Latest / The Jon Sanchez Show / Behind On Retirement? What To Do Now
Transcript
- Jon G. Sanchez: Good Monday afternoon to you. Welcome to the John Sanchez show on News Talk seven eighty KOH Pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I hope you've had a great Monday, great weekend. We're in the thick of it. We're in the thick of it. You know what today is? Besides Monday? It is the ceasefire expiration. That's right. Sixty days ago, the US and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding, MOU, of a ceasefire between the two countries. Well, we all know that that didn't last very long, did it? Well, today is the official expiration of the ceasefire at midnight tonight. Both sides had some pretty harsh things to say back and forth today. president got pretty upset at Oman. On a Fox interview this morning, and he said, Oman, Oman, better stay out of this or we're gonna bomb the you know what out of them. that's how the day got started. Oil prices didn't have much of a negative reaction at that point, but as the day progressed, the oil prices also progressed. So that was one of the driving forces to today's week market session. Give you all the details here in a moment. Let's get down to what our topic's gonna be after I conclude the the stock market recap. Listen up for those of you that are panicking about retirement. I hear it all the time. John, I'm behind the curve. Life got in the way. Maybe I didn't make enough money. I mean, there's a million reasons. And notice I said reasons, not excuses. Because nobody, not one of you, purposely have said, I don't want to have a financially successful retirement. Right? That's ridiculous. But again, what's happened could be a million different things. I don't care what the reasons are. I'm here to solve that problem for you. There's a study out that I'll share with you when we get to the topic that over 50% of Americans, over 50% of Americans, said they felt they were behind on their retirement savings. 37% of those who felt behind said they were, quote, significantly behind. And what was interesting, Generation Xers, they were especially concerned with nearly seven in 10 saying they felt behind. So, folks, this is a common problem. It is a very, very common problem. So I've titled today's show, Behind on Retirement. Here's what to do now. Because there are solutions. Don't think, man, I screwed up. It's too late. Retirement's never going to happen. It's going to be a you know, I'm never going to be able to retire. That's what I hear a lot. I'm never going to be able to retire. Or, yeah, I'm going to be able to be able to retire, but it's not going to be a pretty scene. Well, again. I'm going to do my very best to make sure that does not happen to you. I promise you that. I'm going to give you my best efforts to make sure that that is not the case with you. All right. We'll get to that momentarily. In the meantime, let's get down to the stock market side. So, as I said, things were okay throughout most of the session today until we get to kind of late morning, eight, nine o'clock, right around there, if I remember correctly. Before that, of course, were those comments by the president. He told reporters that he does not think Iran will agree to a deal that he views as necessary ahead of today's expiration. And that deal, of course, he went on to talk about the nuclear weapons. It's non-negotiable. Iran just came out a couple hours ago on the NewsWires saying the U.S. isn't serious about negotiations. And essentially, if the U.S. doesn't come to the negotiating table, which sounds strange for them to say that, right? It's usually us saying that. That Basically, they're going to launch some attacks in the Strait of Hormuz in a c in two weeks, is what they said. So, you know, remember as I as I mentioned on the stock update this morning with Ross, I said, wasn't it just last week that we had the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bissent, come out and say, We're gonna have a deal today or at the latest tomorrow? And the president said the same thing. So my question is, what the heck happened? W I can't imagine that if they didn't have very, very confident feelings, they would have never come out to the world and said, we're gonna have a deal today or tomorrow. But if you notice last week, if you listen to the show each and every day, as every day progressed, we never really heard any more from the Trump administration about a deal's close. All we've really heard is Oman and and Iran have been talking. But now the president's pretty upset, obviously, making those comments that he's gonna bomb the you know what out of Oman if they don't basically get out of the negotiations. So once again we find ourselves in a situation where oil prices are rising and the stock market's coming down. If it were not, if it were not for the semiconductors, I tell you what, I I don't know. I I I don't know. I I honestly feel in my heart we'd probably be in corrective terror corrective territory. The semiconductors, and then of course you add AI into it, it is our saving grace right now. It really is. And I think that's why I use the term so much that this market's tough long coded. It's not that the market's not paying attention to what's happening with oil prices and with inflation, with the fear of rising interest rates, all these things that normally would drag a stock market down. But you got this little island out there, and I say that facetiously, called the semiconductors, the memory stocks specifically. They just keep going and going. Yeah, we have a couple of days where they'll go down, but majority of the time they're moving up and moving up big. And today was another one of those days. Give an example. It started off this morning where Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said the Trump administration does not want Apple purchasing Chinese memory chips. Now remember, last week Apple said that they're in talks with China to purchase memory chips. I thought that was bizarre. Sure, that many of the iPhones are, of course, built in China, and who knows what other Chinese parts are in there. But you know how sensitive this country is, and especially the president, to China and when it comes to semiconductors, right? Pretty easy to spy on things when you are the creators of semiconductors. I don't care what product it's in. So, you know, I thought that was interesting that here we are a week later, Lutnik comes out and says, Yeah, the Trump administration does not want Apple purchasing Chinese memory chips. Apple today only lost 34 cents on the news at 305.59 close. But that sparked more domestic-related semiconductors to do very well today. Here's an example: Sandisk. Up $145.74, 8.88% gain. Big stock now, $1,786.85 closing price. applied material, another big mover today, 5.55% gain up $28.13 to $535.31. the video is a bit on the quiet side. Finished down just $15, $225.01 in that space. And advanced microdevices losing $8.39 to $5.06. all right, let me get out of that space. Let's go to SpaceX. It was a big move today. the reason behind that is continued enthusiasm surrounding the AI trade because of support after anthropic, which remembers not publicly traded yet, reported a massive jump in their revenue, you know, outside the sector. But that transcended, believe it or not, over to SpaceX, which of course has you know, the AI portion now. And you know, it's more of an AI company almost, it seems like. So SpaceX today, because of that news on Anthropic, shot up six dollars and twenty-three cents, four point four five percent gained to one forty-six twenty-three. So Yeah, we're you know eleven dollars and twel twenty-three cents above that that IPO price, post IPO price. let's see, what else did I want to mention? pressure on meta today. the sector itself, because of meta, the communications sector, down one and a half percent. Meta today lost twenty dollars and eighty-eight cents, three point five four percent loss to a price of five sixty eight ninety-seven, under pressure ahead of opening arguments tomorrow in a child social media addiction case in California. let's see, Nike was a jag on the Dow today, but it's a low price stock, doesn't have big impact. Finished down 4.03% or $1.64 to $39.09. lowest level since 2014. Also, home builders, they faced some headwinds today from elevated long term treasury yields. 30 year treasury yield today, by the way, closing to a fresh, you ready for this? A fresh 19 year high. Think about that for a second. 19 year high. Again, that weight on the market. All right. Where do we set on a year-to-day basis? Well, the Dow's up 11.2%. The SP 500 higher by 13.1%. The NASDAQ up 14.6%. And that little engine that keeps going, the Russell 2000 up 23.2%. I'm going to go ahead and sneak in the commodity prices, get this going. oil today, $2.06 rise to $84.46 a barrel. Gold loss $37.10, closing at $4,474 an ounce. And a little uptick in the yields besides that 30 year, the 10 year finished up three basis points to a yield close of 4.72%. So, like I said, a little bit of a sloppy day today. we didn't have any economic news. This is gonna be a very, very light economic week. We're gonna get some Fed minutes later in the week, but but beyond that, you know, like I said, it's relatively light. Tomorrow's gonna be an an okay day. We've got some housing data. The housing starts, building permits, some import-export prices, pending home sales. And then on the 19th, of course, on Wednesday, we're gonna have the FOMC minutes from that July 28th and 29th meeting. And then that's pretty much gonna be it besides our initial claims and continuing claims on Thursday. So market is hungry right now for some positive news. We're not gonna get it on the data side. Like I said, these are not market moving reports, even if that's really good news or really bad news, market's not gonna pay that much attention. we're at the tail end of earnings. Over 90% of the SP 500's already reported their earnings numbers. This is gonna be a week of retail earnings, so the likes of Walmart. Home Depot, et cetera, should be reporting this week. so we'll be focusing on that. And of course, we translate that into the health of you as the consumer. And that's about it. So again, I think the market's gonna be really focused on what happens in the the Iran-US situation and oil prices and interest rates. So those are gonna be the driving factors as we have four more trading days left in the week. All right, when we come back behind on retirement, here's what you do now. Welcome back to the John Sanchez Show on News Talk 780 KO H. Again, a little bit of a rough session today. I tried talking and thinking at the same time there. Sorry about that. All right, here's how we finished up to that $2.06 spike in oil prices. we finished with a loss of $273 on the Dow. That's just a half a percent now, 0.51 to be exact. Closing levels $53,459. NASDAQ gave up 84 points, 0.32%. Closed in at 26,644. S P down 41 or 0.52%. Finished the day at 7,745. Again, $2.06 rising oil, $84.46 a barrel, gold down $37.10, closing at $4,474 an ounce. Three basis point increase on that 10-year at a yield of 4.72%. Again, that 30-year closing at levels we have not seen in 19 years. All right, behind on retirement. Here's what you need to do. So let me start off this educational segment with you with a little data. Okay. I always like to have data. So there was a recent bank rate and UGov survey that was reported by CBS. Here's what it said 56% of Americans said they felt they were behind on the retirement savings. 37% of those who felt behind said they were significantly behind. And Generation X, which if you don't know that age demographic, that's age forty six to age sixty one, forty six to sixty one. Gen X, especially concerned. Nearly seven out of the 10 saying they felt behind. Now there's another survey, another story or a report from Northwestern Mutual Fine Northwestern let me start with Northwestern Mutual. They found that 56% of Americans didn't know how much money they would need to retire comfortably. And a 2025 study by Northwestern Mutual found that 46% of Americans overall didn't think they'd be financially prepared. When retirement arise, rising to fifty four percent of Gen Xs. So those Gen X's are not feeling good. Now, if you're in this age group, let's say fifty five, sixty, sixty five, you hear these statistics and you you have to be thinking to yourself, You know what? That's me. I screwed up. It's too late. I'm gonna be working until the day I die. It's not the case. And that's what I'm my goal today is to show you that that's not the case. If you're thinking at your 401k, looking at your IRA, checked your social security statements, you may be thinking to yourself, huh, bottom line, I haven't saved enough. Now what am I gonna do? Well, that's exactly what we're gonna be talking about today. I want you to think about this. Don't start today's conversation with a panic feeling. I want to start with the math, because the math doesn't lie. Because the first thing that we need to determine is this. Are you actually behind? Or do you just feel that you are behind, right? There's a difference. Are you actually behind, or do you just feel that you're behind? And I find myself that many people, it's a feeling. It's not, they've never ran the math or had someone run the math for them. I'm gonna help you with that today. So I want to start off by starting with one subtitle here. Define not prepared, right? When you say, John, I I I don't have enough money to retire. My response, if you said that to me, it would be, you don't have enough money for what? Right? Really, that's the the trillion dollar question. You don't have enough money for what? To pay your mortgage, to be in retirement successfully? For what? Because retirement readiness isn't I need a million or I need two million. It's how much income, as I've emphasized so many times. It's how much income does your retirement lifestyle require? And where will that income come from? So I always like to give you a hypothetical example. All right. We got a hypothetical couple here. They spend about $8,000 in retirement, is what they're estimating. $96,000 a year, right? Well, Social Security, probably around $55,000, maybe a small pension if they're lucky. Let's say a thousand bucks a month or $12,000. So now the portfolio needs to provide roughly $29,000 annually before we get into taxes and other planning considerations. Now that couple may require a very, very different nest egg from another couple wanting $15,000 a month with no pension. Or another couple that only needs three or four thousand dollars a month. So you can't say I'm behind. You can't know that until you know where you're trying to go. Right. So we have to have that target out there. We have to look and see what is it that I need before I can let my emotions get in the way. And then we run the math. So now let's build your retirement income grant gap. I want you to do a little exercise when you get home today, or if you're at home, get out a pen and paper, and here we go. Step number one. What is my retirement going to cost? Step two, what reliable? Notice I use the word reliable. What reliable income are you going to have? Now, another word for reliable really in many cases is fixed income. So here's the examples of that. My Social Security, my pension if I have one, maybe my rental income, annuity income, other predictable sources. Okay. Notice again, the keyword here is reliable. I didn't say portfolio income. I didn't say Part time income, I didn't, you know, because those things fluctuate, right? Remember, in retirement income planning, we want to focus in on fixed income to cover the vast majority of our bills, variable income to cover the remaining portion, but knowing that we can cut back on our variable expenses if times get tough, meaning if the market goes down. So expenses minus reliable income will determine your retirement income gap. Really simple formula. Expenses minus reliable income equals your retirement income gap. So now that we know what the portfolio actually has to accomplish, and suddenly I only have $700,000 may become, you know what? I need my investments to generate approximately $35,000 annually in income. That's a problem that we can actually analyze and create a solution for instead of just saying, I have a feeling it's gonna be a miserable retirement. Now you may have more what I call financial levers than you think. Because those of you that feel you're behind in the retirement income standpoint may think there's only one solution. Save, save, save, save, save. I need to save more money. And I've told you this a million times also. Wall Street wants you to save and save and save and save. And Wall Street wants to tell you that if you don't have a couple million bucks saved, it is going to be a miserable retirement. I tell you just the opposite. I tell you exactly what I'm doing today. Let's figure out what you need, figure out what the sources are. And then build a plan to do it. That's what we do at Sanchez Gunt Capital Management. Now saving more money, of course, that'll help. But there are multiple levers. And I'll tell you what those levers are when we come back and continue our discussion. Are you behind on retirement? Back to the John Sanchez Show on New Stock 780 KOH. We'll continue on our discussion behind on retirement. Here's what you need to do now. First, let's give you a quick recap once again on the market. Finish down 273 on the Dow 0.51% loss. NASDAQ give up 84.32% and the SP lower by 41 uh.52% loss. Once again, the big culprit rising bond yields, as well as oil surging over $2.06 a barrel as the conflict continues and midnight tonight's the official expiration of the 60-day memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran with no no negotiations going on as the as they are reporting at this point, both sides are reporting. Okay, now we're down to our next segment here. So you have more lovers than you think, right? Here's why I say that. Again, easiest answer, simplest answer, most unsophisticated answer is pretty simple, Mr. Smith. Okay. So you're behind on retirement savings? Save more money, right? That's what anybody could say. But it's not what we do. There are many more levers. Number one, most effective. What I always tell people if you have the cash flow, the best place for you to put your money is in your 401k or other qualified retirement accounts through your employer. You may have a 403B or some other version of a retirement account. Why is that? Because remember, no other investment is going to allow you to put in so much money pre-tax, grow tax deferred, right? So That is where, for most of you, the bulk of your retirement is going to come from. It's going to come from whatever that retirement nest egg, that 401k, for example, whatever that nest egg is worth when you're ready to retire, you're going to assume a certain withdrawal rate. And that's where, again, a lot of your retirement income is going to come from. So the larger that nest egg, the better off you will be. Remember, there are significant catch up provisions nowadays. So again, if you're over 50, the government again allows you to put in a an excess of you know, in most cases around $8,500 ketchup. So you can sh again shelter significant sums of money, especially if there's two of you working, if you're over age 50. Fund the IRAs where appropriate. Remember, there's a lot of confusion on this. People said, hey, you know what? I'm not eligible for the tax deduction of my traditional IRA because I either make too much money or I have a 401k available that I'm contributing to. And you're correct on that. But remember, what a lot of people forget is anybody can fund an IRA. Whether it's tax deductible or not is another question. So this is where we really can get into some nice strategies. You know, this best case example, you you max out your 401k, you and your spouse max out your 401k. Now you're talking, you know, over $70,000 a year you can put in. And as I've shared with you, there are many strategies where you can actually put in more than than what the employer allows you to put in. Again, whole nother subject there. then we get into things like the mega Roth, right? Where you funding it with after tax dollars and you convert it, or excuse me, with pre-tax dollars, then you convert it immediately into a Roth. And that's a great retirement strategy because remember, if you make more, you know, certain amount of money, you're not gonna be able to fund the Roth. But this is a way to get around that, why they call it the mega Roth or the backdoor Roth. And again, you can put in a significant sum of money and convert it immediately into a a Roth IRA and then get the tax-free withdrawal later down the road. again, a lot of rules to it. I can't, I don't have time to, of course, go through those today, but just another idea. so fund those IRAs where you can, whether you get the tax deduction or not. Invest bonuses, right? If you're fortunate enough to work for an employer that gives you bonuses, well, you're used to not spending that money or having that money to live off of. So see if you can defer that into some type of retirement account. Stop allowing lifestyle creep to consume every single raise. What is lifestyle creep? Well, let's say you're making $100,000 a year, you get a $20,000 a year bonus. Now you're at $120,000. Now you increase your spending by somewhere around $20,000, right? You're like, I got more money. I'm gonna bump up my lifestyle. Maybe go get that new car or whatever you want to do. Again, may not be the right time to do that. That's lifestyle creep. If you've been happy living the way you are, and I'll tell you, this is one common denominator I see among you know financially successful people. They do not get lifestyle creep, right? They they're very, very content with what they have, and their focus, their number one focus, is on savings so that they can have that successful retirement down the road. Another option, not the greatest one, but it's not the end of the world. You work a little bit longer, right? Think about that. That can be enormously powerful. Let's say you're gonna work from you know you planned on retiring be you know at 65, traditional age, but now because again, you're a little behind the curve, bump it up to say 67. What does that mean? That means you got two more years of additional earnings, two more additional years of savings, two fewer years of portfolio withdrawals, potentially higher social security benefits, two more years for investment growth, potentially. So that little decision to extend your working time period by just say two years can affect multiple parts of the retirement planning and income equation. It's very powerful. Spend less. You don't know what you're going to spend or what you are spending until you have a budget. So create the budget. It's not sexy, but incredibly powerful. Again, another very important successful step that I see people make. They have a budget. They know every dollar that comes in, every dollar that goes out. If you can sustainably reduce retirement spending by say $1,000 a month, that's $12,000 less every year the retirement plan needs to produce. As I've told you, when we run our cash flow analysis, without fail, I can find thousands of dollars of savings for people. Just a fresh set of eyes looking in. Not that I'm a genius, but just looking at it, saying, geez, you know, you know, it's you and your wife and you're spending a thousand dollars a month at the grocery store. Can you cut that down to maybe six hundred? of course we can. Cool. We just found four hundred bucks. you're spending, know, three thousand dollars on vacations every year. Can you cut that down, say half? So fifteen hundred. absolutely. You get my point? Once you know what your expenses are, then you can go, I don't really need that. Or I can cut that one in half or manipulate the numbers so that again, you hit your goals. It's really simple to do. So the goal, remember, is not to retire as early as possible. The goal that you should be thinking about is I want to retire successfully. So again, to conclude this point, if that goal means working another two years, so be it. Hopefully you enjoy what you do for a living. My next point. The house may be part of the solution. Mmm, this one people forget a lot. Here's an example. Suppose you're 65 years old, you know, quote, traditional retirement age. Let's say you have a house that's worth 800,000. Got a small mortgage remaining, I don't know, 150 grand. Let's say you've done okay savings, you got six hundred and fifty thousand or so in your retirement accounts. People go, my God, John, I only have 650,000. Let's see. You know, at a 4% withdrawal rate, you know, I'm talking, you know, basically, you know, close to $30,000 a year in retirement income. No, that's not going to cut it. You're right. You have a financial picture, however, that includes substantial home equity also. So does that mean you immediately sell the house? Absolutely not. But perhaps, as part of the planning process, part of the income process, you start thinking about the following. Do I really need that big of a house? It's just, you know, my wife and I. So you downsize. Not always a successful move, though. I'll put a little aster because I make that comment. What we're finding with clients that we look at for this is they're finding that it is really no savings. Matter of fact, sometimes an increase in monthly expenses by downsizing. Why? Because again, if you're down to $150,000 equity in this example, you probably got a fairly small mortgage payment. Probably not going to have that small of a mortgage payment if even if you downsize. Maybe you'd have a little bit lower operating expenses, but maybe not. Probably don't have an HOA because you've been in that place a long time. Your neighborhood probably doesn't have HOAs. As we discussed last week with the boys, most new tracks have HOAs. So there's an additional expense. So you really need to sit down and crunch those numbers and say, okay, yeah, I can downsize, but is that really going to make financial sense? I can't tell you how many times, you know, in the last few years I've ran these numbers for clients and I said, You're not gonna like my answer. I know you're in a four-bedroom, th three bedroom or four bedroom, three bath house, and you keep essentially you know three of the bedroom doors closed because it's just you and your spouse. But stay where you are. You're not gonna find anything cheaper. And it's quite shocking to them. of course, the other great thing to do is pay off debt, right? We want to go into retirement with little debt, as much as possible. So this is the time when you're feeling like you're behind the the retirement savings curve. Again, do an analysis. What do I owe? How much do I owe? What's the interest rate? And develop a plan to start tackling that debt. Remember, if you're drawing a credit card debt, I'm seeing a lot of that right now. Even people that have, you know, good amounts of income got a lot of credit card debt. So what do you do? You start with the I and again, this is my philosophy. There's different strategies out there, but my philosophy slash strategy is start with the credit card balance with the lowest balance or start with the credit card with the lowest balance. Okay. So let's just say, I don't know, you got a Amex with I mean that's not a good example. Let's say you got a a Visa with a you know thousand, fifteen hundred dollar balance. Not costing you much per month, but again, if you're making payments, you look at the numbers. What are you paying? 20, 25, 30 percent interest? Doesn't make sense. Pay it off. But the trick of this is the reason we say pay off the smallest one first. I'm playing a mental game with you because I've seen this happen over and over again over the years where you get a client to pay off a small credit card balance and it's it's like an addiction. It's like, wow, I did that. I actually got a credit card paid off. Let me go after the next one. So let's say your next credit card's a $10,000 discover. Okay. Again, probably not a huge monthly payment, but it's a monthly payment and probably again, high interest rate. So you take what you were paying on that first credit card that you just paid off. You take what you're paying there, and then you accelerate the payment on the $10,000 credit card. And your goal there, get that one paid off. You see what I'm saying? And then you go to the next one and the next one. Hopefully there's not too many more next ones. But start with the lowest balance, it's a psychological game, and then start paying off all these others. And you watch and see, you're gonna become addicted to getting out of credit card debt. And remember, take a look at your other assets too. I say this all the time. Why in the world would you want to be paying, say, twenty five percent interest to Discover Card or Visa or whomever it may be when you're making, you know, if you're in the market, okay, you're doing pretty well this year, ten, twelve percent. But what if you have it tucked in an emergency savings account or just a Passbook savings account or something like that or a C D that you're making three or four percent? I don't want you to touch your emergency savings, but if you have other idle cash sitting there in a savings account, making, like I said, a couple percent, wouldn't it be smarter to take that money and pay off the twenty five percent interest credit card? Absolutely. So look at your home. I'm not going to get into other sophisticated strategies. again, there's many ways that you can tap that equity in the home, which again can be used towards additional retirement savings. I am not a proponent. Don't ever jeopardize the equity in your home by investing it into the stock market. Those are those are big no no's. But what about, like we've discussed with the boys many times, what about taking some of that equity and using it as a down payment on a rental property, right? If you can find the right rental property, get the cash flow, leverage that money. That's an opportunity to take a look at. So that house, remember, it's like a piggy bank, but you have to use it correctly. Don't use it to go out and, like I said, get a line of credit to go buy a bunch of toys and things like that, but use it wisely. Pay down higher interest rate debt, leverage it into more income-producing assets, that type of thing. All right. When we come back, we're going to talk about social security, becomes even more important when we're behind the retirement savings curve. Welcome back to the John Sanchez Show on New Stock 780K, which all right, I need to rapidly wrap this up because I'm running out of time and I still got a bunch of things to talk to you about. We're talking about behind our retirement. Here's what you do now. Let's continue. All right, Social Security. again, if you're behind the retirement saving curve, this becomes even more important. First thing that I see people do that are behind the retirement savings curve, they automatically start taking their social security at age 62, right? First time they're eligible. You have to give that significant considerations, right? Because again, there's Penalties or you know, you'll you'll face if you're still working when you take it at 62 and compared to waiting till FRA or full retirement age. there's so many things that go into it. I'm gonna try to do a show maybe on well, probably this time next week on Social Security because there's so many moving parts to it, right? What you do, what you decide could have a major impact on your spouse. So it's a consideration that is very Very, very important that cannot be taken lightly. So don't just automatically think I'm 62, I'm behind on the retirement savings curve. I need to take that now instead of waiting. Please don't do that because again, so many implications. Next one. Please do not try to catch up by taking crazy risk. I see this a lot. You're 60 years old. You realize you're behind the retirement savings. Say you got a half a million dollars in your IRA and you think, huh. Boy, I ran the numbers. I need to double this money before I retire in the next two or three years. So what do you do? All of a sudden your eyes and your brain start focusing on crypto, the latest hot stock, options, concentrated technology portfolios. I had this conversation with a client just the other day. Some of those I quote can't miss investments that your neighbor told you about. Don't, don't, don't do that. Because remember, high risk, high reward, but also. High risk. What if that 500,000, which is all you have saved, which is a significant sum, don't get me wrong. But what if all of a sudden you lose half of that? Now you're really going to be panicking. So this is not the type of money you take risk with by any means. So just because you're behind on the retirement savings does not give you permission or the ability to abandon some of these sound investment principles I've shared with you today. Now let's face reality. What if everything I told you makes sense to you? But still, what if the numbers really don't work out, right? You've cut back on expenses, you've increased income, you've invested every dollar that you possibly can, you've done everything that I've mentioned, but the numbers still don't work out. Because reality, folks, sometimes they don't work out. That's the facts. So I don't want to think here for just a moment that every single one of you are going to be able to solve these retirement challenges. It's just not going happen. But I do have a solution for you. Again, work a couple more years. Another solution? Part-time work, right? Nothing says that because you retire from your current job that you completely stop working. A lot of people don't. They they just I you know, excuse me, at sixty two years old, I cannot just send shivers down my spine. Think about sitting around and not having a reason to get out of bed every day. If I retire tomorrow from STEP and from Sanchez Gaunt, I would find something else to do. I'd start another business knowing me. Now, many of you don't have the entrepreneurial bug like I do, or sickness like I do. But folks, this is a great time to start businesses. It really is. It's so simple to do. You can do anything you want to do on the internet. So if you're short a couple grand a month, that's not hard to, you know, get a business that generates that. Not at all. Even $5,000 shortage. I'm not a big fan, as you've noticed over the years, of going to work part-time. I'm really not, because you got to look at the trade-off, right? You're still reporting to somebody. You still have to show up at a certain time, leave at a certain time. You're limited on, you know, time you can take off. That to me is not a good retirement. But you know what? What is a great retirement? Hey, guess what? Yeah, I'm gonna work part time in my business. You're building equity, you have unlimited income potential, you get some tax benefits in many cases. You control your own schedule. If you want to go sit on the beach in Cabo and have your laptop and a cell phone, you can conduct a lot of business that way. Million there's millionaires doing business that way. So think about that. This is always my saving grace. When I see and I've done everything that I can to help that income shortfall, I always revert to the small business idea. Because again, where else can you go make unlimited sums of money? You know, that you control? Nowhere. So give serious considerations to that. So I've got the retirement rescue plan to wrap up with for you. Here's what I want you to do. Answer these seven questions. What do I actually have today? What will I realistically spend in retirement? How much reliable lifetime income will I receive? Number four, what's the gap my investments need to fill? Number five, how much can I save between now and retirement? Number six, what happens if I work. One or two additional years. And number seven, what am I willing to change if the numbers don't work? Run the plan. And I promise you, just by knowing the numbers, knowing where you are, you will have a success significant source of relief. If we can be of help, give us a call at SanchozGaunt.com. God bless everybody. Have a great afternoon. We'll see you tomorrow on the John Sancho Show.