Now's the perfect time. There isn't a better time ever Mhmm. For you to make your life better, your wife or your husband's life better, your children's life better, and your grandchildren's life better, which will make the world better. You literally can change the world one relationship at a time by learning one new habit. Just be interested.

Stop making it about you, and you'll find that the world's gonna give back in droves. It won't give back immediately, but it's going to start giving back. You need to know what to look for.

Welcome to How to Retire On Time, a show that answers your retirement questions. We're here to move past that oversimplified advice that you've heard a 100 times. Instead, we like to get into the nitty gritty on this show because the truth is, there's no such thing as a perfect investment product or strategy. Now today, we've got a special show lined up for you today. Instead of talking about taxes and investments and portfolios, social security and all that, we're gonna talk about the non financial side of retirement planning.

You know, the rest of our life, our general happiness, joint well-being. So with us today joining is Doctor. Richard Hemmer, author of the book Your Encore Years, has had a wonderful career in psychology paralleling with finance. So it's a pleasure to have you. Thanks for being here, Richard.

Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate it.

A little background on Richard, just so everyone's aware. He's your partner of Majorana Financial and CPAs, which is a great firm out of Washington State.

That's right.

You've built a wonderful business also helping, and correct me if I'm wrong, marriages, individuals, I mean, all sorts of things, but a lot of it's centered on emotional intelligence and kind of healing. Am getting this right? I wanna give you justice for all

that you've done. Yeah. In other words, when it gets down to how people get along when it comes to the the idea of people finding some degree of happiness in life. There really are just principles that get you there. So it really doesn't matter who I'm talking to, whether I'm in the prison system, talking to police officers at their training facility, which I did in Washington, whether I'm dealing with someone, a couple trying to figure out what house to buy or how much they're going to invest.

It's the same concept, but I've never seen it applied outside of just those areas we addressed. I just took the research and said, okay, what happens when we retire? What's that gonna look like?

Now I wanna ask you about part of your history. You were a mortgage broker for a You've also done insurance and a number of things in the financial services space, but you left.

Yeah. I got my I got my insurance license back in 1983, and I was recruited out of San Diego. And from there, I went to into mortgages as they were a really good fit. And what I found was that well, this is a sample survey that I took with people, non scientific at all, and it was really fun doing it. I did it for years.

So I'd be talking to a couple and as soon as they started having a degree of friction, which was every time I sat down with a couple because they're talking about sensitive items. You know, one, their credit report. Yeah. And and and sometimes things pop up these days. Some things pop up there that one of the other didn't know about.

And then they would talk about money. Right? Or the future.

Yeah. Isn't that like the number one stress for marriages is money or top three maybe?

And that's what I asked him. I said, okay. What's it was it was jaded. Keep in mind. It was very weighted to what I thought would the answer would be.

But I just say, okay, mister and missus Smith, in your opinion, what's the primary cause of divorce with couples? And they would usually say it in unison and they go money. I go, would it be interesting to you or would you be surprised if you found out that money is not the number one cause? Money is a symptom. The cause is something much different.

And that's where I started becoming very intrigued with moving into this direction. Instead of just talking about money because two plus two equals four, whether I'm doing a mortgage or I wanna have enough money for someone to retire on, it's a mathematical equation or a set of equations. It's the easy part. That is the easy part. And it's the part that we talk about.

K. So why did you leave the financial services space that you were a successful mortgage broker

Right.

And you went out and got your PhD. People don't pack up and just do something like that. There had to have been a reason.

Because it wasn't working.

What wasn't working?

The way we were we were addressing finances, especially in the retirement field.

How so? I mean, it's the money wasn't working, the budget wasn't working.

Well, why do people retire? Let me just throw it back at you for a

second. They have sufficient assets to quit their job and they can do whatever they want.

Okay. And that's what the financial field has sold you on. Okay. That having enough money is the definition of happiness. What if it's not?

Where what did the what does the research say about that? Now, there's an interesting study alleged I'm gonna use the term alleged study came from Boeing when they were doing research on what happens to retirees.

Mhmm.

And according to tradition, that the Boeing study said that after two years of retirement, the average was two years that they would pass away. Now I wanted to verify that research, and that's not true. That's not what the research said. But it is a fun thing to say if you're supporting the idea that money doesn't buy happiness. Well, this is what they've the real research found because they convoluted some a couple studies.

What they found Are you saying they glossed over important details?

I'd say that you can take anything you want and prove it with statistics.

How to lie with statistics? Very palpable book. Okay. So so what was and this is what you're talking about is the does money make you happiness? Concept.

Right.

Yeah. So first of all, the Boeing research that was really messed up. What they found was that people who retire at age 65 in one study are not as happy as people who retire at 66. I thought, where does that come from? And how do you get two years dying out of that?

And then they threw another one in there, but the the nuts and the bolts of it was this. And this is really how I discovered it when I put my my computer to work and helping me understand what what makes someone happy in retirement. Mhmm. When you retire and you don't have a purpose, your life expectancy is severely diminished. If you retire without an identity, your life expectancy is severely diminished.

And if you don't have connections during retirement and what happens when you retire to all your connections, They're gone. The water cooler talk is gone.

Can you talk about identity? What do you mean by identity? I mean, we all know who we are. You know, I might financial adviser. I'm a husband.

I'm a father. And that's that's where my mind goes for identity.

Okay. First of all, we could start with, hey, you know who you are today, but who are you without your job?

I would say someone trying to help people have a healthier relationship with money, but I'm not a psychologist. Right. I I've seen what you've seen. And I I feel that people make emotional decisions with their money. It's almost like they're trying to buy an experience to cover up the pain that they're experiencing.

But what if you I'm unique in that.

What if you could buy your experiences? What if you could buy your happiness if you knew how to do it properly?

It's a good, great question.

So the research that I was told about, I mean, up was that money can't buy happiness when you hit a certain threshold. And the original research was about 75,000.

Oh, hold on. That's not understood. People say money can't buy happiness period. Right. That's Can you clarify that?

Yeah. So when I got into this okay. Let me go let me go back just one step.

Then we'll circle back to why you wrote the book. Yeah. But this is a fun tangent.

So what I realized when I left the industry and I wanted to go into much more of a coaching environment. And I wanted to go into coaching not therapy and that's a whole another tangent. Because one works and and no no disrespect, but the other doesn't. And there's a lot of research to support that. But the point being, I realized that people did not understand what to do themselves when they got to a certain point.

So here's the research on the retirement. Original research was like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What's that? It's that you need to have some degree of fulfillment. So I need to have a roof over my head.

I need

to have food. I need to have clothing. Walden's Pond. Somewhat. Your basic essentials.

Okay.

Yeah. So once I have the essentials taken care of, once I get to that point, according to the research, money won't buy any greater happiness. And they put the threshold and using the numbers from the research, was about $75,000 a year. And then someone questioned that and they said, I'm not sure I agree with that. So they did some more research.

And what they found was that the people that they did the original research on would have been miserable with a billion dollars, a million dollars. They were miserable regardless. They didn't account for someone's lookout on life or outlook on life. So whether it's 50,000 or a 100,000 or 200,000, this group of people that they researched were miserable. They're just miserable.

So then they found they went to ask a couple different questions and they found 75 will get you. That's important. You got your basics covered. But as income goes up, and if you have an outlook on life that's one of happiness, you have an identity, you have a purpose for what you're doing, you actually can take the increased revenue and create more happiness. So first for example, if you took a trip and you took all of your children with you Mhmm.

Is that gonna be more or less fun than if you don't take a trip?

Some families trips are miserable.

Right. Assuming you have an outlook on life and that was the caveat.

And that's not my family by the way. We enjoy trips.

So if you take the caveat, say if you have an outlook on life that you can have fun, that life is to be enjoyed, then money can buy happiness if you know how to use it. The challenge is, and that first research is still valid. If you don't understand happiness, you don't believe it's possible to have happiness. And when I went back and got my degree, I started understanding the false narratives that people have from early childhood on.

Okay. You just said a lot there. What do you mean false narratives? Like, that's a bit of rabbit hole there.

So from conception on, if let's say mom and dad end up getting divorced and they were arguing while you were in the womb, you're gonna carry a degree of trauma. And that trauma based upon how old you are, you're gonna basically say, they're probably arguing about me. It's my fault. And since it's my fault, I probably don't have any worth. And if I don't have any worth, then this is how I'm going to behave in life.

And everyone everyone listening, anyone you know knows, so often we as humans sabotage the relationships that we want to have, the ones we hold most dear. We'll do things that create problems for us. It's called collusion. Collusion in the world of psychology means if I'm gonna behave a certain way, I'll get exactly what I don't want. Best example.

Mhmm.

I'm driving home from work and tonight, I wanna have a very soft intimate evening with my wife. I wanna have a candlelight dinner. I just wanna listen to some music, hold her hand, just talk a little bit, just enjoy her company. That's my goal for tonight.

Mhmm.

On the way home, work went really rough. I got a phone call. It set me off. I'm frustrated. I'm I'm moving to a a place of anger.

And as I walk in the door, I smell chicken in the kitchen and I walk in and memories from the past come up to me and I say, Sherry, seriously, you're not cooking chicken again. You know you can't cook chicken and you burnt it the last time. Can't you cook something that I enjoy? Now what is the probability that I'm gonna enjoy that evening with Sherry? With a candle, maybe holding her hand, maybe listening to some soft music.

Not high. That's called collusion. My behavior when I accused her, when I jumped out at her, is gonna get me exactly what I don't want from her. Is that common? Very.

In just different ways. In every walk of life known to man. I mean, think about people who don't like management. Right? Middle management according to research, seventy five percent of all people middle management are incompetent.

Why are they incompetent? That's a very fair question. What about parents? How many parents struggle having relationships with their kids? And hopefully we cover this today.

How many grandparents guilt leverage their grandchildren and their children to come over and visit them more often?

Mhmm.

When you get guilt leveraged as the grandchild or this the child by a grandparent who just say, hey, don't you love me anymore? You know, your phone works. Why don't you give me a call on occasion? Mhmm. Or we we bribe them to come over.

We actually inadvertently push them away. I can't tell you how many clients I've had who are the children and the grandchildren of the grandparents who are guilt leveraging their their loved ones

Mhmm.

To come over to the point they're coming to me and going, what do we do? I don't wanna go visit them. It's not any fun. All they do is guilt leverage us to come back some more. So, yeah, that all stems from a very early age.

Well, what changes because you retire? Think about the whole idea of you growing up husband, wife, let's just say the traditional family. And they're getting along, but they're all in their they're all in their different lanes. Husband's in his lane, wife's in his lane. His identity is here.

I'll just share the story of the general.

Yeah.

Okay. The general and his wife, they retire somewhere in The Carolinas. I don't remember which one, but they retire. Over there. Yeah.

Over there. Two star general. He spent his career in the military. They had five children. What did she do while he was gone 90% of the time?

She was the home general.

So she ran it all. CEO of the house. CEO, COO, CFO, taxi driver. She did it all. She ran their budget.

Now his budget was had a whole bunch of more zeros next to his over hers, but she still ran everything. They're thinking, wouldn't it be wonderful that the children are gone now? He's out of the military now. Let's sell everything we own, buy an RV, and drive across the country visiting our children and our grandchildren, seeing the sights that we never got to do when we were together.

Mhmm.

You know, allegedly raising the kids. She was he was gone. Mhmm. So they jumped in the RV and started driving east or west. By the time they got to Texas, they each had divorce attorneys.

They never made it out of Texas. Why? He crossed into her lane. Every time they started talking about what they were going to do, she already had the answer. She had the whole trip already organized because that's what she did their entire married life.

And he kept stepping into her lane. So she didn't know how to protect the lane. He didn't know how not to be in the lane or work with her to communicate. The two live together, but they were never together. They never learned the social skills of how to handle each other.

She had some very heavy responsibilities. He had heavy responsibilities, but they never learned how to work together. We think because all of a sudden we're no longer working for the man that everything is gonna go well. No research can support that. That's just not going to happen.

You need to start early preparing for the retirement. Now, per chance you're retired, way I go over in the book, I talk about the sequence of the things that we need to do preparatory to retirement. And the financial planning side is part of it, but of seven items, it's number seven. It needs to work around all of the other six components. And when it comes to what are we going to do in retirement, The thing that we always talk I hear the most is we wanna travel.

It's number seven on numbers of seven. The two things that we talk about the most, travel and money, are the two things we need to plan last. So many other things need to come before that in order for to maximize that idea of what does retirement look like or what do we want retirement to look like.

Do you have the seven steps of it? I'll stop you

if you don't mind me grabbing, I do not have them memorized. So I have seven steps of retirement and they need to happen. K. The first step is I have to know who I am, and I have to know what am I going to do. Just a quick story on that.

Yeah. And this is the false narrative side that we'll come back to later.

Yeah. Somewhat of it. Yeah. It leads to it as well. I was doing a workshop for retirees or people who wanted to retire, and two of the participants in there.

One was in the medical industry and the other was in technical sales. And as we're going through the little workbook that we take them through, both of them said, and it was within minutes of each other, they just said, they just raised their hand. They said, this is interesting. You're talking about identity. I could have retired three years ago.

And the other one said, could have retired five years ago. I said, okay. Help me understand why you did not. They both said, I don't know who I am without being an RN or I don't know who I am without being the area director of sales. They have no identity.

Well, if you're all of a sudden without a reason to get up in the morning, so no purpose, because you don't know who you are, how do you then build on that? Mhmm. Because pretty soon your days become aimless. It might be cool for a couple weeks, but we're not hardwired to be leisurely. We're not hardwired to lay around.

There's no every bit of research I've ever read from the world of psychology says we're hardwired to connect. So where are your friends? Where's your social group? That's why the grandparents are always leveraging their children and their grandchildren. They miss that company.

They thrive on it. Frankly, they have to have it. We're hardwired to learn, to grow, and to change. So those two things, hardwired to connect, learn, grow, and change, If you don't have that built into your retirement, you become aimless. I watched my grandpa go through this.

As a businessman, he was always got something going on. Every time I'd go over, he was telling me about I never understood anything he said, but he would tell me about it. The words I know what they mean now, but I had no idea what they meant as a 10 year old. But when he retired, he had to live off Social Security and he just sat in a big chair. And he give me candy when I'd come over, but that's it.

But then he always just talked about himself. He talked about his stories or he criticized what I was doing because I wasn't doing what he thought I should be doing, for example. That's hard to want to go visit someone when they're not interested in me. And I thought, it's cool. He doesn't have to take a test tomorrow, but what is he going to do tomorrow?

And I didn't connect all the dots as a kid. And as I grew up and I got into my teen years and I started seeing that and I thought, my grandpa really doesn't do anything. And my grandma just busies herself around the house. So she's too busy to be with me.

And I thought both of them aren't are doing stuff, but are they productive? Are they making Productive to what? Productive in the growth, the learning what were the four things again? K. So Is that

the They're connecting. Right? But we're not connecting. We're not really talking about anything substantive except what they're frustrated with. So they're critical.

And then the other two other set the second one, which is three in one to grow, to learn no. To grow, to change, and to learn. So what did I say?

Yeah. That sounds right.

Yeah. And so the idea is they didn't. They weren't learning. They weren't reading. Well, my grandma was.

My grandpa wasn't. And how can you be happy if you're not actively engaged in that because our bodies are wired that way? Just a quick bit of research I wanted to know, when did we first learn about retirement? When did we first use the term retirement?

Now that's interesting because it me growing up, it's always been there. I mean, my grandpa retired from Boeing. He got the pension. He got the gold clock like and we say that as an expression. He actually has a gold He clock.

Got He actually got one from Boeing. Yeah. Yeah. I was an engineer's whole career. That was basically his only job.

Very successful. No idea what he did because he was on the government Mhmm. Security side of things. But one day he just stopped going to work and he they lived off the pension and Social Security, that was it, and he retired. And what did he do?

So all I know, he was an aerospace engineer. He worked on rockets. Oh, after retirement? His his passion was building model airplanes. And so he he would I mean, and and not just airplanes, ships.

I mean, models.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

He loved the meticulous nature of building, and they have the paintbrushes, the airbrush, all the stuff, and he'd enter them into competitions and had a lot of joy in that. And then he had a purpose.

He loved it. He maintained his identity as an engineer. And by the way, once an engineer, always an engineer. They cannot get that out of him. It doesn't matter who you're talking to.

They're always an engineer first.

But he put an artistic bit on, and I thought that was fun. Yeah. He built model trains too. Very involved in the grandkids. When we would come over, he would focus on us, and so we played a lot with them.

But aside from that, and he'd go on his walks, it was really that he had a great relationship with my grandma. They they always seemed to get along nicely. I mean, I'm a kid. I don't really know if they did or not. I assume they did.

At least appearances were such. Everyone that talks about them talks about how wonderful they were. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the evidence would be there.

But it was model airplanes, long walks, and just trying to maintain his health. He was also diabetic and had so much of what

your grandpa did or he says he passed away since? Yeah. So much of what he was doing is exactly what the research brought out. He had a relationship with his wife, which is so important, by the way. The number one the number one growing area of divorce is the great divorce.

Well, they were here's a funny bit for them, and you might enjoy this. He was a Catholic, she was a Protestant. They never really agreed on religion, but they respected each other. He was a Republican. She was a Democrat.

They never agreed to each other politics, but they got along with each other. He was an engineer. She was an

Oh, okay. She was a teacher.

And so, I mean, it's almost like they were actual opposites in so many ways, but they compliment each other so well. They knew when to compromise. They knew how to they they had their system, and I

don't Yeah.

I I was too young before they both had passed to really understand relationships, but I just have to when you're talking about differences, I'm like, well, figured it out, so it's possible.

Yeah. Anecdotally, you think that our our government could learn about it, the country of Ireland could learn about it. I mean, there's a lot going on here that a lot of people could probably learn from that. But they did do some key factors. Mhmm.

What I found in in when I was researching the book is you don't have to hit all of them. You hit three or four of those main factors, and it's gonna make a a significant difference in your ability to be happy. And he looks like they hit some because of the connections were there. He continued growing. He was doing his model airplanes.

That's tough. But that stuff worked that intricacy of what he was doing. It was very tough. But that's his passion. Right?

Mhmm. There's his hobby. What happens to someone who's retiring and they don't know who they are? Therefore, they don't have a purpose. They're not getting along with their family

Mhmm. Or their loved ones, and they have no hobbies. Well, what's the difference between a hobby and purpose? Because people I've known retire and go golfing or they go fishing a lot, and then it's hollow. So some hobbies are fulfilling, some hobbies are an an empty house, so to speak.

For example, in golf. That was a good one you brought up. I'm learning a lot about that now because I just picked up golf six years ago Yeah. When my I became an empty nester. And I am finding such joy in the connections I'm making in golf.

So we have golf cations. I have two groups of golfers, groups of guys that I go with Mhmm. And we have destination places. So there's a purpose. We go to the destination.

We have so much fun. We talk to each other. We support each other. When we had one of our our buddies, his house burnt down, he was lucky to get out alive. And I had just flown to we were gonna do a golf tournament together to where he was living.

And he escaped through a very small little window that he had to bust on the Second Floor. He had to bust out with his oxygen tanks. He's he's going through some health problems. He got out barely alive, and he got out with just the clothing on his body and and he busted through a window. He and his wife both lived.

K. That was a rallying thing. What made it so amazing was that all of us supported him. We bought him new clothing. We got him new golf clubs.

He went golfing with us two days later right after the fire. And that was just a little over a year ago because we commemorated that anniversary of that fire with another golf tournament that we did. And so the idea is that when you can make the connections, your hobby then turns into one of the key components to connect. So if you're not growing golfing, by the way, is one of the great sports that they talk about we need to do in their later in life for two reasons. One, you can get exercise if you walk.

So if all you're doing is riding the cart, then scratch the exercise

cart. Drive the cart.

Yeah. It does make for a very cranial experience if you understand golf. But if all that you're doing is get out there and hit the ball for no other reason.

Getting drunk on the carts and partying. Yeah.

The Dean Martin Frank Sinatra approach to golf is not going to get you where you need to go. It needs to be an experience. His ability to go integrate with the models, you know, to really get into it. That's a skill. Right?

And he kept he kept the skills like playing the guitar. To integrate with the models? The small the little putting a model together, my son does love.

Oh, model airplanes. Model Model.

Thank you. So that that ability, the small little dexterity and the intricacies of putting all that together in the little parts. I mean, I've seen my sons build the an airplane or a car and they have to put the engine blocks together and Mhmm. The spark plug tops, you know, and they put the hubs on. So that's that's a dexterity.

You keep learning that as you keep that fresh. It's like playing a guitar. I once had to help a buddy of mine who had a stroke. And I went to the hotel or the hospital room, and that's all we did was play the guitar because he had a stroke in his left hand side of his body is what got paralyzed. And when you play a guitar and you're right handed, the left hand side is what, you know, you form your notes.

So we kept working on the notes over and over again. After four or five days in the hospital, it came back pretty quick. We were singing songs again because he was he was able to keep that. Well, what if you stop doing it? What if you stop having relationships?

What if you don't really know who you are? That atrophies. Right? If you don't use it, you lose it. Mhmm.

So those key components when we retire let me go back to one thing you asked me at the beginning. Why did you write the book? And why did you leave the end the the industry? That's because when I saw that it wasn't working for people, I thought there's got to be a system that we haven't employed yet that if we understood would make a big difference. I think the financial industry is a good industry, but I think they're not doing the best they could do.

I'd like to change the narrative by explaining, and I'll get to those sequences in a second.

Yeah. The seven steps.

Money is only one part of it. It's not everything. And that's why when people retire and all they're thinking about is the money, because then they go, well, I have enough money to retire because that's what they ask you. Right? Mhmm.

When can I retire and do I have enough? Well, of

the hardest questions I have found is I say how much money do you need each month to live the life that you want? And they'll throw out an arbitrary, well, is kind of what we're spending right now. And I'm going, no, like, what are you gonna do with your time? Is there lifestyle creep? Are you gonna be spending more money?

Or is this hobby gonna work? Do you need to try several hobbies? Do we need to plan cash flow around those those other hobbies? Because if you do reinvent yourself, what how much does that cost? Certain hobbies are very cheap.

Certain hobbies are very expensive. What is that? And it's almost like people expect me as a financial professional to just say, alright, here's your budget for life, figure it out. And that's why at least at least I believe and I've said on the show over and over again, put the plan together first, then figure out the portfolio, then figure out the investments and the products and all the other things. But what is I

like that.

Plan look like?

Well, there's one other aspect to it I wanna jump on Yeah. To complement what you were saying. When you don't have anything to do, you spend more. You don't have a purpose. Now let's just say my golf habit's pretty expensive, but what if I don't have a golf habit and I'm just bored?

And what I've always done in the past was to buy something. Gabor Mate is one of the authors that I've I do a lot of reading of and I study him a lot. His name is Gabor Mate. He's a psychologist and medical doctor out of Vancouver, Washington.

Okay.

And or Vancouver, BC. And he's the one who explained this. He said, he had a a strong addiction to spending. Well, what if earlier you had a strong addiction to spending? Or what if earlier you didn't have any money and now you have a lot of money and now you're not working and you're you're not raising the kids and you have a lot of free time.

Mhmm. We forget that we have to fill vacuums. When you're not working, what are you filling it with now?

Mhmm.

You used to go to work every day and you used to visit with people every day. Now what are you doing? So the first thing is daily structure.

Can you give us the full seven steps and then we can kind of dive into

Here's the seven steps of retirement, and I wanna show you how to organize them.

By the way, don't know if we even mentioned it. The book's called Your Encore Years.

Yeah. Your Encore Years, the Psychology of Retirement.

And we'll be putting it on the shelf of this show as well for for all those that watch us on YouTube. But it's Your Encore Years, was credit to you, was I believe number one new release on Amazon for midlife and Christian self development. There are Christian elements in there, religious elements, which I think lends to the complement of the book and the I

use a lot of biblical stories to explain what my point is.

And then there was also, I think, number two in retirement planning, which is usually a financial category, but people are seeing Your Encore, Yours, The Psychology of Retirement, this book as being a nice companion to Yeah. What they're that's that's the idea at least. Right. And I mean, I read it, loved it, which is why you're here.

But No. You helped me a lot with it, frankly. Yeah. Appreciate

it. So, alright. So with that, now that people actually know the book's name, let's let's dive into the seven

Here are the seven steps. Number one, identity and purpose. You need to know who you are and what you're gonna be doing. Two, the ability to socially integrate. Three, restructure your daily activities.

Four, building relationships and role changes. Remember the general and his

Yeah.

And the CEO didn't know the roles. Five, mental health. Now in the book, I go through generational, the different generations going back to the great generation. What do mean generational? So boomers, I'm talking primarily to boomers right now.

Then you got your Gen Xs, Gen Zs. You're a boomer, right? I am a boomer. Very proud to be a boomer.

Yeah.

And boomer is kind of what my kids call me.

Yeah.

Right? And then there's the mental health. Mental health is critical because so many people will get to this stage in life when all of a sudden, like a stay at home mom, which you don't have so much anymore, but you did a little bit more in the boomer generation. Now who are you? If you're not the mom who's making lunches and doing homework and running the soccer mom thing running everywhere, who are you?

So there's gonna be a mental health challenge. And that's why the the gray divorce is growing so fast because they don't have an identity. They don't have a purpose. They don't know who that person is that they're living with in the house. And there's gonna be more invisible divorces than gray divorces.

Gray divorce is? That's an actual divorce legally. For? So if if I'm 65 years old, I just retired, and I get a divorce, that's a gray divorce. So gray hair

is what gray means.

Yeah. But invisible divorce is what we see much earlier. There's almost never a great divorce without an invisible divorce. An invisible divorce is that you've lost emotional intimacy. Your physical intimacy probably ended years ago and you were there Ricky, Ricardo, and Lucy sleeping in separate beds or maybe even separate rooms.

Mhmm.

That's an invisible divorce. You have no emotional intimacy, no trust and respect, but it's a convenience to stay married. Doesn't mean it's the best thing. It doesn't mean it's the worst thing. That's a neutral statement.

But it is convenient either for tax purposes or for the children. What they're finding now with the boomers is they're staying married for the kids. But once the kids are gone, I just had this was it I didn't remember if it was you or not. Someone just told me the story. They were talking to a good friend of theirs, and and he and he was it was their nephew.

That's what it was. And his nephew graduated from high school, and he says, how are you doing? He says, oh, great. Now it's coming back to me. I remember now.

He was talking to the mom of the boy. It was it was some relative. And the mother was sharing, yeah, my kid just graduated from high school, and he came for breakfast down. He came down for breakfast after the graduation. And while we're having breakfast, he says to his mom in a very neutral tone, hey, mom, you and dad getting a divorce now?

She looked at me like, And you're good she goes, where where'd that come? Now there's no history of fighting. Mom and dad were getting along great, husband and wife. And he she goes, well, why'd you ask me that? And he said, well, all my friend's parents are getting divorced.

Now their their kids are out of high school. They stayed married as long as the kids were in high school. Now when they're gone, they're gonna live their own lives. So the story was they never connected during their meaningful lives, their Mhmm. Their growth life and when they were raising kids.

Now who are they? Now what's their purpose? Now what are they going to do?

But isn't that more on identity and not

That's both mental health and identity because the lack of identity, the lack of purpose is gonna lead to the challenge in the mental health. Mhmm. Now back way back when, getting a therapist or something like that was you're something wrong with you. Nowadays, it's more of a badge of honor. I have my own therapist now.

So that's neither good nor bad. It's just kinda how we address it. The problem is if the therapy isn't based on principles, which is what we address in the book, it's not going to help you. Just talking about your problems doesn't make them better, but we're getting off topic a But

I wanna, before I forget, ask you, you said you were on to be a coach and not a therapist, and there's a difference there. You're talking about it again. So can you clarify why coaches and therapists are different? Why you

went one route? So let's just use coaching in the traditional sense of sports. Let's say you're a tennis player and you come in and you say, look at, I wanna be a better tennis player. I'm ranked in my group, my age group, but I'm ranked a hundredth. And my goal is to be in the top 10.

Yeah. I know where you are and I know where you wanna go. Everything I share with you is to coach you to become better. So I'm gonna hold you accountable for what you didn't do. I'm gonna agitate you in other words.

I'm gonna help you achieve what you want to become versus what parents do and grandparents do is we irritate people. I'm gonna bug you to do what I want you to do. Agitation is coaching. I'm gonna first find out what you want and then I'm gonna give you the tools to get what you want. So if I'm coaching a grandparent right now and that grandparent says to me, Doctor.

Hemright, I just wanna have my kids come around a little more often. I said, great. Are you willing to do what it takes to get there? I need to know that they're going to do that. Now I can start the agitation process.

And before you think that agitation is something mean, it's not. I'm gonna teach them principles, behavior, which I write about. And I can go over a few do's and don'ts if we have time of how to start inviting the grandchildren to be with you so they want to be with you. Because right now the system you have isn't working. Right?

You came into me for a reason. You're gonna pay me money for a reason. And the reason you're gonna pay me money is because the grandchildren are not coming to your place. So can we just both agree? Your system has failed.

Deming said, 94% of all failures, a systems malfunction. Your system of talking to your kids doesn't work. And that's really what retirement's about. Our current system about how we're going to retire

is not well made. Relationships, communication, lifestyle, just kind of all of the above that we are referring to?

Yep. K. We don't have a system of healthy communication. Just look at the world today. We have more troubles with the world and the way we communicate.

Our younger generations don't even know how to date. Their dating is on their phone, sitting next to each other, texting each other, walking down the supermarket aisle to texting each other. They do not know how to date. As a matter of fact, the research shows they're ten to fifteen years behind previous generations and their social skills. So in other words, their ability to have any emotional intelligence to connect with another is diminishing generation to generation.

Well, that's a malfunction. Now, in other words, if we don't change the narrative now about how we retire, it's only gonna get worse. Now there's more money out there than there's ever been. But that money will not buy you happiness if you do not have the right outlook on life and you don't have the skill set to support connecting, learning, growing, and changing.

In the book, you'd say money's an object and you hit

And that pretty you need to learn how to control the object. The challenge is the financial planning industry would have you believe just the other way around. You're so worried about interest rates, market fluctuations, loss of $10,000 here, loss of $5,000 there. That's the wrong focus. You put your systems together.

As a matter of fact, you say that all the time. You put the right system together, let the system do the work, continually ask yourself, is the system doing what I want it to do? And if the system isn't working, redo the system. The same thing's true in relationships. If you don't have friends, your system's busted.

You're not an idiot. There's nothing wrong with you except what you believe. Well, if you already created that belief one time, let's recreate a new one. Let's develop a new way of looking at it and practice that new way so it becomes who you are. That's your identity.

What if your identity is I make friends easily? But your identity right now might be, I'm an introvert. I can't do that. Mhmm. Okay.

An introvert and not making friends has nothing to do with one another, but it's what the the world has taught you to believe.

And I wanna go back real quick though. This is the coaching ideas. Yeah. Agitation and accountability to get to where you wanna go. That's right.

What's the other side? The therapy.

Tell me how it went this last week. And you'll tell me exactly what you told me before. And then you'll tell me exactly what you told me before. And so you end up venting to me every time we talk. And then you end up looping when you get in an argument with someone.

Looping is called self summarizing. You keep saying something, but say it slightly different. That's an addictive state. Venting and looping become addictive and it deepens the narrative that you're not good enough. You don't have worth.

You can't make friends. That's the problem with it. And if you do the if you've studied some of the research, a lot of our more recent generations, they deal only in emotion. They don't deal in systems that work. This is how I feel today.

In other words, you're trying to be something someone wants you to be. Well, in a in a very subtle way, that's what financial planners have done to their clients. I need you to focus on the things that I want you to focus on. I'm gonna get you a higher rate of return. I'm gonna give you a plan.

I'm gonna do. I'm gonna I'm gonna miss the whole point. The question should be, who are you? What do you wanna become? And how are we gonna take a financial plan and build that around your lifestyle?

How are we gonna build it around your trips? How are we gonna build it around your family? How can we create more love in your family instead of more rates of return, a higher rate of return? The questions are the wrong ones if we want to maximize happiness, joy, and well-being.

The expression I've used is follow systems not sentiment.

And that's where the emotion comes in. And emotion is what's doing us harm.

Emotion can self sabotage or take over, make irrational decisions. Right. Like, oh.

They need to be married. Yeah. Emotional logic, the intuitive aspect needs to be married.

Well, another's another expression I've used before. It's principles first, preferences second. If your preference or your authentic self is within the realm of following a principle, a universal truth that's infinitely applicable, then you are moving in a healthy direction forward. But if you believe that you're the exception to a rule, the universal truth, you're gonna have to pay the piper at some point because that's not how it works. I can't lie and expect everyone around me to think that I'm trustworthy.

I can't steal and expect everyone around me to do this. I'm not suggesting that's an apples to apples comparison, but you get the idea. There are principles that kind of govern us all, and that's what you're talking about. Back to the therapist's question though. Not all therapists are like that.

Some therapists do therapy

There's some good ones out there.

With a coaching mindset. No.

There's some great ones out there. They don't wanna

blank statement that, but generally speaking, a lot of venting.

What where it it changed it tipped me over is when I was getting my degree was when I was reading some research articles on it. And it just says coaching is much more effective because coaching doesn't allow the venting, the looping, and it helps you go from a to b. Then later on, I added the irritation versus the agitation because of another research article I read.

K. What what's else on this the list?

So after we get to mental health, we have six and seven. Adjustment to leisure activities. We don't do if we don't do leisure activities with intent, leisure activities become aimless. And our bodies are not designed to be leisurely.

Mhmm.

They're designed to be productive and in motion. So one of the critical things we must do in retirement is to stay in motion. People who are not in a couch potato is one of the most miserable people you'll ever meet because they sit on the couch, they feed an addictive feel good moment because that's all they're doing. They're not in motion and they become highly critical, highly sarcastic. They might be the most brilliant people in the world, but because they're not doing the things, the systems that provide the right endorphins and the right chemicals in their brain, they get out of balance, and they become very miserable, and they drag everybody down.

You walk into a room of someone like that, and you can just feel it. It just it doesn't feel good to be around them.

Mhmm.

Far better to walk into a room that's light. It's bright. It's it's full of energy.

Mhmm.

We all want that. Even those who say they don't do. They say they don't because they're that's their medicated process to act like, well, I don't need that. I don't need friends, introverts. I can't go into groups like that.

I can't go into social settings. Yeah, you can. You're hiding behind that. That's your medicated behavior right now. And until you are willing to do what is required to do, make the right choice, you will continually to get worse.

You won't stay the same. You'll get more miserable, more miserable until you hit a point where you say, I'm willing to do something about this. I want something different. Think of a dentist. People don't sign up in the morning.

Oh, man. I just haven't seen a dentist in a long time. I need some drilling today just because it's so much fun. They don't go to the dentist until it hurts so much that they're willing to have a needle in their gums or the roof of their mouth because that's less pain than what they know now. That's addiction recovery, and that's what we do when we wanna change behavior.

We have to accept the fact that the Novocaine we're gonna get is actually less painful and will be better in the long term, long run. And that's why and then I'm gonna just go sequence of it. Almost the same stuff, but they all fit within there. The first thing we have to start planning for is our daily structure. What are we going to do with our day?

How will we break it down in a macro sense? So maybe a husband and wife, they spend their mornings apart from each other doing their own things. Number two, how am I gonna create family relationships? I don't get along with my son, my daughter and I get along okay, but my third born, we haven't spoken in five years.

Do you talk about how to address that in the book? I do. Because it's very common that there's an estranged child today. Yeah. Which is so sad.

Yeah. Think of Home Alone. Think of the very first Home Alone, the very last scene. The old man that everyone thought was such a mean guy.

Mhmm.

What was what's this? What's the character?

The neighbor with the shovel.

The neighbor with the shovel, but what's the name of the kid in the movie? Kevin McAllister. Kevin. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I can just hear someone yelling, Kevin. Yeah. Kevin ends up talking to him. Right? And they run into each other at the church.

I think it's Christmas Eve. And they run each other in the church. And basically, Kevin, he does a great interview with the old man. He says, why are you here? He says, well, don't you have any family?

He says, yeah, but my son won't talk to me. And he says, and and that means I don't get a visit with my grandson. And Kevin just says, well, why don't you call him? He goes, oh, no. I can't do that.

Okay. He just told himself a false narrative.

Mhmm.

I can't reach out to my own son who I'm missing right now, especially at this time of year. And I cannot talk to my own grandson who I know doesn't hold the grudge against me that my son does. The grandson's the one who's paying the fiddler right now. And he says, well, just call him. And he goes, maybe you're right.

And then he realizes he has to go home to set the trap for the the was it the water bandits or the

The wet bandits. The

wet bandits. Yeah. Okay. And very last scene, he looks out his window and he sees the son drive up and the grandson run up or the granddaughter run up and hug her grandpa.

Yeah. It's very tender moment.

See, he has to have that. That's that's a driving that's a hardwired aspect of retirement and human humanity.

But it's not that easy. It's No. Most of these relationships are not a phone call from healing.

Let me reframe that. I agree with you that it's not that easy, but I'm gonna argue with you it's not that hard.

Okay.

Pray tell. Okay. So think about the systems again. Go back to systems that you've talked about for so long. If your system is to always criticize, that system doesn't work.

What what else could you do besides criticize? If criticism doesn't work But it's

could you do? Hard to change that kind of habit. I mean, you've done something your whole life.

Mhmm.

So to relearn how to communicate, how to act around people.

How did you learn how to do it in

the first place? Well, I I think most people's behavior was an accident of just a feedback loop of different experiences

What if it was just their environment and they did it one time, one one step, one criticism at a time? And when you criticize someone let me do a parallel with drinking. They say I've never drank beer before, but I've also never criticized before. So I criticize someone, it kinda felt good to chew on someone. Mhmm.

I get a natural electrochemical. We can call it endorphin, but the ones I'm getting are addictive. Mhmm. And remember the brain remember. The brain, just so you know, the brain can't tell the difference between an inside out opioid and an outside in.

So if I give you a criticism and I feel kinda good about that, and I take a drink of beer, I kinda feel good right now. The brain doesn't know how I got it. It doesn't even care. To it, a drug is a drug. All right.

So what we don't understand is that the way we're medicating today is simply because we're telling ourselves false narratives, and that's the way we've always done it. So it starts with deliberately trying something new. So you're gonna go visit with, let's just say your grandson or your granddaughter or your son or whatever. And you're gonna intentionally go for one hour without a single criticism, Which means my grandpa couldn't tell me that I looked like a girl. Was raised in the seventies, had long hair, introduced me as his granddaughter, that didn't feel very good.

If I didn't That's what

your grandpa did? Yeah. I would love to see a picture of you in long hair. Yeah.

Well, I actually used to have some. Yeah. And if I didn't drive a Ford and or an American car, oh, he let me have it. So that's the narrative I grew up with. Right?

Well, was it really fun being around someone who criticized everything I did? Though even the way I looked, even the way I dressed, I could never seem to do anything that met with his approbation.

Mhmm.

So here's it would be the first thing that a grandparent could do. Stop criticizing for one hour. Go home, talk to your wife about it. Say, how did you do? How did it feel?

What was that like? And then when you're really getting good at it, pay attention to how they felt. Because right now all you're centered on is yourself. Too many retirees become How can I put this? They walk themselves into a narcissistic type role.

They moan and they bitch about every pain that they have. They as soon as the grandkids come over, go, how you doing grandpa? Oh, this is hurting and this is hurting. Just for what it's worth you guys, they don't care. They just don't care about every pain that you have.

As a matter of fact, it's a great way to push them away. That's called collusion. Let's try one more. What if for the next hour, all you did was talk to your child, grandchild about school, sports, dance, cheerleaders. My granddaughters are cheerleaders.

I don't like cheerleading. To me, it's the biggest distraction known to man in a football game. I know that some people, like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, I get that.

Well, cheer is a very aggressive sport, but it's like you're trying to have competing sports. Right. The game is

In Texas, this is where I live now and where my granddaughters are.

Mhmm.

Cheerleading is as big as the football game just about.

Mhmm.

Well, I've been humbled and I've been corrected and I've been taught. And now I go to a football game to watch my granddaughters. And at halftime, they'll dance. And then I go to dance recitals. And Mike, I don't know anything about dance.

It doesn't make any sense to me, this modern creative type dance. And I will ask my granddaughter, say, okay, what did that mean? I don't know, Baba. Okay. Well, what does that mean?

I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it's her passion. She doesn't get enough of it. So when I go over, I say, when's your next one? How did it go?

Which one are you doing? Oh, and here was a big one for me. This was a big one. She was doing a solo. This was in her sophomore year.

No, her junior year. She's a senior this year, her junior year. And she wanted to practice it. So she had this gym that she could go practice in. And she invited me to come and watch her practice because I was gonna be out of town for the performance, at least we thought I was.

I ended up making it. So we went there and I said, okay, Abigail, what do you want me to do? She said, Bob, I just need you to watch and tell me what that was like. I said, what's my rules of engagement here for criteria? She said, there aren't any.

Just what works. So I made my own up. Mhmm. So she did the first time through and I just watched. And I asked a few questions and, you know, she was gonna practice it again.

I said, okay. Let's do it again, Abigail. I'm gonna look for a few things. By the time she did it her seventh or eighth time, I was intimately integrated with what she was doing, the movement she makes, the transitions she was doing. Mhmm.

I this was so beyond my capacity. But as I asked more questions and learned about her, I was so involved with it Mhmm. That it became part of me for her to do well at the performance. Mhmm. And her mother came up to me afterwards, my daughter-in-law, and she just said, baba, I can't tell you how much that meant to her.

Just that you cared. I don't get it very well, but I I cared enough because what means more to me than anything is that little girl giving me a hug and telling me she loves me and coming up from behind me when I'm sitting in a sofa and she comes in to visit me and hugging me and saying, I love you, Baba, and sending me a text message. Hey, Baba. I love you for no reason.

Mhmm.

Mike, I can't tell you. That's that's the best thing in the world, and I'm hardwired to feel that way. There isn't a grandpa or a grandma in the world who wouldn't want to have that. It takes one thing. Stop making it about yourself and make it about them.

How difficult is it, or how much time does it take to shift from what is currently either not working or maybe it's just the status quo to this kind of a newer relationship? And then as a follow-up question, how common how many people do you think actually have the level of connection that you have versus what you see out there?

May I ask answer the last one first. That's a tough question to answer.

And here's why I wanna ask it. When I ask people in their financial plan, what do you wanna do with your time? They'll say, we want to travel for a few years, but and most people don't actually care for the travel. I don't I

They say it because that's what everyone says.

They say it because they they say they used to think, we want to see the national parks,

to see

this, so I'll go all that fine. What do you want to do with your time that once all those bucket lists are done? It's always I want be more involved with my grandkids. And one of two things typically happens. They're the free babysitter and after time they typically start to resent it

That's because

then they're suffocated and they don't have freedom and they're just a cheap babysitter. Or it's like they can't get enough time and so then those resentments being built up because they don't get enough time with the kids or the grandkids, and the parents are busy and it's just hard to kind of coordinate it all, and then and so it usually ends up with friction and not what you're describing. So I'm willing to bet you're the exception to the rule

in this. There's two moving parts in it though. And one is the relationship you have with the child. So I have a a golf buddy of mine back in Washington and he was just talking about what you said. I was part of their their life when they made this church.

They moved from one city to another, and they moved their daughter, single daughter with three children in. And his one rule was I'm not gonna become a chauffeur, and I'm not gonna become a built in babysitter. Babysitter. Mhmm. But the relationship in the family isn't such that that's gonna fly, and so he's become a chauffeur.

And our golf tournaments, our tee times are always around him driving people around to different places and his babysitting time. And so that means the relationship between father and daughter wasn't where it needed to be, so the boundary got violated there.

Isn't that an imbalance of power A kind of a version of bullying?

Yeah. But it's a bullying from daughter to father.

Mhmm. But the father's giving the father's being nice, not kind. Yes. Which you talk about in your book, by the way. Nice and kind are different.

Yeah. You go ahead and define that. You know this. Right?

Well Do remember this? This is your here's what I've

remembered Uh-huh.

Is that nice is without boundaries. So nice guys finish last because they have no boundaries, there's no self respect, they'll do anything just to get the attention of someone. Because they need that. And these are my words, and I've had to learn that it doesn't mean that a jerk finishes first, but if I remember you define kindness as and the con there's like a little little bit of love in this conversation. It's unconditionally seen the good in someone, like giving them the benefit of doubt, wanting to help them Mhmm.

But still having your boundaries that you hold with civility.

That's it.

Is that close enough?

Kindness is having being civil, but having a boundary. And the part of the love that you said remember, define love differently than the world does. The the way the world defines love, especially Hollywood and the Beatles, doesn't work. That's a system that's broken. I have too many people who've said, doctor Hemmer, I love my wife or I love my husband, but we're getting a divorce.

If you truly understood love, that's impossible because love is emotional intimacy. It's called mutual trust and respect. You don't divorce somebody that you have the ultimate trust and respect for because you can't trust and respect them until you trust and respect yourself, and there's your identity.

Mhmm.

You've got to start there. The challenge that we have in the story is too many people don't have a boundary. They want to be liked, and you and if you're trying to be liked, you have no self respect. Someone who's civil, who's kind, will say, that doesn't work for me. This is not the time I'm gonna be babysitting tonight.

You'll need to find someone else. Or I'm not taking your children to school every single morning. I've got my own life to live. I'll help you when I can, but that's not going to work because here's how we're going to do it. Mhmm.

Now you may not like me, but you will respect me.

The

goal in life is not to be liked. And that's one of the problems that too many people have as they start moving into retirement. They try to be liked. They they'll they try to be liked by their children or their grandchildren. So they buy them things, they give things away.

They have the bleeding heart syndrome, which you've spoken about in your practice. Those are all boundaryless type of behaviors. They will not get you anywhere near happiness. As a matter of fact, the antithesis is true.

It bleeds you dry. You end up poor in a tough situation, and they don't really benefit from it. They'll just move their their greed or their needs or their codependency just to the next host that then

That's right. Use codependency and you nailed it. There's a book out Adam Grant, I believe, is the author called Give and Take.

I love Adam Grant.

So he wrote a book on it and what what stuck with me the most was this idea of of service. Talks about people who always it's always a quid pro quo. Yeah. Or then there's those who just take. They're the takers.

Mhmm. And then there's two versions of givers. The first giver is one who gives without boundaries. They end up fizzling out. They end up losing the ability to give and they end up being served because they can no longer give because they were nice.

They gave and they gave and they gave. And one of the challenges we've had in society is we've praised women. You're the greatest, you're the best, your husbands and your men should treat you this way and that. That's done nothing but harm. That is not helping them because they're no They were just being nice to them.

And they were just saying, man has to treat you this way. We're creating a codependent society when we constantly praise one and we rip apart the other, which is what we've done societally for about thirty years. Then he said, but the second group of givers thrives because they give with a boundary. And once they give us a boundary, they learn how far they can go. They learn how to give more.

So who do you always go to to get something done when it's critical? Someone who has a ton of time or someone who's very productive in getting a lot done. Always you go to the ladder because they can. Well,

someone I knew a while ago had told me, if you give and never receive, at some point, you have nothing less to give. You have to have a boundary so you're receiving and so you can keep giving. Is that kind of what you're talking about or am I missing something?

I'm they're they're referring to never receive and it may not be in kind.

It may not be in kind, but you can't spend all of your life giving, giving, giving. That's right. You have needs and they need to be met too. Right.

This get this can get a little complex, and we might go too far one way and you can pull me back. But when I teach people some of these techniques like with their grandchildren, if you're gonna be interested in your grandchildren, they're probably not gonna come back and say, grandpa, what was it like for you when you were my age? That's not gonna come back.

Yeah.

So when I say it's not gonna be in kind, it's not gonna be

in the way you're giving. You're giving them undivided attention about them. But you might praise your grandkids. They might never ask you those questions, but you've got other social connections. There's a boundary.

It's not just your grandkids. You've got your golf group. Yes. You've got your bride. You've got other people that are also giving you what you need.

So from an ecosystem, your needs are still being met. They just not might not be an equal weight of every single

Abigail as an illustration. I agree with everything you've said, and that is another way to have it received back. Right? But when I when I told you that she came up from behind me and gave me a hug or she'll send me a text, she'll ask to borrow my pickleball paddles, and then she'll she'll send me the cue messages. Bob, I love you so much.

And and then when I see her, she takes me about it. And by the way, her boyfriend was one of the first ones to buy one of my books. She sends me a note. Bob, I bought your book. I can't wait to read it.

I had another granddaughter who with her own money bought one of my books, and she she videotaped her reading through it. She's reading it. She's going like this. So Baba says, it was the funniest thing. You're telling me that's not a reward?

That's a huge receipt. That's what I mean. Look how much I'm getting back because I'm focused on I didn't tell my grandchildren about the book. They overheard me talking to my son who was asking me, dad, when's the book coming out? And I said, okay.

It just got released. And I sent a note to my boys, and they helped out. But they told their grandchildren, my grandchildren, and the grandchildren wanted to be part of that. That was I don't know. It's kinda cool.

That was a huge give and take. But it was the give and take with boundaries with tremendous affection. I felt like my granddaughters bought my book, Mike. That's it. I'm good.

Okay.

Did we cover the rest of the

last Oh, just one more thing. Yeah. So I did adjustment to leisure activities. And number seven, notice it's last, financial planning. Financial planning covers all

It's hard to do financial planning if you don't know what those things look like. Now you're an anomaly.

I I know that. 99. I mean, in many ways.

Right? My whole my whole decade in this industry has been challenging the assumptions of the industry, which is why I do this. And maybe

that's why we're we're talking this way. I'm arguing that 99% of retirement planning, planning is all numbers based. You don't talk about lifestyle. You might say you do, and I've seen the advertisements.

We're not trained psychologists. No. You're not. But you don't need

to be. Purview. That's not true. I disagree with that.

I think it would be difficult for for a financial professional to try and help a family figure out their issues.

Baseline is where we're we're differentiating.

Okay.

You can say, tell me about your travel. I mean, when you're finished with travel, what do you wanna do? Oh, what's the role that you wanna play with your children? What's the role you wanna play

with your children? Okay. I agree with that. We can't ask those questions. It's just we can't solve if there are problems.

That's not our But to recommend I have had someone actually in the office as well about a month ago. He was talking about how he has one son that's independent doing well, one son that's still at home, a 30 year old kid that gets upset when this this guy and his wife, the couple, go out to dinner on a nice date night and they don't bring something back for the son or help them the son's living at home. Said look, we can do your financial planning, but this is a risk that we're we need to address here. He goes well, how do we solve it? I said marriage counseling or family counseling.

Family counseling. I I can't do that. Right. But that will be an issue because it's affecting his ability. And that's mental health.

He's working in his seventies so that his son has what he needs as a 30 year old kid. That that seemed off to me.

So we're we're actually agreeing. We just might have come at about it a little bit different. You as a financial planner have the capacity and probably should have that as part of your responsibility to help them see what they don't see. Most people, when they come into a financial planning office, comes in with no trust. Yeah.

In in the top 12 industries that have the lowest trust, anything to do with money is in the is four of them.

Well, it's because it's a commission driven industry.

Not all commission, but predominantly. I agree with you.

Yeah. I mean, sell a mutual fund, get 5%. Sell an annuity, get six to 7%.

Manage funds, get x percent.

Yeah. Get your your 1% of assets. Chase the ultra wealthy to get more money for

the same Some of them are just annuity based, and that's all they sell. In other words, they have a one size fits all. No matter what your problem is, the annuity is gonna solve that problem. Yep. How is that building trust?

How is that planning lifestyle? How is that asking all the questions that need to be asked? So in the book I talk I think I kept it in there. But when I train financial planners, what I help them understand is that their first job is to find the right problem. Then start the solving.

And most financial planners are men. So I'm stereotyping in this the following comment, but we inherently are problem solvers. So how many men out there listening will automatically start solving your wife's problem as she starts telling you her frustration only to have her get so mad at you, she won't talk to you now for three or four hours because you're solving her problems again. Well, problem is you're solving the wrong problem. That's not the problem she's coming to you with, but because you're already thinking past it.

In other words, you're thinking about the solution and that's all about, well, I think you should, and I think you should, and I think you should. Why do grandchildren not wanna go to grandparents? Because they're all talking about I, I, I, I. Financial planners are no different. Why do you have such low trust?

Because it's all about you financial planners. Stop thinking about you and your damn commission. What if you started thinking about them? What's the best thing for them? And I can tell you there are six things here that you could be talking about that you could just ask a basic question to get them thinking through because remember as they walk in, you probably do have a good solution.

You might. We accept if you're all you do is sell annuities, then you don't.

No. But there's there's always a solution if your toolbox is big enough. Right. And everyone should be different, but you can't know until you find the right problems to solve. And what's interesting as you're talking about this is I'm immediately going to the couple that is comfortable with risk versus the couple that's not comfortable

with

risk.

Mhmm.

And how do you know which risks are they comfortable with? See, when I said risk, what do you think of? Market risk. What if they're not concerned about market risk, they're concerned about inflation risk? Buying an annuity is subject to inflation risk, not market risk.

So what risks are you concerned about? Which ones are gonna keep you up at night? Which ones are not gonna be What if it's health? What if it's health? What if it I mean, there's so many risks.

Unless you define the problems, you'd have no idea what to solve. I mean, I wrote an article for Kipling about the 10 ways you can take income in retirement.

Right.

They all work, but which one's right for you? You can't know unless you well, I've yet to have someone go through something like what your book talks about to plan their lifestyle so that we're able to plan appropriately their financial plan. I wish that were the case.

I have a utopic goal. It's And that's to change the narrative in the financial planning industry. So more financial advisers start becoming human instead of guys in a suit and tie collecting a commission and talking about it's the next new customer. I gotta close this deal. That's the wrong way to approach it.

It's a very lucrative industry. Well, why don't you take that? Again, I go back to can money buy happiness. Mhmm. What if we could take those huge commissions and simply say, what can we do to better position our clients to experience connections

Mhmm.

Growth, learning Yeah. Good health, mental and physical. What do we what questions do we need to ask to help them see the big picture? Whenever I do a training for financial planners in the in sales, This is kinda how we go. I will ask.

When they come in, they start telling you their story. Do you know what you're going to do? It's not a 99% of the time. It's like, yeah, we already know doctor Himmler. Said, okay.

And what do you do then? Well, we start solving the problem for them. Yeah. And so who's doing the talking? We are And are they listening?

No. They're thinking about what they need to tell us. And are you listening? No. Yeah.

Your financial planning. And some companies are so good at their marketing. They put you on this assembly line from the dinner seminar to an invitation to a webinar or whatnot. You're just on a marketing line. It's like an assembly line putting together a microwave engine

or a microwave Throwing spaghetti against the wall, hoping it sticks.

Yeah. Well, it's a numbers game then, but you're not touching humans. You're treating them like objects.

And

then they train you to have money control you. And what they say to control you and that interest rate fluctuation to control you.

It's so backwards. You wanna wake up?

I mean, go to bed at night every night, am I gonna have enough money to retire? That's not happiness. That's called anxiety. That's called stress.

Now you need to have enough money, but what's the point of the money if you don't have purpose?

Hence, two plus two is four.

Is that what you're getting at?

That's what I'm getting at. You need to make it well rounded. Make the conversation balanced. We talk about a work life balance, right? Well, that's not even true.

You have to balance the imbalance. You will always spend more time working if you're the breadwinner, and you're always gonna spend more time with the kids than you are doing your own thing. I get it. But until you start respecting the most important things, that's the identity and the purpose. Your balance will be so imbalanced, you'll be out of it.

So too much of a good thing is too much. That's the paradoxical balance as you and I have talked about before. In a paradoxical balance, you need to know what two things, two paradoxes are you going to balance. So in work life, I recognize that I'll be at work more, but you know what I'm not going to miss? My anniversary, my wife's birthday, my grandchildren.

My wife, thank goodness for her. She takes care of buying all the gifts. Right? But we don't miss birthdays. We don't miss special events.

We moved to Texas because it was cheaper to move to Texas and to keep flying down because all our grandchildren were there. Little tongue in cheek, but not too far from the truth. And we're here visiting you other than how much fun that is, but I have three grandchildren just down the street from you. I spent we had a party at the hotel last night in the pool. We had our bedroom was a mess.

It was great because we were with our grandchildren. Yeah. We took them for three hours. Over the top. Good.

That it's hard to beat that. And that's what I'm talking about, balancing the imbalance. So

kind of an all encompassing question. Everything you're talking about feels abstract and near impossible to actually implement or affect positive, you know, actual change. It's one thing in the world of psychology to say, Oh, we should just be happier. Oh, well And my mind goes to the YouTube self help junkies, the people that say, Oh, here's the life hack to be happier. Here's this This is thick.

This is dense. How in the world does someone actually take all this? And my mind's going to Bob. You know, remember the movie What About Bob? How do they take baby I don't if that's a good analogy or not, but you know, baby steps?

Steps to to affect positive change to create and move towards the life that they want.

What about Bob's baby steps is a different way of saying you have to compound good behavior and replace the compounded bad behavior. You got to the point of being narcissistic in your approach to talking to people by doing it over and over and over again. So let me see if I can answer it in this way. I just had this conversation. Taught researching all of this over the last twenty, twenty five years.

I've become a facilitator for addiction recovery groups. I've taught it in the prison system. I've taught it multiple different churches around my area. And so I've gotten really a good understanding of how to recover from different addictions. Being a grandparent

A can behavior be an addiction too. Right? Or is addiction also kinda like a coping mechanism? You're addicted to this methodology of behavior?

Addiction is simply any behavior or any drug or anything you take into your body or anything you do to stop the pain on a temporary basis. When you criticize, when you talk about yourself, when you relate, when you one up, when you're sarcastic, you're basically doing something to stop the pain because you didn't connect. There's some some pain in there, and it's a temporary medication. So instead of going into it deeply, I may just explain how you compound in reverse. How

do you heal?

How do you heal? So there's three things that are critical. We have to know our why, then we need to know what to do. And that's what everybody writes about. Covey's seven habits.

He does a good why and he does a good what. Almost everything I've read is heavy on the why and heavy on the what. Churches, heavy on the why, heavy on the what. Where we're not good at is the how.

And

that's what I wanna share another. I've already done one. Don't criticize for an an hour and then debrief with your wife.

And are these all in the book? I think they are.

All of these are in the book. Yeah. So one thing that we could we could practice on is I'm gonna give you a why. Sorry. I'm gonna give you a how.

And you can do this with your spouse or you can do this with your grandchildren or you can build a relationship back with one of your children. And it's called flipping. F l p p n. This will carry you the rest of your life because there's another deeper one off of flipping. So you learn the flipping concept.

You'll be able to start mending relationships or making friends or if you're single, if you've had a divorce or a spouse pass away, start the dating process again. I've got an unpublished book on marriage above the belt. In other words, teaching people how to connect emotionally. The gateway to your bedroom is always through emotional intimacy. When people understand that, then they realize that this invisible divorce that they have, this no physical or emotional intimacy is busted, has to go back to emotional intimacy.

So flipping, frequent. Let's just say you're my son and we're somewhat estranged. We're not talking very often. So I want to talk to you as often as I can. And then most people in my position, if I said that to them, I go, I can't I can't talk to them.

It's because they're already getting fearful and they're already telling themselves false narratives.

Mhmm.

That's because of how you talk to them. I'll tell you a story about flipping here, and then I'll let me finish it.

So low risk Flipping's frequency.

Frequent as often as you can. Low risk. So that means the topic can't be sensitive. Personal has to be about them, not me. So grandparents, stop making it about you.

Positive. No venting, no looping, keep it upbeat, and then the most important one and the most difficult, neutral. So I'll tell you a quick story and I'll cover it. I was teaching when I was developing this stuff, I taught a class at the Boys and Girls Club in Geek Harbor, Washington where I live because I just wanted to get this material out there. Wasn't charging, wasn't selling anything.

I just I also needed the experience to try to teach people how to do this. So it was a parenting class and had a lady. She was so quiet. She was sitting to my right, but right next to a whiteboard. And she raised her hand right at the end of the class and she said, I I got a a real problem.

I don't know what to do. I wonder if you could help me. And the class was there, and I said, okay. What's going on? She says, well, this is a Thursday night.

Mhmm. Tomorrow morning, I'm driving with my daughter to Spokane, which is five hours. We're gonna visit a couple colleges in that area to see if my what my daughter wants to go, which one she wants to go to. And my initial thought was, okay. I don't I don't know what the issue is.

And I said, that sounds like it could be fun. What am I missing? And she said, I haven't spoken to my daughter in two years. I said, well, what's going on? She says, well, her father and I got divorced two years ago and she lives with me.

But she's so angry. She still hasn't spoken to me in two years. I said, mean, what? Not not spoke to you. No.

Literally. She'll come home from school and I'll say, how'd it go? And she'll find. So it's the one worders. Right?

The ones the monosyllabic vocabulary of teenagers. And she goes, I'm scared to death to get in the car with her because we'll sit there for five hours and she'll have her earbuds in. Mhmm. And I'll sit there quietly, and I won't have anything to do. And she won't even talk to me.

Now it's palpable. I can feel Mhmm. What's going on. So I said, alright. So I walked over to the whiteboard and I wrote flipping.

Mhmm. And we talked about the meaning frequent, often as you can, low risk, cannot be, did you do your homework? You know, did you pass the history test? You know, personal has to be about her. It can't be about you.

And I've in the in talking to her right after class, I found out that she's her only communication with her is, did you do your homework? Have you taken out the garbage? Did you do your chores? Did you pass the test? You know, those kinds of things.

And why weren't you home on time? So everything from the mother to the daughter, think of the system, is either critical, judgmental, and uncomfortable for the daughter. So without meaning to, a loving mother didn't have the skill set or the tools to invite her daughter. She was irritating her. She wasn't agitating her.

So she had this pickle that she was addressing and she was really nervous. And so we talked about it and she goes, okay, but I don't know what to ask her. What's the first thing I can ask her? Because I need to get her going. Oh, and by the way, taught her one more thing, part of flipping.

In a conversation with anybody like your children, your grandchildren, and what you've done with me today Mhmm. Is whatever answer they give you, it doesn't matter if you agree or not. It's not your job to judge. You're neutral. Remember, you don't care what they say.

In other words, listen without listening for anything, which is hard for people, especially grandparents.

Can you say that in a different way?

Don't have a bias about what they say. So if I if I'm the grandpa and he's talking to his grandson, I said, what car are you buying? And I know that I think Fords are the best, which was my grandpa's deal. And if he said anything but Ford, I know I'm gonna judge. That was a stupid error.

Listen without listening for anything. Don't be judgmental. The the next question is, why did you choose to buy the Ford? Or Mhmm. What what about that car did you want?

I wouldn't someone feel like that's judgment. You're questioning their decision.

If you can say it neutrally, it's not. Or why is that one? What did you want? What'd you like about that car? Anything like

that? Softer to me. Yeah. Well, if I have

a good relationship with the kid, I can say, well, why that one? Yeah. When I talk to you and I say, why is that? Mhmm. You're not going, oh, Richard's judging me.

Yeah.

That's there's a there's at first, it's gonna be tough. Okay. So let's go back a little bit. So I said, okay, tell me what's going on in her life right now. Well, knows she loves history and she's been studying for this history test and she took that test today.

And then she she told me a few things. So we came up with a singular question to ask her that would be safe. And then I taught her how to inflect her voice neutrally. So the next morning, she drives off and I don't see her for a week. Right?

Mhmm.

So the following Thursday, she's waiting for me half an hour early when I get there to set up to teach the class. And I'm thinking this could be good, this could be bad. Mhmm. So I looked at her and I said, how'd it go? I ain't even got in the classroom yet.

She started crying. And I'm going, what happened? She goes, I asked her the question that we talked about. And then instead of judging her, I asked her another question based on what she told me. And then I asked her another question.

And then now she's having a hard time talking. She said, doctor Hemmer, she talked to me for five hours. I couldn't shut her up. And what about the trip home? She said, she talked to me all the way.

I've never in that those ten hours, I talked to my daughter more than I have in the previous two years she's been in my home. Wow. Grandparents, parents, if you want to have a relationship with your children, be present. Mhmm. Talk to them about them.

Mhmm.

Don't insert your judgments and your alleged wisdom. Be neutral. Learn about it. And eventually, they'll come to trust you and then say, what do you think? But until they say, what do you think?

Don't say what you think because they just don't care.

That's that's a lot. That's quite powerful. We could talk probably all day, but Yeah. We got to one. Be Yeah.

We're probably near out of time for for this episode. Any last comments about the book before we before we wrap up? Something you wanted to mention that we just didn't cover?

Probably a lot. But the first thing that comes to my mind is every single person born has the same goal. We all feel the same way. We all want to connect. And I I'm putting an emphasis on the connecting, but I don't want to discount the learning, the changing, and the growth.

I don't wanna discount that. Because when we run from connecting, it hurts. When we run from learning, it hurts. So one of the I never forget this story. I was talking to a young man about your age, very brilliant, very articulate.

He's he's wanting to reach out and and help a certain segment. And as we were talking about this, he says, yeah, I have a father father I think it was his father-in-law who when he retired looked at me when I was talking about something. He says, I don't need to know anything. I don't need to grow. I don't need to read a book.

I've learned any everything I've ever needed to know. I've already learned it. I'm retired now. I don't need to grow anymore. That guy's just cut his life in half.

That hurt. And I could see it in his eyes because he can't even have an intellectual conversation with this father-in-law because he he won't learn. He won't grow. It has to be his way or the highway. Your ability to connect is gonna dictate your longevity.

Your ability to learn and grow is gonna dictate your longevity. It's also gonna dictate your health, both your mental and your physical. If you really want to enjoy, you want to make your retirement years the encore years, the best chapter that's ever happened in your life, think about all the stuff you've learned. How many times have you said, when I get old enough, I'm gonna do X, or when I retire, I'm gonna do Y. All these passions, all these things that you've done your whole life, or when I get old enough, I'm not gonna do it this way because I learned what not to do.

Now's the perfect time. There isn't a better time ever for you to make your life better, your wife or your husband's life better, your children's life better, and your grandchildren's life better, which will make the world better. You literally can change the world one relationship at a time by learning one new habit. Just be interested. Stop making it about you and you'll find that the world's gonna give back in droves.

It won't give back immediately, but it's going to start giving back. You need to know what to look for. Thank you. Doctor Richard Hemmer, everyone,

your Encore years now available on Amazon. I think exclusively Amazon. That's the end of our show today. Appreciate it. This is How to Retire On Time, though it wasn't a financial show, still a good show.

Don't forget to like and subscribe to us, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want financial advice with a conversation about the, you know, not financial part of it, that's a lot of what we do here at Kedric Wealth. You can go to retireontime.com and click the button that says discover what's possible to get started if you wanna dive into that with us. But sincerely, moles here at Kedric Wealth and our studios, we wanna thank you for spending your time, your most precious asset with us today. We'll see you on the next show.