In this episode of The Year You Retire, hosts John Bever and Jim Uren reveal their list of the seven primary retirement predators.  These retirement predators are the biggest threats to your financial lifestyle in retirement and it is critical that you prepare yourself against the potential damage they can cause.  So listen along as John and Jim discuss each of the seven predators and provide practical steps you can take to help protect yourself.  With a friendly and relatable approach, they share real-life examples and their professional insight, making this episode an essential resource for individuals approaching retirement.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Learn to identify the seven retirement predators and what you can do help protect yourself.
• Discover the concept of “sequence of return risk” and potential threat to your retirement lifestyle.
• Gain professional insight on potential tax reduction strategies.
• Understand the importance of early retirement planning.
• Test your knowledge with some retirement trivia questions.
• Prepare for a successful retirement with clear financial planning session expectations.

The key moments in this episode are:


00:02:09 - Trivia Questions

00:03:58 - Procrastination

00:06:14 - Longevity Risk

00:11:01 - Lower than Expected Returns

00:15:05 - Impact of Market Downturns and Withdrawals

00:16:42 - Sequence of Return Risk

00:19:25 - Protecting Against Sequence of Return Risk

00:21:01 - Spending Shocks and Retirement

00:26:46 - Managing Taxes in Retirement

00:29:19 - Roth Conversions and Tax Strategies

00:30:01 - Procrastination in Retirement Planning

00:30:48 – On Our Next Episode

00:31:22 - Gratitude Segment

Show Transcript

Jim Uren: This is The Year You Retire podcast for people who want their first year of retirement to be right on the money. Your hosts are me, Jim Uren and John Bever, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professionals with Phase 3 Advisory Services. Retirement is one of the happiest times of life, but getting the most out of it requires you to be properly prepared.

Listen along as we explore the financial topics, tips, and strategies that will help you make your first year of retirement your best year yet. Now let's get planning.

John Bever: The year you retire is a time filled with anticipation and dreams, but beware because without the right strategies, danger is ready to pounce at every turn. Today, we discuss the seven primary retirement predators that stand ready to threaten your retirement bliss. Are you prepared to face these common predators head on?

In this episode, we're not just revealing these predators, we're sharing with you the steps you can take to help fortify your defenses. So get ready to defend yourself and take charge of your retirement future like never before.

Hi Jim, it's good to have you here today. I'm looking forward to this session.

Jim Uren: Yes, me too. Good to be with you, John. I'm also excited about this. These are a large part of our job, right? Helping protect people from these seven retirement predators so I'm excited to discuss this.

John Bever: Yeah, they absolutely are. And you know, not just people that are at retirement need to think about this.  People at any stage of life actually need to be aware of these predators.

Jim Uren: Absolutely. And of course, when these predators cause the most damage, it's rarely at the beginning of retirement, right? They're lurking. And if we don't plan properly, they can get you. But of course it's often when you're much later in retirement that they actually do their damage.  And, it's a lot harder to do something when you're 85 or 90 than it is when you're 67.

John Bever: Absolutely. Can't go back in time. Can we?

Jim Uren: Nope. Nope. Too bad.

John Bever: Yeah.

Jim Uren: So John, I wanted to start off with a trivia question, retirement related today. And I know, you know, the answer to this so this is for our listeners, these questions.  What is the earliest age that you can start claiming your own Social Security benefits?  Is it…

1. 59 ½?
2. 60?
3. 62?
4. 65?

And the answer is actually 62 years old. You can start claiming your benefits based on your own work record as early as age 62. Now there will be a penalty if you do start that early compared to your full retirement age, but you can start as early as 62.

Next question. Similarly, what's the earliest stage that you can start claiming a spousal benefit? This is just a normal spousal benefit from Social Security. Maybe you never worked or you just have a much better spousal benefit through your spouse and your own work history. Same, same ages. Is it…

1. 59 ½?
2. 60?
3. 62?
4. 65?

And the answer again is actually 62. So you can start claiming. A spousal benefit also as early as age 62 and like before penalties still apply.

Now there is one time in which you can actually claim benefits earlier. It wouldn't be considered spousal benefit or a benefit based on your own work history, but it would be a survivor benefit.

If you've been widowed, you can actually claim widow or widower benefits at age 60. So you can start at age 60 if that applies to you. And of course, the earlier you start, the lower those benefits are, but it is possible to start as early as age 60.

So those are our trivia questions for today's episode, John.

John Bever: Yeah. And we've actually had several cases where we have been taking a look at those widow benefits claiming at age 60 and whether that's the right strategy or not. Yeah. So let's...

Jim Uren: I was going to say just, yes. And, uh, there's a lot of planning actually that is still available for widowed spouses and we'll get into that maybe in another episode.

John Bever: Yeah.

Jim Uren: But that's the one group that they've preserved a lot of the strategies when they've gotten rid of them for most married couples.

John Bever: Exactly right. Exactly right. Well, let's get to these seven retirement predators. I can't wait. 

Jim, what is the first retirement predator?

Jim Uren: So the first one you and I talk a lot about a lot, John, but it's really what we just simply call procrastination.

Now, normally we think about procrastination is not saving for retirement, but when we're thinking about the year you retire, which is obviously the focus of this podcast, it's obviously too late for that, right? Like you mentioned earlier, you can't go back in time. We can't tell you to start saving for retirement when you're 18, okay?   So this procrastination is really in regards to proper retirement planning.

Now you might do this on your own or you might work with an advisor. Actually we just did an episode on this, episode eight, whether you should use a financial advisor or go DIY. So check out that episode. But either way, you need to make sure that you educate yourself on the major decisions that need to be made in preparation for retirement during the retirement transition and during the retirement years themselves.

And the primary reason is what we'll call, we'll just call them undoable errors, right? In that transition into retirement, there are a number of decisions that need to be made that cannot be undone. If you find out 10 years later that you made a poor choice. It's too late to fix it at that point.

Now, the two most obvious are, are the decisions that you need to make surrounding Medicare and Social Security.  But others include, what do you do with your 401k, deciding on your retirement age, determining how much you should spend from your savings each year's, you know, insurance decisions, etc., etc.

So there's a lot of decisions that need to be made. And so the last thing you want to do is procrastinate on educating yourself or working with an advisor who can help you address these key questions.

So the takeaway here to really protect yourself from this is to get started right away on your retirement planning. That'll help protect you from that procrastination retirement predator.

John Bever: Absolutely. And sometimes that procrastination comes from, “I just don't know what to do.” And that's particularly true when it comes to the Medicare and Social Security issue, because they are unfortunately complicated. Why is it they make some of the most complicated decisions when we're Going into retirement?

And so that's an important thing to take a look at and to jump ahead and not let that delay of, “well, I just don't know what to do, so I'm going to wait.”

All right, well, that's one Jim. What is longevity risk? Cause we now look at predator number two.

Jim Uren: Yeah. So we've identified predator number two retirement predator number two as underestimating your longevity risk.

Now it's a technical term, but the definition of longevity risk from the perspective of an individual or couple, or a typical person planning for retirement. We'll simply define longevity risk as the risk of depleting your retirement savings due to living longer than expected.

John Bever: So it's not that I'm risking living too long, it's my risk of running out of money?

Jim Uren: Exactly. So we all hope we live nice and long, but of course, when we're planning for retirement, each year we live is another year we have to fund. So, and this really is a huge retirement predator because if you live longer than you financially plan for, there's a huge risk you could run out of money.

And of course that's usually, typically, the biggest fear that most people have when they plan for retirement. Right, John?, That's the main reason, typically, someone sits in front of us looking to work with a financial advisor that says, “Hey, I want to know how much I can spend in retirement so I don't run out of money.”

Now, the, the longevity assumptions, obviously you could err on either way, right? There's risk either way. If you underestimate your longevity risk, like we just mentioned, you risk running out of money.

But on the other hand, you don't want to overestimate it either, right?  If you plan that you're going to live to be 150, well, you're hardly going to be able to spend any money in retirement. And that's not a good error either.

Now, which error though, would you think we're most likely to make? Do we tend to underestimate or overestimate our longevity? Well, according to research, we actually are more likely to underestimate our life expectancy.

And we see this a lot when we sit down with folks.  You know, we do a financial plan and we have to come up at least with an age at which we're planning for.

Now, bottom line is we tend to like to use age 95 to a 100. And a lot of times people immediately go, “Wow! I can't imagine living that long.” And yet statistically far more likely to live that long than we think.

So, if we have just a couple, let's say, a male, female couple.  They're both 65. They're both non-smokers. They both have just average health and they have family history that's just average. Okay? So nothing super bad, nothing super great. The life expectancy for the male is 88 and the female is 90.

And this gets a little technical, but the odds are 50% that one of them will live to age 93, because you've got two people so the odds of one of them living longer or higher.  And there's actually a 10% chance that one of them will still be living past 100.

So we sit down with 10 clients, right?  Let's say 10 couples. One of those is it's going to live to a hundred. And so that's part of what we're planning for. We don't want to underestimate your life expectancy.

And so our takeaway is generally to avoid this retirement predator of underestimating your longevity risk, is pretty much to stick with the planning age of between 95 and 100.  That's going to be a safer bet in most cases.  A few exceptions might be, if you have a very specific, well diagnosed health issue that almost certainly would bring it below that, but absent that, we obviously would rather you have a little extra money when you leave the earth, then come up short five years before.

John Bever: Yep, exactly. And this is the difference between life expectancy and maximum lifespan. And so part of our job is to really help you figure out what that maximum lifespan might be. And of course, we don't know the future. So statistics are very helpful on this.

And I agree with you, Jim. It's almost every time I meet with a new client, we're talking about the plan and the planning age and we reveal this planning age of 95 to 100. They go, “Oh, I'm not going to live that long.” And yet how many actually do make it? So far, our longest living client has made it to 99 years and eight months.

Jim Uren: Wow. And we've got clients who are retired, who still have parents living and they're in their late nineties, pushing the hundreds and so it's not, uh, it's certainly not unheard of.

John Bever: No, not at all. So Jim, what is the third retirement predator?

Jim Uren: So the third retirement predator that we want to warn people about is lower than expected returns. Now, lower than expected returns, of course, is referring to your investment returns.

The potential damage, of course, is fairly obvious.  If your investment returns are lower than you expected or plan for, you may have to substantially cut your spending to retirement or certainly risk possibly just running out of money.

Now, there are a few causes of lower than expected investment returns. There's unrealistic expectations, bad luck and poor investment management.  So let me briefly touch on each one real quick.

The first one of course, is unrealistic expectations.  In your planning for retirement, you may have assumed a rate of return on your investments that's simply just unrealistic. Now you can help avoid this by setting realistic expectation of your portfolio's rate of return based on long-term historical averages for a portfolio similar to yours.

Now, similar is the key word. So, for example, historically speaking, a portfolio comprised entirely of bonds, has typically provided a lower rate of return than a portfolio comprised entirely of stocks. So if you have all of your retirement savings in bonds, but assume you'll receive a rate of return similar to stocks, you're likely to experience lower than expected returns. So you need to make sure that your return expectations are realistic for the type of portfolio in which you're invested.

Number two reason is bad luck.  As they say, investing involves risk.  Even though stocks and bonds generally do fairly well over long periods of time, there can be long stretches where investment returns are low or even, of course, negative. And these stretches of time can last years and in some cases, even decades. And unfortunately there's nothing you can do to control the markets, John. I wish there was. 

But you can help protect yourself by using more conservative estimates for your expected rate of return, and by having a retirement spending plan that allows you to reduce spending when markets are performing poorly. And of course, by diversifying your investment portfolio, that also helps you reduce risk.

All right, then the third reason that you might suffer from lower expected returns, that retirement predator, is poor investment management. Now, outside of bad luck, you can also end up with a lower than expected investment return just because of poor investment management.

Now, this could be a variety of reasons or a variety of mistakes from poor diversification, taking too much risk, using high cost investment products that just aren't worth it, and/or just making generally bad investment decisions.

Now, how can you protect yourself from poor investment management?  Well, by spending a lot of time educating yourself and/or working with a professional who's well trained in proper investment management.

So take away on this retirement predator of lower than expected returns is to help protect yourself by setting realistic expectations, being well prepared for down markets, and by making well-informed investment decisions, and/or working with a good fit financial advisor.

John Bever: Right. So the fourth retirement predator is poor sequence of returns. It is related to this previous one, but yet it's different. So Jim, can you explain what it means – poor sequence of returns?

Jim Uren: Yes, I will do my best because this concept is a bit complicated, especially for an audio only podcast.  But, it's extremely important that you understand this because a poor sequence of return can lead to spending through your retirement savings years before anticipated.

Now, a sequence of return risk refers to the potential impact of the order in which investment returns occur during retirement. So, if a retiree experiences poor investment returns early in retirement while making withdrawals, it can significantly reduce the overall value of their portfolio.  This is because the withdrawals combined with market downturns deplete the portfolio faster, thus making it harder to recover even if the market improves later on.

So let me try to give an example to see if this helps. So John, let's say that you and I both have $500,000 in an investment account. And we both plan to withdraw $35,000 from it every year in retirement in the hopes that that will last us 30 years.

Now, this is a little bit of an extreme example, but I'm trying to illustrate a point. So let's say we both pick an investment account that has just a fictitious investment. And this investment, half the time, it gives us a 20% percent rate of return and half the time it gives us a 0% rate of return.  It's kind of 50/50. You don't know what you're going to get each year.

So over our 30 years of retirement, 15 times we get a 20% rate of return and 15 times we're going to get a 0% rate of return. What would the average rate of return on that investment be, John, over a 30-year period?

John Bever: Well, over a 30-year period, you would average the 20% and the 0%.  You'd end up with a 10% average rate of return.

And for the engineers and math experts in the audience here, this is the commutative property of multiplication, to go all the way back to elementary school. We take those sequence of returns, average them together. It doesn't matter the order in which those returns occur for us to end up with the same product at the end.

Jim Uren: Exactly. Exactly. And of course, if we weren't adding to a portfolio or taking away from the portfolio, the average would be fine. But, of course, in retirement, we're not doing that. We're withdrawing from the portfolio and that's where the problem comes in.

But let's now to go back to our illustration.  Let's say John, that you were pretty unlucky in your sequence of return risk, and that you had all of your 0% return years during your first 15 years of retirement.  But, that meant the last 15 years were all 20% returns.

John Bever: Okay. So I get all the bad news out of the way first?  I'm a bad news first, good news second type of guy. Okay, I got it.

Jim Uren: But I had the opposite. I got all my good returns the first 15 years.  And in my last 15 years, I got zero rate of return. Now in both cases, this fictitious, let's say mutual fund in which we're invested, still averaged 10% over a 30 year period.  If we look at their sales literature, it's just going to say 10% average return for 30 years. And as you mentioned earlier, John, that technically would be correct.  However, you and I experienced a different sequence of return.

Now, if that scenario happened to me, my $500,000 investment account would be worth actually over $4,000,000 at the end of the 30-year period.  Not bad. I got my $35,000 every year and 30 years later, my portfolio is at $4,000,000. Excellent.

But what about your portfolio, John? After all, we invested in the same mutual fund, just had different orders of returns. Not only would your portfolio at the end of 30 years be worth $0, John. But guess what? You actually ran out of money by the end of year 15.

John Bever: I want to switch portfolios.

Jim Uren: Yes. In other words, there was nothing left in your portfolio after you're 15. So did it really matter that this fictitious mutual funded 20% a year for the next 15 years, if you weren't able to benefit from it, no. It didn't matter at all.

Now, of course, that's a little bit of an extreme example to illustrate a concept, but a poor sequence of returns in retirement can cause a lot of damage. Specifically, poor investment returns experienced early in retirement can have a substantial negative impact on your ability to make lifetime withdrawals from your portfolio.

John Bever: Okay. So this just kind of sounds like, “Well, it's the luck of the draw.”  We don't have time to get into a lot of detail, but Jim, is there anything that we can do to protect ourselves from this sequence of return risk?

Jim Uren: Yes. And as you alluded to, John, there's a lot of strategies we don't have time to get into, and it is pretty technical, but there are some basic things you can do to protect yourself.

You can, one, use a more conservative assumption on your expected rate of return. That's going to help. You can lower the withdrawals from your portfolio when the market returns are low or negative. You can utilize a variety of investments and/or insurance products that are designed to help specifically reduce your sequence of return risk.

Now you do want to be careful there because there can be some large downsides to using some of these products, and some of them are really bad, but some of them can be helpful in the right situation.

And you can also stress test your withdrawal strategy. Now, this is something that we do. In retirement planning for our clients.  We use software that will stress test the proposed strategy under a variety of market environments to help us estimate a probability of success. Now this helps us determine if the client's spending level in retirement is realistic, or if they might need to make any adjustments along the way.  It's a great way for us to get a sense of, is this withdrawal strategy reasonable given the possibility of a sequence of return risk that is pretty high?

John Bever: Yeah. And I have to say that software has really improved on this in the last 10 to 15 years. When I started in the industry, the main thing we use was just lowering the rate of return in order to try to get to that answer, but the software packages available today are very robust for the stress testing and really important.

All right, so this brings us to predator number 5, which is spending shocks. Please explain what spending shocks are.

Jim Uren: Sure. Spending shocks just refer to large, unanticipated expenses that happened during retirement.  Now, the most common categories are typically home repairs, medical and dental bills, and more and more lately providing financial support for family members. Now, these shocks could be a huge retirement predator because they can cause you to spend through your retirement savings far faster than anticipated.

Now, if your retirement plan is designed to support you spending $100,000 a year, but you end up spending $150,000 several years in a row, you run a real risk that your retirement savings could be depleted much earlier than anticipated.

Now, for more information on this, I would suggest listening to our very first episode of this podcast titled, “What’s This Going to Cost Me?”, where we discuss in a little bit more detail, how to estimate your future retirement expenses.  And also, specifically, how you can help prepare for spending shocks.

Now for our discussion today, I'll say that you can help protect yourself from spending shocks by having a larger emergency fund, or perhaps sometimes even just a whole account set aside for spending shocks that we assume we're not going to use, but it's just there in case we have to. 

You can also protect yourself by having some extra wiggle room in your budget. So for example, when you retire, maybe you have a spending plan that can support a $100,000 per year, but you only plan to spend $90,000.  That just gives you some wiggle room in the budget.

And of course you can also have assets that maybe you can either borrow against or sell if you needed to, if you were in a real pinch.  An example might be a vacation home.

John Bever: You know, this is again, the beauty of the software and how sophisticated it's become, because it's very easy for us to model this for our clients. If they have one of these spending shocks, or if they want to add in a spending shock, which might be, “Hey, we want to do this addition on our home because we want to bring my mom in to live with us,” or whatever it might be. And it's very easy to model those additional scenarios to see what the effect is on the portfolio.

All right, moving on, number six on our list is inflation. How can that become a retirement predator?

Jim Uren: Yes. Well, inflation of course, is the tendency for the general level of prices for goods and services to rise over time.  So, you know, I think back to what a candy bar cost when I was a kid, it was a quarter. Okay.

John Bever: Mine was a dime Jim.  I think mine was a dime.

Jim Uren: And what are they now? They're well over a dollar at the store. So we know prices go up, right? If you think about when you were a kid, what things cost. The problem with inflation and retirement is that you typically have to therefore pull more money out of your retirement savings every year if you want to maintain the same standard of living.  So if you want to keep buying a gallon of milk each week. It's going to cost you more in 20 years than it does today.

Now let's go back to an example that we used earlier, you know, where we were going to pretend we're pulling out $35,000 from a retirement account every year. If we took $35,000 out of that account for 30 years that would total just over $1,000,000 in spending. However, if we were to assume that inflation was going to increase our cost of living by about 4% a year, we would have to obviously increase that $35,000 withdrawal amount by 4% a year to maintain our standard of living. In other words, to be able to buy the same stuff at the grocery store, etc.

Now, if we did that to our spending over that 30-year period, those withdrawals now would reach almost $2,000,000. So just assuming a 4% inflation rate, you end up spending almost twice as much over a 30-year period. And so that's a big difference, right? Planning for a retirement that's going to cost you $1,000,000 versus planning for a retirement that's going to cost you $2,000,000. That puts a tremendous amount of pressure on your retirement portfolio, because you need to make sure that your financial plan properly accounts for that.

Now, again, I'd refer you back to episode one of the podcast because we do discuss planning for inflation. But in terms of today, things you can do to help protect yourself include obviously properly accounting for inflation in your estimate of your future retirement expenses, making sure you, your estimate is, is a good one.

As well as using a variety of investments in your portfolio that tend to grow at a rate faster than inflation over time. So making sure you're invested in things that don't just keep up with inflation, but are really going to help grow your purchasing power over time. And although they can be pretty volatile, a diversified portfolio of stocks has historically been one of the best investments for outpacing inflation over longer periods of time.  It may be disruptive at times, but over long periods of time, when we're thinking about retirement, a diversified portfolio of stocks can be a real help to battle inflation.

John Bever: Yes, the thing that actually hurts you turns out helping you with stocks because companies get to pass on that extra higher cost to their customers.  And as long as they can afford that, that helps your stocks increase in value with inflation.

You know, according to the rule of 72, if we're looking at a 4% inflation rate, that means that your cost of living doubles every 18 years. That's pretty substantial. And over the last a hundred years, inflation has averaged a little bit over 3%.  So really using a 4% inflation rate is not that out of line.

Jim Uren: No.

John Bever: All right. Finally, number seven on our list is taxes. Not a surprise, but what do we need to know about this retirement predator, Jim?

Jim Uren: Well, we've probably heard someone in the world of investments at one point or many points say, “It's not how much you make, it's how much you keep.”  And of course we hear this a lot because it's true. And when it comes to retirement planning and managing your retirement portfolio, there are tax implications for almost everything you do and so you need to be careful.

Because you can get taxed on the interest you earn.  You get taxed on the dividends you received.  You can get taxed on the growth of your investments. You get taxed on the withdrawals you make from your retirement accounts. And of course, if your income is high enough, on top of that, you'll get to pay extra tax if you're subject to the net investment income tax, or if you're subject to the alternative minimum tax.  And of course, if you want to give some of your wealth away, you may be subject to a gift tax. And of course, when you die, you may be subject to an estate tax.

John Bever: Yeah. So really important here. Watch for future episodes on optimizing taxes in retirement. There's a lot that can be done and it's complicated. So we're going to break that into several sessions.

But for now, Jim, what are some of the steps that someone can do to help minimize the amount of taxes they pay in retirement?

Jim Uren: Yes, and as you said, John, there's a whole list of things that we can do, and we certainly have a checklist we go through with clients. 

But some of the main things first, of course, is prior to retirement, is to make sure that you determine which type of retirement account you should be funding.  Should you fund a traditional 401k or an IRA so that you can defer taxes until later? Or should you be using a Roth 401k or Roth IRA, which means you pay taxes now, but you may never have to pay taxes on the gain during the retirement years?

And of course the best option of these two approaches is really going to vary from person to person.  It really depends on which approach results in the lowest lifetime income tax bill for you.

Now to help minimize, let's say capital gains taxes. You can focus on mutual funds or investments that have what is called low turnover. That just means that there's a lower amount of buying and selling of stocks that's happening.

Now this can be beneficial because if you do a lot of buying and selling in some of your accounts, it can often result in realizing capital gains taxes more often.  And a low amount of buying and selling in an account would help you actually defer those capital gains taxes to further down the road, which has been shown to help boost your after-tax rate of return.  The return you actually get to keep. 

The other strategies include optimizing your annual withdrawal strategy each year to help determine how much should you withdraw from your taxable accounts, how much should you withdraw from a non-taxable account or a more tax friendly account. Possibly doing Roth conversions, which is on an upcoming episode we'll mention soon. Maybe doing Roth conversions in early years of retirement can help reduce your lifetime tax bill. That's true for some people, not for all.

These are some more common strategies, but of course, as I mentioned before, there's dozens more to be helpful. And when we work with clients, we have a whole checklist that we go through to identify possible tax strategies. If you're not sure you're doing all you can, I would encourage you to talk to your financial planner or give us a call if you don't work with somebody already.  We can help you start to think through some of the issues that may affect you in your specific situation.

So John, that is seven retirement predators. Anything to add, especially on the tax front here?

John Bever: The thing to add is to not procrastinate.  That number one right there. Start to take the steps that you need to take because that really is, in my opinion, that is the biggest predator – procrastination. So regardless of where you're at, or your situation, or what you're feeling, or what you're thinking, take action today, whatever that might be for you.

Jim Uren: Yes. And John, how many times have we heard over the years, I should have sat down with you years earlier?

John Bever: Yeah. I've never had anybody regret sitting down with us, later going, “Yeah, I should have waited five years or ten years.” Yes. It's always that regret. I wish I would have known this earlier. I wish I would have done this earlier.

Jim Uren: Great. So John, what do we have to look forward to on our next podcast episode?

John Bever: Well, we're going to talk about financial planning and the elements of a plan and what you can expect sitting down with a financial advisor and planner. What are the questions that might be asked? What's the information that you're going to need?  And what are you going to walk away with?

Jim Uren: Wonderful. That will be helpful.  And if you don't want to miss out on that episode, make sure that you follow or subscribe to this podcast so that you make sure you can hear that episode in future episodes, where we're going to be discussing some of the other things we mentioned. So looking forward to that.

So, John, we like to close our show with what we're grateful or thankful for. What are you thankful for today?

John Bever: Well, this got me thinking about starting early, which made me think about youth. And so I'm very thankful for youth.  I've got a few things happening in my body that are reminding me I'm not as young as I used to be. So I'm going to be thankful for the youth that I experienced. How about you Jim?

Jim Uren: I like it. That makes sense.  I was trying to think what I was thankful for today, but this week I was just thankful for some of the modern technology. I was thinking specifically of our vehicles. And we've got quite a few miles on ours. 

It's amazing that they're still chugging along and don't need a ton of repairs. They still need some, but very thankful in this weather to be able to have the freedom to drive the kids to school rather than make them walk.  So if it's raining or if it's cold outside or just too hot, but really thankful for the modern technology of transportation to get us back and forth where we need to go.

So we want to thank you all for listening to this episode of The Year You Retire podcast.