Mm-hmm

...

if life gets in the way or life goes sideways, you wanna have, you know, anywhere, usually around three to six months, uh, depending on your, your nature and, and, and your, your livelihood.

Um, you wanna have that kinda sitting on the sidelines for you.

So the cost of living.

Um, maybe your furnace dies.

Maybe you need a home renovation of, uh, of some sort or a new roof, all the fun things that people like to spend money on.

Um, if somebody listening, and there are lots of our listeners that are your clients, but if somebody listening does have a lot of cash sitting around in a savings account, what should the, you know, carve out or take away from this conversation be?

And why is that?

I mean, insurance is something that, again, a lot of us, depending on our careers, may have some form of insurance through work.

Although we encourage people to check on what that insurance actually is.

Is it insurance protecting the company for you not being there? Or is it actually for you and your loved ones? So a lot of people have insurance, AD&D and life insurance through their work policy.

So a separate one maybe is not necessary.

Ultimately, insurance is there to protect the wealth that we are building.

It's meant to complement a portfolio.

um that's a good question Fred because I'm wondering you know a lot of people who are in the retirement Sherpa demo from late 50s to early 70s wouldn't think they need typically life insurance because their portfolios as you mentioned here if someone has a large portfolio why would insurance still be a valuable asset

your spouse doesn't know about something like that that because we don't tend to look at that as significant and then but it's there and if somebody passed away the spouse bond may not even know it exists you know

100 i mean on all accounts financial institutions are pretty good at uh you know once uh once that death ledger or or the passing has been noted uh all these all these uh groups get notified and believe me visa companies are going to get their payment for sure Um, that's a guarantee.

Uh, the life insurance might sit on their hands a little bit longer to, uh, to pay out, but, uh, but yeah, it'll all get handled eventually, but the whole idea is to create continuity here, right? We just want to have some, some continuity, some, some self, uh, some self-confidence in, okay, like if the worst case scenario was to happen.

And again, in, in our world, the risk management business, that's really what we're meant to deal with is, you know, what is the worst case scenario and how can we protect as much of that downside as we can? And again, it's not all about the, you know, EFT that or the mutual fund this or the stock that.

I mean, that's the bare bones that your financial advisor should be doing for you.

It's the other bigger stuff that can make life a whole lot easier when time's not so

And I think we'd all agree we want to make that process as easy for them as we can.

You know what, we really want to really start doing even for us as great a job as we can and even a better job as we can to learning You know, we have a we have a great group of clients that that we love and our job on a daily basis to let's let's learn about the people above you.

Well, you ask this question, when does it make sense to gift money? So when does it make sense? And what are the sort of mechanics around doing it?

Yeah.

I mean, ultimately, we just want to know in a general sense, you know, where are we? Where are we in our retirement strategy? Do we do we know what lifestyle we want to live in retirement and and in our short term and long term goals? Because we do have to think about our own long term health care.

And are we going to be put in a home and all of those costs? But if all of those are built into your retirement plan or projections and you notice that.

Even even with your guardrails of like, OK, markets have, you know, historically bad years for, you know, for two of the next five years.

And even with all the what if scenarios, your guardrail still has surplus.

you can kind of say, okay, well, the surplus I can give.

And so it's something you've got to plan before you

And so what, from your perspective, what would the risks be? And then how do you sort of counter that with safety? Yeah,

I mean, the public available AI platforms, privacy is the big matter, right? So you put stuff out there and the systems that you're putting it into, they're going to retain this information because that's how they learn.

And if you give it information that you may be aren't aware of, like you upload a statement and you forget that your account number is on there.

You forget your banking information might be somewhere located or your social insurance number.

Like these are big problems because now that information that you just uploaded a statement, you just gave it to the AI platform and now they have it and they're keeping it.

So you got to be really careful.

The general rule of thumb that we kind of tell a lot of our clients when we're talking to them, if you wouldn't post anything, if you wouldn't post it online, Don't enter it into a public AI platform.

And as you just mentioned, then it's gone.

The Retirement Sherpa Shop, um, can help you with these conversations to decide what you wanna do now, because now is the time to do the things you've always wanted to do.

A hundred percent.

It, it, it's, we, we find in our industry, um, far too many that sit in our seats are, "We gotta save.

You gotta keep saving." And, and we are, we, we're not saying that that's not important.

It is at certain aspects in life.

But when you get to another aspect of life in your, call it in your mid-60s, it's, if you've put in the hard work for the last 30 years, it's time to live, man, a- and get out and do it while you can.

Mm-hmm

... um, having stuff passed to beneficiaries outside of things, then what happens is, is, is all that wealth gets tied up in the estate settlement, and now it can be months, years, couple of years before everything gets kind of shoveled out to people.

So basically what you're asking or saying is how do you enjoy today without jeopardizing tomorrow? So enjoy yourself, but be reasonable.

Yeah.

I mean, to quantify some simple numbers, you know, it's paying yourself first for, for, for people at different stages in life.

You know, if you just take a hundred bucks per week and you know that you're saving that, that's $5,200 a year.

then let 20, 30 years, depending on where stage of life you're at, compound for you.

You know that down the road at an 8, 8.5% compound return, in a 20-year period, you're at about $350,000.

And if you do it over a 30-year period, your $156,000 invested is just shy of a million at $940,000, right? So these are numbers that we try to remind people of because...

Those are the conversations you have with someone like Jay and Tim and and everybody at the retirement Sherpa head office.

And maybe you could just take it and, uh, kind of explain what you guys do and, and what, and what, and the value of something like that.

Y- you know what, this is, this is a topic that really does a great job of synopsizing kind of everything we like to do every six to nine months for our client anyway.

So the fact that it's a midyear check-in, we're, we're gonna call it that, but we do this at any time of year when we, when we're chatting with clients.

It, it's really just continually reminding people to ask the simple question, "Am I still on track to reach the financial goals for 2026 if I had some short-term ones and, and beyond? Am, am I still on track for them?" And, you know, really, it's, financial planning is not just about the investments and asking the simple questions that most Canadians and, and, and our friends south of the border say, which is they just only care about whether their account balance goes up every month.

Like, that, that's not what it's about.

Now, it's been about that the last few months, for sure, which has been great.

What does it look like?

Yeah.

This is, I'm curious, what role do my POA and TCPs play from an estate planning narrative? What are those acronyms?

Acronyms.

Yeah, we love acronyms in this industry.

We've said that more than once.

But POA is going to be your power of attorneys.

Most people would have that in their wills and estates, not just only for their financial resources and their assets there, but also for their health and wellness care.

So you'd have a POA for both of those.

I mean, and that's the type of thing people put off and put off and put off, right?

But the question I think a lot of people are curious about, what does a first visit with you guys look like?

The goal for us is to right away add value.

If we're not adding value to people, we're not doing our job.

So, yeah, we love to have the social aspect and the friendship aspect conversations, of course.

But, you know, as I like to remind people, a lot of those friendship conversations that we're having, we're asking you like where you like to go, what you like to do, what kind of travel do you have? Because all of that helps lay the foundation and groundwork for the lifestyle you want to lead.

And in order to lead that lifestyle, there's... financial conversations that need to be involved.

But for us, we wanna begin with understanding what your current actions are.

So essentially, yeah, you do an inventory of where they are and analyze all of that stuff?

It's about what, when and what is the best time to do it.

Yeah, a- absolutely.

It, it, it, you know, it can definitely be around that, that magical age of 60 to 65 when people are looking to retire.

The reality for so many of us in, in Canada specifically, we are very much house rich and cash poor.

And as you go into your retirement years and you stop that, that source of income, which has been your work, you need to know that you have other sources of income.

Like, what, what sources of income versus wealth, like your wealth isn't changing just because-

Mm-hmm.

There's, there's multi-generational homes that are becoming more and more a thing of the now.