226: Rethinking Retirement: Are You Chasing the Wrong Goal?

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Happy New Year. Welcome to 2025. First, I can’t believe it’s 2025. And secondly, I actually recorded pretty much this whole podcast and realized I didn’t hit record. And I only noticed because I was looking at the program I use to record and I noticed there wasn’t a number which kind of tells me how long the recording is, and I realized I never pressed record. 

This has happened one or two times before, and you can imagine it sucks, right? It’s like writing a paper and then realizing it didn’t save. But it’ll be even better because it’s the second time around. 

So a question I get asked a lot is some form of this, am I on track for retirement? Should I hire a financial advisor to see if we are on track? And that is actually the wrong question. Many of us are sort of focused on, well, how much do we need in retirement, what is our magic number, like 5 million or 10 million dollars? And what this number means is it’s based on the 4% rule, which is also based on stock retirements, or rather usually it’s a combination of your brokerage accounts and your retirement accounts, like a 401K, 403B, and a Roth IRA. 

And so you may have heard of the 4% rule where for every 1 million dollars you have invested in the stock market, you can safely take out $40 thousand a year. Now, the word safely is kind of in quotes because they’ve done these fancy calculations that if you do this, then you are highly, highly unlikely to run out of money. But most of you will have more than just stock investments, especially if you’ve been following me for a while you’re probably dabbling in other things like real estate et cetera. 

So here’s what I want to say, you are going to die at your peak net worth. Did you know that? You are going to die at your peak net worth. So then it’s like, why did we work so hard? Why didn’t we enjoy the money that is ours when we were younger, right? That’s when you can enjoy it the most, when we’re younger and healthier. Not that being old means that you're not going to be healthy, but you know what I mean. 

That being said, money isn’t the actual goal. Remember, it is a tool to help you live the life that you want. So the question is, what is that life that you want? Are you living it now? If not, what would you rather have? What would you want it to actually look like, like right now, in the future, and what I mean by future is that life comes in seasons. If you have young children, this is a season. If your kids are out of the house, that is a season. 

And so I know it might seem overwhelming to sit down and think about this, but I really recommend that you do because this is how you're going to know if you are on track. And many of my clients think they need to have a certain amount of money before they can make changes like working less or starting a business, et cetera, but money isn’t linear. And it’s not really a problem to make less in the short term so you can enjoy, let’s say, your kids when they’re young. 

Now, Jack is 7 right now, he’s turning 8 this year. He’s in first grade and will be starting second grade in the fall. And part of me is like, how did this happen? I mean everyone says the days are long but the years go fast. And so many parents I talk to with older kids, they’re always saying it goes so fast, it goes so fast. I remember being told this when I had a newborn, and it sure does. 

And I saw this Instagram post that kind of really pierced through the heart, and it was something like you are going to know your children the longest time-wise as adults. Childhood is so short. So I’m not saying this to guilt trip you if you're a mom with young kids, but I really want you to think about that. 

Pretty much all of my clients want to spend more time with their kids. And so the question is, do something about that. You can. And I think that’s the thing that I see a lot, is we feel like we don’t have a choice because of … money. I never want that to be the reason to not spend time with your kids and things that are valuable for you, experiences that really enrich your life. 

Many of you love to travel and love to experience traveling to new places, and the truth of the matter is it’ll probably be harder when you're older. And growing older doesn’t mean that you're going to be frail and weak and unable to travel, especially if you follow Peter Attia’s principles and really be proactive about maintaining your health and your muscle and your bone density and your agility. 

And so the question is, how do you enjoy the money that you’ve worked so hard for now and also make sure that you're planning for the future? It’s not either or. And so what you need to do is basically sit down and really, really think about this.

Now, this isn’t something you're going to figure out in one sitting. And I know many of you have thought about this, at least day dreamed about it, and how many of you have written it down? 

Now, as I was planning this podcast episode I realized there are so many questions to facilitate this sort of vision, planning, or even brainstorming if you will. And so I actually created a worksheet for you and you can download it. The link will be in the podcast app for this episode. This is episode 226, and so if you go to wealthymommd.com/226, you can download the worksheet there. 

And so this worksheet, really, you should approach piecemeal. Again, you’re not going to get it done in one go. It’s probably going to take several sittings. And so there’s going to be questions like, what does your life look like now? What would you rather have it look like? What experiences do you want to prioritize before retirement? And more. 

So I’m not going to go through all the questions because they’re all on the worksheet. And again, go to wealthymommd.com/226 the numbers and you will be able to grab the worksheet there. 

And so I think you can see that once you have a much better idea of that, then you can figure out what do my finances need to look like to actually have this life? Because that’s the only way you're going to know if you're on track, right? 

And I know many of you will be thinking, well, how do I actually estimate? Now of course it’s going to be not super easy to do that, you really have to guesstimate, and guesstimate loosely. But that’s still worth doing because you're going to get a sense of what that’s going to take, right?

And so if you are attending my upcoming conference, which at this point will be in less than two months, the Live Wealthy Money and Wellness Conference February 20 to 23 in Hawaii. But if you are coming, I’m really excited for you. In fact I really want to make sure you download this worksheet because we are going to dive even deeper. 

And if you come sort of having done at least a few passes, you're going to get so much more out of the conference because with the talks, with the people there and the masterminding you're really going to be able to get so much more clear on what that life will look like and be able to leave the conference with a pretty good plan of how to get there. 

And hopefully it’s not too late, you're welcome to join us February 20 to 23 at the Four Seasons Oahu, and that’s wealthymommd.com/conference to learn more and to see if we have spots remaining. 

Again, I encourage all of you to download the worksheet, it’s going to be so helpful, and honestly it’s going to inform you what you actually want to work on this year in all areas of your life. Remember, money is a tool, there’s so many aspects of your life that you may want to work on. 

For example, if you have a goal of really optimizing your health, again, that’s kind of vague. Let’s say for example you really want to lift heavy weights, you really want to increase your muscle mass, and so obviously you're going to learn a bit about how to do that. It’s actually one of the topics at my upcoming conference, and so you can make a plan for how to do that this year, right? 

It basically means making sure you get adequate protein, and most of us are severely undernourished when it comes to protein, and obviously that includes lifting heavy weights, not multiple reps of light weights. I don’t know what that was even a thing in the, I don’t know, was it a decade ago? But it’s actually about lifting heavy weights, that’s how you build muscle. 

So I hope your year is off to a great start. I’m so excited for you, I’m excited for me because, again, this time of the year is such a great time to dream and figure out what to do next. I’ll talk to you next week. 

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.