, how I’m feeling, how I’m showing up, right? I remember during COVID meeting after meeting with this one particular guy and I made it a very specific point to show up with a smile. I may not have been feeling it, but I showed up with a smile because that’s what the task took. And because I smiled, because I was serving, my own sense of equilibrium increased, my own psychological aspect, physiological aspect, right? We all know this. If you smile, it literally does things to your body, the physiological side.

[06:16] And so consequently, those were very valuable meetings. And about I don’t remember, six months into the thing, into COVID, into 2020, I try not to even use the COVID word, he said, you know what, I owe you apology. I have not been showing up as my best self to these meetings. And I hadn’t actually really noticed it. But when he brought it up, I was like, okay, I’ll accept the apology. Thank you. And let’s go forward doing even better, right? So this start and finish line, again, there’s going to be exceptions, there’s going to be days, there’s going to be even maybe weeks or months if something really haywire occurs for you. But it’s so important that we become conscious of this space and take the agency,

[07:04] the initiative, the responsibility if you want, to have a starting line and a finish line and then do it again and again and again and again as it relates to service. So go find a volunteer space, if that’s what it takes. Go find a group of people that you can serve that have a desire for the talents that you bring to the table, the ones that God gave you to serve. It doesn’t have to be full time, doesn’t have to be every day, and yet if you’re feeling yucky, if you go serve, you will stop feeling yucky. It’s a wonderful thing. It is and it’s something that we can do immediately. Immediately. Like that fast. Amazing. So I did write down progress is the law of God. I’ve got it. That’s good. To me, I’m like, okay

[08:04] I’ve said it twice now and for all of you listeners, that means you’ve heard it three times. It’s cemented in. Okay. In the retirement context, we talked about looking at the whole truth. We talked about the different little elements to it, meaning us living longer, longevity. We talked about the dollar being worth less. We talked about expenses going up. We’ve talked about all these other pieces. Now there’s this thing that all of us have to be a part of, at least in the United States we do, which is called Social Security and it’s called Medicare. So where does that fit in the mix with the R word? Without a doubt, because most of us will live so much longer than we’re expecting, I really recommend in most cases for people to delay taking

[08:56] Social Security, because if you are not on it, it grows faster than if you are on it. So I think 72 now is the longest that you can wait, and so if you take it to 72 versus 70 or 70 versus 68 or whatever the time frame is for you, you will get more out of it. Now typically, the crossover is between 14 and 18 years. In other words, if you take it, let’s just use age 70 for easy math, if you take it at age 70 and you live till 84 or 88, which should be piece of cake for most people, again, barring some bizarre accent or illness, then you will get more money from the Social Security system than if you took it earlier. So again, take it as late as possible, understand that the crossover is between the 14 and the 18 year mark.

[09:52] And so this helps people, I believe, get clear that they must continue to work, serve, create value, get paid for that value into that mid 70 range. And then it also helps people understand that we must understand that Social Security is going to come in, we can’t let the tax tail wag the financial dog, right? So many people don’t want to work because then my Social Security will be taxed. You want to work for all the other good reasons that we’ve talked about and because you’re going to live such a long time. So your Social Security is partially taxed, that’s okay. Now I’m not a Medicare expert, I don’t even want to speak to it because I really have very little knowledge around it, but I know someone who does. So if you feel like you need help in this, in

[10:40] fact, Katie Votava is the person, she recommends that everybody speak with her before they turn 65 and you’re making some pretty long term and final decisions in that space. So reach out to me if you need some help with that, hello at ProsperityThingers.com and I’ll get you connected to Katie, it’s K-A-T-Y Votava V as in Victor O-T-A-V-A Dr. Katie Votava runs a whole Social Security healthcare thing. But it is so interesting when people get into that space, they just, they shut their brains off is the way that I want to say it. And that’s not a healthy thing, you must continue to have your brain on, continue to create value, continue to be forthright, thinking, giving, again the creating value aspect, serving, all of that.

[11:28] And now frankly I’ve talked so much, I don’t remember the original question, help me. That’s okay, because you touched on, we’re talking about Social Security and we’re talking about Medicare. Oh and longevity. Yes, longevity. There’s something that’s critically important that many listeners may not know, and I wasn’t aware of this, I have a friend that owns a Medicare insurance firm. If you’re ever looking for something really exciting, that’s probably not the industry. But it’s very useful. Here’s the deal, I didn’t know this, but there’s actual cliffs in there, meaning if you don’t meet with a person and set things up within a time frame, you lose it, you’ll never get that opportunity again. So listening to this episode,

[12:16] understanding those things, putting these Lego blocks in place right now, there’s irreversible damage that can’t happen. Let’s go back to longevity. So in the insurance world, we’ve mentioned this before, what’s the new actuarial tables? What’s the years on that? So life insurance, all illustrations go to age 21, it used to go to age 100, I want to say it’s 10, 12 years ago that they switched to age 121. So think about that. Let’s just say it was 2010. The life insurance industry has been illustrating to age 100, and 10, 15 years ago, they changed their illustration to age 121. So think about that. Not only are inflation continuing to make your dollars spend as if they were less, but you’re living longer and longer. And so these two things together

[13:12] are very potentially damaging, which is why I so encourage people to continue to work until they’re in their mid-80s. In fact, if you go back and do the math, in 1930 when age 65 was proposed, if we had brought that age forward today, like we should have, it would be age 84, or 87. Now I’ve got my own dad’s situation mixed up with the actual math. It’s 87, right? So what that means, and when I tell people this, they flat out disagree or don’t want to hear it, I think is mostly the case, is you really want to continue to work until you’re in your mid-80s, because think about it. If you’re really going to live until 121, the insurance companies think that you might, they have the law of large numbers,

[14:04] right? That’s 40 years still of you spending money. And so if a typical person worked from let’s say you got serious about your work at age 27 till 87, then that’s 50 years of earning money and 40 years of spending it, and you’re going to do that on saving 10 to maybe 15 percent of your income, that’s just not mathematically possible. Mathematically no way. There’s no way that can happen. And if we look at, just in the health world, then we’re not endorsing this by any means, but if we look at the medical technology innovation, like GLP-1s that have just come out, people, again, there’s obviously side effects there, but this is early stage. Imagine where we’re going to be 10 years from now, there’s going to be something, and it might even just be like,

[15:00] hey, the sequence of the way you eat your food or the time of day, it could be something like that. We don’t know. It’s going to change. If by chance age 121 is freaking people out, there are people in my circle, Peter D. Mandus, Dan Sullivan, they absolutely think 150 is going to be normal. So if by chance you’re struggling with that and you’re thinking, I’m thinking 90, 95, please do some research because all of the elements that are really becoming provable every day these days and more and more as we progress forward are pointing way north of age 100. Yes. Okay. I’m going to do something. I know the answer to this one, but this is actually going to be really fine. Okay. Dan Sullivan, thought

[15:48] leader, intelligent person that you’ve read books from and worked with for a number of years. Where would you, and this is just a chem scale, okay, on a 1 to 10 of doing interesting things in life, where would you put him on a 1 to 10? Oh my gosh. 10, even though on the outside he doesn’t really have that interesting of a life, but he has a very interesting brain. Does, yes. Which means the books that he writes, the podcasts that he does, the thinking that is out there that I get the privy to sit next to literally is out of this world. Class act. So let’s do this. How about on a scale of 1 to 10, his ability to sit on the cutting edge of technology and seeing what’s going around with him and the world,

[16:40] where would you put him on 1 to 10? It’s 10 not only because of who he hangs out with, which is a whole other reason to keep working, right? And by the way, to make friends with younger and younger generations, but also because of the financial capability that he has to put himself in proximity with cutting edge health research aspects, whether it’s workout, eating, oxygen, whatever long list of cool things, going to Brazil to get stem cell. He has the capability to do all that, and consequently he’s exposed to even more of that and he shares it publicly. So it’s very strong learnings that can occur from that space. And oh, by the way, he just repeated this today. His goal is age 156 because he wants to live a full century.

[17:32] And it’s not whether he makes it to 156 that’s important. What’s important is that as an 82 year old today, he literally had a birthday last week. He’s looking at age 156, which means he thinks about tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that way differently than your typical 82 year old would. And so that is the value, not whether he makes it to 156 or not. You stole my question, my last question. I was going to ask how old is Dan Sullivan? And you stole my question right there. Like I had this hype and I was like, oh, I’ve got this. Okay, here’s the reason why I was going to ask it, Kim. Statistically, the guy 65 should have just been retired and done and dead by now. Yet, is this not some of his best work? Absolutely.

[18:29] Yeah, the wisdom, and this is true of you, our listener. You don’t bring less wisdom to the table at 75 than 65 or 85 than 75. You bring more wisdom to the table. You have more value to create. You have stronger and better and bigger relationships, assuming that you have continued to grow during your entire life. Maybe it’s two steps forward and one step back, but it’s still growing, right? It’s failing. It’s learning. It’s winning. It’s learning some more. It’s failing again. That is what life is about, and those, quote, elderly people bring more of that to the table, not less. Yes, oh, so good. 82. Alright, we all have, not all of us, there’s some more, we’re going to call it matured audiences out there. That might be over 82, they’re

[19:33] listening. We all have work ahead of us. Part three of this episode is about the retirement and portfolio allocations and having control over your money. For all of you, if you’re on that edge right now or you have parents or you know someone that’s in that range where Medicare is coming up, or you actually need to be looking at those numbers, there are cliffs that happen. If you don’t execute, you will lose opportunities forever. Send the email to hello at prosperitythinkers.com. Kim has a reference. She can get that to you. That way you’re taken care of and you can actually look at the real math. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get part three of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity

[20:29] Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit prosperitythinkers.com.