Bill & Pete Bush: Episode 970

Transcript

[0:00:34] FG: If you’re like many future retirees in their 50s, you’re facing a milestone in the next decade that can feel like an overwhelming deadline: retirement. If you’re also a business owner or corporate executive, the pressure is greater because people outside your family depend on you. Are you prepared? Perhaps you have all the elements, robust savings, ample 401(k) investments, adequate insurance, even a rough next plan at work where you haven’t connected them in a comprehensive strategy. In The Runway Decade, financial advisors, Pete Bush and Bill Bush provide an insider’s look at how to simplify the complex process of planning for retirement. Their unique holistic approach includes all areas of wealth, from social security benefits and Medicare coverage, to charitable giving and tax planning. You can control your future as long as you have the right tools. With work sheets and exercises available in each chapter, The Runway Decade is your roadmap for navigating the crucial years before retirement, so you can provide, protect and prosper for yourself and those who depend on you. This is the Author Hour Podcast, and I’m your host, Frank Garza. Today, I’m joined by Pete Bush and Bill Bush, authors of a brand-new book, The Runway Decade: Building a Preretirement Flight Plan in your 50s. Pete and Bill, welcome to the show.

[0:02:04] PB: Thanks Frank, good to be here.

[0:02:05] Bill & Pete Bush: Thank you, Frank.

[0:02:07] FG: I’d love to just start by hearing a little bit about each of your backgrounds and how that led to you writing this book? Pete, do you want to start?

[0:02:15] PB: Absolutely, yeah. So last year, 2021, I made 30 years as a financial advisor. I got into that relatively young, right out of school and built a business over time, working with all kinds of different professionals, business people, people that were looking to retire, being a former athlete, ended up working with a lot of baseball players. So it’s really very background as an advisor and fast-forward 30 years, giving you the short version of it, over time, we developed obviously, a client focused business that helps giving retirement advice and just good overall financial and investment advice to individuals and businesses, and then we have our 401(k) retirement plan business that brothers Bill and Andy, I’m sure Bill can tell you more about. Then we also, over time, developed an advisory business that we call Horizon Investor Network, where we support other financial advisors. So been quite a journey over 30 years and probably as excited as I’ve ever been being in this business. It’s just a great business.

[0:03:21] FG: Great, how about you, Bill?

[0:03:22] Bill & Pete Bush: Well, this is actually my third career. I started out right out of college as a sports caster and was your six-in-10 sports guy for about 13 years, and got out of that into healthcare and healthcare marketing and worked my way into the administration side of healthcare, and was actually the CEO for a couple of post-acute care hospitals in the middle part of the state of Louisiana, and so brothers Pete and Andy had this thing going in Batton Rouge called Horizon Financial Group and they came to me from time to time, just looking for advice on some marketing initiatives and that type of thing. One day, out of the blue, they called and said, “Hey man, this is crazy but we want you to come work with us” and so at the age of just about 50 years old, I changed careers, got licensed as an advisor, did all the schooling and licensing into it and joined my brothers Pete and Andy at Horizon about seven years ago. So, been a varied and interesting career but certainly glad to be here and very excited about the book coming out, you know, that Pete and I worked on.

[0:04:28] FG: So I’ve got to ask, what were some of the sports and teams that you covered as a sports broadcaster?

[0:04:34] Bill & Pete Bush: Yeah, well, being in Louisiana, we had no short supply of good teams, you know? LSU and when Shaquille O’Neal was there, Skip Bertman was the coach of the LSU baseball team during that run, had some national championships in that time. I got to cover the Super Bowl which would have been, I think Super Bowl 31 if remember right, Packers and Patriots down in the super dome, and then the middle part of the state covered a northwestern state, was the college up there that had produced quite a bit of NFL players. So I got to see a lot of things, it was great.

[0:05:05] FG: Yeah, sounds fun. All right, your book, The Runway Decade, can you tell me about who the target audience is that you wrote it for? Who did you have in mind as you were writing it?

[0:05:18] PB: Well, The Runway Decade is that decade leading up to retirement. So as we find ourselves in the middle of our 50s. Bill and I, and of course, Andy’s a couple years younger, you know, really writing the book to our peers, you know? The people that have turned 50, there’s something different that happens when you cross over that hill of 50 that all of a sudden, retirement is like a real thing, and it was an awareness that came to us in our practice too, because one person after another and they might have been 49 or they might have been 51 or two but somewhere in that little chapter right there of life, people start thinking differently about the future and about work and knowing they’re on the backside of the working career. So the audiences really those folks either, right about to turn 50 or maybe in their 50s that although they may have accumulated and obviously started saving long ago and building their financial future long ago, this not necessarily somebody that hasn’t started yet, although, I think that would be helpful to that person as well. It's really for that person that has started and has had some success and maybe is even a little scattered at this point. They find themselves on the runway, as we call it, because they may have not got their plan together yet but they still have, as Bill likes to say, they still have runway left to get things together for the retirement years ahead. So anyone in their 50s, but I think particularly your audience is business people, it might be doctors, it might be professionals of all different kinds but I think it will resonate with anyone that has that preretirement-type mindset.

[0:07:00] FG: As you sit down and talk with people in their 50s about their retirement, what are some of the most common questions you get from them or maybe what are some of the more common fears you get from that group?

[0:07:12] Bill & Pete Bush: Well, I think you hit on a good word there, it’s fear, and that often is what leads people not to take action. They’re scared of maybe making a mistake, they’re scared of reaching out to someone who they don’t trust maybe, and so I think part of the book is to talk people through managing those fears and overcoming those fears. In terms of common questions that a lot of people have is, am I on track?

[0:07:38] PB: Yeah, how much am I going to need?

[0:07:40] Bill & Pete Bush: Do I have enough, you know? And even like, “Have I done well, I’m not sure.” There’s a lot of maybe uncertainty about their situation, and I think that’s where maybe the book can help to right them.

[0:07:53] PB: We do get this a little bit. We get, “Hey, for other people you work with my age or people in my age group, how am I stacking up?” and of course, we always, I think as humans, we like to measure ourselves in a lot of ways but this is one way where it’s a truly unique personal situation. It’s really impossible to compare different financial situations because everybody is really different.

[0:08:18] FG: So, you mentioned in the introduction of your book that in the book, you go through the very same process that you take your clients through, you call it, The Confident Wealth Experience. Can you give me a little bit of a background about how you developed that process and maybe just a big-picture look at what that is?

[0:08:38] PB: Well, you got to go back a long way to when I started and the industry itself was a little bit different, it was very financial product-oriented. The advice, planning and advice side of the business really took on shape as I got into the industry and, early on, I think you get into business like this and you realize, “Okay, well, I need to be an investment expert, I need to know all the strategies and taxes” and you know, everything under the sun to help people make good decisions. The thought that came out over time, and this is just from being in meetings with individuals over and over and over again, is what they’re really looking for, if you summed it up in a word, was confidence. As Bill said earlier, maybe afraid of making a big mistake or couldn’t overcome inertia to go get their wills and things done with the attorney. Just something was preventing them, and the something that was preventing them was they didn’t have confidence in themselves or the decision they were about to make, and so I really feel like and we say this in our firm all the time, financially confident people do make the world better. They make everything around them better and it’s because there is an absence of some things. There’s an absence of worry, there’s an absence of anxiety, and confusion and fear. Not that those things don’t come and go in everyone’s life. Confidence is not a permanent state of course. I mean, like right now, things are a little bit scary for people and the idea there is that we’re always in the situation where we’re either helping someone build confidence, we are helping them maintain confidence in the situation they already have, or maybe we’re restoring confidence from a situation where it’s been lost. Maybe they go through a loss of a spouse or they go through a divorce and all along, they were chugging along pretty confident and then all of a sudden, they’re knocked off of confidence. So confidence is kind of a superpower. It’s probably the biggest thing we can give people and that also turns out to be a very individual thing, what makes people confident as individual, but think of it as an absence of worry and anxiety about financial things, that’s really our sweet spot because we know that financially confident people make the world better.

[0:10:56] FG: So the first chapter is called, “Where Are You Going?” and you go over some basic questions that you say people need to ask themselves. Could you talk about what a few of these questions are?

[0:11:09] Bill & Pete Bush: Well, I think for sure, I think the challenge there is when you’re talking about retirement, what do you want it to look like? You know, some people have the tendency just to be caught in their every day work day and mindlessly drift, and then, “Oh, hey, by the way, I’m retiring, you know?” Well, we challenge the reader really to say, “This is your opportunity.” You know, there is runway left, there is 15 years, maybe, for most folks that are reading this book, maybe 10 for some, but there’s time to really think about, what do you want the rest of your life to be, because folks could potentially be in retirement for 30 years. It’s not unheard of when we talk about that in terms of some of the average lifespans of people really and so, this is the time to really paint that picture. What we like to do with our clients when we sit down with them is show them like, “Hey, this is a blank canvas and we’re just here to help you paint that canvas as to what you really want it to be. So, how are you going to spend your time?” That’s a good question. How do you see yourself spending your time in retirement? Who are you going to spend it with, right?

[0:12:15] PB: Where?

[0:12:16] Bill & Pete Bush: Where?

[0:12:17] PB: Where are you going to be? Are you going to live in your current home or relocate somewhere? You know, we see a lot of relocating closer to be by the grandkid’s kind of stuff. So those are some of the core questions and then, we paint a picture in the book because I think this is a good exercise for everybody is, visions are very powerful and pictures are very powerful. We talk about this imagining that your retirement dinner and your best friend is toasting you and—

[0:12:43] Bill & Pete Bush: Right.

[0:12:43] PB: Who is in t he room with you and what do they say in and what had to happen between now and then so that, as you’re looking back to today, whatever today is, that you know you’re drawing this picture in your mind of how it turned out perfectly, and that’s a very powerful exercise to go through.

[0:13:01] FG: Yeah. I mean, one of those very first questions that caught my eye when I was reading through it was, “Where do you want to live?” Well, it sounds like it’s such a simple question but it’s something I find myself thinking about in terms of my retirement, and it makes a huge difference in terms of how much money you’re going to need based on where you live. So I thought that was a great list of questions there.

[0:13:19] Bill & Pete Bush: Oh yeah and I mean, there are other ones. You know, even a second home. You hear about folks retiring, want a vacation home or, like Pete said, live close enough to where you can experience those you love, like your grandkids, that kind of thing. Also, asking yourself, “How am I going to spend my time in terms of am I going to have an encore career or volunteer?” or something like that. A lot of these questions that generally paint the picture around retirement, some of them have pretty deep financial consequences, right? Or financial questions that go along with them. We are really trying to get the reader to sort out in their mind.

[0:13:57] PB: Yeah, there is a little bit of retiring to something or retiring from something and you see entrepreneurs tend to not retire. They just reinvent themselves into the next chapter, whatever it might be. We’ve had some great podcast guests along those lines that talk about not retiring in the traditional sense just shifting gears and focusing on something else, with their time and energy and money and whatnot, and I think that’s an important consideration is some people are looking to retire to something that they want to do, that they just haven’t had time to do. Whereas, you do have folks that hey, they may say, “Hey, I’m grinding it out for 30 years at the chemical plant down here on the river and I am retiring from that, so that I will never have to show up there again,” and I mean it is. There is a wide variety of people and how they think, but it is more like your personal version of that, what does that look like?

[0:14:51] FG: Right, okay the next chapter, Obstacles to Overcome, what are some common obstacles that people face that they need to overcome?

[0:14:59] Bill & Pete Bush: Well, I think the big one is procrastination, you know, just putting things off.

[0:15:03] PB: Good old inertia.

[0:15:04] Bill & Pete Bush: Good old overcome inertia, you know? Making excuses. We do find saving for retirement in the financial and the quantitative piece is one thing but really, there are a lot of these behavioral type issues that could become obstacles, you know? Like hey, we hear this commonly, “I meant to see you guys. I’ve been thinking about seeing you guys for three years” you know? Putting off that initial meeting for whatever but I mean, there are other things that not knowing where your money goes, the details of just your simple household budget, you know?

[0:15:38] PB: Being disorganized. Financial disorganization obviously cost people a lot of money. To Bill’s point about the three years, some people say, “I just don’t have enough time. I know this is important but I am busy at work and with the family and all of this and I just don’t have enough time.” And it’s as we all know. I mean, you make time for the things that are a priority and it is just the fact that it hasn’t become a priority yet but, usually, when you get into the runway decade, people start to make it more of a priority.

[0:16:06] Bill & Pete Bush: I think too, people just accumulate overtime. You know, that accumulation of little pieces of your financial life put in maybe different drawers or at different part of your mind leads to this disorganization. You know, a lot of people change jobs quite frequently now. You know, it is not unheard of to work for four, five, six, seven different companies in your lifetime. Well, if you had a 401(k) in each on those places and you forgot about a couple of them or you don’t know how much life insurance you had when you bought that policy 12 years ago or whatever the case is, this book really challenges the reader to say, this is the time in your life to get organized and to get a plan together and to wrap all the unknowns into knowns.

[0:16:51] FG: You talked earlier that people in their 50s that you talk to, some of the most common questions and fears they have are, “How am I doing? Am I on track? Do I have enough? How much am I going to need?” and in the next chapter of the book, “Where are You Now”, we start to talk about that a little bit. So, I know it is not a simple straightforward answer to calculate “how am I doing now?” but for people who want to answer that question, what are some of the first things they can do or what are some of the key steps they can take to figure out how they are doing now?

[0:17:26] PB: Well, I think the first step is understanding where you are now and there’s a lot of folks, and Bill eluded to this earlier, that just aren’t paying attention. They have been drifting along without a plan, without paying much attention to the monthly, quarterly annual gyrations of their financial life, and so we tend to think of this in terms of a GPS. We talked first chapter about where you’re going, that’s what you type into the GPS when you first pull it up. Well, that’s the first thing. The second thing it does is it finds out where you are right now and, in our world, that is getting an inventory of your assets and liabilities, it is taking stock of all of your benefits at work, it is looking to really turning over the stone of all the different aspects of your financial life, whether it’s risk management or taxes or assistance to others that you need to provide. All those things that are impacting your financial world at the moment, that’s where you are right now and, as the saying goes, you can tell where you are by where you are. That’s a good way to think of getting to pinpoint accuracy on where you are now because you’d be surprised. You would think, “Well, I mean, people may not where they’re going but surely, they know where they are now.” That’s actually not true. People have a vague idea of what kind of insurance coverage they have, their will may be 10 years old and they can’t really recall what they put in it. It is not something you look at every day. So there is some kind of ideas and, like I said, vague concepts of what happen. They may not be paying attention to their 401(k) and their asset allocation and things of this nature. So, you would say people know where they are but the truth of it is, they don’t really have a grip on the details, maybe because it is not their thing or maybe just because they, again, all of those obstacles we talked about in the last chapter.

[0:19:19] FG: So later on, there is a chapter called, “What’s Working and What’s not Working” and you talk about these audits you should give yourself in different categories of your finances and retirement. I wanted to ask you about one of them in particular, cash flow and budgeting. You go over some of the questions you should be considering as you audit this category. What are some of the things you should be considering as you audit yourself under cash flow and budgeting?

[0:19:49] Bill & Pete Bush: Yeah, I think a big one is, do you have an emergency fund set aside? You know, some cash reserves, and there’s been varying guidance along that line, but I would say, three to six months of your household expenses should some emergency come up, would you be able to cover that? That is a goal to build on and even the closer you get to retirement, the bigger that account should become. It should cover maybe a year of your expenses and, right before retirement, hopefully you would build up an emergency fund that could get you through two years even, so that is another one. Then you know, do you have things that are leaking out? It’s little financial pieces that are leaking out of your picture like memberships or subscriptions that you no longer use or you can cancel and get refunded. Is your mortgage rate up to date? Of course, interest rates have risen lately but there is still maybe some opportunities and lines of credit and other things of that nature. Pete, you probably have some more.

[0:20:49] PB: Well, you know, you tend to think of budgeting and it is a dirty word to most people. They don’t like to – they think of the restrictiveness of budget is depriving me of something, you know? That is the mindset they have. All a budget really is, is the tracking of the money that is coming in and the money that’s going out, and then the discretionary money that’s left over. It’s those three simple things but almost no one does it. The most successful people we work with, they keep track of their dollars and their pennies. In some way, shape or form, through technology or through a CPA or CFO service of some kind, they are constantly in tuned, at least once a month, with where they stand financially. So it doesn’t have to feel like this burdensome process. It is more about, and again, most advisers’ advise getting your arms around what they would call your budget or your PNL or profit loss. In the sense that you need the discretionary income to set aside into the buckets to build wealth and to build the buckets of money that are going to provide you income when the paychecks stop. So, to arrive at that, you have to arrive at the discretionary income and all those things Bill said, there is the, we use this bathtub analogy, there is the spigot coming in and the water coming through the spigot. There’s the hole in the bottom, the drain, which we would call your expenses and maybe there is some level of water in the tub which, let’s just call that your cash reserves that Bill talked about. Well, when the spigot stops pouring in, the hole is still there in the bottom, right? So the water level is going to go down. If you haven’t set aside your discretionary income, which again, comes out of your cash flow and budgeting, to start pumping water back into the tub, to keep the water level or at least increase it or whatever, what happens? The drain brings it all down. And, going into retirement, you want that drain to be smaller as possible. You want the expenses to be controllable and the smallest as possible. So that is a good visual, it tends to make sense for most people because we think most people have taken a bath at some point in their life and they can relate to that. The bottom line is that you have to have a plan for that and the way you plan for that is through identifying areas where you can shrink that hole in the bottom, while the money is coming in. You don’t want the tub to overflow either, so if you have so much gushing in through the spigot and not that much going out the tub will overflow. What do you do? You take some buckets out and you set them to the side for later. So I think that pretty much sums up cash flow and budgeting to us. The devil is in the detail I guess for most people and really, the inertia of keeping it. It puts people in a bad mood, it feels like scarcity and you know, there is a lot of angst around budgeting but really, it’s a simple process.

[0:23:46] FG: Well, writing a book is such a feat so congratulations on putting this out into the world. Before we wrap up, is there anything else about you or the book that you want to make sure our listeners know?

[0:23:59] Bill & Pete Bush: Yeah, I will just say that there are a few deliverables, some work sheets that kind of help the reader really wrap their brain around a more efficient planning. Those are available on our website, runwaydecade.com, they are mentioned in the book. There’s a thing called the strategic organizer. As we mentioned, disorganization is one of those main obstacles to overcome and this is just a document that really takes a good inventory, if you can find the pieces that are listed in that document to help you get more organized. So, if you seek out a professional, you’ll be leg up right there.

[0:24:34] PB: Yeah, I think my closing comments would be around taking action. Part of the reason for this book and why we put our heads together to do it, is just to motivate people to take action towards building a plan they can live with, and adjust as they go forward the rest of their lives. We know that if somebody reads this book and they do nothing and they come back a year from now, they’re still going to have anxiety, worry, regret, maybe even that they didn’t take advantage of some things, but the people that we work with that become successful and thriving and confident, which is, the big word of our process, they simply make a checklist, they take action on it, they start checking them off, and that momentum builds on itself. So, that would be what I would encourage people to do, is just don’t read the book and put it down, read the book and take action somehow.

[0:25:25] FG: Thank you Pete and Bill. This has been such a pleasure, the book is called, The Runway Decade: Building a Preretirement Flight Plan in Your 50s. Besides checking out the book, where can people find you?

[0:25:37] Bill & Pete Bush: Yeah, runwaydecade.com is the website there’s a lot of good information there about planning for your retirement and also meeting people in their 50s, we have a podcast called The Runway Decade Podcast, you’ll find some episodes on the site as well.

[0:25:52] PB: Then our practices, horizonfg.com, it’s Horizon Financial Group. We’re located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana but we have clients all over the country. You know, we welcome any emails or calls or questions people have.

[0:26:03] FG: Thank you Pete and Bill.

[0:26:04] PB: Thanks Frank.

[0:26:06] Bill & Pete Bush: Thank you.

[0:26:07] FG: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, The Runway Decade, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as all of our previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time, same place, different author.