In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the real-life complexities behind early retirement planning and what happens when couples don’t agree on retirement goals. Using a recent MarketWatch article as a springboard, they explore whether a couple with $2 million can truly retire early while juggling differences in spending expectations, lifestyle priorities, and retirement risk management. This episode offers valuable retirement planning tips for anyone asking “can I retire with 2 million?”, “can I retire at 55?”, or how to secure your retirement when spouses have competing visions for their future.

Listen in to learn about how emotions, career stress, financial planning for couples, and the FIRE movement retirement mindset affect early retirement decisions. Radon and Murs break down Medicare retirement considerations, Social Security timing challenges, retirement income strategy development, and the hidden dangers of day trading risks and options trading risks when someone tries to “make early retirement work” through high-risk investing. If you’re navigating retirement planning at 50 or planning retirement with a partner who’s not on the same page, this conversation offers clarity, humor, and a practical retirement checklist to help you move forward confidently.

In this episode, find out:

·     How couples can resolve conflicting retirement goals when one wants to retire early and the other wants to maintain lifestyle freedom.

·     Why understanding the real reason behind wanting early retirement is essential to planning retirement effectively.

·     The major financial risks of relying on day trading or options trading to fund retirement income.

·     How to build a retirement income strategy that supports Medicare retirement costs, travel goals, and long-term financial security.

·     Why the Peace of Mind Pathway helps couples retire comfortably and plan for retirement with less stress and more clarity.

Tweetable Quotes:

“Retirement Planning isn’t just about math—it’s also about emotions, goals, and making sure both spouses feel secure in the plan.” — Radon Stancil

“If early retirement adds more stress than your job does, then it’s not truly helping you secure your retirement.” — Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Murs and I are excited to have a conversation with you today on a topic that I

think is something that we run into all the time. And that is basically,

can I retire or not. But here’s the specific question. I saw this article. And when

I saw it, I went, man, this is what we run into all the time. But here was the

article, the question of the article, is can we retire with $2 million when couples

don’t agree on the plan? That was the premise of the article. So let me get it.

It’s a little bit of a setup. And then basically the way we’re going to do this

particular podcast today is I’m really going to just kind of ask Murs how we would

handle this. So, I’m going to kind of set it up and then I’ll ask Murs some

questions as we go through this. So, here’s the setup. A couple has two million

dollars save. So, it sounds pretty good on the surface. But they have a good

lifestyle. They have made good money. They are able to travel. They have the freedom

to do those things. And in this particular case, the husband says, hey, I’d like to

retire. He’s been reading what are called fire blogs, which stands for financially

independent, retire early. So, in this case, we’re going to say that the couple is

60 years old. And they say, look, I want to go ahead and call it. And I’m pre

-Medicare. I’m pre -So -security. So that’s a little expensive sometimes to go ahead

and retire at age 60. But he basically says, look, I’m going to do it. In his

mind, he says, we’ll cut back and we’ll spend less so that we can go ahead and

retire. The wife, though, is saying, hey, I kind of like the travel that we’re

doing. I kind of like the freedom that we got. I like the flexibility and knowing

we can go out to dinner when we want to go out to dinner. And I think it’s a

little early for us to make this call. And I don’t know that the numbers will

support it. And so, we’re going to kind of talk through this scenario and how we

would deal with it when it comes down to this. So, you know, Murs, I know that

you and I are sitting down with couples every single day, individuals and couples,

whatever the makeup of the family might be. And we’re sitting down and we’re having

these conversations and the conversations always start with. And I always tell this.

It doesn’t matter whether a person has one million or 10 million. The question kind

of comes down to this idea of do I have enough to retire. So, when you sit down

with a couple or a family, an individual, and you sit in there, you look at their

work, and they got $2 million, they got it saved, and they’re thinking they want to

go ahead and retire, kind of take us through that thought process you’ve got and

what type of conversations you’re trying to have with people. Yeah, so I think it’s

really important to understand, I think, the driving reason behind wanting to retire.

So, the fire thing is a popular acronym financially independent,

retire early. But kind of getting to the understanding of, well, why do we feel

like we want to retire early? And oftentimes, in that conversation, what we find is

that, well, there’s a stressor amongst the person’s job or their work life, or

there’s a work, there’s an imbalance on work and personal, and they want to find a

way to fix it. And then this idea of, well, can we just call it quits across the

board on everything? Will it work? And So.

comforts. Yeah, maybe I have enough savings to kind of get by, but do I really

just want to get by in retirement and give up some of the fun stuff? Or do I, am

I okay finding another alternative to drive income that’s going to pay for the fun

stuff or, or pay for the health insurance because we’re retiring early? So, I think

understanding the Y first is big and then running some numbers and seeing, well,

what is actually possible in your scenario? And that’s going to help us make better

decisions down the road. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think, you know, in all

He came back in six months. It was like a completely different guy. His health was

better. He said his cholesterol was better. His high blood pressure was better. He

had lost a bunch of weight. Everything was just way better in his life because he

got rid of that stress. So, all right, we got this husband. He’s reading these fire

blogs. He’s thinking, I’m going to crunch the numbers. I’m going to really cut back.

And, you know, I’m not, you know, I don’t want to think about how I want to think

about retirement. And the wife is like,

that financial planning, there is a big element to financial planning that is math

and numbers and understanding of investment strategies and products and things like

that. But there is another element of it being an art and it’s a big emotion that

we’re having to deal with this idea of not generating any more income, living

off of what we have, and is it going to work? And that’s where a lot of the

motion comes into play. So, you know, with the idea of trying to retire earlier

than expected, you have to start thinking about the plan. So, say we walk through

that plan like we should have in the previous scenario, and we see what’s possible.

And now we start to talk about, okay, well, what do we potentially have to give up

or what are our non -negotiables, right? If I’m going to retire early, what do I

need to make sure that I’m going to continue to get in my retirement life, whether

that’s travel or the memberships or the hobbies? What is a non -negotiable for me?

I’m never going to give this up if we’re going to retire early. We need to be

able to afford these things, right? And so, understanding what those things are to

you, how much they cost, and then where potentially can we make cuts or adjustments

or generate more income to make it all work. You know, it’s a balancing act of

this conversation because retiring early, while it sounds fantastic, there’s a lot of

things to think through around the investment strategy, around your income plan, your

withdrawal strategy, also big time thinking about health care prior to Medicare,

and that world is very difficult right now. So, you know, understanding, well, what

do we have? What do we need to have? And what are those, what’s that going to

cost? And are we willing to give any of that up? If we’re not willing to give any

of that up, what are we in a place to cut so that we can make it all work? And

then how important is it really to us to retire early if it’s going to be

stressful? The idea of retiring early is you get rid of the stressor that’s in your

life. But if you retire early and it’s still stressful, does it make sense? So

those are some of the things that we want to be thinking through, absolutely. Yeah,

I think one of the things we’ve seen on this many times is when we do work

through a plan and we kind of go through the five critical areas that we talk

about all the time, which is, you know, risk investments, optimizing their income,

their health care, their taxes, and their estate plan, when we go through those

things and we kind of lay it all out, the stress does come down. And maybe, you

know, in this particular case, the husband who has out this problem goes, wait a

minute, maybe we don’t have to go down that way. And maybe she looks at it and

goes, oh, I didn’t realize that maybe if I cut back over here, I could still get

my vacations. And we get rid of this tugging war back and forth. All right, let me

tell you the next part here, Murs, because I think this one kind of made me kind

of chuckle for a second, because we’ve seen some folks who think this is just an

easy way to do things. So, in this, in the article the guy had a friend and the

friend was had started doing this idea of day trading and they were kind of being

successful maybe they’ve been doing it for a day or two and they hit a couple wins

and so, he goes wait a minute if i take some of my money and I put it over here

and I day trade maybe i could make money that way um how would you talk to

somebody who’s thinking here they got a good amount of money they’ve saved a couple

million dollars and they’re thinking, hey, I’m going to go out here and try to

conquer the stock market and day trade. I would say you want to be very, very

careful.

It’s kind of like this, you know, as you get closer to retirement, and this isn’t

everybody, but you know, just the averages would say that as we get closer to

retirement, we start to become more and more risk averse. Not that we can’t handle

risk, we start to realize the impact that risk is going to make or take on our

portfolio. If I lose 10 % when I’ve got $100 ,000, that’s one number. If I lose 10% When I’ve got a million dollars, that’s a significantly larger dollar number. So

not that we get any less risky, but we start to understand risk a whole lot better

as we approach retirement. What this person is saying is, well, let me get into

options trading. Let me try to conquer the stock market. And that’s going to be my

income driver or my revenue stream for retirement.

I think it’s a very difficult area. Does it work well? Does it work well for some

very specific strategies? Absolutely. But do I do them myself? And I know this

world? I don’t do them. I’m scared of them. And it takes a lot of monitoring takes

a lot of understanding of how the options, markets work, and also how to make

money on that in that world. And then, you know, paying attention to the individual

stocks that the options are being carried on. So, it’s a world where it could work,

but you’re really increasing your risk. And if we’re trying to retire early because

we’re stressed out, well, again, this comes back to bringing stress back in because

what if one of those options doesn’t hit the way you want it to and now, you’re,

you’ve lost a bucket of money or, you know, what if you have to end up selling

some stock because the options didn’t work out? And now you’ve got a big capital

gains tax issue to deal with that you weren’t anticipating. Well, all of that could

completely wreck your year. So, you know, if it was up to me, I would say first,

let’s do proper planning before we start to go after aggressive strategies to make

the plan work. You don’t want to have to have insane or very, very strong rates of

return to occur to make the plan work because we can’t rely on rates of return.

We can rely on sound proper planning and annual conversations around the financial

plan itself. Yeah, you know, we sometimes people come in and they want fancy, uh,

difficult scenarios. And we talk about all the time, hey, look, when it comes to

income planning, we want it to be predictable. This is not trying to, we’re not

trying to create something that’s going to have any kind of volatility to it. We

want it to be kind of boring. We want to make sure it’s coming in and it’s going

to be there. And by the way, by having that predictable income, it’s going to take

your stress level way, way down. So, I guess as we kind of come here and we think

about this particular couple, Murs, and we’re imagine ourselves in this meeting, and

we’re trying to reconcile between these two different ways of thinking, how would you

maybe help kind of think through this idea of helping them reconcile, maybe help

them think through the goals? Obviously, we’re not marriage therapist, but at the

same token, we’re trying to help them think through this idea of retirement. How

would you help them reconcile? Yeah, I was going to, it popped in my head, the

word therapy popped in my head because eventually that is what some of the

conversations end up being is a little bit of let’s make sure we’re all talking the

same language and what is it that’s your goal, I would say to the one spouse and

then what is it your goal and what do you want to see out of your retirement,

right? And sometimes they don’t verbally say that in front of each other, and it

takes them being in front of an advisor or a trusted person for them to talk in a

circle around what goals are. And sometimes they didn’t realize there was a

misalignment. So, I think it all starts with having those open, honest conversations

of if we are going to try to retire early, first of all, are we both on the same

page that we’re going to do what it takes to make it work? If you’re both on the

same page that we do want to retire early and we’re going to cut costs and we’re

going to do this. We’re going to do that for this desire of being financially

independent. Well, then it seems like, you know, if the numbers work out, it’s very

doable. But if you’ve got friction between the two of you, well, then that friction,

unless you resolve it, you talk about it, it’s never going to go away. And in

fact, it could fester. And then the caution that I would bring towards anyone who’s

trying to retire, especially significantly early. The way the world works today is if

you’ve got a gap in your income, if you got a gap in employment and you tried to

retire early type of thing and it didn’t work out, and you try to go back to work

after having a five, six, seven, eight-year gap of employment, it becomes very

difficult to reenter into the workforce. So definitely if you’re going to try to

retire early, make sure you and your spouse or whoever you’re working with are on

the same page that, yes, this is doable and we’re going to do what it takes to

make it work. You want to be

If you are interested, we are glad to give you a copy of our new book that has

just come out called Peace of Mind Pathway. It is all about this entire structure.

We’ll give you a free copy. All you got to do is just reach out to us here at

Peace of Mind Wealth Management. Just an easy way to do it is go to POMWealth.net.

Go to the contact us page and say, hey, I’d like a copy of your new book. We’d

be glad to send that out to you and make sure that you can talk through these

areas because this is what we do every single day. This is how we’ve been doing.

I’ve been doing this for 25 years. Merce and I’ve been together now for almost 14

years coming up this year, all about helping people through this whole process. So

we appreciate you listening. We hope this has been a little bit insightful. As always, we hope you have a great week. We’ll talk to you again next Monday.