Josh's question up next.

He says, for someone in the messy middle,

is there really a reliable way to know your number, meaning your

retirement number?

It feels like so much will change in the next 10 to 15 years alone, so guessing now feels premature. What do you think about this?

Because it is really helpful to think about knowing your number, even from personal experience,

because I'm in the messy middle, and it's really helpful to think about that but I've had similar thoughts like who knows if this amount that I'm putting in for my monthly expenses will be the same

20 years from now.

So what do you, how do you advise people to think about that?

Josh, I could not agree with you more.

Honestly, he probably thinks the same thing.

He's in the messy middle.

I could not agree with you. It is so difficult like me and my life we joke

about this life like the moment that we are living in right now we're living

like six hours at a time like it's like okay get to the next thing and do the next thing and do the next thing and do the next thing get to the next thing

It makes it real real hard to think about hey, hey, babe

When we get to retirement, what kind of lifestyle we want to live like how do we want to live

our like what we know we're like oh my gosh no that one has a poop in the diaper let's take care of that

right now and it's hard and so you you start focusing on that that's why we tell people early on in your journey

and I'm gonna argue that messy middle is still pretty early on now it's it's not

early like the beginning of the 20s rather than focusing on that because it's going to be hard like if you have young kids you have kids in the household

You don't know if they're going to fly out of the nest at 18. You don't know what kind of college they're going to go to you don't know where life is going to take you or your jobs.

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