Dana Anspach: Don’t Let Fear Ruin Your Retirement

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**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
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**Christine Benz** (0:33)
Hi and welcome to The Long View. I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

**Amy Arnott** (0:40)
I'm Amy Arnott, Portfolio Strategist with Morningstar.

**Christine Benz** (0:44)
Today on the podcast, we welcome back Dana Anspach. Dana is the author of a new book about retirement called Living Off Your Acorns, Your Guide to the Four Phases of Retirement. This is her third book. Earlier books are Control Your Retirement Destiny and Social Security Sense. Dana is also founder and CEO of the financial planning firm Sensible Money, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and she has been practicing as a financial planner since 1995
In addition, Dana is the author of the lecture series, How to Plan for the Perfect Retirement, available on the Great Courses, and she has been blogging about her own retirement journey on the Retirement Manifesto website. Dana, welcome back to The Long View.

**Dana Anspach** (1:26)
Great to be here, Christine. Happy to be back.

**Christine Benz** (1:28)
Well, we're happy to have you and congratulations on your new book.
We want to talk about the book, which is centered around what you think of as the four phases of retirement. So a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with the go-go, slow-go, and no-go phases of retirement. But the book also spends a lot of time on the pre-go phase. Can you talk about what that is and when it starts?

**Dana Anspach** (1:54)
Yeah. So the pre-go phase is, I think of it as the 10 years leading up to retirement. But it may not be 10 years for everybody. For some people, they wake up one day, they're 65, and they go, oh my gosh, I'm going to retire, and they get really serious about their retirement planning. Other people may start planning 10 or 15 years out. But I think of it as the foundation of what comes next, just like if you're building a house, you have to have a set of plans, and you have to have the engineering, and the foundation has to be solid before you can proceed to some of the funner aspects, like the colors and the way the windows are going to look. And so that foundation is so critical to not only the numbers side of retirement, understanding the math and how much you can spend, but also mentally and behaviorally preparing for this big shift.
Living off your acorns is scary, and you're suddenly going to wake up without all of the meetings on your calendar, and thinking about what this new phase is really going to look like.

**Amy Arnott** (3:00)
So related to that, you note in the book that the pre-go section is the longest section in your book, and that's intentional. Why is that?

**Dana Anspach** (3:11)
Yeah, that's where, as I mentioned, the foundation where you really want to spend the bulk of the time of running different iterations and different what-ifs, and thinking about what retirement will look like. I feel like as we move through retirement, the planning gets easier, I shall say, if we have done our work on the front end. So if we didn't build the foundation right, and you're trying to put up the frame of the house, and suddenly something falls down, it's because you didn't have a solid foundation.
That's why that is the longest part of the book, is really understanding what does a cash flow projection look like. I think of retirement, for example, like a movie. It's a movie that you have to recast and update every single year versus a net worth statement as a snapshot, a point in time.
In that pre-go phase, if you're recasting that movie every single year, by the time you get to retirement, you're going to have a really good roadmap to follow, not only around the tax and planning aspects of what comes next, things like whether rough conversions make sense for you, or which types of assets you should dry out first or what your Medicare premium situation might look like, but also by recasting how much you can spend. You might think differently about front-loading some of that spending into your go-go years, and you're just going to have this general sense of, okay, this is how retirement is likely to play out. Of course, there will be changes and adjustments, but having that big-picture sense of how it might play out makes all of the rest go a little bit smoother.