In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the launch of their new retirement planning book, The Peace of Mind Pathway, and why they felt compelled to create a clearer, more practical approach to Retirement Planning. After years of working with families approaching or already in Retirement, they saw a recurring challenge: people could be great savers yet still lack Retirement confidence. This episode explains how a truly holistic financial planning approach helps connect the dots between investments, income, taxes, healthcare, and legacy—so you can truly plan for retirement with clarity and purpose.

Listen in to learn about how Peace of Mind Wealth Management designed a comprehensive Retirement financial plan that goes beyond investments and focuses on real-life decision-making. From Income planning in retirement and Tax planning strategies to Medicare planning, Long term care planning, Estate planning, and Social Security planning, Radon and Murs break down the Peace of Mind Pathway framework that helps families retiring comfortably and working toward a goal to secure your retirement.

In this episode, find out:

• Why a retirement planning book focused on holistic planning is critical for today’s retirees
• How the Peace of Mind Pathway ties together risk management, income, taxes, healthcare, and legacy
• What role Required minimum distributions play in your overall Retirement financial plan
• How to think through early retirement strategy decisions, including healthcare before Medicare
• Why having a connected team matters when planning retirement and following a retirement checklist

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Retirement isn’t just about having money—it’s about having clarity, confidence, and a plan that works together.” — Radon Stancil
• “Good savers often feel the most anxiety because they don’t know what questions to ask when planning 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:

Welcome everyone to secure your retirement. Murs and I are very, very excited today. 

The reason why we’re excited is we get to reveal our new book. And it just 

launched actually today. And so, we’re super excited. The name of the book, and I’ll 

hold it up here for anybody listening, I mean, watching and listening is here’s the 

name of the book, The Peace of Mind Pathway, a Comprehensive Guide to Retirement, 

Clarity, and Confidence. So, we are very, very excited. This is really, you know, 

something that. 

book, we took a whole different tone to it. We took a whole different viewpoint. 

And so, we’re excited just to talk to you a little bit about the book. I will tell 

you are right up front, if you’re listening to this and you don’t have the copy of the 

book, all you have to do is contact us. Just go to POMwealth.net. Go to 

the contact us page and send us a message over and say, hey, I’d like to get a 

copy of the book. And we’ll be glad to send you out a copy. We think it’s going 

to be super helpful. So, hey, Murs You know, we worked very hard on this book. 

I’ll let you take off here and kind of talk about the why. Why’d we do this? We 

already had a book. So, why’d we write another book? Right. So, you know, we’ve seen 

a lot of things over the years as far as the industry, the standard of how advice 

is delivered. And what we saw is that there’s areas that were lacking. 

And especially in this idea of holistic retirement planning. I mean, if you go on 

Amazon or go to the library, people still do that anymore, you know, there’s a 

plethora of books on investments and understanding investments and how to invest and 

strategies around investing. But there’s not enough out there around, well, 

I got my investments figured out. How do I really get put all of these, we call 

them puzzle pieces; how do we put all these puzzle pieces together outside of 

investments. Things like, you know, the income plan, the financial plan, the tax 

strategy, the withdrawal strategy, tying in health care for Medicare, tying in long 

-term care for the what -ifs, the estate plan, all these things have gotten, 

they get so siloed and we wanted a place where we could put it all together, which 

led to the creation of what we use in our office, the peace of mind pathway, and 

then led to this idea of, well, let’s publish this because we think we really have 

something here that a lot of people would benefit from. You know, when we kept 

seeing over and over is that people come into our office, good savers, you know, 

they did the work, they put their head down, they saved them to the 401ks. So, they 

built up the investment assets. And you think, in most cases, you would think if 

I’ve got money, I shouldn’t feel that stressed about retirement. Well, in fact, what 

we see often is that good savers, people have built up a decent nest egg or a 

good work, have a ton of anxiety around this idea of retirement because they just 

don’t have all the pieces figured out, all the answers or they don’t know what 

questions to be asking. And so that became a big driver is to try to, you know, 

have something that someone could, one, understand our process that we talk about 

here all the time, but then the other is to, you know, have a place where you 

could really kind of think through what you want your retirement to look like. And 

there are some examples in the book, too, as well, because a big part of total 

financial planning or retirement planning is, well, you got your investments, but also 

we need to file the taxes. We need to have tax strategy. And we would find a 

disconnect there. We’d have one, you’d have an advisor and then you have a separate 

CPA that has no idea what’s going on in the investment world. And then you’d have 

your estate planning attorney drops your trust or your wills and your power of 

attorneys having no idea how your assets are truly set up or what your taxation 

really looks like. And there’s a big disconnect that happens there. And so, clients 

often, we would see, or our families, we would see just kind of getting stuck in 

the middle of having to navigate all this expertise. And while the expertise is 

great, if they’re not connected, well, it’s not all that sound when it comes to a 

good financial plan. So that’s really the big why. Why? 

And, you know, I would argue that sometimes people use that word and they don’t 

actually, do it. So, what is it? Well, I’ll tell you what it is for us. You know, 

what we used to do that we would actually have probably said was holistic, 

is that we would tie all these major things together. And we did that a lot by 

having outside partners. But at the end of the day, that really was not what we 

wanted to be a holistic approach. 

to have a good team of specialists in order to accomplish that. 

So, let’s just talk about those five areas because when we look at this idea of 

holistic, you got to look at more than just investments. But that number one is 

risk. It’s risk and investment management, meaning we have a very, very good team 

that has been put together that are very good at constructing great portfolios and 

great investment strategies. And so, we talk about that quite a bit with our clients. 

And then when we look at that, what we want is we want to make sure that we’ve 

got money that can grow in the markets, that can be exposed to different asset 

classes, that can be exposed to different allocations of investments that will reduce 

risk but still give us a good rate of return. And we have a team now put together 

that is second to none. In fact, we have our in -house team. We also have 

individuals that we have access to as a part of our team that comes on and helps 

us as an investment advisory committee that, you know, oversees many, many billions 

of dollars. And so, we’ve got really deep roots there when it comes to building out 

a very, very good investment strategy. but then we also have to think about how do 

we optimize income and when we optimize income, we want to make sure that our income 

last our lifetime so income planning is a very big part that’s point number 

two of what we do is helping people visualize through a comprehensive retirement 

focused financial plan where their income is going to come from how it’s going to 

come to them what are the tax implications and then another big aspect of what we 

put together here that we wanted to describe in the book is dealing with health 

care issues. There’s health care pre -Medicare. There’s health care whenever you get 

on Medicare as to how do you pick that. There’s long -term care. There are all kinds 

of different things that we have to think through when it comes to health care. So 

we have a health care specialist. And we wanted to have that in the book. So, we 

have a whole part of the book dedicated to health care issues. 

Then we have taxes. Taxes are a big one. And so, we have a 

then the ability for us to actually do tax filing for the client. And the beauty 

of that is now you’ve got your tax planning, your tax strategy, and your tax filing 

all in one place, all connected right to your investment advisor so that everything 

is tied together. It’s tied into your income plan, your financial plan. Everything is 

being looked at there. And then the final area, which is extremely important, is the 

estate plan. Estate planning is essential. And so, we want to make sure that we have 

a good estate plan. And we believe your estate plan should be no Oh. 

updated. So that’s how we call holistic is it’s all done in -house, able to be 

accomplished with a with a very, very good team of people. But there are some 

aspects. We call the book Peace of Mind pathway. So, when we talk about a pathway 

trying to get to and through retirement, it’s got some core elements to help you be 

able to do that. So, Mers, can you kind of walk us through what it what that those 

core elements of the pathway are yeah and that’s the name of the book the peace 

mind pathway and there’s the core elements are things that we put into practice 

day in and day out with the families that we serve, and it all revolves around what 

Radon just said those five critical areas for retirement success making sure our risk 

is in line we’ve got a good income plan we figured out health care We continue to 

have conversations around health care and taxes and the estate plan. And how we 

really do that is in this three -phase type of structure, which creates the pathway. 

It starts with the roadmap. Think about a GPS, right? The GPS helps you get from 

point A to point B, and then it helps you think through all the turns you got to 

take to get to point B in any roadblocks or any issues that are in your way or 

ahead of you, like accidents or traffic or construction. That’s pretty much how we 

approach it, too. It’s a retired. 

or maybe a pension decision, and then also Medicare, when he turned 65, 

if you retire early, what am I going to do with pre -Medicare or private insurance, 

taxation, this thing called RMDs that we talk about all the time, required minimum 

distribution. So that’s just in a nutshell, a handful of the different types of 

decisions that come our way, but they’ll ever, they continue to come our way all 

throughout retirement. And that’s you know, the basics. There’s also the fun stuff 

that’s part of the roadmap too, like extensive travel, right? I didn’t travel a lot 

while I was working and saving. I want to travel for the first 10 years of my 

retirement. Can I afford this? The big question, can I actually retire when I want 

to retire? This is what a roadmap is. And it’s just like a GPS is updating as 

things come, come at us. Our roadmap is updating as well. We want to be reviewing 

this at least annually, in most cases, it comes up in almost every single meeting 

that we’re having with a client or a family. So that’s really the roadmap. Big 

picture is it’s getting us from point A to point B. What do we need to think 

about in between and must continue to revisit that roadmap. Once we have a roadmap 

in place, obviously there’s decisions that have been made around so security, around 

the investment plan. And so, our team now goes into implementation mode. So, whether 

that’s implementing the investment strategy or if it’s implementing the withdrawals 

that we need to take to create our income or, you know, making those decisions 

around Medicare and meeting with Sean and implementing Medicare strategy, implementation 

is big because it gets the ball rolling. It puts those thoughts into action so that 

we can actually get our money working for us in the right way. And it puts the 

efficiencies in place too to make sure our money last and then potentially 

inheritance as well or legacy planning and then the last is what we call nurture so 

we’ve built the map uh we’ve implemented the strategies but then what we know 

is that there’s no plan that is uh one and done right life changes goals change 

desires change people are born people pass away adjustments are constantly having to 

be made, just like a plant in your house that you have to water and give sunlight. 

We believe that your financial plan, your retirement -focused financial plan, that 

roadmap needs to be nurtured very heavily. I mean, you’ve worked so hard to build 

up this nest egg to plan for this retirement. You don’t want to just get to a 

place where you retire and you never look at it again and just close your eyes and 

hope for the best. You got to nurture it. So, in a nutshell, those are the three 

big core, the framework of the pathway, and there’s a lot of elements under those 

three big pieces, but that’s really what the book kind of walks you through in 

sometimes in technical format, but we also give you quite a bit of client stories 

that help you understand how this all worked out and how our team approaches it. 

So, you know, Radon, I think we could talk about this book all day long, and it 

took us quite a long time to put it together and get into pretty 

a team works to make life easy for you. A do -it -yourselfer doesn’t look for what’s 

going to make life easy. They like to do all this stuff themselves, and that’s 

okay. That’s not a pick -on, a do -it -yourselfer, but if you’re doing yourself, or 

you’re going to read this and go, this is a lot of stuff I’ve got to do, and 

you’re probably going to walk away with anxiety because you’re going to go, wow, 

that’s a lot of work. Whereas if you are looking at this and going, how can I 

have a team that will help me go down this pathway, build the roadmap, have the 

income plan, then you’re going to go, wow, I’m getting a lot from this team and 

it’s going to build a lot of value for what you’re getting from the team and 

you’re going to understand the team. So, it’s not about how to pick stocks. It is 

about how to have a good risk managed portfolio, right? It is not about, you know, 

a big tax trick that could actually put you in an audit. It is about good sound 

tax planning pre-December 31st. So, this is really for somebody who says, 

you know what? I want to do. I want to enjoy retirement. I want to go sleep every 

night. I want to be calm. I want to spend time with my family. I want to go on 

vacation. I do not want to sit behind the computer and try to figure out the tax 

code. If you’re the person that says, I want help, I want assistance, I want 

guidance. I’ve got an advisor right now, but they’re not talking about all these 

things. Or I’ve got a CPA, but they don’t do pre -December 31st planning for me. 

You’re going to love it. You’re going to love those books. So, if that’s you, we’ve 

got something that we can give. I’ll let Murs to explain it. But that’s it. Yeah. 

So, you know, if you’ve listened to this and you’re like, man, I, one, I hear all 

these things. I’ve been listening. I’ve heard you talk about the pathway. I don’t 

have this. I don’t have an advisor, or I do have an advisor, but they don’t talk 

about this stuff. or our art 

and just talk through what it is we really do for the families that we serve, and 

if potentially there could be a good fit between us and what you’re looking for. 

Those are usually pretty laid -back conversations with no true agenda to them other 

than to answer questions and see what we do next here. But on top of that, if 

you say, well, this book sounds awesome, which we hope you say that as you’re 

listening, and I’d really love a copy. And, hey, if it could be free, that would 

be even better, well, give us a call at the office, 919-787-8866, and we’ll 

obviously have to ask for some information, but we will be happy to send out a 

copy to you. If you don’t feel like picking up the phone, it’s available on Amazon 

as well. But that is the book, The Peace of Mind Pathway. We are so excited to 

bring it to fruition. It’s taken some time, but we think it’s really going to be 

worth it. So, thank you all for tuning in, and we’ll talk to you again next Monday.