If you had $7.8 million, do you think you could retire? Some of you are like, of course. I mean, I don't even need that much. Others of you are like, I think so, but I don't really know if I really want to spend what I want to spend. Is that going to make sure? And what if I retire too early and who knows? That's what today is going to be all about is diving into a real case study thinking through, do we have enough? And if you don't have $7.8 million, you can use this same framework, the principles we're going to go through to show you how to think about it for your financial strategy. Yeah, now I think a lot of times it's easy to think of, can I retire or not? Well, how big is your number? Do you have a big enough number? And of course, is different for everyone.

But you get big enough and it probably seems like, yeah, of course. Or if you get small enough, it probably seems like, no, of course not. 7.8 million. That's not just a random arbitrary number. I think that came from somewhere. Do you want to share where that came from Ari? Let's share it. So I got this email and I posted it on Instagram as well, minus, of course, for security reasons, their actual email.

But the subject line says what you can see if you're and I posted it on Instagram as well. Minus, of course, for security reasons, their actual email.

But the subject line says what you can see if you're watching on YouTube.

And if you're listening on the podcast app, whether it's early retirement podcast, ready for

retirement, we're going to explain it for you.

Subject line says one simple yes or no answer on early retirement.

Hello, Ari. I've enjoyed watching the videos. I just need a simple yes or no. If I have 7.8 million in my stock portfolio and I have

no debt can I at 57 years old and my wife who is 51 years old retire right now. Thank you.

So when that came in, I read everything that I just told

you right there, and I only read one thing. I read him say, should I get surgery, I'm in pain.

Now, my brain, and we're going to walk you guys through it today, was thinking the following.

Do you want to retire? How will you spend your time? What's your health like? What accounts do you have? Any gains? You plan to do another job that's more fun. What about tax strategy, estate planning? And about 2,000 other questions. So James, what were your thoughts when you saw that? Well, I love the subject line. It says simple yes or no. And I think, and I get where this person's coming from, like I said at

beginning, it seems like, okay, number gets big enough. Yes, you can do this. Number gets small

enough. No, you can't do this. That is obviously one very big important part to retirement

planning is how big is your number. How much do you have in your portfolio? That's one component

of it. All that number really tells you is how much income your portfolio

can create for you, what that can look like. And one thing that we do at Root Financial is we have

our Sequoia system, which means when anyone comes to us, whether they have $8 million,

whatever the number is, it doesn't matter. It's the same process because we worked with

hundreds and hundreds of people over our years of doing this. And we found there is a way of doing this. There's a right way of doing this. It's not to say there's a formula. There's a cookie cutter solution for everyone, but there is a very structured process that anyone should go through regardless of their asset level. So if you're listening to this and say, oh, I don't have $8 million, this doesn't apply to me. This applies to you. If you have $8 million, if you have $80,000, what we're going to go through is what should you be asking yourself? And we're pulling this right from the Sequoia system that we have created internally as our way of helping guide clients when they ask similar questions. So someone comes to you, Ari, I'm just going to say $8 million because that's a easier round number to say than $7.8 million. So I have $8 million and I come to you and I say, all right, take me through your Sequoia system. Just take me through any process. Do I have enough to retire? Where are you going first? I'm starting with purpose. It's like, do you even know what you want your retirement to look like? Like what are you going to do? And not just the classic like, oh, I'm going to golf, I'm going to volunteer. It's like, hey, we need to go deeper than that. And just thinking through what you might want to do is very different from what you might actually want to do.

Some of you are going to hear what I just said and go, it kind of sounds like the same thing.

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