In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss why retirement stress, retirement anxiety, and fear around market volatility are rarely about the markets themselves—and almost always about unanswered questions. After years of uncertainty driven by inflation, interest rate changes, and economic shocks, many people approaching retirement realize that stress doesn’t come from short-term market swings, but from not having a clear retirement financial plan. Without a defined withdrawal strategy, retirement income planning, tax planning in retirement, and estate planning basics, even strong market years can still feel overwhelming.

Listen in to learn about how holistic financial planning creates true peace of mind in retirement. Radon and Murs break down how retirement risk management, income planning in retirement, Social Security planning, Medicare planning, long-term care planning, and tax planning strategies work together to reduce anxiety. By focusing on structure—rather than speculation—you can build retirement confidence, follow a clear retirement checklist, and move toward retiring comfortably with a plan designed to secure your retirement.

In this episode, find out:

• Why retirement anxiety is driven more by unanswered questions than market volatility
• How the Three Bucket Strategy supports income planning, withdrawal strategy, and retirement confidence
• The five critical areas of retirement planning, including tax planning, Medicare planning, and estate planning
• How holistic financial planning helps manage required minimum distributions and early retirement strategy
• Why having a written retirement financial plan reduces stress and supports peace of mind in retirement

Tweetable Quotes:

• “A bad market day won’t ruin your retirement, and a great market day won’t make it successful—it’s the plan that matters.” — Radon Stancil
• “Retirement stress fades when every part of your retirement financial plan is being monitored, implemented, and nurtured.” — 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. One of the things that comes up all 

the time, when we talk about this idea of getting ready for and living throughout 

retirement is this idea of risk management and really honestly if the markets are 

going up it’s not a problem everybody loves it everybody’s like hey I love what’s 

going on big time returns and I like to use 2025 as a good example of this 2025 

you started off the year really rocky, and it means we had a downturn I mean it was 

like what’s going to happen for 2025, and We were just trying to tell people 

like a lot about what we’re going to talk about today. And then 2025 ended up 

being a pretty good year throughout that whole process. So, if you were sitting at 

the end of 2025, most people forgot about the first part of 2025. And here they 

said the end of 2025 and they’re like, I’m good. I have no problems. But the real 

topic of what we’re talking about here today is that the retirement stress should 

not be about the market. We shouldn’t have retirement stress, just all market 

oriented. It’s really kind of from; I don’t have clear direction. I don’t have my 

questions answered. I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a strategy. And so, what we 

wanted to talk about today is the power of walking into a new year. I mean, 

you’re listening to this podcast. If you’re listening to it when it came out, kind 

of the first part of the year, but it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re late on this 

and you didn’t hear it when it first came out. Always walking into and getting 

closer to retirement, I need to have a clear plan. I need to have a clear strategy 

to help me think through how am I going to invest? How am I going to deal with 

risk? And so, I don’t have all these unanswered questions. And I’m feeling like I’m, 

you know, we use the example when we’re doing educational events about the hang in 

their idea. And people let go and say, get me out of the markets at the bottom of 

the market. And so today we want to talk about a real strategy of how to deal 

with these market volatility, volatile scenarios. So, Mers, if you want to get us 

started here and talk a little bit about this idea of markets having anxiety, 

having anxiety around the markets and how that looks. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s 

no surprise that the markets, given the day, can make you feel really good about 

your investments in your plan and given the other day could be make you feel 

uncomfortable or uneasy around your investment strategy and your plan and you know 

can you handle the markets and so I think the goal is that we get away from 

relying purely on the markets to create our level of success or our level of 

happiness with our situation I think there’s way more that goes into a good 

retirement -focused financial plan and then just having my investments working for me. 

Obviously, yes, we need our investments to work. We need our money to make money. 

That power of compounding growth is really important, especially because, you know, 

we’re planning for 30, 40 years of retirement in most cases. But, you know, 

sometimes people will say, well, once the markets calm down, I’ll feel better. Well, 

that only works for a few weeks and then the markets get crazy again and then you 

don’t feel good. You don’t want to have this seesaw of emotions as you’re walking 

into retirement. 

focus, so performance oriented. Again, that stuff is important, but it’s not what’s 

going to make your plan successful. It’s a piece of what’s going to make your plan 

successful. And so, it does come back to, we talk about it all the time. We’ll talk 

more about it today is having a plan in place. If you have a plan in place and 

it’s written down and it’s somewhere you can access it, it becomes this constant 

reminder of, hey, we’ve thought this through, we’ve thought through volatility, we’ve 

thought through withdrawals, we thought through taxation and everything like that. And 

that’s a lot to think through, which is why it’s very important to have processes 

in place around your withdrawal strategy, around your investment strategy and 

everything around that. And if you can do it yourself, which most people don’t want 

to do it themselves, that’s why firms like us exist, having a team in place to 

manage all of that for you, from your risk management to your income planning, to 

the financial plan, the tax strategies, the estate planning, even Medicare decisions 

that can get overwhelming. When we have all of those figured out, we call the five 

critical areas of retirement. 

of withdrawing money and, you know, how long is our money going to last? When, when 

do I take from these accounts? Which accounts do I take from? Oh, this is a big 

one. What happens if someone passes away? You know, my spouse dies earlier than we 

anticipated. How is everything going to play out now? That’s estate planning. That’s 

legacy. That’s transition. It’s not investment focus. And are we missing something 

big? A lot of times we get the question posed to us of, hey, I just don’t know 

what I don’t know. So, what am not asking you right now? And so, these are the 

concerns, a lot of which are not investment focused that we want to be addressing 

so that our entire plan has some element of predictability and reliability to it. 

So, let’s talk, Radon, about, you know, handling this and why people feel the way 

they feel and how we kind of help them think this through. Yeah. So, I’d like to 

just paint a picture. And if you think back, if you’re listening to this right now, 

let’s say you’re 60, 65 years old and you go back in your mind to 2008, 

2008 while it was stressful to you possibly, it probably wasn’t that stressful. And 

why? Well, back then, you were working. You were funding your 401k. 

You were funding your retirement plans. However you do that, you were just saving 

money. You weren’t thinking, man, I got to make sure that whatever I’ve got today 

is the end result. So, you were able to probably live through 2008 without it being 

a big deal. Now, if you were 65 back in 2008, it was a way bigger deal. And now 

here you said, and now you’re starting to get worried at this 60, 65 years of age, 

maybe even 55 of like, I don’t want to live through another huge downturn. So is 

it the markets that’s making you stressful or is it the transition into retirement 

that really is making you stress? And that’s what it is. When I go from working 

and being a person who knows I got another 10 to 15 years of work time so I can 

just keep funding and I can live through a market cycle. That’s a completely 

different mentality than if I am close to or in retirement. So, Mers and I, 

that’s who we work with. If you’re listening to this and your client, that’s where 

you are. If you’re listening to this and you’re, because you’re thinking about 

retirement, that is what you’re thinking about right now is you’re going, hey, I 

cannot afford to have a plan that is exposed to a 2008 without a strategy in 

place. And so, what we really talk to our clients about is that we need to have 

something, some structure. And it’s not some genius investment strategy. That is not 

it, but it is about the structure. And so, Mers and I talk about all the time 

having a simple structure. And that structure is a three-bucket strategy. 

So, you’re going to have bucket number one, which is going to be your cash. You’re 

going to have bucket number two, which is going to be my safety and income bucket. 

And then I need to have a bucket that is going to be for growth. And so, I think 

if you look at those three buckets, what’s the beauty of doing that? Well, the 

beauty of doing that is if I have my growth bucket that is long term money and 

I’m not utilizing that for all of my income needs. I’ve got that in my second 

bucket that’s safe. If I’m living through a market that’s giving me volatility, I’m 

not stressed about it. I don’t like it. I don’t love it. We just love for 

everything to go up, but I’m not that stressed. And the reason why I’m not that 

stress is because I’ve got my essential needs taken care of. Now, that’s on that 

part. We also have taxes. Taxes is a really big deal as you start thinking through, 

I might need to think about tax planning and tax advice in a different way than 

I’ve ever had to think about it before. And so having a tax plan, a tax strategy 

layered on to my investment strategy or connected to my tax, my investment strategy, 

again, takes another layer of worry off. I’ve got plenty of folks that have come in 

here before and I go, yeah, I’ve done my own taxes now for the last 20 years. I 

don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to do that. I want to go on vacation. 

I want to spend time with my family. I don’t want that on my concerns anymore. So 

again, having all that structure. So, if you look, Mers mentioned it earlier, the 

five critical areas, risk management, income planning, health care, 

having a health care plan for Medicare, long -term care, pre -Medicare, if I’m 

retiring before Medicare, taxes, and then estate planning. If I’ve got all those 

things taken care of into a very clear structure, my stress is really low. And if 

I, you know, I’m reviewing those things on a regular basis, very low. So that’s our 

structure is having all five of those things, all in place, ready to go, takes away 

the stress. That transition now is not that big of deal. Now, I know I kind of 

hit on this, Mers, but if you want to talk, we talk about all the time, what we 

call the pathway, our peace of mind pathway. And that really does tie these things 

together. So maybe, Mers, you can kind of tie those areas into what the pathway 

looks like. Yeah. So, over the years, we’ve, you know, we’ve gotten all these 

questions and we wanted to formalize a system all around making sure that every 

facet of someone’s retirement financial plan is, is not just being created in the 

sense of the plan, but also being monitored because we know that life changes you 

know people retire people move people pass away new kids are born all this stuff 

happens in your retirement life and so we wanted to have a nice process in place 

to pretty much tackle anything that can come at you, so we call it the peace of 

mind pathway and the pathway has three major steps to it the first is building out 

the roadmap so think of this as your financial plan. And sometimes, you know, it 

could be while you’re still working. In most cases, we prefer that you’re getting 

ahead of it and you’re building out your roadmap while you’re still working. But 

also, you know, if you’re already retired and you don’t have a plan in place, it’s 

never too late and it’s never going to hurt you to have a plan that you can 

visually see. So, what that looks like is, you know, pretty much saying, where am I 

today? So am I still working am I retired and then what are my goals for 

gifting to kids in our legacy, right? So, what are the things that we want to 

accomplish and what do we want our retirement life to look like? That’s the roadmap. 

And the thing is, is that it changes every single year. You could have one year 

where you have a lower income year, so it creates an opportunity for some of the 

tax planning that we do. You could have another year where you want to go, you 

know, take a heavier withdrawal so that you can go buy that house that you’ve been, 

that beach house that you’ve been looking forward for. You could have another year 

that’s full of travel. So, the roadmap is something that’s constantly being evaluated 

and also monitored to make sure, hey, no matter what comes our way, one, are we 

prepared for it? Can the plan withstand it? And are we living the retirement life 

that we want to live? So that’s building it out, looking at it and monitoring it. 

The next big part of the pathway after the roadmap is phase. So, you know, 

way too often we see a plan gets created and then it just gets put in a drawer 

and never looked at again. For us, we need to implement that plan, which means 

those strategies like the risk management strategy that we hadn’t talked about, the 

buckets, not just doing it once, but monitoring them and implementing them as times 

change or rebalancing them as, you know, what markets provide different types of 

scenarios. Tax strategy is a big part of this as well. So, implementing different 

strategies like Roth conversions or charitable types of strategies, whatever that we 

need to do to make the plan very aligned, that’s implementation. That’s where our 

team really goes to work. And we do all the things that we say that the plan 

requires for success. Another big one is the estate plan. A lot of times people 

don’t have all of the proper documents in place. And quite often, people don’t have 

any documents in place. So, you know, having the conversations about the most 

critical documents like your wills, your power of attorneys, your hip authorizations 

every now and then someone may require a trust, getting those in place and updating 

those as needed. Don’t just shove those in a drawer as well and forget about them. 

We believe those need to be reviewed. And then the last step, so you got the 

roadmap, you’ve got implementation that’s putting the plan to work and then you’ve 

got nurture. To me, this is really the most important piece of the plan. 

We have two major meetings a year, one around financial planning strategy, the other 

around tax strategy. And each has its own focus. Financial planning is, hey, we’re 

walking into 2026. What are your goals for the year? What are the big things that 

we need to know about? How’s your cash flow? How are the investments doing? That’s 

financial planning. Let’s update the plan to reflect reality here in 2026. And then 

we’ll do it again in 27 and in 28 and 29. And we’ll keep on doing that because 

there is no one and done when it comes to a financial plan. The second is tax 

strategy. We do this every single year, kind of on the back half of the year, and 

that allows our team to kind of understand, well, what is your tax scenario shaping 

up to be? What do we expect our taxes to become April of the following year? So 

there’s no surprises. And then it gives us the ability to play around and see, 

well, what else can we do to make our tax our tax lives better? Are there 

contributions that we’ve missed out on? Are there charitable giving opportunities that 

we can be doing better or more efficiently? Do we have investment strategies that 

are tax efficient? Roth conversions is a big topic that we run the analysis. We 

say, you know, help someone understand the cost benefit, the long -term effect of 

Roth conversion planning. And the list just goes on and on and on you’ve heard 

Taylor in our podcast she kind of heads-up tax strategy for our firm uh and that’s 

a big piece of nurturing the plan financial planning and tax strategy the big thing 

is is that it’s not a one and done it needs to be looked at every single year 

because life changes tax law changes like we saw back in 2025 and the markets are 

always moving around so we need to pay attention, so what does that look like great 

and when someone has uh what do we see when they have all of this in 

place with the pathway and, you know, everything thought through and the team behind 

them and the process is there. Well, I say the number one thing that we hear from 

people are that they said, you know what, I love is I don’t worry anymore. I’m 

calm. I don’t have the stress that I had before. We’ve got some folks that have 

come on as clients that, you know, they used to manage their own money. We’ve got 

some of those. We have a lot of people who were, you know, as they were closing 

out their retirement year, getting ready for retirement, they, 

to a bucket list trip, and he said, you know what was the coolest thing? I went 

away for a month. I never thought about the markets. I never thought about my 

money. I never thought about where’s my money coming from. And the reason why is 

because I had a roadmap. I had everything in place. And his wife was like, it was 

wonderful. I’ve never seen him so relaxed in that scenario. So, a calm person who 

doesn’t, who has a plan, they know what the plan is, they’re not looking at the 

markets every day. Why look at the market every day? It doesn’t matter anyway. A 

bad day is not going to make you lose your retirement plan, and a great day is not 

going to make it successful. It is something that happens over time. So worried 

about what’s happening every day only just create stress. The other thing is, I 

would tell you, they don’t watch the news 100 % of the day. You know, they might 

get the highlights. I know for me, I listen to a 10 -minute podcast every morning. 

That’s the highlights of the day of what’s going on in the world in the total 

world, not talking about the markets. And that’s all I need to know. I don’t need 

to know every detail because I can sit there and listen to bad news all the time 

and I’m just going to be stressed. I’m going to have high blood pressure. I’m going 

to have all kinds of problems. They understand that they need to have their plan 

tweaked. So, they are actively being a part of the planning process, but not every 

day we do two strategy meetings a year we do a financial planning strategy meeting 

in the first part of the year and we do a tax strategy meeting in the second 

half of the year when you do a financial plan and a tax strategy meeting and 

that’s you everything’s on track why else do you need to be sitting around and 

stressed and worried about it’s a plan it’s all working it’s in place and uh i 

will tell you our clients that’s the way I feel I always tell people uh you had a 

pandemic we had 2008 we had at the beginning of 2025, we did not have our phones 

ringing off the hook. Why? Because people had a plan. They understood the plan. They 

understood how their investment strategy was. All of that just takes the stress away. 

And that’s the big message. All right. Let’s close up here, Mers, on this topic. 

Yeah. So, I mean, the title of this episode is why retirement stress isn’t about 

the market. It’s about unanswered questions. And we truly believe that. If we have 

plans in place for the volatility of the market, if we have a plan in place for 

our withdrawal strategy, if we have a plan in place for what tax strategy looks 

like for us, that’s going to be individualized to us, a lot of that stress starts 

to fade away because we know that every facet of our retirement plan is being 

looked at, monitored, and implemented on. So, if you hear about, if you, if you were 

listening and you kind of heard and, you know, you don’t have a roadmap or you 

don’t feel comfortable with how your plan is, or you’re close to retirement and you 

haven’t really given it a thought. You said, I’ll just, I’ll tackle it when I 

retire. I would say now is the time. If there’s any uneasiness that you’ve had over 

the last few years with your investment strategy or the lack thereof of a plan, 

this is really what our firm focuses on, is putting that whole pathway together for 

people. And, you know, to us, and we get to, we have the pleasure of hearing this 

all the time that clients truly do have peace of mind when they’re working with 

this case that they know that everything is being looked at, being optimized, and it 

means a lot when it comes to stress reduction in retirement. So, it really comes 

from not having the best investment strategy. It really comes from having a clear, 

focused plan that addresses all the issues. So, if you would ever like to have a 

conversation around any of the aspects when it comes to those five critical areas of 

retirement planning success, which is risk, income planning, the health care side, 

taxation and estate. We do all of them. And we’d be happy to have that conversation 

with you to hopefully reduce any stressors that you currently have with your plan. 

All right, everyone. We hope you enjoyed this episode. We hope you have a great 

week. We’ll talk to you again next Monday.