1286: Derek Coburn | Rethinking Retirement to Live Well Now and Later

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23:37It's great at work. It's great if you're already retired. It's great if you're just entering the job market. It'll make you a better connector, a better friend, a better peer. And a few minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course. It's all free. No shenanigans at sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Derek Coburn. This is interesting because I think a lot of people assume you have to be doing a job that you really don't like, but you could retire from your, let's say, teaching job at age 65, and then you could get a job doing working part time at a flower shop or something like that from 65 to 75.

24:15You don't have to do the same thing. You don't have to be a machine metal stamper from 65 to 75. Once you retire from your job in Detroit, I don't know if those jobs still exist in Detroit. But you know what I mean? So that's an interesting take, because I think a lot of people are going, this is I'm just out there's my school district won't let me, you you know, keep working that long or my government job won't let me work past. I don't know, but I'm assuming that a lot of these jobs have mandatory retirement ages in some states or in some situations. This is all hopefully really good news for people, because when I read this, it changed the way that I thought about working as well.

24:51I really like what I do. I know I'm probably in the minority where it doesn't really feel like work most of the time. Mondays are the exception because I have a crap load of I put all my meetings and all the things I don't necessarily love doing on one day. So I have one sort of rip the bandaid off to start the week kind of day. And then the rest of my week, I read books and talk to smart people, kind of, you know, that's really where I'm at. And it's not just about the work. You mentioned my buddy, Tim Urban wrote a post on his Wait But Why blog, which I love. I think a lot of people probably read that.

25:22By the time you graduate high school, you've spent, I think it was 93 % of the time that you'll ever have with your parents. So if you are out of high school, which like 99 plus percent of my audience is, you've already spent 93 percent of the time that you'll ever have with your parents. And for some people, that's great news. But for most of us, for most of us, we would like to see those people again. And Tim, actually, this post, which we'll link in the show notes, this was a life changing post for me because my parents, they now come over daily and they spend several hours at my house. But that's because in part because I read that post, I told my parents they should move.

25:58It took them three ish some odd years to come around to the idea that living in Michigan for the rest of their lives includes winter. And so I got them a house across the street. But I deliberately engineered the way that they can see me and their grandkids twice a day every day because I realized, oh, I'm either going to see him twice a year for a few hours, really a few days at most, or I can see them every day until they're sick of us. which is quick. Depending on the day, they leave a little earlier, but it's fine. And I love this idea that actually this is within our control for a lot of us, but it's also it should be sobering for most of us that life comes at you fast, I think, is really the point of the post.

26:39You really find that the same thing is going to be true for your kids. Do you have numbers for kids? I know in some of the groups you and I are in, they talk about like you get eight summers or whatever. Do you know anything about this? Well, just take the exact data point that you just shared from Tim Urban, which I include in my book, except I highlight how it should potentially incentivize someone and motivate someone to lean in more to spending time with their kids while they have them in their home. Because I think that society playing this money game, buying into a traditional retirement mindset, society wants us to work our hardest and earn most of our money in the years when our kids want us and need us the most.

27:16Even just on a micro basis, if my macro theme is I get to kind of spend my time and my money differently right now because I know I'm going to be working into my 70s and 80s. Well, right now I have a 15 and a 13 year old. I have three and five years respectively left with them here in my house before they're gone. And me saying no to more speaking opportunities right now, me saying no to coaching opportunities, me solving on a daily basis for I want to spend like an hour or two with each of my kids every single day is sponsored by almost like I'm writing the future version of me is writing the current version of me, a sponsorship check.

27:52It's sponsored by the knowing that I'm going to be ready to work more than I am right now once my youngest is gone and off to college. Sign me up for more speaking gigs, more impact, more work, you know, all of it. I go through this a lot. And my friend, Rich Roll, told me that I was like, oh man, they want me to write a book and they want me to do this. And he's like, work will be there later, man. Your kids are six and three. Take the time, work those lighter, quote unquote, lighter days and spend time with the kids. And then yeah, when your youngest is off to college, then you can sit down and do premium content, write books, do a speaking tour, whatever, live podcast, all the stuff that sounds kind of fun, but for you have kids at home and you don't want to leave them, you can just do it later.

28:31and that's probably a good way to look at things. It's hard though, because everyone's like, you're leaving money on the table. So now I actually look for places where I can leave more money on the table because it's usually a good sign, especially if I don't want to do the work. I don't need the extra cash, which I know is a privileged position to be in. Ryan Holiday writes a newsletter called The Daily Dad, which I've talked about here on the show. And I know you're a fan of that as well. And he mentions that Seinfeld quality time versus garbage time and how garbage time with kids and quality time are basically the same, right?

29:01Whether you're sitting there eating a bowl of cereal or you're, I don't know, doing a workout together or having a heart to heart, it's all kind of the same in terms of the meaning to the kid. And you have your own version of this, which is$50 ,000 moments. I'd love to hear about that. Yeah, so when my kids were 10 and 7, respectively, approximately, we had a nighttime routine, my wife and I, where we would alternate lying in bed with each of them, reading a story, snuggling with them, waiting for them to fall asleep. And I caught myself on a lot of nights thinking, gosh, I wish you would hurry up and fall asleep so I can go hang out with my wife.

29:33I can go answer this email. I can go watch this Netflix show. And I had the realization, like, this is not going to last that much longer. Like, my 10-year-old kid is not going to want me to keep laying in bed with him for too much longer. So I tried to force myself to appreciate it more. And that worked a little bit. But then I just had this wild, crazy thought of, what if 20, 30, 40 years from now, there's a company that invented a time machine? and they will give me the opportunity to go back in time to relive one moment with my kids. What would I be willing to pay for that? What would I pay to have one nighttime snuggle with the 10-year-old version of my kid when I'm 60 and he's 30 something?

30:07And it's like, I would write a$50 ,000 check without even thinking twice about that. And even though those moments are not happening anymore, the nighttime snuggles, we have these other moments. And to your point, my oldest son and I, we have a gym in the house and we work out about three times a week together. that's an hour per session and 45 minutes of that hour. Like he's not talking to me, you know, he's kind of looking at his phone and he's distracted, but I'm in the game and I haven't at bat and I'm there. And if he wants to talk with me, we can have a conversation. And so for me, it's more about presence.

30:40I see a lot of parents who, who get frustrated because they come home early from work and you know, I'm available from four 30 to five, but my kid doesn't want to spend time with me and I don't know what to do. And it's like, no, like you can't just put them into like one of your time blocks. It's just more being around and being available for them. And when it was a couple of years ago, before I was working out with my oldest kid where I was getting ready to work out for myself. And he said, dad, can we play Legos together? And I said, sorry, bud, getting ready to work out. I need to get this in.

31:09I haven't worked out in a couple of days. And while I was in there, I thought, oh my gosh, like I don't want to ever say no to him again. So I just rearranged my days at that point to where I was going to get done everything that had to be done before they got home from school. I would leave the things that would be nice to do, but not necessary to do for after for the days that they didn't want me to spend time with them. But if they were going to ask, I was going to say yes. And the more I said yes, the more they kept asking. Yeah, this is interesting. It's funny. I came to the same realization.

31:37There was just a lot of times where Jaden would say, Dad, I want to play with my drone or I want to play with this or help me build a Lego house. And I'm like, sorry, I've got to get my workout in because this is my only block. and the look on his face is always just like, so it just, you just realize, you know, it's just not that important to do pushups right now. And you end up building a Lego boat or whatever instead. And I pretty much never regret it. You know, yeah, I'd be in a little bit, maybe a love handles would be slightly smaller if I got my act together. But yeah, you're right. I do everything before they get home now.

32:08And if there's something late, it's just generally a mistake. Or somebody says, I can, I have to move this thing and it's occasional because my dad, And your dad, too, probably from that generation. My dad got home at like 8 p.m. Yep. Most days. And he worked at Ford. It's not like he had some kind of crazy sort of business that he was running. It's just Ford would work you to the bone in the 80s and 90s. That was just that's how they rolled. And he got up before I got up. I got up at 6 left at 630. I don't know. And got home at 8. And there was a long time where I didn't see much of him. And then he retired really early.

32:44but I think I was like a sophomore in high school by then, right? Cats in the cradle situation. And if it weren't for stuff like Boy Scouts and all that, I probably wouldn't have done much of anything with him, honestly, because he wasn't around and then I was too old. So luckily we had that system, the Boy Scout thing in place. Otherwise, I think we would have been in real trouble. And I know that a lot of guys in my generation are making this same mistake because that was what we were modeled for the most part. It's not a boo-hoo situation for me, really, because I saw him do the same thing.

33:14As he gets older, you forego time with your friends when you're younger, and then we're older, and then you're lonely. And my dad has had to sort of reconnect to all of this. He did a good job with this, reconnect with a bunch of his friends when he got older because he was like, oh, I neglected all of my relationships for 20, 30, whatever years. I'm curious where the retirement system even comes from. Who came up with let's retire at age 65? I don't even know who picked all this. We'll go back to 1889 in Germany when they were putting together the first ever social program for workers who were leaving the working pool.

33:47The chancellor at the time, Otto von Bismarck, decided to make 65 the age that they would begin to receive benefit because that was the age at which people were expected to live until. So we're going to pay you. Don't worry. You don't have to work anymore. What age are you going to be? Well, hopefully you'll be dead. That's what we're betting on right now. We're betting you're going to be dead by that time or maximum two years left in your life. That's grim. And then FDR just kind of thought that sounded like a good number when they were putting together the Social Security program in the mid-1930s.

34:17And Social Security in part was created because there was an employment crisis where you had all these younger workers that were looking to get into the workforce, but the older workers didn't want to let go of their jobs. And so there was all these shenanigans that took place, like the owners or the managers of the businesses would look out for men who were starting to get old. If they spotted a gray hair, they would give them harder work to do to increase the likelihood that they would mess up and they would have a reason to fire them and get rid of them. And this led to a lot of these workers going to Woolworth on a daily basis to buy shoe polish to put into their hair so that they would be able to pass off as not being as old as they actually were.

34:56And life expectancy at that time was 70, 71. And so if you think about it, and most companies had pension plans, you would get a third of your income from social security, a third of your income from a pension plan. You only had to come up with a third on your own, and you only needed to last for about five or six years because you were going to die after that. So even though our life expectancy now is significantly higher, and it's certainly higher once you hit 65, like once you make it to 65, you're likely to make it to 85. But we haven't really adjusted the age at which most people are choosing to stop working or planning to stop working.

35:28We talked about Social Security at the top of the show. Is that I know we can't really rely on it. First of all, how much is that? How much do you even get? It's like a few hundred bucks a month, right? It's nothing even close. It's all based on. Yeah, it's a math equation based on how much you've worked and how much you put into it. And that's, you know, it's interesting when they were putting this plan together, there was going to be more of a universal basic income type of stipend. And most of the workers rejected that because they didn't want to receive any handouts. So the Social Security model was a nice compromise.

35:55And everybody got by because they got to feel the pride that I contributed to this. And that's some of the money that I'm going to be taking out. Is Social Security even going to be there? I remember even in high school in the 90s, teachers being like, don't count on that. It's probably not going to be enough for you. And then in college, it was like, not only is it not going to be enough, it might not even exist. And now it's almost like a foregone conclusion that there's nothing is going to be there by the time we need it. Is that correct? Yeah. Look, if I were under the age of like 50, maybe even a little younger, I wouldn't be planning on it.

36:25You know, it's interesting. The first social security check was drawn in 1940 to a woman named Ida Mae Fuller. And the amount that she got was$22.54. The amount that she contributed to social security was about$24.75 in total. Wow. She, of course, lived to the ripe age of 100 and ended up taking out about$23 ,000 in benefits. So literally the very first person that got benefits from Social Security just got like multiples and multiples of what she got in. The writing was on the wall that this thing is not going to be sustainable. If you told me that there was an investment where I could put in that amount of money or a small amount of money and I would keep getting paid out after it for the rest of my life, I would report you to the FBI.

37:11Right, because that's what a Ponzi scheme is, is it not? Yeah, totally, man. Yeah. No, don't worry. We're taking money from other people who invest in this, and we're giving it to you. And then when they need it, we're going to find other people who have to invest in it. We're going to give that to them. That's illegal everywhere else unless the government does it. Yeah, this is because the math eventually doesn't work. All right, so we have 401k plans now. First of all, explain what that is, because some people don't know because they're not American, and other people don't know because they don't have one.

37:40Some people do have one and still don't know what it is. So tell us what these are and isn't this going to solve that problem? Yeah. So 401k plans and I'll lump in traditional IRAs with them are essentially retirement plans where you contribute pre-tax dollars. You don't pay taxes on the money. It can go into an investment account. And then whatever it grows to, you're going to pay income taxes at your current tax bracket on the principal and the growth. 401ks sort of came around in 1978. Even the gentleman, Ted Banna, who started this movement, thinks that it got really out of hand and his intention was never for it to be the end-all be-all for retirement accounts.

38:20But I think one of the main reasons why these plans became all of the rage and why everyone has kind of dutifully put money into them without really questioning it is that, oh, I get it. I can put money away now while I'm working. And when I take the money out, I'm going to be in a lower tax bracket because I'm not working. Well, once you decide that there's a chance that you're going to be working longer than you know, than what you were previously thinking into your 60s, into your 70s, into your 80s, then maybe it's not the great deal that it's being advertised as. Oh, man. So I better talk to my CPA because I have a feeling that I have a ton of money in something like that.

38:58And probably I'm going to end up paying a ton of tax on something like that. I can't just give that to my kids, right? I have to spend it. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll have to start taking required minimum distributions at the age of 70 and a half. And the way that they figure that out is they take all of the money that you have in your retirement accounts, and then they figure out how many more years you have left to live based on their master mortality chart. So let's say you're 65 and they think you're going to live to be 85 based on what their chart, the same chart for everyone, then you would have to take out one 20th of that amount each year.

39:31I meant to say 75 and 95, but that's essentially what we're looking at. I've been preaching and I do preach the importance of diversifying how your money is ultimately going to be taxed the same way that you prioritize diversifying your money between different asset classes. And I don't think that one is worse than the other. I think that it's perfectly fine to have money in a 401k plan. But also I think that we need to plan for the scenario where tax rates might be a lot higher in the future than they are right now. And if you throw in some income on top of that, then there's a decent chance that you're not going to be in a higher tax bracket.

40:05There's a decent chance that it would be better for you to contribute to a Roth IRA right now or a Roth 401k plan instead of a traditional plan. And the way those plans work is you're putting after-tax dollars into those plans. And then when you take the money out, it's all completely tax-free to you. So if you're currently lying awake at night thinking, cool, cool, cool, I'm just going to work until I die. Don't worry, we're not there yet. But before we fix capitalism and the retirement system as a whole, let's take a quick break so the show can keep existing in the first place. We'll be right back.

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42:38They make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, please just email us. We are happy to dig that stuff up for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Derek Coburn. It's okay. Tell me about the FIRE movement. Have you heard of this? Of course you have, right? What is it? It's Financial Independence Retire Early. Is that what that is? Yep. So I see tons of people doing this, and occasionally I'll rent a car on Turo or something, or back when I used to rent a bunch of Airbnbs and stuff like that, I would always meet these people, right?

43:18Because these are the people who rent their car out on Turo when they're not using it or they have an extra car. They have like 17 different side hustles that are app based here in Silicon Valley. This is a bizarre mindset to me. And I'm sure some people listening do this. So I don't want to be like too much of a dick about it. But really, I see these people telling me, oh, I take the bus when I rent my car out in Turo because it's profitable. And I rent a room in my house. And yeah, I got to share my bathroom. But I didn't want to have kids because they're expensive. And I eat the same thing every day.

43:46And it's just cheap stuff that I got from Costco that I can kind of buy in bulk. can I they've kind of given themselves this weird pathological addiction to frugality. Not all of them. Don't email me if you're doing this and you still take vacations or whatever. But I've seen it also destroy relationships because one partner realizes, you know, I kind of want to live my life now, not retire at 40 and then still be poor for 50 more years. Yeah, I had a woman show up to my book release party. She bought 50 copies of my book. I hadn't spoken with her in four years. And I had a conversation with her after the event while we were all hanging out.

44:21And she said, thank you for writing this book because I recently got separated and divorced from my husband. And the reason why we were getting separated and divorced is he was really leaning into this fire movement mentality. And I kept saying, I love what I do and I don't want to stop doing it. I don't want to go on a vacation. And he was like, no, we can't afford to go on a vacation because I want to stop working in 10 years. And she just said it really validated a lot of what I was thinking. And you covered like there's going to be exceptions to the rule and there's different people that are using the FIRE movement in different ways.

44:51But at a macro level, the buy-in to the FIRE movement is that you are supposed to be doing something that you don't enjoy doing and figure out a way to stop doing it as soon as possible. And I just think that's a terrible thing for anybody just to opt into. These are mostly younger people who could more likely than not find work that they don't hate and find a way to earn some money and enjoy their life a little bit more instead of, you know, skimping and saving at every chance they get. So your book has destroyed a marriage so far. Congratulations, I think. No, but the marriage was already destroyed.

45:21It just validated for her that, you know, she wasn't crazy. Yeah, no, it's true. It's interesting because I do see a lot of people, again, I'm sure there's, look, if you're 29 and you're doing this and your wife doesn't want kids or you're also still single, whatever it is, do whatever you want. No shade. But if one of your partners wants to go on a cruise and you can't, you're wearing, you know, used clothing from Goodwill because you want to start, you want to retire at 35, it's worth maybe taking a second look at what's important to you and to your partner before you get married, ideally. Yeah, for sure.

45:53I'd love to talk about the consequences of retirement, the psychological consequences of retirement. For me, a lot of people and friends of mine, you know, you'll be at a party and they're like, what would you do if you didn't have to work? And I'm like, I would work probably. It might look slightly different. Maybe I'd release one episode a week or two instead of three or something like that. My friend Neil Strauss is like, what would you do if you only had one year to live? And I'm like, oh, I would totally use that to book podcast guests that would that keep saying no. Hey, I'm gonna be dead soon.

46:24So you better you're gonna jump on here. You know, I'm gonna be dead. I would use that. That would be the ultimate guilt trip to book. And he's like, you know, really, what would you do? And I'm like, you know what, I honestly, I would still, I would do this podcast, again, one or two episodes a week instead of three or four, but I might be at a five-star hotel in Greece for some of it. I don't know, you know, whatever, because I love doing this. I can't really imagine doing anything else. I know, again, that's a privileged position to be in. My parents, when they retired, I think they kind of also went a little bit crazy.

46:56Not crazy crazy, but a little bit crazy. They retired early because they worked their butts off. They worked a lot of overtime. They missed out on a lot of stuff and they retired while I was still in high school. And then it was like, oh, we can go up to our lake house anytime we want. Guess how often that happened, right? They went up to cut the lawn and came home. And then it was like, oh, I can read all the books I want. All right. I've read all the books. After what literally should have been a normal vacation for them, they started to get a little bit nuts, man, because they hadn't taken enough time off.

47:26They were just burned out. They didn't. I don't think they needed to retire. I think they just had burned themselves out. I talk about meaning versus happiness in my book. There was a study done by Barbara Fredrickson out of Stanford. She put together two groups of people. The first group were prioritizing for personal happiness. They were waking up every day, solving for how can I be happy? The second group was prioritizing purpose. There's a reason that I'm getting out of bed every morning and it's beyond me and my own sort of feeling good personally. And what's crazy, they hooked them up to brain monitors, heart monitors.

47:58And the first group, the ones who were prioritizing happiness, were more likely to get sick, get diseases and die. Their inflammation went up significantly. Their immunity went down. Whereas the second group, it was just the opposite. They were flourishing. Their inflammation markers were low. And, you know, I think that there's just something in our bodies that just say, like, when you stop showing up and feeling like you want to make this world a better place, then we're going to stop going out of our way to keep you here as long as possible. I think the moral of the story is sort of like if you want to be happy, don't directly pursue happiness.

48:30Retiring and leaving what you have been doing for years, if you really enjoy it, or even probably if you don't, the lack of purpose would be a little scary. And the isolation, right? Like when you leave your coworkers who you see 60, 50, 40 hours a week, when you leave those people, if you haven't nurtured other relationships, you're kind of alone. A lot of people are. And, you know, like I said, people ask why I don't retire now. And the other reason is because I would go insane. I would drive my family insane, too. And I know that I would just end up starting something else that takes up a bunch of my time, but probably makes no money.

49:07Right. So why do this when I actually love what I do? Like I said earlier on the show, I basically just read books and talk to smart people most of the time. I happen to be able to monetize that. But I think even if I couldn't, I see these, you know, you see those lawyers, they retire. and they're like, uh-oh. And then they start a nonprofit and they're like, oh, okay, I'm still in alignment with my values. I'm still doing something that I enjoy. It fills, it checks the social box. It ticks the purpose box. Maybe it doesn't make any money. They don't need any money. But I think just going, I'm gonna sit around and read all day.

49:38I mean, my dad still watches a lot of TV, man. And I don't really think he enjoys it. I just think it fills up the time. The unretirement movement is interesting right now. We have more people than ever before that are choosing to go back to work. after the age of 65. And most of them are not doing it because they need money. They're doing it because they missed the connection and because they missed the contribution. And, you know, we were talking about friends earlier. Did you see that research that went around about a year ago that showed the amount of time Americans spend with various people, either like by themselves or with coworkers or significant others or friends?

50:12What is this? So it was a really crazy, interesting chart. And Sahil Bloom covered this in his new book. Also, when we're 15, 20, 25 years old, we're spending two and a half hours a day with our friends. When my kids wake up in the morning, they're thinking like, what are my friends doing? And what are we going to do to have fun today? That dips down to under 30 minutes a day by the time we're in our thirties, and then kind of gets around the 20 minute per day mark. And I don't know when we decided to start devaluing friendship and relationships and connections with other people. I'm really, that's amazing that your father was able to rekindle all of those friendships, People spend so much time thinking about how much money do I need in order to retire and hardly any time thinking about who do I want to actually retire with.

50:54Tell me about financial planners and how they calculate the appropriate amount for people to save, because I know that they often fail to do this correctly. Tell us how we actually figure this out. Look, we can make it as complex or not as anyone wants. We can factor in all sorts of things. Essentially, at the end of the day, the back of the napkin math is this. if your money is invested in an effective, but still somewhat conservative way, let's say you're earning six or 7 % a year on your money, you can reasonably take out four to 5 % a year without really running the risk of depleting your principal.

51:29So what does that mean? That means that you need about a million dollars in order to live off of 40 to$50 ,000 a year. So if you need $250 ,000, you're going to want to have$5 million whenever you decide to stop working. But again, we could be earning income from another source. We could be working 10 hours a week to offset that a little bit. There's a lot of ways around it, but that is like the quick and easy math, you know, to keep this, you know, simple. How do you calculate what people need? Because I know in the book you mentioned historic inflation might actually not apply in the future because of the national debt.

52:02Can you speak to that a little bit? You know, one of my favorite books of all time is called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. He came out with a book 15 years ago. And the punchline is that we just do a terrible job of predicting what our future selves are going to want or need. What we need to predict, what our financial advisors are asking us to assume is kind of ridiculous. It's what is the inflation going to be, not just next year, but every single year for the next 30 years? What is your rate of return going to be? What are the tax rates going to be? And oh, by the way, when are you going to die?

52:32And people spend 20 minutes thinking about all eight or nine variable inputs and then feel really confident they know exactly what they need to do when they walk out of there, which is kind of crazy. But then there's also like, do you have kids and do you want to help pay for their wedding? Do you want to pay for secondary school for them? My mom right now, I had a conversation with her and I talk about this in the book a little bit around leading money for kids, making things a little bit easier for your kids. And I told my mom, I don't really want your$600 ,000 when I'm 71 years old, when you pass away, because you hopefully lived a really long life.

53:05I want you to spend this money to create experiences for yourself and your family right now. And so she's writing a check to cover a trip for all of us to go to the Caribbean the end of this year. My family, my brother's family, my sister's family. And that's a conversation that I have with a lot of my clients as well, is let's not hoard this. Let's use this money to provide these amazing experiences for the people that we care about. I suppose if you keep earning, even if you're earning a lot less, like part-time work, as we touched on, instead of fully retiring at 65, spending just probably becomes psychologically easier, right?

53:37You don't feel the need to hoard everything because you don't have that much. Well, this is a little grim, but what forgive me, you don't have as much life on the end of it. Right. So you're like, OK, I'm going to need less money. And since you're not just spending whatever you're, you know, the interest on what are the the appreciation on your investments, at least for me personally, I would feel like if I have income coming in, that's not just passive investment income. I would feel a little bit better. you know, yeah, buying cruise tickets for my whole family, my grandkids, all my kids, the other side of the family, et cetera, because you see it coming back in.

54:12It's not just taking a chunk out of what you need to live and you're just hoping you don't run out of runway. Yeah, I have clients that have a lot of money. I have clients that have like well into eight figures. And it's interesting, group one, and I'm not really looking for new clients at this point, by the way. I sold my practice a while ago. So I want to be clear that what I'm sharing here is not like a pitch or anything like that. But I have clients who, let's just say client A has$15 million and client B has$15 million. And client A is making$100 ,000 a year running like a chartered boat to take people out fishing on the weekends.

54:46And client B is not doing anything at all. Client A continues to spend down their money in much more of a carefree way than client B, who, even though I am begging them and encouraging them and reminding them that you are fine. Like you're going to die with a lot of money if you don't start spending it more. The fact that they turn that knob off entirely psychologically is really preventing them from allowing them to enjoy all that they've worked hard to save up. I'd love to cover the topic of sabbaticals and mini retirements. I brought up the thought exercise. What would you do if you won the lottery that my friends always like to spring on me?

55:20But talk about the mini retirement thing, man, because I know you and I, we talked about this years ago on I think on Michael Port's boat or something. And it's a fun way for I think most people to look at their career. And most people again, credit to Tim Ferriss, I don't think anybody was really talking about this before the idea that you could take a break from the work, and then maybe even switch industries or switch projects or whatever that I mean, that's kind of that was revolutionary at the time. And I still don't think enough people do it. I think a lot of people figure this is the career I'm in, I can never leave, which is a little bit, you know, depressing, especially if you're not in the moment loving it.

55:56Yeah. Look, I think that part of what I'm sharing here is hopefully in a way to liberate people to maybe, you know, I'm going to take a year off. I'm going to reflect. I'm going to think about what I want to do next. I share the story in my book about my friend, Ate Williams, who was a home renovator. And she was working at the time with her husband in DC, just doing remodels and was enjoying it. And they decided they wanted to move out to California once they had their daughter. And then they decided they wanted to kind of take a step back and lean into spending more time with their kid. That led to them realizing that they were not going to continue to be together.

56:32They sort of like stopped working in the business together. She just spent her days for about months, months, months, months went by where she was just kind of taking it easy, slowing down, reflecting on what she wanted to do next. And lo and behold, she ended up starting to work on higher end projects in California, fewer projects. She got connected to somebody at Netflix and ended up hosting a reality show called Hack My Home that ended up being really incredible. So she did that for a season. And now she's back into this reflective period where she's really leaning into being a mom and knows that that countdown is ticking down and just kind of thinking about what she wants to potentially do next.

57:08I would love some practical stuff. I've called you over the years about stuff like life insurance, disability insurance, long term care insurance. Can you speak to that? because I know this is a little bit more rubber meets the road, but a lot of my friends don't have life insurance. And it's like, I don't have kids, so it doesn't matter. I don't know, maybe that's true. Disability insurance, I don't know anybody that has that. And long-term care insurance, the only people I know that have that are my parents, thank God, because, and we'll get into why that's probably a good thing in a moment.

57:38But can we speak to that? Because I think you're the one who convinced me to get life insurance. And it was just like, oh yeah, duh, I should probably have that now that I have kids who are depending on me. Yeah, that's crazy that not a lot of people have it. It just frustrates me so much when I see people that I know were successful and something happens to them and then they're doing like a GoFundMe for the family and kids because it's really not that expensive. And the calculus is really very similar to the one that I just shared about retirement, which is figure out what your spouse, the main reason somebody needs life insurance is to replace their income if they're not around anymore.

58:10So figure out how much income of mine do I want to replace each year and get a million dollars of life insurance for every$50 ,000 of income that you want to provide or leave behind. Disability insurance is one of these things where there's a good percentage of us that are going to spend some time being disabled. It's not going to be a full-on disability, but it's going to affect our ability to work and earn an income. And so where health insurance pays your medical bills, disability insurance is going to continue to have that paycheck coming in on a regular basis. I think once you get to a point where you have a certain amount of assets and you're in a job that maybe is less likely to be affected by that.

58:47I don't know that it is as important, but I mean, I have a ton of disability insurance personally. And now for a word from the people who fund my retirement plan. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by ButcherBox. Jen and I have been pretty much locked into a high-protein diet lately, and if you're eating a lot of it, you want it to be high-quality, not some random grocery store pick. That's why we subscribe to ButcherBox. It just makes our routine easier. ButcherBox delivers over 100 premium protein options straight to your door, including 100 % grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, crate-free pork, wild-caught seafood, so we can keep the freezer stocked to help us stay on track.

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59:52Your choice of organic ground beef, chicken breast or ground turkey in every box for an entire year. Plus$20 off your first box and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash Jordan. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It's something specific and practical that will have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and relationships in under two minutes every Wednesday. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Derek Coburn.

1:00:23Where do you even ask? Because life insurance, you call a broker, and anybody's happy to sell you life insurance. How do you know how much you need? For life insurance? Yeah. So in addition to the income, you mean? The income replacement? Yeah, because I think I can't remember what I got, but it's it's more than income replacement. It's basically like five or maybe even 10 years of my actual revenue. But it's not even that it was needed necessarily, because theoretically I could retire now. There was a different calculation because you and I talked about this because I got some for Jen, too. And it was kind of like and I was like, I don't need that.

1:00:57You know, we have we have savings. And you said something like I'm trying to remember a conversation we had two years ago, but it was something like, what if you decide you need to take a break because you lose your wife? And do you know what I'm talking about? Is this ringing any bells? Okay. Yeah. So I've got like three or $4 million of insurance on my wife, Melanie, and it's just to allow me to have the space and time to not have the pressure to keep earning. If God forbid something would have happened to her three months ago, right? Like I get to lean into my kids. I get to pause what I'm doing.

1:01:26I get to mourn. I get to reflect on all of that. And so I think in that scenario where, especially if someone's is the primary breadwinner and their spouse is not working or is earning significantly less than them, getting it on them is more of a luxury than a need. But I think it's a luxury that's worth it because I'm paying a couple hundred dollars, you know, a year, you know, depending if you're in your thirties, maybe it's closer to a thousand dollars a year. If you're in your forties to just have the reassurance to know that you're not going to have to like tell your kids, sorry, I got you to work, even though your mom's not here anymore.

1:01:55So I always felt like a good. It's funny, like there was this really old school, lovable cheeseball guy who I interacted with when I first got into the industry. And he used to like tell his clients, do you want your wife to have to remarry because she wants to or because she has to? And he would use that phrase to get people to get like a little bit more on their wives than necessary. But that's funny. Yeah. They just appeal to the male ego. Works every time. Yep. What about disability insurance? Is there a simple back of the napkin calculator? Is that just, hey, if I can't work for a year, I still need to be able to get, I don't know, whatever,$100 ,000, which would be my post-tax income, for example, as a dental hygienist?

1:02:36Is that kind of how you do it? Yeah. Like when I was making 100 grand a year,$200 ,000 a year, I would max out on the disability coverage, which is about 60 % of what you're making. I see. And you would want to pay for this using after-tax dollars because you'd want the benefit to come into you on an after-tax basis. But once you start making more than that, and it's more of a, I need to cover needs and not necessarily my nights out at Michelin restaurants, then it might not be like necessarily a 60 % figure. I see. So you pick a sustainable amount, not like, I live pretty high on the hog as a partner at this law firm.

1:03:09I need$600 ,000 a year in disability insurance, right? It could be like 200 grand to live normally through your disability. Where do you even get that? Just a regular insurance broker has that product? Okay. And we don't need to list brokers in the show notes. I don't know. I don't even know any. Most financial advisors should be having these conversations and should have access to these vehicles. I bet most people don't have financial advisors. I mean, I don't know. I don't think most people have that, man. I know you're in the industry, so maybe it seems like, I mean, everybody you talk to does because it's you, but I don't think most people do.

1:03:40I really don't. Long-term care insurance. Again, your financial advisor should have this, right, your insurance broker. But what do you recommend as far as this? What are we looking at? What should we be looking for? So long-term care insurance is what is going to pay for and cover long-term care in the event that something happens to you or your parents where they need assistance. You know, they're either in a home or they have nurses that are coming in. And I was working with a lot of partners at big law firms and a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners who were doing really well in their 30s and 40s.

1:04:14And I'm surprised because this is one that a lot of financial advisors are not talking about. Well, even if you have a financial advisor that talks about life insurance or disability insurance, and that is what's going on with your parents right now? What sort of health are they in and how much money do they have? Because if something were to happen to your parents and you're going to step in to make sure that they don't end up on the street, then you need to get this information and you need to help plan for this. And so I would have this conversation. I referred to Alzheimer's and dementia as the iceberg to your financial plans, Titanic.

1:04:46And I specifically mentioned those two because those two don't kill you. You can live with those for a very long time and need to pay for care for a very long time. And so I began having this conversation with a lot of my clients to say, hey, you know, it doesn't matter if we get 8 % and the firm down the street gets 7.6 % on your investments for the next 20 years. If something happens to one of your parents and you have to start shelling out a million bucks over a five-year period, then your financial plan is not as stable as you might think it is. And I went as far as to even have this conversation with my parents and help my parents.

1:05:22We co-paid for their policy. Lo and behold, my father ended up getting dementia in 2013 at the age of 61. He needed care for nine years and the long-term care policy paid for all of it. My mom wouldn't have any money left if we hadn't done that. And so that's something where, yes, it applies to you. I think for on an individual level, it's something that you probably don't need to look at until you're 45, 50 years or maybe even older. But again, if you're not having conversations with your parents, if you don't know the shape that they're in and you are going to step up and help them if they need your help and have some health issues, I strongly recommend that you start leaning into some of these discussions.

1:06:01Yeah, this is an interesting point, right? I hadn't even really thought about that. You might say, oh, well, my parents don't have it and it's on them. Well, not really, because if you're their first phone call when they need money and they are going to need it for 10 years, what are you going to do? Tell your parents to go fly a kite because you want to retire at a certain point or you want to go on vacations every year? You're going to tell your mom you can't pay for her care. So it's actually a good investment for you because you pay for their policy. And then if something happens, they don't have to call you.

1:06:32They have insurance. So you're actually buying the insurance. It's almost for yourself at that point. For sure. I hadn't thought about that. We've had this conversation and I know that your parents had that and are in good shape. But for a lot of other people, I don't think they've thought about it much. Certainly you're not talking with their parents. No, my parents do have that. And it's funny. I just now was looking over at the screen. I was like, I'm just going to text my dad and be like, can you send me that policy? I just want to take a look at it. Make sure that it still exists and that it's not like one year long or something.

1:07:04Might be even too late. I mean, my dad's 80, my mom's 84. All right, forget retirement. Let's talk about dying. We're kind of already halfway there, but we'll round out the show this way. I wanted to make sure I discussed this with you before I let you go here. What about giving kids money? I had this conversation and I posted about it on LinkedIn. It's Warren Buffett said something like, give kids enough to do whatever they want, but not enough to do nothing. Most people were like, oh, that's a really good point. Of course, there's a couple guys that are like, sounds like you need to spend more time with your kids so that you actually trust them with your money.

1:07:36And I thought that was a boneheaded take because, and I'm trying not to, I didn't want to reply to this guy in a way that was, you know, really aggressive or anything, but I'm kind of thinking, yeah, that doesn't really hold up at a certain amount of money. Like, yeah, maybe if you leave your kids a hundred grand, spend more time, They'll know how to use it. If you leave your kids 40 million dollars, there's a different calculation. Warren Buffett is not thinking, gee, I'm going to leave my kids 30 grand so they can pay for school. Right. He's he has to decide if he wants his kids to be billionaires and never have to work.

1:08:06Right. That's a different calculation. What's your philosophy on giving money to kids and how do you do that? I don't think that there is a hard line in the sand here. I think people can have their opinions about this and I won't push back too hard. But if I've had some success in my life and I am in a position where I can make things a little bit easier or a little bit better for my kids, then I want to do it. it's interesting. I think that kids in the teenage years, 20s, 30s have been one of the biggest benefactors of my book because I've helped people realize that they'll enjoy and appreciate sharing some of what they have with their kids while they can still do something about it instead of leaving them some money 30 years from now.

1:08:48Who wants to get... I'm sure everybody would want to get it, but it's not going to be super helpful to receive a large sum of money when you're 68 after you've been stressing about money your entire life. And I had a friend call me up who was reading the book and she saw her brother give money to his kids and how it kind of turned them into unproductive members of society to where they're still single and they're in their thirties and they're not that there's anything wrong being single, but like the part of her story is like, it kind of kept him comfortable and made him not go out and made him not meet people and be a little lonely.

1:09:20And so she was going to kind of like not do that for her kids. She didn't want it to turn into a similar situation. And I told her like, you know, there's a big difference to your point between giving them a couple million dollars and giving them$50 ,000. Like you can say to your kid, you don't really know what you want to do right now. I would love to be able to support you so that you can take some time and figure it out. If I find out that you're like, you know, spending the money on designer purses, then I'm not going to give you more money. But But if I see that you're using the money in a productive way to sort of figure out what you want to do next, then you can give them more money if they show that they're going to be good caretakers and treat it well.

1:09:57Right. And I just feel like I know there's some who feel like, you know, when my kid turns 17 or 18, he's out of the house. I never wanted to come back. I want him to kind of work hard and go through everything that I went through. But I'll be honest, man, like if my kid wants to come back and stay with us for six months after he graduates college because he wants to figure out his next step, I think that would be like an amazing time to hang out with them and spend time with them. and I don't need to force him out to teach him some sort of life lesson. And again, that's just my opinion. Yeah, a lot of the LinkedIn comments were interesting.

1:10:26One guy had said, I'm gonna get this wrong probably, but it was like his grandfather had given three of his grandkids$18 ,000 each when they turned 18. And the two that were doing really well in life now did a decent amount of things with that money and like put it towards stuff or saved it. And then one kid spent it all screwing around with his girlfriends and stuff like that. And that kid's still struggling. So it was like almost like a barometer for, well, how smart you were with decisions in general. So I thought that was interesting. Yeah, you don't want to give young kids millions of dollars.

1:10:57And by the way, good reminder right now for people, if you have kids especially, but even if you don't, get a trust, get a will. It's not expensive. If you're in California, I'll refer you to my lawyer. It took me way too long to do this. I think I got it. I got it done in my late 30s and it was kind of garbage. And I redid it because I needed a lawyer who knew what Bitcoin was, for example, and understood digital business. And I had to redo the whole thing. And thank goodness I did, because the original one was just the person was way out of touch with modern society. I'll leave it there. But you've got to have this.

1:11:28What do we do if we have young kids? Like what happens if something happens to me and Jen? I don't want Jaden and Juniper to get millions of dollars when they're 18. It's just, you know, so how do we stage this? Do I give it to them when they're 40 by making them wait for it? I don't I just I don't understand what to do with this. Can you go over this? I know you have a concept called the board. That's kind of an interesting thing. I'd love to hear about this. Yeah, look, you can do whatever you want to do. Like the state, they're not going to give money to kids who are under the age of 18. And one of the primary things that you need to figure out before you have this meeting with an attorney is who are the guardians going to be and who are the trustees going to be.

1:12:09And this is where a lot of people just sort of get tripped up. They're feeling like they need to find the perfect people to be with their kids. But if you don't name guardians for your kids and God forbid something would have happened to you three months ago, then the court gets to decide. And hopefully your brother and Jen's sister and, you know, other family members get along great and they come to a quick orderly decision as to who's going to get it. But that the kids, but that's normally not what happens. And normally about 30 percent of an estate gets eaten up through probate while they're figuring all this out.

1:12:38So even just like defining who the guardians are going to be and then the trustees, which can be separate and maybe should be separate, who's going to manage the money on behalf of them. And so the board that you mentioned for me is that for my kids, if they want to go to college, great. But if they don't want to go to college and they want to start a business instead and use the money for other things, they get to present their ideas, their business plan, if you will, to three individuals that we have highlighted, some friends of mine, my wealth management partner, and present their idea. And if two of the three agree that it's a good use of the money, they can release the funds for that instead of keeping it back for college.

1:13:14I see. And there's a lot of different ways you can sort of, you know, lay out a unique plan. And you have seen some clients and I've done this to like certain books you want your kids to read at certain ages, you know, certain things that you want to unlock for them at different ages, whether to buy a house or to take a trip or to go have any type of experience, if you will. So you can get as meaty or not as you want. I asked you some random question the other day, and you said something like giving them all of the money by 35 is better than spreading it out over time. Tell me why. It would just have, again, in my own personal philosophy on this sort of piggybacking on what we were just talking about, where I just feel like it just has more of an opportunity to make a difference for them in a meaningful way than them getting it much later in life.

1:13:56We see the majority of people that leave money to their kids do it when they die. And they're like in their 50s and 60s when they get it. And, you know, I think that's probably nice to receive it. But you haven't really done anything to to make the lives of your kids better by sort of like withholding it from them for that long, in my opinion. What if you die when they're younger? Do you make them wait until they're older to get it? You know, what if you croak and they're 20? Then do you make them wait till 35 so they don't end up ruining their lives and ending up with a Scott Galloway says? the only things I would have if I had a trust fund would be a Range Rover and a cocaine habit.

1:14:30You want to avoid that too. Yeah. I think it's important to give them money like monthly or annually instead of like every couple of years. And this is while, even while they're still, you're still alive and they're still alive. Instead of if you want to help out a kid, if your kid says, I graduated college and I don't know what I want to do. Can you help me take this year off to figure out what I want to do next? Give them money on a monthly basis. You know, if they're mishandling it and they're not making smart choices, then you can cut them off and say, you need to go get a job. If they are using it to lean into more of their interest and to really get closer to figuring out what's next for them, then kind of keep the spigot on.

1:15:03But I think that you can set up all these different unlocks. And for sure, I would wait to give them the majority of the money until after their prefrontal cortexes are fully developed at the age of 25, for sure. Man, thank you. To be honest, I think this is going to help a lot of people rest easier knowing they can work part-time later on in life, not worry about being so frugal now, not worrying about saving$3 ,000 a month or whatever when they, you know, after tax, they're making five, you know, this episode I think is going to allow people to enjoy their lives a lot more. And that's, that's an important part of the mission of the show.

1:15:34And so I appreciate you coming on today and having thought all of this out because most people don't have access to someone like you. So get a lawyer, get a will, get a financial advisor, get insurance. What am I forgetting? Start living more. You know, I think that's also, it's like somebody asked me, Dan Pink asked me, said, what is that? During my book release party, it's like, what is your word for the opposite of retirement? I was like, just living, just doing this more. And that's ultimately what I want to do is I want to help people realize that by opting out of this game, they can be spending a lot more of their time and their energy on a lot of different things with their significant others, with their kids, with their parents, going to the gym, taking trips, having more fun, all of this.

1:16:13And I really appreciate you having me on here to share this. Thanks, Derek. Thanks so much, Jordan. We'll spend hours optimizing diets, workouts, and morning routines, then sit in rooms with air bad enough to quietly wreck our focus, mood, and sleep. After the LA wildfires, air quality expert Mike Feldstein saw just how toxic invisible can get and why fear, misinformation, and neglect are making it worse. My background was in wildfire remediation, floods, hurricane cleanup. So my career was traveling around to Hurricane Harvey and California wildfires, like wherever the most toxic disasters were.

1:16:48That's where I would go. The reason that I got into Jasper making these air scrubbers is because the machines that we would use on the job site were these big, large industrial machines. And when you would compare that to little air purifiers in the store, I was able to see like these little things don't work. Basically, let's make the world's first air scrubber designed for your home. So now I'm kind of on a mission to just talk about air quality. Anyone who's thinking about water and hasn't thought about air, my mission for the next 20 years is to increase people's awareness of the air that you breathe.

1:17:18In the mold industry, they have two sayings. One is the mold rush, and the other one is mold is gold. A lot of people get triggered by mold, but it's become a very fear-induced industry because there is a dark side of the mold industry. Not everybody's a bad actor, but you have to be quite careful when you're navigating it. People often go into debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars, rip their homes apart, move into apartments or homes that were moldier than their first home, and debt, and stress, and then they get much more sick. So I've been seeing this increasing at a large scale, and that's why I has a mold remediation guy.

1:17:52How would we do mold removal? We'd remove the physical mold and we would scrub the air. It was very simple. The average indoor air is five to 10 times dirtier than outside. When you turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, your body can heal itself if you get out of the way. If you think clean air is a given, check out episode 1246 with Mike Feldstein. It might completely change how you think about the air you're breathing right now. Thanks to Derek for coming on the show today. Honestly, I think this conversation is going to help a lot of people sleep better at night. Certainly, I'm in that boat.

1:18:22The idea that you don't have to grind yourself into dust now to maybe enjoy life later, that you can work part-time, stay engaged, not live like a monk in the present, I just feel like that's all so huge. It's a relief. And I think it gives people permission to actually enjoy their lives without feeling reckless or irresponsible. And that's a big part of the mission of the show, helping people think more clearly, stress a little bit less, and build lives that don't require an escape ripcord at age 65. Thanks to Derek for helping us reframe this in a way that is actually humane. And all things Derek Coburn will be in the show notes on the website at jordanharbinger.com.

1:18:55Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

1:19:25In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who needs to hear about retirement, is stressing about their retirement, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. Quick break. And if you like this show, there's another podcast you should check out. If you want to stay informed about what's happening around the world without drowning in noise, check out the president's daily brief. It's built for people who want the big stories fast and clear.

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