I just finished reading Retire Inspired and I loved it!
It’s written by Chris Hogan, a Dave Ramsey Personality (yes, Dave Ramsey has “Personalities” who speak with the backing of his organization — here’s the list of them if you’re interested.)
Instead of doing a more traditional book review (which I generally hate), I thought I’d list ten things about the book that I loved (there are many more great things about it than that but if I detailed 32 things I loved this post would get pretty long! LOL!)
In addition to the list and Hogan’s thoughts on each topic, I’ll add my two cents as well.
I’m breaking it all into two parts since one would be pretty long.
With that said, here are ten things I loved about Retire Inspired in no particular order…
It Starts with Redefining Retirement
Any book about retirement these days needs to address the fact that the traditional definition of the word is changing. Otherwise, it appears out of touch IMO.
The author addresses this topic several times throughout the book including this quote early on:
In order to get down to the business of dreaming, we have to begin to think about retirement in a different way. I want you to replace those old, tired, and depressing ideas attached to the word retirement with the truth.
Retirement is a new chapter — some of your best years. It brings new opportunities. It’s about your legacy. Retirement should mean wealth, peace, fun, satisfaction, security, and freedom!
I want to remind you again that retirement shouldn’t be defined any longer as an “old person thing.” Retirement should be viewed as a “smart person thing.” Retirement is a “focused person thing.” It is the result of having a plan and making sacrifices to get there.
Then later he says:
It is time that we started reclaiming the idea of retirement. Retirement is not the finish line; it is the new beginning. Retirement is not your last paragraph; it is the long, rich, rewarding final chapters of your own book — as many pages as you can dream up. Retirement is not the end of your life; it is the beginning of the best years of your life!
And even later, he refers to the book’s subtitle, “It’s Not an Age, It’s a Financial Number”, with the following:
Retirement is not an age; it’s a number — a financial number. It’s the amount you’ll need to fund your dreams in retirement.
There’s so much that I love about this line of thinking. A few thoughts from me:
- As you know, I am all for redefining retirement, despite what the retirement police might say. That’s why I’ve written posts like The Retirement Police and the Definition of Retirement, Defining Retirement, and What is the Definition of Financial Independence?
- He says that retirement is “some of your best years” (or at least should be). That’s certainly what I’ve experienced so far. I can’t imagine how life could get much better than retirement.
- I like how he includes “security” in his list of retirement attributes. I agree. If I was not financially secure, my retirement would likely be much more stressful than my career was.
- Freedom. That’s what makes retirement so great IMO — the freedom to do what you want to do. He expresses this as follows: “[Retirement] should be the time when you stop worrying about the have-tos of life and start waking up every day focusing on the want-tos.” More on this in a minute.
- The “plan” and “sacrifices” parts are what trip up a lot of people. Many don’t want to take the time and effort to come up with a plan and even fewer want to follow one once they have it. This accounts for much of the sorry state of retirement preparedness in America today IMO.
- I like the fact that retirement is supposed to be “long.” This is one of the best parts of early retirement — it extends a GREAT time of life. Plus you get the added benefit that retirement years are like reverse dog years. I feel like I’ve been retired a decade! I can’t even remember what it was like to go to work each day (at least I don’t try to remember it because I get the chills. LOL!)
- The focus on retirement being a number and not an age is spot on (something I wish I had learned many years ago — if so I would have retired much earlier when I was financially independent in my 40’s). You can retire as early as you want as long as you hit your number. Or you may have to work a long, long time because that’s what it takes to hit your number. It’s about the number, not the age.
Back when I was still working but thinking about retiring I had a friend who told me about a buddy of his. The guy had retired at 50 and whenever anyone asked him (seemingly in disbelief that he could fill his time without working), “What do you do every day?”, the guy would always answer, “Whatever I want to do.”
This story was one of the things that pushed me over the edge and made me retire — I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do. I like the fact that Hogan mentions this concept several times in the book.
Retirement is Your Responsibility and Excuses Won’t Cut It
I love Hogan’s tough love with those who either 1) expect retirement will somehow fall into their laps with no action on their parts or 2) have one excuse after another as to why they can’t work towards the retirement they want.
The author accepts none of this and regularly talks about the responsibility of retirement being yours and how making excuses is a waste of time and effort.
Let’s review a few of the book’s quotes related to these ideas starting with this:
You are responsible for your own retirement.
This short sentence is found early in the book (page 5), italicized, indented, and on a line by itself just to make sure it stands out as it should.
Hogan follows it up later with this:
Let me remind you that this journey toward your dream, your retirement, is completely up to you. You cannot depend on winning the lottery. You cannot depend on the government. You cannot depend on your children. You shouldn’t depend on some big inheritance from a parent or distant relative. It is 100 percent in your hands.
And finally:
Where does your retirement begin? That should be no mystery at this point; it all begins with one person — you! Why? Because we are talking about your budget, your plans, your goals, your effort, your sacrifices, your commitment, and, yes, even your boundaries. You, my friend, are the catalyst.
On the subject of excuses, Hogan says:
Excuses are easy to pick up and use because you can find them lying around almost everywhere in our culture. The truth is that you will have to retire someday, and when that day comes, you won’t care about all the reasons why you thought you couldn’t prepare for that day.
There are no excuses. When you come to the end of your work life unprepared, there will be no one else to blame but yourself. So don’t give yourself an out. Making excuses is destructive behavior, so make sure the buck stops with you.
Several thoughts on this:
- 100% agree that the responsibility is yours. You can either take that responsibility and likely have a good outcome, or shirk it and let the chips fall where they may (and they usually don’t fall in a favorable way).
- Hahaha! He covered many of the suggestions I offered in Top 10 Ways to Become Wealthy While Earning a Pittance (which was a sarcastic post).
- I hear money excuses all the time and I have the same response as Hogan to them. Go ahead, make all the excuses you want. Just don’t drag me into them now (while you’re doing nothing) or later (when you have negative results from doing nothing.)
- There does seem to be a lot of excuse-making in our culture today. People will complain about this or that reason why they can’t get ahead, all while buying the latest iPhone or big screen TV, leasing expensive cars, and taking lavish vacations.
In the end, retirement, just like personal finances in general, is up to you. Whatever you make of it will be what you get. I hope you put together a plan now, implement it, and have a very long and successful retirement.
If you don’t, it’s likely you won’t have the retirement of your dreams. As the old saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
Free Retirement Resources
We all like free, right? 馃槈
The book shares several free retirement resources as follows:
- Hogan says the site with the “best budgeting tool in the world” is Every Dollar. He’s kind of biased since it’s a Dave Ramsey site, but it probably is at least decent (they are kind of the kings of budgeting). Anyone tried it?
- You can get a free e-book titled “Chris Hogan’s Guide to Budgeting for Retirement” at chrishogan360.com/budget
- There’s a free retirement assessment tool at chrishogan360.com
I haven’t tried any of these because I don’t really need them, but if anyone does, please let me know what you think.
As for freebies, I have a few myself:
- Free e-book on the Three Steps to Financial Independence. Subscribers to ESI Money get the book as part of the process. I’ve updated it once already and will keep doing so (though many of the concepts won’t change over time).
- Free e-series. I offer three different email series (find them all here) including Creating a Great Retirement.
- Calculators. I offer three free calculators as follows: ESI Scale Financial Independence Calculator, When Can I Retire? When Will I Be Financially Independent? A Retirement Calculator Guide, and Impact of Career Growth Calculator.
Obviously no one tool or resource will answer every question you have. But if you use several then consider what they say, collectively they can help you develop a solid plan.
Better to Make Mistakes Early
I’ve mentioned several times that everyone makes money mistakes. I have made a ton of them (here are the ones I made on the way to FIRE as well as a list of my worst mistakes) as have millionaires and we’ve all still been able to amass wealth.
While I’ve always said that we’ve all made mistakes, I also note that it’s common for wealthy people not to have made HUGE mistakes (or at least haven’t made them for long) they couldn’t recover from.
Hogan adds to this saying that it’s better to make money mistakes early in life, learn from them, and adjust.
His thoughts:
This is the decade (your forties) when you start to run out of time to fix your mistakes. This is when small mistakes are no longer small. Hear me when I tell you, though, that that doesn’t mean your mistakes are insurmountable. I’m just saying they are a little more formidable to overcome than they were when you were twenty or thirty years old.
This is good thinking IMO. You can alter the idea here a bit and see that many wealthy people probably make their mistakes early in life. This way they can learn from them and move on. They have time to make up for and overcome their problems. But a mistake at 40, 50, or 60 becomes that much worse since the recovery time is shortened.
I know I made most of my money mistakes early in life. They cost me dearly as I lost a TON of time for compounding. That said, it was better that I made them at 35 than at 50 or else I could still be working.
Time is Your Biggest Investing Asset
Overall, the book’s investing advice is pretty basic and not that great IMO (his main suggestion is to get an advisor who can help you invest, ugh).
But one thing he gets right is the value of time in investing.
He discusses compound interest and thus the need to begin investing as much as you can as early as you can. For example:
The formula for success is simple: time + compound interest = good results.
And later on:
Interest is kind of like an employee who is always on the clock, out there doing the work to get you closer to retirement.
And finally:
Investing over the long haul is hard. You have to be strong enough to weather the financial storms that pop up. It may take a while to see any real gains. There is no such thing as getting rich quick. There is no magic formula for building wealth overnight.
You know what the secret ingredient is for wealth building? Patience. Fear, anxiety, and impulsiveness are the enemies of patience, and they’ll all lead you into retirement broke. Don’t let them! Keep your eyes on the goal and keep moving toward your dream — slow and steady.
I love, love, love this! Start early, save and much as you can for as long as you can, and let time do the rest of the work.
Hogan and I agree — time is your most valuable investing asset.
Another thing we agree on is forecasting a reasonable rate of return for any future planning. Hogan talks about using 8%, which is also what I use. I wonder how his 8% went over with 12% Dave Ramsey. Ha!
That’s it for this round. If you want to see the other five things that I liked about the book, see part 2 of this series.
MI173 says
I struggle even with using the 8% return rule these days. As an accountant, I’m naturally conservative, and with interest rates being so low, it’s really hard to come up with a low risk portfolio that can earn high single digits. I’m planning to retire in 5-8 years, and I’m using 6% in my portfolio modeling for conservatism. Plus I think it’s very common to underestimate the impact of inflation, so using a lower estimate for return helps address that issue.
The good news is a plan that works at 6% will definitely work at 8%.
Marco says
Agree that this is a great book and one that really got me thinking differently about the concept of retirement and what it could and would look like (dreaming in HD!).
Big fan of the EveryDollar app! Don鈥檛 recommend using it for one time bills are the beginning of the month but has huge value keeping households on track for categories that are spent piecemeal throughout the month. Worked wonders for keeping my wife and I aligned throughout the month and I鈥檝e seen the same with hundreds of clients. While there are other good apps available (Mint/YNAB/etc.), ED is most often the one that I see work for well for BOTH spouses.
RE@54 says
I just put hold on the book at my library(Sorry, I didn’t purchase it through your link). The library just bought it and is being shipped to them. I am number 1 of 1 on the holds. I am happy that I am the first one to get it, but I am the only one to put a hold in the entire county of 1.5 million??? Of course, the “Housewives of New York” book and similar books probably have 500 holds. Ha ha. Such is the state of what people think of personal finance as you and Chris Hogan point out.
Phillip says
Overall, this stuff makes sense. One thing I don’t agree with:
“Investing over the long haul is hard.” I think it’s really easy. Just automatically invest in the market systematically (e.g. diversified index funds) and ignore everything. If you have a 20+ year investment horizon, just forget you’re even doing it and take a peek at your nest egg around 5 years before you plan to use it. That’s around 20 years of doing nothing. And doing nothing isn’t hard.
I’m serious. I have a buddy who’s a SW engineer and hates investing and money management. I pointed him to some index funds that he should think about investing in. He did some research and pretty much did what I suggested including systematic automatic investments. He peeks at his portfolio value every now and then but hates thinking about it. He’s doing very well.
Steven Tarbet says
I love Dave Ramsey! I love Chris Hogan! I love the retire inspired book! That being said, I want to share my feelings on the R:IQ tool Chris Hogan offers on his website. When I plug in my numbers to this tool, I feel that it is a bit misleading. It figures the annual return on retirement accounts at 11%. I certainly hope that I am able to get an annual return of 11%, but I am planning for much less to be sure to hit my target. To improve this tool (as an accountant that can be overly conservative) it should give you 3 different numbers as follows:
1. 6% return
2. 9% return
3. 11% return.
For full disclosure, it will let you click on a pencil icon and change any of the numbers in their assumptions.
MI162 says
I agree about mistakes. Small & Medium Financial mistakes can be recovered from almost always. I made mistakes and continue to make mistakes ALL THE TIME.
As long as people don’t make massive mistakes they can still do very well for themselves.
Other than that, The Disciples of Dave on facebook/online have begun to leave a bad taste in my mouth as they are are so entrenched in their opinions as if they have the only method to be successful. They are often worse off than the people they are trying to sway.
117 says
Listen to Ramsey and Hogan all the time. Mostly Good stuff. I DO have credit cards though. I think not having one is crazy.
Vigaro says
Funny thing, this kind of circular reasoning in which mistakes, no matter how small, large or profound eventually start taking on this quasi-mystical, nonhuman third person status over time, like a bad vapor, poisonous cloud or disease passing through humanity from time to time, afflicting oneself and others at odd intervals. Take that a little further, drawing parallels to something like Chlamydia and it almost becomes helpful, knowing mistakes are inevitably unwelcome pleasure-killers. Also a lot worse for women, symptomatically and over the long term–imagine that. Nevertheless, I prefer to go full ape and obnoxiously profess it simply comes down to you, you alone, you and one other person, or you and x number of persons, not a syndrome or disease beyond a temporal, occasionally chronic state (or fit) of stupidity. I’ve certainly had my share, don’t get me wrong, just kind of funny the way it’s talked about. It’s always about humans, right? More specifically, YOU, not spiritual forces, wheels of fortune dancing in the sky, a man or law according to Murphy, just always, or almost always YOU–so shape the hell up soldiers, the quicker the better. If you pay 20k to a veterinary surgeon just so 18-year-old Fluffy or something can live two more weeks instead of gently put down today, sparing them further angst and misery, meanwhile corrupting your retirement, it’s love gone mad, not necessarily even a mistake or some bad fart from space that drifted in, just you. Point being, stop thinking like a human and go robotic already, before your real self prematurely kills you. Dovetails nicely with automation, btw, though I still prefer stick shifting due to certain variables in income–like tips, very hard to pull down when you’re laid off due to, you guessed it, a disease. Nonchlamydian in this case, unfortunately, since Chlamydia and/or the clap rarely kill, only some women over the long term, secondarily. Never had it, btw, just an interesting sort of parallel, I think. But let’s make it simple: Circles abound, that’s the bottom line. Women should take extra care. Get square, soldier. No more excuses.
Vigaro says
Better books to be read: Soldier of Finance by Jeff Rose, then Financial Fitness Forever by Paul A. Merriman.
Vigaro says
Credit cards, yeah . . . think I used to have 12 at one time (including dept store lines), 9 for strictly V/MC, AMEX or DSC. My own acronyms, not stock symbols btw. Then it dropped down to 6 years ago, thinking I was smarter, then 0, sick of the incredible abuse, now back to 1. Daresay, I’ve abused them all, one of those transfer monkeys in the days of juicy 0% offers, as if that possibly helped. Anyway, yeah, cash alone like a retro cash king with zero credit is a little unwieldy in 2020, post 9/11, for anyone up for business, travel, or spontaneous (balanced) pleasure. Amazing though, the things done to control myself, because we’re all silly post-industrial apes, and the world of temptation persists. So I turned my zero-sum gambit into 1k control levers. To explain, take your average credit union, low-interest checking and savings, linked up, tot transfer back and forth. I’ve usually kept 1k in savings for relatively easy, short-term emergency patches, and to just sleep better. Checking though, allocated to zero. You have to very careful, though, almost perfect to balance at zero, so I tried a 100 checking, 1k savings arrangement as balance points. These days, feeling a little richer, I use 1k checking, 1k savings balance points. Nothing to do with further investments or allocations, just new zero-sum points set at 1k each instead. Just as easy to balance, really, no fear of overdrafts, other dip wad moves, and to me it’s also aesthetically pleasing on a statement. But then I still have 1, only one credit card (excluding debit). Also linked up to checking, for quick transfers and patches while aiming for credit expansion, rewards and sweet spots. Grooming, basically, trying to extract the most from just one card, ‘balanced’ around the 30% mark, NOT fully paid off every month. So another gambit, strategy, but then some ape manners do persist. Overspending a little at Amazon, for instance, as opposed to thousands and thousands in the hole on multiple accounts, or pure craziness. Still, I have to punish even the most small, minor indiscretions. So at 37.63 overspent on an extra bag of silly sh*t, using my CC online, I don’t patch that from balanced 1k checking. I force myself to drive up to my bank, first opportunity, ATM or lobby transfer it from sacred, untouched petty SAVINGS into checking, exactly 37.63, keep the receipt, drive home, tape it my fridge, all to prove I’m a dirty ape and irritate myself more. Then I transfer 37.63 from checking to that credit card online. Over the next two weeks or so, until the next paycheck or windfall, I see that receipt all day long, every day. I make it a line item expense, part of the next budget/allocation arrangement. Works for me, but yeah, the things I must do because I WAS a serial abuser, no question about it. I manage alcohol and other vices in a similarly elaborate, irritating manner until I am more sacred again, albeit still allergic to church. Fancy ape ways, how I see it, also absolutely necessary. Stated another way, heal thy own bad self, before someone or something worse does.
Vigaro says
Forgot to mention, the last step is driving back to my bank two weeks later, or whatever, to transfer that budgeted 37.63 line item from checking back into SAVINGS, until savings is sacred again at 1k. Pretty irritating, it could all done by phone, but damn if it doesn’t work. Then I can shred that disgusting receipt that bothered me for two weeks, or whatever.
Vigaro says
Keeping that 30% balance would be stupid enough in itself were it not for the gambit to expand credit and rewards tier clearly outpace the relatively low-cost of minor interest on the debt carried over, month to month. That 30% point, lots of spontaneous bobs and weaves around it to rebalance, also correct myself as mentioned before, but that is a principal target and focus until better, more lucrative scenarios develop. Beyond the mildly juicy rewards, having just 4 months cash protection on hand means, until I can pony it up to 24 months up, I will meanwhile labor to expand my ONE credit line without filling it in the old way, so to speak. Circles within circles, but when properly motivated, I am one square killer in the name of future prosperity. Not a service robot either, but a terminator trainee. Getting ahead, always charging those super batteries, keep the game running. Of course, it all began with a series of serious mistakes, time and time again until it actually threatened my life, also the ability to live well knowing the right and able (as opposed to noble) way. Nobler types surely pay it all off monthly, on principle, and for much greater rewards. All relative on this great circular orbit, not just repeating ad infinitum, but spiraling UPWARDLY. That would be the whole point, since crazy (obviously) tends to stay with me no matter what I’m trying to pull off. That’s the spark until the lights finally go out.