Doug Nordman: Military Retirement Benefits

Welcome to the new retirement podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Doug Nordman, a retired Navy submarine commander, author and founder of the Military Guide about what life is like being financially independent and how he got there by being smart about military retirement benefits. Doug lives an amazing life in Hawaii and he travels the world. I met Doug at fincon a couple of years ago and have been a fan of his work and surfing adventures. Before we jump in, just a couple quick facts in the military. So there are currently about 1.3 million active military personnel, representing about a little bit less than half a percent of the total population. And There are about 22 million veterans in the U.S. this is as of 2014. This represents about 7% of the population. One interesting dividing line is that about 1.4% of women and 13.4% of men. So a pretty big gender line there. So with that, Doug, welcome to our show. It's great to have you join us.

Thanks, Steve. I really enjoyed your last episode with Cameron Huddleston. That was a good one.

Yeah, thanks. It was super informative for me and makes me realize I need to get the kind of power attorney stuff fully set. Kids are getting older, too. So, Doug, I just wanted to kind of first jump in and kind of explore what kind of like a day in the life is like for you. So you're financially independent, you've been there for a while. It kind of looks like you live this kind of dream life. And I see you on Facebook, you're traveling, you're surfing, you're going to conference, some cool conferences. So, yeah, like, for you, what is a day in the life like and a year in the life like for you?

Well, like everybody else on Facebook and social media, I only show the highlights, but I literally start each morning with the surf forecast. I want to know if it's something where I need to go out and do dawn patrol and good surf or if I'm going to be free to do other stuff. I'm usually up pretty early in the mornings, and one of my habits is to sit down and try to write first thing in the morning, every morning, as much as I can. And even if it's just 20 minutes, you know, work on the next blog post or an email or some book chapter or something like that. But then surfing two or three times a week, usually at dawn when it's a little calmer and my friends are out there. And then after that, I've got the rest of the day free to play. I mean, we all do chores, we all have projects around the house, all the normal stuff with life. We do travel. I like traveling. An itinerary of about 50 to 60 days, two or three months, twice a year, that's pretty much as much as we can handle. Now we could travel for longer periods or we could make shorter trips, but I find that about a two month itinerary is pretty good.

So you're going off on trips for two months at a time and you do that twice a year. So you're traveling four months a year?

Yeah, pretty much. We'll anchor that around something like fincon. We're going to start this next trip in September with fincon, but then we're going to go over to Europe and roam around Europe until, you know, until we get cold or until we want to come back to Hawaii. So we'll probably be out there for all of September, most of October, maybe into November.

Nice. You realize that sounds pretty insane to most people probably, or do you know a lot of people? Well, maybe you know, people in your demographic that are doing it before. For me, that seems like a third of my life spent traveling. Sounds incredible.

Exactly.

But very different than most people experience.

There's two things. It's, it's empty nest or travel. You know, our daughter's launched from the nest, so it's just the two of us. And the other one, I'm afraid, is travel while you still can. Don't, don't save it for old age.

Right, Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's something I've been talking more and more about that, you know, you only live once. You know, nobody knows what's going to help with their health. And when health goes sideways, it kind of doesn't go sideways in a small way and usually not in a predictable way. And you know, depending on what happens with your health, if it's, you know, if you can't recover from it, that's it, you know, you've kind of lost your opportunity. So it's great that you have that, have that approach. So. And how long have you been kind of living this lifestyle?

Since. Since 2002. Just over 17 years. And we're just going to keep going as long as we can.

So.

Active duty in 2002.

Wow. So you kind of, I was reading your blog and you kind of said, all right, you were thinking about kind of doing a transition from the military to civilian life, working. And then I think you ran the numbers and said, you know what, I can just be financially independent now.

Yeah. And part of it too was when I was in the military as an engineer, a nuclear trained officer and a middle level manager. When I started looking at the transition, the things that came up as my, my subjects that I would do best in was nuclear engineering and mid level manager. And I had enough of that. I wanted to spend more time with family. And this was just back when the Trinity study and all the things that led to the 4% safe withdrawal rate, they had just hit the street. And so it was real early days, but it looked like we had enough. And when you get a military pension, it's indexed to inflation. You've got cheap health care with an active duty retirement. And so that makes financial independence when you're in the military fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, only one out of six people that join the military actually make it to a pension. So it's, it's relatively rare to have the pension.

Right. Wow. So evidently it's working out for you. 17 years into it, I think, I.

Think I can handle another 17 years of this and we'll just keep going.

Nice. Do you, do you feel more financially confident now? I would imagine, yes. Right now, with all, you know, 10 years into this than when you first set out to do this.

And part of that is when you do the Math for the 4% safe withdrawal rate and the success rates and all the probabilities behind the calculators. One of the things that happens is you focus on the failure rates. That's who we are as humans. We focus on the failure of your retirement planning. But if you have a 95% success rate, that means that most of those 95% successes are going to come out with more money than you need. And in our case, we're invested to beat the rate of inflation. And we've kept our spending fairly flat. It's gone up a little bit, but not past the rate of inflation. And after 17 years, it's compounded to the point now where we know we've got more than we need and it's sustainable for the rest of our lives, not just for the 30 year studies that the 4% safe withdrawal rate looks at.

So your net worth has been going up in retirement.

It's been volatile. Right. 2008, 2009, the Great Recession. We had some numbers that just looked ludicrous, but we'd also had some pretty high numbers in 2007, just before the recession. And so I don't sit there and focus on my net worth every day. I just look at our checking account balance and how much money we have to cash out to fund our lifestyle. And maybe I'll check into the 4% safe withdrawal rate and look at the numbers once in a while. Truth is though, that our non discretionary spending, the things that we have to do, have to spend money on like utility bills, that is all held flat or gone down. And most of our lifestyle spend spending, travel, for example, is discretionary. And so if we have to cut that back, we could but not needed.

Not needed. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, I mean you're a pretty interesting case study because you have lived through the, you know, you kind of retired at the tail end of the first dot com, you know, bubble, then saw some appreciation, then lived through the 2008, 2010, kind of like Great Recession. And did you, did that change like in that, in the midst of that? So you're, you know, you're retired, you're drawing down your savings, did you stay invested?

Similar. Yep. Everybody, everybody goes through this cycle. When you, when you first make that transition, you have the white knuckles on the wheel. You're a little concerned about overspending. And so the first couple of years you're probably paying a lot of attention to how much money's going out and whether or not you're going to survive on the, on the withdrawal rate. By the time we got to the Great Recession, that was six years into my retirement and we were comfortable with that. But still looking at those numbers, it was, it's still emotionally jarring. And you persevere knowing that you've got a good plan and you can cut back your spending if you need to. But we just kept on with our asset allocation. We had faith in that asset allocation. We had a plan, we stuck with that plan and we've stayed with it for those 17 years. The recession is never fun. It doesn't necessarily get better with practice, but you are more accustomed to the cycle and you don't worry about it as much the next time you go through it. And again, all the research that has been out there that finds the flaws in the 4% safe withdrawal rate, that research can be applied to give yourself some variable spending, some human factors. We're not 4% robots. We can do some things to overcome some of the flaws that come around when there's recessions. So you do all that and you just hang on. Yeah, it works out fine.

Right. So have you. You know, I think right now there's a lot of talk about, oh, the market, you know, it's kind of, or at least the ratios, like the Cape ratio. It's kind of. I was actually reading Ben Carlson, and he was like, oh, well, the, the Cape has only been above 33 times in history. And this is one of them. You know, one of them was in 1929. I mean, he went on to qualify that, that, well, you know, hey, we're in a low inflation and a low interest rate environment. So when you look at factor that in it, it's not that extreme. But does it make you want to adjust, do some market timing like, okay, we're going to adjust our portfolio to be more defensive.

It's tempting. And the answer is no. The reason the answer is no is because it's much easier to set an asset allocation to do the research to find your comfort zone. And then if it's working, if you can sleep at night, if you've had it for a couple of years and you don't find any need to adjust it or worry about it, then that asset allocation problem probably matches your risk tolerance for volatility and your inflation. Those are the two I worry about. And after that, you're probably going to have your assets compound faster than inflation. You'll start out at a 4% safe withdrawal rate, but if you're keeping your spending under control and your investments are growing faster than inflation, then your withdrawal rate will actually go down over time, which has been the case for us. Right now our withdrawal rate is around 2.5% and that's considered indefinitely sustainable. And I know we've never had this in history happen before. We've never had different circumstances happen before. We've never had the economy in this position for this time. The market's at a top and we really mean it. Oh my gosh, the Great Depression is coming back. After a while, you learn to turn off the news cycle and go live your life and enjoy your assets knowing that you've got a good plan and you've got a good asset allocation and you're going to just do the best you can. I will point out that there are other contingency plans. You can always cut back on your spending if you feel you have to. You can always actually go out and earn some money. I mean, we joke about the Walmart greeter, but one thing I've learned from 17 years of retirement is that there is always a job out there. And the nice thing about those jobs is that if you're starting financially independent and you decide you need a little more money to tide you over during a rough patch, it doesn't take a lot of money and you're willing to do work that doesn't normally pay very well. For example, working 20 hours at a Starbucks might not be a living wage for most Americans, but you can do that because you might only need 10 or $20,000 in a year to tide you over and keep your portfolio going. It doesn't take much to keep it going.

Right? Yeah, no, I think that's a great perspective and I talk about that too, that I think a lot of people when they're working, they're like, oh, you know, I've been making 100,000 bucks a year, I go to retire, I need to be thinking in that $100,000 number of income and well, if you have Social Security and you have some passive income and your expenses come down and your tax rate comes down, maybe you only really need 60,000 and you're most of the way there. So maybe 20,000 or whatever, an extra 30,000 is it. And there's lots of ways you can make that when you've been making a higher income previously.

An example of travel is a good one because when you're traveling during your working years, you're living like a two week millionaire. You've got two weeks of vacation. You're going to the resort hotel and you're eating every meal out. You're paying Disney prices when you're traveling on your own and when you don't have to do a certain itinerary and you don't have a time limit, well, you can travel at the off peak periods. You can go places and stay somewhere for a month or two. You can actually literally rent an apartment and live like a local at a much cheaper cost per day. It's got a kitchen so you can cook. You're probably going around and shopping the farmers markets and buying interesting food anyway. So you can cook a meal cheaper or eat out at restaurants if you want. You just don't have to live the resort lifestyle when you're doing slow travel. And so it's of course travel hacking for airline miles and cheap airfare. It's turned out that the slow travel we do costs a lot less per day than it did to go stay at a resort while we were working.

Yeah, I think that that's a, that's a great perspective, like living like a millionaire for a week. I like that. I never thought about it that way, but I think that's exactly right.

I'd rather live like one for 17 years.

Right. Yeah. No, I. A couple thoughts. The. Well, first I just went to Glacier National Park, I took my 10 year old and so we, we figured out that we could fly there from here for like, I ended up paying 175 bucks each. But I think I could have actually done it for like $100. Each round trip, like on Allegiant airlines was really cheap. And then I rented this through Outdoorsy, which is like an Airbnb of RVs, this Jeep with a pop up tent. And it was awesome. It was incredible. So I think the whole thing costs 1500 bucks for over a week, like seven nights. And so, you know, I mean, I've gone skiing in Tahoe and you know, we'll spend 1500 bucks on the weekend. It's ridiculous, you know, and now, I mean, I see how insane that is. So it's like I'm like, okay, well, you know, we're staying at a campground, 20 bucks a night. You know, we're cooking outside. I mean, it was, it was great and, you know, relatively inexpensive. The other thing is about the 2.5% drawdown rate. I think that it's interesting to hear your perspective that that's what has happened. I mean, I saw with Michael Kitces that the average person living in retirement, their real expenses drop 1% per year on average. So over a decade, it's a 10% decline in spending. So not inflation adjustments. So it's pretty interesting to see that. So I could see that that would happen. So you're seeing that even though you're active and traveling, you're still bringing your, your. Are you bringing your spend rate down or it's just that your assets have grown and so your withdrawal rate is lower or both?

Yes, it's both. They've grown because we have a portfolio that's very aggressive asset allocation. It's over 90% equities because I've got that military pension coming in every month. It's an equivalent of having an annuity, anchoring your baseline spending and then being aggressive with the rest of your investment portfolio. But we've also kept our spending relatively flat. That retirement spending smile that Kitces refers to, that thing is real and it works great because you're able to spend the time and do the things that are important to you and optimize your spending and your activities around that. We joke about right after you retire, you fire the yard service and do your own yard work. You fire the cleaning service and do your own house cleaning. You stop eating out so much or having food delivered or picking up fast food and you start doing your own cooking. Those are expenses that drop right away just because you have the time to design the lifestyle. You Want now, later on you may go back and start that food delivery again if you don't like cooking. But you do get a chance to figure out the optimum spending for your situation. And while you're controlling your spending and doing the things that you enjoy and optimizing those, your assets are probably growing faster than inflation.

Yeah, well, definitely recently.

Yes, it has been a very long bull market. But I've been through these before and if it's going up 2/3 of the time, it's going to keep going up 2/3 of the time, I think even though we do have the recessions.

Right. Yeah. One other last point before I move on. And I know we're kind of going along this part of it, but so Steve Vernon, he works for the Stanford Longevity Institute and he basically, he and some researchers came out with essentially a two part best practice, which is one, delay for foreign civilians. Delay Social Security till 70 to maximize it. Use that higher income to hedge against your minimum, your non discretionary spending and then take the rest of your savings and be more aggressive, which is what you're doing. So you have essentially the same strategy. You had your pension earlier in your life cycle and you've been more aggressive with your portfolio allocation. And that's worked.

And it's worked very well. And it can work in a way that is comfortable for the person who's doing their own asset allocation. It doesn't all have to be invested. Tesla and Apple and Facebook. It can be invested in just large cap stocks that you have a good growth rate or pay dividends. There's many ways to invest in a 90% asset allocation to equities without feeling like you're going to have a highly volatile portfolio.

And do you just do this all yourself, manage it through Vanguard or something like that?

Exactly. We've been using Fidelity. I've been using fidelity for almost 35 years just because my father did and his father did before him and our daughter does. Now there's really no reason to stay with Fidelity other than a customer. Customer service. Vanguard or Schwab do just as well. We've been simplifying. We used to have a more complicated asset allocation that had some dividend exchange traded fund and some small cap and some international and. And I can see now that I'd rather simplify. And over the next few years we're going to just move to a total stock market index. We've got a low withdrawal rate and we might even be able to live within the dividend rate of the stock market. It just makes it easier.

So are you going to buy like VTSAX or something?

Exactly. We're buying the exchange traded fund version of it. But the exchange traded fund shares that we've owned since 2004, 2005, those had expense ratios of around 0.25%, 0.39%. And of course in 2004 that looked pretty good, but it doesn't look so good today. And going to the total stock market index just drops our expense ratio to 0.03%. And that works out to another vacation a year, or some more lifestyle expansion. I'd rather keep that money than spend it on expense ratios.

I think it's just as an aside, I think it's really interesting to hear you say this. I mean, I know in general Vanguard has kind of dropped the expense ratio on fees. Right. It used to be back in the day, hey, 1% for a mutual fund, actively managed mutual fund. And then it became like, okay, now it's 30 basis points. Then it was like, okay, it's 20 basis points, now it's three basis points. But that 15 basis points you're saving or 20 basis points you're saving. Right. One, one fifth of 1% is equipped for you another vacation a year.

You gotta look at those percentages when you're looking at expense ratios. But if your asset allocation is very rigorously tracked, you can look at your accounts, you can put them into a tracker like personal capital, and it'll tell you what you're paying every year in expenses and what you could be paying. And of course, people can do the math and figure out what that is to them. And I'd rather have the money in my pocket. I don't feel like I'm getting any better returns from being in an exchange traded fund and having it split three or four ways when I can just do the total stock market.

Yeah. I mean, and the same discussion's happening with advisors right now, which is, you know, so many advisors charge 80 to 100 basis points and you're like, oh, well, fine, 1%, right. I think if someone's making 7% a year, they're like, oh, that's great, no problem. But when you look at it, and I wrote about this, and a lot of people have written about this, it ends up eating about a third, up to a third of your total returns because you're losing that year and you're losing the future compound growth on those returns forever. So I think that, yeah, it's so much of this is being efficient and really monitoring it. Okay, cool.

Well, if you're paying 100 basis points, if you're paying 1% per year for active management and you retire in a 4% safe withdrawal rate, that means essentially a quarter of the money you're withdrawing every year goes to your advisor.

Yep, exactly. So, yeah, if you have a million bucks, ten grand a year, you know, plus you're not making the returns on the ten grand a year. So, yeah, we're definitely. Yeah. All right, awesome. This is super helpful. So, you know, for financial independence, can you just share a little bit about, like, your, like the two minute version of like, hey, how I got here. And my. I just, I think it might be interesting for our audience to kind of hear how you got to this point or that point and the thinking and learning that went into it.

Here's the secret. High savings rate. Next question. It sounds simple and it is simple, but it is not easy. You sit there and you look at what you want to spend your money on. I tell my readers the first thing you have to do is track your spending for a few months to figure out where the money is going in the first place. And then when you look at your money, I can't tell you what you're wasting your money on, but I can certainly help you track your money. And once you look at your expenses, then you can easily figure out where you're spending more money than you want, or you're wasting it on a car or on going out every night or a house that's too big for what you need to do. But once you start focusing on the numbers and doing the things that are important to you and spending on the things that you value, then your savings rate starts to climb up there. Now, half the savings rate is cutting your expenses. The other half is raising your income. I tell my readers that if you can keep a 40% savings rate, which is a little hard when you're starting out, but once you get your savings rate up to 40%, if you can keep that up for 20 years, you'll be financially independent from the military, even without the pension. And that gives you the flexibility to change jobs, change careers, change your life if you want. You don't have to necessarily stop working once you reach financial independence and even when you're not yet financially independent, even if you still have enough savings to cut back work and maybe take a year off or find something you really like to do that pays the bills and gives you enough money to save for true financial independence. And then later on retirement, you have choices by having that flexibility instead of Having credit card bills, consumer debt, large mortgages. That flexibility is priceless, especially if you're not sure that you're going to have a job and in your field and if you're not certain that your company is going to keep you there.

Right, right. Wow.

Was there high savings rate?

Yeah, high savings rate, definitely. I mean, that's what you hear across kind of fire first. Yeah. Figure that out. What, what for your own kind of like, trajectory. Was there, like for, for a lot of the, you know, the fincon and fire bloggers you talk to, it's like, well, the first part of my story was a disaster. You know, like I didn't know how to save. You know, I wasn't money smart. I got all kinds of debt and then I hit bottom. And then I figured out to start, you know, paying down my debt, saving like crazy and getting austere. And then I figured out investing and now I'm good. Does your story sound like that or is it. Or is it like, hey, I grew up in a. I was, I got some good financial education early on and was making good choices the whole way.

No, that was not me. I did not get the financial education that I have today. Although we're fixing that for my next generation. Right?

Yeah.

But when I was growing up, money was something you just didn't discuss. It wasn't a polite topic of conversation. And you were told why you have to save money, you have to spend less than you earn, those kinds of generic pieces of advice. But otherwise, that part about hitting rock bottom was my freshman year in college. Then I eventually got tired of living like that. One nice thing about the military, I say nice in the aspect of saving money, is that you might be very busy with training, schooling, going out there and getting qualified, learning your job, getting some promotions. And so for those first couple of years after you joined the military, it's fairly straightforward to focus on your career and not spend a lot of money on consumer items. So I was like that right after I graduated from college. I spent the next two years running around getting qualified and doing training. I really didn't have much spare time at all. We always talk about being frugal to the point where suddenly you feel deprivation. And I tell my military audience that the advantage of being in uniform is that you're keenly aware of where deprivation starts. You know, when you've lived a life and you've stumbled over the line into deprivation and you can back off a little bit and be frugal again. So that helps a lot. And deprivation has uses. Right. If you have to pay off a lot of debt, you might live with deprivation for six months or a year to get that debt paid off, but it's not sustainable anyway. You know how to cross back and forth on the line between frugality and deprivation. You live a good quality of life. You're spending on the things you want to spend your money on. You. You've minimized the waste and optimized your finances, and that's how you build the wealth for financial independence. I started doing that right out of college and kept on going. And over the years, at first, you don't really see much of a difference. Right. You're putting away a couple hundred dollars, a paycheck into an investment account, and maybe it grows or maybe the volatility wipes you out and you really don't see a lot of progress for the first few years. But after 10 years of that, you can start to see the progress. And we used to joke it was just like having a third person in our household near the end of our careers earning that money every year.

Yeah. Getting your money to work for you. Totally.

Oh, yeah.

So, you know, on your side for. In retirement, where does your income come from? You know, so save. Obviously you have your savings and investments and you're drawing down against that. And we talked about that. I think you also have like a rental house or maybe more than one. Is that true?

We do just one. First off is the pension. Pension. And then after that is dividend income, interest income. Just like everybody else. We sell shares because selling shares, you can usually sell shares from your investments at a capital gains tax rate of 0%.

Yeah.

So it's a little more efficient there. But we do both dividends and capital gains. We do own a rental property. The reason we own it is more for family than for finances. You're familiar with bigger pockets, real estate investing, things like the 1% rule for having 1% of your. Your rent be 1% of the value of the home. The monthly rent out here in Hawaii, it's more like 0.4%, 0.35%. The numbers just do not work out here as well as they do in the mainland. We, we bought the house that we're renting out now in 1989. We've literally owned it for 30 years. And we bought the house we're living now back in the year 2000. And back then, the Hawaii real estate recession meant that the first house was worth less than we paid for it. So we've held onto it over the Years. My parents in law were living in it for seven years. I can tell you that you don't make much money when you're running a house out the family. That's not a good way to riches. But it's finally started to return some cash flow and we've been pushing that right back into the rental property with upgrades and improvements. We just did the traditional kitchen and bathroom overhaul. It's the first time that house has had that in 38 years. So we're finally starting to get a little bit of cash flow from that property. But it's nothing to make you financially independent all by itself. I have learned that I don't enjoy landlording, that I'd rather just invest in a passive index fund and have the returns without having to be a landlord.

Right. Yeah, I know that I've done a little commercial real estate investing and that's much more passive. But I see people, I know, some folks from fincon that are like, okay, hey, listen, I'm going to build a portfolio of houses. One of the guys I'm friends with, Nate, is Sky. Nate Wilson is like looking into buying. He's starting to buy properties in Toledo, Ohio. And, you know, it's interesting to hear a story. He's like, listen, I think I can buy a duplex for 70,000 bucks. And each one will, you know, generate, you know, six, seven hundred bucks a month in rent. And then, so one half covers the mortgage and the other half is cash flow. I mean, he has to start spinning up a series of these things that, you know, it's doable. And I think if you're really into it, people, you know, then you see these folks that are, you know, that build up big portfolios and it's like, it's a cash machine for them. But it, but it is a job too.

But some people feel a better sense of control and feel like they can control the expenses much better with real estate than in the stock market. It's an asset allocation question. And you find your comfort zone.

Yep, totally. All right. And anything else, I know that you have your, you have your book and you had your blog and the blog. I know the blog income. You donate to charity. Any, any, any other, anything else on the income side or is that those. That pretty much composes how you do things?

No, that covers it. You know, we could go out and earn more money, but we're living off the portfolio, we're living off the pension, and life is good now. My wife did 25 years of active duty and a Navy Reserve and when you're in the reserves, when you retire from the reserves, your pension starts at age 60.

Okay.

And so in a few years, of course, she's 39 years old. Right. But in a few years her reserve pension kicks in.

Got it.

And when the reserve pension kicks in, it's just like the active duty pension at a slightly reduced rate to compensate for the fact that you've been working a weekend a month and two weeks a year. So we do have more income coming in. When she reaches age 60, she'll start that pension in 2022. And that's another source of income. Right. If you get a dual working couple and you both get a pension, then life is really good. Social Security, like you said, like Steve Vernon advises, we're going to let that go until age 70 just to make sure we maximize it. I mean if nothing else, the Social Security is lots of income to pay for long term care and self insurer that way.

Yeah, cool. You're well hedged and you've got a clear plan which is good.

Very well hedged and very well protected against inflation. That's been our biggest concern, you know, children of the 1980s when inflation was in double digits for most of the decade. And also I've been through the long term care experience with my father, so I'm keenly aware of setting things up to make sure that you don't dump a big crisis of financial mystery on your adult children.

Right. Which you know, when you look at the data, you know many people, well, I think it's like a third of people are going to need some kind of significant long term care. And when we model in our planning tool where, you know, we forecast for folks that hey, your, your health care expenses are likely to spike in the last 18 months of your life. Right. That's what the data shows. And most people don't plan for that. And healthcare spending. We've recently, I don't want to make this too much blowing our horn, but we've recently started to model this and it's kind of a holy smokes number where you're like, oh, a couple is going to be spending 250, $300,000 or potentially a lot more if you smoke or have pre existing conditions in out of pocket costs. And there's actually two big phases. There's the health care costs between when you stop your traditional working career in 65, when Medicare kicks in and then there's the cost after Medicare and before Medicare it's still, you know, for a couple, easily a thousand twelve Hundred bucks a month of spending for paying their own insurance if they're doing it that way.

I tell people not to join the military for the cheap health care, but that is a very big benefit at a very low price.

It's a huge benefit. Okay, cool. So let's, you know, well, I want to move into the kind of the military side of this and kind of the benefits there and how, you know, how that's unique and what's different. But you know, just real quick, any. So you mentioned savings, right? High savings rate, 40% is like a huge lesson. Any other huge lessons that jump out at you when you look back on your financial life?

Yeah, the biggest lessons that I'm reviewing these days are mostly the emotional side, the behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and for example, humans. Really, we suck at estimating compound growth. You know, you start out, the curve is very flat for a very long time, and it's easily easy to get discouraged. But when that compounding takes off, suddenly you realize you've way overshot the mark and you cross the finish line and you still got inertia. You still got that momentum from the compounding. And we also focus very heavily these days and all the flaws in the 4% safe withdrawal rate. And I tell people that that's human nature to focus on the flaws and the failures. But you can also take action to minimize that possibility. The easiest way to take action against the failure of a portfolio is to have some annuity income. You could just even go out, buy a single premium immediate annuity to protect your portfolio. But again, the other side of the 4% safe withdrawal rate is that most of the time you end up working longer than you need and you end up with more money than you need. Need. And I'll tell you from the perspective of having been financially independent and retired for almost a couple of decades, that in your 50s and approaching your 60s, a lot of your friends and classmates start waking up dead unexpectedly, and they regret that they had not retired earlier, that they had not gotten their financial act together earlier. Think about your future. Think about the person you're going to become in the future, and think about the fact that you might have to struggle with your finances much more in the future than you are today and try to make that high savings rate.

Right? Yep. Yeah, I think it becomes very real. I mean, I see this in my life where people are getting sick or people passing away, and I think it resets folks. And that's why I think people get really serious about this. Many of them in their 50s, 45. Start thinking about it 50 to 60, 50 to 55. They're really like, okay, they take a step back and also, hey, maybe I won't be able to make this kind of money that I'm making from working forever. So, you know. Oh, yeah, you know, that, that jumps out. Cool.

One of the nice things about the military is that you end up making a transition sooner rather than later. And so you're forced to get accustomed to having to go through that transition instead of somebody who has a traditional civilian corporate career for four years of the same employer.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. We'll have to do an episode kind of like on the psychology of buying an annuity or just kind of, you know, taking steps to guarantee take almost all the risk out of your minimum non discretionary spending so that you can psychologically feel more comfortable dialing up the risk in other places. I think a lot of folks don't understand how their underlying fears affect their behavior and the choices they make.

What we call about that failure rate that causes what we call just one more year syndrome, where you stay in the workplace longer than you need to to earn additional income to lower your withdrawal rate later on down the road. And I'll point out that annuity, for most people, the only annuity you ever might need is Social Security. If your portfolio is sustainable in your 40s and 50s. But you're worried about the sequence of returns. Well, you only need to make it to age 62 if things get really bad, right?

Yeah. All right, cool. So let's. I want to dive into the military side of this. So just really quick, on my side, this is my limited understanding. So my father was in the army for a couple of years. He was going to get drafted, so he enlisted and he's gotten lifetime VA benefits which have been very useful for him. And my half sister was in the Marines for six years. She just got out. She did it largely for the GI Bill.

Oh, yeah.

And she's going to get some amazing benefits for education. Right. So she's going to go back and become a nurse and also on housing. So she got engaged recently and they were like, oh, well, you know, we could potentially move to San Francisco, go to school there, and we'll get an allowance for housing. That's significant. And we'll easily cover living in San Francisco, which is tremendously expensive as a couple and they can go to school. So that's pretty amazing. And she's going to get VA for life, but no pension, because she didn't. You know, I think you have to do 20 years. Right. To get to hit the pension.

Unless there's some kind of early retirement program or unless you're medically or Disabled. Retired, yes. 20 years.

Yeah. So I know that the, you know, the benefits have been, you know, very, very good for them. I'd love to hear kind of from your side. I know that you were in the Navy, you're doing submarines and how long were you in for?

I did the full 20 years after four years of college. So that's 20 years of active duty. My spouse did nearly 18 years of active duty and then another seven years in the reserves. So she's getting her reserve pension, age 60.

Got it.

And I'll go one more generation. Our daughter and our son in law both went to college on scholarships, ROTC and the Naval Academy for him. And when he graduated, they owed a five year obligation to pay back that scholarship from college. She our daughter has just finished her five years of active duty and she went in the reserves and she says life is awesome because she's not working one in six duty section. She's not going to sea two weeks a month and she's not getting phone calls at 2 in the morning very much. But my son in law, the Navy is sending him to graduate school for his degree in the field he's in. So he'll get an advanced degree and he'll owe a few more years after that. So it's very easy to just have your career go one obligation at a time and suddenly you're 10 or 12 or 14 years and now you begin to wonder if you should stick it out for that 20. And I have many conversations with people who have had a high savings rate for a while and they can see that they're going to reach the financial independence finish line before they reach 20 years of active duty. And they wonder if they should really stick it out for the pension. Now the safe answer is, oh, you should stick around for that pension and achieve health care. The financial reality though is that I tell people, don't gut it out to 20, don't stick it out just for the pension. If you're challenged and fulfilled, then stay on active duty. Do that as long as it stays challenging and fulfilling. But when that fund stops, you've been taking it one obligation at a time. That's when you should think about leaving active duty and move into the Reserves or the National Guard. You can still get those 20 years of service in the Reserves or the national guard. That's the one week in a month, two weeks a year option. And once you get that 20 years at 20 good years in the Guard or reserve, then you're eligible for a pension that starts at age 60. It's also got the cheap health care at age 60. And again, you can earn the finances to bridge the gap, even if you're buying civilian health insurance between the time you get out of active duty and the time you reach age 60, it's finding what you want to do and finding a career that you can become good at. And it's challenging and fulfilling whether you're in uniform or out of uniform, whether you're on active duty, you're in a Reserves and Guard, or whether you go total civilian. It's about having that high savings rate, having that quality of life, having those choices. You'll reach financial independence without the military pension. And on my side, I am a child of the fear of getting out. I was the product of the fear and ignorance of leaving active duty. And so I stayed on active duty all the way to 20, mainly because I couldn't envision a future where I wasn't on active duty. I couldn't imagine going in reserves or getting. I just didn't know enough. I was too worried, I was working too hard. I didn't learn how that works. I got it at 20. I way overshot the mark on financial independence. I spent longer in workforce than was necessary. And even today I regret those lost family hours, that lost quality of life. So that's the rule that I tell people to follow. Stay on active duty. One obligation at a time. Challenge and fulfilled. Keep going, but don't cut it out to 20.

Does the, does the military provide any financial education?

There's financial responsibility. Don't sell your secrets to the enemy. Yeah, there is a certain amount of financial literacy, but as we all know, financial literacy depends on not just the teacher, but having the student ready to learn. You're surrounded by financial literacy in the military, but you might be too busy to take advantage of it. There's free financial literacy classes on base for you and your family. There's a command financial counselor at every unit you're attached to, but everybody's busy. You might be deployed. This might not be a very good time to sit down and discuss all the intricacies of your Roth ira. And so financial literacy, like many civilians, it takes a backseat while you're dealing with life and career and all the other things that are going on. The information's out there, but you have to be ready to learn. Or frankly, sometimes service members get so deeply into debt Trouble that they have no other choice but to learn about it and to get their spending under control. I will say that you talk about your dad's VA benefits and we talk about what a good deal it is. But the grim truth is there's a survivor bias to VA benefits and to the pension. All of that is reflected in people who didn't make it to 20, people who were seriously injured or even killed during their military years. The VA disability compensation, you already paid for that, you earned it. And now the government is just trying to make it up to you with money and hopefully that can restore your quality of life. Although I'm skeptical that anybody can bring your quality of life back after whatever it is that caused you to be disabled in the first place. I do think the GI Bill is a wonderful deal. We used to have struggles with people being able to get a college scholarship, but they couldn't afford the cost of living in their area. And giving that housing allowance to somebody who's eligible for the GI Bill and they get that housing allowance for a few years. Your half sister must be really happy to have that financial security that lets her focus on doing a good job in college and not having to work about, worry about working part time to have the income to afford living in the Bay Area.

Yeah, I think for her it was great. I mean, she came out of high school, she was like trying different things. She's like, oh, maybe a chef, maybe I'll be a physical therapist, maybe I'll do this or that. You know, going to two, you know, went to two year school for all. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to do. And then, you know, she joined the Marines. I mean, she's full by the way. My dad is Chinese and my half sister is fully Chinese. So they're not your kind of like what I, when I, when I envisioned people in the military, I was like, you know, kind of John Wayne types or whatever. Right. So, but I think it was great for her because she had this time where she, you know, got, got some skills, traveled the world, you know, and now she's come out and she's got some resources and perspective and you know, can be really thoughtful about like, what do I want to do, where do I want to live, you know, how I'm going to get educated. And you know, just as an aside, you know, she was asking me questions when she was in the Marines or like she was like, oh, you know, how should I invest my money? You know, where should I save my money? And I was like, okay, I didn't really. It felt like she was picking up some of this financial stuff or there was some culture of it. I mean, obviously there's you, right, like how many people do you think are pursuing financial independence or, you know, relatively literate, you know, in the military? Any idea on percentages?

It's probably pretty much like it is in the civilian community. It's probably about the same percentage. A couple things though. Your hatchister, when she came out of the Marine Corps, she not only came out with some benefits, but what she really brought with her coming from the military was motivation, focus, and the discipline to make it happen. And that's completely the product of the Marine Corps training. And she knows that she had a lot of other things in her life and her motivations and her quality of life that got peeled away to make her the person she is today and built back up. So I would say that if somebody in the military is trying to figure out their finances, they already have the motivation, the discipline, the skills to figure out how to carry that plan through and reach their goal. It's just being ready to learn. And, you know, she had some questions. It was a little hard to find the information. You had to take some time out of your day, but you're working a long day and now you got duty or you're deploying next month and those all get in the way. So I don't think that the military has a percentage of people that are necessarily more financially literate than the rest of society. I've often asked, with all the training we do in the military for financial responsibility and a minimum level of financial literacy, what are we doing at General Motors or Google or your average Walmart? I don't know if we're doing that same level of financial training.

Well, I know what the answer is in high school. And the answer is in 20% of high schools there, it's mandatory that you take some kind of personal finance course. And it's available in about 60% of high schools. There's this group kind of next generation personal finance that, okay, that is working on this and educating teachers and providing curriculums and stuff like that. But yeah, there's, I think there's a general movement. Well, there's more awareness that, hey, this should be mandatory. It's like Home ec, right, or phys ed or something. You should take some personal finance in high school. Learn how to balance a checkbook, learn how credit works, learn about savings, learn about investing. It would change our society. Think about the number of people that get into debt, are paying 20 to 30% interest rates on credit card debt. It's, it's crazy. And that changes their lives. Or student debt, it's ballooned. People are graduating with $100,000 in student debt. You graduate with that much debt, your thought number one is, how do I pay that debt back? And okay, where can I make enough money to pay that debt back? And then they're grinding away and focus totally on that like this and not necessarily think about, okay, what's the whole landscape look like for my life? So it's these, these decisions you make really early on that, that can dramatically change your, your overall outcome.

I hope so. And some kids in high school are ready to learn that. Some people aren't ready to learn that kind of financial literacy until they're in their 30s. And then I think the same number of people join the military as there are in the civilian side that have that financial interest.

Yep. Yeah, exactly. So can you just give me the kind of the, the, the summary of like, what does it look like from a, you know, pension and health care, you know, benefits that makes it so different for the military?

Yeah. One of the things that the military starts off with is breaking your compensation, your total package down into base pay and then some specialty pays for advanced skills and then a third category of allowances. And so when you look at your total compensation, it's relatively equivalent to the similar occupation that you'd have in a civilian world. There's actual guidelines. Try to get the compensation up to 90% of, at a minimum of what it would be in a civilian world. The whole idea is that if people aren't staying in uniform, working in the galley, if they're cooks, for example, then you need to pay them more money. You need to pay them bigger allowances or bigger bonus or something to make them want to stay in uniform. So the military pays people as they think they can afford. They look at retention rate, and if the retention is there, then they start handing out a little more bonus money. But about a third of your total compensation is tax free allowances or things that you get for being in on a base. Your pay will probably double, at least double in the first four years that you're in the military. From beginning as a raw recruit to the point where you've got four years of experience. And after that, your money, your pay will continue to rise with promotions. But again, some of it is base pay, some of it is specialty pay, and some of it is allowances. So it depends on where you live and what you're doing in your careers. If you're going to go out there and take the tough jobs and spend a lot of time at sea or spend a lot of time in combat zones, you're taking a lot more risk, but you're going to get some more money. I'm skeptical that the money is worth the risk, but the money is there if you choose to take the risk. And at that point, again, every obligation you have, you'll probably have an obligation of between three and five years, maybe three, six years, every time you reenlist or sign on for another obligation. When you get to 20 now you've got 20 years. And if you do 20 years of active duty or a combination of active duty and reserves time to get to 20 good years, now you're eligible for pension. Now you can keep going. If you keep getting promoted, you can keep going as long as 40 years to age 60, 62, right around in there. Depends on your rank and your specialty and your service. But when you're eligible for that pension, we find that most people who reach 20 years, they don't stick around too much longer. The majority of people that qualify for pension will immediately retire at 20. Now, having said that, out of all the people who joined the military, only one out of six actually make it to that pension at 20 years. One out of six. And some parts of the military, they have a higher retention rate. Marines, the retention rate for a pension is way down there in a single digit. So your, your half sister made the right choice probably at six years. And once you get that pension, it's half of your base pay. And in the new system that just went into effect, the blended retirement system, it's 40% of your base pay. So we bat these numbers around, it sounds like a pretty good deal. But if you look at your total compensation and then look at your pension, your pension is about 25% of your total compensation. It's not the half base pay, other words we use to make it seem like it's much bigger than it actually is. But total compensation that you had the day before you retired versus your pension the day afterward, about 25%. However, however that is indexed to inflation for the rest of your life. You also have very cheap health insurance. When I say very cheap, I mean I'm paying less than $50 per month for health insurance. With a primary care manager and an HMO system, others can take insurance that's considered pay as you go. You pay a cost share of about 20% and your catastrophic cap is about $3,000 a year. Those are the big picture for what military health insurance involves after retirement. Yeah, it's a very good deal. Again, there is some survivor bias and very few, relatively few military service members make it to 20.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's. I mean, the health care benefits is a massive benefit.

And yes, the health care and inflation rate. In 17 years of my pension, three of those years, the cost, the consumer price index, the cost of living adjustment, was zero. Yet in that 17 years, my pension has gone up 40%. That's supposed to be the reflection of what the consumer price index has done during the last 17 years.

Right? Yeah. I mean, inflation's a, you know, it's a silent killer. A lot of people don't realize that, like, hey, you know, 3% inflation over 20 years, you know, your hundred bucks of income or spending that you have now in 20 years and, you know, buying groceries and a gallon of gas, 20 years later, it buys half of that. So you have to be, you don't have inflation adjustment, you know, you're going to be getting a lot less for your money. How do you think the military pension compares to Social Security? Have you written about that at all in terms of like, on a relative basis? Like, hey, you know, I'm going to get Social Security. You know, maybe it's going to be 25, 30,000 bucks a year. I don't know. It's, it's, you know, but it would be less than 25%. I have to look at my average. I know they average your 35 years of income. I'll have to look at that.

I'd say that the active duty pension that a service member could get in their late 30s or early 40s would be about that range, about 20 to $25,000 a year. And I'd say that Social Security that that same person would get if they were magically age 62 or age 66 or 67, it'd probably be a little less than 20, 25,000 a year. I think Social Security is more of a safety net than a thank you for your service, for sure.

Yeah, that's for sure. And also, you don't get it till you're older. I mean, when did you start collecting your pension? At what age?

Yeah, I started collecting my pension the minute I retired from active duty at age 41. Reservists and Guard members get their pension at roughly at age 60. You can get it a little earlier for taking extra risks, but 60 is the number that most people in a reserve and guard start their pension at huh. And then Social Security follows shortly after that. Anyway, when you're age 60, I see the reserve and the guard pension, I see Social Security as backstopping your portfolio. If you've had 20 years of financial independence, a couple of recessions and sequence of returns, risk has put you to the point where maybe your portfolio wasn't going to last 30 years in the first place.

Yeah.

So that's your annuity income.

Yeah. Do you get a, do you get a pretty like so with Social Security, you know, after your full retirement age, you get essentially an 8% bump in benefit every year until 70. Right. So with yours, if you had delayed till 45 or 50, would you have seen a pretty significant escalation in your benefit?

Probably. Right, right, right. If you're, if you're doing good, if you want to stay past 20, if you're feeling challenged and fulfilled, those are all significant problems. Because if you're staying past 20, it implies that you're fairly competitive, you're getting fairly senior, and that you're going to be able to continue doing what you enjoy doing. The reality is after 20 years, the rise of promotions, you're at the pointy part of the promotion triangle. There's very, exactly, very few billets up there and you might not have the quality of life you had when you were only at 10 years of service and much more junior. So unless you're in a leadership position and you really enjoy that life and you really want to continue that on, then it can be much different. And you might have decided that staying for that extra 2% per year in your pension calculation, maybe that extra 2.5% per year, maybe it's not worth it.

Got it. Well, I meant just if you could you just delay. So instead of claiming at 41, could you have just said, hey, listen, I want to postpone the claiming date of my pension? Did you have that option?

No, we don't currently offer that option for an active duty pension. There, there was a way to kind of game that as a reservist, that was a big deal in the 70s. The reason I say this is there are a few people who are still in the reserves that would have been affected by this when they turned 60, the next few few years. But largely. No, you can't, you can't say, I'm just going to delay the start of my pension and you're going to give me more pension. In fact, the survival statistics, longevity statistics, indicate that if you get an activity pension, grab it and go. Don't sit around and Try to delay it. Don't count on your longevity reservists. Actually, same is, same issue. They're probably going to have the average lifespan and if they can get their pension at age 60, take it right away.

Got it.

Now Social Security a little different, right? Because you know, you delay Social Security, you get a return that you might not be able to get. Now I know it's actuarially neutral. If you keep waiting, you'll end up with about the same amount of money. Overall, I see Social Security as a way to bolster your older age income in case you do end up in long term care. At least you've got that higher income to be able to pay your medical bills.

Yeah. One of the things that I've thought about and, or considering building into our tool as well. I mean, you can model this, but you know, you could buy a deferred annuity that kicks in at 75 or 70, 75, 80 or something like that. And then, you know, say, hey, I'm gonna. It gives you an end date to plan until, right? So especially if you buy it till like 80, it's really, it's pretty cheap because you're not expected to be alive. So you can buy a lot of income for a relatively low amount of money. Then you can have a finite planning window, right. Which, and that's one of the big risks people have like this unknown planning window and they're like, okay, how long will I live? What's going to happen with inflation? What's going on with the markets? You know, it's like, it's a lot to think about. I mean, I think for someone like you, you obviously have thought about it, you've got it all figured out. But for many people, they're kind of looking at this problem.

You need that tool. And a planner, that's a very good tool to have. And the military doesn't have that feature. And frankly, the military pension system is so complicated already that I'd say half of my questions come from people in reserves and Guard trying to figure out exactly what their pension is going to be when they're 60 years old.

Yeah, got it. Well, if you can get the Navy to adopt our financial planning tool, let me know.

Yeah, I'm a fan of that. The more financial literacy we get, heaven forbid we shall learn how to manage our money while we're still in uniform.

Yeah, exactly. All right, well, this is super helpful. It's great to kind of, kind of get the, get an overview of like, you know, how you've approached it and what you're, what the day in life is like, you know, jumping back, I want, I actually just curious, what kind of submarines did you, did you work on both kinds?

Yeah, I started my career on an older ballistic missile carrying submarine that, that was the one that launches nuclear missiles as part of the nuclear triad. I did one tour there, my second submarine, my department had tour. I did that on a, what's called an attack submarine, a fast attack submarine. You've read the Hunt for Red October. The fast attack submarine from the Americans was chasing after the ballistic missile carrying submarine from the Soviets. Frankly, if I had to advise anybody who's considering joining the submarine force. The fast attack submarines give you the tactical skills and experience that you need to continue to promote as an officer. The ballistic missile submarines give you the reliable schedule and the family lifestyle, knowing when you'll be in and out of port. That's very comforting to junior officers and mid grade enlisted. But if you want to go far in a submarine force, personally, if you want to maintain the will to live, I'd stick with the fast attack submarines where every day is different, you never know what you're going to have to go do.

And how many people are on a fast attack versus ballistic sub.

The fast attack crews are roughly about 100, 110 people. If you got something special going on, you might get a bunch of people that we don't talk about coming on board, maybe an extra 10 or 15 to come on, join the crew for a special mission. Yeah, ballistic missile submarines, you've got a bigger submarine, you've got more things to take care of. Those crews tend to be about 135, 140.

And how long do the, how long are they going out at a time?

Well, the, the attack boats are typically underway for 30 to 40 days at a time. That would be considered a longer mission. Usually what you do on an attack submarine is you get underway for a couple of weeks, come back into port every couple of years. You deploy to the western Pacific or to the Mediterranean or to the Middle east. And when you're deployed you're gone for six to eight months, but you're not underway the entire time. You're underway for a couple of weeks or 40 days and you can come in port for a week or two. Listed missile submarines, they got two crews and the whole idea is to keep them at sea as much as possible. And so in the Cold War days we would go underway and submerge and literally stay out there underwater for literally 90 days. My personal record was 97 days. That's not the kind of record you want to be proud of, but that's, that's what we achieved these days. It might be 30 or 40 days with a break for a port call or to come in and do some kind of repairs, but it isn't necessarily going to be that same 90 day record from the Cold War.

Three months at a time. That's a long time.

Yep.

That's.

It's an interesting lifestyle. It's a good way to save a lot of money.

Sure.

And of course that's deprivation, not frugality.

Yeah.

But even today I find myself saying, well, what was it like when I was a junior officer? What was it like when I was just beginning my career? Do I really need this consumer item?

Right.

And usually the answer is no, I don't really need it. But I've got to be willing to pay for it to give my life energy for the money for it, or I can figure out how to do without it.

Oh, that's, it's incredible to hear about. You know, my first job I was at, after my sophomore year in college. I was an intern at a company called Task, the Analytics Sciences Corporation. And they were a defense contractor. And my job was to work on the targeting software for ballistic missiles launched from Trident submarines. So this was a crazy thing. Like, so I would go in there, I got a secret clearance. This is a summer job, summer. You know, I'm working with all those MIT people. So it was MIT people, Navy people, and there were some special Forces people in here. It was crazy, like, or retired special. And you know, you heard all these stories. And these guys would go on boats, they'd be like, okay, because we're writing software to go on these boats. And these guys would go deploy and like ride along. And you know, it was all passive navigation. But it was exactly fascinating because they're like, okay, well, here's what happens. You know, these boats go underwater. We're measuring the accelerations of how the, you know, for how the boat's moving around. That's how we figure out where we are. And then we go to. So when we go to launch these missiles, the subs would surface, they would say, this is where I am. They would take a star fixed like, you know, and then they would launch these. The idea is, okay, then we launch the missiles and they know where they're going. But it was kind of, you know, that was my exposure to the sub world a little bit. And, you know, just, it was, it was fascinating. The technology that was being, I mean, this was 30 years ago, right? That was what they could do then. You know, the kinds of stuff they were into at that point. But so I was, I was, that's why I was asking all these sub questions. It's, it's interesting at the first hand.

Account, you've heard this, you've heard those submarine sea stories and there, there are parts of submarine force that I miss every day, but I don't miss them enough to go stand mid watches or weekend duty.

I can't imagine, you know, being underwater for 90 days, you know, with 135 guys, like, it seems like a lot. And that, that sounds daunting.

You develop, you develop some social skills, the soft skills. We talk about how to get along with a small team. And the other side of it is I still feel weird whenever I have an office that has a window on it, because I've spent my lifetime in offices without windows.

Right. Wow.

It takes a certain type of personality and that's probably why I live on an island that's only 30 by 40 miles today. And I'm perfectly happy.

You don't get island fever?

Not at all. I've heard of it, but I don't have it.

Yeah. Okay. Well, with that, Doug, I really appreciate it. Any questions, any quick key influencers or communities or podcasts you want to call out that you think would be a good resource for our audience to, you know, learn more about? Kind of like there's obviously your site, the Military Guide, or your former site, I know you sold it, but other folks, you know, places people can learn more about kind of military benefits and kind of financial independence, things like that.

For the military, you know, come on over to the Military Guide. I no longer own this site, but I still provide them majority of the content. The owner, Ryan Gana, also owns the Military Wallet. And so between us, we've got 90% of the military market covered there. On the, on the non military advice, there's always Facebook groups and there's always the big podcast, something like Bigger Pockets for real estate investors. Choose fi for people that are just beginning their journey to financial independence. If you want to be hardcore frugal, there's Mr. Money Mustache. A lot of that advice goes a long way. And there's plenty of other information out there on Facebook. I would say look up personal finance and financial independence on Facebook and find a Facebook group that works for you. There's probably two dozen Facebook groups you can join that'll help you figure out what kind of people you want to live with in there and what kind of financial independence you want to pursue.

Okay, awesome. Appreciate that. Any questions for me?

No, I think we should spend more time mentioning your planner and, and all the features it's got. It's one of the best ones I've seen. And you know, I tend to beat up on retirement calculators a lot and put them through their paces and I've also survived Darrow Kirkpatrick's due diligence. You notice that not too many retirement calculators get through there on scale.

Yeah.

So I really appreciate having that planer and it's a very powerful planner for military as well as, you know, for military as well as for civilians. I really appreciate that ability to project what your life's going to look like. It really is what you have to do to get there.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah, we actually want to add some more kind of military specific functionality around tricare and various pension benefits and stuff like that. But yeah, we've had some, you know, some folks from the law enforcement and military say, you know, they appreciate the fact that we can add multiple pensions and kind of model, you know, working after that and stuff like that. So. Yeah, but I appreciate the feedback. And yeah, no, with, with Darrow, I was like, I remember, I think he thought in the beginning he's like, oh, you're kind of, you're in this for just making, you know, doing referrals and making lots of money. And I had to kind of, you know, once I got to know him and he got to know me, he was like, okay, I can see a legit person. Right? But you have to kind of earn that like in the community, like, okay, hey, we're here for the right reasons. Here's the work. It takes years, right? But then people start to see, okay, this is what I'm up to. But anyway, Doug, this is super enough.

To have that credibility.

I'm sorry, what?

You've been around long enough to have that credibility.

Thanks. Yeah, still working hard. But Doug, this is super helpful. It's really great to kind of hear and hear from you personally what your life is like, kind of what you've learned along the way. Also just how thoughtful you are about this. I can see why you're one of the kind of the OG financial independence folks and you've got obviously a very good perspective and a lot of experience and you know, a lot of great insights about how to do this efficiently. And you've, and you've, and you've been living it. I mean, there's so few people that. I mean, there's more and more, but, you know, but so few that have been financially independent for a long period of time and survived, you know, the ups and downs of, you know, a couple of decades of this. So congratulations on accomplishing that.

I hope to have many more years of experience ahead of me. Jim Collins and I joke about getting more experienced.

Yeah, I want to get J.L. collins on our. On our podcast. I have to. I have to get through to him. I talked to him. I actually talked to him quite a lot, probably 18 months, 24 months ago. And, you know, I mean, his book Simple Path to Wealth is fantastic resource. And, you know, he shows it. You know, it doesn't have to be super complicated. You just got to make some steps and take the action. A lot of it's just taking the action.

That's right.

All right, so with that. So, again, thanks, Doug, for being on our show. Thanks, Dotto Robison, for being our sound engineer. Anyone listening? Thanks for listening. Hopefully you found this useful. You know, if you've made it this far, I encourage you to check out the military guide, as we talked about, and the resources that we pointed to, and we'll post a lot of those up on our podcast and also, you know, check out our planning tool and give it a whirl. It's free to build a plan, and, you know, it provides a lot of education and kind of structure around thinking about this process of getting confident in your future. And you can find us on Facebook as well, and. Or on Twitter, retirement. And then if anyone wants to leave a pot. Sorry, a review for this podcast. That's appreciated as well. Okay, well, so that's it. So thanks again, Doug, and everyone else, thanks for listening.

All right, Steve, thank you. It.