Discover the tips and strategies that will help you achieve your retirement goals.

I'm your host, James Canole, and this is the podcast dedicated to helping you retire well.

It all starts right here on Ready for Retirement. for retirement.

Everyone and welcome back to another episode of Ready for Retirement.

I'm your host, James Cannell.

And even as I say the title of the show, Ready for Retirement, I think for a lot of people,

those words lead to a lot of uncertainty of how do I know if I'm ready for retirement?

What will retirement look like? What do I need to do to get there? How do I have a strategy in place to take care of all the things I need to think about as I am preparing to be ready

for retirement? Well, that's what we're going to focus on in today's episode, is try to distill

that question down, that retirement question down into its simplest essence so that you can at least

have a great starting point when you're trying to determine if you're on track or not. The premise for

today's episode comes from a listener question, and this listener, his name is also James. And James

writes in and says this. He says, good afternoon. I've been listening to your podcast for over a year now.

It is the best I've ever found. I love how you answer the question in detail. I would love to retire, but I'm not sure

when it makes sense financially to do so. Currently, I live in Texas with my wife where we don't have

income tax. We have $400,000 in a traditional IRA and $100,000 in a Roth IRA. We also have $500,000 equity in our primary house that we're planning to sell in mid-20204.

I believe we can walk away with the equity as a married couple. Then we plan to move into our rental

house that is paid off and valued at $750,000. Once we live in that house for two years,

we can sell it and move away with most of that, correct? I have started trying to back door our Roth, but I make about $180,000 per year and my wife makes

about $85,000 a year. If I can get the money into the Roth, we can move out of state to Arkansas

if it made financial sense. I believe we need $80,000 a year to live uncomfortably. What is the best

way to get there? End question. Well, James, thank you for that question. And that final piece,

...