Ross Anderson
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 7 Jul
Ross Anderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But you may also want to prioritize saving in just a brokerage account and building wealth outside of your retirement accounts because you may need access to them way before you traditionally would have kind of easy access to those retirement dollars.
You're teaching me new terms today. I always called that one kind of coast fire, where you're going to get to a spot where you can coast a little bit. You're still working, but you don't have to necessarily work at the same level of intensity. But I like barista fire. I'm learning today.
Well, ultimately, I think what I would do in this case is a little bit of modeling, right? We kind of have to start guessing at what some of the numbers are going to be. And, you know, we're going to say guessing, but it's hopefully an informed guess on what will it cost you to acquire housing, right? Are you hoping to buy something overseas? Are you going to plan to rent?
That's going to be a big difference in how much money you need to bring to the table versus how much you just need to earn over time. But that would really affect how I would kind of adjust my savings is if I need to make a down payment. And I would also explore the local market.
So, for example, a resident in Portugal, and I'm not an expert on Portugal, by the way, but a resident in Portugal can typically buy a house and borrow up to 90% of the value of the house. So you could put 10% down and end up in a house. If you're considered a non-resident when you move there, you might only be able to borrow between 65% and 80% of the value of the home.
So you might need a much bigger down payment. So really, that's what I would be thinking about is, what am I going to need to purchase... both in terms of one-time things and then on an ongoing basis, how much cash will it take me to live comfortably in those markets? I would do a lot of deep dive on what does it cost an average person to get groceries or go out to a restaurant?
How comparable is that? If you're living in New York now, maybe you've got a really high cost of living now and your costs will actually come down if you do that. And so what that would do is start to build a target. We generally think that people can live on, let's call it 4% to 5% of their portfolio value every year as a distribution. Again, there's a lot of science to that.
I'm trying not to go too deep. But so if you were able to accumulate a million dollars over your lifetime for retirement assets, we think you could take $40,000 to $50,000 out. So if I know that I can cover my expenses with that... Now I've got really good information and you'll have other resources, hopefully like Social Security or things like that on top of it.
But that's what's going to help you plan for can I retire is do I know how much money I need to spend to be comfortable? And then that kind of creates the target for how much you need to get to.
Ellen, I just had a couple of questions. Sounds like you are sitting on quite a bit of cash right now. Is that building up every month that you're kind of underspending what you have coming in? So your cash is just kind of sitting in banks at the moment?
Yeah, so you had mentioned earlier that you're more focused on kind of lifestyle and not as much legacy. So it did tick my ear a little bit when you just said that you had life insurance. Some folks will sell that as a savings vehicle. And ultimately, yes, you can build an asset in the cash value part of a life insurance. So there's kind of two big categories.
Term insurance is normally just kind of think about it like rent. You just pay for it while you have it and then permanent. could either be a whole life, a universal life, or a variable universal life where you're going to have some cash value component. But what you're really doing when you take the money back out of it is that you're borrowing from your own insurance policy.
But if you kind of borrow too heavily, the policy can actually collapse. And so what I would do with that, I would have them run you an illustration. It's called an in-force illustration and say, how much could I actually take out of this and see how that really serves you? Because in most cases for somebody that doesn't have legacy goals,
I really wouldn't reach for a permanent life insurance contract. Some people truly believe in it as an investment vehicle. I'm not really in that camp. So I would at least double click on that and make sure that that product is serving you well, or that it'll do what you expect it to. But I do love that you've got a brokerage account.
It sounds to me like you could probably be a little bit more aggressive in how you're funding that and get through some of that cash that you're accumulating. and maybe just turn that into a regular monthly contribution. So you don't have to put all the work, the money to work right now.
If we're worried about markets, if we're nervous about it, and we don't want to just plop everything in, things could always go down from here, right? And so instead, what I might recommend is just dollar cost averaging and getting some of that cash to work over the next three to six months so that you don't have all of the risk of just a single entry point into the market.
Of course. Yeah, please.
Yeah, an in-force reprojection. So when you bought that contract, what they should have shown you is a projection of kind of if you put X number of dollars into it, this is how much cash value it'll have over its lifetime. And a lot of times it looks really impressive depending on what return rate they show. And then they say, well, all this is going to be tax-free.
And you go, well, that all sounds great. What the policies sometimes require, though, is when you start taking the money out of it, we need to see if it's healthy. Because you can do what's called collapsing them. If there's not enough money to still pay for the insurance component, then the policy can collapse on you. And so, again, different policies are structured different ways.
I don't want to go too, too deep into this, but you can ask them to run a new projection for you and say, well, I want to take... X number of dollars out in these five years so that I can help with this down payment or whatever it looks like.
Showing 21–40 of 73 · page 2 of 4
← Previous
Next →