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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, and today I'm going to talk with you about the power of choosing not to retire.

This has become something of, I guess, a theme here on Radical Personal Finance. I never really set out to make it a theme, but it is something that I have thought for a long time. Way back in the early years of the show, I did a series of shows on the myth, the scam that is retirement, and how basically retirement is a very modern concept, and it's been, in essence, foisted upon people, really without much historical precedent.

Now, that's not necessarily all a bad thing, and I'm not, I don't want to be known as the anti-retirement guy, but I do think that we often raise the value of retirement so high, especially in the Western context, that we miss out on some of the downsides of retiring.

Now, I've talked about the downsides before, but today I want to simply talk about the upsides of choosing not to retire. Another reason why I have a little bit of tension with this subject is that I would say that of the modern kind of financial nomenclature, there's a big movement and a massive growth of what's called the FIRE movement, FIRE being an acronym that refers to Financial Independence Retire Early or Early Retirement.

And I love this movement. I think it's really cool. I've been around it and sort of a part of it for a decade. Long before I started Radical Personal Finance, I was super interested in it. I find much of the FIRE community and much of the FIRE content extremely compelling.

However, I've always had this great discomfort with the FIRE movement. In fact, I actually wrote and recorded a show one time called "Why I'm Not Part of the FIRE Movement." And I chose not to release it because it was too negative and I felt like I was too preachy and I just decided to can the show.

But I don't really think of myself as part of the FIRE movement. Now, if it's just about financial independence, I'm all on board. But the early retirement thing is where I just I don't think it's a great move. And so I don't stress on this stuff a lot just because there's not really any reason to it.

My observation is that almost nobody who is in a position to retire early actually does. And the people that do actually retire early are really keen on it. They really want to do it. And I'm not about to get involved in trying to convince other people to change their mind or to live their life in any way other than they want to live their life.

I don't see any reason. There's no harm in becoming financially independent at an early age. And there's no harm in being able to retire early. Just what I think will happen is what happens to most people is that they'll retire early about five times. And then they might finally someday retire or might finally someday realize, "Hey, this is not for me." And to me, it seems useful to recognize that.

Now, I can't prove that. I don't have all the data on it. But I have abundant anecdotal evidence that I could source that would demonstrate that I think this is the normal path. The normal path is that people who build wealth generally aren't going to just opt out of life and do nothing.

Now, the flip side is this. If you know that's probably where you're going to end up, then why not be a little intentional about it? Which is why I personally am really nervous about always talking about early retirement. Not that I don't want to be in a position to not to have to work if I didn't want to.

My hope is to help people get there very quickly. The goal is 10 years or less. I think you can do that. But also to recognize that you're probably not going to actually retire. And that what most of us really want is not to sit by the lake every single day with a fishing pole in our hands.

What most of us want is not to sit in front of Netflix every single day and never have to go to work. What most of us want rather is some sense of more of control, some sense of more freedom, some sense of more autonomy, some sense of more fulfillment, some sense of more meaning, some sense of more impact.

These are the kinds of things that I think all of us want, or at least most of us want. Not just pure self-indulgent hedonism, not pure self-indulgent wasting time watching TV, just doing pointless things, but the ability to be more self-directed. And I for a long time emphasize the fact that that can be achieved long before you ever hit phi.

Long before you ever become a multi-millionaire and hit your number. It can be achieved long before that. It can be achieved by an 18-year-old who chooses to become a farmer instead of going and taking a corporate job. Because as a farmer, a farmer has a little bit more flexibility with their schedule.

Or somebody who chooses to be a self-employed computer programmer. Or somebody who chooses to be a real estate agent. I have not had, since I was 23, I think, since I was about 23 years old, I have never had somebody direct my day. So it's achievable at an early time.

And in fact, one of the key things that I was very clear on as a young man was that I wanted to have control over my day. I wanted to have autonomy over my day. Now I will also concede that today I could very happily take a job where I didn't have control over my day.

I could very happily take a job where I was expected to be in the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 48 weeks a year, something like that. I could very happily take a job like that and really thrive in that environment. Because that kind of thirst for autonomy has largely been satisfied.

And I've recognized that autonomy also comes with other bits of responsibility. And sometimes it would be really nice to just have a job where I went to work and somebody told me what to do. And I knew if I did what I was told, everything would be fine. I thought about it a lot of times.

But the point is, when I was 23 years old, I didn't have a million dollars. I wasn't financially independent. But by making different career choices, I was able to achieve some of that sense of fulfillment. Now, that's a theme that I've explored many times throughout the archives of this show.

And I don't want to spend any more time on that today. Just to emphasize that it really is true. You can achieve those things with a little bit of money in your pocket and some different choices in your, perhaps, housing. Some different choices in your expenses and some different choices in how you generate income for yourself.

You don't have to be fi to be free. That's not bad. I'll repeat it. You don't have to be fi to be free. You can be free on the way to being fi. But there is actually tremendous power in consciously, willfully choosing, or perhaps a more moderate way of phrasing that, consciously, willfully choosing or recognizing the fact that you probably will never retire.

There are actually tremendous benefits to this. Now, I'm a little nervous about making an open commitment that I will never retire. I'm a little nervous about that because I don't know what I'll think 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 40 years from now. And I've learned to be a little careful about making forward-looking statements because I tend to, as I gain more life experience, my opinions change, et cetera.

So I want to be careful about it. I'm not going to say I'll never retire. But I do think that it's -- I do want to say right now, I don't see any reason why I would ever want to fully retire, to opt out at some point in time and say, "I'm never going to work again," or "I'm never going to earn income again." I don't see why I would be 60 years old and say, "That's it.

I'm just never going to retire again." I understand work again. I understand why some people do it. And I'm going to talk about some of the reasons people do, so how you can avoid them. But I just don't see why I would ever do that. Because if I can achieve all of the freedom and the autonomy and the liberty and the control over my day and over my life and my lifestyle without retiring, and I can simultaneously achieve all the benefits that come from working, generating income, having connection to the community, making an impact for my customers in some way, then why would I quit that?

So let me talk to you about some of the benefits and the power that can come if you will simply choose not to retire. The first benefit is that by choosing not to retire, you can afford to take the long view. And it radically changes your perspective on life.

I think there is real value in changing how you look at things so that you understand what you think and why you think it. So I think there's value in saying the classic question that I've tried to raise, "What would I do if I knew I could never retire?" And I also think there's value in saying, "What would I do if I knew I had to retire two years from now or eight years from now or 10 years from now?" Because then you can look through different ways of approaching things and you can generate creative and interesting ideas and you can choose to achieve those ideas or not.

If you can be financially independent in 10 years or less, which I'm convinced you can be as I teach and as I do, if you can be financially independent, why not do that? But then why not also say, "What would I do if I knew I could never retire?" And here's how this helps me right now.

My wife and I have been in a phase of life that is draining. It's difficult. We have young children and to care for our young children the way that we desire to care for them requires a tremendous amount of time, a tremendous amount of energy, and a modest amount of money.

And I often find that tough because I am a competitive person. I know the skills that I have and I look around at other people who do some of the things I do and I get jealous of what they can do. I get jealous of the time that other people can devote to things.

I know that if I could just sit down and have 168 hours a week with just me and my laptop, I know the things that I could do. I laugh when I hear young single men talk about, "Here's my morning routine. Let me tell you about this." And I have to get up at—these days I have to get up at 4 o'clock to have an hour or two before my children wake up.

And so I do that. But still, sometimes the baby's up at night, you're up late, you're dealing with—you're taking care of people, you're investing in relationships, and sometimes I can't get up at 4 o'clock in the morning. And no matter—it's not a matter of mind over matter. If I set my mind to it or I could certainly do it, it's a matter of it's not good for me.

I need to sleep. And so I can't have my life tightly controlled. I can't plan out the hours of my day because for me to be involved with my children, the way that I wish to be involved, means that I don't know if I'm going to be available at 1 o'clock.

And it's really been frustrating to me, very, very frustrating to me. Because then I think, "Well, wait a second. What if I don't achieve all the goals that I've set out for myself for the next five years? What if I don't achieve these things?" And I have to sit down and say, "Wait a second, Joshua.

Priorities. Do you want to have these goals or the other goals? Which is more important?" And I don't think you have to always choose. I don't think you have to choose to either be poor and in good shape or to be rich and fat. Why can't you be rich and in good shape?

You don't have to choose to be rich and have a bad relationship with your wife or be poor and have a great relationship with your wife. You don't have to choose those things. We live in such a world of abundance that you can have all of those good things that you wish.

But you sometimes can't get them all right when you want them. If I go and work out, if I go to the CrossFit class at five o'clock in the morning, then that means that I'm not able to do some of the things with my young children. I'm not able to care for them.

I'm not able to help my wife sleep a little bit longer. I'm not able to do those things. But I'm also not able to get work on my business. So you have to juggle. Now, I don't want to make this all about me. My point is, one of the things I do take comfort in is the fact that I'm in this for the long term.

So even if the past few years, the next few years are topsy-turvy because of my family commitments, that doesn't mean that my life is a failure. It doesn't mean that I'm going to fail because I'm not a multimillionaire and financially independent and able to go to FinCon and tell all my friends that, "Hey, I hit five this year because..." It doesn't mean I'm a failure.

My goal is not to be able to go and tell all my friends, "Look how cool I am. I hit financial independence this year." My goal is to impact the lives of my listeners, work and to help people. My goal is to strengthen people, strengthen families, encourage others. Those are the things that matter to me.

And so it helps me personally by simply recognizing that I can choose not to retire, to recognize that I can take a long view. I don't have to freak out the way that is easy for me to fall into that I missed two weeks on my podcast because I was taking care of my sick baby.

I don't have to freak out because I didn't get as much work done this week. I know that there's plenty of weeks, there's plenty of years, and it really helps me. And I think it might help you too. Now you probably aren't in the same situation that I am, but you might be looking around and saying, "Man, if only I could double my sales and make more money, then I would be able to be financially independent in six years." But the cost of doubling your sales might be too much for you.

And if you recognize that 16 years is good enough, you might be able to slow down. You might be able to appreciate those things a little bit more. Now I love the early retirement financial independence stories. I love the stories of the young couples that work like crazy and they're financially independent before they have their first baby.

There have been many times where I have said, "Man, I sure wish I'd done that, but I didn't." And it's not going to happen. And so you have to make a fresh perspective. And I want to encourage you that taking the long view can be really helpful. So by choosing not to retire, or by at least recognizing that you may choose in the future not to retire, and be happy with that choice, be confident in that choice, you can do some things today that you might be happier to do.

Let me use some non-kid examples. Kids are just where I'm at, but let me use some non-kid examples. Let's say that you are, I don't know, 40 years old, and you're working a job that you recognize this job does not suit me. And you don't have to work the job.

It's not that that's the only job available for you to fulfill your responsibilities. You just recognize that this job just doesn't suit me all that much. And you think, "Man, I would like to go and do something else." But the cost of going and doing something else is going to be time.

It's going to take time out of your career. Maybe you need to go get an advanced degree. I'll tell the story of a friend of mine. Friend is a very successful car dealer. Makes a lot of money selling cars. Used car dealer. Has been very good at it. But has been doing it for so long, just not really enthusiastic about it.

And when this friend was a young man, he wanted to be an attorney. I think he'd be a great attorney, but he hasn't been in school in decades. And I keep trying to tell him and trying to get him to say, "Listen, stop. Why don't you go back, get a law degree, and go start practicing law?" He would love it.

He would be thrilled with it. And he's so utterly bored with the car business that the money just doesn't matter. But he won't do it, or at least hasn't done it yet. Because how can I walk away from my six-figure income and go back and spend years in school studying for something else?

And by the way, I'm almost about to retire. I need more money for retirement. So now, it's his life. He can choose what he wants to do. But when you can take the long view and recognize, "I'm 40 years old. I'm 50 years old. I'm 60 years old. I'd like to go be an attorney, or I'd like to go and be a marine biologist, or I'd like to go and drive a truck." Do it.

Because if you just recognize, "I don't have to keep working this job for another seven years so I can be financially independent and retire because that's what my financial advisor says I need." Why don't you take a few years and go and change? Why don't you adjust things a little bit?

It can be very, very powerful. And if there's something that you know that would be very attractive to you, it's worth the time and potentially the cost to your retirement accumulation for you to go and retool in that because you can take the long view. In a minute, I'll tell you another story about another friend of mine who did this and I thought just a beautiful way.

Next benefit. If you choose not to retire, you can eliminate the pressing burden of saving huge amounts of money for retirement while young. Now, hear me carefully. I think that saving money is a good thing, a wise thing, something that's worth doing. I would like to help people save lots of money.

10% is great. 50% is wonderful. 90% is awesome. So I want to help people save money. But there is a time and there are situations in which saving money for retirement just isn't the best solution. And here I'm thinking about people that I've known, clients that I've worked with who they don't have large amounts of income.

They don't have for whatever reason. Sometimes they're constrained by family situations, caring for an aging parent, caring for a sick spouse, caring for young children, and they just – they're constrained. They have a job that's good enough but it's not providing tons and tons of surplus. Sometimes they're just constrained by living situations.

Yeah, they could sell the house and possibly move somewhere cheaper but that would be too disruptive on an aging parent, on a sick spouse, on children, et cetera. And I get tired of the pressure that's often put upon these people. You've got to save for retirement. And I used to do it.

When I was a financial advisor, I used to run the numbers. I used to run the programs. And I used to tell people, "Listen, you've got to save for retirement because the math says this." And we would use such conservative examples and try to show this person how you've got to retire at 65 years old and you're going to live till 95.

And just – I used to see people walk out of my office discouraged because they knew they couldn't do it. And year by year would go by and I would run my financial needs analysis and it would say, "You need to save $10,000 this year." And like, "Where are we going to get the $10,000?" These days, interestingly, I almost never have a consulting client or someone like that who walks away discouraged.

I find myself more than anything telling people, "You're doing great. Look, you're already financially independent in a minor way. Look, you're doing awesome." And I don't know whether I've changed – of course, I know I have – but I don't know whether I'm the one who's changed or whether just the client base has changed or necessarily what has changed.

But I find these days that although I am much more aggressive, I recognize that you don't have to have this perfect thing that fits into a financial needs analysis. I guess it's because I don't use financial needs analysis anymore. I just use a calculator and a pen, and it just helps me to be freer in my thinking.

But if you just come to the point and you recognize, "Right now, I can't save money for retirement, but that's okay because I'm going to choose not to retire," that can be really freeing just to give yourself the permission of saying, "I am choosing a different path." And this is valuable because then it keeps retirement from being this controlling thing that controls everything else in life.

Functionally, now for those of us who make a lot of money, we don't have an excuse to not save money. But there's a whole wide swath of our fellow citizens who just don't make that much money. And yes, they can learn to be extremely frugal. Yes, they can save money.

Yes, they have to save. But there's a wide swath of our fellow citizens who are structurally bound where they can't save a lot, but yet we put this pressure on them about retirement. It just doesn't work with the normal flow of life. Let me give you just some life stage examples.

A young person, right? Most of us would come to a young person and say, "Take advantage of the fact that you're young and are relatively unencumbered with commitments to other people, and try different things without necessarily worrying about them working out." Most of us would come to a young person and say, "Try different jobs.

Try different careers. Travel a little bit. Try different degrees." We would have no problem with telling a young person, "Try something because you're not always going to be this unencumbered. You're not going to always have this same freedom that you have now to try different things, and that trying will be valuable for you." So it would be normal that a young person wouldn't be making tons and tons of money.

But then what frequently happens is that young person marries and starts having children. And now you have a couple things that change. First, you have more commitments. You have commitments to a spouse. You have commitments to children. And those commitments are with time, and they are with money. For me to maintain my household costs me time.

It would not be good for me, it would not be good for my household. My household would fall apart if I maintained the same work schedule that I could easily maintain when I was 21 years old. I can't do it because that time away leads to weakness in my household, weakness in my relationship with my wife, with my children, etc.

And then of course it changes the financial dynamic. But what's interesting is this is the time at which we try to tell people, "You've got to retire, so you've got to start saving for retirement." Now, there's nothing wrong with it. Certainly, if you start when you're 20 years old and save 10%, then that can work out in the fullness of time, it really works.

But it's just weird because instead of emphasizing and encouraging people with the fact that, "Listen, this is valuable for you. We try to put this financial pressure that you've got to think about when you're 65 years old." Now, I think it doesn't make sense because if you come through those times, the best time to work is, yes, when you're young, but then of course you're kind of exploring a little bit.

But the best time to work is when your kids move out of the house. But that's the time at which everybody starts freaking out about their missing 401(k) balances. But what if you just recognize that, "When the kids leave the house, I'm going to keep on working." Now you've fulfilled your commitments to your family, you've fulfilled your commitments to society, you have wisdom, you probably have lower expenses then than almost any other time.

There's plenty of time. So by choosing not to retire or recognizing that that may not be the number one thing, you can actually eliminate the need to save huge amounts of money when you're young. If you're 45 years old or you're 55 years old and you're worried about the fact that I only have $50,000 in my 401(k), don't worry.

There are times in life at which it's easier to save and there are times in life in which it's more difficult to save. So don't, I'm not sure how to phrase this, I guess I just feel bad for the people that I used to watch leave my office being discouraged instead of encouraged.

And today I look at people who are raising children, who are building stable households and I think, "That's really valuable." It's more valuable than having a big 401(k) balance or being fire in five years. Next, by choosing not to retire, you can be a, you give yourself a path to stay engaged in life and engaged with people.

Retirement, especially for people who kind of just quit and drop out, is bad for the health. It's bad for the mental health. It's bad for the physical health. Many older people are devastatingly lonely, devastatingly lonely. When somebody drops out of life, out of work, they usually lose their most important social sphere.

I experienced this when I left a job with a social sphere to work independently and it's hard to recreate that. It's hard to recreate what you get when you just go to the office every day and see your friends. It's hard to recreate that. It takes much more work to be intentional about spending time with friends, etc., than it does where you go to an office every day.

When people retire, they often lose that engagement with other people. This especially is important because most of the time, people who are retired don't have that much social interaction in their community, especially in the American context where we don't really talk to our neighbors. They don't have much social interaction with their family members.

Obviously kids are out working all the time. Yeah, they come over once a week and that's great, but filling that same social connection is very, very hard. Now, you can sit around and argue with people on the internet and use your time that way, but that just doesn't sound healthy in the same way that going to a job is.

Being involved in life and being involved in the workforce is valuable for your mental health, which then of course influences your physical health. People who retire and who don't replace their time at work with a busy other social life, they die. They get sick and die. Now, you don't have to work at a job to have a social life.

Many people volunteer. They're part of clubs. They're a part of charities. They spend their time doing other things. They have a network of friends that they go boating with and do all kinds of things with. So it's not that you have to work to have engagement in life. No, of course, you don't have to do that.

But you have to have something. And for most people, the job, the income is that cornerstone that structures their week. So if you just rip that out and somebody is not super intentional about replacing that, it's very easy just to start to lose touch. The other thing is you stop being on top of your game and you stop being sharp if you just drop out.

Now, if you have a side business, a side hustle, a little something that you're still engaged in, you can maintain your sharpness. But being in the workforce where you have to compete is really good for staying sharp. And the practice of staying sharp in your career, staying sharp in your skills, makes a big difference in your engagement with life.

Learning is one of the most valuable things that you can do to stay young. Now, some people are self-directed strong learners, but most people don't seem to be. They seem to be forced to do that, usually by trying to stay employed, trying to stay in the workforce. And that competition of staying employed, staying in the workforce is really good for people, for most people at least.

Maybe there are some that it's not good for, but it seems to me to be good for most people to keep them sharp, to keep them involved and engaged. The challenge of life is helpful. It's valuable. So if you choose not to retire, you'll have an easy mechanism of staying engaged in life with people, to stay sharp and stay on top of your game, and that will be good for your health.

It'll be good for your sense of purpose and meaning. For most of us, the work that we do is a primary place that we find fulfillment and meaning in our life. If it's not, we should seriously consider adjusting that. Now, you can decide what that work is, but that work that we do is a primary source of meaning for all of us.

Next, a major benefit of choosing not to retire is I'm convinced if you will choose not to retire, you can make a massive positive impact on the world around you. I need more 80-year-old coworkers around me. I need more 85-year-old people who are teachers, who are teaching my children.

You and I both need to have people around us who have experience and the wisdom that comes with age to help us gain perspective. It is very difficult for those of us who are young to maintain perspective, but people who are older are able to share that perspective, and a good healthy society is a society that has 80-year-olds and 8-year-olds spending large amounts of time together.

The US American society in general is not healthy. As a society, we institutionalize our 8-year-olds so that they only learn from other 8-year-olds how to behave, how to act, what to do, what's in, what's not in. Then those 8-year-olds become 38-year-olds, and the 38-year-olds then institutionalize their 80-year-old parents.

And why wouldn't they? Because they were institutionalized at 8 years old. So you have this very unhealthy dynamic where the 8-year-olds really only care what the 10-year-olds and the 6-year-olds have to say, and the 8-year-olds look up to the 10-year-olds and they pick on the 6-year-olds, and the 38-year-olds spend all the time with 38-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 36-year-olds, and then the 80-year-olds are all stuck together in a nursing home, dying together, trying to figure out how to pass their time.

This is not healthy. It's got to change. Well, how does it change? Well, a lot of us try not to institutionalize our 8-year-olds, and if you keep an 8-year-old in contact with other 8-year-olds, but also with 38-year-olds and 80-year-olds, you'll make a much healthier, much more competent, much more self-confident child.

But then if you allow the 80-year-old to spend time working with the 8-year-old, you'll have a much happier, healthier 80-year-old. It's got to change. And I find it very frustrating when we take people who have wisdom and perspective and lessons to share with us, and we just stick them aside in an old folks' home.

It's not good. It's much better for the 80-year-old to be working, to be involved. But in order for that to change, we're going to have to change some things. First, we have to be very careful of discriminating against people, of not discriminating unjustly against young people and against old people.

We need to make sure that young people and old people are welcome in our society around us. My dream is always to have environments where 8-year-olds and 38-year-olds and 80-year-olds are collaborating together, each of them contributing their own useful, meaningful skills, contributions, things that are helpful. Now, this is very hard to do in a modern society where we all have specialized labor, specialized skills, and we spend our time in these artificial groups, usually called companies, which are very, very specialized.

It was much easier in an agrarian society, or seemingly much easier in an agrarian society, where the 8-year-old certainly couldn't do everything, but you could take an 8-year-old, especially in a non-mechanized farm, you can take an 8-year-old out, and the 8-year-old is really useful. It's hard when you get tractors and dangerous power equipment, things like that.

It's hard to have children around that. That can be very hazardous. But if you have a traditional, modestly or unmechanized farm, it's a quiet, healthy place, especially if it's a diverse farm where it's just not a manure pit, where it's actually a healthy farm. You can have 8-year-olds in that environment, and they're really useful.

Now they can't do as much work as a 38-year-old, of course, but they can do work. But then on the other side, the 80-year-old is also very useful. The 80-year-old brings wisdom, brings experience. And you think that's not valuable, just talk to somebody who actually grows something. You need to know when to plant, and all these things that you can't learn in a book.

You need that age and experience. Now it seems very hard in the modern context where almost none of us exist in that agrarian society and almost none of us want to go back to it. It seems very hard to figure out how do we keep that same integration. I don't have your solution.

I simply point it out as a problem and say let's work on that, all of us, try to figure out how to keep all of the generations of our families engaged and working together. I don't know if it's possible in a corporate environment, but it's at least possible in your home.

So build a home that embraces the old and embraces the young and embraces the middle-aged and takes advantage of all of those things together. Next, a major benefit of the power of choosing not to retire. You can generate massive, massive amounts of wealth. And I'll show this to you in just a minute with some numbers.

But just think for a moment. If you are working and you're practicing frugality, you're practicing earning a strong income, you're saving a lot of money, and then instead of simply drawing down that capital and spending it, you keep working for yourself, providing for your living with your income instead of with your capital, you can leave behind a massive inheritance for your family or for your family foundation or for something that you're desiring to impact.

Now this is a concept that it's not that we don't work with it in the modern era, but it seems like we make this intense, we live in an intensely individualized society, especially in the United States, where we all just think of taking care of ourselves. And yeah, we think about taking care of others, but we don't think about working together.

But if we could develop the skills and develop the practice of actually working together, there are tremendous opportunities that can be had. Specifically, and I'm talking about financial planning, financially working together. First, there are phases of life at which some people, where it's hard to work, for example. And it's hard to do this because you have to balance out those who are makers and those who are takers.

And what I observe is people frequently who are determined to be productive usually don't want money. I don't want my parents' money. I want to care for my own family, care for my own children. But I don't deny the fact that this would be a very convenient time of life to receive money from my parents.

Most of the time, the way that inheritances work is they often come in at a time where they don't make that big of a difference. An 85-year-old parent dies and leaves the money to their 50-year-old. Well, the person didn't really need it when they were 50. They needed it more when they were 30.

But then you have to ask the question, am I actually helping the 30-year-old? Do they have the character where they're actually being productive and industrious? Or am I harming the 30-year-old by keeping them on economic outpatient care? Economic outpatient care is not good for them. But if the 30-year-old is industrious, then that money can be helpful.

What's interesting is if you'll put these things together in a family environment, oftentimes it should be the parents and the grandparents who are investing in the projects of the younger people. Now, I've been working on this and trying to prove things out and also researching, etc. But this should be a primary source of family finance.

Older generations should be a primary source of family financing. One of the unique things about modern American society is in most circles, I don't think in the truly wealthy, but in most circles, people automatically look to the corporate solution to a problem. So if somebody looks to buy investments, they say, "Well, what does the financial advisor say?

What does Wall Street say?" And often, those of us who are parents, we don't raise our children to have capacity and financial acumen and investing skills, etc. We just kind of say we send them out, let the institution teach them how to be good employees. And so they're not really prepared to be good investors.

But there's another way. And if you study the wealthy, I don't think in every circumstance, but in many circumstances, what you'll see is you'll see a passing down of investment knowledge and you'll see an investment in ideas. Wealthy parents seem to me, from my research, to be much more predisposed to being willing to invest in the projects and the schemes of their children than people who are not wealthy.

And this is kind of wacky in the sense that, of course, if you don't have any money, it's hard to invest in other people's projects, but a lot of us do have quite a bit of money. It's just tied up in a 401(k). And I think it should never just be all tied up where it has to be invested in stocks.

Now, you can do it with a self-directed 401(k) or just make sure you always have money in other accounts so that when your children come and say, "I've got this project," or "I've got this thing that I'm working on," that you can endow them, that you can give to them, that you can invest with them.

And I've always had this vision of having family investment companies working together because the perfect scenario in my mind is to have a family, the family meeting. I want my 80-year-old parents and my eight-year-old children to be all at the table with us, with me and my wife, while we're sitting there saying, "Here's our plans," and to be working as a family unit.

Because within the family unit, you can assess character, competence. You can assess work ethic, diligence, wisdom, et cetera. And you know each other really well. And so the family should be where a lot of these things are happening. And if you will take a long-term perspective and not make yourself useless and not keep every dime for your own payment, for your own money as you get older, then you can be much more free with your money.

It's very hard. When I was a financial advisor, it's very hard to sit and look at a 70-year-old person who has $1.2 million that's set aside to last them for the next 30 years and to then look at that 70-year-old person who wants to take $300,000 and invest it in their child's new business.

It's very hard to say, "Yes, you should do that." Because if the $300,000 is a loss, it really puts a pinch on the 70-year-old person, really bad. And so you would find in a scenario like that, you would generally find the financial advisor open to the idea, but you would find the financial advisor being very discouraging and saying, "This is a big risk," because is your son actually going to care for you if you get older?

And a lot of times, then, of course, the 70-year-old doesn't want to be cared for if they run out of money. They just, "I've got to take care of myself. I don't want to be a burden on my kids." Whereas if that 70-year-old person has $1.2 million and still has an income coming in and says, "Hey, I'm making $80,000 a year, and I'm going to keep on making $80,000 a year.

I'm not going to change," now it's much easier to say, "Yeah, go ahead and invest $300,000." And so the whole concept of retirement leads to financial scarcity because you're trying to just spend from a fixed pot of money, instead of a mindset of financial abundance where you've got flows of income and you're living on income, saving out of income, and you have pots of capital that are growing and continuing to grow.

Now take this on and think about the massive generational wealth that you can build. And if you just simply build the capital, set up the appropriate succession plans within your family, you build the family advisory firm, you build the family charity, you build the things where the kids' college educations are paid for, etc., now it can be a tremendous blessing.

And if you talk to somebody who has far-seeing forebears and they know that the grandparents come up and they know, okay, all the 20 grandchildren are always raised knowing that there's an educational fund there. You don't have to start your life deep in debt. We want you to get a good education.

We want you to go to college. And we know that grandparents can pay for it. And if the parents know that the grandparents are willing to invest in them, etc., it can create a totally different family dynamic. Now it's certainly not utopia. It's not perfect. But it can build something that's really, really strong and it can help to keep families together.

Now, you can do that. You can endow that kind of family tree. You can do that. But you can't do it if you just make money enough to live on and then you spend it all on your maintenance and support. But you can do it if you work a little bit longer.

So then finally, I would say by giving up, by choosing not to retire or choosing to recognize that it would be perfectly fine for you to choose not to retire, you can make up for lost time, so to speak. And what I mean is I'm talking to the 50-year-old who feels like, "Okay, now my kids are 15, but I'm behind on retirement," or the 60-year-old or the 70-year-old, etc.

"I'm behind on retirement." No. You've got to get that mindset up and create something that will really work for the next 30 years. Don't measure yourself to other people. Just focus on what would work up well for you. And if you're worried about making up for lost time, the easiest way to do that is just to add on a few more years of working.

Now, there are all these other benefits to it, but financially, you can completely make up for the profligacy of your youth if you'll add another five years or 10 years of your working lifetime. So those are just some of the benefits. That's not an all-exclusive list, but I hope you'll think about those things because there are really compelling reasons to be intentional in your choice not to retire.

How do you do this well? Here are some things that I do think you have to think of because this is not all a utopia. First, if you're going to choose not to retire and be satisfied with that decision, you must choose a career that fits you well and that will provide you with a comfortable life balance.

You have to have something that's a good fit for you because if you dread Monday mornings, because you dread going to work, you're not going to be happy about that. It's not a good way to live. And I think there are a couple of components about this. First, I think it's important to get right on the attitude towards work.

Work is not a curse. Work is a blessing. Work is not a curse. God didn't curse man when he said, "You have to work in the garden." Man was given work in the Garden of Eden long before the curse came. The curse just simply made the work hard. But work itself is not a curse.

So work is not something that should be detested and come against. It's one of the most... It's really wrong. And you can... I can preach the sermon on it. I can preach it biblically. We can just simply do the observational component though. How healthy is it? Let's just use an evidentialist discussion.

How healthy is it just to look at work and say, "Wow, work is bad." You can't even make that... If you have a little bit of awareness of the world and watch a little bit, that is not a healthy attitude. Work is not a curse. Work is a blessing.

Now, there are some types of work, and some careers, some jobs that can certainly be a curse or feel like a curse for you. But you can change those things. None of us are slaves. If we were slaves, we could still be content and simply serve our masters with a good attitude and be content as slaves.

So if you are a slave, don't reject your slavery. Work at it. But we're not slaves. So we can choose careers. We can avoid ethical issues. We can avoid things that are not well suited for our skills. There is more career choice now than there has ever been in the history of the world.

For the vast majority of the human time, the work that you did was simply based upon work that you did because that's what your parents did. Your name was Mason because your dad was a stone mason, so you're going to be a stone mason. You just did what the family did.

Or you farmed, just like everybody else did. Or you were fished, because that's what everybody else did. We don't live in that world anymore. There are millions of permutations of work. Now that can be overwhelming because it's hard to find something that's suited for you, but it's doable. So you need to choose a career that fits you and that fits your skill sets.

You also need to choose a career that brings a comfortable life balance. Now the term work-life balance has become a cliche, where it was used a lot. Now people make fun of it, say, "Well, it doesn't exist." But it does bring an important recognition that you cannot, for example, you cannot sustainably work 90 hours a week, 52 weeks per year for decades, no matter who you are, no matter what you do.

That is not sustainable. Now to say that we have to have a sustainable life balance doesn't mean that you have to say, "Well, I can only work 10 hours a week, 10 weeks a year for 10 years." No. I don't say that. But six days a week, 10 hours a day, eight to 10 hours a day, you can do that.

Maybe 48, 50 weeks a year. You can do that sustainably over time. If you want to work 35 weeks a year, 40 weeks a year, that's up to you. But you can't be on 100% all the time. You'll burn up. You'll burn out. And so you've got to find a comfortable balance.

You can't produce at 100% all the time. You can't sprint all the time. So in recognizing that, you should put a little bit of moderation on yourself. And maybe I'm wrong. I think I'm right. But this is what I tell myself. Being an entrepreneur, I often just want to just work, work, work, work, work.

But I recognize, no, I can't. For example, I used to stay up late. Stay up late, get up early. For whatever reason, when I do that, I could do it one night. If I do it for more than a couple nights, I get sick. And I go through this cycle again and again and again.

And where I would just say, that's it. And I have this intense mental dedication. I'm going to work like a maniac. And then I get sick and everything falls apart. Finally, maybe I'm getting mature. Maybe I'm becoming wise. I don't know. Finally, I said, I'm not going to do that.

I go to bed, same time every night. I wake up when my body's done sleeping. I'm going to work a reasonable amount. And it changes things. It changes things. It brings them to a comfortable balance. So work is important. It's a blessing, not a curse. But it has to be done in an appropriate amount, an appropriate balance.

Each day can have enough work, but you can't have too much work. So you have to choose a career that will fit you well. You have to choose a career that will allow you a comfortable life balance. You must also choose a career that you will be engaged with and that you can grow in.

Now that doesn't mean that you have to be at the cutting edge all the time. For example, I come from, one of my grandfathers was a farmer. At 90, he died when he was I think 93 years old. At 90 years old, my grandfather was still engaged with his farming.

He was always excited about the new crop he was going to plant. He was researching this new thing. He just bought a new tractor. He was building windmills to do wind generation. He was buying and selling land. And although he had farmed, he was raised on a farm when he was a kid and he'd farmed his entire lifetime.

He was always engaged with farming because there was an unlimited amount that he could learn and he was always excited by the next new thing, trying the next thing. And so he had, even though it seemed like a very, we've been doing this for millennia, he had a great deep engagement with his work.

And farming is a good example because it's the kind of work that fits well into a lifestyle. You have seasons that you're working like crazy, where you're early and working late, and you have seasons when you're sitting around and not working so much. You have the winter there for rest.

I think it could be a challenge in the modern age when the farmers harvest till two in the morning with electric lights and everything. You got to figure out how to balance those things. But even with something like farming, there was an engagement. I watched him be engaged his entire lifetime.

Now I think there are other careers where it just isn't so easy. I don't know, for me, I look at something like a truck driver. When I was a kid I wanted to drive trucks, drive over the road trucks, because I loved to drive across the United States. But the problem is, a truck driver, what's your opportunity for growth?

Basically it's the same old, same old every single day. Now you can get a little bit better at running the gears, you can get a little bit safer in your driving, you can see a new road and see the mountain you've seen before, but at the end of the day, I don't see how there's a lot of opportunity for growth over the long term in being a truck driver, unless maybe you run a business and you're saving for buying more trucks and hiring more and getting bigger.

So I would look at something like a truck driver and say, "That's a perfect in-between job. That's a perfect short-term job. That's a perfect, 'Hey, I got to get out of debt,' or, 'I'm going to save money so I can start a business.' That's a perfect in-between job." But I don't see how that kind of job can be done with satisfaction from 20 to 100.

But if you will think about it and build a job for yourself that will allow for you to grow, if you're going to be a consultant, financial advisor, an engineer, a lawyer, a physician, a teacher, a farmer, if you can see in your career that there are opportunities for you to grow, then I think you've got something that you can stick with.

You want to work in a career that is changing over time so that you can always stay on the cutting edge and, if possible, that you can be the one pushing that cutting edge forward. So find something that fascinates you and then choose to be fascinated by it and really engage with it.

I think if you have a career that engages you and a career that's changing, that'll be a career that you can do for your whole lifetime. Next, you must have the autonomy to grow and change over time. And I think here you have to put yourself into a position where you have some measure of self-direction.

I think it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be an entrepreneur, but you do at least have to be moving in the direction of management or in management of a company. You cannot be in a job where you're just going to put the same widget on the same doodad every single day and not advance, because then how do you have the chance to grow?

Whereas if you're in management at a company or if you're an executive of some kind, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a consultant, then you've developed more and more autonomy. So let's say you're a lawyer and you like practicing in one section of law, but then you realize, "I'm kind of bored with this.

I want to move in another direction of law." Then you can devote 20% of your time to the new section of law. The thing that bugged me when I was a financial advisor was my business was largely static, where I had a certain parts of financial advice that I could give, but I couldn't exercise my interests to go beyond that.

Or at least I couldn't do it comfortably. I couldn't do it profitably. I couldn't do it comfortably. I couldn't adjust things. So you need to be in a position to where you can change what you're doing to change with the markets, to change with the time, and to change with your interests.

At any point in time, I think we should be looking at our schedules, looking at our activities, looking at our markets, and pruning off maybe the top, bottom 20% of things that just we're not too interested anymore, and move in another direction, add on another 20% of things that we're really interested in.

So you have to have the ability to direct yourself and to control yourself so that you can grow and change over time. And that's going to require you to be in a position with at least some autonomy. So set a goal of getting yourself to a position of some autonomy.

Next, I think you need to have a career that won't expel you due to just normal things like you're physically wearing out or due to some kind of policy that discriminates against you because of your age. So example, the physical wearing out. One summer when I was in high school, I worked for a tile setter.

And I quickly learned, even though I was a high school student, that there's a reason why I have never met a 70-year-old tile setter. It's hard on your body. It's hard to make a living on your knees. Your back hurts. Your knees hurt, et cetera. Now there are some guys who can make it go for a longer period of time.

They're usually very lightweight. They're not overweight. They take care of themselves. They develop techniques and things like that. But there's a reason why old tile setters become company owners and managers rather than keeping on working as a tile setter. So be careful because if you choose a career that will wear out your body, you can't do that forever.

I saw an interview recently with a guy who's a world champion bull rider. And I was just amazed by it. He's a world champion. He really is the best in the field. He's renowned to be the best. But I was amazed at how he very explicitly said in the interview, "I know I'm going to be crippled up like crazy in 20 years, but I want to be the best in the world." I can't imagine selling your body out as a 20 and a 30-year-old knowing that you're going to be crippled at 45 or 50.

I can't imagine guys that do a long football career or one that I saw a documentary on Ronnie Coleman. I guess it was on Netflix. You can go and check it out. But when I was in high school, I used to read bodybuilder magazines. And there was this bodybuilder named Ronnie Coleman who at that time was just winning every competition.

The dude was incredible, massive, incredibly lean. Just he was kind of the specimen of the bodybuilding perfection. I was stunned when I just saw his name on Netflix one time and I flipped it on. I was stunned to see that he can't even walk at this point in time.

He had all these surgeries and he's walking with canes because of the intense abuse that his body went through, through all those years of moving thousands of pounds of weight around. So those are just a few examples. Just recognize that you need to have a career where you're not going to wear out your body.

Now in time, amazing modern medical science, you can swap out knees and hips and elbows and all kinds of crazy things, but still don't wear out your body. So recognize that. Recognize also that your physical strength in time is going to diminish. So if you are in a career where your physical strength is primary, recognize that should be a fairly short-lived career.

And move yourself in a direction where your brain can be your tool. Because over time, whereas your body may wear out, as long as your brain can stay healthy, your wisdom and your knowledge can accumulate. And you can experience the compound effect from the accumulation of interesting ideas, of specific knowledge in time to generate, I mean to be really amazing, to have amazing opportunities.

So plan accordingly. Make sure that there's an important mental component in what you're doing. You have to have a career that you won't wear out in, rather one that you can stay sharp in, and which is going to use your wisdom and your judgment, which will develop as you get older, rather than your physical strength.

Physical strength is going to go down. Wisdom and knowledge continue growing forever. Think Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, not Ronnie Coleman. Now Ronnie Coleman, to his credit, that same determination that served him to become a world champion dozens of times over, is helping him to recover physically. But it was just, it was shocking to me to see this guy who, when I was in high school, was the epitome of physical perfection, walking around with crutches.

Amazing. Next, make sure that you're not in a career that's going to expel you due to age discrimination. Now that is largely minimized now. There are still some companies where when you hit 65, they're not going to have you around anymore. You've got, you're forced out. There's still some, but there's not as much as it used to be.

But there are still places where you're going to face age discrimination. And like with any kind of discrimination that you face, whenever you face discrimination, you have to adjust it. And you have to go somewhere where you're going to be valuable, or you have to shield yourself in some way so that people aren't aware of your age.

Now those are the only two ways of dealing with discrimination. So think that through as well. Because if you're going to face age discrimination as you age, then you've got to think ahead. How are you going to deal with that discrimination? How are you going to either move yourself from where your age is a liability to where your age is an asset?

And or how are you going to shield the perception or the knowledge of your age from somebody else? Now, let me give you some planning ideas here. And here's where we get some nuts and bolts of finances and especially some money things for you. First, I think that if you're going to walk away mentally from the idea of retirement, it's really healthy for you to bring in some other concepts around the phases of your life.

So I think you should plan to have a series of career changes and job changes throughout your life. Lifetime employment seems to be a thing of the past. But that doesn't mean that you can't be employed throughout your lifetime. It's just not going to be with one company. It's probably not going to be in one career.

And I don't think this is a bad thing because most of us, if you put in 10 years at a career, you feel like, "I pretty well got this covered." So it's time for the next career because to stay sharp, you're going to need to be learning and growing.

Now, ideally, you're in a situation where you can kind of move systematically from one career to the next career without there being a major break. You can develop skills and tools and ideas. So for example, I draw on, in the work that I do for you now, I'm drawing on a vast amount of knowledge and experience that I gained doing finances.

But over the last five years, I've developed skills with being able to articulate concepts, building teaching skills. I've developed technical skills, marketing skills, et cetera. Not only to the highest degree, I still have a lot of room to grow. But I could now take the things that I've developed now and I could completely walk away from money to an entirely new area of interest and use the skills that have accumulated in the last five years over the next set of changes.

And then I can use the skills from that next five years to the next set of five years. And so that should be the goal. As your skills grow, you can just simply adjust your focus. You can adjust what you're doing. You can move in a new direction. But use the skills that you've been developing.

So make that a plan in advance. Plan to have a series of career changes. Plan to have job changes throughout your life and then pursue it systematically. I think if you're going to walk away from retirement, I think it's important to schedule into your life and into your career opportunities of liberty and freedom from work.

So I would say plan to have a sabbatical fairly regularly, maybe every decade or so, every five years, eight years, 10 years, 15 years. You think it through. I don't know that we could fit these things into a perfect predetermined timeline. I'm going to work nine years and take one year off every single decade.

It seems to be more organic than that. Markets going up, markets going down. This company is dying. I got a better job offer. The housing prices are good. I'll sell my house. Kids are graduating. It seems to be much more organic. At least in my mind, it should be more organic.

But plan ahead to have a sabbatical regularly. Have some time off. And the interesting thing about a sabbatical is you can enjoy those things about retirement that a lot of people would really like to look forward to. You can enjoy sleeping in every Monday morning. You can enjoy sitting on a beach, playing golf every day, whatever your thing is.

You can enjoy that. But after you enjoy that for a few months, six months, a year, that's probably enough. And you'll probably be able to go back into a regular work schedule with a lot more focus and dedication. And so plan that in. Plan it. Now I don't know that you have to predict it, but at least plan for it.

Set aside money so that you have money that you can spend on a sabbatical. And watch for the times at which it's convenient for you to take that sabbatical. If you're in something like academia where sabbaticals are regular and are recognized, you can plan more specifically. But if you're like most of us working in the corporate world or working in some kind of entrepreneurship, watch the market.

And if you see the market going down, you see a recession coming on, take your sabbatical. Or if you see that your company is really struggling, get laid off, take a sabbatical. Plan to have a sabbatical so you can get some of those things that most people are looking forward to in retirement.

Now if you study the people who become very financially successful and retire early, what you usually find is that after they retire, they'll go and pursue some—I wish I could have a better term because I don't love to use the term hedonistic in this context, but I just don't know better.

But like they'll go and pursue some purely hedonistic pursuit, some purely pleasurable pursuit. Going to the Caribbean, sitting on the beach, drinking all day every day, or going and playing the greatest golf courses of the world. They'll go and pursue that for a time. And then their energy for that seems to run out.

And then they start to itch for the new thing. And it seems to take a few years, a year, two years, three years, a few years before they have that itch. So recognize that that would happen to you because it happens to most other people, so it'll probably happen to you, and plan for it.

A sabbatical is a good way to satisfy that itch, that break that all of us need, and then go back and start something new. Start a new business, start a new job, et cetera. Next, plan to spend time with the people in your life during the time that it makes the most sense.

It doesn't make sense to spend all the time when your children are in your house working like a maniac so that you can be retired at 65 and then want to spend time with your children who then don't have time for you. It doesn't make sense for you to work like a maniac when your brother is sick and dying from cancer so that you can write a big check to his favorite foundation when he dies.

It doesn't make sense for you to work like a maniac when your parents are aging so that you can somehow have more money down the road. These are the things that make life important. Now, I'm not going to not work just because I have children. I'm not going to not work just in case my brother is sick.

I'm not going to not work if my parents are aging and need care. But if you'll keep the financial flexibility so that you don't have to work all the time, then you can really take the most advantage of the time with the people in your life when it makes sense.

So you can spend more mornings playing with your children or coaching their little league or whatever it is that you do with your children. When your brother is sick, you can come and you can help him. You can take time off from work to be with your sick brother.

When your parents are aging and need care, you can work less or walk away from work or take a sabbatical to care for them. Now, these don't fit into neat time periods. Sick parents, aging parents could be one year of care and then they die or it could be 20 years of care.

Your brother could be sick for a month and then die or it could be a year. The point is, if you're not so worried about retirement, then you can recognize the value of the people in your life and commit to them. And I've never heard somebody who said, "Man, I wish I'd just spent more time working when my children were young." I've never heard from somebody who said, "Man, I wish I'd finished that project instead of going to see my brother before he died." I've never heard from somebody who said, "I wish I'd been in Japan when my parents were sick instead of caring for them." Never heard it.

So recognize these things are important and don't let retirement get in the way of that. Adjust your life so that you can care and spend time with the people in your life. Finally, for those of you who stayed with me till now, take advantage of some of the interesting financial planning ideas that can happen if you choose not to retire and if you'll fit these things together.

So give me some examples. If you are planning that in your life, there's going to be a series of perhaps career changes, job changes, perhaps you'll be taking a sabbatical, perhaps you'll be spending time with people. It brings up some interesting things in terms of your living conditions. Let's talk about housing.

When you're young, you can live really cheap, save a lot of money, recognizing that when you have children, you'll buy more of a house. But then instead of planning to keep the same house for 50 years after your children are gone, you can plan to get rid of the house and downsize into a small little one-bedroom apartment and you can really enjoy that.

And then in the United States, under the US tax code with the exclusion on capital gains from your house, you can build up a lot of money in terms of tax-free gain. So set a goal of trying to figure out how do I maximize this $500,000 of tax-free gain in my property.

So can you fit that in? Can you buy a house cheap and then do something to improve its value or choose it some way so that when you go on sabbatical, you can sell the house and capture $300,000 of tax-free gain, set that aside and use that money to live on during the time of your sabbatical?

Or perhaps you can time your sabbaticals with the real estate market. So you look around, you recognize that house prices are really high right now and now would be a good time to go ahead and sell the house, sell the house, lock in the tax-free gain, go on sabbatical, wait for the recession to come, real estate prices drop, then you go ahead and buy your next house.

Right now, as I record this in May of 2019, right now might be a useful time for you to think about something like that. Now I don't know your market, I don't know your situation, but if I owned a house with a bunch of capital gain in it right now and if I'd been working something steadily for years, I would be very seriously thinking about selling my house right now and adjusting and then wait for some kind of change in recession, change in the economy, change in the real estate market and buy a house cheaper.

So interesting things like maximizing that $500,000 for a couple, $250,000 for an individual, maximizing that ability to have tax-free gain could be extremely valuable. You could do that every two years. Two years seems a little too much for most of us, but once every five years, once every ten years isn't that big of a deal.

Next can you take advantage of your IRAs and your 401ks in order to generate maximum tax efficiency on your investments for life? Now let's start with the obvious one. The obvious one is a Roth IRA. One of the great things about a Roth IRA is there is no age limit to your contributions and there are no required minimum distributions for a Roth IRA.

There is no age limit and there are no required minimum distributions on your Roth IRA. The only qualification for you to be able to put money into a Roth IRA is that you have earned income. So if your ten-year-old has $5,000 of earned income, your ten-year-old can make a $5,000 Roth IRA contribution.

And if you are 100 years old and if you have at least $5,000 of earned income, then you can make a $5,000 contribution to your Roth IRA. And the numbers on this can be incredible if you add the fullness of time. Let me just give you an example of how insane these numbers can be.

Let's pretend that you are 30 years old and you plan to invest until you're 100 years old, which is $5,000 every year, which by the way, I'm going to use age 100. The reason that I use that number is a couple of fold. First of all, I recognize that many people don't think they're going to live that long.

I come from a long-lived family. My grandmother right now is 104. My other grandmother died when she was 96, other grandfather when he was 95, other grandfather when he was 93. So I've always thought in terms of 95 years or 100 years old being the average age of people dying.

I have a great-grandmother who died on her 100th birthday. And so that's just for me personally, I always just think of 100, hopefully, assuming that things go as I hope in my own life, I plan to live to at least to 100 if not longer. Also then, with some of the modern changes in the advancements in medicine, it is very reasonable to expect that lifespans could increase in the coming decades, especially as we make modern, many incredible advancements in longevity.

Right now, lifespans, especially for men, for white men in the United States are going down. But a lot of that seems to be due to drug abuse, alcoholism, basically lifestyle problems. And so if you can avoid alcoholism, being addicted to drugs, etc., if you can avoid some of those, and there seems to be, I don't see any reason why you have to plan to die when you're 80 years old.

And if you study what some of the human longevity experiments some of these people are doing, it's really incredible to see the things that could be coming in the next few decades. I'm super interested in that stuff. But it really changes everything if you just put the numbers out.

So I'm going to stop at 100. Lots of people are far more aggressive. People who are really involved in the cutting edge of human longevity are very aggressive and 120, 150 years old, etc. I'll just stop at 100, but that's why I use these numbers. So back to my numbers.

Pretend that you're 30 years old and you plan to invest until you're 100 years old. You're just going to invest $5,000 every year. So the goal is to earn enough to provide yourself and just invest $5,000 per year. Well, if I run that numbers, we start with 70 years from 30 to 100, $5,000 per year, and I'm just going to keep that contribution flat, 5,000 every year.

I'm going to ignore inflation for this calculation, starting with nothing. And let's say that we earn 10% of our money. Let's use a double digit number. Not necessarily easy, not easy with stocks, but doable with many forms of investment. Let's use 10% of our money. At 100 years old, you know how much money you would have?

Take a moment and guess. $5,000 per year from 30 to 100. $43,381,000. $43,381,000 because you invested $5,000 per year. And if you do that inside of a Roth IRA, and if the government doesn't change the rules, if they don't start taxing that money more, then all of that growth on the money would be received completely income tax free by you or by anybody that you leave that money to.

And your total contribution, by the way, the magic of time would be only $350,000 to that account, be $43 million. Now if you drop it to, let's say 7%, well, major decrease, $8.6 million, but that should show you how important investment returns are. But still, $8.6 million if you just fund a Roth IRA every year from 30 to 100.

Now can anybody do that? Maybe not anybody, but can almost any listener of radical personal finance who is an hour and 14 minutes into this kind of show, can you do it? Of course you can. Of course you can. So do it. Now what about a 401(k)? Here's what's interesting.

In a 401(k), if you set things up right, you can keep your money invested and you can never stop if you do it right. And the neat thing about a 401(k) is a 401(k) gives you interesting flexibility to put away a lot more money. Now this is very hard to predict because we're going to use very long amounts of time.

How do you predict what happens to 401(k)s in the coming decades? Let's just assume everything stays the same. And let's assume that you invest in a 401(k) from age 30 to age 100. So by age 30, you get yourself in a situation where you're making at least $100,000 a year so you can comfortably max out a 401(k) and still have plenty of other money set aside.

More is always better. But let's just say you fund a 401(k). Well, in 2019, as I record this, you can put $19,000 of employee contributions into a 401(k). Ignore employer contributions. Let's just say you invest $19,000. Well, what is $19,000 worth if you invest it for 70 years? Ever run the math?

Let's do it. $19,000 in 70 years, starting with nothing, and let's use 10% as our investment return. Future value on that 401(k) account? Take a guess. Say it out loud right now. $164,848,114. $165,000,000 by maxing out a 401(k) from age 30 to age 100. I repeat, $165,000,000 by maxing out a 401(k) from age 30 to age 100.

That's the power of long-term investing. But what most of us do is we look at the charts and say, "Man, if I'd started at 18, then by 65, I could have $100 million or by 75, whatever." Anyway, the point is, "I could have this $100 million if I'd started at 18, but I didn't start at 18 and I'm 40." Well run the numbers from 40 to 100 and make yourself recognized.

"Wow, I could still do that." That is within the realm of any person who wants to, to develop potentially a $50 million or $100 million portfolio just by working and investing through a 401(k). I ignored employer contributions. I used a flat $19,000. I didn't adjust it for inflation, which you could, and I did assume an aggressive rate.

But if we drop it to 7%, 7%, $32 million. So you can endow your family and you can change your family tree if you keep working and you don't stop and then spend all the 401(k) on your retirement. Now in case you're interested about the rules of this, I would point out to you that keeping it, what about required minimum distributions?

Here's how you handle the technical side of it. So if you are 70 and a half, of course, at starting at the age of 70 and a half, you have to start taking required minimum distributions from a traditional IRA or from a 401(k), 403(b) and their brethren. So if you are continuing to work, you don't have to take required minimum distributions out of your 401(k) as long as you don't own more than 5% of the company that you work for.

So this would be a planning point for you. If you are 65 years old and you have a million dollars in traditional IRAs and you don't want to take required minimum distributions, what you need is you need to go and get a job for a company that has a 401(k) and you need to work there so that you can put your money from the IRA into the 401(k) and as long as you don't own more than 5% of the company that you're working for, then you don't have to take any required minimum distributions because all the money is in the 401(k) and as long as you stay actively employed, you can keep contributing to that 401(k) and not have to take required minimum distributions.

Now if you own more than 5% of the company, which would be fairly common for people who are older workers, usually what happens is somebody will work for a company for a time, then they'll start their own consulting company, etc., they'll start a solo 401(k). So if you own more than 5% of the company, you do have to take required minimum distributions, but at least if you have a 401(k), you can still contribute.

And if you run the math, you can still put, let's say you put in $19,000 and you have to take out $1,500 of required minimum distributions, you're still going to be farther ahead because basically what you're doing is you're having a net of $17,500 into the account. So even if you do have to take required minimum distributions, still keep participating because you'll still come out ahead if you participate in the account.

So you should consider that. I try to get older people to make sure, hey, keep a job. Keep a job going. It's good for your asset protection, it's good for your health, etc. Even if you're doing something fairly modest, and I don't want to make fun of modest work, so it's not a pejorative use of the word, just simply that if you're doing something modest, you're working at a coffee shop.

I think one of my dream jobs, someday I'll probably own a coffee shop just because I like hanging out in coffee shops. Go work at one. If you're working at a cigar bar, work at a restaurant, work at a greeter, do customer service, do sales, do something. If you have a 401(k) and if you can make enough to where you can make some 401(k) contributions, you can at least avoid taking RMDs.

And that can be helpful if you are older and you're trying to figure out how to accumulate money and you're going to work until 75 or 80. If you at least have a job where you have access to 401(k), you can avoid your RMDs. That'll help you accumulate more money.

And it can be a really efficient thing to do. What I would do, I would go and get a job within a family business. Now you have to be careful of the controlled group rules. For example, minor children, if I were working for a business that was owned by my wife, then of course her ownership would be attributed to me.

If I were working for a parent, it would only be attributed to me if my parent owns more than 50% of the company. But of course we would assume that my parents would be dead by then. Siblings, you can work for siblings and that's not considered to be attributed ownership.

For children, if let's say you're working for a company that one of your children owns, you can get by with that. For a minor child, your minor child's ownership is always attributed to you as a parent. But if you were working for an adult child, the adult child's ownership is attributed to you only if the adult child owns more than 50% of the company.

So there are some ways that you can adjust it. Same thing with grandchildren. So what I would want to be doing, if I were 100 years old however, is I would want to be working for a family business as an advisor, perhaps doing sales, perhaps being an advisor. I would want to have a nice healthy expense account with that company.

I'd want to have a nice healthy salary that wouldn't be taxed too much but that would give me an opportunity to contribute to 401k. And I would want to make sure that I had enough autonomy in my day and in my responsibilities that I could come into work every day at 8am but I could also not come into work every day at 8am.

And that's one of the great things is if you've built wisdom, if you've built yourself to a knowledge worker, if you've developed yourself to be a valuable person, you have the autonomy and almost anything that anybody wants to do in retirement can be done while you're working full time.

If I wanted to go to London and travel, I could go to London today, I could write the whole trip off under business activity and I could do my business. And you can go and you can travel and time spent fishing is work time if you're engaging with customers.

You can travel, you can entertain, you can do all those activities. All those things work as long as you are in a management or a productive capacity. As long as you are a highly compensated person and you're in a place where you do financially valuable work. So that's what I would want to be doing at 90.

I wouldn't want to necessarily, there's nothing wrong with going and working in a coffee shop but I would rather be the coffee buyer, traveling throughout Central America and doing the deals with the coffee growers. Or I would rather be doing something like that than just working in a coffee shop.

Then there are other interesting things. Can you fund education accounts and then use them to send yourself back to school to retrain for your next career? If I had a 529 account, I was funding it, I'd take it and spend it on myself and I'd go to law school in Paris or something like that.

And then of course, use your money and set up a private foundation, a family foundation and then you work for the foundation. And this way you can keep your engagement with work, you can keep your income and you can make sure that the bulk of your wealth is now being properly used and you can pass this down through the family and build that strong family culture.

So these are just some simple ideas. I try to keep things simple and not go too deep. But if you really embrace the idea of not retiring, it opens up a tremendous opportunity to you. If you never have to plan to live on your money, you can generate massive amounts of money and the things that you can do with that money are so important.

One of the proverb that I think about from time to time in the Bible, it says, "A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous." One of the interesting things is it often doesn't seem like the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous because we come on in two-year periods and say, "Look, the sinners have all the money." But if you take that out over decades, you'll often see that the sin in somebody's life leads to so many failings, they wind up losing the money and the wealth is sitting there and gets accumulated by the righteous.

Back to the beginning, leaving inheritance to the children's children. You need a lot of money to leave an inheritance to the children's children. And that inheritance isn't just money or it shouldn't be just money, in my opinion. You have to make sure that your children's children are ready for the money, but it should also be money and you can do that.

So if you are behind on retirement, so to speak, quote unquote, the way that people say, "I'm behind." Take heart. You can adjust things. And I could tell stories. Let me finish with a couple of stories just because I promised earlier I would say one and I forgot. There are a couple of people that I did financial planning work for that really just impacted me.

One of them that most impacted me was a guy I met who was an entrepreneur. He ran a landscaping company and the landscaping company was moderately profitable, but he and his wife both wanted to become teachers. And so what he did was for a few years, he had not finished college early in his life.

He was very smart, man. He just had not gone to college. And so he did his landscaping company. He sold his landscaping company. Then he took a job working as a private gardener for a wealthy family on Palm Beach. And that provided him with an appropriate basically work-life balance where he could just go to work, do a job.

He was using the skills that he had developed running his large landscaping company, but he was doing it in a job that gave him time. Then in time, he went back to school at night and he got his college degree and he got his teaching certificate. And what he wanted to do is he wanted to go and teach high school history.

He loved history. He loved to teach history. And so he wanted to teach high school history. So he and his wife both, they had four children. Their children were mostly grown. Youngest was about 13 when I met him. And so he and his wife both were planning to become teachers, full-time teachers.

And he actually did it. After he started working with me a year later after I met him, he quit his job as a gardener and he got a teaching job. And the thing they loved about the teaching job is the teaching job provided them with everything that they wanted.

It provided him with work that he really cared about. He wanted to teach high school students and he wanted to teach history. He really wanted to have that impact on the lives of those young men and women. It also provided them with a really livable schedule. Teachers, some of them, yeah, have to go in at 7 o'clock and leave at 7 o'clock.

But there's no reason. And he was teaching in the government schools. If you're teaching in a government school, you don't need to spend all of that time there. If you're good, if you're diligent, if you make good use of your time, you can go in when you need to be there and you can leave at 3.30.

And that was what he did. He worked hard, went in at 7.30, left at 3.30, which was a very livable lifestyle for him during the school year. Then as a teacher, of course, he had all the holidays free, never had to worry about that. And he had this massive summer vacation.

And he and his wife would spend their summers traveling the world. They had enough money. He had been very good with money, had a lot of investment estimates that he saved over time. But they had enough money that they could spend freely traveling the world and the summertime was plenty for it.

And they found that going and traveling for two months perfectly satisfied their travel bug and then they would love to come back home, live back in their house and pick up the teaching job again. So it was an ideal situation for him. Now, could he do that until he's 100?

I don't know. My grandfather taught until he was 85, but he couldn't keep his job the whole time. He just became a tutor and volunteered because he couldn't run the college classrooms where he was a teacher. But in time, you could do it. And it just really inspired me because I always thought I would really love to be a high school teacher too.

Maybe someday I will. I don't know. Maybe I'll go and get a job and teach high school history at the government schools like he did. It just sounds like an ideal thing for me. Maybe it doesn't to you, but I would find it far more exciting to think about doing that than to face 12 months and try to figure out how on earth would I fill up 12 months being 65 years old not knowing what to do.

And by the way, other more retirement security, they had, they liked teaching because then they had the government healthcare benefits. He had the government pension. Really was a good plan. Other story. I met a guy who was a salesman and he was in his mid-70s. And this guy really impressed me because I had never met a guy who was in his mid-70s who was in as good a shape as this dude.

He looked like he was 40, maybe 45. He was big. He was buff. He was tanned. He had blonde hair, et cetera. He played beach volleyball. I asked him his secrets. He played beach volleyball. He loved to play beach volleyball. Super tall. And he would play hours per day down in Fort Lauderdale.

But he was a salesman. And as a salesman, he made 200 to $250,000 per year. He sold restaurant supply equipment to restaurant people. But he'd been doing it for so many decades, he only needed to work about 15 hours a week. Made $200,000, $250,000 a year selling to restaurants, managing his accounts, worked half the time, played beach volleyball, had a girlfriend, traveled the world, was basically living the good life, and yet he was older.

And he was never planning to retire. And his physical activity and the fact that he had a good job for him that provided everything that he needed, low stress, plenty of time flexibility, was really, really ideal. And things like that. Sales. In sales, if you need to combat age discrimination, one good way is be tanned and blonde and play beach volleyball.

And to make people think you're 45 instead of 75. But it's probably a little exaggeration. Maybe I don't remember at this point. It's been too many years. But he did not seem like his age. So that would be one thing, is that people not know how old you are.

But then also something like sales is really good. Anybody can learn to be an effective salesperson. And if you go into a thing like selling restaurant supply equipment where you can do well, it's just not a business that is full of a lot of competition. So if you're looking for a way to make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year after a few years building up accounts, work half the week, spend beach volleyball, consider that.

There are tons and tons and tons and tons of ways to do it. And I'm convinced that by planning to never retire, you can put yourself in a mindset where you have tremendous options available to you. And then simultaneously along the way, just work hard now, save hard now.

And then if you want to retire, go ahead. That's up to you. In closing, I just want to mark it to you, my Radical Personal Finance Guide to Career and Income Planning. I have a whole class on this. This is one component of that. And I've touched on a few concepts that I teach in the course.

But if you've never sat down and thought about a career and how do I build a career that I would just, would be perfect for me, that is your best thing to do. Please do it. Do it with my course or do it without. But sit down and just really think about what would I want to do?

What would I do if I wanted to retire? If you want to travel, build a career that embraces travel or allows you to travel. If you want to fish, build a career that embraces fishing or allows you to fish. You can do it now. You don't have to wait.

And if you'll build the career right, you never have to retire. And then you can build that $165 million portfolio. Remember, that was $165 million by just contributing $19,000 a year. And you don't have to, so you don't have to think, how do I make a million a year?

We're going to talk about that soon. I had a listener who wrote in and said, "What would you do if you made a million dollars a year?" I'm going to talk about that. But you don't have to make a million dollars a year. A lot of people are intimidated by a million dollars a year.

You can make a hundred. But if you'll make a hundred in a really pleasing way and then figure out how to max out that 401k, you still can build in your family that $100 million portfolio if you have enough time. So come on by RadicalPersonalFinance.com/store. Check out my guide to career and income planning, see if that can help you.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com/store. Also have in there my credit card course and a course on how to survive the coming economic crisis. Both of those are really good courses as well. And I've got more stuff in the works. So be back with you with, I'll talk about more of that stuff in the future.

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