Transcript

Hi Everyone, and welcome to the Wiser Financial Advisor show with Josh Nelson where we get real, we get honest and we get clear about the financial world and your money. This is Josh Nelson, Certified Financial Planner and founder and CEO of Keystone Financial Services. Let the financial fun begin!

Josh: I’ve got a special guest today. Welcome back, Cheri Smith, founder and CEO of Wishes And Waves Travel. She can be found at www.wishesandwaves.com .

Cheri: Thank you so much for having me today.

Josh: Our topic today is one that comes up a lot. I think you know with both your clients and mine that when it comes to retirement there are different phases people go through during those years. In the early years, aka the go-go years, people typically are more active, physically and mentally and otherwise. And then the slow-go years, which are kind of a transition and then the no-go years later on when health is starting to limit what people are capable of and the types of travel that they’re able to do. I know that’s a conversation that came up recently with your family. Can you speak to how that came up and how it relates to travel?

Cheri: Yes, we travel quite a bit with our family. We have an 11-year-old son and we do a lot of multi-generational travel with extended parts of our family. We were on spring break this year with my dad and my stepmom. My dad’s been retired about 20 years now, and starting to slow down a bit. He and my stepmom are going to be 80 in two years, and travel looks different for them now. And as we were sitting talking about what our next trip would be, he was telling me about the go-go years, the slow-go years and the no-go years. Those weren’t terms or a theory I had heard before. When they first retired, they traveled quite a bit, going as far as they could for as long as they could. They spent time in Australia. They spent time in China. They visited all the Disney parks in the world, traveling extensively. But as they’ve gotten older, my dad is now in the slow-go years and my stepmom’s pretty much in the no-go years because she has a harder time getting around. So he was reflecting on the fact that he’s so glad that they spent time traveling when they were able to. Now, cruising is a good option for them because there are all sorts of options.

Josh: Why is it important to think about those phases early in retirement? Obviously, there will be no-go years for everybody, but why is it important to have that perspective early on, maybe even before retirement as far as planning out what people are going to do?

Cheri: There are a couple things to think about. One is, I hear a lot of clients say, “When my grandkids are a little bit older, I want to take them here or there,” and it’s not always the most ideal time because if you wait too long, you miss the opportunity. I know that you, Josh, do Disney cruises with your daughter Cameron, who’s 5 now, and you’ve been doing Disney Cruises with her since she was 2 or 3. You caught that sweet spot when it’s the right time. She might not remember, but you will always have those memories of her meeting the princesses for the first time. The other part comes with when you want to travel farther. It’s taxing. Last year I went to Bali and it took 22 hours to get there. I’m in my 40s and that was a lot on me. It’s a long time to be flying. It’s hard on your body, and the older you get, the harder it becomes. So you need to think about where you want to go and what you want to do.

I have clients who want to go on safari. I think a safari is the most incredible thing you can ever do, but what a lot of people might not realize is that on safari, you’re sitting in a in a Jeep all day looking at animals. These are unpaved roads in the middle of the African Serengeti or the Masai Mara. This is not an easy trip. I do work with some safari operators who have outfitted their jeeps with lower rises and have steps so you can get into the jeeps more easily. But my point is, these are not trips you want to wait to take. I have an older client in her late 70s and she wanted to go to Machu Picchu. We had to have a long, hard conversation about what that would mean. I needed to ask her whether she could do this physically. While some people’s minds may be very strong, their bodies are starting to give out on them.

So, you really have to ask yourself what’s your bucket list/dream trip list. Then go through and think about what you can do that requires you to be more agile and what you can do later. For example, a river cruise in Europe is a great way to see Europe. You unpack once and you get to see all these cities. It’s a much slower pace, which is better for later in retirement. Then do things like Machu Picchu or a safari earlier in retirement.

Josh: Yeah, I can speak to that too. You’ve got the go-go years, the slow-go years and the no-go years and part of it is financial planning. Everybody’s got a different budget and different resources. Some people are perfectly happy camping and going around the US but other people have bucket list items like going to New Zealand, to Europe, to Alaska, all kinds of different places. And studies show that for the average retiree, their greatest fear isn’t of dying or public speaking. It’s running out of money. So, sometimes during their early years retirement years, people are afraid to spend money on these experiences.

If you’ve got a good Certified Financial Planner, whether that’s us or somebody else, it’s their job to help you figure that stuff out and show you what the guardrails are as far as how much you can spend without endangering your later years. It’s a balance. Some people have been saving, saving, saving, putting into 401K’s, and they’re so in the habit of doing that, it becomes stressful to take money out of their investments. So, when planning and specifically planning for a travel budget, we do talk about the fact that there are going to be no-go years at some point, so maybe we frontload the travel fairly aggressively if somebody retires at 60 or 65. If they’re still in good health, it might be that the next 5 to 10 years is the right time to get out there doing safaris or whatever their thing is.

I agree with you, international travel can be taxing even at my age and I’m in my 40s too, barely. I’m gonna be 50 later this year, but a long day of travel is kind of exhausting, especially when you’re crossing time zones. Finance is a huge part of this, but it can be liberating, too, for people to actually do the planning and do the math to figure out what’s possible so they don’t have to be stressed every time they’re going on a trip. Add-ons such as special birthday celebrations are great, but if people are stressed about it, that’s detracting from the experience. Anyway, the whole financial demand of things is important not only because we don’t want to run out of money but also to be able to give people the freedom to spend when it’s appropriate.

Cheri: And if this is something you’re thinking about and concerned about, sit down with a travel agent. I do this all the time, sit down with clients, and they’ll give me their bucket list and say, “These are the pie in the sky. Can we do these? Can we afford these? And these are places we want to go that are probably more within reach.” I can ballpark them on what any trip in the world is going to cost. I will sit down and explain, “If you book this today, if you want a moderate experience, this is what it’s going to cost and if you want a luxury experience, this is what it’s going to cost.” Then they have an idea of whether something is within reach. Let’s take a safari for example. When you go on a safari, it is truly an all-inclusive experience. Your alcohol is included, your lodgings are included, all your food is included. It’s not like a cruise, where the drink packages are more and the dining packages are more, all of these things are extra. So, people will see an ocean cruise price tag and it’s $6000. They think that’s a great deal. But when you’re actually out the door, you could be closer to $12,000 because you’re doing add-ons, excursions, and other things.

On most river cruise lines. your accommodations and your alcohol are included, and most include one or two, sometimes up to four excursions to choose from. So if you’re thinking about a river cruise or a safari versus an ocean cruise, and you’re thinking the ocean cruise is more affordable, it might not be. I’s important to sit down and talk to someone who knows, like a travel agent, how much these things are going to cost. That way you know realistically what the costs are likely to be. Because it’s hard to know. A lot of these things, the earlier you book, the better pricing you get. We can book sometimes two years out, so it’s definitely something you can plan on and budget for and pay for over time. Also, the agility level of what you’ll be doing physically plays a role in the decision. Find out what shape you need to be in to do these different trips, and plan that accordingly as well.

Josh: Yeah, hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim in late May, there’s a training plan. It’s fairly hard workouts. Although going down is optional, it’s not optional to get yourself out of the canyon once you’re down there, right? So, I’m not going to do the rim to rim when I’m 80. And it’s not even that expensive of a trip. It’s a cheap domestic flight, but as you say, you need to ask what shape you need to be in. And making sure you don’t run out of money certainly is important. Nobody wants to do that and nobody wants to spend their retirement stressed out. But yeah, doing some good planning can alleviate that worry.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you tend to see with regard to planning ahead and how that bucket list might get phased in, and during those later years when people aren’t as mobile, what are some experiences that people tend to look at?

Cheri: I see a few things over and over. Safari is a big one. Europe is a big one. For a long time, everybody wanted to go to Greece and Italy. Now France is becoming really popular. Croatia is popular. But you know, Europe is full of cobblestones, which is something people don’t realize. You need to be able to walk easily on cobblestones. There are ways to get around that. For example, Ireland could be an easier trip because you can self-drive a car into the Irish countryside. Asia is really popular right now. Travel has slowed down in China for a while. Japan’s really hot right now. There’s a resurgence in Thailand. A long haul trip is going to be Australia, New Zealand. The trip there is hard. I have a travel agent friend who just booked a group in their 70s to fly to Australia, spend a couple of days and then jump on a cruise ship and take that to Hawaii and then on to Los Angeles where they’re getting off. That’s a fantastic trip because they only have to do that long flight one way, which is a lot easier.

I can put you on a helicopter tour over the Grand Canyon if you’re not able to hike it. In a lot of these cases, there are ways we can modify a trip so that depending on what you want to do, you can do it later in life when you’re in that slow-go stage. Whereas certain things like Machu Pichu, you have to do earlier in the go-go stage to do it right.

Josh: Another thing to be mindful about are the ages of people you’d be traveling with—ages of either parents or your own kids or people’s grandkids. The Disney Princess experience probably isn’t going to be a thing when they’re 13. There’s kind of a window. So it’s helpful to be thoughtful about when and how to stage these things. We work with clients to help with their financial planning and we aim to plan well ahead to have the experiences they’d like to have. Thinking about estate planning, too, they don’t necessarily want to pass on some huge amount of money later on; they’re thinking about what amount to invest in having experiences at a time when those experiences are possible. Then someday when they’re in the no-go years, they’ll have those memories.

Cheri: Absolutely. I’ve seen this a couple of times where people want to do things, and then one of the parents passes before they can take their grandkids somewhere. It’s heartbreaking because it’s something that they talked about and waited for. Like I said, we travel quite a bit with our parents, and one thing we always land on is a cruise because it has something for everyone. We may be running around all day doing this and that, and then we come together for dinner and a show in the evening. Or my dad will sit by the pool and watch my son swim. There are things we can plan for even when you get to the no-go years. So I say, “Don’t wait. Do it now.”

Josh: I’ve seen that a bunch of times too. Sometimes people wait and wait, planning to travel, and then one of the spouses passes unexpectedly and they never got to do that. None of us is guaranteed tomorrow. It’s a balancing act. Everybody’s got their own budget, but from what you’re saying, there are different levels of cost on the same experience, whether a safari or a cruise or Disney or whatever it may be as people shift from phase to phase.

Cheri: Yes, there’s always a budget version or a moderate or luxury option for any travel that we do. And also the experience level and physical limitations of what some of these trips entail. For instance, I just had a family on a multi-generational trip to Paris and we found Grandma a scooter because she did not want to miss seeing her granddaughter go to Paris for the first time. It was a great moment, but we can make things happen with some planning.

Josh: I’m curious. What are some of the off-the-wall, bigger-budget things people do?

Cheri: Well, my family and I were going to Italy this summer and in talking with my husband, he found this Become a Gladiator class. So we’re going to do gladiator training, which I didn’t even know was a thing, but that’s kind of exciting. I’m booking more trips to Antarctica for people to go kayaking with the whales. Social media has brought some of these things that people didn’t even know existed get within reach. So, I’m seeing people go to the ends of the Earth.

Josh: Easter Island is one that some clients had the dream to see, and they got to go do that. We know a couple people that have done an around the world cruise. For that, you have to be really committed to be on the ship for months. There’s kind of an unlimited number of options out there.

Cheri: Right. The sky is really the limit. Just last year, I went to the North Pole—to Svalbard, which is owned by Norway. We went to the furthest inhabited place that you can go if you’re not a scientist. It was 65 miles from the actual North Pole, which was really amazing. That was a bucket list item for me. We’re definitely going to go back. My husband wants to take my son.

Josh: Yeah. And some of these things, when they’re truly a bucket list item, might be a one-time thing where somebody spends 50K, 100K on a trip. Sometimes people don’t go on a big trip every year, but instead every other year they go international and the other year they camp or do some other stuff. It depends on what you want your retirement to look like. Hopefully you get 70, 80, 90, 100 years old. What do you want to look back on? It makes sense if you’re seventy in really good shape and you’re capable of Machu Pichu or a safari, to do something more aggressive like that.

So, Cheri, tell me about your YouTube channel. I’ve seen it. You produce a lot of good content and it’s a great way for people to brainstorm and plan ahead on trips they’d like to take.

Cheri: Thank you. Yes, I have a YouTube channel. I do a lot of tips and tricks on there from all of my travels. I have a couple of videos that I’m still editing, but this last couple of months I’ve been to the Bahamas twice and once I swam with the sharks. I did it with my dad, and that was really a lot of fun. So you can see my adventures over there on YouTube. My website is www.wishesandwaves.com .

Josh: That’s awesome. Thank you. And why is it called wishes and waves?

Cheri: When I started six years ago now, I mainly booked a lot of Disney trips and a lot of cruises. It’s grown since then, and now we really book everything. I not only talk the talk, I walk the walk. I’ve been to most places that I book, and I can tell you how to have the best trip. It’s really rewarding to get pictures back and hear what a great trip people had and the difference I made.

Josh: Well, you are truly a professional, I can say from experience, with your level of detail and communication. That’s why we continue to use you for our own trips. You are very good at that.

Thanks Cheri for joining us, because it’s a big topic. Have a great week, everyone.

Cheri: Thank you for having me.

We love feedback and we’d love it if you would pass it on to me directly at josh@keystonefinancial.com . Also, please stay plugged in with us, get updates on episodes, and help us promote the podcast by leaving us five stars and also subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast.

The Wiser Financial Advisor show with host Josh Nelson offers general information only and is not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine what may be appropriate for you, consult with your own accountant, financial or tax advisor prior to investing. Investment Advisory services offered through Keystone Financial Services, an SEC registered investment advisor.