Unedited Transcript:

Mark Struthers (00:00.216)

Welcome to the Healthy and Wealthy Retirement, where your certified retirement counselor, Mark Struthers, takes a holistic approach to retirement, going beyond finances and embracing holistic wellbeing. This YouTube channel will address not just the financial part of retirement, but also the social, the physical, and the emotional parts of retirement. Everything you need for a healthier, a wealthier, and a happier retirement.

Here is your host, Mark Struthers.

Welcome, welcome to the Healthy and Wealthy Retirement. My name is Mark Struthers. I’m your host. Today we are getting away from the financial side of things. We’re going to talk about ROM. You’ve probably heard of ROI, Return on Investment, ROE, Return on Equity. This one is ROM, or Return on Your Memories. And we’re going to give you three ways to enhance, to get a higher ROM.

We invest our time and money for a return. Like any investment. Any investment has a return, otherwise you wouldn’t invest it. The return, and I like the word return. There is a popular book, a very good book, that talks about memory dividends, moment dividends. Dividends is not a bad term. But I like the term return.

because it can be harvested now, it can be harvested later. Dividends are often something that are kicked off at the discretion of a company. It’s not that it’s bad, but I like return. Returns more often are compounded. And also when you think about investing in general, sometimes you might not access that return for weeks, years, months, decades. In the case of money or real estate,

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It can even pass to your heirs and it’s a long time before that return is harvested.

We invest our time, we trade our time, invest our time for money, that’s our jobs, our expertise. We also work out, you know, and all those returns often, some of it comes right away. You know, most of the time we feel better after, immediately after a workout. Not always, especially once you get past the age of 40, 45, quite often you’re a little sore, but that return is there immediately or it is there.

shortly after or sometimes even weeks, months in the future. And same when we do things that maybe aren’t healthy. My father was a heavy smoker for boy, at least 40, if not 50 years of his 80 years on this planet. So in that case, that was not a good ROI on his time and money, most likely. You who’s to say what sort of

pleasure that he got immediately afterwards. know, maybe that did allow him to get through the days. tend to think not, but any good financial planner is going to try to see all angles. Financial planning is all about making better decisions, better decision making, making an informed decision about possible outcomes increases the chances that you’re going to have a good outcome. Nothing’s perfect. We’re taking an educated guess.

so that you have a better chance at a good outcome. The outcome you want, or sometimes you could even have a better outcome. A different outcome might be better than what you intended. So here are three things you can do to enhance, to increase the chances that your memories have a good return on them. Number one is be intentional. And I touched on this when we talked about keystone activity.

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our conversation on Keystone activities had more to do is kind of both in and out of retirement, but how you spend your time. And we talked about how that if you are a health nut, you are probably going to have better connections with those people doing CrossFit than maybe with those who are golfing or pickleball. Cause most of time people who do CrossFit are going to be looking for an overall healthy lifestyle. And you know, and

Not so much with pickleball and golf. It’s not a good or bad thing. But I can remember my buddies and I used to actually, we had a few pints when we played golf. We enjoyed it and at least we were out moving around. it wasn’t the, generally speaking, it wasn’t the healthy activity that CrossFit or running or triathlons were. And this is kind of the same thing.

Being thoughtful, being intentional about what you are paying for an experience of good or service and acknowledging the trade-offs. This is about you making an educated guess. It’s what financial planning is. You could think of this as life planning, memory planning. One thing I’ve done for years is my youngest is big on traveling, much like my wife. He kind of takes over a lot of the planning. He has a budget.

And he has gotten better and better. He knows the trade-offs that if he does a luau, say we go to Hawaii, don’t do it very often because it’s just too expensive and I’m pretty cheap. But that means something else has to give. That means he can’t maybe go to the golf course he wants. And I know these are first world problems, but even simpler trips, you he might pick a restaurant.

that is less expensive so he can do an activity someplace else. So there’s a great lesson for kids if they have to actually stick to a budget and then work with the trade-offs. And also one thing that I think he’s gotten better at is also just the trade-off of time. Even if he’s able to do all these things because he’s able to get some good deals if we’re too busy to enjoy them. And that’s a big issue for me actually.

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I don’t get too involved in the trip planning, but I like to have some downtime. If we’re at, you know, even a somewhat nice hotel, I’d like to be able to have some time just swimming. You know, I often enjoy things that are cheap. enjoy hiking craters and talking about Hawaii. I enjoy the surfing. I enjoy these athletic things that, that costs little, but we, you need quite a bit of downtime really to.

So acknowledging the trade-offs, being intentional. When you think about some of the things you might invest in, you could think one of our neighbors has a support court. And for them, I’m guessing the ROM was quite high. They have several kids and that was one way for them to spend time with their kids at home. Our deck and patio is not fancy by most standards, especially in today’s world, but we had our deck and patio redone.

And having those areas and, and we intentionally bought a nice house with a nice yard over the last 15 years. That’s paid off quite a bit. even simple things like a coffee with my son was a fancy coffee shop, not far from here. He and I, he’s a freshman in college, but he and I will go there and we’ll often talk about things or work on things like internship applications or planning a race.

So we’ll do things like that or trips to dog park. So when you think about your investment, you have to think in terms of what is the cost and the time. Boats are a big one. Some people would say, yep, a boat is worth the money and the time because boats can be very time consuming. I can’t remember the kind of the joke is that the best boat is one that someone else owns, which there’s truth to that. Same with cabins. So

There’s not a wrong or right answer, but the point is to be intentional and say, what are we giving, what’s the cost? What are we giving up? do, is it worth it to us? Do we have a good chance of having that return on memories? Quite often with cabins and with boats, when I talk to clients, the answer is no. In my family, we have two of us that are Lake people that would love the water skiing, the swimming, the fishing.

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And two that are, not that they dislike it. For us to ever have a cabin and my folks used to have one. So we spent enough time there where I could safely say both having a cabin and a boat that that was not going to be worth it. Not just the money, but the time involved, you know, and especially what you run into a lot too, is that folks, because kids sports are so demanding, you you find that a lot of their weekends are all booked up. When do they have time to go to?

spend time with that expensive cabin and take care of it and things like

When we think about return on memories and how we invest our time and money, sometimes the daily things are overlooked. Now, for the longest time, from a budgeting standpoint, people talked about giving up the latte, the expensive latte, and they’ve gotten really expensive the last couple of years. That’s a good one when you think in terms of entertainment. You could think in terms of beer too, of wine, that restaurant. Now, those discretionary spending that…

that sometimes people tend to, those are easy spots to get additional cashflow. But also when you think about making memories, it’s not that you shouldn’t spend money on those, but just think about the trade-off. If you’re spending six, seven dollars a day on lattes, you know, and a few beers a week, a couple of happy hours, that could easily add up to $50 a week, 50 weeks, $2,500.

And it might be that having those daily releases do offer value. It relieves stress. It makes you more productive that if you were to remove those, happiness that those bring on a daily basis would not equal, an extra, an extra week of vacation, or maybe buying a good, maybe you, you you take that over 10 years and you buy a, a boat, a wave runner or whatever the case may be. So the point is.

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not to criticize what you’re spending money on, but to criticize that maybe there wasn’t intentionality to it, that there wasn’t a plan, that you didn’t say, how am I spending my money? You could throw streaming services in there as well. And could I get a better ROL, a return on those memories, if I put that money someplace else? Sometimes simply acknowledging that you could, could have you give up maybe what is an unhealthy.

We often let inertia habits or fears keep us from acting inertia and habits are powerful things for good, but also bad. You know, it’s, a, I love making connections. You see it a lot with employee healthcare benefits. Sometimes people do not make the best choices because of inertia. It’s easier just to keep things the way they are rather than saying, yep, that HSA plan might be better for me or Hey,

They have this new weight loss service to my HR department, legal service, whatever the case may be.

So number one is be intentional. Number two, I call it, the stage. Don’t write the script. What I mean by that is in order for memories to be valuable, they really do have to be organic. I see as say as someone who has been a father for over 19 years, who has been in the financial services industry for well over 20, 21, 22 years.

and a good chunk of that working with private clients, that those memories really do have to be organic. You can’t force it. When I think about organic memories, I often think of the movie Groundhog Day. Well, Bill Murray, one of my favorite comedic actors, really lives the same day over and over, and he’s trying to get Andy McDowell to fall in love with him.

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He goes through different phases and he finally realizes that if he can get a little bit of information each day about a person, could who pitch who to use a Monty Burns from the Simpsons quote, he could pitch through, could trick them into falling in love with them, sleeping with them. And he does that with one woman. He tries that with Andy McDowell and he succeeds in learning so much about her that he’s able to make this kind of artificial connection, but it doesn’t work.

There’s a scene where they’re throwing snowballs and it’s a forced laugh where he’s written the script, but because it’s not organic, it doesn’t work on her. She doesn’t fall.

So that’s something to keep in mind, that especially if you’re spending money and you’re unsure about the outcome, think about how much you’re going to spend on that investment. For me personally, one of the best memories I have is something that had nothing to do with really an investment, it had to do with the power outage. Where we, one of the few times the power’s been out here, we were making shadow puppets with a flashlight.

and in case dogs and I can’t remember what else I came up with, our dog at the time had a coprophagia, she ate her poop. And we had been trying for weeks to put hot sauce on it. So I pretended that I was a dog talking about the complaint about the hot sauce and the poop that my boys won’t bring it up much anymore, but they used to bring that up as being so funny that that was one of the best memories they’ve had. And while that’s something that you can’t really set the stage for other than

Maybe you don’t buy a generator and hope that it happens. don’t, I wouldn’t recommend that. but it just goes to show that you can’t force things. All you can do is set the stage, let the others write the scripts and hope that, that you get some good memories out. I think as a parent, we’ve all been there where we, we have bought in a gift. We’ve planned an activity that we thought, Hey, this is going to be awesome. And it falls flat to where we.

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you know, we didn’t anticipate it. And it happens with me, things I used to love, either as a kid or things, places I visited when I was a young adult before kids that really didn’t resonate with my family. Kind of a Clark Griswold type thing, you know? And again, I come to think of it that there were some kind of artificial memories trying to be created there as well.

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So when I think about setting the stage in my life, am right now I’m focusing on two things. One, I’m trying to get back in the shape with running. My oldest was a cross country runner. He still runs. I don’t think he has aspirations to run a marathon right now. Now that could change or do the Boston marathon, but he wants to do more races. that’s something that investment decision was pretty easy. One, I used to run up until gaining some weight and having some injury issues.

A years ago, I used to do at least a marathon a year, several half marathons, 10Ks. I can’t say I was in Boston marathon fast, but I was kind of fit. I can’t use the word athletic, but decent shape, and it’s something that I enjoy doing. So that one was an easy one, and the cost of running is low. Even the time is pretty low for something like running.

It does take more time to get a CrossFit, but the running, the ROM potential for that is quite high, especially given even if Joseph gives it up, my oldest, it’s still possible that I would get some return on that. The other one is golfing. Now, once my second child was born, I gave up golfing. My youngest has always had an interest in it, gave it up when he was younger because his friends didn’t do it.

but has been getting back into it and it’s pretty good. Now that one’s a bit trickier because I don’t know for sure if he’s going to stick with it. Golfing takes a lot more time and a lot more money. So I’m a little more cautious with how much I devote to that. But those are two areas where I’m trying to set the stage. then kind of like we talked about keystone activities, if there’s other potential benefits, it could be a good thing with running.

You know, assuming I have to add more stretching the older I get, but assuming I do it smartly, there’s, there’s not a lot of downside. Number three, photographs seems odd, but, it’s easier, easier and easier these days, but I think being a little intentional about maybe even investing in a nicer camera, you know, some people certainly use that kind of stuff as an excuse just to spend any amount of money on a camera or a phone.

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But having that little nicer camera, being able to capture things, organize things. Social media has a lot of faults, but having those memories pop up from Google, from Apple, from Facebook, as a father, they’re just wonderful. I was never a, you know, save photographs and look at a scrapbook, a photo book type of guy. But when I get the photos popping up from my son’s family stuff,

several years ago. Truly wonderful. One of my favorites is one. It’s my oldest and I having lunch after his first 5k. It was a monster dash. I don’t think they have that race anymore. I was, I, hope it was Halloween related. I was wearing a, a gladiator uniform, but seeing that picture and at the time my son was my oldest never really took the team sports.

but for a while triathlons, really took the running. That was his kind of first exposure where we were trying to find something where he could compete and compete. He made varsity competed at least a somewhat high level, but that was kind of the start of it. You know, didn’t know it at the time, but looking back on that memory of us doing that first 5k together. and don’t think I took a lot of pictures. I really wasn’t, I wasn’t really aware at how much those pictures meant of the race.

there might be out there. But having that one path pop up to where someone else took it of us together, it’s that four or five taverns.

That one was special. being conscious that a little investment financially, a little bit of time in those photographs do pay off. I know some of you already do it. My wife was already big on saving photographs. But for some of us, it doesn’t come naturally. So I think having that is critical. So there you have it. Financial and life planning is about making better decisions.

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And as mentioned, there are folks who will use making memories as an excuse to spend without thinking about it, to just spend on things impulse buying, spend, to buy that super expensive boat, to, to not put any thought into how it affects their future, their future, their retirement, whatever the, whatever future timeframe you’re talking about, you know, you could, you can always go too far. The goal should be about thought, should be thought.

to be about being thoughtful about balancing living for today and not putting tomorrow in jeopardy.

And this is especially true when you think in terms of how living for today can produce the R.O.M., the return on memories.

Those can compound, those can grow just like your investments, just like the photo of my son and I after our 5k race. But the important part is, is that there’s some planning involved. Nothing’s perfect. know, could you, could you do some planning and still spend too much living for today? You could, but in order to make sure you don’t have regrets either way, the point is to be intentional because if you do these things, you have a much better chance at a

Having a healthier, a wealthier, and a happier retirement. Stay well everyone. Don’t forget to hit subscribe. Hit subscribe.