Many people think they are taking all the right steps toward a long retirement full of time with family, travel, and relaxation. Unfortunately, there are many financial threats to your retirement plans – some you can see, some that are invisible until they take away income and assets. To make matters worse, too many folks have assumptions about their current retirement plan that are just plain false.
But you can plan and prepare for these threats, even the unexpected ones, to protect your retirement funds. And you can cut through the misinformation out there. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, and the solution is not to simply buy more financial products.
It takes a personalized plan, and you must take action ASAP.
Listen now to discover…
The 4 biggest threats to your retirement right now
How taxes can impact your retirement plans in ways you didn’t know
Why you need to go through a “retirement rehearsal” right now
A 4-part plan for creating an effective retirement plan (or fixing your current one)
And much more
Listen now…
Gordon: Hi, everyone. This is Steve Gordon. I’m here with John Curry.
John, I want to pick your brain a little bit, selfishly honestly. You and I have known each other for a long time and we’ve worked together on many, many different things, and I’m holding here in my hand a little pamphlet that you’ve created called “John Curry’s Secure Retirement Method” up at the top. And at the top of this, there are four boxes and I’m really curious about these boxes. I’d like to learn more.
You’ve got one that says “The Vision Session,” another that says “The Discovery Session,” a third that says “The Strategy Session,” and then a fourth that says, “The Implementation Session.” And I would love for you to walk us through what each of those is and how you use those to really fulfill your mission.
Curry: Okay. Well, let’s start with the mission. Steve, I reached a point after being in business almost forty-two years… I’m in my forty-second year actually… that I’m frustrated with the financial services industry in the sense that it’s all about profit. “Hey, let me come and sell you a life insurance policy or a long-term care policy or an annuity or a mutual fund, whatever.” And my philosophy is it should start with planning first. So here’s my mission, real short and sweet.
My mission is to help as many people as possible prepare for a secure retirement. My team and I do that by helping you identify what the financial threats are to your income both now while working and ultimately when you retire. Then we help you, the client, and your other advisors prepare for those threats, either by eliminating or at least reducing those threats to your income now and your income in retirement.
Gordon: Let me interrupt you.
Curry: All right.
Gordon: You’ve talked about financial threats. What in the world do you mean by financial threats?
Curry: Well, it’s funny you ask the question that way because a lot of people are totally oblivious to the threats that are around them, totally oblivious. For example, the four biggest threats… three are involuntary; one is voluntary. The voluntary one is retirement. So, if you retire, you have no more income, at least earned income. Agreed?
Gordon: That’s interesting. I never thought about that as a financial threat.
Curry: Most people don’t. However, going back to 2000, 2001, 2002, people who went into retirement in 1999, at the end of ’99, they got smacked in the face with a bucket of cold ice water called the stock market being down 20-something percent. Everybody said don’t worry about it; it’ll come back. It didn’t. In 2001, down again 20%-plus. In 2002, the same thing. So they got hurt. So this thing called retirement… they had no more income coming in; therefore, they had to retire on their financial assets. But that’s a voluntary loss of income.
Let’s talk about the three that are involuntary. How about job loss? You lose your job. You’re either laid off or just flat out fired because the company went belly up. We saw a lot of that in 2008; didn’t we?
Gordon: Tons.
Curry: A lot of people still not at work. So job loss. Next would be disability. What if you get sick or have an accident and you’re totally disabled and can’t work and earn income? Not only does your present situation suffer, but now you can’t save or invest money for this thing called retirement.
And then the fourth one, which is the ultimate loss of income threat, is dying. And we talk about dying too soon. I don’t know about you, but whenever I die, it’s too soon, you know. I don’t care when it is. I could be a hundred years old and it’s still too soon.
So, if you recap, you think about, okay, retirement. I lose my income. If I lose my job, I lose my income. If I become disabled, I’ll lose my income. If I die, my family loses my income. So we look at those, but there are other threats other than the financial side as far as losing income.
Think about stock market losses. Now we’re not worried about income so much because you’re working and have a paycheck. But what if you were depending upon, say, half a million dollar IRA to give you an income stream in retirement and you’ve been told to use a 4-percent withdrawal rate and now you’re account is only worth three hundred thousand because the stock market took away $200,000? Your income just suffered, didn’t it. So it wasn’t just the value of the asset going down. When you start converting the asset to income, your income is clobbered. I teach that to people.
Gordon: Well, we’ve seen that. I mean, we’ve seen people who would have retired, probably wanted to retire several years ago, but because the markets were down, they were sort of forced to continue working, continue producing income because the asset that they had accumulated is now worth less than it was. So it effectively reduced the number of years of income stream that they had from it if I’m understanding you correctly.
Curry: You’re correct. And what’s happening is survey after survey by universities like Boston College, their retirement section, division, their retirement conference survey that’s done every year for the past twenty years, indicates that people are doing just that. They’re working longer, not because they want to but because they have to, because they have to. So all that being said, that led to me coming up with a process, a method, if you will, to help people prepare for secure retirement. And I’ve been using this all my career but I got really serious about it in 2003 after what we just described happened.
So the first thing is in those boxes as you referred to it in the vision session. We begin to explore somebody’s current situation, and we look for possibilities for their future. I like to call it thinking about the realm of possibility. Where are you today? What do you have? And what is possible for you?
Gordon: So this is kind of a big deal because I know just with the people in my world who have recently retired or are looking to retire soon, a lot of times they kind of have this preconceived thought in their mind of what’s possible and sometimes it’s not a real good picture. But because they don’t know what they don’t know, they’re not really able to see clearly what all the possibilities are. So as you’re meeting with people in one of these vision sessions, how do you kind of help expand their thinking to really be able to see a bigger possibility?
Curry: Sometimes by asking a lot of very sharp, detailed questions that they’ve never explored, sometimes frankly a shock effect. I’ll just give you an example that happened yesterday. The guy was kind of smug about his money. He says, “Look, you can’t help me. I’ve got a million dollars. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
I said, “Okay, why are you here?”
He says, “Oh, wow, good question.” He said, “Well, I’d like to think I’m okay.”
“Do you want to test that? I have a way of testing that. Would you like to test, do a retirement rehearsal and see what could impact your future?”
Gordon: That’s really interesting. I’ve never heard that term before, “retirement rehearsal.” What is that?
Curry: Because I created that. I hope nobody’s ever heard it.
Gordon: What is that?
Curry: It’s taking what you have, and this is where we get down to the discovery session, number two, taking what you have and putting it in a model of where I can show you what the impact of inflation, taxation, market upticks and downturns will do to your money. So, for this gentleman, he assumed a 4% payout rate on his million bucks. Okay? That’s forty grand a year. And I said, “That’s great, but that’s as far as you’ve gone. What if we have just a 2% inflation factor? Because I have no idea what it would do. Would you like to see it?”
He said, “Yes, please.” So I showed him and it went from green to red. He said, “Wait a minute. Does the red mean I’m out of money?”
I said, “The red means you are totally broke. All the money’s gone.”
He said, “That’s only twenty-one years of retirement. What if I live longer?”
“You’re still broke.”
And he says, “Thank you for being so direct.”
I said, “Now, can we back up into the way I like to do it?”
He said, “Please.”
So then, we showed the impact of not only inflation but taxation. “So now you’ve got inflation taking away your money. And what about taxes?”
He said, “John, I didn’t even think about paying taxes.”
I said, “Most people don’t. See, you’re thinking that when you go into retirement, all of a sudden the government is going to forgive the taxes.” I said, “They let you accumulate all this money in your IRA, 401k, profit-sharing plan, state deferred comp, whatever you have, and they defer the taxes for you. You didn’t save any taxes. You simply deferred it into the future, so when you take it out, now they want the tax.”
But somehow people forget that. So when I showed him the tax impact, he goes, “Holy cow! I won’t have any income.”
And I said, “That’s assuming everything stays the same.”
Gordon: So, really, the way… your process, and that’s really what it is… you’ve got four parts to a process, the vision; let’s look at what’s possible in the future beginning with where you are now working forward. The discovery session where you sort of… you gain a deeper understanding of their current situation, and then once you kind of marry where they’d like to go with where they are now, you can begin to put together a strategy to get there. But until you’re able to do all that… I mean, what’s just occurred to me… I mean, I haven’t thought really deeply about this before, John, and I think this is important. What’s just occurred to me is that so many people are approaching retirement with these assumptions that are probably incomplete.
Curry: Yes.
Gordon: At worst, or excuse me, at best incomplete and at worst completely wrong based on bad information.
Curry: Absolutely. And misinformation.
Gordon: So really, what you’re beginning to describe, and I know there are a couple more parts to this, but what you’re beginning to describe is a process where you are able to take the assumptions that they have and actually put them into a model that will show them and take all these other things into account that you know exist because you’ve been doing thousands and thousands of these plans throughout your career.
Curry: You’re correct. And here’s the key. Instead of sitting there and telling you what you need to do when you come sit with me, part of the vision session is asking questions. I’ll probably ask you thirty or forty questions. I have nothing to tell you. I’m learning you who are, what you want, what you don’t want, and then we discover every piece you’ve got. We look at everything you have, everything from something as mundane as car insurance all the way over to your life insurance, your savings, your investments, everything. And somebody listening may be wondering, “Why in the world would this guy care about my car insurance?”
I care very much, because what if you have an accident and you injure or, worse, kill somebody? That sucking sound you hear is a cashectomy of the attorney taking away your assets. So I want to make sure that you’re properly insured with car insurance and homeowner’s insurance. I don’t sell either one of those, so I would refer you back to your property and casualty agent and say, “Please get this fixed.” Because I don’t want all of my work that we do together to be lost because something bad happens. In my world we call that unplanned life events.
I want to go back to something you said a moment ago. It’s not me coming up with the strategies. You and I as a client/advisor relationship, we co-create a plan, because whose plan is this? It’s not my plan; it’s yours. So we have to make sure that we co-create it and it’s very important. Not everybody out there is a client for me. They have to have the mindset that they want to grow, that they want to improve. If their attitude is that everything is just fine like it is; “I don’t care about learning anything new,” I’m not the advisor for them. Just got to be honest about it, Steve.
Gordon: So, coming back to your process, we talked about the vision session. We talked a little bit about the discovery session. I think you’ve just touched on the strategy session a little bit. Is there more to that that we need to talk about?
Curry: Yes, because in the strategy session, here’s where most people get in trouble. They go to someone who says, “You know, Steve, everything you have is no good. Let’s throw it out and buy new products.” No, no, no, no. That’s not accurate. Let’s work with what you’ve got. Whatever you have today, let’s see if we can make that work. Now, if you’ve got a product that’s not working, we will know. You know, Ronald Reagan would always say, “Trust but verify.” I believe in verifying. I need to verify to your satisfaction that the strategy I’m showing you works. If it does not work and I can’t verify that, you should not do it.
Likewise, if you say, “John, I’ve got $200,000 dollars in a mutual fund,” I’ll say, “Great, let’s look at the statements. Let’s verify that.” Not because you may be lying to me, but every day when I see clients, they’ll say something and they’ll look at the statement and go, “Oh, it’s not as much as I thought,” or maybe it’s more than they thought.
So I believe that, when you get into the strategy session, it’s: What do you have? What can we use? Don’t throw everything out and try to buy new products. That costs you too much money and, frankly, a lot of times it’s recommended just so somebody gets paid a new commission. Don’t waste your money. I’m not going to waste mine, and you’re not going to waste yours if I’m working with you.
Gordon: So then you take people through the strategy session, and then you get to the implementation part.
Curry: Correct.
Gordon: How does that work?
Curry: Well, once we agree on a strategy, you have to then follow through to take action. To give you an example, a client yesterday, a medical doctor, he’s been talking about getting his will updated for the last two sessions that we met over the last six months. So I said, “You have not followed up on that. You have to implement. This has to be done. Your wills are so outdated and trust provisions.” So I picked up my phone; I called the attorney that we agreed to use. This is after hours, 6:30 last night, and he answered the phone. “I’m sitting here with Dr. So-and-so. He’s going to be giving you a call. I’m calling you to put him on the spot, with his permission, to have accountability. Either he or his wife will call you tomorrow.” This morning at 10:15 I got a text saying they called and booked the appointment.
So that’s implementation. That is, instead of talking about it, it’s acting on it. That’s implementation. If you need life insurance, buy it. If you need long-term care insurance, buy it. If you need to transfer money from something aggressive to more conservative, transfer it. And my job is to say, “Steve, you as a client said you wanted this; correct? We have to take this action.”
And if you reach a point of where you don’t do it, I simply say, “Steve, do we need to cross this off the list?” Because, see, if I have to keep badgering you about this, you’re going to get frustrated and it’s a waste of my time and energy. So let’s either do it or let’s agree not to do it, and it’s okay either way. People don’t get mad at me. See, the thing is, we together determine what’s important for you, and if it’s no longer important, it’s okay. It’s okay.
Gordon: So let me just make sure I understand. So together with the client you co-create the strategy. Take the client’s vision of what they want financially in the future through retirement or maybe even before retirement and into retirement, and then maybe even beyond the time that they’re on the planet, what legacy they want to leave. You take all of that into account. Okay, that’s the vision.
Curry: Correct.
Gordon: And then you figure out what they’ve got and what you can still use, and maybe to reach the vision, there are some changes that need to be made. If there are, that’s the strategy that you sort of map out, almost like a prescription.
Curry: Well said. So we agree on what needs to be done and now what is the best way to do it. So strategy, the way I describe it, would be what is the best way to get what you want done? Because really, is it just one way? I’ll give you a quick example that’s very controversial out there. Which life insurance plan is better? Term insurance, universal life, variable universal life, or whole life?
Gordon: I don’t have any idea.
Curry: It depends on the client. If I’m working with a young couple in their thirties because their parents asked them to work with me, I’m going to say, “Buy all the term insurance you can get. Protect your future insurability. We’ll argue about whole life and universal life in the future.” If someone is my age, sixty-four, term insurance is a waste of my money. Why would I have term insurance? Only one reason, to allow me to have protection until I upgrade it later. So it depends upon the client’s needs.
And I get so frustrated with my industry because somebody will say, “The only way to do your insurance is X, Y, and Z.” That’s wrong. That’s not accurate. Maybe we have a blend of different products. For a long time, I had whole life and term insurance. Why? Because I didn’t have enough cash flow to justify having all whole life insurance. I had to pay some bills. I had to educate some kids and grandkids. So that’s a good example.
So now the strategy might be we blend products. We have this product, another product, yet a third product, and that’s the part where I love what I do because my clients are not under pressure to buy anything, because right up front the first meeting there’s no charge, but then we’ll agree on a fee. They pay the fee, I present the information to them.
There’s only four things they can do with it, Steve. They can ignore it, do nothing, throw it in the trashcan; implement it all by themselves; go to another advisor, a competitor; or work with the Curry team, which is me and my team of advisors around me and a support team. So I have zero pressure to sell anything and my client has zero pressure to buy anything because of the process we use, the secure retirement method.
If I’m just pedaling products, then I’ve got to make a sale to, quote, justify my time with you. You don’t like that as a consumer. I don’t like it. I don’t like the implied or the outright pressure, “Hey, you have to buy from me because I gave you something of value.” No, no, no, no. Let’s agree upfront that there’s a value. Put a dollar value on it, write a check for the planning fee, and then do what you want with it. A different approach, isn’t it.
Gordon: It’s a very different approach. And so what I see here is that you’ve really… you have a process to guide someone through so that they can get to the point where you’ve co-created a plan, and once you’ve co-created the plan and you get into the implementation phase, there are things that the client will have to do, and you’re there almost as a coach to guide them through that piece. Because, I mean, all plans are great, but if you don’t implement the plan it really at the end of the day hadn’t had any impact. So you’re guiding them and helping them and some of these things are difficult to do.
You mentioned the doctor that needed to get a will. We don’t all want to go sit with an attorney and get a will done, but having that extra bit of accountability sometimes is very, very valuable to get the things done that we don’t necessarily want to do, but we know that we need to do.
Curry: Absolutely. And it’s not just me helping with that. I have a team around me, so sometimes it will be me. Sometimes it will be one of my teammates that would help with that process. Sometimes it’s another associate. Heck, sometimes it’s a competitor. I’m in situations where sometimes some of my competitors, a friendly competitor will call me and say, “Would you please help me with this case. I don’t understand the Social Security; I don’t understand the retirement planning side.” Because that’s my specialty. Now, when I first started September 1975, I just sold life insurance and I got tired of that. I wanted to do the planning. I wanted to be more creative. How do we take the pieces of the puzzle, dump them on the floor, and build something together?
Gordon: That’s really exciting, John. Now, coming back to this pamphlet that I’ve got that you’ve created. Inside there are a couple of pieces here that I think are very powerful. You’ve got one that’s titled, “The Secure Retirement Scorecard,” and on it, you’ve got a whole series of… There are ten statements and it gives you an opportunity to sort of rate where, you know, as an individual you might stand on each of those. And I’m just going to read a couple of them and maybe you can tell me why you think this is important and the impact that it has, the clarity that it brings for people.
So on here, there are statements like: “I have a clear well-defined vision of my future.” You say, you know, another statement is, “I have a step-by-step action plan to achieve my retirement goals,” or, “I have a trusted team of advisors helping me to achieve my goals.” So you’ve got some statements on here and there are ten all together. Those are just kind of a sampling, but as I look down the entire list and I’ve gone through this as a client, at the end of it I’m able to get a really clear picture of what’s… just in my opinion what’s working well and where maybe I have some holes. And that, in and of itself, is valuable.
Curry: I think there’s tremendous value there because what it does, it allows you in the privacy of your home or your office to do your own assessment. And I do a lot of telephone appointments, see, where they’re twenty minutes, thirty minutes long. People will complete this ahead of time, call my office, schedule a telephone appointment, and we’ll go through it together.
Now, one of two things will happen… actually, one of three things, but the two bookends are somebody will say, “Wow, I really need your help. I’m struggling with this.” The other end is somebody says, “I don’t need anyone’s help. This is letting me know everything is just fine.” Maybe they’ll zoom in and say, which is in the middle, “I need help in one particular area.”
I think people come to me and say, “Well, I don’t want to do the planning process at all. Frankly, I just want to buy a long-term care insurance policy. Will you help me get it?” Of course. So now when I do the planning, now you’ve hired me by offering your business to me, I get paid whatever commission they pay me for selling that product. I will do that if it’s appropriate.
Gordon: Really what you’re doing is you’re empowering an individual to understand where they may need help and where they may not need help. Or maybe it’s everywhere or maybe it’s nowhere or maybe it’s one or two or five things, but you’re empowering them to know that before they ever get on the telephone with you or anybody else.
Curry: “Empower” is a great word because, instead of me taking the power away from the client and now I’m this big shot, know-it-all advisor who has all these designations after his name, I’m giving you a tool where you could go through and assess what’s most important to you and your family. It gives us a place to start when we have the conversation and that’s all it is. It’s what I call the retirement conversation. We’re sitting there and talking about where you are today and where you want to be.
Gordon: Now, in a few minutes, we’ll share with people how they can request a copy of the scorecard so they can experience this for themselves, but before we get there, John, I want to move on to the next piece of this pamphlet, which I think is really powerful. And it’s called “Your Retirement Vision.” And if it’s okay with you, I’d like to actually just read the four questions that you have there. I think they’re powerful questions.
Curry: Okay.
Gordon: The first question starts with a statement: “Think ahead to the day of your retirement. Looking back from that day, what has to have happened along the way for you to feel happy about your retirement?” How does that impact people when you ask it?
Curry: It’s shocking. When I first did this back in 2000… well, the first copyright back in 2003… I did it before… all of a sudden people would look at me and they go, “Wow. I don’t know.”
And I always said and still do, “I know you don’t know, but if you did know, what would the answer be?”
And they’ll start telling me. They’ll say, “Well, you know, I’m healthy. I have a great relationship with my spouse and my kids. I have money in the bank. I have an adequate income.” So all of a sudden, they start building their future. And then once we have that vision of what it looks like, then we can measure to see if what they have will get us close or is it way off? And then that’s the starting point.
Gordon: The second question on here, and I love that you then begin to break this down. You ask: “What obstacles and concerns stand in your way to achieving your vision of retirement?”
Curry: Yes, because there are obstacles. There are things that get in your way. For example, ___________ (audio time 26:22) to come in and he said, “Well, I’m the biggest obstacle.”
I say, “I don’t understand.”
He said, “The truth is my wife and I fight about money because, you know, I watch all the talking heads on TV and I thought I knew all of it and I’ve been investing our money and for the past ten years we’re flat out even. I’ve made no money and overall lost no money but have had no growth. Zero growth.”
I say, “Wait a minute. With all of the bull market we’ve had, how could you not have some growth?”
He said, “Because every time something changed, I moved my money around. So the biggest obstacle is me.”
For others, they’ll say, “Well, the biggest obstacle is we’re not able to save enough money. We have too much debt. The biggest obstacle is I’ve got two adult children that moved back in, so I’m spending my money that I planned to save for retirement taking care of them.”
I hear all kinds of things. Stuff that, if I wrote a book about it, nobody would believe it. They’d say there’s no way that that’s occurring. But you have to remember, I see… the days that I choose to see clients, I see four to six clients a day, and I see all kind of stories, good stories, sad stories, but there’s a lot of obstacles. Maybe it’s paying taxes. “Yeah, I’m in a higher tax bracket. After I pay my taxes I don’t have enough money.”
Another obstacle could be someone’s health. “Hey, I would love to work. I can’t. I have medical problems. I can’t work. I’ve become disabled.” There are a lot of issues here.
Gordon: Let’s go to the third question. The third question here is: “What are the most important actions you must take to overcome these obstacles and concerns?”
Curry: That question took a while to work on, because I wanted a question that would let you the client determine what you feel like the steps are, and that’s why I came up with that question, because I don’t like it when someone points their finger and says, “You know, John, you’ve got to do this, this, and this.”
My standard answer is, “I don’t gotta do nothing.” I have the right to die broke. I have the right to go to jail because I didn’t pay my taxes. I don’t have to do anything, so I resent it when somebody’s like poking their finger at me saying I’ve got to do something. So I say, “Okay. Let’s take that finger away and give you the client the opportunity to tell me what you think the actions are.”
Now, I may not agree with you. I have the right to disagree if we have a good, healthy relationship, but I want you to be thinking about what steps need to be taken. And I’ll tell you what I hear most of the time, almost every time. They need to spend less and save more. “I’m spending too much money today, enjoying life, and it’s going to hurt me later in life.” That’s what I hear most of the time.
Gordon: I love… and this fits with the theme of everything that we’ve talked about and, really, coming back to that word “empower.” All the way through here, you’re empowering the people that you work with to own their financial future, to create their financial future. And I think that’s so different and refreshing from what happens most of the time.
Curry: Thank you. I think that’s the way it should be, because it is your future. It’s not my future. Hey look, my plan’s in place. I know if I drop dead today my family is taken care of. If I become disabled, I get money tax free to pay my bills. If I want to retire today, I could. I could literally walk out this door today and retire. I choose not to. I’m on a mission, Steve. I’m going to help as many people as possible with my books, my CDs, my DVDs, my webinars, my live events. All they have to do is say, “I want the help.” They don’t have to buy a product. There’s ways they can learn. So my view is, help as many people as I can. You know? I don’t want to retire. I hope that I’m like George Burns. One hundred years old when I die and they have to cancel engagements because I died.
Gordon: What is it about that mission? Why? Why do you…
Curry: Do you want the truth?
Gordon: I want the truth. Why are you so passionate about this?
Curry: My grandfather and my father. My grandfather retired from the State of Florida Department of Transportation out of Defuniak Springs, Florida. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the corporate world or in the state government. Doesn’t matter where you work, the concept is the same. My grandfather retired healthy as a horse. He lived… flat lived for four years in retirement. Because of the lousy advice he got, the day he died his pension died with him, and my grandmother got squat for the rest of her life. She lived to be one week shy of ninety-five years old. Died at age ninety-four. She lost all that money for almost thirty years, twenty-seven years. So he took a pension option that when he died it died also. So she suffered.
My father worked at the same place my grandfather did. He saw what my grandfather did, and he chose a different option. So he chose an option to take care of him and my mother for the rest of their lives, but he gave up tens of thousands of dollars every year in retirement income. He retired at sixty-two. He died August 15 of 2015 at age eighty-five. So for twenty-three years… twenty-three years my dad settled for less income than he could have had for him and my mom. Now Mom’s taken care of now, but they could’ve used so much more of that income to do things during their lives together in post-retirement. That’s why.
I have the passion for it. I’ll stand the ground. People say take a stand. Hell no. I am the stand when it comes to retirement income planning. I’ll fight for you, and I’ll fight with you if it’s important to you. And if it’s not important, we’ll say goodbye and part ways on a friendly basis. But that’s why.
And sitting with my father over the years, begging him and pleading with him to let me help him with stuff, but his attitude was, “Hey, I’ve got it taken care of. Don’t worry about it.” It wasn’t taken care of. It wasn’t.
And one day I told him, I said, “You know, Dad, I help total strangers with this stuff and you won’t let me help you.” But it was pride, and it was a individualist attitude that my grandfather and my father both had, and frankly, they were a little scared. They didn’t want anybody to know about their poor decisions and not taking action. So that’s why.
And frankly, I’ve worked with, oh, maybe thousands of people. I went to a funeral yesterday of a gentleman who’s been a client for thirty-five years, and most of what we did for him was on the insurance side and the retirement planning side, you know. Eighty-something years old. The work that we did together will endure for the rest of his wife’s life and the rest of his two daughters’ lives. How can you not want to do that? How can you not have the passion to want to share that with people when you know you’re making a difference in someone’s lives?
Now, when I was younger, it was about money. I needed the money. Now it’s about how many people can I help. And if I never meet whoever listened to this recording, if I never meet you, if something that we have said today will help you get action in your life to improve what is done, God bless you. If I can help you, pick up the phone, call my office, book an appointment, come and see me, attend one of my webinars, whatever. And there’s no cost or obligation. If you want to work with me, great. If not, it’s okay.
Gordon: Wow. That’s powerful. So I want to come back to the last question here in this retirement vision and the last and fourth question is: What progress have you already made towards achieving your retirement vision?
Curry: I have that question there, Steve, because most people beat themselves up. They come in with “I don’t have this. I haven’t done that. I gotta do this. I gotta do this. I gotta do that.”
And I go, “Whoa, stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop. That’s all negative. That’s energy draining. Let’s focus on what you’ve done. Let’s give you credit for the actions you’ve already taken. Maybe you have X amount of money in your IRA. It didn’t get there by itself. So you’ve already saved some money in your IRA. You’ve reduced some spending. You’ve reduced your debt. You’ve taken action. Let’s make sure that you take a few minutes and give yourself credit for what you’ve already done. Focus on the positive.”
And I think about the word “team” all the time when I’m working with people. Time, energy, attitude, mission. Time, energy, attitude, mission. What’s your mission? Prepare for a secure retirement. What’s your attitude about it? Attitude will drive your action. If you have a great attitude and you want to improve it, you’ll do better. So that question helps you get in the right frame of attitude. It raises your energy level, and now you make the most productive use of your time and my time.
Gordon: It’s powerful stuff, John. Thank you for sharing what you’ve shared today. Now, I know people listening to this are probably really curious about this pamphlet that I keep referring to and then maybe they want a copy of it so that they can go through the secure retirement scorecard and the retirement vision and experience this for themselves. How can they get a copy of this?
Curry: Well, they can do a couple of things. Number one, they can send us an email. You can send it to john_curry@glic.com. I’ll repeat that: John underscore Curry, C-U-R-R-Y, at GLIC, G-L-I-C, dot com. Or you can go to my Website, John H Curry dot com. Remember the H… JohnHCurry.com, or they can call my office, 850-562-3000. You can call and request it. We can mail it to you, email it, whichever you prefer.
Gordon: Very good. John, thanks for spending some time today and talking with me. And for everybody listening, thank you so much for your time and we’ll talk real soon.
If you'd like to know more about John Curry's services, you can request a complimentary information package by visiting johnhcurry.com/podcast. Again, that is johnhcurry.com/podcast. Or you can call his office at 850-562-3000. Again, that is 850-562-3000. John H. Curry chartered life underwriter, chartered financial consultant, accredited estate planner, masters in science and financial services, certified in long-term care, registered representative and financial advisor at Park Avenue Securities LLC.
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