Your Retirement Plan Has a Fatal Flaw

0:00So me and T hope you get loads out of the content that we put out but we also understand that there's certain financial decisions and problems that you'll face in your life that you have to seek out professional. advice for mortgages accountants financial advisors and we speak to a lot of those people on the podcast so we've put together a list of qualified professionals that we can introduce you to you you used one recently didn't you mate tom ashworth helping me uh financial consultant financial planner helping me set up my limited company did go well yeah yeah saving some money very happy like i've wanted to do it for a while but i just didn't have the confidence or knowledge and the thing that we always try and do is is have them sat here so that people before they go and speak to the person can go watch a full hour long conversation with the individual and go well you know i like the way they i like the cut of their gym i was gonna like the cut of their gym i like their vibes they've got good aura good energy so if you're facing a big financial decision or life change and you think you could do with some personal support then you can book a free chat with my colleague will you can discuss what you're struggling with financially and he'll explain the options available to you you can book that free call through the link in the description there's There's also a QR code on the screen because we're bougie like that.

1:06If I planned for my money to last to 88, I've got a one in four chance of outliving it by almost a decade. Can you afford to live to 100? Depending on your age, you've got more than a one in 10 chance of getting there. Marianna Hunt is a personal finance specialist at Fidelity International, and she's looked at how you can actually plan for it. This is such a difficult question to answer. You don't know what stock markets are going to do. You don't know what inflation is going to do. You don't know how long you're going to live. if longevity is real and we're already seeing people grapple with this question of how do you make your money last in the 100 year life so instantly one of our favorite guests because you bought snacks you bought purple snacks can you explain what's going on here please yeah absolutely so can we open them as well please do yeah and we have some purple sweet potato flavored kit kats and purple sweet potato i guess pringles definitely try these pringles so because we're talking about longevity i thought i would bring some longevity inducing snacks I was in Okinawa in the summer, which is one of the so-called blue zones, which are the places around the world where you get the most centenarians per capita, according to some data.

2:14And one of the theories behind why people in Okinawa live so long is the Okinawan purple sweet potato. Actually, like lots of the science behind this has been discredited, but I thought it'd be quite fun to try them. I don't know how well it works if you smother them in chocolate or deep fry them and cover them in salt. I'm pretty sure Pringles are like one of the things that actually kill you, not give you longevity. You can, but try. This says no brand made for consumer. Yeah, it felt very edgy. Yeah. No brand. No brand. They're like, we're not Pringles. They taste pretty good. I'm obsessed with living forever.

2:47You're obsessed with food as well. Yeah, this is true, which will probably kill me, to be honest. But no, I'm obsessed with this idea. I was watching some documentary recently around the anecdotal evidence that people provide for why they live longer. and there's like a trend amongst people that live to 120 odd where they all go oh i drink and smoke every day and what they found is actually they probably have genes that make them resistant to the diseases that kill most people so the old there was a lady who lived to i think 124 in france she'd have a beer every day and smoke but she just was super resistant to the big four basically like cancer heart disease diabetes and dementia or alzheimer's so yeah you get this anecdotal stuff of like, oh, it was a beer a day or it's the purple sweet potato, but it may be like genetics or some other thing.

3:33Yeah. I mean, I'm lucky enough to have been to three of the five blue zones around the world, of which Okinawa is one. And the thing that struck me wasn't that they were eating some kind of magical superfood sweet potatoes or whatever it is. It was more just kind of the tight knit nature of the communities that these old people were so active, so sociable. They're all playing chess, hanging out with their friends all the time. I met the world's oldest working married couple in okinawa who were 98 and 96 and they still worked every day in their noodle restaurant and they had just had the best time they were so happy and they just came up to me and we started talking about why they think working for longer has actually helped them have these longer lives and a successful marriage over so many decades and things like that where are the other blue zones so i've been to okinawa in japan uh some mountain villages in sardinia there's an island called Ikaria in Greece and there is a religious community in California called Loma Linda and what's the last one they live across the road from them it's like the lowest life expectancy isn't that yeah yeah I've seen that so like people and they're it's all fast food diet basically and they're really poor and then these guys are like part of their religion is fitness yeah but they're very healthy and quite an austere lifestyle and the final one is a peninsula in costa rica but again i should say that like the science behind this isn't super robust um but it's still really interesting and i did meet loads of 100 year olds so i can attest the fact there's lots of old people there did any of them smoke yeah absolutely wow um and interestingly they didn't necessarily have the healthiest diets like they ate a lot of kind of fatty pork things like that they drank quite a bit um well at least in the places that i went to because my partner's parents like her dad she said he smoked 40 a day but like they lived on a farm so he ate lots of like fresh food and he worked manual labor outdoors and he like lived for ages but he smoked 40 a day so like you hear these stories and you think is it that they're resistant to the smoking or is it that they just ate really well or they're outdoors working or they have a good community like it's hard to find the correlation yeah so the book i was reading i remember that's called outlived have you seen that yeah it's good it's like a longevity scientist he basically says that the common thread amongst people that live past 100 is they don't get cancer dementia they don't they don't have any of these diseases which dramatically just basically most people just get knocked up out by one of the big four so they're resistant to these and then it becomes like 50 of your like longevity is genetics but then the other 50 is diet and lifestyle and things like this the greek diet or the mediterranean diet is a big one and a lot of those places you mentioned there were mediterranean sardinia yeah kind of greece they've got that mediterranean diet you think so but you don't think it is diet well i think the blue zones research specifically kind of glossed over all the meat that these people eat because it talks a lot about the importance of fresh vegetables mediterranean olive oil and things like that but i think the guy who did the blue zones research is a vegetarian so when i went to these places they said the one thing they found most annoying about his research was he kind of glossed the fact that they eat loads of pork pork is such an important thing in sardinia um in greece they had a lot of goats and pork and in okinawa in japan they eat loads of pork interesting so that might be the thing could it be the quality of the meat because like recently i've really gone into like butchers so we go to this nice butchers and ealing i get all this like fancy meat but uh like grass-fed beef and all these things do you think like in america they say a lot of people die because of sugar like there's lots of sugar in their diet and their drinks and their food do you think it could be to do with like the quality of the meat or like the hormones and the sugar and things like that in america i feel like this is straying well out of my territory of personal finance we're gonna go into the finance the blue zone stuff is more of a kind of a personal interest but definitely my my realm is more pensions and not uh grass-fed beef how do i live forever i think the community Everything's interesting, though.

7:30I think people underrate that. Loneliness kills you. And a lot of these are really tight-knit communities. Even Greece and Sardinia, there's real family values there. And they're working for longer point as well. I think it's really important if you've got a purpose and something that you're passionate about. Yeah, my granddad used to say, if all my mates stop working, then they die. They die straight away. He retired at 89 and then went like, pew. And that keeps your mind more active and sharper so you have less chance of dementia, I guess. Thanks for these. These Kit Kats are nice. Did you eat all the Pringles that were here?

7:58I ate all the Pringles. Oh, I had the ones that were here, yeah. You put your stack in and eat them all. My allocated slap, mate. I was, yeah, on the side. I thought we were sharing. Have a kick out. No, I'll keep these Pringles going. Do you want anything? You know why? So many of them in Japan are past. Okay. So we used an ONS calculator to look at our chances of how long we might live. Did you do it as well? Yes, I have. Okay, so me and Tomein, I know it doesn't look like it. He's like a shriveled up prune, this guy. I'm like a younger, fitter version of you, Moo. I, he, we're a similar age, so we've got similar results.

8:31We'll go into those in a little bit in a sec, but we've got a one in 10 chance, basically, of living to 100. My average life expectancy was 84. So same for you. Yeah. Without giving away your age, what did, how did yours come up? How have I to give away my age? So I'm a 30-year-old woman, and using the ONS life expectancy calculator, I've got, my average life expectancy is 88, so a bit higher than yours. I've got a one in four chance of living to 97. and a one in 10 chance of living to 100. So similar one in 10, but your average is four years higher. I looked into it a bit more. I looked based on ethnicity.

9:07Yeah. Because like, obviously, there's a big difference between me and T, so the age thing. And being a white male is the worst. No, there's one worse actually, mixed. You throw a bit of white in there and you... Excuse all the data, mate. You ruined it. So yeah, it says here, this is um 7.9 79.7 for a white male whereas asian or other is 84.5 females are longer but again it would appear that being white is is not a good thing in terms of longevity what we got for you black african it says uh 83.8 but the the black african women so the biggest age sex gap is among Bangladeshis and black Africans.

9:54So a Bangladeshi woman lives 6.2 years longer than a male and a black African female lives for 5.1. Whereas within the white cohort, it's only 3.4 years and Pakistan is 2.5, which is the smallest. But women generally doing better than men. I think that's well known that women tend to live longer. I mean, they put up with us. They deserve a few years without us, don't they? but um yeah it's it's interesting because you know you plug in the cow but then there's a big difference between someone like me and you i also know that taller people die like younger so i because the heart works harder yeah the heart is like a range of sizes and the gravity effect of pumping the blood you'll get less beats of the heart yeah so being tall so tiny dame will outlive me because i'm like so much taller than him so yeah no one believes that i'm 6 '3 can you verify that I'm pretty tall?

10:50Taller than expected, I would say. What does that mean? Yeah, there's like a conspiracy. Someone's like, he's sat on a pillow. He's not six foot three. We need to verify it. Okay, so let's get into the finance. You've recently done a study on longevity, Fidelity this is, who you work with. You've looked at retirement savings as well. What did you find? Yeah, so we spoke with around 12 ,000 people from different countries all around the world, all of whom were aged 50 or over and one of the most striking findings for me was that people consistently underestimate their life expectancy and they do it by a significant amount so overall we found that around two in five people are under preparing for retirement by a decade or more compared with average life expectancy in their country and when compared against a potential 100-year lifespan, which we've just found out is not that surprising, around four in five people are underpreparing for retirement by a decade or more.

11:49So that's really concerning for us as a pensions company and for society, and particularly given the context in which this is happening in the UK, where we've had this seismic shift from a system where the responsibility of funding your retirement and making sure your money lasts has moved from companies to individuals just at a time when we're all living longer than ever and so the risks of our money running out are greater than ever um so so yeah it's it's a really interesting finding and i think we all need to be using these calculators and figuring out what our risks are yeah i've quite the data in another episode we film today but the o and s data that i looked at said that people undershoot by 10 years in younger life so if they're under 60 they tend to think that they'll live 10 years less than they will but then at the end of life people get um they think they're going to live longer so there's like two ends to the longevity risk those people who are 75 should probably spend more money than they are they think i will live for another 15 20 years when because i think they become optimistic right people at that point don't want to think oh i might die in under 10 years but yeah we all know people that go, oh, I won't live till 60.

13:02You know, I'll be dead by then. But statistically, probably not. And what's interesting is that we're actually seeing longevity impacting customers directly. So 10 years ago, we had less than 90 customers aged 100 or over who are investing with us. Now we've got about 370 centenarian investors on our books. So longevity is real. And we're really seeing people grapple with this question of how do you make your money last in the 100-year life. Why? I mean, I know you're not the medical, but why are we seeing this rise in longevity, do you think? Well, we've had significant improvements in healthcare and all these kinds of things.

13:43So that's probably one of the reasons. I had a crazy stat the other day that life expectancy increased by about 17 years during the course of the 20th century. But I think probably what's a more interesting question is why do people underestimate their life expectancy and how can we help them to understand what their chances are of living to these much greater ages and I'm no kind of behavioral scientist or psychologist but I think there's probably two things here the first thing is that conversations around longevity usually focus on average life expectancy and as we've just found out there's a big difference between average life expectancy and your risks of living to these much bigger ages so for example if I planned for my money to last to 88, I've got a one in four chance of outliving it by almost a decade.

14:27That's a significant difference. And the other thing is, I think that often we anchor to ideas of old age based on what we saw in our own grandparents when we were younger. And my grandma, she died in her 70s. And that wasn't unusual at the time. Whereas my mom, she's not that far off 70 now. And she's still riding her bike everywhere, going for runs, doing her yoga classes so you know old age has it's really changed over the course of our lifetimes definitely yeah i i look at whilst having this conversation with my mom she looks so much better than my nan did even even our age groups you know you look at the happy days thing where they're like this is a 30 year old man in the 70s and he looks about 60 yeah they look like they've been through the wars yeah we age better definitely who do you think's most at risk for this situation older younger people So I guess if I was to identify a specific cohort, I think Generation X I'm particularly worried about because they are kind of too young to have fully benefited from defined benefit pensions where you get the guaranteed income for life.

15:32But they're also too old to have fully benefited from auto enrolment. Whereas if you've been auto enrolled from a young age, your chances of being able to fund the 100 year life are greater. but then also in terms of employment groups we were doing some research recently and we are particularly concerned about the self-employed and the kind of retirement they might be facing and i know you're both self-employed so i apologize in advance but you're very savvy so i'm sure it's not an issue i was at the pensions uk conference saying can you please help our self-employed people like yeah i definitely think it's a problem for everyone who's self-employed and because we know that obviously the self-employed don't benefit from being auto enrolled.

16:07And looking at the ONS data, I found that someone in there, the average person in their late 40s, early 50s, who is an employee would have around£71 ,000 in a pension, which in itself is concerning. But even more concerning, the average self-employed person of the same age only has around£3 ,000 in their pension. And we then cash flow modelled what could happen to those two people over the next few decades. And we calculated that based on those pension amounts, the average self-employed person could face having to work four years longer than the employee to achieve the same retirement income. Four years.

16:45That's the difference between retiring at 66 or retiring at 70. If you're running a business or you're self-employed, normally your focus is just on getting more money in your business bank account, not on what you do with it once it's there. But that's a missed opportunity and it's why we're really happy to be working with Tide. I use their Instant Saver account to earn interest on the money in my business account that I don't need day to day and the money that I allocate towards my tax bill each year. I like the small win of earning some interest on my tax money and also I treat it like an emergency fund for my business because I keep it in an easy access savings account where it earns interest.

17:22If you sign up to the Tide Instant Saver account you can earn up to 4 % AER variable. Plus you'll get£100 cash back if you deposit£5 ,000 into your account in the first 30 days. If you want to try it out, you can use the code MAKINGMONEY, or one word, or just use the QR code that's on screen. We've also left a link in the description where you can find the terms as well. Variable rate is correct as of the 15th of January, 2026. Yeah, and it's like the quality of life that it takes from you in those golden years almost. Yeah. And it's like, can they work? Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like what job is it?

17:56A lot of self-employed people, they're like tradespeople. They're, you know, they're working with their hands as well. And I think, you know, oh, just work an extra four years. A lot of people can't do that. They get to the end and they're done. Yeah. It's such an important question that we need to be asking, particularly as pension ages go up. And you're absolutely right that for some people, it won't be possible to work in their 50s and 60s. For one, because, you know, they might be suffering from ill health, having worked a manual job. Other people might have caring responsibilities. a lot of this cohort fall into the sandwich generation.

18:30And also, you know, you see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who feel like there simply aren't the job opportunities available for their age cohort. And that can mean they fall out of the workforce, really struggle to get back in and end up having to draw on their pension savings years earlier than they might have done otherwise. And it's something that I personally saw in my dad who fell out of the workforce in his early 50s, really struggled to get back in and ended up having to kind of gradually accept an early retirement and start drawing on his pension. And he is by no means an anomaly.

19:02The ONS data shows there's around 900 ,000 people in their 50s and 60s who aren't in work but want to be. And although we're by no means kind of bottom of the pile internationally in terms of employment rates for older workers, we're definitely well off the best performing countries. So Iceland, Japan, and New Zealand, they all have employment rates for workers aged 60 to 64 of well over 70%. Ours is less than 60%. And you're seeing more and more countries realising the benefits of supporting older people to find interesting and meaningful work and introducing amazing policies to support that.

19:42So in Germany, they're introducing tax breaks for older workers. Singapore has some great schemes going on. Denmark has these things called senior leave days, where if you're over a certain age, you get extra annual leave to use however you want. So, you know, there clearly is loads of benefits, not just for individuals, kind of financially, but also health benefits. You know, we talked about potential cognitive and physical benefits of working longer, benefits of society, the economy, and also for employers. I mean, me as a younger employee, I get so much from working with colleagues who are in their 60s.

20:14I've got a colleague, Tom, who's in his early 60s, who's like a walking encyclopedia of financial knowledge and having him around enriches my working environment so much yeah i mean the reason mammals are so successful is because we share information across generations elephants the grandmother will teach the mother how to raise the kid you know like through the generation so why do we suddenly seem to think that people in their 50s and 60s have no value in the workplace i know that's a generalization but these are like the most skilled they have all the experience and we're not we're not down the mines we're doing mental work most of the time so why wouldn't they be seen as valuable by workplaces i i don't have the answer to that but the positive thing that i'm seeing is there seems to be some movement in the right direction so we're seeing some companies like unilever for example introducing some amazing policies to support older people to remain in work and have interesting flexible opportunities so it's not all bad news give me a 60 year old doctor over a 20 year old one.

21:12Do you know what I mean? Don't you want the guy with all the experience? Yeah. Okay. So what are the options then that people have? I mean, you recently went through an experience with your mom, didn't you? And I think this is a good place to talk about that because I know that people, it's different circumstances that people go, I can't work, I can't say more. Can we just talk about the process with your mom, what you've done and how that's helped her and then bring some of these options to life that people have? Yeah, absolutely. And I probably should start by saying I'm not a financial advisor, so none of this is kind of financial advice but essentially my mum is not the most financially savvy person so she didn't really know how much she was spending at all or where you know how many pensions she had where they were so and she is turning 66 in March and wants to stop working at some point so we were going through this process of okay how can you retire how can we make sure your money lasts and which is why this question is very pertinent to me at the moment and fortunately she's in quite a good position once we'd sorted everything out so she's got some level of defined benefit pensions which are going to pay her guaranteed income she'll be getting her state pension in March and with those two combined that covers a good chunk of her everyday spending and then she's also got some defined contribution pensions and I've got some ISA investments that I help her manage and she's obviously got a pot of cash so what we've decided to do is to use some of her defined contribution pensions to purchase a small annuity that will bump up the rest of her guaranteed income.

22:39So overall, with the annuity, state pension, and defined benefit pensions, that will cover her everyday spending. And that means that we can take a little bit more risk with her remaining investments in the other pensions and the ISAs. And hopefully that money will keep growing and she can draw on it if she needs to in future. yeah um with you might hear some drilling in the background because the next door neighbors are doing some uh work on on the wall that that sits just behind us so yeah sorry if you hear that do you think a part of so that process you went through with your mom do you think what helped her there was just kind of having a plan i think it's the most important thing it doesn't necessarily matter what your plan is it's just going through the process and having a plan and the good thing is there are more and more tools available to people free of charge online that can help them.

23:31I mean, shameless plug, Fidelity has loads. And we have to remember that this is such a difficult question to answer of how will you make your money last? It's genuinely one of the most hard mathematical problems in finance because you don't know what stock markets are going to do. You don't know what inflation is going to do. You don't know how long you're going to live. And you don't know how your spending needs might change, particularly with the potential for care in later life. So this is really hard and we shouldn't berate people for struggling with it. We need to support them better to make these decisions.

24:01Yeah, but I think the tendency is people will ignore the problem if you berate them or if you make it too scary. Whereas if you just lean into it, you can actually make a lot of progress and just feel a bit more confident. Your mom now knows that her basic living costs are covered. So whatever happens, she's going to be able to live because of that annuity, right? So you mentioned inflation there. You did some really interesting research around what small changes to the inflation rate long term can do to retirement savings. Can you just tell us kind of why you see that as such a big risk for this problem?

24:29Absolutely. So it's interesting that you often see retirees having sleepless nights and worrying so much about the potential for a stock market crash. But actually, it could well be inflation that's even marginally higher than expected, that is the kind of silent killer to their retirement savings. It's kind of the difference between a head-on car crash and a slow puncture, but equally both will cause you to break down. So as you say, we did some number crunching and this was back in November when I think the inflation rate was 3.6%. So we calculated what the impact would be of inflation of 3.6 % versus the Bank of England's target of 2 % on a typical person's pension pot.

25:10And we calculated that in the scenario we looked at, it could mean the money runs out 11 years earlier than it would have done otherwise. that is a huge difference even for what doesn't feel like such a big difference in inflation and we've just been through a rampant inflation so the last four years i don't even know how long it is it just feels like we've been in this mess this cost of living crisis that's just now the living this is what we do normal now yeah yeah but the rates peaked at like 11 and this is like official measures the actual basket of goods that people use probably much higher i think you know things were going up like 50 weren't they yeah what damage has that done i know you don't have the numbers but are there a cohort of people that have just had like 15 years shaved off their their pot because of the last few years we don't know for sure but it is good it's a good point you make that older people are particularly exposed to things like energy costs um i mean my grandma has her house heated to an extreme level at all times um but it's really important to remember that there are things you can do about inflation to protect yourself or at try to protect yourself.

26:16So firstly, you can look at how much cash you're holding and make sure that it's an appropriate amount, not an excessive amount. You also need to think about potentially maintaining a good level of stock market exposure. People often try to de-risk too much in their older age, and it is good, particularly if you've got a retirement of potentially 30, 40 years to continue growing your money over that time. And if you go down the annuity route, you do have the option to index link that so it goes up with inflation or with my mum we chose to increase the annuity amount by a set amount so 2.5 percent each year so there are options available yeah you can get inflation and bonds and stuff as well like the linkers yeah so there is like you're more protecting from catastrophe than trying to like swing for the fences it's like that different mindset versus the accumulation stage which is like where we're like what what risk can we take on to improve it is how can I manage the risk?

27:12I think the stock market point is interesting because most people would say you decumulate, you move away from the stock market into bonds. Do you think part of the fidelity research is a much higher exposure to equities? Do you think like the lifestyle in products and things that you probably have, how are you guys viewing those? So it's a good point. And I don't think there's ever kind of one definitive answer of if you're age 70, you should have X percent and X percent. So William Bengen, who was the guy who did the 4 % rule research, which is a rule people often use to ensure that their money lasts over a certain period of time, he tested different percentage allocations to stocks and bonds.

27:55And if I remember correctly, if you had too low of an allocation to stocks, your money would run out sooner. But if you had too high of a percentage to stocks, it actually wouldn't help you that much. So he did find that 60-40 for the 4 % rule was kind of the ideal allocation. We spoke to Ben Felix, who's like a big finance YouTuber. And he made a bit of a criticism of the 4 % rule. And he said, actually, I think it's about 2.7%. But actually, I don't think there is a withdrawal rate that people should have. This fixed idea that I will take that amount. and that most people will just tailor their withdrawals to the current economic climate.

28:35They'll spend less. They'll cut back on discretionary spending. Do you think that we are at risk here of worrying people too much when actually people couldn't be just quite flexible within their retirements around how much they spend? No, I totally agree. Every plan should be flexible. And it's not about having the kind of the perfect number to plug into your assumptions of, OK, you know exactly what stock markets are going to do. You know exactly what inflation is going to do. it's more about stress testing different scenarios and having a plan for what you would do if things didn't turn out as expected so if you're doing your retirement planning look at what would it mean for your portfolio if inflation was five percent ten percent and think okay in that scenario what could i change what could i cut back on what rate of inflation do you think people should be benchmarking i think again it's the it's the point that there's no perfect number you need to test different scenarios i think a lot of the calculators that are available will use something between two percent and three percent but as i say it is important to go what would five percent mean for me what could i change yeah yeah i'm just worried it's going to scare the crap out of people because it almost becomes an impossible task if you if you're saying oh well you're five percent so what would returns be on the market then maybe two percent real three percent if you're assuming eight percent but we're also entering a period of potentially lower expected returns because evaluations yeah one thing that scares the crap out of me um we talked about it earlier like when if you like especially self-employed people you what if you don't want to keep working for longer what if you can't keep working for longer but one thing which i keep bringing up on the podcast is ai and stealing people's jobs and a lot of people come and they say oh but the jobs will just change and the type of jobs we need but i think if you're like you said you're 50 60 you're coming out the workforce and all the new jobs are ai related like how how is that going affect people like with AI taking replacing jobs and people trying to work longer?

30:27I think it's probably too soon for us to see the data. I was reading an FT article recently about how they were slightly debunking the idea that the slowdown in the jobs market is solely AI related. And actually, you know, we've had a tricky economic period. It's been very uncertain. Companies have just held back on hiring. So I personally don't know yet what the impact of AI will be. But one of the things that I find really frustrating in the conversation about older workers is when people just assume that because someone is older that they won't be able to adapt as easily to new technology. I personally have seen no evidence of that.

31:02I think, you know, they've lived through a huge period of change and had to adapt to so many different things during that period. Why should we assume that someone who in their 50s and 60s can't use AI? It's just, I find it ridiculous. Yeah, they rolled with the dice for the internet. Also as well, the AI systems, you know they're going to find it hardest to replace the most experienced workers so it's not the old people it's probably the younger people that have got no experience where the ai you know like paralegals are like people that are potentially under threat it's like that cohort i would say but yeah i i think most people forget that for every technological shift that we've seen there's been lots of job creation on the other side of it it's just how painful is that shift yeah yeah um go on mate what if people don't want to work longer like what's the alternative what should they do some of these crisps yeah of course he's like yeah you asked a question so i can yeah what should people do if they don't want to want to work longer so i think let's break this down into two age cohorts so if you're more than a decade off retirement the good news is you've still got lots of time to do something about this you've got time to save more and to benefit from the magic of investment growth and compounding for that to really turbo charge your savings so anything extra that you can put into your pension when you're young will make so much difference for you to be able to choose how and when you start working and what quality of life you're able to enjoy in retirement.

32:21So we did some number crunching on this actually. We looked at someone aged 25 earning 40k who would be auto enrolled throughout their career and we calculated that they could retire at state pension age and spend the comfortable amount using Pensions UK's definition of comfortable. But if they did that they'd risk running out of money at age 85. Whereas if they put an extra 3 % of their salary into their pension throughout their career, then their money would last five years longer. And they'd only need to adjust their spending by a small amount for then that to last to 100. So you can see how if you start early, your options are so much greater.

33:00Then if you're in that cohort who's kind of at or near retirement, your options are more limited. So if you're kind of ruling out the working for longer option, then the main two options left are you could look to spend less, which no one really wants to hear when it comes to their retirement, but it is really effective at making your money last longer. And two, you could look at purchasing a lifetime annuity, which if you're worried about living longer than expected, it's a good way to hedge against that longevity risk because it will pay you that income for the rest of your life. Now, there are drawbacks to annuities, including lack of flexibility, difficulties passing that wealth on.

33:38But if you're worried specifically about longevity, it's a good option. So T, in your opinion, what makes a good salesperson? Me. Resilience, a sense of humour, empathy, a dogged determination. You just can't give up. Yeah, the ability to take no. Yeah, and just keep going. I think the one thing that does block a good salesperson, though, is compliance. Nightmare. This is why we're happy to be working with Vanta. Vanta automates compliance with security protocols like GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and SOC 2. If you want to do business with larger companies or grow internationally, then you need to prove your compliance with these kinds of standards or your deals will get blocked.

34:22Compliance is one of those things you just have to do in business. And the beauty of Vanta is they make it really easy. Saving you up to 90 % of the time it takes to prove that you're compliant. And on average, half a million dollars. So if you know what those acronyms are, then you probably need Vanta. You can get started at vanta.com forward slash making money. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description and we've put a QR code on the screen. What about the, you mentioned that you've got 370 customers now over the age of 100. I know you can't share specific details, but how are they adapting?