Retirement Planning's Hidden Tradeoffs | With Jesse Cramer (Ep. 114)

Steve Chen (0:00)

Oh, okay. Hi, folks. Today on Boldin Your Money, we're joined by someone with one of the more unusual paths into financial planning that you're gonna hear about. So Jesse Cramer is joining us from Rochester, New York, and he used to launch orbital satellites before he got into financial planning. And so he's a fee-only, fiduciary financial planner, focused on retirement primarily. He's also the host of the Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors podcast.

And he's a writer behind The Best Interest. And that reaches about 20,000 folks and retirees every month. So he's respected for something genuinely rare in this field, the ability to take complicated retirement questions and make them clear.

So with that, Jesse, welcome to our show. Appreciate you taking the time.

Jesse Cramer (0:48)

Hey, Steve, I am happy to be here.

Steve Chen (0:51)

Yeah, it's going to be awesome. So today, I wanted to dive in kind of like, you know, into your history a bit, how you got into, how you made that transition into retirement planning.

Talk a little bit about some of the big things people get wrong, you know, from your practice as they think about their retirement plan. And then also some of your insights into kind of behavioral finance and some of the big risks that people face. So let's get started. So yeah, no, we'd love to just hear your story for how did you like, why did you make the switch from, you know, Oracle Science Engineer to financial planner?

Jesse Cramer (1:22)

Yeah. So the 62nd background is from a tiny little town in upstate New York, went to college, two degrees in mechanical engineering, worked in aerospace for seven years, designed and built and tested satellite telescope systems, which is really cool, really fun. And while working as an engineer though, in my 20s, I'm making a paycheck really for the first time in my life and just got incredibly interested in my own personal finances, you know, as you do, and just dove in headfirst to all the books, you know, Boglehead's Guide of Investing and a random walk down Wall Street and listen to, I would go on runs, Steve, I would run, and I would listen to Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway, Shareholders' Meetings. Like, I just found it so fascinating. And in 2018, I started a blog which really was inspired, I would write these emails to my colleagues, my engineering colleagues. They knew I was a nerd for personal finance.

They'd ask me questions. I would write them these long answers. And then it's like, well, I just explained to my colleague the logic behind an index fund. Why don't I publish this? It's basically a blog post. It's just a one-to-one email. Might as well publish it on an actual blog. So that was the birth of The Best Interest. And then a couple years later, I figured if I'm doing all this writing that's close enough to a podcast script, might as well speak into a microphone. So that was the birth of my podcast, which I eventually renamed and now it's Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors.

And then as my audience grew, I wondered, would any of these people pay me for really sound financial planning advice? And so that's when I switched careers and left engineering for good and became a financial planner.

Steve Chen (3:01)

I mean, it's kind of a, I mean, it's a cool story. And by the way, my dad worked on, he was a quality assurance engineer and worked at a company called Orbital Sciences.

And remember he was telling me about satellites. And I think I visited him one time and these things used to be custom built, like handmade satellites. And then they would send them up and then the rockets would explode sometimes. And I just remember thinking, that would suck.

Jesse Cramer (3:30)

Well, so now a lot of the small sats, the stuff that Elon Musk is doing with Space Link, is that what it's called, Space Link? Yeah, Star Link. Star Link, right. These are almost mass produced.

But some of the projects I was working on, I mean, they were N of 1 or N of 3 projects. So yeah, these were custom specialty, pretty cool stuff.

Steve Chen (3:52)

Yeah, no, it's so interesting. I mean, we could do a whole separate thing on space and what's happening here. It is the next frontier. I don't know if it's the final frontier, but it's the next frontier for the Star Trek fans out there. Anyway, yeah, I mean, but it sounds like it's such a big career pivot. I guess when you're younger, it's like, okay, you have maybe fewer obligations. I don't know if you had children then and stuff like that, but to go from like, hey, I'm an engineer, right? So I have an engineering degree, and you can make pretty good money as an engineer, and it's pretty reliable. There's a lot of demand for it to be like, okay, guess I'm going to start this company with probably a few clients.