Easy Ways To Ruin Retirement

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Here's what's coming up on this edition of The Retirement Huddle with Mark Howard and your host Ron Studz.

**Mark Howard** (0:08)
We might be finding that planned retirement activities are going to dictate that you're going to need more income than you thought. Maybe even more than you were earning when you were working.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:20)
It's time for The Retirement Huddle with your local financial coach, Mark Howard. If retirement is a game, you're in it to win it. The Huddle is where your financial battle plans are drawn, and Mark Howard is here to help with the X's and O's. So, let's kick it off and break the huddle. The Retirement Huddle starts now.

**Ron Stutz** (0:47)
Coach, you're a fan of Paul Simon, I'm assuming. Paul Simon has written some great music and performed some great music over the years. You remember this, hop on the bus, Gus. Don't need to discuss much. Just drop off the key, Lee, and set yourself free. 50 ways to leave your lover.
I know you. I know you're familiar with that.

**Mark Howard** (1:13)
Oh, yeah. Great songwriter.

**Ron Stutz** (1:15)
Well, we're going to talk about, well, maybe not 50, but some easy ways to ruin retirement. See, it fits right into the meter. You could do a song about that if you wanted to.
Easy ways to ruin retirement. That's not a pleasant subject, but we're going to take it on here, and the coach is going to give you some good advice in here. Everybody likes things to be easy, so we've made this handy list of easy ways to ruin your retirement, if you're into that kind of thing. I don't know if there's anybody out there who actually wants to ruin their retirement, but a lot of people manage to do so anyway. So, number one, a quick way to ruin your retirement is treat retirement as the destination rather than the beginning of another part of life. I guess that's probably 100% true. Wouldn't you say so, coach?

**Mark Howard** (2:07)
Well, yeah, and I just think about so many facets of life that we look forward to, and we don't really do a lot of planning. We plan for that particular moment. Maybe it's a vacation, but we haven't really thought about what's going to happen after we get back from the vacation.
And it's really retirees are the same way, pre-retirees especially. You're still working, and it's really easy to think of retirement as the end goal. But you can't think of it as a finish line, because after all, your retirement could end up being longer than your working career. So we've got to have a plan in place that's going to make sure that your assets last instead of simply just trying to reach a certain number in your portfolio, and then assuming that you can coast through the rest of your life. So that's a real difficult thing for a lot of people to get their head around, to be honest with you. But it really, reality hits when people don't get a paycheck anymore, and they realize the importance of it. And we've talked many times as well, take it a step further, about retiring to something instead of from something. And that gets into a whole headspace about purpose in your life, and understanding not just what you want your money to do, but what you're going to do, and having that plan for your life, whether it's giving or serving or playing with grandkids and spoiling them or whatever it is.
And there's a lot of people get lost in those moments after they've retired, because they had so much of their self-worth wrapped up in their job. So that's an area that we help folks in as well.

**Ron Stutz** (3:44)
Yeah, a lot of people have their identity wrapped up in what they do for a living, that's for sure.
And like you said, I mean, you can't treat it like it's the finish line, because it's the beginning of a whole new phase of your life. Another way to ruin your retirement is believing that retirement is going to solve all your problems. That is not necessarily going to happen at all.

**Mark Howard** (4:07)
Yeah, and I think it's a little bit like I was just discussing.
You're going to have less work-related stress, and that's going to be great. You're going to have more free time. But retirement often presents these additional challenges that you did not have when you were working. And just because you've retired doesn't mean that you suddenly got enough time just to do every single thing that you want to do, and you're not going to have any problems that need to be solved. So yeah, life goes on, and there's certain facets of life that kind of come more to the forefront, because you're dealing with them maybe on a daily basis instead of when you're working on a little bit more, I guess, seldom basis.