Derek Coburn is changing the way people think about lifestyle design. Derek Coburn is a financial advisor with over twenty-five years’ experience and is the founder of CADRE, a professional community for CEOs and entrepreneurs. He is the bestselling author of two books, Networking Is Not Working and a new one, Let’s Retire Retirement.
In his second appearance on the show, Derek joined host Robert Glazer on The Elevate Podcast to talk about his new book, how our understanding of retirement is changing, and much more.
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Derek Coburn On Retiring Retirement
Welcome to the show. Our quote for this episode is from Joseph Campbell. “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” My guest, Derek Coburn, is changing the way people think about lifestyle design. Derek is a financial advisor with over 25 years of experience and is the founder of CADRE, a professional community for CEOs and entrepreneurs based out of Washington, D.C. He’s the bestselling author of two books, Networking Is Not Working, and his latest, Let’s Retire Retirement.
Derek, welcome back to the show.
What’s up, Bob? It’s good to be here. I’m excited to chat with you for a bit.
Financial Advisor Derek Coburn
It’s been some moons since your first appearance, which was episode 18. At the time, I was probably bad at doing the show. For people who have not been following us from the first weeks of this show, can you share a little bit more about your background and your work?
I became a financial advisor in 1998 and grew my practice pretty quickly and effectively by cold-calling. I got a bunch of great clients by grinding it out, and got to a place where I was like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I started to look at networking as a way to grow my practice. That worked well for a little bit until around the time I was getting ready to get married and have kids. The market in 2008 was getting a little shaky. The big networking events were not an effective way to meet new people.
I started hosting smaller events, curating different experiences for my clients and their friends. It was client appreciation leveraged to acquire more clients disguised as networking. I hosted wine tasting events and golf outings. I grew my revenue by 300% in about a year and a half. That was on its way. I got to 2011 or 2012, and my industry wasn’t letting me take advantage of any of the word-of-mouth opportunities or social media marketing that were available to the rest of the world because the compliance and the red tape were so heavy.
I also had a lot of financial advisors around me with 1,500 to 2,000 clients, and they only liked working with 20% of them. I decided to shave my practice. I went from 350 clients down to about 75. I took what I had learned through hosting these smaller events and started a business with my wife called CADRE, which we still have now. We serve about 100-plus CEOs and entrepreneurs, most of them based in the D.C. area.
What year did Networking Is Not Working come out?
Networking Is Not Working came out in 2014. I’m at a 10-year pace. That’s my rhythm.
What Happen Post-COVID
Honestly, that’s more sustainable than what I’ve been doing. What’s changed for you since COVID? COVID was such an interesting moment for so many people, either in your events, in your business, personally, or in how you approach anything.
I started writing this book in 2017. I was writing this book about the idea of questioning whether retirement and saving for retirement were a good idea or not. I was writing it mainly as a way to have it be a business development tool to get more ideal clients for me. My ideal clients at that time and to this day are clients that have multiple millions of dollars of assets under management. All of a sudden, in 2019, a year before COVID happened, I got approached by a private equity company that wanted to buy the practice for my partners and me. We did that deal. I put the book down and didn’t think about it.
COVID happened. My father got a rare form of dementia in 2013 that got progressively worse over COVID. He passed away during COVID. By the end of 2023, after I put myself through a midlife crisis, there was some money in the bank from the sale to give me the time to figure out some of the tendencies I had. What were some of the subconscious behaviors that I was dealing with? I’ve got to get right with all of that. It became clear that I needed to revisit this book and write this book. Going back to it now from the perspective of someone who isn’t looking to grow the wealth management practice and isn’t looking to write a book as a way to get more clients, I got to write a book. I think it’s going to be much more valuable to a much larger group of people.
The Rise Of The Freelancing Industry
There has been a lot of evolution around this. Tim Ferriss, with The 4-Hour Workweek, didn’t get enough credit for what that book was. A lot of people thought it was a productivity hack book. I took it similarly to your book. Doing all this stuff and then seeing if you’re going to be happy and what you like to do at 70 years old, when you may not make it there, is not such a great idea. Think about more of this happening. He didn’t really take the financial angle. You have this whole group out there with, “Automate your life and never work a day again,” then there’s “If you do what you love, you’ll never work.”
There are a lot of approaches to this. Some people are doing what they’re doing to put food on the table and resources, and then hoping to do what they love. They don’t want to work a day more than they have to. You’re speaking to a different audience in terms of thinking about what retirement might look like. You’ve seen this with retirement and people selling their businesses. People go off a cliff. There are a huge number of disappointed people who die shortly after retiring. How do you make sense of all these different philosophies in terms of bringing them together?
When I was writing the book, I initially used language throughout it like, “I want you to find the work that you love doing. I want you to find the work that is aligned with your purpose.” I changed that in a lot of places to “I want you to find the work that you don’t hate doing.” It’s great that some people have found this idea of “You have to find your purpose, and you’ll never work.”
For a lot of people, their purpose isn’t tied to what they do for a living. Their purpose might be that you’re the person who plans all the great neighborhood parties. You’re the person who plans all the amazing trips for your friends to get together every single year. If you find a job that you don’t hate, that’s not terrible, where you like it and your co-workers, and you don’t mind doing it, then you keep doing it. It’s going to allow you to invest back into your passions that are not work-related. That’s where I sit on that topic right now.
You jump back and forth between the philosophy and the finances of this, but the base premise is that with retirement, you shouldn’t have this end date. That doesn’t serve most people. You’re saying it doesn’t serve them probably financially, and a lot of advice is geared around that. It doesn’t serve them in other ways beyond financially or emotionally, in terms of what they need.
Are we put on this Earth to do work that we don’t enjoy doing for 30 years to earn the right to sit around and do nothing at all for another 30 years after that?
Also, try to figure out what you like at that point.
As a financial advisor, reading Tim Ferriss’ book in 2004 or 2005 probably had a big impact on me leaning into this idea, and having conversations with my clients that the majority of financial advisors are not having. Everyone is automatically opting people into this idea. When you meet with a financial advisor, they don’t say, “Do you want to retire? They say, “What age do you want to retire?”
You call it the hard stop at 65.
It was the age picked by a German chancellor many years ago, and FDR decided to roll with it when life expectancy was 71 or 72, while he was setting up the Social Security Act. People are walking around, and they’re not thinking about it. We’re seeing this on the retirement movement, which is showing about 25% to 30% of people who have retired are going back to work. In most cases, it’s not because they’re running out of money but because they missed the connection. It’s because they missed the contribution.
25%-30% of retired people are going back to work not because of money but to find connection and satisfy their desire to contribute.
There are a lot of people out there who have created communities. There are a lot of thought leaders like Brian Clark, who has this great community called Further over on Substack. He’s serving the unretirement community. Chip Conley has the Modern Elder Academy that he has set up. All these 60-year-olds have said, “Now that I’m here, it’s not what you told me it was going to be. Now, what do I do?”
This happens with achievement, where it’s more about the destination than the process. They always fail to deliver in some way.
While I think I have a lot of ideas that can help those people who are a little bit older, I’m trying to get the attention of people who are twenty years younger than that. I’m trying to get the attention of people in their 40s, early 50s, and late 30s, who still have kids at home and who still have their health. They can still make big changes to the way that they’re living life. I am helping them realize that they’re probably going to work longer than they think. Once they realize they’re going to work longer and have more money coming in from their income, they don’t have to save as much. If you don’t have to save as much for this retirement date, that means you could have more money and more time to spend on the people and things that are important to you.
How The Macroeconomic Shift Affected Retirement
There’s also a big macroeconomic shift in how we work now. We have more white-collar work. It’s not a factory lifetime. It’s 40 hours or nothing. If you try to hire a CMO these days, that’s 40 or 50, you can’t find that because they’ve all gone fractional. None of them wants a full-time job. If you look 20 or 30 years ago, a lot of these jobs, law firms even, are in or out. Now you have a whole bunch of part-time. How much does that factor in where the structure of work has allowed far more opportunities to do things in maybe a different amount or a different way, or even not having to go into the office?
It’s a pretty significant factor, depending on where you get your information. I saw a recent stat that said by the year 2027, over 40% of workers in the United States are going to be freelancers. I’ve been telling my clients for years, “I don’t expect you to work 60 hours a week like you’re working now. I don’t expect you to necessarily be doing the same type of work or putting in the same type of effort.” There are going to be a lot of opportunities for people to do things on their terms, in the way they want to do it, if they’re good, if they have wisdom, and if they have skills.
What other companies that are looking to hire are not going to want access to these people if they’re great at what they do? They’re going to accept the fact that they say, “I’m only going to do ten hours a week. I’m only going to have this number of clients at once. I’m not going to work summers. I’m going to take this entire year off. I’m going to do it all while I’m sitting in my house in my pajamas.” People are going to say, “We’ll take you. Tell me how much.”
There’s this notion of reverse mentoring a lot, where people connect with a young person. Things are changing so fast. If you don’t try to keep yourself modernized or involved, or understand what’s going on, you may feel very disconnected from society. If you don’t know how to use ChatGPT, you’re probably not in a lot of conversations.
Chip Conley had 50 boutique hotels that he ran, operated, and then sold. He retired in his 40s, or maybe even 30s. He was hanging out, enjoying that life. He was approached by the CEO of Airbnb. They said to him, “We’re a bunch of young guys. We created the tech. We’ve got the idea, but we don’t have any wisdom. We don’t have any older people around who know how to run a business, who know how to have important conversations, and who know how to fundraise.”
They brought him in. He is like the Chief Wisdom Officer. He helped them with his gray hair and with his experience to take the business to the next level. He’s moved on from that. He’s written a few books on midlife and how we need to reframe midlife. There are going to be opportunities. You need to have a basic understanding. Knowing how to have conversations with people, have empathy, and lead from a certain place are going to be valuable. The need for those traits and skills is not going to dry up anytime soon.
Knowing how to have conversations with people, have empathy, and lead from certain places will always be valuable and will not go away anytime soon.
I got a lot of value out of Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength. You’ve got to think about how you contribute in a different way. You’re moving from producer to being someone who contributes more of their wisdom and experience in a lot of roles.
I’m a big fan of his.
The Financial Formula Of Retirement
The book did a lot of this between the financial and the nonfinancial. This math hits people who are planning for retirement in a way, and it was in a discussion around people exiting their business years ago. Some people are chasing a number. They need a number. I don’t think they look at the actuarial table where you were to say, “I’ll go for a low return, like a 4% return or something like that.” Having some role that I do that makes me $40,000 a year is the same as an extra million dollars in the bank.
Suppose you sell your business, and you were like, “I needed $10 million,” and you only got $9 million. A couple of people ask you to be on board roles. Someone said to me, “If you take that math on $5 million, and you figure out a couple board roles, or someone pays you $200,000 a year, it’s a quarter of your time because you’re getting paid for that wisdom, that’s the same as if you had hung it up and had $5 million in the bank that you were using.” When they presented the math that way to me, it was pretty striking. That’s the basis of the financial formula that you’re promoting here.
If it’s 3 or 4 board roles, then that means you could have stopped doing the other thing five years sooner. People don’t fully appreciate the ridiculousness of how trustworthy they are, and how much faith they have in the assumptions that they’re making in their financial plan to play out. You have to nail the annual inflation rate. You have to nail what the tax rate is going to be every single year. You have to nail what your pre-retirement rate of return is going to be on all of your assets and your post-retirement year in and year out.
By the way, you have to pick the year that you’re going to die. How long are you and your spouse going to live? Are your kids going to get married? Are your parents going to need healthcare or long-term care at some point that you’re going to have to pay for? People don’t think about these things at all. Their financial advisor says, “We’re going to use these assumptions,” and they say, “Great.” They’re walking around with an eighteen-parlay on FanDuel that has zero chances of hitting. They’re completely confident that they saved X amount of money per month, that everything is going to work out for them exactly the way that they’re hoping.
The seeming is because of this assumption that you go to zero. Walk us through this basic math on someone says, “What’s enough? How much do I need to do in the withdrawal rule?” You need to understand the math behind some of this logic to then understand how you can change those numbers when you start, or how much a little bit matters.
I have an example in the book about a guy named Tony, who is 45 years old. Tony makes $150,000 a year, and he has $150,000 saved up in his retirement accounts. I have a calculator on my website that people can go to to enter their own income and their own assets. They can use the calculator as they see fit. Tony tells his financial advisor that he wants to stop working at 65. The advisor says, “You’re going to have to save $2,400 per month every single month. It’s going to continue to inflate for the next twenty years in order to retire at 65.” That’s 20% of what he’s making, and that is a nonstarter for most people. That would mean that he’s saving almost as much as he’s spending. We don’t know anybody doing that.
I have to go back to the premise here. There is no guarantee that Tony is going to be here in twenty years. What happens is that the money goes into his IRA. His kids inherit it, and he doesn’t get to do a lot of the things that he wants.
If Tony were to say, “I don’t hate my job. I’m going to be doing work that I enjoy doing and, at a minimum, don’t dislike with people that I enjoy being around. I’ll probably work until I’m 75.” The amount that Tony has to save on a monthly basis, if he goes from 65 to 75, will go from $2,400 a month that he has to save all the way down to $110 per month. He has to save 96% less by deciding to work ten years longer.
If he decides to work until he’s 70 instead of 75, the number goes from $2,400 to $600 a month. It goes down by 75%. I want people to understand, realize, and alleviate themselves of the pressure that they may be feeling to have a certain number by a certain age. As long as they feel like they’re going to want to continue to do something and income is going to be coming in, they don’t have to save anywhere near as much as they think they have to save.
That’s the same logic when you start taking Social Security. The actuarial table works the same way. You get a huge amount more monthly payment if you delay it five or ten years.
It’s the reason why Social Security is having so much trouble. Denmark announced that they’re taking their version of Social Security, and they’re raising the minimum age from 65 to 70. They’re saying people are living longer. There are a ton of people in this country, whether you agree with them or not, who say, “We should be more like Denmark.” Denmark is saying, “You’re living longer. We’re not going to pay you until you’re 70 years old.”
When Social Security was first put into place in 1935, it was based on actuarial tables where most people were expected to live to be 71 or 72. Now, if you get to 65, you’re living to be between 85 and 90. If you have some money and access to pretty good health care, you’re probably living longer than that. The money is potentially going to be there. Your ability to continue to work and earn an income creates a ton of flexibility for you in the short term, with the choices you’re making for how to spend your money and spend your time.
These systems are a little bit like Ponzi schemes, and they work if you have more payers than withdrawers. We have plummeting birth rates all around the world. The math isn’t going to work, and something’s going to have to happen. There’s an argument that you make, too. If you’re planning on no income and being covered by this, and if birth rates keep going at the same rate, there’s going to be no one to pay it. The only way to pay it is in inflated dollars that won’t buy anything.
Not only are there fewer people paying into Social Security, but fewer people are taking money out of their monthly paycheck to go into the 401(k) plan to keep those balances maybe artificially higher than they’ll be once those contributions stop.
The health thing is bad for you. People live longer if they want to. It’s going the other way. I think about my parents. My kids think about their grandparents. They’re out playing golf, they’re at the gym, or they’re at aerobics. These are not things that we said about my grandparents when I was growing up. People are more active. We have a large part of the population that’s not healthy, but the ability to live with more vitality, and if you make it, it’s there. You’re going to have to play a different game. I didn’t think of this as a risk mitigation strategy until we were discussing that. If your plan is to stop and take Social Security and let all your skills and stuff atrophy, there’s a general risk component to it that that pot of gold may not be there at the end of the rainbow.
There’s a psychological component, too. I have several clients who have $10 million, $15 million, or $20 million, and they have a traditional retirement. They’re in their 70s. I’ve got other clients like them who have the same amount of money, except those second set of clients are still working. They’re not making a lot of money. They’re making like $100,000 or $200,000, moving on a couple of boards. For the ones who are not working, I have to almost beg them to spend more of their money. The ones that have the income still coming in or spending their money in such a more carefree way because they know, “I can keep earning. I’m going to keep adding to this,” versus, “I’m done adding to it. All I’m doing now is taking money out of it.” This is a little scary.
Enjoying Your Money Before You Die
No one likes that feeling where it’s a one-way drain. I know a central theme in the book is that people defer their best life until someday. You also talk about the fund recession. Why do you think so many high achievers fall into this trap where they never enjoy the fruits of their labor? You probably read Die With Zero, which I thought was interesting on this. You made a great point that most of the good that people will do with their money is after they die, which they don’t even get to see. You made it clear.
I had so many people mention that book to me while I was writing, and I didn’t read it. I didn’t want to be influenced by it. It was too similar, but I eventually read it. I thought it was great. It’s very complimentary, and I feel really good. It’s a different conversation, but there’s some overlap for sure. That is one of my favorite takeaways from that book. I preach about it. I have a little section at the end of my book about I like giving from a charitable standpoint. What it does to your endorphins when you give money to other people is good for you.
Society would like us to feel like our contributions are less worthy if we feel like we feel good for making the contributions. That’s why people give anonymously. I’m like, “I don’t care. I’m happy to give money because it’s helping them and because it’s going to make me feel better about myself.” When you are saving and waiting for you and your spouse to pass away, before you give money away, then you’re missing out on that feeling. That feels great when you are making a contribution.
He said the average age your kids would likely inherit your money is 65 or something like that. At that point, their life and things that they were going to do or contributions that they could make are deferred anyway. If I think about our audience, and this probably is the core person you’re trying to address, how would you approach a 40-year-old who’s both thinking about, “How and what should I think about work?”
“Maybe I don’t want to work with it. How do I think about what I need under this framework? I’m with you philosophically. I want to do what I want to do. I want to spend less.” Also, a lot of people get in trouble because they don’t have a basic enough emergency fund. How do you nail the middle lane here so that you’re safe and you have the life you want to live? Most of us can’t survive a crisis. Think about where they want to steer that on both sides of too short, too long.
Having an emergency reserve fund is important. Having different types of insurance in place is important. I’ll give one example. Long-term care insurance is something that doesn’t get enough attention. I’ve referred to it for a long time as the iceberg to your financial plan, Titanic, that everything might be great, especially as it pertains to your parents, if we’re talking about 40-year-olds. I was preaching this to my clients. I did it myself with my parents.
Alzheimer’s disease is the main one that I’m worried about here. That’s the iceberg to the Titanic. We got long-term care insurance. My parents were healthy. My father got dementia in 2013. He lived with it for nine years. The reason why this one is so bad compared to other ones is that, with other diseases, you typically die within a couple of years, whereas with this one, you can live with it for a long time. It ended up saving my parents a few million dollars.
You need to be covered for these types of situations. You need to talk with your parents about their financial situation and their healthcare plan because if you’re going to ultimately provide for them, if something happens, and you’re going to live on the street, let’s get as much information right now as we possibly can. I cover a lot of the how-to-put-up-the-guardrails in the book. To the 40-year-old that you’re mentioning, who maybe felt before like they were under the gun, and that if they were Tony, they had to save 20% of their income every year to make their dreams come true, they were missing more family dinners, they were missing going to the gym, they were sleeping less, and they weren’t taking care of themselves.
By highlighting the value of compounding interest and letting this money sit for longer and working a little bit longer, I’ve created a lot of additional money and time for people. What I hope a lot of people do is make different choices about the way they’re spending their time. They are not missing family dinners. They aren’t skimping on vacations. They aren’t sleeping well because our society overemphasizes the long-term value of all of these things.
If you sleep great tonight, it’s going to be better. It’s going to be good for the twenty-year-old version of you, but we don’t talk enough about this idea that if you sleep well tonight, it’s going to be great for you twenty hours from now. With you working out and sleeping more, you have less time in the business doing the work, but you’re showing up with more clarity with more energy. You’re ending up producing even more for a lot less time than you were before. I hope I inspire that change in a lot of people.
It gets to this notion and the problem with the notion of the finish line. Think about what happens after a marathon or a triathlon. You come across that finish line, and you’ve got nothing left because you put it all in, and then it is an endpoint. That’s why there is a fall-off. You may not even be able to do a lot of the things that you think you want to do. I can’t remember whose framework it was. You need three things. You need the financial means to do stuff, you need your health, and you need freedom and flexibility.
When you’re younger, you have the freedom, flexibility, and health, but not the money. There’s a sweet middle. Eventually, you have the money, freedom, and flexibility, but not your health, which negates all of it. A lot of these opportunities for people to do the things they want to do are going to be in their 40s and 50s, which takes away this whole “I’ll do it after 65.”
That’s the part that I don’t buy into. That’s the part that I’m thinking that the more I work out now, the more I travel now, the more I sleep better now, the more likely it is that I’m going to be able to continue doing those things a lot longer.
It’s a double benefit, then.
One begets the other. I don’t think you’re all of a sudden going to fall off a cliff and not be able to do these things because you turn 65.
I was thinking about more of the inverse. If you go and never take time for any of this stuff, and then you get to the cliff, probability would say that you’re more likely to have a health issue than you are in your 30s or 40s. Not that those don’t happen.
There was some research that I shared in the book on meaning versus happiness. There was a study done where they put people into two groups. Group A was people who prioritize personal happiness. Their goal was, “I want to be happy.” The second group was people who were prioritizing purpose and meaning. “I want to contribute to something. I have something that gets me out of bed every morning that’s bigger than me.”
They hooked everybody up to brain monitors and heart monitors and trapped them for a period of time. The people who were pursuing and prioritizing happiness had a response in their body that was very similar to the response a body has when it’s dealing with chronic adversity, the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a job. The inflammation goes up. The immunity goes down. These people are more likely to die, get sick, and have health issues.
Whereas the people who were saying, “I’m here for reasons beyond myself. I’m excited to contribute. I’m excited to be part of something bigger than me,” it was the opposite. Their inflammation was incredibly low. They were much more able to fight off sickness and disease. We’re here to contribute. We’re here to make this place better. As soon as our bodies, our internal systems, feel like we’ve given up on that, they’re probably like, “We’re going to give up on you since you’re not looking to make this place better. “
I have a lot of thoughts about the happiness thing. One, it’s a little narcissistic that the point of life is about me. It’s almost contradictory to the meaning or purpose. They’re hard. They have ups and downs. You saw the same thing, potentially, as you spoke a couple of years ago at MMT. It is something about the sentence, “I’m only as happy as the least happy child.” I’m like, “I hate that. I’d be miserable all the time if I were only as happy.” If you’re launching a book, you’re not happy every day. It’s a lot of work, but you’re trying to do something. It’s so interesting that you say that. You want to be fulfilled, engaged, or purposeful. That doesn’t mean it’s fun and happy all the time. That puts a lot of pressure on you and or kids to be happy. We all go through cycles.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his research on flow, concluded that he feels like people are at their most happy when they’re in a flow state. When they’re doing meaningful work, then they’re loving it. They’re losing track of time. With all the attributes that are associated with flow, they’re not their happiest when they’re sitting on a beach with a fruity drink and under an umbrella for extended periods of time. That’s where this is coming from.
People are at their happiest when they are in a flow state, doing meaningful work, and losing track of time.
Obsession With Growth And Hustle
You and I have been around a lot of high achievers who had some goal. You talk to them, and you hear over and over. They get to the top of that mountain, and they enjoy it for five minutes. They find another one to climb, and they don’t look at the view. The world is a little obsessed with growth and hustle. Is part of this redefining what success looks like, what’s enough, and what fulfills us versus what we think we’re hearing that we’re supposed to do?
I think so. There was a period of time when I would get inspiration from the people who were showing off the things, the stuff, the cars, the jets, and all that. It’s great. There’s an audience out there for that. It’s wonderful that they are able to see that, create from that, and improve their lives and the lives of the people that they serve. I spend an excessive amount of time with my kids. My boys are 15 and 12. They’re going to be out of my house in three and a half, and five and a half years, respectively. I workout with my oldest son 3 to 4 hours a week. It’s an age where he doesn’t want to hang out with his dad for four hours a week. I’m doing that with him.
I’m dating my wife a lot. I’m having a lot of fun. I spend a lot of time with my friends. For me, flexibility is the flex. Free time is the flex. I could have a lot more money, and I could have a lot more stuff. I know that I’m going to be working more. I’m going to be working harder when my kids are out of the house than I am right now. I’m bucking against this trend. Society says that we should be working our hardest.
Why Are We Having A Fun Recession
It’s a narrow window. They get their license, and you’re useless. My last one got the license, and your utility as a parent falls off the cliff. I didn’t realize the last one. What a milestone that was, but I won’t speed it up for you. Why are we having a fun recession?
I’ve been going around asking adults at soccer games, basketball games, school events, and even within my own community, although it’s a little bit less there. When was the last time you had fun? If I ask this question ten times, nine out of ten times, the person will typically pause. They will have to reflect and think hard. They’ll usually land on something like, “We went out to dinner with this other couple a month and a half ago. We had a bottle of wine, and we talked about fill in the blank.”
I don’t think that’s good enough. I don’t know why we stopped deprioritizing having a good time in our society. There are certain ways that we can have more fun. If you’re not going out ever with anyone, doing the wine thing with another couple is amazing. Think back to when you were having the most fun in your life. Would that version of you right now be impressed with the amount and type of fun that you’re having? Would they say, “What is going on? Why aren’t we having a better time?” This was tied into the happiness thing.
There is a term called collective effervescence. Adam Grant wrote about it after I hit publish on my book, so I couldn’t include it in my book. In my book, I talk about how I believe going to concerts, experiencing live music, and experiencing standup comedy are the best ways that we can access fun as humans. Not only, but the best. This term, collective effervescence, validates the thinking. Collective effervescence is the combination of being in a flow state, forgetting where you are, and being in a pulled energetic space with a bunch of other people. You’re singing along to a lyric that you’ve sung out loud driving around 100 times. Now, 5,000 other people who have had that same experience are singing that lyric along with you. That’s a little bit different than if you were to have some other type of fun.
Is that a sporting event or not as a collective? You’re all watching.
A sporting event is in consideration, except that the problem with a sporting event is that 50% of the time, you’re going to be unhappy at the end of the night.
Did you tell me this? I’ve been quoting this. I heard someone say that they went to eighteen concerts a year. Their friends were giving them crap about it. It’s been hundreds of dollars. He’s like, ”It’s like going to eighteen sporting events, except my team always wins.”
I never have to worry about my favorite guitar player going zero for nine from the three-point line.
Was that you who said that, or did I hear that somewhere else?
I’ve said it before. It’s possible.
We’ll give you credit. I have been going to more concerts these days. There’s also a nostalgia effect if it’s the band from college. There’s a lot of happiness we get from things that are nostalgic.
Big time. There’s a good app called Bandsintown that will sync with Spotify. Based on who you listen to, it’ll give you alerts when the bands that you listen to or other artists you might be into are coming to your town.
I have been looking for that functionality in my life.
You should also ask me because I’m happy to make recommendations. I’ll peek at the Boston schedule.
They sneak in sometimes, and you don’t know who’s coming.
Stand-up comedy is almost easier because you don’t have to know the comedian. Odds are you’re going to laugh.
By the way, we’re back to being able to say things that are funny and inappropriate again, which has been a big upgrade for comedy. I think it was the Tom Brady roast that finally broke it open, where people are like, “Is it okay to laugh at that?”
Have you ever done stand-up comedy?
No.
Have you thought about it? I feel like you’d be good at it.
I’d be so not good at it. I do enjoy it. My wife and I talk a lot about how much we enjoy it, and we don’t go as much as we would like. This is where I could use some AI agents in my life, telling me the real-world events that are coming to town that I would like to go to, without having to pay attention to them.
Bandsintown is it.
I need Comediansintown, too. If I followed someone on Instagram, and we were all talking about this guy on Instagram, tell me when he’s coming next time.
I do about 25 to 30 concerts a year. If somebody has not been doing that, I wouldn’t tell someone who hasn’t worked out in three years to run a marathon in two weeks. I would tell them to go to the gym and work their way up to it. It doesn’t have to be a big, amazing band. It could be a local cover band. It could be a local acoustic guitar player playing at a bar near your house, on the lake, or something. Find something to go to get reintegrated and get your toes wet, and build from there.
How Community Shapes Your Retirement
You’ve always emphasized relationships over transactions. Community is a big part of this. How does community factor into designing the life that you don’t want to retire from?
There was a study that was going around that showed the amount of time people were spending with various people over the course of their lives, including themselves. The number of minutes per day that you spend alone is 150 when you’re fifteen years old, and it’s 350 when you’re 60 years old. Most people were sharing this data and were commenting on the alone part. “You’re going to be alone. You’re going to be spending a lot of time by yourself when you’re older. You better get used to it.”
I thought it was very interesting that no one was commenting on the fun piece. My kids get home from school. They’re going to say, “What are my friends doing? How can I hang out with them? How can I spend time with them?” It’s 100 minutes a day between the ages of 10 and 20 that you’re spending with friends. It goes down to about twenty minutes per day in your 40s and 50s. It’s ten minutes a day after that. I don’t know when we decided that we were going to start deprioritizing friendship in our society. If we are spending a decent amount of time thinking about how much we need to retire and when we want to retire, then I think we should also be spending a little bit of time thinking about who we want to retire with and what we want to do with them.
If you are spending a decent amount of time thinking about how much you need and when to retire, you should also consider who to retire with and what you want to do with them.
My parents went to a community in Florida, and every time I talk to them, it’s like talking to my kids at summer camp. “We’ve got to dance tonight.” They like it far more than I would have ever. They were the last people in the world that I thought would go to Florida. That community has been a big part of it. You can see that.
Do you think your parents are normal? Based on what you shared, your parents are unique in the way that they’re living with their health and their travel. You thought it was a grandparent thing and not a parent thing. I’m here to tell you that most people our age, who have parents the age of your parents and my parents, are not living their lives the way your parents are living theirs.
One Big Shift And One Big Mistake
They’re very active. They’ve always been active, but I thought of my grandparents as a kid. I didn’t think of active. That’s what’s different. It wasn’t, “You can go catch up with Grandma after she comes back from the gym.” That phrase would not have been spoken. That’s important to them. They ended up switching where they were spending time to a place where they loved the geography and everything about it. There was more community in this other place. That made the difference for them. What’s one shift, mental or practical, you’d encourage people to stop deferring joy and fun and start living a more intentional life?
Somebody told me earlier that my message will be good for anybody. Better late than never. I said, “The problem is, if somebody has younger kids that are living at home, and they read my book, or they think about what I’m sharing when their kids are 30 years old, they’re not late to the message. They missed the message. They’re not going to be able to go back in time and make different choices.” I would love people to pause and think, “How much thought have I given to picking the age that I want to retire? How much thought have I given to what I want to do and how I want to spend my time when I get there?” In most cases, the answer is going to be, “Not a lot.”
I’ve hopefully opened the door and opened your mind to realize that maybe there’s another way and a better way that you could be doing this. If you were to work longer, if you were to have all of a sudden an extra 20% of discretionary income, or you were able to have an extra couple of hours a week available to you, what would you do? How would you spend that time? I want people to be able to not have answers to the questions that they’re being asked about. What are you going to do when you retire? When I’ve asked people these questions in the past, sometimes, they will say things like, “I want to travel the world with my spouse.” I say, “Great. When was the last time you all went out on a date?”
A weekend vacation as well. This is doing the marathon without having run the 1K sprint.
I’m going to play golf five days a week, but you haven’t been to the gym in four years, and you’ve had your hip replaced. When is all this going to start to happen? We’re seeing people with lots of regret already. I’m hoping that I can spare and prevent a lot of other people from feeling the way that some of these people feel right now.
Your job is regret avoidance, Chief Regret Avoidance Officer. Maybe you can coin that. What would the acronym be?
I should play around with that. I told somebody I’m in the regret minimization game, but yours is better.
I’m going to augment the last question for you. What’s a retirement mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from, or a planning for retirement mistake? It could also be that you’ve course corrected, or you were going in one direction, and you went a different direction.
I quickly course change this. This will be the most valuable thing I can share with people tuning in. If you think about traditional 401(k) plans and IRAs, they became all of the rage because people are excited about deferring money on a tax-free basis now, while they are working on the idea that when they pull it out, they’re not going to be working. They’re going to be paying taxes when they’re in a lower tax bracket.
Once somebody realizes there’s a good chance that they’ll probably be working and earning some income into their 70s, then maybe this is not the great deal that it has been cracked up to be. We have tax rates that are close to historical lows, and maybe we shouldn’t be aggressively piling up money in these accounts that are getting a nice tax deduction but are going to be subject to income tax on the way out. Tax rates could be higher. We could still be working.
They’re looking like they’re going to have to be higher. I don’t see how we get away with that.
It is similar to the interest rates a couple of years ago. I was telling all of my clients years ago, “Whatever you can finance, back the truck up.”
I ignored that advice from someone because I had paid off some things, and I liked the security. They were speaking at a conference. They were like, “Back the truck up and borrow as much money as you can at 2.5%.” I wish I had listened to it.
You’re young and successful and have plenty of time, so you don’t have to worry about playing catch-up.
Get Into With Derek And Buy The Book
Derek, where can people learn more about you and your work? I assume Let’s Retire Retirement is available wherever books are sold.
I’m excited to get this book out there. It feels like it’s the right time. It feels like it’s going to potentially help a lot of people, and I’m excited to show up and share what I know and what I believe. As you can hopefully tell, I’m desperate to grab people figuratively by the shoulders, shake them, and say, “I want you to enjoy this thing more than you’re enjoying it. I want you to leverage the fact that you’ll be working longer to have more experience, have more life, and have more love.” The best place to keep in touch with me is my website, DerekCoburn.com. I’ll be on socials and look forward to connecting with people there.
Thanks for coming back. We’ll see you in another 400 episodes if we keep the same pace. Your sequel to this will be out in a decade, so we know where to find you. Thanks for joining us, Derek.
I see you more often than that. Maybe we’ll have a reason to do this sooner.
To our audience, thanks for tuning into the show. We’ll include links to Derek and Let’s Retire Retirement. If you enjoyed this episode or the show in general, I hope you’ll sign up for Friday Forward, which is my weekly newsletter with 120,000 subscribers. It’s free, but there’s also a premium edition that includes a second newsletter called the Leadership Minute, which provides great advice for those who are actively managing and leading. You can sign up at RobertGlazer.com on the Friday Forward tab or look on Substack for Friday Forward. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- CADRE
- Networking Is Not Working: Stop Collecting Business Cards and Start Making Meaningful Connections
- Let’s Retire Retirement: How to Enjoy Life to the Fullest―Now and Later
- Derek Coburn’s Website
- Derek Coburn On Un-Networking | Elevate with Robert Glazer
- The 4-Hour Workweek
- Further: Live Long and Prosper
- Modern Elder Academy
- Chip Conley’s Website
- From Strength to Strength
- Die With Zero
- Adam Grant’s Website
- Bandsintown
- Friday Forward
- Leadership Minute
- Robert Glazer’s Website
