Today is not one of my normal episodes where I go through a case study in detail.

This is a story.

Now, I hope it's one of the most entertaining stories when it comes to bonds in retirement,

because that can only be so entertaining unless you are weird like me who loves this stuff.

But I'm going to share this story with you now because I think it's powerful.

And I appreciate all of you who continue to listen to the

podcast, whether it be on the apps or on YouTube and share the kind comments on how this helps you

in your retirement journey. So the way that I think about bonds now has completely shifted from when I

entered the industry. You'll see textbooks that say, make sure to have the amount of bonds

based off how old you are. So if I'm 60 years old, I might want to have 60% in bonds. And that just

didn't make sense to me because I thought, well, shouldn't it vary? Like, what if I want to spend

$100,000 in retirement and my neighbor wants to spend $200,000 in retirement and we're both 60. Like, why would we both have 60% in bonds? That didn't make sense. But then I thought, you know, these people must know more than I know, clearly, what else am I missing? So I would read on more and more, and then there would be other rules of thumb, such as, hey, maybe get a target date fund. If you know you want to retire in 2040, why don't

you get a fund that will attempt to mimic what your portfolio, quote unquote, should look

like if you retire in 2040. But what I started to find is these rules of thumb, they're okay

as a starting spot, but they don't go into detail, meaning they err on the side of caution,

but I would argue too much. So if you're overly conservative, what happens is you actually

look back and you go, wow, I lost a lot of memories in life. So an overly dramatic example

of this is imagine you're scared to get hit by a car. Are you going to never

drive and not go anywhere? Well, obviously, you'll look at life very differently and that's not a fun

life. But most people don't take it to that degree with investing, but I do look at it in that

lens. And the reason for that is there are people I see who don't need any bonds at all. It's

completely unnecessary.

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