Welcome back. If you listen to last Thursday's episode, today will not be a surprise. If you happen to miss that episode, you might wonder why there are two people on this podcast now, since traditionally I do this on my own. Every Monday, I'm still doing the podcast solo, but on Thursdays, the founder of Root, James Cannell, and one one of my mentors is actually doing the show with me.

So this episode is going to be with both myself and James.

It's a fun episode.

We talk about goalpost planning, which is what a lot of people do, although they don't know they do it.

What does that mean?

A lot of people are like, yeah, just one more year, two more years, three million dollars, then I'm going to retire. But they're really just continuing to push that back. So we walk through the strategies to think through, are you really ready to retire, both financially and emotionally? And how do you think through this? Because I don't want anyone to retire too early and go, hey, I should have worked two more years. And I really don't want anyone to go, hey, I've got 10 million bucks and I'm 85. And that's not important to me. I wish I did retire earlier when I had my health and my energy and time to do what I cared about most. So hopefully this episode is helpful for you guys. Once again, every Thursday, both myself and James, and then on Mondays, you're going to get me solo. So not stopping those. Hope you guys enjoy this. Hey, Ari. What's up, James? How are you? I'm doing good. I'm thinking about us as the initiators. I don't know if it's caught on yet from the last episode, but maybe it'll stick. Maybe something else will come along. We'll find out in the YouTube comments. Let us know if you have no idea what we're talking about. Let's the last episode. We just started this new podcast. Don't have a name for it. Ari has the early retirement podcast. I have the Ready for Retirement Podcast. This episode is going to be pushed to both of those and also live on the James Cannell YouTube channel. So what should we call this? So if you're totally confused about what we're talking about, listen to last week's episode. What do we have going on this week? Today we've got a fun one. So I hear often, I know you do as well, James, of, hey, should I just work one more year? Oh, maybe one more

bonus, two more years, three million bucks, then I'm finally going to retire. And we'll call that

goalpost planning. We're going to explain what that means in a second. But these comments,

everything we discuss on this show, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast

apps, these are coming from you.

So you can see here, this comment was left from Woods Parker 7902. And he says,

Ari, teachers may have a strong desire to retire early because of the stressful environment

they work in. Now, only teachers, this is a real stat, James, only teachers are stressed in

their job.

No, everyone's stressed.

So this could be applying to you if you're a teacher, engineer, what have you.

Even if it means sacrificing some of the finer things in life, let's call it a first-class

ticket over coach, I would predict one more year of work may not be worth the trade to fly

first-class if it means an early

classroom exit. So my question is very simple to you, James. Have you ever flown first class?

I have one time in my life, and it was great. Did it feel weird? It did feel a little weird,

and it was a compromise. What was the compromise? It was, gosh, I hope I'm

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