In this episode of the Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) podcast, Steve Chen interviews Fritz Gilbert, a former corporate executive and author of Keys to a Successful Retirement, who has been retired for six years. Fritz discusses his journey to retirement, emphasizing the importance of physical fitness, financial planning, and finding purpose post-retirement. He shares insights on maintaining a healthy lifestyle through activities like trail running and strength training, while managing finances with strategies like the bucket approach and delaying Social Security. Fritz highlights how the transition to retirement requires more than just financial preparation—it also demands planning for purpose and fulfillment. He encourages retirees to focus on what brings them joy, embrace curiosity, and live intentionally, fostering both personal and community connections for a rewarding retirement experience.
Steve Chen (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by the Boldin Financial Planning Platform, formerly NewRetirement. Create a financial plan for free Boldin.com. Welcome to NewRetirement Podcast. I'm your host Steve Chen. Today we have a special guest, Fritz Gilbert. He's the author of Keys to a Successful Retirement. Fritz is a former corporate exec and he's made the transition to retirement six years ago. He also runs the popular blog of Retirement, the Retirement Manifesto. That's how we originally met, and he has written about his journey to and now living in retirement for actually nine years. So we're going to get Fritz's six year take on what he's learned six years into retirement. So with that, Fritz, welcome to our show. Appreciate you taking the time to join us.
Fritz Gilbert (00:52):
Hey Steve. Thanks so much. I remember back when we met in 2017 at FinCon and I hadn't even retired yet. I was a year out and a couple years into my blog and you were just starting New Retirement and now look at us these many years later. I've been retired six years living in the mountains and just loving life and you're doing great with New retirement, so congratulations. Thanks for having me back on the show.
Steve Chen (01:12):
Yeah, I'm glad we've kept in touch and obviously we did some work together as well, so just catch the audience up, what's new with life and stuff like that.
Fritz Gilbert (01:21):
Yeah, well, when I was still working, we were in Atlanta, so when I retired we moved up to our cabin in the mountains in Blue Ridge, Georgia, right in the Tennessee border. So we're in the Appalachian Mountains where the Appalachian Trail starts, and I tell you what, retirement has just been awesome. Steve, my wife started a nonprofit called Freedom for Fido. So we're building free fences for low income families with dogs on chains. We've got a couple hundred volunteers. We're doing a fence build every week. So we've built this whole community of generous people who are all about giving back to the community, and it's just become this huge network of really good friends. We call it the Fido family. We actually have a name for it and we're getting together tomorrow to Microbrew, right? It's just these spontaneous popups. Somebody will shoot out a group text, Hey, let's get together at Grumpy, and we just show up and it is become a great core friendship.
(02:07):
My blog, obviously I'm nine years into that now and still continuing to write and enjoying that and the interaction with the readers and helping people figure out this whole retirement thing. And it's really been interesting, Steve, I started writing before I'd retired three years prior, so I talked about preparing for it and the transition, but you just don't know what it's going to be like until you actually do it. And now I'm six years into it, I know what it's about, right? I've been there, I've been through the phases I've settled in, and we're just living life. We've got a couple dogs up here. We've got a second home down in southern Alabama where our daughter lives, and we spend a week down there every month with our granddaughter, three weeks up here at the cabin, and then we'll hook up the RV and we'll travel around the country a couple times through the year. And we're loving life. We're healthy, we're focused on fitness. We're doing stuff outdoors all the time. I couldn't be happier, Steve. Life is very good. We're blessed.
Steve Chen (02:54):
Yeah. Well, I know I see you on Facebook and social media and it definitely seems like everything you're communicating. I see the work with the dogs and you're building stuff on your properties and you're checking around the country, and I definitely envy the fact that you have accomplished this and can live confidently. It's interesting how you're focusing on health. I want to talk about that. You're reading younger next year and you've obviously been running around, but also because of that and hopefully knock on wood, staying healthy. You could live quite a long time and the reality of managing your money over that time period, but I love your commentary on both those things. How do you manage your health and then also how you kind of think about the financial side of it.
Fritz Gilbert (03:34):
Yeah, that's a great question and really, I mean, I've always kind of been fitness oriented. I ran for 25 years in my career and I'd run at lunch and whatnot, but the freedom in retirement to just do so many different physical activity things. We're doing a fence build, so you're doing strength stuff there today. I went out on a six mile trail run. I'm 61 years old and I can still run six miles in the trails. It feels awesome. I'm probably in better shape now than I was at 50 because I've got the time and I've put in such a variety of workouts. I bought a Peloton type thing, so I got a home gym. I'm doing weights. I never really did weights when I was working, but now I've really noticed the importance. I've done a lot of research on longevity and things you need to do.
(04:15):
I guess there's several planks in our retirement. We've got the travel, we've got time with our daughter, we've got the blog, we've got the charity, but fitness is absolutely a key part of that. And I probably have pretty aggressive workouts three to four days a week. So how does the money play into that? It's interesting when you're preparing for retirement and obviously new retirement, this is what you guys are all about. There's a huge focus on the financials and there should. There needs to be. But as you get into retirement, you start thinking about, this is probably one of the things I've learned in retirement. You think about the money less after you've made the decision to retire and you've gotten a couple years into retirement, you've kind of gotten used to spending what you can safely spend. You kind of settle in and you don't worry about money nearly as much.
(04:58):
I know we're within our safe withdrawal rate. I know we've got investments that'll keep up with inflation, hopefully demonstrated in the past, no idea about the future, but we've got a diversified portfolio. We're going to delay social security. That's a good longevity step. So we're doing the things we can do to hopefully not run out of money, and we really don't worry about it. We know we're well within our safe withdrawal rate. We're comfortable that we can live like this. We've got some luxuries built in. If we had to scale back to a little bit, we could do that without any major sacrifices. So it's really refreshing how the financial anxiety goes down significantly once you're into retirement for a couple of years.
Steve Chen (05:36):
Yeah, so you're 61, you're nine years from claiming if you delay social security till 70. Yep. You're kind of living on your own ass. I mean, and then that'll help, but probably, I don't know, how much will a difference will it make? I mean it does make a huge difference in terms of hedging your longevity and stuff like that.
Fritz Gilbert (05:53):
Yeah, I mean you can argue, okay, here's an opportunity cost spending our investments to delay social security. My whole take on that is social security is if you can get the bump every year while you wait 8% or whatever they claim it is, and then once you start claiming it's inflation adjusted every year. So to me that's kind of a guaranteed locked in inflation adjusted income, whereas your investment returns have more risk by definition. So to me, there is a breakeven point. You can probably see it in your models. I mean it's typically in your early to mid eighties is the breakeven point. So yeah, you could say it's not that big a deal and it's probably not, but it's just one of those levers you've got. If you live to a hundred, you're going to be glad you delayed social security clearly past the break even point. So
Steve Chen (06:38):
Yeah, a hundred percent. No, it's also great to hear about your path to, I mean you've always been healthy in exercise and stuff like that, but leaning even more. Joe Kuhn is another guest we've had and we do some work with him and he got really fit. He's on YouTube and he was originally talking about all this plant stuff and then people were noticing how fit he was getting. They were like, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm retired. I'm getting super fit. And it's like I wanted to really get into what he was doing there. Do you see this with your peers, other folks that are retired today leaning into the exercise side of it and getting more fit?
Fritz Gilbert (07:10):
Yeah, we're fortunate because so many of our relationships now have been fostered through this freedom for Fido work, and I think it's kind of a self-selecting subset of population. The people that we interact with tend to be earlier retirees. They tend to be fit. They're out there building fences for dogs. So by definition, the vast majority of our friends are really into fitness as well. If you go, we're on Strava together, we see each other doing stuff. So I look at my friend, there's this woman, she's amazing. She's probably late fifties. She's out there doing eight to 10 mile hikes. I mean 2000 feet of vertical climbing. She's absolutely just crushing it. Like 20 year olds couldn't keep up with her. And that's just representative. I mean, mark, another friend of mine, he lives at the top of this huge mountain and every day he walks down the mountain, he does a five mile hike with his dog and he hikes back up this mountain and that's probably a 1500 foot climb.
(07:59):
So I got mountain biking buddies, I've got swimming buddies. There's a group of us that swim in the lake every year. It's a three mile swim across the lake. It's a big event and the lady that organizes that is like 78 years old and she's still swimming three miles across the lake. So yeah, health, like you mentioned younger next year, there's no reason if you don't make a focus on health and it's easy to make excuses, but once you retire, the biggest thing I urge people stop making excuses. Just get out and start walking. I got a friend of mine who just retired, he and his wife, they're kind of out of shape and you know what? They're starting to walk and they're doing two miles at a city park and I'm like, good for you. They're doing it and they're getting out there three days a week and they're walking there two miles.
(08:39):
And the rewards of it, not only do you hopefully get better longevity, but you feel so much better. I can do anything I want to do anytime I want to do it, and I have no aches and pains and if we want to go travel to Colorado and climb a fourteener, we can do it. So the benefits far exceed just the longevity. It's health span. If you study this stuff, it's being able to do what you want to do longer in your life. Being surrounded by a community of like-minded friends certainly helps because you're the nature of your five best friends. As they say, our best friends are equally focused on fitness.
Steve Chen (09:13):
Yeah, that's awesome. It's so important, the community, the people that you're around and leaning into it and yeah, I mean I think about my life this way too. It's like I want to be able to ski bike surf. I just took up wing foiling. Oh, cool. Which is sport where you're holding this wing and then you come up and yeah, if I want to keep doing this kind of stuff and you're working out way more than I am. There's a friend of mine, yeah, he's retired. He is like 63. He's in better shape than I am, but he works out two to three hours a day.
Fritz Gilbert (09:41):
Yeah,
Steve Chen (09:41):
Yeah. He just swam like 5,000 meters. I was like, what do you,
Fritz Gilbert (09:46):
Well, it's like anything else, right? I really believe in balance. I got a friend of mine who works out 10 times a week and I'm like, dude, you got to back it down. That spoke in your wheel is too long, right? You got to have balance. But the one thing, I just saw a YouTube video the other day about the top five regrets of retirees, and this is 80-year-old people that this guy had interviewed and I think it was number two or three. The biggest regret was that they hadn't taken better care of themselves and focused on fitness because at that age you're starting to really, even at my age, I think of my high school classmates, you can see a huge difference between the people that think about fitness and the people that don't already at 60. So by the time you're 80, it's a huge chasm and that's a big regret. People that didn't focus on it, when it starts catching up to you and it's kind of hard to dig yourself out of that trench, that's when you start having regrets for not making it a priority.
Steve Chen (10:33):
Yeah, I definitely think that There's a certain age where I was like, okay, I'm going to get ripped, whatever. But now I'm like, alright, I just want to stay fit. And I feel like if you don't keep it up at a certain point you may not be coming back. You're just not going to get back to, could I go do a 2000 foot climb and do a 10 mile
Fritz Gilbert (10:54):
Hike? I just published a post last week longevity lessons from a 91-year-old and this guy 91 years old, he can still do 15 pushups, two chin-ups. He jogs a little bit, he walks a lot and he is 91 years old and younger next year was all about this. You can do stuff well into your late seventies, early eighties. If you maintain your fitness, you can do the same thing at 79 that you can do at 50. It's shocking to people, but I see a lot of those late seventies, early eighties in our community that are that model, the lady that I swim with, it can be done. And my goal is that my wife and I'll be in that camp and I want to build fences until I'm 85 years old. That's kind of my goal. That's awesome.
Steve Chen (11:34):
So what are the biggest lessons you would share kind of six years in? One of the things you talked a lot about beginning then, I know you hedge is sequence of return risk and actually I'd love to start you share your thinking there. Does that go away? It kind of feels like you have long duration ahead of you, you always have that sequence of return risk or do you feel like there's a big risk right as you retire?
Fritz Gilbert (11:59):
Well, you could argue because I'm only 61, most people are retiring now, right? I've already been retired six years, so I should absolutely see it as big a risk now as I did at 55, but I don't, and I went through the bear market of 20 20, 20 22. There've been a couple of bear markets since I've retired and I really put a lot of focus. I use the bucket strategy, so I keep three years of cash. Obviously with interest rates being higher, it's less of an opportunity cost to do that these days. But what I've learned is having a couple of years of cash and then just knowing from six decades on this earth and four decades as a do it DIY investor, you learn that markets are cyclical and they're going to go down and you don't freak out about it. So you've got to have that exposure to equities to offset that long-term inflation.
(12:48):
So you worry about it a lot when you first retire, but then you go through a couple downturns, you kind of pull your cash down for a little bit, you don't refill the bucket and then the markets come back and you refill the bucket and you're like, Hey, that was pretty easy. So I still have that same position in place, the bucket strategy, three years in cash, five to eight years in bonds, which I changed to a bond ladder because I learned as the interest rates obviously went up, the bonds got crushed. So I've moved that to a bond ladder, so it'll be a known return at a known date. But beyond that, it's just in place. I maintain it and I don't really worry about sequence of return risk, but I have, and I probably always will, three years of cash and five years of bonds and a little bit of alternative commodities, some stuff like that, some REITs that I feel comfortable, if we had to go 10 years in a horrendous bear market, we'd be okay. We'd find a way to get through it. It's something you need to be aware of, but once you position it and you just start maintaining it, you worry about it a lot less.
Steve Chen (13:45):
How do you compare with your community of fit, friends, building fences, like a bunch of you in good shape? Do you guys talk about money where you're at? We're leaning into this story of we think financial wellness is going to be a lot physical wellness, which is like it's a lifelong practice.
Fritz Gilbert (14:03):
You
Steve Chen (14:03):
Got to pay attention and you just got to keep at it. You got to keep working out. You're going to have to keep managing your money, doing the bucket strategy. Are your friends the same way? I mean, I'm sure they're not like you because you're the only person I know has written a nine year blog book. Are they taking a little bit?
Fritz Gilbert (14:20):
I wrote an article called the 90 10 Rule of Retirement, and I basically said as you're preparing for retirement, 90% of your thinking is on the financials. And then you get into retirement and it switches and 90% of your thinking is about life and only 10% is about financials. And I can honestly tell you six years retired active in the community, tons of friends, a lot of 'em obviously, apparently quite affluent, early retirees. We never talk about money, we never talk about it. I don't know what most of these people did while they were working. It's not even relevant now. I started a retirement mastermind group about two years ago, eight guys all kind of similar age. And in that group, we'll talk a little bit about money because it's intentionally focused to talk about retirement. But even there, we don't share specific net worths. We don't really talk about asset allocation. We'll talk concepts, we'll talk about safe spending strategies and safe withdrawal rates, but I have no idea. I know the one guy, he's got a property that he's putting up to sell, so it's okay that guy's loaded. He's got a very valuable property. So you get little things like that that you see, but it's not something that we kind of make a big part of our life. That's a surprise to me in retirement that it's not a big topic.
Steve Chen (15:32):
Well, but it's good that people are confident. It's interesting, I look at my friends that are approaching retirement and some of them are thinking about it a little bit. It feels like it reflects the wealth concentration of this country where some people are like, they don't have to think about it money at all. They're just like, whatever, I have tons of it. It's all over the place, and who cares? And then most people are like, I got to pay attention and maybe it's not going to be that great, and I got to work for this amount of time and it's not a slam dunk.
Fritz Gilbert (16:02):
So
Steve Chen (16:02):
A lot of it also depends, I think, on where you live. I mean, we live in northern California. It is very expensive to live here. And I think that a lot of people are probably going to end up making trades where they might be like, all right, I'll go to Mexico for a few years, or I'll go somewhere else in the country and downsize. I'm going to have to carry this expensive house around and taxes and all that stuff.
Fritz Gilbert (16:21):
And I think part of that where I live is very low cost. And most of the people that are here that are retirees, they've moved here from somewhere else. We actually have somebody that moved here from Silicon Valley. We joke they were Silicon Valley billionaire. I mean we have no idea, but obviously they did very well. But they don't talk about it, right? It's like, where did you work? Where are you with Google? And they don't talk about it. But the point being, there's clearly some people that did well in high cost of living areas and they intentionally chose to move here because it is a low cost of area with a plethora of outdoor activities. So it draws outdoor enthusiast type of retirees that typically have done pretty well in other parts of the country. You
Steve Chen (17:01):
Should just buy a bunch of real estate and then get on a podcast circuit and pump it up.
Fritz Gilbert (17:06):
Yeah, that's one thing. You talk about buying a second home in retirement or we bought our house in 2009, our cabin, and we were still in Atlanta. We bought it as a weekend place. And thank God we did Steve, because the property values have probably everywhere else in the country, but this area in particular with all the retirees moving in, wall Street Journal had an article, they call 'em halfbacks and all these people moved to Florida. They want to get closer to their grandkids, so they move halfway back. They still want a better climate. And then Covid leaving the city, so they're all moving to the mountains. They can work from home now. So the property values absolutely exploded, but by buying our house 10 years before I retired, we locked in our housing costs for retirement. And it was great that we did. I mean, we'd probably be able to afford it, but it would be a much bigger dent in our retirement portfolio than it was buying when we did.
Steve Chen (17:54):
No, that's interesting. Okay, I have a question just generally. I know that people with money, one thing that is kind of counterintuitive to a lot of folks is that they have money and they've done a good job of saving even after they retire, they keep building wealth and they pass away with more money. Is that your story? Are you kind? You don't have to share the details if you don't want. I'm just curious.
Fritz Gilbert (18:15):
No, it's a great question. And if you do the research, the vast majority of retirees that have done their planning and they're financially in a good state to retire the 4% safe withdrawal rate, that's worst case scenario, right? That's designed for a 4% market over. And we all know over time the markets tend to return 10%. So if you're designing your whole retirement plan to deal with a 4% safe withdrawal rate and the markets are normal, by definition, your wealth is going to grow. So yeah, our net worth is up from when I retired. It's shocking, but the markets have been good, right after being conservative our whole lives and being very careful in our spending and having a high savings rate, it's hard to go from a lifelong saver to a retirement spender. That's one of the lessons I've learned. It's hard to spend money and most people don't do a very good job of it. So I'm encouraging people, look, you're safe. Withdrawal rate automatically transferred into your checking. If you have money left at the end of the year, give it to charity. Force yourself to spend it because otherwise you're going to end up with a portfolio twice as big as when you're retired. And you might as well enjoy it while you've got it. And I've talked to others conceptually on this, that phenomenon, because most people have equities and most people are using a 4% or less withdrawal rate. Most people's portfolios do increase in time. It's a fact.
Steve Chen (19:31):
The best thing I did for my net worth was retire. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean there's a guy, a friend of mine here, he retired super young in his forties. He was worried his father had some heart disease. He is like, I'm going to take this time with my family. He is like, I have more money now than when I retired. He lives pretty frugally. I think the cost managing your spend, but it's pretty interesting. So it's good.
Fritz Gilbert (19:56):
Lemme throw one more thing in there. Do you know Nords, Doug Norman, a blog military dollar. He's been retired like 15 years now, and he goes, my withdrawal rate's down to two point a half percent. He said, I'm still spending the same, it's even going up with inflation, but my portfolio's grown so much faster than my spending. My withdrawal rate is actually declining in time. And that kind of struck a chord to me. I was like, and I'm starting to see the same with us.
Steve Chen (20:18):
Yeah, started at 4%, then it gets, I think I saw it as some blog, but it's like it's 2%.
Fritz Gilbert (20:22):
Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy.
Steve Chen (20:23):
Andrew Biggs, he Social security administration isn't really a retirement crisis. Everyone talk. The press is always like, Hey, everyone's going to run out of money. It's going to be horrible. When I look out there at people who are older, many of them are fine. They're not on the street. Now, people that plan, that's definitely true. I think some people, maybe they're not covered, maybe they're not retired, they can't retire, they're still working.
Fritz Gilbert (20:47):
I think that's my take on it. People that listen to your podcast, the people that read my blog, they're the ones that are planners. They're the ones that are going to be fine. And I don't know what percentage of population is, but let's say it's 20 or 30% are going to be absolutely fine. There's probably 30% in the middle that'll kind of make it. But boy, they really need that social security and they'll have to kind of cut back, but they'll be okay. And then there's probably 20 or 30% who haven't saved a dime. They've always bought the big boat. They've always bought the big house. They've always kept up with the Joneses. They're in debt to their eyebrows and they're 65 years old going, oh crap, I've got nothing saved for retirement. That's a big percentage. But those aren't the people that listen to us talk unfortunately.
(21:25):
So I think there is a retirement crisis. I think it's probably 20 to 30% that are going to be dependent on social security, and that's almost all they're going to have. And I know a few of those people, they're hanging on by their fingernails because they can't afford to lose their job, but they're starting to face ageism. They're starting to hate their job, but they don't have a choice. And that's a miserable place to be, right? I really feel a burden for those people, but some of it, not all of it, but some of it you can say, well, they made bad decisions through their life. Ultimately they got to pay the price. Some of 'em are there because just bad luck. And those are the ones that I really feel bad for.
Steve Chen (22:02):
Yeah, it's tough. We're now teaching financial literacy in more high schools, which is great, but it's not taught to, I think especially in our generation or 15 six year olds, it's like we're gen one, 401k people, no pension. Do it yourself. If you make good choices like you did your whole life investing and saving and regularly and not breaking out about the market, you're fine. Most people don't learn that lesson. Now, hopefully they're learning that lesson.
Fritz Gilbert (22:29):
And I think you're right to target the high school and even college. That's a huge underserved market. It should be a mandatory curriculum for every high school in the country. And I've got a buddy of mine who's really pushing it in Georgia. He's connected with some state senators and stuff, and he's making some headway. The area, when you talk about financial planning and your point, financial wellness for life about compounding, the earlier you start the better it is. The earlier you can learn some of the basics of this stuff. So you don't get into trouble right out of the gate, the better off you're going to be. And that is a gap I think, in our society.
Steve Chen (22:58):
Yeah, a hundred percent. Okay, and a second, I want to shift to time a bit, but I want to ask one more question about money. Any other huge money lessons that you learned post that you didn't expect post retirement?
Fritz Gilbert (23:13):
Not huge, I would say other than, like I said, it's hard to spend your money. When I was planning our retirement, I was conservative, meaning I overestimated the cost of almost every category. So we had a lot of buffer in our spreadsheets. Now that we're living it, obviously a lot of those buffers aren't needed because things aren't as expensive as we planned. I used a higher inflation rate than now we're starting to see inflation. I'm glad I did, but I inflated everything every year. So the one surprise is that it's harder to spend money than I thought it would be. We're even with, we don't live a luxurious life. We're very basic. We have a little cabin, 2100 square feet, so that's number one. Number two is kind of something I discovered a couple months into maybe six months into retirement, maybe a year, I talked about the bucket strategy and my initial plan going in was, okay, I'll spend cash for a year.
(24:03):
At the end of the year when I do my formal financial review, I'll do a rebalance. I'll top off bucket one. And as I got into it, I was like, you know what? That's probably not the best strategy because if you have a bear market in November, you just drew down 11 months of cash in a bull market and then it turned to a bear right before you're going to refill it. So I moved to quarterly refilling of bucket one, and I think that's something people should think about is if the markets are good, you're not working anymore. You're not in the accumulation phase, you're in the withdrawal phase, and it's different when the markets are good. Keep skimming some off the top and keep that cash buffer as full as you can as frequently as you can so that when the market goes down, you've got the full three years of protection that you'd land on.
Steve Chen (24:44):
That's interesting. Could you define this? You obviously have thresholds in your head, but you could just, this is the kind of stuff like we're automating or thinking about automating our platform, but it's like, hey, if the market's up a certain amount of money, then you're continuously refilling. And if the market starts correcting, then maybe that stops. You could automate.
Fritz Gilbert (25:00):
Yeah, everybody's asked me that. Is there a number you look at, and I tell you the one thing that really shows it is your asset allocation. If you run your asset allocation and just blow it through, use whatever, you've got to update your asset allocation. You'll see your equities growing and obviously your cash is going down, spending it every month, but you'll see not two or three or 5% moves, but you'll see half a percent moving to a percent. You'll see a shift in those allocations. And that's also an easy way to determine should I sell bonds or should I sell stocks to refill my cash? So if suddenly your cash is becoming a higher part of your allocation, guess what it tells you? Your stocks and bonds are getting crushed, which happened in 2022. You can see your asset allocation as kind of a single metric that will give you some indication of, Hey, I'm at 72% stocks. I want to be at 70 and my cash is down to 8%. I want it to be at 10% and I'm going to go ahead and take 2% equities and move 'em over to cash.
Steve Chen (26:00):
Interesting. You're doing it all yourself, right? You're tracking all this stuff and doing it. Do you think your other friends are doing this too, or are they less active on it?
Fritz Gilbert (26:11):
I think they're less active. Most of 'em are DIY. We were talking about how much cash doesn't make sense. I get a lot of criticism, three years cash. That's crazy. That's way too much. And I'm like, no, it's okay. I'm good with it. 5% interest these days. That's less of an opportunity cost. And I sleep great at night. I never worried through the two downturns since I've retired. And I got a buddy of mine, I said, oh no, I keep a lot more than that. So I'm like, okay, but then what do you do for the inflation risk? Right? What's your equity exposure? But he doesn't get into that. So for the first two years of retirement, it was kind of a big exercise. Oh, I got to look at refill and bucket one. It's almost just become now just a routine thing. I know when the market's up, you keep an eye on the market, man, the market's been doing well. I haven't filled my buckets for a while. I probably ought to take a look at it and it's a five minute exercise. It's not a big deal. I did a thing about how I spend my time and how much time I spend managing our money, and I did a little spreadsheet on exercise and doing this and doing that. I think the total time spent managing our portfolio for the year was like 27 hours.
Steve Chen (27:10):
Really,
Fritz Gilbert (27:11):
It's less than a half a percent of your time. It doesn't take a lot of time. Once you've got a system set up and you're just in the maintenance mode of it, it's not that much work.
Steve Chen (27:20):
Yeah, that's super interesting. I feel like this stuff is going to get automated for a lot of people and it would be helpful for folks. I want to talk a bit about time. We talk about the bucket strategy for money. I was thinking, do you have a bucket strategy for time and big buckets? There's the Go-go logo
Fritz Gilbert (27:39):
And go
Steve Chen (27:40):
And obviously want the Go-Go's to be long, but do you think, oh, I have to do certain things now I'm younger?
Fritz Gilbert (27:50):
Yeah, perspective comment. I would say when I first retired, no, I was just glad to be out and glad to be able to do whatever I wanted to do. But everybody's talking about Die With Zero. I dunno if you've read it, but I read it. I disagreed with a lot of his premises on the financial side, but the one thing that really did stick with me is exactly what you're saying. He didn't call it this, but a bucket strategy for your time. You can only climb Mount Everest until your early sixties maybe, right? If you want to climb mount ever, she better get out there and do it right? So prioritize the things you want to do early because you don't want to wait too long and then have regrets. So my wife and I, again, we talked about not being able to spend all your money or it's hard to spend money.
(28:28):
We've been talking about doing a Nordic cruise. We took our daughter and granddaughter on a little Disney cruise and we're like, man, we're not doing a Disney cruise again. I mean it's fine. It's for kids. And my wife and I were saying, we need to do a cruise for adults. Let's do something really nice. We've cruised maybe seven, eight times over our life and we want to do something big. So we just booked because we're 61 and next year we're going to be 62 and we're like, who knows how long we can do this kind of thing. So we booked a cruise to Greenland and the Northwest Passage and we went with a nice cruise on Viking, went top of the line, we're like dog on it. Yes, now is the time. We are in the go-go years. We don't know how long they're going to last.
(29:05):
And that was one of the other regrets people had is that they didn't spend their money when they could still do things that they wanted to do. And so we are starting to think like that and okay, let's take a big trip and it takes like 22 hours to get to this little town in Greenland where we get on the ship, it's crazy, you got to fly to Boston, then you got to fly to Iceland and you got to connect from Iceland up to Greenland. And we're like, you couldn't do that when you're 75 years old or you wouldn't enjoy it, so let's do it now. And then as we got into the registration on the ship, well son of a gun, they require a physical to take this cruise because you're so far removed from medical care. I mean they have a ship doctor, but if anything serious happens, you're so far removed, they don't want people doing that cruise that aren't healthy enough to, so I wouldn't say it's structured, but I would say it started to creep into our thinking.
(29:56):
The things that we're doing now, building this workshop that I'm in, this is my writing studio and my woodworking shop. We built that early because I'm like, you know what? I want to enjoy building doghouses for Fido and having my own writing studio to do podcasts in. I want to enjoy that for as many years as I can. Let's go ahead and spend the money and get it done so we can enjoy it for a long time. There's a balance. You don't want to go over your spending. You want to spend your money and you want to spend doing things that you might not be able to do forever.
Steve Chen (30:24):
Yeah, it becomes an interesting problem solve because you think probably a list of things you want to do, your crews and your work and stuff like that, and then you also have to filter by what it costs and your physical capability and all that stuff. Did you do that kind of exercise? Do you have a bucket list or whatever better name for it? It's not like a bucket list for life. It was like a decade list or something. Oh, that's a good idea. A time sequence. It was like, here's the things I want to do in this timeframe.
Fritz Gilbert (30:50):
I think that was in Di was zero that a buddy of mine calls it is a dump truck list. He said, I got so much stuff in my list when I was planning for retirement, I did a bucket list and all these, we haven't really looked at it. It's not driving our life. So much of our life was structured when I was in the corporate world. You had to do the five year strategic plan every year and I just hated it. I hated that stuff. So my wife and I both kind of decided when we get into retirement, it's going to be much more of, my favorite word is serendipity. And serendipity is just kind of exploring as you go and discovering new things unexpectedly. And we've made a conscious decision to live our retirement in a more serendipitous fashion. So no, we've not done a forced ranking based on cost and decades and all that, but somebody like an engineering type mind, which a lot of people that are really into the personal finance are like that, right? They've got all their spreadsheets. I was like that with the financial side. But interestingly on the life side now we've become much less formal and much more serendipitous.
Steve Chen (31:49):
Cool. So you're 61, right? With healthcare. How long are you planning to live for? How long do you think you might live
Fritz Gilbert (31:56):
For? When I did our cashflow timeline for retirement, I put it out to 95 like okay, I'm probably not going to live that long, but I'm going to plan that long just to make sure we're good. I don't want to retire and then get to be 90 and run out of money. So I ran it out to 95. Who knows? I mean healthcare technology, you talk about FinTech. Well, there's a lot going on in the healthcare side. It's not at all inconceivable that between my wife and I, both of whom are healthy, both of whom are 61, the odds of one of us living to a hundred are probably 20, 30%. I fully expect to live into my nineties and I expect my wife will live a couple years longer than me, but I don't really obsess about it. I focus on enjoying every day that I'm given, while I still have the health.
(32:38):
We have the financial, and a big thing I've learned is the mindset that you take into retirement is huge. And taking on a mindset of optimism and half glass full and gratitude and curiosity. Curiosity is a big one. Listen to your curiosity. It's that taking the time to be appreciative. I don't really care if I die at 80 or die at a hundred, I just want to be healthy. I would rather die at 80 than live to a hundred and be in a nursing home for 10 years if I had my choice, but it's out of my control. So I think of big circles, little circles and you got one big circle, which is all the things you can worry about. And then there's a small circle in the middle, which is all the things you can worry about, but you can do something about, I can't do anything about my genetics. They are what they are, but guess what? I can do something about my physical fitness. That's small circle. So I'm making that a focus. I try to focus my time and energy looking at things in the small circle and not worrying too much about stuff in the big circle. That's one of the mindset things I've taken on for retirement.
Steve Chen (33:38):
That's awesome. I love it. You should be a life coach. So you had a career, a long career kind of doing consistent stuff and now you've taken on this six years in, you've done a lot obviously. So interesting to hear you've got this 200 person organization, you're doing all this good work. Do you want to keep growing that or do you think that you'll shift gears and pick up another thing or how do you see that
Fritz Gilbert (34:00):
Unfolding? The way I look at that, Steve, and I've written articles about this and I compared life in retirement to a poker hand
(34:07):
And I said, you've got a hand of cards. The difference between this and poker is you can put down any one of those cards you want at any given point in time and you can pick up another one and see if you like it better. And you can pick up 10 more cards if you want. You can pick up 20 more cards, you can pick up unlimited amount of cards and you can put down an unlimited number of cards. So I'll give you an example. When I first retired, this is a big fly fishing area and I like fly fishing. You're on the river, it's nice, it's peaceful. I'm like, man, I'm going to fly fish all the time. That was a card in my hand. Well, we got up here a couple of years and I'd fished the, I don't know, eight or nine areas where you could access the river 10 times each.
(34:41):
It was kind of getting boring. So you know what? I didn't renew my fishing license. I put that card down for a while and I picked up a different card. I started mountain biking. So my whole thing is always remember in your mind that everything you do in retirement is an intentional decision to do it. And you can say no to anything now. It'd be harder to say no to the charity now because it's gotten so big. But example there of what we did, because my wife and I were really starting to get kind of buried. We were leading all these fence builds. So we reached out to our volunteers and we said, look, we love what we're doing, but man, it's getting to be quite a bit of work. Would any of you volunteers be willing to step up and we will train you to be build leaders? And we had three other couples that all volunteered. So now my wife and I only lead one fence build a month and then we can go to Alabama, we can visit our daughter and guess what? They're still building fences. So we found a way to delegate and balance things where it doesn't feel like work. And that was one of those intentional designs of putting down the card of having to lead every build and finding a way to bring better balance into it.
Steve Chen (35:45):
I wonder if we're going to get to this world where, I mean I start to see it happening, more people have more agency and they kind of choose the work they want to be like. When I grew up, my family moved to Rochester, my dad got a job there. I don't envision moving my family cross country and I never have in my whole career. And I think many people don't now and especially with work from home and stuff like that. So do you kind of see a world where we have better choice, better balance? I will say personally grinding, building this business, they say a lot of here's the goal, let's go get it grinding away. And there's not like, okay, hey, we can take the foot off the gas and stuff like that.
Fritz Gilbert (36:24):
But you're also in the grinding years. There's a phase of life where you've got to grind and if you grind well, it gives you the flexibility to have more freedom of choosing what you want to do later and sooner. So I think certainly the whole advent of the side hustle industry, the work from home industry, I have no doubt that that's going to continue. The reality is there's so many side hustles now that I did. I started my blog while I was still working, right? It's fine. I could do it a couple hours in the evening, whatever. It's fine. And you can experiment with different things. And like my blogging, I found something that I love. I'm doing it now. We don't need the money and I'm not really making a lot of money from it, but it's paying for a health insurance. Okay, that's fine. So you can find things that you love to do and you can test 'em while you still have your real job. And if you find something you love that you can make a living at, man, our parents never had that luxury, that trend I think is going to continue to grow. Absolutely. Yeah.
Steve Chen (37:20):
This has been great. Any last things you'd like to share with our audience in terms of things to be thoughtful about, things to look out for and also maybe as you think about the next five years, in five years it'll be like the age when many people are probably like, okay, I'm actually going to retire now at 66, but you have been retired 11 years
Fritz Gilbert (37:37):
At that point. 10. Yeah, exactly.
(37:40):
I think the two things I would say, number one is by definition and a large percent of your audience, they're really focused on the financials. When I started my blog three years ago, I was absolutely obsessed on the financials you have to be and you have to get the financials right About a year, underwriting my blog. A couple of my friends had retired before me and they're like, man, that transition's brutal. I'm really struggling, blah, blah, blah. And then I heard other people say, man, I love it. Best years of my life. So I really started doing some research on what differentiates the people that have good transitions to retirement and those that struggle far and away. The highest correlation is the amount of time people spend planning not only on the financial, but I would argue almost more importantly on the non-financial. You said I almost sound like a life coach.
(38:24):
That's what you almost become. You have to find a way to bring fulfillment to your life. You think about the paycheck from work, obviously, but you don't think about all the other things you get from work. You get structure to your day, you get relationships, you get a sense of identity, you get a sense of purpose, you get deliverables, you get a lot of things that are gone the day you retire. And most people don't think about that until they retire. But the correlation is those that do think about it and start thinking about, I started my blog three years early as an experiment and it's brought me great satisfaction in retirement. So find a way to think about all those benefits you get from work beyond the paycheck as you're working through your financials. Typically most people kind of get the financials in order and they're, oh, I got to wait about a year or two before my numbers are going to work, right?
(39:12):
Well take that year or two. Don't keep refining your numbers, you kind of know where they're at. Take that energy that you were investing in the numbers and kind of put it into that lifestyle side of the equation and figure out what you're going to do to get a sense of purpose too. And the biggest thing is it's serendipity. I wrote an article, retirement is nothing like I expected, and yet retirement is exactly what I expected because the mindset I had of just pursuing my curiosity and finding things is absolutely what I expected. But the places that it's led me are the things I never expected. Building this, woodworking shops, starting the charity, et cetera. Focus some time on that. That's the biggest takeaway. I'm telling people, especially people that are financially oriented because it's a blind spot for most people. The second thing to what are we going to be doing in five years?
(39:59):
I don't know my writing, I've been writing nine years. It's like I look at all the bloggers that were blogging when I was starting. 90% of 'em are gone, right? 95%. So what have I done there? Okay. I scaled back. I used to write every week. Now I write every two or three weeks when I feel like writing. And I've made it where it's not become an obligation. I'm doing it because I enjoy it. I'm always cognizant and weighing the cards that I've got in my hand. So to be honest, I have no idea where I'm going to be in five years because I never expected I'd be where I am. When I retired six years ago, I could have listed a hundred things on a piece of paper and probably 80 of the things that we're doing wouldn't have been on that page. I mean, it is just amazing how none of the stuff we're doing was stuff that I had kind of planned for. It just kind of happened because it interested me and we pursued it and off we go. So I think my life is probably going to remain that way. Follow your curiosity. If something interests you, go after it. You try it for a while. If it doesn't work, you put the card down, you pick up another one. And where that leads, I can't find a way to plan for that. I go thankfully along to wherever it leads. And I love the journey. It's a great way to live life.
Steve Chen (41:09):
I'll have to find a little clip of your six year years ago and now you have essentially the same or higher energy. Yeah,
Fritz Gilbert (41:17):
Hopefully higher. Yeah, I'm younger. I'm younger now than I was. You're six years younger. It's awesome. Yeah, younger next year, every year
Steve Chen (41:23):
Exactly. Prince, thanks for joining us. We will direct folks to your book, Keys to a Successful Retirement and your Blog Retirement Manifesto, and everyone who's listening, thanks for listening and being part of this community and hopefully you check out Fritz's stuff and hopefully you build a plan and update your stuff@newretirement.com, which is very soon. Maybe when you listen to this, going to have a new name. So that's coming. We haven't talked too much about that, but appreciate it. And also, any reviews are welcome and any sharing of our site is also welcome. So with that, thank you very much. And Fritz, thanks for coming on the show.
Fritz Gilbert (41:56):
Thank you Steve. We'll see you in six years.
Steve Chen (41:58):
Hopefully.