472: Creating Financial & Life Freedom to Live Authentically in Retirement with George Kinder

[INTRODUCTION]

Casey Weade: We all want financial freedom, but ultimately, we want that financial freedom so that we can live a life of freedom. Today, we talk about the intersection between these two areas. How do you have both financial freedom and life freedom? We're going to take a dive into how to live authentically in retirement. Make the most powerful resource yours, and that is your time in retirement, and create a deeper connection to your values and aspirations. I'm Casey Weade, and it is my mission here on the pod to deliver clarity and purpose and elevate meaning in your life. And if you're going, "Well, that seems kind of weird. I thought this was a financial podcast," well, we like to tie in both the financial with the nonfinancial when it comes to this very important stage of your life and the transition you're going to go through.

So, you hear us have conversations about both the financial and the non-financial getting with you week in and week out on very important topics that can elevate your meaning and experience for this next phase of your life. We have a very special guest joining us again today. We have George Kinder, who actually joined us about half a decade ago. I can't believe it's been five years. But go back to the 2019 episode with George Kinder. I encourage you to do that. That really lays the foundation for our conversation. That's episode number 64. We'll have a link to that in the show notes as well. We talked about life planning and how life planning lays the foundation for freedom in retirement. We're just going to be taking that conversation even further today.

George is a leading thinker in the financial life planning movement and pioneer of the life planning model, a real inspiration to the way that we plan here at Howard Bailey Financial. He was also listed as Professional Adviser’s annual review as one of the 50 Most Influential People in the world of financial advice. He is the founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning. And this institute, it focuses on the human aspect of financial planning, encouraging client-centered and values-driven money management philosophy. He is the author of several books. And the focus of our conversation today will be on his newest book, that is The Three Domains of Freedom: Each Moment Is Yours, Your Life Is Yours, Civilization Is Yours.

So, today we're going to be jumping into that. We're also going to be giving away free copies of George's book. We partnered up with him to do that for you. Now, if you want to get a free copy of that book, it's super simple. All you have to do is go over to iTunes, write an honest rating or review of the podcast, and then shoot us a text. We will then verify your iTunes user name, get you a copy of the book. So, it's that easy. Just text us the keyword 'BOOK' to 888-599-4491 or you can just check out the show notes at HowardBailey.com.

[INTERVIEW]

Casey Weade: George, welcome back to the pod.

George Kinder: It's great to be back, Casey. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Casey Weade: Yeah. We're excited to have you back. It's such a powerful conversation half a decade ago and you've done so much work and more research and more writing since then that I want to dive into that. But before we get there, I want to lay a little foundational background of yourself, and that is that you refer to yourself as a Buddhist teacher. And I'm curious, what about Buddhism do you personally connect with the most? What aspects of Buddhism really tie in or get incorporated with this life-planning movement?

George Kinder: I think and it's interesting that you mention that because the book, The Three Domains of Freedom, the essence of that book is our experience. And I think the beauty of the Buddhist practice, and by the way, I grew up Christian. I have Christian preachers, my best friend and my brother. And so, I'm all over the map. But I do think of myself as a Buddhist teacher. I teach a meditation that is what we call direct seeing. And it's basically experience. It's our experience. Freedom, you know, what is freedom for ourselves? I think what Buddhism does is it takes us directly to the moment, that's its whole essence, and to the experience of the moment.

And it's the practice. I don't even think of it as a religion so much as a practice, almost a psychological practice to be more and more present and more and more awake. And the more you do that practice, the more freedom you feel in your life. It's pretty incredible.

Casey Weade: Well, that gives me the sense. It kind of takes me to a place that you didn't feel like you always had that sense of presence or that sense of freedom. And early in your career, you were doing tax returns. You were doing financial planning for a living. And then you said that you realized that you weren't living that life of freedom. And I think very interestingly enough, you said that the clients you helped weren't living a life of freedom either. However, you were there to give them what they idealized or defined as freedom in their own lives. So, let's first define what is a life of freedom, and how do we compare/contrast this to financial independence or financial freedom?

George Kinder: I think they're intimately related. And I think that a lot of times we place too much attention on the financial aspect of that because what money is really meant for is to deliver us into our dream of freedom. And that life of freedom that you're asking about, I think it's, first of all, it's the second domain in the book. There are three domains, each moment is yours, your life is yours, and then civilization is yours. And your life is yours, it's really about this question of financial freedom between you and me and how we understand finance and everything. Your life, what freedom means is it's not so much analytical. It's the experience. People know, each of us knows what it is, how it is we really want to live, who it is we really want to be.

And when we're living that, there's an energy that we feel inside of us. It may be that there's more heart, that there's more kindness, more compassion. It may be this wild creativity. It may be just being in nature and experiencing the extraordinary quality that nature brings to us in each moment. So, freedom, as I understand it, is that thrill of existence that we feel and we understand it most through what you and I think of as financial freedom or the pursuit of it, because it is identifying who it is we really want to be and then going for it. And money is merely a part of how do we make that happen. Very, very practical part of it.

Casey Weade: When you reflect on working with clients prior to really incorporating life planning into working with clients, would you say you are doing them a disservice at times? And is that kind of a common theme that you see in the financial advice world that we're delivering financial freedom but we're simultaneously doing someone a disservice?

George Kinder: Well, I think early on, I challenged myself around that, Casey, because I knew that it was wrong. It just didn't feel right to just be focused on the money. And part of that was myself. I felt I wanted to live a life that was really rich. And I understood that I wasn't and I needed money to be able to make that happen. So, almost from the beginning, maybe not when I was doing tax returns, but it was starting there because when I was doing tax returns, I was noticing that people weren't living the life they really wanted to live. And that's what drove me to become a financial planner.

And when I became a financial planner almost from the beginning, I was going, "This is all about who you really want to be, you, my client, really want to be." So, I started from the beginning really listening to that and attempting to listen so well that they got excited about it or they felt heartfelt about it. They felt connected with us and they felt then they could unleash to let all of their stuff out with me, talk about authenticity, really, really come out in ways that they had never come out to a financial professional before. In fact, that was probably the most incredible comment I got again and again from my clients. And so, the question of did I feel I was doing a disservice? That was pretty rare.

But I did feel that the financial community, in general, was doing a disservice because the financial community in general was too tied to the product and to the kind of the legal regulations and the terms, the structure of how retirement works rather than going, "Who do you really want to be? And let's make it happen."

Casey Weade: Did you find - I know we find this that some come in and they're looking for financial advice. That's why they engage with you as a financial advisor. They want financial advice and sometimes they just want a specific product or a specific tool or a specific segment of planning. They want to do tax planning. They want to do insurance planning. And then you go down this path that's a little bit strange to them. Did you find that some would get caught a little off guard and go, "What are we doing here? Why are we having this conversation? That's none of your business. Why are you asking me that question?"

George Kinder: I think initially there were a few that happened that way, but I think I was pretty tuned in, emotionally tuned in to how to talk with the client about it. So, I would prepare them for the meeting in a lot of ways. And right at the beginning, I would say, "You know, this is going to be a little bit different because the way I work is I feel I have to know who you are and who you really want to be in order to deliver to you the portfolio structure, the tax structure, the retirement you want. And that might feel a little strange because you might be coming in just thinking, "Oh, you just want your 401(k) taken care of."

But the truth is, I can't even think about your 401(k) if I don't know where we're aimed, where we're really going. And I think mostly they got it. Pretty much they got it. And they got it right away. In fact, they got kind of intrigued and they got interested, "Oh, you mean you really want... This is really supposed to be about me rather than my money?" And that became kind of exciting for them. So, yeah.

Casey Weade: That's beautiful. And I think that's exactly what this world should become as we become, you know, the financial advice world becomes more and more commoditized, more and more technology-driven, the rise of AI. It's going to be more and more vital to have these truly meaningful conversations to align these things properly. That's what I love about your newest book as well. You're really talking about the most important elements that should be aligned in order to align those things with your finances. Now, for those that didn't listen to my advice and go back to listen to that first episode that we had, just give us a quick overview of the premise of life planning and this life planning movement.

George Kinder: Why I think in a way that's what we've been talking about. The life planning, the premise of life planning is that your money is meant to deliver you to your dream of freedom, basically. It doesn't mean necessarily that that dream is about owning that island in Paradise somewhere. You don't have to be as rich as Elon Musk or the Queen of England was but you need to... So, it's about who you really want to be. So, it's about your authenticity as well. So, the premise of it is to have a conversation with yourself if you're doing this yourself or with your advisor that is really authentic.

And that's a beautiful aspect of it because the purpose is to deliver you into that authenticity so that you're living with that experience of who you know you're meant to be all the time, and money is merely meant to serve that. And what a great thing to have a life planner who knows all the skills of money.

Casey Weade: And it's just so easy to get distracted from that throughout our lives as we're just focused for 20, 30, 40 years on the accumulation of wealth, "I need to save more. I need to make a bigger return. I need to get to this place of financial freedom," and we can kind of lose track of why we were doing this in the first place. So, let's talk about these domains that really create that authenticity in our lives. In the book, you talk about three different domains. Just give us a high-level understanding. We're going to take a deeper dive into each one of these three domains here in a minute. But what are these three domains from a high level?

George Kinder: What really gives the book away are the subtitles. So, I call it The Three Domains of Freedom, and then each subtitle you're meant to really think about. Sometimes you do a double take on it to go, "What does he mean by this?" So, the first subtitle is Each Moment is Yours, and that's powerful. I mean, we kind of know that but we don't really know it. And so, I go into it in the book in a deep way. I mean, if you're having that thrill of living in freedom, of living your life, that thrill is something that happens moment after moment after moment. It's an extraordinary thing. Each moment is yours.

And so, I also speak to both why and how that is kind of philosophically the nature of life in a way, but also practical skills to how to gather that skill inside yourself so you can live it. The second one is your life is yours. And again, we can take that, "Yeah, of course, my life is fine," but here what we mean is that your life is yours to define and to deliver. It's a rare thing. You know, we don't know how. Different religions have different structures of how, you know, are you born once or you're born many times? But this is a pretty rare thing to be alive. And so, your life is yours, meant let's maximize who you can be and what you can deliver into the world. And then the third one is that civilization is yours.

And Casey and I were talking a little bit about how odd this time is because this is a moment Casey and I are talking. I know that this is getting recorded. We're talking the day after the election that has really troubled the nation and has delivered kind of a real polarized experience of is it this way or is that way? And often we feel kind of worn down when we think about. So, civilization is mine. What do you mean? There's 8 billion of us and there's all these powerful forces and there's government and big corporations. Civilization is yours. Civilization is who we as a species are meant to be. And that's a pretty incredible thing to realize that you're participating in that and the way I've come to understand it is we're participating in that all the time.

And so, we're actually adding value to who we are meant to be as a species by how we behave toward each other and how we craft the world. The world that we have of, you know, government and politics and capitalism and democracy and all these things, that's crafted by us. Civilization is who we are. It's a very, very special thing. And I love it. And I love that we're at a time where in a way, we've become global and that means that there are some unique things that are happening right now that are saying it's the first time we've come together as a whole species and we could talk to each other with this, the cell phone. 90% of the species own a cell phone right now.

So, I mean, this is an incredible time. And yet how much turmoil has come up because all the negative stuff comes up at the same time. Economists call it negative externalities of our institutional life. But I think this is an incredibly exciting moment to be alive in. And it is for us to take that on. Civilization is ours and not to be afraid of it, not to be worn down, not to feel codependent, as they'd say in Alcoholics Anonymous, but to stand with the freedom of our life and the freedom of moments ago. Let's make this world a great place.

Casey Weade: Would it be fair for me to characterize these three areas as presence, purpose, and meaning or legacy?

George Kinder: I think those are a beautiful frame, Casey. Absolutely. I mean, I could kind of tweak each of those in a way but presence is being right here in the moment and purpose is what is your life purpose. And then meaning has to do with the whole species. I think in a way, the book addresses the most profound things that we think about. What is the meaning of our life? What is the meaning of each moment? And what is the meaning of us as human beings, as a species on this planet?

Casey Weade: Now, this book is pondering those things. Would it be fair or would it be something that you think we should do to self-assess ourselves in these areas? Is there some kind of self-assessment that you think we should do around these three domains?

George Kinder: I think that's a wonderful question. And of course, we do that in the life planning arena. We have questions that go on around that. In the first arena, it's pretty clear I think to most of us, and even to me that I've done a practice around all of this for 50 years and often for hours a day. And yet there are moments every day where we miss, where we, you know, the plumbing explodes in the house or Hurricane Helene comes by or the politics of the day goes the wrong way. And we feel devastated, we lose a child or we lose a parent. I mean, so there are moments where our life goes off no matter what. No matter what.

So, how do we address that? We know that we can improve that way. And then in terms of civilization, self-assess. That's a really interesting one because part of it is about our relationship to civilization. And then part of it is about our courage to actually stand up and say, "Hey, we can make this a better deal for everybody. And let's talk about it, think about it together." And being willing to say that does take courage because it puts you right in the middle of something, which is controversial.

Casey Weade: It feels like these three domains are somewhat sequential. There's some intentionality between the sequence of these three and how they're written in the book. That first one, the Three Freedom of Moments, you say that is the deepest and the most fundamental. Does that make it most important or does that just make it the starting point?

George Kinder: A really good question. I think if I'm recommending to anyone what you should do first, as the freedom of moments is fundamental. It is the most fundamental and most profound aspect of this and surprising aspect. But the one that we identify with throughout our life is, who am I meant to be? The second domain, your life is yours, is the one that we kind of long for. I want to be on the beach. I want to have a home in the country. I want to have kids. I want to do something really cool in my community or I want to write the great American novel or I want to do little videos on TikTok and be wildly creative. So, these are things that we kind of naturally go towards.

So, even though the moments are the most fundamental thing and there's a basis that they give for all the rest of us, there's a way in which if we haven't taken on who we're meant to be and we aren't really pursuing it, then we're constantly critiquing ourselves unconsciously. And that robs us of a whole bunch of moments and that actually makes us more self-centered. It's ironic. The more we can fulfill who we want to be, the less self-centered we are, because the less we're absorbed in self-oriented questions, "Why can't I do that? And why are they stopping me from doing that? Hey, I want to do this," rather than just living it and knowing that this is who I am. So, yeah, the freedom of moment is fundamental but the freedom of your life is what we all kind of really want to be going for somehow.

Casey Weade: Well, it feels like as humans, we're just future-oriented. We always want to be somewhere else than where we actually are. We want to accomplish something in our lives, and when we want to accomplish those things, we want to accomplish financial freedom. If we're always living in that future, then we're never going to actually accomplish those things because life is actually happening in the present. It's actually happening right here. So, if we don't get present, we can't take action to get to where we wanted to go.

George Kinder: Right, right, right. Absolutely. And the practice of being present, I mean, I've done it as a practice of mindfulness, which is often taught or thought of as a meditative practice. There are many aspects to it. But the more that we practice it, that also is a practice that diminishes kind of the self-grasping that we naturally have and the clinging to things, the desiring for things. So, the more that we practice being present, the less kind of our attachments around money get in the way of being clear about what money's purpose is, which is really to deliver us into the life we're meant to live.

Casey Weade: Well, what does that practice look like in your own lives? And for some the maybe, well, uncomfortable with mindfulness they go, "Eh, that feels a little woo-woo to me. I don't know if that's me," how do you get them over that hump? How does this show up in your daily life? How do you get started?

George Kinder: Well, I think there are two things for that. First of all, I want to acknowledge that challenge. But both the woo-woo, part of the woo-woo comes because it's difficult. You know, you'd think it'd be easy just to be here in the moment but you close your eyes and you try to just be here and you get pulled all over the place. And that's part of the nature of life. Life is constantly changing and it's part of the nature of time. So, I'm going to talk about that in a moment, how do you get over that notion that it's woo-woo or it's too difficult or I just can't do it? But the first thing I would say, Casey, is when you step outdoors from inside, you know, you and I are both inside these cubicles right here, these rooms, right?

And the moment we step outdoors, what happens? You feel the air on your skin. You feel the slightest of the breezes. You feel different experiences of coolness or warmth. You hear the birds or the sounds of traffic. Your senses come alive and they're alive moment after moment after moment. And we love it. It's why we love to go to take a walk in the woods. It's why we like to walk on the beach. We love kind of being immersed in nature. And it's one of the reasons nature is called Mother Nature. I call it Mother Nature because it feels like that. It's where we're meant to be and how we're meant to be. So, nature is a great teacher of mindfulness. It brings us immediately to what our senses are meant to be all about, as a human being how we're meant to be alive.

It's a great teacher but it's an easy teacher and there's a better teacher in a way because there's a way of having mindfulness as a discipline so that we can use it everywhere where we don't need nature necessarily to be delivering it to us. So, we can do it inside, we can do it while we're engaged with our computer, we can do it when we're challenged in a relationship. And that is a practice that, as you say, some people call woo-woo where some people go, "I can't do it. I've tried it but it's like trying to play the piano, man, I'm all thumbs." And so, but what we don't realize in that challenge of it is that those moments that we can't do it are exactly and precisely our cutting edge of how awake we are.

So, to attempt to do it in those moments where we get distracted, we're actually building the muscle and we're building the capacity to be here in the midst of those experiences. So, I would say one of the things is that it builds enormous emotional intelligence because we're able to be here in the midst of the waves of life, of confusion, of anxiety, of frustration, of disappointment. And because we just keep coming back to just being here, that's what the meditative practice is. So, if you get discouraged and you think you can't do it, you're doing it the right way. And I will say after 50 years of doing it and often hours a day, I still can't do it. There you go. I mean, it's still a challenge.

But I know from having done it that much that it rewards me every day. In the Christian community, there's a wonderful one. One of my teachers was William Blake and was a great, incredible mystic in the 19th century. And one of his sayings, it's a dark saying, but he said, "There is a moment every day that Satan cannot find. Find that moment and build upon it." And that's what a mindfulness practice does is it takes you away from all your distractions, all the ways you get attached and pulled and you find through the practice that usually what happens is you find some piece of it, most times, not always, but most times, but you have to sift through things to get there. And once you get there, you often have the ability to call on that experience throughout your entire day. It's pretty extraordinary.

Casey Weade: Do you have a way that you remind yourself throughout the day that, "Hey, I need to stop. I need to get present"? Because we all live busy lives. We live busy days. And we need those stopping points, those reminders to get present. Do you have any practices that bring you back in the present that offer you that reminder?

George Kinder: Mostly, for now, I have done it so much that it comes up a lot just secondhand. Just by having done a lot of meditative practice, you're more naturally inclined when you find yourself getting distracted or pulled into something, particularly something that's emotionally distracting where you don't feel quite centered. You naturally come back because that's what your practice is. But there were many times I remember back in the old days, whenever I would open a door, I would remind myself. I just use these things. Whenever I brush my teeth, I would remind myself. But opening a door is a good one because we go from room to room often.

Casey Weade: I'm going to implement that today. I'm excited about that. I love it. That's the one practical nugget that I really want to implement in life. And there are so many people that might be listening and they're probably having a little angst around their finances or their financial planning, the decisions they're making. They're going to hire this advisor. They're not going to hire this advisor. They're going to allocate more to equities, less to equities. They're going to buy an annuity. Should I buy a life insurance policy? They're trying to make these decisions and it can create a lot of angst.

And you said that freedom of moments, if we get this right, they can actually help us feel more peace and confident in our financial decisions or investment decisions. How so? How does that show up? How do we put that in practice? Because we all want to be very confident that we made the right decision, especially as we're transitioning to a period of life where these decisions are pinnacle.

George Kinder: The freedom of moments is something really quite extraordinary. And there's something you'll find in the book called The Map of Mindfulness. And it is, I mean, if you think about it, it's about what the present moment is all about. There's a trick question. I might have asked it five years ago because I was just beginning to ask it but I'm not sure. But I ask audiences of a thousand, I go, "Hey, have you ever experienced a moment of freedom in the past?" And I get everybody to raise their question. I tell them it's a trick question because I don't like taking advantage of people but I get everybody to raise their hand. And then I say, "Well, you all got it wrong. We've never experienced a moment of freedom in the past. The only time we've ever experienced freedom is in the present moment."

And so, in terms of why do mindfulness, well, if freedom we only experience in the present moment, why would you not want to do a practice that is a practice toward the mastery of the present moment, which is what mindfulness is? And so, I've explored this in so many ways, and way back, the first book I wrote, the only book that was never published was a book on quantum physics and also black hole physics. And I was looking at the nature of time and all of this. So, I thought these big thoughts about what's the nature of the universe and everything. And I realized that if the present moment, what does freedom feel like? And when we feel free, we feel very spacious.

Not only do we have this thrill, but we don't feel like we're confined to a little tiny moment that is bordered by past and future and bordered by horizontals of space and time and verticals. We feel really spacious. And so, I realized that, gosh, the maps of space-time don't get at this, that if the present moment is the only experience we ever experienced, why don't the maps of space-time center on, as you were suggesting we do in our lives earlier, center on the present moment? And what would happen if we shifted that map? So, I designed a map that does that. And what happens is that then it becomes something about our relationship to that present moment.

So, the universe, rather than it being about time and space, it's really about our relationship to each moment. And when you focus on that present moment, what you find is that two things occur that are really incredibly helpful with your finances, just incredibly helpful and it's stunning, really. What happens is that the present moment happens so rapidly that there's something that you might call energy or alertness or clarity. It's one of the things. And then the other thing that happens, because what happens as you do that as you're constantly lessening your attachments of self is you become very peaceful. You find ease and/or calm. And so, it's a paradox because you're both more alert and more energized and you're more at ease.

Well, we need both those things when we're dealing with finances. Finances are complex. And they attack, they get at our emotions. We go, "I can't do it," or, "I don't know what to do," or, "Who to choose as a financial advisor?" We have all of those things. And what if I get it wrong? You know, all the anxiety. And we need calm around that. But we also need a clear and quick and attentive mind so that the advisor we're talking about, one of the dangers in financial advice always has been that the financial advisor we look up to and think they're so much smarter than us and they're running circles around us intellectually. We can keep up with them. And a good advisor will explain something to you so you really get it.

And so, we need that clarity of mind and that ease in order to make great decisions. And if we don't have either, we can either get twisted around by the advisor or twist around really by ourselves, ultimately, and we're not going to make the greatest decision that we can make.

Casey Weade: You know, staying on this topic of money and when we start talking about the freedom of life, you say that money can be and we talk about money as, yeah, this is the biggest factor. This is the one thing that can give you the most freedom. And yet you say that money can be one of the biggest obstacles to this freedom in life as well. How so?

George Kinder: You know, we do pursue money because we think it'll give us the most freedom. And I think that we're missing something because it's our life itself that is the most incredible thing. You know, I give up all my money if I had a choice between living and not living, right? You give all your money. It's the life. And so, it is the moments, ultimately. So, how money becomes an obstacle is where... Money is cool because it can deliver that life, that dream that we want. Where money becomes an obstacle is where we get attached to it, where we play routines. It could be routines from our childhood that we learned and like being a miser, over-saving, or spending recklessly. It's where we aren't calm and clear.

And in those places, then money can be an obstacle. And there are other ways. I mean, one of the reasons I don't know if I ever shared this with you and it always comes as a surprise to financial advisors, the people that have taught me the most about money were people who didn't have any because they knew that their life was even more important in some way. They knew the value of being alive, of being present, of being wise, of being kind, of being generous. And I think of, you know, again, in the Christian world, St. Francis was a great model of that, William Blake was a great model of it, and in the Buddhist world, the Zen monks that went up and lived in the forest monasteries or in the mountains and just kind of lived in the present moment.

So, they've taught me the most in a way about money, that who we are is more important than the money itself. So, in any case, having this calm sense and this clarity means that money diminishes as an obstacle.

Casey Weade: And I would argue, just like mindfulness, we all need to continue to practice these things. You know, money, even if we think we have the perfect relationship with money, it can always be healthy for us to have a little reset. We need to check in with ourselves because it's never going to be perfect. It's never going to be perfect. Just like perfect mindfulness, never going to be perfectly in the moment. We're never going to be perfect with our idea about money. But you offer three questions that can help shift our preoccupation or our relationship with money. Can you walk us through these three questions?

George Kinder: Yeah. The three questions I'm most known for in the life planning movement and there are three questions that are asked by pretty much every life planner of their clients, although there are other exercises that help as well. The first question is, if you had all the money that you needed for the rest of your life, what would you do? And the notion there is to allow yourself to loosen up around who you really want to be and look at all the aspects that would be fun. It's really a fun two-question, right? And it could be meaningful. It could be that you wanted to give a lot more in that way. So, that's the first question. But it's just a warm-up because what we really want to get to is your life and who you most want to be.

So, the next two questions are surprisingly life and death questions. The next question is you go to the doctor and they share that you only have 5 to 10 years left to live. And you're going to be happy and healthy throughout that time, as happy and healthy as you are right now. But you're not going to relive the moment of your death. You're going to last for at least five years, but you won't make it to the 10th. So, then again, the question is, what would you do with your life? And here I think we often think more about our relationships, our partners, our family but it could be a legacy thing that comes up that we think of that we've always longed to do and always held ourselves back from. So, we begin to think about, "Gosh, time was that short. This would really be important." And now we're getting close to what the life plan should be about.

Casey Weade: Now, if we could stop on that question, I've got a question about that question. So, the first one, imagine you have all the money that you need for the rest of your life. What do you do? How do you spend your time? How do you live? Then the second question, you say, imagine going to the doctor. Doctor says you have a rare ailment. You only have five, ten years left to live. You'll be healthy during the time you're alive. But sometime between the fifth and 10th year, you're just going to keel over. I want to know what's important. I feel like most often this question is asked that you have ten years left to live. What do you do? What's the importance of inserting this sometime between year five and year ten that's when you're going to keel over?

George Kinder: It's a really good question. It takes me back to the beginning of this, of the questioning, of designing with three questions. And initially, I had the first question and I had something like the third question. And the second question might have been three years initially, and then maybe it moved to five years. And what happened was that the main people who objected to the questionnaire had trouble, were troubled by the question, had real difficulty with the question where women who want to have kids, more often women than men. And they felt, and they didn't have kids yet, and so their time was really short. And it brought up this question, "Should I have kids?"

And so, I kept expanding it until it felt like they felt there was that in the question, in these last questions, you want attention between anxiety and excitement, anxiety and meaning. And so, I kept expanding. And what I found was when I gave them that flexibility, they felt a little bit more at ease with the question. So, that was why I did it. I don't know if it's the right thing or not.

Casey Weade: So, ten years, that period of time you felt gave people a better frame of mind, put them a little bit more at ease that they had more time than, "Oh, boy, I only have three years left or four years." But then you still wanted to insert some angst around that that you don't know when it's going to happen between years five and ten.

George Kinder: Right on, Casey. That's it. Yeah.

Casey Weade: Awesome. Well, let's go to question three.

George Kinder: Yeah. So, question three, go to the doctor again. This time they've been doing some tests and you were feeling fine, great. And they shock you with the news that they completely misdiagnosed what you've been feeling or how your body was and what they revealed to you that you only have 24 hours left to live. And the question is not what you would do. You gather your friends, go to the pub, whatever it is that you treat yourself to. It's not what you would do. The question is reflecting on your life, what you'd anticipated doing or being or accomplishing. What did you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do?

And what has been stunning is that question, that absolute life and death question that is the focus for most financial life plans, because that's the place where the greatest meaning lies, and therefore, if we can deliver the client, and often places where the client's been holding themselves back from doing it. And so, if we can deliver the client into it, it brings the greatest energy, the greatest inspiration, the greatest life force inside themselves. Often it's family, but it can be creativity. It could be something about spirit or kindness or values. It could be community. And we also see the environment as part of it.

Casey Weade: We reach out to our Weekend Reading subscribers prior to these interviews and have them submit questions for us. And I think this is a perfect spot for Gary’s question. And Gary has obviously listened to our first interview or has read one of your books anyways. Gary says, “What is the secret or process that helps us to transform the desired state of the three questions into reality?” He goes on to say, “Is that a daily mindset of affirmations?” So, the question here is, “Okay, I’ve went through these three questions. I’ve identified my answer to these three things. I know what I want. I know what I’m missing. I know what I want to create. But now, what do we do? How do we transform these things into reality? What’s the action steps?”

George Kinder: Yeah, great. In the trainings that we do, the advanced trainings, the five-day training, which I think of as our signature training now, we have a process that we call EVOKE. And it sets up the stages. So, the first stage is Exploration, and that’s connecting. It’s having this experience of authenticity and trust, relationship between yourself and the client or between, if you’re doing yourself, just with yourself.

And then the second stage is Vision. And as the questioner is bringing this question up, that’s where you have, oh, I get it. This is what I really want. And what we do at that stage, what I train advisors to do is to really build that into what we think of as a torch, as a beacon. And one of the things I think I say in the book is that if you have a torch for your life, it should see be so bright that it lights up the night sky. So, you build a dream that is so strong and so much you and so powerful that you can’t say no to it.

And then the main obstacle that gets in the way of being able to do that is yourself, is you. You’ve held yourself back from doing this. Most of us who’ve known what it is we really want to do, but somehow, for some reason, we’ve held ourselves back, we may have money excuses. Maybe we recognize emotional structures that are there. We’ve held ourselves back. So, the obstacle primarily you, but money, let’s talk about money as an obstacle here.

So, part of the obstacle of money is that if we’re just by ourselves, we might not really know how best to set up retirement assets, how best to budget things, how best to to save. We might not even recognize that we can do that. And so, one of the wonderful things about having a financial life planner is having someone who says again and again to you, and this is what you’d want to say to yourself, this dream is who I’ve meant to be. And a great advisor will say, this dream of freedom that you have, this is you. And we can make this happen. Put the money aside for now and really live into that dream.

And if you live into that dream and you contrast it with how you’re living right now, you realize there’s no choice. And then the advisor or yourself can make the budgetary. There may be budgetary adjustments, there may be time adjustments. You may be spending too much time at work. You may be spending too much time scrolling on your device. There are adjustments. If your dream of freedom, it lights up the night sky for you, you can make this happen.

Casey Weade: You’ve given us practices. Here are questions to ask, mindfulness practices to embrace freedom of moments questions to ask ourselves and reflect upon, so that we can really embrace our birthright, the freedom of life. Then we get to the freedom of civilization. What are some things that we can do? What are some practices, some questions that we can ask ourselves in order to truly embrace this freedom of civilization?

George Kinder: Great. So, I think of it as two things. One of them is the spirit that we talk about, that we’ve been talking about, this thrill of civilization. One of the cool things for me right now is just being with you, Casey, just being here, I mean, have we ever actually met? I mean, other than here, other than this Zoom thing, right? And yet, it’s so wonderful seeing you and experiencing you, and you’ve got your headphones on and you got an office around you. And I’ve got my kind of home office here around me. And we’re a thousand miles away, something like that.

And here I am, I’ve got spectacles and I’ve got hair that’s white. And I’m older than probably most of my ancestors were lived to. Civilization has given us these things. We’ve got these complex structures that we live inside of and complex relationships. What a wonderful, extraordinary thing. And so, part of the freedom of civilization is not getting down about all the negative stuff. We’ll get there. It’s important to address this stuff, but it’s really celebrating the joy of it and the delight of it and the freedoms that we have in it and sharing that in a way so that we have a joy in our own life, a celebratory quality in our own life that we can bring to other people.

Joy is a really underutilized theme and it’s so helpful for people and people who are down. Empathy is really wonderful. But to move from empathy and to joy is an extraordinary thing. So, the way we move into joy is through inspiration. And so, now, let’s look at the dark stuff. So, part of the freedom of civilization is celebrating it. What we’ve got.

And then part of the freedom is recognizing, it’s in the subtitle, Civilization is Yours. So, there’s some ownership there. There’s some leadership that’s called to there. For your audience, Casey, 55 to 65, whatever the ranges of audience, there’s mentorship. There’s a connection that’s called for. It’s a wonderful thing as we move toward retirement, realizing that we’ve got something to give back.

Part of that giving back is understanding, is looking at where we’ve gone wrong in civilization, where civilization still has stuff to do. And we know that. It has stuff to do. Well, who’s better to do it than us? Who’s going to do it other than us? We’ve created this and now, there’s more stuff to do to make it really work, really work well.

So, I’ve got a whole program on that in the book. It’s a tiny little book, by the way. I know the audience is not all visual, but it’s a tiny little book. So, it’s meant as a book of wisdom to get you thinking. It’s meant as a book to go back to and reflect on. And the last part of the book is about, is there a way that we could actually restructure what we’re doing so that it works phenomenally well? And instead of going at all the things we think are wrong and getting called from thing to thing and being overwhelmed by it with this rapid pace of history that we’re in, we can see that, oh, there’s just a simple structural tweak that we can do. And if we deliver that, a lot of things will be better and we’ll be able to have so many more people living their life plan.

Casey Weade: So, what I love about this and the way I see it is we’re getting very clear on presents. So, let’s get present. Let’s get clear on our gifts and our values and what’s most important to us in life. If we’re able to identify those things, then we’re able to leverage them and take action. I see freedom of civilization as taking action on those gifts, on those unique abilities to make a bigger impact in the world on civilization.

And that tagline Retire with Purpose, our tagline Retire with Purpose, the reason that we talk so much about that is I truly believe this generation, we often talk about, wow, there’s this generation of retirees. There’s 10,000, 15,000 people retiring every day, and this is going to be a detriment to society. And this is the biggest opportunity that we have in history to take the largest generation in history and leveraging all of their wisdom, all of their wealth to make an even bigger impact on society. But that’s only going to happen if they go through this kind of process, if they get clear on where they are and where they want to be and what those gifts are.

George Kinder: Wow, Casey, I’m inspired by your frame of how you do it and how you understand it. What you’ve brought to these questions that I’ve been wrestling with as well in the book, but how your frame coming from your understanding of retirement. And this generation is you say that is retiring at this moment and how huge it is and how accomplished it is, how wise it is, how much we’ve gone through. And so often, we feel, I mean, there are times when I want to apologize to my kids or to people in the next generation because there’s a lot of news out there about how the older generation has really screwed this up and it’s all messed up because of them and all that. But this is the opportunity.

And by the way, I don’t buy into that. I think it has more to do with power structure and that we’ve slightly tweaked institutions in a wrong way that we haven’t. Institutions will never be human, never be human beings, but we can require them to be humane. And we never did that in the structure of capitalism and structure of capital.

So, there are ways that we can tweak that so that instead of having global warming, if that’s happening or a diminishment of democracy or of the press being not always telling the truth, we don’t need to have those things, we can solve that. But what I love about what you’re saying is, and I see this too, but I’ll say that most of the financial advisors and you’ve opened my eyes and said, “No, this is a whole generation we can speak to. Let’s do it. Let’s make the world the great place that we want it to be for our kids. And let’s take on all the challenges and let’s also look at the big picture and how are there tweaks that we can make that can solve it all, relatively simply, relatively quickly.” Beautiful. Thank you for that.

Casey Weade: This is a great place to bring an end to our conversation, but I’m really interested to ask kind of a, I don’t want to say a different kind of question, but I mean, it’s a very general retirement question that we had somebody submit. But I just have a sense that you’re going to have a unique way of addressing this question that can help a lot of people. So, one of our fans, Jim, he said this. He said, “As an individual about to retire, I find the financial aspects easily calculable, not overly complex. However, what I find very difficult to evaluate are the non-financial matters. What am I going to do with all my free time? How will I spend my day? Will I miss work, which has given me aspects of my identity and purpose for over 40 years?”

So, then he says that, “Even though I can financially retire, should I keep working?” And I know you have such limited, we don’t know the answer, right? But how do you answer that when someone says, “Should I keep working? I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Should I keep working or should I retire?”

George Kinder: What a beautiful question. And so many of us have gone through it or feel it. And part of what’s going on there is that Jim has a real affection, real love for the work that he’s done and appreciation for what he’s done. And there are aspects to that work that is still really fulfilling him in some way. And so, the question is from a life planning purpose is what would fulfill him most and how would you structure that? And that’s what a great life planner, financial life planner, I think will do, Jim, is first of all, you go the three questions route, right? And you come up with, well, what is that torch? What is that dream of freedom that would just be incredible for me?

And you don’t want to hold back on that. You don’t want to compromise. I mean, if your dream of freedom includes 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, 30 hours or 40 hours a week doing the work that you’ve been doing, then that’s part of the dream of freedom that belongs in there. If it includes kind of a mentorship at a distance, of an office at a distance, it belongs in there. What is that dream? Well, how does it work? What would, oh, gosh, make you so excited and come alive?

So, part of it is to buy into that, build that dream of freedom, hopefully, with an advisor that can actually help you. Maybe you can do this yourself, but if you can do it with an advisor who can hold your feet to the fire and really support you to be engaged with you, that’s a great thing. Another of the exercises that I love that we’ve given, it didn’t appear in my first books, but it appeared in my later books, is an exercise I call Ideal Day, Ideal Week, Ideal Year. And I do that periodically where things shift in my life and I go, what would an ideal day look like?

Not an ideal day, like it’s my one day a year that I get this ideal day, but an ideal day as a way to spend my life, as a way to be, to live on purpose, to dedicate my life to what I care about, to be with my kids more, to do more like play my saxophone more, or whatever it is, to meditate, whatever it is to do. And how would I structure my day, so I’d really be able to live that, to be in nature more, to be at work in a way that’s really purposeful? What are the things that I’d let go of? And what are the things that I keep?

So, I do Ideal Day, and then I do Week because weekends mean something. So, what’s the difference in weekends? Our kids might have only weekends free and it’s the only time we can be with them or our spouse or our friends. So, that’s a meaningful shift. And then I do Year. Where do you want to be? Do you want to be skiing in the winter or do you want to be on a beach in the winter? Just as an example, where do you want to be in your life as a place and throughout your day? And so, I do Day, I do Week, I do Year crafted. And then see if with all those numbers that you think you can crunch really well or deliver it yourself and if you can’t see quite how you can do that, then hire somebody who’s really trained to listen. So, they’re on the side of your dream of freedom. Even more, you know that they’ve got all the finances, but know that they really care and really are great listeners to who you want to be and want to really support that. And then you’ll know, should you keep working or should you retire?

Casey Weade: Well, George, to me, and you did not disappoint. Again, I knew you wouldn’t, but I think your gift is getting those wheels turning by asking really good and very powerful questions. Now, I believe in your message. I believe in this movement. I love this book. And I want to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. So, get a free copy of the book. All you have to do, check out a link in the show notes. Write an honest rating and review of the podcast on iTunes and then text us. We’ll verify that username. So, just text us “Book” to 888-599-4491. We’ll get you a free copy of The Three Domains of Freedom. George, thank you so much for this. It’s been a true pleasure once again.

George Kinder: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Casey.

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