Roger Whitney: How To Rock Your Retirement

About Fun With Annuities Episode #111

Roger Whitney is known across the country as The Retirement Answer Man® and hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country under the same name. He is the author of the Rock Retirement Bookand founded the Rock Retirement Club, a groundbreaking organized collaboration of ideas and best practices for consumers interested in maximizing their retirement.  Got your attention yet?

What I love about Roger is his unique approach to financial planning.  In the future, I predict that his model will be the accepted way to plan, enjoy, and maximize “Chapter 2” of your retirement life.  It’s not just about the money, the accepted portfolio management practices, or risk tolerance.  Roger pounds the table that it’s more than that.  It’s about the fact you have earned the right to enjoy your accumulated assets.  It’s about lifestyle.  It’s about your family.  It’s about your passion for living now and not continually putting off that well-intended “next chapter” start date.

We discussed the “middle-class scars” of not being able to enjoy your money, and how to overcome that.  As I always say, “there are no U-Hauls behind hearses.”  Roger’s answer, suggestions, and unique approach are worth listening to.  Retirement is not just about managing money or leaving money as a legacy.  It’s about you.  It’s about maximizing your life.  It’s about “harvesting” what you have worked so hard to accumulate.

Of course, Roger has a fantastic newsletter that you need to sign up for on his site’s home page and some of the best resources I have seen for retirement planning.  You would expect that from someone with Roger’s pedigree.  It’s a no-brainer to access these ridiculously good “freebies.”

This podcast is a must-listen because Roger explains how his process works and how it can work for your specific situation.  We covered a ton of ground during the conversation, and you will come away feeling better about yourself and your customized retirement path forward.

In addition to listening to “Fun With Annuities” every week, you also have to add The Retirement Answer Man podcast.  It’s that good.  Enjoy!

"The majority of planning which feeds the mindset of this very uncertain world is always gonna default to denying today, and that’s not right because tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone. You gotta be a good steward." —  Roger Whitney.

Brief Bio on Co-host: Roger Whitney

Roger has been walking life with clients as a financial advisor for more than 25 years and is the host of the award-winning Retirement Answer Man® podcast. He is on a mission to change the way the world thinks about retirement, one little conversation at a time. Roger established the RRC in 2018 to help foster a safe online space for soon-to-be retirees to learn, plan, and interact with other like-minded folks on the path to retirement. As if that’s not enough to keep him busy, he is the author of Rock Retirement: A Simple Guide to Help You Take Control and Be More Optimistic About the Future, a Forbes online contributor, creator of the Agile Financial Planning process and the Retirement Standard of Care, and past instructor of the Retirement Planning & Employee Benefits CFP® certificate program at the University of Texas Arlington and of Wealth Management at Texas Christian University. Investopedia has named him to the Top 100 Most Influential Advisors 2017-2019, and he has brought home Plutus Awards for Best Financial Planner Blog (2019) and Best Retirement Blog (2015 and 2017).

You can chat with him regularly in the Clubhouse, during Meet-Ups, or shoot him a note at [email protected].

In this episode, The Annuity Man and Roger Whitney discuss:

• The two retirement crises
• Balancing on the teeter-totter
• Before going into fancy tactical stuff
• Focusing on what you can control

Key Takeaways:

• There are two retirement crises: one is when people don’t have enough money to pay the bills when they can’t work anymore. The other crisis is for people with many resources and options but doesn’t know the right thing to do.
• On the one hand, you should start having your best life today, and on the other hand, you also want to make sure that you’ll be alright when you live until 80 or 90. There’s tension between those two things, you’re standing in the middle of it all, and you have to cover yourself on both accounts.
• Start with what you want, then create a strategy that will make that feasible. Make it resilient so that you don’t get knocked off course and get too fancy tactics.
• Don’t waste your life trying to predict the future or reacting to every event. Instead, focus on things that will be useful to you, like building functional health - health that will enable you to spend time with family freely.

Fun With Annuities® Podcast is hosted by America’s Annuity Agent®, Stan Haithcock, The Annuity Man®. Hear brutal annuity facts with no sales pitches from the top independent agent in the country, licensed in all 50 states. Author of 7 books, Stan dives deep on all annuity types and strategies. It’s fun, learning the contractual truths on how annuities actually work and if they’ll fit your personal retirement lifestyle.

Listen in on how you can be livin’ the reality, not the dream®. Listen and subscribe on Libsyn, Stitcher,Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, and Spotify.