Episode 317: Your Retirement Sketchbook: How to Envision, Plan, and Live Your Best Retirement with Jamie Hopkins and Bonnie Treichel

Retirement is one of the most talked about financial milestones, but the concept of retirement itself, what it looks like, how it feels, and how to actually envision it, often goes unexplored. Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Jamie Hopkins, CEO of Bryn Mawr Trust, and Bonnie Treichel, CEO of Endeavor Retirement, to talk about their new book, Your Retirement Sketchbook. Equal parts workbook, coffee table book, and retirement roadmap, it covers 125 snackable concepts designed to help readers think about retirement in a whole new way.

From vision boards to estate planning, adaptive spending strategies to the emotional side of leaving a career behind, Jamie and Bonnie bring both the technical and the human side of retirement planning into focus. This is a conversation for anyone who wants to move beyond the spreadsheet and actually picture what retirement can look like for them.

What You'll Learn

• Why most people build their retirement vision from someone else's experience and why that creates problems
• How planning toward averages, including average life expectancy, can lead you astray
• What adaptive retirement planning is and why it better reflects how people actually live
• Why many retirees with significant savings actually underspend and how to give yourself permission to enjoy what you have built
• How retirement vision boards work and why putting yourself on the board changes everything
• Why your relationship with money follows you into retirement and how the book addresses that head on
• What the sketchbook concept means and how the book invites you to evolve your plan over time
• Why end of life planning remains the most overlooked piece of retirement and what to do about it
• How Jamie and Bonnie each updated their own estate plans while writing the book

Connect with Jamie: www.bmt.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiehopkinsfinancialservices

Connect with Bonnie: www.endeavor-retirement.com

IG: @retirementrisks 

The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only.  No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https...

Transcript

Welcome And The Retirement Gap

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Girl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence, and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money, and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. As someone who has helped coach people through retirement, I find that the financial concepts of retirement are spoken about often, but the concept of retirement itself is somewhat unexplored. And we definitely need more resources to help us imagine and envision and figure out retirement. And we have just that today with the authors of your retirement sketchbook. So I'm thrilled to be joined by a friend, Jamie Hopkins, who is the CEO of Bryn Mawr Trust, and his co-author, Bonnie Trikel, who is the CEO of Endeavor Retirement. And they have a book that's being published imminently all about retirement and how you need to think about it. Jamie, Bonnie, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:21

Thanks for having us on. It's great to see you.

Why A Retirement Sketchbook Works

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks, Bonnie. And I maybe I'll start with you, Bonnie. So the book is like short, snackable chapters that go over 125 concepts that are important for retirees to know and understand. How did you and Jamie decide to write the book and, you know, come up with this vision?

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Great question. So I think, you know, Jamie had this vision for having a sketchbook type of concept. And I think we really wanted something, you know, think coffee table type of book. Think about something that is very approachable and fun for thinking about retirement planning. So it doesn't just have to be for a retiree, but someone who's preparing for it. Or think about, you know, from my perspective, it's that book that you can sit around the dinner table and pick it up, put it down. You don't have to do it as a straight read-through type of book, but it's really more of that workbook type of thing. So, you know, Jamie had this crazy idea. And if you know Jamie long enough, he'll come to you and you're like, this is insane. Sure, I'm in. Let's do it. So he had this idea came to me, and it really started to come together. And for me, it's this passion of really thinking about when I was younger, we didn't talk about money, politics, or religion, right? We were taught that that wasn't polite to do so. And so I wanted something that could get people interested in sitting around the dinner table and talking about money, talking about that future of retirement. So that's, you know, kind of my passion and how that came together and saying yes to Jamie's crazy idea.

How Retirement Expectations Have Changed

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Well, I can totally envision having had a chance to check out the book that this would be great for a um couple to, you know, kind of flip through. It it would be inspirational to use as a launching point for some journaling and um some activities like that. And um also you could get together with your girlfriends and kind of have, you know, what do you envision for retirement? So lots of great launching points and it's a very approachable book. Um, Jamie, if I could ask you, because because I know I've known you over the years, and you really are an educator to financial advisors as well as to large groups of people about how to think about a myriad of financial concepts for you as you look at what our parents' retirement was versus what we hope retirement will be for ourselves and our clients. What has changed? What are we getting right now that we used to kind of miss?

SPEAKER_03 4:11

Uh, such a good question because this this book's also like 20 years of my retirement experience and the different ways I've thought and how it's changed. So, like I've gone through a bit of that myself. Like, how do I think differently about this than 20 years ago? And to your point, most of us kind of create this retirement vision in part due to whether it's our families, like our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends that retire. And that's how we start like piecing it all together in our mind. And what you find is a lot of people haven't actually like done their own version of it. It's like, well, my parents did this, somebody I used to work with did this. Because we haven't lived through retirement, we have to piece it together from other people's experiences. And in that, we get a lot of stuff wrong because we're like, well, you know, what your grandparents did in the 1980s and 1990s for retirement was a completely different world. Um, from an investing standpoint, it was from a product set, and annuities really were not a great subset of products back then. Uh, just the longevity, housing costs, all these things. So I think part of it is you really need to build something that is personalized, not just experiences that people had at different decades out there. Uh, some of the stuff I do think we really get wrong is planning towards averages. That's something I bring up a lot, and it's a similar concept that we gear ourselves to the average retirement age or the average life expectancy. And I'm always like, well, you're gonna be wrong 50% of the time. Like that averages when we think about life expectancy is a terrible measure because like it that's a coin flip. Like, I don't think a coin flip style approach is very good at anything. So, right, what's the longevity? How's your health, family health, and and it's never perfect, but you should look at those factors versus using, you know, side of actuary uh tables because they're gonna be wrong, you know, half the time. And uh I think that's one thing we really get wrong in the planning world around retirement today.

Why Planning To Averages Fails

SPEAKER_01 6:14

I would have to agree with you. And there's so many phases of retirement. I think that, you know, so many people think of retirement as this finish line and it all is figured out and then it's all wrapped up. You put your final investment allocation in, and just like um, you know, you've done all that research up front. There's so much focus on like withdrawal rates and stuff. And then it's just like, I don't know what they think is next, maybe hibernation. Um, and there are so many phases of retirement that I see with my clients. There's like active living, checking off the bucket list, there's staying closer to home, there's end of life care, and all of those need to be wrapped into something, which really in essence means that we need we need it to be prepared for more. Um, Bonnie, when you kind of broke out things, because you did, I think you guys did a great job of of really having a bunch of different concepts, but kind of grouping them. Um, how did you figure out how to kind of divide and conquer in in the sections of the book?

Phases Of Retirement Beyond Finances

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Well, there's from the divide and conquer perspective, you know, Jamie and I have different expertise. So that was one of the great things about the partnership for the book is bringing together our different expertise. So I come more from the plan background and Jamie comes more from the wealth background. But I think one of the cool things about the book is that we were able to really divide it up in these different, it's it's really snackable, but then within the chapters, it's divided up into really that like thinking about your lifetime and thinking about this kind of ARC concept. So when you think about it, it's um, you know, starting with what is that relationship with money and thinking about it just from the beginning and then thinking about it in the saving and then the investing, and again, throughout all the way to end of life thoughts. So, you know, really thinking about all the different things that impact you. And one of the things that I think is unique about this book is that yes, there's the basic investing concepts, basic saving concepts, but probably half of the book are things that I'm gonna call are the softer side of it, more about the emotional aspects and some of those things that I think are often overlooked. But to the point that we were making earlier, probably some of the more important things that we have to think about when we think about retirement. Maybe it's gonna be a phased retirement. We're not just going to like fall off the cliff at retirement age, you know, and go into hibernation, you know, we're gonna do other things. And so really thinking about what that transition or phased retirement might be. And so I think that's one of the great things about the book is that it does include a lot of those other thoughts and more of the what is your vision for retirement that isn't just the traditional, hey, it's a couple walking on the beach holding hands.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Yeah, that couple on the beach needs to be retired because how often I mean, it the sand is a lot to clean off too. But um, how many of us are really like spending most of our retirement just like walking into the sunset? Um, I I when I kind of talk to clients about retirement, we're looking for books just like yours and a multi-year, you know, kind of approach where there is the hard technical financial planning of like how does this actually work? But then, you know, for so many of the people like myself that I work with and I know our listeners, you know, so much of your identity is entwined with the work that you do. Um your time is really owned by your career in many cases for high achievers. And um, I know, Jamie, that you've been working on um retirement vision boards with um people, which is a great companion exercise to, you know, kind of engaging with the book. Can you how do you how do you get people away from the reality that is today and comfortable with um, you know, kind of exploring what the purpose and the um passions and the the use of time that will um occur in retirement if mapped out correctly?

Vision Boards For Purpose And Time

SPEAKER_03 10:33

Yeah, and this all goes down to the individual level too. There's some advisors that just hate this concept, and I'm sure there's some people too. Like my dad, no chance he's gonna do a retirement vision board. Like, I'm not gonna talk him into it. Uh but these are always the things like you ask questions before you suggest solutions. And so if you know somebody is more creative or is really into goal setting, and they always talk about the goals they've set, then like they're probably more open to these concepts. And uh, I've done it before in rooms where I just said, who's ever used a vision board for a project or something before? And you'll see like 60% of the people in the room raise their hand and say, okay, well, then there's my audience. The other 40%, they've probably heard about it, doesn't really interest them, like for whatever reason, right? They just don't want to. So I'm not gonna try to force them into it. But then this idea of a vision board is actually like putting yourself on the vision board. So we actually do take photos of the people and we put it in. And then we I've used about like 12 different concepts. So one of the ones is like, what's your biggest concern about retirement? So that goes on the vision board. Like, what is the top three values you have that goes on there? Where do you want to live? And be like specific, like the city state, not like I want to live by the beach, but like pick something, like really name it. And if you want a beach home and do the couple walking on the beach together, right? Like name it, like Sandy Shores. If you want a mountain house, pick that. If you want to live in the city, right, pick the area of the city that you love, even if it's not the one you'll eventually live in. But those exercises are all kind of based in connectivity to these future activities. So uh there's kind of like two things that happen there. Um, one of them is that you actually anchor in these future points in time, like the more time you spend on them. So then you actually like work towards these things instead of uh a lot of our goal setting is done like backwards, and we anchor in today. And I say, like, I want to lose 20 pounds. Well, I've anchored in my current weight, which makes it really hard to do, versus like I'm going to weigh 180 pounds on December 24th, the day before like holidays, whatever. And then you work back from that. And vision boards kind of operate like that, like set this vision and then go through the planning of like how I'm gonna get to all these different things. So, how am I gonna get to Nashville? How am I gonna buy a home there? Right. Like, you know, how am I gonna deal with my biggest uh concern is you know, dementia or you know, decline in mental cognitive state. And so, what are all the things I'm doing about these? And it just puts pictures to it. I think it's fun and approachable then. And it's not about how much money I have. We we put no numbers on there at all, right? So there's nothing about your 01k or IRA or taxes or how much you're gonna spend. It's all, you know, kind of your vision and values. And it's a fun exercise. And so I've had some advisors now that actually go print these out for clients after they do them. And so the client can walk away with this kind of like fun vision board. And ultimately that came from the idea of everybody talks about wanting more engagement. Clients talk about wanting more engagement with their advisors. Advisors talk about wanting more client engagement or just a great client engagement. This is a different way to engage some, probably not all of your clients, but you can engage some of them in a really fun, meaningful way here.

Your Money Story And Flexible Values

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Well, and I always describe to people that come and work with us that, you know, there's there's a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of wealth management and financial planning. And certain people, they just want the basics covered, you know, like is there money in my account every month? Do I have, you know, the appropriate protection? And that's that's totally fine. But for other people that, you know, kind of getting to the wisdom level or exploring purpose and identity and so much more is um there's room for that once you have the basics covered. Um, and the reality is for many people that uh benefit from working with a financial professional, um, and you know, the a lot of the benefit is that blocking and tackling of financial decisions. But then the companionship to talk about, you know, hey, you're the call I was just on, um, we're talking about a big budget for travel for a client's 65th birthday. And we've been talking about this for four or five years. And but she's not a spender. And so, you know, the whole conversation today was like, I know you're probably not going to hit your$60,000 budget for your age 65 travel, which you could totally afford. And that's okay. But let's talk through how to make it bigger if you want to well while you have the choice. Um, and I think we could probably benefit from the first section of the book, your relationship with money, um, because that endures into retirement, right, Bonnie. What did you guys, you know, what do you think? How do you make sure that that concept is really understood by your typical reader? Um, and what do you think is most important for them to understand about their relationship with money?

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Yeah, I think, you know, we put that right up front, the relationship with money, and really had that focus up front. But I do think it stitches throughout the entire book when we talk about some of these other concepts. Um, also, we've left space in the book again to make it more like a workbook style. So there's those sketchbook pages at the end of every chapter. So really reinforcing this idea that this is your sketchbook. This is your opportunity to take your vision and your relationship with money. And you can sketch along the way. So this whole kind of sketchbook concept is you're gonna draw, you're gonna erase, you're gonna adjust, and you're gonna continue to take your value set and what you believe and adjust as you go because things are gonna change, your values are gonna change, uh, your family situation is gonna change. All things can change as you go. But if you start with kind of your values and your relationship and understanding them, then you can infuse that throughout your life and change and resketch and bold some things as you go, but it's not just sticking to some specific, you know, here's what the spreadsheet says and here's what I must do, but it gives you the freedom and flexibility to evolve as you go and learn about all these other concepts throughout the book.

When Life Forces A Retirement Pivot

Three Mistakes People Still Make

SPEAKER_01 17:02

That sounds perfect. And I can't emphasize enough for our listeners that it's okay to have a targeted goal and then make an adjustment. I mean, that's life is pivoting, editing. Um, one example I can think of is a client who's really emphasized a desire to have a second home that would really eventually become their primary residence on the other side of the country. Um, they happen to live in California. And then their adult daughter um was getting married and then um decided to relocate back close to home in California. And like, you know, that changed everything. Maybe there would be grandkids and the that all the time we spent discussing the whole of the second home pivoted back toward changes to the primary residence where, and that's that's great. I think it was time well spent to have that game plan. It moved the retirement goals forward and you know, kind of kept focus on um having the financial resources to do this big second um edition like purchase. And it's it got us into a more prepared place for the um pivot anyway. Um, and you know, that's part of the beauty of financial planning. Um Jamie, if you think about it, since you're an educator at heart, I think hopefully it's fair to say that. What do you think people what do you think that people get the most wrong about retirement? Like what uh what are we missing, still missing, even if as we've had this evolution where it's more um uh culturally acceptable to discuss and think about in it hopefully a healthier way. Um, what what do we need to focus on next?

SPEAKER_03 18:54

Yeah, I I'll actually give you three things. I know you asked for one.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

No, three is great.

End Of Life Planning Reality Check

SPEAKER_03 18:59

I'll try to give you the first one first. And I think you hit it is the um retirement models have been very static. So they're like linear, right? So we talk about 4% distribution, which is very well known. At least most people have heard that at some point. Not everybody, but a lot of people. But that's this like very static model. It doesn't really adjust for life and downturns in the market in the sense of changing dynamic spending. Like you just react differently. When there's high inflation, you spend less money. And the models don't react to a lot of that. So I'd say over the last five or six years, there's been a lot of research and technology is caught up to where we can have what I call like adaptive retirement planning. And adaptive retirement planning is more how we live life, that we're not just spending some constant amount adjusted for inflation for 30 years. We adjust up and down, we make changes, we spend more one year and less the next year, we push off something if there's another high expense, right? Like we just wait longer to buy the next thing. And that's very normal. And so I think that normalizing that is really important, that our planning is a version of how this is going to go, but it's not the be-all end all. So I think that's one. The second one that you actually hit on that's uh the first story, which was um we don't give ourselves permission to spend enough. When we're talking about clients for the three of us and probably most of your listeners, you have some amount of accumulated savings. Uh, the bottom third of the country that has nothing safe, they're in a completely different world. Like you can't give yourself permission to spend when you have no money. Um, but that's not solved by good retirement planning. There's more policy work that needs to be done there. But for many retirees, they actually underspend in retirement, like your story. Um, because we live in this scarcity mindset of running out of money and that we self-insure, we hold on to all this, these assets in retirement out of fear of outliving our money. And what the data shows is that most people with, you know, a half million million dollars of savings and more underspend. And they actually could spend more in retirement. So giving ourselves permission through planning and like envisioning what we want to do is super powerful. And the last one is, and Bonnie mentioned it quickly, um, was end-of-life planning. Uh, we're we're still terrible at that. I mean, from a statistics standpoint, I would argue that is the biggest thing we get wrong. It's less than 10% of Americans have an updated estate plan uh in place. That's really not acceptable, right? Like we're all going to pass away and we're leaving headaches and challenges to our family and loved ones or to somebody else. And uh, you know, in that situation, we have to talk about this more. To your point, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's hard to talk about our death if we haven't taken care of some of these other things along the way. So I think proper planning actually enables us to have those conversations with loved ones and actually do planning for end of life. And uh I so I I push on that one a lot. It kind of gets left off with the you know, it's like always like step 12 on a 10-step list for retirement planning. So but we do have to talk about it and get better at that.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Well, I think for me, because so many of my clients um have our Gen X, older millennial, and they're um they're coming up against it with their parents, where oh, you know, mom and dad are very private about money, that's a you know, generational thing. And oh my gosh, they didn't file taxes last year and also like, you know, didn't want to deal with some of these things, or I can't even find the estate planning attorney because the estate planning attorney is older than mom and dad. Um, and so if you don't proactively bring up the topic and use a book or a tool like this and others to kind of both um, you know, nudge mom and dad or the generation you're responsible for that's above you, and also like look in the mirror and be like, okay, if I if I expect this of others, I need to do it myself. Um, then this is just, you know, it's a Nikki subject who wants to think about who would take care of their minor children or make decisions or living with extra support. Um, you know, not everybody loves to discuss that, but if you ignore it, it does not fix the issue. It compounds it. Um Bonnie, to pivot, because I don't want to go so deep, we have a lot of episodes actually on um kind of preparing um and thinking about your kind of estate planning needs. But Bonnie, when you collaborated with Jamie, were there any chapters where you go you guys were going in different directions or really needed to like mediate and negotiate on different perspectives when it came to retirement?

Writing Without Jargon Or Overload

SPEAKER_02 23:53

Um, good question. I I don't think we had too many different perspectives on like which direction to go. I would say probably the biggest difference is that on some of the things like the retirement plan chapter, right? Um, you know, I get pretty technical on that because that's my area of passion. And, you know, and and Jamie does a lot more on the behavioral side. So that's probably where there had to be some like in-between of, you know, no one wants to go too deep on secure 2.0 provisions and how they impact, you know, retirement plans. So that's probably the biggest mediation point. I don't know, Jamie. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 24:37

Uh yeah, so interesting. Yeah, that that was probably it. There was we had we got overly technical in the middle for a bit. Um, but to the point, like you want to find a balance there. It but it was a lesson I learned from a previous book because I had a friend of mine say, Oh, this book's not for me. And I was like, why? And he's like, Oh, because it's got all these technical industry jargon terms in it. But he's a 43-year-old doctor who runs a hospital, and he felt like the book wasn't for him because it had too much financial jargon. And so we actually learned um was that you know, books that do well in this space, like the best ones, actually hit an eighth-grade reading level, as crazy as that is. Ours is probably still a little bit above that. Um, but we tried really hard to get it more approachable, less technical, less jargon. Um, so that was probably one of the mediations because both Bonnie and I are both attorneys by trade. So, like we want to write it this other, like really structured, different format. And so the editing of it is is hard to take what feels like our voices and make it for you know more approachable for others. Uh, but we actually wrote the book as odd as it's gonna sound, mostly in Excel, um, which I don't know how many people have done that, but because it's 120-0.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Tell me more.

What The Authors Changed Personally

SPEAKER_03 25:53

Yeah, so we we probably had 150 some original chapters-ish. And so we narrowed it down a bit. Uh eventually, too many is too many. Uh, but we did like the topic, who was gonna write it, um, a fact, a quote, an explanation of it, um, you know, planning around that topic, and then reflection questions. And so we filled in an entire spreadsheet of 125 like that. Now, that is not what's actually written in the book. We then took that and put it and like turned it into more of an actual, you know, written, so it's not like block, block, block, block. But yeah, we really wrote the whole book inside of an Excel sheet, um, which is very, you know, I guess that's very uh financial planning.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Well, and I also think like I love both of your descriptions. I I work collaboratively with another planner. We have like, you know, most of our clients, we know both of them know them. Um and for any given topic, that right brain, left brain of like the technical versus the art. Um is sometimes one of us picks up the, you know, the behavioral um uh, you know, kind of cues from the client. And other times one of us will pull out uh, you know, technical provision of Secure Act 2.0 and it's like that never would have crossed my mind because I'm just trying to convince them to spend more or less money. And so it it's really nice to have this perspective um of more than one person. And I think that also speaks to those of you that are considering a retirement journey that um you may not have all the angles to see what you may need to consider. And that's where hopefully a financial planning done right really gets it right. Um we're wrapping up, but um, is there anything that you're taking away? I'll start with Bonnie from the work on the book that you is going to kind of inspire your own insight on retirement, and then I'll ask Jamie.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

We've been asked a similar question before, you know, and I think one of the things it does, of course, is just like you have to eat your own cooking, so to speak. Right. So it takes a takes a step back to reflect on like where I am in all of these pieces and you know, everything like from making sure my estate plan's up to date and things like that. So I think one of the things it does is just make sure that I'm doing all of these things that I'm suggesting. But it also, you know, as we've been talking about, it continues to help me to think about how to make things approachable, fun, and really reinforce that power of visualization when working with clients. So I'm working with a lot of advisors in my practice, but helping me even just to think about the power of visualization in so many different aspects, because I do think it's really, really powerful when we can think about what visualization does and making things fun and approachable in so many different ways. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

How about you, Jamie?

SPEAKER_03 28:59

Yeah, and so two quick things about the visualizations like it's okay that your drawings and sketches in front of clients are terrible. Uh, I've I it's not so much in the book that I talk about this, but I do in a presentation. Um, they actually make it more approachable. And so you it feels like an unfinished project. So then somebody's invited in to actually work on it. So, you know, what they used to call like uh pencil sales where you draw on the piece of paper and slide it across and show them. It's actually a very uh successful technique on engaging people. So use that on my own planning. You know, Bonnie did answer similarly, but my wife and I, Kathy, updated our state plan uh kind of through the process because it's it is one of those things that when we did it, it was a decade ago. And you know, our lives have changed substantially in the last decade, so it was worthwhile revisiting. But that's the one very concrete thing. I think the rest of it for me is probably more uh still, I don't know, aspirational uh in the future. Although I I have also lived by this. I'm a big fan of Roth uh IRAs and Roth contributions, which I've written many, many times, and lots of people know that. And uh it was funny. My old book, somebody actually wrote on the like review of it, this guy likes Roth too much. Otherwise, I would give it a higher rating. And I was like, great, that's exactly who I am.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

I will die on this, this alone.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

But I have I have uh moved all of my you know 401k contributions to Roth. And uh so I do tell people that. Like, that is like I don't just walk around telling people they should do this and I'm trying to get a tax deduction this year. Like I I very much believe in it. I've done Roth conversions before. I am uh I'm a big fan of Roth. So uh that that is something I live by at this point too.

Where To Follow Them And Closing

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Well, and I will um uh add a third commitment to refreshing the estate plan. So you I think I've done it about every five years, and I'm getting some work done on kind of the organizational documents of the business that um need to come first. But then once that's done, I've already told my estate planning attorney, hey, we need to look at this and do a refresh. Um and so that's something that um, you know, I feel find the people most reluctant to do their estate planning are often attorneys. So kudos to both of you for doing the refresh. And where can people, as we leave off, we'll have a link to the um book in show notes, but where can people follow each of you? I'll show I'll start with Jamie.

SPEAKER_03 31:32

Yeah, so uh mostly on LinkedIn at this point. So I'm sure there'll be a link, but if you type in Jamie Hopkins Financial Services, I pop up everywhere. Uh, it's pretty easy. Uh and then uh bmt.com is is our company. And uh so those are the two best places to follow me at this point.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

Thanks. And Bonnie? And same. Uh you can follow me on LinkedIn, Bonnie Trikel, or uh you can follow the company, endeavor-retirement.com. We also have a sister law firm, endeavor.law.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

So uh you can follow us there. Love it. Congrats on the book, and thank you so much for making the time to join us.

SPEAKER_03 32:09

Thanks for having us on, Melissa.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way that you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to ProPlan.com and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned. This presentation by Pro Planning is intended for general information purposes only. No portion of this presentation serves as the receipt of or substitute for personal investment advice from ProPlanning or any other investment professional of your choosing. Copies of Pro Planning's current rent and disclosure brochure and form CRS discussing our advisory services and fees are available upon request or on our website platform at ProPlan.com. The information that we share is meant to educate and inspire, not serve as personalized financial advice. Everyone's situation is unique, so be sure to consult with your own financial professional for guidance that fits your life. And just so you know, the opinions shared in this podcast are Melissa's own and those of her guest. They don't necessarily represent any organizations with which Melissa is affiliated. For more important disclosures, please go to our webpage at proplan.com.