Tom Mosley:

Happy retirees and Super Bowl champions have a lot in common, that’s what we’re going to talk about on today’s show.

Happy retirees and Super Bowl champions have to start with a vision. You have to know where you’re going on the football field in August when it’s hot, and you’re doing two-a-days and you’re really trying to get into shape. And everything is tough, but you’re not seeing that. If you’re really going to be a championship football team, you’re seeing yourself on the platform at the Super Bowl, picking up the trophy. Trying to knock away the confetti, riding the parade. Those are the things you look for in football if you’re going to be a Super Bowl champion. If you’re going to be a happy retiree, you’ve got to have a vision for what that looks like too. And you know what? Your vision of your retirement is different than anybody else’s. What’s your dream? Do you want to travel? Do you want to see the Grand Canal in Venice?

Do you want to sleep over a hut on Bora Bora so you can see the mountains? Do you want to go on an African safari and be there when the lions come up, and just see them firsthand in their own environment? What is your dream? Maybe it’s your grandkids. You don’t want to travel overseas, but you just want to go to all your grandkids baseball, football, soccer, dance, gymnastics, everything in the world. Whatever your dream is, let it be your dream. Have your dream. And a happy football team that wins the Super Bowl and a championship retirement. Yes, I switched them because they’re the same. Both of them have to have a dream. Number two, after you get your vision, then number two, you’ve got to just begin with the fundamentals. I remember a story of Vince Lombardi had a horrible team in Green Bay, and they had just gotten decimated when they went to Cleveland. 59 to nothing, they lost, and he brought them back to Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

And the lights were on and the players were saying, “Why are the lights on? It’s midnight.” And he took them all out to the 50 yard line in that cold weather. And he held up a football and he says, “We’re starting at the very beginning. Gentlemen, this is a football.” When you go back to the basics in football, that’s what you do. When you’re practicing in football, you’re running the same plays every practice. You run the A gap, the B gap, the C gap, the D gap. You run the same pass routes on defense. You run the same thing over and over and over again. It’s not how much you do, it’s how many things you do right in football and don’t make mistakes. And you know the fundamentals. Guess what? Along comes retirement.

It’s the same way. If you’re going to be a happy retiree, just like you’re going to be a happy championship football player, you got to have the fundamentals down. You got to know what different plans you can save in. Let’s run that play. It’s called a 401k. Let’s run that play. It’s called an IRA. Let’s run that play. It’s called a pension. Let’s run that play. Let’s save for a house. That’s a non-qualified plan. You got to have those things going. You got to be diversified among all of those. You may want to throw in a Roth play. And you got to make it routine. You’ve got to practice these over and over and over again. How do you do that? You automate the important. In anything in life, you just begin to do it and build it into your routine.

So every paycheck, you put into the 401k. Every paycheck, your pension gets contributed to. Every paycheck, you may add to your Roth, but you just do it. Over and over and over again, and that’s what builds a strong and happy retirement. Because you get the fundamentals right. And it’s a grind, and some people get wiped out by the grind, but you just continually save on a regular basis and contribute on a regular basis. And before you know it, you’ve built all this ability and you built all this skill when it comes to financial planning and being a happy retiree.

Here’s the difference. Everybody has a certain level of ability, that’s God-given. But skill on the football field comes from just repetition, doing it over and over again, and learning how to do it right. Retirement and happy retirement is the same way. As you’re planning for retirement and you’re building for that great retirement, you’ve just got to do it over and over again. And you’ll learn along the way, and you’ll get better and better, and your skills will develop in the area of financial planning along the way. The third thing that happy retirees and Super Bowl champions have in mind and have alike is they build a winning game plan.

Now, what does a football team do? They build, after they’ve know what the vision is, after they’ve got the fundamentals down, they begin to build a series of plays. If you ever watch the coach on the sidelines, he’s got a piece of paper this big, that’s red and orange and yellow and all kinds of things. And he’s looking at it all the time, and he’s telling the quarterback, “That’s the game plan. What are we going to run here? What are we going to run here? What are we going to do here? What can we do well?”

Same thing happens with happy retirees. Just like that coach is so very, very important in putting together the game plan that the team runs, I think it’s so crucial that you need a retirement planning coach who’s able to have been there before, have knowledge. He’s got the perspective of seeing the whole field and having done it before with other players or happy retirees. And you begin to put together, what can you run? I don’t want to run that play, it’s too risky for me. Okay, run a different play, run a different investment, okay. Build your own game plan. This is how we’re going to build our income in retirement. And work with your coach, this is what we’re going to do with our investments in retirement.

One thing I found was amazing, as good as Tiger Woods was in golf, he had four coaches on an everyday basis that coached him in different areas of his life. As good as Tom Brady was, in addition to the coaching staff of the Buccaneers, and before that the Patriots, he had four coaches that were coaching him on different areas of your life. A coach, it’s been proven statistically, can improve your performance by 37.4% in all areas of a game plan. So if you’re out there on a football field, you wouldn’t think of doing it without a coach. If you’re in financial retirement and you’ve got that game plan, that game plan is the plan you need to build with a coach who’s giving you another perspective, a broader perspective to make sure that you’re putting on the field a winning team that’s going to win the game because you’ve got the right plan put in place.

Peyton Manning said this, “Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what you’re doing.” And I’ll guarantee you, in retirement, pressure is what you’re going to feel if you don’t have a financial game plan. We call it at our place a retirement blueprint. So let’s dive deeper into a financial game plan. First of all, it’s written, just like the coach on the sidelines has it all written out. You need something written out. You need to know what you’re going to do for income, and where’s the income coming from. That’s a crucial part of the game plan. In fact, I think it’s cardinal to the game plan.

You also need to know when you do an evaluation of a company, you always look for the weaknesses or the opposition that might come. I think that’s taxes. How are you going to deal with taxes? Because most people have their retirement savings in a 401k or an IRA that’s still got to be taxed. Your game plan has got to say, how are we going to attack those taxes so that we pay everything that’s legal, but we pay no more taxes than we’re legally required to pay?

The other thing is investments. What are we going to do with our investments? Are they going to be as risky as they were in the game plan and the first and the second and the third quarter when we were 20 and 30 and 40? Or, when we’re in retirement, now that we’re down to that fourth quarter and the game is close, and we can’t lose the game, what are we going to do with our investments? They probably are going to have less risk with them. And there are other minor things, like healthcare, because healthcare can really submarine and torpedo everything you’re doing in retirement.

And then legacy. How are we going to leave it? You may be gone, but your game plan may not address legacy and how you’re leaving it. And you may leave it to a relative, but it’s your Uncle Sam in Washington rather than your children that you’re leaving it the right way. So the game plan, going deeper, will touch on all of those things. In your retirement, I want you to feel like you’re on the platform, the confetti is raining down, and you’re holding the trophy because you did it right. And if you need a coach, and I don’t know of anybody who could not be helped by a coach. Tiger Woods even said one time, he said, “I can see where the ball goes. I can see the results, but I can’t see myself making the swing.”

And if you want to see somebody else, and have somebody else as a coach look at you and say, “This is what I feel like you’re doing right. This is what will make you hit the ball further, will make you score more touchdowns, will make you win more.” That’s what we do at Mosley Wealth Management. We’ve been doing it for 29 years. If you need a coach, reach out to us. The number is 8-5-5-5-6-7-0-9-3-3. That’s 8-5-5-5-6-7-0-9-3-3. And if you liked this show, hit the like button. And I hope your team wins the Super Bowl, the NBA championship or whatever. And I hope you win when it comes to retirement. It’s why I do the show. Every week I come on this show with the sole purpose that if you will give me eight to 10 minutes, I will do my best to increase your financial knowledge and help you ease into retirement.