This article is for those of you who are thinking of retirement to get some opinions on the subject by watching some online videos. I selected five and they are all accessible through this article by way of hotlinks.
It was not my intent to focus on the financial aspects such as opinions on the amount of dollars in a retirement account or the attainment of a pension calculation. Those and other financial benchmarks indicate you may be able to retire – but should you?
What I thought some of you who are on the verge of retirement would find useful is to sit down with a beverage and listen to some folks who have assisted others with the question of whether to continue to work or not.
Kyle Walters, The Personal CFO, with 20 years of experience helping others navigate the prospect of retirement presents a sense of urgency with his 5 Reasons You Should Retire Today. He notes that 2023 may be a good time to also retire for the fact that you can safely retire and lock in large returns because of where interest rates are at this time in this under 9-minute video.
He emphasizes time and the quality of time among his reasons. A neat resource he offers to accent his insistence to take advantage of retirement is a chart, Your Life in Weeks, available from Tim Urban. This graphic shows your life with a block for each week. Sometimes life seems short, and other times it seems impossibly long. This chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite.
James Shak is a Chartered Wealth Manager and Partner in a financial planning practice based in the UK. So, you are not going to be burdened with details of Required Minimum Distributions or when to select Social Security. James focuses on the dynamics of your time, health, and money. He also likes the chart created by Tim Urban and although you have heard about the tool from Kyle. I think hearing about it again from James in his 10-minute video, 6 Reasons to Retire as Soon as You Can, will be a good use of your time.
Be ready for a quick tour from James on the following concepts Arbitrary Goals, Recency Bias, Losing Your Best Years, and a review of the Go-Go, Slow-Go, and No-Go cycle of retirement. He is in step with Kyle Walters in noting the recent uptick in interest rates as a good reason to retire now.
Eric Sajdak is a Partner and Head of Research at Safeguard Wealth Management. His 8 Timely Reasons You Should Retire As Soon As Possible offers the graphic aids in his argument that now is a “fantastic” time to retire today. He does get into the financial realm when he talks about 2026 when marginal income tax rates may revert to the 2017 thresholds set before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect. As of this publication. Congress may act to preserve current tax rates beyond 2026 but failing to do so will increase personal income tax liability for most Americans.
Erik’s 14-minute video is intense. I liked his use of graphics which is a good example of adding value to his argument to retire today if you are on the fence. His closing advice is, “You don’t need more money, you need a better plan.”
If you think you need a coach to give you a no-nonsense litany of reasons to Retire As Soon As You Can (9 Reasons It’s Time To Go) might be locker room talk to get you to commit. Eric Bowie aka The Smart Money Bro in his 11-minute is compelling. He does not waste your time.
Eric is no stranger to videos and he offers extensive advice online. He looks you in the eye and drives home several points. Stress and anxiety may be eroding your health. Take care of yourself to take care of others. Finally, we just don’t know how much time we have left.
20 Reasons You Should Retire Today will take about 16 minutes but it will be well worth it. Adam Bornn is a Canadian Certified Financial Planner. I picked Adam to end your journey because he provides a flyover of the landscape for not continuing to work. He covers the issues in less than a minute delivering a holistic discussion to convince you to retire but will tie in the multiple concepts for your future well-being.
All of these video hosts have additional online presentations you may find useful. I am not endorsing any of them beyond being useful to giving you a possible nudge if you are straddling the fence separating work and retirement.
If you are single, it might be nice to have a series of auditory prods to reflect upon retirement. And if you are married these videos can be shared.
Consider viewing them individually. There is some redundancy but you only retire once so a little redundancy might be warranted. Begin on a Monday. Then think about it over the weekend before visiting HR the next week.
