Welcome back to the early retirement podcast. Today, we are going through a fun article that my client sent me.

And they told me this helped them in their early retirement. And they told me not to say their name for

security purposes, but it's John. No, it's not John. I'm just kidding. But this is going to be a fun

episode. And it's important one. Because if you have enough money to retire, great.

That's a piece of the puzzle.

It doesn't solve everything.

And there's a point where you have plenty of money and go, look, maybe I don't need 10 million. Maybe if I had 3 million or 2 million, I could retire, spend more time with family and friends and do what I actually want to do in retirement. So I want to show you a few statistics that were really cool in this article might make you think a little differently when it comes to an early retirement.

Once again, if you don't know, my name is Ari Taal bleep. I'm a certified financial planner.

I'm the host of the early retirement podcast that you are listening slash watching right now.

And I'm the vice president here at Route Financial Partners.

Now, if you're listening on the podcast app, this is not going anywhere.

Some of you guys have sent me a few notes going, hey, are you only doing the YouTube channel

now or is it what's happening?

I go, everything's going to keep posting to the podcast app per usual.

That's a lot of your just daily routine, weekly routine, should I say. And then I'm going to keep posting to YouTube as well because I like making content there where you can actually see it and some people resonate with that more. I'm trying to help you all out. So this article comes from a really cool company and you can see in the upper left here or you can just listen to what I'm going to say. It's called Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which I just thought was a cool name. And the title of the article we're going to go through is, how do you have a happy retirement? Four secrets from research. The reason this video is titled podcast. Three is because I only think three of them are worth noting. They're all good, but three big ones. Here's the first one, and I am quoting this, and you can see they discuss exactly this in the article, so I'm going to link the whole thing if you want to read it, but they say, healthy retirees in the first year of retirement rate their overall quality of life slightly higher than those who are still working. So just slightly, very quickly, somewhere between years one and two, retirees hit a low point, and they just start crying. It just doesn't stop. No, they don't cry. But they are sad, and in large part, that's because they're like, I just worked a job for 20, 30 years. And now I really don't know what I'm going to do for purpose and fulfillment. That quality of life, as they say here, beginning in year three, starts to recover, but only

slowly.

And it's not until they are eight or more years in retirement.

We finally see their ratings improved to when they were still working.

That's powerful.

Now, I can also give you real guidance of someone, not fun, but important to hear.

This was today, when I'm recording this on Wednesday, so Monday, I was speaking to a new client, and they were upset that they had $3 million. And I said, listen, I don't know why you're saying that. I don't hear that often. Someone's upset that they have $3 million, but tell me more. And she said, you're missing it. I have a bad degree of sciatica and I want to travel in retirement, and now I don't think I'm going to be able to do that to the extent I'd like.

I said, tell me more. you're missing it. I have a bad degree of sciatica and I want to travel in retirement and now

...