Retired, Not Done: A Software Engineer's Bold Move to Financial Freedom | Scott Garrett (ep. 98)

This episode is brought to you by the Bolden financial planning platform, formerly New Retirement Create a Financial Plan for free@bolden.com welcome to Bolden youn Money. I'm your host, Steve Chen. And today I'm excited to have Scott Garrett join us. So Scott's a member of the Bolden community and we met when he sent us a bunch of feedback, which we deeply appreciated. We jumped on a zoom earlier and got all his feedback, talked about AI and stuff like that. He retired early. We're going to talk about his journey to that and he's got. We're going to talk about kind of his future and how he's thinking about his plans now that he's retired. So with that, Scott, welcome to our show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. So, Scott, it would be great if you could share just a little bit about your background and why you decided to retire early.

Yeah. So obviously I was a software engineer. Well, I managed software engineers. When I retired, I was a software engineer. But it didn't start out that way. Obviously most people don't start out there. I think life is like a river. It takes you where it wants you to go. You know, you think you're going to do something and the next thing you know you're doing something different. So I used to sell forklift parts. That was what I did. And I saw a need for some software. Decided somebody had to write some software to look these up. It's just way too time consuming. So me and a business partner got together. We wrote that. We did. Okay. It was going to be my million dollar idea. But guess what? It didn't make me a million dollars. But that's fine. We ended up selling out to what I would consider to be the Napa forklift parts. They sell aftermarket, not OEM parts. Did that work for them? For 15 and a half years. Finally decided it was time to break off, do my own thing. Interesting story. I didn't graduate with my computer science degree until I was 43 years old. So I was working as a software engineer for something like 20 years before that. But it was kind of nice to get that opportunity. And then I got to go do some medical software. Pharmacy solution was one. I really enjoyed that. Then off to blood transfusion software. And that's when I started managing teams. More than getting hands on the code, I like doing it up until those last few years. So those last few years were kind of rough.

What changed in the last few years? Because was this around Covid or something or.

No, it wasn't a Covid thing, we were acquired. We were a small company. I used to call it the gravy train with biscuit wheels. It was the best job I ever had. I really enjoyed it. I liked the people I worked with. And then we got acquired by a private equity group. And then from there it was acquisition after acquisition. Something like 17 acquisitions in something, I think something like five years. It was unrealistic growth. Trying to keep that double digit growth number, you know, anybody in corporate knows what I'm talking about. That double digit growth, man, you got to have it. That EBITDA number, you got to have it. And the stress started to build, the anxiety started to build more and more with less and less because, you know, it makes sense. Let's get rid of people and we make more profit. I don't always understand that. And ultimately I was starting to do things, being asked to do things that rubbed up against my moral compass. And at that point I said, you know, this is getting to be a little too much for me. Not enough sleep, 24 hour on calls. And I just said, you know, it's just time. I wouldn't have left though. I'll tell you. I wouldn't have left. I love the people I worked with, but I wouldn't have left if I hadn't had confidence that I wasn't going to be out of money and destitute. That confidence is everything, right?

Totally. Yeah. It's interesting. I think private Equity owns like 40% of the company equity in the country right now. It's ramped super hard and, and also it's tied to companies can stay private longer or exist in this kind of like private world. And the number of companies that are public I think has gone from 8,000 to like 4,000 over the past 20 years. It's also much harder to go public. So many more firms, private equity becomes like the exit. But yeah, there is a. They're like a factory for companies where my brother runs. My brother runs a private equity back firm and it's like they bought his company, he stayed on. Some people get equity cashed out from that. He stayed on as a CEO and then they basically bolt on. They make the company more efficient, fire 20% of the people. So now you increase your EBITDA, borrow money, buy the next company, fire 20% of those people, grow it a bit and keep going. And it, I mean it works. I mean it works financially, doesn't build a long term.

It does work financially. It's just, you know, that's the game plan. I Mean, if you look at private equity, that is, you know, they have a certain set of, you know, game plan book, you know, that they follow, you know, a game plan they follow. And, you know, we were doing it to the T. Exactly what you just said. That's it doesn't change.

So you retiring early was basically two things. One, you weren't as in love with the environment that you were. The environment changed at work. And then also you had built the financial confidence that you could do this. And so you're just like, all right, I can make this decision.

Yeah, that wasn't the original plan originally. I was going to work until my 60th birthday. That was the original plan. You know, both my wife and I in our latter years, for the last seven years, we worked together at the same company, she in the legal department and me in engineering. And we both were just getting worn out and we just decided, hey, if we can leave, we should. And some of the folks that you've had on your podcast in the past, someone will talk about that. When you get enough and you have enough, why do you keep working? At what point do you have enough and you're trading? I always tell my kids this, if you're going to trade your time for money, get the most you can out of it. But at the end, when it's all said and done, once you have enough, quit trading your time for money. Start trading your time for experiences. Live your life.

So do you think, are you done with full time work then?

Yeah, I don't see. I mean, obviously we can't tell the future no matter how much we can guess. And we can use planning tools if there's a global recession that lasts for six or seven years or something like this comes along, which, you know, not saying that was going to happen, but you just don't know. And if it, if it was bad enough and we couldn't tighten up and I mean, obviously when, when the markets go down, you tend to spend less. And that's something that, honestly, that's something that even your software can't really account for. It doesn't know. It's, it's saying, hey, how much am I going to spend every month? But there's really nothing in there to say, well, but if the market goes down, I'm not going to spend 10,000amonth, I'm going to spend 7,000 or 6,000 or I'm going to cut back on travel, I'm going to cut back on these things. And I don't really think a software package is going to be able to do a lot of that in a meaningful way.

Yeah, well, one of the things that we are going to roll out, we're talking about this right now, is guardrails. So the, you know, the ability to say, hey, if I have, say, $2 million now and I'm spending and I'm forecasting to spend $10,000 a month or withdraw $10,000 a month, if the, if my returns and like we say we have good returns and that goes up to two and a half million or something like that, then I could, or over time that I could take my spending up to 11,000 or something, 12,000 or whatever. But if it goes down to, you know, 1.3 million, I might have. Or 1.4 million, I might have to cut my spending, you know, to, you know, 8,000 or 8,500 very often. It's not like, one thing we want to make clear to people is that in our software, a lot of people index on kind of, you know, chance of success, which is really the chance of needing to make a change. And we want to make it clear that, like, hey, even if, you know, in the, say you have a 90% chance of success, that means that 90 out of 100 times, you probably don't need to make a change. I mean, it's all forecasting, but you probably can keep spending and, you know, you'll be on track. But in the 10, the 10 out of 100, you know, you might have to make a small change. It's not necessarily like it doesn't work like you're out of money. It's just you have to make a. A small change. And I think communicating that clearly is a big part of this.

Sure. You talk about the guardrails. I'm glad to hear you said that, because I'm actually using a spreadsheet. My wife and I, we don't use a whole lot of spreadsheets. That is one we use. What we do is we use the software to determine what it thinks we should have at the end of the year. So January 1st, we say, okay, what does it say we're going to have at the end of the year? Right. Because that is giving us our chance of success. Right. And so what we do is we write that number down. Then January 1st of the next year, we compare that against what the software said. And if the number is higher, we have more money than the software said, well, then our chances have gone up. But if we have less than, our chances have gone down. And so then we use that just like you said, to drive our monthly spending or annual spending, whatever you want to call it, to fall in line with that. And so I think the guardrails is something that I think a lot of people can certainly use. I know, we'll use it.

Yeah. Well, this planned actuals idea I think is also something else we're looking at which is I was talking to Joe Kuhn about this. Do you follow Joe Kuhn?

Absolutely. My wife follows him religiously.

Yeah.

So he follows a great guy. He's a great guy. He's just got a great personality.

100%. Yeah, I met him. He actually came out here. He was out in Mill Valley. He was like, I'm going to be in California. I think he has, I think it was his daughter was going to Berkeley or something like that. And he's like, you know, like, let's have dinner. So we had dinner. It was great. Yeah. Good guy. Same, same in person as he is on, on YouTube. And yeah, he talks about this where you know, he goes on a year, he's got his portfolio set and he's got his spending plan set and then he kind of goes through the year and spends his money and kind of keeps track of things at the end of the year. Now kind of does a checkpoint, does a rebalancing and reforecasting and kind of tunes up his budget and stuff like that and then go and does it again. So.

Sure, sure. And that's what we're trying to do now. We have some, a little bit of headwinds. I mean we have an 18 year old. This is getting ready to start. Rockhurst University City, Missouri for her bsn and you know, it's not the cheapest school. Luckily she, she's done the right thing and she, she's got a $98,000 scholarship which is good, but it still cost over 200,000 to go there. So you know, we still got to come up with some cash and it's a good thing we set that aside and that's, you know, we. I will have to go back to the software. Right. Because it allowed me to say I'm going to have these one time expenses every, you know, these twice a year where I'm going to have to pay Rockhurst and this is what I got to pay them, give or take. You know, tuition seems to be going up every year so let's hope that doesn't happen. And it allowed me to see is is this possible or do I need to keep working even though I'm stressed out And I'm really ready to leave. Do I need to put in that extra year so I can cover this extra tuition? So the software gave me that confidence. I was like now we got this, we got this, we could step away.

Yeah, we try to do that. I mean, you know, let people model these kind of, you know, spending changes or one time spending spikes because a lot of times also people spend less overtime. You know what we A lot of folks, they're optimizing for having their maximum wealth when they're 90 years old. And it's like, it's like with the back to die with zero. It's like well maybe your maximum wealth should be way younger when you can really use your money and you're not necessarily going to need whatever a ton of money when you're not going to be spending it. Unless I mean, hey, maybe that we're going to have super duper health AI enabled health should be good. But we'll see.

I don't know about that but. Right. Ours is in the same boat. It's highest net worth is in, in the, in our 90s. So the.

So while it's good, you're so a BSN, is that like a nursing degree?

Yeah, it's a bachelor's of being Nursing science. Nursing. I don't know. Bsn, Bachelor's of science in nursing, I think, I don't know it, it's just a, like you, there's like an RN thing and then I think you can go like one step further and you just, you still have to take the nursing thing and get your RN or whatever. I'm not really sure my wife handles all this stuff but honestly I just hope that she's successful in life and that's really what, what we care about the most. We just, you know, we're retired man. We can't be supporting a third wheel for the rest of our life.

I know, you gotta, gotta get people launched successfully. Right? I totally appreciate that. Yeah, we think about the same thing. I mean our kids are in the mid. Mid launching. Yeah, the. I mean well getting a nursing degree should be good, right? I don't think there's a high demand for nurses and like my mother in law's a nurse and she goes works where the heck she wants, makes really good money and like seems to have had. She actually just retired too but had a good, super good life.

Yeah, the PRN thing is kind of a deal right. Where you can you work when you want and travel to different places if you want take gig work and it Allows people, you know, to travel the country. You see this on YouTube where people live in RVs, and they travel the world by simply working six weeks at a hospital, making some money, and they move around and then take the next job. And it works for them. See it all the time.

I mean, I'm interested in getting a sprinter van, but those things are super expensive.

We have an rv, we know exactly what they cost.

We can do a whole lot.

The first, the best two days of owning an rv, the day you buy it and the day you sell it. Just keep that in mind. Same with the boat. Same with an airplane.

Yeah, I know that. I knew the saying about the boat. I didn't know that that applied to RVs as well, but I, I, I believe it.

Yep, it does.

All right. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I would love any, any other kind of best practices that you've adopted as you were getting ready to, you know, transition to retirement.

You know, originally, before we found Bolden, we was out looking and there's a couple of, like, you know, Phi Calc is one, you know, you can put in some stuff. There's another one, I think it's called Fight Fire Calc. They're very rudimentary. They don't take into account a lot of stuff like taxes or any of that stuff, but they will give you some confidence. MPower is actually one that's a little better, I think, than some of the others for free. It has a very, very rudimentary retirement planner that you can put in. Get a chance. What's your chances of success? So we were looking at those, and we just got to the point where we actually were very close to hiring a financial planner. A fee for service. Because I'm not a person that really believes in the assets under management. I think the cost is too expensive. But a fee for Service Advisor that we watched on YouTube for years, and we were very close to doing it. And I said, yeah, I'm going to Google one more time. And that's when we ran across Bolden and the free trial. And I'm going to give this a shot and see. And I was like, there was other software packages. There was a couple that we did, three of them, as a matter of fact. One of them was just absolutely awful and just didn't have enough. Just, it just didn't do enough. In the end, it was. Empower was stronger and more powerful than that. The other one was pretty good, but it wasn't very intuitive and there was a few tools that were missing. Roth Conversions is a big One Monte Carlo was a big one. And then we, you know, we, we did the Bolton thing and we're like, you know, this is pretty good. This is pretty good. This is not too far off from what, you know, I'm sure a lot of us watch YouTube videos of financial plans and so on and kind of get some ideas. And you see the software they're using, you're like, well, here's the main features in that software package that I want. I want this, this, this, this and this. That's what I would pay an advisor to do for me. I don't want him to tell me how to invest because I've got that down. I've been doing that, I've been doing it for a lot of years. Otherwise I'd be broke right now if I didn't know how to do it. So. And by the way, I didn't put all of our money in crypto. I just didn't do that. I didn't do the whole bitcoin thing. But I know a lot of people put some money in there. But, you know, I found that the Bold did have all the tools we needed that I was looking for at the time to be able to give us some confidence. And that's why we ended up going with it. That was the reason first it was we could get it directly from, you know, to the consumer as opposed to going through a financial planner just to get access, which, which was a bonus, right, because there are a lot of folks like myself that, you know, we really don't, we don't think a financial planner is going to be worth the money we spend with them. Not saying that, that's for everybody. You know, my mother in law, she has a financial planner. She's assets under management. She likes them, she likes what they've done for them. They've been successful with their portfolio and she feels confident with them. And I wouldn't take that away from anybody. But if you have the confidence on the other side that, hey, I know how to do the investment, I've been doing it, I feel good with it. I have backup plans to my plan. I just want to run the numbers. Do I have enough? And that's where I think Bolden really, really, really helps out. I mean, a lot. Without that, we'd have never left. We'd have never left. I'd be working until I'm 90, still thinking, well, I hope I don't run out of money.

Did you have your own spreadsheet before this? I mean, do you have your. I Mean, it sounds like you have had your own models and stuff like that.

I mean, yeah, we did have some, some, some spreadsheets mostly trying to forecast what we would earn, being conservative, but saying, if we earn a modest six, six and a half percent a year on average, what are we going to have? When are we going to think we're going to be out? You know, we had a number in our heads, and if we get to this amount, we are, you know, we're going to be able to withdraw. Even at a 4% rate, we're going to be able to withdraw roughly this much money. And so we said, well, you know, what do we spend? And at the time we, you know, I guess I didn't realize how much we were actually spending. I don't think anybody does. You don't realize when you're making money, you know, you don't realize always that amount of money you're spending on, oh, that's fine. I'll just go, you know, have the RV detail. That's only $1,200. Or, you know, you act like it's nothing, but it is something. And I kind of wish some of those decisions I could pull back and put that money and then like, nah, it's fine being dirty. I'll wash it. I'll wash it with a brush out in the driveway.

Totally. What do you use for spend tracking?

It's funny, we have. We've always had a budget and we've run a budget for a very long time. But I got to the point when we retired because we didn't have the same inflow that we did. You don't have any money coming in. It's all going out. We paid off all of our debt years and years and years ago, including our house. We just didn't have a debt payment. So when we retired, we moved our spending all into one bank structure, right? So with that, I can simply go in, log in and say, what if I spent this money under my budget now? My wife is still keeping the budget up. I haven't looked at it in probably six months. I just figure it like this. We know we're not really getting money inbound, so it's all what we're spending outbound. So I'm just looking at what is our balance. And luckily the markets have done fairly well. And so our balance is actually higher than the day we retired. Which power works actually quite well for that, because you can set a custom range and say, what was my balance on this date, the date I retired, versus today? You can say, well, did it go down? You expect that? Hey, I've spent so much money, it should have gone down that amount or earned something. And it shows in the green. We haven't actually dropped, we've actually increased. So with that, I'm not worried about that side of it. So I'm just looking at. Or are we staying within the budget that we said, how much we'll spend monthly that we put into Bolden? So we said, we'll spend 9,000amonth. That's what we have. We'll spend 9,000aMonth. That's what we said. So every month I go, look, did we spend 9,000 or less? And my theory is as if it's less than that. Well, I'm winning, right? Because my chance of success is great. And that's the only thing we do. So I don't really use a budget anymore like I used to.

All right. Hey, folks, we're back. We had a. A brief technical outage that took us out for about two days, and now we're back. And I put the same shirt back on, but Scott has changed his T shirt, and that's why he looks a little bit different. But we are gonna stitch these two sides of the podcast together. It was actually on my side, I think my docking station choked out, and it was like a slow, slow decline. Welcome back. Thanks for making the follow up. Time. So I think where we left it was we were talking about kind of budgeting and how you use the platform over the course of time to kind of think about your plan and then track it over time. Could you describe that a little bit?

Yeah, I think we. If I recall, we were left off at the point where I was saying, having. Knowing what this software is saying I'm going to have. And then I track that in a spreadsheet. Right? So the software says at the end of 20, December 31, 2025. Right. If it says I'm going to have X dollars, I make a note of that on the 1st of 2025. So the very first day. That way, at the end of the year, I can track that. And, you know, if the software has given me a high probability and yet I'm either over or under that projected amount that it. Because that's the projected amount that it was using to get those calculations to get that probability. And, you know, it was just important for us to say, if it's lower than that, you know, we can look at our spending because, you know, you gotta be flexible in retirement and be able to modify your Lifestyle slightly, you know, and so we'll look at that. And if we have more money than the software projected, we might give ourselves, you know, a little raise that year. If it's less, we might give ourselves a haircut and you know, tighten up a little bit. Maybe take more RV trips and let, you know, international trips. Right. Because those can be costly. So that's what we were, we've been doing. And you know, I really like that approach because I think it keeps me within a set of, you know, guardrails from running off the road so I don't end up, you know, crashing and burning, you know. You know, once you leave the job market and you get a little stale after a couple of years trying to pop back in and say, hey, you know, I'm 60 and I want to pop back into the job market and by the way, I'd still like to make a similar salary to what I used to make, you know, that, let's just face it, that's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen.

Yeah, I think a lot of folks, they, they do anticipate that they'll be able to work longer than they can and some people are forced out. But then, yeah, people do leave and then they're. Yeah, I think being realistic about, you know, your earning power and potential makes sense. Having said that, there's also market forces at work. Like they're, you know, unemployment is still pretty low right now. And despite all the doom and gloom about AI replacing jobs, I think there is a real threat if a lot of boomers or kind of older workers that have a lot of experience leave. It could create issues. So that I also, I do see, personally, I just see folks, you know, and I think the data does show this. People will leave their main job, but then many of them consult for a few years, they're working fractionally and they're doing okay and they kind of use that as a glide path out. Do you see that with any of your friends?

You know, I'm the youngest of my friends are all still full time employee. The number of them that, that kind of made fun of me really like, I can't believe you're leaving, you know, you're going to be back. And those kind of comments aren't super helpful because you're already nervous leaving early. You don't need a dozen of your friends telling you that, no, all of them are still working. But I, you know, I, I do have some, some acquaintances that are a little bit older and I haven't really seen them do that. I mean, most of them just leave and they're done maybe. But you know, I also believe that a lot of them, for a lack of better term, I don't think they're very good at planning their own finances. I think lack of financial literacy is a major problem across the world. But really in the US Especially, you know, it's a yellow economy. You know, I love that people like to spend all their money. It really helps my investments go up. But on the other hand, I hate seeing people strapped in debt. So I just think that a lot of people will leave the workforce and they may have a few hundred thousand, maybe a half a million, and they just, they, that's a lot of money. If you, you know, if you're a blue collar worker and you have worked, you know, making 40, 50, 60,000, 70,000 a year, you know, 500,000 is just a wealth of money that equates to a lot, a lot of years of living frugally to save that. But then you hit retirement and, you know, expenses can be unknown, especially if you don't have a plan, if you haven't looked at taxes, if you haven't looked, you know, so many people my age were told a 401k is the right savings instrument, which it is up to a point. But you are robbing Peter to pay Paul when it comes to those taxes. So you have 500,000 in your 401k account, but you have a partner. There's somebody that's a partner in that with you. And it's called the government, it's called taxes. And they're going to come for their pound of flesh at some point. So you don't have 500,000. You have less than that because you owe somebody. That's why I think if people had a little more financial literacy would be saving. You know, the new, one of the newer things that came out not too long ago that my wife and I utilized was the Roth 401K at artwork. So we started putting our part in there. But when I talked to a lot of the people that were, you know, younger and older than me, they had, they didn't even know what it was, even though the company had offered it for two years. They had no idea. So I do think that a lot of people do get maybe jump out a little early and it seems really good. And they seem like they have that, that pile of money that's going to last them, but they quickly find that they're eating into that. So they have to Come to that realization, I'm going to have to cut my expenses substantially in order to make this work. Especially if you go into retirement with debt. Debt is the killer of wealth. And frankly, I kind of consider, and I tell my kids this, I consider debt to be indentured servitude. You know, yeah, you're getting that money, you took it, and now you're going to work for somebody in order to pay that back. Plus whatever interest that's been accrued on that. Especially if it's credit card debt, which is astronomical. I do not like credit cards at all. We do have one, don't get me wrong, I'm not on the Dave Ramsey no credit card thing. We do have one that's used for travel. It is our travel credit card offers us some perks, especially like insurance and stuff when we travel, which could be helpful if we were, you know, if we were on a cruise or we were in Mexico or, you know, Europe or something, and something happened and we needed attention, medical attention, that could come in very handy. But we don't rely on that credit card and we pay it off a couple times a month because I just. Because I think it's because we've been out of debt for so long that having anything show up, that's a, that's a negative net worth. You know, I'm ocd, so my eye starts to twitch and I'm like, okay, I'm pay this real quick. I'm going to just pay this off. Maybe it's a little too much, but that's the way we think about, you know, debt and retirement and budgeting, especially, especially before you retire. You really need to have that budget in place.

Yeah. One of the things I've learned from just doing this podcast is kind of one of the big indicators for folks that lead to success is just having a high savings rate. And that implies a lot. Right? That implies earning potential, managing expenses, you know, being careful with debt. If you are going to have a high savings rate, that's 1. And then it's invest, you have to invest. I mean, it's hard to save your way to like. True. It's basically impossible, I think, to save yourself, save your way to financial independence. But if you, if you save and you invest and just capture the returns of the market, you should be fine as long as you get. It's like that, you know. You know, I think that a way to think about it is, yeah, if you, if you're a blue collar worker or, you know, whatever, you've got a Mainstream job and you make $60,000 a year. Yeah. If you save 10 times that 600,000, you'd have to make a 10% return to equal your salary. But if you save 20 times, then you only have to make a 5% return to make your salary. But hopefully you'll be getting Social Security and some other stuff, so you don't need to, you can have a lower safe withdrawal rate and ideally build wealth. But like, understanding those numbers is key.

Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, anybody who's, who's saved for any amount of time that goes and looks at their, their retirement account or their, you know, where they have their money invested will notice that at one point your, your earnings from your investment have, it has exceeded what you've actually put into that account. And you know, you may have invested 300,000, but that account could be worth 700,000. So it's actually grown more. The key is to try to replace a good part of your income, if possible, with the earnings from your retirement accounts from those returns in order to do that. I think I see so many people that are too conservative early on. If you're in your 30s, maybe even in your 40s, and you're going in with this 60, 40 portfolio kind of thing, I just think that you are leaving so much money on the table. You're not going to need that money. You're not going to need it. You shouldn't need it. And it's not an emergency fund. You see this too much. I think during COVID so many people used their 401ks as like a savings account because there was no penalty for making that 401k withdrawn. People were pulling money out left and right, robbing their future self. I think they should have sent their self a letter into the future and say, well, this is what I did to you. I bet you wish you wouldn't have done it because you saw a lot of that. So I do think that a lot. Again, goes back to financial literacy. You know, if you don't, if you, if you don't invest aggressively enough early on, you know, you're not going to get that growth the way you need to to support what you want when you get older. I mean, I would have loved to have saved enough that I exceeded what I was drawing off of these accounts, would have exceeded what I was making working. But with my wife and I both having professional jobs, making a fairly decent salary, it would have been pretty impossible. Well, I wouldn't say impossible, but we would have had to save another decade or so to hit that point and we would have to save plus have that additional growth on what we already had. Decide. But then when you look at it, I think a lot of people, they look at what they make and they're like, well, listen, I'm going to need that much. Well, you're not going to need that much. You don't need that much. You're no longer putting money into your accounts. So you can take that right off the top of what you made. You know, you're no longer paying. Well, most people, I don't know, pay as many taxes in retirement as they did when they were working. I know in our case it isn't because we made sure to save money in taxable brokerage accounts, Roth accounts, et cetera. So yes, a good portion is still in a 401k because that was legacy. Right. There wasn't. First off, we don't really know about brokerage account. I'll be honest with you. We didn't know early on because we were still in that learning phase. But most of the money when we were, when we were working went into that straight pre tax 401k. And I think a lot of people are in that boat and they see 65, 70, even 100% of what they've saved in that account. And it's great that they saved. But you can't retire early on a 401k.

Yeah, no, right. Because you can't claim until 59 and a half. Right.

And you're not going out of the workforce at, you know, 50. You know, my wife retired at 47, so, you know, I was a little bit older than her. That's why the old school shirt. But I'm a little bit older than her. I'm seven years older than her. So I went out of the workforce at 55 because I worked, I worked a few months, a few months longer than she did.

And how long have you been retired now?

My wife retired March of 2024 and I retired May 31st of 2024.

Okay, so you're a little over a year into this right now.

A little over a year into it. And I can tell you from my perspective, that first time you don't get a paycheck, you're so used to that automatic payment every two weeks it drops to your bank and you open your account Friday morning, you're like, wooh, ooh, look at all this money. But then I didn't get a check. I got the first one because I worked and then I got that final check and then that next, you know, the two weeks after that I didn't get a check and it was a little nerve wracking. You know, I don't think people realize that all of a sudden that it's reality strikes that now I have to actually take money. And that's hard to do when you have been a saver. It's hard to turn that, that switch and say, well, now I have to do drawdowns, so I'm taking money, I'm not saving money. And you know, you, you know, it does take some time. I know people tell you this and you know, but it does you. Yeah, you're excited that you don't have to get up and go to work and don't have to deal with the stress or whatever that your work has. But on the other side, you have the stress of, okay, I have to change my mindset. You know, I stressed out over my job for over a month. I still had, you know, if anybody that has a stressful job knows that you lay down to go to sleep and you're still thinking about, hey, I got to do this tomorrow, I got to remember to do this and maybe grab your phone and text message yourself, hey, don't forget to do this or send yourself an email. I actually dealt with that. Even after I, it was no longer my problem. I was still having those lay down at night, having a hard time sleeping because I was thinking about work kind of thing. So I don't think people realize that it shuts off instantaneously. You know, it slowly goes away. It probably took me two months to quit thinking about work.

Do you think it would be good as listening to it? It's super interesting and I've heard this from other folks, but you think it'd be good to start paying yourself before you stop working? Like, just get used to that motion of like, hey, six months before I'm going to start this drawdown thing. So, like, I'm used to it. And you're double paying. Right. Your income will be higher.

Yeah, I don't think it'll work, Steve, because. Because mentally you already know what you're doing. The finality is when that paycheck doesn't hit because it's still going to be there every other Friday or every whatever day you get paid every week or every month, whatever your pay schedule is. I don't think it works. I think you just have to hit the wall and say, wow, you know, this is really the finale and I'm not going to get another paycheck. Going forward, it's just not going to happen. I think even if you started paying yourself early, your, Your accounts are still growing because you're, you're getting that influx into those, those accounts. And I don't think, I don't think it would work. I just don't think it would. I don't think it would work for me.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's. Yeah. No, I'm not sure. It's. It's probably not a tax efficient idea either. It's not tax efficient because you're also double paying yourself and stuff like that. Did you engineer a, like a retirement paycheck? Do you, like, pay yourself, like, automatically take money out or do you just kind of pull it out as you need it?

No, no, we don't do that. And when I went into this, this is where things change. Okay. I went into this thing. You know, maybe we could just set up an automatic transfer of cash from our brokerage account to our checking account. We could just do it every other week so we still have that money. The problem is, is that you, you have money tied up in the market and the markets are volatile at best. Right. As you saw, early in this year, markets were getting crushed, and now they've not only come back, but they set new records. So just two days ago is when we took and harvested cash to last us through the end of the year. Because, you know, we were like, okay, wait a minute. The market just hit a record. What better time to take it now? That doesn't mean that tomorrow won't be the next record because you can't time the market. This doesn't happen. But we knew, well, if it's at its highest, it's the highest it's been all year. Well, really ever. I'm going to go ahead and take a paycheck now. So what we try to do is we're looking for it either to hit a high or we're looking for it to be at a, what I'd say a fair spot to take a withdrawal. And then we try to take out anywhere from three to six months, depending on the expenses. We took out a little extra because we have a daughter at university this fall. And I know the tuition fee is going to be pretty, pretty expensive because, yeah, that's a, that's a cash transaction. They want their money now.

Yeah. It's interesting. It's, it's. I think so many people struggle with this and really think about. And there's many ways to do it. You know, I think we touched on Joe Kuhn before. But like, you know, Fritz Gilbert, he I think keeps like three, three years some people and I think actually Joe may do the same thing. They're keeping like over a year in cash out, you know, and so they're just like, hey, it's the bucket strategy, you know, and. But they'll do, they'll replenish it when the market's good. And then if things like the first, you know, Q1 and Q2 are kind of like super volatile, they'll just be like, okay, fine, I'm going to ride it out and with my cash. But then they're not also getting returns on that cash. So that's the.

Well, they might. So we have that same kind of. But we only have a two bucket strategy. So we have our investment accounts, we keep the bulk of our money in, but we try to keep enough cash in a high yield savings account we're getting right now we get 4%, it is paid out monthly. So we are getting compounding interest and we keep enough cash in there so that in the off chance that there is a down market, which did happen earlier this year, so we were able to draw cash not out of our retirement accounts because we were starting to run out. Right. We're getting to the point where like, hey, we, you know, we're going to need to get some money and to live on. So we just took that from our money market account and said, well this, we'll just take it from here. You know, we didn't replenish it this time. I probably should have, but we didn't take that much out. And I was like, well, it's okay, it can ride another little bit. Because I knew I was going to need to take out the tuition money not only for the fall, but also for the spring. Because spring has to be paid in December. So fall gets paid here next month and then spring in December. So I have two tuition payments this year, not just one.

So you really have. Well, you have the, you're fully invested in one bucket. You've got like a money market account at 4% in another bucket. And then you. It sounds like you have a spending account over here that like you're just.

Yeah. So I guess that would be three buckets. I guess, I guess that is. I don't know. I looked at the three bucket thing and I was like, yeah, it just seems so complex. I'm just going to go with easy. I got my checking account which has the money. We spend, spend, spend and then the money market and then our invested accounts because we're not entirely, we're not very conservative on our investment accounts. We're just not right.

Well, I think it's good. I mean, if you have a long time horizon, you actually need to be taking the appropriate level of risk. Yeah, we need to take the appropriate level of risk when we're accumulating and decumulating, especially with long time horizons.

Sure, sure. And I love what you guys did. So one of the things I thought was super cool was when you guys put the average rate of return and you could choose those, like, hey, this is what I'm invested in. And so we picked the proper investment. But then what we did is we run the software in pessimistic. So it takes several percentage points away from that amount. And that's where we, we plan from. We plan from pessimistic. If we hit optimistic, I get to do the hoo hoo. That's great. Maybe we can take a, you know, six month world cruise or whatever, that dream vacation that people want to do or whatever that thing is that they wanted to do. But if it, if it really only, if we really only get about 6% returns total, then I know that we're still fine. But if we do get that 10% or whatever it is, I can't remember what that number was. Well, that's, that's gravy on what's already some biscuits and gravy that's already tasty. So I'll take that extra gravy.

Your gravy train with your biscuit wheels.

The gravy train with biscuit wheels.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I bet, you know, it'll be, we should, we should talk again, like in a few years. So I was talking with Fritz Gilbert. He's been retired six years, kind of similar story. He retired in his mid-50s and then he, you know, we, we just did a podcast and, you know, he has been getting wealthier after stopping working. So I think he planned in a way and he's frugal. And so he's like, still. And this is what you kind of see. People that have done a good job of saving and planning and are just used to building wealth keep doing that. Now the question is, you know, I don't know if it's good to like, again end up with like your highest terminal wealth. Like, oh, you know, I might have over 10 million or whatever, some big number when I'm 90 years old and I'm not really going to be fully utilizing it, you know.

No, that's not really Good. And, you know, we've noticed the same thing, but you got to remember right now that even though you're building more wealth, like we started out with a certain dollar amount when we retired, and that has actually increased. So if I go look at it today from the date we retired, because again, I have a spreadsheet for this, this is the one thing I do, because I told you I have that guardrail spreadsheet. So I know what it was the day we retired. So we have actually accumulated wealth even though we purchased an rv, which wasn't entirely inexpensive. We've lived, we've taken, I think, five, six, seven cruises, we've gone to Mexico, Florida. We've done some nice trips, but our wealth is accumulating. But remember, the markets are on a tear right now, and there's no guarantee that that will continue. So I believe you should be increasing your wealth when the markets are doing their best in retirement, because the lean years will come. And if you continue to let that grow and it grows 3, 400,000, possibly before that market downturn hits, you're just going to be sitting in a much better position than you would have been if you were, you know, drawing it. And it was literally going down month over month over month. I, I just think that that that's when you're taking the, the fat days, because, you know, the lean days are going to be. They're, they're coming. It doesn't matter. We, we've been on kind of what I would call the, the fat days in the market for probably a little too long. I'm a little nervous about it, right? But, you know, there's no point in being too nervous, right? Because it's going to work out and we have a plan for that. And that's the point of having that chance of success. Right there on that big homepage, it says, hey, you still have a good chance because we ran a thousand simulations and even if stuff is awful, you're going to be okay. You'll be fine. But I think you have to trust it. And that's where I think being from, you know, coming from software engineering and working with software my whole life or most of my life, you have to decide, is that software trustworthy? And really, is it trustworthy? And early on, what I noticed when I was. I told you earlier, you know, I did several packages before we chose Bolden, which was new retirement at the time, but bold and now. And the first thing I noticed was the software was well put together, right? First thing you notice is there's a lot of data, but if you ever noticed it loads extremely quick. That means somebody knows how to properly code, because otherwise it would be slow as molasses, asynchronous loading in the background. Clearly, there was money spent on it. There was thought put into it. There was an architectural plan on the back end. Clearly financial planners were consulted along the way. And it started over time. You're like, okay, do I trust this? Because, man, listen, I've been in the business long enough to know that I've seen software that's been in the field 10 years, and then a major bug is found, and it's like, how did it last 10 years? And nobody caught it, right? Because you wouldn't have noticed it until later on. So as I went through it, I started to get more comfortable and I just compared it against other software packages, even though they weren't as robust from. I mean, because you guys added tools, go lower, you got all the tools. But there are very, very simple planners like Empower, right? It's got a very, very simple planner. I wouldn't risk my retirement on empowerment, right? But I could compare that and say, hey, how does that look? Does it still look pretty close? Oh, yeah, pretty close there. Within a few percentage. And then you go to the next one like, well, that's pretty close. Within a few percentage. Then you start to get the trust that, hey, this is really trustworthy. Then said, okay, I can trust this now that I have my trust. Right. I can use that as my primary planner all the time. And then. And we switched over and I just. I think you guys did a really good job. I really do. I say that because I know behind the scenes what this could look like if it was not properly coded and it wasn't properly hosted. And you know what I mean, it has all of the pieces to make it a good piece of software.

Yeah. Well, thanks for noticing that. Quick shout out to Dave Ginn. He's someone I've known for, like 30 years and was our principal architect. He actually retired, but when he came here, he's like, hey, I want to rearchitect this whole thing. We've rebuilt our platform a few times. It's actually good in software to rebuild things. And yeah, speed, responsiveness matters a lot. Scalability. We have 100,000 people a month in their plans now, and it's growing and it needs to keep running fast and be secure. And we work with Raytheon and Nationwide as enterprise customers. They're putting us through the security ringer, you know, in Terms of, like, how we manage data or SOC2 type 2. There's a lot. There is a lot going on here, and I appreciate that you notice it. So thank you.

Our team will appreciate it that you bring that up. I've been through a lot of SOC audits. I've been through a security audit every year. Every single year we go through. Went through a security audit. And these guys put this. They put the screws to it, some of these guys pretty good. And so it's good to hear that you guys have all those accreditations, especially on the SOC side and the security side, because that's important to people.

Yeah, 100. Yeah. Like, it's a lot of. It's, you know, for inside baseball. It's just like, you know, it's. It is the environment and stuff, but it's also like the human capital. Best practices. Right. That, like, you have the right level of roles and responsibilities in the company. Not everybody has access. Like. Like, you know, you know, few people have access to the data. Right. And we manage that really tightly and stuff like that. Okay, cool. We'll look.

I could tell it's fast. It's really fast. Somebody knows how to write some good code. I noticed right away. I don't sit and watch it load.

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, I appreciate that. All right, well, look, I actually wanted to ask you another quick question. Just like, one thing that you mentioned, too, is you kind of formed your own group, right, of people that are thinking about retirement or doing financial planning. I was just curious why you did that and kind of how it came about.

Okay, so it's going to be kind of funny because you guys have a Facebook group, the Bolden Facebook group. And I joined the group. I noticed there were a lot of people asking questions and a lot of people had answers. The problem was, is that the people answering the questions weren't necessarily financial planners. And everybody has a different level of knowledge. I mean, I don't think I know everything. I know I don't know everything. I wasn't trained to know everything. But there were a lot of people giving some pretty bad advice on there. And I thought, wow, this is. And people would correct them, which was hats off to those people. Like, don't follow this. This is going to lead you in a bad spot. Started thinking, you know, I would really like to be able to ask some questions and not just get overwhelmed with just junk because it's on Facebook, anybody can comment. And so that's what you were seeing. You know, I would ask a question, and I would get just a lot of opinions but no real facts. So I thought, you know, it'd be really nice for other people that a use Bolton because we're all looking at the same interface and following the same set of rules that are either retired or hopefully or into retirement, you know, thinking about it. And so I posted out on your Facebook group, I said is there anybody in Kansas City? And I specifically said the Kansas City metro. Is there anybody in Kansas City Metro that wouldn't mind once a month getting together we can go have a coffee, talk about our plans, our questions, you know, time horizons, et cetera. You know, just to try to help each other, motivate each other, cheer each other on either be fans for each other. Well, I, I got a lot of responses and one was in Kansas City and the rest were across the US And I thought, you know what, that's okay, we can do a virtual call. So I picked out there's about six of us and a lot more were trying to get on the group. But I feel like there's an optimal size for the group. If you get too many people, it's not a productive. Everybody's talking over each other. So it was important for us to keep the group small enough that we could all have meaningful conversations within our hour allotted time. That's what we allot once a month. And what we've seen since we started this group, there was a guy that had been retired for quite some time with some pretty complex investment instruments which really surprised me how complex his investment instruments were. We had a gal that was a handful of weeks from retiring and she has recently retired, just came back from five weeks in Europe after that was her retirement thing. We have got here in Kansas City, North Kansas city, and she's 90 days out, a little less now because it's been a while. And so she's getting ready to do her fall into her retirement and she's already given her notice of when she. She just wants to get through the, you know, insurance and benefits elections through at her company. Once that's done, which is later this year, she's out. And I think there's one other that's still working. And so what we're doing there is we are helping each other. We talked about the change in the Monte Carlo, we talked about, you know, how are you doing this, how are you doing taxes? What withdrawal strategy are you using to get there? Some people have a pension, some people don't. So you know, because one's a government employee and I believe I may be Wrong. But I believe they may be already drawing a pension or qualified for that pension. So it's kind of important. You know, one of them has a bunch of Airbnb's, and so that's what she's doing. Yeah, and we're. What we do is we advocate for each other, we build each other up, you know, and I think seeing others that have gone through it, so we have somebody that's already retired, and they have a lot of good knowledge, and actually they're quite familiar with Bold and software. They actually taught us a thing or two. And so I really feel like that small group, people, you become friends, even if it's just on the phone, on a video call for once a month. But hopefully when we're all retired, maybe we can plan something. I'll get together, you know, maybe take a cruise, go to the beach, you know, a resort or something, and spend some time together and just. Just hang out a bit. But it all came together because of the software we all use. That was the. That was the key. We're all wanting to retire or retired, and we all use this software package. So because of that, how about we come together and share knowledge and. And, you know, if somebody has something going on, they can lean on us, they can ask us questions, and we can answer. Now, we don't show our plans. A lot of people, you know, your. Your. Your finances, your money is your business. Right. So we are not actively saying, well, I've got this amount of money, and I want to draw that. That's not what this is about. Now, if some people want to do that and they want their plan to be more open, that's really on them. That's not something I personally would do. I think that's. Your money is your personal, mine and my wife's business, and no one else's. So we really like it. I thought about starting a second group because of the demand, but then I also thought, you know, I'm retired, and I really don't want the responsibility, because even though. Even though it's this group, I tend to be the one that schedules all the meetings and so on. And that's okay. I don't mind. I mean, I've done this for years. Right. This is kind of what my career was. You know, you schedule a lot of meetings.

Well, it's interesting. I mean, we have seen this emerge. I have now talked to a couple groups that have just like, spontaneously emerged like this, where. And it is like that. Eight people. Eight to ten, you know, but, yeah, you have to keep the right size. And some people are like, hey, we're open. We, we share, you know, we'll, we'll get out there, but we don't really know it there. They tend to be a little bit geographically distributed, but yeah, they become friends and they're kind of comparing notes and like best practices. So it depends. Yeah, we, we're interested in leaning into this because it's, you know, we do feel like it's a great way for people to build literacy, build trust and like learn from other people, but that are not selling anything and just kind of like going through the same process with them. And then also like the folks that are doing this are obviously the most enthusiastic people and probably and know the most. How do we spread that to that knowledge to other people and bring them along? And that's like there's some unlocking here and we're thinking about it. But yeah, you know, don't be. We'll have to recruit you to come. You can come, come over here and help us run all the group efforts, you know, the community efforts.

I'm going to tell you a little something about a lot of the people on my group. A lot of them have went to your financial planners and had a plan. I guess it's called a plan review or something. And a lot of them have already done that. And actually I believe, and I could be wrong, but I think one of them may have scheduled it because the other ones talked about the fact that they had it done and that person. And I'd have to ask my wife to be sure if that's what I heard. I kind of got a little distracted. My dog was jumping on me during that conversation because she was like, hey, what do you got? You got a treat in that pocket? And I did it. But I'm pretty sure she scheduled one and had one after hearing that others had done it. And I tell you, I found that everyone that purchased the financial planner review was happy with the person they spoke to, felt they were very knowledgeable, and then left with a little more confidence than they had going into it. Because you know, when you're a self planner but you're not trained, you know, I mean I could, I could skydive, but I don't think I'd want to pack my own parachute. Right. I'm just saying so. And I feel like a lot of people that are doing this and using the software, that's why I think you offer this. But is that, yeah, they think they've got this pretty good. They've Been pretty successful, you know, over the years building their wealth and they bought the software to see how, where they were. But again, that's like packing your own parachute to some people. You know, they're like, yeah, but man, if I could just get somebody that really, really, really understood to just say, you know what, you, you're in pretty good shape here. I think that gives a lot of confidence. And for that I actually feel like that that's probably a great service and there, and there's probably a point where my wife and I may also do that, but mostly for tax purposes because our RMDs are going to be pretty substantial. Mostly because I think a lot of people don't realize when you retire early, you're responsible for your insurance until age 65. Right. And the problem with that is that if you want an ACA subsidy, which I don't know how the big beautiful bill, what do they call it? The one big beautiful bill. I don't know. I understand it's going to change that a little bit because I think that was. The subsidies were expanded during COVID and then I think that's, I think all it is is the expansion of those is getting pulled back because the ACA, I think was in law. I think that was, you know, signed. But I think what it was was the expansion of the ACA subsidies. That's, that's getting repealed back. I'd have to do more research, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is. And so we're actually benefiting a little bit from that. But the problem is, is they, you know, most people, if I don't care who you are, there's only so much income you can have to get a subsidy. So Roth conversions to lower your tax bill and getting ACA subsidies, I just don't think you can effectively do both. You got to make a choice. You're either going to save on your insurance or you're going to save on your taxes. Now granted, probably saving on the taxes long term might be a better payoff. But early in retirement, the last thing you want to do is draw your accounts because you're going to be paying taxes out of those. In my case, I would have to pay the taxes out of the brokerage accounts, my taxable brokerage accounts. So what you end up with is you're drawing that back. And that's the sooner, the sooner that drops and is depleted, the faster I have to start taking from those pre tax accounts and I have to pay taxes. So not only that, but you're paying money to the government. So, yeah, they already had their hand in it. Right. But you're going to see your net worth go down because you're paying that to the government. You're getting no living out of it. And those first four or five years in retirement that you just don't want to see your account take a drop. This, you know, sequence of return drifts. Right. You really, really, really, really, really do not want to be a month in and have the market crash or have very, very large expenses above what you planned for. And so we're kind of pushing them off. And I think maybe we're right, maybe we're wrong. And this is where I, we may end up.

Yeah, there's a trade off. It's interesting. I was, I saw something on Reddit recently where someone was like, I'm thinking about doing one massive Roth conversion all at once, paying all the taxes, getting everything in the Roth and then basically trying to have no taxes for the rest of my life or super low taxes.

You could do it. You could do it. Is it tax efficient? I mean, you're depending on what you're converting, you could be in some pretty high tax brackets.

I mean, it would be like this was a, like a seven figure kind of situation, was crazy. I mean, like our users are trying to operate within that. They're making that trade off that you're making, which is like taxes now versus, you know, get them and reposition the assets into a Roth and then lower taxes later. Lower income and lower taxes later. But. Yeah, no, I hear you. It's a trade off. And we, you know, we try to make that more visible because you can put, you know, the IRMA means testing stuff in there. And I know some people do the ACA stuff.

Yeah, I mean, like one of the things that we're doing because, you know, we don't want to pull all of our money from brokerage accounts because we still have our standard deduction between. For both of us. Right. So married, filing jointly, we have a standard deduction. So because I'm 55, I qualify for the rule of 55 for my 401k that I left because of that, it's going to allow me. So what we're doing is we're literally taking off what our standard deduction is every year so that we can at least fill that, that tax bucket and then with our standard deduction should wipe that income out. That's what we, what we're doing. Now. The good news is, even though Boland doesn't Just say, hey, you can do this. The money flows. Allow that to happen. And I want to shout out. I know you shout out to. I think you said, dave, I got a shout out to Nancy because, listen, Nancy's fantastic. And, you know, we got on some of the. I think they were some calls where she had that she talked about certain things, like classes, some learning material you had. I think we talked to. I think I talked to her specifically about one issue I was having with the. With the withdrawal order. Because back in the day, it would just randomly pick them. Not randomly. I'm sure there was something behind the scenes, but my wife was 47, and it was like, okay, you need to take from her retirement account. And I'm like, no, that's a 10% penalty. So she showed us how to fix that, but you guys fixed it. You rolled out a. It's been a while, but you've rolled out that order of withdrawal. And I was so happy that I didn't have to have that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in front of the accounts like I used to. And. But Nancy had a. See, that's what I love. She was like, yeah, she's like, here's a workaround. And I know as a. When I. In software and as a. As an end user, you never want to hear that workaround. But I gotta tell you, she had the answer for all of the things that I had problems for. And then she was like, but it's on the roadmap. We're going to have this for you. So just give us another three, four months and we will have this for you. And sure enough, there it is. So kudos to Nancy. I want to make sure she knows that, you know, any. I mean, for me and my wife personally, she did fantastic and we really appreciate everything she did.

I will definitely let her know. Well, yeah, she is an incredible person and also just totally into the work. And a former school teacher. Her story was, you know, she taught Spanish in upstate New York, like, near where I grew up. And we met her through Bogleheads. And then she's like, hey, I think I can help. I want to help out. Like, let's build some classes. And then, like, let's do coaching. And now she has a super senior role in her business. And yeah, it is like a lot of our roadmap is we learn with our users. What are they doing? What are they trying to get done? Oh, we have to do a workaround. And it's like, okay, you know, we're feeding that in. I mean, she has literally a list of 160 things that we want to get built into this platform.

I think in my case, because we, I don't know how many people retire as early as we did. Right. Compared to people who hit the typical retirement age. So for you guys, you have to hit that, what I call the beaten path. This is 90% of our users are this path. And I'm over in the weeds over on the side. So, yes, I would love for there to be some features that are specific for my case, but I also have to temper my expectations along the lines that nobody's going to spend a whole lot of money to make custom software changes for me. I would love it if you would, but I assume that would come with a big bill from you guys on the other end. Well, I could do it, but it's going to be $62,000.

Well, we're trying, we're trying to, like, I mean, it's interesting that it's, it's, it's changing anyway. Well, Scott, I mean, this is, I'm like, this is amazing. I do want to, I just want to, like, shift gears a little bit, like, and then I think we'll wrap it up. But, like, you know, I don't know if you have any last thoughts for our audience since you've lived through this and, like, things that, you know, you've learned and would want to pass on and like, kind of how you're thinking about, you know, the next phase for yourself, too.

So the first thing that I have to tell everybody, you got to pay your debt off if you want to retire successfully. I mean, I know there are people that are successful that go in with a $3,000 a month mortgage. Okay. I couldn't even imagine the stress I would feel going in with a $3,000 mortgage. So, number one, get out of debt, including your house. Right. If you can do it. I get that. Not everybody gets that opportunity. And some people, like, I think you brought it up, Steve. Is that some people get pushed out circumstances and they leave out maybe a little earlier than they anticipated. But the truth being is that if you can pay off your debt, pay your debt off, because debt is the worst thing to have going in there. To your point, you got to have a high savings rate and you got to be invested appropriately for what your age is and your retirement horizon. How far out is horizon is your retirement date? Because if you're not aggressive enough, you're not going to have enough saved. But then once you hit retirement, you have to be, have that honest conversation or before retirement you have that honest conversation of how comfortable you are with being maybe 100% equities or do you want to be 90% equities or 50%? What is that comfort level? You know, because again, I, you know, I like, I think I told you my mother in law is retired and she's more conservative. And you know, that's because that's what makes her feel better. It isn't really about what makes others around you feel better, it's what about makes you feel comfortable. Because I can tell you once you go into retirement, you do have that first little bit of stress about, I don't have a paycheck and you start to draw down. And if you already have stress from, hey, I feel like I'm not investing, you know, I'm not aggressive enough or I'm too aggressive. Right. If you're not in your comfort zone, that is going to add stress to an already. What is that first couple? You know, probably first year or so, kind of a stressful situation because you are retiring and your life doesn't change. You know, if in the past you were somebody your kids came to for, hey, I got in a bind and they need money and you were always the person, okay, I'll help you out. Well, that's a problem because now you're taking out of the plan that you never planned for. You're taking money out. So for us, we went to our kids because we've unfortunately been sometimes the fixers. And we went to them ahead of time and we said, listen, next year we're retiring, we're not going to bail you out. So whatever happens to you, happens to you. So get your life together. And at that time, I think some of us owed us, some of them owed us a little money and we just said, forget about the money, don't worry about it. But you're not getting any more.

Debt is forgiven, but like we're not going to bail you out the credit back. The credit backstop is stopped.

Yeah, I actually think we might have all given them like a gift across all of them and said, I'm pretty sure we did and said, this is it, don't ask anymore. Now did that stop them from asking? Well, no, but you know, so, you know, you do have to do this. So if you have kids, you know, hopefully, you know, your kids don't find themselves in a bad position. Anybody can, I mean, you could be having kids very, very successful, but find out that they're leveraging a lot of debt and One layoff could change their life and they could come looking for money. So just because you're, you know, you have a son or a daughter that's very, very, very successful, a divorce, a job loss, maybe making some mistakes and getting, you know, buying that house they couldn't afford and that big F350 and then that Lexus SUV to haul the kids around and oh, I'd really love to have a boat. And you find out that they, they leverage debt for every single one of the things that they don't own anything, they owe everything and you know, they could come, it only takes a very small change in life. So I think going in, I think the number one, try to get out of debt, make sure you're aggressive early on in trying to build your wealth. Double digit saving rate being probably a little more aggressive in your investments than you're comfortable with. But then as you start to get to retirement, that's when you really need to have that hard conversation. What do I feel comfortable with? Because you don't want to go into retirement and have that uncomfortable feeling like, oh my God, if the market goes down, my plan is blown out of the water. And I think the other thing is when the market goes down, people leave your money alone, do not cash out. I don't even know how many times. I'm not going to mention a family person, but pretty wealthy. And when Covid hit in March, they withdrew all of their money from the market when it was down and in April and they, it hit record highs, right?

Yeah. And then they go back in and.

Like, no, as far as I know, they're still not in. They just, that's.

Yeah, this is, this is the thing, like people can, you know, it's interesting. I think people don't understand that their own worst risk is themselves. For most people, it's their own behavior and it's this emotional stuff and you know, they're like, yeah, sell it. I mean if there's actually studies on this, retail investors, I think their average return is like 2% across the board. Because they do this. It's worse than just throwing in the bank or whatever. It's just like they, they cannot control themselves. They, they sell, you know, low and they buy high for, you know, they're excited because it's high. Let's get in. Market tanks are like, I'm freaking out. And they sell and, and then they have a hard time getting back in. You know, this is where I do think sometimes having a, a trusted resource to help you manage your own Behavior. Understanding yourself is such a key part of this, of success.

Sure. I would say that's true. If you are that person and emotions are driving your investment decisions, your best bet probably is to find a good financial advisor, put your money with him and then stay out of his way for the most part. I mean, you don't just trust him. Carte blanche. You don't trust anybody. Carte blanche with your money. It's your money you need to know. But when the market, maybe you're best to remove the stock ticker from your phone and don't watch the financial news and let that guy do it for you because he's investing with his brain, you're investing with your heart. He's going to win 100% of the time, every time, every single time. Even if it's costing you 1% AUM, maybe it's worth it because to your point, if you, if you're, if you're selling out when the market's low, you're, it's a no win. You're not winning, you're going to lose every time.

Right. I feel like that's like the biggest value for a lot of folks. It's like being able to go to someone when you're like, I want to hit the sell button and not doing that is key. And it's really hard. Especially like, you know, there's capitulation in the market. That's when you want to buy. It's when people believe that there's no future hope, is when you actually need to be investing and everybody's selling because that's when the market's absolutely bottoming. It's, you know, sell when there's blood in the streets.

Oh yeah. You know, I thought to myself, I said, man, I wish I had my, you know, our money's invested. But if I would have been working when Tesla stock went down like it did, I was just saliva in my mouth. I was like, God, I want to buy that stock right now. Because they're coming back because they have too much in the pipelines. They have too much going on. It's not just about them selling individual cars anymore. They're making robots. They're going to invest in xai, they're doing battery packs. They've got probably the best self driving package out there. Granted, still got a few glitches, but when they get those glitches fixed, it's not Geo fenced like Waymo. Waymo is Geo fenced because they've driven every route and they know every street. It's pre programmed. When you can eliminate that pre programming and a person can get in their car from California and it drive all the way to New York by itself. Okay, that's worth a trillion dollars.

Yeah. No, it is pretty amazing how like this stuff is stuff that we, you know, for a long time we're like, where are the self driving? You know, where are the, where the flying cars? But now it feels like we are entering this age. Like you do see, you see, you know, rockets landing themselves, right? And yeah, we've got batteries and like self driving. I've taken the Waymo I and my cousin has done FSD in the Tesla and he's like, yeah, it's pretty amazing. But yeah, like, you know, I'll drive to Tahoe to go skiing and I'm like, ugh, it'd be great if I could hit a button and it would do this and I could do other stuff instead of like navigating my car around. I mean, I like to drive sometimes, but I don't want to be driving all the time. And it does feel like this is going to happen.

Those long trips, like sometimes when we cruise out of Texas, we just, we're just like, we'll just drive down. It's. Yeah, it takes a little longer, but by the time you drive to the airport, go through security, wait, get on the plane, you're saving a few hours is all you're saving and you're paying a whole lot more for it. It would be so nice to hop in the car and say, hey, take me to Galveston. And you're just let it go and you maybe play cards with your significant other on the way there. But I also noticed because he also owns Xai Grok. Four just came out and it hit. It blew everybody out of the water. I mean, not just a little bit by a substantial amount.

Now there's some amazing stuff going on that it's pretty amazing. All right, well, look, Scott, clearly we need to do another podcast because there's a lot of material that we can cover here. I do think we got to get you in here helping with communities, though, and maybe get you in here helping with AI.

I don't know about the AI, but I could say that if you need some help with some communities, let me know what you're planning to do. I actually think maybe if you're going to do communities and you were going to be the place where they meet up, that you can maybe create a webpage where they can sign up for a group first name only. No other geographical information. And then if those people choose to share some personal information about their net worth or whatever, high likelihood is that nobody's going to know who they are. There's some amenity to that because I, I, I wouldn't feel comfortable myself with the community sharing their net worth. You know, if somebody has, well people.

Well people, people could opt in. Yeah, people could opt in and say hey, I, I, I want to be in a more anonymous community or I want to be in a more sharing community. But there, there is a lot of this trust stuff. So it, it needs to be a curated experience. But, but it, it's valuable there. You know, it's, it's, they're like as a, you know, founder guy, there are these founder groups and CEO groups that you people meet up and they compare notes. It's, it's in all these different areas. Right.

Well, I just, I'm looking forward to the AI stuff. So you know, I don't know who you've chosen. Have you chosen an AI yet? Have you chosen which AI you plan to go with?

Well, we've done, we're, so here's what's happening with AI. We, we do use it internally for creating content building tool. I mean we're, you know, it doesn't do all the work but like it helps us accelerate things like internally. Right. It's just productivity. And then we do use it for support and that's been a really big win because it's not only we had done tens of thousands of support questions and written all the support text like you know, articles, you know, Nancy's all over that stuff. And then we trained it on that and now it's handling like 60 to 70% of questions and multi threaded questions and resolving like 80% of them. So it's definitely like helped us scale the support and we're known for support. We have a bunch of ideas about how to bring it to life inside the product in terms of like yeah, asking questions about your plan, summarizing data, you know, pulling out insights and stuff like that. So there's a bunch of stuff that is under consideration. We're going to be rolling out some of some initial features but we're trying to accelerate the work that we're doing and ultimately we do want to build an AI financial advisor or an AI enabled platform. We don't think people are going away. Right. I don't think like people still like to talk to people and hear their stories, but we do think we can make people more productive. The coach is more productive. The advisors More productive, you know, people using the software, more productive, make it easier to use and explain everything that's going on there. So you'll see that's coming down the pipeline on our side.

Well, I think that's important. I think, you know, some of the things that I noticed was like early on, the Roth Conversion Explorer had no way to apply it to the plan, right? You could get the information, but it was up to you. Now there's a apply it to the plan. But, you know, if I'm asking some complex questions about, hey, should I withdraw this money here and here and here, or what's the best combination? Because I need my, you know, modified adjusted gross income to be 50,000 or less, and, you know, AI is going to be able to run those scenarios, look at my plan and say, here's what you should do based on this. And if that's not, here's that alternate plan, you know how it does. It'll give you plan A, plan B. And then being able to say, you know what? I want to apply, that I want it to apply because I'm going to do it. And I think that isn't replacing an advisor. I don't think nobody's thinking we're going to completely replace an advisor. Because you're right that human interaction of human touch is not going away for a long, long time. But I think asking some pretty simple questions and not having to engage your advisor for some simple, hey, I would like to do this. And giving good information is a worthwhile adventure. And I think that that's something that you guys are probably more positioned than others to do it, because some of these others, you know, they're so tied to the advisor side of it that you got to be very careful. I worked in an industry like that where you had to be very careful because if you made the dealers mad, because that was why we were dealers that sold parts. If you made them mad, they wouldn't sell your parts, so you couldn't sell directly to the end user because that would make them mad. And so there was this struggle along the way, and you're kind of in that same boat where you have to tread lightly in what to do.

Yeah, no, we've been pretty intentional about this. We do have to be really thoughtful about how we're the incentives for what we do and how we get paid. And that's why we charge users directly versus get paid indirectly. I mean, there's lots of ways we could make money indirectly, but we would rather charge users and be completely transparent and Then, yeah, how we work with advisors and other service providers, but we are. We're successfully navigating that. We charge them too. You know, we basically, ultimately, we feel like the value we provide is the end user, so they should pay us. And if advisor wants to give it to someone, they're still paying for the software for the end user. The advisor can be working in that process, but we are not getting paid. You know, ultimately it's between the platform and the end user, and that's how we want to. That's like the fundamental construct. And it seems simple, but this is where nobody was doing it. And it's a core thing. It's like architecting your software. We're architecting our business model and being pretty intentional about it.

But you are going to have to charge extra for the AI. It's too costly. Sorry, you're going to have to wait. I don't want to have to pay more, but unfortunately I'm going to pay more.

Yeah, well, we were talking about that internally, like the tokens, and we're trying to get our hands around it because, yeah, it's like cloud computing, right? So the stuff that costs us money is cloud computing. I mean, from a software, it's account linking costs us money. And then, yeah, if we're doing LLM stuff and paying tokens and stuff like that, then we have to make sure that we're not getting creamed on the back end. But we'll be, you know, again, we can be transparent about, like, explain this is what's happening. You know, here's what it. Here's what it's taking. Well, look, Scott, we will definitely do another podcast. So, hey, thanks for coming on and sharing your story and like, what you're learning and why you use planning, you know, leading into, but then also living in retirement, which is fantastic. And appreciate that you're all the feedback you've given us and also doing the community stuff. That's fantastic to hear about. Thanks for taking the time to, like, originally just contact us with your feedback, which is how we got in touch. So I appreciate that.

My pleasure, My pleasure. I'm glad you had me on. It's been great to get to talk with you.

Yeah, no, likewise. And we have a couple guys in Kansas City, so if you want to meet up with Jerry, who has Enterprise or Brett, our cto, is actually there, we should make that happen. Or maybe if your group's happening, it'd be great to get people together and hopefully if you're in San Francisco or I'm sure. I'll get to Kansas City at some point. I'll look you up.

Sounds good.

Okay.

All right. Thank you, Steve. Take care.

Bye.