From Solo to Social: Creating Your Boldin Retirement Planning Support Group | Office Hours

Hello everyone. Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Nancy Gates. I lead the services team here at Bolden with a focus on delivering meaningful support for our users through education, coaching and tonight's topic, community engagement. Tonight's event is a special office hours devoted to the topic of creating a Bolden user group. I want to welcome everyone to the session and express our appreciation of the Bolden team. The the appreciation of the Bolden team for your engagement and membership tonight. In terms of the agenda we have our welcome and housekeeping and then I have four guests joining me. Delano, Mark Felton, Mark Eckel and Al Champagne. Welcome and thank you for joining me tonight. These four gentlemen have organized, participated in, led their own user groups and they've joined me this evening to share their experiences with you in hopes of supporting you in potentially doing the same thing. So as always, my disclaimer. Please keep in mind that our live events are intended to provide general educational information so that anything discussed tonight should not be considered specific investment, tax or legal advice. These are the four members, as I said, who are joining me tonight. They've each participated in groups where which involved sharing financial plans and getting feedback from their like minded peers. So tonight we're here to help you learn how to connect with the Boldo community and deepen your understanding of financial planning, personal finance and improve your own personal plan. Our first speaker is going to be Mark Felton on the topic of the benefits of belonging to a Bolden user group. Welcome Mark. Thank you.

Thank you Nancy. Hi everybody, my name is Mark Felton. I am 59 and a half. So what's that magic number tell you? I am still working full time but I began this retirement. Well, I began the retirement journey 30 some years ago, you know, when I started putting money in 401k and other investments. But I really got serious about planning for retirement a little over a year ago and I started investigating. I've always been a DIY kind of financial planner and figured I'd carry that over into retirement planning. So I began investigating what tools were out there for, for me, someone like me, and I assume someone like you to be able to, you know, really put together a solid financial plan. I came across Bolden at the time, it was new retirement and, and I was very impressed with the tool. The problem or the downside of the whole DIY approach was it was just me, you know, I didn't have the ability, or didn't think I did to bounce ideas off other people, to share knowledge, to really interact with someone, to make sure that I wasn't missing something major along, along this whole retirement journey or this journey towards retirement. And so as part of the whole Bolden thing, I got on the Facebook group and one of our other speakers here tonight, Al Champagne, had made a post about putting your information in a Google sheet to express your interest in participating in retirement groups. It was actually inspired by Tim Updike. Tim actually is a part of the group that I'm in. We call ourselves the Financial Freedom Alliance, a name created by another one of our members. The primary benefits of the group that, that I'm a part of is that I feel like I have people like minded people that are using the same tool, they're using Bolden, but they're also considering a lot of the same things that I am. Roth conversions, when to take Social Security, you know, impacts on irmaa, all kinds of stuff. Pension questions, the retirement paycheck. I mean, we've got a whole list of topics that we've discussed. And so I've had the ability to bounce my ideas off of, off of a group of guys. It just happens to all be guys. Wasn't necessarily intended. I had this conversation with Nancy. It wasn't intended to be that way, but it just worked out that way. So I can bounce ideas off of them and they, and they will say, have you thought about this? You know, you know, have you considered this? Or I went through that same thing and here's what I did and it's been invaluable. I would say the other thing that has resulted from the group that I'm a part of is we've developed really, I feel like pretty deep relationships. I feel like I know these guys, although I've never met a single one of them in person, not yet. That's, that's going to soon change next week, as a matter of fact. We, we have laughed together. We've celebrated, you know, we've had one guy retire a couple months ago and everybody gave him a virtual high five and really celebrated the fact that he retired. And you know, we, we talk, we've got other guys that are, you know, we know their retirement dates. And so it's, it's really built a sense of community and camaraderie. And I feel like that was, like I said, it was a something, a huge void that I experienced when, when I started down the whole Bolden path of planning for retirement. They've got the numbers in spades. No, no issue with the numbers whatsoever. It was just that personal connection was kind of missing the same sort of thing that you'd get with a financial advisor. So anyway, as I mentioned, Al Champagne was the one that originally posted the Facebook post. And so I'm going to hand it off to Al and let him kind of describe how he, the nuts and bolts of how he went about forming the group that he's a part of.

So Al.

Hey, thanks Mark. I appreciate it. My name is Al Champagne. I actually retired last October after 30 plus years in the tech industry. I'm based in Santa Cruz, California and I lead a group that we call the Pacific Group. Most of us on the west coast. I've been using Bolden for over three years. I think I started in, in late 2021 or 2022. It helped me prepare for retirement. I had used a bunch of other tools prior to Bolden, including spread sheets and other online tools and I just, I felt like the Bold and features were the strongest and the best that met my needs. So what I'm going to discuss today is kind of group organization. How do you go about organizing and putting together a group? So first of all, you need to find team members. Like Mark mentioned, there's a very strong Facebook group with lots of people monitoring and providing feedback. So, you know, Tim placed that message out a few years ago or maybe year or two and there was a lot of response. So I created a spreadsheet to, to help, you know, people, you know, self select into groups. So that Facebook group is a really good place to start. You can also start the Bolden subreddit and then I encourage you to, you know, to reach out to others or to, to update that, that spreadsheet. Once you, once you find some like minded Bolden members, you'll want to select a group leader that can either be the person who kind of initiates the, the search for other members, which was the what happened in my case, or it could be more of an organic thing where people come together as like a jury and then one, they select 114 person to, to lead it and facilitate it. You just need that as, you know, for somebody to, you know, kind of take notes, schedule meetings, you know, that kind of stuff. So somebody needs to take ownership of that. You'll also want to determine the group size, you know, you, whether you want to be small or large or whatever. So determine that that optimum group s stay flexible in terms of what you're learning from the group in terms of kind of group processes. I started with communications, so you got to start with, you know, either it's some type of a chat session. It's Google Chat, it's Slack, it's something like that. Microsoft Teams, you're going to use something like that, that, where you can have ongoing discussions. You want to be able to share information. Say you're only meeting once a month or once every two weeks. You want to be able to share information and questions in between meetings. So we do that either via Google Chat or Slack. We also share each other's cell phone numbers. So we do have a text group that we, that will pose questions to and get responses almost immediately. The next section, you know, around getting organized is making sure you got your documentation straight. You want to either have a Google Drive where you can share documentation or have one large Google Doc where you're keeping track of your agenda. The notes for the meetings, future topics like who's tracking future topics. What are you going to be talking about next week, what are you going to be talking about next month? That kind of stuff. Google Calendar or some kind of calendaring tool. You want to make sure that you get those calendar events on everybody's, on everybody's individual calendars so that everybody knows when the meetings are coming up. And then you'll meet via either Google Meet or Zoom. There are free versions of those. They're limited to time. So if you don't, if you go with the free version, you may have to book two back to back meetings in order to, you know, do a one and a half hour or two hour session. And then in terms of staying flexible, the group dynamics are going to change over time. As you get to know each other, people may come and go, you may have some people drop, you may want to add some new members. You also need to recognize that not everybody can attend every single meeting. So you'll have some people coming in and out, but you'll let the group culture evolve over time. Another thing you want to consider is kind of group diversity and culture. Like Mark mentioned, his group is all male. My, my group happens to have a good mix. We also have a good mix on retirement phase. We have a, you know, are you retired already? Are you close to retirement? Are you far from retirement? You know, we specifically look for those things to make sure that we had diversity. You'll also want to consider whether you want, you know, other people may be coming in with pensions and some with not pensions. Right. So there's, there's another element of diversity and then professional backgrounds, teachers, engineers, public servants, you know, that kind of stuff. So you want to determine how much diversity you want and then you want to determine are there common areas that you're specifically looking for. When I was putting my group together, my most, my biggest common area was I wanted everybody in the same time zone because I didn't want anybody to have to attend late evening or early morning meetings. But there might be, you know, number of years of DIY experience or, you know, everyone's has a baseline level of skill set to be able to use the tools that I mentioned above. And then also net worth might be something that you want in common areas. You might want somebody all, you know, the group to represent a very similar net worth. So they're all having similar, similar problems. And then in terms of size, I would say a small group is two to three people, medium group is four to eight, and I would say large is nine or more. What I found is with the small group is that if you have one or two people missing a particular month, then you may have a, you may not be able to get a quorum for meetings. So you want to make sure that you factor that in in terms of group culture. You know, you can either discuss this specifically or just let it grow organically. In our group, we just kind of let it grow organically. You know, we have an expectation that everybody shares information, everybody contributes. So we don't have lurkers or somebody who's not contributing. So we, we specifically make sure that everybody has a chance to contribute. You should also expect a willingness to be vulnerable. Team members will be sharing net worth, portfolio numbers, concerns and fears about retirement, asset allocations, all that kind of stuff. Right? And then you also want to make sure that there's an expectation of privacy and discretion. You know, what happens in retirement club stays in retirement club for to, to a certain extent, right? You're not sharing other people's information with anybody outside of the retirement group. And then in terms of monthly meetings, we started out monthly and then we've moved it to every other week. And I would categorize the meetings as being in two stages, right? There's the early meetings for the group and then there's the ongoing meetings. In the early meetings, you're going to just, you know, it's going to be initial introduction process, feeling each other out. Your next several meetings after the first few intro meetings is going to be retirement plan sharing. So somebody's got to raise their hand and say, okay, I'm willing to share my retirement plan with people that may have only, they may have only talked with for, you know, across two or three meetings. You want to, in the early meetings, you want to decide on common, you know, common agenda, common format, how you're going to share the information. You know, are you going to share your screen and open open up directly into Bolden or are you going to have some type of a template that everybody follows? My group used the template. I think Mark Felton's group, they a lot of them used, went straight into Bolden and shared the reports or the PDFs within Bolden. Those the meetings early on can also include other topics. You know, what's happening in the world of finance today. But that tends to make the meetings go long because if you're, if somebody is sharing their retirement plan, you want to give them a good hour, hour and 15 minutes to share their plan. If you're adding other topics, your meeting, we had several meetings, go two hours and you know that just that gets a little bit long. And then I would say the last type of meeting is the ongoing meetings. Once everybody shared their plan. Now it's like what other topics are there and what is the cadence that we want to, to go? We went from monthly, now we're going every, every two weeks or so, twice a month. You want to determine do you want shorter meetings. We wanted to go more frequently with shorter meetings as opposed to monthly with two hour meetings. So we went to, went that route. Typical agenda on a meeting is 15 to 20 minutes of catching up. Hey, what have you been doing since the last time we discussed are there any things going on with, you know, with your, you and your life or with your financial life, you know, those kind of things. So that's, that's one of the ways that we build that rapport in that culture is that first 15 or 20 minutes of sharing and then the rest of the time is spent discussing agreed upon topics. We track the topics like Mark said earlier. He also has a list of topics, future topics. We track those and then we'll drop them into, you know, each, each week's schedule as we go, depending on what people want to want to talk about. And those topics can range from anything from hey, how do I set up a T bill ladder or what's what, what are you guys doing for fixed income strategies or what are you doing for insurance? You know, now that you're retired, you have different types of insurance products or strategies. So it's not all about Bolden, but Bolden is kind of the glue that holds it all together, that makes sure that we're all on track. But anyway, that's a little bit about group organization. I'm going to hand it off now to Mark Eckel who will discuss the next topic. Mark?

Thank you Al. Hello everyone. I'm Mark Eckel. I'm 61. We are both still working. We're really kind of in that one more year mode. So hopefully I'll have a different answer sometime soon. We've been a subscriber for Bolden for a long time and we do have the once a year review from one of the planners and coaches. I thought that was relevant here because that was one of the biggest values for me and I think my friends in our group of having a second set of eyes, someone else to look at what you're doing, someone else to bounce questions and ideas off from. As we approach this, I saw some questions about privacy and I thought I could speak to that a little bit. That was one of our earlier, very first conversations is what's your comfort level? We have some pretty capable people in the group and we researched like the terms and conditions, what does Google offer for security. And then we talked about how do each of us want to find the level of information we are willing to share. And you keep it really simple. I don't mind sharing like totals, but just never individual. Like even where it is, you maybe give it a name and say how much is there? But we did really think about that. But it's up to each member how much information to share. As we went into these groups, we did start with personal information and talk about our goals. Some common discussions are things like asset allocations, how are you going to withdraw this? A lot of interest in the scenarios embolden, you know, I'm, I'm a big fan of that. And then each of us approach that with our own set of goals. So we very quickly arrived at that practice of what do you really want to achieve from your turn to present your plan and how would you like to do it and then where do you want help from? So like that was when I had my turn. I had some very specific topics that I wanted help with. I wanted to know and asset allocation is one of those. So you know, I mentioned one more year. I felt like we were at that point where we really needed to become a little more conservative. And we all shared that. That's not anything I worry about sharing is where's my asset allocation. And that really helped me to see where the other folks were at that time. Social Security has been a lot of discussion. You Bolden's powerful when you think about taxes and required distributions and things like that. When I presented I had like a one pager that talked about myself, my family, our personal situation and what we hope to achieve. And then just at the highest level, here's where we are. And then I pulled up Bolden and this group, you know, we'd already talked several times. I felt very comfortable, might say, you know, that's a lot to share, but I really didn't have any concerns. And I walked through the Bold and Plan and I got a lot out of it. I really did. I won't say as much as the certified financial planner, you know, which was a little more involved, but I got my questions answered. And then really a compliment to the group. As we were nearing the end of the hour, one of the members interrupted and said, hey, what was Mark's questions? Did we get him his answers? And we were able to go right back to the very first one pager and talk about, you know, what I asked for help with. And it really did help. The other thing I'd like to share, which, you know, as a member and a presenter, you know, I think Joe Kuhn coined the gut busters term. That's probably my highest value. And that is something that has continued. We're in our second year and we can do that on demand. So if I think two or three times now, somebody just said, hey, I've got a decision to make. I would really use some help. Anybody free tomorrow night? And you jump on a call and you talk through that and help them make that decision. So that's really important. I think the peer reviews was a great way to start. And then much as Al was saying and Mark was saying, and Mark does this for my group as we have those discussions, as our chats happen, out of cycle, out of the meeting, Mark pays attention and he builds our agenda. So we've got a document out there that's probably got our next three meetings with agendas. And like, I've already raised my hand when in the future I'll have to make my decision. Is today the day that I give notice and I retire, but very powerful. Really complements the Bold and tool, really complements the service. You're being a subscription and having that access, getting that information from that group, that really, really helps. Having a second set of eyes, multiple second sets of eyes to help think through what you're doing, look at your options, look at your data. I mean, that's a small thing, but really my plan has been improved every time I've asked someone to look at it for me. But really good experience and I hope everyone is able to enjoy that as well. So that's what I wanted to share about. You're preparing your presentation, making your choices. Really good question about how much to share. That's up to you. Your technology is part of that. I wouldn't highlight that. And then we haven't had a problem with that. But I glad that I get to be here tonight and share this and be part of this group. And I'll turn it over to Steve now.

Hello, everybody. Good evening. Thank you. I'm Steve Bellino and I've been a bolden user since September of 23. And I'm going to go a little bit into the weeds and describe our group and how we actually did the meeting. So a little bit about the group. There were six of us, two women and four men. And we represented west coast, east coast and also central area of the US because of the west coast user, we usually met in the evenings for the east coast users so they could get off of work. Our group simply was designed. We met on Facebook after a series of Joe Kuhn videos where he kept talking about having a retirement group where you can bounce ideas off of. We. We met on Facebook and our group was pretty much designed just to shoot holes in each other's plans from a complementary perspective, if you will. So we'd meet monthly and this is past tense. We're. We're still a group, but we don't meet because we've accomplished our goal. We sometimes send messages back and forth to each other, but we would meet monthly. And the purpose of each meeting was to review one of our plans. So the details of how we do that.

Rough.

Excuse me. Roughly one to two weeks ahead of the meeting, the person whose plan would be reviewed would upload it to a shared Google Drive. What would they upload? They'd do the bolden print plan and they'd export it to a PDF and then they'd upload that like a book, if you will. They publish their story to the shared drive. Now, those one to two weeks before the meeting, the rest of us would download it or look at it. I would personally download it, use my iPad and make notes, scribble notes, try to read, figure out what the narrative is of that story, of that plan based on our own life experiences. You know, we have our own perceptions and experiences and. And I would use my own perceptions and come up with what the. What the story is trying to say. So during the meeting. Now we meet once a month and the reviewee, the person whose plan was being reviewed, they would Share their screen of the plan. They would sometimes share bolden, but that was very rare. We usually just looked at the plan, the printed plan, and go through it page by page. And as needed, as we go through the pages, the group would ask questions or make suggestions. And using, using the book example I used earlier, this is where the author is reading us the backstory and telling us if what we were perceiving was reality. So some observations, like I think it was al mentioned earlier, reviewing the plan would sometimes initiate broader discussions. But some sample observations of things we'd pick up on or ask about. Do the rates of return and assumptions look reasonable? Do the end of plan savings look reasonable? And an example of that is sometimes we'd have a 529 plan with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars at the end of the plan. Did the person intend to spend that down? Was it somehow. Why was it that way? It was probably not on purpose. We noticed one. Here's another example. One member's transportation expenses stopped around the age of 85. And when we asked them if that was, you know, did they not expect to drive any longer? The answer was yes. And the point there is they were being very intentional. Their plan said exactly what they wanted to do, and that was at 85 years old. This person did not expect to be driving anymore. Still on transportation, one had a car loan, a current car loan, but no replacement. And this person was going to be retired for 30 plus more years. So that was just simply an oversight and a testament to the power of having extra eyes on your plan. And lastly, this is one I'm particular about. When we were looking at each other's expenses, we were often looking for what are the high cost and infrequent expenses that might be missing, for example, a new roof, new H VAC system, car replacement, or over the span of 30, 40, 50 years, multiple car replacements, any appliance replacements. So that's it in a nutshell. That's, that's the nuts and bolts of, of how we met and would meet on a monthly basis.

Thank you, Steve. Steve, your group ran from 2023 to 2024, about a year, roughly from February.

Of 24 to the August time frame of 2024.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

And then Financial Freedom alliance ran from.

Well, we're still running. We review, we reviewed plans. We began in the end of June 2024 and we completed review of all of them mid August. And then we just meet monthly, right?

Yeah, right. And you don't have a Slack channel. You do Google Meet And Google Chat.

That's correct.

Right, right, right. And the Pacific group started, we started.

In June of last year as well. Same time as Mark.

Yeah, Yep, yep. Wonderful, wonderful.

And we use, we use Slack and, and Google Meet.

Right, right. I have to say I didn't mention this earlier, but just for everybody's information, Steve Chen, our founder and I met with groups, they were gracious enough to invite us to speak to their groups, but really to, to listen to them speak to their groups and we were both so incredibly moved. I mean just the power of the community in these groups and the trust and the vulnerability in the, just the expression of the appreciation for a safe place to talk about money, work on your finances, learn more. Mark Felton, you mentioned you know something about, you know, finding like minded people and feeling comfortable talking about your finances. And I always think that's why I love being a part of Bolden because wouldn't it be nice if it felt like that everywhere in our lives with everyone and it doesn't in our culture. So maybe we're starting something that's going to spread that, that experience a little, a little further in our culture, you know.

Yeah.

And I, you know, I would add, I should have said this when I my slide I knew something was missing and the group that we formed filled that void. But, but it did way so much more than I expected. I mean it was, there were, there was stuff missing that I wasn't aware was missing and the group has fulfilled that. We've talked about, you know, like I said, getting together. Several of our group members, group members have physically, you know, gone to visit other ones and we've talked about going to the Bogleheads conference together in October. So it's, you know, there's just a lot there that, a lot of it. You just can't put dollars and cents or numbers on it. There's an intangible element to it that's been invaluable.

I completely agree.

Agree.

I'm going to cover the last slide, then we'll go into Q and A and discussion. James Rowe is with us today. He also belongs to a user group so maybe he'll share some information as well. Just our final slide here. As the members here sharing with us tonight expressed. The group may initially begin discussing financial topics but reviewing one another's plans and then expand into something which is more topically oriented. As the group evolves, the plan reviews are completed. So these are some topics already mentioned. Withdrawal strategies, income planning, estate planning, Roth conversions, expenses. Steve, I love how you mentioned when I do coach reviews, which I don't do a ton of them anymore, but when I do coach reviews, I see massive HSA balances at the end of plan. And HSAs are so tax disadvantaged to anyone other than a spouse. And then there's the leftover 529s. So it's really, really great to have another set of eyes on your plan like that. So thank you so much, Steve, Mark, Mark and Ellen, for all of your hard work in joining me today and just being so willing and open to share your experiences in your groups, inviting Steve and I to your groups and being generous enough to to be with us tonight to to bring all this wonderful information to all of our users. Happy planning, and we look forward to seeing you again in another live event or other engagement, Facebook, subreddit, et cetera. So thanks again. Have a wonderful evening. Happy planning.