Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to How to Retire on Time, a show that answers your retirement questions. Say goodbye to the oversimplified advice you've heard hundreds of times. This show is about getting into the nitty-gritty so you can make better decisions as you prepare for retirement. Text your questions to 913-363-1234 and we'll feature them on the show. Don't forget to grab a copy of the book, How to Retire on Time, or check out our resources by going to www.retireontime.com.
Welcome to the How to Retire on Time podcast. I'm Michael Decker, and with me is doctor Himmer, special guest, who has a a book coming out soon, Hardwired. So grateful to have you on here. This show is all about the nitty gritty of retirement, not just the financial side but the holistic side of it. So we're excited to dive into some reasons why maybe some people aren't as excited about retirement once they retired and some of the pitfalls that financial advisors frankly don't talk about enough.
Richard:This is the emotional side of preparation for retirement. So I got to ask you first, Doctor. Hemmer, when we look at retirement people have all this freedom and the money to support this freedom. Why is it that people frankly are just finding themselves worse off? Like it's almost like they should have just stayed at their employment.
Richard:Well, first of all, the human body wasn't designed for retirement in the traditional sense, the way we've described retirement. We're sold this idea that when you retire and this magic number of 65 appears, and where did that come from, why is 65 the golden time when we're supposed to retire, number one. And then number two, we're supposed to be happy, at peace, completely at rest, and just enjoying this life of luxury that we've worked so hard to earn. The blueprint isn't accurate according to human psychology. So it isn't that anyone's done anything per se wrong, it's just that we've moved to an imbalance in the way we approach our retirement.
Richard:Does that mean you can't be happy in retirement? Nope, it means the opposite. If all you focus on is just the finances, the probability of living a fulfilled life is reduced. If you balance your financial planning with a lifestyle planning, because there's four things that you're gonna lose the day you retire. You're gone just like that.
Richard:It's your identity because right let's just say I'm an engineer for argument's sake. As an engineer my identity is working for this company solving their problems, I'm an engineer. I have a purpose when I go to work. I get up in the morning with a purpose. My connections are at work as much as an engineer can connect and I don't mean that to be mean at all.
Richard:It's just that engineers, they have a very narrowly way of looking at things. And then the last thing that they have is they have a structure. Their entire day, their entire life, their week, their month, their year is structured according to the game plan of work. And now we have this number, 65 that enters into the equation, and then we have an industry that has morphed over time since the 30s and 40s and everybody now is geared towards age 65 and I need to have a certain number, enough money in order for me to be happy. Yet there isn't a single therapist in the world or a psychologist in the world that goes to an Excel spreadsheet that has your assets and liabilities that says you know what, I think I know why you and your wife aren't getting along or I now know why you're miserable because you don't have any friends and I can find that on line five underneath missing assets.
Richard:It doesn't happen that way. So I guess what does it mean?
Mike:Let me ask this question. Because you talk about identity a lot in
Richard:your book. Is identity something that we build or is it something that we recover? Okay. This is the coolest question and here's what I found and this is coming after years and years of trying to figure this out for myself. I believe that every single human being is born with three things, or I'm sorry, four things hardwired into their being.
Richard:First thing is your identity. Now I believe that we came from the presence of God. I'm a Christian. And because of that belief structure, I believe that every single human being at birth perceives value. Second thing I believe is that we're all, we already have a purpose.
Richard:We're here for a reason. The third thing is we're here to connect with other people. There isn't a single human being who's ever been the happiest all alone. Isolation isn't the same as insulation. Insulation, there's books written on this called boundaries.
Richard:Isolation is what you do when you're in an addicted state, when you're in a fight or flight, which would be a flight mode, and you're filled with cortisol and testosterone and norepinephrine, these addictive drugs, opioids if you will. And then the last thing, and this one is what we miss a lot, and that's the structure, the environment, the habitat, the framework in which one resides. And in the book I call it a core. It's how you are wired. Everyone is born that way.
Richard:And then the world constructs what you're going to look like and when we let the outside world tell us who we are, we become a constructive self instead of an authentic self. How do you differentiate the constructed self with your authentic self? That seems very subjective. If you as a human are trying to get other people to affirm who you are, to show affection to you are and affirmations to who you are, you are seeking for something you didn't get as a child. That's not subjective.
Richard:That's an objective observation that leads to false narratives you have about yourself. Some people use the term shadows, but a false narrative is a story you're telling yourself on the inside, the subconscious about you that your cognizant area isn't aware of. Like I have no worth or I'm not good enough or I can never get that. Things of that nature. That behavior is constructed, the environment constructed and you start telling yourself these stories at the subconscious level.
Richard:Think about a young man whose father passes away when he's four years old. Well what's he telling himself at that age level? What's he telling himself about a dad? I'm not good enough to have a dad or it's my fault my dad died or whatever it might be. And now he's gonna live his entire life until he processes that with that false narrative.
Richard:That's constructed. That's environment driven. Do these false narratives, I mean they have to play a role in your entire life, but does retirement almost amplify it? Does it make it worse? Because it seems like when people retire they're left to their own.
Richard:It's like they were swimming and now the tide's out and you can see if they've got a swimsuit on or not. So the most recent book I just published is called Your Encore Years, The Psychology of Retirement. You and I have chatted about that before. When we get to retirement, ideally, and this is more of a historical or longitudinal look at life, we're not really designed just to stop. We're actually designed to always be productive.
Richard:And if we're always productive, our identity drives that production. When we get up in the morning we kind of know where we're going. We feel that in our very bones and so it becomes a very fulfilling moment for us in that stage of life. But what happens when you can't find that identity or that identity has been constructed from the outside in? Happiness is always inside out driven.
Richard:Misery, unhappiness, addiction is outside in driven. And if I'm trying to get you to tell me that I'm a good person, that's outside in. When you hit retirement, all of a sudden you have something you didn't have before, time. And when time doesn't have a structure, you become aimless. It's like putting you out in a sailboat with no rudder.
Richard:You're just gonna go everywhere. So what happens, and this will be a financial planning example, I have an advisor, one of my advisors told me the story of one of his clients. He's in his late 70s, he's done very well financially. He hasn't a care in the world when it comes to money. But he calls them about every two or three weeks just to talk about the market and he usually starts with you know I've been thinking about this, I'm just not sure we have the right mix.
Richard:You might want to consider this. I've been studying this and I've been studying this. All that guy does when he gets up in the morning is study the market, listen to MSNBC, listen to all the different podcasts about money, watches the stock market, the bond market, S and P, etc. Does he connect with his wife? No, he's always worried about the money.
Richard:In other words, he bought into the story that 65 I retire, having the most money I can will make me happy during retirement so I'm always gonna be measuring my identity, my production, my success by how much money I have. How much is that going to help him in the graveyard when he's buried? Will it on his tombstone? Will it write something? Frank had $4,700,000 that he carefully managed on his own with a little bit of help from his advisor.
Richard:Here's what he's missing. He doesn't have an identity now outside the portfolio it was once when he worked. He doesn't have a purpose in the morning because he's always letting the stock market tell him what he's gonna do. What kind of connection does he have with his wife, his children, and his grandchildren? And where's the structure in his life that pushes him forward?
Richard:Those four things are now missing. Could you be interested in the market that you want to study it but also still find balance in all things? Is it are you saying it's are you it sounds like you're almost vilifying the interest of money or his attention to it. But if I'm reading this right, it's not that's not the issue. It's the imbalance of the holistic That's all is.
Richard:Life. Is that right? That is all
Mike:it is. We live in
Richard:a modern day where it seems like we're trying to create this hack or this shortcut or this efficiency by adding, adding, adding, which is easy to do. It's easy to buy that gadget or to implement the strategy or to add, add, add. How difficult is it to do what you're proposing which is at least it seems like it's to take away? The self help industry is massive. Billions and billions of dollars.
Richard:So the first question I would ask is why is there a self help industry? So it exists because there's a demand for it. People are not happy. People don't feel content. People are not getting along with each other.
Richard:They don't know who they are. They don't have a purpose and they don't have a structure. So everything that I just talked about, the self help industry has grown in order to support that. This is interesting. What I found was instead of adding to the different things you need to do, so here's one of the things, self help industry will teach you to do positive affirmations.
Richard:We might get to that later on. But when you're trying to tell yourself that you're something that your subconscious is telling you you're not, you're adding on to something, a constructive self that already is wobbling because you know it's not true. What my research has found in the work I've done with addiction recovery, marriage consulting, parenting, coaching, etc. Even dating. What I found is that what if we stop adding on to something that's already broken?
Richard:It's like the straw that broke the camel's back. When I keep adding something on eventually it can no longer be sustained. What if I excavate? What if I excavate the very things I'm telling myself that aren't true? What if I excavate that huge need to have the affirmations and the affections and the approvals come from the outside in?
Richard:What if I excavate the need to have all the likes on my Facebook? What if I'm just really who I am? So this isn't creating your identity, it's just rediscovering who you've always been. You've always had that worth and if you believe in God then you don't have to earn anything other than that. Think about your mom.
Richard:Most of us will say, yeah, my mom gave me unconditional love and she gave me all the love she had to give. You didn't have to earn that. You're her child. So she loves you because you're her child and she wants the best for you. What if you could love yourself the same way?
Richard:Not in a narcissistic way, but sufficient that you could be balanced in your approach because the reality is I can only connect to you or to my friends or to my wife to the level I accept myself. And if I love Richard for the right reasons in the right way, then I'm gonna have a higher probability of connecting with my spouse. The problem we've got Mike is that right now the fastest growing segment of invisible divorces and then gray divorces is what they call it now are retirees. Why? They lost their identity.
Richard:They lost their purpose. They don't know how to communicate with each other anymore and they have no structure in which to ride this encore year train. So it's aimless. It's just going down the road. So it's critical that we recognize and self awareness is where we're coming from.
Richard:Just recognize, who are you? What a good question. The very first chapter in the book I have them spend five days just being aware of who they are. It's hard
Mike:because it's something you normally haven't been asked to do before and that's to be aware of who you are. In your book,
Richard:there are seven or eight false narratives you talk about. That's the constructed of the constructed self that we create in life. Why is it that it's so hard to break those and go back to our original authentic self? I'm going try to answer it with two ways. One, I don't think it's as hard as we make it out to be.
Richard:I think is that we choose not to go there because the drugs still feel so good to be broken if you will. The drugs are. The opioids that I'm telling you about that are produced on the inside. You've heard the term victim, someone plays a role of a victim or I'm in the victim trap or whatever. When we play woe is me, when we say gosh see it's always this way, I never win, I can never get this done.
Richard:We're drugging ourselves, we're medicating and there is no difference. The brain cannot tell the difference between playing the victim card or shooting up with cocaine or taking a drink of vodka. A drug is a drug to the brain, it doesn't differentiate. The world focuses all their attention on the outside in drugs, but those aren't the ones that I'm focusing on even though they're critical. It's the ones when you're telling yourself a story that's not true from the constructed self, you're miserable and your brain knows in order to stop the pain all you need to do is act out again.
Richard:Let's say anger is the drug of choice today. All you need to do is find an excuse to get angry. Mhmm. You can play the role of a victim and go, oh, yeah. I was offended.
Richard:I'm feeling offended now. You offended me. You need to apologize to me. What am I doing? I'm medicating.
Richard:We have a society full of this addiction. When you walk around looking for a way to be offended, you're in tremendous pain on the inside and you're trying to find a way to stop that pain. One of the reasons is you haven't a clue who you are. You have no real productive purpose. If your purpose is to save the world through getting offended by wearing some sort of a badge because you get offended more than other people, you don't have any good relationships.
Richard:You're not connecting anywhere. You don't have a structure. Again I go back to those four things. These have been recurring things for the last twenty plus years in all the research and all the coaching that I've ever done. And what happened was one day in a conversation I was talking to one of my partners who's a financial planner much like you and he said, I feel like I'm a psychologist every time I sit down across from a couple who's ready to retire.
Richard:And I said, well why is that? So let me turn the table just a little bit on you if you don't mind. Why is it? Because I know you feel the same way. You cannot.
Richard:If you do a decent job you're basically giving them coaching advice is the term I'll use on a constant basis about something other than money. So in your experience, what is it that you're seeing with them that puts you in a position where you actually are playing a coach or a psychologist. I found that most people don't have a healthy relationship with money and it's really a reflection of their own false narratives. And where would that come from? Well I'm not the psychologist but usually You are right now.
Richard:We just switch spots. Many people tend to make financial decisions based on their experimentation early on in their life. So for example, some people invested or started investing. So many people retiring today started investing around 2000 In 2001 and 02/02 the markets only went down that created trauma and now they've avoided the stock market ever since. And in spite of their best efforts, they are or their attempt to save themselves from market risk, they have worked their tail off to save enough money using other instruments like CDs or bond funds which really haven't grown.
Richard:So they had to work harder because of an early trauma. Other people who started investing in 'four, 'five, 'six, they saw the markets continue to grow. They experienced the market crash, which 2008 was a very significant market crash. But some stuck to the system, some played the victim, and depending on what their choices were, those compounded for their decisions later on. Some people in 2008 went out and bought an annuity.
Richard:And annuities back then are very different than annuities are today. And so they'll walk in and say, I don't want an annuity. I said, well, what's an annuity? And they'll tell me
Mike:a definition. I'll say that's not not at all accurate. Do you want to learn what
Richard:they are or is it just not a go? And I'm indifferent. I want to help people retire how they're comfortable helping. But notice how their experiences are shaping a bias that's affecting their decisions. It's not like we're looking at a toolbox here and saying, okay, you've got some nails, here's a hammer, you need to cut some wood, here's a saw.
Richard:It's I'm going to build a house, but I'm only going use those instruments. And your bias, the term you're using for a bias, is the term I'm using for a false narrative. Bias that you're describing, they at least have at the cognitive level. The distorted view of an annuity or of the market itself is based upon previous experiences or their environment at that time. And so instead of questioning it and processing it through, they're allowing it to dictate behavior.
Richard:When people retire they still carry those biases. Now we can use the relationship they have with money, So if we have a law of scarcity couple going into it, have plenty of money, but they've always been so frugal. Well they're gonna move into retirement and the market and their money will still be dictating who they are and they become the marionettes to the money. Yeah. Many people will say, oh I want invested for maximum growth because risk equals reward, which is not true.
Richard:Risk equals potential reward. Yeah. And it depends on when you need the money. So if you've got long term needs, it's fine to take some risk. But if you have short term income needs, that's a different conversation.
Richard:And they'll say, well, we'll just change your life around it. That's allowing something that you cannot control to control what you can control. And there's your false narrative. And that's the disconnect that I often find. We're not looking at tools.
Richard:We're looking at biases that are shaping how a portfolio is structured. And my job is to help to meet people where they are and that build the best plan that I can around what they're giving me permission to use, which is very frustrating. It's kind of like telling a doctor, I'll only take those medications, and you've got an iron deficiency, but I'm not going to take any shots. Well, how are they going get the iron in you? Right.
Richard:It's the same thing because we don't define financial investments or products as tools, biases. Now I've spent almost thirty years in this industry from a practitioner standpoint, but I got my license originally in 1983. So I've been around this for some time and this is what I've noticed and I do appreciate that comment from the standpoint. If there's a balance between understanding as a financial planner from understanding lifestyle needs to be part of the conversation and the plan that is put together supports the lifestyle, not the Excel spreadsheet dictates the lifestyle. So the order is critical but the balance is even more.
Richard:If all you've ever done is work on your relationships and not given money any kind of thought or just stuck it in the money market because you feared the market, you're probably still gonna be working at Walmart in your 70s and 80s because you just don't have the funds in order to do anything more than that. But you'll have rich relationships but you'll be money poor and therefore you'll be in a need and that will be a draw on everybody around you. Now flip it, What if you spent all your effort trying to be the richest man that your identity is tied with your portfolio balance, so you're always monitoring it. Well look what's been given up. Yes, you've got a lot of money.
Richard:Probably have an invisible divorce. You probably don't have a great relationship with your children. You probably have a very minor relationship with your grandchildren and you probably guilt leverage all of them. They come over and visit you on a regular basis. And then when you do talk, it's all about you, it's not about them and they don't care about you.
Richard:So grandpa's and grandma's out there, one thing if you wanna connect with your kids, stop making about your aches and pains. They just don't care. They don't relate to that, they don't understand that and the more you talk about it, the more you push them away. So just a small conversation, the right questions, helping them know what does next Tuesday look like after you retire and what does the next October look like in the first year that you retire and what are the things you're gonna plan for now when you retire that have to do with lifestyle, passions, hobbies, growth, relationships, and how are you gonna structure that moving forward? That doesn't take long to ask but it does bring some degree of balance into the equation that has been so heavily money driven and not lifestyle or psychology driven.
Richard:If you could give one piece of advice, one thing that people could do to raise their awareness and prepare for the shift that happens in retirement, to prepare for the addressing of their construct, right, the self they believe they are and not their true identity or their true authentic self. What's the first step in trying to raise your awareness to address that? Who are you when nobody's looking? Answer the question. You're not an engineer when no one's looking.
Richard:You're not
Mike:a doctor when no one's looking. So who are you without the title?
Richard:How do you answer that? That seems very open. You can start writing, you can start reading the book if I ever get it published right? Yeah. I'd go this way.
Richard:Think about the things that mean the most to you. So think back, let me just try it with you for a second. Think back a month give or take and you can go further back if you need to. Think of a time where you were like in a zone. You were literally time stood still because you were so in that zone, so in that euphoric position and what you were doing was giving you great satisfaction.
Richard:Almost an insatiable drive and that you never got tired of doing it except for the limits of the body. Think of a time and tell me what you were doing.
Mike:Researching, creating something. K. I have five books right now with my editor. Right here?
Richard:Or No. They're written out. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm backlogged.
Richard:Okay. I'm calling her after this, actually. I have five books, and every single book is a construct or a framework. I call them precepts. It's a principle and a framework that teaches something about finance that is often misrepresented by fortune cookie advice.
Richard:Okay. Sorry to interrupt, but now you have a couple of identities in there. What would they be? I am. I can't stand people being taken advantage of, so I feel like I'm a defender of bad advice.
Richard:I'm a defender of bad advice. What else are I'm a researcher. And you are an author. I'm an author. Now we're getting to where I'm the creator of frameworks and systems.
Richard:Right. That's an identity. Therefore, what's your purpose?
Mike:What's your call? Creating frameworks. And it can
Richard:go deeper but we'll get to that later. Now how do you connect? What do you mean? Alright. So if you know who you are and you know what you're doing when you get up in the day, you have a purpose, your call is there, how do connections happen with Mike?
Richard:It's just a natural thing. We're not going out of our way. How do you then create connections around you? What's your social world look like? It's family and coworkers right now.
Richard:And what do you talk about with coworkers, for example? Work. And this is part of it. Well, we talk about our personal lives as well in vacations and other hobbies. I mean, is a social aspect that extends beyond the
Mike:And you also talked about work in your home. Yeah.
Richard:In other words, you're not a different person at home than you are at work in your authentic self. The world has told us that we have to be someone different at work than we are at home. That's a constructive self. It's a false constructive self and it's harmful. And then
Mike:the last thing is how is
Richard:your day structured? What are the values or the principles that you live within the framework based upon the things that you've shared so far? Say that question one more time. You bet. Have a day, it's a structured day, like you come to work at a certain time but before you come to work you also have things that you're doing every single day, right?
Richard:I know that because I've got a one year old so if I get a good night's sleep the day starts out right. And you also have a six year old. Okay so you've got these two crumb crunchers at home. You've got a Brite at home. So you've got a pre work routine, you have a post work routine, and then you have a post work routine routine because I know that you work late at night.
Richard:So the question is do you see how your life is structured based upon where you are right now? Now let's pretend the kids are raised and they're gone. They're either in school or they're married off creating grandchildren. Let's say that you no longer have the office that you officially retired from everything and now it's Monday morning on Mike's first day of retirement. Who are you?
Mike:A researcher. What's your purpose?
Richard:It's it's to create frameworks and understanding. So that doesn't end then. So you can you're the same person Yeah. Without work than you are. K.
Richard:This is wonderful. The third one's a little more difficult. I would probably change though from financial frameworks to a blend of psychology and religion frameworks because I think there's more purpose. Money is just a thing. It's actually quite easy to solve.
Richard:It's the behavior that gets in the way. That's because your relationship with money is incurring a false narrative that drags you down.
Mike:Yeah. Now go to the connections. What's different?
Richard:Kids are gone, life's still there. Why I don't have the co workers. Exactly and that's where retirees are just getting bludgeoned. When you were in high school you made friends because you had class together, had PE together, you had a club together right or you participated in some sort of extracurricular activity. That came natural.
Richard:Went to college same thing. It's the guys you were studying you had commonalities in the studies that you were going through. Now you're at work, you have commonalities, we're together, we're working together. Retirement shuts that off and for men especially more than women, we're still afraid to go out. We're afraid that it somehow will impact how people look at us.
Richard:Oh he's lonely. Yeah we're lonely. The whole retirement community is lonely. It's one of the biggest fears that psychologists and mental health professionals have right now for retirees is they're all lonely because they stopped learning how to make friends and they're nervous, afraid, trepidatious, whatever to go out and create new friendships. So again, connection critical.
Richard:Can you connect in groups in retirement over the Internet or is it better to have localized groups?
Mike:Would you rather do a webinar over Zoom or would you rather do a workshop in person? I would rather do it in person, but I'd rather have Zoom than nothing.
Richard:Okay. That was a very guarded answer. The reality is you connect in person in a way you can't do over Zoom. So is there a, for example, a lot of my grandchildren I talk to via Zoom, why? Because they live 2,000 miles away, that's why.
Richard:I prefer to be there, I prefer them to be with me. So as soon as this is over, where am I going? North. The three of my grandchildren. So that's a big deal for me.
Richard:The idea behind it is the connection is still required and even a phone call back in my day work was so expensive to call long distance, that was better than nothing. I remember when I engaged I spent two months on Capitol Hill as an intern and the only way I could keep in contact with my wife because I couldn't afford to call her on the phone. In those days it was the government came out with a Watts line and it was in existence long before we had one eight hundred. And so in my office because I worked for the Republican Policy Committee and I sat at the desk across the next desk to me was Nixon's former secretary when he left office. Oh she was not fun to be with I'll tell you that but right behind me was a Watts line and I had permission to use the Watts line before eight a.
Richard:As long as I wanted to so I was able to get to work at 07:30 every day and call my fiance and talk to her until 08:00. Now the problem with that was is that Sherry was in Tacoma, Washington. That's a three hour difference. And she worked a late shift at the pizza. She had three jobs going on just to make enough money because we were so poor when we got married and so sometimes she didn't even wake up and I woke her mother and father up and they didn't like me at all but that was a connection at least I had that.
Richard:Now today it would have been free on Zoom. That would have been better than that connection. What's the best connection? In face to face. Oh and then last thing Mike just to finish the answer and
Mike:that's now what's your structure look like? How do
Richard:you frame your day? What pushes you? What guides you around? What takes the body of water coming off the mountain and funnels it into a direction that's productive instead of aimless? So retirees oftentimes, that's why they call their financial planner so much.
Richard:Their identity is stuck to the portfolio balance and they call the planner and they start talking to the planner about all the research they've done. Not only is that a waste of the planner's time, it's an infringement upon all the other clients of the planner, but it's incredibly selfish and narrow minded and look at all the other things you're blocking out. You have a constructed narrative about who you are that your portfolio matters. Your purpose is not to study stocks and bonds. Your purpose is to enjoy a life with your loved ones.
Richard:This is a connection now. And then your framework hasn't even been redone. You lost it all at retirement and you didn't put anything back in its place of health, of anything of value. That's why the statistics are so high on people who retire. One, we weren't designed to retire at all.
Richard:There's no historical information to share with us that we were designed to retire. So when we retire we've created the 65, now I'm rest, I deserve this.
Mike:How do you deserve it? Why do
Richard:you want to hurt yourself when you retire by moving into a very sedated life? That's like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, just sitting on the sofa doing nothing and walking aimlessly around playing your Sudoku. There's got to be more to it than that. Any last words for people getting ready to retire after that very encouraging I didn't mean to come off as a Debbie Downer. To me, I'm hearing it's not about retirement.
Richard:It's about leaving the workforce where you need a paycheck and then intentionally designing the life so that you're still working, but it's it's playful work. Yeah. You might not be working for a stressful job with a paycheck, but maybe you're volunteering at the charity or the church. Maybe you're you're doing some nonprofit work. Maybe you're more involved in your community.
Richard:Like, you're you're just you have to deliberately structure what your life's gonna be because if you don't, you don't connect. You've got no structure, and you've got no reason to do something with yourself. Therein lies the lack of and you fall. When I was younger, I remember thinking a lot, when I'm older, I'm not gonna do that. So I'll see a parent do something, a grandparent, an uncle, a leader, whatever it might be.
Richard:I would see adult behavior and I remember even talking to my friends about it, man, when I'm older, there's no way I'm gonna be like Mr. So and so or Mrs. So and so. And I used to think okay when I'm older it's gonna be different. I'm gonna be different right?
Richard:When you were working starting in your 20s give or take after school and this is a stereotype I recognize, how many of us thought when I'm retired this is what I'm going to do and this is how I'm going to do it and this is who I'm going to be. Have we really forgotten all of that? There's no way a 20 year old is thinking I'm gonna sit on a sofa and do nothing all day. That just didn't come across our mind especially a boomer who grew up outside not inside. No internet.
Richard:We didn't have seat belts. We rode in the backs of trucks. And we're still alive, some of us. But what if you actually spent a minute like I asked you to do about when you got into the zone what were you doing? What if you went back to the things that really made you happy, that you were passionate about, the things that used to say to yourself like I'm going to learn to play the guitar or I want to learn to do woodworking or I'm going to do X or Y.
Richard:What if you actually spent time five years before he retired and started thinking about it, talking about it, writing it down and then discovering who you really are. Who's your authentic you? What really brings happiness and joy into your life? And then what would it be like if you actually had relationships based on trust and respect that it was mutual, that you felt safe around this family, really wanted to be with your your boy or your girl your grandchildren, what would that be like? And then what would it be like knowing that when you wake up in the morning it didn't matter when you got up, that there was no alarm clock.
Richard:That's great for a day or two but you know what? Aimlessness breeds addiction and you don't want that because bored is one of the primary causes that trigger people into maladaptive behavior to medicate themselves because they don't feel connected. And if you're lonely as a retiree, you don't feel connected, you're gonna find a way to medicate and now the research just kind of falls away, falls out for us because that's where all the mental health challenges are. Mental health leads to physical health. Physical health leads to earlier death.
Richard:That's not retirement. That's not an encore year. It's all preventable. Every single bit of that is preventable because we just start now. And one last thing, my little soapbox if you don't mind.
Richard:What if the financial planning industry just spent a few more questions asking their clients to give them a view of what the life looks like, their lifestyle looks like, and then builds a plan around the lifestyle. And then their annual review is instead of doing a full review of stocks and bonds and the current presidential policies, What if you talked about them, their trips, their children, their grandchildren, their hobbies, their passions? What a difference that would be in our industry. We would revolutionize the mental health industry because we wouldn't need as many of them. We'd be doing it just by giving people a principle based living.
Richard:Appreciate that. Doctor. Himmerer, you can subscribe to his newsletter at drhimmerer.com. That's drhimmer.com. And as always, for the Retire On Time resources, you can go to retireontime.com for books, kits, calculators, and much, much more.
Richard:Appreciate you being here. We'll see you the next episode.