Folks, retirement comes faster than you think. You may be listening now; you re already in retirement, but it s never too late or too early to start planning for retirement. So I d thought it d be good time to go to Arkansas, Denton, AR to be exact, and talk to Aaron Campbell who s author of the book, Never Worry About Retirement Again and subtitle is A Financial Guide to a More Stress-Free Happy Retirement. Aaron, welcome in. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Now, this book is right up the alley of our listener, Aaron, and I don t know what gave you the idea to write it. Was it because you were talking to somebody and they said we don t have a book out that speaks to us, or were you just I know you re a financial advisor. Was it in your day-to-day activities where you run into different problems that people had, and were they all the same problems a lot of times? Well, being a financial advisor and getting the opportunity to see people and talk about their money, it became very apparent to me that the lack of financial education in our country is a significant problem in my mind. I meet people every day, and they save significant amounts of money. They ve done well. They ve done what they thought they were supposed to do by saving on a systematic basis. Now they ve got a larger sum of money, and they really are getting closer to the time in their life where they re going to need that money to actually produce for them. In other words, that money s going to need to provide an income or whatnot in the future. The fact is that many of those people I was meeting with had no clue how their investments worked, or how that money was going to in turn provide the lifestyle that they wanted once they retired. That s such a scary situation when you work your entire life and you really don t know how the investments work, and you re relying on that money to provide the lifestyle that you want once you retire. That s kind of the reason why I wrote the book, to try to help those people. Yeah. I talk to people all across the nation, and one of the themes seems to be there s too much spending these days with money that people shouldn t be spending before retirement. Then when they get into retirement, there s a lot more spending than they ever thought. There s too little trust or there s a lack of trust these days in the financial process in the financial world. Constantly, I m apologizing for mistakes that other financial advisors have made, Aaron. There s a lot of bad advisors out there these days aren t there?
. Oh, I would say that that s absolutely accurate. However, I do believe that though there are the bad advisors, there s bad individuals out there in every profession. I think more than anything that a lot of advisors that come into the business, I mean, their education level, it doesn t take a whole lot to be a financial advisor. Let s face it. You know how that is. It s some test that you have to take, and they give the opportunity to say, Hey, I m a financial advisor. The fact is that many of these advisors are simply generalist. They re learning from their peers, and depending on what organization they work for, whether it be a bank, or a brokerage company, or an insurance company, whatever organization they re working for, that s probably the advice that they re going to give you. So if they can only sell an insurance product and that s all they ve got in their repertoire, then guess what? That s probably what they re going to sell to their clients. So it s so difficult to differentiate between the professionals that are going to help you in your situation, and someone that just might not be the right fit, or frankly, have the knowledge base to be able to give good advice. Yeah. The challenge is very much so on the consumer today. So I m a huge proponent of education because there s no one in the world that you can trust more than yourself, and so you have an opportunity to educate yourself about the areas that you want to invest. I can t impress upon people how important I believe that is. Yeah. In your book you talk about a lot of things we talk about. One of them is when you build a financial house, and of course, you have walls and a roof to protect your money, but the most important part of any house is the foundation. You talk about laying the financial foundation, and the quote you have in there is, Financial success is reserved for those who aggressively seek financial knowledge, and then apply that knowledge to create a prosperous life. Now, how can someone go about making sure they are putting the right foundation together for their financial future even if they re already in retirement? It s been my experience that the biggest thing that someone can do when it comes to laying a foundation for retirement is it doesn t have to do with the number of assets that you have. It has to do with the level of income that you can produce. So if we think about it, just imagine if you had zero dollars at the bank but you had property, or investments, or whatever source out there that could produce an income stream for you and I don t really care where that money comes from. It could be rental real estate. It could be dividend paying stocks. It could be annuities, whatever the case may be. Income has to be the number one priority before you retire because that s what s going to be responsible for providing the lifestyle that you live.
Literally, my parents are a good example. They re retired school teachers. They never made very much money in their working careers, but once they retired after 30 years of work, they ve got nice pension plans. They make a good stream of income each and every month, but they don t really have to worry about interest rates, or stock markets, or investments. It comes in rain or shine pretty well, and so any other monies that they have are just icing on the cake. Well, the challenge is a lot of people today simply don t have access to pension plans any longer. It s their sole responsibility to take whatever money they save and turn that money into some source of income for retirement because to me that s what it s all about. If you don t have the income, then you can t live the lifestyle that you want. So that s the number one foundation that you have to build to be stress-free and happy in retirement in my opinion. You have a quote in the book from Dwight D. Eisenhower. Everyone knows who Dwight D. Eisenhower was. It says, Neither a wise nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. You call it the shift in the financial world, and a lot of people out there listening, they re looking at their account balances in their 401K s or wherever they ve saved money for retirement, but they don t know how to translate that lump sum into an income. Many times they don t realize there are safe ways to do this without putting your money or exposing it to risk, I think. Putting it in the market and having your income in the future depending on the market being up. That s a mistake a lot of times with people taking all their money and leaving it in the market, or taking all of their money and putting it somewhere else. I think you ll agree that income planning is just making sure you have different buckets of money for different segments of your retirement life. What do you think about that? I think that s absolutely correct. I mean, like I said, with the disappearance of pension plans in 1978, the 401K was established, and so now, during in that date, basically, it took the responsibility of your retirement lifestyle and put it directly on each one of us, and said, Hey, now you re responsible for making investments that are going to ultimately grow your money so they can produce an income for you in the future. The problem is that when you worked for 30 years, and you saved all this money, and you look at this big pot of money, maybe a half a million to a million dollars, and you re thinking, well, that s all my money. I have to conserve. Really, what you have to do is determine how you re going to use that big lump sum of money and carve off very specific purposes. So what is the purpose of that money that you saved? Well, one of the main purposes, again, on the foundation, is to provide the income for you for the rest of your life regardless of what happens to the stock market or interest rates around you. So if you think, alright, I m going to take this money and I m going to carve off a certain
percentage of it and that money is going to provide income for me. I don t care whether I spend it or whether it makes money. I just need to know that it s going to provide a reliable stream of income for the rest of my life. If people start to think of it like that, they can in fact really create their own pension plan in a way by using a portion of their savings to provide that lifestyle. The rest of the money is there for emergencies, or inflation, or whatever other lifestyle issues that they might have. That s what I think that people need to consider is that money is there for a purpose, and that is to provide the lifestyle that they wanted. I know you call that the stress-free retirement. When someone has the money allocated correctly and also starts knowing what s in their investments. Unfortunately, in your book you talk about people who don t know the true investment risks they are going through right now, where there money is now. They don t know the fees they re paying in their investments, and they don t know how their investments work. Aaron, as someone gets closer to retirement, people don t have to know like when I get in the car. When I put the key in the ignition and it starts, I don t have to know how the engine works. I just have to know I m getting the right gas mileage, and it s not going to blow up when I go down the road. Same thing with the investment world, too many people are driving around in Ford Pintos getting ready to get rear-ended, and blow up sometime if the market goes down the wrong way. Absolutely. Again, I don t necessarily believe that someone has to know the alphas and the betas, and all the financing jargon around their investments, and exactly every nook and cranny as how they work specifically. However, they do need to understand that hey, this money that I m putting here isn t going to be worth half as much a year from now as it was today, especially when you re close to that retirement date. You d be surprised how many people have come into my office, and they have 100% of their money in a position where if we see a major financial collapse of some sort like we did back in 2007, 2008, 09, time period, that their dollars in their 401K plans or whatnot are subject to significant loss and losses that would devastate their plans for their future retirements. So if they could just become a little bit more educated about the detrimental effect that those losses can have on them, and they can learn that if they can simply get to a certain level, and as long as they don t lose their money, then they can provide the income they want. They don t necessarily have to take the additional risk because they ve reached the level that they can provide the lifestyle that they want with the money they already have. So I think that s really what I m talking about as far as becoming more educated about their investments. Especially as they get closer to retirement.
Folks, again, his name is. The name of his book is, Never Worry About Retirement Again. I really think that it s a read that everyone needs to get familiar with and a situation that everyone s going to go through. If you joined this interview late or want to hear it again in its entirety, you can visit FinancialSafari.com and click on the As Heard on the Show icon. Aaron thanks for your time today. Thank you very much for having me,. Folks, thanks for listening to the Financial Safari today. Coming up next, we re going to check in again with your local trusted advisor.
Do terms like stock market volatility, bond bubble, hyperinflation, government debt, unemployment, low interest rates, rising tax rates, disappearing company pension plans, nursing home care, and the uncertainty of Social Security and Medicare, make you feel stress-free and happy? More than likely, they make you feel full of stress and unhappy. That's why it's crucial to learn the simple steps that can lead to a stress-free, happy retirement, no matter what the economy has in store. Aaron leads people through simple yet powerful concepts that, if applied, could lead to a more stable, happy retirement.
Peter J. D Arruda Peter J. D'Arruda is President of the IARFC (International Association of Registered Financial Consultants), an Investment Advisor, and has been in the financial arena for nearly 25 years. He is the founder at a financial firm designed to help his clients "Cross the street of life." At Capital Financial Advisory Group, LLC he and his team strive to help their clients take the worry out of living in retirement. Known as "COACH PETE" to most of his clients, Pete has made it his lifetime goal to assist his clients in achieving the levels of success they desire. He has authored 6 books and co-authored 2. Two of his books have reached the bestsellers list on Amazon. The most noteworthy book, Successonomics, is one that Coach Pete co-authored with Steve Forbes. But, by far, his favorite book just happens to be his most recent, "7 Baby Steps to a ridiculously Reliable Retirement Income" Each week he hosts the wildly popular, nationally syndicated, Financial Safari radio show, heard by millions each year. You can listen to past shows on itunes and by visiting FinancialSafari.com He has just been named to the prestigious Forbes Leadership Council and will be submitting at least 6 articles a year to Forbes for their readers' print and web enjoyment. He graduated from The University of North Carolina in 1988. is WINNER OF: 2 EMMYS 2 Quillys (best-selling author award) 3 EXPYS He is a proud father of daughter, Caroline, age 11 with his wife, Kim.