Christine Benz is the director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar and senior columnist for Morningstar.com. She also co-hosts a podcast for Morningstar, The Long View. Christine is widely quoted in the media and the recipient of several awards, including being named by Barron’s as one of the ten most influential women in wealth management in 2021. She is the author of three books. Her latest, and the focus of this podcast, is How to Retire, 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement.
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This podcast is hosted by Rick Ferri, CFA, a long-time Boglehead and investment adviser. The Bogleheads are a group of like-minded individual investors who follow the general investment and business beliefs of John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group. It is a conflict-free community where individual investors reach out and provide education, assistance, and relevant information to other investors of all experience levels at no cost. The organization supports a free forum at Bogleheads.org, and the wiki site is Bogleheads® wiki.
Since 2000, the Bogleheads’ have held national conferences in major cities nationwide. There are also many Local Chapters in the US and even a few Foreign Chapters that meet regularly. New Chapters are being added regularly. All Bogleheads activities are coordinated by volunteers who contribute their time and talent.
This podcast is supported by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a non-profit organization approved by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity on February 6, 2012. Your tax deductible donation to the Bogle Center is appreciated.
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Transcript
00:00:10 Rick Ferri
Welcome to Bogleheads® on Investing Episode #73. In this episode, I’ll be talking with Christine Benz, the Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar and a senior columnist for morningstar.com. We’ll be discussing her new book, “How to Retire.”
Hi everyone. My name is Rick Ferri, and I am the host of Bogleheads® on Investing. This episode, as with all episodes, is brought to you by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a nonprofit organization that is building a world of well-informed, capable, and empowered investors. Visit the Bogle Center at boglecenter.net, where you will find a treasure trove of information, including transcripts of these podcasts. Before we begin, I have one announcement.
Tickets for the 2024 Bogleheads® Conference in Minneapolis, MN are on sale at boglecenter.net. And I’ll be discussing the incredible agenda with Christine in a couple of minutes. Our repeat guest today is Christine Benz, the Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar and a senior columnist for morningstar.com. She also co-hosts a podcast for Morningstar, The Long View. She is widely quoted in the media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, CNBC, and PBS.
Barrons named her to a list of the 100 most influential women in finance in 2020 and 2021, and as one of the 10 most influential women in Wealth Management in 2021. She is the author of “The 30 Minute Money Solution” and co-author of, “Morningstar’s Guide to Mutual Funds: Five Star Strategies for Success.”
Her new book coming out on September 17th is called, “How to Retire,” and that’s what our discussion is going to be about today. So, with no further ado, let’s welcome back Christine Benz. Welcome back to the Bogleheads® on Investing podcast, Christine.
00:02:17 Christine Benz
Rick, it’s so great to be with you. It’s my honor to be here. And you know I love the Bogleheads®. So, I love having the chance to talk about this book with them.
00:02:26 Rick Ferri
You are not just helping the Bogleheads®, you are the President of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, who happens to be putting on a conference next month in Minneapolis. Tell us a little bit about that.
00:02:41 Christine Benz
Sure. And Rick, you are my co-collaborator on this conference, and I succeeded you as President of the Bogle Center. This conference is an expansion of a conference that we did for many years, mainly in the Philadelphia area when Jack Bogle was still alive. We have decided to move it from city to city since Jack passed away and since we came through the post-COVID period. So, this year’s conference is going to be up in Minneapolis.
We have a lively Bogleheads® chapter in the Minneapolis area, and they had indicated that they were happy to help us identify the venue and source volunteers. So, we want it to be kind of a grassroots effort because we have these fantastic chapters that are doing wonderful work already. So, we have one of our best rosters ever. Each year I think, well, this is the best we’ve ever done. But this year it really is just a fabulous lineup of individuals, all of whom have volunteered their time to be there. I think that’s an important component of this Bogleheads® conference.
There’s no pay to play. There are no booths, there’s no marketing, no advertising. None of the things for people who have been to any sort of financial conference, none of those trappings. You won’t see the breakfast breaks sponsored by iShares or anything like that. Nothing against iShares, but we do not have any of those sponsorships.
It’s just paid for by each attendee’s registration fee. And each of the speakers has volunteered their time to be there, and in many cases these are speakers who fetch a pretty good speaker fee on the open market when they are speaking at various financial conferences. But everyone’s there for free. So, it’s all in the spirit of education and improving all of the conference attendees’ financial well-being.
So, I always learn a lot. I think people learned a lot last year in Washington, DC. That was a near sellout. Maybe sellout. We had close to 500 attendees. I’m expecting the same-ish for Minneapolis. So, people should hurry. I expect that we at some point may fully sell out which would be about 500 people.
00:04:56 Rick Ferri
That’s fantastic. Oh, I’m looking forward to it. There’s a tremendous roster of speakers there, and you get to meet all the speakers, too. Everybody is there walking around, milling around, and corner them if you can and ask them whatever questions you wish to ask. Again, that’s in Minneapolis, MN and the dates are September 27th through 29th.
00:05:14 Christine Benz
And one thing, Rick, I would mention for this year’s conference, a couple of interesting emphases. One is, I know a lot of Bogleheads® are interested in safe withdrawal rates, and we just have a power team to discuss safe withdrawal rates.
William Bengen, who many people know is the father of the 4% guideline will be there. Karsten Jeske, who is a FIRE participant (financial independence, retire early) but talks about safe spending guidelines when you have a very long time horizon. John Guyton, the creator of the guardrails approach to retirement spending will be there. John Rekenthaler, my colleague and co-collaborator on some research we do at Morningstar on safe spending rates.
That’s an emphasis, as is the fact that we’ve got some of the leading lights of the FIRE movement at this conference, so I mentioned Karsten, Paula Pant will also be speaking. Paula has her own podcast called, “Afford Anything.” I think she’s one of the leading lights in the FIRE space if people are interested in the financial independence movement. We’ve got some terrific speakers for them.
00:06:30 Rick Ferri
Well, I’m looking forward to it. Now, we’re going to talk about you. Congratulations on writing and publishing – it’s soon to be released on September 17th – “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement.”
I just want to read what Michael Kitces wrote about your book. “In Christine Benz’s, “How to Retire,” prospective retirees gain valuable perspective on why the day-to-day experience of life in retirement can be more challenging than anticipated, and how they need to prepare both financially and beyond their finances to ensure they actually find fulfillment in their decades to come.”
I thought that was a good introduction into really what this book is about. It’s much more than about money.
00:07:20 Christine Benz
That was definitely the goal of the book, Rick, because the more I’ve looked at retirement planning, the more I’ve concluded that it’s not a math problem. You need to look at the numbers. You need to make sure that you have the resources to retire on. But a lot of successful retirement, in my view, is about some of the softer aspects of life in retirement.
What is going to give you purpose later in life? Where will you go for your relationships? If you had important relationships through your work, how will you replace them? All of those considerations. How will you take care of your health? Those things, I think, are even more impactful.
00:08:03 Rick Ferri
A lot of people who write these books, they just go to 20 different people and they say hey, send me a chapter. And the 20 different people write a chapter and they send it to you and you compile it together and you publish it and you call yourself the author, when really maybe you wrote the forward, but you really didn’t really write the book.
Not here, though. You spent a lot of time interviewing, one-on-one, each of these 20 luminaries to get to the questions that you wanted to have answered.
Let’s talk about that. Why did you decide to go that direction rather than just having people write a chapter?
00:08:39 Christine Benz
Yeah, I don’t think it was ever on my radar, actually, Rick, to have people write the chapters. Initially the genesis for this concept came from Harriman House editor Craig Pearce, who I have been talking to for a few years about some type of a book project. We thought it would be about retirement bucketed portfolios, which is a topic I write a lot about on morningstar.com. And I just never could find the time.
And so, Craig said, well, you do these interviews for your podcast work on a Morningstar podcast called The Long View. He said you do these interviews, you have some good contacts. What about a book that was structured in this way, where it’s a conversation with you and some retirement thought leaders?
He was saying would that be something that you could squeeze in? And I thought, well, maybe that seems like a little easier lift than writing a big book from scratch. In hindsight, I had many moments where I was working on this project where I was just wishing that I was just writing my own book because it would have been easier in a lot of ways. But the thing I love about this format is that it brings humility into the whole discussion, because I do think it’s important to admit that you don’t have all the answers.
You need to look to other people. I’m sure that’s why you like doing your podcasts, too, Rick. That you get to tap into people who are absolute experts in their given area. So, I love that there’s just a humility about the project.
And I also just loved that I could spend time with these people talking deeply about something that they know super well. So, it was a fun project, a little bit of a logistical hassle. But now that it’s done, I’m very happy with it. And I hope that people will find it useful.
00:10:51 Rick Ferri
I found that just excellent the way you did it, and I really got a lot out of it. But I want to start right at the beginning. We’re going to go through this book now. There are 20 different interviews. So, we’re going to spend about two minutes on each interview. So, it’s going to be quick. But before you even got into the interviews, you had Jonathan Clements write the forward. And that’s touching in a way. Could you talk about why you chose Jonathan?
00:10:54 Christine Benz
Yeah. Jonathan was top of my list, absolutely, in terms of who would write the forward to the book, mainly because he has been so influential in my own career journey. So, I remember when I started as an analyst at Morningstar, I’d laugh at this now, but I thought I needed to read the Wall Street Journal basically cover to cover every day.
So, I’m reading about corporate earnings news and the latest management shakeup at McDonald’s. Whatever I thought I had to read the whole thing. And I remember hitting on Jonathan’s column and thinking, OK, there’s a lot, as I did this for a while, I realized there’s a lot in this paper that’s very ephemeral. It’s really just noise. It doesn’t matter at all.
But this guy, this Jonathan Clements fellow, seems to really be hitting on the most important things that investors need to know, that people need to know when thinking about their financial lives. And his column was just so seminal to me in terms of influencing what I wanted to work on.
I realized that I didn’t want to be toiling on things that ultimately didn’t really matter in people’s financial plans. I wanted to talk about the stuff that really mattered. His lively writing, just his very clear explanations meant everything to me and were so influential to me in terms of my own career path. He was the logical person to reach out to. This was prior to his cancer diagnosis. He said he would be willing to write the forward and I did a dance around my kitchen when I got the news and was just so thrilled about that.
And then you know, obviously as Jonathan has been discussing his diagnosis and been very candid about his thoughts on his prognosis, it’s obviously been a very bittersweet thing to see him here in the forward.
00:12:50 Rick Ferri
But what I will say, Jonathan is a trooper because even though he has the diagnosis, he has been continuing to write some fantastic articles on the Humble Dollar website. His blog, I mean, you have to read these, if you’re, I guess, getting older, if you will. You should read them anyway, because the things that he’s touching on now, I mean it’s just very good stuff that I haven’t read really anywhere. The Humble Dollar. Jonathan Clements. If you get a chance to go to the website and read his stuff, I mean, it’s just great.
00:13:26 Christine Benz
I couldn’t agree more. I love that Jonathan is continuing. He’s made such a contribution to all of our financial lives, but I love that he’s continuing to do that. He’s continuing to take his own life and use it to influence what he what he is working on. So, I love that. I also love to see following him on social media just how he’s visiting with friends. There was a recent post from him and Jason Zweig where they had spent some time together. So, I’m loving to see that too.
00:13:55 Rick Ferri
OK, we’ve got about two minutes for 20 lessons from 20 different people and we’re going to start with number one and we’re going to go all the way through.
And then we’re going to have a little closing. What I’m going to do is I’m going to read the lesson, and then the person you interviewed, I’d like you to talk a little bit about that person and why you interviewed them. And then the big one or two takeaways. Lesson #1: visualize your in-retirement lifestyle with Michael Finke.
00:14:26 Christine Benz
Michael, I knew had to be in this book. He is a Professor of Financial Planning, head of the program at the American College of Financial Services and a leading researcher in the retirement planning space. But what I love about Michael’s work is that he brings a human component to everything he does. He thinks about real life human beings.
And so, this discussion that we have for the book is about visualizing your in-retirement lifestyle, thinking about how you’ll change throughout your retirement. I think that’s one thing that people don’t grapple with necessarily. You think about your 65-year-old self or your 62-year-old self that that’s how you’ll be 20 years hence. And Michael’s point is you really need to look into the future because you want to be the one who’s making decisions about yourself, about your plans. You don’t want your kids deciding about your housing in retirement, for example.
So, he talks about looking forward, he talks about cultivating healthy habits with respect to health, physical health, as well as relationships, and also talks about the role of work later in life. That and this is something that comes up in several chapters, just the value of some type of work. Maybe paid, maybe unpaid, later in life. I thought it was a good stage setting chapter for the rest of the book.
00:15:55 Rick Ferri
Very good. The next lesson is lay the groundwork, and here you interviewed Fritz Gilbert. So, tell us about Fritz and why you chose to interview him and what he had to say.
00:16:10 Christine Benz
Yeah, Fritz has a great blog for people who don’t know it called The Retirement Manifesto, and I think he’s just tremendously clear in terms of enumerating the steps you need to take as retirement comes within, say, five years. He has a checklist for five years until retirement. Do this, then this, and then as it gets closer, the tasks get more specific down to very granular things like making sure you get stuff off your work computer and making sure that you’re saving contacts of people who you want to keep in touch with. So, he’s very, very specific about the jobs to do.
But the main thing I love about Fritz is that I feel like he’s a walking illustration of how to do retirement right in that he started this charity with his wife, called Fences for Fido, where they go out on these fence builds for dogs who would otherwise be living on chains.
And this is a passion project for them. But the beauty of it is that they’re doing good for the animals and for the families that they’re building these fences for. But they’ve also just built this great community of other fence builders through this charity, people they get together with. And it’s also physical activity. So, to me, that ticks a lot of boxes about what you want to be doing. You’ve got purpose. You’ve got relationships. You’ve got physical activity. You’re doing it right. And I think in a lot of ways it’s a great model for all of us as we think about how to spend our time in retirement.
00:17:39 Rick Ferri
I really like that chapter because he broke it down by 5 years. This is what you should be doing before your retirement in three years. This is what you should be doing in two years. This is what you should be thinking of one year, and so on. I thought that was great. Makes it so easy.
OK, lesson #3. Nurture your relationships with Laura Carstensen.
00:17:58 Christine Benz
Yeah. Laura Carstensen is the Director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford. And a lot of her research has been about the value of relationships later in life. Really relationships throughout our life. And one key finding is that a lot of research has shown that relationships are really everything in life in terms of our happiness, that our interconnectedness with other human beings is just a huge component of whether we’re happy.
So, the point is to have relationships. But one thing Laura’s research team has found is that our networks tend to become a little smaller as we age. And her point is that actually, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s even a good thing because we’re doing some winnowing. We may cast off some people in our lives who are kind of tangential others.
Maybe like parents of our kids’ friends or something like that. She talks about how we have a more focused social network, and she also talks about the role of relationships for people who are introverts. How they’re important and how it’s important to keep those relationships alive through physical contact. That even though a lot of us do tend to do a lot of texting with our friends or meeting with them virtually, it is important to get together with friends with loved ones on a face-to-face basis regularly, if we possibly can.
I just loved that discussion. I’ve loved her research and she’s a fabulous speaker, so I definitely knew that I wanted her to be part of this book.
00:19:34 Rick Ferri
The big thing that I was thinking of when I was reading that chapter was pickleball. I mean, for me, playing pickleball, getting out, getting exercise, it’s social.
00:19:43 Christine Benz
Absolutely. It ticks a lot of boxes.
00:19:45 Rick Ferri
We’re going to get into kind of the nitty gritty, a little bit of finance and here get the most out of Social Security with Mary Beth Franklin.
00:19:56 Christine Benz
Mary Beth is an absolute guru in the realm of Social Security. She was a reporter for many years. I think her last stop was with Investment News. Now she is mainly retired. Does a lot of public speaking on Social Security. So, we touched on a lot of things in this conversation, including the solvency of Social Security, which I think is top of mind, especially for people who are several years from retirement.
You may wonder, will it be there? She had some reassuring thoughts on that topic. She’s not Pollyannaish, she does think that there will have to be some adjustments, but that, generally speaking, Social Security will not be going away.
And then she talked about Social Security claiming strategies for people in different situations. So, we hit on single people. The headline there is that delaying is often a good idea. She talked about divorced people, how to think about spousal benefits. In that instance, she talked about married couples with different ages and different earnings histories. The answer might be different for them. And finally, she talked about couples for whom they both worked, and maybe they’re of similar ages. And I told her there I was kind of asking for a friend because that describes my own marriage. And so, she shared some strategies for people at that life stage as well. Or in that situation.
00:21:17 Rick Ferri
You’ve got to get that free advice. I get it.
00:21:19 Christine Benz
Oh, that was definitely part of this whole project. You can see me like asking question a little bit of “me-search” there so definitely.
00:21:27 Rick Ferri
All right, lesson #5. Understand how your spending might change by David Blanchett.
00:21:34 Christine Benz
David Blanchett was a researcher at Morningstar for many years. One of my close colleagues. Now he is at Peacham, where he’s continuing to do research. And the great thing about David is that I could send him an e-mail today and he’ll respond straight away with some, really super feedback. So, he’s one of the preeminent retirement researchers in the country, in my opinion. And one of his greatest research pieces related to an examination of how retirees actually spend over their life cycle.
So, this dovetails with what many of us probably have experienced with older adults in our lives, or maybe in our own lives, where you have those go-go years, the slow-go years, and the sometimes called no-go years. The later years of retirement where maybe healthcare expenditures have flared up. So, David identified what has sometimes been called the “retirement spending smile.”
And we talked about that, and we talked about the implications for retirement spending and the headline really is that if you incorporate the fact that spending does tend to trend down for many or most retirees, you can spend more in those early years of retirement. You shouldn’t worry about it if you’re in good health and it takes you over, say, the 4% guideline in those years before Social Security has come online for you. You should be OK with that because your spending will probably trend down. You just need to be OK with your side of the bargain, so you need to know that, yes indeed your spending will have to trend down.
00:23:06 Rick Ferri
It’s kind of scary, but you’ve got to get over the hump. You’ve got to be able to be willing to allow yourself to spend some of the money that you’ve accumulated or it’s all going to go to your heirs or a charity.
00:23:16 Christine Benz
Absolutely. Well, exactly. And you know, our friend Mike Piper has written the whole book about this the value of lifetime giving. No one is saying go out to dinner every night or buy a new car every year.
What we are saying is that giving to your kids when they’re in their 20s and 30s will probably be more impactful for them than them inheriting from you when they’re in their 60s.
00:23:38 Rick Ferri
And you know what? I have kids in their 30s and that’s what they say, too.
00:23:42 Christine Benz
Not surprised.
00:23:43 Rick Ferri
Alright, we’re on lesson #6 now. Create a spending plan with Jonathan Guyton. So, it sort of goes hand in hand with distributing money.
00:23:53 Christine Benz
It does. So, John is a financial planner and a retirement researcher, which is kind of an interesting hybrid because his research then is very much grounded in his interactions with his clients. He did some research that has been shorthanded as the guardrails approach to retirement spending. It’s basically a dynamic spending system that puts bands around how low your spending can go in a bad year for your portfolio and how high it can go in a good year.
So, we didn’t delve so much into the guardrails approach because it can get a little bit complicated. He takes issue with me saying I think it could be a little complicated. You need to read the fine print, but we did talk about assuming that sort of straight-line spending in retirement isn’t a great way to go about it because effectively you are building your spending plan for worst case scenario.
So, his analogy is it’s similar to setting out on a road trip and you’re only allowed to go one speed for that whole road trip. You don’t know what road conditions will be like. You don’t know what weather will be like. Well, of course you’d go really low, right? And that’s what it’s sort of saying. OK, I’m just going to take 4% initially, then inflation adjust that dollar amount thereafter. That’s effectively what you’re doing when you use a strategy like that.
Jonathan is an evangelist for people using a more dynamic approach. He finds that it very much syncs up with how his clients want to spend. And one interesting piece of feedback from him is just that this dynamic spending thing actually syncs up with our behavioral impulses. So, in a bad market, we naturally do want to rein it in, and it’s a rare time in his vantage point where doing what’s good for your portfolio is also the thing that feels right behaviorally.
00:25:51 Rick Ferri
And this partly is into lesson #7, which is give yourself permission to spend on what matters to you by Ramit Sethi.
00:25:59 Christine Benz
Ramit has written one of my favorite books for people just starting out with their financial plans. It’s called, “I Will Teach You to be Rich.” He has an empire at this point where he’s got a Netflix series. He’s got a bunch of other things going on. What I love about Ramit’s work is that he talks about aspects of financial planning that I think are terribly under-discussed.
And one of them is spending. That yes, we talk about not overspending, living within your means, blah blah blah. But his point is don’t just spend like everybody else, take a step back, think about the activities and the things that actually bring you joy, bring meaning to you, and focus your spending efforts there. And then if you have things that you don’t especially care about, for him it’s cars, he doesn’t care about driving an older car, he said. You know then just pinch pennies mercilessly in those areas.
And his point is a lot about how as a culture, there’s just a tendency to want to drive what our neighbors drive. Make all the home upgrades that our neighbors make, clothes that our peers wear, all that stuff. His point is take a step back, and we should do that into retirement. We should take a look at how we are spending and just make sure that our spending, our planned spending, is very much aligned with our personal priorities.
His point is, if you get funny looks with how you’re spending your money, you’re probably doing it right.
00:27:30 Rick Ferri
Let’s get back to the income side of this. We did talk about Social Security, but the next lesson, which is lesson #8, is know your retirement income style with Wade Pfau.
00:27:43 Christine Benz
Wade, of course, is a longtime friend of the Bogleheads® and has contributed a lot of very important retirement research. I wanted to talk to him about this retirement income style awareness matrix that he came up with, along with one of his colleagues, and the basic idea is that we’re all wired a little bit differently in in terms of our retirement cash flows.
Some of us might be very geared toward, “I just want that paycheck equivalent,” something like what I had while I was working. Other people may be fine with more variability. But his point is that this is really personal. So, we have in the book a link to a questionnaire that people can take to kind of get their own customized retirement income style analysis where you go through a series of questions and you come out with a sense of, OK, here are the things that I should be focusing my energies on in terms of my retirement portfolio, whether an annuity should be under consideration or just put it on the trash heap.
So, it’s a helpful discussion about the various dimensions of that RISA matrix that Wade has come up with. The way I think about it is that it’s kind of like a style box for investors in retirement, which I think is just sort of a genius complement to our Morningstar style box.
00:29:03 Rick Ferri
Wade has some great ideas. I’ve known him for many years and some wonderful information he puts out in his book is about, I don’t know, as thick as a phone book.
00:29:12 Christine Benz
It is always on my desk, though. It’s one of my favorites. It just is if there’s anything more comprehensive, I don’t know what it is. It’s a go to.
00:29:21 Rick Ferri
Well, let’s continue to pivot a little bit here and talk more about investing. And lesson #9 is set an asset allocation for your retirement portfolio with Dr. William Bernstein.
00:29:33 Christine Benz
Yeah, I was lucky to be able to call Bill up and say, hey, would you do this? And so, we talked about how to construct an in-retirement portfolio. Bill, of course, is, I would say fairly risk averse with respect to inflation, especially making sure that whatever you do, you are hedging against that as a key risk. So, we talked about using treasury inflation protected securities as kind of the bedrock of that portfolio and then bringing equities into the mix.
As you know, Rick, since Bill is a mutual friend of ours, he has very strong opinions on certain topics. So, whereas Wade might see more of a gray area on topics like annuities, for Bill, there’s no gray. He does not love annuities at all, but we delved into a lot of different dimensions of constructing and in-retirement portfolio, we talked about simplifying the in-retirement portfolio, even using all-in-one type funds.
Bill admitted that there are shortcomings. But overall, he loves the simplicity. And then at the end he talked about how the behavioral aspect of this is just so important. So, in addition to creating a portfolio that passes muster from a mathematical standpoint, you also need to create a portfolio that you can live with. That’s the best portfolio of all.
00:30:57 Rick Ferri
I recall the first Bill Bernstein book I read years ago, it was, “The Intelligent Asset Allocator.” I thought it was fantastic. Great book.
00:31:05 Christine Benz
He’s a genius.
00:31:06 Rick Ferri
OK, sticking with investing, stick to a simple investment plan with JL Collins.
00:31:13 Christine Benz
I wanted to talk to JL because he has a lot of fans, obviously, among Bogleheads® and circles that I move in. And his book, “A Simple Path to Wealth”, has been so influential to so many people. So, I wanted to talk about how one could radically simplify a retirement portfolio if they so chose. And so, we talked about using simple index funds as the bedrock of that portfolio.
In JL’s view, just a basic U.S. equity index along with a bond index and maybe a little bit of cash. We also talked about some of JL’s most controversial work which relates to home ownership. JL is not a fan, although he is a homeowner, actually. But he thinks that we in the US are a little bit overextended with respect to homes and that people are overly defensive about homes as part of wealth building. So, we discussed that aspect as well.
Then especially the idea of whether you should carry a mortgage into retirement or not.
00:32:20 Rick Ferri
Yeah. So, this gets to something that I just want to throw in. I mean, we all have the philosophy of the Bogleheads®. You know, live below your means, try to invest simply, try to use index funds, and so forth. This is like the philosophy that we use.
But the strategy that we all use to get there can be vastly different. Even though we may have the same beliefs about how to invest, how we actually put our portfolio together and whether we own a house or don’t own a house. I call that strategy. And it could be vastly different from person to person. It doesn’t make mine right and yours wrong. Yours right or mine wrong. It’s what’s best for us. And I think that’s a lot of what we’re getting at.
00:32:57 Christine Benz
Absolutely. So JL’s vision for retirement portfolio, I would argue, is kind of radically simplified. But the point is as you move into retirement, you should try to reduce the number of moving parts. Especially if you’re a DIY type, you want to be very careful about managing something overly complicated. So, I hope the message gets through from that standpoint. Try to reduce the number of holdings in your portfolio if you possibly can.
00:33:24 Rick Ferri
And you in Chapter 11 are your own interview-ee, I guess. But you did ask Susan to interview you from Morningstar. You get to put your own words into this book.
00:33:38 Christine Benz
That’s right. So, I asked my colleague Susan Dziubinski to interview me for one chapter, and the chapter was about retirement portfolio planning and especially this bucket approach that I often work on for morningstar.com. And the basic idea was influenced by a conversation I had with Harold Evensky, who’s a now retired financial planner. He and I were talking probably 20 years ago, and I was asking him what he did with his retired clients to create their cash flows.
And his point was, well, I just strip off this cash bucket amounting to a couple of years worth of portfolio withdrawals. And having that cash set aside gives my clients a ton of peace of mind with the rest of the portfolio. The long-term piece of the portfolio, which will naturally fluctuate a little bit as the years go by.
And so, I’ve been writing and talking about the bucket approach, and it looks deceptively simple. When you see these three buckets and you’ve essentially got a cash bucket, a high-quality bond bucket and an equity bucket. But it gets a little bit more complicated when you are talking about how to maintain the buckets on an ongoing basis. And also, how the logistics work if you have multiple tax silos that you’re bringing into retirement. So, Susan and I discussed some of the finer points of bucketing in this chapter.
00:35:03 Rick Ferri
Oh, that’s excellent. OK, now we’re going to pivot again. Back to housing for lesson #12. Make smart choices about housing with Mark Miller.
00:35:14 Christine Benz
Right. Mark has been a longtime contributor to morningstar.com, and housing has been one of his beats for us where he talks about housing for older adults especially. And he and I had just a fabulous conversation about thinking ahead. Don’t just think about your 62- or 65-year-old self. Think about yourself as you move through retirement and what you may want from your housing as the years go by.
So, he and I had a great conversation about location, proximity to healthcare, proximity to people, taxes. So financial considerations were certainly part of the discussion, but I feel like it’s an under-discussed component of retirement planning. We also discussed reverse mortgages and tapping home equity in other ways in retirement, including to pay for long term care. So, it was a tremendously wide-ranging discussion. I know that I and many Bogleheads® tend to not think of housing wealth as really part of our investment portfolio, but it’s silly to ignore it. So, I was happy that Mark and I did discuss the financial dimension of housing in retirement.
00:36:29 Rick Ferri
The next one is lesson #13, focus on what you can control with Maria Bruno from Vanguard.
00:36:37 Christine Benz
Maria has been a longtime friend, and she and I have collaborated on several events at Vanguard over the years. She works on some of Vanguard’s financial planning that it provides to its clients and is a CFP, so she’s incredibly conversant in many different aspects of retirement planning. Retirement decumulation has been a huge focus of hers, so that was a thesis that she wanted to discuss the importance of not getting overly concerned with things that, especially as an investor, you have no position to exert any control over.
So, a lot of this stuff that you might hear about on CNBC, for example, just put that in your too-hard pile and instead we focused on some things that investors do actually exert control over.
Their lifestyles and what they want them to look like. She’s Vanguard, so no doubt we talked about costs controlling the total costs that you pay. We talked about health care costs, having discipline with your plan, lots of different dimensions of control in retirement, which I think can be empowering because there are a lot of aspects about embarking on retirement that do feel uncertain. It’s really terrific if you can take stock of the things that you actually control.
00:37:56 Rick Ferri
Lesson #14. Be adaptable as retirement unfolds with Jamie Hopkins.
00:38:04 Christine Benz
Right. Jamie, is another CFP. He’s also an attorney and is very conversant in the ins and outs of retirement planning and this is a huge thrust for Jamie in his work. I’ve seen some great presentations from him on this topic.
But the basic idea, and it picks up on a theme I think that people are hearing probably loud and clear, is that you should be prepared to adjust. One thing Jamie hit hard in this topic was the transition from saving to spending, which Rick, I’m guessing you probably hear from clients in your practice that it’s difficult.
00:38:38 Rick Ferri
Very difficult.
00:38:39 Christine Benz
Yeah. You identify as a saver as an investing person. This idea of ever tapping your portfolio, and I wouldn’t know, I’m not retired. But this idea of tapping your portfolio feels very uncomfortable. So, Jamie talked about making that adaptation, some tricks that you can use to get yourself over that hump. We talked about the value of kind of phased retirement. Jamie, like several of other several other interviewees in the book, is a big believer in people phasing into retirement if they possibly can. But he talked about getting ahead of some of the changes that what retirement will bring.
00:39:21 Rick Ferri
Well, I’m right in line with Jamie on a lot of this. I mean, probably the biggest hurdle I have with the clients is getting over the hump, which they’ve accumulated all their lives and saved all their lives, and they just have this feeling that if they stopped doing that within six months, they’re going to be living under a bridge and eating dog food. Of course it’s not true. And so, the phase part is exactly what I am personally doing myself. So, I’m 100% on board with a lot of the things that Jamie is talking about.
OK, let’s go to another Boglehead we both know well, plan for taxes with Mike Piper.
00:39:58 Christine Benz
Right. Mike could have been the expert on several topics in this book, including Social Security. So, I had to pick my spots. Mike is just so clear at explaining tax matters. So, we started very basic where he talked about the tax treatment of different silos that we might bring into retirement. But he spent a lot of time talking about being thoughtful about sequencing your withdrawals from your retirement accounts.
He’s just super clear in terms of explaining various considerations about, OK, so you’ve exhausted this account, or you’ve spent everything you’ve had you had in your checking account. Where do you go next and where do you go after that? And he also talked about the influence that Social Security can have on tax planning, as well as required minimum distributions, which kick in once you hit age 73.
So, I think just a very clear discussion of the tax implications of constructing that retirement portfolio and figuring out where to go for your spending money.
00:41:00 Rick Ferri
And Mike will be one of our speakers at the Bogleheads® Conference, as will many of the people on your list.
00:41:06 Christine Benz
That’s true. Mike will never retire from the Bogleheads® Conference. I think he’s always just such a big hit.
00:41:12 Rick Ferri
All right, lesson #16. And here’s a big one. You touched on it, but now we’re going to get into it a little bit. Plan for health care with Carolyn McClanahan.
00:41:25 Christine Benz
Right. Carolyn will also be at the Bogleheads® Conference in 2024. Carolyn is a medical doctor, and she’s also a financial planner with a practice in Florida. And Carolyn specializes in getting ahead of healthcare spending, thinking about how your healthcare might play out in retirement, thinking about your provider. Thinking about long term care.
So, this was the chapter where we discussed long term care in depth, figuring out where you’ll receive care, how importantly how you’ll pay for care, which is an area that Caroline is I would say somewhat uniquely equipped to address because she’s a doctor and has encountered this though with a lot of her own clients.
She also talks about the importance of having good proxies to help make health care decisions for you if you can’t make them for yourself. So many different dimensions to this discussion, and she also just talked about the importance of taking care of your health in the years leading up to retirement that I think she calls it the “live long, die quickly” plan that we all want to be on. And one of the best ways to do that is to be preemptive about taking care of your own health while you are younger.
00:42:43 Rick Ferri
Now we know that historically, women tend to outlive men. That’s what the mortality records show, and women often end up alone, and you have a chapter here, which I thought was really interesting. Lesson #17 what women need to do differently with Jean Chatzky. This is an interesting chapter. Why don’t you get into it a little bit.
00:43:05 Christine Benz
This is a passion of Jean’s, helping women with their financial lives. She’s got several groups going where she works with women about their financial plans. And as you said, Rick, it is a little bit different for women and that we tend to outlive our male partners by a couple of years.
00:43:23 Christine Benz
And that means that we’ve got to be more concerned with having our portfolios last. It means that we are also more likely to need long term care because we often provide care for our partners and they aren’t around to care for us. So, she discussed that dimension. Jean is very much a believer in women making sure that they have a plan for long term care, not necessarily insurance, but just what is the plan?
And she also discusses the dimension of sandwich generation people, so people who are caring for their parents as well as their children and adult daughters are some of the main informal caregivers in the US. So, she discusses that dimension as well, including some of the career ramifications for women who need to take time away from work to care for their parents. That can be a big deal in terms of their portfolios, in terms of their financial plans.
00:44:20 Rick Ferri
The next lesson, which is really important, and a lot of people don’t do it. Lesson #18 communicate with your loved ones, with Cameron Huddleston.
00:44:33 Christine Benz
Yeah, Cameron wrote a terrific book called, “Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk,” and it’s really drawn from her personal experience of losing her dad at a fairly young age. He passed away with, I believe, little to no estate plan.
And then her mom developed dementia at quite an early age. So, grappling with her mom’s healthcare needs with her mom’s financial life effectively grappling with the custodianship of her mom later in life. So, Carolyn used that really painful experience to make this her passion that she talks to older adults about making sure you are laying the groundwork for your kids so that they understand what you want, what you have.
I think that oftentimes it is a missing layer in communication, so she discusses all of the things to do to make sure that you’re giving your loved ones a read into your financial life. And her point is they’re going to find out at some point. So why be shy about the specific contours of your plan? Either they find out and they and you share your wishes with them, or they find out after you’re gone and they’re left having to figure this stuff out on the fly. So, I love Cameron’s work. I hope people find that that chapter to be a good igniter to get them working on this stuff as well.
00:45:55 Rick Ferri
Fun story, talking with a client who was in her 80’s, and I asked her if she had this conversation with her children yet about her estate. And she goes, no, I don’t want them to know what I have because that would make them lazy. And I said, well, how old are your children? She goes, well, they’re all in their 60s. I don’t know. People have some strange ideas. Hunter gatherer type things, you know? DNA things that we just can’t shake.
OK, next thing that we all need to do is an estate plan. So, lesson #19, create an estate plan with Jennifer Roselle.
00:46:30 Christine Benz
Yeah. Jennifer Roselle is an estate planning attorney in Indiana, and she’s also just a tremendously clear communicator about the why and what of an estate plan. I think sometimes people glaze over a little bit when they hear about these different documents that they should have. She keeps it very basic.
But also, I think does inject that real world perspective because she works with clients on this stuff day-to-day. She’s dealt with issues like clients with cognitive decline, making sure that kids are taking care of how to deal with kids who maybe have unequal asset levels. Whether you should help the kid who needs it more. So, she discusses a lot of real-world dimensions of estate planning in addition to sharing the basics of some of the documents that you want to be sure to bring into your later years.
And you, by the way, you shouldn’t wait until retirement to get an estate plan. I have one. I have had one for probably 20 years and I think people should start younger on the estate planning process and you will have to update things as the years go by. But nonetheless I think it makes sense to stay ahead of it.
00:47:42 Rick Ferri
And the last lesson, lesson #20, leave no regrets with Jordan Grumet. He was a wonderful final speaker at the last Bogleheads® Conference.
00:47:53 Christine Benz
Right. He was a keynote speaker and he’ll be at the 2024 conference as well. He was such a crowd pleaser. He is one of my favorite individuals to talk to. And Jordan is a hospice doctor who is also a podcaster, a blogger and author, and has written a couple of great books. He’s got a new book coming out this year, but Jordan has so much to say about making sure that you don’t have regrets.
Because this is something he talks to people who are on their deathbeds, about what gave you gratification in your lifetime, what do you wish you had done? And the key takeaway from Jordan is people don’t regret things they tried and failed at. What they regret is that they didn’t try. And so, he and I had a discussion about that.
I remember telling my husband about this and he was like, wait, you’ve got a hospice doctor as the last chapter of your book? And I was like, hold on a sec. I swear it is an incredibly uplifting chapter. His point is, don’t wait. The other thing I love is that he talks about what he calls the “Big P” purpose and “Small p” purpose. So “Big P” purpose might be something kind of grandiose that you want to do like start a foundation or something like that. But all of us on a day-to-day basis have “small p” purposes. Things that really give us joy that bring us closer to our loved ones. His point is that those “small p” purposes are just as important as the “Big P” purpose stuff, which is a message that I love.
00:49:28 Rick Ferri
Yeah, I really enjoyed his talk last year and I’m looking forward to it this year. Okay, closing thoughts or concluding thoughts. Did all of these interviews you’ve said, if you’ve made it this far, you probably guess that this book is a little bit of a “me-search” project, which I never heard that before “me-search,” but I like it.
So, what did you get out of the book?
00:49:51 Christine Benz
So, Scott Rick, who’s a professor at University of Michigan, I don’t know if he came up with it. He used the term “me-search,” and I was like, oh my gosh, that’s genius. And that is exactly what I’m working on here.
A couple of key takeaways, Rick. One is just the value of I’m just a big believer in staying busy. And not busy for the sake of being busy, but just continuing to try to make an impact for me is something that even if I retire from paid work at some point, if and when I do that, I still just want to make an impact. I still want to fill my days with doing things that are making the world a little bit better.
And that sounds cheesy, but I would say the book project very much reinforced my goal. To do that. The whole idea of being adaptive and I cannot put myself in the shoes of my 85-year-old self, but really trying to think ahead, not be stubborn about life changes as they might come at me. I want to listen to loved ones if they’re telling me I should do something. I am not just going to put my head down and keep doing what I’m doing. I really do want to try to listen to the people around me.
A key take away I would have for Bogleheads® is just the importance of not overly obsessing about the money piece. If you are a Boglehead, I’m guessing the money piece will probably be just fine. Instead, spend as much time on the relationship piece, the purpose piece, those things will ultimately be even more impactful in terms of whether your retirement is a success. So, I would say obsess about those things just as much as you do about the financials.
00:51:39 Rick Ferri
I’d like to tell you about a conversation I had with Jonathan Clements, because it hits directly at what you said a little bit earlier.
I was sitting across the table from him, we’re having dinner at a Bogleheads® event and he had just started or was working on the Humble Dollar. And you know, he didn’t need to do that. He was doing it as a non profit. He was asking for donations from people to help him pay for expenses and I asked him, I said, Jonathan, I mean, you don’t need to work anymore. But you’re doing this new project called the Humble Dollar. You know, why are you doing it? And his answer was, well, Rick, I just want to continue to be part of the conversation.
And I never forgot that. I said, you know what? I get it. I get it, and I hear that coming from you as well. So, I want to thank you so much, Christine, for being our guest again on Bogleheads® on Investing. And good luck with the book. And we’ll see you in a few weeks.
00:52:36 Christine Benz
Rick, thank you so much for having me on. It’s been such an honor. And grateful to the Bogleheads® for listening to me talk about the book. Thanks much.
00:52:44 Rick Ferri
This concludes this episode of Bogleheads® on Investing. Join us each month as we interview a new guest on a new topic. In the meantime, visit boglecenter.net, bogleheads.org, the Bogleheads® Wiki, Bogleheads® Twitter, the Bogleheads® YouTube channel, Bogleheads® Facebook, Bogleheads® Reddit, join one of your local Bogleheads® chapters, and get others to join. Thanks for listening.
