Financial Independence, Purpose & Happiness

Foreign. So welcome to the inaugural podcast for new Retirement. Today we have J.D. roth, maybe the OG personal finance blogger, joining us. We're going to be discussing financial independence, purpose, and happiness, which align with the two main themes of what we want our podcast to be about, making the most of your money and time. Our goal is to have guests on here that can help our audience of people who are planning for retirement or financial independence with financial insights and with ideas that help them make the most of their time. On that note, I want to introduce JD Roth, who is the founder of Get Rich Slowly and JD if you could just give us kind of a quick background on yourself. I mean, what, what I think is most interesting is how you kind of rose from essentially the ashes of debt to achieve financial independence in less than a decade. And I'd love to hear or have you share more of your story behind kind of how that happened.

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the inaugural podcast. That's an honor.

No problem.

So I grew up in rural Oregon in a poor family. My family had always been poor, didn't know how to manage money. Good people, hard workers. But when my parents got money, they would just spend it. It was kind of a boom and bust cycle. So I went off to college, got a psychology degree. I was always involved in literary stuff, worked for the school newspaper, managed the literary magazine on campus. And I was also very interested in computers. So all these things are relevant, the psychology, the computers, and the writing. So I graduated from college, didn't really have a plan. I was a poor planner. So I did something I swore I would never do, which is to go to work for my father. He owned a business that manufactured corrugated packaging, so, like shipping boxes, that kind of thing. I went to work as a salesman. And I graduated from college not with any kind of like student loan debt, but with the start of a credit card habit. I had credit card debt. And working for my father and getting out of my own, that credit card debt just grew and grew until by the mid-1990s, I had over $25,000 in credit card debt. At that time, I realized I had a problem. So I cut up my credit cards. But I still found ways to take on more consumer debt. So at the very bottom, in 2004, I had over $35,000 in consumer debt, credit cards, loans, that kind of thing. And it was at that time my then wife and I, we bought a new house and on paper I could afford it. But the reality is, once I moved in and I was saddled with all the debt that I was struggling with, trying to pay the new mortgage and just take care of things. I just felt like I was drowning. So I sat down one night, it was in October of 2004, and I drew up this plan to get out of debt. This was because a couple friends had realized that I was struggling and they loaned me some books. They loaned me Dave Ramsey's Total money Makeover and a called you'd money or your life by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin. And I read those, decided I needed a plan. So I sat down, formulated a plan for getting out of debt. I wanted to be out of debt by December 2007. So I started reading more and more about personal finance. And at this time I had a personal blog where I wrote about cats, computers and comic books. I always say, but it's true. I mean, I wasn't writing about anything serious. I read all these books, all these books about money, about investing. I thought I saw a theme. In the past, I'd always wanted to find quick ways out of debt, quick ways to get rich. I wanted to get rich quickly. But what I felt like was these books were saying that there's no reliable way to get rich quickly. You just can't do. There's no one way to do it. Sometimes it happens, but it's luck. But there are reliable ways to get rich slowly. And so I thought that was a pretty clever concept, get rich slowly. And so I decided I would start a website called Get Rich Slowly to document my progress getting out of debt, and maybe would make a little money along the way. Turns out it made a lot of money. For whatever reason, people really attached to my writing. Over the next three years that I owned this site, I not only got out of debt, I got out of debt. Exactly on target, December 2007. But I was able to quit my day job and work full time on the website and then eventually sell it. So that is the, like, extended version of my story there.

You know, that's an awesome story. And I think for our audience, a lot of folks are kind of thinking about how do they achieve financial independence as they go through traditional retirement. They're 50 to 60 years old, they've been working, saving money, and now they have to kind of figure out how am I going to live on the savings and the other resources they have for the rest of their life. So, you know, as you're going on this journey of kind of achieving financial independence, any big highlights in terms of events or people that you kind of met along the way that you felt were kind of a big impact for you?

Oh, there were so many. I was having epiphanies constantly. Once I got serious about. Once I stopped looking for quick fixes and started taking the long view and trying to figure out, how does this money stuff work? I would have all sorts of epiphanies from books, from conversations with people in real life, and from the interactions I had with my readers. Now, I was in a very fortunate situation that I became financially independent because I sold the website I started. I sold Get Rich Slowly, and I sold it for a large sum of money that allowed me to become financially independent. Now I would have become financially independent anyway because it was making a lot of money. I just accelerated the process. I would say some of the people that have really influenced me, a lot of them have come in the time after I sold the site, before I repurchased it. I recently repurchased Get Rich Slowly. So, for example, I think many of your listeners might be familiar with a fellow called Mr. Money Mustache. He runs a blog called Mr. Money Mustache. Before meeting Mr. Money Mustache and talking with him, I had not really latched onto this idea of financial independence or really embraced the idea of early retirement. I thought it was like a pipe dream. But the more I talked with him and the more I read his material and the more I came to understand his worldview, the more I realized, no, this is something that average people can pursue if it's what they want.

Many of our listeners may not be familiar with Mr. Money Mustache. And when I first heard his name, I had the same reaction that Datto, our sound engineer, is having, which is. I kind of laughed. I was like, is this a joke? Actually, what happened was a guy who's kind of interested in being an advisor investor was like, hey, he's looking at what we're doing. He's like, have you heard of the site called Mr. Money Mustache? And I went to it, and I'm like, I don't know. This is kind of ridiculous. But I was like, oh, this guy has 2 million visitors a month going to his site. And then, you know, the last 12 to 18 months. I mean, I know he's been around for a while, but just for background for other folks, I mean, he really preaches about kind of achieving financial independence and being able to retire early through really efficient living. And very interesting story and very kind of like, useful, pragmatic steps that people can take to really achieve financial independence. But he's done it. And it's a pretty Amazing person.

Well, and the thing that I think that he has done is really change the course of conversation online regarding money and saving for retirement. Because before, you know, most advisors recommend saving 10% of your income towards retirement, or maybe if they're aggressive, they say save 20%. And when you save at those rates, it's going to take you 40 or 50 years to save for retirement. That's why we have a standard retirement age of about 65. But what Mr. Money Mustache did was sit down and say, now look, this is the standard assumption that we have in this society, but it doesn't have to be this way. What if you saved more? What if you boosted your savings rate so that you were saving capital income or 70% of your income? And I know those numbers might sound crazy to some of your listeners, but he sat down and he showed the math and he's like, if you're able to do this, especially if you start at a young age, if you're able to save half your income or 70% of your income, you don't have to work for 40 or 50 years before you retire or before you decide to do something else. You can actually work for a much shorter period of time, as little as 10 or 15 years. And that's a, that was a huge, mind blowing realization when I looked at the numbers, because this isn't, it's not a scam or anything. It's real. It's just math. And when you look at the math and you actually process it, you're like, oh, wow, why hasn't anybody ever taught us this?

When I look at what he's doing, I feel like he's like kind of some super celebrity, you know, fitness guy that has a unachievable physique, but there are still elements of what he's doing that you can apply. So, like, you know, in my life, cars are now 7 years old and 10 years old. You know, we try to reuse things as much as we can. And I think just really being thoughtful and intentional about how we spend money and, you know, what we're spending it on. So I think that he's got some really good lessons. I mean, when I read that, like, I know that he feeds his family of four for like 25 or $30,000 a year, I'm kind of like, that is amazing, but probably not realistic for me personally, but he has some great ideas. I want to ask you another question. One thing that I found really interesting about you is that you're really writing about kind of personal finance and Helping people make better choices. But, you know, also, I know that a big thing for you is kind of purpose, like helping people figure out what should they be doing with their time and their lives. And, you know, wondering if you could kind of elaborate on that a little bit.

So for me, I have a money blog. As I said, I recently repurchased Get Rich Slowly. And I should mention that it's getrichslowly.org, not getrichslowly.com because they're just completely different websites. I write about money, but I've always, because I mentioned at the start of the show that I have a degree in psychology and I have always been interested in the pursuit of happiness. What does it mean to be happy? What does it take to be happy? And so even though I'm writing about money, I say what I'm actually writing about is the pursuit of happiness. And from my reading, in my experience, the best way to achieve well being is to have a sense of purpose and to pursue that purpose and to direct, to build your life around that purpose. And I know that sounds kind of New Agey, maybe a little hokey, and I don't mean it in a hokey New Agey way. I mean it in a very real way. People as long ago as Aristotle, thousands of years ago, up to modern day psychologists have found that when you have a purpose, when you have a direction in your life and you build your life around it, you tend to be much more fulfilled. It's easier to make decisions with your money, with your time, with your friends, with everything if you know what it is you want to accomplish out of life. And I don't think there's any one right purpose that's right for everybody. For some people, your purpose might be your family. For other people it might be travel. For others, it might be serving a higher calling, whether that's God or some other purpose like serving others. So it doesn't really matter, but as long as you. I urge my readers, Steve, to get clear on what their purpose is so they can make better financial decisions.

One interesting thing is that kind of the rates of depression actually go up when people retire. They have traditional retirement because they lose kind of a lot of the benefits that they had from work that they might not have been aware of. Like the social connections, you know, the sense of purpose, you know, the daily activity, you know, just being out and about, suddenly that goes away. And your life is tradition is suddenly different. And thinking about that ahead of time is super important. And I think that's that's one thing that I've taken away from the fire community. So something just for background, there's something called financial independence, retirement early. And that's what Mr. Money Mustache is about. You know, what, what JD has accomplished, which is folks have found a way to save enough money, and instead of retiring it, you know, 60, 65, 70 years old, you know, they're retiring it, you know, 35, 40, you know, 45 years old. But they're really thinking hard about, you know, what am I going to do with my life once I'm financially independent. It's not that they want to, you know, be done and, like, play golf all day, right? It's, you know, they're thinking hard about, like, now I have independence, so I can choose what I spend my time on.

And I think you. I'm going to just define financial independence a little more clearly in case your listeners are unfamiliar with it. So financial independence is essentially the state where you have enough money saved that given rates of inflation and expected returns on investment, you have enough money to support your current expenses for the rest of your life. And it's essentially the same thing as retiring because people retire at 65 because they have enough money, or at 70 or whatever the age is because they have enough money saved that it should support them for the rest of their expected lifespan. So financial independence is the same thing. It just, it might be happening at a different stage in life. And for me, early retirement and financial independence are the same thing. But a lot of people want to argue that if you're working in any way, you're not actually retired. So I consider myself retired even though I work eight hours a day, but I'm working at something that I love and I don't have to be doing the job. So to me, that's not. I'm still retired, but a lot of people would argue that I'm not. And I get that. So we talk about financial independence instead as a way to differentiate that. You mentioned that people can get depressed once they get into retirement because they lose the infrastructure they had before. And I think that's a very important point because from my reading, I'm 48, almost 49, so I'm not to 65 yet. But from my reading, a lot of retirees struggle because their purpose was given to them by their job or by whatever came before. And all of a sudden that has been stripped away and they don't have a purpose. And so they're left floundering for a period of time until they discover that purpose. So I think it can be great for people of all ages to figure out, okay, what is it? What is my overall goal in life? What is my objective? And that makes it so that once you do enter retirement, you're not left wondering, what do I do now? You know, because you figured out what your purpose is.

I mean, when I think back in my own life, it's like, you know, grow up, you know, kind of middle class person, you know, went to college and then college, you know, did lots of navel gazing and thinking about, hey, what do I want to do right, with my life. Yeah, I was actually computer science. Well, I was a systems engineer, which is like electrical engineering, computer science. But I think if I had to do it over again, I would have been an economist and a computer science person. You know, it was interesting, is like, you think a lot about it, then you get a job and then you're making money. And then, you know, like for me it's like, okay, you know, getting married, having kids and bang, 10 years goes by and you know, I'm 48 years old, I've got a 16 year old, a 14 year old and an 8 year old. And it's like time is flying by. You know, kind of the idea of like really thinking hard about, you know, how do I want to spend my life because I can see it going by quickly is something, you know, that I'm thinking about more now. And I think for a lot of folks, they think about it in college, they think about it at traditional retirement or if they achieve financial, you know, financial independence, they're like, okay, let's be more, more intentional about it. And kind of one interesting data point here is that for kind of traditional retirement, a white collar worker, they will be back at consulting, volunteer or a small business, some type of like engaged work, like activity within two and a half years of traditional retirement. So people typically actually jump back into it.

And that's not because they have to do it financially. Right. It's because they're, they're looking for something.

To do that's right. Yep, that's exactly right for our listeners. I met up with JD face to face at a conference called fincon in Dallas back in October. We had breakfast and it was great to meet him face to face. But one thing he shared, and I thought it would be interesting for our audience to hear is like, you know, you know, you told me that like in your family, you know, healthcare is an issue and life expectancy is an issue.

And I was wondering, yeah, this gets kind of deep and heady. So for whatever reason, the men on my father's side of the family do not live long. Now, my grandfather did. He lived till 80 something, but his oldest son died at like 53. That was my uncle. My daughter, not my daughter. My dad died at 49. I had a cousin who died at 46. I have another cousin who's 53 right now and struggling with cancer. So the men on my father's side of the family die young. And I've just had this premonition that that's going to happen to me, too. It makes me nervous. And so I go and I have colonoscopies. I have my first one at 40 and another one at 45. I have them every five years. The doctors think I'm a little. They think I'm a little neurotic about it, but I'm worried, you know, so this actually kind of changes how I frame things. I want to live a long life. I hope that I live to be 80 years old. And, you know, statistically I will live to be 76 or 78 or whatever it is based on that. I need to make sure my money will last that long. But at the same time, because I know my family history, I also don't want to just sit here and not enjoy life. You know, I want to do things. I want to go places. I want to use the money that I have now to actually experience life. So there's this really delicate balance that I'm struggling to find. And it's been very challenging.

You know, there's a friend of mine, he's in his late 50s. You know, he's a senior executive. He's saved millions of dollars. But his. His wife is ill. Their plan was, you know, hey, retire around now and then, you know, travel and then kind of, you know, do other things. But all that could be very changed and may not be an opportunity for him. And, you know, he thought about, you know, retiring a couple of years ago, you know, and I think. I'm sure now he would have liked to have done that, to just have the time. I mean, the one resource that we have that we can't get back is time. And, you know, I'm hearing more people talk about kind of like sabbaticals or kind of mini retirement, you know, so hopefully we all live a long time and we have longer health spans. Is it a better idea to kind of take, you know, many retirements along the way? And I know Michael Kitces has talked about this a little bit, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about it?

I recently. Not recently. I guess it's been six, seven years now. I got a divorce a few years ago, still on relatively good terms with my ex wife. And then I started dating another gal. And we were talking and we came to the realization that my girlfriend, Kim. Kim and I both have always had the dream of traveling the United States. And it's just never been practical to do it. And I was like, you know what? I have a chunk of change. I'm nearing this death date that the men in my family have. And if you're up for it, Kim, I think it'd be awesome if you would just like quit your job and let's buy an RV and travel around the United States. And so that's what we did. We took 15 months off. We thought it was only going to be three months and then six months and then it turned into 15 months. We took this huge chunk of time off, basically a sabbatical or a mini retirement. And we traveled around the United States and we had a blast. It was probably the best thing I've ever done in my life. And Kim talks about it all the time. She might come home tonight actually and say, oh, I'm so tired from work. It would be great to be back on the road again. So that's my experience with it. And I know that a number of other people you mentioned Michael Kitces, I also have a colleague who writes@montanamoneyadventures.com and Jillian, she's actually very dialed into this mini retirement stuff. She and her family just took one and so she has experience with it and she's been writing about it and sharing her experiences and experiences of other people. To me, I don't know what the difference between a sabbatical and a mini retirement is, but I think those two things, they're both very useful. And I would also suggest, Steve, a concept called semi retirement, which is something that I learned about from Bob Cliatt, who wrote a book called Work Less, Live More. And Work Less, Live More is all about moving to semi retirement instead of like full fledged retirement. And what he means by semi retirement is intentionally scaling back your work life so you're only working 10 or 20 hours a week, basically working part time and doing that, making that a conscious choice and not like just giving up work entirely because he recognizes that work brings purpose to people and gives you social interaction. And so I would encourage your listeners to maybe check out Worth Less, Worth More also.

And by the way, I do see that out here in Silicon Valley, you see people that, you know, maybe they, they get liquidity, they sell a company or something like that, and they, and they take a chunk of time out. I'm also seeing more and more people as they're getting a little bit older, really thinking hard about like, that work life balance. And is there a way to get more schedule control? That's the biggest thing. I mean, you see people out here, they're working, you know, 80, 100 hours a week. And I've done this in my life too, and it's just like, all consuming. And, you know, is there another path where you can, you know, still work hard, do meaningful work, but also be more available to your family and kind of, you know, because you don't get this time back. I mean, you can, you can crank your whole life. Look up, you know, your kids are like in their twenties, in college, and you're like, and you have a pile of money, but, you know, have you really, you know, made the most for your own life and for them? You know, so, yeah.

And this is something, you know, I think I feel like people struggle with this. Not at all ages. I don't think young people necessarily struggle with the work life balance because they haven't reached that point yet. But by the time you get to your early or mid-30s, it's definitely something that comes up. My girlfriend's brother owns a couple of hotels outside of Yosemite, and he's really been struggling with this lately too, because he has two young children. What he wants to do is spend time with his kids. And yet these two hotels take up so much of his time. And so a question he's asking himself, I don't think he's actually articulated it in this way. I'm just reframing it for him. But he's wondering, how much is enough? How much money do I actually need? At what point am I just, like, earning more money and the time is actually more valuable than the money would be? And it's a tough question. Everyone's got to figure it out for themselves.

The problem is, is that nobody knows how long they're going to live. So the risks are, hey, how long will I live? What's going to happen with inflation? What's going to happen with market returns and health care costs? And so people, they, you know, people that are kind of savers and planners, they're more conservative and they kind of keep going and saving. And like, that's what happened with our friend. You know, he could have retired at 55 and traveled the world, but he's like, I'll keep going. And then at 57, it's like, oh, my life is. Could be. Is likely to be very different now. And I wish I had that. That time back. You know, it's interesting if you look at the data, is that the people that do save money, they tend to keep increasing their net worth over time. Some of them actually just keep increasing it even. They basically, you know, make more in returns than they spend. They get conservative. And then, you know, they were. So you retire at 60 with like a million dollars or a million and a half bucks. And then like, at 80, you know, you're sitting on 3 to 4 million dollars, but you didn't really necessarily take full advantage of it. So I think finding. Helping people find better ways to enjoy what they've got, either themselves or give it to causes they care about. That's something that we want to help our audience be thoughtful about and also do the math around and figure out.

Are you familiar with the work of George Kinder?

Yeah, I've actually read, when I search for those terms, Kinder's three questions, your blog comes up first. We wanted to add it to our software, but why don't you go ahead and share? Because I think the questions are great. Yeah.

Okay. So George kinder, he's a financial planner. He considers himself a life planner because he's trying to, like, look at the big picture, not just the financial stuff. And he has a series of three questions that he asks his clients. And I will put out, make a caveat here there, that I thought these were original to Kinder. And then I found. I was reading a book by this time management guru called Alan Lakine from, like, the 1970s, and those questions are in there. So these aren't actually Kinder's questions. He just. He's the one who brought them to the realm of money. I think I'll just have to, like, remember these off the top of my head. The first question. Okay, first of all, these questions are designed to help you figure out what's important in your life. Not necessarily to find a purpose, but to make sure that you're not wasting your time and your money on things that are unimportant. So it's three questions, and they each follow from each other. So the first question is basically, what are my lifetime goals? If you didn't have to worry about money, imagine that you had all the money that you ever needed. What would you do with the rest of your life? And the object here is to sit down and spend five minutes just brainstorming what would I do with the rest of my life? And not worry about anybody else's expectations, just what do you want out of life? And again, spend five minutes writing those down, then maybe spend a few minutes reviewing them, making changes, and then move on to the next question. The next question is, how would I like to spend the next five years? Now, this question doesn't assume that you have unlimited funds, you're in real time right now, all your resources, your current life, what do you want to do with your next five years? You shouldn't, like, list what you think you should do or what you will do, but what you want to do. And don't judge yourself. Just be honest. Again, take about five minutes to answer that question. And then the final question, and this is the one that usually gets people, is how would you live if you knew that you were going to be dead in six months? So imagine that your doctor says, oh, I'm sorry, Steve, it looks like you've got this new mysterious disease and six months from today, you're just going to drop dead. There's no cure, there's nothing you can do. How spend your time. And what would you regret not having done? How would you spend your last six months? So those three questions combined and kinder. You can probably find a video of George kinder presenting this online, probably on YouTube. Those three questions are designed to lead a person through kind of the broad, big picture thing, and then kind of narrow it down to, like, what is really important. And generally people realize, oh, you know, what's really important is my family, is my time with my friends and so on.

You know, I think it's really that third question of like, hey, if you read very limited resources or time, what would you do? And that's really what points you to like, hey, this is what's most important. And there's definitely data out there that says that, hey, you know, the, the key to happiness is, you know, your social network, your community of friends and family. Oh, absolutely. You know, it's not like there's hedonic adaption out there, right? You know, people can get tons and tons of money, they start buying nicer, nicer things, and then they find they get used to those nicer things and then they're not really any happier, you know, and you can have people that don't have a lot of money or societies that don't have lots of money and they're perfectly happy and content. You know, you see countries like Costa Rica, I think, like Brazil, you know, they've got kind of like a happier population.

There was a blog post that was very popular a number of years ago by this palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware. I think she's from Australia. And basically she had been working with people who were near death for a long time, and she began to see patterns in the regrets that they expressed near the end of their lives. So she said there were basically five common regrets. The number one regret was, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. People, especially men, would find that they had been kind of trapped in the rat race, and they'd spend so much time working that they didn't spend their time doing the things were most important. The second thing they wished or that they regretted is that they didn't have the courage to express their feelings. They were so scared and caught up on what other people would think that they kept their emotions bottled inside. The third thing goes right along with what you just said. People wished that they had stayed in touch with their friends. And this is something I'm wrestling with right now because I've kind of. Because of the RV trip, because of the divorce, I've kind of lost my social network, and I don't have a lot of close friends anymore or I don't have contact. And I regret that. The fourth thing was people wish that they had let themselves be happier. And I think this is an interesting one because it shows that happiness really is kind of a choice. It's not just about what happens to you. It's about how you decide to react to things. So one of the regrets of the dying was people wished that they had allowed themselves to be more positive and to react in a. Or just to be happier with what was going on around them. And then the final thing was people wished they had the courage to live a life true to themselves instead of doing what other people expected of them. And I think that one's huge, at least for me, because for so long I was a people pleaser. I just did what other people want or what I thought other people wanted. And it wasn't until I let go of that and just started doing what I wanted and not being a jerk. I'm not saying you should be a jerk to other people, but focus on what's important to you and not trying to please others. That's how you find happiness. And so I think these regrets of the dying are very interesting.

Just real quick as we wrap up here, love to get any more thoughts from, you know, you about kind of the Future of Get Rich Slowly. I saw that you wanted to do like 500 posts in 2018, which seemed really ambitious. You know, like, where do you see taking it? Where do you want to be in, you know, the next few, you know, few years and, you know, any great resources that you're using when you build it or that you think, you know, our audience would find valuable again.

I started get rich slowly in 2006 as a way to share my journey out of debt. When I got out of debt, when I was out of debt and I had enough money saved, I sold it. And I never intended to buy it back. I never even knew it was a possibility. And then that opportunity fell in my lap recently and I was able to buy it back for much less than I got for selling it. And so I am just having fun going out there every day, trying to find the best information I can about personal finance and then sharing that with my readers. It's been a kick, actually. I've been back at it for two months and I'm really excited about where the future is going. And like you said, In 2018, I want to publish 500 articles, which does seem ambitious. I think it's doable. We'll see.

Yeah. Well, good luck. I mean, I struggle to write like once a month or once every two weeks. And also we're going to see what.

Gives me meaning and purpose is writing. I mean, Get Rich Slowly really is like this culmination. At the start of the show, I mentioned that I was into computers, I was into writing, and I was into psychology. And then I had the financial issues. All four of these things just kind of merged in this one beautiful, weird thing that wouldn't be possible without the Internet. And it's just a place for me to, I guess, fulfill my purpose.

Well, we're in the age of the super empowered individual. And I think, I mean, it's pretty cool. Like, you know, you look at yourself or Mr. Money Mustache. I mean, you can be out there and, you know, touching millions of people, you know, with your ideas and build a following and, you know, have a great, I think, also dialogue with folks back and forth. I mean, I know for our business, it's. It's amazing watching people, you know, build retirement plans and kind of think about their future. And, you know, we, we get all kinds of great feedback and ideas from them about not just the money stuff, but also, you know, the life stuff. And, you know, the whole idea is to facilitate people learning and, you know, from people that have gone before them and help the people that are coming behind to make better choices, and so they have much better, much better outcomes. Last question here. You know, any predictions for 2018 as we go in here about, you know, what you see coming across the, you know, either the financial markets or, you know, political landscape or anything like that?

Oh, man, that is. I'm the wrong person to ask. I intentionally bury my head in the sand because I find that exposing myself to too much news, it makes me unhappy, and too much financial news, it doesn't actually help me make better decisions with my money. But if I were to hazard a prediction, I would say that we've been riding an upward market for a long, long time. And I don't want to say that we're due for a correction, but it would not surprise me if sometime in the next year or two, we experience some sort of recession. It's just. It's bound to happen. These things do happen, and it's been so long since we had one that I guess that would be my prediction. If you wanted to. Wanted me to give you a prediction.

Sure. No, I appreciate that. I think it's kind of interesting, you know, on the money side here. I was talking to one of our users earlier today, and, you know, he's saved up, you know, $400,000, but he's been. He, you know, he's, you know, in his 60s. He's like, well, I've been sitting on the sidelines for the last 10 years, and so I feel like an idiot for doing that. I mean. And, you know, I think. But it's. I was like, hey, you know what? You're in good company. 58% of retirement savings is in cash right now.

Holy mo. Really?

Yeah. That's the wall of worry that keeps this market going, actually. I mean, I think there's. There's tons of cash on the sidelines. So, you know, who knows? I mean, I kind of.

So he has $400,000 in cash, and he has not been in the market.

Yeah, right. I mean, I think that a lot of people got burned in 2008, 2009. You know, they kind of freaked out. You know, they were like, wow, market's gotten cut in half. You know, I'm out. And then. Then the market's been shooting back up, and people are like, oh, should I. Should I jump back in? Or. It's already gone too high. It's gonna come back. And so that keeps a lot of people. People paralyzed. We'll probably get a whole other podcast on this.

I always think of Warren Buffett say, saying, where Warren Buffett says, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. And what he means by that is the time to sell is not when the market's down, but when the market's up. And the time to buy is when the market's down, not when the market's up.

Unfortunately, most retail investors do the exact opposite. They basically, you know, they're, they're, you know, you can't get the emotion out of it. That's actually where an advisor or coach is most valuable, where they can kind of talk you back off the cliff and, and then hopefully get you to buy. When there's, quote, blood in the streets, that's when you do. All right, well, J.D. this has been awesome. I want to say thank you for being our first guest. Also thanks to Dotto Robison for being our sound engineer and anyone who's listening. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Hopefully you found this useful. You know, our goal at New Retirement is to help anyone plan and manage their retirement so they can make the most of their money and time. And you can find kind of free retirement planning tools on our site, kind of lay out your vision for the future. And the idea is it's a living plan that you can maintain over time.