Have We ALL Lost Our Minds?

Alex writes in telling me that he needs help with his retirement plan because Vanguard doesn’t think $14,428 a month will be enough to retire.  See the video I did on this here. 

The funny thing about this is that Alex says even when he and his wife were making the most money they ever did they never lived on anywhere near $14k a month. So, why would they need that kind of income in retirement?

The answer comes down to the stupidity of rule-of-thumb retirement planning.  For some reason we’ve all been lead to believe we’ll need 80% of pre-retirement income, or in appears in Alex’s case it’s 70% of his highest earning year in which he and his wife grossed $250k.

Why we still use this silly number as a rule-of-thumb absolutely boggles the mind.  Yet, here we are. And sadly many people won’t retire because some stupid software program projects they won’t have enough to live on.  And the client won’t even begin to question the INPUTS that went into that stupid software program . They’ll just take it on faith the software is good. (hmmmm…Neil Ferguson at ICL come to mind? Or Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick.?  Haven’t we’ve seen this horror show before?)

I once had a client who’s husband was a doctor and a professor in a medical college.  She was told by various “financial advisors’ they’d need $4million to retire and they didn’t have anywhere near that.  She was panicked when somehow I started to work with her.  

After running some basic numbers on ACTUAL projected expenses, we found they were well on their way to a successful retirement.   Sadly, she fired me as her advisor because she didn’t find my views interesting and didn’t want to subscribe to my newsletter.  :). Hopefully, she’s still on the path of the straight and narrow and enjoying a well-deserved retirement. 

Anyway, if YOU are worried about YOUR retirement I highly, highly suggest you buy this book, in the hardcover format too.  I’ve recommended this book before and I’ll do it again. It’s THAT critical to you in your successful retirement planning.  

One of these days I’ll get the author on my Youtube channel for a Q&A. But until then, get this for yourself and keep it in a place that’s easy to access. You’ll be happy you did.

Oh, and I’m sorry, if you can’t retire on $14,428 a month, there is something drastically wrong.