Jack Phelps - The Relaxing Retirement Formula: For the Confidence to Liberate What Youve Saved and Start Living the Life Youve Earned

In 1989 the passing comment of an older gentleman changed the course of my professional life and launched a crusade that occupied my next twenty - nine years. He and I were casually discussing a new savings discount that allowed parents to prepay all four years of college tuition. His kids had already graduated, he said, or he would have jumped at the chance.

It hit me like a lightning bolt. I thought he was nuts. Like this man, my father had been a high school teacher, but my parents didnt even take a vacation for twenty - six years. Why did this guy believe he could have prepaid four years of college? How was he so confident when my parents worked hard but always worried about money?

Working to answer those questions, my research revealed that after a forty - year career, only a tiny percentage of Americans successfully retire independently to a same or improved standard of living. This struck me as incredibly sad. What made that tiny percentage so fortunate?

My first thought was the obvious one: they simply had more money. But that wasnt the case. In the twenty - nine years Ive worked to develop The Relaxing Retirement Formula, Ive met with very affluent men and women who faced every morning with enormous anxiety and lived like they might run out of money that night.

I immersed myself in studying this tiny percentage of successful retireestheir mindsets, systems, and practices. After extensive research, I identified the key difference between those who retire successfully to exciting, fulfilling lives and those who dont. The difference is financial confidence.

One of the biggest emotional, social, and financial challenges youll ever face is the transition from working hard and saving prudently to no longer getting a paycheck. Even if youve done a great job building up substantial retirement savings, how can you be certain you have enough to live the life you want?

In phase two of your financial life, youll no longer depend on income from your employment. Many of the old rules by which you built up a comfortable nest egg no longer pertain. The pension plans of your parents generation are gone, and a financial mistake at this stage could be much more costly. Deep down, youre not 100 percent convinced that you have enough. After decades of working hard and saving well, flipping the switch from saving what youve earned to spending what youve saved simply feels weird.

Many couples facing this strange inflection point and uncertain of the precise dollar amount they can afford to spend without worrying about running out work well past the point when theyd like to retire. Others, without a reliable system to make their money last, start pulling punches, modeling their behavior on retirees they know who are living on a fixed income. They responsibly managed their finances through flush years and lean in the employment - dependent first phase of their lives, but now they recognize the terrain has changed. Within that new landscape, they lack the financial confidence to spend what theyve earned and enjoy what theyve saved for. Nobody, not even that small percentage I studied, is born with such confidence. They develop it.

Most people who have achieved a degree of mastery in their field recognize the value of expertise in every arena. Most successful individuals learned early in their lives how to benefit from the advice and guidance of others, and they actively seek out mentors and coaching. I grew up watching and playing football, so for me, the readiest example is Tom Brady, who at forty - one still has his own personal quarterback coach in addition to Bill Belichick. Top performers from Tiger Woods to Amazons Jeff Bezos credit a coach or mentor with at least a portion of their success. As experts themselves, they recognize the need for an outside perspective and objective, professional advice.

It was a lesson I learned early. My dad coached high school football, and I grew up playing the game. I wasnt a star, but I was good enough to go to college on a football scholarship, where I played for some extraordinary coaches. My head coach, who went on to coach in the NFL for over twenty years, taught me something that became the cornerstone of my own coaching philosophy: its the little things. Its wisdom I learned from him but proved to myself as I worked and studied to understand what separated that tiny percentage of Americans who retire successfully from the vast majority who do not.

As I analyzed how people find clarity and direction and achieve their goals, I realized there isnt a single big key to success. More often than not, its the 5 or 10 percent you do and nobody else does that separates you from the rest and that delivers great results. It isnt talent or luck that puts you in the position everyone wants to be in. Its that you see both the big picture and the details. You catch the things others miss and attend to what they overlook.

It was a lack of financial confidence that kept my parents from doing many of the things they had always wanted to do before it was too late (unfortunately, because my mother died young, this moment came quite early). Its been my mission since to help others whove worked hard and saved avoid the same regrets and to give to you what I couldnt give them: the confidence to liberate what youve saved and start living the life youve earned.

The Relaxing Retirement Formula provides the missing system, the checklists, and the exact numbers you need to flip that savings - to - spending switch with confidence and to start living exactly the way you want to. It will give you the following:

• The amount you can afford to spend each year without the fear of running out
• The one number that must guide all your investment decisions
• How to strategically and confidently position your Retirement Bucket of investments in all market conditions
• Four strategies to avoid paying more in taxes than you legally must
• Five tools you need to prepare for what you cant predict
• Four documents and a critical checklist you must have in place to ensure your loved ones are seamlessly cared for after youre gone