When Every Day Is Saturday
This story is adapted from Winning in Retirement, by Chad Slagle.
Twenty years ago, most Americans preparing to retire did not need to do much financial planning because there was already a plan, called a pension, put together for you by your employer. It was a defined benefit plan where you worked for twenty, thirty, or forty years, and they took a little money out of your paycheck every period and put it aside. When you retired, that was your income stream, and the only decision you had to make was to either take 100 percent for yourself or to make sure your spouse was taken care of if something happened to you before him or her.
Once you made your decision, you knew that you would have that guaranteed income each and every month for the rest of your life, and your spouse’s life, no matter how long either of you lived. From there, you simply adjusted your lifestyle to match the level of income you knew to expect.
Today, however, it is a very different story. According to the Pension Rights Center, less than 20 percent of American workers have a pension. And that number is going down.
It’s a scary thing to retire in the twenty-first century. You don’t know if you’re going to live to be 75, 85, or 105. If you’re like many of the families we work with, you’re worried that the money you’ve saved won’t be enough. You don’t know if you’ll be able to retire on time. There’s a lot of anxiety all around.
Another major concern for retirees today, of course, is long-term care. What happens if you get sick and have to spend months or even years in a long-term care facility? How will you pay those bills?
What we’ve seen, over and over again, is that when you build a game plan, all those fears start to subside. Even the body language changes: Shoulders relax. Faces brighten. Ultimately, you develop a peace of mind, knowing you have a structured plan in place. You feel confident you will be taken care of — no matter how many years you end up living.
What Is a Successful Retirement?
When people come to our workshops, one of the questions we always ask them is “What day of the week do you spend the most money?” For almost everyone who is still working, the answer is the same: Saturday.
It makes sense. Mondays through Fridays — the weekdays — are also workdays. There just isn’t that much time outside of work to spend money. You wake up, go to work, come home, make dinner, and maybe watch some TV. Then you go to bed, wake up, and do it all over again. When the end of the week comes, you want to have a little fun. Saturdays are when families tend to do things like go to restaurants, movies, concerts, and sporting events, as well as shopping and running errands.
When you retire, however, there’s no distinction between workdays and non-work days. That’s right, folks: in retirement every day is Saturday.
How are you going to afford it, and even more fundamentally, what are you going to do with all that free time?
It’s no longer the norm to sit in a rocking chair on your front porch and get old. Think about your lifestyle. Do you want to have a second home in Florida or Arizona? Are there hobbies you want to spend more time doing, like hunting, fishing, cycling, or gardening? Is there a club or volunteer organization you want to belong to? Is it your dream to play golf at all the nicest courses in the United States? Or maybe you want to travel across the country in an RV or take your entire family on one big trip every year.
Then the big question becomes: what income do you need to support that lifestyle?
Often, retirees haven’t given much thought to their lifestyle goals; nor do they know how long their money will last. We find that a lot of our clients have just been sitting on their money and not spending it because they’re afraid of running out.
That is why it’s so crucial to define your lifestyle and build a written, structured game plan to support that lifestyle.
A Journey, Not a Destination
We hear it from many of the people we work with: after they retired, they felt like they had no purpose in life, almost like a postretirement hangover. This is not surprising when you think about it: retirement is a massive life change, one of the biggest transitions we go through as humans.
Say you’re a foreman or a boss. For all these years, you’ve had people looking up to you. You’ve been responsible for leading them. Now, all of a sudden, you’re retired and there’s no one for you to lead. You’ve lost your identity.
For so many of us, our job is the thing that keeps us going, day after day. It’s only natural, then, that there would be a lot of anxiety and discomfort when it all comes to an end and we retire from our jobs.
But what if, instead of retiring from your job, you could retire to something else — something new and meaningful?
You may have another twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five years left! What do you want to do with that time? It may seem like common sense, but most people don’t think this way. They’ve worked so hard their whole life just to get to this point. Their focus has been on getting to retirement, not through it. Now they’re finally here; they’ve made it — but they don’t know what to actually do with this thing they’ve been longing for all these years! Often, they grow lonely. They feel like they don’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
This is why it’s so important to understand that retirement is a journey, not a destination. And in order to do that, you have to have a game plan to retire to your ideal retirement, not simply from the workforce.
Our happiest clients have a clear vision of what they want in retirement. Some wish to travel; others play golf, or fish, or hunt. The point is: they know what they want their lives to look like and they are excited to make it happen. But in order to achieve their goal of retiring to that new life, obviously they have to have the necessary funds available and secure to be able to pursue those hobbies and perform those activities.
That’s where we come in and help you build a plan.
Your Retirement GPS
Once you have a clear vision of where you want to go, we use our four-step guided planning system to help get you there. It’s just like when you get into your car: you know the location you’re trying to get to, and you probably have some idea of where it is, but you don’t know exactly how to find it. So you punch the address into your GPS system, and it tells you turn-by-turn what roads to take, what turns to make.
When I was a kid, my family took one big trip every summer, and we all looked forward to it. My parents, brother, sister, and I would load up the family station wagon and make the two-hour trek to Busch Stadium in St. Louis to watch our beloved St. Louis Cardinals. And even though we made the drive every year, my dad would still get lost every single time. My mom would have the map in her lap, but it made no difference. He would have to make at least two or three stops at local gas stations along the way to ask for directions because when the map failed, there was no backup plan.
You may think that your 401(k) or company plan is your perfectly planned map for retirement, but retirement today is different, just as navigation today is different than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Today we have a GPS system that will guide us turn by turn until we reach our destination. Thirty years ago, stopping at gas stations was the way a lot of people got to unfamiliar places, and pensions alone got retirees through retirement. Things are constantly changing. Pensions are rare in today’s workforce and company plans cannot be counted on to get you successfully through retirement…unless you have a plan that goes along with them.
Which, again, is where we come in. Tell us what lifestyle you want to have, what hobbies, and how much income you’re going to need to have coming in to support that lifestyle. We then use that information to guide you, turn-by-turn, step-by-step, showing you what vehicles to use to get there and how to navigate your successful retirement, start to finish.
We show you HOW TO WIN.
Winning in Retirement
If you have decided to read my book, chances are you are experiencing some anxiety around your retirement. You’re afraid to spend your money because you fear it might run out.
Well, I am here to tell you: you are going to be okay. As long as you are smart about it and have a set game plan in place, your money can and will last the rest of your life.
Recently, we had clients come in who wanted to buy a second home in The Villages near Orlando, Florida. But they were fearful that if they spent that money on the new house, they wouldn’t have enough left to last them through their retirement years. In reality, they had plenty of money. The problem was that it was almost all invested in the market. When your money is in stocks, you have no idea how long it’s going to last. You don’t know how long you’re going to live or if the market is going to go up or down.
So, in the case of these particular clients, we sat down with them, discussed their lifestyle goals, what kind of income they would need if they bought the second property — and then built a game plan for them. They walked out of our office knowing exactly what income they would need to support their lifestyle, including both their first and second home. And because we had this game plan, our clients were assured that the necessary funds would be coming in each and every month for the rest of their lives, no matter how long they lived.
You too can have this clarity and peace of mind. You can win in retirement and not have to be kept up at night worrying about running out of money.
It may be hard to see now, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel; I promise you. Maybe you are also considering a major purchase, a second home or something else, and fretting about whether your money will last. Obviously, as with everything in life, the devil is in the details. But in general, if you have the right game plan in place, it is very likely that you can, indeed, make the purchase — and you will still be okay and have your money last you through the rest of your life.
In fact, even if you have already made mistakes in retirement, it’s not too late. As I have learned in my own life, mistakes happen — the key is to learn from them, as well as from the mistakes of others.
For more information about winning in retirement, you can find Winning in Retirement on Amazon.
CHAD SLAGLE grew up in a small Illinois farm town and learned the value of hard work at an early age. This strong work ethic helped Chad play college football, coach high school football for ten years, and start his own financial firm out of the back of his truck. Chad draws from the techniques and ideologies he learned coaching football and uses those every day as the president and founder of Slagle Financial, which has seven offices across Illinois and Missouri. He’s the host of The Chad Slagle Show: Coaching You to and through Retirement, which airs on ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates throughout Illinois and Missouri. Chad lives in Edwardsville, Illinois, with his wife and four children.
