[Travis] Welcome back. Over the course of this series, I've spoken with many different guests on the new realities of retirement, and one of the things I like to ask everyone is, what have you learned that you wish everyone knew about preparing for retirement? Well, my guest today shares my curiosity. In fact, she posed that question to a variety of thought leaders and compiled their answers in her new book. Welcome again to "Rebuilding Retirement: Navigating a new reality with your clients," a podcast series from Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America. I'm Travis Walker. Joining me is Christine Benz, director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning at Morningstar. She's got a new book out, "How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement." In it, she explores not just the financial but the emotional side of retirement. Christine talks about the benefits of the bucket strategy for retirement portfolio planning, different income styles for the decumulation phase, and the need to think of retirement as a series of stages and not as a hard stop. She also talks about how financial professionals can incorporate purpose and values into their conversations with clients. I really appreciated getting her perspective, and I think you will too. Thank you for joining us. Welcome, Christine.
[Christine] Travis, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.
[Travis] You recently came out with a book, "How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement." Tell us about that book.
[Christine] So the book is a series of 20 interviews with thought leaders, and each interview, each chapter is a lesson about how to do some aspect of retirement planning. And many people are probably familiar with my work on Morningstar.com, it's mainly financial, I talk a lot about investing and tax matters. The book does cover that terrain, but it also spends a lot of time on non-financial matters, because as I've gone down this road of understanding retirement and thinking a little bit more about my own retirement, I've come to realize that the decision about whether and when to retire is probably less than 50% financial. There are a lot of non-financial considerations that go into how to do it and how to be happy and successful in that part of your life. And so I wanted to bring those topics out in the book as well. So I'm really happy with how the book turned out and it covers a ton of ground, I think.
[Travis] What about your experience set you up to write the book?
[Christine] Well, I had started at Morningstar as part of our fund research team, that we now call it manager research and then eventually headed up our U.S. manager research team. So this is the team that does the reports on individual mutual funds. Now we have a big suite of research on exchange-traded funds. I was heading up that team and eventually came to realize that there were a lot of things that we weren't helping investors address, so even though we're helping them select great funds, we weren't really helping them with the decision about how much to save and how to asset allocate across different investment types. So we weren't helping them with a lot of decisions that I felt like we should be helping them with. And that's where I began to focus more on financial planning, more on retirement planning. I went through the certified financial planner curriculum. I didn't actually earn the CFP because at the time my work that I was doing at Morningstar wouldn't have qualified for the work experience needed to earn the CFP, but nonetheless, felt like I got a lot of good working knowledge of financial planning matters under my belt. And so I have really been working on retirement planning in earnest over the past really couple decades because I've realized that the challenge is not so much for people saving and investing for retirement in the years leading up to retirement, that there's just so much more to talk about in the realm of retirement decumulation. It's just way more complicated and to my mind more interesting. So I've been toiling in that area for quite a few years now, writing articles and doing videos and presentations on the business of retirement planning. And I had also met a lot of the people who I interviewed in the book during the course of my podcast that I work on, which is called "The Longview." I had had the opportunity to meet with a lot of terrific retirement thought leaders and I think the book really nicely brings their voices out and I love that aspect of it.
[Travis] Looking at retirement money, in the book, you're mostly interviewing other people, but you turn the tables for one chapter, "Structure Your Portfolio for Cash Flows." Tell us about the strategy that you have gravitated toward for retirement portfolio planning, the bucket approach, and how has your view of income strategies changed over time?
[Christine] Yeah, it's interesting. I initially hit upon the bucket strategy, heard about the bucket strategy when I was talking with Harold Evensky, who was a financial planner, he's largely retired now and was also a professor of financial planning, and this was probably 20 years ago. And yields on safe securities were going lower and lower and lower for the better part of a couple decades there. And I remember saying to Harold, well, so if subsisting on income distributions isn't really a good way to do it, how should people think about constructing in retirement portfolios? And he said, "Well, I've hit on this simple system where I manage a long-term investment portfolio for my clients, and I also bolt on this cash bucket to cover their living expenses if the long-term portfolio isn't performing well for whatever reason, they know that they could pull from those liquid reserves if they needed to." And his point to me really stuck in my mind, which he said, "A big part of people's quality of life, whether they're retired or still working, is being able to plan for things, that that is one thing that gives people, it kind of animates their days." And so if you could set aside those liquid reserves, they know that they can still plan that cruise that they had wanted to take the family on or that they could still keep going out to dinner on Saturday night with their friends if that's something they really enjoy. He said, "I just wanted my clients to be able to continue to plan their experiences, to plan their lives, regardless of what was going on with their long-term investment portfolio." And his point was, inevitably the long-term investment portfolio will have some volatility, you'll have the periodic market downdrafts. The point is that I want my clients to not be spooked during those periods and I want them to just go on with their lives. And so I'm thinking something like that sounds like it really works behaviorally, that if it can keep people in their seats with their long-term portfolios, that is a concept worth talking more about. So I've been increasingly writing about the bucket strategy, I've come up with a lot of different bucket portfolios, model portfolios that are really just there for educational purposes. But the basic idea is that you are holding like two years' worth of liquid reserves, two years' worth of portfolio withdrawals in liquid reserves, and then you're stepping out a little bit on the risk spectrum with the next sections of the portfolio. So for the next, say, five to eight years' worth of portfolio withdrawals, you would hold a high-quality shortand intermediate-term bond portfolio, and then the remainder of the portfolio could go into a globally diversified equity portfolio. And then if there were any other sort of risky securities, whether high-yield bonds or commodities or precious metals or something like that, I would also hold that in my very long-term bucket, it's not there to meet my near-term living expenses. But the basic ideas that with those three buckets and especially those first two, you're building yourself effectively kind of a bulwark against an extended market downturn, an extended downturn in the equity markets. So you're giving yourself assets that you could draw upon if stocks went down and stayed down in a period of your retirement. So I feel like it does really work behaviorally. I've been hearing from a lot of readers over the years that they've taken the bucket strategy to heart, and I love hearing from them that it provides them with peace of mind, that it gives them the comfort to have the long-term assets that they need in their portfolio because they know they have that buffer of liquid reserves. In terms of thinking about how the strategy might fit in with an overall income strategy, I think the set thing that sometimes gets glossed over is that it's really sort of the last piece of the puzzle. The first piece is thinking about your in-retirement spending. And I like the idea of people getting quite granular when mapping out their in-retirement spending to the point where you're saying, okay, in year three I think we're gonna have to replace a car, in year seven, our roof will probably need to be replaced, whatever, to actually get quite specific and try to forecast some of those lumpy expenses. And of course it's hard to do that with a great level of precision, but you're doing that and then you're getting into, okay, what do I have coming to me in terms of guaranteed income sources, non portfolio income sources? So that's Social Security for many of us, for some people they may have a pension, for other people they may want to explore some sort of an annuity product. But the basic idea is that you are trying to line up your fixed spending, your very fixed outlays with those non-portfolio sources of income. And then you're moving on to, okay, given that, given the anticipated demands that I expect to make on my portfolio, how do I structure that portfolio? So a very long answer, but it is a process and I think people should start at the very beginning with their spending.
[Travis] Well, I think it's a very well thought-out strategy, and you mentioned some of the risk and that people are gonna think about when they're looking at retirement income. And I've said a million times in my life, you can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather. So yeah, what are some drawbacks that you could foresee with the strategy if you're looking at it from a financial professional's perspective, what they should know about the bucketing strategy and how that works?
[Christine] Well, one of the big ones is the opportunity cost. And this is especially true in a very low-yield environment like we had for the better part of the 2000s through really, 2021, we have very, very low yields. And as a bond investor in such a period, well, you benefit in terms of price appreciation, at least in your bonds, so you're having to settle for ever lower yields, but you also, when interest rates decline, you do get rising bond prices. So as a cash investor you get none of those things. So you have to settle for lower yields in a declining rate environment and you don't enjoy any price appreciation. So the big downside risk is opportunity cost with bucketing, which is why I always say you don't wanna overdo that cash bucket, even though it does provide an attractive sense of peace of mind, and may at various points in time, like the very recent past supply a halfway decent yield, you wanna be careful not to over allocate to that cash bucket, because it's basically kind of dead weight in your portfolio. It may beat inflation by a little bit, but in many environments it'll be negative on an inflation-adjusted basis. So you need to take care.
[Travis] Gotcha. Well I appreciate you giving us the other side of the coin. It's only fair and you described that very well. So thanks. You have talked about how accumulating for retirement is pretty automated with 401(k) and other options, but then decumulation is somehow very manual, and that causes a lot of stress and we're gonna get into it later a little bit about feeling and behaviors and things like that. But how can a financial professional help their clients with the very manual phase of decumulation?
[Christine] Yeah, it's a complicated business. I think you can help them understand why you're recommending a certain asset allocation. It's also helpful to give your clients some guidance on how much they can reasonably spend from their portfolios. This is obviously a hot topic for anyone advising on retirement matters, kind of safe spending rates. In my experience, it's a little bit counterintuitive because we have a lot of people who are quite under-saved for retirement. But there's an equally persistent problem I think for a lot of retirees, more affluent retirees, is they really have difficulty spending from the portfolio that they worked so hard to save. I think that we can tend to identify as savers and that's sort of a badge of honor for us that we're living within our means and so on. And so you tend to anchor on your portfolio's high watermark, where you look at your balance going up and up and up and it's very difficult to ponder reversing that. But I think helping clients over the mental hurdle of switching on portfolio cash flows is super important, and an advisor can certainly serve a valuable role there in helping them understand, okay, here's what I think you can spend, here's why I don't think you'll run out even if you spend within that range. And I think it can also be helpful for advisors to talk with their clients and kind of get to the bottom of what they are looking for in retirement. Are they looking to maximize their own lifestyle and quality of life, are leaving residual balances at the end of their lives important? Really helping unpack those very personal decisions seems like a tremendously valuable role that advisors can serve.
[Travis] There is an interesting chapter with Wade Pfau that talks about retirement income styles. What are the varying styles and what impacts which style works for a client?
[Christine] Yeah, Wade is an absolutely seminal figure in retirement planning. In fact, I'll say that when Wade's "Retirement Planning Guidebook" landed on my desk a few years ago, I was like, I sort of had a, why am I even even bothering moment because that book is so comprehensive. But one thing I love is that he does talk about these four quadrants, four different retirement income styles. So one would be someone who really wants kind of a paycheck equivalent in retirement, they just wanna lock it down, give me the income, I don't ever wanna think about this again, that's kind of the income-centric mindset, I forget specifically what he calls it. But the perfect example would be, the person with a combination of Social Security and maybe some type of very simple annuity that doesn't include equities. They've got their cash flows for retirement and they never have to think about it again. So that's one extreme. The other extreme would be the person who is more comfortable with equities, who wants to hold maybe a balanced portfolio or a portfolio with even more in equities and then periodically just take systematic withdrawals from that portfolio. So that's kind of the other extreme, it's the most familiar for a lot of advisors. A lot of advisors manage their client's decumulation in that way, where they continue to manage a total return portfolio but then just sort of periodically take distributions from that portfolio, they use rebalancing to help supply cash flow. So those would be sort of the two extremes. And then there are these hybrid strategies that fall between the two. So one hybrid strategy is, I think he calls it risk wrap, where it does include some risky assets, but in the context of something that is providing you some guarantees around cash flows. So that would be some sort of an annuity product that includes equity exposure on an ongoing basis. And then another kind of hybrid strategy that Wade identified is the bucket strategy, which is a version of that total return strategy, but one that kind of helps you lock down where your cash flows are coming from. So those are the different shades of retirement income styles. And the beauty of that is that we're all wired a little bit differently in terms of what we want and it helps tap into that, it helps say we all want something different, so advisors, really listen to your clients, maybe run through the survey or the questionnaire that Wade has produced to try to figure out how your clients are wired and help custom craft a retirement plan that addresses what seems scary to them, what they're looking for in terms of their retirement paycheck.
[Travis] Yeah, Wade sounds absolutely brilliant. How should financial professionals think about these income styles when they're designing these strategies? And then how does that underscore the importance of personalized planning?
[Christine] Yeah, to me it does underscore the importance of not being one size fits all. And unfortunately I think that is kind of something that we fall into. My thing has been bucketing, it makes sense to me, personally, I like to talk about it, but understanding that it is important to custom craft a plan that addresses what your client is looking for from his or her retirement plan. How much equity exposure do they want? How much are they geared toward safety and security and something that feels like a paycheck? How much are they kind of one and done in terms of how much they want to interact with the decision making? In which case a decision like buying some sort of an annuity product might be perfectly appropriate if someone really doesn't wanna have ongoing interactions. Or are they okay with periodically making adjustments and course corrections? So Wade's survey is a, or Wade's questionnaire is a starting point, but I think really conversing with your clients and figuring out what they're looking for in terms of their retirement income is a place where an advisor can add a ton of value.
[Travis] Gotcha. Now in the book, and I think this is really important, you address some of the divisions in retirement planning, like what strategies are their varying opinions and then how can a financial professional help their clients make sense of these disagreements?
[Christine] Yeah, one of the big ones that comes out in the book, in fact a few different people voice different views, is the role of annuities in retirement planning, where some individuals, Wade as a great example, believe that they can have a role, whereas other folks, Bill Bernstein, JL Collins, practically said they should be kind of marked with skull and crossbones, maybe a little too extreme. So that is one major area of disagreement and I think part of it is a vestige of the industry that financial advisors tend to either be people who are open and conversant in insurance slash annuity products or they're kind of investment people. And I'm happy to see that that division is becoming blended a little bit more or becoming a little bit more nuanced than perhaps it was even a few years ago, especially as the academic research has pointed to the value of annuities in certain contexts in terms of enlarging lifetime income. So that's one area. Another area where we see some divergence in opinion is in the realm of the role of work longer, where Fritz Gilbert was someone I interviewed for the book, and Fritz has been a perfectly happy, like fairly young retiree, whereas other of the individuals I interviewed are big believers in kind of phasing into retirement, that many people should continue to do some version of their life's work for longer. And there is an area where I think advisers, both areas really, annuities and figuring out the role of work, if any, are areas where an advisor can add a lot of value in terms of custom crafting a plan based on the client's feedback. I was talking to another financial advisor I know and one ongoing question she has for her clients, whether they're working or retired is, how happy are you and what adjustments can we make? And some of the adjustments aren't within her control, but some of them are, what adjustments can we make to make you happier with what you're doing today? Because we never know what'll happen in the future the key is to really try to stay plugged into what your clients are experiencing and try to create a plan that addresses whatever their goals are, whatever they're feeling today.
[Travis] We've also found that many Americans are thinking about retirement as this sort of slow transition in this annual retirement study that we do. You've alluded to it a little bit, I'd like you to pull on the thread a little bit more about one of your big takeaways from the book being that we need to think of retirement as a series of stages and not a hard stop. What are those stages and how do they vary?
[Christine] So one phrase that has been out there for a while and it mainly relates to how retirees spend, but I think it applies to the whole of retirement is kind of go-go, the early years of retirement, slow-go, which is when people might slow down, and no-go, which is sort of the later years of retirement where people are often staying fairly close to home. I think that general lifecycle applies to a lot of retiree households. The lengths of those specific periods might vary quite a bit. Ideally you're going for more go-go, a little less-slow go, and the no-go phase you'd wanna be quite short. But those are the very high-level phases of retirement. But I do love the idea of people exploring phasing into retirement very gradually. And sometimes I think people think about this really literally, like they might think, okay, I work 40 hours a week now, in three years I wanna go to 30 hours, and maybe that's how you do it, or maybe you're a little bit more creative with it or more expansive in terms of your thinking where maybe you say, well I plan to leave my employer altogether but I still like these one or two things that I did in my job, and how can I continue to do them in some fashion going forward? So maybe it's, I just wanna do volunteer work, but I wanna do volunteer work that really aligns with what I did during my career, where it harnesses some of the things that were most valuable to me and where I added the most value. So I like the idea of people getting a little bit creative about phasing into retirement. It turns out that that's really good for people in terms of their financial health, that if you can continue to keep some cash flow coming in through work, it has a lot of beneficial effects from the financial standpoint. But I think that also helps just in terms of giving you a sense of purpose, giving you a sense of identity that you're not totally walking away from your work identity when you retire. Those things are really important too and probably not to be underrated.
[Travis] No, absolutely. It's funny you mentioned that, I actually was... Since I was in the office today, I was standing in the lunch line with a longtime colleague and we were just having some small talk and she confided in me that she's retiring early next year, but it wasn't gonna be a hard stop, to your point. She's actually gonna do something, just a little bit of work, to kind of ease into it. And I know that it is something that's out there on the horizon for a lot of people on how they're going to do it. And so if you are a financial professional then how do you help design that retirement strategy so that they can ease into it and not have the hard stop?
[Christine] Yeah, I love to hear it. And I would also say, for some people if they do not enjoy what they're doing, if they are coming into retirement feeling like, they're just gasping for air, they're so burned out, stepping away is the right thing. So this whole phase retirement thing, it's kind of a luxury good, I would say, if you like what you do, if you're in good standing with your employer, you can definitely consider the phasing-in thing. But for other people, stepping away entirely may be the right call. And I would also point out that, some people have jobs that are just physically difficult to do after a certain age and that may necessitate that they step away. So it tends to be more the domain of better educated knowledge type workers are more in the driver's seat with respect to working longer than people who are doing jobs that are physically difficult. That's for sure.
[Travis] Throughout this podcast and when we talk about rebuilding retirement or even the annual retirement study, retirement planning is not just a math problem. And I know that at Morningstar you talked about some of the things you've done. You're a dollars and cents person, how did you decide to explore the emotional part of retirement?
[Christine] It was definitely a "me search" project. I picked up that term from a professor at University of Michigan, but and I was like, oh that's perfect, that's what I'm doing here. But yes, I have largely toiled on the numbers side of things for a long time, but my husband and I have been good savers and good investors and stick with our investments, we don't make many changes. But as I've gone along and started to think about our retirement, I feel like the financial ledger for us is something we're not terribly worried about, but I do think about all of those other dimensions, the sense of purpose, the loss of identity that may accompany leaving work for me, the relationships that I know I have through the workplace, thankfully I have a lot of non-work relationships too. But kind of thinking about all those things, thinking about myself as a whole person and harnessing some of the experiences I've had with other older adults in my life. It's just gotten me more cognizant of the non-financial pieces of retirement, that you have this period of time, you don't know how long it'll last, but you really want to maximize your time on Earth allocation. That the investment allocation is one thing, it's important, but time on Earth allocation, I mean time on Earth is, it's the one finite resource that we all... truly finite resource that we all have. And so we just have to make sure that we're spending that time really as mindfully as we possibly can.
[Travis] You just mentioned what will give them purpose later in life, what it'll do to their relationships, how will they maintain connection. Why is it important to ask those questions?
[Christine] Well, the one thing I would say is, for people who work with advisors, you may be the only one in their lives who is asking those questions. If you've been through it with clients, and we all have reference points in our lives of people who have had spectacular retirements, who have really used this time well. In fact, I've sometimes thought a sequel to this book would be just a series of discussions with those people about how they did it, what did they do. And I think we all have counter reference points in our lives too where people who have retired and maybe gotten sick shortly right after retirement, or just retreated to the couch and really didn't have a great quality of life. So we all have good reference points, good role models, as well as some not so good role models. So I think it's really helpful for advisors to explore the financial and non-financial dimensions of retirement to be there as kind of their advocate to make sure that their in-retirement life is as full as it can possibly be.
[Travis] And so as a financial professional, how can they help more with those emotional aspects of retiring?
[Christine] I think starting earlier with your clients versus waiting until one or two years before retirement, ideally you would be having those conversations earlier in the accumulation period where you're like my advisor friend who's always asking her clients, how are you doing, how are you feeling, are you happy? Sometimes that doesn't even come up in some advisor-client conversations. We move straight to how the portfolio is doing and we're toiling strictly on the financial side of the ledger. Going deeper to me can make the advisor's job more interesting and can just give you a greater sense of satisfaction from that job. So I would go deeper earlier so you have a more of a sense of what your client's life's goals are. I think that's a great starting point. And then also in the book we do a little bit of discussion with, and this sounds so somber and ominous, but I talked to a hospice doctor I know who is a writer, and he's also a leading light in the Financial Independence Retire Early movement. He talks a lot about working with people on their deathbeds actually about what their regrets are in their lives. And I think preemptively advisors can work with their clients to just take stock of what are your goals, what would you really regret if you didn't get to do? To me, that can be kind of a helpful way to frame the conversation and help your clients articulate some of their goals.
[Travis] Oh, absolutely. Well, I'd say provided you're comfortable with that, you're aware of that and just how valuable that can be. You close out this wonderful book, "How to Retire"" with a chapter about regrets and purpose, and we just talked about that a little bit. What should financial professionals know about regrets and purpose to help their clients? And then how can they incorporate purpose and values into the conversation with their clients without veering too far outside their lane?
[Christine] Yeah, it's a great question and this whole idea of, are you a financial advisor, are you a life coach? And I feel like increasingly financial advisors are being told they need to be sort of armchair psychologists or life coaches. If you're not comfortable with this, that's totally fine. But I do think that uncovering what your client's life goals are, inextricably links back to whatever you're doing with their investments. So you sort of have to know what they wanna accomplish in this life. So having some conversations with them about those things is really important. Identifying the things that they might have regretted if they didn't have the opportunity to try them, that's super important. In terms of purpose, I love Jordan Grumet's discussion of what he calls Big P Purpose and small p purpose. So Big P Purpose would be kind of the really aspirational things that we think we should all have. Like at least one or two of those things going. So maybe it's something like climbing a mountain or writing a book, or starting a foundation. People might embark on retirement thinking they need to do some of those types of things. But Jordan points out that those things, even though they're totally worthwhile, you should have some ideas on that front, they give people some sense of like, purpose anxiety. It seems too big, it seems too scary. So his point is that having small p purpose is just fine too. And that might be a series of small p purposes. An example he gives is reengaging with some sort of childhood or teenage hobby that you just kind of had to leave by the wayside because you got too busy. Or maybe it's that you've been so busy at work that you feel like you haven't been able to give as much to being a parent to your adult children or being a grandparent as you would want. You could use retirement to kind of stoke that small p purpose, or maybe it's just being a great partner to your spouse. Any number of those small p purposes, maybe it's just like, you like to work out five of seven days a week, or whatever. A series of small p purposes is a really valuable thing to embark upon. And he also makes the reassuring point that our loved ones will actually really remember us for that stuff, just as much as they will those really big-ticket things that we may have wanted to tick off.
[Travis] No, it's great to see that we're turning towards that and people are paying a lot more attention to this aspect of retirement. I got my start in the industry doing suitability, and obviously you'd have like a fact-finding sheet and you'd list all these things and that's kind of how we made the determination, but you didn't really explore how they felt. So books like this, conversations like this, I feel like it really heartens me 'cause I'm like, this is great that we're paying attention to the other side of the coin and not just, fill out this worksheet and then I'll determine if you're worthy. You definitely wanna have a life full of purpose. So that's great that you touched on that. So our final questions that we ask all guests, I'll start with this one, what's something you wish you would've known about retirement when you first started working?
[Christine] I definitely underrated the non-financial piece, and that is something that has come out through these interviews, through the interviews I do through my podcast. Some of my favorite conversations that I've had for my podcast have dealt with issues like relationships and purpose. Maybe I'm a little bit of a kind of frustrated psychologist myself, but I just wish I had spent a little bit more time understanding the psychological dimension of this because I think it's super important and people need to get their arms around it as they embark on retirement.
[Travis] Absolutely. And then what have you learned through your work that you wish everyone knew when preparing for retirement?
[Christine] I wish people knew how much this is all linked together, that each of these decisions that you make has a knock-on effect somewhere else. So in terms of tax planning or in terms of investment planning, it's all sort of a unified whole. And I like the idea of advisors being more holistic about retirement planning, where they are thinking of the complexion of the entire plan. It encompasses perhaps insurance, investments, taxes, it all fits together and the decisions that you make for clients are all interrelated. And I love that, increasingly we're seeing attention paid to just creating holistic retirement plans along these lines.
[Travis] Okay. For listeners who have enjoyed today's conversation, and I assume that it's all of them, where can they find you online?
[Christine] So I'm on morningstar.com frequently writing articles, doing videos. My podcast is called "The Longview." I co-host it with a couple of my colleagues and I'm on LinkedIn like everyone else. And I'm also on Twitter slash X, where my handle is Christine_Benz. And then my book, of course, the labor of love, it's called, "How to Retire."
[Travis] I really appreciate you taking time out to talk to us today and can't wait to dive in more to your book. Thank you so much for your time.
[Christine] Thank you so much, Travis. It's been a lot of fun.
[Travis] That was Christine Benz, and I think she brought a lot to our ongoing discussions here. It's easy to think of retirement planning as primarily a financial problem to be solved, but she reminds us that there's a human element to consider too. It's great knowing you have the retirement income you need, but it's not just a question of, how will you pay for the rest of your life, it's also, what are you going to do with the rest of your life. Thank you for listening to "Rebuilding Retirement." Remember, these things don't disappear. All of our past episodes live on and are there for you to enjoy. And the more you listen, the more you'll get a wide angle view of the issue surrounding retirement readiness and most importantly, how you as a financial professional can respond. If you are enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and consider giving us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Thanks for joining me. I'm Travis Walker.
