Intentional Retirement Living with Fritz Gilbert [Ep. 84]

Foreign. So welcome to the new retirement podcast. I'm your host, Steve Chen. Today we have a special guest, Fritz Gilbert. He's the author of Keys to a Successful Retirement. Fritz is a former corporate exec and he's made the transition to retirement six years ago. He also runs the popular blog the Retirement Manifesto. That's how we originally met. And he's written about his journey to and now living in retirement for actually nine years. So we're going to get Fritz's six year take on what he's learned six years into retirement. So with that, Fritz, welcome to our show. Appreciate you taking the time to join us.

Hey, Steve, thanks so much. I remember back when we met in 2017 at Fincon and I hadn't even retired yet. I was a year out and a couple years into my blog and you were just starting new retirement. Now look at this. Many years later, I've been retired six years, living in the mountains and just loving life. And you're doing great with new retirement. So congratulations. Thanks for having me back on the show.

Yeah, no, I'm glad. We've kind of kept in touch and obviously we're doing some work together as well. So, yeah, we'd love to get kind of your take on, just catch the audience up, like what's new kind of recently with life and stuff like that.

Yeah, well, you know, when I was still working, we were in Atlanta. So when I retired, we moved up to our cabin in the mountains in Blue Ridge, Georgia, right on the Tennessee border. So we're in the Appalachian Mountains, right where the Appalachian Trail starts. And I tell you what, retirement has just been awesome. Steve. My wife started a nonprofit called Freedom for Fido. So we're building free fences for low income families with dogs on chains. We've got a couple hundred volunteers. We're doing a fence build every week. So we've built this whole community of just generous people who are all about giving back to the community. And it's just become this huge network of really good friends. We call it the Fido family. We actually have a name for it. We're getting together tomorrow at a microbrew. Right. It's just these spontaneous pop ups. Somebody will shoot out a group text, hey, let's get together at Grumpy's. And we just show up. And it's become a great core friendship, my blog, obviously, I'm nine years into that now and still continuing to write and enjoying that and the interaction with the readers and helping people figure out this whole retirement thing. You know, it's really been interesting, Steve, because I started writing before I'd retired three years prior. So I talked about preparing for it and the transition, but you just don't know what it's going to be like until you actually do it. And now I'm six years into it. I know what it's about. Right. I've been there, I've been through the phases, I've settled in, and we're just living life. We got a couple dogs up here. We've got a second home down in Southern Alabama where our daughter lives, and we spend a week down there every month with our granddaughter. Three weeks up here at the cabin, and then we'll hook up the RV and we'll travel around the country, you know, a couple times through the year. And we're just, we're loving life. We're healthy, we're, we're focused on fitness. We're doing stuff outdoors all the time. And I couldn't be happier, Steve. Life is, life is very good. We're blessed. Yeah.

Well, I know, I see you on Facebook and social media and it definitely seems like you're everything, you're communicating. I see, I see the work with the dogs and like you're building stuff on your properties and you trucking around the country. Yeah. And I definitely envy the fact that you have accomplished this and can live confidently. I mean, it's, I think you're, it's interesting how you're focusing on health. I want to talk about that. Like, you know, you remember we, you know, you were reading Younger next year and you know, you've obviously been running around, but also, you know, because of that, and hopefully, knock on wood, staying healthy, you know, you could live quite a long time. And yeah, you have to kind of like this, the reality of like managing your money over that time period. But I love your commentary on both those things, like how you, you know, how you manage your health and then also how you kind of think about the financial side of it.

Yeah, that's, that's a great question. You know, and really, as, I mean, I've always kind of been fitness oriented. I ran for 25 years in my career and, you know, I'd run at lunch and whatnot. But the, the freedom in retirement to just do so many different physical activity things. You know, we're doing a fence build, so you're doing strength stuff there. This today I went out on a six mile trail run. You know, I'm 61 years old and I can still run six miles on the trails. It feels, it feels awesome. I'm probably in better shape now than I was at 50 because I've got the time and I've put in such a variety of workouts. I bought a peloton type thing. So I got a home gym. I'm doing weights. I never really did weights when I was working, but now I've really noticed the importance. I've done a lot of research on longevity and things you need to do. So I guess there's several planks in our retirement. We've got the travel, we've got time with our daughter, we've got the blog, we've got the charity. But fitness is absolutely a key part of that. And I probably have pretty regimented, pretty aggressive workouts three to four days a week. So how does the money play into that? I guess it's interesting when you're preparing for retirement and obviously new retirement, this is what you guys are all about. There's a huge focus on the financials and there should be, there needs to be. But as you get into retirement, you start thinking about them. This is probably one of the things I've learned. In retirement. You think about the money less after you've made the decision to retire and you've gotten a couple years into retirement. You've kind of gotten used to spending what you can safely spend. You kind of settle in and you don't worry about money nearly as much. I know we're within our safe withdrawal rate. I know we've got investments that'll keep up with inflation, hopefully demonstrated in the past. No idea about the future. But we've got a diversified portfolio. We're gonna delay Social Security. Cause that's a good longevity step. So we're doing the things we can do to hopefully not run out of money. And we really don't worry about it. We know we're well within our safe withdrawal rate. We're comfortable that we can live like we've got some luxuries built in. If we had to scale back to a little bit, we could do that without any major sacrifices. So it's really refreshing how the financial anxiety goes down significantly once you're into retirement for a couple of years.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it's so funny that you're 61, you're nine years from claiming if you delay Social Security till 70, you're kind of living on your own ass. And then that'll help. But probably. I don't know, how much difference will it make? I mean, it does make a huge difference in terms of hedging your longevity and stuff like that.

Yeah, I mean, you can argue, okay, there's an opportunity cost because we're spending our investments to delay Social Security. My whole take on that is Social Security is, you know, if you can get the bump every year while you wait, you know, 8% or whatever they claim it is, and then once you start claiming it's inflation adjusted every year. So to me, that's kind of a guaranteed, locked in inflation adjusted income, whereas your investment returns have more risk by definition. So to me, it's, it's, it's, there is a, there is a break even point. Right. You can probably see it in your models. I mean, it's typically in Your early to mid-80s is the break even point. So, yeah, you could, you could say it's not that big a deal. And it's probably not, but it's just one of those levers you've got. If you live to 100, you're going to be glad you delayed Social Security because that's clearly past the break even point.

So, yeah, 100%. No, it's also great to hear about kind of your, kind of your, your path to, I mean, you've always, you've always been healthy and exercise and stuff like that, but leaning even more. You know, Joe Kuhn is another guest we've had. And, and we did some work with him and he got really fit and like, he was, he's on YouTube. And yeah, people were like, he was originally talking about kind of all this plan stuff and then people were noticing how fit he was getting. They were like, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm retired. I'm getting super fit. And it's like, yeah, I wanted to really get into what he was doing there. Do you see this with your peers? Like other folks that you know, that are retired, are they like, are they leaning into the exercise side of it and getting more fit?

Yeah. You know, we're fortunate because so many of our relationships now have been fostered through this freedom for Fido work. And I think it's, it's kind of a self selecting subset of population. Right. The people that we interact with tend to be earlier retirees. They tend to be fit. They're out there building fences for dogs. So, so by definition, the vast majority of our friends are really into fitness as well. If you go on, you know, we're on Strava together, right. We see each other doing stuff. So I look at my friend, there's, there's this, this woman, she's amazing. She's probably late 50s. She's out there doing eight to 10 mile hikes. I mean like 2,000ft of vertical climbing, you know, and I mean she's, she's absolutely just crushing it. Like 20 year olds couldn't keep up with her, you know, and, and, and that's just representative. I mean Marco, another friend of mine, he, he lives at the top of this huge mountain and every day he walks down the mountain, he does a five mile hike with his dog and he hikes back up this mountain and that's probably a 1500 foot climb. So you know, I got mountain biking buddies, I've got, you know, swimming buddies. There's a group of us that swim in the lake every year. It's a three mile swim across the lake. It's a big event. So, you know, and the lady that organizes that is like 78 years old and she's still swimming three miles across the lake. So yeah, health, like you mentioned, younger next year. There's no reason if you don't make a focus on health. And it's easy to make excuses, but once you retire, the biggest thing I urge people, stop making excuses, just get out and start walking. I got a friend of mine who just retired, he and his wife, they're kind of out of shape and you know what, they're starting to walk and they're doing two miles at a city park. And I'm like, good for you. They're doing it and they're getting out there three days a week and they're walking their two miles and you've got time to do it. And the rewards of it, not only do you hopefully get better longevity, but you feel so much better. I can do anything I want to do, anytime I want to do it. And I have no aches and pains. And if we want to go travel to Colorado and climb a 14er, we can do it right. So the benefits far exceed just the longevity. It's health span. Right. If you study this stuff, it's being able to do what you want to do longer in your life. And being surrounded by a community of like minded friends certainly helps because we, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're the nature of your five best friend as they say. Right. And, and, and our best friends are, are equally focused on fitness.

Yeah, that's awesome. I, I think it is so important, the community, the people that you're around and leaning into it and. Yeah, I mean I, I think about my life this way too. It's like I Want to be able to ski, bike, surf? Like, I just took up wing foiling.

Oh, cool.

Sport where you're like holding his wing and then you come up and like, yeah, you know, if I want to keep doing this kind of stuff, you know, I need to. And you're working out way more than I am. Actually. There's a friend of mine. Yeah, he's, he's retired. He's like, he's like 63. He's in better shape than I am because he's just, he's like. But he works out three hours a day, two to three hours a day, you know, he's. Yeah, yeah, he just swam like 5,000 meters. I was like, what do you.

Well, you know, it's like anything else, right? I really believe in balance. I got a friend of mine, he works out like 10 times a week and I'm like, dude, you got to back it up. You know that spoke in your wheel is too long. Right. You gotta have balance. But the one thing, I just saw a YouTube video the other day about the top five regrets of retirees. And this is like 80 year old people that this guy had interviewed. And I think it was number two or three. The biggest regret was that they hadn't taken better care of themselves and focused on fitness. Because at that age you're starting to really. You know, even at my age, I think of my high school classmates, you can see a huge difference between the people that think about fitness and the people that don't already at 60. So by the time you're 80, it's a, it's a huge chasm. Right. And that's a big regret. People that didn't focus on it. When it starts catching up to you and it's kind of hard to dig yourself out of that trench. That's when you start having regrets for not making it a priority.

Yeah, I definitely think that there's a certain age where I remember I was like, okay, I'm going to get ripped, you know, like, whatever. But now I'm like, all right, I just want to stay fit. And I feel like there's also, if you, yeah. If you don't keep it up at a certain point, you may not be coming back. Like, you know, it's like you're just not going to get back to, could I go hike? You know, do a 2,000 foot climb and do a 10 mile hike.

I just published a post last week, longevity lessons from a 91 year old. And this guy, 91 years old, he can still do 15 push ups. Two chin ups. He jogs a little bit, he walks a lot and you know he's 91 years old. So they're and younger next year was all about this. You can do stuff well into your late 70s, early 80s if you maintain your fitness. You can do the same thing at 79 that you can do at 50. It's really, it's shocking to people when they. But I see a lot of those late 70s, early 80s in our community that are that model, they're like the lady that I swim with, you know, it can be done. And my, my goal is that my wife and I will be in that camp, you know, and I want to build fences until I'm 85 years old, you know, that's kind of my goal, you know.

That's awesome. That's cool. So any like what are the biggest lessons you would share kind of six years in like, like one of the things you talked a lot about the beginning that I know you hedge is sequence of return risk. And actually I'd love to start you share kind of your thinking there but also like does that go away? Like because like it kind of feels like you have a long duration ahead of you. Don't you always have that sequence of return risk or do you feel like it's very, there's a big risk right. As you retire?

Well, you know, you could argue because I'm only 61, most people are retiring now. Right. I've already been retired six years. So I should absolutely see it as big a risk now as I did at 55. But I don't, you know, and I went through the bear market, you know, of 2020 was a 20, 20, 2022. You know, there have been a couple, couple bear markets since I've retired.

Yeah.

And, and you know I really put a lot of focus. I use the bucket strategy. So I keep three years of cash. Obviously with interest rates being higher, it's less of an opportunity cost to do that these days. But what I've learned is having a couple years of cash and then just knowing from six decades on this earth and four decades as a do it DIY investor, you learn that markets are cyclical and they're going to go down and you don't freak out about it. So you've got to have that exposure to equities to offset that long term inflation. So you worry about it a lot when you first retire, but then you go through a couple of downturns, you kind of pull your cash down for a little bit. You don't Refill the bucket. And then the markets come back and you refill the bucket. You're like, hey, that was, that was pretty easy. And, and so I still have that same position in place, the bucket strategy. You know, three years in cash, five to eight years in bonds, which I changed to a bond ladder because I learned as the interest rates obviously, you know, went up, the bonds got crushed. So I moved that to a bond ladder. That is one change I've made. So it'll be a known return at a known date, but beyond that, it's just in place. I maintain it and I don't really worry about sequence of return risk, but I have and I probably always will, three years of cash and five years of bonds and a little bit of alternative commodities, some stuff like that, some REITs that I feel comfortable. If we had to go 10 years in a horrendous bear market, we'd be okay. We'd find a way to get through it. So it's something you need to be aware of. But once you position it and you just start maintaining it, you worry about it a lot less.

How do you compare? Maybe you don't talk about this, but like, like you're with your community of friends building fences, right? Yeah, like how and like a bunch of you in good shape. Do you guys talk about money, like kind of where you're at or like from a fiscal. Like we, we're, you know, leaning into this story of we think financial wellness is going to be a lot like physical wellness, which is like, it's a lifelong practice.

Yeah.

You got to pay attention and you just got to keep at it. You got to keep working out. You're going to have to keep managing your money, doing the bucket strategy. Like, are your friends the same way? Like, I mean, I'm sure they're not like you because like, like you're the only person who has written a nine year blog. But you know, but I'm like, are they, are they thinking a little bit like you?

You know, Steve, it's, it's surprise. I wrote a, I wrote an article called the 9010 rule of retirement. And I basically said as you're Preparing for retirement, 90% of your thinking is on the financials. And then you get into retirement and it switches. And 90% of your thinking is about life and only 10% is about financials. And I can honestly tell you, six years retired, active in the community, tons of friends, a lot of them, you know, obviously apparently quite affluent, you know, early retirees, we never talk about money.

Okay.

We never talk about it. I don't know what most of these people did while they were working. It's not even relevant. It's really strange how now I started a retirement mastermind group about two years ago and it's like eight of us, eight guys, all kind of similar age. And in that group, we'll talk a little bit about money because it's intentionally focused to talk about retirement. But even there, we don't share specific net worth. We don't really talk about asset allocation. We'll talk concepts, we'll talk about safe spending strategies and safe withdrawal rates, but I have no idea. I know the one guy, he's got a property that he's putting up to sell, so it's okay. That guy's loaded. He's got a very valuable property. Property. So you kind of get little things like that that you see. But it's not something that we kind of make a big part of our life. It's, it's, it's surprising. That's a surprise to me in retirement that it's not a big topic. Yeah, well.

But it's good that there are. People are confident. I mean, it's interesting. Like, I look at my friends and, you know, that are approaching retirement and some of them are thinking about it. Right. So some, A little, A little bit. It feels like it reflects the wealth concentration of this country where some people are like, they have, they don't have to think about it. Money at all. They're just like, whatever. I have tons of it. It's all over the place and like, who cares? And then most people are like, I gotta, you know, I gotta pay attention and maybe it's not gonna be that great and I gotta work for this amount of time and like, you know, it's not a slam dunk. Yeah. A lot of it also depends, I think, on where you live. I mean, we live in, you know, Northern California. It is very expensive to live here. And I think that a lot of people are probably going to end up making trades where they might be like, all right, I'll go to Mexico for a few years or I'll go somewhere else in the country and downsize. I'm going to have to carry this expensive house around and taxes and all that stuff.

Yeah. And I think part of that where I live is very low cost. Most of the people that are here that are retirees, they've moved here from somewhere else. We actually have somebody that moved here from Silicon Valley. We joke they were Silicon Valley billionaire. I mean, we have no idea. But they were. Obviously they did very well. But they don't talk about it, right? It's like, like we always, like, where did you work? Were you with Google or. You know, and they don't, they don't, they don't talk about it. But the point being there's clearly some people that did well in high cost of living areas and they intentionally chose to move here because it is a low cost of area with, with a plethora of outdoor activities. So it draws outdoor enthusiast type of retirees that typically have done pretty well in other parts of the country should.

Just buy a bunch of real estate and then like get on a podcast circuit and like pump it up.

We're lucky. I tell you. We're lucky. That's one, that's one thing you talk about buying a second home in retirement or, you know, for. We bought our house in 2009, our cabin, and we were still in Atlanta. We bought it as a weekend place. And thank God we did, Steve, because the property values have probably like everywhere else in the country, but this area in particular, with all the retirees moving in. Wall Street Journal had an article, they call them halfbacks. And all these people moved to Florida. They, they wanna get closer to their grandkids, so they move halfway back. They still want a better climate. And then Covid, everybody's leaving the city, so they're all moving to the mountains. They can work from home now. So the property values absolutely exploded. But by buying our house 10 years before I retired, we locked in our housing costs for retirement. And it was great that we did because it would be. I mean, we'd probably be able to afford it, but it would be a much bigger dent in our retirement portfolio than it was buying when we did.

That's interesting. Okay, I have a question. Just generally, like, I know that people with money. One thing that, that is kind of counterintuitive to a lot of folks is that a lot of folks, if they have money and they've done a good job of saving, they actually keep. Even after they retire, they keep building wealth and they, they pass away with more money.

Yeah.

Is that your story or is it like, are you kind of like, maybe you don't have to share the details if you don't want to. I'm just curious.

No, no, it's a great question. And if you do the research, the vast majority of retirees that have done their planning and they're financially in a good state to retire, the 4% safe withdrawal rate, that's worst. Case scenario that's designed for a 4% market. And we all know over time, the markets tend to return 10%. Right. So if you're designing your whole retirement plan to deal with a 4% safe withdrawal rate and the markets are normal by definition, your wealth is going to grow. So, yeah, our net worth is up from when I retired. It's shocking. The markets have been good, right. And we're actually. I've written a lot of articles about this. After being kind of conservative our whole lives and being very careful in our spending and having a high savings rate, it's hard to go from a lifelong saver to a retirement spender. And that's one of the lessons I've learned. It's hard to spend money, and most people don't do a very good job of it. So I'm encouraging people, look, you know, your safe withdrawal rate automatically transferred into your checking. If you have money left at the end of the year, give it to charity. Force yourself to spend it, because otherwise you're going to end up with a portfolio twice as big as when you're retired. And, you know, you might as well enjoy it while you've got it. Right. And, and, and I've talked to others conceptually on this and, and that, that phenomenon, because most people have equities and most people are using a 4% or less withdrawal rate. Most people's portfolios do increase in time. It's. It's a. Yep.

The best thing I did for my net worth was retire.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's. No, I mean, there'. It's like. There's a guy, a friend of mine here, he. He retired super young, like in his 40s. Right. And that's because he was worried, like his father had some heart disease. He's like, listen, I. You know, his father died really young. He's like, I'm going to take this time with my family. And I remember asking this question. He's like, yeah, I. Or he shared. He's like, I have more money now than when I retired. I mean, he's. He lives pretty frugally. I think the cost, you know, managing your spend. But it's pretty interesting. So it's good.

Let me throw one more thing in there. Do you know Nords, Doug Nordman? He's. He's a. He's a blogger, Military dollar. He actually, I saw somewhere and it stuck with me because he's been retired like 15 years now. And he goes, you know, he said, my withdrawal rate's down to like, two and a Half percent.

Right.

I'm still spending the same. It's even going up with inflation. But my portfolio has grown so much faster than my spending, my withdrawal rate is actually declining in time. And that kind of struck a chord to me. I was like, and I'm starting to see the same with us.

Yeah, like, withdrawal rate, you started at 4%. And it gets. I think I saw it as some blog. It's like. It's 2%. You know, it's like.

Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

Yeah. We had this guy. I'll link to it. Andrew Biggs. You know, on. He was. He's worked for Social Security Administration. And he's like, really? He's like, is there really a retirement crisis? Everyone talked like, the press was always like, hey, everyone's gonna run out of money. It's gonna be horrible. He's like, you know, when I look out there at people who are older, many of them are fine. You know, they're. They're not like, on the street now, people that plan. That's definitely true. I think not everybody, you know, some people, maybe they're not covered. Maybe they're not retired because they can't retire. They're still working. Right.

I think that's. I think that's my take on it. And, you know, the people that listen to your podcast, the people that read my blog, they're the ones that are planners. They're the ones that are going to be fine. And I don't know what percentage of population is, but let's say it's 20 or 30% are going to be absolutely fine. There's probably 30% in the middle that'll kind of make it, but, boy, they really need that Social Security. And they're going to. You know, they'll. They'll have to kind of cut back, but they'll be okay. And then there's probably 20 or 30% who haven't saved a dime. They've always bought the big boat. They've always bought the big house. They've always kept up with the Joneses. They're in debt to their eyebrows, and they're 65 years old going, oh, crap, I've got nothing saved for retirement. That's a big percentage. But those aren't. Those aren't the people that listen to us talk, unfortunately. So I think there is a retirement crisis, but I think it's a. I think it's probably 20 to 30% that are going to be dependent on Social Security, and that's almost all they're going to have.

Yeah.

And I know a few of those people and they're, they're hanging on by their fingernails because they can't afford to lose their job. But they're starting to face ageism, they're starting to hate their job, but they don't have a choice. And that's a miserable place to be. Right. I feel, I really feel a burden for those people. But some of it, not all of it, but some of it you can say, well, they made bad decisions through their life. You know, ultimately they got to pay the price. Some of them are there because just bad luck. And those are the ones that I really feel bad for.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's not, it's, it's tough because like we're now teaching financial literacy and more high schools, which is great, but it's not taught, you know, to, I think especially in our generation or like kind of the kind of 15, 16 year olds. It's like we're gen 1, 401k people, no pension, kind of do it yourself. And like if you made good choices like you did your whole life, like investing and saving and regularly and kind of not breaking out about the market, you're fine. But most people don't learn that lesson. Now, hopefully they are learning that lesson.

Yeah. And I think you're right to target the high school and even college. That's a huge underserved market. It should be a mandatory curriculum for every high school in the country. And I've got a buddy of mine who's really pushing it in Georgia. He's connected with some state senators and stuff and he's making some headway. I think that's the area when you talk about financial planning. And your point? Financial wellness for life. The earlier you know about compounding. The earlier you start, the better it is. The earlier you can learn some of the basics of this stuff so you don't get into trouble right out of the gate, the better off you're going to be. And that is a gap, I think, in our society.

Yeah, 100%. Any other huge money lessons that you learned post that you didn't expect post retirement?

Probably the one not huge, I would say, other than, like I said, it's hard to spend your money. When I was planning our retirement, I was conservative, meaning I overestimated the cost of almost every category. Right. So we had a lot of buffer in our spreadsheets and now that we're living it, obviously a lot of those buffers aren't needed because things aren't as expensive as we planned. Right. So I used a higher inflation rate than. Now we're starting to see inflation. I'm glad I did. But I inflated everything every year. So the one surprise is that it's harder to spend money than I thought it would be. We're underspending, even with. We don't live a luxurious life. We're very basic. We have a little cabin, 2,100 square feet, but. But that's number one. Number two is probably. And this was kind of something I discovered a couple months into, maybe six months into retirement, maybe a year. I talked about the bucket strategy, and my initial plan going in was, okay, I'll spend cash for a year. At the end of the year, when I do my formal financial review, I'll do a rebalance. I'll top off Bucket One. And as I got into it, I.

Was like, you know what?

That's probably not the best strategy, because if you have a bear market in November, you just drew down 11 months of cash in a bull market, and then it turned to a bear right before you're going to refill it. So I moved to quarterly refilling of Bucket one. And I think that's something people should think about, is if the markets are good, don't. You know, you're not working anymore. You're not in the accumulation phase, you're in the withdrawal phase. And it's different when the markets are good. Keep skimming some off the top and keep that cash buffer as full as you can, as frequently as you can, so that when the market goes down, you've got the full three years of protection that you'd land on.

That's interesting. I mean, could you define this? You probably. You obviously have, like, thresholds in your head, but you could just. This is the kind of stuff like we're automating or thinking about automating our platform. But it's like, hey, if the market's up a certain amount of money, then you're continuously refilling, and if the market starts correcting, then maybe that stops. You know, you could. You could.

Yeah, you could. Everybody's asked me that. Is there. Is there, like, a number? You look at, And I'll tell you, the one thing that really shows it is your asset allocation. If you run your asset allocation and just blow it through, use whatever you've got to just update your asset allocation. You'll see your equities growing, and obviously your cash is going down because you're spending it every month. But you will see not 2 or 3 or 5% moves, but you'll see half a percent moving to a percent. You'll see a shift in those allocations. And that's also an easy way to determine should I sell bonds or should I sell stocks to refill my cash. So if suddenly your cash is becoming a higher part of your allocation, guess what it tells you. Your stocks and bonds are getting crushed. Right. Which happened in 2022. So you can see your asset allocation as kind of a single metric that will give you some indication of, hey, I'm at 72% stocks, I want to be at 70 and my cash is down to 8%. I want it to be at 10% and I'm going to go ahead and take 2% equities, move them over to cash.

Interesting. I feel like all this, like you're doing it all yourself, right? You're tracking all this stuff and doing it. Do you think your other friends are doing this too, or are they less active on it? You know, I think they're less, I.

Think they're less active. Most, most of them are diy. You know, again, we were talking about how much cash doesn't make sense because I get a lot of criticism. Three years cash, that's crazy. That's way too much, you know, And I'm like, no, it's okay. I'm good with it. You know, 5% interest these days, that's less of an opportunity cost. And, you know, I sleep great at night. I never worried through the two downturns since I've retired. And I got a buddy of mine said, oh, no, I keep a lot more than that. So I'm like, okay, but then what do you do for the inflation risk? Right? What's your equity exposure? But he doesn't get into that. So. And the other thing I would say, Steve, is for the first two years of retirement, it was kind of, you know, a big exercise. Oh, I got to look at and refill in bucket one. And it's almost just become now just a routine thing, you know, I know when the market's up, you keep an eye on the market, man. The market's been doing well. I haven't filled my buckets for a while. I probably ought to take a look at it. And it's, you know, it's a five minute exercise. It's not a big deal. I did a thing about how I spend my time and how much time I spend managing our money. And I kind of did a little spreadsheet, you know, on exercise and doing this and doing that. And I think the total time spent Managing our portfolio for the year was like 27 hours.

Really? Okay.

And I mean, it's like, it's less than a half a percent of your time. It doesn't take a lot of time once you've got a system set up.

Yeah.

And you're just in the maintenance mode of it. It's not. It's not that much work.

Yeah. That's super interesting. I feel like a lot, you know, this stuff is going to get automated for a lot of people and. Yeah. And it would be helpful for folks. Okay, cool. Let's shift gears for a sec. I want to talk a bit about time and my, you know, I know I want to hear you kind of like how, you know, you're thinking about purpose and stuff like that, but also like, you know, we talk about the bucket strategy for money. I was thinking, do you have a bucket strategy for time? Is there some analogy that way, like, we're like, in terms of like, you know, because I know that like in big buckets, there's like kind of the. The go go, slow go.

Yeah.

And obviously want the go go's to be long, but. Yeah. Do you kind of think, oh, I have to do certain things now.

Yeah.

I'm younger.

Yeah. Perspective comment, I would say when I first retired. No, I was just glad to be out and glad to be able to do whatever I wanted to do do. But, you know, everybody's talking about die with zero. I don't know if you've read it, but I read it and I disagreed with a lot of his premises on the financial side. But the one thing that really did stick with me is exactly what you're saying. He didn't call it this, but a bucket strategy for your time. Right. There's only certain you can only climb Mount Everest until you're early 60s maybe. Right. If you want to climb Mount Everest, you better get out there and do it. Right. So prioritize the things you want to do early because you don't want to wait too long and then have regrets. And then that impacted me. So my wife and I, you know, again, we talked about not. Not being able to spend all your money or, you know, it's hard to spend money. We've been talking about doing, you know, a big. A big, like a Nordic cruise. Right. And we were just talking about. We took our daughter and granddaughter on a little Disney cruise and we're like, man, we're not doing a Disney cruise again. You know, I mean, it's fine, you know, but it's for kids, right? And my wife and I were saying we need to do a cruise for adults. Let's do something really nice. You know, we've. We've cruised maybe seven, eight times over our life, and we want to do something big. So we just booked because we're 61, and next year we're going to be 62, and we're like, you know, who knows how long we can do this kind of thing? So we booked a cruise to Greenland and the Northwest Passage, and we went with a nice cruise line, Viking, you know, top of the line. We're like, doggone it, yes. Now is the time. We are in the go Go years. We don't know how long they're going to last. And that was one of the other regrets people had, is that they didn't spend their money when they could still do things that they wanted to do, you know? And so we are starting to think like that. And, okay, let's take a big trip. And it takes, like, 22 hours to get to this little town in Greenland where we get on the ship. It's crazy. You know, you got to fly to Boston, then you got to fly to Iceland, then you got to connect from Iceland up to Greenland. And we're like, you know, you couldn't do that when you're 75 years old. Right. Or you wouldn't enjoy it. So let's do it now. And then, as we got into the registration on the ship, well, son of a gun. They require a physical to take this cruise. You know, they. They. Because you're so far removed from medical care. I mean, they have a ship doctor, but, you know, if anything serious happens, you're so far removed. They don't want people doing that cruise that aren't healthy enough to, you know. So, yeah, so I wouldn't say it's structured, but I would say it started to creep into our thinking. And we're. And we're. You know, the things that we're doing now, like building this workshop that I'm in. This is my writing studio and my woodworking shop. Yeah, we built that early because I'm like, you know what I want to enjoy? Building doghouses for Fido and having my own writing studio to do podcasts in. I want to enjoy that for as many years as I can. Let's go ahead and spend the money and get it done so we can enjoy it for a long time. There's a balance, because you don't want to go over your spending. So it's a constant balance between. You want to Spend your money and you want to spend doing things that you might not be able to do forever, right?

Yeah. Like it becomes a, like an interesting problem solved because you think probably the list of things you want to do like your, your cruise and your, your, your work and stuff like that, and then you got to stack rank them and then you also have to filter by what it costs and your physical capability.

Yeah.

And all that stuff, you know. But did you do that kind of exercise? Do you like have like, people call it a bucket list or whatever, you know, better name for it? It was, it wasn't. It's not like a bucket list for life. It was like a decade list or something or like whatever. There's like, oh, that's a good idea sequence. It was like, here's the things I want to do on this time fr.

That was in DIO0 that he did that. A buddy of mine called it his dump truck list. He said I got so much stuff in my list. When I was planning for retirement, I did a bucket list and all these. We haven't really looked at it. It's not driving our life. We're kind of. So much of our life was structured when I was in the corporate world. You had to do the five year strategic plan every year. And I just hated, I hated that stuff. So my wife and I both kind of decided when we get into retirement it's going to be much more of a. My favorite word is serendipity. And serendipity is just kind of exploring as you go and discovering new things unexpectedly. And we've kind of made a conscious decision to live our retirement in a more serendipitous fashion. So no, we've not done a forced ranking based on cost and decades and all that. But somebody like an engineering type mind, which a lot of people that are really into the personal finance are like that, Right. They've got all their spreadsheets. I was like that with the financial side. But interestingly on the life side now we've become much less formal and much more serendipitous.

So you know, you do you think, I mean you're 61, right? Like with health care and stuff, like, like, like what age do you like, like how long are you planning to live for? Like how long do you think you might live for? Like realist. I mean, obviously we all hope, you.

Know, when I did our cash flow timeline for retirement, I did, I put it out to 95 because I'm like, okay, I'm probably not going to live, live that long, but I'm going to plan that long just to make sure, you know, we're good. I don't want to retire and then get to be 90 and run out of money. So I ran it out to 95, you know, who knows? I mean, healthcare technology, right? You talk about fintech. Well, there's a lot going on in the healthcare side. I think it's not at all inconceivable that between my wife and I, both of whom are healthy, both of whom are 61, you know, the odds of one of us living to 100 are probably 20, 30, 20, 30%, you know, so I fully expect to live into my 90s and I expect my wife will live a couple years longer than me. So. But I don't really obsess about it. I focus on enjoying every day that I'm given while I still have the health, we have the financial resources, you know, we. And a big thing I've learned is the mindset that you take into retirement is huge. And taking on a mindset of optimism and half glass full and gratitude and curiosity. Curiosity is a big one. Listen to your curiosity. But it's that taking the time to be appreciative and to just, you know, I don't really care if I die at 80 or die at 100. I just want to be healthy. I would rather die at 80 than live to 100 and be in a nursing home for 10 years. Right. If I had my choice. But it's out of my control. So the other thing I look at is I think of big circles, little circles, and you got one big circle, which is all the things you can worry about, and then there's a small circle in the middle, which is all the things you can worry about, but you can do something about.

Yeah.

And you know, I can't do anything about my genetics. Right. They are what they are. But guess what? I can do something about my physical fitness. That's a small circle. So I'm making that a focus. So I try to focus my time and energy looking at things in the small circle and not worrying too much about stuff in the big circle. That's one of the mindset things I've taken on for retirement.

That's awesome. I love it. You should be life coach, you know, all this life stuff. So, okay, do you think that you'll continue to, like, you know, you had a career, right? A long career, kind of doing kind of consistent stuff, and now you've taken on this, you know, six years in, you've, you've done a lot, obviously. So interesting to hear. Like, you've got this 200 person organization, you're doing all this good work. Do you want to keep growing that or do you think that you'll like shift gears and like pick up another thing or like, how do you see that unfolding? You clearly have a ton of human capital, right? You could be go back to work tomorrow if you want to.

Yeah, sure. The way I look at that, Steve and I've written articles about this and I, and I compared life in retirement to a poker hand. And I said, you've got a hand of cards and you're holding the cards you're holding. The difference between this and poker is you can put down any one of those cards you want at any given point in time and you can pick up another one and see if you like it better. And you can pick up 10 more cards if you want, you can pick up 20 more cards, you can pick up unlimited amount of cards and you can put down an unlimited number of cards. So I'll give you an example. When I first retired, this is a big fly fishing area and I like fly fishing. You're on the river, it's nice, it's peaceful. I'm like, man, I'm going to fly fish all the time. That was a card in my hand. Well, we got up here a couple of years and I, you know, I'd fished kind of the, I don't know, eight or nine areas where you could access the river, you know, 10 times each. And I was kinda, you know, it's kind of getting boring. So you know what? I didn't renew my fishing license. I put that card down for a while and I picked up a different card. I started mountain biking, Right. So my whole thing is always remember in your mind that everything you do in retirement is an intentional decision to do it and you can say no to anything. Now it'd be harder to say no to the charity now because it's gotten so big. But example there, what we did, because my wife and I were really starting to get kind of buried, right? We were leading all these fence builds. So we reached out to our volunteers and we said, look, you know, we love what we're doing, but man, it's getting to be quite a bit of work. Would any of you volunteers be willing to step up and we'll train you to be build leaders? And we had three other couples that all volunteered. So now my wife and I only lead one fence build a month and then we can go to Alabama, we can visit our daughter. And guess what? They're still building fences. So we found a way to kind of delegate and balance things where it doesn't feel like work. And that was one of those intentional designs of putting down the card of having to lead every build and finding a way to bring better balance into it.

That's awesome. I start to see it happening. More people have more agency, and they kind of choose the work they want to build. Be like, you know, when I grew up, my family moved to, like, Rochester because my dad got a job there. Right? Like, yeah, like, I don't envision moving my. My family cross country, and I never have in my whole career, and I think many people don't now, and especially with work from home and stuff like that. So do you kind of see a world where, you know, we have better choice, better balance? I will say, personally, like, grinding, building this business, like, yeah, they're saying a lot of, like, here's the goal. Let's go get it. Like, grinding away. And there's not like, okay, hey, we. And take the foot off the gas and stuff like that.

But, yeah, but you're also in the grinding years, right? There's a phase of life where you've got to grind. And if you grind well, it gives you the flexibility to have more freedom of choosing what you want to do later and sooner. So I think certainly the whole advent of the side hustle industry, the work from home industry, I have no doubt that that's going to continue. The reality is there's so many side hustles now that, like, I did, I started my blog while I was still working. Right. It's fine. I can do it, you know, a couple hours in the evening, whatever. It's fine. And you can experiment with different things. And like, my blogging, I found something that I love. I'm doing it now. We don't need the money, and I'm not really making a lot of money from. But it's paying for our health insurance, so. Okay, that's fine. You know, so you can find things that you love to do and you can test them while you still have your real job. And if you find something you love that you can make a living at, man, our parents never had that luxury.

Right?

So, yeah. And that's. That trend, I think, is going to continue to grow. Absolutely.

Yeah. That's awesome. All right, well, look, this Francis has been great. Any last things you'd like to share with our audience in terms of things to be thoughtful about, things to look out For. And also maybe like, what do you think as you think about the next five years? Right, Yeah. I mean, if you work five more years, I mean, sorry, you're retired, like in five years, it'll be like the age when many people kind of are probably like, okay, I'm actually going to retire now at 66. But you have been retired 11 years, 10 years.

Yeah, exactly. I think the two things I would say, number one is by definition and a large percentage of your audience, they're really focused on the financials. When I started my blog three years ago, I was absolutely obsessed on the financials. You have to be, and you have to get the financials right. But about a year into writing my blog, a couple of my friends had retired before me and they're like, man, that transition's brutal. I'm really struggling, blah, blah, blah. And then I heard other people say, man, I love it. Best years of my life. So I really started doing some research on what differentiates the people that have good transitions to retirement and those that struggle. And far and away, the highest correlation is the amount of time people spend planning not only on the financial, but I would argue, almost more importantly on the non financial. You said I almost sound like a life coach. That's what you almost become. You have to find a way to bring fulfillment to your life. You think about the paycheck from work, obviously, but you don't think about all the other things you get from work. You get structure to your day, you get relationships. You get a sense of identity, you get a sense of purpose. You get deliverables. You get a lot of things that are gone the day you retire. And most people don't think about that until they retire. But the correlation is those that do think about it and start thinking about. I started my blog three years early as an experiment, right. And it's proven to be. It's brought me great satisfaction in retirement. So find a way to think about all those benefits you get from work beyond the paycheck as you're working through your financials. Typically, most people kind of get the financials in order and they're. So I gotta wait about a year or two before my numbers are gonna work, right? Well, take that year or two. Don't keep refining your numbers. You kind of know where they're at. Take that energy that you were investing in the numbers and kind of put it into that lifestyle side of the equation and figure out what you're gonna do to, you know, get a sense of purpose too, you know, and the Biggest thing is it's serendipity. I wrote an article. Retirement is nothing like I expected. And yet retirement is exactly what I expected, because the mindset I had of just pursuing my curiosity and finding things is absolutely what I expected. But the places that it's led me are the things I never expected. Building this woodworking shop, starting the charity, et cetera. So focus some time on that. That's the biggest takeaway I'm telling people, especially people that are financially oriented, because it's a blind spot for most people. The second thing, what are we going to be doing in five years? I don't know. You know, like, my writing. I've been writing nine years. It's like, I look at all the bloggers that were blogging when I was starting. 90% of them are gone, right? 95%. So what have I done there? Okay, I scaled back. I used to write every week. Now I write every two or three weeks when I feel like writing. And I've made it where it's not become an obligation. I'm doing it because I enjoy it. And I'm always cognizant and weighing the cards that I've got in my hand. So to be honest, I have no idea where I'm going to be in five years because I never expected I'd be where I am. When I retired six years ago, I could have listed 100 things on a piece of paper, and probably 80 of the things that we're doing wouldn't have been on that page. I mean, it's just amazing how none of the stuff we're doing was stuff that I had kind of planned for. It just kind of happened because it interested me, and we pursued it, and off we go. So I think my life is probably going to remain that way. You know, follow your curiosity. If something interests you, you go after it. You try it for a while. If it doesn't work, you put the card down, you pick up another one, and where that leads, it's something I can't find a way to plan for that. I just. I go thankfully along to wherever it leads. And I love the journey. It's a great way to live life.

That's awesome. I think we got to do it. I'll have to find a clip of your six years ago and now and. Yeah, essentially the same. Or higher energy.

Hopefully higher. Yeah. I'm younger. I'm younger now than I was six years younger. Yeah, six years younger. Next year. Every year.

Exactly. All right, cool. Well, look, Fritz, thanks for joining us. We will direct folks to your book, Keys to Successful Retirement and your blog, Retirement Manifesto. And everyone who's listening, thanks for listening and being part of this community. And hopefully you check out Fritz's stuff and hopefully you build a plan and update your stuff@newretirement.com, which is very soon, maybe when you listen to this, going to have a new name. So that's coming. We haven't talked too much about that, but that is coming. So anyway, appreciate it. Also, any reviews are welcome and any sharing of our site is also welcome. So with that, thank you very much. And Fritz, thanks for thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, Steve. We'll see you in six years, hopefully soon.