#189 – Will Nick Saban Be A Happy Retiree?

Wes Moss [00:00:37]:
Here’s a question you probably haven’t thought of. Will Nick Saban? Yes. The storied Alabama football coach who just retired sooner, will he be a happy retiree? We’re going to apply here on the retire sooner podcast, the ten habits of the happiest retirees. Five of those are lifestyle related. Five of them are financially related. The most high profile retiree of the year, maybe of the last decade. To truly pull the rip core early, it’s got to be Nick Saban. The guy had years left on his contract, millions of dollars a year, and he just said, nope, I’m out of here.

Wes Moss [00:01:16]:
I’m gone. I’m retiring sooner. Hopefully he’s been listening to retire sooner broadcast. Maybe that’s what got him thinking. I highly doubt it, but he probably thinks we’re Georgia fans because we’re coming from Atlanta and there’s a lot of Georgia bulldogs around here, but we’re going to go through that. It’s high time and we have a mega update for some of the financial numbers that we have not brought to the table yet. And this is the episode we’re doing that we are actually adjusting some of the happy retiree numbers for the massive inflation that we’ve seen over the last couple of years. It’s high time we did that and we’re going to go through the five and five, five financial, five lifestyle.

Wes Moss [00:01:58]:
We are going to have an introspective look on is Saban. We know he’s got plenty of money, but is he going to be a happy retiree? Because we all know that it’s much more than just the money. It’s half money, half lifestyle. We’re going to do that right here today. And guess who we’re bringing in? We’re bringing in Ryan Doolittle, who we say here around the studio does the most. Ryan Doolittle, who is the, he’s the host of happiest retiree podcast where he’s our go to guy to get real life happy retiree stories. That’s what his podcast is all about here. Of course, you know, if you’ve been listening, we do retirement experts.

Wes Moss [00:02:38]:
We just brought you a Social Security expert. We’ll bring psychologists around. The science of happiness. Doolittle goes right to the source. He’ll find a guy who’s a happy retiree who’s conducting on a train at a zoo, and he’ll make that an interview because it’s relatable. And he wants to bring just the reality of not just not being a famous football coach, but everyday Americans, everyday happy retirees. Doolittle, welcome to this podcast.

Ryan Doolittle [00:03:07]:
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Wes. I would say no happy retiree is safe from my clutches. So if Nick Saban happens to become a happy retiree, he better look out. I’ll be searching for him.

Wes Moss [00:03:20]:
Would you go so far as to knock on his already?

Ryan Doolittle [00:03:24]:
I’m halfway there. I’m just waiting for the verdict.

Wes Moss [00:03:29]:
Stalking by Doolittle, finding happy retirees. And I will say this, I like to do the punchline right out of the gate. Of course, you do not have to be Nick Saban to be a happy retiree. Of course, you don’t need to make $40 million a year or $200 million in your career or more. A couple of disclosures. I’m not a giant Alabama fan. I know that if you’re in the southeast, you’re either a, for the most part, you are a Georgia, Auburn or Alabama fan. In fact, a friend of mine the other day who works with a big company and one of his big accounts is in Alabama.

Wes Moss [00:04:06]:
He said that the way people greet each other in Alabama is the hello and the goodbye is just simply roll tide. Roll tide. So, hey, man, how you doing? That’s what we do here in Georgia, in Atlanta, in Alabama. Hey, man, roll tide. All right, y’all ready to leave? Roll tide. That’s how big Alabama is. It is a religion to some extent in the state of Alabama. So if you’re outside, look, of course wes got huge.

Wes Moss [00:04:40]:
College football is one of the biggest. It’s second only to the biggest reality show that has ever been on television, which is, of course, we know the NFL, the greatest reality show of all time. A close number two is college football. And that’s all that people watch in America. If it were not for college football and NFL football, there’d be no place to advertise because you couldn’t even get your message out. It’s that big, it’s that dominant. We know what the ratings are, so it’s everything. When it comes to entertainment, it’s the last live event in the United States that people care about.

Wes Moss [00:05:14]:
I laughed the other night that, trying to think what it. Wes, was it the national championship game? They had the Emmys on at the same time. No, it was not the college football championship. I think it was just Monday night football or it was a playoff game. And I kind of chuckled because in the Wall Street Journal the next day, I saw that the Emmys had been on because it was delayed for the writer strike. I was like, I didn’t even know the Emmys was on, nor would I have ever tuned in because there was football on. How big of a football fan are you, ma’am?

Ryan Doolittle [00:05:46]:
Well, it’s hard not to be a football fan. I’ve tried not to be at times, and it just always comes back because it’s such a fun game to watch. But I will say it was definitely the Emmys because I saw a picture of the guy from it’s always Sunny in Philadelphia at the Emmys in his tux, and he was holding his phone, watching the wedding.

Wes Moss [00:06:07]:
Still watching the game.

Ryan Doolittle [00:06:09]:
Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:06:09]:
Church, watching the game. Roll tide. The question I have is this, and here’s another Carolina. I went to UNC, so I’m a tar heel fan, but tar heels have not. They’ve been pretty disappointing over the years. From a football perspective, not so much. Not basketball. So I’ve adopted some other teams.

Wes Moss [00:06:31]:
I spent a ton of time in Michigan, and my wife’s from Michigan. We’ve gone up there 20 years. I go to Michigan a lot, so I’m a Michigan fan. I do love University of Michigan as maybe a top three team in my life. And they’ve won the national championships this year, so that’s a big deal. And the Lions, I love the Lions again because of the Michigan connection, but I grew up outside of Philadelphia, so I grew up as an Eagles fan to some extent. But sports when I was so unlike my current household with four boys, everything is sports. They all play sports.

Wes Moss [00:07:08]:
They play football. They love football. They’re watching football or they’re watching basketball or they’re watching football clips on YouTube about football. It’s actually a little overwhelming. I didn’t grow up that way because I grew up more of on a farm. We had one crappy little tv, had the rabbit ears. We had no reception. I didn’t really grow up watching sports until I got to college, and my friends at college thought I was like, they thought I was Amish, for God’s sakes.

Wes Moss [00:07:37]:
They thought you grew up without a television. So it took me a while to get integrated into sports and really start to understand it, and it takes a long time if you don’t grow up with it. But again, for the last 25 years, being in Atlanta coaching sports, four boys that all play sports I think have caught up. But anyway, let’s get to our topic of the day. This is the most decorated guy in college football. Maybe not all of football, but definitely college football. He just announced his retirement. It wasn’t retiree to me.

Wes Moss [00:08:11]:
It was a way early retirement in Jan. Of 2024. We’re talking Saban, who’s the goat? Greatest of all time for college coaches, 28 years as a head coach. He started in Toledo, then he went to Michigan State, then he went to LSU. He won a national championship at LSU, then he left, he went to the NFL, coached for the Dolphins, I think it was only one year. And then finally back to Alabama, where he’s coached the last 17 years. At Alabama, he had 201 wins. That’s tied with Vince Dooley, second most wins of college school or in SEC history at a single school.

Wes Moss [00:08:47]:
Trailing only Bear Bryant, who was at Alabama, who had 232 wins. He won nine SEC championships, six national championships at Alabama. You have to build a whole room for his trophy stash. Back in 22, he signed his last contract with Crimson Tide worth $93.6 million. That was a total deal scheduled to run over eight years through 2030, meaning he had another $72 million to get paid. And that’s money in the bank that was going to come to him no matter what. But we know how life goes. We know how collegiate sports have gone, which means that you’ve got this nil money, and particularly the old school coaches.

Wes Moss [00:09:37]:
It’s like throwing Chat GPT at an english teacher today after 30 years, they just don’t want to deal with it like we’re not doing it. Same thing with these coaches have been around. They don’t want to all of a sudden now have to deal with paying their athletes. That’s not the way it used to be done. So they got the nil thing. Then you have what’s called the transfer portal. And for producer Mallory, who only watches football to see Taylor Swift and the guy that she dates, that’s a big deal because now college football players can just hop anywhere they want to go all the time. Oh, I’m in the transfer portal.

Wes Moss [00:10:14]:
Two good years in Michigan and I’m out. Well, wait a minute. Now you got to deal with nil. Now you got to deal with players who are just kind of going wherever to go get more nil money or get more playing time. Can’t blame these guys at all. But if you’re a coach, have been doing this forever, that may be too much to bear, as in Bryant. So here’s what we need to think about with Saban. Clearly, this is why this guy’s out of here.

Wes Moss [00:10:39]:
He’s like, I just don’t need the money and I don’t want to take this anymore.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:41]:
The tide was turning, Wes, and he didn’t want to roll it anymore.

Wes Moss [00:10:47]:
Roll tide. So the process to get to the point in your life for retirement is not going to be the same for everyone. Your path is not going to be the same as Nick Saban. Everyone’s journey is a little bit different, or maybe a lot different. People retire at all different ages. Some that are at 40, some in the fire group are in their thirty s. The secret that they don’t quite know is that they’re going to unretire at some point. But they’re that young.

Wes Moss [00:11:16]:
Some don’t ever retire. Charlie Munger worked the week that he passed away. He was still working Warren Buffett’s partner. But for somebody who’s studied the habits of happy retirees. So what do retirees do and not do to land them in either the happy or the unhappy retiree camp? And what I think is fascinating about Sabit is that his whole career has been about his process. And I think that’s what really piqued my interest about this story. He’s always talked about his process and his approach to life in his approach to football. Now, another one of our producers you may have heard here on retire sooner, Jeff Lloyd lives in Alabama and does a weekly group.

Wes Moss [00:12:02]:
I can’t remember what the group is, but I think it’s called quarterbacks for life. It’s some charitable organization related to football. And he’s seen Saban speak. So he has seen and heard Saban in the flesh many times. So part of our knowledge today is coming almost firsthand from our producer, Jeff Lloyd. So I want to take some of his teachings, his process, and talk about ways that we can apply it to our financial mindset. How can we apply the process to getting prepared for retirement and, of course, getting to retirement or economic independence? It takes a bunch of time and it takes a process. Then, of course, we’ll figure out if Saban is going to be a happy retiree or not.

Wes Moss [00:12:46]:
So the process was born. This is Saban’s process. It was born at Michigan State under Saban, and it emphasizes what you have to do to win. It focuses on how you have to compete in a game in order to be successful. It’s not about focusing on the outcome so much, it’s focusing on the process of what you have to do to get there. So whether we’re talking about being successful in football or the game of life or the game of retiree, we all need to have our own path and process to do so. So here’s Saban’s process. Number one, focus on the process, not the outcome.

Wes Moss [00:13:26]:
Saban emphasizes the importance on the little things, the daily processes, the tasks, the habits, rather than just fixating on the end result. So what do you have to do right every single day? Study the playbook, understand what the team’s doing, working out every day, eating right every day, thinking about and training every day to be the best you can be. That’s what his process is focused on. Not just what are we going to do to win, because if that’s all you focus on, then you’re missing all the steps to get there. Just like when it comes to money, let’s say you think you need a million dollars to retire. You can’t just sit around and think that, oh, I’ve got to get to that million, I’ve got to get to a million. You need to think about the steps and break it down through the process in order to eventually get to the million dollars. Yes, we need to invest regularly every year.

Wes Moss [00:14:17]:
Put everything on automatic pilot. Maximize your 401k, maximize what you can put in an IRA, brokerage account. Anything above all that, it goes into, again, a brokerage account. Stay invested in the market. That’s part of the process. Find the right allocation that works for you so you don’t get shaken out of the market. That’s part of the process. Allow your investments to continue to grow and compound.

Wes Moss [00:14:41]:
And it takes, guess what? Just like in football, it takes discipline to do it takes discipline to be able to put money away, every single paycheck to max out 401k every single year. Takes a lot of discipline to do that. Number two, attention to detail. We know Saban is known for his meticulous attention to detail in everything, every aspect of the game. Practice drills, game planning, reviewing film. He has the belief that success is built on getting all of those small things right. And that approach contributes to consistency and contributes to excellence. Again, retirement parallel.

Wes Moss [00:15:22]:
Just like a coach would have to plan for a game, retirees have to plan for retiree. There are a lot of different things you got to do. One, calculate how much you’re going to need to save. You can use an online calculator. You could do an excel, you can do a pencil and paper. It doesn’t matter. But I’ve seen a lot of really successful retirees. Part of the detail is they’re writing their spending down.

Wes Moss [00:15:41]:
They do it once a week. They do it once a month. I’ve seen pen and paper. I’ve seen people use software applications. We have an online calculator that we built to do that. Doesn’t matter which tool you use. It matters that you’re doing it so that you’re getting the detail. Calculate how the 4% plus rules will work.

Wes Moss [00:15:59]:
If you have a million dollars saved for retirement, 4% of that is $40,000 a year, plus inflation, plus your Social Security. One and two, maybe that gets you to 60, 70, $80,000 a year. Do the math in order to figure out if that’ll be enough. Do you have a mortgage? Do you not have a mortgage? Some of these are happy retiree habits that we’re about to go through. Number three, building a strong team culture. Saban knows you have to have a really strong cross culture, a positive team culture. So he fosters an environment of mutual respect, hard work, commitment to a common goal. And that culture that he builds helps his players buy into the process and work harder because they have that shared objective.

Wes Moss [00:16:50]:
All right, retirement parallel. We got to have the right team. You can 100% do retiree planning on your own. Many happy retirees do it. Do your own planning. You do your own taxes, you do your own investing. That absolutely can work. Or you end up having a team around you.

Wes Moss [00:17:07]:
The right CPA, the right investment team, financial planning team that helps you with that, keeps you on track, the right estate planning team, and maybe most importantly, making sure that all of those coaches, if you will, from the head coach down to the assistant coaches, they’re all talking to each other and they understand what your common goal is and what part of the process they’re helping with. That’s your financial team. Number four in the Saban process, handling success and failure. Look, as good as Alabama has been, they don’t win every game. So a lot of pressure on him, the coaches, the players. So they’ve got to be able to understand how to bounce back from failures, bounce back from mistakes, and then keep their humility during all those successful periods so they don’t go back to being unsuccessful. It’s a lot like the long term game of investing. No investor wins all the time.

Wes Moss [00:18:09]:
There’s always things that don’t go the way you want them to go. Certain asset classes don’t do well certain years. The market is terrible anywhere you look. We’ve had multiple year periods where stocks didn’t work, periods where stocks and bonds together didn’t work. If you’re looking at just how markets have done, even though if you go back over the last 44 years, markets have been positive, 33 out of 44 years, and the average rate of return is north of 10%. The average inter year decline, a clobber on average every year of 14.2%. So it’s not a, hey, maybe we’re going to have a tough spot in any given year. It’s inevitable we’re going to have a tough spot in any given year.

Wes Moss [00:18:59]:
And by the way, each new slap in the face as an investor feels like the big one and it’s going to get worse. So it’s not just, oh, it’s every year we go down, no big deal. It’s every year when we do go down, it’s for another new scary reason. Makes it tough. But we’ve got to be able to handle those temporary declines, the challenges of being invested, so that we can be successful over time. Number five, long term vision. A guy that’s coached almost 30 years with that much success, thinks about everything that he’s doing today, how it’s going to impact his team in three and four and five and six years. Who is he recruiting today that may be a star to win a national championship five years from now? He’s thinking way out.

Wes Moss [00:19:48]:
It’s not just thinking about what’s happening this week or the season. No different in retirement planning. It’s a very important two words when it comes to retirement planning and investing. Long term. Ultimately, we all want to be happy in retirement. That’s the long term goal and the vision. And we can’t get fixated or stuck on what’s happening in the short short term that can ruin our long term vision. Take, for example, wanting to trade out of or get out of the market on a rough day, a bad day, a bad week, a scary headline, a war, two wars, three wars, another war might pop up over here real easy to sit this one out or say, hey, it’s been a good run.

Wes Moss [00:20:36]:
Let’s not necessarily do this again. There’s just too much bad happening in the world. And then we try to time the market and then the market gets good and then we pop back in the market and we end up chasing our tail. And investors that do that and they’re hopping in and out and they’re not thinking longer term. Those are the investors that get burned. And it’s the majority of investors, one of the most telling studies, that show just how important it is to stay invested. I think of the stock market sometimes as it’s almost never good. It’s either going down or recovering from going down, and it’s always in that cycle.

Wes Moss [00:21:14]:
Once in a while, it’s making new highs, and when it’s making new highs, you’re thinking, well, it’s got to come back down. So it spends the majority of its time in not necessarily a great state, but then you zoom out and over time, you’ve had this extraordinary double digit return. Over time, if you’ve given it that much time and you’ve stayed invested, but let’s say from 1995 through the end of 2023, you were fully, fully invested. You never got out of the, let’s just call it the S and P 500 compounded annual growth rate. Fully, fully invested that whole period of time, almost, not quite a 30 year period, but fully invested averaged 8.3% per year. That’s a seriously positive rate of return. That means rule 72 divided by 8.3. That means your money would have doubled every about eight and a half years.

Wes Moss [00:22:12]:
You missed five days in that whole period of time, five days out of almost 30 years, your rate of return drops to 6.6%, almost two full percentage points. You missed ten days out of almost 30 years, the best days. Because you have hopped in and out of the market, you weren’t there. For the rare time the market really does do well and makes new highs. Now your returns down to 5.4%. That’s a 35% reduction over your entire investment lifespan for just ten days. Ten days out of 28 years, you miss the 30 best days out of approximately 30 years, almost your entire returns are wiped away. You go from over 8% if you were fully invested, all the way down to less than two.

Wes Moss [00:23:08]:
Ouch. Long term vision. So there’s a lot of parallels between this process that Saban does to be successful or has done during his career what he’s taught all of us over this period of time. So much of this applies to our investing game plan as well. Thinking about retirement in 2024? Well, you’re not alone, and I’ve got just the thing to help guide you on your journey. What the happiest retirees know my most recent book that shares the ten habits of the happiest retirees, meant to help you land at a place where work becomes optional for a limited time get 25% off@westmossbooks.com. Simply use the promo code. Our treat.

Wes Moss [00:23:56]:
All one word at checkout. That’s westmossbooks.com. Now, on a lighter note, do little. Almost forgot you were here. I was so enthralled with the process. Let’s see if this guy is going to be a happy retiree. So we’ve got ten different things. Five and five.

Wes Moss [00:24:18]:
Where do you think he’s going to come in? Is he going to get ten out of ten?

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:24]:
I don’t think he’s going to get ten out of ten. I don’t think he’s known for being a cheerful chipper Charlie, so I’m a little bit nervous about that aspect.

Wes Moss [00:24:36]:
What would you be if he’s not a chipper Charlie? He’s a what? He’s a sad Saban.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:41]:
A grumpy. Oh, a sad Saban nitpicking.

Wes Moss [00:24:48]:
Yeah, he’s a nitpicker. He does remind me a little bit of the Grinch. Yeah, he’s never happy. Right. Even if he wins, there’s a lot of things we did wrong. We can do better. We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves. He’s never jovial at no out of the gate.

Wes Moss [00:25:09]:
Doesn’t appear to be your quintessential happy retiree.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:14]:
Yeah, I picture him.

Wes Moss [00:25:16]:
Even if he was, would he admit it? I could see you having on your show, Nick. We would interview Mr. Saban for the Happiest Retirees podcast. I’m not going to do to.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:31]:
He wouldn’t admit to being happy.

Wes Moss [00:25:33]:
Right.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:34]:
Which is interesting. Maybe he’s happy on the inside. I just picture him watching his wife doing something and he’s holding a clipboard and looking disappointed like he has notes or something.

Wes Moss [00:25:47]:
We’re going to do it again. We’re going to do it again.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:51]:
You’ve got to execute, honey, till we get it right. Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:25:56]:
So we’re going to start with habit one, which is the liquid part of retirement savings. Of course, it’s a very big deal. There’s several financial pieces. To be a happy retiree, having a certain amount of liquid assets, of course, is a big chunk of it because that is now going to produce income for you for the rest of your life. And it’s there when you need big chunks of money, it’s your safety blanket. Of course it’s important. What we learned through our research over the last decade plus is that there is a plateauing effect. And we’ve measured what happy retirees need to get to kind of as a bare minimum financial checkpoint when we originally did.

Wes Moss [00:26:33]:
You can retire sooner than you think. And this goes back over a decade. Now, the median number and the mean number, there’s two numbers we calculated. We found that the median number to jump from the unhappy retiree to the happy retiree camp, that inflection point was $500,000. That’s a lot lower than you’ve heard on. Again, Susie Orman will say you need, I think she says you need at least 5 million. Who’s this guy saying we need only 500? Well, the average, though, was a higher number. The average happy retiree had closer to 900,000.

Wes Moss [00:27:05]:
It was about 875,000. So that was the average. But the median, there are two ways to look at, there are a lot of different ways to look at statistics. Median, I think, is an important one when it comes to money related statistics, particularly wealth statistics, because it cuts out the really high end and the really low end. It looks at the middle point and the average can get skewed. And the fact that we know there is a, we believe through our research, and this is up for debate as well, but I very much believe there’s a plateauing effect of that. Yes, more money in the early stages of increasing your income, early stages of getting a cushion or nest egg. It does increase your levels of happiness.

Wes Moss [00:27:44]:
It may be just a feeling of security which allows you to have a higher level of happiness, and then it plateaus off. So at a certain point, more money doesn’t necessarily, quote, buy us a whole lot more happiness. So I think it’s important to look at it in that context. But this is a major update here for the retire sooner camp. This is an update to the, you can retire sooner than you think. This is at least one major update to what the happiest retirees know, and that’s around this number. Ryan Doolittle. So here’s the drum roll.

Wes Moss [00:28:16]:
If we had a drum roll, Shannon B. We can put in a drum roll. The new number, I feel like you should. It’s a hailing from Bethesna High School at 245 pounds. Six three comes in at not 500 anymore, but $700,000 in liquid retirement savings. Again, when we first did retire sooner, 500,000, that was the key inflection point. It’s been over a decade. The world has changed dramatically.

Wes Moss [00:28:46]:
So we have to update our data as well. This one is simple to update. We have had massive inflation since then. Well, cumulatively, since that period of time after we published, you could retire sooner than you think. Inflation limped along for seven years, we had very little inflation in any given year. It was 12% over that entire seven year period. So it was around one and a half percent a year, barely noticeable. Then we got almost 20% inflation, tsunami inflation, over the course of a little over two and a half years.

Wes Moss [00:29:25]:
So, put it all together, we’ve had over 30% inflation since retire sooner was first published. So we’re adjusting our h Rob happy retiree on the block checkpoints to the following 700,000 for the median and for the average of the mean, 1.25 million. We’ve used the inflation that we’ve gotten over the last, call it decade plus, with a little bit of a buffer. So we’re really using 40% inflation buffer. So, both through our research and what we see in real life, these numbers make a ton of sense. Now for future would be retirees to focus in on, we’re going to have the same debate that we did when we first published these numbers a decade ago. That seems like too much money. I can’t get there, Wes.

Wes Moss [00:30:11]:
You’re only talking to people that are super wealthy. And then I’ll get it from the other side, which is. That doesn’t even sound like enough. How could you tell people they can retire with $700,000? Now, I’m not saying that more is bad. Of course you could have more than these financial checkpoints, but I’ve seen people do this. Yes, there’s some other variables that need to fall into place, and we’re going to get to these. But even if you look at investing $500,000 back in 2013 and using the 4% rule, that’s 4% plus inflation each year in a balanced 60% stock 40% bond account. And this is just.

Wes Moss [00:30:52]:
I’m just using the SP 500 and the aggregate bond index here. So I’m not a funder. This is for educational purposes only. 500,000. Taking out your 4% plus, still left with over 800,000. So now. And this is the whole reason we invest to begin with, that nest egg has more firepower and more horsepower to generate more income to have helped you overcome inflation over time. So 500,000 back then, invested in a balanced way, has worked.

Wes Moss [00:31:22]:
As we sit here in 2024, past performance is not indicative of future results. We don’t know if it’ll continue or the world will fall apart. But these are things that we have seen work over time, over and over and over again.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:39]:
Wes, you dumped that new liquid number on the audience like a big gatorade bath for Nick Saban. After a championship game.

Wes Moss [00:31:48]:
I was talking so much that you had time to think that one out. All right, so, Ryan, and there’s not a ton of suspense on this one, but does coach Saban practice this habit getting to these liquid financial checkpoints?

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:04]:
My one concern was that I know Susie Orman is concerned about people going out to dinner. It’s okay to charter private jets. So if he does that, that’s fine. But if he’s gone out to dinner a couple of times, is that 12 million going to. No, I think he’s going to be fine. Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:32:21]:
So he gets a check for this one. And that is true. What you’re saying is interesting. I love that. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about Susie Orman who refuses to eat out at restaurants because she thinks it’s too expensive. But then in the very next paragraph says that her one little splurge is flying private. I think she said private aviation. And if you do the math there, like let’s say you’re going from New York to down to the Bahamas or wherever she lives, it’s about 35 to 40 grand per leg when you’re splurging a little bit on private aviation.

Wes Moss [00:32:58]:
So think about there and back, your minimum. You’re talking $70,000 to get from New York to the Bahamas, back to New York, even at a really nice dinner of $200. And that’s 350 dinners. So one round trip flight or three. Or eating out a super nice restaurant almost every single day of the year. I don’t know. It’s kind of a funny dichotomy between the two.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:25]:
You can fit a lot of spagos into one leg of a private jet. I don’t know. Is Spago still the.

Wes Moss [00:33:31]:
I don’t even know what Spago is.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:33]:
I’m out of the restaurant game, so I don’t know. Insert your fancy restaurant title there.

Wes Moss [00:33:40]:
What is the best one in America? Isn’t it Lebeck Finn? Isn’t that one? Or is that in Europe? What’s the one in Napa Valley?

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:48]:
The french laundry. French laundry.

Wes Moss [00:33:51]:
Laundry. What a great name. At $1,000 a pop at french laundry, it’s 70 nights at french laundry or one round trip flight. I don’t know. The numbers don’t lie. While there is no way to know if Saban, how much he has, because there’s no way these net worth things online are so ridiculously off. They’re so wild, they’re ridiculously inaccurate. Of course.

Wes Moss [00:34:22]:
We got to check this box. He’s going to have more than the 700 or the 1.25 billion. He spent over $120,000,000 at Alabama alone. So I think he practices this habit. Number two, have your mortgage payoff within sight. We know that retirees within five years of mortgage payoff, so light at the end of the tunnel, getting rid of the mortgage, that group is four times more likely to end up in the happy retiree camp. As the years to pay off mortgage tick down, happiness levels go up. We’ve seen that in our research.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:57]:
You think Saban owns Wes? I was afraid he might be renting.

Wes Moss [00:35:00]:
There’s just a weight that a mortgage has. It’s the biggest bill for the vast majority of Americans. It’s like a giant pesky mosquito. It’s just hanging around every month, buzzing you. Every month. It’s a big check. It’s to a bank you probably don’t love. It’s probably been sold three times to four different mortgage servicers.

Wes Moss [00:35:24]:
Then you refinanced it and the years got longer. You went from 30 down to 20, refinance back to 30. It just hangs around. But because shelter is a primal need for humans, we have to do it. And there’s some emotion around it because, again, it’s core to survival, but it’s also a huge chunk of money for most people, and getting rid of it has this great psychological benefit. From what I’ve seen both in my research and just in real life, there’s no perfect or easy way to do it. I think the easiest way either. There’s two ways I look at paying off the mortgage.

Wes Moss [00:36:09]:
One is the one third rule. So once the mortgage balance gets to the point where you could take a third of your after tax retirement money. I’m not talking about retirement savings, just after tax investment money and pay it off in one chunk. I just call that the one third pay down rule. And I think that makes a lot of sense to get rid of the final amount. The other way that I’ve seen folks do this quickly is just extra payments. So we know that if you’re making a three, four, $500 extra payment per month, it can shave five years, eight years, ten years, depending on the size of the mortgage, off the life of that loan, you can take a 30 year down to 20 year very easily. You get rid of the mortgage payment, and now it takes the pressure off of your nest egg.

Wes Moss [00:36:57]:
Now, the money coming from the nest egg doesn’t go to something you have to pay for. It goes to the things you want to do during retirement. Another psychological lift of getting the mortgage paid off. Ryan Doolittle, does coach Saban practice this habit of a happy retiree?

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:16]:
You know, Wes, the only shred method Nick Saban needs is to max out on his bench press because I think his mortgage is going to be definitely paid off.

Wes Moss [00:37:24]:
You’re referencing the shred method is what? Can you remind our folks about that?

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:29]:
It’s a way to turn the tables on the banks and pay your mortgage off faster so you’re paying less interest, which know, obviously the goal of the bank is to get as much interest from you as possible.

Wes Moss [00:37:43]:
The shred method. For those interested from our friend of the show, Adam Carroll, who has a proprietary method that it’s actually pretty complicated and I think that’s why you need software to do this, to try to pay down the mortgage even more quickly. But again, I’m not an expert on the shred method. I would turn to Adam Carroll for that. So I’d probably check the box on this one too. I doubt coach Saban has any debt. It almost seems like the kind of guy that wouldn’t stand for debt either. I could see him just saying I don’t stand for debt.

Wes Moss [00:38:14]:
No, we pay cash here in the Saban household. We do know that he just bought a 17 and a half million dollar house on Jupiter island in Florida sometime in 2023 and maybe it was tough for him to just plunk down that much money. I don’t know. I would lean towards thinking he probably does not have any sort of mortgage whatsoever. But he may for there are other reasons to have a mortgage to some extent and maybe we need to do an episode around asset protection. But having a mortgage can sometimes can be an asset protection strategy. So I’m going to leave this one uncommitted. Ryan Doolittle.

Wes Moss [00:39:01]:
I’m not going to give him a check for this one.

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:03]:
Do you think he might have to rent out his 9th bedroom just to sort of make his mortgage nut each month?

Wes Moss [00:39:09]:
Saban vrbo room number nine. This quaint room in the mansion of famed coach Nick Saban goes for $372 a night. And you get a signed autograph from Saban number three. Multiple streams of income. Imagine you’re going to receive $10,000 per month. Ryan Doolittle. Do you want to get it in one check every month in the mailbox or ten $1,000 checks? Which do you choose?

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:39]:
You’re putting me on the spot here.

Wes Moss [00:39:42]:
Are you just good either way?

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:45]:
Well, yeah, I don’t think I’d be upset at either, but probably dividing it up would be the more preferable option, right?

Wes Moss [00:39:52]:
Well, it would for some folks because here’s the way I think about this. Imagine you opted for the $10,000 check once a month. What happens if the check got lost in the mail? Hey, wait a minute. There’s a lot riding on that one check. And really it’s not lost in the mail. There’s a lot riding on that one source. So there is, again, another psychological, financial and psychological benefit to having multiple tributaries that run into one larger stream of income because there is more diversification of your income. Happy retirees have three to four different streams of income.

Wes Moss [00:40:30]:
Happy retirees have closer to two. Think Saban has more than three or four income sources? Ryan Doolittle I do. I’d probably going out on a limb. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:43]:
I think he has more than one. He probably has more than know. It’s like when he’s recruiting for his team, he’s not just looking at the quarterback. He’s got to look at all the positions.

Wes Moss [00:40:52]:
Well, he’s got to have three to four quarterbacks is what he.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:56]:
There you go. Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:40:57]:
So I would say his process would make sure he has plenty of income streams. Look, he had his coaching salaries and possibly a big pension with the state of Alabama. He’s a part owner of a bunch of car dealerships that could be generating income every single month. He’s got endorsement deals. He’s got multiple companies. I love the Aflac commercial he does with Coach prime. He probably gets speaking fees for going around the country talking to various audiences. So, yes, I think safely we could say coach Saban has multiple streams of income just like the happy retiree number four, be a tomorrow investor.

Wes Moss [00:41:37]:
I think we touched on this about the process. But happy retirees are tomorrow investors, meaning that they understand that not any given year is going to be the answer to their retirement 401k balance. It’s going to take a lot of time and they’re looking not what’s happening today, they’re looking way out into the future. So I call them tomorrow investors. We did a whole show about this, so I’m just going to quickly summarize it. But you can always listen to the driving through the smoke participation versus perfection episode of retire sooner. It’s essentially a really cool study that shows an investor putting $10,000 in in any given cycle. We went back to the, made the perfectly timed investment choice, meaning that the market had gone down a lot, bear market down 30, 40% and nailed the exact bottom, which is almost impossible to do.

Wes Moss [00:42:36]:
And that’s when they got started. So right at the trough, which, of course, produces the best returns. And then we did the polar opposite. That same investor took the $10,000 and invested it at the exact worst time, meaning that put the money to work, and then the market dropped into big bear market territory. So you’ve got those two variables. The perfect investor and the worst possible relative to investing in t bills are essentially cash in any time period. We look at long run, semi long run, medium term, short run. The worst stock investor still beats cash by a long shot.

Wes Moss [00:43:17]:
It’s fundamental to being able to get to retirement. Saving your way to retirement is hard enough if you don’t have a tailwind, which can be through the equity markets or the real estate markets or owning of private businesses. But if you don’t have some sort of tailwind to help with all that savings, it’s almost impossible to just save your way to economic freedom versus invest your way to economic freedom. Now, this one, I have no idea. I would think that because he’s a long term guy when it comes to his process with football, I would think that Saban would be a tomorrow investor. Ryan Doolittle.

Ryan Doolittle [00:43:53]:
Yeah, I think Nick Saban knows how to send his fullback up the middle for four yards just to make the field goal a little bit more probable. That kind of guy is a tomorrow investor. He’s setting up the next play. He’s not just thinking about right now.

Wes Moss [00:44:08]:
Man, this is good. Yeah, I would agree. Habit number five, spend wisely using the 4% rule again. We’ve done an entire show on this called why we believe the 4% rule is here to stay. Again, this goes back to 1994. William Benghen, the MIT aeronautics engineer and turned financial planner, he originally calculated, how can I max out what I’m pulling out from my retirement savings without running out? And he landed on 4%. And that’s 4% ratcheted higher for inflation every year. That’s 4%, which is a dollar amount when you start.

Wes Moss [00:44:49]:
Then ratcheted higher for inflation every year. Based on his calculations, nest eggs lasted 50 years, plus 80% of the time in the worst case scenario showed that money still lasted 35 years. Now, our team updated this and recreated that study because it hadn’t been updated for a long time. In 20, 14, 20, 21, 20, 23. And Wes believe it still works as an incredibly important rule of thumb. At 4%, money lasted 40 years, 90% of the time. In our calculations, 84% of the time, it lasted 45 years. In fact, banging came back a few years ago and said you could push the rule to four and a half percent, which is a twelve and a half percent income boost to anybody using the rule.

Wes Moss [00:45:43]:
I look at this, I still think it works over a long period of time with a balanced portfolio of equities and bonds or stocks and bonds. I’m partial to dividend paying stocks, but for over 20 years of me helping people plan for retirement, the way I look at this is that we want to just be in that range. Arguably, four is not maxing out rpms on the amount you’re withdrawing. Five starts to get a little bit maxed out. But we use four as this kind of home base and we can be in between four and 5% in any given year as long as we’re not going beyond the 5% and we’re kind of using that 4% number. Four and a quarter. Four and a half as our home base that we’re getting back to because it’s a dynamic rule of thumb. It’s not a set exact calculation every single year.

Wes Moss [00:46:34]:
Ryan Doolittle, you think Saban practices the 4% rule or he will. I guess it’s time to start.

Ryan Doolittle [00:46:39]:
If anything, he’s taken out less than 4%. I mean, he’s the kind of discipline guy that is not going to go above it. Reminds me of a scene from a documentary I saw about comedians where Jay Leno says he just never spent a penny of his Tonight show money because he’s too worried about it. And Jerry Seinfeld says, yeah, jay, I think it’s fine at this point. That’s how it would be with Nick Saban. He’d be penny pinching just in case. So if anything, he needs to spend a little more or draw down a little more of his retirement.

Wes Moss [00:47:14]:
Now, I’m going to go a little bit on a limb here. I don’t disagree with what you just said. I’m with you. If you’re watching Alabama game, you’re going to see in the fourth quarter, all the coaches and the fans and the players raise four fingers on both hands. Right? It’s for the fourth quarter. I think what they’re really doing, particularly this year, they’re raising four fingers in the air to show their appreciation for coach Saban utilizing the 4% rule. So out of the five habits, I think he nails at least four out of five, probably five out of five. And I think he’s going to be in good shape.

Wes Moss [00:47:55]:
On to the Saban lifestyle. Habits do little. This is right up your alley. It’s right in your sweet spot.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:03]:
It’s a big fat pitch right down the middle that I’m just going to knock out of the park.

Wes Moss [00:48:08]:
Wrong sport. I’m sorry? Wrong sport.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:10]:
Which one’s that?

Wes Moss [00:48:12]:
Yeah, that would be softball. Baseball. I think what you’re saying here is this is your blocking and tackling. This is two great blockers right up the middle, five to seven yard run. You could do this all day long.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:25]:
Then I’ll get a first down every time and I’ll just march down the field.

Wes Moss [00:48:29]:
That’s what you’re touchdown with.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:30]:
Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:48:30]:
All right, here we go. Number one core pursuits, aka hobbies on steroids. We know happy retirees have 3.6 average. 3.6 core pursuits. The unhappy group only has 1.9. These are things that are really important to you and they’re big activities in your life. So you look forward to doing them and you look forward to continuing to do them and get better at them. And very often they’re social and they can give you some purpose, but they can give you some structure, too.

Wes Moss [00:48:56]:
So you fill the 2000 hours of time that you used to be working and now you’re doing your core pursuits. Question is, do you think Saban will be able to do this? Ryan Doolittle, this is one area that.

Ryan Doolittle [00:49:12]:
I’m a little worried about for Nick Saban because he runs the risk of his core pursuit being watching Alabama football games and thinking about how he would have done it instead of doing anything else. And then it’s like he’s not even retired. So I really need Nick Saban to hit a pickleball court now and then. Maybe pick up some fly fishing, some volunteer work, something, maybe ask his wife if she has some thoughts. We need Nick to branch out a little bit.

Wes Moss [00:49:43]:
Yeah, this would be the same. I liken this to an entrepreneur or CEO that’s run a company, built a company. The company’s their life. That’s a group that very often crowds out all those other corporates because they’re so focused on business and they end up with a ton of money, but they’re restarting life once the business gets sold or they retire from a storied football franchise. A little research again from Jeff Lloyd. Evidently, Saban’s a golfer. We know he loves to play golf. Of course he’s going to continue to love college football.

Wes Moss [00:50:20]:
You could call him a car collector. He has multiple dealerships, so we could call him a car collector. And we know he does a ton of volunteer work because, again, one of the charities that Jeff is part of, Saban has come and spoken to and talks about the value of giving. And he has a family foundation, Nick’s Kids foundation, so that one, again, I think anybody can go out and materialize having three, four, five different core pursuits. And of course, Nick Saban can do it because he has the process. The question will be, can he make the transition? And maybe it just takes some time, but this is a classic situation where you’re working 24 7365. Takes a long time to get back to something that multiple things that matter to you versus just one thing that’s completely usurped your time.

Ryan Doolittle [00:51:14]:
Yeah, you’re making me feel better about this, Wes. I’m just still a little worried he’s going to be reading statistics, saying, well, on paper, I’m the happiest retiree ever, so why do I feel kind of grumpy?

Wes Moss [00:51:25]:
We’ll see. All right, family habits. Number two on the lifestyle is retirees who live near 50% or more of their kids are between two and five x more likely to be in the happy retiree camp. So if you’re not close to them geographically and it’s feasible, consider moving. It’s a pillar of the happy retiree. Ryan, do we know if Saban practices habit?

Ryan Doolittle [00:51:46]:
We don’t know for sure. I have a feeling Jeff Lloyd has done some research on it because he’s a content king. But I don’t know per se.

Wes Moss [00:51:58]:
I don’t know either. This is Jeff Lloyd’s theory is that because he’s got a son and a daughter, but they stay out of the spotlight because God forbid dad loses a game, who knows if the lawn gets toilet papered. But we can say with confidence that at least one of those kids lived close to him while they were in Tuscaloosa. So I’m going to say, remember, you only needed to live near 50% of your kids. We’re going to check that box. Happy retiree number three, love life marriage. It’s not a requirement to be a happy retiree. We know that.

Wes Moss [00:52:30]:
But retirees who are married are four and a half times more likely to end up in happy retiree camp. Ryan, does he practice his habit?

Ryan Doolittle [00:52:39]:
Yeah, I think he’s got that locked down. They seem to have a long term marriage. He thinks long term, even with marriage.

Wes Moss [00:52:47]:
I think he’s 50 years. Yeah, he’s been married 50 years. They met back when they were in 7th grade, when they were back in their West Virginia days. So, yes, coach Saban is married. He’s four and a half times more likely to be happy than those who are not. That’s hilarious to me. They met in 7th grade. Talk about long term view.

Wes Moss [00:53:10]:
He has a process. He has a process. Amazing. Number four, social. We know happy retirees have at least three close connections in this world. They average really closer to four. It’s 3.6. This is the essential socialization piece of this.

Wes Moss [00:53:26]:
Humans have to have social connectedness or else they end up being lonely. And we know that that’s a terrible thing for you. It’s like eating cheeseburgers every day from McDonald’s. So is he going to be a happy retiree from a social perspective? Ryan?

Ryan Doolittle [00:53:41]:
I think Nick Saban probably has a few close friends, and I bet their love language is sipping whiskey and insulting each other. But that tells them, I love you, man.

Wes Moss [00:53:58]:
I could see that. I could see Saban again. He’s a little grouchy, little grinchy, but really kind of always poking at his buddies a little bit. Kind of funny. I could see that, yeah. If you think about his coaching tree, the number of his former assistant coaches who have become bosses at some point after working for him, it’s 39, 39 coaches that he has helped get a top job somewhere. 18 of those were head coaches at the start, 2023, and then a ton of big time assistant coaches in 2015 alone on his team. That was part of his staff.

Wes Moss [00:54:39]:
Kirby Smart, who’s now the head coach of Georgia, Lane Kiffin, head coach of Ole Moss. Billy Napier, head coach of Florida, and then Mario Cristobal, who’s the head coach of Miami. All were assistants just in one year for Saban. I think he probably still pokes fun, love, language, just like you said with those guys. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:55:01]:
And I think he’s also still close friends with Bill Belichick, who he used to work for. I’ve read that they’ve stayed close.

Wes Moss [00:55:09]:
Do you think that’s a grumpy plus grumpy equals happy?

Ryan Doolittle [00:55:13]:
I think so. I think they don’t expect anything more from each other. So it’s kind of just like the Goldilocks. Friendship faith habit.

Wes Moss [00:55:23]:
Number five, happy retirees have some sort of faith. Retirees are one and a half times more likely to fall into the h rob camp if they attend church on a somewhat regular basis. It’s really just belonging to a church I believe is a big part of this one. Got to go at least twice a year, at least as far as our research, which means you have to belong to a church, which in and of itself may be the piece of the equation that tips the scales towards happy versus unhappy. What about his faith? You know, I do.

Ryan Doolittle [00:55:59]:
He is a devout Catholic and I was raised Catholic. So I can say with some authority that there is enough guilt in the catholic church to make sure Nick Saban goes to church at least twice a year, probably Christmas and Easter. I get the feeling he goes a lot because they used to celebrate mass before games. So I think this one, he definitely checks the box.

Wes Moss [00:56:23]:
So we’re going to give him four out of five on the financial and we’re going to get him five out of five on the lifestyle, which gives Saban, in our opinion, a solid atrop. Nine out of ten. I think more importantly, I like the thought around a guy with a process and a long term cadence, a long term vision, who pays attention to the details and knows that those little habits along the way create the success, which is just like planning for being a happy retiree. There’s a lot of different moving parts. None of them can be done overnight. It’s all this just fun journey that I think is a wonderful process. We never called the book the Happy Retiree process, but it could be wes called that. We could have named it the retire sooner process.

Wes Moss [00:57:16]:
Maybe we’ll start using that, but it really is a process. And this news story gave us here the opportunity to share the habits with you. We think they’re all important to collectively have. We got to have all these components on the team to make it successful. And it’s a really fun journey as well. If you’d like to get a recap of the five financial and five lifestyle habits of happiest retirees, you can find it right on our website, retire sooner.com.

Mallory Boggs [00:57:53]:
Hey y’all. This is Mallory with the retire sooner team. Please be sure to rate and subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. If you have any questions, you can find us@wesmoss.com that’s wesmoss.com. You can also follow us on Instagram and YouTube. You’ll find us under the handle Retire Sooner podcast. And now for our show’s disclosure. This information is provided to you as a resource for informational purposes only and is not to be viewed as investment advice or recommendations.

Mallory Boggs [00:58:21]:
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. There is no guaranteed offer that investment return, yield, or performance will be achieved. Stock prices fluctuate, sometimes rapidly and dramatically, due to factors affecting individual companies, particular industries or sectors, or general market conditions for stocks paying dividends. Dividends are not guaranteed and can increase, decrease, or be eliminated without notice. Fixed income securities involve interest rate, credit inflation, and reinvestment risks and possible loss of principal. As interest rates rise, the value of fixed income securities falls. Past performance is not indicative of future results. When considering any investment vehicle, this information is being presented without consideration of the investment objectives, risk tolerance, or financial circumstances of any specific investor and might not be suitable for all investors.

Mallory Boggs [00:59:05]:
Investment decisions should not be based solely on information contained here. This information is not intended to and should not form a primary basis for any investment decision that you may make. Always consult your own legal, tax, or investment advisor before making any investment tax, estate, or financial planning considerations or decisions. The information contained here is strictly an opinion and it is not known whether strategies will be successful. The views and opinions expressed are for educational purposes only as of the date of production and may change without notice at any time based on numerous factors such as market and other conditions.