Welcome back to Don’t Retire… Graduate! I’m excited to kick off our seventh season with a powerful conversation about redefining retirement—and how to do it with confidence, purpose, and a solid financial plan. For our season premiere, I had the pleasure of hosting Jeremy Keil, author of the highly acclaimed book Retire Today. Jeremy is not only an experienced financial advisor with over two decades of expertise, but he’s also a passionate advocate for helping people move from confusion to clarity with retirement planning. Together, we delved deep into the “battle of the books”—comparing his vision of retiring today with my philosophy of graduating into your next chapter.

In our discussion, Jeremy and I explored the five-step framework from his book designed to help you maximize income, minimize taxes, and sidestep costly retirement mistakes. We tackled the critical concept of “retirement longevity” and why getting your timeline right is as important, if not more so, than knowing how much you’ll spend. Jeremy shared actionable insights on planning for spending spikes in the early go-go years of retirement and preparing for potential healthcare costs in the later stages. We broke down one-time decisions like Social Security, pensions, and annuities and talked candidly about the importance of optimizing these choices—especially when they’re irreversible.

We also discussed the often-overlooked art of tax planning in retirement, how to make the most of your investment accounts, and why wise estate planning means leaving behind a legacy, not a mess. Throughout, Jeremy emphasized process, preparation, and having a thoughtful plan for everything from cash flow and investments to healthcare and long-term care. Finally, we sparred a bit on the qualitative side of retirement, discussing whether full retirement is the ultimate goal or if “graduating” to financial independence is the best way to live a meaningful, high-impact life.

5 Key Takeaways:

1. Retirement Longevity Matters Most: Jeremy introduced the concept of the “retirement longevity number”—the importance of planning not only when you’ll retire but how long you’ll need your money to last, factoring in early retirements and underestimated life expectancies.
2. Spending Is Not One-Dimensional: Expect higher spending in your first decade of retirement. Do detailed cash flow planning that accounts for one-time costs like travel or home renovations and prepare for possible healthcare spikes in your later years.
3. One-Shot Decisions Require Strategy: Social Security, pension choices, and annuities are often irrevocable. Plan ahead using net present value calculations and seek advice that considers math—not just gut feeling or sales incentives.
4. Tax Planning Is a Game Changer: Post-retirement offers tremendous flexibility for tax strategies. Learn how different account types are taxed, and consider timing and sizing Roth conversions to optimize your lifetime tax outlay.
5. Invest After You Plan—Not Before: Good financial planning puts investments near the end, not the beginning. Build your foundation first by aligning investments with your spending, income, and risk tolerance. Join us for this enlightening episode and discover why retirement isn’t just a final destination—it’s the start of your next, most purposeful chapter. Subscribe, rate, and share our show so others can join you in reimagining—and graduating into—a life of financial freedom and fulfillment!

Welcome to Don't Retire Graduate, brought to you by BFG Financial Advisors. We're here to rethink what retirement really means to you so you can graduate into your next chapter of life with a purpose and a passion. I'm your host, Eric Brotman, and in this, our seventh season, we'll be bringing you interviews with guests who will share their money stories with us every other Thursday. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe so you never miss an episode. Today, I'm pleased to be joined for our season premiere by Jeremy Kyle. Jeremy wrote Retire Today, this terrific book, and it shows folks how to move from confusion to confidence. In five simple steps, you'll learn how to maximize your income, minimize your taxes, and most of all, steer clear of costly retirement mistakes. Jeremy.

Welcome to Don't Retire Graduate.

Thanks for having me on the show. And you held up my book. I've got to hold up your book. Don't Retire Graduate.

Well, there you go. I mean, at. At the end of the day, I would like this to be battle of the books. We can have some fun because, you know, you talk about retiring today and I talk about never retiring, but graduating, of course. So let's learn first a little bit about you and then we can. Then we can dive in and debate a little bit.

I like it. Yeah. So I've been a financial Advisor for over 20 years, and I learned really quickly that I really like kind of the. The puzzle solving of financial advice where a lot of people have all these different kind of pieces of retirement or their finances, but they don't know how to put it together. And I love helping people put it together. Really quickly I realized that I love the retirement part of putting things together because a lot of times you. You are faced with a decision you've never faced before, and you make this decision and you can never change it. Like your Social Security and your pension and your health insurance decisions, all kinds of things like that.

So getting people prepared and helping them make great decisions for retirement is what I love to do. And that's why I wrote the book.

Well, the book is terrific. And I have to tell you, I read the book on an airplane last week, and while I was reading it, I was actually the plate. The flight was delayed and I was reading it at the airport and a woman next to me said, oh, are you thinking of retiring? And it. It made me laugh. First of all, it means your cover is very compelling and stuck. Stood out across the room. Yeah. And secondly, I said, no, I'm.

I'm Never retiring. However, I said, I, you know, I'm also an author and a podcast host and I'm having the author on so that we can debate whether retirement's good for you or not. And she started to laugh. She said, what's the podcast? And I told her. So I think she's probably listening to our episode today. So I'm delighted to have a new listener and a new fan and hopefully a buyer of both of our books when that happens. So let's talk about what retire today was, was meant to do. Because you've created a framework.

You've created a framework of five steps. You refer to them as simple. The words are simple. I don't know that the actions are simple. But you've created a five step process. Would you share that with us so that we can start diving into that?

Yeah. The big thing is people want to retire. They just don't know how to retire. I was just sharing this concept with somebody yesterday and he really liked it, so I'm gonna share it again. When you are 22 and you start saving for retirement, you just get your first job and then you maybe graduate at 62. When you put your money into your 401k 26 times a year, you have a thousand chances to figure it out and to get it right. But you hit retirement, you only get one shot at retirement. You've.

You only retire once in your life, most likely. And learning how to do this ahead of time will help you avoid those big retirement stakes. Thankfully, there's people like myself and you, Eric, where we've met thousands of people and can help them. We've learned from them, so we can help you make these retirement choices. And I've discovered too, I was a physics major in college and so I like the scientific method. I like processes. And when you hit retirement, you've never done it before. You're just wondering, how do I do this? Well, having a process of, okay, someone's done this before and if I take step 1, 2, 3 and 4 and 5, I'll come out ahead.

It just kind of eases the stress just knowing that there's a process there and I'm willing and able to share the process.

Whenever it is stress, it is stressful. And you talked about how to retire. I think there's also a question of why to retire. Why are you looking for this change? But let's talk about the steps. I want to make sure we highlight what's in the book. And I'm going to nod and smile on 80% of it and I'm going to throw a jab on some of it.

I love it.

Let's start at the beginning.

Yeah. So step one, the first step is figure out what it is you're going to spend in retirement. And I'll give you a quick hint, Eric, is that I, I have five steps, but writing the book, I realized there's actually a sixth step. I call it step zero. It's kind of part of step one of, of you want to figure out how much you're going to spend in retirement. But there's another part of that equation. It's how long will you be in retirement? And I call that your retirement longevity number. It's my new step.

Zero is your retirement longevity number. That is the number one most important number to your retirement planning. It's the most important factor in any equation. But it's also your attitude towards what your retirement longevity number might be. And I say retirement longevity because there's a beginning and there's an end. And all the research shows on average, you retire three years earlier than you expected. So if you ask a 55 year old when will you retire? They'll tell you 65. But if you ask a 65 year old when did you retire? They'll tell you 62.

So I want you to get ready for retirement three years ahead of time. Whatever number you think, whatever age you think you're going to retire, be ready three years ahead of time. That's the beginning part. Then there's the ending part. How long might you live? And most everyone has a number. Most everyone's number is wrong. And it's wrong because they read in the paper the average life expectancy is age 78. But what they don't read is the next sentence that says the average life expectancy at birth is age 78.

You, you don't retire right after you're born. You're 55, you're 65, you're looking to retire. Your life expectancy is different at that age. So quite commonly it's going to be towards 85. 90 or so is your average life expectancy as of right now. But here's another part of life expectancy and why I talk about it so much is if you figure out you're 62 years old, you figure out what your life expectancy is, you have a 4, a 4% chance of dying at your life expectancy. Like if you're 62 and you think your number's 80 or 85, you have a 4% chance of that age being the Age, you're gone and you've got a virtually guaranteed chance. It's either before or after.

So, one, I want you to get your number right, but I also want you to consider what happens if I don't make it there, what happens if I make it past. You've got to consider that because it's almost always going to happen. So that's the, the step one is figure out the spending, but then especially focus on how long you might be in retirement. Step two.

Let me, let me interrupt you and we'll play with this because I actually think it's terrific, the question of longevity. It's not just lifespan, it's also health span and the quality of life. And you actually address some of that in the book and talk about health care and some of the expenses that can come. And certainly that can be a major piece.

I liken this to trying to figure out your baby's due date. My daughter was born an hour and seven or eight minutes into her due date, like the type a human she became, as if to say, hey, it's my day. Let's do this, people. What are we waiting for? But you're right. I mean, the, the odds of retiring either earlier or later than you expect and the odds of living shorter or longer than you expect. So many people think, well, my parents only live to X and therefore I'm only going to live the X. And that's simply not true. Part of it is genetics, certainly, but part of it is standard of living.

Part of it is medical care and technology. And there's a lot of different things that lead to some longevity. But I do think figuring out spending is really, really important and figuring out what is a fair inflation rate because what you retire on at 62, as you and I well know, is not the same number you'll need at 72 or 82 or 92, even, with all things being equal. But you also spend a little bit of time talking about how the first 10 or 15 years of retirement sometimes are more expensive than the rest. Can we talk about that before we go on to the next step?

Yeah, and I'll go beyond sometimes, virtually every time you retire, the first year in the first five to 10 years is more expensive than the rest of your retirement. Just think about it, what you're doing right now, you're not retired. You, you're working, you want to be retired, and you're just building up this list of things you want to do, like vacations you want to take, and you're building up this list of things you want to change in your house but you can't get to it right now you're retired. So as soon as you do retire, you've got all the time in the world and you're either going out on all the vacations you wish you could have taken before or you're changing all the things that you wish you could change on your house. Either one is, and oftentimes it's both is expensive. So don't be surprised and plan out in your cash flow planning. What's these extra costs going to be plug into there? A lot of people say what am I going to live on retirement, 80% of my salary? No, I think you're going to live on 100% of your take home pay. You know, if you're making 100 grand a year but your take home pay is 5,000amonth, you're spending the 5,000amonth and that's kind of your base levels.

I'm spending this right now. It'd be great if you could keep spending that same amount in retirement but then add in the extra costs that are likely to be there where you say I'm going to go take that extra trip, I'm going to go take that extra two trips, I'm going to remodel the bathroom and remodel the kitchen. Plug that in there. For the first couple of years of you've got your baseline spending and then your kind of one time items, you want to plug those in for the years you're expecting those to, to happen.

Do you consider the, the last five years also sometimes being super expensive for medical reasons or how do you, how do you account for that? Because I think there's sort of a U curve where you spend early while it's go go and then you don't spend as much in the slow go years that it's talked about. And then the no go years are real expensive again. Sometimes.

Yeah. The tough part about the last five years, it's, it's an either or. You are either healthy enough or die soon enough. Where you don't have the health care costs, where you're getting older, you're in your 80s and 90s and your spending's going down, it keeps going down, or you get to the point where your health changes and your healthcare costs change and you go just skyrocket straight up. So that's the, that's the tough part is it's either going to go down a lot or it's going to go up a lot. And kind of this either or this optionality. There's probability. These are all words that fit pretty well with insurance.

And that's why sometimes, yeah, sometimes, yeah. They fit pretty well with insurance in that. Okay, if it's a maybe going to happen, decide how are you going to, how are you going to plan for that maybe? And I encourage in the book, I give you two examples where you may take the maybe and buy the insurance. So if it doesn't happen, you're out the insurance dollars. If it does happen, you do have insurance, or you say, I'm just going to carve out a piece of my retirement and I'm not going to count on it for my income. I'm just going to have it there where it's going to turn into an either or for me later on. Either I needed it for my care or it's just extra money that gets helping out to my spouse, you know, my surviving spouse, or to most likely the kids.

Yeah, no, I love that framework. That's very simple and it was spelled out very clearly in the book. Let's go to step two now. We've, we've figured out what we're going to spend now. What?

Well, and you hit retirement. Just because you stop working doesn't mean you stop making money. You will be making money in retirement. So step one is spend. Step two is make. You'll be making money from Social Security. You might have a pension. You might have bought an annuity back in the day.

You might have rental real estate. There's all kinds of things where you'll be making money on a consistent basis. And you've got to make those decisions a lot of times ahead of time. Like your, your Social Security decision you make once you got 12 months, you can kind of, you know, do a redo. I've seen two people, I've helped, hundreds of people actually file for Social Security. Two people have done the redo on there. So pretty much it's a one and done with Social Security, with pensions, it's absolutely a one and done. And I know you're, you've got clients nationwide, but you're in the Baltimore, D.C.

area. You probably have a lot of federal employees and they make their pension choice once. And the default for the pension choice is not that the surviving spouse gets 100% of that federal pension, but then it drops down to 55%, basically the default. The best case you can do is lose half your money in a pension when the federal worker retires. And you want to plan that out. It's going to be A big deal. And you're better off making this decision ahead of time, you know, planning out what it's going to look like ahead of time. So focusing on the big one time decisions of what is it you're going to make in retirement, that's step two.

And if you're successful in retirement. And you know, I put retirement in quotes because I never want to do it in the traditional way. But a lot of folks wind up doing consulting or working part time or doing other things so that even though they've retired from their primary career where their primary job, a lot of them are still also earning. Which then lends itself to a conversation about income taxes because naturally this, this idea that you're, you're working years, you're funneling money into a 401k or IRAs or 4 or 3Bs or thrift plans or something, you're taking a tax deduction, you're growing the money tax deferred and now you're going to pay taxes on it later. Later might not be sweeter in terms of what that, that income tax rate looks like. And you know, you did a nice job talking about how a lot of people don't touch their plan until, until the RM required distribution ages. There's a lot of planning to be done by folks like yourself and, and, and our, our team here. There's a lot of work to be done around tax planning and timing income which I, I thought you did a really good job of, of illustrating why that's important.

And I, I just wanted to give you a kudos because that, that I do think is really important. This, this idea. Now I will say I always thought you made it before you spent it, but. All right, that's nitpicky. Let's go to step three.

Yeah, well, step three is keep, you want to keep more of your money with that tax planning. That's where you're bringing that up. And what's interesting is exactly what you said, that half of Americans, this is a big study with tiaa, so they have millions of higher income Americans that are reaching retirement and half of them, fully half them don't even take out one $1 from the retirement account until require minimum age. So basically half Americans say I am not going to plan anything out, I'm just going to follow the government plan. And guess what? The government plan is pretty much set up that you pay more and more taxes every single year. And so you want to plan things out ahead of time. Plan things out ahead of time. And this is new to People, because you're working, and you don't have too much choices on your taxes.

Like, you get your W2. Maybe you can do a couple IRA deductions or an HSA. There's not much you can do while you're working. But when you hit retirement, you have an entire world of flexibility where you've got four different main types of accounts. You've got your savings accounts, your brokerage accounts, your traditional accounts, and your Roth accounts. Well, those four different types of accounts have four different types of taxation. So first, learn the different taxations. And now you've got the timing of it.

You can choose what. Which of these four accounts you take money out of and when. You could choose to take money out in December or January. That's two different tax years. You can choose to take money from your traditional IRA and live off of it, or take money out of your Roth IRA and live off of it. That's two different tax situations. And quite often what gets brought up in tax planning is, should you do a Roth conversion? And I don't think the question is, should I do a Roth conversion? The question is, how much of a Roth conversion should I do? And how long should I do that Roth conversion for? A lot of times people think, oh, the answer is yes, I should do a Roth conversion. And I share a story in the book where the person just converted the entire $600,000 account all in one year because she thought the answer is yes.

I told her the answer is yes, and let's do it piecemeal over three years. Yeah. But she said, I didn't think it mattered. I did the math. I didn't tell her because it's like, you can't do it. You know, I don't want to rub her nose in it, but she paid, I think, over 20 grand more in taxes because she chose to do it all in one year instead of spreading it out of here's the how much. Here's the how long for your Roth conversions.

Yeah. No, tax diversification is a big deal. And having some dollars that are not taxable at all, and there's ways to do that, and then having some dollars that are. That are taxed as ordinary income versus capital gain. And then, of course, you also have to consider which. Which. What is my tax bracket and what is the tax bracket of my heirs if you are blessed to be leaving money behind, and I know you're going to get there momentarily, but you know, which accounts are better to spend during your lifetime, which are better to leave behind? So. So let's move on to the next step.

Yeah, the next step. So we've talked about what is it you're shooting for your spending, the making of the money that's coming in. You're trying to lower your taxes. We're finally talking about investing. Step four. Four is invest. And I want to highlight that because most people think it's step one. Just where do I put my money to make income? Where do I put my money so I don't lose? Let's figure out what you're planning for first and then the investments come in to take care of your plan.

So step four, investing. I think it really boils down to two things. It's how much money do you keep out of the market and how much risk do you take within the market. Where if you want to have a certain number of years, I like to think of it in years of do you want the next 1 year, 2 year, 3 year, 5 year, 10 years? How long of a Runway do you want to have where when the market drops you don't have to worry about I'm going to sell at a loss. So that's the first step is to set up a short term income bucket based on how much you want to have set aside. And I think look at in the number of years kind of do your cash flow planning of I want, you know, three years set aside. Well, add it up and that's how much you set aside. The rest is long term and it can be long term because you've got short term money.

That's the big fear when you hit retirement is oh my goodness, what happens when the market drops. Well, your money can still be long term if you have the short term money available and that long term money, you can't choose what your return is going to be. But you can choose, am I taking a higher risk or a lower risk? You can choose am I rebalancing when the market's up or down? Right. Am I diversifying amongst different types of investments? Those are the things you can focus on in the growth, the long term growth area.

You know, Jeremy, we're kindred spirits in a lot of ways and this is one of them. You know, most of the time been doing this over 30 years and most of the time when somebody calls, you know, hey, I was referred to you by so and so and I, I have a portfolio that it's the lead conversation I have about X dollars in a portfolio and I don't know what to do with it. And you know, in a decent financial planning Process. In a thorough financial planning process, investments are nowhere near first. Right on. You know, it's almost, almost like you got to dig the foundation of the house before you start picking the window treatments. And in that case, the investments are the window treatments. Not that they don't matter, of course they do.

But.

But they are definitely not the lead. They are definitely not the deciding factor. And in fact, I flagged that page and wrote not first step in big letters while I was. Because I was like, I love that. We agree on that. So many folks lead with that. First of all, financial advisors shouldn't lead with it because it's commoditized. And second of all, it is so much less of a determinant in terms of your successful ability to navigate not only your accumulation, but even your retirement and decumulation.

So kudos to you. Let's go to step five and then we can start. Start wrestling with each other a little bit.

Yeah, I like it. Well, step five is. What is it you're going to leave behind? Some people leave behind some money, some people leave behind a mess. I'm guessing you'd rather be the person that leaves behind the money and not the mess, which lends itself towards the idea of estate planning. What documents do you need to have? How much money might you be leaving behind? What's the tax situation? There's. But first you got to take care of yourself. Half of estate planning is what happens to you while you're still living. And you can't take care of your finances or your health situation.

So it's making sure you're well protected on the estate documents. It's also taking care of you. And that there are some big risks to your retirement. One bit big risk, especially if you're a couple, is you might actually die too soon. I was just reading a news article and the question was there's a couple there. The question was they're making 190,000 of income. That's a good income. But the way it's set up, it's going to drop to 70,000 when the first person dies.

That's a big risk that if the first person dies too soon, the spouse has a long lifespan ahead of her without that high income. So you wanna consider. This is back to longevity question. Consider what happens if I die too soon. You also wanna consider what happens if I live too long. Cause that's a risk when people are worried about running out of money. You don't run out of money if you don't have much of a retirement timeframe. You'd run out of money when you have too long of a retirement timeframe.

So all is a decision you were looking at before in step one and two and three, consider what if I live longer than expected? Did I make the right Social Security decision? Did I make the right spending decision? You know you want to consider that. And then of course, if you do live too long, usually the longer you live, the worse your health gets and the higher your healthcare costs come into play. And a lot of times when you're 85 and 90 and 95, your health insurance decisions were already made. Can't change it by the time you're 65, your choice of which part of Medicare are you going in? Is a consideration. Don't make your Medicare decision at 65 based on what is the cheapest premium. Make your Medicare decision at 65 based on how is this helping me out today? But how is it helping me out 20 years from now? How's it helping my spouse out 20 years from now? And of course another part of the healthcare cost and situation is your choice and approach to long term care planning. I say not everyone needs insurance, but everyone needs a long term care plan. Think of who is it that's going to provide you the care? Where is that care going to be provided? Is it in your home or are you looking to like a community retirement community there? And then how is it going to be paid for? Do you have a long term care fund set aside or did you choose the insurance? Or are you just sticking your head in your sand and just saying whatever happens, happens? I, I don't like the third option.

Have a thoughtful discussion with you and your spouse, if you're married, of what are we going to do down the road with where is the care going to take place? Who's going to take care of me and then who's going to be paying for it?

So in the book, you spend some time talking about the pension decision, particularly the lump sum versus the annuity version of the pension, and you highlighted something and you were spot on when you highlighted the conflict of interest that consumers face sometimes when they get advice from financial advisors, particularly those financial advisors who have a vested interest in that decision and who want you to take the lump sum so they have more assets to manage. And again, I think you did a nice job of not painting advisors out as necessary evils in some way. Obviously there's a lot of really good people doing good work, but understanding that the conflicts of interest in this industry can't be eliminated entirely. They still exist and doing the net present value calculation. And now I'm getting wonky on everybody but figuring out what is the value of that lump sum versus what is the value of that income stream given all the parameters. Are you married? Are you not married? How old are you? What is your health level, what is your spouse's health level? And all those things plus just what's the math is, is one significantly more valuable than the other? I love the way you framed that. And I'm wondering if you'd share a couple of thoughts with that with our audience.

Yeah. When it comes to the pension, I don't mind you getting wonky. I just reached over, grabbed my HP12C calculator. I'm the kind of person that loves to do net present value calculations on a calculator, not even Excel, but on a calculator. But that's not most people. And so when you get to the pension decision, and I had a question somebody asked me, you talked a bit about pensions. Does anyone have a pension these days? A lot of people do. And you can skip the chapter if that doesn't apply to you, but a lot of people do.

And you want to make this great decision with something you've earned. Your pension could be worth a hundred thousand, could be worth a million dollars. And how you fill out a piece of paper and when you send that piece of paper in could make or break you 100 grand or more. It's a huge one time decision. And it's really tough. It's really tough to make this pension decision because you're often given this piece of paperwork, you have 30 days to turn it in. And the question is, do you want a thousand a month or a hundred grand all up front? Well, who doesn't want 100 grand all up front? Whatever that lump sum value is, I guarantee it'll be a much higher amount than that monthly amount. So it's a tough decision.

It's really. A lot of people say it's apples and oranges. I think it's more like a currency. It's more like dollars and euros, dollars and pesos. You've got to have the exchange rate of yes, I could get a thousand a month. But what is that thousand a month actually worth compared to the lump sum? You've got to kind of do the exchange rate first. And the easiest way I've found to do this is you go to an online income calculator. There's places like Schwab Fidelity, I think income annuities.org is maybe one that's out there and whatever it is you're getting promised by that pension.

So $1,000 a month, we're using right now as an example, plug it in, say I want $1,000 a month for. However the situation is married, not married. And then the calculator online will say, oh, you want to do that? It's going to cost you $150,000. You'd have to go to a place like New York Life and give them 150,000 for them to pay you 1,000amonth for the rest of your life. Well, now you know the value of that monthly pension. You know the value is 150. The lump sum's only a hundred. And now you can compare.

Now you can make the decision of do I want to take the hundred in cash and then try to invest it and try to beat what the pension's going to do? And that's. And if there's a. If it's equal, you know, that's, it's like a personal choice. What do you like better, the market or the guarantees? And people usually know which they like better. But when there's a huge disparity, it really kind of pushes you towards that one area. So I'll give you some examples is for quite some time when interest rates were dropping, I would often see the value of the monthly pension was worth 30, 40, 50% more than the lump sum. And that's hard to make up. That was often kind of pushing people towards taking the more valuable lump sum pension back in.

It was a 2022 or 2023 when interest rates really jumped up. It was actually the opposite where it was just amazing to me that the value of the lump sum was worth 30, 40, 50% more than the value of the monthly pension. So people retiring in that year, we did the math and the encouragement was to go with the thing that's more valuable. Which is why I think you should never make assumptions about what you should do. You should never always take the lump sum or always take the pension. I think you should always do the math. And so that's something I put in my book. I say you should learn the math, do the math, and probably follow the math.

And when it comes to pensions, the easiest way to do that is just take that pension, that monthly amount, go online, calculate, and say, what is this worth? And now you can make an actual comparison with that lump sum that the pension company is willing to offer you.

So I feel compelled to talk about this whole idea of retiring in a qualitative way with you and you knew this was coming. And I've been saving it. I've been saving it. I. I think retirement's horrendous for you and no one should do it. And the reason that I feel that way is because I. People don't thrive when they're not engaged. And I realize that there's lots of ways to define retirement.

I've always tried to retire, to define it as being financially independent, such that work is optional, because anytime we're doing things that are, that are filling our tank rather than draining us, it feels good. And to be in a position of that choice where you're financially independent, whether you're 45, 75 or whatever, when you get there. I think we're talking about the same thing, financial independence, but just to retire itself sounds awful. It's a retreat, it's a disappearance. I talk about people who have their LinkedIn profile and it just says retired. It might as well say deceased. What say you about the, the social and qualitative aspects of retirement and maybe some of the pitfalls that you've seen in your 20 plus years doing this?

Yeah, it's interesting because I see this debate on LinkedIn all the time where a lot of people will say that retirement's not all it's cracked up to be. Really what you ought to do is do some consulting, keep, keep having a passion on there. And I've just got a thought that, because that's kind of how I feel about myself, is I probably won't be retiring. I'll probably do something version of what I'm doing for, you know, to the end of time. But I have to remember I can't impose how I feel about what I want to do to others. And there's so many people that they come to me. The reason why the book's called Retire Today is because Retire Yesterday is not as good of a title. And when I.

People walk in my office and they ask, when I ask them, when do you want to retire? They say, can I retire yesterday? That's the most common question answer I get back. There's a lot of people that want to retire because they are tired. They are tired and they're just done with work. They're tired of work. And when they retire, they get reinvigorated. And usually a lot of times the retirements come into play because they've got this list of things they want to do with their travel, with their house, with their community. But most often even above that is grandkids. Like, grandkids show up and you want to get out of your job as soon as you can and spend more time with the grandkids.

And so those are the folks I'm talking to that if you want to retire today, here's how you do it. And it is interesting that often if you do have a higher income, a more intellectually academic kind of job, you've got maybe the opportunity and maybe the desire that you want to be more of a, of a graduator. I work with a lot of folks that are, they're we energies, they're gas linemen, they're going up. I mean, they're 55 years old and they're climbing these, you know, trees basically to take care of your power lines. And they're tired of it because they're doing this in Wisconsin where it's 20 degrees below zero. And a lot of those folks say, like, I don't want it to keep working, I just want to be retired. Although my next question beyond when do you want to retire? Is what would you do in retirement? The people that say, I don't know, I'll figure it out. Those people, I'm concerned about everyone else that says, oh, I've got a whole list, I'm going to go see my grandkids in Texas.

Those folks, they're going to do fine. Their purpose and passion is there. But their purpose and passion has nothing to do with money, has to do with the people they want to go spend their time with.

Well, you started to indicate this already and so that means I'm going to get a different answer from you this time because you can't use the same one. And that is what do you want to be when you grow up? Notice I didn't say what do you want to do? But what do you want to be when you grow up? What's the plan?

Yeah, what I want to be when I grew up. I'm so, I'm. I've been. This came to me like yesterday. So I'm going to share this with you. First time out in the public, I, I just want to be high impact. I don't know what that is. And I used to tell my wife I would never retire.

And then meeting with thousands of retirees over time and then doing the research for this book, I started realizing. And then actually there's another book. I think it's be your future self now. But it also tries to get you to think of your future self. I don't want to impose as a 45 year old, I don't want to tell my 55 year old self and my 65 year old self, here's what you're going to do. Right? So I don't, I don't know that I will retire or not retire, but whatever it is I'm doing, I just want to be, I just want to have a high impact. I want to be impactful to anyone that I come across, which right now is mainly my family and the people I work with, the clients that I, that I have that could change. I like to change.

Who knows but I, I like that a lot. High impact, making a difference is a big deal. I, I've heard it said that, you know, may you live a life of consequence.

Oh, there you go.

You know, when I was a, when I was a kid and I heard about consequences, it was usually not a.

Good thing, straight up.

But when you're thinking about a consequential life, I, I do think that matters. That means that you're, you're not only impacting yourself, but you're impacting the world and your community and doing some good things. So where can folks find out more about you and, and where can they pick up a copy of this? That, that going to be asked at the airport? Clearly. When are you retiring? What's your plan?

Yeah, so I've got the book Retire Today. If you want to create your retirement master plan in five simple steps, you can head over to my website, which is jeremy kyle.com. it's J E R E M Y K E I L dot com. You're also listening to a podcast. You might be watching it on YouTube. If you check out my podcast, it's Retire today. And on YouTube I am Mr. Retirement.

So Mr. Retirement, if you're looking for me on YouTube, I love that.

Thank you so much for doing this. First of all, it's a great way to start season seven. Secondly, for those folks who have followed my career, they know that I have most recently graduated and I'm no longer the CEO of our firm. I am now the chief growth officer and chairman of the board and working in largely a new job for the first time in over three decades. So yeah, you know, I'll have to be back on your show in a year or two and let you know how it's going because I'm definitely not retired. Never retiring, sir.

Well, you're living it. You're living it. And you're right, you did graduate on to a different role and that's something to be congratulated about. So way to go.

Well, thank you my friend. I'd like to thank everyone for watching and listening today. If you enjoy our show, please share it with friends and family so they can join you on your journey to financial freedom. We'll be back in two weeks with another engaging guest. In the meantime, next Thursday, be sure to check out BFG Financial Advisors webinar series Diary of a Financial Advisor, which you can find@bfguniversity.com for now, this is your host, Eric Brotman, reminding you don't retire. Graduate.

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