2034: Ask Farnoosh...About Farnoosh: My Midlife Financial Plan, Unveiled

Farnoosh Torabi (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:37)

Each day, get a 30-minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh yourself.

Farnoosh Torabi (0:59)

Welcome to So Money, everyone. I'm Farnoosh Torabi. And for a long time, honestly, 15 years maybe, a lot of my financial life was on cruise control. And I mean that in a good way.

I have been automating my investing. I've been saving for retirement. I've been contributing to my kids' accounts, whether it's their 529 college savings accounts. We just opened up Trump accounts. And I just took them to the bank with me yesterday, and we got them checking accounts. And for myself, I've built emergency savings. I got all the insurances. My husband and I have our state plan. We're doing all the things, A, for us. And for many years, a lot of it was left to the robots, frankly, like the technology. But something really started to shift for me over the last couple of years. So newsflash, I'm in my mid 40s. My kids are getting older.

I have friends becoming empty nesters. I'm seeing what my future might be like. I'm thinking a lot more seriously about what I want over the next decade, up to 30 years of my life. What does that look like? And not just what my investments are doing, but like what am I doing every day? And how much is that going to be costing me? And so I started asking myself a lot of questions. I think many of us encounter at some point in midlife. Are all the financial decisions that I'm making for the person that I was 10 or 15 years ago, still the right decisions for the person I am today? And what is the life that I want next? Yeah, just some small questions. Because here's the thing, I know how to save and I know you do too. Maybe in some cases, we're saving too well. Like I actually started to think, am I saving too much? Could I scale back some of my investing at least, and free up more cash flow today without jeopardizing my retirement? Could my husband and I finally tackle some home projects that keep getting pushed down the list? Could we take that really nice family vacation where I'm not mentally calculating the opportunity cost of every hotel room? And at what point does being responsible with money also mean giving yourself permission to spend your money? And then there were some really, really big questions, like how much do we actually need for retirement? What does retirement even mean for someone like me who may never really stop working? How about social security and taxes and health care and longevity? How does that change the math? Should I be thinking about, wait for it, an annuity?

Yeah, scary word. All of these directions, all of these questions have led me to today's guest, Maggie Johndrow. Maggie has been coming on So Money for years. She's a financial advisor and someone whose perspective I've always respected and quietly, she didn't know this, but over all of our interviews, I was doing a little analyzing of my own thinking, huh, could Maggie and I actually work together?

And the answer is yes. Over the past several months, she and I have been taking a fresh look at my financial life, not because anything was necessarily broken, but because I wanted to know and my husband wanted to know whether the plan we had built was still optimized for where we are today. And I have been promising you this episode because I wanted to pull back the curtain on that process and we're near completion.

So what did we look at? What surprised us? Where was I potentially overdoing it? What needed more attention? What could I loosen up on? And how do you build a plan that gets you to retirement without regrets, but also without sacrificing your entire present for some theoretical future? So today is Farnoosh's Midlife Money Checkup. And through this, I hope you can have one too. Maggie Johndrow, welcome back to So Money. Hi.

Maggie Johndrow (4:29)

That was such a beautiful intro. And I didn't know that you were interviewing me.