Hi Ashby, how's it going?

Great man, how about you?

I'm all right.

I'm on the line with Ashby Daniels of Shorebridge Wealth Management in Pittsburgh and

the author of the Retirement Field Guide blog.

I asked Ashby on today to talk about a recent post of his entitled

Spending Your Life Savings, two ideas for overcoming the fear of spending in

retirement. You know in my opinion this is an important and under-discussed topic. Financial planers spend so much of their time helping clients build up their assets so that they're available to them when they retire, but for some people making that transition from saving to spending is a

really difficult one. My colleague Chris Van called this an epic mindset switch and

so Ashby you've written about this.

Maybe you can jump in and tell me why this is the case.

Absolutely.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned Chris because I was going to mention him to you as well in the sense that obviously I know he's talked about the idea

that people are reluctant to spend in retirement and I think it's kind of funny that

so many people think my job is to help them keep them from spending when sometimes that's true but more often

than not especially being a retirement planner my job is to encourage them to spend

prudently and so yeah that's kind of where this post came from is that I you know I run into I run into this on a pretty regular basis where clients are reluctant to spend their life savings.

And so it's I find that to be kind of ironic.

But in any case, you know, I think it comes down, I think the reluctance at least comes down to two issues.

And one is, and I kind of titled it, self-worth equals net worth worth and what I mean by that is our net worth once you get to retirement is pretty much your only material representation of your cumulative working years.

You think about that you've been saving your entire working your life and then you get to retirement and that's all you've got.

So spending those dollars can feel like you're kind of compromising your future.

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