A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

A different drummer.

And now, coming to you from Dead Center on your dial, welcome to Risk Parity Radio, where we explore alternatives and asset allocations for the do-it-yourself investor.

Broadcasting to you now from the comfort of his easy chair, here is your host, Frank Vasquez.

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to Risk Parity Radio.

If you are new here and wonder what we are talking about, you may wish to go back and listen to some of the foundational episodes for this program.

And the basic foundational episodes are episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9.

Yes, it is still in my memory banks.

We have also created an additional resource, a collection of additional foundational episodes and other popular episodes.

We have top men working on it right now.

Top men.

And you can find those on the episode guide page at www.riskparty radio.com.

Inconceivable!

All thanks to our friend Luke, our volunteer in Quebec.

Zachar.

We'd be helpless without him.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Because other than him, it's just me and Marion here.

I'll give you the moon, alright?

I'll take it.

We have no sponsors, we have no guests, and we have no expansion plans.

Over the years, our podcast has become very audience focused, and I must say we do have the finest podcast audience available.

Top drawer.

Really top drawer.

Along with a host named after a hot dog.

Light in the Francis.

But now onward, episode 481.

Today on Risk Party Radio, we have a little treat for you.

Shirley, you can't be serious.

I am serious.

And don't call me Shirley.

At least I hope you'll think it's a treat.

Maybe it's a trick-or-treat.

Confloyd!

So what we'll be doing today is talking about one long email from my friend, Mr.

Bill, and that's Dr.

Bill to you.

This is Bill Yount, who runs the Catching Up to Fi podcast with Jackie Cummings Koskey.

And I'm on the way to the studio to take my new show, FUNA, Mr.

Bill Gross!

And he found out late last year that he and his wife have reached financial independence and are actually ready to retire if they'd like to.

So he sent us a long email about it last month, which I told him we would hold until this month because he also just appeared as a guest on the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast with Scott and Mindy talking about this very topic.

So I wanted to wait until that interview came out before I released our own podcast on it, so I can refer to it and you can go listen to him there, give all the gory details and answer many of the questions that you might have, and I will link to that in the show notes.

It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

But we'll mostly focused on what he wrote us in his email to us.

You are talking about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind.

And so without further ado.

First off, second off, last off.

First, second, and last off, we have an email from Mr.

Bill.

Mary Mary, why you bugging?

And Mr.

Bill writes.

Dear Frank and Mary, Mr.

Dr.

Bill here.

I write in follow-up to a prior email about my exploration into a retirement risk parity portfolio construction based on Bill Bangin's latest research and book.

For my 60th birthday, I did a thing or two.

Standing on the Cape of Good Hope and exploring South Africa had been a dream of mine since standing on Cape Horn for my 50th birthday.

Doing so with my wife, you, and Queen Mary made it all the sweeter.

It was one of the best and highest uses of a lot of money that we have ever spent.

The project was to independently run our numbers to see how close we were to catching up to five.

To my great surprise, we already were financially independent.

That is the straight stuff, O Funkmaster.

Given that my investing EQ was getting jittery about a drawdown that could possibly forcibly extend my working career, we immediately set about designing our own risk parity portfolio according to your four fundamental principles.

I remember well you saying to me prior to our trip that you didn't want a market drawdown to hamper any happiness.

I was fortunate to be able to bounce iterations off people like you, Bill Bangin, Tyler, and one other risk parity portfolio engineer after backtesting a few options.

The collaboration with my new advisor was engaging and quite fun.

Funny how.

This is certainly due to U.S.

outperformance in the last 15 years.

I consulted Sonia and she assured me that the international market will outperform the U.S.

market over the next 15 years.

The crystal ball can help you.

Let the horse race begin, my friend.

I suffered a bit 2-3% of a market timing whipsaw in the process.

This reminded me of the significant emotional behavior aspects to investing.

I am, from an investor's personality makeup, more susceptible to market swings, especially at the time of this massive transition.

I just can't do this.

I have also once reallocated from a global market cap accumulation portfolio at an annual rebalancing in January 2025 after long-term frustrations with the US international tracking error.

And it's gone.

Uh what?

It's gone.

It's all gone.

As a recovering late starter to real accumulation and investing, I have had to learn about my investor self from all the mistakes that one should make with smaller numbers in an earlier start.

The hat and the nickel get your hot cup a jack squat.

In spite of it all, we are happily financially independent.

I sleep much better at night now, knowing that I have done all I can to preserve our wealth and meet our spending needs with a smaller nest egg at a 5% safe withdrawal rate than otherwise would have been needed with a standard stock bond cash boglehead portfolio.

Risk parity, properly applied, is a powerful tool in the Late Starter Toolbox that I hope more discover and adopt.

If I had not bumped into you at FinCon in 2019 in DC, who knows where my late starter path would have ended up?

Eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a van down by the river.

Like many others who have bumped into Risk Parity Radio, I am eternally grateful for your friendship and mentorship.

The best, Jerry.

The best.

Now for a question or two.

Feel free to break this email into two parts and please forgive my loquacious nature.

Yadda yada yada.

Yadda yadda yada.

Yada yada yada.

Yadda yadda yada.

Yadda yada yada.

Yadda yadda.

Yadda yadda yadda.

First off, I have entered the fog of phi.

My reaction to the shock of finding out that we had caught up in nine years was whoopee and big whoop at the same time.

This happened two to three years before I had hoped or planned that it would, thanks to a 40% of gross income savings rate, market growth, and proper management of an unexpected modest inheritance windfall.

Heck, it happened even in spite of the fact that I never had the investment balls given my late start to ever have more than an 85-15 stock bond split.

Luck plays a greater role in life than most of us care to admit.

You've got to ask yourself a question.

The question is, how does one handle the emotional roller coaster of the fog of phi?

We strive hard and long on the hero's journey towards a singular goal that does involve a number.

We complain about having to work longer than many members of the Phi community.

I call it Phi FOMO.

I burned out at my job right about the time I woke up to our financial mess and unconscious distress.

Climbing this mountain has been hard.

I reached the peak and now another lies ahead.

It's like finishing a marathon in the joy and pain of a dopamine crash.

Now I am suddenly confronted with the one more year syndrome, the moving goalposts, the one more million to reach the more than enough oversaved safety buffer.

I have built some pre-retirement structure, but suddenly I am reticent to leave the structure and benefits of a job in the emergency department that I have dreamed of leaving for years.

Oddly, I like it a little better and am a better doctor for my newfound financial stability.

I can leave anytime I want, but I have no plans to do so at the moment.

My wife says that I should cut back and that I can't complain about working long hours anymore.

Well, you haven't got the knack of being idly rich.

You say you should do like me, just snooze and dream, dream and snooze.

The pleasures are unlimited.

I have some leverage of FU money to boost my income, given the difficulty of recruiting new docs to my shop, and maybe practice some art of subtraction to reduce my night shifts.

My current thought is to work at the same clip for one to three more years and ratchet it back to four day shifts per month rather than ten for a period.

Is it really worth it?

I am acutely aware that the clock is ticking down more quickly each year and that the health span of my go-go, slow go, and no-go years is somewhat uncertain.

How do we know when spending our time working for money becomes less valuable and a waste of the golden years?

How do I time the tipping point of the transition and pull the ripcord so I do not succumb to the regrets of the dying of working too long and worshipping the idol of money?

I don't have a problem spending.

If anything, I have a problem overspending.

This is one of the reasons for accumulating a buffer and engaging a financial advisor.

Financial independence brings up so many more questions after one has gotten used to the routine and habits of accumulation.

It is an identity crisis at its core and not the degree of relief that I thought I would feel.

Sensei o sensei, please share with us the nature and emotions of your transition.

How did you define enough for yourself and what was it like?

Do I need to schedule a reading with Sonia?

Now you can also use the bowl to connect to the spirit world.

I can read books, understand the theory, and talk to others, but the reality of financial independence is not what I thought it would be.

I view risk parity as more than a portfolio construction.

In the larger picture, it can be seen as a model for life construction.

Do you have any principles for retirement rebirth in the next chapter?

And it's gone.

Mr.

Dr.

Bill.

Mary, Mary, I need you hugging.

Yeah, Mary does need a lot of hugging after slogging through that one, Bill.

But she does appreciate that you gave her a crown as a holiday gift, along with sending me a couple of crystal balls.

I have a cow site ball, and I have a black obsidian one here, which is huge.

So before we get into the meat of it, I should mention that Bill would ordinarily go to the front of the line because he is a donor to the Father McKenna Center.

As I think all of you know now, we do not have any sponsors on this program.

We do have a charity we support.

It's called the Father McKenna Center.

It supports hungry and homeless people in Washington, DC.

Full disclosure, I'm the board of the charity and I'm the current treasurer.

If you give to the charity, you get to go to the front of the email line.

Two ways to do that.

You can do it directly at the Father McKenna website donation page, or you can do it as a patron on Patreon through our support page at www.riskparty.com.

Either way, you get to go to the front of the line unless you're special, and then we wait until your interview comes out, and then we move you to the front of the line.

Sweet!

So first congratulations are in order for those of you who don't know Bill's story.

He and his wife are both doctors, but about ten years ago, when they were around fifty, they realized they really hadn't saved anything for retirement, and that there wasn't gonna be any retirement at least anytime soon, unless they got on that lickety split.

So they made it their mission to do so, including downsizing some of their lifestyle and moving.

And they thought it would take about fifteen years, and it's actually only taken about ten, so they're ahead of the game.

That's what I'm talking about.

Which leads to Bill's current quandary of what exactly to do now that he's made it, as it were.

So some of you may be wondering who is this financial advisor and planner that Bill found that works with risk parity style portfolios.

And his name is Brian, and his firm is Cardinal.

I will see if I can link to that in the show notes so you can check it out.

I actually think I linked to it before.

I do not know Brian, I've never met him personally, but I did review Bill's plan that Brian prepared, and I thought it was a good example of an advisor working carefully and closely with their client to get exactly a plan that everybody was comfortable with.

If you want to hear more about Brian, I suggest you go listen to Bill's interview because I'll probably screw up the details.

But as you know, I frequently rail on the financial services industry here, and it's really not because I believe that most financial advisors are bad people or are trying to do bad things.

I just think it is an industry filled with bad business models and bad incentives overall.

Am I right or am I right or am I right?

Right, right, right.

But there are now a considerable number of advisors who are essentially trying to do the right thing and modernize the practice to make it more consumer friendly and to use a lot better ideas and techniques than people were using, say, 10 or 15 years ago.

And most of these new advisors are relatively young.

They're in their 30s, they're in their 40s.

They may or may not have a presence on YouTube.

But I can tell you, unlike last generation's advisors, they're not telling their 60-year-old clients they can only spend 3% of their money.

Stupid is, stupid does, sir.

They're coming up with good plans and better portfolios to allow people to enjoy more of their retirement as they should.

And whether that's through a risk parity style portfolio or using some other methodologies, that's not the point.

The point is there are people out there trying to be better.

There aren't a whole lot of them, but there are there.

And as Bill has shown, yes, you can find them.

You may have to do a little bit of searching, though.

Because they don't have big advertising budgets and they're not plastering their name all over sports stadiums or wherever you see typical ads for financial services.

And they are using the only business model that I think we should be accepting as good do-it-yourself investors who have accumulated a significant amount of money, which is a fee-for-service model.

You are correct, sir.

Yes.

No commissions, no AUMs, no nonsense.

Forget about it.

And no, I don't plan on promoting anyone in particular.

Not gonna do it.

Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

Or creating any kind of Referral service because I do want to maintain complete independence.

Forget about it.

So that I feel free to criticize away whenever I see fit, in however way I see fit.

Watch out for that first step, it's inducy.

Well now let's focus more on your email and questions.

You mentioned this feels like the fog of fi.

That's probably a pretty good description of it, particularly when you essentially get to the venue early, as you have done, and you're sort of standing outside wondering whether you should go in now or go in when you planned.

And these are all good things to think about.

And I'll tell you about my experience, although I'm not sure my experience is that useful for most people, because I had a kind of forced down ramp, if you will, which I will explain.

So if you've heard my interview on the Afford Anything podcast, that's number six eighteen, I think is the episode number.

You realize that I had been sort of planning to be financially independent since about 2010.

That's when I came to the conclusion that we would reach financial independence sometime in the next decade.

I was already involved in financial independence-related groups, what little group we had over at Early Retirement Extreme that included people like Tyler of Portfolio Charts, in addition to Jacob Lundfisker.

So I essentially had a very long windup.

In the meantime, this is the time our children were graduating from high school between 2014 and 2020.

And one of the things that we wanted to know was what they were going to do next and how much that was gonna cost.

So, if anything, that probably delayed or muted the desire to really walk away from the workforce entirely at that point, and I was a lawyer at a big law firm with all the long hours that entails.

The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you, unlike any schooling you've ever been through before.

But I had already decided to stop trying to climb ladders in terms of going higher up in the partnership or becoming more famous through affiliations outside of that.

And because I'm very curious, I never really worried about having enough stuff to do or finding something that would be interesting to do.

During that period, we were spending a lot of time at our kids' sporting events, and I was doing a lot of videography and commentary for their various teams, mostly the crew teams.

If you go to my personal YouTube channel, there's thousands of hours of rowing videos and basketball videos and other things.

Mary joined me in 2004, and we're still teaching that class.

We're debating whether or not to continue after this year.

But we'll see, that's just a couple hours every week for one semester a year.

I had also created a blog called Prospecting Mimetic Fractals, which talked about prospecting theory, complex adaptive systems, and the memetic theory of Renee Girard.

But that was something I started doing, and after a little while, a couple of years of doing it, I decided it was too much work.

I was tired of writing stuff because that's my job.

So are you gonna get another job?

I don't think I'd like another job.

So it's still there, but it's been dormant for many, many years now.

So that was another kind of creative experiment I engaged in.

I also saw that financial independence had suddenly become extremely popular, and there were a lot more blogs and podcasts and other things going on at the time.

And I think that's where we met.

There was a FinCon event in Washington, DC, and since I was here, I said, well, I can go check that out.

And that's where we met, Bill.

That's also where I met your wife Karen.

Wow, we're very nice.

So that was a good experience, but it also made me realize that I did not want to have some kind of new career in financial media.

Because what turns me off about things like FinCon is they're so promotional.

And I'm way more interested in the financial part and not the media part.

Which is funny for a podcaster, but it's true.

Man's got to know his limitations.

So I finally pulled the plug on being the partner at the big law firm in 2020, which was highly inauspicious timing.

My official separation date was the end of April 2020, right in the middle of COVID.

But it wasn't a complete work stoppage, I can tell you that.

Because what happened is I still have relationships with kind of residual clients that have gone on and they've tailed off over the past five years.

But for a while there, particularly in 2021 and 2022, I was still doing a lot of legal work for the same clients.

And then also the way that our partnership is structured, you have to contribute capital when you become a partner, and then when you leave the partnership, they pay you your capital back, but it's over the course of six years.

And so I'm only now getting the last of the capital.

And that really meant that there was going to be this stream of cash coming our way that constituted about 40% of our expenses.

So that made the transition easier.

We also had the benefit of the rule of 55, although we didn't actually need to start taking money out of the 401k right away, but we had the option to.

So those two things have given me this kind of automatic ramp down that I really didn't plan, but I was stuck with one way or another, and I think it was helpful, as it turns out, because it wasn't going like switch on, switch off, kind of leaving the profession.

And it wasn't that I disliked being a lawyer.

What I disliked about it is it took up all my time essentially, and there was more traveling than I really wanted after doing it for over a decade, that I just kind of felt like the rest of my life was on hold.

So after I left the firm in April, I began to pick up other things.

You can thank COVID for the existence of this podcast because there wasn't a whole lot to do at that point in time in terms of getting involved with any kind of face-to-face activity or doing anything.

So this was in around July of 2020.

I thought, well, you know, I've been making all these videos for 10 years.

It might be fun to make a podcast, and I already know how to edit things.

Well the freaking guy.

Editing audio is way easier than editing video.

So I just started making it as a lark and had fun making a little logo, and I went and got a trademark for it because I'd never gone through that process, and I thought that might be kind of fun.

We have an odd idea of what's fun as lawyers sometimes.

But at the beginning, it just was kind of like something to do when there wasn't a whole lot else to do.

What would you say you do here?

Mary and I were going on a lot of hikes together, which was nice.

But everybody just kind of had to figure out things to do that did not involve a lot of direct contact with other people.

But since all our kids went to Gonzaga, they were very familiar with that.

They had volunteered there, and our two youngest had actually done Eagle Scout projects there.

So there was a long affiliation.

And they actually sent out an email to Mary, believe it or not, looking for people who are interested in joining the board.

And Mary says to me, Well, I don't think this is for me, but there's somebody here that might be appropriate for this.

And I thought that might be a nice thing to do and get involved with, and so I applied and joined the board in 2021.

So you can see how all these things just kind of stacked up organically in a way.

And we still had first two kids in college and then one kid in college until 2024.

So there was going back and forth to Philadelphia and Boston for that.

On the health side, I was having some struggles.

I have unfortunately an inherited gout.

I got my first attack in the forties, in my forties.

And the doctor said that eventually it may become chronic, and it did about the time I retired or around there, which caused me to have to figure out what kind of meds to take for that.

And that involved a bunch of adjustments over a couple of years.

But it was fairly debilitating for a couple of years there and periodically.

Fortunately, it's all under control now.

So hopefully you won't have to deal with anything like that.

And then finally, there was a question of things that I thought I might be doing, but decided I did not want to do.

And I think that that's an important thing also to decide things that you want to stop doing.

So for me, one of the things was that blog I had started was like, nah, I'd rather not write things.

I'd rather just talk into a microphone, and that'll be my creative outlet for that sort of thing.

We hear that you pay good money to sing into a can.

Well that all depends.

I had also historically had a couple of old cars, a 1963 Ford Ranchero and a 1948 Plymouth.

They're both modified, so they weren't like real classic things, but I used to like to work on them back when I was younger.

At the end there, they were just sitting in the garage getting dust.

And at one point I thought to myself, yeah, I'll work on these things when I retire.

And the truth was I just wasn't interested in that anymore.

And so I actually decided to just give them away rather than even worry about selling them because they weren't running.

And as it turns out, one of my five friends, Holly, had a husband who works on cars.

And so he took the ranchero, and I think a friend of his took the uh Plymouth, and he's been able to rejuvenate it and get it working much better than I had had it working in many years, which was gratifying to see because who wants to just see something rotting when somebody could be doing something useful with it?

So I'd say well that was one of the better experiences or efforts that I made in sort of cleaning out old stuff because Mary was very happy to get rid of those things which had been occupying the garage and preventing her from parking in it.

I was relieved of the burden of either working on them or trying to figure out what to do with them.

And then the recipients of them have had a great time revamping them and getting them back on the road.

So I do think that's an important thing to be reviewing every year you're in retirement is every year think about is there something I'm doing that I should stop doing because I've just lost interest in it or it's no longer serving a great purpose in my life.

Because I think that's what makes life more interesting is you don't stop a career and then start one big new thing that and that takes up all your time.

It's more fun to have a bunch of little things that then can come and go, and you can evolve over time with that.

I think the trouble a lot of career people get into is that they treat their career like that's the whole novel, and then retirement is just some kind of epilogue where nothing's really happening.

You're gonna think of that's a mistake.

I think you want to treat your retirement like the next chapter or the next series of chapters, and be willing to make those chapters relatively short if they need to be.

As Arthur Brooks says, you really need to make sure you're not worshiping the four idols anymore, or one of the four idols, the four idols are money, power, fame, and unhealthy pleasure seeking.

We have a Don Perignon, 71 at $120.

That'll be fine, pal.

And you want to be doing activities because you enjoy doing the activity and not because it's going to make you more money or get you more power or make you famous or anything like that.

We're putting the band back together.

Forget it.

No way.

We're on a mission from God.

What's a much better outcome is whatever your activity is, is helping you develop more friendships and relationships, or make the ones that you have even better than they are already.

Wrong glass, sir.

So for you, that's the lens or framework I would be applying to kind of decide what you want to do next or what you want to continue doing.

And really, how is that serving your either just temporal well-being, enjoyment of life, or your relationships?

How much for the little girl?

The women?

How much for the women?

What?

Your women.

I I I want to buy your women, the little girl, your daughters.

Sell them to me.

Send them to your children.

May or D.

May.

So, starting with still being a doctor for you, how much do you enjoy the work itself?

And how much do you enjoy interacting with the people you interact with?

Those should be the primary considerations.

And Karen, your wife, is right that if you find yourself complaining about whatever you're doing with respect to that, that is a sign that you need to change that or stop that.

Because there's no point in doing something if you're just going to complain about it.

Are you crazy?

Or just plain stupid.

Because if that's the case, the juice isn't worth the squeeze anymore.

And what you need to stop yourself from doing is evaluating this on, but I can earn this much money from doing this, and it doesn't take very long, and things like that that kind of justify things when you're saying, basically, yeah, I'll take some more pain and complain just to get a few more bucks.

And I think that's the trap that a lot of people fall into.

And you want to apply that same kind of decision-making process or matrix essentially to everything that you're doing.

I mean, you've got your podcast, and that's going well, and I know you really enjoy making that and meeting new people and having the guests and the social aspects that go with that.

But you also should be asking yourself, is there parts of that that you don't really enjoy doing that you can either farm off to somebody else or just stop doing altogether?

And don't get too hung up building the brand or getting the most views and all that sort of stuff.

Unless that really is your goal.

But you need to be honest with yourself about whether you're trying to do that or not.

Because you really don't want to turn your activities into these chores with the purpose being more fame or more money or more power or more pleasure seeking, at least in the unhealthy kind, I mean alcohol and drugs and that sort of stuff.

Who wants an orange whip?

Orange whip?

Orange whip?

Three orange whips.

You don't want your life to start looking like some scenes out of the Wolf of Wall Street or something like that.

$30,000 in one month, Geordi?

The business expenses.

Look at this.

$26,000 for one thing.

No, no, no, this can be explained.

Dad, we had clients.

We had five declining.

Right.

The Porter House from Argentina.

Expensive champagne and the wine.

We had to buy champagne and you voted all the sides.

Tell them about the sides.

Sidestones.

$26,000 worth of sides?

What are these sides?

They cure cancer.

Because ultimately we need to recognize that as we get into our 60s in particular, that time is the only currency that really matters anymore after you've accumulated enough money.

And so you want to be reflecting on that frequently.

Am I using my time in a way that suits me best and suits my relationships best?

Because if too much of it is spent doing work you really don't want to do or you really don't enjoy, or just kind of passive brain rot screen time and that sort of thing.

Why did you lie to me, Spongebob?

Why?

Patrick, just how dumb are you?

It varies.

Then it may be time to recalibrate some of those activities.

So I definitely would do some kind of time tracking.

It doesn't need to be that formal, but just like the way you would track your spending, so you can reflect on what you spend money on.

You should also be kind of keeping track of what you're spending your time on so you can reflect back on is this really serving me now or not.

So we talked about the four idols, which are that money, power, and fame and pleasure seeking.

And that comes from Arthur Brooks, but it's really ancient stuff.

Goes back to Aristotle in some ways.

You might also recognize that if you're familiar with Doc G's book about the purpose code.

All that stuff is what you would call big P purpose, where you are essentially doing something because it's got a scorecard that goes with it that you can wave around and other people can see.

That's kind of the wrong way of approaching things as you get towards retirement for most people, because it just saps your energy and time from the important things, and the important things are related to the five regrets of the dying, which generally revolve around not being true to yourself in terms of what you value as creativity or creative outlets and relationships, with relationships being the number one thing.

So on the other side of this coin, and this comes from The Soul of Wealth by Daniel Crosby, there's a nice chapter in there about how to spend money to buy happiness, essentially, or something like that.

And there are five ways listed.

The first one is just meeting all your regular needs, and when you become financially independent, that's kind of the definition of that.

And then the four other things are relationships, is number one.

The second one being experiences, and there are basically two kinds of experiences.

Talking about here.

Are there things you just enjoy doing so much they put you in a flow state?

Like I like riding my bike.

Is it the most efficient or most effective form of exercise?

No, it's not.

Particularly since a lot of times I don't go very fast either.

Exhibit A.

A photograph of the victims.

My bike and me.

And some people like to travel, particularly if you haven't done enough travel.

Some of us have done enough travel in our lives.

But then really this flows back into relationships.

You want to be participating in experiences that help you cultivate relationships, whether that's new relationships or old ones.

And so I'd also start looking at your continuing to work as a doctor in that light.

Is this experience of working as a doctor, do I get some kind of flow state kind of benefit doing the work?

Is this helping my relationships or what is it doing for me?

The third one is work avoidance or buying your time back.

So make sure you are not doing menial tasks if you can afford to pay somebody to do those menial tasks.

Make sure you are not getting involved in really long commutes because that can suck the life out of you and it's no fun.

But for every person, this is a little different.

What sort of things you like or don't like doing in terms of chores?

Some people like working in the yard, most of us don't.

Some people like cooking a lot, most of us don't.

But the point is to just sit down and make a conscious effort to figure that out and then start paying other people to do the things you don't want to do so you can get your time back.

So I'd rather pay somebody to deal with the yard so I can go ride my bike.

And then the fourth one is charity.

And actually giving money away is kind of the broader context of that.

And that generally takes several different forms.

One is giving it to the people who are going to get it anyways, kind of in advances on your inheritance or supporting other family members that you want to support in some way, helping your kids get their financial lives off the ground.

And that's going to vary person to person.

But again, this should also be tied to relationships with whomever you're helping or dealing with in this regard.

You can give to charities, formal charities, or other things like that, and then you can volunteer or work or get involved in some way.

And I know you guys like to take your dogs to the hospital to brighten people's days.

And so those are the kinds of activities you should be thinking of.

I think what I see people, at least in the financial independence space, get most hung up on these days is trying to turn everything into a profit center or choosing whether to do something based on whether it's going to be profitable or how much it costs.

And you really need to excise that because it's as long as it's within your budget, you need to pick it by what it's going to do for these relationships or other experiences, or getting your time back, and not giving really any regard to how much it costs or whether this is going to lead to be making money or becoming more famous or something.

So every time you find yourself putting money into your equation about whether you should do something or not, you need to step back and pull that out and make the decision without regard to whether it costs something or what it costs.

Because you're missing the point then.

You really want to be exchanging your money for time now and not exchanging your time for money.

So a lot of this just involves being more intentional about what you really want and how you're spending your time with regard to what it is you want.

Because when we're in our careers, a lot of decisions are just kind of made for us about what time we need to show up and when the meeting is and all these other things.

You don't have those restrictions when you're not working anymore.

Which leads me to another issue or point.

And since we know each other, we know that you are the consummate optimizer and I am the consummate satisficer.

And we probably both need to learn a little bit from each other with respect to some of that.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, somebody who is an optimizer, for instance, if they're shopping for, say, a pair of jeans or something on Amazon, an optimizer will look at every last possibility or reasonable possibility they can find before making a decision.

Somebody who is satisfacing on that will either just pick something that's familiar that they've gotten before, or the first thing that meets some kind of minimum criteria, recognizing that what they're really doing is saving time and hassle, even if their decision is not optimized because maybe there's something better out there, or maybe there's something similar that costs ten dollars less or something like that.

So most things that are either not very important to you or are of a trivial cost should be satisfied.

And what is a trivial cost?

Well, use Nick McJulie's rule of thumb, which is if it's less than 10,000th of your net worth, that's a trivial cost for you to spend on something in one day.

So if you're on vacation and you see some, say, kind of boat tour or something that looks like you'd like to go on, and it's less than ten thousandth of your net worth, a satisfacer just says, Oh, that looks nice.

Let's do that, spend the money, go on the trip.

An optimizer would start looking for every other boat tour or every other tour they can find and try to compare them all and figure out which one is best in some metaphysical way.

That's probably not worth your time anymore.

And that sort of behavior can be very damaging to relationships.

I think both you and I were in a conversation with a few other people where one of the participants was talking about this trip they had, and they went to go visit some people somewhere on a nice coastal beach, and they were out and gonna get a cup of coffee or something to eat or something like that.

And they found a decent place that was just good enough, and it would have been nice to be there, but their friends insisted on looking at all the menus and walking up and down the boardwalk or wherever they were to the point of distraction and annoyance.

And you don't want to be doing things like that.

A couple places where I have found this to be particularly useful, one has to do with the car I drive.

It is a 2011.

I thought I'd have to replace it by now, but I'm not driving at all, or not very much, so it just sits there most days and I don't go anywhere in it.

And so while I could be sitting around thinking about the next car and then how to optimize that, or whether I should sell this one and get a new one, and whether it should be an EV or some other kind of thing, the reality of it is it's just not that important.

So what satisfies us in this case is to just simply keep driving it until it doesn't work, and then think about all that stuff.

Because I'm simply not spending enough time in the car or commuting or doing anything with it to make it worthwhile to be expending a lot of time or energy thinking about the next car.

Another one is morning routines.

I think this one's kind of funny.

It's kind of a fad these days to have these complicated morning routines.

And I actually was listening to an interview of Arthur Brooks, I think it was by Tim Ferris recently, and he's one of these people that, you know, I get up at this hour and then I do this kind of exercise and then have this kind of coffee and then sit here or meditate there, and then me and my wife go to church.

And, you know, it's a very rigid thing he's got going on there.

And I suppose it works for him, but if you don't have one of these kind of routines, don't feel like you need to be developing something that is that complicated.

Because I'll tell you, my morning routine, well, it's changed a little bit.

When our dog was alive, my morning routine was to wake up when I woke up.

And as I get older, I find I wake up earlier and earlier, so I usually wake up around sunrise.

And then I would just go sit in an easy chair.

When the dog was with us, she would sit in my lap, I'd have a cup of coffee, and I'd think about what I needed to do that day and kind of put it in some kind of mental order.

And so a lot of days it'd be something like, all right, well, I have this one thing scheduled, maybe it's some kind of Zoom call or something with somebody.

And two other activities might be making a podcast or researching something for a podcast and riding my bike.

And so I would be sitting there thinking, when would be the best time to ride my bike?

How warm is it today?

Is it gonna rain?

Those sorts of things.

Because what you really have in retirement is the flexibility to do things in any order you want to do them.

You're not constrained to having this particular morning routine or some other routine where you have to do these things in this order or your life is gonna blow up.

So I don't think you need to optimize things like morning routines, just satisfy some.

But I'm just putting that out there by way as another example of what I'm talking about.

I suppose if anything you'd want to optimize or really be thinking about consciously, it would be time blocked out to do things with particular relationships, particularly with your wife, because while Mary and I have our own things we like to do, she's got her court-appointed special advocate work, and I've got this podcast and charity and other things.

There are other things that we do together.

So one of the things we do together is teach together.

Another thing we do together is oftentimes we participate in church together.

So we'll be lectors on the same day, or we'll both be Eucharistic ministers or something like that.

And we'll sign up for events or other little things.

But the point is you're actually blocking off this time where you and Karen are going to do this activity together, whatever it is.

And you can do that with your other relationships too.

But the point is that's probably the most important one, so that's the one you should focus on first.

And something that is very idiosyncratic to me, that's probably not as important to you, and I'm just mentioning this basically you're gonna have your own idiosyncrasies.

Because I spent so much time away from home traveling for work and doing other things like that, I really don't like the process of traveling very much anymore because going to the airport feels like going to a job.

Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.

I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob.

So my general rule for me is that I will not go on trips unless there's some kind of relationship component involved, and in most cases, unless Mary is with me.

Now that kind of rule isn't gonna make much sense for most people.

But the point is it it makes sense for me, and there's probably something that you should be doing in terms of a little rule that makes sense for you, but isn't gonna make sense for most people, and you need to figure out what those things are.

But again, this is all just being more intentional about how we're spending our time and treating that as the limiting resource and not money or something else.

Anyway, my final advice is don't try to figure all this out at once.

Because you probably won't be able to, and you really don't need to.

This is more of a try and see what works and then be willing to either keep doing that or not doing it, depending on whether it worked or not.

Trial and error is really the way to go through this, and not trying to plan out what you're gonna be doing at age 75 or 78.

The next morning you find it filled to the brim with Jack Squat!

Just focus on the next year or two for starters, and the next month or two if that seems too daunting.

Retirement should be a happy adventure, not a cause for stress about identity or anything else.

I've officially amounted to Jack USquat!

So hopefully some of that resonates.

Be sure to go back and read those books I mentioned in episode 436.

If you're looking for some homework.

You need somebody watching your back at all times.

Thank you for sharing your journey with us.

Thank you for being a good friend.

And thank you for your email.

But now I see our signal is beginning to fade.

If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to Frank at RiskPardyWare.com.

Then email us frank at riskpertyware.com.

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That would be great.

Okay.

Thank you once again for tuning in.

This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Party Radio.

Signing off.

The Risk Parody Radio Show is hosted by Frank Vasquez.

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