Retire With Ashley

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: The Downside of Being Wealthy

Today, I’m talking about another big downside of being wealthy - the overly complicated life. When you’re wealthy and you have a lot of assets, many people fall into the trap of overcomplicating their lives. They might have a vacation home, multiple rental properties, a boat, more cars than drivers in the household, and while real estate and acquiring certain assets can enrich your life, it’s also more stuff to clean, fix when it breaks, replace when it wears out, etc. 

If you’ve ever been to central Oregon, it’s absolutely beautiful. When most people think of Oregon, they think of rain. But central Oregon is the high desert, and Bend, OR boasts that they have 300 days a year of sunshine. That plus mountains, rivers, and lakes, and all four seasons make central Oregon a beautiful place that is definitely worth a visit if you like the outdoors. 

Bend is about a 3 hour drive from our home, so we usually make it there once a year. It’s fun to visit in the winter when there’s snow, and in the summer when it’s warm and sunny. My husband and I have talked about maybe buying a vacation rental there someday, but the more I think about it, the less appealing it becomes. 

As much as I would love to have our own place there to take our family, and daydream about snowshoeing in the winter, playing outside in the pool and golfing in the summer, and just having a relaxing place to make memories together, I think I’ve talked myself out of buying a place there. 

We can rent there a couple weeks a year, save a lot of money, and still get maybe 75% of the benefit of owning a place without the added expense and hassle of mortgage, taxes, repairs, renting it out to try to make some income on it, etc. 

So even if you have a lot of assets and can afford the rental property, the vacation home, or the boat, or just more stuff in general, it doesn't mean that it’s something you should do. Or that it’s even a good thing. It might make you unhappier as a result because you’ve unnecessarily complicated your life and created more headaches for yourself. 

That’s why I prefer owning good quality stocks, because they make you a lot of money over time, and there’s nothing to fix and no problem tenants that require months and thousands of dollars to evict. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: The Downside of Being Wealthy

Today, I’m talking about a surprising downside of being wealthy that very few people realize until they reach a certain net worth: that life can be boring

From the outside, most people look at wealthy people or celebrities and think that their lives are amazing. They live in beautiful mansions, drive fast and luxurious cars, go on the most amazing vacations, exclusive restaurants, and parties, etc.

But we’ve all had the experience of something great losing its luster over time. The toy we had to have for Christmas that we never really played with. The new car that we pined for that just became not so special anymore after driving it for 6 months. The forever dream home that becomes too familiar day after day of living in it. The first class airline ticket that is just meh.

We all become accustomed to certain things. With 4 kids in our house under 8 years old, my husband and I rarely eat out at a sit down restaurant. Like I can probably count on 1 hand the number of times in the last year my husband and I went out to a restaurant just the 2 of us. So when we do, it’s special and it’s a memorable, and it’s usually a lot of fun. But if you go out to eat all the time, even the 5 star restaurant become ordinary and there’s nothing special about it anymore because it’s so familiar.  

Many wealthy people are bored, because they’ve indulged themselves in the best of what they can afford without reservation, so nothing is special anymore. They’ve become accustomed to specialness, and so they need bigger and better and more extravagant just to have the same feeling I have when my husband and I go to the so-so Mexican restaurant down the street. I’m all giddy about free tortilla chips and my cadillac margarita, and didn’t even feel that way when they stayed at the Ritz on Maui. 

If you find yourself in this situation - where nothing makes your heart flutter anymore - one solution is to fast - intentionally deprive yourself of luxuries so the special remains special. As some of you long time listeners know, I’m a devout Catholic, and now during Lent is a time of fasting. It’s a beautiful opportunity to say no to something for a season, get rid of excesses. The purpose of this season is to repent and focus on God, but even if you’re not religious, the same principle still applies. There is tremendous wisdom in the call to fasting, because we need to balance fasting and feasting. When we just feast all the time, we begin to rot, and life loses it’s specialness. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: The Downside of Being Wealthy

Today, I’m talking about how money can distort your reality and the relationships of those around you. 

You don’t have to look far and wide to see how money and the power and status that come with it completely warp one’s reality. If you’ve read the story of the rich man and Lazarus in the bible, you know what can happen when our reality becomes warped because of wealth and success. 

The rich man enjoyed all the comforts of the world. Fine clothes, food, and drink. It wasn’t his money that made him a bad person. It was his concern with his self and focusing only on his own needs that he spent eternity in agony in hell. 

Money can do this to people. Especially those who acquire power and status along with their wealth. People treat them differently. They get used to getting everything they want, never being critizced, and affirmed in how they are because of their outward signs of success. This is dangerous not just the rich man in the bible, or the powerful dictator, or the out of touch celebrity, but even for successful millionaires. I see it in everyday life. 

Wealth can damage our own sense of reality and it can also damage relationships. People will schmooze you, treat you differently, because they want something from you or because they want to be careful not to upset you so it doens’t harm them or their status. Even your own children can see you as not much more than a bank. Friends and colleagues are impressed and want to be around you because of what you have or can do for them, not for who you are.

So be careful when it comes to money, because being on a pedestal isn’t often a great place to be. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: The Downside of Being Wealthy

Today, I’m talking about how pursuing wealth leads many down the path of a wasted life. 

[story about how I almost didn’t have kids]

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

The 2nd biggest regret: , from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'...She said: "This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

And if you read between the lines, it wasn’t work for the sake of work that they were pursuing. It was the income, the money…the result of working more. Now I understand that some of us don’t have a choice. A nurse who misses dinner and putting her kids to bed each night because she works the night shift, or the traveling businessman who misses his kids' games, sometimes, we can’t do anything about our circumstances, but it’s worth noting what we can do and be present with our kids as much as possible. 

The lesson here is that pursuing more income and promotions at work in order to increase wealth is a good way to waste your life. Money will buy you certain great things but it will not satisfy or make you happy, and it comes with sacrifices and very real trade offs that you may deeply regret later in life. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

Welcome to a new week here on the Retirement Quick Tips podcast! I’m your host Ashley Micciche, co-owner of True North Retirement Advisors, an independent financial advisory practice managing $340 million in client assets. I’m a Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor and I’m using my 15 years of experience as a financial advisor to help you gain clarity and make a plan for the retirement you envision.

On this podcast, I cover everything from investing, to retirement spending, to taxes in retirement in just a few minutes each day, so if you’re 5-10 years on either side of retirement, and looking for some daily doses of retirement planning wisdom, stick around this week as I talk about The Downside of Being Wealthy.

I know someone who sold his business for several million dollars a couple of years ago. After working hard his entire life, building a successful business from scratch, this business owner had reached an idyllic end to his working life - a financially secure retirement, free from ever worrying about money again.

But then something unfortunate but not uncommon happened…he realized that his identity and sense of who he was was handcuffed to his identity as an owner of a successful business. He didn't know how to be retired, enjoy his comfortable income and assets. 

He felt like a purposeless rudderless ship, and the discontent spilled over into his marriage as well. Less than 2 years after selling his business, he was divorced and lost half of his wealth. 

The lesson here is twofold. First of all, many people fall into the temptation of letting the source of their wealth - in this case his identity as a business owner - define who they are, and it's like building a house on sand. He built his entire life on the wrong foundation and the wrong identity and as soon as he got what he thought he wanted (selling his business and attaining comfortable wealth and financial security) everything else fell apart. 

The other lesson is that a higher net worth doesn’t mean you’ll be happier or have a better life. There are, in fact, real downsides of being wealthy. And it’s important that each of us understands those downsides, so we don’t blindly pursue more with the misguided idea that it will lead to happiness and fulfillment.  

So this week, I’ll talk about how the pursuit of money can cause you to waste your life, how it can distort your relationships, overcomplicate your life, and lead to unhappiness if you’re not careful and learn to develop a rightly ordered relationship with money. I’ll also give you some practical tips on how to avoid some of the pitfalls of being wealthy. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! Come on back tomorrow…where I’ll talk about 

My name is Ashley Micciche...and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

It’s Sunday, which means...it’s recap time here on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast

This week the theme was: Why Banks Are Going Bust & What To Do About It

Tomorrow, I’m starting a brand new theme: The downside of being wealthy

Many people pursue more wealth, without really thinking about the downside of having more and growing your net worth. But it’s important to be grounded in reality when it comes to building wealth - because there are pros and cons to having more. So next week, we’ll explore the downside of being wealthy to keep you grounded in reality when it comes to how having more will actually benefit you

Thank you so much for listening this week! If you’re enjoying the podcast, chances are someone else you know who is getting close to retirement could also benefit from checking it out, so please share the show with a friend, a neighbor, your sister, or your boss. Just go to your favorite podcasting app, hit the share icon, then text or email the show link to someone you know who is eyeing retirement. 

Thanks for sharing the love and spreading the word. I hope you have a blessed Sunday. My name is Ashley Micciche, this is the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast.

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: Why Banks Are Going Bust & What To Do About It

Yesterday I talked about the most important way…

• Brokered CDs - spread out coverage among financial institutions within one account. For businesses, they can do basically the same thing with what’s known as Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service

• Treasuries - backed by the full faith and credit of the US government without the much smaller FDIC insurance limits

• Money Markets - variety of institutions to spread out the risk even though they’re not FDIC backed

• Stash Your Cash with the Biggest Banks - Too Big To Fail & more diversified (remember SVB was a niche bank catering to venture capital and tech startups, so they were doomed as soon as the perfect storm hit of deposits and new capital flows drying up because their customers VC businesses were also drying up, and interest rates started rising which created huge losses for them as they sold bonds to cover withdrawals from the bank)

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: Why Banks Are Going Bust & What To Do About It

Today, I’m talking about how to protect yourself against bank failures.

The most obvious way to protect yourself against bank failures, is to make sure your cash & savings account holdings at the bank are fully covered by FDIC insurance.

The problem is that if you have a lot of cash that exceeds the FDIC coverage limits, you could leave yourself exposed, and if your cash far exceeds FDIC coverage limits, it could be too cumbersome to spread your money around enough to maintain full coverage amounts with different banks, so people just don’t do that, especially with the 2008 financial crisis getting dimmer and dimmer. Up until early March, most people and almost certainly the depositors at SVB, many with millions of dollars sitting exposed and unprotected by FDIC, never considered that they might lose their deposits. But how quickly things change, so let’s break down the FDIC coverage limits so you can protect yourself 

The standard FDIC insurance amount is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank. So if you’re married and have a Joint bank account, your assets there are insured up to $500,000. Anything under that amount is fully insured. Any cash or savings with that institution above that amount are uninsured. 

There are some other nuanced rules for other types of accounts and entities, like trust accounts, but applying the general rule of $250,000 in coverage per depositor per bank is going to be applicable in most cases. 

So if you have a lot of cash or savings with your bank in excess of this amount, the prudent thing to do is to spread your deposits among enough banks to always maintain the coverage limits. 

[Note - you don’t have to do this with all of your investments, keeping $250k at all financial institutions - doesn’t apply to investments, since those assets aren’t on the balance sheet of the financial institution. SIPC protections & additional insurance which will most often be fully insured and protected, and risk of investment itself]. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: Why Banks Are Going Bust & What To Do About It

There was a good opinion piece by the editorial board at the WSJ last week after the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank was announced:

“For the second time in 15 years (excluding the brief Covid-caused panic), regulators will have encouraged a credit mania, and then failed to foresee the financial panic when the easy money stopped. Democrats and the press corps may try to pin the problem on bankers or the Trump Administration, but these are political diversions.

You can’t run the most reckless monetary and fiscal experiment in history without the bill eventually coming due. The first invoice arrived as inflation. The second has come as a financial panic, with economic damage that may not end with Silicon Valley Bank”

It certainly is frustrating to see that the risks for Silicon Valley Bank were in plain sight but regulators didn’t do anything about it. 

Thankfully in the short-term, I don’t think this will look like 2008, and the result of all of this will not be the total financial collapse and contagion spreading, but just more costly and ineffective regulations on banks that in the end will only lead to higher costs and fees for the average American, while doing little to nothing to prevent the next bank run. 

So while it’s frustrating to know that this could have been prevented by better management at the bank and better oversight by regulators, the point I want to make in today’s podcast is that it’s scary and you might even be angry when something like this happens, but it doesn’t mean it's time to panic. 

NO doubt in the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank failure, people did panic. I know of one person who went down to their bank and pulled out several thousand dollars to put in their safe at home. This is an emotional and bad decision. The money is much safer at the bank then in your safe at home. 

Many investors also took this as a sign of just the beginning of a collapse and sold. Thankfully, it doesnt seem to have happened en masse since the stock market didn’t budge that much in the day following the regulators stepping in and taking over. You’ll hear this episode about a week after I record so it remains to be seen how much investors panic and sell.

The worst thing you could do…

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance

This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: Why Banks Are Going Bust & What To Do About It

Today I’m talking about the problem with bank bailouts and moral hazard, and how stoping a contagion in the banking system today leads to more problems in the future because of moral hazard. 

On Sunday, March 12th, regulators announced that they would give depositors of Silicon Valley Bank access to their funds, not just those that were covered by FDIC insurance. This is important because roughly 97% of all deposits at SVB were not covered by the FDIC insurance limit, and the millions of dollars that some depositors had a SVB would have been reduced to $250,000 overnight. 

Since regulators stepped in to back all deposits, the next question is:Are all uninsured deposits now covered by government guarantees?

No. The regulators said they were making an exception for SVB and Signature (which also collapsed at the same time as SVB). 

If you recall from September 2008, it was the government’s refusal to bailout Lehman Bros after their collapse, that is widely accepted as the tipping point of the Global Financial Crisis. But 6 months prior to that, Bear Stearns collapsed and was bailed out. 

So its likely that Lehman, AIG, and other troubled banks with garbage balance sheets assumed that they could be bailed out too. And if they made that assumption, they would have been slow to act. It’s possible that Lehman could have found a buyer as things started to head south to prevent a bankruptcy. And they certainly would have taken on less risk with their CredDefSwaps and other risky investments if they didn’t have the backstop of the government. 

This played out the same way for SVB. By the time SVB tried raising capital to keep things afloat, it was too little too late, and it was too far gone. 

When the regulators step in it’s controversial, because it creates what is known as a “moral hazard”. It’s like the parents who will always bail their kids out no matter what. When the kids know this, they feel untouchable and certain kids will take advantage of the situation by doing crazy and stupid stuff and feel invincible all the while. Well as you and I both know, that behavior, if it continues will catch up to you someday with often catastrophic consequences.  

That’s moral hazard, and the same is true for banks if the government will always backstop them in a crisis. They and their customers have no incentive to manage their risk or act prudently, because Daddy Government will always step in and save the day. That poor incentive structure and the risky behavior encourages is scary when the US Financial system is put to the test as a result. 

Banks and regulators should have learned more from the 2008 financial crisis, but SVB is proving that’s not always the case. Especially in the banking world, where it seems like the management made poor decisions and mistakes. These mistakes were in plain view of regulators months ago when they started racking up the losses, but nothing was done about it, and here we are today. 

So when you once again have regulators stepping in to backstop all deposits, unfortunately no one learns from their mistakes and we can expect more of the same in the future. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.    

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance