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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Radical Personal Finance is a modern crowdfunding experiment. And here's how it works. A lot of times, the financial industry gets criticized for being all about the money to line their pockets, and not about the customers. As the joke goes, if you go to Wall Street, you see all of the brokers' yachts floating in the harbor, but you don't see the customers' yachts.

So, I think it should be the other way around. I think the customers, or the clients, or the consumers, should be enriched first, and then, based upon the value of that information, the advisor should be enriched. So, I've decided to put my money where my mouth is. On Radical Personal Finance, I give you all of the information that you need to grow your wealth.

That's my goal. And then, my hope is that you'll take a percentage of the money that I save you, and send it to me. Whatever you think is fair. It's on a voluntary basis, but try it. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron for details. Today on the show, we have a little bit of a chat with a couple of financial advisors.

My guest is Roger Whitney. He goes by the Retirement Answer Man. He's a professional financial advisor. We're going to talk about retirement and the financial planning business. Enjoy. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. Today, I'm accomplishing my goal of pulling back the curtains of the financial industry.

See, very few people ever have the opportunity to actually talk with financial advisors when they're not across the table with a paying client. But I do. And so today, I'm going to let you listen in on a conversation between two financial advisors who both face the same problems. And you'll hear how each of us answers them.

I actually am often very challenged with how to do interviews with financial advisors. I've received various requests for interviews. And I've brought a few of them on and I've had specific reasons why I've brought them on. But for the most part, going forward, you'll very rarely hear an interview with me at another financial advisor.

And I've got a few reasons for that. Number one is they're usually, well, A, many advisors don't have a lot to offer. So I have to weed through and pull out some of the good ones. B, a lot of times financial advisors are just flat out boring. And unless they have some unique concept, oftentimes it's challenging as an interviewer to pull from a guest the ideas that you're trying to pull from them.

As an interviewer, someone who's conducting interviews, they're, as I've been able to figure out, primarily two different approaches. Most of the time when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm trying to bring out their story. And I'm actually simply interested in what they have to share. And I'm trying to find the interesting tidbits to satisfy my curiosity.

I don't have a lot of preconceived ideas that I'm trying to cover. I'm just trying to understand and interview the person and then see where the conversation goes. The other type of interview, however, is if I know a lot about a subject or I know a lot about a person and somebody's writings, then I have an idea of the reason that I'm bringing them on the show and I'm trying to lead them through some of the major themes that they write about, for example, but to do it in an audible format.

Oftentimes this occurs when people are writers, for example. And it's actually I've found very challenging to interview an author with that idea in mind, with the idea that I want them to present their topics because they've written a book about it. And it's challenging to lead them. Sometimes some people don't want to be led through a subject.

So when I bring interviews on – interviewees on, I'm usually doing one of those two different things. Well, with most financial advisors, many financial advisors have – don't have a very unique story. They're not jumping – they're not doing some extreme lifestyle. They're just building a business and serving their clients, which is awesome.

But that can be a little bit dull on a daily basis. Financial advisors are subject matter experts and so then I'm bringing them on as a subject matter expert and trying to coach them into a specific scenario. But oftentimes it's just simpler for me to actually present that information because I can do it with a more polished outline, a more coherent, practiced presentation and teach more effectively.

But I have a third reason and this is actually why I brought Roger on the show today. I have a third type of interview that I try to bring to the show. That's what in my mind is – it's cataloged as the behind-the-scenes interview. This is where I try to pull back the curtain of financial planning and try to introduce you to some financial advisors and some financial planners.

Financial advisors and financial planners get woefully little good press these days. And yet most of the men and women with whom I've worked professionally, with most of them I've had a great feeling and enjoyed the conversation. I found that most of us come to about the same conclusions on the problems, on what the problems are.

And then we have different solutions that we try to strive for in bringing those answers. I also have a unique competitive advantage in this space with the idea of interviewing financial advisors in that I was one and I am one. So unlike perhaps a finance columnist or journalist or somebody who is more of a lay person with a little bit of knowledge in an area, I can hopefully ask slightly better, slightly deeper questions.

And I'm not scared to ask those questions, not scared to disagree with somebody. So I sort through the requests that I get for financial advisors and I try to look for ones that might have something to add – some area where they can add value. Roger was one of those that got through.

His staff reached out to me, asked me for a request and I looked at his background and he has a long history of background and I thought it would be a valuable content to you and indeed the interview is. So my guest is Roger Whitney. Roger is a financial advisor.

He also hosts a podcast called The Retirement Answer Man. Most importantly, he does have a substantial amount of experience in the financial advice business. He also is a knowledgeable financial advisor. He holds the certified financial planner designation from the CFP board. He also holds the CIMA designation, the Certified Investment Management Analyst designation.

In the alphabet soup that is the financial planner designation marketplace, that is one of the better designations. He also holds the Certified Private Wealth Advisor designation and the Accredited Investment Fiduciary designation. So he has some depth in his background regarding personal financial planning. Also importantly, he's a teacher. And what's even more fun, he's a podcaster.

So with his firm, and you'll hear in the interview, with his firm he's able to use the podcasting technology to reach his clients, which can help him be comfortable with sharing a little bit more and teaching a little bit more. So the interview is quite fun. We go into a number of different topics, both the formal side of retirement planning.

But what I think will be very interesting to you is what do you do when you have a client that can't retire because they don't have enough money. And what I think you'll find is interesting is that he, with his technical background of financial planning, and I with my technical background of financial planning, we have reached similar conclusions, which is basically don't worry about retirement and design your lifestyle instead.

So I think you'll enjoy that. Finally, we do have some discussion where we actually talk about the impact on his business of podcasting as a technology. And for those of you in my audience who are interested in establishing a financial advisory practice, I have quite a contingent of listeners who are in the process of establishing a financial advisory practice or who are interested in moving into this type of business.

I want you to pay attention to what he has to share from his experience in that part of the interview. Two quick notes. On the day that we conducted this interview, my voice was a bit messed up. I wasn't feeling very well, so forgive that. And also you'll hear in the interview a couple of times some noise.

You'll actually hear at one point my dog growling in the background. When I record the show, I actually have two dogs that generally are lying on the floor beside me. That's the way that I keep them from barking at the neighbors during my show is I bring them into my office and they lie on their bed next to me.

And for the most part, that works great. But one of my dogs – and one you'll hear – my dog's names are Ruffles and Remington. And Remington is their brother and sister. And Remington is actually – he was not feeling very well that day, so you're going to hear some noise from him.

Please forgive it. But just when you hear it, it's Joshua's. He's a brindle-colored – basically a lab boxer mix. It could be lab pit, something like that. But he's just a brindle-colored mutt, and he's a lovely, wonderful dog, but he wasn't feeling well that day, so you'll have to forgive his noise in the recording.

And also the other reason is usually those noises are muted out on my end, but we were using a different technology to record the interview, and so I wasn't able to mute the noise out on my end. So that's it. Roger, welcome to the show. I appreciate you making time for me today.

Hey, man. It's great to be here, Joshua. So you call yourself the retirement answer man. That's pretty gutsy of you. I know. It's self-proclaimed, right? It's a scary thing to do, but we'll try to live up to it. You know what? That's the key, though. With all the years I've been around, the longer I live on this earth, the more I realize that you don't need to sit around and wait for other people to tell you what you can do.

Just declare yourself something and do it, and all of a sudden, people start believing it. Well, and you start becoming it, right? You start to live up to your own hype. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm interested in your journey in the financial advice business. On this show, I am a former financial advisor.

We talk with financial advisors, but in general, financial advisors don't have the best reputation. So I love to put you on the hot seat. I'm interested in your path through the financial planning profession to where you are today. Okay. Well, I'll tell you my path, which I think is the normal industry structure.

This is traditionally a sales culture. I was a branch manager at a firm for a while, and when you get into the industry, you want to stay in the industry, and the only way to do that is to sell. So in that first phase of a financial advisor's life, and this mirrors my experience, is you're just trying to keep your seat.

So you're serving anybody that has a pulse that might be able to do business with you. And you can do it in the right spirit. It doesn't mean you're nefarious or a bad advisor. It just means that you're just trying to stay in business and serve people. And I went to the training of the largest private bank in the world at the time, and it focused on three things.

It focused on--or two things, excuse me--product knowledge and sales presentation. So that is how financial advisors are trained. And that's traditionally how you come up into the business, is you have to sell to keep your seat, even if you're trying to serve clients in the best way you can.

And usually what happens for the small percentage that actually make it--and it's probably 10% of the people that get into the business that finally make it-- what ends up happening once you make it, now you have this huge tapestry of clients that some are doing bonds, some are doing stocks, some are doing planning.

It's all over the place because you are taking any clients that you can get. And that's really the first fork in the road for a financial advisor is, "Okay, what do I do? Do I just keep this siege mentality and have more and more and more clients?" And I know advisors that have 2,000 clients.

Or do you--as you mature in the industry, do you say, "Well, you know what? This is what my core competency is, and this is definitely what it's not." And then you basically have to reinvent yourself, and that was the path that I took. And that was around 2003 where it really took hold, and then you start to really define what you're good at and where you can add value.

But I think from a consumer's perspective, the problem is millions of dollars have been spent telling them that financial advisors are your trusted experts like your doctor or your attorney. But doctors and attorneys are trained in a mentorship type of program. You have residencies, and you're working on your craft.

Financial advisors are trained to salespeople, and only a select few actually go the path of actually being a practitioner. So that was the path that I took. So it was 2003 when you went and started an independent firm? Yeah, 2003. So I made that decision in '98 to get--I knew what my competency was, and then I went to a very large firm.

And 2003 is when myself and my two partners realized that we couldn't work in that traditional structure and serve clients the way we wanted to. So how is your practice set up these days? We are a partnership with two other partners, and we're a registered investment advisory firm with 13 total.

Wow, that's great. And you've had a good bit of growth. I mean, you're managing quite a bit of money. So that's fantastic. Are you building at this point--are you trying to bring people in off the street and kind of train up new advisors in a different model? Because that's a very familiar refrain as far as that frustration.

But what are you finding as now you build your firm? Are you bringing new advisors in and starting them off under a planning model, or how are you approaching that side of the business? Well, traditionally we grew the firm as a--I'll call it loose federation. We had other advisors that had been in the business that were at major firms that wanted to go independent, but they weren't necessarily entrepreneurs in terms of starting a business and dealing with all those complexities.

So we gave them a home. We gave them all the infrastructure, all the compliance support, and all of the administrative support. And that's a lot of what our firm is today outside of the core business that my partners and I serve. In my mind, I think our industry is in a transition from that type of model of people getting into it because of the sales culture and the idea of running your own shop to a more business-like structure.

So my plan is that any future advisors will be brand new that will be trained in the process that I use every day with clients, and it will be more of a traditional employee model. Why did you choose to focus on retirement planning? One, that's basically what I do all day long with clients, with the clients that I serve.

And two, what I found is most of the information people get in terms of how they approach retirement planning I think is really wrong. It's all very investment-centric, and there's so much more to it if you're trying to create a great life for yourself beyond what investment you buy.

And I think that's actually one of the least important things to think about if you're planning for retirement. What types of things do you need to think about? Well, you need to run your life like a business. You need to focus on your cash flow. You need to focus on your net worth and positioning yourself for.

You need to think a little bit more intently about what retirement actually means. A lot of people run from something to retirement rather than really saying, "Okay, what exactly does this retirement mean to me when I get there?" And then most of the time they have no clue, and then they find themselves a little bored and a little without a course a year or two into retirement.

Are you seeing any transitions in the years that you've been practicing of the way that people view retirement? Definitely. In my mind, and this is just from my experience with the people that I've walked life with, is the whole traditional conception of retirement of you kill yourself and then you enjoy life once you retire, and then it's what all the marketing photos are.

I think that's really blown up. I think it's going to get even more so because people are realizing that, unlike my grandfather who retired with a worn out body and literally moved to Florida and didn't do anything, nowadays that's not the model that people are interested in because they're living longer, they're healthier for longer, and they want to be a lot more active.

They understand that the numbers don't work, that you can't just save up this big pile of money and then retire. What I'm seeing is the vast majority of my clients that are in retirement or transitioning to retirement, they're stair-stepping. Retirement is more of a changing of the way their life is organized to where they're still working, but they're working more on their own terms for longer.

I think that's going to be the norm going forward. What do you do with a client who is committed to that idea that they do want to just quit, but they're right on the edge with the amount of assets? What type of approach do you take with that kind of client?

What I do is I have three steps. The first is I really focus them on dreaming up their ideal retirement. That's really hard for people to do, is to think ideal, because they think they need to be prudent. A lot of people will shortchange themselves if they don't think really big at the beginning of the process.

The first thing I have them do is dream up their ideal retirement and get that all on paper, if they could really have everything. Then I dial in exactly what their cash flow situation is now and what their cash flow situation is going to be once they make that transition.

That's going to include, obviously, Social Security, maybe part-time work, pensions, and things like that. Then dial in their net worth statement. I use the net worth statement a lot with clients. Most people don't even know what their net worth is, because that's really where all the decision-making should happen.

Once we dial that in, I use some tools to analyze, can we actually achieve their ideal retirement, given all the uncertainty that they're facing? Most of the time, no. But that's okay, because if you start off with that ideal, now you can actually prioritize all your goals to get down to the things you care about most.

Most people don't take that step. They don't do the ideal, so they never do a prioritization. It's a really productive way of going about it. Then we negotiate that ideal retirement down to something that means actually something to them. Then we implement the plan and have lots of little scheduled conversations to adjust as reality unfolds.

One of the biggest challenges that people face is we're often taught consistently how important it is to pile up money. It's easy to know how to save and invest money after you learn a few basic things. But then there's a major question, "Okay, I got this pile of money, and I need to turn this pile of money into income." What is your firm's approach, and why did you choose it for how you coach clients and guide clients to liquidate assets?

The fundamental premise of our entire process, and this is going to sound very sophisticated, is that we have no clue what's going to happen. We tell clients that right off. We have absolutely no clue what's going to happen, not just in the markets, but in their lives. I look at my life 10, 15 years ago, and in a lot of ways I'm surprised at where I'm at.

If clients acknowledge it, they can direct their life a little bit, but they really don't have any clue where it's going. Our entire process is set up to not try to predict the future, which is what most people try to do and forecast out. Our entire process is set up to have lots of little conversations so we can make adjustments as life unfolds.

When you're dealing with cash flow in retirement, what we do is very simple. Let's say you're going to take out $100,000 a year for retirement lifestyle expenses. If that's the case, we're going to keep $150,000 a year in cash or cash-like investments. In addition to that, we're going to keep any extra monies that are going to come out for extraordinary expenses in cash.

We're going to create a paycheck for them from those funds. Most people are used to getting payroll. They're used to getting money hit their account systematically. Typically, they're used to living within whatever hits their account. We recreate that in a bucket-like system. Then also have any extraordinary money set aside because we're a big believer in liquidity.

Then we stair-step that into the portfolio. We're basically trying to get to having anything that's invested or at risk be long-term oriented so we don't have to sell it at the wrong time. That's how we manage cash flow during retirement pretty much with every client. Dave: You're using a bucketing strategy where you are keeping, "Okay, we've got cash for the next year and a half worth of expenses." Are you using a strategy then where you're putting fixed income or low volatility investments into say years two through five and you're replenishing those and then volatile investments five plus?

Or are you using a perspective of, "We're just going to pull off the portfolio but we're always going to keep a year and a half in cash. We're going to keep the portfolio completely invested according to our planned out asset allocation. We're just going to pull off every year the money and maybe when the market's down, we're going to go to these cash reserves first?" Mike: Yeah, we're doing exactly the latter there.

We're not dialing in the three to five year especially in this industry environment. We're just implementing a total return portfolio and then through rebalancing, we replenish that bucket. Dave: Got it. Yeah. Simple and effective. I'm interested more about how these things are changing over time and I'm interested to know in your experience with clients because I have my personal anecdotal experience.

But one of the things that my audience is interested in I think is what do you do if you want to retire but the numbers say you don't? So are you – and this goes back to that question I asked earlier about the ideal goals. Are you focusing on saying, "Well, let's find a job you love." Are you – I mean how do you approach that?

If I come to you and the numbers say Joshua needs 1.8 million but Joshua has 900,000, what do you do? Mike: Well, I actually just had this kind of conversation yesterday with someone that I'm doing some planning for. And as part of those ideal goals, I always try to identify the deal breaker.

Some people's deal breaker might be they have to leave an estate. Some people might be they don't want to take a lot of investment risk. In this particular instance, the deal breaker was I'm retiring next year. I can't stand what I do. I have all these hobbies I want to do.

I'm retiring next year. But the numbers wouldn't support it. So what we did was through the conversation, she was so adamant about retiring next year that it was, "No, I don't want to work and I'm not interested in working." That was the initial discussion. But as we unfolded that a little bit more, it was really I'm so burnt out.

I need to have a little time off. And what we started to formulate, and we're going to have a follow up coming up here in a week or so as I renegotiate based on this discussion yesterday, was, well, really, if she could take a couple of years off and then work part time doing something that she would enjoy a lot more, just that amount, and it wasn't a significant amount that she would have to earn relative to what she's earning now, made all the difference in the world in her scenario as I ran the numbers.

So there's only so much you can do. If you think of it, it's not all the numbers are just the numbers. You're really projecting cash flows. So there's only so many levers that you have available to you, and it's helping the client understand that and think a little bit creatively about that.

Now, for her, it was a year away. So it was pretty blatant. Now, if you're talking to somebody that's a little bit ahead of time and thinking proactively about it, and this is always the hard part and the people that can be intentional about it right before it actually comes to a decision point, that's when you have the most flexibility in your decision making.

I have another client that I've worked with for over a decade where he's a high income earner, and we've actually worked that he's going to stair step his career or his practice down so he can buy more lifestyle at certain points in his life. So it's just walking through those discussions.

But what I found is generally if the numbers don't work, you just have to help them negotiate and facilitate them understanding what the options are rather than just prescribing. I think this to me is one of the biggest services that we can provide as advisors is helping people to understand the balance between the numbers and the reality.

Because numbers on a page, the only thing they mean is a lifestyle, and yet that lifestyle can be achieved in so many ways. Often, however, people don't think of the alternative ways of achieving it. I have a beef with our industry, for example, for young people, but oftentimes I think one of the dangers, and this is something that I faced, a mistake I made personally, was because I was so focused on setting money aside for retirement and putting everything into tax sheltered accounts where it's difficult to get the money out.

It means I didn't have enough money available in liquid cash when you want to do things. So if you're 35 years old and if you've got a couple hundred thousand bucks in the bank that's not in IRAs or 401(k)s, that's very different than having a couple hundred thousand dollars in IRAs and 401(k)s.

Both of them are great, but the couple hundred thousand dollars that you can access allows you freedom to start a business, allows you freedom to make a career transition, allows you freedom to take a year off and travel, and that's more of life planning versus just focusing on, "Well, someday we're going to have this big pile of money." But it's exactly the same thing I think that we need to do at retirement is learn to help people with goal planning, to help people set out a strategy that fits what they're trying to accomplish and it doesn't only look at the numbers.

I found for me as I realized a real weakness in my financial advisor training and I said, "I don't need more technical. I don't need more financial advisor training. I could pick up the phone and call someone smarter than me to answer a technical question." What I need is I need some of that life coach training and I started focusing on how do life coaches coach people?

How do performance coaches coach people because I think that's that extremely valuable but somewhat fluffier side of what we do that really makes a massive difference in people's actual results. - Josh, you hit on so many important points. So first off, especially if you're younger, is yes, it's like lifestyle design.

You can be so intentional about how you structure your life if you realize you don't have to save this huge mountain of cash to retirement. So from a financial planning perspective or an industry perspective, basically the issue is defined as this. You either have to save and sacrifice your life now or you're going to have to settle for less later.

Those are really the only two options that are presented by most investment or financial planning people. And that is very limited and there's so much more to it. It's how you design your work and what type of work you do. It's how you manage your balance sheet and whether you do non-public investments or you invest in yourself from a business perspective.

There are so many things other than public investing. And if you think of--we're all trying to make the same calculation. It's like a teeter-totter. We're all trying to live as well as we can today without sacrificing our tomorrow. And I think everything that is taught in our industry is sacrifice for tomorrow.

And no, it's not about your work. It's that you have to save this huge monumental amount of money, which is insurmountable given all the demographics of how retirement's changing. So, yeah, you're 100% right. And in terms of the things that you were in search of as an advisor, they're the same things I think about all the time.

And that's what my podcast, I try to keep it about is there's enough information out there. Really what we need or people need when they're making these important decisions is wisdom on how to deal with these actual issues. And I think most financial advisors, although they're well-intended to do it, they're not trained to do it.

And they don't have those discussions. I was out in Texas last week and on the airplane back, I sat next to a guy on the airplane, fascinating guy. He was 65 years old, lived up in Canada, and worked as a boat surveyor. But as I started asking and inquiring about his life, one of the things that quickly became apparent, we were just talking, he was openly sharing.

One of the things that quickly became apparent was he didn't have any savings. He didn't have any money. He had a small pension from the Canadian government. But as we talked, he had taken all of these just incredible trips around the world. And he was just on an airplane flying from Canada to Florida to see a friend for a few days.

And he'd taken all of these incredible trips all around the world, just all of these crazy travels. I started finding out why, and what I discovered was he lived on a sailboat in Vancouver. He was traveling all over the place, and he was traveling all over the place because he didn't bother with needing to save money.

He didn't worry about saving money. He just kept his expenses low, and whenever he wanted to buy a plane ticket, he bought a plane ticket. He would take a charter sometimes, or he would go and do a survey, and he would be paid to fly to the other side of the world.

He just had built together this adventurous life without any – basically without any money and with a very low earnings rate. Now, that makes the formal financial advisor in me horrified because, I mean, we're immediately thinking, "What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this risk comes to fruition?

We don't have a plan for this." It kind of makes that inner nerd advisor kind of clench up and say, "Oh, I don't know. This is not safe. This is too risky." But on the other hand, I admire the guy for building a lifestyle that has just been filled with adventure and filled with fun, and he never waited for permission.

He never waited to get rich. He's not rich. He never was going to be rich because he spends all his money, but he buys a lifestyle that many people dream of. That's what I love to think about is there's so many ways to do things. I'm not going to pursue his strategy myself, but I know it can provide a little bit of light for someone else who's feeling like, "Oh, I have to keep doing this, living this life I don't like." I think this is one of the jobs that we as financial advisors have to do is to, yes, take the technical background, but let's talk about helping people to build their ideal life in every way now.

Not at 65 only, but yes, at 65 also, but now and at 65. I think visually you think about it. Yeah. As you were describing him, I was like on my technical side. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. You didn't think about that?" Whether his teeter-totter is balanced or not, that's for anybody to say, but you make a really good point.

Visually, if you think about it, right now, the idea of retirement, and this is how people, at least in my experience, really think about it, is it's like climbing Mount Everest. It's just this trudge to get up there, and supposedly when you get to that summit, then you're going to enjoy yourself.

In my mind, it's more like walking a journey or a trail in that you never actually get there. The more you can walk a balanced life, and especially if you accept that, "You know what? I'm not going to retire at 60, or maybe I'm going to just have more freedom but still work up until 70 or even 75." I have clients that do that.

The more you accept that on the front end, the more balance that's going to buy you along that entire journey. That's why it's so important to think intentionally about this stuff and not simply think it's about investing and saving. I tell you, my mom and I had these discussions when I was younger, and she was always about sacrificing her entire life to provide for the family.

She would always say she would enjoy life later, and we'd always have these discussions. She passed away when she was 48 of cancer, so she never got to that. I think that's the big risk of the way that it's presented to individuals now. We could argue as to why it's presented that way, but I don't think it's the right way to do it.

I think it's just the reality of the situation also that people look at what the AARP is doing with their Life Reimagined program. If any listener isn't familiar, AARP has a whole website built around this idea of Life Reimagined. It's lifereimagined.aarp.org. It's all about goal planning. It's all about sitting down and saying, "How can you put together this amazing life for the future where you're doing work you enjoy, you're living in a place that you want to be, spending time with the people that you want to be, and living the purpose that you want to live?" In my opinion, when the AARP is preaching this stuff, all they're doing is acknowledging the reality that the vast majority of Americans will never retire.

It's just simply not possible. When you look at the amount of assets that are accumulated, the vast majority of Americans will only retire when they're forced to, and their only resource is going to be Social Security. Oftentimes, this number of people that have the assets set aside to where they can just enjoy this beautiful financial advisor brochure retirement is certainly not.

I mean, it's a tiny percentage of the population. But that doesn't mean we can't all live a great life. Yeah, I think that's totally okay. I mean, I'm almost done with my book, and the working title is, from the retirement answer, man, "Screw Retirement." Nice. So, yeah, I agree with you 100%.

I'd like to ask you a little bit about your foray as a financial advisor into so-called new media. Why did you get into podcasting? Okay. Good question. I'm older than you, Josh. I'm 48 now. But I had a midlife crisis about a year and a half ago. Okay? And I was like, "My business is good.

I've been very blessed." And I was like, "You know, I could do what I'm doing and leave a very balanced life, maybe too balanced, and do well and serve my clients and be done." And I'm like, I started to really get to, well, man, when I'm 60, 65, and I look back and say, "Okay, yeah, that was fun, but what did I really do in the world?" That really started to haunt me, so I went through a process of hiring somebody and really focusing on what my calling is for the rest of my life.

I know that's now that we're getting real touchy-feely here. No, it's a big deal. It's a big deal. It was to me because, you know, and a buddy of mine, he sparked it all because he said, "No." You know, he said, "We're entering our maximum power as an individual." And what he meant by that was, and I took it the wrong way at first, but he said, "We're highly trained." Yeah, I'm highly trained, and I have a lot of experience, meaning that I have a lot of successes and I have a lot of failures, so I'm battle-proven.

And I still have motivation to achieve something, and that's a really powerful combination. Now it's what do you do with that? So doing the podcast and talking, really laser focusing in on the stuff that we've been talking about is my current expression of what I'm supposed to be doing for the rest of my life.

And so on the podcast and on my blog, I'm talking about the issues I'm struggling with every day with clients and serving the listeners. And I get tons of feedback, which is amazing, and all of this makes me a lot better at what I do, which allows me to serve my clients better and allows me to serve others better via the podcast and everything else.

So it's a beautiful circle where I'm being a lot more intentional and focused on what my purpose is, which is to change how people think about retirement and really find that balance on their teeter-totter. I know that sounds all pie in the sky, but this is what I'm meant to do.

Have you, other than just feeling better and kind of feeling like you're fulfilling your purpose, what have been some of the specific benefits to you of podcasting? I'm a lot better advisor. I'm a lot more intentional about how I work with my clients, and I've made more connections, and I think I've had an impact on other people's lives in terms of them dealing with these issues.

And these are not financial issues. These are really the life issues that we've been talking about, and that's what's important. So it's made me a lot better at what I do, which means I'm making a bigger impact on other people's lives. Have some of your existing clients started listening to the podcast?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What I talk about is what I do all day long, so they like it. They like it. It's really helped them know me and understand the foundation of how I'm advising them, so I think that's really supported and got them more engaged in the process.

Have you gained any new clients because of the podcast or gained any people who are prospective clients that same and said, "I wasn't sure if I was going to work with you because I started listening to your podcast. I felt a lot more comfortable with it." Yes, just in the last month, actually, for the first time.

And the way I've always treated the podcast is, is there some business aspect of it? Yes. I mean, traditionally, we've built our business and I built my business for sure as unsolicited referrals because you're probably like me. I'm not a marketer. I don't want to be a marketer. I'm just a practitioner.

To get wise counsel is not something you're sold. It's something that you decide you want and you find the right person. So the nice thing with the podcast has been that people have gotten to know me, and if they reach out to me and it's a fit, we work together.

And I've just had that in the last month or so. But the way I describe it to my partners is we're blessed that we're in a position where we're really dialed in. So we don't have to be one of those hunter and killers like a normal advisor model is.

So I look at it as building an orchard. I'm plowing the fields, building an orchard, and becoming better at what I do. And over time, I will attract people that want what we do. I think it's incredibly powerful. And one of the things that I think each person has to do, whether or not they're in the financial advice space or whether they're in any space, is we've got to be able to connect with people that care about what we're into.

And I think every financial advisor needs a podcast, if only just to connect with their personal client base. Because the reality is if you look at your touch schedule, okay, here are my A clients, my B clients, and I'm going to give my A clients 25 touches in a year.

If you go through and touch this as a marketing term, meaning how many times am I going to connect, and you go through and you say, "Okay, we're going to have four quarterly conference calls. We're going to have an annual meeting or a biannual meeting," reality is there's just not that much time.

And it's tough to really get to know someone, especially builds over time. But no matter how hard you try, it's hard to get to know someone. But when you can establish in-depth, asynchronous communication where you can share, "Here's who I am," man, the power of allowing clients to self-select through that process can be amazing.

Because then you're going to be working with a pool of clients who are a perfect fit for you and a perfect fit for your message. And the ones who are better served by another advisor are going to find the other advisor. And then everyone is going to be better served.

And that's my hope going forward in the future is we can use some of this and get out of the dark ages and actually build some of this trust, share what we are, who we are, what we do, and help people to see who we are and what we do so that they can know, so that they can find someone who is a perfect fit for them and create more satisfied clients instead of more dissatisfied clients, which is what we've done a pretty good job over the decades of doing.

Yeah, the hard part for a client is, or a potential client, say someone listening to this podcast is, I think a lot of people feel they need advice, whether it's a flat fee, put the plan together, let me go do it myself, or they want ongoing advice and somebody to walk life with.

The problem is, because our industry is still structured the way that it is, that everybody sounds the same when they talk to somebody. Usually they're going to ask for a referral from a friend, and if they go meet with the advisor, all the advisors sound the same for the most part.

And it's very difficult for a client to know who is competent and is always going to show up, and who is not going to follow through on everything that they say. And it's hard for a client to know that, how to know where competency is and where focus is, because on the front end we all sound the same, and that's the nice thing about a podcast.

I'm on my 52nd show, you can't fake it. You can't fake it over time. You can't just do it on the podcast and not live it. So that really helps. I will say, since I started podcasting, I have a massive level of respect for talk radio people who spend hours talking.

It's a level of respect I never had before, and I am convinced there is no possible way to fake who you are on the radio when you just have to talk. I mean, you cannot fake it because it's unscripted. You've got so much time. All you can do is just simply share who you are and what you think and let people go with it.

And then just, you know, my only thought when I started doing my show was, all I can do is just simply be honest with who I am, say what I think, because otherwise there's no way I could keep any stories straight. You cannot fake it in this medium. Yeah, which I think is really good for people looking for advisors.

How do you advise someone? If someone comes to you and says, "Roger, how do I find a good financial advisor?" What do you say? I actually have a checklist of about 20 questions that I give them that I say, "You need to interview people to get an understanding of what their process is." I think most people don't do enough due diligence on advisors when they hire them.

So I just say, "Interview them and here are some questions to go through." Is that linked on your blog somewhere? I can send it to you. Yeah, send it over. I can send it to you. How do you structure, in your practice, how do you structure fees and things like that?

We work two ways. One, for me, all I work on is those people that are planning into and transitioning into and living in retirement. So that's all that I do. I do it two ways. I do a flat fee planning, which will dial in, identifying their ideal retirement, organizing their cash flow, and building their net worth statement, seeing if the ideal is possible, and if not, helping them negotiate down and then giving them a framework to execute it on their own.

I do that for a flat fee. Then for clients that want to walk life with somebody, I do that in a more traditional fashion on an AUM basis. So I charge a percentage of the assets that we manage, and then we walk life together and have scheduled little conversations.

Flat fees range from how much to how much, ballpark? Flat fee, $2,500. AUM, around a percent, depending on the size of the account? Yeah, a percent or less. When people say, "What do you do in exchange for 1%?" How do you justify charging people 1% on their portfolio every year?

Well, it's a choice. The way we justify it is that, one, we're going to take the entire plan that we built out and execute it. They are going to act as the president or the general, where when we come to them, we have big – I'm a big fan of little conversations.

I talked about how we have no clue what's going to happen in the future, so we focus on making sure we have the right conversations at the right intervals. And if we're managing the assets, then executing on everything that we can execute on and just reporting to them so they can make decisions.

So it's like – the way I describe it, the flat fee planning is a transaction. And clients that work with us ongoing, we're walking life with them. We help people buy cars. We're there when good things happen and bad things happen to deal with anything on the financial end of it.

But what I'm getting at is in a world where I can call it Vanguard and I can buy a portfolio for about 20 basis points, why should I pay 125 – 100 plus extra basis points to work with you? Is it because you're going to give extra investment performance and you're going to be able to choose some stocks and mutual funds that are going to do better?

Or just because I have someone to call on the phone? Like what tangible value do I get from sending you so much money? Well, the tangible value is going to be stopping people from doing things that aren't in their best interest. So let's take the Vanguard example. Over the last 20 years, I think I'm going to use round numbers, the S&P has performed about 9 to 9.5%.

And bonds were roughly 6 to 6.5%. And the average investor, according to Dow Bar, returned about 2.5%. So they drastically underperformed exactly what they invested in. And the reason for that, fees are part of it. And the bigger part of that is that we get very fearful and we get very optimistic and we tend to buy high and sell low over and over again.

And that's what a good advisor should help you not do. It's more of all the things that they stop you from doing in terms of investment performance. We don't try to pick winners. We use DFA funds, which are smartly created index funds, and then we satellite out some very inexpensive managers to complement that.

So we're not in the predicting the future business. We're in the consistent little conversations to make sure they get to where they want to go. It's nice to hear your answer. It's funny to me because in the years that I was an advisor, I struggled with that because I never had any particular investment expertise.

I never had any particular ability to prognosticate and predict what's going to happen in the future. And it wasn't until I figured out that, in essence, my job is to be the buffer. My job is to help clients avoid the big mistakes that I ever understood the value that I could bring.

And today, I'm convinced there's a tiny percentage of the population that can effectively do it yourself. They can effectively handle things. I have no idea what the percentage is, but I think it's a tiny percentage. But I don't see how today in today's world is possible for anybody to be able to successfully negotiate all of the complexities of our modern world and have successfully managed their emotions without somebody external coaching them through it.

So it's interesting to hear other advisors who came to the same conclusion that I came to as far as the primary value proposition that I bring. It takes a long time because we're not brought into the industry that way. Most of us get into the industry thinking that we're going to be investment gurus.

Now, I will say, and some people may not like this, I think the current state is there are a lot of advisors that are not adding value for the fees that they're charging because they are more investment-centric and they're not doing a lot of the things that we talked about.

So I think that we're going to see a lot of change in our industry because of that. Because if you're not adding value, real value, to people that want exactly what you offer, they should go to Vanguard. They should go somewhere else. I think right now, a lot of advisors aren't dancing hard enough for their dinner.

That's the phrase I use. So I think that's a risk and that's an opportunity from an advisor perspective. It's absolutely the case. I mean, our industry is changing and I love it. I'm so glad for it. I mean, anytime you can bring transparency to a market and anytime you can just pull down the barriers, everybody's going to win.

Because number one, we need to be serving clients better and clients need to win and transparency is always good for clients. And number two, it's going to differentiate those advisors who are able to add value versus those who aren't. And that should be something that we're not scared of.

I don't have any interest of earning money in a way that isn't positive and helpful for all involved. So if I'm not doing any good, let me get out and get somewhere where I am doing good or let me learn some new skills to where I can show and demonstrate the good that I can do.

So I love it. I love the world we're going into. But there are definitely – I agree with you. There are a lot of people who I think are going to have a tough time and are already having a tough time justifying their business practices. Well, that's the natural – I mean, I grew up in Detroit.

So that's – auto industry went through that as well. You get to be the big guy on the block and you get to be fat and happy and smarter, leaner players. If you're not – will come and disintermediate you or knock you out of the industry. I'll tell you, I've done this for 25 years.

I still find new ways that Wall Street makes money that I didn't realize. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. Yeah, it really is. Well, Roger, anything else that you want to cover? I know RogerWhitney.com, your podcast, it's an iTunes retirement answer man I assume. Retirement answer man, yeah. So if anyone is listening to your show, it's retirement answer man.

You're primarily – you're exclusively focused on retirement questions. I do some retirement on this show but I dance around a whole bunch of things. So if somebody wants kind of just a retirement feed, maybe that would be a great show for them. Anything else you want to say about your site or about your show?

That's all I talk about and I try to be like you, just as transparent as possible. If – on my website, you can go to youaskianswer and you can ask me any question and I will answer within the terms that I'm allowed to answer. So you can go to RogerWhitney.com and ask me any question you want.

That's great. Man, I'm so glad that you're doing this. I think more and more advisors need to be following your path and I appreciate your leading the way and kind of setting it out and hopefully it can be an inspiration to other people as they go forward. Thanks, man.

Awesome. So what can you learn from that? Well, obviously a lot. But here's what I want you to focus on. If you know the deck is stacked against you from the perspective of retirement, most people aren't going to save enough money. Most people aren't going to be able to accumulate enough to live their ideal vision of a retirement.

Why don't we start with actually building a life that we don't want to retire from and then make our retirement plan? It's the missing step oftentimes in retirement planning. It's interesting if you ask Roger, I doubt he intends to retire from his financial planning practice as quickly as he can because he's built a business that he likes doing a job that he enjoys and is meaningful to him.

And then he's built other aspects of it with his podcast and his teaching that fulfills some of the other desire for meaning that he was trying to get from his career. I doubt very much that he's working on retiring as quickly as he can at the age of 65.

So if even the financial advisors who hopefully have enough money to retire aren't incredibly focused on that, then why are you? Why are you obsessed with the idea of retiring at 65? Now, I'm not saying we can't be financially independent. I'm just saying let's get a little bit creative.

If there's something you're waiting on doing until 65 when you're going to retire, is there a way that you can do it within the next five years? Is there a way that you can take a distributed retirement or take many retirements or build a business or build a lifestyle that gives you what you're trying to accomplish today instead of waiting for them down the road?

Spend some time thinking about it and then see if that might factor into your plan. There's a real need for balance here because both of these things are important, both the formal having the retirement set up with the actual savings there but then also planning the lifestyle that you don't want to retire from.

So consider how you can apply these ideas to your life. That's it for today's show. Thank you guys so much for listening. I really appreciate each and every one of you. I'd be thrilled if you consider supporting the show. And if you haven't already done that, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

Become a patron of the show. That would mean the world to me. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com. You can also connect with the show on Twitter @RadicalPF and at Facebook.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment.

But your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy. And consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please help me by coming to the show page and commenting so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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