Hello and welcome once again to Mr. Stillman's Opus. John Stillman joined this week by a good friend, Chris Galise, in the Electric City, Scranton, Pennsylvania. Well, technically what, Dunmore, Chris? Dunmore is where I actually live and where my practice is located, but not many folks know about Dunmore. So right next door at Stone's Throwaway is Scranton. And everybody knows about Scranton, especially with the popularity of the sitcom, The Office, because that's where that is based.
So yeah, I just tell folks from outside the area that I'm from Scranton and they know exactly where it is. By the way, we have some sort of affirmative action thing where every year we have to have one Notre Dame fan and one Dolphins fan on the podcast. And so I wanted to just knock both of those out in one interview. Okay, so I'm the Tolkien Irish slash Dolphin fan. Yeah, exactly.
The main reason I wanted to talk with you, even though being a Dolphins fan is very important, is that you're a marathon runner and I know you've been able to draw a lot of analogies between training and planning for a marathon and planning for retirement. In fact, you wrote a book about it, right? That's right.
Yeah, it was published back in I think 2011 or 2012. Time flies, but it's called Retirement is a Marathon, not a Sprint. And it basically talks about how you could get to the finish line of retirement successfully. And so the thing that I think is fun to think about is when you're getting ready to do a marathon, if you've never done it before, and I've never run more than four miles in my life, not cumulative total, but at one time, I've never run more than four miles. And so for people who haven't trained for a marathon before, it's not just the training, right? It's not just going out and running every day or every other day or whatever you want it to be. There's a lot of planning that actually has to go into it, right?
Exactly. And usually for most folks that want to run a marathon, it will take anywhere from six months to a year of a carefully laid out and written training plan that takes into account how many runs you'll do each week. What are the distances of each of those runs? What is the purpose of each run? Some of your runs are filled with just easy days where you're running at a relaxed and a conversational pace. Some of your runs are filled with what are called speed work where you're running faster than normal. Some of your runs are long runs where you're going out there for 10 or 12 or 18 or 20 miles and you're trying to simulate the marathon. So it's not just a matter of just going out and running and thinking you'll be ready. You have to have a plan in place that thinks about all the different physiological aspects of the human body and how to best train it to prepare you for success during that race. What about the nutritional aspect of it?
That's a huge part of it as well. I always talk about the human body, especially when you're training for an endurance event like a marathon. It's like your automobile. The better gasoline you put into it, the higher the grade, the more efficient that the car is going to run and the same holds true for your body. The better nutrition, the better food that you put into your body, the more efficient your body will perform during that race. And then certainly the night before the marathon, I guess you're doing the carb load and all that, right? Not only the night before, but generally for about a week before the marathon, you do want to carb load because the body burns carbs a lot more efficiently than it burns fats. So you want to have a good supply of carbohydrates in your system so your body is burning that and it will give you the best chance of success come race day.
I've been doing a carb load for the last 15 years. I just haven't run a marathon yet. And by the way, you've run how many?
It's terrible to say that. I've almost lost count. I think I'm at 68 now. Oh my goodness.
But it's in the high 60s. At what age did you start? How many a year are we talking?
Yeah. So my first one, I ran my first in 1993. So that's 23 years. So yeah, about three a year is what I try to average. Some years I've only ran one. There's been a couple of years where I've ran six or eight, but over average, it's about the two to three a year. So when you have a marathon on the horizon, how far in advance of that marathon do you start? A pretty regimented, really planned out training schedule. Well, for myself, John, because I've been doing it for so many years and for so long, I almost feel like I'm perpetually training for a marathon because I generally will do at least one in the spring and one in the fall. So for me, it's year round that I'm in training mode, if you will. But once I get, let's say, three months away from race day, then the training will become that much more focused. But in my book, and when we're talking here, when I'm talking about laying out a marathon plan and how important the planning aspect is over a period of six to 12 months, it's really for the first time or for the novice marathoner.
Yeah. And so, so many analogies that we can draw there to retirement planning. And as I was saying, a lot of people think that training for a marathon is just going out and running every day and then suddenly you're ready to run a marathon when in reality, there's a lot of planning that needs to go into it. Well, same thing with retirement, right? You can't just go out and save and invest for many years and suddenly get to age 65 or 68 or whatever it is and say, boom, ready to retire. It's not that simple.
Right. We wish it would be that simple or maybe we don't wish it would be that simple because, you know, guys like us wouldn't be able to enjoy our profession as a career where we're actually able to help so many people. But it's not that easy.
You know, you do have to put a lot of thought. You have to have a lot of planning together of how do you turn these investments that you have accumulated over the last 20 or 30 or 40 years of your life? How do you turn these investments into income that will last you for the rest of your life? And that's one of the big challenges to John is when you think about it, when you are saving for retirement, a lot of times people have a fixed goal in mind, a fixed age in mind. So let's say you're 35 right now and you want to retire at 65. Well, you could say to yourself, OK, I have 30 years now to save for retirement.
So that's kind of manageable because you have a fixed number to shoot for. But once you get into retirement at, let's say, 65 and now you need to make sure that your money lasts for the rest of your life, well, we now have an unknown. How long is the rest of your life?
And we don't know how long it's going to last. And that's one of the things that makes planning for retirement such a challenge is just that unknown of how long this money needs to last for. And that's where the marathon component comes in. And I know, as you said, the title of the book is Retirement is a Marathon, Not a Sprint. So many people, I feel like because they don't have that plan, they get into the early years of retirement and they're just going too fast. You can't go on an all out sprint the first couple of miles of a marathon. Well, the same thing with retirement, right?
Oh, yeah. And this is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they, number one, are taking too much risk with their portfolio, with their investments during retirement. And number two, they're spending way too much in the first couple of years of retirement. And that's a mistake or it's a potential mistake, again, because we don't know how long we're going to live. And if you're spending twice as much as you should be or three times as much as you should be in the early years, that may be OK for those early years, but it eventually will catch up with you where you look back at some point and say, oh, I made a mistake. I spent too much.
Now I have nothing left. And the same thing happens with with marathon runners, John, especially with inexperienced marathon runners, where they'll go out in the first couple of miles of that race and they feel great. They have all the energy of the crowds helping them. And they're so excited that this is their first marathon. They finally got to the starting line. They trained for months and now we're ready to go.
I feel great. And they start out and they run a lot faster than they're capable of just because they feel so good. And that may not catch up with them for the first two or three miles or even maybe the first eight or nine miles. But if you go out faster than you're capable, it is going to catch up. I could almost guarantee it's going to catch up at some point, usually around mile 15 or 18 or 20, where then you just feel like you have nothing left. And that's where folks we talk about hitting the wall where they have no energy left.
And they it's almost like a death march then where they have to stop running and they're just walking now and even walking becomes a struggle. So it happens so often in marathons where people start out too fast and the same thing could happen in your retirement. If you start out too fast, it will eventually catch up with you and can ruin your whole plan. I take it you've never done that, come out of the gate too fast, even in your early marathons? Actually, my first few marathons, because I read all the books and did all the right training, I was very, very cautious with it. Where it came back to hurt me later on was experience provided me with overconfidence. And I was thinking, oh, God, I've done this so many times now I could maybe I could get away with it, you know, going out too fast and never works. So I have had those marathons, John, where I am reduced to that death walk. And it's just like, oh, man, I'll never just get me to the finish line and I'm never going to do it again. But then you always forget about how bad it feels and I sign up for it again.
Yep. So many different retirement analogies we can draw from marathon training. Maybe that's why you're so successful as an advisor, Chris. You've run all these marathons over the years. And even if you're not drawing a clear distinction when you're talking with your clients about retirement planning and marathon planning, you have that in the back of your head and it just kind of helps you with the overall planning process.
Right, right. I tend to be a patient person because training for a marathon and running a marathon, there's really no instant gratification. You have to trust in the months of training that it will help you be successful come race day.
And it always has worked out for me, thankfully, for the most part. And it's the same thing with with retirement planning. Everybody wants to hit a home run. Everybody wants to have that magical stock that, you know, returns 50 percent in one year.
You just hit a home run. And we know from experience that those happen just very, very, very infrequently. While it's more exciting to get a 50 percent return in one year, I would rather just consistently get four or five or six percent year after year after year without the big ups and downs. I'd rather have it just slow and steady wins the race.
It goes back to the classic tortoise and the hare analogy. Just steady Eddie as it goes is the best way to be successful in marathon running. And it's also the best way to be successful in retirement planning. Again, the book is Retirement is a Marathon, Not a Sprint.
Chris Scalise is the president of Fortune Financial Group. Glad to talk with you, buddy. Hey, it's my pleasure. And I do get these requests for interviews on a lot of podcasts.
And I'll say to you, you're my you're my token Tar Heel and Panther fan that I will do my interview with. I appreciate getting some sort of precedence there. Absolutely. That's good. Well, good talking with you. We'll do it all again very soon. Again, here on Mr. Stillman's Opus. Take care.
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