A Life-Changing Retirement Is About More Than Money With Benjamin Brandt (EP.189)

0:28We all need to make smart decisions with our money. a financial planner and host of the award-winning show Retirement Starts Today, but here he's joining me to discuss his new book with the same title, Retirement Starts Today. In this episode, we're going to explore often overlooked aspects of retirement planning that go beyond spreadsheets and budgets. And Ben really opens up about his philosophy on how to balance financial security with living a meaningful and regret-free life. I think whether you're a few years away from retirement or already in it, you're going to find this conversation really inspiring, and it might even help you rethink your approach to saving, spending, and planning for the future.

1:08As always, you can find detailed show notes and links to resources mentioned in the show notes at thelongterminvestor.com. And also, if you open up your podcast app, in the description, there is a link to sign up for my newsletter. We have so much exciting stuff coming down the pipe for 2025. It's only going to be available to newsletter subscribers. So again, open your podcast app, hit that subscribe button, and hold on tight for a lot of great things this year. And now, without further ado, here is my conversation with Benjamin Brandt. Benjamin Brandt, welcome to The Long-Term Investor. Oh man, I'm so excited to be here.

1:49Thanks for having me. Well, I am really excited that your book, Retirement Starts Today, is now out and available everywhere. Your podcast is called Retirement Starts Today, as I mentioned in the intro. Those of you watching us on YouTube, on Cheddar, if you haven't checked this out, you've got to go to the podcast, got to go check out Ben's show. Really good stuff. And I think that your book did a nice job capturing a lot of the things that I hear you talking about on a weekly basis. So I want to start about an idea you were talking about throughout it, which is an abundance mindset for retirement.

2:23Can you tell me a little bit what that means to you? Yeah. So an abundance mindset, abundance as opposed to scarcity, right? When we think about scarcity, we think I'm going to run out of something or something bad is going to happen to me. Abundance is almost like I'm going to power through no matter what. I've already decided that I'm excited about my compelling future and I'm going to go towards that. no matter what pitfalls might be in front of me. So that when I think about abundance, I think about I'm pursuing something that I'm excited about or worthwhile. And I think one of the things that you call out in the book is just generally speaking, people when they are thinking about planning for their retirement, it is more of a scarcity mindset.

3:00I'm gonna run out of money mindset. How would you suggest people can shift from that scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset in their retirement planning and saving? When we talk about scarcity and abundance, we talk about the two ways that you can mess up retirement planning. One is running out of money and two is dying with regret. And to me, that kind of separates abundance and scarcity. If I'm wholly focused on not running out of money, it's going to be almost impossible to convert the money in my retirement account to fun things and memories made with loved ones, right? I feel like that's abundance.

3:33So our industry, we tend to only focus or primarily focus on the not running out of money part. I'd like to talk more about the dying with regret part. That's kind of the whole idea of the book. But again, if we focus too much on not running out of money, we're going to miss a lot of the opportunities because the market's going to be bad or we're going to get nervous or something politically bad is happening or who knows. But that's kind of how I separate abundance and scarcity is what am I focusing on running out of money or dying with regret? And so if those are the ways that people are generally getting retirement wrong, either in the process of planning for it or in the actual process and journey of living it.

4:07If you feel like the regret's a bigger one, what are some things that you feel like people can do? You have a number of exercises, thought exercises in the book. I mean, one that I thought that was particularly interesting is the time machine in$500. Like what would you do with$500 if you go at a time machine back to when you were 13 years old? Maybe talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So unfortunately, financial independence finds us at an unfortunate time, right? Ideally, we'd be financially independent when we were 13 years old, but for most of us, that's just not an option. So we're financially independent at the end of our career.

4:39Maybe we're in our fifties or sixties and we've been beaten down many of us by the corporate world. So we're at least possible creative time when we have the most money. Ideally, we'd have the most money when we're the most creative. And so I came up with this idea that we have our peak creativity at 13, maybe before we exit middle school, before we start college, things like that, We have no money. So I said, all right, what if we hop in the DeLorean and we take$500 and we go visit Peter on his 13th birthday? And you can't give me a cop-out answer like, oh, I help homeless pets or something, right?

5:09You have to spend it on yourself. By the end of the day, what are you spending money on? In the book, I said, I buy a drum kit. And I actually did end up buying a drum kit. Did not learn how to play it. It's currently like in the corner of my basement, but I did buy one. So I'll put you on the spot. 13-year-old Peter Lazaroff, 500 bucks, which was a lot back in 1991 when you were 13 years old, what would you buy? You know, I was actually seven years old in 1991, but I appreciate you think I'm so wise. You know, it's interesting. I, when I first read this in the book, had a very difficult time coming up with this.

5:41So I'm fortunate that I did think through this, through reading the book and you're asking me, so it's not fully off the cuff, even though I didn't know you were going to ask. But the reason I mentioned all of this and I'm talking in circles is that if you're listening or as you read the book, I do think you should spend some time with this because originally I think, well, what would 13 year old me buy other than like video games and baseball cards? And you know, I don't really want those things as an adult. I do still sometimes think about, should I go out and buy baseball cards? Cause I watched my 11 year old do it now and it kind of looks fun.

6:10So I kept thinking and thinking. And what I remembered ultimately was last summer, my family, my kids, my wife and I, we went to Moab on vacation and we took our kids to a rock store and they were picking out rocks and they were kind of drawn to these same geodes, I think they are, as I was as a kid. And I remember telling my oldest son, one of those purple ones that looks like craggly crystals, I had pointed out that I always wanted to buy one. And I'd never really had the money. And my parents never bought me one. And I don't know if I asked him as a kid, but if I did, they must have said no.

6:43And he's like, Dad, that's sad. You should buy one now. And I remember being like, yeah, okay, buddy, I'm not going to buy that. And I paused for a second. I go, you know what? I am going to buy that. And I really regret that I'm recording this from PlanCorp headquarters as opposed to my home office because it sits on my shelf at my home office just as a reminder of like, hey, I did this thing that I dreamed of at one point. And as I started thinking more of that, I was like, you know, I also really wanted to go to spring training as a kid. I still want to go as an adult. And so I think this exercise that you have painted in the book, it does take a little work to find something that you might actually want to purchase as an adult.

7:18Did I really want to purchase a rock as an adult? I don't know. It just felt like, you know what, I finally have my own money on my own adult moment. But I do think you buying a drum set is a great example. Like you can do that. You can share it with your kids. You can also ask me for lessons. I know we're friends, but I don't think you ever knew that I'm a drummer and still play. So I'll have to come to your place and give you a couple drills to knock that home. That would be amazing. I would love it. Yeah. So one of the interesting things that you said about baseball cards or video games, that's good data.

7:47Even if you decided something that you no longer connect with, I think that's good data. We want to create a compelling future. We talk about retiring to something rather than from something. Ideally, on the run-up to retirement, a few years before you end your career, we're making these small investments of either time, energy, or money to find out what we like or what we don't like. And a data point of something I don't like is almost as important as a data point of something that I do like, because we want to figure all this out before we're retired. So like spring training. Maybe you like baseball.

8:15Maybe you want to get your kids excited about baseball. Maybe you want to coach a little league team. Maybe you want to, and who knows, PlanCorp sponsor a team, something like that. These are all kinds of data points. What we want to avoid is concentrating too much on quitting our job and less on what I'm going to do with my time. Because if we just wait until we're retired to find out what the next thing is, that energy is going to be totally different in that I've got to make this one thing work because I'm retired now. My paycheck is gone. I'm living off my savings. I don't feel fulfilled. I've got to make this one thing work.

8:47A better solution would be, let me try 10 different things. Two of them really resonate with me and the other eight don't, but those are good data points. That's something I don't have to invest any more time, energy, or money into. I'm going to have a much better idea of what I'm going to spend the next 20 or 30 years of my life working on or doing because I took time to gather that data early on. So that's kind of one of the ideas of the money and the time machine is that I can get good data points and bad data points. So the drum kit, I bought a drum kit just because I thought it'd be fun, but maybe there's something else there.

9:15I like music. Maybe I should part of my retirement or my financial independence should be touring with the Grateful Dead or following bands around or something like that, or taking my kids to shows. And we had to some music festivals last year in 2024 with some of my older kids. So there's data points. We want to identify what those are and then try to expand upon those. You know, here's what I did like, or here's what I didn't like. We can do that with$300 and a time machine. We can also just do that with our career in general. Maybe you are a teacher or a financial advisor. You can specifically write, what is it about that job that I like and what I don't like?

9:46And then how can I intentionally create that on the other side of financial independence? You're a teacher. Maybe you like to collaborate with others. Maybe you like to see projects come across the finish line. Maybe you like to mentor and help tap the potential in younger people. There's all kinds of things of data points that we can say, this is what I get fulfillment from. The really hard part about retirement is project completion or all the attaboys and attagirls we get in life, a lot of those don't exist in retirement. And a lot of times we don't figure that out until we get to the other side of retirement.

10:15Like life just feels a little bit hollow or empty. We've got to be hyper intentional about being drawn. I talk about in the book about being drawn forward by a compelling future rather than propelled by your past, which is a lesson I took from Ben Hardy's book, be your future self now. So journal about these ideas and get data points. Things you like and things you don't like, I think are equally important. I love that throughout you talked about, yes, obviously there's this financial data that we go through as advisors to ensure that people don't completely run out of money. Now you do call into question, and I appreciate that you do.

10:48The use of money calls to say you should have a 90 % success rate, meaning that out of a thousand trials, a hundred of them, you had to make some sort of tweak to your financial plan, but you comment in a number of different ways that that's the financial piece. The emotional data is just as important because there does become a point in time in your planning for retirement that maybe maximizing savings isn't the right choice. How do you think about that? How do those conversations go in your experience? Yeah. I don't remember if I specifically talked about this in the book, but I talk a lot about it on the show in that I don't love Monte Carlo analysis, not because I don't like statistics, but I think that we use the numbers wrong.

11:29We use the data for Monte Carlo wrong. So Peter, I know you were an A student, but I was more like a C student in school. And when I would get a good grade, like a 90 and above, my mom would like take me out for ice cream, right? So those wires in my brain got connected with like big numbers, good grades, you get ice cream. And I think a lot of times when we go on Vanguard or Fidelity website and we do the Monte Carlo analysis, we want to make that likelihood of success as high as possible, meaning that my goal income in retirement might be 10 ,000, but that might give me a 70 % likelihood of success.

11:59Well, that's bad, right? I'm going to get in trouble when I get home. If I bring home a 70, I want a 90. So I need to bring that down to like$3 ,000 a month because then my Monte Carlo score is the best. And that means I win retirement. But in reality, all you did is just downgrade the thing that you saved up your entire life for, which I don't love that. I don't love that for people. So likelihood of success, I think is gravely misinterpreted by financial advisors, by software, but especially by people that are trying to do the right thing and create a written financial plan for themselves, but that are misunderstanding or misinterpreting the results.

12:28So I think something like a 60 % or 70 % likelihood of success is actually better than a 90 % likelihood of success. We are planning our retirement, we're 60, and we're going to live until 90. What's the likelihood that we can perfectly estimate 30 years into the future, right? That would be like saying at 30, I'm going to perfectly estimate what's going to happen at 90. And of course, we're only focused on the bad with likelihood of success. We're ignoring the good parts about changing, right? If it's a 90 % likelihood of success, it's a 10 % likelihood of change or course correction. We only think about the downside.

13:01That also includes the upside. So I want to see your likelihood of success closer to like 70 % because it's actually more likely that we'll have an upside surprise than a downside surprise, especially if we're planning for 30 years. So in the same way, we couldn't perfectly guess at 30 what we're doing at 60. We can't guess at 60 what we're doing at 70, 80, or 90. We need a lower likelihood of success so that we can take advantage of the market upside. And guess what? The market's up most of the time. When we invest in the market, we're investing in human innovation, which sometimes slows down and pauses, but never stops.

13:29So the market's going to be amazing 10, 15, 20 years from now. If you're dialing in your likelihood of success 90%, you're basically saying, I'm intentionally downgrading what I want by 20, 30, 40%. So there's absolutely no chance of me running out of money, which what we talked about is much more likely that you'll die with regret. And I learned that from meeting with clients over the last almost 20 years. And like clockwork, clients would say, my mom has all this money. She's 85 years old. She's too old to spend it. I wish she would have done X, Y, Z. And I don't want that for the people watching this.

14:01And I don't want that for our clients in that they're just hyper conservative on that 90 % likelihood of success. And their wealth doubles, triples, quadruples over the course of their life. And they never spend it. I don't want to get on my soapbox too much. But that drives me crazy. you. So don't downgrade your dreams because you think you're going to get some ice cream at the end of retirement. If you 10 X your portfolio, you saved up that money to spend it. I want to see you spend it. You know, it occurs to me, we could have done a whole episode on this very topic because I actually do agree with a lot of what you're saying.

14:28And I'd like to read my favorite quote from your book. Other than I will say there's a close second where in the footnote to one of the early chapters, you write your opening line in a comedy open mic night that you did. It's a small footnote in the book. So that gets second place. But the one I wrote down that I want to read here, let me move it over to this screen. So can I tell you, I debated for weeks if I wanted to, even when I was recording my audio book, do I include my opening line from when I do stand up or not? And I thought part of the story in the book is that I didn't have my buddy record my first standup and I regretted it.

15:00So I said, all right, I'm going to put my opening line in the book. Do you want a chance to redeem because I'm recording or do you want it to be a teaser for reasons for people to go check out the book. I'm happy to share it now. Yeah. So guys, picture Ben, who's taking a standup comedy class doing an open mic night. And I've known you for a while. So this rings really funny for me because I just know you, but yeah, why don't you drop this line? Cause now we've built it up too much. Yeah. I'm no, you know, Nate Bargatze or anything like that, but I have six kids. And so when people meet me for the first time, they say, Oh, six kids, you must be Catholic.

15:30And I say, I'm not Catholic. I'm just impulsive. Honestly, I laughed out loud. I was actually on a plane when I was reading that part. And my wife looked over at me being like, what's funny? I'm like, just don't worry about it. So love that. Okay. So that was my second favorite quote of the book. Here's my first quote. Money represents time. Every dollar represents a time you told yourself no. An ideal retirement is one where you tell yourself yes. The balance of your retirement plan represents untapped potential for you. You saved up for you. And so I think this really resonates with what you're talking about with the Monte Carlo analysis that as you get up to that high probability of success, you are saying no to a lot of things.

16:11I don't know what the right number is. I don't know if it's 70, 80, 60, 100. No, but I just said it's not 100. Everything else below that's up for debate, but it's probably not 90. It's probably not 100. And I can give some math reasons and non-emotional reasons, but I think one of the thought exercises that you come up with in the book is that people should think about tripling their travel budget. Maybe talk a little bit about that so that we can have people expand how this idea really applies and how they can think about it in their own financial planning and retirement planning. Yeah. So when we think about financial independence, you're doing something you've never done before.

16:45And so we can wax on about, oh, you're financially independent. You're doing fantastic financially. You should travel more or fly first class, or I even called one of the chapters in the book, you should fly first class or your kids will. But we can talk about these things, but people have never done it before. And especially people that have saved up a significant amount of money, they tend to be more detail oriented, they tend to be risk is kind of a funny word, but they tend to be more risk averse, they tend to not be impulsive or flippant with how they spend their money. And so one of these ideas we came up with is what if we plan like a bucket list vacation?

17:15And for somebody that's never outlaid money like that, in fact, they just spent the last 20, 30 years saving money, which would sort of be the opposite of spending. We said, how can we create like an activity of spending money in a way that they normally wouldn't? So what we do is we look at the recent past and we say, tell me about the last vacation that you went on and how much did it cost? And someone would say, okay, well, I went to Moab with my family and we flew on Spirit Airlines and we stayed at an Airbnb and we were there for three days, whatever that was. And so we say, okay, on paper, let's write out what that budget was.

17:45And then for each line item on the budget, we have to triple what we spent. So rather than fly Spirit Airlines, what if I flew middle of the plane American? Or what if I flew JetSuite X? Or I stayed in an Airbnb? Or what if we rented an RV? Or what if we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton or something like that? Now, we want to make it three times because we want to get into the territory of, oh, I would never actually spend that money. But I want you to do that just as a thought experiment and then ask yourself, would I genuinely enjoy that? Yes, no, or maybe. And if it's yes or maybe, and especially if we're financially independent, we have the backing of a confident written retirement plan.

18:18I think you should go out and do those things. And again, we have data points. I love that. Okay. From now on, when I go on vacation, this is the new standard of what I'm going to do. Or I hated it. Okay, great. You love flying at the back of the plane. First class does nothing for you. That's a data point. We don't love that. We never have to do it again. Or at least we don't have to do it for many years, right? So whatever your vacation budget was,$3 ,000, now it's$9 ,000. I want you to spend that money on paper and then reflect on. I think I would love that. I might love that. I know I would hate that.

18:45Do it with your spouse, you might be surprised their answers are different than yours. And then your next vacation, you've got new data to experiment with. And I think when you are working with a financial planner, you can have the confidence that you can afford some of these things. I think when you're doing it on your own, that's maybe where going through this exercise might be met with some mental resistance. Maybe you feel like you can't financially do this. And I think it's not that you or I would say, hey, go spend whatever you want. This is all within guardrails. Once you have a financially viable plan.

19:16I think you take on these steps to figure out, okay, the finances look good. How can I make the story better? How can I make my life more interesting? And I love the idea of experimenting with different experiences. The goal in many ways when you retire is to have fulfillment. You can't take the money with you, right? So we're trying to turn this money that we do have into something worth remembering. Yeah, actually, that was one of the chapters. What if you can take it with you? So when you think about a loved one that's passed away, you're probably thinking about something that you did together.

19:47Maybe your dad or your uncle took you to spring training. And that's one of the things that you're thinking about. We can't take the money with us, but if we can convert that money, I think in the book, I talk about Roth conversions are cool, but converting those dollars into memories is really the coolest thing that we can do. So if you can make memories with loved ones with the money that you've saved up, and then you pass away, when that loved one thinks about you, a decade after you're gone, they're going to think about that unique experience that you provided by your financial independence and your ability to save money.

20:17So in a way, we're almost creating a tiny bit of immortality. And in that way, we can kind of take it with us in that we live beyond our lives and our finances because we were hyper intentional about, my goal is not to die with all of my money. My goal is not to 10x my wealth. My goal is to 10x my life experiences through the lens of financial independence based on my ability to just save this money. And I think a lot of people don't cross that bridge. A lot of people don't make that connection. What made me financially independent was saving and not spending. And I'm never taking the step to stop that.

20:48I'm just going to keep doing what had worked in the past, not necessarily deciding if that's what is going to work in the future. There's a saying that says, what got you here won't get you there. I think financial independence is a great line of demarcation to say, okay, I've got to change the way that I think about my finances. I saved money by saying no to myself and putting the money away so that I can say yes to myself in the future. But we never actually start saying yes. So maybe a long winded way of answering your question. But yeah, I want to see you do stuff with that money. I don't want to see it sit in an account somewhere.

21:17We're talking about big spending, but also there's a little spending where this is effective. And I thought to myself as I was reading, you gave a lot of thought exercises through the book, and it did cause me to reflect on things. One person I thought about was my grandmother, who took me and all my cousins and our parents on these really big trips a couple different times in her lifetime on her 70th birthday and a couple other milestone moments. And that's great. But when I think about my grandmother on an everyday basis, you know, the thing I actually remember more so than those trips, I actually barely remember anything from those trips other than we went.