The personal finance expert explains why retirees struggle to spend their savings, how to build reliable retirement income, and why she changed her mind about annuities.
Today on the podcast, we welcome back Jean Chatzky. Jean is the author of a new book about retirement planning called The Forever Paycheck: The New Retirement Strategy to Spend More, Worry Less, and Never Run Out of Money. In addition, she has written several other New York Times bestselling books about money and investing. She’s also CEO of HerMoney.com and host of the podcast Her Money with Jean Chatzky. She served as the financial editor of NBC Today for 25 years and is the financial ambassador for AARP. She appeared frequently on CNN and MSNBC, and was a recurring guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:00 Why Retirees Struggle to Spend
00:05:18 Creating a Retirement Paycheck
00:09:25 Choosing Annuities and Financial Advice
00:20:40 Bridging the Social Security Gap
00:23:40 Managing Sequence-of-Returns Risk
00:28:42 Retirement Planning for Couples and Working Longer
00:37:17 Protecting Against Financial Fraud
00:40:39 How Jean Chatzky Reimagined Retirement
Brett Arends: Worried About Outliving Your Money? There’s an Answer
Dana Anspach: Don’t Let Fear Ruin Your Retirement
Stefan Sharkansky: The Retirement Rule That Leaves Too Much Money Behind
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Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Amy Arnott: And I’m Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist for Morningstar. Today on the podcast, we welcome back Jean Chatzky. Jean is the author of a new book about retirement planning called The Forever Paycheck: The New Retirement Strategy to Spend More, Worry Less, and Never Run Out of Money. In addition, she has written several other New York Times bestselling books about money and investing. She’s also CEO of HerMoney.com and host of the podcast Her Money with Jean Chatzky. She served as the financial editor of NBC Today for 25 years and is the financial ambassador for AARP. She appeared frequently on CNN and MSNBC, and was a recurring guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Benz: Jean, welcome back to The Long View.
Jean Chatzky: Thanks. Thank you so much for having me.
Benz: Well, thanks for being here and congratulations on your new book, The Forever Paycheck. We want to delve into the book today, but before we get started with some substantive questions about retirement planning, I just wanted to ask what made you want to go deep on this topic of retirement planning?
Chatzky: I think it was a couple of things. I’m 61 years old, and so, in the guise of doing a little “me-search,” this is where I’ve been living lately and where the people that I’ve grown up with have been living. But I also have watched people, including my mother, live in retirement over the past couple of decades and noticed the real difficulty that she and others have had spending their money, which to me seems incredibly sad. We hear, of course, a lot about people who haven’t saved enough, but for those who really have done the work and who have set themselves up so beautifully to then find that they just can’t open the spigot and live the lives that they had wanted to or planned on living is a real problem. As somebody who spent so many years writing about accumulating money, investing money, building wealth, it just seemed time to turn to this idea of, “OK, what’s next?”
Arnott: To expand on that a little bit, why do you think it is that so many people, even retirees who have more than sufficient assets to support their spending, are still reluctant to spend? What do you think are some of the main factors that are contributing to that?
Chatzky: I think it’s twofold. First, it’s really complicated. When you look at the maze of accounts in which we hold our money, taxable, tax-deferred, Roth accounts, and the penalties that we could hit if we do it wrong in terms of things like IRMAA for Medicare or getting kicked into a higher tax bracket, it becomes this very, very difficult math puzzle to figure out how much and what to pull from which accounts at what time. There’s also a huge amount of fear that if you do it wrong, you’ll run out of money, you’ll blow through your resources too fast.
But the other factor is this emotional gate that seems to go up for people when they’re asked to flip the switch from accumulation to decumulation. It just turns out to be highly uncomfortable. Part of that, I think, is, again, the fear factor, but part of it is that we’ve gotten so used to saving money for 30, if not 40, years. We’ve bought into this language of paying ourselves first and maxing out our retirement contributions and grabbing all the matching dollars, so to ask ourselves to one day just wake up and do the opposite is really, really difficult. And while we have these behavioral finance helpers that have been built into the accumulation process, things like auto-enrollment and auto-escalation of contributions and target-date funds to make sure that we’re investing appropriately, none of that stuff exists for spending.
Benz: You had a great section in the book, Jean, where you talk about just the mental accounting aspect of spending income—that we’re all used to spending income from our paychecks; we’re not used to spending from our assets. I thought that was such an astute point.
Wondering if you can kind of unpack that for us because Amy and I have talked between ourselves about how, just logistically, extracting cash flow from a portfolio with a total return approach is harder than just spending dividends. Maybe these people who are really focused on dividends aren’t so irrational; it’s just easier to use dividends for your spending money. Can you talk about that issue of income versus assets?
Chatzky: Sure. There’s some really interesting research to back me up. When you’re receiving a paycheck, the nice thing about it is the frequency; you know that you got one today, you’re going to get another in two weeks, you’re going to get another in two weeks again. That money is going to keep replenishing itself. Even if you do spend every dime that comes in through that paycheck, there’s another where that came from. That’s not true of assets. When you’ve got a chunk of money sitting in a retirement account, chances are pretty good that somewhere along the way, as you accumulated it, you anchored to a particular number. You focused on, I really want to have $1 million for retirement or $2 million for retirement, and maybe you were even successful, and you got there. Seeing that number then begin to fall is, once again, really uncomfortable.
I saw this with my mother. When my mother inherited from my father—my father passed away about 20 years ago—my mother was fortunate enough to have his pension because he spent some years as a teacher. She had Social Security; she had a paid-off apartment; she had a decent long-term-care policy, which was a nice back-pocket sort of safety net for her. And then she had this retirement portfolio that was worth $1.6 million. And she was very, very happy to spend the pension, to spend Social Security, to spend the income from that $1.6 million, but she didn’t want to see that number go down. In fact, when she died more than 20 years later, she had a little bit more than that. That’s what we’re seeing across the board. We’re seeing studies point to the fact that many retirees are not spending anything in terms of their principal.
Some of them are spending a little bit, but not nearly what they could be. Two noted retirement researchers, folks that I know that you know, Christine and Amy, David Blanchett and Michael Finke, actually did a study where they compared people who had similar-sized wealth, but half of the people had the wealth in a pension that was annuitized. It was coming to them every single month in the form of a forever paycheck. Half of them had the money in a brokerage account, and the people with the paychecks were spending typically twice as much. The researchers believe that that’s simply because they know that there’s another paycheck where that one came from, and another after that, and another after that.
Arnott: For people who do want that type of paycheck equivalent and decide to use an annuity to create that steady income stream, what process should people be going through to research and purchase an annuity, as well as making sure that the insurer is financially strong?
Chatzky: Before we get to that, I would never suggest that people take all of their money and put it into an annuity. This is a solution for the money that you need in combination with Social Security to cover your needs and your important wants, the things that you really don’t want to live without. Typically, it’s about 20% to 30% of your money. You can think of it as the component of your portfolio that you have in fixed income rather than in equities or in stocks, but everybody needs the growth of the market in retirement. You still need to keep a hand in the market, assets in the market, a significant amount, because you need that growth to keep up with taxes and inflation.
Once you’ve decided that you want a paycheck, if you want to create it using an annuity, there are a number of steps you need to go through. You have to figure out what type of annuity. There are a number of different products out there, but they boil down to fixed and variable. The fixed annuities have a guarantee that you are never going to lose principal. You may not make a ton in some years, depending on how this annuity is baked, but you know that there’s this guarantee that you’re never going to lose money.
Variable annuities and what are called RILAs, registered index-linked annuities, have an investment component that is tied to a market index, and in those you can lose money. How much depends on how that annuity is once again put together, but you have to decide what kind of product you want. And then you go through a process of shopping, and this is not something that you’re likely to do yourself. You certainly can go on the internet. There are a number of different sites like immediateannuities.com and annuity.com and Stan The Annuity Man that have calculators and the ability to price out some simple annuities, much like you’d price out life insurance on the web.
That’s not at all a bad place to start, but eventually you’re going to want to talk to a financial advisor or an insurance agent who can walk you through the different products that are available on the market today. You’re going to compare them by their various features. What are you getting in terms of a return? What are the guarantees? Is there a cost-of-living increase built in? Is there what’s called a return of premium guarantee, which means that the amount of money that you put in, you or your heirs will get back?
All of those things factor into the pricing of whatever product you’re looking at, but you want to make sure that you’re comparing apples to apples from different companies. It’s really important to look at the quality of the underwriter and the rating of the insurance company itself. As with life insurance, as with bonds, there are ratings agencies, many of the same ratings agencies, that will give the insurer a letter grade, and you want to stick with those insurers that are in the A category. I would not go into the B category for something as important as this.
Benz: Jean, we have lots more questions about annuities, but first I wanted to discuss the fact that there seem to be kind of two factions in the space of guaranteed income where a lot of my Bogleheads friends would say, forget the annuity, you should just do a laddered portfolio of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, TIPS bonds where you do have that built-in CPI adjustment, you don’t have longevity protection, but can you compare and contrast those two different approaches to securing quasi-guaranteed income in retirement?
Chatzky: Absolutely. I think there are a lot of people like your Bogleheads friends who are going to want to build their forever paycheck, if they want one, with investments rather than with insurance. It basically comes down to two considerations. Number one is how much of a guarantee is important to you? You can do an awful lot with ladders, but one thing that you can’t do is predict the future of interest rates. When rungs roll off that ladder, the money needs to be reinvested. If rates have shifted in a way that is not great for income, that is a risk that you’re going to have to live with. On the flip side, there are guarantees available with insurance that you can lock into for life. The returns will vary. You have to compare the returns that you’re going to get from those laddered TIPS, or those laddered bonds, or CDs against what you’re likely to get with insurance, but it’s another way to go.
The other factor that plays into this is how much of a feeling of FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” you have in your personality. If the markets do incredibly well and you’ve locked up a chunk of your money in an annuity that’s only going to pay you a certain amount, are you going to be kicking yourself every single day? If you are, then you’re probably better off trying to fund your paycheck with investments. In the book, I explained how you can do this with a total return portfolio, how you could do this with a Bucket portfolio, and how you could do it with annuities that do have a leg in the market. You need to understand who you are and how you’re wired in order to figure out how to best create a paycheck for yourself.
Arnott: One trend we’ve been hearing a lot about in the annuity space is the fact that there are a lot of private equity-backed insurance companies who have been investing their reserve assets in private credits. Is that something that annuity buyers should be worried about? Is there a way for people to avoid the potential problems related to that?
Chatzky: You’re right that life insurers have been big participants in private credit, and they have figured out a way to make use of it in the portfolio. The question is how much transparency you have into what sits inside that portfolio. Generally, this is more of a caution with those annuities that are linked to market performance—the ones that actually can lose value—the variable annuities, the registered index-linked annuities, the RILAs, the fixed annuities, which again, there are many types of these, are not market-loss products. As long as you lock into an annuity provider, a carrier that is top-rated, I think that you’re going to be fine. But as far as those variable products, I think you do want to know what’s in the portfolio. I think that is something that is a perfectly reasonable question to ask anybody that you’re working with to buy an annuity.
Benz: In the book, you talk about the value of getting some financial advice, some kind of a planner or something like that. How would you recommend that investors navigate finding the right person if they are compelled by this idea of an annuity? How do they find a partner to help them navigate? Because in my experience, a lot of planners would be like, “Oh, I don’t really touch insurance products at all.” How do you find someone who’s conversant in all of these issues?
Chatzky: Well, this happened to me. I have a financial advisor. I’ve had a financial advisor, the same one for many, many years. I’m generally a very, very happy customer. But as I went through the research for this book, I became more and more convinced that actually I do want a forever paycheck. Based on my personality, I’m going to fund that forever paycheck, or part of that forever paycheck, with an annuity. I went to my financial advisor, and I said, “Let’s talk about this.” And he wouldn’t help me. He said, “We just don’t do this.” And what I learned in interviewing financial advisors is that they tend to lock into a particular methodology, many of them. If they’re total return people, then that’s what they’re going to do for you. If they’re bucket people, then that’s what they’re going to do for their clients. You are going to want to ask outright the question.
If you are unable to get this from your own advisor, you’re going to want to ask other advisors, “Is this the type of product that you can help me with?” I went through an exercise of asking people that I trust for recommendations of advisors who work in the annuity space and have been going through a process of evaluating a few of them and the different types of products that they are suggesting for me. But I would not be at all surprised if you find yourself in that situation. I also think it’s fine to divide and conquer. I’m going to stay with my advisor. I’m very happy with the work that he’s done for me, but I’ve also told him I’m taking a chunk of my money and I’m using it to do this.
Arnott: We also wanted to spend some time talking about other sources of income like Social Security or portfolio withdrawals. You write in the book that waiting to file for Social Security until age 70 is the best course of action for many people, especially people who are in good health and expect to live long enough to get the full advantage of those higher Social Security payments.
But if you are waiting to claim Social Security, you’re kind of faced with a gap between when you retire and when you start getting those checks. Can you talk about some strategies for bridging that gap between when you retire and when you actually start receiving Social Security?
Chatzky: Yeah, absolutely. One strategy is just to continue to work a little bit. We’re seeing more and more people phasing into retirement. Although there are some penalties, if you earn too much money, keeping a certain amount of income flowing in can help bridge the gap. It may pay to pull money out of some retirement accounts in order to bridge the gap from when you stop working until you file for Social Security. What you have to keep in mind is that each year you wait to take Social Security generally equates to about a 7% to 8% bump in what you’ll get in your monthly check. If you have other places that you can pull the money from, then it often pays to wait for that money to grow, especially because Social Security is a program that has a real cost-of-living adjustment. It actually adjusts with whatever the inflation rate is each year, and that was hugely helpful over the past couple of years as inflation spiked.
You can look at pulling money out of your other retirement accounts. If your income drops significantly, it actually can be a fairly good time to pull money out of your tax-deferred accounts because you may be able to pay taxes at a lower rate or in a lower bracket. You can also look at using what people call a bridge annuity, which is a simple income annuity that you buy not forever, but for the certain number of years between the time that you stop earning and start taking Social Security. You might buy a simple income annuity that lasts for five years if that’s how long you expect that period of time to be.
Arnott: Another issue that people face when they’re getting close to retirement is sequence-of-returns risk. This is probably top of mind for a lot of people just given that the market has been doing so well for so long. Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about retiring, but are worried that they might be retiring into a very poor market in the years ahead?
Chatzky: We haven’t really touched on the 4% rule in this conversation yet, but the sequence-of-returns risk goes sort of part and parcel with the 4% rule and is a big reason why the 4% rule has come under fire and why Morningstar has started to issue a new number each year for what that initial portfolio withdrawal should be. Sequence-of-returns risk is essentially the problem of hitting a down market in the couple of years right before or the couple of years right after retirement. What happens is that if your balance dips that much, or dips significantly, and you are pulling too much out of your portfolio in those initial years of withdrawal, you are at a greater risk of running out of money down the road. Considering that that’s the fear that keeps people up at night, it’s no wonder that this is something that’s on a whole lot of people’s minds.
I mean, my advice would be if this is what you want to do, if this is how you are planning to fund your retirement, then as you enter retirement, I’d turn right to Morningstar. I mean, you guys are issuing a number each year. As I’ve been following it, it’s ranged from about 3.3% up to 4.0% of what you can safely withdraw in the first year of retirement. If you follow that guidance and then you adjust with inflation each year following, you should be OK.
Benz: One thing Amy and I have concluded in working on that research, Jean, and thank you for the shoutout, is just that if people can be flexible with their spending from year to year, that is kind of a best practice in terms of portfolio spending. I don’t know if you agree, but to me that goes hand in hand with securing as much steady income as you can. If you have more steady income, then you can be flexible. Do you tend to concur with that approach?
Chatzky: A hundred percent. Look, there are some things that are very, very difficult to be flexible on. Your Medicare premiums—very hard to be flexible. Your housing costs, if you have been living in the same place and you have a pretty steady property tax bill; general upkeep, food and utilities, and all of those things that fall under the category of needs. It’s very, very tough to be flexible when it comes to those things. When it comes to the second vacation, when it comes to the number of times you go out to dinner in a particular week, we are able to flex. What I have seen from the massive spending database that the folks at JPMorgan Chase maintain because they follow the flows of money that people spend on their credit cards, their data shows that retirees are flexible; that in years when the markets are down, specifically around the Great Recession, people did spend less.
What I think is the benefit of having your fixed expenses and some of your wants covered by income that you know is guaranteed in the form of a forever paycheck is that it gives you the ability not to have to flex on everything. It gives you the ability to know, yeah, OK, I’m still going to be able to go on that first vacation a year with my family. Maybe the second one is something that we won’t do, but I know I have the first one covered. I know my gym membership, which I really do not want to have to compromise on, is covered. If you can lock in knowing that you’ve got a certain amount of money that will last you as long as you live that will cover those things, I think that’s a very nice way to be able to put your mind at ease as you enter retirement.
Arnott: I wanted to transition into talking about some more lifestyle-related issues for retirement, and one interesting stat that you quoted in the book kind of jumped out at me, and that was that only six out of 10 couples share the same vision of retirement or vision for retirement. Are there ways to talk to your spouse and kind of bridge the gap if you do have a different vision, or is there a good way for each person to maybe get part of what they want?
Chatzky: I think talking about it has to be the goal, and what that research and other research has shown is that a lot of people don’t talk about it. Not only do they not talk about it with their partners, but they don’t really plot it out themselves. They haven’t figured out what retirement is going to look like, when it’s going to begin, where they’re going to live it, what they’re going to do on a random Tuesday afternoon. Until you actually start thinking about those more mundane touchpoints and then line them up with your spouse, I don’t know how anybody comes up with an estimate for what their retirement is going to cost because, depending on your vision for it, the price tag could be wildly, wildly different.
I have clipped and saved an article from The Wall Street Journal. I wrote about this in the book. A woman, a reporter years ago, wrote an article with the headline, “He Says Maine, She Says Florida.” It was all about how she and her husband had never had the conversation about what they were going to do. When they finally did have the conversation, she wanted to see the world, and he wanted to spend his days going to the public library three blocks from where they lived. I mean, the visions could not have been more different. Eventually they came to a bit of a compromise. I called her as I was reporting this book and said, “What happened?” And she said, “Well, he goes on the trips that he wants to go on. I go on more trips than he does, but we’ve kind of learned to divide and conquer.”
And I think for many retirees, particularly as we live longer, that is going to be a key to happiness. There are trips that I want to go on that I know my husband doesn’t want to go on, but I’m going to go with my girlfriends. There are things, experiences that he wants to have; he would like to have a certain number of baseball tickets every single year. I’ll go to one game. Give me a hot dog and a beer, one game a year, and I am happy. But he’s going to have to find somebody else to enjoy those games with, and that’s OK. He can come back, and he can tell me about them after.
Benz: We had David Bach on the podcast earlier this year, and he made a provocative point that’s kind of stuck with me. We were talking about the go-go, slow-go, and no-go phases of retirement. He argues that for some men, it’s a won’t-go kind of mindset, that they retire to the couch. I’m wondering if you can talk about whether you’re seeing that in any of the data and also how men, women—I suppose it could cut across genders—how they can make sure that that’s not them if they don’t want it to be them.
Chatzky: I’ve heard David say this, which is so the opposite of David, right? I mean, you know David Bach, and I know him very well, and he wants to ski 100 days a year. So, I’m not exactly sure where he’s getting this, but I do think part of the issue is a loneliness issue and a friendship issue. I’ve seen a lot of research on the very few number of friends that men have compared with women. When you retire, you need people to do things with. If you have very few friendships, that makes it hard to find playmates to pal along on these adventures that you may want to have or to encourage you to get up and get off the couch. I think if you sense that you might be this type of person or that your spouse might be this type of person, before retirement is when you want to start encouraging them to be a little bit more of a joiner, to pick up some sort of a hobby that involves other people, to look into classes at the local university that they might be able to audit, to think about volunteering or mentoring, or just something where they are going to very, very frequently see other people besides you, because loneliness in retirement is a huge issue and it’s very difficult to fight it if you don’t have the right networks going in.
Arnott: You also touched earlier on people who actually go back to work after retiring, either full-time or in some sort of part-time or consulting capacity. Some of those people might be doing that for financial reasons, but there are also a lot of nonfinancial reasons that people decide to continue working or start working again. Can you talk a little bit more about what work can add in terms of the quality of life for people who might be retirement age?
Chatzky: I think work can add a social element. It gives you the opportunity to interact with other people. It also, this may be generational, but I sit right on the bubble of baby boomer and Gen X, and I think that this generation of people about to head into retirement is very attached in an ego way to work. Work feeds their ego. It’s a constant source, for many people, of affirmation. Continuing to work, finding some way to stay connected to that life means that part of you continues to get fed. For people who are afraid of retirement, and I’m one of them, I think that is something to think very, very hard about. How are you going to handle the loss of that source of good feelings, and is there a way to keep a foot in the door?
I don’t think that you can discount the financial reasons, too. I mean, having a little bit of money coming in means that you can pull a little bit less out of your retirement funds. It means that those retirement funds can continue to grow. It may mean that you can help your adult children without feeling like it’s a stressor. And if you’re trying to delay Social Security, it can help with that too. I think there are reasons on both sides of the ledger to think about continuing to work.
Benz: Jean, I wanted to ask you about something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, which is the risks of scams and fraud and cognitive decline that we all might run into as we age, especially. I’m wondering if you can talk about, as you think about those things, what are kind of best practices for people who want to help safeguard themselves and their money against some of those risks?
Chatzky: I’ve seen these studies as well, and it’s very, very frightening both that cognitive decline shows up in our financial lives often, and also well before we get a diagnosis of being in cognitive decline. It’s often as much as five to 10 years before the diagnosis hits. This is where I think family and financial advisors become really important. There comes a point in your life where you have to say to your kids or to an advisor, “I know I’m getting older. This is an issue. It’s an issue that I’ve read about. It’s an issue that other people are experiencing. If you start to see any behaviors in me or in my life that worry you, you should say something.” You can say it to me, or you can say it to the advisor, but I think it’s up to us to sort of open the door for the fact that we know that these are issues and we want the help if someone suspects that it’s an issue in our life.
Financial institutions are also now on the lookout for this. The thing to do is to name a trusted person on your accounts so that if your financial institutions start to suspect that there’s a problem, they have somebody besides you that they can call.
Arnott: Another kind of scam that we often hear about with older adults, and this ties into the loneliness issue that you were talking about a few minutes ago, is romance scams where people meet someone online and get emotionally involved without realizing the other person is looking for money, basically. Is there a way family members can look out for that, but without being overly controlling of an older relative’s relationships?
Chatzky: Oh boy, it is really difficult. The proliferation of romance scams shows just how difficult it is because quite often the older adults do not want to hear it. This is somebody who is paying a lot of attention to them in a way that they have not been paid attention to in quite some time; the attention feels validating. It makes them feel good and young and important. I think you tread carefully, but you don’t keep your mouth shut. Sometimes it helps if the advice, in this case, is not coming from a child, but is coming from an advisor. This is one of those cases where I think that the adult child who is worried brings the financial advisor into the conversation to try to help shut the fraud down before it gets bad or worse.
Benz: I wanted to ask, as you peer forward into your own retirement, and you and I have talked about this before, Jean, but how have you adjusted your thinking in the intensive research that you put into this book about your own retirement plans, both financial and nonfinancial?
Chatzky: From a financial perspective, I absolutely am looking to put a forever paycheck for myself in place that will cover, once again, those things that I need, but also some of the things that I really want. One of the things that will allow me to do, because I know that my needs have been taken care of and because I also—as my mother did—have a long-term-care policy, is that it allows me to think differently about how and when I want to help my children. My kids are right around age 30, both of them. My son’s a little bit older, and my daughter is a little bit younger. They’re embarking on their own lives, adult lives, which means having children and buying houses. As I have gone through this research, I’ve been thinking about the fact that hopefully I live a really long time, but if I live until, say, 90, they’re going to be 60. I hope that they don’t need my money when they are 60, but I know that they absolutely could use some of it in the near term to do things like getting a down payment together and helping with 529s for their own kids. Part of this exercise in putting together a paycheck has allowed me to think a little bit more flexibly about what I want to do for them and also for the causes that I care about.
From a nonfinancial perspective, it really wasn’t the research that has adjusted my thinking so much, but rather the fact that this year, right around Christmastime, we lost a good friend who just died. Not sick, just died. Young guy, early 60s. That really shook us in terms of realizing that you just don’t know how much time you have, and we better start doing some of the things that we want to do.
I’ve already said that I’m scared of retirement, and I am indeed scared of retirement, not from a financial perspective, but just because I like what I do and I’m pretty involved in it. But I have really started thinking about, OK, I think for me, retirement looks like doing a little bit less of what I do today and how to shift into that. Right now my husband and I have agreed that we will take one more trip each year. That’s like a baby step, but it’s a baby step that was meaningful to him. It’s one that I could sort of get behind, and we’ll look at it from there.
Arnott: You did a lot of research and conducted a lot of interviews for the book. As Christine mentioned, it’s pretty packed with information about a lot of retirement-related topics. I’m curious, were there any areas where you changed your mind about a given topic after going through the process of doing research for the book?
Chatzky: I write in the book about my evolution on annuities. I was, like many personal finance journalists, a hard no on annuities for many, many years. In fact, our financial advisor tried to, years ago, sell one to my mother, and it would’ve been a very good product for her, I have learned in hindsight; I would not even let him talk about it. I took a very, very hard pass on that, but I’ve learned about what these products can do that other products can’t, and so my mind has definitely been changed about that. As far as other areas where I’ve done a complete 180, I don’t really think so, but I’ve learned so much about why we behave the way we behave in retirement, particularly with spending, that I think I’ll be smarter about it when my time actually comes.
Benz: Well, Jean, we are so glad you did this “me-search” for all of us. The book turned out so well, and we always love hearing your insights. Thank you so much for joining us.
Chatzky: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Benz: Thanks again, Jean.
Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on social media at Christine Benz on LinkedIn or @christine_benz on X.
Arnott: And at Amy Arnott on LinkedIn.
Benz: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast. Jessica Bebel produces the show notes each week, and Jennifer Gierat copy edits our transcripts. Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at thelongview@morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.