Making the transition from putting back and saving…

Transcript

Two common responses I get when I talk about no longer receiving a paycheck and how you have to adjust to that are the most prominent responses, just a misunderstanding of what I'm saying. People say, well, you should have saved for your retirement if you don't have money. That's because you didn't plan financially. No, I mean, I have savings. I have a retirement savings account or retirement portfolio or whatever, and I'll be drawing from that for my retirement. So it's not that I don't have the money to retire. It's that I'm no longer getting a traditional paycheck. The second response is usually, what's the difference? You got a paycheck from the company. Now you get a paycheck from your financial institution, your bank, your brokerage, whatever. And so, I'm not saying, well, you should have saved for your retirement. I'm not saying, well, you should have saved for your retirement. I'm not saying, well, you should have saved for your retirement. In the form of dividends, interest, etc. Well, there's a huge difference. One is every check that I get from my financial institution is money I don't have anymore. Whereas when I used to get a paycheck, it was new money every time. And so it's just a different feeling. You know that you're actually reducing your financial footprint every time you draw a check. It isn't a complaint. It isn't bad. It's just something you have to be ready for. The second one, and this is the biggest one for me, is adjusting to the idea of you're no longer putting aside money for savings or for your retirement. It's weird. All the planning tools say, how much money do you need each month? And invariably, I'll go, okay, we need about this much for these things, this much for those things. And we should be putting back about, well, there's nothing to put back to. It's like you don't have to be calculating in what you're quote unquote putting back because all you'd be doing would be pulling it out of your account just to put it right back in. It's such a hard thing to get used to. It's weird. Like every time I work through a plan, I cannot get my head around the idea of how much do you need each month? It's just a weird number to come up with. Normally, what we would do is we would say, well, here are our expenses. Now, we're going to want to make sure that we have, you know, whatever, 30% more than that coming in so that we can put some back and that we can, you know, do fun things like buy stuff on Amazon or take a small trip or whatever. But in this new model, you don't bring in extra so that you can sort of stash it for fun things you're going to do. You just bring in what you need. And then if you're going to do something. You either have to say, okay, I'm going to bring in a little extra so that I have like this bank account slush fund for these other things I do. Or you say, I'm just going to pull down what I need. And if we're going to go do a trip or something, we'll just pull down more. It's just weird because it's always pulling down. It's never putting back. And it's logical because you're just putting it back to the place you just pulled it out of. But if you haven't retired and you haven't experienced this, it is a super weird experience. And this isn't, I'm not complaining. I'm not frustrated. I'm not sad about it. It's just hard to get used to the idea that in no part of your financial planning, are you putting back savings or putting back for your retirement? Because you're now on the other side of that. Very, very weird experience.