Hi, my name is Bob Brooks and I'm here to tell you that saving more money won't get you to retirement. Now, you may think that is the most ridiculous thing that I could possibly say, because after all, the financial services industry, the mutual fund industry, they tell you, if you want to get to retirement, the key to it is saving more money. In fact, they go as far as saying in some publications, that if you save X percent of your income on a monthly basis, that you'll be able to take out a certain amount of income, as if just by saving that's going to happen at retirement. And I understand that, you know, it's one of those situations where consumers have to rely on the financial services industry, they have to rely on the mutual fund industry to get information because we're as adults, we are learning on the fly.

You know, we go through 12 years of education, and if we're fortunate, we go to another four to five years of college education. We do all that education without a single course on how to deal with money. How to Learn the key skill set of dealing with money. So we get out of school, we get our first job. We just we kind of learned here and there we learned through the money magazines of the world, the Kiplinger's of the world. We learn through radio shows, financial media, and we just piece it all together.

The problem is, is that we do so in a manner that creates the process of what I've defined as belief renting. This is using other people's beliefs and adopting them as your own because they sound right. Now, we do this all the time. It's a very, very bad habit. And what happens is, is that, let me give you an example. Let's say that I said, I told you that value stocks are the best way to go value stocks are the only investment that you need to use to get to retirement.

And I give out a whole series of reasons why you listen to that, and you go, Wow, I think I want to be a valued value stock investor. That makes total sense to me. Now, at that point, what you've done is you've rented my belief because if I went to you I said, so tell me why you want to be a value investor and break down your strategy for me, you probably wouldn't be able to do it because you don't understand it fully. You see, this is the problem is that we hear things and we go, Oh, that sounds reasonable. And then we take it and apply it in our lives. And the problem is, is this pop culture Finance?

Now think about this for a second, financial education and information developed as a belief rent for the masses. And let me read that, again, financial education and information developed. So this this is these beliefs, these ideas, these principles, they market it out to people as a belief, right? Because they just want you to buy into it and believe it. It's for the masses. And this is so this is so true, this that this happens this way is that the masses all believe the same way.

They're all listening to the same financial services industry. And here's the thing about pop culture finance, is that they dumb it down. They make it they make the complex, so simple, and there's a reason why The financial services industry does that the reason they dumb it down is because salespeople can sell dumb down ideas better, you kind of get to see where all this is going. So the reason and I'll give you another pop culture finance, Tip of the day, if you will, is buy and hold, you know, invest your money and never move it, never touch it. And there's a reason why they never want you to move it, they never want you to sell it. Because if you sell your investments, if you take your investments out of the stock market, guess who doesn't get paid the financial services industry.

So there, here's the problem with with ideas, in messages and things that is communicated to you is that they come from a bias or they come from an agenda. And so you've got to be able to take that information and say, say I say something about value stocks, we'll go back there again, and I'll give you the process that I go through. And you look at that and go You know what, I I'm gonna start making that taking ownership of this idea. So you start investigating it, you look at the pros and the cons and you find that 20% of it. What I say you don't really agree with because it doesn't it's not really doesn't apply to your life. So you adjust it and you make it your own.

That's the beauty about ownership of an idea, ownership of a belief is making it your own. Now, Humphrey be Neil, he wrote a fantastic book called The Art of contrary thinking. And this should be a book is written back in 1956. This should be a book on everybody's reading list because it does what we're talking about here. It teaches you to think indiv on an individual basis, not as the masses are thinking. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Back in the late 90s, the tech bubble was just going crazy. Everybody was investing in internet stocks, buying tech stocks thinking they're gonna make you rich when reality. These were companies that didn't even have a product. They weren't even off the ground but yet people were throwing tons of money based on these stocks are going to go to the moon and make me a millionaire. And so what ended up happening everybody was pouring money into it under this belief, this popcorn your belief. And what happened was that technology stocks crashed and crashed in a big way.

And most of those companies got wiped out. Same thing happened in 2008 leading up to 2007 in real estate, pop culture belief that real estate prices were going to go sky high, they're never going to decline. And people it was interesting back then, well back in Oh 706 is that people really did believe that real estate prices couldn't go down? Well, they can't go down. They did go down, they crashed, and people lost a ton of money with the financial crisis. So the masses do everything together.

This book teaches you not to think of like the masses. I love this quote, and it stood the test of time. When everybody thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong. When everybody thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong. So you got to be real careful about pop culture, finance. So saving is important.

There's no question, but it's not the only thing. The only important part of the equation. Now we want to teach our kids to say we want to savings one of most important habits. If you're saving a good healthy amount of your income, you're probably living within your means. It's a good part of the entire process. But there's really four keys to retirement success.

And if you can manage to work through this process, these four important critical aspects of the retirement planning process, you will greatly increase the odds of future investment success, unfortunately, and I can say this pretty confidently, that I have met very few people who practice this. And it's a shame because you'll see as we talk through it, if you can refocus your attention on going through this process, you have so much more of a probability of success going forward. So let's start with the first part of it. Obviously, it's to save and you can't start the process without the habit of saving and You know, in talking to people, you'll ask them, Well, are you saving for retirement? Oh, absolutely. I'm saving for retirement.

Well, what are you specifically saving for retirement? Well, what does that look like? And that's the problem is that most people can't tell you a great answer would be well, at age 66, I plan to retire at age 66. I plan to start drawing out this amount of income. And I know that between now and age 66, I need to make this amount of money on my on this amount of return on my money, and I need to save this amount of money. And so it's a concrete laid out plan.

But most people don't know that. And they just they're just uninformed. I call it unintentional saving. You got to change that to intentional saving, saving for a true purpose, a true financial objective. And then there's the invest part, obviously a very important part as well. And what's interesting, this is where most people stop, they go, they save, they invest and they stop investing money.

Is just the start of things. Now the dumb it down. Pop Culture finance would tell you, hey, you just put that money in those investments, sock it away, lat leave it for the long term. And there's so much more to it than just that. There's I call it Plan A and plan B investing. Plan A is Yeah, put it, put it in the market put it to work for you.

But the problem with the stock market is that it's not always a great place to be invested. So why be invested if it's not the best place to be? You know, one of the things that pop culture finance will teach you is that if you're young, just take as much risk is possible because you have time on your on your side. But when Why does it make sense? When the markets not working to be invested in the market? Why did it make sense in Oh 7209 to lose almost 57% of your money, because you just couldn't stay invested for the long term.

So there's way more to it comes down to having an investment strategy. You have your investments you go through the process of investing, but you've got to back that with a strategy, which leads us to the third. And this is uncharted territory for most people, which is managed for risk, you see there's a risk and reward formula. And it goes like this. If the reward is high and the risk is low, then you want to make that investment. So the chance of losing a ton of money is low.

The market environment is amazing. It's a real good environment for investing. And so the possibility for reward is up here. But a lot of times we get this shift, where the possibility of losing a lot of money is really high. So the possibility of making money is low. So the whole management process simply means you're putting your you're giving gas to the car, you're putting your foot on the pedal, giving it gas taking risk, but sometimes you got to break sometimes you want to back off of that risk.

And the problem with with pop culture, finances, they almost villainize you for doing that. You want to sell your investments, you want to change things. Instead, another way you want I think is what you want to do. You want to manage for risk managed for growth. If you talk to most investment professionals are going to talk about growth and focus on growth, I would suggest it's an equal focus. And if you can apply the the principles of managing for growth and balance it with risk with equal emphasis on both, you have a far better chance of succeeding long term versus role riding, the roller coaster of investments where you go up for a period, you go back down and give it back, you give it away, you go back up, you go back down, and markets go through these cycles.

I'm really excited about doing that teaching videos, we're going to talk about how markets really work. And you may be something that your advisor doesn't know but you're going to notice we're going to talk about it. When I do that video. Then the what I always had a tendency to say this, the most important there are four important parts you got to have all four to work together. I do put a little bit more emphasis on tracking because it makes no sense to go through the process of saving to go through the process. Excessive investing and having a strategy to go through the process of managing if you're not going to know where your results are, and most people don't know where they are, they'll come in, they'll sit down in my office, and they'll say, and I'll ask them.

So how do you feel about retirement? Oh, I was No way. No way I'll ever retire. There's no way I know, I haven't saved enough. Well, what's your goal? I don't know.

But I know there's no retire. So it comes down to really knowing your numbers. So a very simple method. Once again, we're going to do another teaching video on this. But the process of benchmarking and that is knowing at the end of each year, this is where I need to be this is how much in assets are investments I need to have. So let's say at the end of this year, I need to have $300,000 accumulated as my goal for two for this particular year.

Let's say I have 325. That extra $25,000 is very powerful. It gives you decision making options like you wouldn't believe and plus it gives you the confidence that you're on track and you know that this is going to get me to where I need to go. Now, here's the thing about planning like this, some people will lead you to believe they'll put this financial plan together, they'll put it in a nice leather bounder binder, they'll put it down in front of you. So here is how everything's supposed to work. Well, I don't know about you, but life doesn't kind of work that way.

There's no flex, there's not a whole lot of flexibility, sometimes unexpected things happen. Life happens, as I say. And so you got to have flexibility. So our whole goal of tracking here is to get us to in the ballpark. Because once you get to the ballpark, you've got options. It's just like a kind of kind of use this analogy.

It's like you point A to point B, you're trying to go to your first NFL football game. And so you want to get to the parking lot you want to get to the game once you get to the game. Now you get to buy a ticket and you got all these options of what you want to what ticket you want to buy. It's the same thing with retirement. You have all these options from best case scenario, down to worst case scenario. The thing about the importance of tracking along the way is that you are flexible with that tracking guide that with those benchmarks, and you adjust them, you adjust your goal.

It's very, very fluid, but unimportant process. You know, it's interesting that, you know, we we, as far as investing goes in the way that we go about the process of our beliefs that people don't put more time into it. You know, there's been time periods in the past, where it's been easy to be an investor. I always heard the expression many times in the 90s, that you could take the Wall Street Journal, put it on a wall, throw a dart, hit a stock, invest and make money. I mean, it was easy, then you just kind of go through those sweet spots in the market. And because of that, people don't pay attention.

People don't think Today we're in a totally different environment. You don't have the luxury not to think not to own your beliefs about how, see how you get to a successful place with money. So if I can encourage you to do anything is to Take what I've talked about, make it your own, make it your own belief systems based on your particular situation. But be intentional about the keys that will make you very successful down the road.