What Retirement Planning Gets Wrong, with Jamie Hopkins

Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2026

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#701: Forget the idea that you need a magic number to retire. Jamie Hopkins is a certified financial planner, professor of taxation at the American College of Financial Services, director of the New York Life Center for Retirement Income, and Top 40 Under 40 financial services professionals from InvestmentNews. His take on retirement planning will make you rethink a few things. We start with the "no magic number" concept. Hopkins explains that fixating on a savings target - whether it's $1 million or $10 million - misses the point. What matters is what income you can generate relative to the lifestyle you want. And that lifestyle shifts. Research shows retirees often spend more than 100 percent of their pre-retirement income in the first few years, then gradually spend less as they age. From there, we get into sequence of returns risk, which Hopkins calls one of the biggest threats to any retirement plan. A market downturn in the first few years of retirement can be nearly impossible to recover from, since you're withdrawing money while your portfolio is declining. We also dig into the well-known "4 percent rule" - which Hopkins prefers to call a "4 percent finding" - and why it only holds up in certain historical contexts. The conversation also covers the topics people tend to avoid. "Silver divorce" - the spike in divorces among people over 60 - is happening at higher rates than most people realize, and it can gut a retirement plan that was built around shared costs and two incomes. We also discuss elder abuse, which Hopkins says is mostly committed by family members or trusted advisors, not strangers - and how AI-generated voice cloning is making financial scams harder to detect. Finally, we end on what Hopkins considers the most important, and most overlooked, element of a good retirement: community. He argues that retirement is actually an ideal time to intentionally rebuild your social circle, choose where you want to live, and figure out what you're retiring to - not just from. Hopkins holds a JD, MBA, LLM, CFP, RICP, CLU, and ChFC. Resources: Jamie’s Book: Your Retirement Sketchbook: 125 Retirement Planning Lessons from Financial Experts Share this episode with a friend, colleagues, and your frenemies: https://affordanything.com/episode701 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The hardest question in retirement planning, the question no one has a good answer to is,
0:04.5	how much money do you actually need in order to retire?
0:08.8	Many people have a loose idea, many people have a number in their head, and most people are
0:14.2	thinking about it wrong.
0:16.9	Today, we're going to discuss better ways to think about retirement.
0:22.0	Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers
0:27.0	five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and
0:32.8	entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. I'm your host, Paula Pan. Today's guest, Jamie Hopkins, is a certified financial planner.
0:41.4	He's a professor of taxation at the American College of Financial Services.
0:45.4	He is the director of the New York Life Center for Retirement Income.
0:49.2	He was named top 40 under 40 in financial service professionals by investment news. He has two law degrees.
0:56.9	He has a JD and an LLM. That's a master of law. He also has an MBA. He's a certified financial
1:03.1	planner. He is a chartered financial consultant. He's a retirement income certified financial
1:07.8	professional. He's got this big long alphabet soup. So the point is,
1:12.0	this is someone who has studied retirement from every angle, the legal angle, the financial angle,
1:17.8	the tax angle, and the behavioral angle. He's here to talk about why your retirement number
1:23.8	is probably the wrong thing to focus on. He's going to talk about the myths and misconceptions
1:28.9	around the 4% rule. He's going to talk about real risks to your retirement that no one talks about.
1:36.5	Elder abuse, silver divorce, cognitive decline. Yeah, it's unpleasant stuff. That's why we don't
1:42.3	talk about it. But those are the risks you face.
1:46.1	We're also going to talk about why retirement is less about money than people think and what a good
1:52.5	retirement really looks like. Let's begin. Here's Jamie Hopkins.
	...

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