Today's episode of Animal Spirits is sponsored by Navi Plan by InvestCloud, built on the most precise

calculation engine in the financial planning market. Naviplan empowers advisors to cater to their

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visit adviceant solutions.com.

Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael

Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching.

Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holtz Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions

and do not reflect the opinion of Rithold's wealth management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Once again, we have unloaded the inbox and we're going to do a listener mailbag. It's been a while. When to do it? Do I want to? Let's do it. Yeah, never mind. Let's do something else. All right. I like this one. Myself and my wife are both Midwestern elites like Ben,

32 and 33 years old. In 2021, we increase our income substantially to around $240,000 a year and have

around $250K and non-retirement investment accounts and both max out our 401k and HSA. Nice. No children,

don't plan on having children. Only debt is a mortgage and live on less than 50% of our income and invest the rest. Worked hard, put ourselves on a path to financial independence. One major goal is to have portfolio producing income that would cover our baseline financial needs so we can choose how much we want to work from age 45 on. My best guess is we should have around $2.5 million in our non-retirement accounts by then if we work full-time. What is the best way to set up an income-producing portfolio using money that isn't necessarily tied to retirement? Spend around $60K a year, and $15 of that is mortgage, which will be gone in 14 years. The first thing that I thought of when I read this question was rental property. Well, I have a problem with this question in some ways. I think too

many people... I don't like the premise. I don't like the premise. Well, here's my problem.

Too many people in retirement think they have to have income instead of thinking through total

returns. You can always create your own dividends by selling. So the thing is, if you're going to have

money in taxable non-retirement

accounts, do you really have to change your investment strategy right away just because

you think income is better than taking away from the principal? I don't think so.

Yeah, but maybe you're discounting like mental accounting. That's probably part of it.

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