Women's Money Wisdom

Episode 250: How to Retire with Author Christine Benz

• Melissa Joy, CFP® • Season 4 • Episode 250

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Ever wondered how to navigate retirement planning with both financial security and personal fulfillment in mind?

In this episode of the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast, Melissa Joy, CFP®, CDFA® sits down with Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning at Morningstar and author of How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement. Christine shares her approach to retirement planning, highlighting strategies like annuities, cash flow management, and balancing time-tested methods with innovative ideas. Gain insights into navigating retirement complexities with an open mind and a strategic outlook.

We delve into managing retirement finances, including equity compensation, tax strategies, and post-retirement financial decisions. Christine provides actionable tips on handling restricted stock units (RSUs), Roth conversions, and optimizing portfolios based on risk tolerance and long-term goals. Generational lessons and past market experiences add valuable perspective.

Christine also emphasizes balancing financial planning with personal fulfillment. Inspired by real-life stories, we discuss aligning work with passions, transitioning gradually into retirement, and making intentional choices for a meaningful future.

Listen and Learn:

  • Holistic Retirement Planning: Key strategies like annuities and cash flow management for financial stability.
  • Smart Tax and Investment Moves: Tips on RSUs, Roth conversions, and portfolio optimization.
  • Generational Insights: Lessons from past market downturns and diverse viewpoints.
  • Purposeful Living: Align financial plans with personal passions for a fulfilling retirement.

Join us for practical advice and inspiration to help you create a secure and meaningful retirement. Tune in today!

The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only. No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https://pearlplan.com/

Melissa Joy:

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show.

Melissa Joy:

We're rounding out 2025 and have had some exceptional authors on the podcast this year. I actually am pinching myself because they're just books that are big and I have been recommending to friends, and Today is no exception. It's actually one of my favorite books of 2024, even more so because it's by a female author in the personal finance realm and it's on a topic that we all need to hear about how to retire. So today I'm joined by Christine Ben. You may have heard her name because she is the Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning at Morningstar and she's a Senior Columnist at Morningstarcom. She's also the co-host of the Morningstar podcast, the Long View, which I would highly recommend as one of your listens, and this year she's the author of how to Retire 20 Lessons for a Happy, successful and Wealthy Retirement.

Melissa Joy:

We're going to kind of scratch the surface today talking about this book, but I strongly recommend for any of you who are in retirement, approaching retirement, starting to think that it's real for those Gen Xers like myself, listen to this book, read this book. It's great. And so let's dive in. Christine, welcome to the podcast.

Christine Benz:

Melissa, thank you so much and I really appreciate the kind introduction and also the pitch for my book. I'm very grateful, thank you.

Melissa Joy:

Well, the enthusiasm is authentic. I've had conversations with a couple clients who are retiring just this year and the book went in the mail and we got the thank you. Because when it comes to retirement, I think the assumption is like what is my number? How much do I need? But retirement is so multidimensional, it is a massive change in your life and you have interviewed experts on retirement in order to delve into this multidimensional perspective and when you kind of wrapped up the book, you talked about how important it is to be willing to entertain different perspectives. Tell me about this process, tell me about how you kind of came to that conclusion of this framework for the book and what it meant to you when you kind of pulled it all together with the outcome.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, I worked with Craig Pierce at Harriman House, the publisher, and we had been talking for probably five years more than five years maybe about me doing some kind of book, probably a retirement planning book, and I just could not find the time in my schedule.

Christine Benz:

So it was actually Craig's idea to pursue an interview format for the book where I would interview external experts, and I love the humility that that suggests that I didn't have to sit here and pretend that I know everything there is to know about health care planning in retirement, or you know how to use annuities or you know matters that I haven't focused on very squarely during my work. So the opportunity to interview external experts, you know, who do have deep wells of knowledge in those areas, I thought was really appealing. So I liked how it came together and, as you said, melissa, I also liked how you had some people who actually disagreed on some aspects of retirement planning where the perspectives on annuities, for example, were quite different. People like Bill Bernstein and JL Collins were, you know, kind of marking annuities with a skull and crossbones, and then you had other people like Michael Finca or Wade Pfau who were much more positive on annuities. So I think that there are different perspectives across a range of topics, and I liked that as well, I love that too.

Melissa Joy:

I think that actually it's a really interesting question to ask, if you work with a financial professional, how you've challenged your own assumptions, brought in and entertained different viewpoints.

Melissa Joy:

For someone using the annuity example, as someone who kind of was burst into this profession in the late 90s, early 2000s, when really there was a sea change from things being sold as commissionable products to more of an advisory not product sales, but advice Annuities really have a bad rap, but then academics love them actually because they create certainty and sustainability for a certain part of the portfolio. And this is what I love about the book, because I think if you just set out to write the retirement Bible, it would be inherently a challenge because it would be one point of view. For example, you talk about how cash flow and bucketing strategies is really your sweet spot, where you've dug in, dived in and you're really an expert there. But there are so many different aspects of what it means to be retired, not only for your portfolio but as a human, that you really have laid in front of us in a way that's very approachable.

Christine Benz:

Well, thank you. The portfolio construction is another one where you know I did talk about bucketing in my chapter of the book, but there are really different perspectives. Like Bill Bernstein is sort of like buy some tips, maybe hold some equities and call it a day in terms of constructing the portfolio. Jl Collins is in favor of kind of a radically simplified retirement portfolio where maybe you have total stock market, total bond market and maybe a little bit of cash. So I like that. There were an array of opinions on that as well, because you know anyone who's saying there's just one portfolio that fits everyone for retirement decumulation. I don't think it's, unfortunately, quite that simple or clear cut.

Melissa Joy:

No, I agree. I think that it's important to have a point of view and a process and framework and not being kind of skipping through different, you know, kind of ideas from year to year as kind of the winds change. But I totally agree with you. And another area, perhaps a controversy you interview people and you're famously a big, you're involved in the global has community, which is from a group of people that are really investing as a culture and their personal investing and people that really love that and implement their investment portfolios themselves.

Melissa Joy:

Ramit Sethi also is a big proponent of receiving financial advice but not having investments be the form of compensation and not having necessarily implementation of investment strategies handled by a professional. And then, of course, you also are often speaking to professional financial planners and the work that you do with Morningstar. Can you talk a little bit about this? I mean to me there's some people that are ideal for self-implementation, those DIY investors and the bobbleheads. There's other people that have absolutely no desire to ever place a trade, who love the ability to outsource their personal investment management. I work with many of those types of people and people that just enjoy delegating and somebody navigating complexity. So what do you see? And I just love that they're both perspectives, because I don't think every person is similarly kind of set up.

Christine Benz:

Well, absolutely, and I completely agree that it is not black and white at all. In fact, I will say I've come to the realization. Even though I spent a lot of time talking to DIY type investors, I've come to the conclusion that most people do need some help in retirement whether it's like full on.

Christine Benz:

You know someone is doing all of your portfolio management on an ongoing basis. Maybe not necessarily for certain Bogleheads types, but most people do have some kind of blind spot, some things they understand less well. You can't be an expert in every aspect of this. It's one reason why my husband and I have a financial planner who we work with. We have an hourly financial planner. I'm comfortable managing our investment portfolio, but I recognize that there were some areas where we had questions, specifically in the realm of tax planning related to employer stock and also to help us sort out the long-term care problem.

Christine Benz:

I didn't want to go to a purveyor of long-term care insurance to help us figure out whether we needed long-term care insurance.

Christine Benz:

Help us figure out whether we needed long-term care insurance.

Christine Benz:

I wanted an objective opinion and she was able to offer that to us. So that kind of thing can be a kind of a medium ground or a middle ground for people. But my thought is, my argument, is most people do need at least another set of eyes on their plans, and another side benefit for us to having a planner is there's another receptacle of our investment accounts someone who actually can look at our accounts in real time. If something were to happen to both my husband and me where we were unable to access our accounts or tell our loved ones what we have, well, she's there, she is their person that they could call upon to find out how to pay the bills and all that kind of stuff. So I think that that is another valuable sort of layer of protection that people might think about, and that's particularly important as we age, and you know we know that the incidence of cognitive decline increases as we age, and you know you may run into a situation where you're unable to be that DIYer at some point, and so, yeah, so interesting?

Melissa Joy:

Yeah, I really A I am not spending my life's work focusing on this, because when somebody comes to me in their 50s and says we're skeptical about professional kind of implementation, I often do financial plans for those people.

Melissa Joy:

But my you know, kind of the majority of my work is with people that want to delegate and it's not a you know, I don't want to work with you, but it's like kind of a natural friction for ongoing work. But for those people it's so interesting because one of the most impactful presentations I've ever seen was actually at a Morningstar conference, probably 20 years ago, 15 or 20 years ago, talking about diminished capacity in people and how it shows up first often just in the natural process of aging, in terms of indecision and or difficulty in numbers, financial accounts and things like that. And so you know, while this isn't my particular area of focus, I think for those of you listening who are those self-implementers, I love you listening to the show. Having a game plan where, before you get to that point where it's, you're unable to be decisive yourself of how you will manage if there is diminished capacity, which often occurs even without dementia in a long life, is something that is definitely worth thinking about and putting in place before you have an emergency.

Christine Benz:

A hundred percent At a minimum. Get that trusted adult child on board with whatever you're doing. But the gold standard would be probably some objective financial professional, I think, and I think I remember the presentation you're referencing, melissa.

Melissa Joy:

I need to look it up.

Christine Benz:

I think it was David Labeson at Harvard. That sounds like one of my hobby horse sessions that I had been like we need to get this first, and I think it was David Labeson at Harvard who has done some amazing research in this area. It's not an uplifting topic. None of us wants to ponder that aspect of our lives. But I often think about my dad, who experienced cognitive decline and he had me to be his investment buddy and, you know, to make sure that nothing slipped through the cracks when he went through that experience, when we all went through that experience with him. But not everyone has kind of that adult child who works on investment matters for her day job.

Melissa Joy:

So anyway, yeah, yeah, he was pretty fortunate. Yeah, and I agree, it is a difficult conversation, but it's so much less difficult speaking about it in a time like this where you know speaking about it in a time like this where you know we're before the crisis.

Melissa Joy:

The other like thing that is so interesting as a practitioner is that some of the best savers, some of the best accumulators, really have a struggle when it comes to permission to spend. Like are you serious? Like I'm going to be taking money out of my portfolio instead of putting it in? This is just something that is, people that are gifted in one side of the equation may not feel comfortable on the other side of the equation spending In areas of financial planners. The academic research says we may be encouraging people not to spend, discouraging people from spending what they could be spending, in some cases for safety's sake, and this is just like a really interesting emerging area to talk about when it comes to retirement, because it's a massive shift.

Christine Benz:

It is, and it's almost perverse to talk about, because we have this group of individuals in our country who are quite undersaved relative to what they, and so this isn't an issue at all.

Melissa Joy:

Yeah you're just going to have to take your social security and borrow when you need to Right.

Christine Benz:

But you're absolutely right, with people who have kind of burnished their identities as saving people, as investing people, it's very difficult to make that transition where you're not just seeing this one-way channel of your money going from your paycheck into your various investment accounts. It's going the other way and I do think it's a huge psychological hurdle. I encountered this in my own household a couple of years ago. We had sold a lot of employer stock and it had a big tax bill attached to it. Well, I transferred the proceeds to our investment account and then, you know, the taxes came due and I'm looking at our sort of household cash flow and I'm like, oh, we don't have any money. Well, you know the taxes were over there in the investment account but I hated the idea of ever touching that, even though you know, technically really the tax bill should have been paid from those funds. But it's a huge psychological hurdle.

Christine Benz:

A couple of people in the book did offer some practical solutions to help people over that hump. Jamie Hopkins talked about the virtue of practicing some spending in those years leading up to retirement. While you're still working, you know, do things like buy the car with cash and of course that's good advice today, with. You know, interest rates up a little bit. Most people, if they have the wherewithal to buy cars with cash, probably should do that. So practicing some big ticket purchases with cash, I think, is good advice, getting some training wheels on the spending. And then the idea of potentially you know going back to an annuity. That might be another idea where it's kind of this one and done decision maybe not perfectly comfortable to make this big outlay to buy the annuity, but once it's done you have that stream of cash flows coming towards you. You don't necessarily have to be going into your portfolio year after year to raise your living expenses. So that's, I think, another idea for people to contemplate.

Melissa Joy:

I'm laughing because I'm thinking of your investment portfolio, when you had done that equity compensation sale. And I remember a friend who gave me a cutting board that was wood once, and the day that she gave it to me she's like, hey, give me a knife. And she like ran a knife across it because she was like this is intended to be used, that's so funny.

Christine Benz:

I have a beautiful cutting board that my friend in Napa gave me. That is like sitting downstairs, like never, never to be used at all. So I've got to think about that because I have not been able to get over that hump.

Melissa Joy:

Maybe the next cutting board. But I mean that really is like. You know, sometimes you have people this is an aside but on Equity Comp they receive RSUs, they get taxed that day and then the RSUs accumulate and they're like I've got this big tax bill and you're like, yeah, the tax bill that came from these guys that you're not touching, Like yeah, that was compensation. Would you have bought that stock that day? But I just I have to laugh and you know, I also think that the complexity it's one thing where you always know you're saving on taxes.

Melissa Joy:

If you're, you know, kind of maxing out your retirement accounts when you flip around, especially if you retire, before you turn on social security and before your required distributions, which are getting later and later, there is so much tax optionality that, like is the are the warm waters I love to swim in. That are very intimidating to understand, and so people often oversimplify and just think you know I want to turn on dividends or I'll spend whatever the interest is in my portfolio and that may not give you the highest quality of life or let you achieve the things you want to do in retirement. So that's one of those areas where it's just like it's next level up that may be difficult for you to become an expert in when you retire, where it may be helpful to have the advice of a professional, definitely the tax dimension of retirement decumulation is a little bit of a mind bender and I did delve into it with Mike Piper in the book who is, I think, really clear about explaining.

Christine Benz:

I love that chapter. Thank you, mike. Is amazing and he talks about kind of levers that you have and he references specifically that post-retirement, pre-social security, pre-required minimum distribution period as a really rich period to potentially explore some different options like a series of Roth conversions and or, you know, maybe even accelerated withdrawals from the traditional tax-deferred balances to help, you know, maybe even accelerated withdrawals from the traditional tax deferred balances to help, you know, kind of reduce eventual RMDs. So, yeah, there are things that can be done in that period. And then the whole thing about that you referenced, Melissa, about people wanting to subsist on income. It's that was my initial attraction to the whole bucketing thing. I was like so what can we do? That is not that where someone is just trying to live on whatever cash flows are organically generated, and I think the bucket approach is kind of an attractive way to address how to construct cash flows if you're not just going to be exclusively reliant on dividends or other income-producing securities.

Melissa Joy:

Absolutely. That is just when somebody's really dug into that philosophy. It is so hard to undo the work that has been done, to say I figured it all out and not to say that you can't use that you know kind of income paycheck in the mail concept. I'm just saying there there may be some other considerations. Have to do a whole episode of dividends someday, you should because there is a lot there.

Christine Benz:

I mean I'm curious and I'm going to ask you a question. But when you work with clients and they have that dividend-paying mindset, that they mainly want that dividend-paying portfolio and they never want to sell anything and they really have no interest in bonds as well typically or that's been my experience component of so do you kind of deal with that and use that as kind of the bulwark of the portfolio? Do you say, okay, for this client, we are going to just lean in that direction at least and do have the equities mainly focused on dividend production.

Melissa Joy:

You know it's interesting. So I do have one client I'm just thinking right now. You know it's interesting. So I do have one client I'm just thinking right now who really loves a dividend-focused, separately managed account. And, yeah, not a problem, we can fit that in. It's not the entire portfolio and we've made it work, but she's had some flexibility with us in terms of where we distribute funds. So it's not fully funding that paycheck For extraordinarily wealthy people. It can work.

Melissa Joy:

So another client who's very uncomfortable with risk. So don't think dividends, but think CDs north of 10 million in net worth, so it works. And so I don't need to get in the way of that. Because they very specifically kind of want to live off of principle. I'm curious about, like, what that means for next generation. There's a lot of curiosity there which if someone were willing to dive in they could go there. But in this case they don't need to and you know we take it as far as they want us to.

Melissa Joy:

Interesting though I think most of the people like that, they often come to me for financial planning don't want the investment implementation because they've read I can do this myself, which I don't disagree, many people can. I don't know if it's always an intersection with this group of people and then very willing to take on equity risk, but then also very focused on the dividends, self-implementing. My question is because we've had really a very resilient 15 years, very brief interludes of negative returns, but you and I both lived through 2008 and 2009. I think it's one of the extraordinary benefits of being Gen X, with, you know, some leg room for the next 10 or 20 years in careers. But also, having seen what my younger colleagues have not seen is like what's going to happen when 35% for a year or two or, like you know, more than 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, in terms of do you just bail and go to cash because you didn't? You know you needed something that was really locked in framework, especially if dividends go down at the same time?

Christine Benz:

Yeah, that's the thing and that's what we saw in that 08-09 period where the financials, the bank stocks that had been such a huge source of dividends, historically cut their dividends in a big way.

Melissa Joy:

Absolutely. I mean, it's like and I look at my career too not to get too far off of our topic, but you know I learned so much about mistakes that financial professionals make. Coming out of that and being a part of those mistakes in terms of you know, I really feel like at the firm I was working at the time, we were overly conservative at the wrong moments in time and for a long time coming out of 08 and 09, because financial practitioners are just as likely to have their own behavioral biases and mistakes, and so it's just a really extraordinary. It was a horrible experience to live through. I remember being pregnant with my first child and I could not wait for maternity leave just to be, like, get a break from talking.

Christine Benz:

Get out of there.

Melissa Joy:

But also, it's just such a valuable experience for us to have that perspective, not reading about in history books or looking at it on a chart, but actually knowing how people reacted to a true, you know, kind of two standard aviation event. When it comes to like kind of bad markets to, standard aviation event.

Christine Benz:

When it comes to like kind of bad markets, yeah, and you know the mistakes and we can do the whole thing on 08-09,. But you know institutional investors too. I mean, when we look at like the funds that were created in response to that period, we saw a huge flood of alts. Alternative investment products hit the market. Well, okay, those would have been helpful for 08, 09, but now here we are in, you know, late 2009. Okay, whole bunch of alts. A lot of people talking about tactical asset allocation. What's your tactical strategy? Lots of new products around tactical asset allocation just sort of like fighting the last war basically Absolutely.

Christine Benz:

Right, and we see this again and again. We see, you know, individual investors are often, I think, caricatured as like the dumb money in the market. But, I'm sorry, we do see it to some extent with the professional investor class.

Melissa Joy:

It's totally self-owned. I mean, that's another great question when you're working with a financial professional. What mistakes have you made and how have you adjusted? Because then I get out the litany of reasons I became more and more strategic, less and less active in terms of investment decisions and investment, even the investment strategies that we utilize, because that takes away the opportunity for you to out think yourself and you know, like de-risk into really, really bad performance.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, no, that's. That's wonderful to hear. And I think about, like humility I mentioned humility before but like, like we should be looking for that in our financial helpers. They should be able to say what they don't know or the things that they just don't care to conjecture about, like you know what stocks will do next year.

Christine Benz:

Or yeah, they should have a whole big, too hard pile Like here's what I don't do. They should have a whole big, too hard pile Like here's what I don't do. And here are the tried and true things where I think we can really add value. So I like the idea of people asking their financial professionals you know what don't you do? Where do you feel like you add the most?

Melissa Joy:

value. Well, you're speaking my language, because one of the things we remind people of at the beginning of every year is if you hear us predicting, then we've changed our stripes. Not that we're not going to say you know, I like to talk in possibilities and probabilities instead of predictive certainties. So it's not like we're not going to talk about the future, but people that think they can predict lack the humility and also probably aren't disclosing their track record.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, no, exactly. I love that idea of dealing in probabilities and possibilities rather than outright predictions. Anytime anyone is saying you know something in the near term will come to pass, you know for sure. I think you need to check it out.

Melissa Joy:

Well, you have a chapter I think a lot of women in investing do have that humility and you have a chapter from Jean Chotsky, who's done extraordinary work in making money relatable for women especially, but just in personal finance in general, and it's what women need to do differently. And we're talking about retirement. So I mean, this is the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast, so let's talk amongst the girls for a moment. What do women need to be thinking about differently?

Christine Benz:

A couple of things, and I love Jean's work when I asked her what she wanted to talk about for this book, because she's Jean Chatzky, she can talk about what she wants. So I kind of let her tell me and this, of course, has been such a passion of hers working with women to improve their financial wherewithal. We do know is, when we look at the data, women are much more likely to be poor in retirement than men. They're much more likely to be reliant exclusively on Social Security versus having any portfolio assets at all. So a few things that women need to do differently. They need to understand the role of caregiving in their lives and its impact on their earnings trajectory. We know that women sometimes take breaks and I put that in quotes because it sounds like it's going to be super relaxing but women, you know, are more involved in child care oftentimes than their male partners.

Christine Benz:

They are much more likely to be caregivers for their aging parents, and so women are likely to feel this sandwiching effect much more acutely than men, and that does put a crimp on our earnings power.

Christine Benz:

Women tend to peak in terms of their earnings earlier and we see that, you know, women are just crushing it in terms of educational attainment, becoming doctors and lawyers and so forth. But women tend to peak earlier because they oftentimes do reduce their work, do reduce their earnings, I should say, earlier in their careers and then later in their careers. When women are involved, maybe involved in caregiving for their elderly parents, that too can curtail working income later in life. So women need to be mindful of that. I think it argues. For if you are a young person, young woman just emerging from college, young woman just emerging from college, you really need to hit the savings hard early in your career, if you possibly can, to build up that nest egg, to try to get compounding to work for you. So that was something we talked about in the book. We also talked about longevity and how women are.

Christine Benz:

You know, based on the averages are likely to outlive their male partners or male counterparts by a couple of years on average, and so we need to plan for that longer life expectancy. All else equal. It argues for having a pretty equity heavy portfolio, if you possibly can, because you need that growth potential, especially in your accumulation years, and you also need to lay the groundwork for long-term care, because our male partners live a few years shorter than we do. We're more likely to be caregivers for them, but then, when they pre-decease us, there's no one around to care for us, so we need to lay a long-term care plan as well. Absolutely.

Melissa Joy:

I totally agree with you. I think long-term care is really interesting. I'm not someone who every person who walks in the room says you need long-term care. I really am anxious about you know, if you go to someone who sells long-term care, every you know, everybody with a heartbeat is a candidate, and so I really do think it's I. I that's the only type of insurance business that I do because I just always feel uncomfortable, kind of going to, like I said, someone who's only specializes in long-term care and having people, especially women, sold based on fear. But I do think that that can help with that ability to take on risk in the portfolio if you can show that there is insurance, if you're kind of the last one standing. But it is a very personal decision. I have long-term care insurance. You described that you, you know, could have had have had that conversation with yourself and your husband um, but as a personal decision, it's not necessarily for everyone. It's very expensive, so you need to tackle that as well.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, A dimension of it is that it's a peace of mind, allocation that I think doesn't necessarily get represented when you look at the finances alone.

Melissa Joy:

Yeah, and it's complex. It's really not like that straightforward, so you need some time and you need a consultative approach to really tackle that.

Christine Benz:

Right, right, and I like the idea of women at a minimum, you know, if they have decided to forego insurance. What's your long-term care plan then? Because I think the odds are like roughly 50-50 that someone will need long paid, long-term care in their lifetimes. Someone will need long paid, long-term care in their lifetimes. So is your plan that, yes, I'll spend through my resources and then rely on government provided care, or is it that I want to self-fund long-term care, and in which case, well, there are implications for the spendable portfolio that's left, because I think you'd want to like kind of hive off that portion of the portfolio because that's your peace of mind allocation. But it seems to me that you know people, if they skip insurance, they don't take that next step of and then really think through okay, then what is my plan in that case? Absolutely.

Melissa Joy:

Yeah, we start just like a practitioner perspective, with an assumption of two years of long-term care for a couple it would be for both. We start with an assumption of living until age 95, and then we talk about whether we need to add longevity as well as like kind of forecast longevity in a home, just knowing that you know either through, if you stayed in your home you could borrow, perhaps against the equity, and or in many cases a home is sold and you move to a place where perhaps there's a deposit but higher rent if you need to kind of transition past independent living near a long-term care. But that really that's an element. That is, it's not a warm and fuzzy conversation to begin with.

Melissa Joy:

And so you really need some. You need to be realistic and and thoughtful when you approach it.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, no, it's, it's. I've concluded. You know, it's kind of the human condition that we want to assume that the body that we're in today, the mind that we have today, that it will ever be. So, you know, and, and I think a good planner can get you visualizing some of those less happy phases of life, and Michael Finca makes the point in the book that, like, if you actually can visualize some of these things, which admittedly are not fun to think about, you're at least in the driver's seat of the decision-making where you're articulating to your loved ones here's what I want. If I should encounter some cognitive decline, I want to stay in my home or maybe you don't want to stay, but to the extent that you can get ahead of that decision-making and articulate what you want, it really, I think, lessens the burden that you're putting on your loved ones Absolutely.

Christine Benz:

You're not trusting them into making these decisions for you at what is likely to be a stressful time for them. Anyway, If you can alleviate that somewhat, to me it's really an act of love, you know, if you can try to get ahead of some of that decision making.

Melissa Joy:

So so true, we don't have time to go into it, but you have a great chapter with Jenny Rizal about estate planning. Even just a letter about what you know like just your words instead of a legal document to say what's important to you, or a video I mean we're recording today in video format Could be something that might be a nice touchstone for those that might be your caregivers someday.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, absolutely With the softer side of estate planning too.

Melissa Joy:

Yeah, absolutely. The forward to your book was written by a retirement columnist, jonathan Clements, who is really a legend in the personal finance journalism field for being very personal, talking about the intersection of money and life, spent really his life's work kind of preparing people for retirement. Since he wrote that chapter which was, or that forward, which was great, he's been very public talking about a terminal cancer diagnosis and how that's impacted his life, his money. It's just really generous to and beautiful, frankly, for him to be sharing in this way. I know you're close friends. Could you talk a little bit about how? The first thing I thought when I read his chapter was like, oh my gosh, it kind of catches you, knowing his story, that he's been so willing to share publicly Just the perspective of when he wrote that and today, yeah, I was so thrilled that Jonathan was willing to write the foreword to my book. He was my first and only choice when I thought about who would be best who would be my top pick.

Christine Benz:

He's just been such a huge influence on how I think about money and investing, but also such an inspiration to me in terms of, you know, being an amazing human being and more recently, being willing to share this personal journey with all of us.

Christine Benz:

I had heard about Jonathan's diagnosis before I actually read his post on Humble Dollar where he disclosed that this was going on. But through this journey he's been sharing with all of us his thoughts on his imminent maybe not imminent, but his terminal diagnosis and kind of just sharing a lot of wisdom with all of us.

Melissa Joy:

So it meant the world to me, yeah, yeah, and I mean that's one of the things to think about that, I think you know, kind of brings us full circle is retirement isn't just money.

Melissa Joy:

When I think about Jonathan's story, I think about my uncle, uncle Jack, who was a lover of life and always dreamed of retirement, and he passed away before he retired.

Melissa Joy:

And so much about the message in your book is about make sure that you're thinking about the person you will be in retirement as well as the money. You know many of your important relationships may be through work and you may find that while you think that they'll stay the same, they're different or perhaps lost when you leave the workforce or your workplace. And also there's certainly a message just like Jamie's chapter talking about practice that life doesn't start at retirement. Even if you don't love your job and think, get me out of here, I just want to be sitting with my feet up by the beach, take care of your current self as well as your future self and don't wait to live. But also don't assume that a life well lived is easygoing if you go off the money part figured out when it comes to retirement. What are your thoughts on that, like taking care of that human and really, you know, being present at all moments, knowing that anything could happen.

Christine Benz:

Yeah, and I think, as we age, we naturally encounter more friends and loved ones who are, you know, very suddenly, you know, have some terrible diagnosis or something like that. So you start to really understand the importance of not coming into retirement with this huge bucket list of things that you didn't, that you weren't able to pursue while you were working. I think ideally we would all try to have a little bit of balance all the way through, and certainly as you get closer to retirement like five to 10 years from retirement to me it's so advantageous to think about kind of the work that you're doing, try to make it something that you enjoy, that you feel like it's giving you a sense of purpose. I've been talking about kind of the Sunday night calendar test, where you look at your week ahead as most of us do, where you're sort of you see things on your calendar and you're like, oh yay, I get to do that and you're looking forward to it. And then you have other things on your calendar where you are a little less enthused about them. Can you kind of use that as food for thought to determine how you're progressing and work?

Christine Benz:

Can you subtract some of those things that you don't enjoy as much, pull forward and keep maybe doing longer the things that you do enjoy more, and I've just come to be a big believer in kind of phasing into retirement very gradually in that way, and I do think that for a lot of people, continuing to work at some fashion is the right answer where, if they can find aspects of their work that are agreeable you know, maybe it's not 40 hours a week, that's a lot of time to give to an employer, but maybe it's fewer hours, more agreeable tasks, and, you know, maybe you're kind of getting more of what you want in terms of work, work, life balance, where maybe you aren't commuting anymore but whatever, rather than thinking literally about oh, I go from 40 hours to 30 hours to 20 hours.

Christine Benz:

You know, do you think about all of those those things when you, when you think about the, the nature of the work that you're doing?

Melissa Joy:

I love that and I can speak personally having a very fulfilling achievement oriented early career and then getting to a milestone where I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish. They listed that I was sitting on top of that mountain and it didn't necessarily feel that good and pivoting changing, starting a company and not necessarily in the early years, having the monetary rewards that I had been grown accustomed to. In fact, you know I've had practice using my investment portfolio as I started my new venture in Pearl Planning. But the purpose and the meaning, the alignment I did that switch from an hour each way commute to five minutes where I can, you know, leave at 845 and make a 9 am meeting with plenty of time to make coffee. You know that is a gift. And don't wait for the life to craft the life that you dream of until a certain retirement point. It may be that it was worth it to start earlier or just integrate different decisions into your current life.

Christine Benz:

Right, and they're not necessarily the most remunerative decisions, that's okay, there are some trade-offs Exactly.

Melissa Joy:

Yeah Well, christine, I love the book Again. It's how to Retire and, like I said, I've been giving it to clients. It's going to be on our year end to read list and it's also just like on our year end to read list and it's also just like having female voices in our profession is so important. It's kind of a desert out there, especially when it comes to book publication for great voices that are women. So kudos, congratulations and keep up your amazing work.

Christine Benz:

Melissa, straight back at you. I love what you're doing here and I've loved talking to you today. It's been an honor. Thank you so much.

Melissa Joy:

Thanks, Christine. Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to PearlPlancom and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned.

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Melissa Joy, CFP

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