The Retirement Café Podcast

John MacGregor is an American financial adviser based in Hawaii. As he climbed the corporate ladder, John realised that the higher he was getting, the more miserable he was. So, he left the nice salary and corporate ladder behind to pursue his dream – transforming the world's relationship with money.

Having been brought up with great financial role models, John had always understood what it was to save money, but a lesson learnt while mowing lawns as a student helped him realise the importance of having savings and how just how much money plays a role in our dreams.

While living his dream of helping people change their relationship with money, John has written Why the Rich go Broke, a book that explores the mistakes people make with their money that leads them to living pay-check to pay-check.

In our conversation John shares some personal stories from his upbringing, he shares with us why we all need to be financially responsible for ourselves and how to achieve this. Throughout this episode, we delve into some of the core mistakes that people make, leading them to go broke.

If you are a fan of money-related podcasts or video blogs, you may know of this week's guest already – it's none other than Pete Matthew.

From flipping burgers in McDonalds to becoming Managing Director of Jackson's Wealth Management, Pete followed a fairly classic career path. Until he started messing around with a video camera.

Knowing that the work he was doing with his clients at Jackson Wealth Management wasn't making the impact on the universe that he wanted to make, Pete sat on the beach talking to his camera and posted the video on YouTube.

A decade later, he is now host of the award-winning podcast Meaningful Money – a podcast dedicated to helping anyone get their finances in order.

With the success of the podcast and YouTube channel, Pete has set up an online academy – The Meaningful Academy – which teaches you everything you need to, and should, know about money.

Pete joins me today to discuss what motivates him to run Meaningful Money, and why he believes everyone is capable of investing. We also delve into his recent retirement planning series, discussing why retirement planning is so important and the steps everyone should take when thinking about their retirement.

In planning for retirement, people often have dreams about the lifestyle they want to have once retired. Unfortunately, as we get older, our health starts to impact our ability to live the life we want to live.

But what if we could prevent or defer those age-related illnesses to extend the number of years lived in good health?

Hannah Thomson watched her gran deteriorate quickly after a dementia diagnosis and was struck by how little we do to try and encourage an active lifestyle for those early on in their retirement. But she found that money is often a barrier to people staying active and healthy as they age.

Her gran's deterioration was a lightbulb moment and Hannah created The Joy Club, a membership site that offers discounts on a wide variety of activities, enabling retirees to have a joyful and social retirement.

A few months ago, we launched a new series called The 9 Accelerators of Successful Retirement Planning. The series covers the 9 steps in our Retirement Success ProgrammeTM. This week, my wife and business partner, Kathy, is back in the interviewer's chair to quiz me on why investing is such an important part of retirement planning and what the difference is between investing for retirement and investing in retirement.

In our in-depth conversation, I explain the effects that inflation will have on your retirement, what investment risk is and why we need to keep our emotions out of investing.

So far in the series, we have discussed the importance of Life Priorities, Lifetime Financial Forecasting and Minimising Lifetime Tax. Next up will be Asset Allocation.

John Mathers spent his career working in marketing, branding and design. At the age of 60 he retired and in the past four years, he has carved out what he deems to be a successful retirement for him.

After a rebranding exercise opened the door to the problems faced by older people, John realised how much innovative design could help improve the lives of the older generations.

He has since worked with young designers to try and get them to understand the problems those in later life face and use that to design products that will enhance their lives.

He is now co-founder of Design Age Accelerator, a government funded initiative to help innovative designers which continues his work in innovative thinking and design in a field that has been neglected for many years – healthy ageing.

In our conversation we talk about Johns own approach to retirement, how he got into the field of ageing, and the incredible work Design Age Accelerator is doing to get young entrepreneurs to design products that will their help older people lead better lives.

Most of us don't enter our careers with the aim of retiring early, and our guest this week certainly didn't think early retirement would be an option when he stopped enjoying his career.

Chris Mamula qualified as a physiotherapist in Utah but quickly realised he did not want to stay in the industry for 30 or 40 more years. When his wife discovered she was pregnant, Chris dived into the world of personal finance and discovered the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement.

Having spent their entire marriage living off one salary and saving the other, Chris found that the maths and core values of the FIRE movement resonated with him.

Since discovering the FIRE movement, Chris has used his personal journey as inspiration to write about how others could live the best life possible and retire early. Partnering with others passionate about gaining financial independence, Chris has written a book Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence, and runs the blog Can I Retire yet?

In our conversation, Chris shares his attitude towards money, and how that has helped him, and his wife, reach financial independence and retire at the age of just 40 years old. Chris also talks to us about redefining retirement, and how you should live the life you want to at every stage of your life.

Family is something that most of us take for granted, especially as we get older and we start to rely on our children for help and support.

But for some, they don't have that luxury. There are currently 1 million people over 65 who don't have children, and that figure is expected to double by 2030.

But what does this mean? It means that over 1 million people will face struggles in everyday life that most of us won't even bat an eye lid at. Who is there to help clean the house after an operation, or to phone the bank to sort out an issue or even to do the food shopping during a pandemic?

This week's podcast guest, Kirsty Woodard, has spent the last 30 years working on issues around ageing. But in the past 7 years, she has turned her attention to helping those 1 million over 65s who don't have children they can turn to for help.

In our conversation Kirsty shares with us the difficulties faced by those who can't turn to their own children for help as they age, but more importantly, Kirsty tells us what needs to change so that those ageing without children can access the support they need.

In recent months, we have discussed the idea of ageing well and longevity a few times.

This week, we bring the topic back but with a slight twist.

Joining me this week is Dr Daniel Levitin.

Dr Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist, musician and author. 15 years after dropping out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to follow a career in music, Dr Levitin realised he no longer wanted to be part of the music industry and needed a career that was a bit more financially stable.

He went back to university and not only completed his bachelor's degree but went all the way to getting his doctorate.

He is now the author of five books, His most recent book The Changing Mind looks into debunking some of the myths of ageing. From memory loss, to the ability to continue learning and creating new neurons, the book is a reminder that ageing isn't as bad as it is made out to be, and that it is just a process of the mind changing.

In our conversation we chat about how he went from being a rather successful musician, to becoming a neuroscientist, we delve into the myths of ageing and what the truth really is, and Dr Levitin shares with us some personal stories which lead him to life changing realisations.

We also discuss how Dr Levitin recently returned to music, and the journey he has been on to record his own album. The release of his second album is pending.

To pre-order Daniel's forthcoming album, send your address and $20 USD for the CD, $25 USD for vinyl, to PayPal.me/DanielLevitin or Venmo @DanielJLevitin.

If you are outside the US, please add another $15 for shipping to these prices.

Over the past couple of months, we have been releasing episodes in a new series called The 9 Accelerators of Successful Retirement Planning.

The series covers the 9 steps in our Retirement Success ProgrammeTM which include: Life Priorities, Lifetime Financial Forecasting, Minimising Lifetime Tax, Protecting your Legacy, Estate Planning, Care Funding, Well-Crafted Investments, Asset Allocation, and Staying on Track.

We have already discussed the importance of life priorities and lifetime financial forecasting.

This episode is the third in the series in which my wife and business partner, Kathy, is back in the interviewer's chair to ask me all about minimising lifetime tax.

In our conversation, we chat about some of the concerns people have around tax as they approach retirement. I explain the impact retiring can have on how much tax you pay, and why it is important to look at tax paid over a lifetime rather than just in the present moment.

Tune in to hear which taxes you need to consider in planning for your retirement.

Have you ever thought about where our money came from?

We have! And so has this week's guest, Jacob Goldstein.

Jacob is a correspondent and co-host at NPR – an independent, non-profit media organisation based in America. He co-hosts the radio show and podcast Planet Money, in which they try and explain the economy in a fun and relaxed way.

In 2008 Jacob was a successful journalist working at the Wall Street Journal covering healthcare. After realising he had no idea what was happening in the 2008 financial crisis, Jacob was told that he had been looking at money all wrong. Because money is fictitious.

This inspired him to learn more and dig deeper into the history of money around the globe. In doing so, he has written a fascinating book called "Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing" which tells the story of where our money system comes from.

In our conversation we chat about the inspiration behind the book and Jacob's fascination with money. He shares some of his intriguing discoveries from the book and what he thinks of cryptocurrency.

Tune in to hear our conversation.