Podcast – Episode 017 – The Age at Which Suze Orman Wants You to Retire
Podcast Transcript
Hello Genius Nation! Hope the markets are treating you well. Got some cool stuff to talk about today, let’s go ahead and just jump into this, shall we? Question, big question for you, so what age do you want to retire? You probably have an answer in mind, right? What is it, like 50, 60, 65, today, tomorrow, you know? Well, what is it? When do you wanna do it?
Because for most people, the age just keeps creeping higher and higher and it’s scary really. Everything, you have these articles coming out always, people are now retiring, people don’t have money when they retire. Back in the day you worked 20 years, you get a pension, you get a gold watch and you’re done. Woo-hoo. Then if you want to, you can go back and get another job because you’re still not that old or you could just leave up your retirement, live off your savings or whatever, social security. You have a good retirement.
Back in the golden days when the old people actually got to not have to work at McDonald’s. But then today the age is just going higher and higher. First it was work 20 years, get a pension. Then it was 55 was a good age to retire, then it was 60, then 62. Now the typical American retires at age 63 and it just keeps getting longer and longer.
A few years from now they’ll be like, “Well, you’ve got to wait till 65, 66, 67.” Yes, I know we’re living a little bit longer, but that doesn’t mean that we should use those extra years that we’re getting to be working, because those extra years that we’re getting, we might be getting them, it doesn’t mean we’re going to be in the best of health. So the time that we’re spending is going to be in poor health as retirement age.
That tells me just the way people think about retirement is completely off to me. The fact that they look at work as so horrible and then retirement is so amazing. Recently I had a deadline that I wanted to get a calendar for, the kind of calendar, not a calendar but it would be like a countdown. So it was like a one year to this particular goal that I wanted, and I wanted something on my desk where every year it would tell me okay, you’ve got 365 days left. Then you would tear off the page and it would be like you’ve got 364 days left.
I wanted a countdown calendar like that. Really couldn’t find anything online, but they do have these retirement calendars, so if you have a year left to retirement, that’s the one I got. It was a year left to retirement so it’s this big thick calendar, sheets, 365 sheets. Then in big black letters it tells you retirement days left and it gives you the big number. I just used it for the number, but on the bottom it has all these quotes I guess to keep you motivated or just to be funny.
It has all these funny things like, “Fifty days left till freedom.” “Seventy days left till your time is your own.” Here’s a funny one, “The heck with adulthood. Time to start acting like a kid again.” You know? That’s what people think about. The way it’s worded is like work is so horrible and evil and retirement is going to be so grand and wonderful. Well, not if you can’t afford it like most people can’t, you know? It’s not going to be all that.
I just read this article by this financial adviser Suze Orman who says that you should not even, you shouldn’t even retire at 63 when the average person retires. You should wait much longer than that. You’ve probably seen Suze Orman. She’s got, I mean she’s older. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s got this colored hair, dyed I guess it’s blond with blackish roots or something like that. She does a great job getting on TV and she has dozens of books out there, kits, courses and other products about financial planning.
Every once in a while she’ll do a special on PBS talking about how to retire and whatnot. She has this show, you might have seen it, it’s late night, people call her and ask her if they can afford certain purchases. There will the guy that’s like, “Hey you know, I’ve got $10,000 in the bank, but I want to go buy a boat and I’m 60-years-old.” No. She’ll be yelling at him like, “No, you can’t do that. You have to take that money and put it in a mutual fund,” stuff like that.
There was the one time where this lady called and she was asking if she could afford to buy a $300 purse. Suze Orman is asking her all these questions. Turns out that this lady has $12,000 of credit card debt that she hasn’t paid off in years. She still wants to spend $300 on a purse. Yeah, so those are the math wizards that Suze helps, you know?
What age do you think Suze wants you to retire? Well, her newest advice is that the age should be 70. Yes, 7-0. Can you believe it? She wants you to work util you’re 70. Is she insane? Geez. I’m 41 and my back is hurting all the time. I don’t know how I’m going to feel when I’m 70. Oh man, I don’t even know if I’ll make it that far. I just calculated when I would probably die. Okay, so there’s this website, it’s called DeathClock.com and you go in there, you type in your birthday, you type in your weight, you type in if you smoke or not, you drink or not.
Four or five different questions, and it estimates the day when you’re doing to die. It’s kind of gruesome, but I did it just for this and I just did it again right now and it told me I’m about to die in 31 years. I’m 41 right now. That means I’m dying at 72. I’m not even going to make it to like 80.
What the heck, right? I’m supposed to work all the way to 70 so that I can enjoy my next two years of retirement? No. Sorry Suze. That plan is not for me. That’s not going to work. Yeah, I might live longer than the Death Clock tells me, but I might not, right? You never know, but there is no way I’m going to wait around to retire until age 70. That’s not going to happen. That is the problem with 99% of all of the financial advice out there.
It’s not for people like you and me. It’s for the lady who has $12,000 in credit card debt and wants to spend $300 on a freaking purse. It’s for geniuses like that. Because almost all of the financial advice you get out there is cookie cutter for the stupid masses. Okay, well maybe stupid is too strong a word. They’re not stupid. Some of them are very, very smart, but they’re ignorant. They’re financially ignorant.
They don’t want to take control so they stick their heads in the sand and hope things will be okay. That’s why the majority of Americans will retire with less than $20,000 in their names. So on one side these financial advisers fail them because they don’t have good enough products. They tell you whatever, whatever, put your money here, put your money there and all they do is take fees and fees and fees.
They don’t care if your money goes up or down or if you lose money. All they want is their fees. That’s what they’re worried about. On the other side they get advice like work until you’re 70 because we’re not giving you good enough financial products to help you. That’s horrible, right? So if they’re going to work until they have to die anyway, why bother saving money or looking for another alternative? That’s what they’re thinking?
Why am I going to give this financial adviser all this money, wait for 30, 40, 50 years, hopefully it will go up and I won’t lose it all. Or I could just spend the money now and enjoy myself. Who knows if I’m going to live that long? Hopefully their families and the government will take care of them. That’s what social security is supposed to be for, right? Which might be going broke or not, who knows? But for you and me, that is not good enough.
No way, Jose. We want to retire on our terms, when we are still healthy enough to enjoy retirement. In fact, I just got a message from a student this week and it made my day. It made my whole week actually. That’s why I want to bring it up here. He wrote in that he was able to make enough from his trading to not only stop working on an oil platform, but to buy a motor home and drive it around the country. Can you imagine?
Can you imagine quitting your job, having … What has he told me? I think he spent like, I don’t know what he spent on the motor home, but he’s made over $78,000 since he started. That’s an amazing amount, right? He was just working about a year ago. So he was dabbling in trading, but then he got involved with us about a year ago. He was able to quit his job and now he bought a motor home and now he’s driving around the country with his wife.
The last time he wrote me, he wrote me again after that. The last time he wrote me it was from the Grand Canyon. He sent a picture. Can you imagine that? Isn’t that the way to live? Isn’t that the way you want to live? Or maybe not drive around, but still, not have to work? That is the way that I want to spend my retirement years. Right? Trading a few hours in the day, driving around with your friends and family, your spouse, spending time at amazingly beautiful places.
Geez man. So Suze Orman, I say to you no. No you crazy fool. We are not going to retire at 70. So stop trying to scare people. Stop with all your Doomsday predictions. How about instead of all that, instead of trying to scare people, you actually help them? How about you tell them how they can do better with their investments? How about you do that? Huh, Suze?
Because all she wants is for you to get freaked out so you reach out to her for help so she can peddle her courses, her books, her seminars, her coaching and who knows what else she sells. She even used to have this super high fee rip-off debit card, but I think the media makes so much fun of her because it was such an awful product and so bad for the consumer that she stopped pitching it.
But she still pitches all of her other stuff. That would be great if the stuff actually worked. If I didn’t have to wait for 30, 40 years to retire. If I didn’t have to wait till I was 70-years-old to retire when I won’t even be able to walk much less drive around the country. You know? Currently I am working with the first batch of students in my Passive Trading Formula Class.
It’s a brand new class. We’ve got our first batch of students. These are like my guinea pigs, they’re testing out everything, and making sure the whole class is perfect. We’re working with them to make sure it goes and it works, right? So this is the class where we take people and we teach them how to trade options in just a couple hours a week or less. There’s specific strategies that we use. Not everything, but there’s specific strategies used that we’ve been focusing on that really takes all options and investing and turns it into more of a passive activity.
Not where we’re actually in the market day trading or looking at options, looking at our trades all day long. No, I don’t want that. I tried that. It didn’t work. Not for me anyway. So what I want is time. Maybe I don’t want to retire. Maybe that’s something, I haven’t even thought about that since I’m only 41. I don’t know if I want to retire or not, but I do know that even if I stop working officially, I’m still going to be trading as long as I am mentally able to.
If my brain goes then yeah, okay. If I’m physically not able to do it then that will be a different a story, but the fact is that even if my back goes out, even if I can’t walk around, even if I have all these other health issues, I can still click some buttons on the mouse and trade and still make a decent living, right? As long as my brain is stable, that I won’t get hopefully knock on wood Alzheimer’s or any other disease like that, which are crazy, bad, horrible diseases, but if I don’t get anything like that, my brain is still intact, then even if the rest of my body goes to pot I can still be able to trade.
Because who knows what’s going to happen, the technology that’s going to come in the next 15, maybe even 10 years, five years? Instead of even clicking a mouse we’ll probably just be able to put a headset on our head and just think or speak and say, “Okay, trade Apple options. Sell the February 52 put for 55 cents. Good to cancel order. Boom, submit.” Maybe that’s all I’ll have to say in a few years. I won’t even have to click a button and I’ll be able to trade just by talking or just by thinking.
That’s the future. That’s probably coming. I’m sure that brokers are even working on that right now. Maybe you just open the app on your phone and you just speak into it. That will be there and so I know that no matter what else happens, I’ll still be able to make some kind of income by trading. To me that is exciting.
On the call I had yesterday with one of my Passive Training Formula students, Olga, she told me that she had wishes that she had started with options so much sooner. You should have heard it in her voice. She was giddy. She was so excited. She was having so much fun and totally loving it. We’re just going through three or four of her trades that she had, she was happy because when you start selling options, you’re probably never going to stop because it’s exciting and it’s addicting because it’s so fun.
Now, right now, today is a great time to get started. If you’re not doing it right now I urge you, go, just do it. Get yourself a trading account. Get it open. Start doing it. Start practicing. Start paper trading. Even if you don’t have any money, even if you’re working a full-time job, start paper trading. You can still do it, you know? Olga, she works her full-time job. I had an email earlier this week from somebody. “Hey, I work a full-time job. How many minutes does it take to trade options?”
Well, I guess it depends on the strategy that you pick. There are some strategies where I spend less than an hour a week. Sorry, an hour a month. Not a week, an hour a month. You can definitely do that strategy. So I mean the answer to his email that I had, I told him, “Well, can you spend 10 minutes at lunch? Can you check the markets in the morning one time? Can you go take bathroom break and go in the bathroom and check your broker’s app on your phone?”
If you can do that for five, 10 minutes a couple times a day, yeah, you can trade even more complicated strategies. You could do credit spreads. You could do condors, butterflies, in stabile markets. Now if the markets are going crazy then you know, you cut back a little bit, but when the market is stabile, yeah you do all that stuff. We’re not day trading here, you know? It’s not like okay, in one day we’re going to lose all our money. That’s not going to happen.
So you need to get started. There’s no time like the present. If you need help, ask us. Help at OptionGenius.com. That’s our email, Help at OptionGenuis.com. We’re here to help you. We’ll point you in the right direction. Tell us what you know, tell us what you need to know, tell us what you want to know and we’ll point you in the right direction. If you don’t know anything about options you can go to the bookstore, you can go to the library, any book, Intro To Options will help you.
Get the basics down. What is a call? What is a put? Once you know that stuff come over to us. We’ll show you how to sell options. We actually have a nine lesson course free that you can opt into with your email. You put your email address in-site in the thing and we send you the nine lessons on how to start selling options. That’s on our website, OptionGenuis.com. You can get that right away.
Now is just a great time to get started. I hope you do. Great show. That’s the end of this episode but a quick note that I wanted to share with you, in our next episode I’m going to be interviewing one of my current students. Now, this guy, I love him, he’s a good friend, but this poor guy listened to all the financial planners. He actually had more than one unfortunately, and he did everything by the book for his whole life.
He’s a smart cookie, he knows the game. He understood. He listened to the financial advice. He put money away. He has retirement funds and he has everything and he put it in the right places, but then when he was in his mid-fifties he went for a checkup to see how he was doing and the planner told him that he was still not going to be able to retire when he wanted. Can you imagine doing everything right and still not being able to do it the way you want to?
He was going to have to push back his retirement a few years. Ouch. Geez, you know? I can’t even imagine how many people these financial advisors are telling the same thing to. It’s like, “Yeah, I know you gave me your money and I know I promised some things to you, but I had to charge you more in fees and the market didn’t really do that well. I didn’t put you in the right things so you’re not going to be able to retire next year. You’re going to have to keep working for three, four, five, maybe six years.
But as long as you keep giving me your fees I’ll be happy to take them.” Right? How many times have they said that? Probably, I don’t know, they’re saying that to thousands and thousands of people all over the country every day. It’s crazy. This guy, the student that I’ve been telling you about, he found me and he found options. So now this is just in two years I believe, maybe three years. I think he found us about three years ago and then he really started going with it a couple years ago.
He is doing well enough that he is actually going to be able to retire early. I mean not after his retirement age, but before retirement age. He’s going to be retiring early if he wants to. He can. He has that ability now. Not only that, but his trading profits, the money that he makes from trading will very soon equal his salary that he’s making from his job. This guy is a college professor, okay? So he’s been doing it for a while. He makes a good amount of money, okay?
So his trading profits are going to equal is salary and so he’s not even going to have to touch his retirement savings. He won’t have to touch his pension, his social security, his whatever money he put in his IRAs and all that stuff. Can you imagine that? It’s unbelievable what can be done in just a short period of time when you have the right strategy. Okay? It’s amazing. We’re going to be sharing his complete story, A to Z, how he did it, what worked for him, what didn’t work for him, all that we’re going to be talking about in the next episode, so I hope you stay tuned for that one. Until then, folks, trade with the odds in your favor.
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