Christine Benz on the Keys to a Happy, Prosperous Retirement

In this rebroadcast of an interview recorded last November, Christine Benz joins Motley Fool financial planning expert Robert Brokamp to discuss:

• Updated research on safe withdrawal rates in retirement.
• When and how to de-risk your portfolio as retirement approaches.
• The right age to claim Social Security.
• Whether retirement is healthy for most people.
• Benz's advice to find your micro-joys and don't be afraid to be a weirdo.

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on July 19, 2025.

Christine Benz: I do think that we have a tendency to want to fall back on how our parents did retirement or how the people around us are pursuing retirement, but it's a really lovely life stage to take a step back and think about what you're going for and create a retirement plan that's very customized to what you want to do.

Robert Brokamp: I'm Robert Brokamp, and that was Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance at Morningstar, and the author of How to Retire; 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement. In this rebroadcast of an interview that first aired last November, Christine and I discuss her book and some of its main takeaways, including updated research on safe withdrawal rates, the right age to claim social security, whether retirement is actually good for our health, and the value of being a weirdo. Christine, your excellent new book is a series of interviews with 20 experts. Each of them have some lesson about some aspect of retirement planning. Even though I'm interviewing you for this episode, I feel like I'm actually interviewing a panel of experts, and you're the spokesperson.

Christine Benz: That's a good way to think about it. That's how I've been thinking about representing the book because I do not want to take ownership for all of the great contributions in the book. They really belong to the people that I interviewed then. Frankly, that's something I really liked about the project, the humility. I don't have to deal with my own impostor syndrome and pretend to have all the answers about things that are not right in my wheel house, like healthcare planning and retirement or estate planning, things like that. It leans on external experts, so I really liked the humility that that suggests.

Robert Brokamp: Well, you definitely included many of the people who I respect the most when it comes to retirement planning. Highly recommended book. Let's start with research on withdrawal rates in retirement, because it attempts to answer a key question. How much can I spend and be reasonably sure my money is going to last as long as I do? Plus, you could then use that to back into how much you have to have saved before you retire. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the research report that established 4% as a safe withdrawal rate, written by a financial planner named Bill Bengen. Since 1994, all studies have come out, many saying that 4% is too low, some saying it's too high. Morningstar jumped into the game a few years ago. The most recent publicly available report was published toward the end of last year, and it brought us back full circle to 4%. What's your take on how someone should choose the right withdrawal rate for them when they retire?

Christine Benz: This whole thing about safe withdrawal rates, in a way, Robert, when I think about it, rests on what I think of as a straw man. The formula that we use to even do our research, our base case, safe spending research at Morningstar, is that we assume someone's looking for a social security equivalent or paycheck equivalent in retirement. They're going to take the same amount out every year. Inflation adjusts that dollar amount, so they'll take a little bit more if inflation's up, maybe take a lower inflation adjustment if it's not up so much, but that's how we assume that someone marches along for however long their retirement is. The baseline assumption that we use for our research is 30 years. When we look at the research on this, it's not really how people spend that people do tend to spend less throughout their retirement life cycle sometimes for reasons of uninsured long term care costs. Mainly we see healthcare spending flare up later in life. Then that inflates the averages for everyone, even though it's a fairly small segment of our population that has that catastrophic long-term care spending need. Anyway, it doesn't really factor in real world spending, and another thing that we know when we look at this problem is that ideally you would pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in your portfolio. In a good year, you can take more.

In a good year like 2024, in a bad year like 2022, you'd probably want to take a little bit less, and the basic intuition there is that you're preserving funds if in a downturn, you're preserving funds that will be available to recover when the market eventually does. I definitely prefer that people think about flexibility if they possibly can, and one thing I liked in the book is that Jon Guyton, who's a financial planner and has also done some work in this realm of retirement withdrawal rates, he notes that it's like a rare thing where our behavioral instincts, which is to spend less when our portfolios are down, actually align with what's good for our portfolios, and in many cases, that's not the case. We feel like selling oftentimes out of our portfolios when the market's up, spending more feels better than spending less. This is a time where actually those two things are in alignment.

Robert Brokamp: One of the points made by Jonathan Guyton and at least one other person that you interviewed in the book is that 4% is a worst case scenario. It's survived the worst conditions we've seen since the 1920s. In most situations, someone who filed the 4% rule would actually die with more money than they started with at retirement. Some of the suggestions from the experts, as well as the research from Morningstars, like, you could, for example, instead of assuming that you just take an inflation adjustment every year, whenever your portfolio is down, you just don't take an inflation adjustment. That adds 0.4-0.5% to the safe withdrawal rate. Or if you use the actual spending of retirees, which tends to go down over time, the actual beginning safe withdrawal rate could be 5%, especially if you are willing to cut back during times when your portfolio is down.

Christine Benz: Now, it's absolutely right that this is particularly important for people with tight financial plans, where there are real quality of life issues in underspending that if they wed themselves to this 4% guideline in many market environments that would prevail over the subsequent 25 or 30-year period or shorter period, perhaps, that would be too low. Ideally you would revisit this. You'd think about how your portfolio has performed. You'd be willing to be a little bit flexible, and I think another factor that has gotten underrated that we're addressing in the 2024 retirement income research that we're working on is that most people have other sources of cash flow in addition to their portfolios. Most of us will come into retirement with the stabilizer of social security, that's going to make me more comfortable making those adjustments. My portfolio isn't my sole source of spending. If I'm able to look at Social Security is providing my baseline living expenses, I probably am willing to tolerate a bit of volatility in my portfolio cash flows, or at least that's how I think about it.

Robert Brokamp: We'll get to Social Security a little bit later, but one of the other benefits of the research on safe withdrawal rates is that it gives an indication of what asset allocation seems to best enhance portfolio longevity. It depends on your assumptions and, frankly, which withdrawal rate strategy you're going to follow, but the research seems to indicate that there's this Goldilocks amount of stock you should aim for, not too much, not too little. What's your general idea in terms of a range of a reasonable asset allocation based on the research you've done on safe withdrawal rates?

Christine Benz: It's more balanced, I think, than many people might think. I frequently run into retirees who say, you know what? I just own dividend paying stocks. Forget your bonds. I own maybe a little bit of cash, and I call it a day. When we look at the research with our base case, where, again, we're assuming someone wants that fixed real withdrawal throughout their retirement years, it very much points to the value of balance. In fact, when we did the 2023 research, in light of the fact that yields had gone up pretty decently on cash and on bonds, because we're asking it to provide this fairly stable stream of cash flows, our model was basically saying back to us, I see that here today, and it's mainly in fixed income securities. The recommendation, the highest safe withdrawal rate, somewhat counterintuitively to all of us until we took a step back and thought about it, pointed to a 20-40% equity allocation, which is pretty light for most retirees. I think many, especially investor type retirees have more ample equity ratings, and I think the reason our model gravitated to that is because we are basically saying we want to lock down our cash flows, and we don't want a lot of volatility in those cash flows from year to year in light of higher yields. The Monte Carlo simulations that we run gravitated to that more conservative asset mix. If you're looking at a more flexible strategy where you are going to make changes to your spending on an ongoing basis, and you're up for that, then if you look at something like the guardrails strategy, which is Jonathan Guyton's strategy for dynamic withdrawals, it points to a higher equity mix, but still on the realm of balance not 90/10 equity versus fixed income. It's more 60/40 that delivers the highest spending rate with a guardrail strategy.

Robert Brokamp: That's generally consistent with many of the other studies that have looked at historical returns as opposed to your study, which is more prospective, and that you don't want to go too much over 60 or 70% when it comes to stocks.

Christine Benz: Right. The reason is pretty intuitive. You don't have to be a market guru to understand the importance of if you're going to be spending from this portfolio, and this gets to the bucket thing that I often talk about, but you want to lock down a stream of cash flows that you could pull from without disturbing equities. If you happen to be super unlucky, retire headlong into a market environment that where stocks immediately drop, you would want to be able to withdraw from safer assets and leave those equity assets to recover.

Robert Brokamp: Now, with your bucket strategy, you've often talked about three buckets. That's one super safe bucket, about two years of retirement income in cash, maybe years 2-8, corporate bonds, maybe some safer stocks, and then years 10 and beyond, our stocks. When you're working, you're probably going to be mostly in stocks, but at some point, you have to de-risk. At what point do you think people really have to start taking that seriously? Is it 10 years from retirement, five years from retirement, and do you have any particular suggestions for how they should do that?

Christine Benz: For sure, within a five-year window, I would be thinking seriously about de-risk. I think sometimes people hear de-risk and think that we're saying, you're going to flee equities entirely. No, it's just that you probably have been neglecting safer assets in your portfolio. You might have that emergency fund, and if you're using some all in one fund like a target date fund, it's tipping you into more bonds, but if you haven't been paying close attention or we've had a great equity market, your equities are probably hogging a bigger share of your portfolio. I think the best way to address that is to perhaps turn your new contributions onto fixed income. That's probably the simplest, most painless way to approach it, where new contributions into your company retirement plan or maybe into your IRA, if you're building an IRA, would go into fixed income assets, and then within I would say probably a couple of years of retirement, then you would want to start building out that cash position, but there's definitely an opportunity cost to having too much in cash too early, even though inflation has moderated a little bit. I think you want to be careful about the peace of mind that you get with cash because there really is a significant opportunity cost over time with inflation, just taking a bite out of that purchasing power.

Robert Brokamp: One of the points one of your experts made, Fritz Gilbert, that we talk about series of withdrawal risk often in retirement and that's often conceived as of the series of returns you get in retirement, that sequence of returns risk actually starts before retirement because you don't want to get three years from retirement and then the market drops 50% and then your plans have changed.

Christine Benz: I love that point that sequence risk, I think, is something that we understand to be like there's some big market drop right after you retire, but Fritz is absolutely right that it's important if you encounter that just before retirement, you want to build a bulwark against having to come in. You want to let your portfolio fully recover. I also think that inflation risk is maybe an underdiscussed aspect of sequence risk. It comes up in the book a little bit, but I think Wade Pfau talks about it, where if inflation's really high in your early years of retirement, that's meaningful, too. Because I don't imagine that we'll be going back to 2021, prices on cereal and hotels and all that stuff. We're probably here to stay, even though we will see the inflation rate moderate a little bit. So you need to be thinking about sequence of inflation risk, too.

Robert Brokamp: Because it raises basically the floor of your spending for the rest of your retirement.

Christine Benz: Exactly.

Robert Brokamp: One of the most important decisions people make besides what to do with their portfolio is something we mentioned previously, and that is Social Security. It does seem like the consensus of the experts in your book say that people should try to delay to age 70. If you're married, maybe the lower earning spouse would claim earlier, but the higher earning spouse should aim for age 70. That said, only about 10% of people actually claim at age 70. Do you agree that people should aim for age 70? If so, why do you think most people don't do it?

Christine Benz: Well, I think because they need the money. [laughs] That's still why we see this healthy cohort, even though we're seeing a bit of a shift, but you still have a healthy complement of our population claiming it at age 62. The simple reason is I'm retired. I don't have income from my work, and I need some money. I do think that many people want to retire and have some source of cash flow that isn't their portfolio, and many people retire prior to age 70. In fact, we tend to see a disconnect. People think that they will work longer than they actually do, but I think that that largely explains why many people don't delay all the way to age 70. I do generally agree. It's important, especially for certain cohorts. Single people, if they possibly can, and if they believe that they have average or above average health should think about delaying, and the bottom line is that it is that individuals sole source of inflation adjusted lifetime income, oftentimes. If you can enlarge, that's a wise thing to do. It puts less fewer demands on your portfolio over time. Then, as you said, Robert, for those married couples, where you have one higher earning partner, that's often the best strategy for him or her because it enlarges the couple's lifetime income from social security. I often recommend Mike Piper's to open Social Security. People can hop on there and plug in some of their own variables and come away with a bit of a recommendation of how to proceed with respect to Social Security.

Robert Brokamp: One interesting point Mike made in the book when you interviewed him was that delaying Social Security actually can have tax benefits because it depends on what else you're going to spend if you're delaying Social Security because he used the example of, you might have a traditional IRA. All the withdrawals that come out of that are going to be fully taxable unless you had non deductible contributions, but most people don't. Social Security, though, is partially tax free for everybody. If you can spend down your IRA assets so that you can get a bigger Social Security benefit, which is partially tax free, it could actually result in lower taxes over the span of your retirement.

Christine Benz: The name of the game is the post-retirement, pre-Social Security, pre-required minimum distribution period. Say you retire at 65. Between 65 and 70 is a really good period to do some tax planning. Mike unpacks that that accelerating those traditional tax deferred withdrawals can make a lot of sense in that time period, so can potentially converting some of those traditional IRA and 401(k) balances to Roth. It's a really good life cycle to get some good quality tax advice about where to go for your cash flows. If your plan has been to delay Social Security, you can get some guidance, and that can reduce your lifetime tax burden, which is really what you're going for. You're not going to try to reduce your tax burden in any one year. You're trying to smooth it out over the whole of your retirement life cycle.

Robert Brokamp: You and I entered this business around the same time in the '90s. I don't know about you, but the first several articles I read about Social Security, I would say, you can rely on social security. It comes from the government. Yes, the trust funds are going to be depleted, but that's 20-30 years from now. Well, now it's 2025, and they are scheduled to be depleted in 2035. We have an incoming administration that has said they're going to make Social Security completely tax free, and those taxes that people pay on Social Security go into the trust fund. Basically, if that happens, the trust funds will be even further, it will be depleted sooner. How do you think people should think about incorporating Social Security into their plan when there's so much uncertainty about it?

Christine Benz: I think it's a question really that rests on your age. If you're over 60, I would say, and never say never, but it seems quite politically untenable that people that close to getting their fair share from Social Security would see meaningful cuts in their promised benefits. You could maybe even lower that to say age 65 that Social Security is an immensely popular, valuable program. The idea that Congress would sign off on really huge changes to the program seems unlikely.

Christine Benz: But I do think that people say under age 50 should potentially think about the fact that there could be adjustments to the program over time. There could be adjustments to the age when you can claim benefits. Maybe 62 would be no longer available, or there might be means testing where higher income people would, receive less of a benefit than they do today relative to what they've paid in. There are a lot of adjustments that could happen in that open Social Security tool that I referenced, it actually allows you to haircut your promised benefit in the expectation of potential changes. I don't think that's an unrealistic thing to do. I do object, though, when people say, oh, it's going away, or I'm not going to count on it at all. First, I would say, take a look at what that means for your savings rate because you're probably not going to love that. If you're not expecting any help from Social Security with respect to your retirement spending, that is a major shock to the system in terms of how much you need to be putting away. Take a look at that first because I think it's pretty politically untenable that it would go away entirely, and you would be really short drifting your quality of life, making these Draconian cuts to your spending in order to save a huge amount that would be appropriate if you're not expecting any Social Security benefit.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, if and when the trust funds are depleted, payroll taxes will still be enough to cover 75%, 80% of benefits. When I run my numbers, and I'm in my mid-50s, I assume I will get 75% from Social Security, and I think that's probably a good reasonable assumption.

Christine Benz: Yeah, better safe than sorry, but I wouldn't be radically safe because there are implications for your life in the here and now, and that matters too.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, good point. You mentioned Roth conversions contributing to Roths. It's one of the big decisions, are you going to go with traditional account? Are you going to go with Roth? If you have traditional money, do you convert to Roth? How do you think through that decision, particularly now when tax rates are historically on the lower side?

Christine Benz: If you talk to Ed Slott, who's a tax expert, he would be like, all Roth all the time, basically, because of the secularly low tax rates that we have today. I do think it's pretty individual specific. I often talk to groups of new employees at Morningstar, really smart people from good colleges. My guess is that we probably aren't paying them as much as they will eventually earn in their careers and their tax rate in retirement may in fact be higher than it is today. For them, it's an easy answer go Roth. For the late career saver who perhaps has not yet saved that much for retirement, the Roth contributions aren't necessarily a slam dunk that you may be in a higher tax bracket today than you will be in retirement, so you're better off taking that tax break, making the traditional tax deferred contributions, receiving that deduction on your pre-tax contributions. It's individual specific, but one thing I would say for a lot of people in my age cohort, many of us started our careers where the traditional tax deferred accounts were the only game in town, and until very recently, all of our matching contributions were going into traditional tax deferred accounts. That was the only option for company retirement plans. Many of us have built up very substantial traditional tax deferred balances, and even if we are in our peak earnings years where that tax break on our contributions might be valuable, tax diversification is a valuable tool, too. In retirement, if you have some assets that are Roth that can come out tax free, there's something to be said for that. I've actually probably running counter to what might make sense from a math standpoint. I've actually been fully funding Roth contributions to my company retirement plan and also doing after tax contributions, with details of that. But I just want that tax diversification and the opportunity to have some tax free withdrawals and retirement, and you get that with Roth accounts.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, part of the math is, if you think you're going to be in a higher tax bracket in the future, the Roth makes sense. That's partially just making an estimate of how much money you'll have in retirement. It's partially also trying to look to the future and say where tax rates will be. Again, talking about, what I would write in the early 2000 after, like, the Bush tax cuts, and then we had some wars and the recession and Social Security is underfunded. I would write back then, ejoy these tax rates now because taxes have to go up in the future. Here we are. We're probably going to get another tax cut here soon. Do you even try to project that anymore? Do you think we should just assume tax rates are going to stay low forever, even though I don't know as a country how that math works out?

Christine Benz: Right. I think we have to work with the tax rules that we have. We do have tax rates set to expire at the end of 2025. The Trump tax package was set to sunset. I think there's a general perception that it will be renewed for 2026 and beyond. I think we have to deal with the tax laws that we have today rather than thinking too much about how things might change. You're absolutely right, Robert, that it seems like the general mood in Washington for the past couple of decades has been to keep tax rates nice and low. This seems true, really for both parties, as far as I can tell.

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Robert Brokamp: In your book, you cover a lot of non-financial aspects of retirement planning. In fact, you wrote, "The more I've learned about retirement planning, the more I've come to understand that whether when and how to retire is less than 50% related to money." What else should people be thinking about when it comes to retirement planning?

Christine Benz: I have to say I was guilty of this. I toil on a lot of retirement income research, and my articles are talking about the financial aspects of retirement. When I thought about some of my favorite conversations that I've had for the podcasts that I work on, which is called the Longview, I realized that many of them were actually non-financial conversations. I think I had been underrating the importance of things like identity that many of us have some sense of identity conferred by our jobs. When we walk away from that, we lose a little bit of that. This is particularly true for people in high status professions, you know, doctors and attorneys and so forth. But even for regular folks like me, I think, when I retire, I'll kind of be walking around, like, "Don't you know who I was," there's a sense that what you do for your job is who you are. There's that. There is the relationships that we get through our colleagues, real friendships that we have with colleagues if we haven't built out a social network apart from work, that's a risk. You might overrate the extent to which you will stay in touch with those colleagues when you're no longer there sitting alongside them or seeing them on Zoom meetings or whatever. Identity relationships, and then perhaps most important is purpose that work gives us a sense of the fact that we're contributing to the conversation, we're adding value to the world that we live in. If you haven't taken steps to replace that purpose in retirement, you may feel a sense of loss there as well. I love the idea of people in the 10 year runway leading up to retirement, taking a step back and thinking about the whole picture. Certainly, run the financial calculators, do your spreadsheets on what your budget will look like in retirement, do all that stuff, but also give due weight to the non-financial side of the ledger.

Robert Brokamp: I'm one of those people who will often say, I don't know if I'll ever retire, but there are days when work is so busy, and then I come home and then there's the kids and everyone wants something from you. I'm like, maybe retire would be nice. But then I think the only thing worse than everyone wanting something from you is no one wanting anything from you. I think that's the whole point you're getting to. You don't want to feel irrelevant. You don't want to feel like there aren't people who are looking forward to spending time with you and working you. You want to have some project intellectual stimulation. I thought one of the interesting points made by someone in your book Jordan Grimm I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly.

Christine Benz: Yes, you are.

Robert Brokamp: Yes. He's a hospice doctor. He wrote a book about what people tell him toward the end of their lives. He made the distinction between the Big P purpose and the small p purpose. If you think of the Big P purpose, it's often like, I need to change the world, and that actually causes a lot of anxiety. Where's the small p purpose that we should be looking for because it's really we're doing it for our own satisfaction. There is still consequence for people, but it's really what brings us happiness.

Christine Benz: Yeah, I love that section. I remember I told my husband, I'm going to make Jordan's chapter, the last, and my husband knows Jordan. He was like, A hospice, doctor? Seriously, the last chapter. But I find it really uplifting in part because he's reassuring about that, that he calls it purpose anxiety, that people think, oh, I need to write a novel or start a foundation or something really dramatic. That's Big P purpose. But his point is, like, a set of small p purposes, whether it's like gardening or being a terrific parent or grandparent or, pursuing some hobby that you've been a little bit interested in cultivating a suite of those things is just fine, too. When we think about, you know, older individuals in our lives, probably our parents, we probably call upon those things like, oh, dad loved to garden and go to the opera, and played the opera for us and all that stuff. Those are beautiful memories and very much a part of legacy as much as some of those big P purpose achievements might be.

Robert Brokamp: But, of course, we get some of that from work. I'm going to read a line from your book here. You wrote, "The more I've worked on retirement, the more I've concluded that many people should continue working in some capacity if they can and not just for financial reasons." In your opinion, is retirement good for people?

Christine Benz: Laura Carstensen, who's a researcher at Stanford, Head of the Stanford Center on longevity, actually makes the provocative point in the book, maybe it's not that provocative that work is good for people. It doesn't need to be paid work, but getting back to this idea of purpose, she just thinks that the way we work in this country is all wrong. That people show up in retirement. They're so burned out. They haven't been able to visualize anything about what retirement might look like beyond like Netflix and just leisure activities, which is great. We all look forward to having more of that stuff. But the point is that if you have some pursuits, and again, they may be paid, maybe unpaid, those are the things that will give you something to relax from. It's all about balance that ideally you would want some things that can for a purpose, get you out in the world, get you mixing and mingling with other people and then you would just have that pure relaxation stuff, whether it's golf or travel or reading or whatever is in that category for you.

Robert Brokamp: Now, Jordan made this point, and it's a point often made by Carl Richards, too, another financial writer about, "What you subtract from your life, getting rid of the things that drain you so that you could focus on the things that you really derive value from."

Christine Benz: Yeah, I love that idea. I've been encouraging people to use what I call the Sunday night calendar test, where you take a look at what's coming up for the week ahead and make some mental notes on that. For me, one thing I love is when I see that wide-open day, actually, where I know that's going to be a writing, researching day, not a lot of meetings. Take mental notes of those things that you would perhaps like to continue doing longer and those things that you want to pull back from. If you're in good standing with your employer in the years leading up to retirement, I think this can be an active sort of process, an active discussion/negotiation where you are saying, I want to keep doing this set of things and I want to do less of X, Y, and Z. I think that's a valuable exercise. The challenging part is, that some of the things that we've gotten good at probably are the things that our employers most want us to continue doing, but they may not be the things that we love. It's not always going to line up perfectly where your employer is like, go, go, go, letting you shed all of the things that you don't love as much. But I think it's a way to ease into retirement so that by the time you hit retirement age, you're doing a more agreeable set of tasks. Some people might listen to this and be like, you're nuts. I hate everything I'm doing, and I know people like this. In which case probably he healthiest best thing is, so let's think about what you will do instead of that, because encouraging you to keep doing something that you are not enjoying in any way, shape, or form isn't good for anyone.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, the evidence on whether retirement is good for us is very mixed. There are plenty of studies that find that people who retire die sooner, suffer some cognitive and physical decline sooner, become depressed. But there are other studies that find actually no people are happier. I think it does depend on what you're retiring from and what you're retiring to, because there are some jobs that are very arduous, physically demanding or frankly, just boring and certainly being able to retire from those is pretty good.

Christine Benz: 100%. The data on happiness in retirement is hopelessly polluted by wealth and health that we do see a tight connection. The healthier and wealthier in our population tend to be able to work longer. They're the ones who are expressing a lot of life satisfaction. They have more longevity on their side too, so it's really hard to disentangle healthier people are able to work longer, and so they're able to stay healthier longer. It's really hard to disentangle.

Robert Brokamp: Let's wrap things up with a couple of lines from your conclusion in your book. See if it give us a little riffing on these. Find your microjoys and don't be afraid to be a weirdo.

Christine Benz: Yeah, so the microjoys is just something that I've been thinking more about because I've realized the more I have traveled and done big things, the more it comes back to just those daily things that give me pleasure. For me it's always cooking, reading, and walking, just the three things that I love to do. I can do them day in and day out. They're cheap. I can get my books from the library and so I just would urge everyone to have those things that they can practice every day, not just in retirement, but in the years leading up to retirement. I think those things for many of us, maybe dovetail with Jordan's small p purpose. But those are the things that really constitute quality of life for all of us. Then in terms of, being aware of, I do think that we have a tendency to want to fall back on how our parents did retirement or how the people around us are pursuing retirement. But it's a really lovely life stage to take a step back and think about what you're going for and create a retirement plan that's very customized to what you want to do. Even though all your peers might be taking their families to Europe or something like that, and that doesn't sound especially fun to you. Don't do it. Really take a step back and make sure that your goals for your retirement and your spending in retirement is quite aligned with your inner compass. Obviously, if you're part of a couple, you'd want to be somewhat on the same page with respect to these things, too.

Robert Brokamp: Well, Christine, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for joining us.

Christine Benz: Robert, thank you so much. I always love talking to you.

Robert Brokamp: That's the show. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. You see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Brokamp. Fool on, everybody.

Robert Brokamp has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.