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The Smart Take:
Here’s some of what we discuss in this episode:
- Background on The Retirement Manifesto Blog and the blog post we’re discussing.
- The complexity of non-financial issues and why these lead to our true happiness.
- Your retirement will be different than you expect.
- Retirees find that their priorities change as they move through retirement.
- Retirement can be the best years of your life but it’s up to you.
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The Hosts:
Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA – About – Contact
Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP® – About – Contact
Episode Transcript:
Tyler Emrick:
Join us as we walk through the thought-provoking insights of Fritz Gilbert’s 6 Lessons From 6 years of Retirement. We explore the key lessons that challenge traditional views on retirement, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, mindset, and the pursuit of fulfillment beyond the financial spectrum. All coming up today on Retire Smarter.
Walter Storholt:
Hey, it’s another episode of Retire Smarter. Walter Storholt with you once again here as we’re talking with Tyler Emrick, wealth advisor and CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER at True Wealth Design based in Northeast Ohio. The team also has offices in Southwest Florida, in the greater Pittsburgh area. Tyler’s also a chartered financial analyst, and so he’s the guy we turn to each and every episode for insights and guidance through the financial and retirement planning landscape. And looking forward to another great episode with you, Tyler. You already teed it up for us. So before we dive into the meat and potatoes of it all, how’s life treating you?
Tyler Emrick:
Oh, we’re hanging in there. No complaints. Although I did come in here this morning all pumped thinking that I got a lot of work done this weekend on my house and cleaning out the garage and all this stuff, and then you one-up me with the starting of a shed, putting up an entire fence, but, hey, other than that, I think I’m doing all right.
Walter Storholt:
I had help though with those tasks and you got to go to the pool. See, I didn’t ever make it to the pool. So you really had a solid weekend there, I think.
Tyler Emrick:
Well, I think maybe up here in Northeast Ohio we never know what the weather is going to do, so fall is rapidly approaching, so we got to take advantage of-
Walter Storholt:
If you get that pool day, you got to take it, right?
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, no, absolutely, because they’re going to be gone. Plus, my two little ones, it’s like their favorite thing to do right now is they’re just at that point to where our oldest is five and she’s learning to pretty much is on her own swimming. And the youngest just turned three, she’s almost there too.
Walter Storholt:
Nice.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, they’re pretty much over the hump and starting to actually enjoy it a little bit.
Walter Storholt:
Are we starting kindergarten this year or is that next year?
Tyler Emrick:
Next year, yeah. Next year for both of them. But both of them will be in preschool starting in about a week.
Walter Storholt:
Okay. Nice.
Tyler Emrick:
We will be in the thick of it and on the normal school routine here pretty soon.
Walter Storholt:
Nice. Very cool. Well, good luck to the great start of the school year for you guys, the preschool year, and hopefully a few more pool days before all is said and done as well. Well, let’s dive into the topic today. We talked really specific financial stuff on our last episode about buffered ETFs and now we flip to the other end of the spectrum here, Tyler, as we talk maybe about the softer side of planning, or not necessarily the exact numbers and dollars, but a little bit more of just the mentality of retirement and lessons and things like that. And this comes from a blog that jumped out to you recently and a neat perspective, somebody that’s been in retirement for a little bit now and looking back and seeing what lessons they’ve learned.
Tyler Emrick:
It is, yes, absolutely. I think the blog is pretty well-known. It’s called The Retirement Manifesto. And it’s an individual that’s been writing for a number of years now on just retirement and really exploring, just as you had mentioned, the softer side of retirement. And I came across an article that he had wrote here recently called 6 Lessons from 6 Years of Retirement. So it’s really just him reflecting back on those first six years of retirement and saying, “Hey, what lessons can I draw from it? What was I originally thinking heading in? And how has my mindset changed a bit over those years?” And from my perspective, I talk to retirees all day every day, so I absolutely have a passion for it, but of course, I’ve got a few years to go before retirement’s on the doorstep.
So understanding that perspective of someone who’s lived it is very, very valuable. So I always try to read articles like this when I come across them, and I thought it was a good time to fit it in. And really as we think about the game plan or the roadmap for today, it’s just diving into saying, “Hey, what were these lessons?” And hopefully we’ll be able to add a couple good comments and how it’s applicable to some of the families that we’ve worked with in the past, and any individual listen that’s heading into retirement and really getting serious about the retirement planning or if you’re just starting retirement, I think this is going to be a good one to take a look at that softer side, as you had mentioned before.
Walter Storholt:
Sometimes the roadmap to follow is a pretty easy one, and so today we break down the six lessons from this article. And just love getting your perspective on these things, Tyler. So shall we start with the first and dive in?
Tyler Emrick:
We should. We should. Which is I think a pretty easy one. And some might listen and go, “Well, hey, that makes sense. That’s probably what would’ve been number one on my list,” but his first lesson is, hey, retirement is complex. And, hey, we got a whole podcast on it, Walt, so hopefully we don’t we’re run out of topics and we understand the complexities there, for sure. The comment that he made when he’s going back through here, he is like, “I’ve wrote over 400 articles on the topic over the last almost 10 years,” and he’s like, “If that don’t tell you the complexity of retirement and some of the decisions that are facing retirees today…” And he’s like, “I don’t know what will.” But when he gets down into this lesson, what I found not necessarily surprising but very helpful is he says, “Well, issues of money are top of mind early in retirement or in his early phases of retirement.”
He emphasizes that the true value comes from figuring out the non-financial issues. And his comment is, hey, as he moved through retirement, realized how truly complex the non-financial issues are, and essentially that understanding and discovering those issues and how they apply and how he can understand them better is where he found true happiness in retirement. And I think that rings true to a lot of individuals that I’ve talked to over the years that are really right on that doorstep of retirement and getting ready to turn the corner into the beginning phases and actually start to live that retirement life, and they’ve thought it for themselves. But there’s a lot of complexity there around, well, hey, when do I take social security and what about healthcare and, hey, do I have enough to retire? And all these very, very good questions.
What you’ll find here as we go down through some of the other lessons is that we don’t want to lose sight of and forget about the other aspects of what entails retirement, what are you going to be doing, how are you going to spend your time, where are you driving purpose in retirement. And we will dive into some of those as we get in and you’ll see how some of his lessons really ring true there. But his first one, pretty easy one here to set us up, retirement is complex. And I don’t think we need to belabor that point to any of the listeners. It’s a multitude of decisions that are going to be in front of you.
Walter Storholt:
Plenty of moving parts to keep track of and try to understand. Lesson number two I see here from the article is that retirement changes with time. And I find this interesting because he’s only six years in, which isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things to be in retirement. So to already have that be one of your lessons is intriguing.
Tyler Emrick:
Correct. And I love the way that he phrased it. And his thoughts on this part of this lesson I think evolve around a TED Talk and maybe a book as well, or a blog by Dr. Riley Moynes called The Four Phases of Retirement: What to Expect When You’re Retiring. And it speaks to these what he calls phases of retirement that each retiree goes through. And we’ll touch on those phases real quick because I think they might be helpful to frame that retirement journey. And it’s going to be different for everyone. Not every person is going to go through every phase of retirement from this individual, Dr. Riley Moynes work, and some individuals might go through these phases more quickly than others. But if you think about how they frame these four phases, the first of which is right into retirement, right at the beginning, and they call it the vacation phase, which is just that.
Hey, it’s like a vacation. You’re off work and you don’t have to go in for 40 or 50 hours a week. So that first phase is that what they call the vacation phase or the honeymoon phase. And then what happens is once you start getting to the end of that vacation phase, what you’re going to start asking yourself is is this all there is to retirement? Is it just going and traveling, or staying at home, you’re reading books and spending time with family? Or whatever that vacation phase was for you, you start to question in their mind and say, “Hey, is this all there is to retirement?” And they call that second phase lost and lost. And what they’re referring to is the fact that you might realize what you have actually lost. You no longer have your job, which you might’ve been working in for a number of years.
You’ve probably gained quite a bit of a sense of purpose. Maybe you have a strong network that you had at your employment or the job that you were working. Maybe you had a very important job and you maybe even have lost a little bit of some power for running a division or running a company or whatever the case might be. So this second phase is really exploring that, hey, the vacation phase is over. Now you start to realize like, hey, this is a new chapter in my life, and you start to think through and say, “Man, what have I lost?” And maybe even feeling a little bit lost in the thick of it.
Now, again, once you go through that second phase in their mind and you start asking yourself, “Well, how can I make my life meaningful again?” And really start to dive into saying, “Well, how can I maybe contribute and have some purpose?” They call that as you’re entering what they call the third phase, which they call trial and error. And the concept here is essentially you going through and trying different things to find meaningful life again. The reference that he makes as he’s going through this on his TED Talk is he’s talking about how he joined his condo association, and he’s like, “Well, that was a mistake, because I had people yelling at me about the type of flowers that we decided to plant in the condo community.” So for him it’s the-
Walter Storholt:
You’re bringing back a lot of memories of me listening to my grandfather’s stories of his HOA battles.
Tyler Emrick:
Did he do the same?
Walter Storholt:
Oh, yeah. They were all about saving this one tree, and half the people wanted this tree gone because it ruined the view of the harbor, and the other half thought it made the view of the harbor unique, and just all the battles that go on to make it a historic tree and just years-long, years-long battles over a tree.
Tyler Emrick:
I am sure a very valid point’s probably on both sides, right?
Walter Storholt:
Oh, 100%. Yeah, absolutely.
Tyler Emrick:
But he quickly realized, and the story that he tells pretty funny, he’s like, “Hey, this is not how I envision retirement and not what I want to do,” so he had to reevaluate and try something new. But that trial and error phase is really trying to find out and say, “Well, what is that meaningful purpose in your life and what are you going to be doing to bring that back into it?” I know Kevin speaks quite a bit on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and once your basic needs are covered you start moving up that hierarchy of needs and getting to some of these things of what’s purpose and where are you getting that from in retirement, because so many of us get that through our job and through our network and the things that we’re doing throughout our careers. So that third phase, trial and error, and then he said the end goal essentially in their mind is get to phase four, which they call reinvent and rewire.
So we got the vacation phase, phase one, we got lost and loss, phase two, and then we got the trial and error phase, phase three, and this final one again is reinvent and rewire, which he comments and says, “Not everybody makes it here, but if you do, it’s some of the most happy individuals that he’s spoken with in retirement.” And it’s essentially this idea or this concept where you find, well, what is my mission? And he phrased it, and one question that I actually found, I thought it was just awesome, so I’m going to just read it here word for word, but it’s how can I squeeze all the juice out of retirement? So how can I squeeze all the juice out of retirement? And that resonated with me thinking through and saying, “Well, hey, what are the things that you can do that brings the most impact to your life?”
And those aren’t always going to be financially related, but this idea, these phases and going through them at your own pace, maybe skipping one of them or two of them, but the idea of getting to this place where you can reinvent and rewire and bring happiness to your retirement and be fulfilled is I think just a wonderful idea. And I don’t think enough families think about that side of things as they’re transitioning to retirement. Rightfully so. There’s a lot on their plate, there’s a lot of decisions. Hey, do I have enough? Can I do this? Can I actually retire? I think there’s some credence and some benefit to trying to understand and think through how are you going to approach retirement from a time perspective and how are you going to spend it. But he summarizes this lesson number two, this retirement changes with time idea into a pretty succinct couple of sentences here that I’m just going to read them word for word, but he states that the important point is to realize your life doesn’t change on the day you retire.
Those changes will last for years and will be different than you expect when you first enter retirement. This new reality requires a new approach and embracing the challenge as part of the fund. And he really just stresses that importance of foster a mindset of curiosity and learn to enjoy the new fluidity of life. So I think that summarizes it pretty well, this idea that, hey, retirement changes with time. I think it’s probably, hey, that makes sense. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it and explore it a little bit further, I think there’s some valuable lessons to learn there.
Walter Storholt:
Yeah, it’s fantastic. I’m thinking about watching my own folks go through their first year of retirement, not quite I don’t think at the one-year mark yet, but it’s coming up soon for them. And it’s just interesting because mom’s just trying to figure out her place and what she wants to get into. They’ve gone through the house renovations, they’re at the end of that part of the journey, and now she’s like, “I think I might want a part-time job,” because she’s doing just free consulting work for friends back at her old job and they’re calling with questions. And whenever they call with problems and questions, she loves that sense of purpose, I think, of being able to walk them through it and still feeling that value, and so I think she wants to scratch that itch with a part-time job.
Not because she has to, but just because she’s like, “I think that would be fun, keep the muscles sharp and give me that purpose.” And so she’s in that journey right now, do I do that in a volunteer role, do I do that for a job? I don’t know if she would go down the consulting route, but she’s got some options there that she can navigate through. And so it’s interesting she’s going through that change already of trying to figure out what her place in retirement’s going to look like.
Tyler Emrick:
Going to look like. Yeah, no, that’s cool. And I see it all of the time. I’ve seen it with my father as well. He went back to work twice after retiring. He was a state employee, so one of those was to double dip a little bit and get that pension, but the second one was much more similar to what your mother’s going through here. So we see it all the time.
Walter Storholt:
Well, I think that dovetails nicely probably into this author’s third point of you go into retirement and it might not be what you expected it to be.
Tyler Emrick:
You got it. He lists off quite a few examples of what he ended up doing that wasn’t on maybe that initial list of priorities. He talked about how he has a woodworking shop and a tree house writing studio, he’s talked about his volunteer efforts and charitable work, and how they bought a second home after downsizing, which were all things that weren’t on his initial retirement list that he thought he’d be doing in retirement, which is perfectly fine. I think we all realize that retirement is going to be a little bit different than you expect. But what I loved here is that he tied it back to what he calls a broader mindset of issues that he wanted to tackle when he went into retirement. So he listed them out as this concept of 10 Commandments of retirement, but essentially these were his guidelines for retirement.
And a couple of them that he listed out was he wanted to give with a generous heart, which dovetailed nicely into it wasn’t saying, “Hey, I want to run a charity,” but this idea of, hey, I want to give with a generous heart and this mindset led me to being involved more in the charity. One of them was I want to try new things. Well, hey, that’s how the woodworking shop comes to fruition and comes down there. So this idea that the important thing is to get a mindset right and let the journey lead you where it may I think is the biggest thing that I gained from this lesson number three, that retirement will be different than you expect. I think it’s extremely important to head into retirement with a certain mindset. And if you have the right one, I think it can really help you go through and at least help you during struggling times in retirement and just make sure that your course is steady. And if you start to stray off of it can certainly bring you back into where you want to be.
But we’ll talk more about this idea of the 10 Commandments because it does come in a little bit later in one of his lessons, but retirement will be different than you expect. And then his number four lesson mentioned that his priorities actually changed throughout retirement. And what he meant by his priorities changed throughout his first six years of retirement as I think about it is you equate it to your working years. After college, your priority is to find a job. Once you find a job, maybe you want to start a family. If you end up having a family, maybe there’s kids that come down the pike. Once the kids get out of the house, maybe you start thinking about retirement or paying for college or whatever the case is. But he mentions that this idea that your priorities continue to change and are an evolution over time, he thought that pattern would change once he was retired and, hey, I’m retired.
But he says that that’s just not the case and it hasn’t changed. And he mentioned this concept of, well, when he was first retired, he was very, very focused on, hey, do we have enough to retire? And that really trickled down into his spending patterns and his spending habits and so on and so forth. And then as he started to move through that vacation and honeymoon phase, that phase one like we had mentioned a little bit earlier, he actually got to this point to where he is like, “Man, it’s actually hard to spend my money.” So him and his wife actually shifted to focus to find ways to force themselves to spend what they could safely spend. And this idea of him finding it hard to spend money, I think some individuals might be like, “What do you mean hard to spend money?” But I see it time and time again with retirees. A lot of individuals when they get to retirement, they get there because they had good spending and saving habits, right?
Walter Storholt:
Yeah.
Tyler Emrick:
Maybe they live a little bit below their means.
Walter Storholt:
Hard to unwind those things sometimes.
Tyler Emrick:
Oh, I feel like it’s a struggle that many, many families face. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in with families that are two, three years into retirement and we’ve had a goal of, say, travel, or a big trip, and we’ve pushed it each year and they just haven’t ended up taking it yet. And they thought when they headed into retirement, all this money would be geared towards this particular item. Travel is just an example, there’s a whole host of things that you can think of to spend your money, but it never really comes to fruition. And it takes time and effort to really think through that and get comfortable with this idea of, hey, I’m not working anymore, I got to start potentially living off some of my assets, is there going to be enough there?
And then two, hey, if I’ve saved enough for retirement and live this retirement that I want, and some individuals will have a retirement of hopes of spending more in retirement than what they did while they were working because of maybe travel or helping out friends or family, or whatever the case is, I think it can be hard to just change those spending patterns that you’ve had your entire working career.
And I think that’s where a financial advisor can be really worth their wheat and gold is getting down in there and making sure that we’re revisiting and rehashing those conversations from a year ago or two years ago of what they wanted and what they were trying to accomplish and taking a good hard look and say, “Well, hey, did those objectives change and should we be appropriating dollars elsewhere? Or is it a fact of, hey, we just need to get more and more comfortable with actually spending and how do we get there?” And really getting families to live their best life in retirement. And I think it can be a struggle for many, many families, especially individuals early on in retirement.
Walter Storholt:
Well, lots of great lessons already. Hard to believe we’re going to squeeze a few more out here, Tyler.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, two more. Almost down there. But lesson five might be one of my favorite, or probably is my favorite, but it just says mindset matters, and then in parentheses, he’s like, “A lot.” So mindset matters a lot. And I think it’s going back to this theme of having a positive mindset and understand that you are going into a different phase of your life that is going to be different, and a lot of it is going to be on you to fill your time, so you have to be maybe a little bit more deliberate than what you have been in the past for some individuals. And he goes back to this idea of the 10 Commandments that I briefly mentioned earlier, and he wrote these 10 Commandments right as he was heading into retirement, and he viewed them as almost like self-imposed directives, or maybe said another way, they’re guidelines that he set for himself as he lives the retirement that he wants to abide by.
And a couple of those 10 Commandments we already mentioned, give with a generous heart, try new things, cherish friends and family, stay flexible to change. These are just a handful of ones that he had listed on there. And what you’ll notice is these are very, very much mindset ideas and concepts, not necessarily things that are very granular like, “Hey, I want to buy a new car every two years, or, Hey, I want to travel to Greece.” These directives are much, much more than that. Like I mentioned before, the guidelines I think is a great way to think about it. And on his blog, he’s got the 10 Commandments on there. You can look them up and see what his are.
But the idea that if you have the right mindset, it’s going to help you as you move through those phases of retirement that we mentioned earlier. And when you get into that, say, second phase of retirement where you’re feeling maybe a little bit lost and realizing some of the loss that you’ve experienced not having that work or maybe some of that purpose, you can really lean on them and rely on them to move forward and find a place of happiness as you’re approaching this idea of retirement and finding out, well, hey, what does it look like to you and what is the meaning going to be.
Walter Storholt:
Yeah, a lot of these things seem closely related and work with one another, like the changing priorities, no wonder you’re going to have your mindset mattering a lot, and so neat to see the relationship between these different lessons.
Tyler Emrick:
Yeah, absolutely. And then finally the final lesson that he had mentioned on here was just that, hey, retirement can be the best years of your life, but it is up to you, and that’s taking that ownership. And I can’t stress enough as I think about my role as a financial advisor and helping families tackle this big concept of retirement, I take a lot of pride and hopefully, families I work with think through and say, “Hey, it’s my job to bring up some of these things.” Certainly, help out with the financial related decisions, and making sure that you’re making the best decision for you and your family, or whatever that you’re trying to accomplish. Certainly, I think that’s a big piece. But this softer side of things and understanding your spending and understanding where you’re using your dollars and making sure that they are being put to their best use case I think is maybe often looked or missed…
Excuse me, not looked, but missed by some advisors, especially some of those advisors that don’t take that holistic financial planning approach and taking the time to get to know their families, I think that is just so important. The better that you know the individuals and the clients that you’re working with, the better you’re going to be able to help see some of these transitions in retirements and be able to speak intelligently and offer advice, and certainly just help them get to a point to where they feel more and more comfortable with retirement and where you’re at in it.
Walter Storholt:
Great points across the board, Tyler. Some great lessons to take from this article. And can we link to this article in the description of today’s show if folks want to go check it out a little bit more?
Tyler Emrick:
Sure. Absolutely.
Walter Storholt:
We covered them all for you, but we’ll link to it in the description of today’s show if you want to go do a little bit more reading on these great lessons from this Retirement Manifesto blog. In the meantime, Tyler, it seems to me like there were other lessons in here that he talks about where it’s really important to get the right guidance and advice through some of this stuff, not just on the numbers and the dollars, but an advisor or someone in the financial realm that’s going to help you through these kinds of things as well, this softer side of planning, emphasizing to make sure that you’re working with somebody who takes that heart and into account.
Tyler Emrick:
Absolutely. You even look back on some of the prior podcasts we’ve done where we’ve had a multitude of guests on, Kevin’s even interviewed, trying to get to this idea of what are retirees doing in retirement, how are you spending your time, and how can you set yourself up for success and a successful retirement. I think it’s just we want to make sure it doesn’t get lost. The financial aspects are extremely, extremely important, but you work hard your entire life, you save, you do the right things, you want to make sure that you’re using your money as a tool to get you to where you want to be, and I think a good financial advisor should help you to get there.
Walter Storholt:
Great points. All right. If you need some guidance and some help, it’s really easy to get in touch with the True Wealth Design team. All you have to do is go to truewealthdesign.com. Click the Are We Right for You button, and you can schedule a 15-minute introductory call with an experienced advisor on the team to see if you’d be a great fit to work with one another. Again, go to truewealthdesign.com, click Are We Right for You. You can also call if you prefer, (855) TWD-Plan, (855) 893-7526. We’ll put that contact information in the description of today’s show so you can find it easily. Tyler, thank you for all the great assistance and help today. Really appreciate it. Hope you have a great rest of your week, and good luck getting the girls into preschool and ready for that school year to begin, and we’ll be catching up again in a few weeks.
Tyler Emrick:
Oh, absolutely. It was fun. [inaudible 00:28:09]
Walter Storholt:
It’ll basically be fall next time we chat.
Tyler Emrick:
It will be.
Walter Storholt:
We’ll probably turn that page [inaudible 00:28:13] It’s good stuff. All right, man, take care, and thank you for listening, everybody. We’ll see you next time right back here on Retire Smarter.
Speaker 3:
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