017: Why Smart Women Finish Rich with David Bach *

[INTRODUCTION]

Casey: Welcome to the Retire With Purpose Podcast. This is your host, Casey Weade, and today I am joined by a very special guest and friend. David Bach is here with us. David, welcome to the podcast.

David: Casey, it’s great to be with you and congratulations on your podcast too by the way. You’re doing a really nice job so it’s great to be with you. I appreciate it.

Casey: Thank you so much. You know, we’re a big fan over here at Howard Bailey at everything that you do and the resources that you provide to our clients and all the people out there in the world, specifically women, most recently and I want to focus on your most recent book here during our discussion, The Smart Women Finish…

David: Okay. Here, we can make them touch, right?

Casey: Yeah. I've always got several of these copies of your book on hand in case we have a woman that comes in say a single lady or even a couple that is interested in learning more about what it takes to create a secure retirement and your book does a really wonderful job of creating that in a nice neat package that's easy to understand. A typical financial book is kind of boring and difficult to make it through and yours is a little bit more of a page-turner. So, thank you for that resource. I want to start the show off with a couple different statistics that you had pointed out in your book and kind of kick it off from there. One of the statistics you shared was that $39.6 trillion of the world's wealth is now controlled by women, that is 30% of global wealth, $72 trillion by 2020, and on average, women have accumulated 34% less money in the retirement accounts than men. So, those two factors coming into play I'm sure I have kind of created this passion of yours in writing and helping women secure their own personal finances and their financial future, but I'd like to hear it from you. Why has this become such a passion of yours and not just recently, this happened back in the mid-90s when you originally launched this book, and now it's being relaunched. Why just such a continual passion for helping women over the last 20 years?

David: Yeah. Well, there's so much to unpack there. I’ll just tell you, I’ll shamelessly brag here for one second because it's a super exciting week for me. I just found out from my publisher that Smart Women Finish Rich, this book here just came out for its 20-year anniversary edition. Not only is it officially well over a million copies now sold, but it just went back for the 63rd printing of this book, 63 printings, and that's pretty remarkable. So, what's been incredible is that this book has become truly a word-of-mouth phenomenon. It’s been now popular for two decades and it didn't start with the book. It goes all the way back to my grandmother. The book is actually Smart Women Finish Rich is dedicated to my grandma Rose Bach. She's a woman that changed the whole course of my family's life because she was poor at 30. She was living paycheck to paycheck. Both her and my grandfather did not have a college education, didn’t own a home, didn't have a retirement account, and at 30 my grandmother decided that she was tired of being poor and she wanted to make changes in her life and that she wanted to start saving and investing.

And the way the story turns out, Casey, is that over her lifetime she became a self-made millionaire and she passed those lessons on to myself, my father, and my sister. Our whole family has been in the financial service industry now starting with my dad for 50 years. So, I grew up in the investment business. My grandmother helped me buy my first stock at age 7. So, when I came into the business along with my father back in 1993, which is almost 25 years ago, I was really shocked. What I was shocked by was that my grandmother was not actually typical where the woman wasn’t in charge of the money and the investments. It was often still the man that was doing it, and what I saw firsthand in my father's financial advisory business was we had a lot of older men and they were starting to die. And so, I was having meetings with widow after widow after widow where we were teaching them the basics around financial plan, where the money was, where the income was going to come from, how even to write checks. And really on the third meeting with the widow, I turned to my dad and I said, "This is crazy. We need to do something about this.” And he said, “What do you want to do?” and I said, "Well, why don't we do exactly what grandma did? Why don't we just teach a class? Grandma went to classes on investing for women and money. Why don’t we teach a class on investing for women and money?” And he said, “Hey, if you want to go teach it, go for it.” My dad had built his career teaching retirement seminars.

So, I created a class for originally my women clients and I just told them like, “Look, we’re watching women be widowed and learn about money at the worst possible time. You don't want to be learning about money once your husbands die. And by the way, if you're not married and you’re single then you need to know what’s going on with personal finances because you’re going to live a really long time so we have to protect you.” And so, I started teaching this class in Lafayette, California, and that first class my mom was like, “Well, that's amazing. I'll bring all my girlfriends and all of our clients wanted to come.” We had 225 women clients want to come to the first seminar and that was in 1994 and I got the local paper to come, wrote a story about it, and I just started teaching that class in my community over and over again. At the first seminar, I got asked, "What’s a good book for women and money?” and there wasn’t one out there. So, after about three years of teaching that class and people just beating me up going, "When are you going write a book about this?” I finally sat down and did the difficult work of putting into a book what I was teaching.

So, Smart Women Finish Rich became a way for me to teach women about money that couldn’t hire me one-on-one like I was a financial advisor but I know I couldn’t help a million people individually. But with a book, I can go out maybe and help a million women. So, that became a mission. Let's figure out a way to teach a million women to be smart about money so they can protect themselves, protect their families, and teach their kids about money. And here I am two decades later finding out the books is in the 63rd printing but I still love it. It's more fun now than it was even 20 years ago because all this, it’s crazy but, Casey, all of a sudden you would think women and money is like the hottest topic in the world. I’ve been talking about this for 25 years.

Casey: Well, that’s what I was going to say, you’ve been talking about this over 20 years. So, what's changed over the last 20 years as you’ve been having these conversations? How have your conversations evolved and how has the world of money evolved when it comes to women?

David: So, it was really interesting when we went to update the 20-anniversary edition like you were mentioning the statistics and I had to go through and say like, “What’s different now than 20 years ago?” So, I’ll give you some examples. Average age of widowhood was 56 when we first wrote the book. That happened to be a statistic I didn’t even believe like average age of widowhood, women are widowed at 56 on average. I'll never forget this too because I was telling my grandmother about the book because I’m working on it and she goes, “David,” this is my mom's mom, she goes, “I was widowed at 56.” I didn’t even realize that because I knew my grandfather passed away at a young age, but I didn't realize that my mom's mom, my other Grandma Rose had been widowed at 56. She outlived two husbands. She lived to be 97. So, at first, I was like, “Has the age of widowhood changed?” And it has, it’s gone up. It’s gone up to 59. So, what's happened is that women are now living longer and so are the men, but the biggest issue that affected women 20 years ago and it's affecting them even really worse now that you live longer. If you're a woman and you’re watching this, you live longer.

So, my other grandmother, she outlived two husbands. She outlived her first husband by 41 years. So, the thing I started really, you know, I teach so passionately now is, ladies, you could be retired for 30% to 40% to 50% longer than the man in your life. Your retirement could be 10, 15, 20 years longer than the man in your life. That is a huge, huge issue, so you got to prepare for that. You have to have more money set aside for retirement than the husband does. I can't share that enough with you. You need more money than your husband putting aside. You need to be putting 23%, you know, women hate when I say this but I always tell them, "You ought to be putting 20% more away for savings than your husband,” and the reason is this. You’ll be retired longer and often who get sick first is the husband and that's what eats up a lot of retirement savings. So, knowing these things, you know, what changes I think there’s an awakening. Women are realizing, “I have to have more money for retirement. I have to be in charge of finances. I don't know if my marriage is going to last,” the biggest issue I talked about in the update. The only category divorce is growing right now is what’s called gray divorce. It's couples over the age of 50. Couples over the age of 50 divorces has gone up 109%.

Twenty years ago, people were not getting divorced in their 50s and the reason, Casey, was that people aren’t expecting to live to be 80, 90,100. Now people are getting into their 50s and even their 60s and they're going, "You know what, If I’m going to be alive 23 more years and my marriage isn’t going well, then I don’t know if I want to stay in this marriage.” So, what I'm seeing is that women are proactively more involved with their finances than ever before, that you are taking charge of not just paying the bills, but you’re taking charge of the investments, and you’re recognizing like this is super serious. Now, what hasn't changed, Casey, is that women are still earning less than men. That's a big problem. They have less money in Social Security and less money in pension plans. And so, there's this retirement gap and that's the whole reason I went back out with an update of this book was to help women cross this fight. There's a gap. There’s literally like a retirement gap of you’re going to live longer, would you have less money set aside, and how do you cross that gap?

Casey: Well, you'd said there that women need to save about 20% more than men and in your book, you called this the 12% rule that’s usually known as the 10% rule. So, we need to save 10% of our paychecks and just been a good rule of thumb that we need to be putting away every year. You said, well women, we need to be saving 12%. Well, if you're married, then you've got a woman that's there and you need to bump that up from 10% to 12% in order protect that person. You mentioned death and divorce in that discussion being some of the biggest issues and in your book, you said women are financially devastated after divorce and death. Why are women typically financially devastated after a death or divorce of a spouse?

David: So, let's go through the different issues. Let’s go through divorce. The first thing that you will fight over when it comes to divorce other than the kids is money and what I tell ladies is this, if you don't know where the money is when the pie gets divided, because that's what happens, you get to court, you get attorneys, and you fight over dividing up the assets. If you don't know how big the pie is, you don't get half. So, the first thing is the best way to protect yourself as a woman and, guys, it’s true too by the way if your – you need to know like the most important thing for couples that you can do as a couple is work together in your finance as a team. I want couples to stay married. I wrote Smart Couples Finish Rich so you guys could stay married, so you could work on your finance as a team. When you work on your finance as a team when you have goals and dreams based on your values, when you do financial planning together, you stay married, and you stay happy, and you have a purpose bigger than just yourself. So, what I teach is that and it’s in the beginning of the book, I have these 17 things you need to know about your money, where it all is, everything. Where is the will? Where is the insurance? Where is the 401(k) plans? Where are the IRA accounts? What are these things earning? You need to know this before you go through a divorce or before you go through widowhood.

And so, I always say to women like, “Look, if you're married, what do you need to know about the money? The answer is everything.” Like, literally, the quiz in the beginning of Smart Women Finish Rich there’s a 17-question quiz. It’s s called the Financial Knowledge Quiz. I’m like you need to know everything in here. Now, if you’re single, what do you need to know and do? You need to do everything in here. So, the best way to protect yourself financially is not to delegate your financial life to another man in your life. Even if you hire a financial advisor, you really need to know what's going on. My wife hears me do this radio show all the time and she's like, "Okay. Remind me again where is this document? Where is that document?” And the other day I’m walking past the bank with her and she's going to get some jewelry out for a party that we’re going to tonight and she's got a safety deposit. This is just a classic example. She's got a safety deposit box at our bank and I looked at her and I said, "You know, I'm always telling you where everything is. Do you realize I have absolutely no idea where you keep the key to the safe deposit box? If you died right now, I don’t even know what’s in the safety deposit box,” and she's like, “Yeah. I guess I should teach you this stuff too.”

It works both ways but that's a great example like even for myself that was like a wakeup call like we’re literally walking down the street and I’m like, “What have you got in your safety deposit box?” She’s like, “All my jewelry is in there.” “All your jewelry is there?” She said, "Yeah.” Like, "Where did you put the key?” So, those are the kind of things. You always have to be constantly sharing with your spouse and your significant other and your kids. If you got a will and your kids don’t know where the will is like those kinds of things are so important to talk about.

Casey: Well, it sounds like even the expert in couples finances struggles sometimes with having these conversations and making sure you're staying on top and having these open lines of communication with your spouse. What type of strategies or tools do you put in place for you and your wife to make sure that you're staying on top of your finances that there's open lines of communication? Do you have a regular schedule? Do you have a framework that you walk through every year, every three months? How do you go about having these conversations?

David: So, like everybody else, once you get married and you have an idea what’s going to be like and how it’s going to work and then you go through the real world. So, when I wrote Smart Women Finish Rich, the thing I started hearing from women is, "How do I do this with my husband?” And that's what led me to write the second book which was Smart Couples Finish Rich. Here was a roadmap. I went on studied all of our couples that are really doing well financially and we’re happily married after 20 and 30 years and like, "What did you do versus what did these other couples who got divorced do?” and I modeled them. So, that's the book Smart Couples Finish Rich and my wife and I use a similar model. We do a financial anniversary so like we sit down once a year and we look at how did we do. Do we make progress this year? What are we working towards? My wife and I are big goal setters. So, we talk about our goals based on our values and we do planning together as a team like here’s where we want to be in a year, here’s where we want to be in two years, here’s where we want to be in three years.

And, Casey, it's not just about money. It’s about our lives like my whole thing is like how do you live your richest life? And I don't take for granted even though I say we’re all going to live long, I don't take for granted that we’re going to live long. Like I always say to my wife, "We have young kids. We have an eight-year-old and we have a 15-year-old so they’re getting older fast,” and I’m one of these people that’s always counting the time we have left like we’ve got 10 more Christmases, we've got 10 more spring breaks, we’ve got 10 more summers, where in my 15-year-old’s case, we've got three more summers. And so, our conversations aren't just money-related. They're really life-related. And then we go back to the money and we’re like, “Okay. How are we using our money to make sure that all of our life dreams we’re absolutely making them real?”

Casey: So, how often are you sitting down and having these conversations?

David: I’d say monthly. I tell people I have like a money day. I don’t know that ours used to be superficial. They’re probably less official now, but it’s that check-in, right? It’s that check-in time when it's not related to paying the bills so that you’re like, “Okay. Let’s set aside a little time. It can just be an hour but let's just check-in again with each other like on our goals, on our dreams, and our values, and make sure we’re doing the money thing the way we want to do it so it matches up. It needs to be fixed. What do we need to – there’s always something every year that you're working on fixing. What's left for us to do? Like does the will need to be updated? Does the insurance need to be updated? The kids are going off to college. Are we getting enough money in the college savings plans? Just to check in, even like my wife’s self-employed. She's got her own business. I'm self-employed. Making sure that we've maxed out the retirement accounts. When it came time to do the annual meeting with the CPAs, going back through the IRA accounts or SEP IRA, making sure accounts are performing well, making sure it's fully maximized. When she met me, I got her into the Pay Yourself First plan. So, I am always making sure that she's maxing out her retirement accounts over here.

Casey: Well, I like that. A lot of times these conversations don't happen because maybe one of the two partners are intimidated by the process or maybe their lack of knowledge going into it when it comes to the technical aspects of finances in their financial plan. As you said, it doesn't have to be overly technical. It can be a very general conversation that has to do with, "Well, let’s just get on the same page. What are our goals? What are our dreams? What do we want to accomplish? What do we value about where we’re at today, value about life, value about retirement?” And just having these open lines of communications, but in many instances, also now with couples that have never had this conversation in their entire lives. They've been married for 40 years. So, I met one couple, they were married for 60 years. I didn’t even meet the spouse until several different meetings, maybe even, yeah, it was more than months, maybe even over a year before I actually met the other spouse and she didn't want to be part of the conversation in the first place. They never had these conversations so where do we start? If we've never had this conversation, how do we have this conversation? How do we initiate the conversation, as a woman say, to make sure we’re on the same page? Because in my experience most of the time when I'm just seeing one of the two couples, it's the husband. The woman's not there. How does the woman say, “Hey it's time I want to get on the same page?” How does she initiate that conversation?

David: It can literally be is as simple as what you just did, “I want to be on the same page with you.” I tell women all the time, "Blame it on me. Just don't tell your husband where I live.” Like, really, they go, “You know what, I just read Smart Women Finish Rich. There’s this guy David Bach out there. I went to a class,” I know you’re going to be teaching our course on this, “and I really want us to work as a team on our finances but most important thing is I know you love me and if anything happens to you, I got to know what’s going on with the finances.” And here's what I would tell you, ladies, and I would say this to the husbands too, if you're married, imagine losing your spouse today and ask yourself what do you need to know about the money tomorrow? And the answer is everything. But don't just write the word down everything like literally ask yourself, “What would I really need to know about the money tomorrow if my partner or my spouse died?” and make a list of those things because all those questions that you have, that's where I would start with the conversation.

If you have a partner who’s had two or three jobs, one of the questions is where are the 401(k) plans? Did they leave them at their old employer? Do you know where the statements are? Would you know where to go and get the money transferred into your name? Is there an insurance policy? Are you sure you're the beneficiary? I mean, so many people who were in second and third marriages, they’ve never checked to see the beneficiaries been updated, and people often leave their first spouse down as a beneficiary just because they didn’t get around to fixing it. Are you sure you're the beneficiary of the retirement accounts? All these things, and here's the thing. I'm so biased like I completely believe that most people should hire a financial advisor. A good financial advisor can help you do all this in two sessions like what a good financial advisor fiduciary does is sit down with you and help you, first of all, the first thing a good financial advisor does is they help you get all our financial information, organize it in one place, which for couples is the place to start. Where is everything?

Now, again, in the book, I’ve got all the tools that I use with my clients so I’ve got the inventory worksheet which helps you see where all your money is. I’ve got these file folders, these 13 file folders that you put together so you can see what's missing like one of the file folders is a will. People call me up, people send emails and they’re like, "What I do about the file folder for a will that’s empty?” I’m like, "Well, why is it empty?” “Because we don’t have one.” “Then you need a will.” So, part of getting organized is figuring out what’s missing and what I literally did with Smart Women Finish Rich and Smart Couples was design it so that you can work on it as a team. You could literally like go through it step-by-step. Okay. Take the quiz, get the file folders together. I even go through how to go meet with a financial advisor, the questions to ask a financial advisor so that you can find the right financial advisor that’s going to put your interest first.

Casey: I recently had the opportunity to see you speak at an event in Indianapolis and you talk about the importance of making sure that a woman is engaged in the actual financial planning process and you had stated that most men implement the financial plan and this was by far my biggest takeaway. You said, “Most men implement the financial plan and they will never know if the financial plan actually works out in the end.” You said, "It's neither safe nor practical to assume that the man in your life can be counted on to take care of your finances.” Those two things really stood out to me and I think there's something to be learned from that.

David: Well, again, I am trying to really get people's attention here.

Casey: When I think you said, well was it 89% of…

David: It’s 80% of men die married, 80% of women die widowed.

Casey: What a mind-blowing statistic.

David: So, that right there should stop you in your tracks because, first of all, women tend to marry men that are older. Men die first, and men just candidly don't take nearly as good care themselves as women do. So, women live to be again, 10, 15, 20 years older often than their husband. Now, look, I know there are exceptions to the rule but they’re exceptions. Like, as I’ve traveled around the country and I do these events for financial advisors and I do these events with their clients. In the last event I just did, three women came up to me who had been widowed. One of them had been recently widowed within 90 days and she was in her, again, typical, she was 56 years old and he hadn’t been sick. So, I’m like a positive person. I'm trying to positive, even though these are like scary things I’m saying here so what I’m trying to get women to realize is this is no joke. Now, guys, I try to get guys realize this too by the way like when guys are sitting in a room and their arms are crossed about this topic, I’m like, "If you're married and you love your wife, then shame on you if you don't protect her by having the financial act together. Truly, if you got married, then be Prince Charming, then do all the things you’re supposed to do, have the correct life insurance, have all your stuff in one place so if you die first, she knows where it is, have a financial plan. Like, why would you work 90,000 hours during your lifetime and not actually have taken the time to do a financial, to make sure you won’t run out of money in retirement.”

Casey: If 80% of women are going to die, married women are going to end up dying widowed, what do you find is the typical first step that they're taking as soon as they lose their husband financially and what is a step they should be taking?

David: Good question. What should you do? Truthfully, in the first year, you should do nothing but deal with the mourning. There’s a lot of emotional issues to go through going through widowhood. You got to deal with the mourning period and what you do in the first year is get everything organized. You have to go and find all the assets. You have to get those assets transferred in your name correctly. So, that first year is about typically settling the estate. Now the question becomes do you do it yourself or you get help? Many women will go out and look for it. If they don’t already have a financial advisor they like and love and trust, they’ll go find a new financial advisor and this is one that you’ve heard me talk about like it’s been estimated that 70% to 80% of women will leave the financial advisor that they’re working with right now if their husband dies within 18 months and the reason is the financial advisor is not working closely with them. The financial advisor’s always been working with the husband. Huge mistake, guys, and gals too by the way. If you’re a financial advisor and you're not working closely with the spouse, the wife, you’re making a big mistake because she’s going to leave. So, we train all of our financial advisors, we put the wife first, like, don't ever do meetings with just the husband.

I used to tell women when I was a financial advisor, “I'm okay if you don't bring your husband. I would not let husbands don’t bring their wives.” So, I just think that first year though it's getting organized, finding all the money. Finding all the money is a big thing like making sure that you find all the assets and transfer all the assets in your name correctly, that you do the 401(k) rollover into an IRA account correctly, that you do the IRA account into a deceased beneficiary IRA correctly that you know how to take the insurance correctly. There's just a lot to deal with and so the best time to deal with it, by the way, is before somebody passes away. The best thing to have happened is you've already worked with a financial advisor, you have a financial plan, and God forbid you lose your spouse, you’re literally going to call your financial planner, and be like, "Worst thing ever happened. I’ve lost my spouse and now I need you to come in and have you help me with all this,” and that helping process is so much easier if it's all in one place and all organized.

Without being super technical, it comes down to you have to have death certificates and if money is scattered everywhere, which is very common when by the time someone’s in their 50s or their 60s, they have money everywhere. It can be very hard to find it all unless you know where it all is. But the opposite of that is you work with one financial advisor and all the money is sitting in one place. And when you lose your spouse, you basically come into the financial advisor’s office with death certificates and it can be transferred into your name in a matter of days.

Casey: So, you said get organized and take your time. I think that was the biggest thing that you said there, get organized, take your time, and is that fair to say that most what women or even men for that matter when we lose a spouse, we don't take the time to get organized and mourn and we begin to make financial decisions, major financial decisions too quickly?

David: I've seen many people make it too quickly. I think what you don't want to do is make, I mean, I tell women over and over again and men too, don’t make major investment decisions in the first 12 to 18 months because you don't actually know how you’re really going to feel until it’s been 12, 18 months later. And so, don't go out of and move, don't buy a new home. Don't feel the need to make really big investment decisions right away, and a good financial advisor won’t pressure you to make them. Good financial advisor is like, "Fine. Let’s get everything organized, roll your money in the money market account until I know you're really in a good position. Let’s get your income set up so you know where your income is going to come from, but we don’t have to make a bunch of financial decisions right away. Let’s just get you organized.” Time heals but you need to give yourselves some time. You'll make better decisions financially provided you’ve given yourself some time to mourn and go through the emotional process. I mean, if you’ve ever gotten, I personally haven’t lost anybody. I haven’t been widowed, but I've worked with a lot of widows and two years later they’re like, "Wow. I was in a fog. I look back on the last 12, 18 months and I was in a complete fog. It’s like coming out of a fog. Anybody who's watching who’s going through this know what I’m saying is true. And so, they'll come back and they’ll say, “I'm so glad you didn't let me make that decision to sell the home or move. I'm so glad we didn’t rush to make investment decisions.” I’m like, “I know. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen what happens.”

Casey: Well, I've seen so many of those mistakes myself. You know, when we've lost a spouse, I have one gal that immediately liquidated all these accounts and paid enormous amounts of taxes and had just taken her time and got some good consultation before she started making these rash decisions. If I was to save a quarter of a million dollars in taxes, we have to take our time no matter what type of emotional distress we’re under, we shouldn’t be making major financial decisions. So, we've covered kind of I think the couple's side of things. I want to kind of shift here and really focus in on women here and starting with – we've talked about what women are often absent from these conversations so they don't really know what's going on and we need to be present for those, we need to engage the husband, we need to have these regular conversations with our spouse, but there are also some things that women do much better than men when it comes to their finances. What are those attributes that women have that make them much better at financial planning?

David: Yeah. So, the research and now there’s decades of this to prove this. So, year in and year out, women actually outperform men as investors and I always love to say to women audiences as like, “Well, why do you think that is?” And they go, "Because I'm smarter of course," but there are key attributes that women have and do, and men, by the way, we can model these attributes. So, what do women do that often men don’t do? First of all, they do actually a lot of research before they invest. So, they don't get stock tips and turn around and go out, always on a golf course, got a stock tip and turn around and buy the stock. Like, they really do the research before they invest. They do real financial plan. They actually are slower maybe to make an investment decision but once they make the investment decision, they stay with it. Women are not the ones that panic when markets go down. It's often it's the men. So, women are better at investing long-term which is how you get better performance, they don't trade as much like when you look at who’s actively trading stocks, it’s men like 90% of day traders are men roughly and they do terrible. They do because you can’t make money day trading.

Casey: I've never met a female day trader.

David: You don’t, right? And so, women will like, and also, they’re cost sensitive, they look at the cost of things, they don’t want to overpay, but what I've seen firsthand is that women are just really good at financially and they’re good at financial planning not just looking at it as a numbers game, but they’re better at looking at their values first, their money second. So, when I teach this concept called purpose focused financial planning in our seminars and I talk about what's really most important to you. Your financial plan should be built off your values. Women get it and the key is when you do financial...

Casey: I got to interrupt here. When I have these conversations about values and purpose with men, I get kind of this glazed over look in the eyes and women tell you, “Oh yeah. It's all about meaning.”

David: Because we’re totally wired differently. Now, there are some men that do get the values conversation right away, but for the most part, guys are very focused on the sport of investing, you know, the competition of investing. That's not what it's about. The whole reason you even watch a podcast like this or you have a financial plan or you’re saving money, it’s not for the numbers. It’s not for the million dollars or the $1.5 million. It’s for what does that money help you do? How are you going to get the best use of your life? Like we teach this concept called our ROR, return on retirement. It’s in the seminar that you’re going to teach. Return on retirement is not ROI, return on investing. Return on retirement is you worked your entire life, how do you get the greatest return on your retirement as possible? How do you have the best years of your life in retirement as possible? And it's not just about money. And so, we teach that there are three phases to retirement. Their first phase is the go-go years typically 60 to 75. You have your health, you have your energy, you have your friends, you have family, you have grandkids that just want to spend time with you. You have money. That's the time to enjoy your retirement the most.

The 75 to 85 are the slower go years. Lot of times your health starts to decline and you can’t do as much and you won’t spend as much by the way either between 75 to 85. And then there's 85 to 100 and whatever it turns out to be, and we call those often the won't-go years because, by that point, you don’t have the health and the stamina to be running around traveling all over the world and be as active as you were. And this is general like I’m giving three phases and this is what we’ve seen with health-related issues in life. But it’s a pattern like I just went on a safari with my mom. She's 76. Talked to her yesterday. She is in amazing health. That Safari at 76 was her dream trip. She's going to be 77 this November. She is running around going on Disney cruises chasing the grandkids. She’s awesome. And my dad is not so awesome. Now, my dad is 78. Thankfully, he’s alive but his health is deteriorating. He didn't go to the safari. He didn't go in the Disney cruise. He's already in the won't go mode at 78 years old, so his won’t go years didn’t start at 85.

And why is this so important? Because when you're doing retirement planning, you just need to know that these years are not all linear and you need to make sure that your financial plan allows you to go have the most fun you can early on in retirement. That's why you need a financial plan. When a good financial advisor does is show you, give you permission to spend money without worry, provided you’ve done a good job of saving. I think a lot of times people are afraid to meet with financial planner because they think that the financial planner is going to say, “Oh, we can’t spend money,” and often a good financial planner will be like, "You're in great shape and you’re not spending enough money. You’d go spend more.” That surprises people but that's what purpose focused financial planning is all about.

Casey: Well, we love talking about this concept all the time as return on life, using Mitch Anthony's kind of Return on Life approach, you talk about return on retirement and on the way to retirement you’re accumulating at all costs. You’re just trying to get the highest rate of return you can possibly get so you have this nest egg so you can live a fulfilling life someday but then it's difficult to change, switch gears, and start to focus on what’s my required rate of return and it might not be 10% a year in this extra 1, 2, 3 percentage points that you’re going for is now putting you at risk of not being able to have that return on life, that return on retirement that's really important. Maybe you want to dial that back, maybe we can be more conservative, give you more peace of mind, and allow you to spend with confidence and give you that return on life you're looking for by focusing on a different number, not accumulation at all cost. So, I really love that concept, return on life, return on retirement. I hope that that really hits home with our listeners.

David: Also, I think, Casey, there’s a huge movement right now to retire sooner than normal. I think it’s called the Fire Movement. You’ve done a podcast on this, I think.

Casey: Yes.

David: And it's really getting a lot of buzz like there's a whole article in the Wall Street Journal about this last week and you have some people out there saying you should work until you’re 70. In fact, ARP did an article about this. I don’t know if you saw that article. It was a couple of months ago where one of the financial experts was like everybody needs to work until they’re 70 and I got asked about this on an interview I did I think it was on Yahoo or CNBC and they’re like, “Dave, what do you think about this idea that we all need to work until our 70?” I’m like, “That’s ridiculous.” First of all, it's just there's no sense of reality there. Only 4% of Americans right now are working until they’re 70 and there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them is health-related. You don't actually have the health to be able to work in your 70s. And so, the idea that you’re just going to have an extra decade or two of saving time is if you think that that's the case, you could be wrong, which is why I'm trying to people to double down on their savings and triple-down on their savings. Save more than you think you need to save in your 20s, in your 30s, in your 40s. Don't save 10%, save 15% or save 20% of your gross income and people are like, “Oh my God!” I’m like, “I know but you know what, you might not be working as long as you think.” That's health-related. Number two it’s corporate related.

If you have a corporate job today and you think corporate America is planning on letting you stick around until you’re 70, you are absolutely delusional. It's not happening. Corporate America today wants 50-year-old employees out of there. Now, and what are they doing about it? By the way, there's proof every single day in the paper. All you have to do is pay attention. Verizon has just given massive pre-retirement package out. Pfizer, just pay attention to all the corporate packages that are being given out to people in their 50s to take retirement early. Why is corporate America pushing people out on their 50s? Because 50-year-old workers, 55-year-old workers are expensive and they know they can go out and hire somebody who's 20 years younger for half the price. So, even if they give you an extra year or two of retirement benefits, in the long run, they save money. And so, what's happening across America is that these packages are being given out and if you don't take the package then you sit around and go, “Well, just everybody around me left. They didn’t hire more workers so I got to go work now. All my friends are gone and I just got their work too.” So, I’m just telling you, if you have a corporate job, if you're not an entrepreneur, if you don’t have your own business, don't believe you’re going to work until you’re 70.

So, save more money now, get the financial plan going, and I get asked, "What do you think about early retirement?” and I’m like, “God bless you. If you can start ratcheting up your savings in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s and you want to be a part of this Fire Movement where you can get out of the corporate rat race earlier, then go for it.” And one thing that people don't know that the critics of this fire movement of retiring early, they don’t understand it's not just about, again, it’s not just about the money and it’s not just about the age. Most of the people who were actually taking these, who are doing these early retirement things, they’re still freelancing.

Casey: They’re still working.

David: They’re still working. They’ve just found out, figured out a way to work on their passion and their purpose instead of just trading their hours for dollars. So, I just want, you know, my biggest passion right now is making sure that people live their richest life that you go do you. You go do you like whatever it is you want to do, you go do you. I know this, if I can help you with the financial stuff, it will free you to go do you faster.

Casey: Well, being that we’re having a discussion on Retire with Purpose, we have to talk a little bit more about the subject of purpose, purpose-focused planning, and the development of that purpose. When I sit down and I start asking individuals, "What does retirement mean to you?” sometimes it feels a little uncomfortable. “Why is he asking me about what retirement means to me? We’re supposed to be talking about investments and stocks and mutual funds and bonds and things like that. Why is he asking about my purpose?” And it can be difficult to really get into this discussion and ultimately, identify what do we value most. What is our purpose for retirement? How do you help women discover their true value when it comes to money? Are there any exercises or strategies that you walk them through or just asking the right types of questions?

David: So, we have a system in place which is called purpose-focused financial planning where we walk you through a values ladder. It’s actually in Smart Women Finish Rich. There’s a values ladder where you walk through the hierarchies of your values, what's most important to you, and you work your way through writing down on a piece paper, what your most important values are. And when I did in Smart Couples Finish Rich is I took the values ladder and I turned it into a circle so that you don’t have to have a hierarchy conversation. You can basically take out a yellow pad of paper, draw a circle, and write down five biggest values that are most important to you. Now, ask yourself a question. These five values, am I actually getting to live them on a regular basis? Whatever they are. Like, someone says, “My highest value is family,” and then you sit down with them and you find out that they never see their family because all they do is working. So, then the question becomes, “Well, do you want to see your family more? What would you need to do to change your values so you could actually see your family more?”

Some of them say, “Charity is the most important thing to me,” and then you go, “Well, what did you do on charity this year?” They go, “I don’t have enough money to give to charity right now.” “Okay. Well, great. Well, do have time?” “Well, I mean, I guess but not really.” “Well, how would you have more time?” It's people think that the job of a financial advisor is to give you the answers. Here's the truth about anybody who's a good coach, a good financial coach. A good financial advisor, a good leader for that matter, is that they ask you good questions. So, so much of my books have been designed like help you ask yourself meaningful questions. What happens is we get so busy making a life that we don't design our lives. We’re just going through the motions of life because we’re busy, busy, busy, busy.

Casey: I think you call this automatic pilot.

David: Yeah, it’s automatic pilot, and I'm always trying to get people, I guess, Casey, you really read my books. Good job. I’m trying to get people to wake up and you can get on autopilot at any age, at any time. I mean, if you have young kids, it’s very easy to get on autopilot like you’re so busy taking the kids from one thing to another and I'm constantly trying to like have these special moments with my family and my children and sometimes that creates a lot of extra work, but to me, that's the gift of life and it's capturing it. I mean, I’ve got all these things I teach too like on gratitude because I think one of the greatest ways to truly be super present in your life is to constantly focus on gratitude and people talk about gratitude a lot but like they don’t actually show you how to do it. So, like in Smart Women Finish Rich, there's a section on how to get grateful, how to write down your gratitude, how to share your gratitude because gratitude is an active habit.

Every single day I wake up and I do a gratitude focus. I write down what I'm grateful for the day. I write down what I'm looking forward to for the day and then at the end of the day, I write down what really went well for the day and I do it every single day and then I have a picture. And so, I've got my own little journal of that process and even on a bad day I can go back and look at like, okay, well what else has been going around lately? Because I know today was a bad day but like, "Oh yeah, yesterday wasn’t so bad.” So, it's capturing that.

Casey: Wait. In your book, you talk about the difference between goals and values and wishes and dreams, and I think it can be kind of confusing. What's purpose? What's values? What’s vision? What’s dreams? What are all these things? Can you kind of compare and contrast these different aspects of this purpose-focused plan?

David: Yeah. I’ll use my own life for example. So, purpose. My purpose was to go out and inspire a million women be smarter with money so they could protect their families, teach the kids, and protect themselves. That was like overarching purpose. The dream was I want to write a book called Smart Women Finish Rich and that's the dream but that wasn't the purpose. That was the dream. The goal was, I want to have a book, Smart Women Finish Rich be on the New York Times bestseller list and sell a million copies. The goal helped me fulfill the purpose. So, the purpose is at the top and then you work your way back. What's the purpose? What's the dream? What's the goal? What are the action steps? And like there’s 100 action steps like, "Oh, well, in order to write a book, I have to have an outline. I have to have an agent. I have to write a book proposal to get the agent. I have to sell the book. I have to write the book and I have to promote the book and this is why, by the way, most people never go from dreams to reality because the dream is just to have a dream. They go, “Well, I have a dream to write a book,” but that's it. They don’t work towards on what needs to get done. They don't think through what are all the obstacles like I talk about in the book like anything you want to do that’s big is going to have all kinds of obstacles. So, what do you need to do to overcome those obstacles? Because that's where the actual work gets done.

Casey: Well, you’re talking about dreams and I interview employees all the time and view potential employees all the time and when they’re 20. 30 years old I ask them what their dream is, boy, it seems like it's top of mind. It just pops right in. They go, “This is my dream. This is what I want to do with my life. This is what is important to me, what my values are.” When I ask that same question to a pre-retiree or retiree, "What’s your dream?” it seems like it's just not top of mind. Do you think there's a point in time when we just kind of stop dreaming and how does that happen?

David: Well, see, I could talk about this topic with you. I have to do another show with you just on this topic because I think this is the most important thing that we have 75 million baby boomers and a whole another generation behind that. We have 10,000 people turning age 65 every day now and there are two types of people when they reach retirement, those who look backwards, they look at their past, and those who are truly planning forward who have a future-focused self. And the happiest retirees are the ones who are future focused. Because you can only talk about what you did in the past for so long like it's only interesting for about 90 days after retirement, like, "Oh, I used to do this.” “Great. Now, what are you doing next?” That's how the human body is. That's how we’re wired like when you look at why some people retire and they’re depressed, it's because they don't have a future that’s bigger than their past. When you look at retirees that are super happy and excited, they’re really engaged in the future. They’ve got something they’re doing right now and they have something else they’re really looking forward to.

I’ll go back to my mom, for example. That trip to Africa has been on her dream list for 10 years but when we finally booked it, she had like two years to look forward to. The trip itself is 12 days. It was the looking forward to part, the planning part. That’s like 80% of the gift. Then the 12 days ago, that was like a trip of a lifetime. Then you come home and you got the pictures and you get to look at them and you show your friends and that’s like but it’s the looking forward and it’s the doing part. So, I just think for retirees and you’re right, people in their 20s and their 30s they’re not afraid. They got all kinds of dreams. They’re all excited about life. Too often in our 60s, in our 70s we stop dreaming and I think that that's something that people can be coached on and can be changed. I think as we start to live to be 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, your people are going back to school. They’re going to be starting second, third, fourth, fifth careers. There's a whole life ahead of you and I want you to live that life fully because the other opposite of that is and I see this unfortunately with people I know, they’re 75 years old, and they live with the actuary tables and like I’ve got like technically like four more years to live. So, like what's the point of losing weight? What's the point of getting in shape? Why do I need to go to the doctor? Now, men do that a lot more than women do. So, I think it’s important where both of you to be working on your future self at any age.

Casey: Well, for you now and I’m allowed to ask you this, and that is how old is David?

David: I'm 51.

Casey: 51 and when are you going to retire? What’s your big dream?

David: Well, I mean, it’s funny because I actually do think about this more and more, and I’m living my dream right now. I love what I do and I’m fully engaged both from a career standpoint and also as a dad. I love spending time with my boys, big skiing family, big traveling family. I ski every weekend. As soon as it snows, man, I’d show this weather outside. Now it’s gorgeous it’s not snowing but as soon as it snows, I’m skiing. I don’t know. It’s funny. I’m torn because part of me I love what I do so much I could see doing it into my 60s and my 70s and then the honest truth, Casey, I also really do focus a lot on, how I say this the right way, I worry about dying and when I say I worry about dying, I mean, what I really worry and focus on is fully living. My obsession is I’m with my kids right now. I’ve got a 15-year-old. I’m obsessed with the fact I only have four more ski seasons with before he moves off to college. I’ve got four more Christmases with him. I’ve got four more summers. My eight-year-old, I’ve got 10 more summers, I’ve got 10 more Christmases, I’ve got 10 more spring breaks. This drives my wife crazy by the way but that's how I am.

Casey: Understandably so.

David: Because I want to fully utilize all this time. So, I am super grateful for the life I have. I love the work I'm doing. I’m a co-founder of AE Wealth Management, one of the companies that you're associated with. I am loving out there teaching. I have a new book coming out called the Latte Factor. It’s coming out May 7, 2019. So, I’ll come back and do a show if you want me to put that book out. I consider sometimes retiring in my mid-50s or even earlier because I have things I can’t talk about yet probably but I have things I want to do that involve traveling all over the world and taking my family abroad. I don’t want to miss out on anything. So, fortunately, financially I’m at a point where I have just amazing options. All these little charts and these books, these miracle compound interest charts, they’re real. Like, when you start saving money in your 20s and you just save money automatically and you diversify and you leave it alone, before you know it, you turn around and you have a financial freedom and your money makes…

Casey: Well you've got to some place where you've got financial freedom yourself. You have job optional status. You don't have to go to work tomorrow. You can retire if you want to. Where is your time spent throughout the week? Are you spending a lot of time working or are you finding this time to spend with your kids making sure you're making the most of every single moment in your life or are you waiting until this line in the sand approach as you say, “Oh, well, then I'll get to spend this time with kids?”

David: Yeah. No, that's not me. My family comes first but like they’re at school right now. It’s like my thing is I take my younger son to school. I basically work really hard from like 8:30 to 4:30 but I’m home for dinner every day. And on the weekends, I’m dad. Now, I’m dad as much as I can be dad because now the 15-year-olds already started to be done with me but eight-year-old is not yet. So, this is what happens but ski season rolls around every week and we’re skiing. We take a lot of family vacations and I love that time. Also, I’m a husband so my wife is like, “That's great. We got the kids trips now. I need my trip.” So, I do a lot of family stuff and I balance that with a major career. I basically have two businesses that I’m focused on. One is finish Rich Media, which is all my financial education and the other is AE Wealth Management which is one of the fastest growing registered investment advisors in the country and I’m constantly out there either creating new material, creating new content for our advisors to go use and I’m still doing the message like I’m showing up today doing this with you because you can tell I’m still passionate about it. I’m not dialing this in. I do this because I still love this because I hope if I just helped one person today then this was worth doing and that's why I'm still doing it.

Casey: David's never going to have a traditional retirement, I would take it. You're going to continue to do this as long as you can. So, we’re running out of time here, and usually this would be at a time reserve for some generic questions, but there are still some things running through my mind that I have to pull out of you and one of those is that in your book and you’ve talked about this here today, one of the most important things for a woman is to find a good financial coach. What are some things that women should be looking for in a financial coach specifically or how should they go about this process of finding a financial coach that's a right fit for them?

David: Yeah. So, there really isn’t a detailed like major section in the book on how to hire a financial pro. So, I think first so I would literally go through the book and read this step-by-step but the most important thing I would tell you like, first of all, find a fiduciary, find somebody who's going to by law put your best interest first. There should not be a conflict of interest. They need to be doing holistic based financial planning. That means that they sit down with you and they go through your values, your goals, your dreams. The conversation with you should be about your life, not just about your money. If the first thing they're doing is drilling into your money, I just personally know that’s the kind of financial planner you shouldn’t work with. I think you want somebody who’s going to talk to you about your life, talk to you about your goals, look at your money, make sure that you’re maximizing your money so that you get as close to these goals and dreams as you can. And you should be able to tell within two meetings if this is the right financial plan for you.

A good planner will, in the first meeting is all about getting organized and understanding who you are. Second meeting is usually about presenting you with a plan, showing you what that looks like. And then after that, it's about implementing that plan but a financial planner should not be a salesperson. They should truly be in the role of a coach and they should be meeting with you and you should be asking yourself a question. “Is this the person I can see myself working with for decades?” Which also is really important too because if you are in your 60s or 70s, my dad was older when I came in the business and they would look at my father and they’d say, “Well, Marty, when are you going to retire?” And my father would say, “Well, my son’s going to be here so you never have to worry.” Like you want to make sure that the plan that you're working with, if they’re not younger, that they have a plan to take care of you if they retire or if they die. You should be thinking about your financial planner for decades and you should absolutely feel a connection with them and then with all that being said, you need to check out the financial advisor’s background.

So, I go through in the book, Smart Women Finish Rich, all the different websites to make sure you do your own due diligence and that you hire someone who has no complaints or epic issues or has been in trouble like you need to look that up online. It’s all public. And then the next thing I would say is very important no matter who you hire that you don't write the checks directly to that individual advisor. Checks should be going to the custodian and I talk about that in the book which should be going to like TD or Fidelity or Schwab or major firm where the money is held and the statement should be coming from that firm so that you never have an issue like a Bernie Madoff situation where somebody could steal money from you.

Casey: Well, you talked about a lot of aspects that are going to apply to pretty much anybody that’s looking for a financial advisor. Make sure they have a third-party custodian, make sure they’re a fiduciary, make sure they're practicing holistic financial planning, all really important things for us to be focused on, but when it applies to women specifically, are there certain things that they should be looking for or putting bigger emphasis on that maybe a man wouldn't being that 80% of these women are going to be the ones that are ultimately working with this advisor one-on-one?

David: So, I think the biggest thing I would ask yourself as a woman is, “Do I feel like this financial advisor respects me? Am I being talked to as an equal?” Because this is what I hear women complain about. The advisor talks down to you. The advisor focuses on my husband and doesn't talk to me. I go to a meeting and he spends 80% with my husband and at the very end, he turns to me. There are so many good financial advisors out there that many who I’ve trained that get the fact that you should be priority number one. If you feel like you're not being treated as priority number one, if you don't feel like you have a relationship with this advisor, if you think this advisor is talking down to you, if for any reason you’re a financial advisor like some advisor is not going to be the same, but if you have a financial advisor that makes you feel small or insignificant, or dumb, that's wrong. This is a business about respect and trust and truthfully love too.

When I was an advisor, my clients would come in the office like give me a hug. I would love them because I was a part of their family. I think that financial advisor relationships are often some of the most intimate working professional relationships you’ll ever have. It’s different than a dentist or often even a doctor because they know everything about you. The things that people tell me about their lives, even more than a therapist because you have all their money. You know where everything is. And so, it's a very close relationship so look for somebody that you think to yourself, “Yeah. You know what, this person’s – I feel good about this person. This person is really like I trust this person. This person cares about me.” That's so important like do they care or am I just another person coming through the office?

Casey: Relationship above all else, that's what I take away from that. Now my last question for you. It really goes out to the grandparents that are listening in, because you attribute where you're at today from your Grandma Rose that really turned you into what some might call one of the financial gurus that are out there today and have become very successful, become very money savvy, investing savvy. How do grandparents, I ran to so many grandparents that are concerned about their kids not growing up with an education about money, being able to be as responsible with their finances as they were growing up, what are some of the things that as a grandparent we can do to make sure that our children or grandchildren turn into the next David Bach?

David: A toast to her about how my grandmother got me into investing. I was in McDonald's, my favorite restaurant in the whole world and at seven years old she's like, “There are three types of people that come here. There are those like you who eat here and spend money. There are those who work here for minimum wage and that's a really hard way to build wealth,” and she’s like, “And then there are those who get rich,” and the thing is my grandmother knew I was obsessed of being rich at a young age because I would want to play Monopoly every single night when I was with her. So, she's like, "I can teach you today how to play Monopoly for real. The way you play Monopoly in the real world is you own places like McDonald's." And so, she taught me that day at seven how to find out if McDonald’s is publicly traded. She taught me to go up and ask the question, is McDonald’s publicly traded? She took me home, open up a Wall Street Journal, circled MCD, showed me how to look it up, taught me how to read a stock quote on the bottom of a TV screen then took me to a brokerage firm, opened my first account, and help me buy my first share of McDonald's.

That simple thing that she did at seven can be done today by any grandparent literally like tomorrow. You could do it at McDonald's. Today, my kids they own Shake Shack. You could do it with Amazon. Your kids are on Amazon, click, click, click. You know, you can buy stock in Amazon like you could do with Facebook or Snapchat or like it’s finding something that your kids are engaged in and letting them know that they could be an owner of that company and teaching them how to think like an investor because it's investors who get rich. You have to own I’ll close by saying this. If you want financial security, if you want to build real wealth, you have to own assets that go up in value. Those are real estate, those are stocks, even bonds. You have to be in a game of owning assets that go up in value. It’s the escalator to wealth. And so, teaching kids at a young age how to think like an investor, how to think about your money, making new money, that's a game changer for a child and the beauty of being a grandparent is that your grandkids will listen to you. They’ll listen to you more than they will their parents. It’s just totally true. So, take that little idea and go try and run with that.

Casey: Well, we had John Lanza on one of our podcasts teaching your kids about money. So, if you’re a parent and you want to explore this concept, I've imparted and actually employed a lot of his concepts with even our three-year-old son. He's starting to save for certain goals and invest and learn about these things. If you want to learn more about that, I’d really encourage if you go back and listen to that podcast. David, I'm just so thankful to have you here. I could continue having this conversation with you for the next probably two or three hours. I know you've got other things that you need to get done today but I very much appreciate your time and I very much look forward to having you on next time as we talk about your new book, The Latte Factor.

David: It’s a deal. Casey, thank you. This is great. Totally appreciate it and thanks everybody for tuning in.

Casey: All right. Until next time. Thanks, David.

David: It’s a deal. Take care. Bye.

Casey: All right.

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