The Retirement Road Trip

Welcome in to Mr. Stillman's Opus, the podcast.

We talk some finance, some investing, retirement planning, a lot of different stuff with John Stillman, who is the president and founder of Rosewood Wealth Management. And he's on with us now. John, how are you? What's happening? Good to see you. Good to see you.

Thank you so much. We'll start off with the first item on the road trip checklist. And that's very basic, but very important. You got to decide where you're headed. Have you ever done one of those road trips where it's not really about getting to a particular place? It's just it's more about the journey than the destination. I love those road trips. Yeah.

Yeah. See, that is a disgusting idea to me. I cannot fathom the concept of driving with no purpose in mind. I hate being in the car.

I want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. No detours. I'm not going to go on a road trip just for the joy of traveling. OK, so different there. Yeah.

All right. Well, so give me an example of a destination less road trip that you've done. Well, I would say, like, OK, let's OK. When I was in Connecticut, I was like, let's just go somewhere that we've never been before. So I'd looked on a map, found a town that was kind of an area I wanted to go.

So I cut up through the woods, you know, see the foliage. You know, hey, we might see an apple cider shop on the side of the road. We want to stop at or, you know, we might pop off at this little farmers market on the way up. I don't know what we're going to see. We might not see anything. We might just get there.

The town might stink. We might just turn around. But let's just see what happens. Yeah, that sounds like Dante's seventh circle of hell to me. But to each his own, I don't remember exactly what we did. I think we had a good meal at a local restaurant. So try it out something.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Well, so, yeah, you want to decide where you're going. You want to have a destination in retirement planning. You can't just say, well, I want to be retired. That's not really a destination.

That's not a purpose. What do you want to do with your time? If you want to travel in retirement, where do you want to travel?

Kind of crossing the streams here with deciding where you're going. Where do you want to live? Are you going to live in the house that you're in now? You're 64. Now you're going to be 84 at some point. Is the house that you're in now, can you live there when you're 84? Does it work for an 84-year-old to live in? Those are the kinds of things you want to think about.

How much income are you going to need to make those things happen? So deciding what you want life to look like in retirement is really important because the financial plan hinges on what you want that lifestyle to be. So once you know where you're going, once you know the destination, you've got to determine how you're going to get there. There's a lot of different options when you're traveling, you know, which app you're going to use to get there, how you're going to get there. And if you're like me, you might just say, we'll get there, however we get there. But you have to have a route in mind when you take off. When you were a young lad growing up in Birmingham, did you guys ever order the triptychs from AAA?

No. So basically what that was, was you say, all right, I'm going from Birmingham to Nashville. Birmingham to Nashville.

Sounds great. Well, let's pick a further drive than that. Birmingham to Chicago.

Very good. Birmingham to Chicago. And you call AAA and you say, all right, I want a triptych to get me from Birmingham to Chicago. And they're going to send you this little book of maps.

And it's your route. It shows your route from Birmingham to Chicago. But it's not one big map. You turn the pages like it zoomed in enough that you couldn't have it all on one map.

It's multiple pages that shows your route as you traverse from Birmingham to Chicago. Right. So obviously, this is outdated with GPS on our phones.

Right. In fact, I remember when I was a kid sitting in the back seat, looking at the Atlas when we'd be on a trip. And just thinking, how cool would it be if there was a little red dot on this Atlas that showed me where I was and that red dot would move along with the car and I could I could track our progress as we drive. And then but, you know, seven year old me was like, but obviously that's impossible. That will never happen.

And now I have that on my phone. But in any event, determining your route on a road trip now is a lot easier than it used to be. So what is determining your route in retirement planning?

Well, there's a lot of questions we want to answer. Like how much risk are you willing to take? For some people, they want to get from point A to point B with the least amount of risk possible. Let's not have any more volatility than we have to that allows us to get from point A to point B. There are other people who love the risk. They want to take as much risk as they can while still getting from point A to point B. So think of risk on a spectrum from one to ninety nine with one being no risk and ninety nine being the highest risk possible. There are some people who say, all right, well, if I can create the income that I want in retirement and have a risk number of twenty five.

Yeah. Sign me up for that. Now, you might say, well, we could still create the income that you want, but have a risk number of sixty five.

No, no, no. Give me the twenty five. The least amount of risk possible. There would be other people, though, that would take the sixty five. So there's this range of risk that you can have where the plan still works. And we have to determine what route you're most comfortable with, what gives you the most peace of mind. You know, what type of investments are going to get the job done for you? Are we getting an SUV? Are we hauling a trailer or a camper behind a pickup truck? Like, what is our vehicle of choice for this road trip? That's part of determining your route.

Who's going to coach you along the way? Is it a backseat driver telling you what to do? Do you have an actual navigator in the passenger seat looking at a map telling you where to turn? All those things go into determining your route. And of course, you can apply the financial context to that pretty easily, too.

Who whose directions are you listening to? Well, I want you to give me some financial context of this next one, because once you're in the car, you know, seven year old John in the backseat with the Atlas out, you want to hear some music, though, on the road trip, especially if you're going from Birmingham, Chicago. It's going to be a long drive.

So how does deciding what you're going to listen to on your drive relate to financial planning? When I graduated from high school, a bunch of my friends and I left for the beach the next day. And one of my friends, his graduation gift to me was he burned me a bunch of CDs.

Specifically to use on this trip. So it was like Journey and John Mellencamp and all this classic rock stuff. He had a Zeppelin CD in there, I think. So I had a wide range of music for that particular trip. And actually, they're still in my truck to this day.

I don't really ever listen to them, but they're in there if I need them. Now, I have a brother in law who he doesn't anymore, but he used to drive a truck for a living. And so he'd get up at four in the morning and drive all day and be back at home by four in the afternoon. Well, one year for Christmas for him, I mapped out because he loved listening to talk radio. And so I mapped out for him.

This was very inexpensive gift, but he liked it. I mapped out on each of his routes because he had a different route every day of the week, what talk radio hosts were on and the times that he would be driving, like what station he could find them on. So no matter what day of the week he had and what route he was driving, he knew exactly he could look at my little chart and see who he could tune into in that particular area at that particular time.

So that's probably a little more scientific than most people are going to be in deciding what to listen to before they go on a road trip, but that's certainly one way to do it if you want. So in retirement planning, you need to decide what you're going to listen to as well. Is that financial news in the mass media? Is that Money Magazine?

Is that Forbes? Do you listen to a lot of friends or family or coworkers when it comes to financial advice? I can't tell you how often somebody tells me, well, my brother-in-law does this or a guy at work told me I should do this. And it could be that that person is correct for their own situation. It's also possible that they're just completely wrong to begin with, but it's possible that they're right for them, but that advice isn't right for you because you have a different situation. You know, I always hear, well, I've always heard you have to have a million dollars before you can retire. Well, based on what?

And I was talking to somebody the other day and they had that mindset. Well, you know, we only have $257,000 and only five more years to retirement. We're never going to get to a million.

Well, guess what? You don't need to because you have a $4,000 a month pension that's almost going to completely replace your current income and you're going to be fine. We can draw a little bit of income from the money that you do have saved and maintain your lifestyle.

So you don't need a million dollars to have the life that you want. So who are you listening to? Do you have a financial advisor? Do you have a CPA?

Do you have an estate planning attorney? Are you listening to those people? Are they talking to each other? Are they listening to each other?

It's important to identify which voices you're going to let into your financial world. Okay. That makes sense to me now.

Thank you. Final thing is when you're on the road and you're making that long road trip, it's nice to be able to sit back and relax sometimes to put it on cruise control. So when you're on that road trip from Birmingham to Chicago, there's going to be a lot of highway driving involved. Sixty-five straight north for most of it. If you don't want to be on the gas and break the whole time, you're going to have the cruise control set for a good portion of that trip, I would have to imagine.

Your right ankle is going to be really tired if you're pushing the gas for 12 hours straight or however long it takes to go from Birmingham to Chicago. So you also have to keep in mind, though, that there are times where cruise control isn't going to work. If traffic's heavy and you have a lot of stop and go or weather is bad and you have to slow down for water in the road or fog or whatever, cruise control is not going to be our friend. Well, in your financial life, it's also nice to have some things on cruise control when you can. So when you retire, we don't want to be every single month trying to figure out, okay, where are we going to take income from this month? Yeah, we've got our Social Security, but we need another $2,500.

Where's that $2,500 coming from? No, we want that to be set up in such a way that you have monthly paychecks coming into your account every single month. And there are many different ways that could be structured, but you want to be sure that there's money landing in your checking account. Because if you have to do this calculus every month of, all right, well, where am I taking the money from this time? Now you're never going to spend with confidence because you're always going to try to talk yourself into taking out less because you're afraid you're going to run out. And so you take out as little as you can, then you can't enjoy your life because you're trying to make sure you don't run out of money. But if we have that autopilot concept set up where that money's landing in your checking account without you having to think about it, well, now it's just like getting a paycheck and you can live your life just like you did when you were working.

So there are going to be things that are unpredictable, though, and we have to address those like just within the last month. Talk to somebody who's about to redo their kitchen. Okay, well, where do we come up with the money for that? Another couple whose daughter is about to get married and they're paying for a wedding. Where's that money going to come from? You know, you have to buy a new car or put a new roof on the house and you don't have the money just sitting in the bank for it.

Where is that money going to come from? Well, this is not autopilot. These are anomalies that we have to address. But in terms of your monthly lifestyle, we want that to be autopilot, cruise control as much as possible. And each of these checklist items will help you reach your retirement final destination and hopefully safely with plenty of gas still left in the tank. So, John, appreciate that breakdown on the retirement road trip, but these are all great points. Make sure you check out RosewoodWealthManagement.com.

Get in touch with John. Help set up your road trip checklist and make sure your route is taken care of so you're not just heading out aimlessly like I did that one summer in Connecticut. So thanks for joining us. Happy trails. Yeah, happy trails to you indeed. That'll do it for us here on Mr. Sillman's Opus. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts on whatever app that might be. And you'll have the next episode delivered right to you. And we'll talk to you then.