Retirement readiness is a phrase that can be defined differently by everyone, but we believe that it involves the idea of living with purpose. If you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to find purpose in retirement, this show is for you.
Transcript for Episode 1 of the Retirement Readiness Podcast, Hosted by Tim Regan, CFP®, CHFC®:
Hi, and welcome to the first episode of the Retirement Readiness show. I’m Tim Regan, the founder of PrairieView, and I’m welcoming you to what we hope to be the first of many episodes.
Here at PrairieView, we are a family-focused, faith-based financial planning and investment management firm. What we find is that most of our clients, as they enter the retirement phase of life, start to have a lot of questions and get really concerned, not overly concerned, but have a little bit of trepidation. And so we thought we’d like to put together a number of videos for you so that you can dial in, here’s some of the things that we’re working on, and things that you should be thinking about as you near your retirement.
When we think about retirement readiness, part of the reason we start thinking about that is because life starts to shift fairly significantly. For most people, when they’re working, they think of life as and identify with kind of what they did as a living for a living. Many times you’ll talk to people and say, “Well, I’m an engineer, or I’m a doctor,” you know, those types of things.
As you get closer to retirement, though, you need to start shifting, how do you identify what am I going to do with my life? And what we find is a lot of times people start to have trepidation. We think about a kind of, like, “Am I retiring from?” or “Am I retiring to something?” Let me explain that a little bit.
So if you think about “Am I retiring from?” maybe work has gotten to be a bit of a drag. Sometimes clients will tell us, you know, “I got a new boss at work, and it’s not as much fun,” or “I’ve been doing this for a really long time. And I’ve lost some of the excitement to go into work. So I’m really not sure what I’m looking to go do. But I’m looking to retire from being what I was.”
Other clients will tell us, “I’m really excited about retirement. I’m looking so forward to being able to do the gardening, I wanted to or to spend time with my grandchildren, or maybe volunteer at church and go on some mission trips.” For those clients, they’re not so much retiring from work, they’re more retiring to the life that they want to lead. And so here, part of our philosophy is that being ready for retirement is so much more than just financially having the wherewithal to be able to retire.
Many times through the money side of things (happens to be what people think about most), they come into the conversation wondering:
- Do I have enough money that I’ll be able to last for the rest of my life?
- How should I be managing maybe my Social Security?
- When do I take it?
- Should I worry about how my investments are invested? Especially if we have a market that’s pretty volatile?
All of those money questions, many times, are the first things that people think about. But what we find is that really retirement readiness means more than that.
It means: How am I going to live my life of significance?
Once I don’t get up and go to work every day in the morning? What am I going to do? Will they spend time with my grandkids or mission trips? Or, how do I define my life at that point?
So what we find is the clients that are the most successful are those clients who have created a plan—who put together and said for the first, kind of, 100 days, if you will, retirement, here’s what I’m going to do day one, through seven. Maybe I’m gonna sleep in and I haven’t been able to sleep in. And since I was working, I’m gonna sleep in. But then beyond that, here are the activities that I’m looking to do.
When we talk about retirement readiness from a financial perspective, we have to also include things like, “Will I actually run out of money? Or do I have enough?” You know, a lot of times when we talk to clients, and we ask them: “So tell us throughout your life, when do you spend the most money?” And most of the answer is, “When I’m on vacation or on the weekends.”
When you retire, every day is the weekend and every day you can choose to be on vacation. And so many times clients aren’t sure, “Do I have enough not only to live the lifestyle to become accustomed? But really do I have enough money that I can lead a life of significance the way that I want? Maybe I want to take the grandkids on vacation? Or maybe I want to give a little more to church?”
Those are things that we really have to unpack and say, “How do you continue to live that life of significance?” So leading up to retirement, the questions are:
- Am I situated well enough?
- Do I have a plan for how I’m going to spend my time?
- How are my investments allocated?
Once clients are in retirement, it really becomes a question of:
- How am I managing these things to accomplish the things that I want to?
- At what point do I take income out of my portfolio?
- How do I manage my tax liability every year?
Those are the money side of things. The non-money side of being ready really has to do with:
- How many vacations can I take?
- How much money should I give my grandkids when they get married?
Those are things that are the intangibles that allow us to answer some of the questions around “Beyond money, what does it mean to be retirement ready?”
And then the last piece of this is ultimately: What legacy will I leave?
How will I impact, not only my family or my church or other places that are important to me, but how do I leave a legacy that is uniquely me for many generations to come (hopefully)?
I hope you’ll join us on this journey. We look forward to hosting these twice a month, where we’re going to talk about everything that we can think about when it comes time to be, like I said, retirement ready. So here at PrairieView, again, we are a family focused, faith-based financial planning and investment management firm. Our model is that we want to help you to live your legacy with confidence. So hopefully you’ll join us on this journey. You’ll dial in and and watch us when you can. Until that time, we hope that you’re well and we hope that you live your legacy with confidence. Thank you.
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