My Most Important Video Ever

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]We all have our own unique set of life experiences that we bring to the table and a unique message that comes from that that we can share with people that we love and care about. And so in today's video, I want to share what I consider to be the most important message I can share with you after a lifetime of being a financial advisor and having helped guide hundreds of people successfully into retirement as well as my own transition into retirement about 18 months ago. And the most important message I can share with all of with all of us is is just to be careful to treat the the time from let's call it our mid50s until the time that we lose our health with unfortunately for many of us is going to be much sooner than what we we think it's going to be. So that period of time is what I call the youth of our senior year or so.

[00:00:58]So being very pro protective of that time, being very thoughtful and deliberate about how we spend that time.

[00:01:06]Now let me let me share some thoughts on the back end. When do most of us lose our health? And unfortunately it's a lot sooner than than we most of us think.

[00:01:16]Um, according to the World Health Organization, unfortunately here in the United States, the average American, it's called the Hail Study, the healthy average life expectancy. The average um time until the average age when an American loses their health is just 66.1 years old. That's just 13 months after when many of us are planning on retiring. So, you know, if if if we're lucky at 60 years old, we have a thousand weeks of healthy active time.

[00:01:51]And as the World Health Organization hail study tells us, uh many of us are going to have less than that. And and that's, you know, you get a cancer diagnosis, you have a stroke, a heart attack, something like that. It doesn't mean that you die, but you're now dealing with a a serious health issue.

[00:02:08]And I I want all of my healthy time I can. you know, I'm here in front of the Puget Sound. I want as much time as I can doing fun things like this versus um worrying about and and my full-time job, frankly, being to stay alive and to to regain as much of my health as I can.

[00:02:27]So, I I call it our 999 weeks. And today, I'm I'm sharing that, you know, I I want to start a movement.

[00:02:37]I want to start a movement with your help uh called 999 weeks and think about you know how each of us are planning on spending our 999 weeks. So I'd love you to leave a comment uh down below and share you know just the word 999 weeks just to let me know this resonated with you but also share with me some thoughts about how you're going to spend your 999 weeks.

[00:03:05]Now, let me share some things because it's one thing to say, I want to protect those 999 weeks. It's another thing to have the financial resources in order to be able to pull the trigger and be confident and and be a good steward of of for your future self, right? I'm not telling anybody that they should retire before they have enough money to retire.

[00:03:27]Uh because having enough money is critically important. But what I am saying is I think a lot of us think that the bogey that we need to hit is is way up here where for many of us it might be here and we can have a perfectly comfortable life. And because we think it's way up here, many of us unknowingly are unnecessarily giving up the youth of our senior years.

[00:03:52]we're giving up half or more of those 999 weeks um unnecessarily.

[00:04:01]And let me share a couple thoughts. And and guilty is charged as a financial advisor. You know, I wanted my clients to have as high of a likelihood of never having to worry about money again, of never um having to to worry that, you know, they're not going to be able to pay the bills. And of course, you don't want that. But the question is, do you need a million dollars to make that happen? Because that's that's kind of the gold standard. That's what a lot of Americans think that they need to retire. But the reality is fewer than 10% of Americans do have a million dollars uh in re when it comes time to retire. And I know that number sounds surprising to you, but according to the Federal Reserve, they do a study called the Survey Consumer Finance, and they look at the median household net worth by age. So at at 55 to 64, that number is $365,000.

[00:04:59]That's the median. So half have more, half have less. That's a household number. So if there's two people or more in the household, that's for both of them. And importantly, um, that includes the value of your house. So, or or I should say the home equity that you have in your in your house. And 80% of us that are 60 and older here in the United States own a home. And and for most of us, the value of the home equity in our homes, pointing to some homes down there, uh, is about 50% of our net worth. So, not only do we not need a million dollars to retire, most of us you have to run the numbers, I should say, and the gold standard to find out how much you need is to work with a financial advisor or to use software designed to help you analyze this yourself. The software I like is called Balden. Used to be called New Retirement. You can sign up for it at the link showing up here. You'll get a two-week free trial and you'll be supporting the channel and the 999 weeks movement because I am an affiliate of Baldens. But even working with a financial advisor, it's important that you ask the right questions because financial advisors are designed to to want to give you as much certainty as possible. So we use a tool most financial advisors use a tool called a Monte Carlo simulation. It's just a statistical tool where where we can evaluate different scenarios importantly different uh sequences that stock market returns happen. Um and and we can literally run like 10,000 of these in a matter of minutes and we can look and say okay 5,000 of these cases did better 5,000 did worse. And in what p that would be for the median. And we can also ask in what percent of the cases does this person not run out of money in a 20-year time horizon, 30 years, 40 years, whatever we're analyzing. And and the gold standard is, you know, you want that to be in 95% 97% 99% of the uh scenario. The person never has to tweak anything. And often times it's called your success ratio. your success percentage, but but there in lies the problem because just let's say you have a score of 80%.

[00:07:26]What that means is there's a 20% chance you may have to tweak some things that are in the plan and and if if you get unlucky and get bad stock and market returns early on in your retirement, it's called sequence of return risk. But importantly, this is not a pass fail test. This isn't, you know, you either pass and and you live happily ever after or you fail and and you live as a homeless person. This is the likelihood that you have to tweak some things along the way. So maybe you had a big expensive trip to Europe you were planning when you're 65 or 70. Maybe we have to postpone that. Maybe you had a a Disney cruise with the grandkids you said you wanted to do. Maybe we have to postpone that. Maybe you wanted to save money for the grandkids to go to college. Well, you know what? Maybe mom and dad have to save for your grandkids college just like most of us did for our kids, right? So, these are tweaks and the question is, and nobody can provide this answer except for you. There is no right or wrong answer. Certainly not financial advice, but something for you to think about. Would you rather have a 20% chance of having to tweak things or a 100% chance of giving up two, three, four or five year of your healthiest, most active years in retirement? Um, and and that can be a lot. You can be giving up, you know, 100, 200, 300 of your 999 healthy weeks. So, if you enjoyed this video, another video similar to this but different talks about enjoying the journey until you get to pull the trigger and actually decide to retire.

[00:09:11]It's not just hitting that end goal, but it's also enjoying the journey. And that's why I made this video here, eight things to stop doing in your 50s and 60s in order to enjoy your time until you get to retire. I'll see you in that video. Bye-bye.