Why the Last 3 Years Before Early Retirement Matter Most

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24:12Mindy Jensen:I do find a lot of people focusing on their health in a way that is definitely obsessive, but also it's difficult to make time to go to the gym when you're also going to work and you've got to get the kids to school and they've got after school activities. And all of a sudden it's time for bed and you're like, ooh, I didn't get it to the gym today. And then now it's been only the last 10 years that I've missed. That's right, yeah. And the beautiful thing about post-fi life, Mindy, is your life now opens up, right? You've got all that time. And one of the things I've enjoyed the most is being creative and finding ways to stay fit.

24:46You know, I go swimming in the lake now. I mountain bike. I hike with my dog, as I mentioned. I used to just run at lunch because it's all I had time for. You know, now I'm lifting. I invested in a home gym. I'm lifting weights, you know, three, four times a week because muscular degeneration is the stuff that leads to mobility issues, right? So it's a healthy obsession and it's a good place to put it. And it's just interesting to me, the reality of a lot of people post-fi, they do redirect it there, which is a good thing. Let me give you this one last fact. This was Dan Halet, a good friend of mine over in the UK.

25:16He wrote this, it's a longevity gap, that people are living longer, right? By, I don't know, a couple of years, you know, every couple decades, people live longer. But their health years aren't increasing. So the gap, let's say you start getting unhealthy typically in your mid-70s. So now instead of living at 85, you're living to 90. So instead of 10 unhealthy years, you've got 15 unhealthy years. So people are living longer, but they haven't pushed forward that healthy year, the health span year. You've got health span and lifespan. And the gap between health span and lifespan right now in the U.S.

25:50is about 12 years. That's a big gap. So anything you can do to reduce that gap, hopefully by increasing healthspan and not reducing lifespan. But if you can push that healthspan horizon out, you're going to have that many more years of enjoyable life post-fi. It's just, it's math. It's so funny because as soon as I stepped out as CEO, I started obsessing over fitness. And I just published this to the BiggerPocketsBuddy blog right around the time we're recording this. Scott's age 35 health and fitness protocol with my six-part philosophy around weightlifting, VO2 max, recovery, diet, skin and hair care to prevent my hair from receding, which is, you know, a losing battle.

26:31And then, you know, the prevention and screening components in there all listed out in a protocol format. And of course, that's accompanied with a home gym around there with Barbell, because that's critical. It's just like so funny watching, going through your deck and saying, Oh, yeah, yeah, that's correct. That's correct. That's correct. That's how I did it. Yep, I wish I had done that. Oops. And it's not even retirement, right? We're doing this right now.

26:53Mindy Jensen:When you were CEO, Scott, you had no time to work out. You got up, you had five minutes with your family, you had 500 hours at work, and then it was time to go to bed. It's so easy. I can't tell you how much weight I gained while working at BiggerPockets because I am butt in chair 40 hours a week. And then I've got kids on top of it and taking care of the household and, and, and. And all of a sudden you're like, I mean, getting to the gym was never my priority because I don't like working out. So that's super easy to say no to. And now it is a priority because I see how my parents are aging. I see how my in-laws are aging and I want to have a better lifespan where I am more active.

27:36Mindy Jensen:And I want to go on hikes. I want to go on bike rides. And I can't do that if I am couch bound. So we just added a bonus because that wasn't going to be one of the five we talked about, but it is on my list of 20 is develop a health span plan. And that's what we're talking about, right? How are you going to keep yourself healthy longer now that you've got time to do it? So that's a good one. Let me jump to the second one that I'd suggest we talk about. I got some financial stuff in here. I'm not, you know, you guys are all financial. We got the financial stuff down. So let me talk about the stuff that may not be as intuitive.

28:03The second one I think is worth talking about is step number three, which is experiment. In experimenting, basically, this is the concept that I talked about with my blog. You can start experimenting in your last couple years of work looking for shiny things that interest you that will survive post-phi. And the more that you can do this pre-phi, the greater your odds of skipping phase two, which is our goal. So I put this one in here to just encourage people to start exercising that curiosity muscle. Curiosity to me is probably the most important word in post-phi life. So you really need to foster that curiosity.

28:39It's not intuitive. It's kind of the artistic side. But it's think back to when you were a kid. I use the story when I was a kid. I grew up in Michigan, small town, bunch of woods around. I used to go ride my bike through the woods with all my buddies. We'd build forts in the woods, right? I spent all my time outside. Well, now I'm 62. And what do I do? I spend my time riding my bike through the woods because I like mountain biking in the mountains. It's like, wow, that's pretty weird, right? So looking back at some of those things you enjoyed as a kid is a good place to look. Thinking about ways that you can just experiment with something that interests you a little bit.

29:11For my wife, it was starting the charity. You don't have to wait until you're post-fi to do that. And I encourage you not to. Take your weekends and go volunteer at a dog shelter, right? Find ways to get engaged that are outside of your workplace that may provide means for fulfillment post-fi. That's what experiment's all about.

29:29Mindy Jensen:Ritz, do you have a bucket list? You know, it's funny. One of the things on here is fill your activity jar. That's number 17. What my wife and I did, this was kind of neat. It's not really a bucket list, but I think it's worth talking about. The last year of my working career, my wife and I, we had a bucket, literal bucket in our house. And each week, each of us would write a note of something we wanted to do in retirement. And we didn't tell the other person what it was. So there were 50 weeks, two of us doing it, 100 things that we put into this bucket. Only half of them, I knew what they were.

29:59And only half of my wife knew what they were. But we didn't know what the whole thing was. And our plan was always, when we get into retirement, every week we're going to pull something out of the bucket. I'm eight years into retirement. We've pulled like two things out of that bucket because we've gotten busy and we're doing stuff we love. So that's something you can think about doing. It's a way to get your spouse engaged and dreaming about what you want to do post-retirement. The funny thing is, it didn't work out the way I thought it would. We still got the bucket. I'm like, we've got to start pulling some stuff out of this bucket.

30:25So that's not necessarily a bucket list. Now, I do have some things. This is kind of the die with zero approach, right? Right. I've thought about Daiwa Zero, for those that don't know, is do things you can do while you can still do them. If you want to hike, you know, the Himalayas, you better do it before you're 80 because you're not going to be able to do it. Right. So we've thought about sequentially what are the things that matter the most for us to get done. And an example I'll give you was last summer. We took a cruise up to the Arctic and we I showed you a picture from Greenland. We went up to, I don't know, 75 degrees north.

30:56We were 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And that was one of those things that came from that exercise is, you know, yes, we kind of have a bucket list of places we'd like to go, things we'd like to do, impacts we'd like to make. But we've also kind of time sequenced it to say, let's make sure that the things that we really want to do, we do while we still know we have the health and the, you know, the fitness to be able to do them.

31:17Mindy Jensen:I love that answer. Carl and I recently sat down and we were on a drive. We dropped our oldest daughter off at college and we were driving home, California to Colorado. so we had a lot of time to talk about it. But we started talking about our bucket list. We have a daughter who's a sophomore, so we still have two and a half years at home before we can really go off and travel. And we're not counting the days until we can do it. But we are very entrenched in this community. And we have seen the stories of the people who are like, okay, I'm retired. why isn't my life better? So we're trying to plan so that we don't, like we're skipping phase two.

31:57Mindy Jensen:We are 100 % skipping phase two. So we're starting to plan and talk about this. And I mean, I've got decades worth of stuff that I'm going to do starting in two and a half years. I don't know if I've announced it on this show or not, but is it 2028? October of 2028, I'm going to hike the Camino with Darren and Jolene and Carl. And anybody who wants to come with us, email me, Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com because we're going to be gone for about a month. And Darren and Jolene have done many of them. This is like the first thing I'm going to do once my youngest daughter is in college. And, you know, we've given her a little bit of time to get settled.

32:32Mindy, good for you, because what that to me is talking about is you're thinking about what do you want your life to be post five, right? Basically emptiness. But you're already thinking and I would encourage people. The first thing you almost always think about is travel. And that's good. You should. You should travel and see the world while you can. That's absolutely important. And Camino is going to be a great hike. I've always got a thought about that one, too. I had a buddy that did the Appalachian Trail. Then he did the Continental Divide. Then he did the Pacific Crest. So he's done the Triple Crown.

32:59Only 500 people have done that. But anyway, what I would say is the other thing you find, we started with a lot of travel. We have an RV and we spent, you know, months going across the country, spent the summer up in the Pacific Northwest. We did a lot of traveling. I've got a lot of friends that were full-time, you know, RVers. but what they tend to find over time, travel is fun, but it doesn't necessarily bring you that purpose because you don't have the relationships like you have in Longmont, right? You have a sense of community and there's something about being engaged in a local community and making a difference that is rewarding in a way that travel isn't.

33:34Think about blending both of them together and what we do now is we take off for a month with the RV every year. Okay, what are we going do for a month. Last year, we went to the Arctic on a cruise. We do something big every year, but we complement that with things like the charity work, things like my blog, other ways. These are cards in the hand, right? Travel is one card in the hand, but think about all the cards in the hand and you're thinking exactly the right way. You're thinking about it now while you still have a couple of years to go. Perfect.

34:02Mindy Jensen:Yep. And we've already made the decision based on our conversations with Darren and Jolene, who have a house that they love, but they also love to travel. So they're gone and then they come back because they love where they're at. I love where I'm at. I told Carl, I didn't want to just fly away and travel for six months at a time. I want to go experience something in a slow travel way and then come back and experience my neck of the woods. Carl doesn't like it when it's really hot. So we'll probably be out of town in August, but we'll be back for Christmas and the holiday season and birthdays with our kids and things like that.

34:39Mindy Jensen:We've been thinking about it because we don't want to get caught up in phase two. All right. You want to move on to the next one? Yeah. Let's talk about the four C's. Okay. The four C's. And again, I give this credit to Dan Halet. So Dan Halet, as I mentioned earlier, I was writing a post. It's still in my drafts. I'm going to get it done. But it was basically the six things that have led to a great retirement or something along those lines. And as I was writing this article, I've got it kind of scoped out. I get this weekly email from Dan Halet and he said, pursue your four C's. And I'm like, oh my gosh, these four C's were exactly part of my six.

35:13So I've got two other ones, but I don't have it done yet. So I went ahead with his four C's. And this to me is really good. This gets to what we were just talking about, Mindy. Where do you find real fulfillment in retirement? This is Dan's work, so I'll give him credit. But he came down to these four C's and I'll just read them. Contribution, creation, curiosity, ironically, right? I mentioned curiosity earlier and connection. And his point is pursuing these things are the areas where you'll get real fulfillment post-Fi. And contribution, basically, if you think about it, all through your working career, you've been making a contribution, you've been getting recognized for it.

35:48I mentioned earlier, you get the little pat on the head for doing a good job. Finding a way to contribute, I think it's a basic human need, right? We want to feel needed. We want to know that we're making a difference in the world, however small it may be. It doesn't have to be big. So finding a way to contribute to society is an area that you should focus on. That's typically, for me, kind of charity work that we're doing now. But I would argue it's what you're doing on your podcast. It's what I'm doing in my writing. We're contributing to society. The second one is creation. And this is the point of don't get focused on personal consumption type stuff.

36:21Life is not about just consuming and me, me, me. Find a way to make something that makes a difference in the world. So for us, we build fences. That's creation, right? I write my blog. That's creating content. It's not just creating. It's just focus instead of just consuming stuff. Redirect that focus to what can I create that can make an impact? I think that's a really good thing to think about. The third is curiosity. We've talked about that. Pursuing your curiosity of all the things. I really believe that is the key to a successful post-fi life. And then the last one, connection. We talked about this in Longmont.

36:55You've got those relationships. And everybody underestimates how important those relationships are until suddenly they're gone. And if you look at the Harvard study that made the rounds a couple years ago, right? They tracked all these people for 80 years. It's one of the longest ongoing studies of retirement happiness ever. I think it is the longest study. And the number one factor they found that matters is the quality of your relationships and those connections. Those are the four C's. And I think it's a great concept. So it's step number 12. And I recommend you can do this two years out, three years out, but make sure you make time to do it.

37:29Mindy Jensen:After the four C's, Fritz, what do you think is next? This is really, I call it write your 10 commandments. And I did this about three months before I retired. And what it is, is it the chance to kind of define your North Star. And it's really focused on your mental attitude. For example, my number one is have an attitude of gratitude. Number two, give with a generous heart, pursue passions, keep the balance, etc. So these are primarily focused around, are you going to be a glass half full or glass half empty type person? because having the right mindset is tremendously important. You're going to face trials.

38:03You're going to face things you don't expect. But going about it or going through it with the right mindset is really helpful. So I wrote these 10 commandments. I actually printed it out. I've got it on my wall on the other side of that bookcase behind me. And I look at them from time to time. And it's amazing, eight years into retirement, how these principles have really applied. but the way that they've actually demonstrated themselves in terms of things that we're actually doing in life was totally unexpected. I'll give you an example. Try new things. That was commandment number five. So try new things.

38:38I was pushing myself to never get stuck in the rut. Always try new things. Look for the shiny object. And it has led me to, I now have a woodworking shop on the other side of that wall. I was never into woodworking, but my wife started this charity. We needed some dog houses. We had one of our volunteers that had a really nice woodworking shop. So I went up with him. We built some dog houses. I'm like, you know, dang it, that was fun. And I was like, you know, that might be something that's worth investing in, right? You've got to learn to spend your money. We've been, by definition, because we're FI, we've all been miserly.

39:08We've been, you know, careful to spend our money. But there are things that you need to spend your money on once you're within your safe withdrawal rate and all the disclaimers that bring dividends beyond financial considerations. We've made investments all our life that have gotten us to FI, what are you going to invest in post-FI that brings you non-financial benefits? To me, it was a woodworking shop. I love being out there in a woodworking shop, building dog houses, doing stuff like that. That came from these 10 commandments, trying new things. I never expected it would lead there. So I really encourage everybody, and this kind of goes back to the take a hike mentality, as you're working through, you know, what do I want my life to be?

39:48Take an afternoon and go with your spouse and sit down somewhere quiet. Just think about what are your 10 commandments and refine them, go back to them a month later, look at them, print them out and hang them on a wall and look back, you know, five, 10 years post-fi and say, okay, if I kind of stay aligned with what I thought was going to be important to me, I think it can be a very nice, like I said, North star to what are your priorities and how do you want to live your life? You know, one of the things I think is really important here is, you know, I'm not, I'm not a very religious guy in all of these contexts.

40:18But that last one, keep eternity in mind in terms of your 10 commandments, there's a real power in this concept of awe. Like what brings awe to you, is that that can be God, that can be religion, it can be majestic mountains, it can be, you know, the exploration of the universe or whatever. But that's, that's actually like a quite, there's like a real science behind many of these. And that kind of concept of eternity or zooming out or whatever it is that brings you into your life. I just wanted to hit on that. That's something I've been learning about recently that I hadn't really approached from that.

40:52Oh, what does this actually mean in a more deep way? And I would argue, I would expand it out to maybe spirituality. You know, I am a Christian, but one of the other ones on here I've got is measure your spokes. It's number 11. So look at this. Your listeners are going to get through all 20 of them by the time we're done here. But measure your spokes is the concept of there are many, many different areas of your life, right? You've got your financials, you've got your family, you've got, you know, your spiritual is one of them. And if you're spiritual, I had a friend of mine, not a friend, but I was in a Dale Carnegie course when I was like in my twenties, this really resonated or stuck with me.

41:24You know, I was in a work environment and now you should take this Dale Carnegie course. Fine. So I went to Dale Carnegie course, but halfway through a guy didn't show up in class. And the professor said, yeah, you know, Bob, Bob killed himself last night. We're all like, what? And he said, yeah, he said, I can't get into a lot of it. But let me just say, Bob didn't have very even spokes. And a wheel with uneven spokes doesn't roll very well. And man, that hit home with me. And ever since, it's all about balance, right? But the point of the eternity and the spirituality side of it is that's a spoke.

41:58And don't sacrifice it. Spend some time thinking about it. Whatever you believe is fine. You know, it's your life. But make sure you're thinking about it? You know, what brings you off to your point, Scott? What do you think about what happens to you after you die? And, you know, that's something you need to factor into your thinking as you live life. It's part of having a whole life. I just bring it up because we've talked a lot about happiness in the recent past. And if you do any of these workshops for goals or whatever, you're going to find like a wheel of life concept, right? Here's your relationships, here's your business, here's whatever.

42:28And almost all of them include this concept of spirituality, which is very weak in my world. I'm not even sure it's like a factor that I'm very concerned about in a personal sense. But I think it's, I'm curious, why do so many people talk about this? And for someone who is not a Christian, how does that begin to apply? And it's this, I think that the concept of awe is the starting point I bring with that hypothesis. So something interesting there without getting into the world of religion too deeply. It's this concept of spirituality that you're trying to bring up here that I think is the question.

42:56How do I explore that? In what way? Some people will have a very obvious answer to that and other people have to other people have to work harder kind of a tangent but it's somewhat related you know think about what's really important from a long-term perspective at the same time think about what really isn't very important right and if you look at you know our Facebook feeds and the stuff that people get all irate about and you know losing friendships and everything else a lot of that stuff's not really important so I would almost say you could couch this in a bigger question of determine what's really important for you and focus your energies there at the same time think about the stuff that you're spending a lot of time on that really isn't that important and reduce your focus there.

43:36That's all about rebalancing your spokes.

43:38Mindy Jensen:And that's good advice even before you get to retirement. That's good advice for right now. Stop fighting with people on the internet. Yeah, exactly. You're never going to win. Oh, Mindy's just taking a dig at me right there. That's my favorite part of the thing. I didn't say stop fighting with people on the internet, Scott. That was for everybody listening. If you take it personally, good. Let's talk about one or two more core concepts here before we adjourn. What is maybe the next biggest thing people miss? Let me touch on a financial one because none of these have been financial. And I would say it's probably number five.

44:10I'm sure you guys have talked about this a lot. It's a well-known concept, but I think it's important to touch on it. Prepare for the move from accumulation to decumulation or withdrawals, right? And the point of this one is we have spent our lives perfecting our skills at accumulation, right? We've all done a good job with it. We wouldn't be where we are if we hadn't. And the point is the skill sets that you need to develop to manage your financials post-FI are different skills than the skills you've had pre-FI. I wrote a personal drawdown strategy. I encourage everybody to do that. I actually went back and revisited like three years later and said, okay, here's what we were thinking this is going to play out, how did it actually play out?

44:51So, you know, you can revisit these things. But there's a real psychological impact to moving from always having your paycheck, saving your 20, 25, 50%, you know, to pick your number, to suddenly not saving anything. And you've got your safe withdrawal rate calculated and you're spending. That's a totally different mindset. And the anxiety over down markets, legitimate with sequence of return risk, right? All of those types of things, when you're working, the best thing that can happen is a rip-roaring bear market because you're buying on the cheap and you know it's going to rebound and you'll be fine.

45:24Man, that's terrifying when you're in retirement and you're living off your assets. Preparing for that and designing a scheme to build a systematic paycheck that you're comfortable with the system, that's, I think, something most people do think about because it's one of the financial things that escalates. But But it's really important, having been through it now myself, the risks post-fi are different than the risks pre-fi. And I've actually got a slide on that. There's four basic risks that I outlined in the presentation for decumulation. Sequence of return risk, we mentioned on that. You're spending without any income.

46:00So your investments have to cover your spending. You've got long-term risks of inflation and longevity. The biggest concern people have is that they're going to run out of money before they die. Those risks are materially different than the risks you had while you were accumulating. So it's really important to take some time. And this is an area where even if you're DIY, I think this is an area where it justifies paying for a retirement readiness review with an expert to make sure you don't have any blind spots. Even DIY people should do that because it's money well spent because you just have never been through it.

46:32But there are experts that have led thousands of people through this and they know things that you don't. So it's an important element on the financial side. I've been obsessing with this area recently. And the more I dive in, the more I model things out, the more I find offsetting and comforting findings that are typical to many people's situations. And I find very unsettling failure states that are very concerning, have very aggressive assumptions in other hands. And a way I'll articulate this is the 4 % rule's risk with respect to sequence of return risk is very well known and quantified, or it should be by anyone who's considering early retirement.

47:07You should have come across that topic. If that's new to you, you're very early in the journey of being ready to understand what the financial risks of early retirement are. Really, that's a first order kind of understanding of the 4 % rule. The real risk is spending volatility. It's inflation in specifically healthcare or certain other known areas that is structurally going to increase faster than inflation, not CPI or your average spending, assuming higher inflation. It's those pieces that can really derail your plan. And in many cases, there are offsets to those risks. Like if you have a home that has a mortgage on it and you're 10 years into the mortgage, you have 20 years left, that's almost exactly going to offset, for example, the healthcare premium cost risk in many scenarios.

47:47And the problem that I'm coming to is that these rules of thumb are fine for the guiding you towards the beginning of the end at the 4 % rule. But they can be accidentally right in many cases. They can be too conservative in some cases, and they can be way off in other cases. And in particular, the 4 % rule, I think, is doing a disservice to the lean fire community who are most at risk of falling into challenges with it, not just because they're low, the lower dollar amount, but because of the risks of any one of these things moving outside of their band that they can't control, like health care, for example, far outweigh, you know, are such a big, bigger percentage of spending that they can't be absorbed in the rest of the pile.

48:30How close am I in terms of what you've observed in the community across your work? I agree spot on, Scott. I think the tactical way that I would recommend people think about this, when we were in that stage where we were really fine-tuning our numbers, we really got serious about tracking our spending, something we always saved first and spent the rest. We didn't live on a budget because we knew we were saving aggressively, so whatever was left we could spend. But we knew that wouldn't work for retirement. So we went through every line item for a year. We tracked it. We adjusted it for what would it be post-fi.

49:01Private insurance, I'm only 62 now, right? I've been paying for private insurance for seven years. So I have three to go. So we've seen those inflation type things. So what we did is we were conservative on all of our assumptions, but it's a delicate balance because if you're too conservative, you're never going to retire. One more year, one more year, one more year, one more year, because you just, you know, you talk yourself out of it. So build in some discretionary spending, travel. Mindy just talked about this, right? Yeah, we're going to go to Europe every year, somewhere international every year.

49:29So we're going to throw$10 ,000 in for that. You know, whatever. Build in some of these things that you know are discretionary. Now, that affects the lean fire because if you're lean fire, you're not planning on going to Europe every year. I would encourage people that are too aggressive, maybe work another year and maybe add a little bit of padding and, you know, assume a little bit higher inflation because once you do that, that year seems like a long time when you're in the middle of it. But once you get, I did one more year. Once you get out and your actuals come in lower than your projections that you used, that's a lot better situation to be in than the reverse.

50:04Because then you're like, crap, I didn't, you know, this is getting out of control. What do I do now? And then you're really at risk. So it's a delicate balance though, because if you're too conservative, you never retire. So it's one of those subjective pieces. But my encouragement would be pad your numbers a little bit, but don't go crazy with it. That's about the only thing you can do. Yeah, I think the community overwhelmingly does that and their instincts are right. And I think that there's a pushback among that, you know, in a big portion of the community that I think is a little too sunshine and roses in some cases, because this is a serious risk that you take when you fire, right?

50:42You're not going to, in many cases, be able to return to that same level of pay. Your career trajectory will be permanently altered in there. And it's a worthwhile pursuit and it's realistic here, But I think there's a carefulness that is missing in some assumptions about there that we've talked about in the past too. Like this is an evolution of my thinking over the last year in particular as well on this. But I think it's a little too hand wavy to say the 4 % rule solves the problem. It's more serious than that at the end of the journey. And really what building some discretionary spending in allows you to do is it allows you to set up guardrails instead of a straight 4%.

51:18What I do every year, we take our net worth, we strip out the house. you know, the stuff you can't spend, your cars. So we end up with this retirement reserve. And I multiply the retirement reserve by three, three and a half, four, four and a half percent. And every year, I redefine kind of what could we pull for the next year. So it's dynamic, right? As the market's doing well, hey, we can spend a little bit more, knowing that if the market tanks, we've got some of that discretionary stuff built into our budget. We went to the Arctic last year, we could have not done that. So having the ability, because what has been proven to significantly improve the odds of something like the 4 % rule is the dynamic spending, right?

51:54Where you are able to flex your spending. The only way you can flex your spending is if you built some stuff into your spending forecast that you can strip out if the market tanks. That's where this discretionary buffer comes in. That's the way you build your insurance. And the other thing I would say, Scott, is a lot of these risks don't necessarily materialize over a year. Inflation, that can be a multi-year problem that you may not realize until you're three or four years in. And by then, you know what? Your ability to go back and work, you're kind of out of date. And maybe you say, okay, I got this side hustle.

52:27I got two years to go. I'm going to start this YouTube channel. I'm going to pull in 20 grand a year from the YouTube channel. Fine. But what happens if you get into retirement and you don't really want to spend your time on your computer doing your YouTube channel, but now you have to because you need that income to live. That's the other risk, right? So minimize how much money you think you're going to make from your side hustle and overestimate your cost a little bit, but don't do it to excess because then you'll never get out. So it's tough. I just kind of harp on these problems. That flexible spending component is clearly fine for somebody who is in that chubby or fat fire range, right?

53:02Just spending maybe$150 ,000, $200 ,000 a year. Okay. You don't go on vacation this week, right? Like great. But it's so different if you're spending$40 ,000 a year in lean fire and that's your plan. Like that's not like it's just not realistic to bake in those flexible spending components in there. And that's where that's where, again, I'm challenging this stuff is I don't want to be a party pooper for the fire stuff. I believe in this, of course. But I also I think that more important than cheerleading these components is being real about the assumptions you're making from a financial perspective.

53:31And of course, doing the prep work that we just covered for the most of this episode, to be prepared for what that's actually going to look like and how you're going to enjoy yourself. I think that those risks have been understated in some categories, in some components. And the 4 % rule is too sweeping for this. The risk is not really sequence of return risk, which is a known variable for most people. It's the more subtle cues, especially at lower FIRE numbers. It reminds me of a personal story that I think is worth sharing. We've got a friend here who's in his late 60s, and they basically, I wouldn't say they lean fired, but they didn't have a lot of fluff in their budget, and they kind of missed.

54:07And so now this guy's like 68 years old, and he's working at the supermarket 20 hours a week in the meat department. You know, nice guy, had a business, sold the business, you know, very successful guy, but didn't get his forecast right. And they're short, and he's got to go back to work in his late 60s in a scrub minimum wage type of job. How terrible is that? So it's a real risk to your point. And it's scary, but you've got to recognize, and this gets into all, you know, this is the decumulation risk that we're talking about, right? That's my point on this element of these 20 steps is you've got to make that mental adjustment to recognize what your risks are going to be in the next phase because they're different than the risks while you're working.

54:47That's the point. Becoming wealthy is not really an intellectual challenge, right? It's you spend less than you earned, you try to increase your income and you invest in this total market stock index fund, right? The rules are so simple for the base case for that. Staying wealthy and managing this portfolio across 40 to 60 year retirement is a real intellectual challenge and discipline that requires reasonable controls if you're close, if you're around this 4 % rule for 3.5 % to 5%, depending on which school of thought you want to ascribed to. So I think that's a piece there. Spot on.

55:23Mindy Jensen:I want to bring up one more slide of yours. Number seven, live on your retirement income. I think this is so important to test out your numbers before you actually get there. Test run your spending assumptions and not just loosely keep track of where your money's going. I would encourage you to tightly keep track of where your money's going. In the beginning of 2022, I publicly tracked my spending just so people could see that people like me who are supposed to know all about money get it wrong. My budget was, I blew out of my budget every single month for some random thing or another. I broke the ball joint on one of my cars and I don't have a traditional emergency fund because I have different buckets that I can pull from.

56:14Mindy Jensen:It's a conscious choice. But I noticed that I kept track of different spending. I host a lot of parties at my house. So I kept track of what I'm spending money on for the parties because that's really easy to cut out while still living my life. Or I go to, I live in Longmont. We've got like 13 microbreweries in town. It's a big thing to go and meet people at the microbrewery, but beer's really expensive at a microbrewery. So that's something that I can cut out. Going out to restaurants, not just a food budget, but I separate it out into groceries and restaurants because I can cut the restaurants if I need to.

56:53Mindy Jensen:And I encourage people to not only live on their retirement account and test run their spending assumptions, but tightly keep track of where that money is going. So you can see, oh, I really am spending$100 ,000 or hey, I thought I was spending 100, but I'm actually spending 125. Maybe that one more year actually does make more sense. Yeah. And a really good hack that I used, this comes after the make your numbers real, which is one of the earlier things. That's where you're putting your retirement spending forecast together, et cetera. So now you've got your assumed spending. So what we did, we said, okay, we think we're going to spend X.

57:26So what we did is we said, okay, Let's just adjust our savings rate so that my take home is roughly X. Now, okay, I still got to commute to work. So, okay, that's a little bit extra for gas. Okay, I've got, you know, you can adjust it because you're still working. And we still had a mortgage. We paid off our mortgage when we retired. We downsized and sold the house. So I could add money in for the mortgage because that's okay. But we basically got it to the point where my take home pay by adjusting our savings rate was exactly in line with what we thought our retirement spending was going to be, minus the adjustments, because we were still working.

58:01Hope that makes sense to everybody. Because what it does, it automatically forces you to say, okay, you can't spend more than what's in your checking account. And you got to do it for a year without transferring any money from savings. Can you do it? It's a great way to test it. Because like you said, oh, geez, that car repair, you know, things pop up. And it's a real eye-opening experience. instead of just working on a spreadsheet, live it and see if you can live with it. And you can automate that by adjusting your savings rate to get your take-home pay to match what you think you're gonna spend.

58:30You don't have to worry about it. You just say, okay, I can only spend with my checking account. Am I gonna get into trouble? Really easy to do.

58:36Mindy Jensen:Yeah, and the best time to discover that you are in trouble is when you still have a job. Exactly. All right, Fritz, this was fantastic. I am so excited that you had time today to sit down and chat with us about this. Please tell our listeners where they can find out more about you. Yeah, I'm at the Retirement Manifesto. You can look it up or type my name in Fritz Gilbert in Google. I'll pop up all over the place. But, you know, I'm around and I really appreciate you guys having me on the show. I love your show and it's great. Man, it's been probably three or four years ago, I think, since we talked.

59:08And Mindy, I saw you at Economy last year, so it was nice seeing you. We keep in touch. Scott, nice seeing you again. And I really appreciate you guys letting me share some of this stuff. I think, you know, the takeaway I would give to your listeners is if you're focused on the financials, great, but recognize they're necessary, but they're not sufficient. Awesome. And you are both an expert on the non-financial aspects of retirement and the financial aspects of retirement. It's been really a privilege to learn from you today. Thank you so much for sharing this. And thank you again to the Economy Conference for allowing us to repurpose or reuse or reshare the presentation you put together at Economy.

59:44Mindy Jensen:And if you missed the Economy Conference this year, go to economyconference.com and sign up for the newsletter. And that's economy, E-C-O-N-O-M-E, conference.com. Diana, we'll love to see you next year in Cincinnati. All right, Fritz, thank you so much for your time today. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks again, guys. We'll see you. All right, Scott, that was Fritz. And that was his retirement manifesto. What'd you think of the episode? He's just fantastic at what he does. I love this about the FI community, right? And of course, we got a comment on this that was a little snarky in a recent video about, oh, everyone who achieves financial independence goes on to do a podcast.

1:00:22Well, some people who go on to achieve financial independence go on to write 400 or 500 or 1 ,000 pieces of content obsessing over philosophical topics related to that, and they become very good in those areas of personal finance and thus wonderful guests for our podcast because they've thought about and put so many hours into working and reworking mental models around early retirement. And that's exactly what Fritz has done. It's a big service to the community. Many other people go on to make contributions in fitness or community service or travel or whatever it is in their community or their workplace or their spiritual pursuits or whatever.

1:00:58And they're just not as relevant to the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. That's why you don't see them here. I just absolutely love this. It's so wonderful to talk to yet another just master in their arenas in terms of the mental models and frameworks and thoughts that they've put into solving real problems for this community.

1:01:13Mindy Jensen:I really love talking to people who are on the other side of retirement because so many people who have this podcast and have their blogs, once they hit financial independence, they kind of stop talking about it. So I love the lessons that he's learned, sharing them with our audience who is mainly on this side of retirement. So I am thankful that he's here. I am thankful that he shared his teachings with it. And thank you, Diana, from Economy Conference for letting us share this as well, because not everybody can get to economy. They only have 500 tickets. Scott, you mentioned that your take a hike is to sit down in a beautiful setting and hypothesize about what your life is going to look like.

1:01:55Mindy Jensen:And you went one better. You set up a goal setting worksheet that I want to share with our listeners, completely free of charge. You can go to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash goals to get this worksheet. You don't even have to give us your email, but you can, if you go to biggerpocketsmoney.com, you can sign up for our newsletter anywhere. Thanks, Minnie. Yeah. That's the same worksheet that Virginia and I use. That's the exercise, right? Be at peak state, be energized, feel good, and then set your goals. Don't do this after, you know, several drinks on a Friday after a very long week of work. Do it on Saturday morning after, you know, you've had your coffee and your workout, and there's ideally something that you've driven to that's, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes away and a beautiful backdrop that tends to actually say, oh, there's something more to life.

1:02:37Like, what do I really want? Or I've already got it. And I'm happy, even though I've removed myself from those circumstances. Like, it's just very powerful when you're actually doing this exercise. And it's not this like high stakes thing you have to nail on the first try. It's the first iteration of many. And I think that that lowers the barrier to actually getting this important piece of work done.

1:02:54Mindy Jensen:Yep. And it's a beast of a document, but I think it's really, really helpful to... It's eight pages. It's not that big of a... But you're making people think about a lot of things. Carl and I started it. And let me tell you, we have not finished it yet. That's true. Defining what you want is a hard challenge. That is true. This worksheet is a great place to start because it gives you things to think about that I would not have been thinking about at my current space. So we're still iterating on it. You're right. It definitely doesn't have to be a perfect document the first time through, but it gives you so many things to think about.

1:03:27Mindy Jensen:And I think that's a really important step. So again, biggerpocketsmoney.com slash goals to download this document. One important follow up there I want to I want to share real quick is that word iteration at biggerpocketsmoney.com. We are attempting to build the best tools and resources free or paid on the internet. And that will be a forever pursuit. So this workbook we just shared is a iteration that we will hope is among the best free tools, if not as good as any paid goal-setting workshop you could find out there. And we will iterate on it as we get feedback. So you come back six months or a year from now, hopefully we'll have made some improvements to that.

1:04:04Same thing with our personal financial statement. Same thing with the software that we're creating that's free. All of this is free in the sense that we're not saying you have to exchange your data or information. All of our tools and software are essentially front end right now. So there's no data stored. Go use them. We want to build stuff that actually is used by people. and we want to add value. And you know, you're welcome to join our newsletter list if you want to. We hope to send you some valuable stuff, but you do not have to in order to access any of this. So that's our goal is provide really free, valuable content and iterate on it forever to keep improving it as we learn more.

1:04:36Mindy Jensen:And if you have any comments about what you are seeing on biggerpocketsmoney.com, you can email scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com or Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com. Please help me iterate. All right, Scott, with that, let's get out of here. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying peace out, stout.

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1:06:40Mindy Jensen:We'll see you next time.

1:06:51Mindy Jensen:Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with Found.