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Episode 1.10 Christine Benz on the emotional side of retirement
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Christine Benz is the director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar. Her new book, "How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement," explores the financial and softer emotional side of retirement.
Christine talks about retirement portfolio planning and different income styles for the decumulation phase, the need to think of retirement as a series of stages and not as a hard stop, and how financial professionals can incorporate purpose and values into their conversations with clients.
Go to the Morningstar website to learn more about Christine’s book
See more retirement risk management insights from Allianz
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Transcript
Introduction to Retirement Realities
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back. Over the course of this series, I've spoken with many different guests on the new realities of retirement. And one of the things I like to ask everyone is, what have you learned that you wish everyone knew about preparing for retirement? Well, my guest today shares my curiosity. In fact, she posed that question to a variety of thought leaders and compiled their answers in her new book.
Introducing Christine Bens and Her Book
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome again to Rebuilding Retirement, navigating a new reality with your clients, a podcast series from Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America. I'm Travis Walker. Joining me is Christine Bens, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning at Morningstar. She's got a new book out, How to Retire, 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement. In it, she explores not just the financial, but the emotional side of retirement.
00:00:53
Speaker
Christine talks about the benefits of the bucket strategy for retirement portfolio planning, different income styles for the accumulation phase, and the need to think of retirement as a series of stages and not as a hard stop. She also talks about how financial professionals can incorporate purpose and values into their conversations with clients. I really appreciated getting her perspective, and I think you will too. Thank you for joining us. Welcome, Christine.
00:01:21
Speaker
Travis, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on. You recently came out with a book, How to Retire, 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement. Tell us about that book.
Financial and Emotional Aspects of Retirement
00:01:34
Speaker
So the book is a series of 20 interviews with thought leaders. And each interview, each chapter is a lesson about how to do some aspect of retirement planning. And many people um are probably familiar with my work on Morningstar dot.com. It's mainly financial. I talk a lot about investing and tax matters. The book does cover that terrain, but it also spends a lot of time on non-financial matters because as I've gone down this road of understanding retirement and thinking a little bit more about my own retirement, I've come to realize that ah the decision about whether and when to retire is probably less than 50% financial. There are a lot of non-financial considerations that go into how to do it and how to be happy and successful in that part of your life. And so I wanted to bring
00:02:27
Speaker
ah those topics out in the book as well. So ah I'm really happy with the book, with how the book turned out and it covers a ton of ground, I think. What about your experience set you up to write the book?
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, I had started at Morningstar as part of our fund research team. We now call it manager research and then eventually headed up our US manager research team. So this is the team that does the reports on individual mutual funds. Now we have a big suite of research on exchange traded funds. I was heading up that team and eventually came to realize that there were a lot of things that we weren't helping investors address. So we weren't, even though we're helping them select great funds, we weren't really helping them with the decision about ah how much to save and how to ask to allocate across um different investment types. So we weren't helping them with a lot of decisions that I felt like like we should be helping them with. And that's where I began to focus more on financial planning, more on retirement planning.
00:03:33
Speaker
um I went through the certified financial planner ah curriculum. i I didn't actually earn the CFP because at the time my work that I was doing at Morningstar wouldn't have qualified for the work experience needed to earn the CFP, but nonetheless felt like I got a lot of um good working knowledge of financial planning matters under my belt.
Decumulation and Complexity in Retirement
00:03:53
Speaker
And so I had really been working on retirement planning in earnest over the past really couple decades, because I've realized that the challenge is not so much for people um saving and investing for retirement in the years leading up to retirement, that there's just so much more to talk about in the realm of retirement decumulation.
00:04:18
Speaker
It's just way more complicated and to my mind more interesting. So I've been toiling in that era area for quite a few years now, writing articles and doing videos and presentations on the business of retirement planning. And I had also met a lot of the people who I interviewed in the book i during the course of my podcast that I work on, which is called The Long View.
00:04:42
Speaker
ah I had had the opportunity to meet with a lot of terrific retirement thought leaders and I think the book really nicely brings their voices out and I i love that aspect of it.
00:04:54
Speaker
Looking at retirement money in the book, you're mostly interviewing other people, but you turn the tables for one chapter. ah Structure your portfolio for cash flows. Tell us about the strategy that you have gravitated toward for retirement portfolio planning, ah the bucket approach, and how has your view of income strategies changed over time?
Understanding the Bucket Strategy
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I initially hit upon the bucket strategy, heard about the bucket strategy when I was talking with Harold Ovensky, who is, was a financial planner. He's largely retired now and was also a professor of financial planning. And this was probably 20 years ago and yields on safe securities were going lower and lower and lower for the better part of a couple of decades there. And I remember saying to Harold, well, so if,
00:05:46
Speaker
subsisting on income distributions isn't really a good way to do it. How should people think about constructing in retirement portfolios? And he said, well, I've hit on this simple system where I manage a long-term investment portfolio for my clients, and I also bolt on this cash bucket to cover their living expenses if the long-term portfolio isn't performing well for whatever reason.
00:06:13
Speaker
they know that they could pull from those liquid reserves if they needed to. And his point to me um really stuck in in my mind, which he said, you know, a big part of people's quality of life, whether they're retired or, you know, still working, is being able to plan for a things that that is one thing that gives people, it kind of animates their days. And so if you can set aside those liquid reserves, they know that they can still plan that cruise that they had wanted to take the family on or that they could still keep going out to dinner on Saturday night with their friends if that's something they really enjoy. He said, I just wanted my clients to be able to
00:06:55
Speaker
continue to plan their experiences, to plan their lives, regardless of what was going on with their long-term investment portfolio. And his point was, you know inevitably, the long-term investment portfolio will have some volatility. You'll have the periodic market down drafts. The point is that I want my clients to not be spooked during those periods, and I want them to just go on with their lives. And so I'm thinking,
00:07:22
Speaker
something like that sounds like it really works behaviorally, that if it can keep people in their seats with their long-term portfolios, that is a concept worth talking more about. So I've been increasingly writing about the bucket strategy. I've come up with a lot of different bucket portfolios, model portfolios,
00:07:45
Speaker
that are really just there for educational purposes. But the basic idea is that you are holding like two years worth of liquid reserves, two years worth of portfolio withdrawals in in liquid reserves. And then you're stepping out a little bit on the risk spectrum with the next sections of the portfolio. So for the next say five to eight years worth of portfolio withdrawals, you would hold a high quality short and intermediate term bond portfolio. And then the remainder of the portfolio could go into a globally diversified equity portfolio. And then if there were any other sort of risky securities, whether high yield bonds or commodities or um you know precious metals or something like that, I would also hold that in my very long term
00:08:36
Speaker
bucket it's not there to meet my near-term living expenses. But the the basic idea is that with those three buckets and especially those first two, you're building yourself effectively kind of ah fullward a against an extended mark market downturn, an extended downturn in the equity markets.
00:08:55
Speaker
So you're giving your yourself assets that you could draw upon if stocks went down and stayed down in a period of your retirement. So um I feel like it does really work behaviorally. I've been hearing from a lot of readers over the years that they've taken the bucket strategy to heart.
00:09:14
Speaker
And I love hearing from them that it provides them with peace of mind, that it gives them the comfort to have the long-term assets that they need in their portfolio because they know they have that buffer of liquid reserves.
00:09:30
Speaker
um In terms of thinking about how the strategy might fit in with an overall income strategy, I think the same
Mapping Retirement Spending and Income
00:09:38
Speaker
a thing that sometimes gets glass glossed over is that it's really sort of the last piece of the puzzle. The first piece is thinking about your in-retirement spending, and I like the idea of people getting quite granular when mapping out their in-retirement spending to the point where you're saying, okay In year three, I think we're going to have to replace a car. In year seven, our roof will probably need to be replaced whatever to actually get quite specific and try to forecast some of those lumpy expenses. And of course, it's hard to do that with
00:10:12
Speaker
ah a great level of precision, but you're doing that. And then you're getting into, OK, what do I have coming to me in terms of guaranteed income sources, non-portfolio income sources? So that's Social Security for many of us. For some people, they may have a pension. For other people, they may want to explore some sort of an annuity product. But the basic idea is that you are trying to line up your fixed spending, your very fixed outlays with those non-portfolio sources of income. And then you're moving on to, OK, given that, given the anticipated demands that I expect to make on my portfolio, how do I structure that portfolio? So a very long answer, but um it is a process. And I think people should start at the very beginning with their spending.
00:11:01
Speaker
Well, I think it's a very well thought out strategy. um And you mentioned some of the risk and that people are going to think about when they're looking at retirement income. And I've said a million times in my life, you can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather. So yeah, what are some drawbacks ah that you could foresee with this strategy? If you're looking at it um from a financial professionals perspective, what they should know about the bucketing strategy and how that works.
00:11:31
Speaker
Well, one of the big ones is the opportunity cost. um And this is especially true in a very low yield environment like we had ah for the better part of the 2000s through really, you know, 2021. We have very, very low yields. And as a bond investor in such a period,
00:11:52
Speaker
Well, you benefit in terms of price appreciation at least in your bonds. So you're having to settle forever lower yields, but you also, when interest rates decline, you do get rising bond prices. So as a cash investor, you get none of those things. So you have to settle for lower yields in a declining rate environment and you don't enjoy any price appreciation. So the big downside risk is opportunity cost with bucketing, which is why I always say you don't want to overdo that cash bucket, even though it does provide an attractive ah sense of peace of mind and may at various points in time, like the very recent past, supply a halfway decent yield. You you want to be careful not to overallocate to that cash bucket because it's basically kind of dead weight in your portfolio. It may beat
00:12:47
Speaker
may beat inflation by a little bit, but in many environments, it it'll it'll be negative on an inflation adjusted basis, so you need to take care. Gotcha. Well, I appreciate you giving us the other side of the coin. It's only fair, and you ah described that very well. so Thanks. um You have talked about how accumulating for retirement is pretty automated with 401k and other options, um but then decumulation is somehow very manual. um And that causes a lot of stress. And we're going to get into it later a little bit about feeling and behaviors and things like that. But um how can a financial professional help their clients with the very manual phase of decumulation?
Aid from Financial Professionals in Decumulation
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's a complicated business. I think you can help them understand why you're recommending a certain asset allocation. um It's also helpful to ah Give your clients some guidance on how much they can reasonably spend from their portfolios. This is obviously a hot topic for anyone advising on retirement matters, kind of safe spending rates. In my experience, it's a little bit counterintuitive because we have a lot of people who are quite undersaved for retirement, but there's an equally um persistent problem, I think, for a lot of retirees, more affluent retirees,
00:14:10
Speaker
is they really have difficulty spending from the portfolio that they work so hard to save. I think that we can tend to identify as savers and we you know that's sort of a badge of honor for us that we're you know living within our means and so on. And so you tend to anchor on your portfolio's high watermark.
00:14:33
Speaker
ah where you you know look at your balance going up and up and up, and it's very difficult to ponder reversing that. But I think um helping clients over the mental hurdle of you know switching on portfolio cash flows is super important, and an advisor can certainly ah serve a valuable role there in helping them understand, okay, here's what I think you can spend. Here's why I don't think you'll run out even if you spend within that range. And I think it can also would be helpful for advisors to talk with their clients and kind of get to the bottom of what they are looking for in retirement. Are they looking to maximize their own lifestyle and quality of life? Are
00:15:23
Speaker
leaving residual balances at the end of their lives important, really helping unpack those very personal decisions seems like a tremendously valuable role that advisors can serve. There's an interesting chapter with Wade Fow that talks about retirement income styles. What are the varying styles and what impacts which style works for a client?
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, Wade is an absolutely seminal figure in retirement planning. In fact, I'll say that when Wade's retirement planning guidebook landed on my desk a few years ago, I was like, I sort of had a, why am I even the even bothering moment because that book is so comprehensive. But one thing I love is that he does talk about these four quadrants, ah four different retirement income styles. So one would be someone who really wants kind of a paycheck equivalent in retirement. They just want to lock it down, give me the income. I don't ever want to think about this again.
00:16:24
Speaker
that's kind of the income-centric mindset. I forget specifically what he calls it, but the perfect example would be you know the person with a combination of social security and maybe some type of very simple annuity that doesn't include equities. therere They've got their cash flows for retirement and they never have to think about it again. So that's one extreme The other extreme would be the person who is more comfortable with equities, who wants to hold maybe a balanced portfolio or a portfolio with even more inequities, and then periodically just take systematic withdrawals from that portfolio. So that's kind of the other extreme. it's the It's the most familiar for a lot of advisors. A lot of advisors manage their clients' accumulation in that way, where they
00:17:14
Speaker
ah you know, continue to manage a total return portfolio, but then just sort of periodically take distributions from that portfolio, may use rebalancing to to help ah supply cash flows. So those would be sort of the two extremes. And then there are these hybrid strategies that fall between the two. So one hybrid strategy is um I think he calls it risk wrap where it does include some risky assets, but in the context of something that is providing you some guarantees around cash flows. So that would be you know some sort of and an annuity product that includes equity exposure on an ongoing basis. And then um another kind of hybrid strategy that Wade identifies is
00:18:04
Speaker
the bucket strategy which is um a version of that total return strategy but one that kind of helps you lock down where your cash flows are coming from. So those are the different shades of retirement income styles and the beauty of that is that we're all wired a little bit differently in terms of what we want and it helps tap into that. is It helps say we all want something different so advisors really listen to your clients, maybe run through the survey or the questionnaire that Wade has has produced to try to figure out how your clients are wired and help a custom craft a retirement a plan that addresses what seems scary to them, what they're looking for in terms of their retirement paycheck.
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah, Wade sounds absolutely brilliant. um How should financial professionals think about these income styles when they're designing these strategies? um And then how does that underscore the importance of personalized planning?
00:19:07
Speaker
Yeah. To me, it does underscore the importance of not being one one size fits all. And unfortunately, I think that is um you know kind of something that we fall into. My thing has been bucketing. It makes sense to me personally. I like to talk about it. But understanding that it is important to custom craft a plan that addresses ah what your client is looking for from his or her retirement plan. How much extra equity equity exposure do they want? How much are they geared toward safety and security and something that feels like a paycheck? um How much are they kind of one and done?
00:19:50
Speaker
in terms of how much they want to interact with the decision-making, in which case ah you know a decision like buying some sort of an annuity product might be perfectly appropriate if someone really doesn't want to have ongoing interactions. Or are they OK with periodically making adjustments and course corrections? um So Wade's survey is at where Wade's questionnaire is a starting point. But I think you know really conversing with your clients and figuring out what they're looking for in terms of their retirement income as a place where an advisor can add a ton of value. Gotcha. Now in the book, and I think this is really important, you address some of the divisions in retirement planning. um Like what strategies are their varying opinions? And then how can a financial professional help their clients make sense of these disagreements?
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, one of the big ones that comes out in the book, in fact, a few different people, voice, different views, is the role of annuities in retirement planning, where um some individuals, Wade is a great example, believe that they can have a role, whereas other folks, ah Bill Bernstein, JL Collins, practically said they should be you know kind of marked with skull and crossbones, maybe a little too extreme. um So that is one major area of disagreement. And I think part of it is a vestige of the industry that ah ah financial advisors tend to either be people who are open and conversant in insurance slash annuity products or they're kind of investment people. And I'm happy to see that that um division is becoming blended a little bit more or becoming a little bit more nuanced than perhaps it was.
To Phase or Not to Phase into Retirement?
00:21:40
Speaker
even a few years ago, especially as the academic research has pointed to the value of um annuities in certain contexts in terms of of enlarging lifetime income. So that's one area, another area where we see some divergence in opinion is in the realm of ah the role of work.
00:22:00
Speaker
longer, um where Fritz Gilbert was someone I interviewed for the for the book and Fritz has been a pur perfectly happy, like fairly young retiree, whereas other of the individuals I interviewed are big believers in kind of phasing into retirement that many people should continue to do some version of their life's work for longer. um And there is an area where I think advise both there is really annuities and figuring out the role of work, if any, are areas where an advisor can add a lot of value in terms of custom crafting a plan based on the client's feedback. um I was talking to another financial advisor, I know, and one ongoing question she has for her clients, whether they're working or retired, is how happy are you and what adjustments can we make? And some of the adjustments aren't within her control, but some of them are. What adjustments can we make to make you
00:23:00
Speaker
happier with what you're doing today because we never know what will happen in the future. that The key is to really try to stay plugged into what your clients are experiencing and and try to create a plan that that addresses whatever their goals are, whatever they're feeling today. We've also found that many Americans are thinking about retirement as this sort of slow transition and this annual retirement study that we do. You've alluded to it a
Retirement as a Series of Stages
00:23:28
Speaker
little bit. i'd I'd like you to pull on the thread a little bit more about one of your big takeaways from the book um being that we need to think of retirement um as a series of stages and not a hard stop. What are those stages and how do they vary?
00:23:43
Speaker
So one um ah phrase that has been out there for a while, and it it mainly relates to how retirees spend, but I think it a applies to the whole of retirement is kind of go-go, the early years of retirement, slow-go, which is when people might slow down, and no-go, which is sort of the later years of retirement where people are often staying fairly close to home.
00:24:08
Speaker
I think that general life cycle applies to a lot of retiree households. The lengths of those specific periods might vary quite a bit. um Ideally, you're going for more go-go, a little less slow-go, and the no-go phase, you'd want to be quite short. But um those are the the very high level phases of retirement. But I do love the idea of people exploring phasing in into retirement very gradually. And sometimes I think people think about this really literally, like they might think, okay, I work 40 hours a week now. In three years, I want to go to 30 hours and maybe that's how you do it. Or maybe you're a little bit more creative with it or more expansive in terms of your thinking where maybe
00:24:58
Speaker
you say, well, I plan to leave my employer all together, but I still like these one or two things that I did in my job. And how can I continue to do them in some fashion going forward? So maybe it's I just want to do volunteer work, but I want to do ah volunteer work that really aligns with what I did during my career, where it harnesses some of the things that were most valuable to me and where I added the most value. So I like the the idea of people getting a little bit creative about phasing into retirement. It turns out that that's really good for people in terms of their financial health, that if you can continue to keep some cash flow coming in,
00:25:43
Speaker
through work, it has a lot of beneficial effects from the financial standpoint, but I think that also helps just in terms of giving you a sense of purpose, giving you a sense of identity, um that you're not totally walking away from your work identity when you retire. Those things are really important too and probably not to be underrated.
00:26:05
Speaker
No, absolutely. It's funny you mentioned that I actually was, since I was in the office today, I was standing in the lunch line with a longtime colleague and we were just having some small talk and she confided in me that she's retiring early next year. um But it wasn't going to be a hard stop to your point, she's actually going to do something just a little bit of work to kind of ease into it. And I know that it is something that's out there on the horizon for a lot of people on how they're going to do it. And so if you are a financial professional, then how do you help design that retirement strategy so that they can ease into it and not have the hard stop? Yeah, I'd love to hear it. And I would also say, you know, for some people, if they do not enjoy what they're doing, if they are coming into retirement feeling like, you know,
00:26:50
Speaker
They're just gasping for air. They're so burned out. Stepping away is the right thing. So this whole phased retirement thing, it's kind of a luxury good, I would say. If you like what you do, if you're in good standing with your employer, you can definitely consider the phasing in thing, but for other people,
00:27:09
Speaker
stepping away entirely, maybe the right call. And I would also point out that um you know some people have jobs that are just physically difficult to do after a certain age, and that may necessitate that they step away. So it tends to be more the domain of um you know better educated knowledge type workers are more in the driver's seat with respect to working longer than people who are doing.
00:27:35
Speaker
jobs that are physically difficult, that's for sure. Throughout this podcast, and when we talk about rebuilding retirement, or even the annual retirement study, retirement planning is not just a a math problem. And I know that at Morningstar, you talked about some of the things you've you've done. You're a dollars and cents person. How did you decide to explore the emotional part of retirement?
Emotional Aspects and Personal Experiences
00:27:59
Speaker
It was definitely ah um a me search project. i I picked up that term from a professor at University of Michigan, but I was like, oh, that's perfect. That's what I'm doing here. But um yes, I have largely toiled on the number side of things for a long time, but my husband and I have been good savers and good investors and stick with our our investments. We don't make many changes. But as I've gone along and started to think about our retirement, I feel like the Financial ledger for us is something we're not terribly worried about, but I do think about all of those other dimensions, the sense of purpose, the loss of identity that may accompany leaving work for me. um ah The relationships that I know I have through the workplace, thankfully I have a lot of non-work relationships too, but you know kind of thinking about all those things, thinking about myself as a whole person, and um
00:28:52
Speaker
harnessing some of the experiences I've had with other older adults in my life. It's just gotten me more cognizant of the non-financial pieces of retirement, that you have this period of time, you don't know how long it'll last, but you really want to maximize your time on earth allocation, that the investment allocation is one thing, it's important, but time on earth allocation, I mean time on earth is it's the one finite resource that we all truly finite resource that we all have and so we just have to make sure that we're spending that time really as as Mindfully as we possibly can you just mentioned what will give them purpose later in life? What will it do to their relationships? How will they maintain connection? Why is it important to ask those questions? well, the one thing I would say is um for people who work with advisors and
00:29:46
Speaker
You may be the only one in their lives who is asking those questions if you've been through it with clients and we all have reference points in our lives of people who have had spectacular retirements who have really used this time well.
00:30:02
Speaker
um In fact, I've sometimes thought a sequel to this book would be just a series of discussions with those people about how they did it. What did they do? um And I think we all have counter reference points in our lives too, where you know people who have retired and you know maybe gotten sick shortly right after retirement or you know just retreated to the couch and really didn't have a great quality of life. So we all have ah good reference points, good role models, as well as some not so good role models. um So I think it's really helpful for advisors to explore the financial and non-financial dimensions of retirement to be there as kind of their advocate ah to make sure that they're ah in retirement life is as full as it can possibly be. And so as a financial professional,
00:30:59
Speaker
um How can they help more with those emotional aspects of retiring? I think starting earlier with your clients versus waiting until you know one or two years before retirement. Ideally, you would be having those conversations earlier in the accumulation period where you're like my advisor friend who's always asking her clients, ah how are you doing? How are you feeling? Are you happy?
00:31:28
Speaker
Sometimes that doesn't even come up in some advisor-client conversations. um We move straight to how the portfolio is doing, and we're toiling strictly on the financial side of the ledger. Going deeper to me can make the advisor's job more interesting and can just give you a greater sense of satisfaction from that job. So I would go deeper earlier So you have a ah more of a sense of what your client's life's goals are. I think that's a great starting point.
00:32:01
Speaker
And then also in the book, we do a little bit of discussion with, um and this sounds so somber and ominous, but we I talked to a hospice doctor I know who is a writer um and he's also a leading light in the financial independence retire early movement. He talks a lot about um working with people on their death beds actually about what their regrets are in their lives.
00:32:28
Speaker
And I think preemptively, um advisors can work with their clients to just take stock of what are
Connecting Life Goals with Retirement Planning
00:32:35
Speaker
your goals? What would you really regret if you didn't get to do? To me, that can be kind of a helpful way to frame the conversation and and help your clients articulate some of their goals.
00:32:47
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. um Well, it's a provided you're comfortable with that. um You're aware of that and just how valuable that can be. You close out this wonderful book, How to Retire with a chapter about regrets and purpose. We just talked about that a little bit. What should financial professionals know about regrets and purpose to help their clients? And then how can they incorporate purpose and values into the conversation with the clients without veering too far outside their lane?
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's a great question. And this whole idea of, are you a financial advisor? Are you a life coach? And I feel like increasingly financial advisors are being told they need to be sort of armchair psychologists or life coaches. If you're not comfortable with this, that that's totally fine. But I do think that um you know uncovering what your client's life goals are inextricably links back to whatever you're doing with their investments. So you sort of have to know what they want to accomplish in this life. So having some conversations with them about those things is is really important, identifying
00:33:57
Speaker
the things that they might have regretted if they didn't have the opportunity to try them. That's super important. In terms of purpose, I love Jordan Grummet's discussion of what he calls big P purpose and small P purpose. So big P purpose would be kind of the really aspirational things that we think we should all have like at least one or two of those things going. So maybe it's something like climbing a mountain or writing a book writing a book or starting a foundation. People might embark on retirement thinking they need to do some of those types of things. But Jordan points out that those things, even though they're totally worthwhile, you should have some ideas on that front. They give people some sense of like purpose anxiety. It seems too big. It seems too scary. So his point is that having small p purpose is just fine too.
00:34:51
Speaker
And that might be a series of small pea purposes. An example he gives is re-engaging with some sort of childhood or teenage hobby that you just kind of had to leave by the wayside because you got too busy. Or maybe it's that you've been so busy at work that you feel like you haven't been able to give as much to being a parent to your adult children or being a grandparent as you would want. You could use retirement to kind of stoke that.
00:35:19
Speaker
small p purpose or maybe it's just being a great partner to your spouse. Any number of those small p purposes, maybe it's just like, you know, you like to work out five of seven days a week or whatever. um A series of small p purposes is a really valuable thing to embark upon. And he also makes the reassuring point that our loved ones will actually really remember us for that stuff just as much as they will those really big ticket things that we may have wanted to tick off. No, it's great to see that we're turning towards that and people are paying a lot more attention to this aspect of retirement. I got my start in the industry doing suitability and obviously you'd have like a fact-finding sheet and you'd list all these things and that's kind of how we made the determination but
00:36:08
Speaker
um You didn't really explore right how they felt. So books like this, conversations like this, I feel like it really hardens me because I'm like, this is great that we're paying attention to the other side of the coin and not just fill out this this worksheet and then I'll determine if you're worthy. um You definitely want to have a life full of purpose. So that's great that you touched on that. so Our final questions that we ask all guests, um I'll start with this one. What's something you wish you would have known about retirement when you first started working?
00:36:45
Speaker
I definitely underrated the non-financial piece and that is something that has come out through through these interviews, through the interviews I do through my podcast. Some of my favorite conversations that I've had for my podcast have dealt with issues like relationships and purpose. Maybe I'm a little bit of a kind of frustrated psychologist myself, but I just wish I um had spent a little bit more time understanding the psychological dimension of this because I think it's super important and people need to get their arms around it as they embark on retirement. Absolutely. And then what have you learned through your work that you wish everyone knew when we're preparing for retirement?
00:37:29
Speaker
I wish people knew how much this is all linked together, that each of these decisions that you make has and a knock-on effect somewhere else. So um you know in terms of tax planning or in terms of investment planning, it's all sort of a unified whole. And I like the idea of advisors being more holistic about retirement planning, where they are thinking of the you know the the complexion of the entire plan, it encompasses perhaps insurance, investments, taxes, it all fits together in the decisions that you make for clients are all interrelated. And I love that you know increasingly we're seeing attention paid to just creating holistic retirement plans along these lines.
00:38:23
Speaker
Okay, for listeners who have enjoyed today's conversation, I assume that it's all
Christine's Online Presence and Contacts
00:38:27
Speaker
of them. Where can they find you online? So I'm on Morningstar dot.com, frequently writing articles, doing videos. My podcast is called The Long View. I co-host it with a couple of my colleagues. And I'm on LinkedIn, like everyone else. And I'm also on Twitter slash X, where my handle is Christine underscore Ben's. And then my book, of course, The Labor of Love. It's called How to Retire. I really appreciate you taking time out to talk to us today and can't wait to dive in more to your book. Thank you so much for your time.
00:39:00
Speaker
Thank you so much, Travis. It's been a lot of fun. That was Christine Bens, and I think she brought a lot to our ongoing discussions here. It's easy to think of retirement planning as primarily a financial problem to be solved, but she reminds us that there is a human element to consider, too. It's great knowing you have the retirement income you need, but it's not just a question of how will you pay for the rest of your life. It's also, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?
00:39:27
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Rebuilding Retirement. Remember, these things don't disappear. All of our past episodes live on and are there for you to enjoy. And the more you listen, the more you'll get a wide angle view of the issues surrounding retirement readiness, and most importantly, how you, as a financial professional, can respond. If you are enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and consider giving us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Thanks for joining me. I'm Travis Walker.