Want to finally stop working and retire in peace. It's about more than quitting work and living off your savings in retirement reimagined. You'll discover how to have a fulfilled retirement that lets you enjoy travel, family time and freedom. And now here are your hosts, Ron Bernstein and Nicole Sullivan.
(00:24): Hi everyone. Welcome to retirement reimagined. My name is Nicole Sullivan. I'm the co-founder and director of financial planning at prism planning partners. And today I'm joined by my wonderful colleague and the managing member of our firm, Ron Bernstein. Hi Ron.
(00:41): Hi Nicole. How are you today? I'm doing just great. How about yourself? I'm fantastic. Excited about this episode as well today. So let's get at it As am I, as I, and I think too, it's just such a great day out 70 it's June in Chicago, bright sun. The topic of today is called reconsidering retirement. I can see where on a beautiful day like today, you don't wanna be beholden to your desk and retirement sounds like such a great thing. It kind of brings up an interesting question and an interesting thought in my mind. Why would someone want to reconsider retirement? And there's probably a lot of reasons for this and we're gonna delve into that today. So I would say the first one is some of the surveys and job report data that we've been seeing is reflective of, of some of the mood here.
(01:30): Well, I wanted to cite this study here by the St. Louis fed their senior economist, Miguel Faria Castro wrote back in October of 2021 that an estimated additional 3 million Americans retired during the first 18 months of the COVID 19 pandemic. People typically retire every single year, but during COVID 3 million people more than normal retired. Now more recently in may of 2022 and estimated 1.5 million retirees reentered the workforce, according to a study by labor department, data conducted by economists that indeed and studies are now showing that Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 are back in the workforce at roughly their pre pandemic rate. This is quite interesting.
(02:22): Exactly it certainly is. And let's, uh, break it down a little bit because I'm sure there's just a lot of, uh, factors that resulted in some of this shift and we can really look at it and, and maybe take a step back and say, it's all about, you know, confidence am, am I really feeling that I'm in a strong position mostly financially to make this move into a full blown retirement? And this was one of the things was great is, is that we had just really wonderful markets over the last 10 years. So folks were feeling as though that, uh, financially they were in a strong position to make the decision and they did, but things have changed. You know, we came back to earth era with what's been going on on the market more recently, inflation now has become a household, uh, word, which has been absent for probably a whole generation now. And we really need to discuss, you know, how inflation may impact retirement, uh, for these folks in the years ahead as well. I think after time, people may feel that maybe where I'm too young and maybe I, you know, retired prematurely and I'm sensing that I'm lacking the necessary structure and got just too much time on my hands. So a lot of interesting things going on here,
(03:32): A lot of interesting things, and I think as financial planners, we have definitely been getting more calls from people who've retired during COVID or maybe kind of shortly after. Do you think that it's bad though, that now folks, especially in this kind of younger baby boom generation are reconsidering retirement.
(03:50): I really don't. And we've said this in a previous podcast. I think that the timeframes that we're dealing with today are so elongated that being in a, a retirement situation at, at a younger age right now just provides a lot of discomfort that I've got too much time and, and it's not going away. And I think as well, that redefining who you are and, and what you've got going on could be a purposeful exercise to decide whether or not really had made sense for you to retire. Were you doing it as a result of burnout or just feeling as though that you were just confident enough that you can just jump into a retirement situation with really not thinking about what you're gonna do?
(04:29): Right. Exactly. And I think retirement involves planning as we preach on this podcast quite a lot, but I think also one's career track periodically requires reexamining. We hear about this great resignation and you think a lot of those folks are in their twenties or thirties, a little bit on the younger side of career, feeling burnout and feeling overworked, but maybe some of these folks kind of in the latter part of their year were, or latter part of their careers rather were feeling a little bit burned out as well. And this kind of quote unquote pre-retirement early retirement actually was more of a sabbatical. So I guess around a question for you, cause I know you have some interesting thoughts on this, regardless of financial status, should retirement really be considered retirement where you sit in a rocking chair and, uh, look out into the sunset every day. And how do you develop that structure?
(05:20): Well, it's very funny because retirement and quotations really is just sense of permanence. Like, okay, this is my next stage in life, my back nine or whatever you wanna refer to it as maybe the better way to approach it is just once again, what you're saying is treat this as just a reboot, taking some time off, treating it as sabbatical, do some things that were on your plate of that you wanted to get done and just allow yourself to, uh, re-energize and figure that. But retirement, isn't something that needs to be permanent. I just wanted to slow down here temporarily and rethink what I'm doing and then really figure out what is my next plan in life here? What is it gonna take to get me refocused and feeling energized to tackle something
(06:05): New? I'm gonna tell a tangent here, but the summary is this isn't your grandparents' retirement anymore. So I have an elderly relative who is about to turn 101, he retired between 55 and 60, 45 years ago. And my mom was saying that she thinks he has been retired longer than he was working. And I think that may be true. So if you have 45 years potentially to live, what are you gonna do? And some of that may involve work. Some of that time may be filled by volunteering or developing some sort of a new routine, but people's grandparents didn't live until they were 101, maybe you would get to 80 if you were lucky. And it's just, it's just really interesting how retirement is something that really needs to be planned out both financially and emotionally.
(06:55): Yeah, I, I would say that we always treated retirement. Maybe our grandparents did is, is the reward for good financial choices. And this was their ability to say, now I can get back to what I wanna do and not feel as though that I'm beholden, you know, to a career or family at this point anymore. And that's just not the case. The world is too dynamic of a place to be sitting here and pulling back in that way. And that's why we need to really view things in terms of how do we get our clients and the folks who are out listening today are re-energized because a lot of it really made, be just subject to, I just needed something I needed a change and retirement really for me was, was really that marker that I could use to, to make that happen. Let's dream. And think beyond just what retirement looks like or look like for our grandparents.
(07:45): What do you do if this all sounds great, but you need some help figuring things out and putting a plan together. I think the first thing is, is just educate yourself. See if there were things that you were excited about in the past, but just couldn't bring yourself to really entertaining because you had too much going on canvas, some of the marketplace, do some salt, searching on, you know, some of those things that you're really good at, and you may be able to leverage in a form of a hobby or, uh, another career,
(08:17): I would say too. Think about some of the lessons that probably we all learned from the COVID 19 pandemic. Give an example for myself. I really had a little bit more free time and was able to reconnect with some hobbies and things that I enjoyed actually as a child because my social life pretty much died as everyone's did during the pandemic. So for example, I personally really enjoy baking. I've always enjoyed that since I was little. And I was taking that up a little bit more during the pandemic and maybe a tip I'd give to some of the people contemplating retirement out there, go back to college and think about some of the classes you took, maybe if you had a different major or changed a major or wanted to change a major, what would that have been? And could that maybe be something that you opt to pursue now kind of in this, uh, next chapter.
(09:02): And I think that would work in conjunction too of maybe revisiting your plan, particularly the plan assumptions we're going into a new phase here would appears to be with the economy adjusting to just higher inflation. And then in addition to maybe market assumptions. So, uh, all your savings and investments, we, you, that needs to be rethought about whether or not those assumptions are still relevant to your situation, because at some point, yeah, you may need to look at supplementing your income where that wasn't an issue even a year ago.
(09:36): And just for total clarification, we're discussing revisiting your financial plan and some of the assumptions that maybe you and your planner have hopefully put together, just talking a little bit about the work, the quantitative work that we do here at prison planning partners, we help model out different scenarios for clients and a client could come to us and say, I want to buy that boat or buy that vacation home or do this or that retire at a certain age, of course, but we also stress test for the UN fun things that you may not be considering such as what if inflation remains persistently high? What if you suffer a long term care event or there's a disability or death we like to stress test again, your goals and the things you'd like to do against some of these potential threats to someone's financial plan.
(10:27): So the key takeaway is making sure that there is a qualified accountability partner. You know, someone is here, who's walking in LA lockstep with you and making sure that, you know, everything is functioning according to how it was set up. And in the event that there may be some need to tweak that we're getting ahead of that, the whole idea of having a successful retirement and doing everything that you wanna do. And as well as make some changes, whether it's lifestyle or financial that we are ahead of that conversation and that the client doesn't have to worry that that is driving their decision making process, that, uh, the plan just didn't work for them.
(11:07): Financial planning is a career is very interesting because on the one hand, it is quite black and white X and O math problem, but there is just such a subjective element to things. And I think a big value that we provide as advisors is helping clients understand that there is a balance between being too conservative and, and afraid and hoarding all your money and not doing what you wanna do, but also making sure that folks don't go to the other extreme and spend and do haphazardly. So it's about kind of finding that equilibrium.
(11:41): And we could revisit legacy as a, as a conversation because that could play into the equation as far as reconsidering retirement, because in many cases, as you're building towards a retirement, that's really more for you and your household. But looking past that, that is another way to, to say, you know what? I've got something more in the tank here. I want to, um, uh, take advantage of it. So it could positively impact, uh, my legacy. I think legacy conversations are gonna be wonderful topics for future podcasts. Ron, I know a lot of people have lots of differing thoughts and feelings around what should I be leaving as a legacy, be it a financial legacy for my kids, a legacy of certain values, things like family, giving, helping charities, things like that. So I hope our listeners will look forward to us covering that topic in greater detail in the future. Absolutely.
(12:35): I wanted to thank everyone for listening to today's episode. And Ron, thank you so much for your time and wonderful insights as always You As well. If anyone, if anyone's interested, please make sure that you check out our website, which is prism planning, partners.com. We have a host of content on our website regarding retirement planning, uh, blogs, videos, all kinds of activities, wonderful things to download as well too. If you have any questions, Ron and I are more than happy to chat with you, I'll make sure that our contact information is linked in the show notes. And finally as well, we are going to be releasing new podcast episodes every Thursday for the next little bit here, at least the next couple of months, uh, we have a pretty good rhythm going with this podcast, which is really exciting. And please make sure that if you like this podcast that you subscribe and look out for us every Thursday. Thank you so much, Ron. Really appreciate everything. Thank you, Nicole. And thank you everyone for listening. And we look forward to delivering more pertinent topics down the road. Take care byebye, Take care. Bye. Now
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