The Retirement Marathon: Finishing The Race

Getting through retirement can be a lot like running a marathon. Let’s talk about some of the similarities of getting to the finish line in racing and retirement.

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Transcript Of Today's Show:

Speaker 1: Welcome to Plan With The Tax Man. Thanks for tuning into the podcast with Tony Mauro and myself. We're going to talk about the retirement marathon on this episode of the podcast, making sure that we finish the race. Many people have heard, Tony, that saying, retirement is a marathon, not a sprint, right?

 

Tony Mauro: Mm-hmm.

 

Speaker 1: So thought that made sense, and you and I used to do sports in our younger days, and I think you even did some marathoning. So I thought it'd be kind of fun to visit this as an analogy and maybe laugh at ourselves for, you and I were talking about being older today before we got started and how the body's not being as nice as it once was.

 

Tony Mauro: No, and I got to caveat this. I did some half marathons and barely made it through those.

 

Speaker 1: It's tough, yeah.

 

Tony Mauro: Yeah. And what we're going to talk about is I didn't plan and I didn't prepare.

 

Speaker 1: And it got you didn't it?

 

Tony Mauro: It Got me. And when you're young you can do it, but I mean I was never in them to, for any type of competitiveness, just to see if I could do it.

 

Speaker 1: Yeah, I gotcha. Okay. But you know what, that's a great analogy. It really is because when you're younger you can weather more stuff just like financially. So it's a really great analogy for retirement, strategy, planning, all that kind of stuff. Taxes, all of it fits really well into that kind. Really a lot of sports does. It's easy to use a lot of sports metaphors. My wife did a lot of cross country running when she was in high school and whatnot. She was definitely in the competitive, very competitive, but wound up tearing her, I think tearing one of her... What's the big muscle there in your leg? The thigh muscles there?

 

Tony Mauro: The...

 

Speaker 1: Hamstring.

 

Tony Mauro: Quad?

 

Speaker 1: Quad. Quad and hamstring. Yeah, both of those. So, but it's an interesting analogy. So we were sitting there talking about the idea of planning and preparing for long races and things of that nature. And it just hit me that it's like, yeah, makes the same amount of sense to talk about this from a retirement standpoint. So let's just jump in and roll. Planning and prep is key. You already admitted that, it's like something that you didn't do when you were younger, it kind of bit in the tush. I used to play football all through high school and so on and so forth. And it was the same thing. If you didn't have a plan, if you didn't prepare, it didn't go as well as you wanted it to. And a good friend of mine, I guess probably about six or seven years ago, Tony, decided he had to lose weight and he was going to do it by jogging and running every day. And he headed out the door and he just made the decision hardcore. I applaud him for it. He went out the door one day, just started running. The problem was, is he was fairly heavy and he didn't really kind of plan or prepare and he wound up fracturing his foot because his body wasn't ready yet. He needed to work himself into a different mode and make sure he was doing it properly and so on and so forth. And that's really pretty darn similar to retirement. You got to have a plan.

 

Tony Mauro: Yeah, you do. You got to have a plan. And it really comes down to just like we're using our little marathon and my half marathon debacles that we're talking about. And if you just go about it somewhat haphazardly and you're not setting yourself up with a plan, it's easy to just go out, I think, and we've talked about it before, there's so many different investment choices that you know, pick something and you just hope for the best and you don't really have much planning behind it.

And that's very similar to what I used to do with these half marathons. When I was young, I thought well how hard could it be? I can do it and I was in it competitively. But when you have to walk some and then your body's killing you for 10 days afterwards, that's not good planning and preparation. And it goes the same way with our retirement planning. And I think that, I was reading an article over the weekend when I was traveling back from a golf thing that this author was talking about having assets in different locations as the same as allocations. And it kind of struck home with me about we need to have in our plan not only good asset allocation but different locations, and I think he's referring to is tax differed, tax free, some things like that. But this plan though, too, has to be monitored. We forget about that. We start investing when we're young and we're not prepared and then next thing you know, you wake up, you're in your fifties and you're like, well, where am I really at? And that may or may not be a good place to be. So I think the moral of my talk here is to, when we're talking about planning is make sure you monitor these plans and make adjustments with your advisors by all means.

 

Speaker 1: And if you think about the stages or the steps of any kind of sport activity and retirement planning, the same thing. You've got to start building up. And the preparation a lot of times is, for many of us, it's the accumulation phase. You could almost call that prepping for retirement as far as building that part. But that's just one part. You've got to start looking at the other pieces. And that kind of fits to the second piece of this, which is a proper diet. If you're doing any kind of athletics, you can't just eat junk food. Junkie. Another financial advisor I chat with, Tony, he is a marathon or he's written several books about it and he actually runs, he has the Boston and all that kind of stuff. But he's an admitted hardcore junk food addict. He loves candy bars and chips and all that stuff. And he's like, so I think I run as a way to excuse my bad behavior for my diet. But when he is getting ready to train and he is in that mode, obviously he puts his diet in the proper kind of way. And if you think about moving that from that preparation stage of retirement into the next stage, that's that proper allocation, that's the proper, all the diversification, the different things we need. That's that kind of diet idea.

 

Tony Mauro: It really is. And I think in the retirement area, especially as you get into your fifties, which I'm there now, we need to start thinking about more how our portfolio is structured. Asset allocation, we're just not that far away. And this year has been a crazy year in the markets. And if you just aren't on top of your plan and really working with your advisor, I mean we haven't had it yet because the Marcus had a little bit of a bounce back. But we're going to have a down year. And again it's just one year, but you really can't afford to have huge losses in the 30% - 40% or more because that's really not going to fit in with the diet at all, because you're going to have a tough time making that up in your fifties and or sixties. So it pays to definitely pay attention more to your diet. And even I think as we, getting back to the actual food aspect, as I age, I pay attention more to my real diet now because you know, want to live a long time and be able to enjoy some of these things that you're working so hard and painfully to try to accumulate. But we've spent hours talking about food. I got this crazy theory we as Americans, I mean we tend to eat a little too much and

 

Speaker 1: Yeah, just a little bit.

 

Tony Mauro: And we don't really have all that good of a diet for most of us but...

 

Speaker 1: It's the way we process stuff, right?

 

Tony Mauro: It is.

 

Speaker 1: It's crazy.

 

Tony Mauro: It does go hand in hand with getting back to the financial picture. If you don't have that, you do use analogies, there are heavier people that do live a long time.

 

Speaker 1: Sure.

 

Tony Mauro: Without a good diet. And you possibly could have that in your financial situation, but the odds are...

 

Speaker 1: Right, you could weather some storms, you could like '22. It's funny because some people with the markets have obviously been very volatile this year and you talk to some people and they are taking a beating and then others are not, right? They could be the same age but they are like, why is one... And it's how you're allocated. It's that diet really. It is a financial diet. If you were tech heavy, man, you're taking a pounding this year. So lots of different ways to look at that and talking about the way we don't eat that great. Tony, you've been to Italy, right?

 

Tony Mauro: I have twice, yeah.

 

Speaker 1: So I was watching a guy having a chat the other day, this actor who's in ridiculously great shape, he's over 50 as well. And he's Italian and he was over there shooting a movie about Lamborghini and he was talking about, he said I was eating like crazy in Italy the pasta, it's just amazing. The food is amazing. And he said and believe it. So the person interviewed him said, But what does that do? Aren't you paleo, keto, all that kind of stuff for dieting? He's like, honestly, he's like, I ate more food in Italy than I eat here at home and I lost weight. And a lot of it is to our processes. We just put so much stuff in there that we don't need.

 

Tony Mauro: Yes, I agree.

 

Speaker 1: I thought that was interesting.

 

Tony Mauro: It's amazing when I go over to Italy, we're getting off the subject, but...

 

Speaker 1: That's okay. It's diet.

 

Tony Mauro: Yeah, it's diet. I've been over there twice and you look at the Italians, of course I'm Italian heritage and you look at them and you say, well, you guys, all you do is eat carbs, you eat bread...

 

Speaker 1: Right, exactly. You eat carbs and bread like crazy.

 

Tony Mauro: And I don't see a lot of heavy people. I see a lot of very old Italians walking around, but they're different than us. They go to the market every day, they cook all their own food and they walk a lot.

 

Speaker 1: Yeah, they walk a lot. And over here I just came back from the heart doctor myself and he is like, lay off the carbs. And I'm like, But what?

 

Tony Mauro: Right. So, it is weird. But it's interesting, some of the other types of nationalities or ethnic backgrounds are like that. And you just scratch your head saying, how's that possible?

 

Speaker 1: Well the Mediterranean diet is very, it's totally different, so...

 

Tony Mauro: Yes, yes.

 

Speaker 1: Well good stuff. So let's finish back in, I guess jump back into the marathon. I know we're kind of all over the map, but it's still a fun conversation. Get back to just finishing this up. And that's really the idea. If you're going to run a marathon for the first time, or even if you're just, like I said, like my friend who decided he needed to lose weight for our listeners, a lot of our listeners are over 50. Walking's a great idea. Maybe light jogging is a great idea to start losing weight. Any of that stuff. Don't start too fast because you're going to burn yourself out, your energy level, you kind of come out of the gate too quick. And so if you think about running a marathon, if you're a newbie, if you're a novice and you're really excited, you're amped up, your adrenaline's flowing, boom, starting gun goes off, you got to go 13 miles like you were doing the half marathon for example. And you start running, your pace is too fast, you're going to run out, you're going to run out of gas.

 

Tony Mauro: You're going to run out.

 

Speaker 1: And that's the same thing with retirement, right? There's something called sequence of returns where if you get out of the gate too fast in retirement and you're spending more and you're not managing some stuff properly, you could mess yourself up for the long run.

 

Tony Mauro: Absolutely. And my marathon story with this, and I got one I was running at the time, this was like a 10K and it was for breast cancer awareness. And I got to the thing late, I was running late and I was literally running to the start line. Well I didn't have time to get all the way in the back where I belonged. So I wedged myself right in the front with all the real runners. And literally I started out so fast because I was just like, well I got to keep up and I... 200 yards in, I was like, I'm dead, I'm out. I got to almost walk. And it's the same thing really in retirement. Like you said, if you don't have a plan going in and you start out of the gate too fast, it is tempting when you're younger because you always start thinking at least the clients I have that, well I want to enjoy some of this before something happens. They get going too fast, don't plan properly, and now all of a sudden they're in their mid seventies, some in their eighties saying, well, geez, I got out of the gate too fast, I spent too much money. Now I don't have all that much. So it is important at the start not to do that. And that's where I think where us as advisors can really lend some value there in the beginning and during retirement.

 

Speaker 1: Tony, you made a good point, you said they get to retirement, they want to do some things and they start a little too fast and because maybe time or health or whatever. And there's nothing to say that you can't do that. It goes back to topic one, just plan and prepare, right? So if you want to hit the ground running in retirement, that's great, but talk to your advisor about it so that you can structure that plan accordingly.

 

Tony Mauro: Exactly. I think the more conversations you have in retirement with your advisor, the better. Because that way you can bounce things off of them. And I have a client that she likes to put a lot of money in her house and she always calls and bounces things off of me, and sometimes I say, well maybe it's a little better to wait on this and because here's where you're at and if you get going too fast, here's going to happen and then let her make the decision. But it is important to do that because there are, and I'm the same way, I've got a list couple pages long already, the stuff I want to do in the beginning of retirement.

 

Speaker 1: But I love the fact that she bounces it off of you. I love saying this, you're not the money police, it's not your job to just say, well sorry, you can't do it, right? It's your job to say, okay, let's take a look, what's it going to do to the plan if you do that, you're going to be fine. Or okay, we're going to have to make this tweak in order for you to do... It's just a matter of making sure that you're not shorting yourself in the latter years of retirement.

 

Tony Mauro: Exactly. And I'm not here to be the person too that tells her, well that's a goofy idea. It's her money, you do what you want to do and I'm there to be the voice of reason and then kind of tell her the goods and bads and how it's going to affect her plan.

 

Speaker 1: Yeah. You're there to be the coach and say, yep, you can do this without causing yourself issues or no, you can't do this without causing issues, but we could do this there's this, this, and that'll kind of fix it later on. And to your point, you, or you could say, well that's a good idea, but let's wait like three months or something, whatever that kind of thing is just based on buckets and when you're pulling, where you're pulling, what levers are dropping, so to speak in the retirement bucket plan. So a lot of different ways to think about that and that's why it's so important to have that professional on your side, a coach. So it could be a track and field coach, it could be a football coach, it could be a golf swing coach, it can be a money coach. All kind of comes back to the same thing. A tax coach, that's what you, I mean, taxes are massively important, which is obviously why we call the show Plan With The Tax Man, because you are at Tax Doctor Inc. And you've been helping families get to and through this thing for a long time. So again, folks, if you got some questions, you need some help. If you want to make sure that you're not starting that retirement marathon on the wrong foot and you want to have that longevity there, even if you don't wind up having a longevity yourself, your spouse could be left behind or leaving things to your heirs. It's all part of that plan that you need to have for yourself. So do yourself a favor, get onto the calendar if you need some help. If you're not already working with Tony and the team at Tax Doctor Inc, stop by the website yourplanningpros.com. That's yourplanningpros.com, subscribe to the podcast, book some time with the team, lots of good tools, tips and resources. Find it all at the website. Tony, thanks for hanging out my friend in sharing your...

 

Tony Mauro: Embarrassing stories. No problem.

 

Speaker 1: Your embarrassing stories, me too. I can't even talk right now. So it's good stuff. Yeah, it's always fun to just kind of keep it, just kind of keep life normal things in there, right? Everybody can relate. So have yourself a great week. This is actually going to be our Thanksgiving episode, so this is coming out about a week before Thanksgiving. So happy Thanksgiving to you, Tony, and all the listeners.

 

Tony Mauro: Yes, you the same. See you later.

 

Speaker 1: You know what? After we eat all that Turkey, I might need to run a marathon.

 

Tony Mauro: Me too, yeah.

 

Speaker 1: We'll see you next time here on Plan With The Tax Man. Enjoy your holiday. We'll be back soon with more episodes with Tony Mauro from Tax Doctor Inc.

 

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