How Can Mindfulness Give You a More Abundant Retirement?

For over 2 decades working with Gen Xers and Boomers, this is the question I have answered more than any other question. Given that millennials and Gen Z are starting out with more debt in a working environment that is at once both more competitive and completely uprooted by a pandemic, this question is more important than ever.

In this hour, we explain the 5 pieces of information that are required to make the calculation; we explore the two major variables that can impact the answer; and we help everyone in attendance complete the calculation.

At the end of this session, you will know:

1. Your Retirement Asset Number – The size of the pool of invested assets you will need to spin off a retirement income that rises to meet your rising cost of living and lasts the rest of your life. You will not need to know how long you will live.

2. Your Required Monthly Savings Amount – The amount of monthly savings that, given moderate "expected" returns, will get you to Your Retirement Asset Number.

We live in a timing and selection culture. The vast majority of investors are market focused and performance driven. They “manage” their investments by focusing on two things that academic research tells us don’t work:

1. Selecting better investments (and re-selecting when it goes wrong), and

2. Timing the economy and markets (predicting the economy and trading around the ups and downs).

This doesn’t work. No one can consistently predict the markets or handicap the future relative performance of specific investments. Even in cases where we KNOW what is happening, we get the effect on markets wrong. The literature on this fact is exhaustive.

When people are successful, it is explained by luck… not skill. In every environment there are a few who get it right… those that get it right change between environments. No one can predict who might get it right in the next shift.

In this session, you will learn to focus on the three core decisions that will lead to most of your lifetime returns. You will also learn the 2 "optimizers" that you can lean on to improve your outcomes relative to the markets you are investing in and the actual investments you are using.

At the end of this session, you will know:

1. How to design your Mindful Retirement Portfolio, and

2. The Low-Cost Tools you should use.

The moment you put your Mindful Retirement portfolio into place, it will be out of balance. Markets move every day. Depending on the number of moving parts you have in your portfolio, you could see extreme movement in a very short period after you invest. The question we will answer in this session is, “What should we do about it?”

There is a portfolio we will cover that requires ZERO maintenance. In fact, my largest personal investment is managed in this way. Low-cost simplicity keeps me from getting too excited by short-term upside or too worried by short-term downside. With this process, I literally do not have to pay any attention to market movements or economic news.

Most portfolios have a variety of holdings that need to be managed occasionally. In this session, we will investigate how to manage a Mindfully designed portfolio in any market condition.

You’ve probably heard of the “Safe Withdrawal Rate” or seen FIRE bloggers talk about needing 20X or 25X your spending in assets in order to create a sustainable income. These are all fine starting points but understanding the nuances will help you ensure that the income lasts.

We can’t know what the future will hold. We don’t know if one down year will become 2 or 5. We can’t know if today’s high inflation is a new normal, or if it will recede. If it recedes, we can’t know where it will land. Since we can’t know how the economy will effect our source of income or our need for more income in the future, it is incredibly hard to develop confidence in our spending plans.

This is why we have created “spending rules.” Understanding how all the elements work together to help or hinder your future income enables us to create rules that we can apply to any environment.

At the end of the session, you will know:

1. How to manage your investment portfolio through ANY market environment - good, bad, or boring,

2. How to employ your emergency fund to increase your income longevity,

3. How to adjust spending in different inflation & return environments, and

4. How to wisely increase your income to cover your rising cost of living (without running out at the end).

We spend a lifetime saving and investing so that we can have enough money retire comfortably and remain comfortably retired. If we start work at 22, then by the time our full retirement age of 65 – 67 comes around, we will have worked for 43 or 45 years.

We will have spent more time working than doing any other thing in our lives. It is important to recognize that we got a lot more out of work than just money. The implication of this, obviously, is that we lose a lot more than an income stream when we retire.

For most of us, we lose a group of friends. Sure, you can stay in touch with those who are not retiring, but it isn’t a certainty that you will.

More many of us, we lose at least a portion of our life’s meaning. We used to work on a team of people towards shared goals. This effort provides definition and meaning to life. Some people who retire express a loss of purpose.

For some of us, we lose our identity. This is what I fear personally. I’ve been a financial advisor for 25 years and I have offered reassurances during stressful times when clients are entering retirement, when their kids are off to college, and when their parents have taken ill. I don’t know what it will be like to not field those calls. I have been relied upon for so long, it is no longer “what I do” – it is “who I am.”

At the end of this session, you will know:

1. The three non-financial things you need to have in place before you retire, and

2. How to continue living a happy and fulfilled life without going to work every day.

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This is your time!