Show notes
How do you know if you are ready to retire? In today's episode, Victor goes through some signs to help you identify if you are ready for retirement or, if you should wait. Text the word INCOME to 609-554-5936 for a free report on the income bridge to make sure you have enough income to last your entire life. Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend! Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and Certified Elder Law Attorney (CELA) and Certified Financial Planner professional (CFP). Through his law firm and independent registered investment advisory company, Victor provides 360º Wealth Protection Strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement. For more information, visit Medina Law Group or Palante Wealth Advisors. See below for full transcript... Announcer: Welcome to "Make It Last," helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner. Victor J. Medina: Hey everybody, welcome back to Make It Last, the only show that takes you on a fun and exciting journey through the world of legal and financial retirement planning. I'm your host, Victor Medina, and I'm really glad you can join us here today. I'm excited for today's show, as I am for many of the shows. More and more I've been interested in the soft part of retirement, less about the numbers and whether or not you've done the right calculations. More about signs that you're ready to retire or the emotional components around that. In today's show, I'm going to be attacking how to evaluate or see if you contain any of the signs that you aren't yet ready to retire. Like, how are you going to know when you're ready to call it a career. The thing about it is that, retirement is such a big decision. It shouldn't be taken lightly. For most people, the decision itself to retire doesn't come easy, it is full of all kinds of emotional input on there. A lot of people are defined by what it is that they do. Even if they're not consciously aware, or that it's defined that way. They are by how they spend their time up until that point in time, in which they retire. They get up and work, five days out of the week for most people. That means that the majority of time that they spend, even the majority of those days in which they're working, they spend doing something that defines their existence. I'm of a mind that people should take their time and consider all of their options and make the best decision for them and their family, both financially and emotionally. How does one really know that they're ready for retirement? How much money is enough? How can you prepare for the social and emotional side of the equation? Today's show is all about being prepared, or to the contrary I guess, how to know when you aren't quite ready. There are some signs that you can catch on to that could indicate that the timing isn't quite right. I'm here to help you identify some of those signs that say that you're not quite ready to retire. I'll tell you there are all kinds of things that are going to factor into making that decision. What I want to do is try to help you get some of the information to understand whether or not you're ready. I have created a number of different reports that are out there, that are available for you to download. They're 100 percent free. I want you to have these so that you can have the best information about retirement and getting ready for that. One of the ones that I want to help you understand more about is called the income bridge. There is the need for people to understand how they're going to live on a day to day basis. For that reason, we want the opportunity to know that they're going to have enough income to last their entire life. For that reason, I want to give that report. If you're looking for it, what you need to do is text the word "income" I‑N‑C‑O‑M‑E to 609‑554‑5936. That's the word "income" to 609‑554 5936. If you do that, we will send out to you by email, our report on the income bridge. It's a really important part about making a retirement decision. Today I'm going to talk about a question that, I am sure many of my listeners have asked themselves or their advisor. That question is, how do you know when you're ready to retire? Of course, the question itself is pretty subjective. I mean, it could mean a lot of different things to different people. Like, are you financially ready? Are you emotionally ready? Are you socially ready? What are you unsure of? You might be thinking that it comes down to a financial decision and to a certain extent, you're right. I mean, that is kind of what we do here when we crunch numbers and help people understand can they make the decision to retire. Many times, it's just around the numbers discussion, but there's much more to it than that. I'm going to examine today some signs that may point to the fact that you might not be ready to retire. My goal here is to help you identify some of the warning signs and I guess, on the other side of it, help you re‑install your confidence, either way, in your retirement decision. In this, I'm thinking about a very particular client, who has been wrestling with the decision to retire. I'm not aiming this show at that client, whatsoever, should they happen to be listening. I have been struck with the difference that different people will evaluate making that decision. Some of my greatest inspiration in and around retirement comes from evaluating my parents. My parents were ready to retire for a few really good financial reasons. They were both school teachers, and had put in the minimum number of years that it took to get the maximum amount of pension for the rest of their lives, and be able to secure health insurance. From everything on the outside, it was a really great financial picture that they were making a decision that says, "Look, I'm ready to retire." The social and emotional side of it, I think that they wanted to get away from doing their job but to doing what, was still very much influx. They spent some time living in Florida and living the golf retirement life. That had its own schedule, its own routine, and only lasted for a period of time before there was time to do something else. Was their decision to retire the wrong decision because they didn't stick with the life that they set out to have as a moment that they had retirement? Probably not. It's not a big deal to change. In fact, there's probably a lot of value in changing. There's a lot of worth in being able to make a different decision and to be flexible about it. It's probably something that should be held up as an example, for sure. It did raise the question for me, "Were they, in fact, ready to retire?" As I said, I'm trying to help you make that decision as I think about my parents on one hand, this other client that's wrestling with that decision on the other hand. As an extension of this show, I want to make sure that you know that I can potentially help you examine your own retirement situation more closely. You're welcome to call my office and schedule a consultation if you're ready to explore that. I want to help you examine the topic today as it pertains to your individual and unique situation. If you're interested in that, our phone number at the office is 609‑818‑0068. Again, the number is 609‑818‑0068. You can also visit us online by going to our brand‑new website. I'm really excited to show this one off. In fact, we haven't had a full launch of this. You, my podcast and the radio show listening audience get advanced notice that it exists. You go to palantewealth.com. That's P‑A‑L‑A‑N‑T‑E W‑E‑A‑L‑T‑H dot com, and that will help you understand more about the services that we provide. Either way, if you're interested in exploring that with us, remember we're one of the very few, if not, for sure, the best when it comes to being able to handle both the legal and the financial parts of your retirement planning, making sure that you have a plan that works together across the board. If you're interested in doing that, just reach out to us at 609‑818‑0068. In my experience, as I mentioned, retirement means a lot of different things to different people. For some, it may mean starting a brand‑new career. One of the shows that I did about a year ago that I love to recommend to other people talks about the different kinds of retirement. It explores a form of retirement in which you retire from what you were doing to doing something else. Maybe that can happen very early in your life. That is not an age 65 decision. For some people, retiring is starting a brand‑new career or trying something new in the workforce. For others, it may mean kissing work goodbye forever, and finally living their lives without having to punch the clock ever, ever again. My parents, when they retired from being in the school system, they were basically saying goodbye to waking up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, and working a job that required them to be there 184 days out of the year and that they couldn't set their own vacations. They were always already set by the school calendar. They did different things from there. My mom started volunteering holding some babies in the NICU, in the ICU for neonatal. My dad ended up working the front desk at the hospital to help surgical patients and their families know what was going on at any point in time. They were doing other things, but they definitely kissed their work life goodbye. For others, it can be a combination of those two, whether it's starting a new career or saying goodbye to something, but what I like to explore is what retirement means to you. Have you thought about that? Because if not, you might not be ready. Have you considered, for instance, how much income you might need in your retirement assets to produce regularly to support your lifestyle on these. That's why I offered that report, the income report. You can text the word "income" to 609‑554‑5936, but if you haven't considered that, you might not be ready for retirement. I can go on and on and on. What are these signs that you're just not ready. I want to talk about that in today's show to make sure that you hear about the signs that might be pointing the fact that you aren't quite ready to retire yet. When you are ready, then you want to explore that with somebody that can help you do that. Get some professional advice. The first thing that I want to do is, I want to talk about the major components of retirement planning. We focus so often on the financial one. I'm going to get to that today as well, but I want to talk from a very high level on the main components. I'm not talking about investment decisions between stocks and bonds or tax sufficient strategies. I'm talking about three main components to drive retirement and planning for it. There's a social part, an emotional part, and a financial part. Each one of these are considerations of retirement planning, and they need to have their own evaluation. Each one of them individually to know that, in fact, you have considered the biggest the blocks that are necessary to being in determination if you're ready for retirement or not. Let's start with the social component first. This one might be overlooked most often. The question that I want to put in front of you is, have you thought about how quickly your social life may change when you retire? How long have you been working? 20 years? 30 years? Likely more? I know that my parents couldn't retire until they had gotten 35 years in, 35 years for many people. You've most likely tailored your entire routine on a weekly basis, maybe even monthly, seasonally, annually to your job, and the time that you spend there. If you're the typical worker, but this, of course, doesn't cover everybody. Do you work from Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM? You've been doing this for the last 30 years, even if your job has changed. What hasn't changed is that you have had to work, and you, in fact, have been working. If that's true, or even partly true, you've likely developed a lot of social relationships through your work. These are the people that you spent the most time with, and they started out as co‑workers, perhaps became acquaintances and now are friends. I just attended a church block party this Sunday. It happens to be that one of my wife's co‑workers is also a member of the church. Here we are, we're sitting in the grounds of the church. There are tables that are up. Kids are out there playing. They're on the Slip 'N Slide. There's cornhole tournaments. There are food trucks there. It was really a fantastic time. We're sitting at the table and over comes the co‑worker. That's the person that my wife spends most of the time with, nothing wrong about that, that she's not spending time with other people in the church, but she is. What are they talking about? They're talking about work‑related stuff. For them, everything around that related to the work and you have to understand that. My wife, she runs a schedule that goes from September to June. She's off right now. She's not working in the school system, and by the way, neither is this other co‑worker. Here they are, hanging out with one another, socializing. It's Sunday afternoon. There is a pizza food truck. There is a burrito food truck, and there they are, socializing, talking about work‑related stuff. It's not going to restart until sometime in September. You can imagine their entire world centers around this. This probably is you in some fashion, that there are these friends, that are all around work. Imagine that you aren't going to see them on Monday. Let's say that my wife and this co‑worker were hanging out on Sunday, but that Monday, they're not going to see them a whole lot. They've gone from seeing each other and talking to each other, and being with each on a regular basis, too, pretty much not at all. Certainly with nothing in common to talk about any longer because if my wife has gone ahead and retired from her job, what's going on in the job...between you and me, a little pathetic. Let's move on. There's nothing there that you should be linked to. This is a huge change, and I want to ask you the question, are you ready for the social change that you're very likely going to have to go through? I believe that planning your social life in retirement and the changes that are surely going to take place is almost as important as the financial part. Why is that? Why do I think that? Because part of the decision to retire should be in and around, making a decision to at least maintain your level of happiness going forward. Your social connections, knowing that you belong to a tribe of sorts, that you belong to a group, and that group accept you for who you are, and that you can have interaction with other human beings at a level that matches what your needs are. If you want to have intellectual conversations, you are. If you want to share an experiences, you're doing that. If you're contributing in some fashion, and giving to others that you're able to do that, as part of a group with other people, so that you have that sense of belonging. That is so important to the joy that you can create and have in retirement, that it has to be cons…
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