The Big Money Decisions that Don’t Go Away in Retirement – Episode 249

Big decisions don’t go away in retirement—and they don’t get less emotional. 

On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Reese and Ryan take a look at some of the stressful money issues that retirees come up against. You spend a career planning for retirement, but retirement itself can lead to some surprisingly difficult, and unforeseen, money issues. 

The decisions you face as a retiree—housing decisions, family issues, and how to handle your retirement portfolio—can all seem burdensome. Setting yourself up for a retirement with less stress starts years earlier with holistic financial planning. 

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, Dentist Money Show listeners, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Dentist Money Show. Today, we’re talking about the big event that happens in all of our lives at some point, some want it sooner than others. That is retirement. We’re talking about how complex a dentist’s life gets, what financial planning is like, how consequential the decisions are and all the emotions that come along with making decisions well after working years and into retirement. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for joining us. If you have any questions you want to chat with this, go to dentistadvisors.com. Click on the book free consultation link and enjoy the show.

Announcer:
Consult an advisor or conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money. Now here’s your host Reese Harper.

Reese Harper:
Welcome to the Dentist Money Show where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I’m your host, Reese Harper, here with my trusty old cohost, Sir Ryan Issac.

Ryan Isaac:
Still trusty, still co-hosting. Here we are.

Reese Harper:
Welcome to a blustery day, Ryan, here in the mountains of Utah, where I just went through what my wife called it a goal wind or a gall wind?

Ryan Isaac:
Gale.

Reese Harper:
Gale. She said it’s like an ocean storm of some kind.

Ryan Isaac:
It might be a gull, like a seagull.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. Like something like that.

Ryan Isaac:
I don’t know if that’s true.

Reese Harper:
Some podcast listener’s going to know what I’m talking about.

Ryan Isaac:
Someone’s going to know what kind of wind you just went through.

Reese Harper:
But we’re talking major tree damage here for an arborist supporter like me.

Ryan Isaac:
Did you lose any?

Reese Harper:
As a member of the Arbor day foundation. I’ve lost many a limb today. It was crazy. I was like, “Okay. That’s a hundred year old tree and she could be coming down on my house.”

Ryan Isaac:
And then so this is kind of a good segue. Well, let’s keep going on this for a second because one of the things we’re talking about today is how things change when a dentist goes from the all the working years and then boom, retirement. So yesterday wasn’t it like 90 degrees in Utah? And now it’s like 46 and 90 mile an hour winds rolled through last night? Just changed everything in one night.

Reese Harper:
Howling. Yeah. I mean, it was like, I was driving home from our Labor Day little excursion. We drove down to Lake Powell and it was smoking hot. And the AC wasn’t working in the van that we were driving. Got like one of those passenger vans. And one of my friends let me use his really sweet built out van. And the AC just wasn’t performing at all. And as we started coming back into Utah, the wind was starting to pick up so much, I just stopped trying with the AC and rolled down all the windows in the van and let all this dusty wind kind of come flying through the van windows because it felt colder than the hot 95 degree van I was in. And then it started getting scary because then there’s like fires on the mountains as we were driving by. We saw big brush fires starting to take off. You could see the flames.

Reese Harper:
Helicopters are dumping fire retardant or whatever it is they dump out of their helicopters onto the mountains. And I’m just getting closer and closer to my house. And it’s just becoming a darker fire storm. I’m like, “We should just go back. This might be a sign.” Anyway, it was wild, man. You should be worried for me.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Well, I mean it’s 2020, so I don’t know what else we expect it to be like, but I mean yesterday in Denver they recorded like 100 degree temperatures and then it snowed on the ground in Denver today, like 18 hours later.

Reese Harper:
I didn’t know that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. So it was like heat wave sunset with fire smoke and then snow. So that’s a great segue because today we’re going to talk about how things change in the life of a dentist and for a dentist’s own financial planning and financial decision making, once that thing hits, once retirement happens. And not everyone goes overnight, you’re just done, but a lot of people do, they sell their practices and Friday evening they say goodbye or Thursday evening. And then next Monday it’s in someone else’s hands and life is totally different now. There’s no longer a business entity. There’s no retirement plans. There’s no P and L anymore. Insurance is different. Tax are different. Income, it’s all different. And sometimes for these people, it’s overnight it happens. Obviously, it goes a little slower for some people who maybe stick around or work back or something. So right now, as of this recording, what’s average age for dentist’s retirement, according to the ADA? Is it 69 still?

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I mean, that was a couple years ago data now. I think it was it’s, it’s likely that that has been extended to the ripe old age of seven zero, if I had to guesstimate.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, okay.

Reese Harper:
If a survey were done today, I’m guessing that COVID probably didn’t decrease the average retirement age. That would be surprising if it did it. I guess it could maybe, but I doubt it. So yeah, it was 69, a couple of years ago. Prior to that it was 67, I think based on 2015 data, if I’m not mistaken.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
And so that’s where we’re at.

Ryan Isaac:
And that’s kind of interesting to you and I both have… Your parents retired, didn’t they, recently like officially done in the last few years? Same with mine. My parents, finally they’re done and a good chunk of clients that we’ve worked with over the years are approaching there, starting to enter. Some are like selling outright. Some are selling to DSO. Some are working back as an associate for a few years, but this phase is starting to happen. So the first-

Reese Harper:
And we’ve had and we’ve got, I don’t know, we probably only have less than 10% of our clients, but we’ve always had people in retirement as well. There’s a lot of people during that time that it’s just different when you go through the retirement phase with people, as opposed to meeting them a couple years into retirement, when they’ve already kind of made the decision and they’re just looking for a better retirement advisor.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a different thing. So let’s do this. Let’s take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to start with like the most important theme or message I would want to give a retiring dentist and then we’ll go from there. We’ll take a quick break.

Ryan Isaac:
We know there are listeners who want to know what Dentist Advisers can do for them, but they’re a little reluctant to reach out. Stop hesitating. Let’s just chat. Our consultations are completely free. You can just call 833-DDS-PLAN or go to dentistadvisors.com and click book free consultation. We’ll see you soon.

Ryan Isaac:
Tell me if you agree or not. If you don’t, this will be a lively debate. But I think if I wanted to say one takeaway message to a dentist, who’s going to be retirement, I would just want them to know that big decisions don’t go away and they don’t become less emotional, just because some things get more simplified. I would want somebody to know that you still might have, I mean, if it’s age 69, you might have, I don’t know, 15, 20 years left of living. If it’s earlier than that, if someone in their fifties, I mean, you might have another 30, 40 years and so big life decisions, big financial decisions, they don’t disappear just because they’re different and they definitely don’t get less emotionally complex or difficult. There’s not like, “Oh, now I won’t make emotional financial decisions.” I’m watching my own parents, for example, make housing decisions after living in a place for three decades.

Ryan Isaac:
And just the act of moving to a new house is pretty emotional and it’s heavy and you go back and forth and you’re like, “Should we? Shouldn’t we?” So I think that’s the message I would want to give people just overarching as you retire. These big decisions, they don’t disappear. Just because it’s different doesn’t mean they get easier and the emotional weight of these decisions, it doesn’t go away. So your reaction, Reese, to my main message to a retiring dentist. What do you think?

Reese Harper:
First I’d like to let you know it is now snowing outside of my window.

Ryan Isaac:
You’re kidding me. Really?

Reese Harper:
So I’m like, “Oh man, it’s snowing now.” So yeah, I guess the Denver storm made its way over here to the-

Ryan Isaac:
That’s crazy.

Reese Harper:
The Wasatch front. Anyway so, what I was just thinking-

Ryan Isaac:
That’s a great metaphor. That’s a great metaphor, like how fast these things change.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. It’s like, “Oh man.” Yeah. There we are. It’s snowing. I’m just thinking through my conversations with all of my retired clients right now and in some ways the decisions have gotten more difficult.

Ryan Isaac:
Interesting.

Reese Harper:
For example, my parents won’t mind me sharing this, but I look at the decisions that they have to face as a retired couple and they’re having to face decisions on family vacation frequency, right? A new expense item that wasn’t there before. You have family reunions, you’ve got kids, you’ve got grandkids. You’ve built this legacy of family. And now you’re trying to decide like, “Do we just meet at a park and make everyone potluck it? Or should we do something really big? Or will we run out of money if we do that or is there plenty and are we going to have too much? And Should we really just enjoy it while we have it?” Because your 60s are a phase of retirement that are different from your early 70s and your late 70s and your early 80s. And another thing that I’ve seen people deal with is real estate related concerns.

Reese Harper:
So do I do the big remodel? Do I do an expansion? Do I add to my property? Do we downsize? Well, if we downsize, it costs more. Well, maybe we should remodel then. Well, remodel is expensive, too. Do we really want to remodel a house that’s the wrong size? All of these housing conversations, they’re significant. They require big lump sums to come out of your portfolio, similar to the larger, kind of multi-generation vacations I was talking about. Those two things are, yeah, you made a housing decision earlier in your career, but now there’s a big, sometimes multi-property housing decision because now you’re spread across multiple states and your kids or family that you want to be close to aren’t in one location anymore. And so you’re making condo decisions, a cabin and condo or a condo and a second home or a summer home and a winter home.

Ryan Isaac:
And you hear this argument too, where they’re like, “Well, should we just keep a bigger house because we want to entertain the kids and the grandkids?” And mathematically I’m always like, “No.”

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
We only come into town twice a year. Please don’t pay a bigger mortgage so you can house us for a few days. But can you afford it because it’d be nice if you could just keep it, if you could.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. One of the hardest decisions I know that I had to make and was kind of going through that decision and what to tell my dad when he wanted to sell this place that I wanted him to keep up in Idaho on the Snake River.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, I’ve been there. I wanted him to keep it too.

Reese Harper:
And this’ll probably make them sad that I’m talking about them about their property because they loved it so much, but they had to make a decision, “This property is only a place that I can really use a few times a year, meaning a few, three, four months, a year, maybe five months a year. It’s a very awesome summer kind of beautiful property, but can we really keep both of these and have what we want and need and, you know, meet our income goals and our lifestyle goals”? and some of the charitable and humanitarian goals that they had. It’s very complicated. And I’m kind of resonating with your initial comment about, does this get simpler? What changes? And I’m like, “Dude, my experience has been there’s more at stake.” People’s decision making capacity starts to dwindle a little bit. Their ability to kind of handle financial stress gets less as they age because it’s scarier to be unstable with your finances when other things in your life are also changing so much like your health and your family relationships and maybe even the place you live and are relocating to a new community, new social structure.

Ryan Isaac:
So stay on that thought for a second, because I kind of want to hit. This was on my list today, that emotional and mental and sometimes physical capacity to make decisions is very different at 70 than it is at 40 or 50. How have you seen some clients that are getting into their 70s and 80s have decision-making affect them? My experience would be that people feel more paralyzed by decision making, the older they get. It’s just harder to commit to something or to make a change, even if it’s in their best interest, even if all the facts and the data point to that change, it just gets mentally and emotionally harder to shift and make changes.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think of it like kind of a there’s a point in your life where you’re probably like this exploding volcano of flexibility. Okay. We’re meaning you’re lava spewing from the earth.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s my middle name.

Reese Harper:
You’re flowing everywhere. But over time, that stuff starts to get hard.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
And it starts to get to where it’s not very malleable anymore and whatever choices you made with your finances and your life, they emotionally get almost impossible to change. It’s like you could tell someone you cannot live in this home any longer. You’re going to run out of money and it’s going to put you in a precarious situation in two years. And some people will not be able to process that and they’ll wait until they get evicted. Right? Or they’ll wait until they can’t eat. They don’t have any money left in their bank account. And they’ll be like, “Why don’t I have any money left in my bank account?” I’m like, “Well, because we told you that you can’t.”

Ryan Isaac:
Have you seen that apply? Have you seen that apply when people need the money and may be taking it back out on a reverse mortgage, like same concept?

Reese Harper:
A he-lock or, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. To get ahead on the property again.

Reese Harper:
Yep. I’ve seen it happen as simple as making an investment change to an account, shifting a rebalance from US equity to international, even if it’s really modest, a modest diversification decision that you would make to protect the value of an account. It’s just like buying and selling something doesn’t make any sense? Switching banks becomes more difficult. And I think this is why it’s really critical to… People don’t realize it takes sometimes five plus years to get a real great financial plan and strategy in place.

Ryan Isaac:
What do you mean by that? For people listening, explain that.

Reese Harper:
The right amount of money you’re contributing to accounts at the right banks and custodians with the right allocation, the right estate plan, the right insurance plan, the right tax strategy, to get the right CPA in place, the right estate planning attorney in place, to build your professional team, to get your cashflow organized properly, to measure your spending, to track your net worth, all this stuff, even when you hire a financial advisor, takes years. You’ll feel great in a month, you’ll feel great in a week, just because you’re making progress and people [crosstalk 00:16:50] progress.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
But in terms of a really comprehensive and holistic financial strategy, it takes a long time. And so a lot of times people don’t realize how important that is to do in advance of their retirement, that it needs to be something you’re doing, in my opinion, at the latest, by the time you’re, I would say, five to six years into your main career. You’ve got to kick start the planning and get going on it because there’s so much that’s going to happen throughout your life, both behaviorally, what you’re going to get used to feeling and thinking and what you believe about money, and then also the practical side of getting all this stuff done.

Ryan Isaac:
Man, you bring up some of these things that are very large. They’re heavy emotional things. I mean, think about as people approach their 50s and 60s, you start experiencing the passing of their parents, if they still have parents around. Then they start having to deal with working on a parent’s estate or an inheritance and what to do with splitting money between siblings. And then they often deal with the passing of a spouse or siblings. You start dealing with these things that you just didn’t have to normally deal with in mid career that change not only your financial picture, but they put more weight and more emotion on your financial decision making that’s really tough. I think you bring up housing as a perfect example. I don’t know if there’s anything more emotional than housing and the places-

Reese Harper:
Well, it’s where you say you want to live.

Ryan Isaac:
Exactly.

Reese Harper:
I mean, it’s not just the fact that it represents a home.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
It’s the choice of geography. You picked the restaurants you’re eating at, the roads you drive on, the schools you want to support and the place you sent your kids. It’s the memories that you made in that region of the world. People don’t realize how, and there’s so much change that happens for most people. And you might think you look at your family, maybe your parents, and you don’t see a lot of change, but the bulk of people in today’s world, they’re moving and relocating any much higher frequency than they did in years past.

Ryan Isaac:
I was going to say that. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s true.

Reese Harper:
And so I don’t have a exact quote to reference on this, but this is something that’s an interesting topic for me and I have read multiple times that the world is more transient right now than it’s ever been, both across country lines and state lines domestically and that’s not going to change. It’ll probably just increase as the housing market becomes more liquid and easier to sell and websites like Homie start to gain more traction and just make it easier to like buy and sell a house. Like, “I’ll just switch you. I’ll switch you.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Or even longterm rentals a lot like even selling everything-

Reese Harper:
Yeah, VRBO.

Ryan Isaac:
To rentals. Yeah. Sticking around for a few months in one place at a time or RV life or the van life.

Reese Harper:
Well, think about all the hotels right now that have like vacancies like they’ve never had before. I mean, commercial real estate just generally is has a massive vacancy rate that we’ve never seen before. And van sales, camper sales, cabin sales, outdoor equipment sales is skyrocketing. People are living out of their Astro vans and refitting their Mercedes Sprinters and it’s crazy town. I think it’s awesome. I just think it’s a mistake for people to feel like going into retirement, that things are just going to be status quo because just a lot changes and fast, too. Stuff changes fast.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. And you brought up a point, I think is really important too. And this will kind of go into our next topic, which is the stakes are so much higher because it’s the peak wealth you’ve ever had. It’s the most money you’ve ever had. It’s the most wealth you’ve ever had. And in some people’s cases it’ll maintain or maybe even grow. A lot of people’s cases, it will slowly dwindle as you spend it down in your retirement years. And that just carries some huge consequences. So let’s take a quick break. We’ll come back. I want to talk about the consequences or some of the decision making around investment accounts and the way people invest in, just because you finish working and have maybe a simple portfolio doesn’t mean you’re not going to experience recessions and market crashes and downturns over the next few decades. So take a quick break. We’ll hit that stuff when we come back.

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, Matt, what do you like to drink or snack on when we do our webinars every month?

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. That’s a good question. I’m usually hitting a red bull, but it’s hard because it’s an evening webinar.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. These evening webinars taking place 6:30 p.m. mountain standard time.

Matt Mulcock:
Mountain time.

Ryan Isaac:
Once a month.

Matt Mulcock:
Where do you find it?

Ryan Isaac:
Well, if you’d like to find the webinar or you’d like to register for it, you go to dentistadvisors.com/webinar, or just go to the website and click on webinars under the education tab.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s a good time.

Ryan Isaac::
It’s a great time. What kind of things do we cover in our webinar, Matt?

Matt Mulcock:
So each month we’re going to hit an element, right? So it’s going to be some component of your financial life. We’re going to dive a little bit deeper than we would on the Dentist Money Show. Right? We get to draw pictures. There’s live polls. You can ask questions.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s a great time.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. It’s a good time.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, we’d love to see you in attendance at one of our fantastic webinars. Just go to dentistadvisors.com. Sign up today for the next one. Thank you very much.

Ryan Isaac:
See, average dentist, by the time they retire, is probably going to have half a dozen different types of accounts, right? We might have some old Roths, an old IRA, some corporate retirement accounts that we’ve accumulated, 401k, profit sharing, defined benefit, probably have some brokerage accounts, some kids’ accounts, maybe some insurance policies with money. There’s probably half a dozen to seven or eight different types of accounts. So as you go into retirement and your timeline shrinks and your income’s gone and your risk tolerance changes, what are some of the things you’ve seen people have to deal with? What changes and what is different than your working years now that there is no income and your time horizon’s shorter and your risk is probably different?

Reese Harper:
Well, one of the things I was just thinking of, that comes to mind for me is that people think that their retirement portfolio should shift when they hit retirement, meaning like, “Once I retire, I got to change the way I’m invested.” It’s usually a really big eyeopening conversation to have with people when you tell them we’re going to be building your portfolio well in advance of retirement to be ready for that moment. What that means is like, let’s say you want your portfolio to be, just for simple conversation today, let’s say you want it to be half fixed income and half in equities or half in stock, half in bonds. Those are synonymous terms. Now I can do that by saying, “Okay, well all the way up to retirement, I’m just going to be investing in stocks. And then right at retirement, I’ll switch. I’ll sell half my stocks and I’ll buy bonds with half of it.”

Reese Harper:
Or you could say, “Well, during my early years I’m going to be buying stocks. But then, depending on how much money I’m saving and what my savings rate is, how fast I’m accumulating,” this will affect when you make the choice. But at some point prior to your retirement, you’re going to start buying bonds instead of buying stocks. So, instead of investing so heavily in a stock portfolio, you just start buying bonds. What we’re saying is at some point, instead of just shifting from stocks to bonds, you could actually start investing your new money into bonds, as opposed to selling off the stocks and buying bonds with that money.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, a practice owner who sells a business, too, will have an opportunity to take a pretty large chunk of practice sale proceeds, right. Pay taxes on it. And then you could, I mean, which technically, it’s funny as we talk about this, I’m like, man, this affects the way you invest money, like 20 years prior to this, because if you’re a business owner and you have the chance to rebalance a portfolio at or during retirement with sale proceeds, that gives you the opportunity to be pretty aggressive through your working years, which I don’t think a lot of people take advantage of or enough people do. They kind of discount that. So what about the fact that most dentists will retire having multiple accounts? What have you seen people have to deal with? Maybe the profit sharing retirement, the 401k account, we’re not going to touch for another 10 years, even after we start pulling money from the brokerage account or the bonds, what kind of decision making is involved in?

Reese Harper:
Well, every time you open up an investment account, it’s more important to know when you expect to liquidate that account. It’s more important to know that, the date that you’re going to start with drawing is more important than knowing anything else. If this is a 10 year account of 15 year account, a five-year account, then what percentage you’re going to be withdrawing, that’ll affect how you invest the money. And so both the percentage that you’re anticipating withdrawing and the date that you think you’re going to be withdrawing from, that really has a ton to do with building an efficient portfolio. What you’re trying to do is, during the accumulation stage, you’re trying to be as aggressive as possible. But then instead of just like shifting things arbitrarily like some target date funds do, which are mutual funds that just automatically take you from a equity or an aggressive position to something conservative, the best way to approach that is just being more precise with when you buy what type of investment.

Reese Harper:
You want to buy aggressive investments in your early accumulation years, and you want to be more conservative with investments that you buy later on, but you don’t want to sell the aggressive ones and buy conservative ones. You just want to don’t have a mix that’s imbalanced. You don’t want to be too aggressive or too conservative. That’s why it’s really important to be thoughtful as you approach retirement with the way you’re investing each specific account, again, referencing what date you’re going to withdraw from and the percentage you anticipate taking out of that account.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you find that most people assume that there’s just this date, like, “Okay, that’s my stop working date”? And every account, maybe I have six accounts.

Reese Harper:
Totally.

Ryan Isaac:
They’re kind of lumped in the same mental space, like all of them have to be more conservative on age 57, all of them at the same time, not assuming that, I mean, a lot of dentists are going to sell a practice and have, I don’t know, seven to 10 years of spending just from a practice sale maybe or five years of spending from a practicing sale, plus social security and maybe a little bit of work. So anyway-

Reese Harper:
I think everyone kind of assumes that. I think it’s right. Many people assume that.

Ryan Isaac:
Overall message then, what kind of takeaway as a dentist is? Maybe a dentist is looking to hire a financial planner and wondering, “In retirement, does this relationship stop, or how does it shift?” Or maybe a dentist is thinking, “Ah, things seem pretty simple because I don’t have a business anymore. It’s probably easy. Or it’s probably easy to put on autopilot.” What’s the takeaway message you would want them to have?

Reese Harper:
Well, let’s start with yours. I’d like to hear yours.

Ryan Isaac:
I said my takeaway in the beginning. So I’ll just have to repeat it.

Reese Harper:
What was that?

Ryan Isaac:
I would just want to emphasize it. The decisions are different, but they don’t get easier and they don’t get less consequential. The problem, like you said earlier, they’re the most consequential they’ve ever been because your account balances, your net worth, I mean, everything’s as high as it’s ever been. And the emotional weight of the decisions, I think, is so much heavier at that point in life than it is earlier in life. When you’re working, there’s always just kind of this defaulting in the back of your head, like, “I can take that loss because, or that hit, right, because I’m working. I’ll just keep working.” It’s easy to say that. “I’ll work an extra year, whatever.” But when those years are done, I mean, that’s just so much more stress and I’ve watched people from clients to family go through the same things. Once income is done and work is finished, those decisions just weigh so much heavier than they used to because that option, that safety net of work is gone.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think that’s totally true. I think you can procrastinate quite a bit of good financial planning when you know you’re just going to keep earning more money.

Ryan Isaac:
Especially high earning, right?

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think there is to some degree for some people, retirement becomes less complex in that you really, really did a good job in your accumulation phase. You’ve like over accumulated or adequately accumulated.

Ryan Isaac:
I totally agree.

Reese Harper:
And so all the things we’re talking about have to do with some level of scarcity or pressure. And so a lot of the concerns, not all of them, but many of them, I should restate that. So many of the concerns that we’re discussing are what happened to people emotionally and behaviorally when there is some lack of money or scarcity, or when they’re in a spot where they having to make a tough trade off decision. If you did planning really, really well, and you made a lot of good decisions along the way, there will be less pressure on part of the dimension of retirement, which is just how you feel emotionally about your retirement. If you have a lot of money and plenty of liquidity, you have a little bit less pressure because nothing else. I mean, we all know what it feels like. The closer you get to that point of not having to work anymore for money.

Reese Harper:
I don’t remember even contemplating that in my early career like, man, that one day I’ll not have to work, but the closer you get to that point of being like, “Huh, it would be really nice to not have to wake up one day and feel like I have to make a living,” that starts to become like appealing as you get older and you hurt your knees and you get surgeries, like I’ve had and you realize your body’s not going to last forever. That moment it starts to become appealing. It’s like, “It’d be nice, just wake up and do what I want to do, not what I have to do.” Right? And I think that that is more enjoyable for people like the moment that they get to that moment a little bit sooner and it lasts a little bit longer when you just have done good financial planning throughout your early career. And it’s a big payoff at the same token, everyone has these emotions.

Reese Harper:
Everyone has these struggles. Even if you have a lot of resources, you still have to make decisions that are stressful. A lot of them have to do with estate planning, with kids, with charitable donations, with controlling your lifestyle and making sure that, even though you do have a lot of resources, you’re not foolishly looking back at your retirement, just realizing you kind of made a lot of big mistakes and overspent.

Ryan Isaac:
What about that mistake? That’s a good point. I’ve been wondering as you’re saying this, have you seen people who you would describe what you’re talking about who have prepared well? Maybe they have an abundance of net worth or liquidity who still made big mistakes in retirement, maybe investment decisions, because I mean, those don’t end, right? People aren’t going to stop hitting you up for investment opportunities. Your opportunity to invest in businesses or real estate projects and stuff doesn’t go away. Have you seen people make mistakes, even when they’ve prepared really well heading into retirement?

Reese Harper:
I think it depends on how they earned it. If they earned it slowly in kind of a grind and had to make a lot of decisions along the way that were difficult sacrifices to make, meaning did they build the good habits along the way? Or was it just money they came into? Were they totally, for lack of a better word, just broke? Were they totally broke and then got bought out by some huge inefficient market DSO that just flooded them with cash? Right?

Ryan Isaac:
Right.

Reese Harper:
And then now they’re just sitting on a big pot of money and they happen to be ready to retire. That type of person who never built the good habits but then has a bunch of money, they’re more likely to also squander it away and not make smart decisions. The common thread here, I think is just people who have learned to build habits along the way and understand that the delicate balance in personal finance, between being conservative and being too liberal and aggressive, those people are always usually fine, even if they’ve under accumulated.

Ryan Isaac:
Sure.

Reese Harper:
I think it’s more about how long have you lived and contemplating how you want to have your finances look and feel and the less time people spend on that, the more likely they are to make mistakes.

Ryan Isaac:
No, I think that’s great, man. I think that’s a good way to, to wrap things up. Well, I hope you make it through the snow storm, the blizzard of September 2020.

Reese Harper:
I’m sure the sun’s just come out. It’s going to be 110 tomorrow.

Ryan Isaac:
Tomorrow will be a hundred degrees. Thanks for tuning in today, everyone, hopefully this is helpful. A lot of you might be years away from this point, but man, I feel like it happens fast and you’ll find yourself there at one point or you might be listening and you might be there right now, ready to sell or retire and be done. So if you have any questions about this stuff, a couple of good resources, you can always post a quick question in our Facebook group, Dentist Advisors Facebook group. Lively discussion going on there right now about vacation homes, which is a big thing for retirees. It’s really good. It’s an awesome discussion. So that’s dentistadvisors.com/group. You can go there and post a question. Or if you want to chat with us, go to dentistadvisors.com, click on the book free consultation button and just book a chat with one of our advisors. We’re very friendly. All we work with is dentists. So we know your situation. We’re happy to answer any questions and point you in the right direction. So thanks for tuning in and we’ll catch you next time.

Reese Harper:
Carry on.