I'm going to come out and say your biggest fear. You never want to run out of money. Now, yes, there are other fears of course, but that is what the major concern is when people reach out to me. Now, before you listen any further, I'm gonna tell you right now, this is not going to be your regular podcast episode.

It's not going to be about a tax strategy or Roth conversions or investment allocations. It's going to be about how you truly create success on the mindset. And what I mean by that is I've now, because of all of you, helped over a hundred thousand people retire early or give confidence when it comes to an early retirement.

That's just what we crossed this week from a download perspective on the podcast. That's because of all of you. So thank you for those that have shared this. Now, that's not why you should keep listening. There's plenty of advisors, in fact, people who are not advisors who give amazing guidance when it comes to retirement.

But I ask you, listen to me today because I assure you, you will not find another person who is more obsessed with helping you create your dream retirement. My parents are storytellers. They've won Emmy's, and I do my best to incorporate stories into the financial work that I do. So if you've been listening to the podcast for some time, you already know that.

Now my parents are very special people and they did well, and I grew up in Malibu, California. Lots of advisors become advisors because they didn't have money growing up, or they saw that there was just something that changed when all of a sudden there was financial literacy in the house. And they wanted to be the one to change and help.

And that's amazing. It really is. That wasn't my situation. We had money yet it still felt like it was even more stressful than if we didn't have it. And that's what I call undisciplined wealth. And you're likely thinking right now, okay, when are you gonna get to the retirement piece, Ari? And I assure you, I'm headed there.

The reason I'm a planner, and the reason I'm obsessed with this is because I have seen undisciplined. I've seen tremendous wealth that people have worked so hard to attain, go by the wayside because there just was not a strategy. You wanna know how to feel confident about your ability to retire and and never run out of money.

Start by ignoring the money and yeah, you heard that, right? Take a piece of paper and write out what you want to do from when you wake up until you go to sleep. Not because every day will be the same. I assure you it. But because you want to get a clear sense of what you are excited to do and create that sense of upcoming fulfillment.

Upcoming fulfillment is something that can certainly happen. If you don't do this exercise, you do not have to do it. But the reason I invite people to do it is so that when you are working and you are going to work, and you are adding dollars to your 401k or Roth IRA or 4 0 3  or all of these things, and if none of that sounded like English, that's okay too.

Now money isn't the goal, but I want to talk. If it was the goal, then I would tell you go make as much as possible, save it all, and live under the freeway. In fact, I joke with people who say, Ari, I heard you talk about a withdrawal rate, and how do I keep a withdrawal rate really low so I never run outta money.

And I tell them, I know how to keep your withdrawal rate lower than any study you've ever seen before. And they go, amazing. Are you talking about the, the 4% rule, which I've heard you talk about, or you know, guidance, guardrails approach, or you know, some of these other rules? I go, no, not at all. If you wanna keep the lowest withdrawal rate possible, don't take any money out of it, you'll have the best withdrawal rate there is.

0% and they'll go, but, but then I can't do what I want to do. I can't travel and I can't maintain standard of living. I go, exactly. The point here is not to have the best withdrawal rate. In fact, I'd argue it's the opposite. It's to have the highest withdrawal rate and still never run the risk of running outta money.

The most successful people I know, both clients and from messages I've received, they travel without worry. They fund their children's wedding without worrying about the impact it's going to have on their ability to retire. They write down everything that they've put off for years before they retire and why they're so excited to do them now.

And I ask every potential client the same question because I only work with people who want to retire early. What's one thing you do right now that you cannot wait to never do when you are retired? And I'm gonna repeat that. What is one thing that you do right now? That you cannot wait to never do ever again when you are retired.

That might be as simple as Ari, I, I want to be able to drink wine and not have to worry about waking up next next morning to go to work. It could be as simple as I wanna be able to take my kids to practice and not have to worry about telling my boss. Whatever that is, write down what you're so excited to do in retirement, because I'll tell you one thing, it makes the saving, it makes the investing a whole lot easier.

Now, here's the financial breakdown. You've been waiting. Spend less than you make and you'll retire just fine. Right, wrong. And here's why it's wrong. I'm talking about inflation now. When most people talk about inflation, they're talking about the consumer price index and prices up and down. And yeah, I'm talking about that too, but a little bit differently because in retirement, the goal isn't to say, how can we just hit home runs with our investments?

It's to say, how do we hit singles and doubles to never run outta money? And that's a fancy way of saying outpacing. I. A very simple example is when I have my iPhone, and by the way, I'm recording this on my MacBook, so I'm using Apple products. When Apple raises their prices and I'm a shareholder, I participate in those profits.

So historically, the best way to outpace inflation is with equities. Now, if we have too much of a concentration to equities, we subject ourselves to a greater risk, which is now. We don't want to have to take funds out if the market is down and you're pulling off of them to live, because that's a lose losee situation.

So how do we create the dream allocation for exactly what you're looking for, but not stopping there, connecting it to your taxes, to your estate plan, to insurance, to cash flow. And you can see there's a lot of pieces to this. I joke with clients a lot, as you probably can tell already. But I tell people I'm anti vacuum planning and people go, Ari, I don't even know what that means.

It doesn't even sound like English, and it's a weird way of saying it, but what I mean is I'm anti making decisions in a vacuum. I don't just go to my tax repair and say, what should I do to save on taxes? Because it connects to my investments. And I don't just say, here's a, when people reach out, they'll say, Ari, send me an allocation to invest.

They say, if I were to do that, I would not be doing my job. And they're like, no, your job is to provide me investments. Right? All. I go, not at all that, that's maybe 15, 20% of what I do. My job is to connect your investments to your life goals, which is why when people say, should I have a 60 40 portfolio, or 70 30 or 80 20?

I tell them, I have no idea what you should have until I know what you want to do with your life. Because if someone who has a million dollars and someone who has a hundred thousand dollars, if they're spending the same exact amount, should they have the same allocation? Well, not at all, because we need to make sure that both of them never run outta money.

And one of them might run outta money quickly. One might run outta money a little bit more slowly, but. The ultimate goal, and the reason I bring up these examples, which can seem overly simplistic, is to implement the idea that when it comes to saving for retirement, if this is upcoming for you, momentum is more powerful than speed.

Don't feel you need to get everything in a row tomorrow, but can you make steps? Can you make sure you have beneficiaries on all of your accounts, all the way to making sure that the investments you have are, are allocated the way that you. In a way that allows you to sleep at night because of a lot of advisors, and I've seen this myself, they will create an allocation and it looks great on paper and they go back to the client and the client just says, yes, it sounds like what I'm looking for.

But you can sense there's not that confidence in whether that be from experiences as a child or going through downturns that just causes them to lose sleep at night. I tell all of my clients, if at any point I recommend something and it makes sense on paper, the numbers re. But it doesn't sit with you, then guess what?

We're not doing it because this financial planning is just that. It's personal finance. They call it personal for a reason. So the real risk, as I see it, is the risk that you do not optimize what it is you work so hard for. The real risk is that you could have traveled more, you could have gifted more, worried less, and still never run out of money.

Now, you might be thinking, okay, that's great, Ari, but I don't have the money. And you might be right, or you might not be, but how on earth could you know if you don't have a strategy? From personal experience, I can tell you 70 to 75% of people that come to me could have retired one to five years earlier and been more than fine.

Now they would've had to switch their investments. They would've had to shift their tax strategy. All things very doable, and it's why I talk about them on the podcast, but these are shifts that could allow five more years of relationship development with your partner. It could allow for years back on your health where you're not having to work a stressful job.

It could allow you to see, oh my gosh, if I switch and do part-time work, here's the impact. I'd still be okay even if it means less. As you can see, I am obsessed about this stuff because the last thing I. Is for anyone to end up in a situation where they are working unnecessarily because of financial reasons.

Now, if you love what you do, I will be the first person to stay. Keep doing it. Please do not stop because of me. But here's what you could do to make your money work even harder if you love your work. And there are, there are strategies for them. So what's the risk of your health of those one to five years?

That doing a job that doesn't allow you to spend time on relationships or working out or whatever is most important to you. This is where a true financial tip comes in part-time income, shifting a tax strategy, adjusting your investments. These are things in your control that can really change your quality of life.

And at the end of the day, retirement is a cash flow game. How do you make sure you never run outta money? How do you make sure that you don't have to be stressed in retirement and ask yourself, what do I need today to make my money work for me, as opposed to thinking about money as the end goal?