we've been working with clients in their 60s and 70s for the last decade and a half and if they could go back to their 50-year-old selves and give them some advice this is what they'd say there's 10 things here and the seventh one is actually something that I'm struggling with and it's exactly what a a 70-year-old told me not to do and it's actually a common trap that a lot of retirees fall into now it might be too late for them but it's not too late for you so let's get to number one this first
one it actually might hit the hardest for 70 year olds or even 80 year olds and that is be aware of the three stages of life and make sure you don't miss the one magical stage that only lasts a little bit of time we only have a little bit of time in this one and let me show you what I mean here so as 70-year-olds look back on their life they see these three stages when they were in their 20s maybe 30s they had a lot of time and they had the health cuz they were
young and they didn't have the money yet cuz they were just starting their career and getting started now this is kind of midlife where now you're starting to make some money you're still young and healthy in your 40s or 50s but this is the thing time is what's lacking a lot of the time we have is going to career and to family those are the two big ones and and sometimes there's not a lot of time for hobbies and then stage three usually after retirement when we're in our 70s or 80s we've got all the
time now that we're retired we've got all the the money but health is starting to decline or we're starting to notice changes there but there is a magical fourth triangle here and that's where everything is equal in between these two where we've got the time money and we're still young enough in our 50s or 60s to do the things we want to do that require some activity and movement but sometimes we see people stay in this phase for too long where they're so busy and they keep putting off that trip or they keep delaying that
Adventure as an example someone in their early 60s might be more apt to go to Paris and do a walking tour in uh in France or wherever their favorite International city is versus someone who's in their 70s or in their 80s you know where it might take a little bit more effort to be able to do something like that or if it's hiking or whatever anything that requires activity so don't forget about these triangles and this actually leads nicely into the next piece of advice it's the second piece of advice when we look at the
time side of the triangles here the advice that we get from people in their 70s is don't forget the three types of time because it's common to prioritize two and completely forget about the third one but if you do that you could end up really harming the other two and let me show you what I mean now to simplify three types of PL time we've got career and then we got time spent on relationships and then this is the one we see people ignore the most which is recovery or renewal time this is the stuff
that gives us energy and the advice from 70-year olds that I know is during our busy year years so going back to uh what our life looks like maybe right now the advice is make sure we know what R renews Us and then also prioritize it what do you really enjoy and and what's the thing when you do it it feels like time flies you know could it be walking in nature uh or maybe working out or maybe tennis or hiking or uh woodworking whatever it is maybe it's cold plunges and saunas what are the
things that you do that rejuvenate you make time for it I actually heard a 55 y- old he recently rediscovered his passion for rock climbing he did this when he was younger you know he probably started when he was five did it in his teens and his 20s and then it kind of went away and now he's getting deep into that sport again and it's becoming a bigger and bigger piece of his identity even more so than his career his advice was actually try to divvy up think about your identity in in the way of
a pie chart now I don't know if you're you're that big into charts or or pie charts but this is how he viewed his identity and kind of how how he wanted to model his time big piece was still career a big piece was family he was big into fitness and Faith but now this rock climbing thing he wanted to keep expanding wider and wider not into the fitness area but really he wanted to cut back on career and expand the rock climbing piece even more and he's doing this in his 50s because he realizes
rock climbing it's not one of those those forever sports like swimming or biking or maybe tennis or or some of those other things we can do in our 70s and even 80s now let's get to the third piece of advice from 70-year olds to 50y olds but before I get into it let me know if you're liking this so far click the like button or let me know in the comments it just helps me figure out what's most valuable what's most useful to you now the third piece of advice that I've heard quite frequently from
older clients is that it's okay to say no more now especially in your 50s because you think about the first half of life or maybe as you were getting started in your 20s and 30s you said yes to a lot of things and part of the reason you're where you are right now is because you said yes to the new opportunities and to the things and that opened up a lot of doors for you but the second half of life we got to realize it's okay to say no and respect your own needs and desires
right it's important to prioritize that recovery time like we talked about and sometimes the only way to do that is to say no to other things and to other people right it's okay to say no to social obligations or work commitments uh or even New Opportunities it's even okay to say no to friends if the if it's not serving you right so prioritize those activities that bring you joy and peace because you've heard it now the fourth piece of advice from 70 year olds and 80y olds to those in their 50s is remember time is
infinitely more valuable than money that whole quote of time is money or yeah time is money that's completely wrong time is something we have less and less of every day but when it comes to money you might be in the place where your money is actually starting to make more money for you without you doing anything but it's definitely not making any time right time is still the scarcest asset we have even more so than than the retirement accounts or the Assets in our in our different accounts that we have remember in your 50s this
is a pivotal time because this is going to set the tone for the second half of your life and and how everything unfolds but here's the thing we need to be intentional because time's going to only speed up from here and probably faster that actually you probably realize this already how fast things are getting and and how it continues that's a common theme we hear time and time again now there's another piece of advice related to this and it's that saying of how we can't make more time but there's ways that we can actually slow
it and I'll give you an example of a client who actually did this so here's my life Let's Pretend This is me and we've got this number of healthy years and then there's a period as we get older you know maybe hopefully healthy years extends a little bit longer and then there's a period where we start to slow and then there is an eventual end date right the if we could get this thing to work that's it but what if I made a decision in my 50s that created a habit of Fitness or cardio or
strength training could that habit actually extend the amount of time that I have could it at least extend the amount of healthy time that I have and could it hopefully uh lessen the amount of slow logo time that I have and and whatever the eventual end date is a lot of studies say yes this is exactly what happens now obviously we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow but an investment of time and money in health it's proven to give big big returns but there's actually a second way to get more time now we can't
make time but we can buy it and you're actually doing this already let's say that there's something that you need Let's Pretend you've got to do an oil change on your car and you don't know how to do it you don't particularly like to do it so you could find the YouTube video you could go to the store get the list buy the stuff uh get the right equipment and then spend the afternoon changing the oil on your car and maybe it's two to three hours all in doing that work on something you don't really
love to do or you can make the decision go to the local auto shop and then get the oil change in 20 minutes and maybe you could take a walk while they do the oil change for you in the second scenario you essentially bought 90 minutes of life back right doing something you'd rather do versus something you don't want to do and you actually helped employ someone who's providing for their own family a subscriber to the channel said it was time to power wash the deck I don't really like doing that anymore and uh I
decided to just hire someone to do it and I ended up getting back four or five hours of my life back and uh I provided for somebody else by giving them money to do the job and then they hopefully were able to support their family and it uh it was a great feeling and a lot of our successful clients will have this mindset of I do what I do best and then I pay for the rest now they can afford it there's we have to make decisions here and see what works but if you can
uh buying back your time could make sense there's actually a verse in Ephesians that says redeem the time and when you look at the translation redeem means to buy back or buy up and that's kind of how we see our role in our clients lives you know they our clients they could study they could learn they could monitor the Investments and apply the Tax Strategies and investment Strat IES to their retirement plans or they could work together and then our goal is to help clients have more of these things time and money and peace of
mind and energy and in all of these things and the really nice thing about working with a a good retirement planner is you can actually see the return that uh that is made by when you buy our time and really to sum this up how I look at it is this SC CCF it's streamline means Clarity confidence and freedom that's what we're trying to do for clients and the next piece of advice comes from a 69-year-old client and it's related to this idea of making more time we were meeting shortly after her husband had passed
away unexpectedly so she was at the time 68 and as is common when someone you love passes away an important person we feel kind of lost so we were talking through we were doing the the things that need to get done and then we were trying to talk about some upcoming things that maybe she could look forward to in the coming year and she had mentioned you know some ideas around Travel Health and then also deepening her faith and she listed a few goals under each each one of those areas so that year we talked
and and we had a few times where we connected via phone and and she she's doing better um but one year later we met in person and there was a few tax planning strategies we wanted to go over that she could take advantage of and I'm not exaggerating at when she walked into the office at first glance I almost didn't recognize her she looked completely different she was vibrant she was healthy and she looked renewed and though she didn't have any work done she told me that she created a few habits around health and then
also mental health so the things she was doing she started doing regular yoga and also workouts and she also would spend time in meditation and spending time in the scripture often so she was 69 but I remember she looked like she was in her 50s and she told me she feels like what she said she said I feel like I added 10 healthy years to my life and that is exactly what we were just talking about over here so that was very inspiring to me that was surprising and now as I think back she really
figured out how to make more time at least more healthy time right she extended her healthy years so the tip is to prioritize physical health and mental health in your 50s if we can do that we can extend that magical triangle that we were looking at earlier and have more of this now the seventh piece of advice comes from a client who was 6 months into retirement and this is the one that I was actually struggling with or continue to struggle with and it's very common for 50-year-olds and retirees as well I don't like to
admit it but I think it might coincide with that uh well-known midlife crisis right and that is playing the status game now the status game that's coined by author will store and his book and it means we often buy things to signal success or to fit in with a certain group but the truth is these things they rarely bring lasting happiness right that's what that that 70-year-old or 69y old client mentioned I mentioned earlier um six months in we mapping out his plan and he said can we look at a scenario where I finally buy
my dream car I've always wanted one and this is the time to do it he was in retirement it was time to have some fun I said great we put it into the plan and we saw it barely changed his graph and his chart and and income plan looked looked great so he felt good about buying it he did it and then six months later we were talking and uh we were talking about a few small optimizations to his investment strategy and I said hey how's the Porsche and you might have guessed what he said
and I'll share what he did uh actually what he ended up doing with the car but I want to stress there's nothing wrong with buying nice things right having I know we've got car enthusiasts who are clients and they're going to disagree with me on this car example but the main thing is it might be worth an extra 10 minutes just to reflect on the reason behind the next expensive purchase if you do have one you don't have to do this but U I'll give you a few examples of of uh others because it's it's
usually men that we see that uh have this decision around status symbols and this goes a little bit deep but we're also are we going to talk about this this kind of stuff and I'll actually turn it on myself because uh looking deeper here's why I wanted to buy a fancy watch last year number one it was validation and recognition right I wanted to have a visible um sign of hard-earned success something that's saying hey I've made it right that's kind of the status why we get status symbols the second reason we do it is
that comparison and social pressure right unfortunately we live in a society where we're often measured by what we have versus who we actually are and then the third thing why we do this is identity and self-worth and it our identity is closely tied to our career we know that as we get closer to this point of ending our career in retirement buying an expensive thing or things can be a way to really affirm our selfworth and project an image of stability U or power right and then the fourth one this hits kind of hard and
it's the fear of irrelevance or irrelevance as we move into the our 50s we might be thinking about uh fading relevance in this world that really values youth or or young people and having high status things can make us feel like we're relevant and we're signaling that we're we're still successful and we're in the game so back to the my client with the with the car when I asked him how it was he said oh yeah yeah it's it's good uh but really the excitement wore off in in a couple weeks looking back maybe I
should have just rented it for a month and and that might have been enough for me so his advice see if you can rent the experience first before you actually buy the expensive thing so looking back he would have rather dropped three or four or 5K to rent it for 30 days and just have fun and figure out hey maybe this is good enough and maybe it solidifies his reason to definitely buy that that Porsche instead he spent I think it was 150 or so again which he could afford but he spent 150 to figure
it out if we rent experiences we might spend money on something that we never own but it might end up saving us a lot of money in the long run so the next piece of advice comes from multiple clients who always heard that it's common for expenses to go down in retirement but the exact opposite happens the first few years and then it takes a little bit of adjustment and reworking of plan to just make sure everything gets on track Like I said before we've been helping people retire for a decade and a half and
we'll often put in what if scenarios in their plan to see hey what if expenses were more than we're actually thinking about right now what if we added in big trips or a new car or whatever it might be and and really what if uh this is the go- go years like we were talking about that triangle equilateral equilateral triangle we want to spend the money now well we can and we're young but sometimes that's not even enough you know the most recent um or one of the recent scenarios we we were talking about was
expenses is this it's 10,000 a month that's it okay what about this this this no we couldn't really see that happening that's probably not going to happen that's not going to happen and then the first few the first year of retirement expenses were a lot more than than what they had thought because this is the time it's now never and uh the expenses became more than what they thought they adjusted things are fine but the here's the advice start thinking about tracking your expenses now in your 50s and use a tool like monarch money and
that automatically tracks expenses and it also categorizes it each at the end of each month so you can say oh we spent this much on groceries this much this month good to know or we spent this much on going out to eat good to know or this much on on vacations so that helps it gives you some real data versus guessing about retirement expenses then the next piece of advice comes from a client who actually retired in his 50s and with the new found freedom of time he focused on the three C's which maybe you've
heard me talk about before one of the C's is connection and he was focused on increasing that more than he uh had in the past 30 years so he one of the things he did he reached out to an old friend one of I think it was one of his best men in his wedding and it's someone he had lost touch with in their late 20s and 30s and 40s because they got busy they had families they were both business owners and uh it was that period of time where they had no time right so
um now that he had more time after retirement he reached out to his friend and he said it was like they picked up as if they had just stopped talking yesterday I think that's a sign of a true friend right have you ever had that experience before with uh with one of your friends let me know in the comments um but it it was 20 years of not talking but now it feels like uh yeah it feels like yesterday so there's many other clients in their 70s and their 80s where they they said they wish
they nurtured their relationships a little bit more in their 50s before retirement it's easy to get caught up in the work in the daily responsibility but don't forget to to spend time with those who truly matter so his advice was make an effort to connect with old friends or strengthen your bond with your family or be open to meeting new people maybe it's joining the club and and finding groups of of people that actually share your interests like that rock climber I had I had mentioned because these connections they're going to provide you support and
joy and a sense of belonging in your later years now the next piece of advice comes from people who have a maybe a stressful job or maybe they're hard charging and uh yeah their career can be kind of stressful or it's getting more stressful and they don't want to do it anymore or they can't do it anymore and because life is so busy they don't spend that much time thinking about what they're actually going to do in retirement you know they they they need to stop and they they need to all they can think about
is obtaining more rest in Leisure right they they're not worried about the financial things they could cover that but they just need to stop what they're doing because they they're the stress is too much but here's the thing clients who have been that way people we've talked to who have been that way and then retired they say 6 months in you know retirement's kind of boring or is this really all that there is in retirement so here's the advice that they'd give you they would say Don't just run away from something you really have to
focus on what is that thing that you're going to be running towards so plan for retirement not just of leisure but plan for retirement of purpose start thinking about what your purpose is in retirement it's never too early to to to start exploring the things that you truly enjoyed or the things that you kind of forgot about since your teen years or 20 years and seeing how you could integrate that into your life right now in a few seconds I'm going to give you a few questions worth writing down in a kind of a a
guided thing here to to think about how to make this your best stage of life yet because remember growth doesn't come from just the experience that we have it comes from reflecting on the experiences so you've got the best stage of Life coming up you've got a lot to look forward to if you agree with that give this video a like and also it's just remember it's not too late for you take the advice from those who have gone before you and the ones that are giving advice and maybe pick two to three things that
you heard today and write them down maybe maybe save save those things or watch this video again and pick the two most important things and then here's the video with questions to write down and think about on your next peaceful quiet morning where you're drinking a cup of coffee and then if you're looking to make your retirement even better check out these videos here I hope this was helpful take care and I'll see you in the next one
