Retire to the Fullest

What Is Retirement Anyway? Her hands were shaking as she reached for her coffee cup. This dear woman had just lost her husband to a sudden and aggressive cancer a few weeks prior. It was my first time meeting her. She was still grieving, but the initial shock of Pete’s death had passed. As she spoke a mile a minute, her eyes were dry, but they were filled with something more than tears. They were filled with fear. She was terrified and overwhelmed. Pete had paid all the bills, taken care of all the taxes, and managed all the investments, but now he was gone. She was smart, trained as an ER nurse, but she didn’t know where to begin. Questions came out of her mouth like machine gun bullets: Did she have enough money to cover Pete’s medical bills? What were these 1099 forms and K-1s she was getting in the mail, and what should she do with them? Would the IRS come after her if she did the wrong thing? Would she have to sell her house and go live with her sister? She hadn’t worked in twenty years because she had raised their kids when Pete got his promotion. Was she going to run out of money? Would she be eating cat food in her old age? The questions came faster and faster, so I finally took her hand and said, “Marcy. You are going to be fine, and I’ll tell you why. Just like you knew what to do when a cardiac patient came into the ER, this is what I do…and I don’t mean to brag, but I’m good at what I do. I’ve helped hundreds of people like you. So, we are going to take a deep breath and not make any big decisions for six months. Over that time, we’ll slowly and intentionally put together a wise game plan, and we’ll triage appropriately, but I promise you that you will feel much different in one year than you feel right now. In one year, we will have explained what you own, why you own it, what expenses are sustainable, and which ones are not, and when you understand those things, your anxiety will turn into confidence. You are going to be fine, and we will get there together.” Marcy took a deep breath, and the fear in her eyes turned into tears—the good kind of tears, and that was when we got to work. Marcy is part of the reason why I am writing this book. I want to provide a bit of an introduction to explain what I’m trying to accomplish here. It’s probably important to say that I’ve never written a book before. I don’t even really consider myself a writer, but I have learned a lot about helping people retire well throughout my eighteen-year career in wealth management, and I am hopeful some of that knowledge will be useful to you. I started my career in wealth management in 2004, advising and helping clients (like Marcy) on their path through retirement. Along the way, I’ve learned a great deal about how to help people retire to their fullest, to make the most of not just their money but their lives. This book is my opportunity to share some wisdom with you, wisdom some pay thousands of dollars to get. We’ll cover all kinds of topics, including investment strategies, risk management, diversification, stewardship, and so on, but the most important topic on my mind is redefining the meaning and purpose of retirement so you can live a fulfilled, financially peaceful second half of life. There is a path to follow, and it’s not a path of enlightenment or a yellow brick road, but it is a path that leads to financial peace of mind. Throughout this book, you will hear me say many times that financial planning is so much more than just about finances. You may be a few years away from retiring and want to make sure you are sufficiently prepared before you pull the trigger. Or maybe you’re already retired, but things aren’t going the way you hoped. This book will be very helpful to you if you are five to ten years away from retiring or five to ten years into your retirement. That’s not to say that someone in their forties will not learn something in these pages, but most of the information is geared around some of the nuances around transitioning from the accumulation phase of life into the distribution phase of life. In other words, it will be most valuable to someone approaching that transition from when they draw an income from their paycheck to drawing an income from their nest egg. Either way, I’m confident you will learn something of value in the following chapters. How can I be so sure? Because the concepts and principles in this book work. These are the same concepts and principles I teach my own clients and put into practice myself. Many of my clients are pre-retirees and retirees who pay a decent amount of money for the lessons I’m going to teach you. My firm manages over a quarter-billion dollars of our clients’ hard-earned money, so we’ve practiced these principles for decades and seen the results firsthand. If you don’t glean anything of value, that’s okay. You have my permission to throw this book in the trash. Or better yet, donate it to your public library. How about this? If you don’t learn anything new in these pages, I’ll invite you to Durham, North Carolina, and I’ll treat you to a beverage of your choice. I’m easy to find. But if you do learn something new, how about buying an extra copy of the book and giving it to a friend. Sound good?