35. How can money make you happier? A conversation with Andrew Hallam

Transcript:

Evan Neufeld: Hello, and welcome back to the Canadian Money Roadmap podcast. I'm your host, Evan Neufeld.

Today is my last episode of 2021 and I'm very excited to share with you my conversation with international best-selling author, Andrew Hallam. You might know him from his previous books, Millionaire Teacher and Millionaire Expat. We have an interesting conversation about his upcoming book and topics around success, happiness and money and wealth and all those types of things, less so related to investing and saving on taxes and things like that, but I think you're gonna really enjoy this conversation. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Andrew Hallam.

All right. Well, it is my pleasure to welcome Andrew Hallam to the Canadian Money Roadmap podcast today. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me.

Andrew Hallam: Thank you, Evan. I really appreciate it.

Evan Neufeld: Awesome. Well, many of you listeners will be familiar with some of Andrew's other work. He is the international best-selling author of the books, Millionaire Teacher and Millionaire Expat. In addition to his upcoming book called Balance, How to Invest and Spend for Happiness, Health and Wealth and we're expecting that on January 18th, is that correct?

Andrew Hallam: That's correct.

Evan Neufeld: Okay. Well today's conversation, Of course, many of you are familiar with, Andrew's earlier books of how to invest in making your investment life simpler. I was hoping to focus today's conversation on your new book, Andrew, about happiness, health and wealth, because that is a very different topic. So maybe there let's start with the title: Balance.

So when it comes to saving and investing in happiness and health, how is it possible to actually have balanced or maybe that's too broad of a question to start out with, but maybe lead me into the topic.

Andrew Hallam: Yeah, thanks for asking that question. It was something where I started to find myself really surprised by how many people would epitomize success as something that just related to career and money.

And so somebody would say, oh, that woman over there, for example, is really successful. She owns her own law firm. She drives a Maserati. She has a giant house overlooking a lake and I would look at it and ask, well, I mean she might be successful, but I think success in itself is really broad, like when you ask someone why they want to do anything. So whether that's, you know, get an education or improve your education or get another job or run a marathon or whatever it is, invest money. Ultimately, when you continue to ask why do you want to do this? Why are you motivated to raise your children in this way or whatever that question might be. If you continue to dig with why, but why?

No matter what they say, just keep going. Why, why, why and just dig, dig, dig down. Ultimately their answers will reflect their life satisfaction. Allow them to make them feel happy, safe, or secure. That'd be important to their lifestyle section. So I look at the word success, I look at how we've defined it. I think sometimes how backward that is, because truly to be successful, we need to maximize life satisfaction because you know, when we asked that question, why do you want money? Why do you want that house on the hill? Why do you want your own law firm or whatever it might be, ultimately that the answer would come down to something relating to life satisfaction. Okay. So now how do we define or how do we maximize our life satisfaction? And the research on this is such that it doesn't necessarily need more money in the bank or a better career. It's much more holistic and so for me, with the book Balance, I thought, let me dig into this research. And I wanted to find out what is it that actually enhances life satisfaction? Therefore, what is it that enhances success? Because that's what success is. It's life satisfaction. So I broke it down into four categories.

One is of course we do need to have enough money. So enough money for shelter. You want to make sure when it rains, you're not getting wet. You have a safe place to live. You have enough money for good food to keep you and your family nourished. You need enough money for healthcare. So that you can stay healthy and a little bit of money left over to spend on some fun experiences.  So things that you could do together. Then of course there's a little bit for savings and savings for the future. But that's just one component.

So another component is relationships. And when we look at the Harvard study of adult development, which is an eight decade long study and they're trying to look at what is a number one variable leading to a happy life. So after studying these people for eight decades, they found it all boils down to the most important variable, above genetics even, is your actual relationships with other people. So that's key. So money was one, relationships with other people is two and a decent level of health that you're actually looking after yourself.  So you're doing what you can. We can't control everything, but we're doing what we can to control our health. That's really important therefore, to be successful. And then fourth is a sense of purpose. Like what gets you up in the morning and what actually motivates you? Is there something that drives you forward?

So we need these things to enhance our life satisfaction. And that's why, you know, when it came time for me to figure out a name for this book, I just thought I want to call it Balance. I want to talk about life satisfaction and it's really required that we have that balance because you can have loads of money. You could have $50 million, nice house on the hill, drive a Ferrari, but if your relationships are a wreck, then your life satisfaction is not going to be where it could be. You're going to be mostly bummed out because that's far more important than just the money itself. So yeah, I really enjoyed digging into the research on life satisfaction when I wrote the book Balance and trying to give people suggestions and tips so that they can hopefully end up building some of this into their own lives.

Evan Neufeld: Very interesting because you know there's so many things that we could focus on and talking about investing in markets and those types of things and broadly speaking, my point in the podcast is that I want to focus on things that you can control and a few number of the things that you mentioned there stood out to me because you know, when you're looking for success or happiness or whatever you want to call it, it could be semantics at that point. It sounded like your argument would be a lot of those things actually are in your control and it's not just chance that these things might happen to you.

Andrew Hallam: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think there are these things that we often pursue that, and I was listening to some of your podcasts before and I thought, oh, philosophically we align on a lot of these things, but I thought it was pretty exciting.  The idea that you talked about how we overspent and  we're a culture of over spenders and this is all well and good. If what we're spending our money on actually does enhance our life satisfaction or it could be all well and good, as long as we're not going into major debt to do it.  However, the things that we buy don't enhance our life satisfaction if they're material acquisitions and most of the things that we're purchasing are material. So, you know, we're buying or buying a new car or a better car. We're upgrading our kitchens or we're getting the latest i-phone. Or whatever it might be if we're getting a new purse or whatever. These things, according to research, do not enhance our life satisfaction, but we think they do. So Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel prize winner in behavioral economics and he's just dug into this so prolifically over his career. And I love the fact that through his research, he says, we don't know what actually makes us happy.  That's the weirdest thing. We think that if we purchase something new, it will give us satisfaction. It will increase our life satisfaction. When in the reality it's like a short term sugar fix. So it ends up perhaps making us feel good at the moment we purchase it. But it doesn't take long before he hedonic adaptability starts to take place whereby essentially when we buy something like whatever, let's just call that a brand new car. We're excited about it for a while, but we get really used to it. And within just a few weeks, it's just another car that gets you from A to B. So there was an interesting study at Michigan State University, on new vehicles or expensive vehicles versus low priced vehicles and you know, when they asked people who drive like top end Mercedes-Benz,  are you happier with it than you would be driving a Honda Civic? They said, well, of course I'm happier. And Daniel Kahneman called that, reflective happiness. It's what we believe. But the truth is what's more core is our actual experiential happiness, which is what we're actually feeling, so the actual experience of it. And based on the research they did at Michigan state, they'd found that people that drove high-end vehicles didn't enjoy their driving experiences any more than people who drove low end vehicles, because we get used to what it is we're driving and we're not focused on the vehicle all the time in terms of how it's feeling in terms of how tight it is, how it's handling, how it's accelerating, how it's breaking. We're focusing on, Am I going to be late for my son's soccer practice? Am I going to be late for work? Oh, look at that jogger running down the street, Oh, am I going to catch this light? Those are the things we focus on. So we're not thinking about the vehicle.

So the idea that we end up going into debt and debt often equals misery, like debt drags us down on a subconscious level. The fact that we go into debt to buy something or extend ourselves to buy something that we think will enhance our life satisfaction. This action is completely misguided. And so like the ideas I love looking at, what does the research say about life satisfaction and for me, I'm not suggesting we be a cheapskate and not spend our money at all. That's not what I'm saying, but when we look at what is it that we can spend our money on, that actually enhances our life satisfaction. It's actually things like giving, like pro-social giving feels awesome. Especially when we can see the results or we can actually see the people who are receiving the help. Buying or spending money on experiences like you and a group of friends go out, rent a cabin, and you fish for awhile and maybe you rent a boat and you just have an awesome time for a weekend.  When we do that, we're actually building memories. And so like for you and me, Evan, if you and I were sitting around a campfire 20 years from now, and you and I were telling stories, we're not going to talk about the car we bought back in 2033, or the iPhone 53, we're going to be talking about the fun/crazy things that we did because the experience has become part of our identity.

Evan Neufeld: That's interesting to me. So can you elaborate on that identity formation a little bit more because let's keep using some of those same examples here.  I'm not a car guy, but just the term car guy means that that is somebody's identity. Right. And so is that person finding inherent value or happiness in that identity that relates to a physical experience or would the research show that it's mostly more of a facade than anything?

Andrew Hallam: I think they find an alignment with an identity and people do through what they purchase, but does that identity actually make them feel better about themselves or happier about who they are. The way to feel great about who you are is if people love you. That's the pinnacle, that's the absolute pinnacle to feel great about who you are, you need others to love and respect you. And so a lot of people, though in a misguided way will think, well, others will love and respect me if I am successful with a business. They'll somehow respect me if I'm successful, but it isn't entirely true. I call this sociological math in that if I give love and respect to other people, I will receive love and respect from other people in turn.  So we get what we give. And that doesn't mean that necessarily, if I treat you with loads of respect, you're necessarily going to reciprocate and treat me with respect. We all know circumstances where we we've met people where that's been the case, but then there'll be other circumstances. Whether it be somebody else, I treat them with respect and I don't really think so much about just pouring my love into this person. And that person gives me that back two or threefold. So what we give the world is what we ended up getting back in terms of love and respect that we have for individuals. And so if we really want to feel great about who we are and if we really want to feel so solid about our identities and enhance our life satisfaction, we have to be as good as we can be. We have to be the best people we can be. It's not going to come from stuff. And yet we often think it does. And that's the unfortunate part, especially as I said before, if we go into debt to get this stuff.

Evan Neufeld: Right. Yeah, I agree with that completely. Like so much of your financial life completely falls apart if you overextend yourself, especially on things that depreciate in monetary value, but also what you're referring to is existential value almost, right.

Andrew Hallam: It's funny because you know, when it comes down to, let's take our example of car guy. In the balance I talk about this litmus test and essentially if you want to buy something and let's say it's some kind of luxury good. Ask yourself if you would still buy it if nobody else can see it.  I mean, nobody loves or respects anyone any more or any less because of what they buy. Otherwise people who drove Ferrari's and Lamborghini's, we would love them more than everybody else and we don't. Right. And that's just not how it works.  We love and respect the people who essentially are loving and respectful. But the desert island Litmus test to me was an interesting case. A friend of mine told me that. The guy reconnected with, I went to high school with him and he bought a Porsche nine 11. He always wanted it, it was his dream and he became a lawyer and obviously he had a lot of student loan debt and was really responsible and said, I can borrow money to get this Porsche, but I'm going to pay off my student loans before I buy the Porsche and I want to make sure that I can afford the Porsche so I'm going to buy it with cash. So that's what he did. So he paid off the student loans and he bought this Porsche with cash and he got a call, you know, he ordered the car and he got a call from the dealership and they said, Rob, your Porsche is here and come get it. And he said, oh yeah, great, thanks and He didn't. Three days later he got another call and his wife answered the phone and said, Rob, it's the dealership again. Like, are you going to go get that car? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay I'll go get it. I think it was the third call before he actually went to pick it up.  So it was like a full two weeks after it arrived. It was paid for, top of the line nine 11. He picks it up and he puts it in his garage. And as he explained it to me, he drove it twice in the first two months. And I asked him like, Rob, why did you drive it twice during the first two months? And he said, because I was kind of embarrassed by it. Like I always wanted it, but then I was sort of embarrassed to be seen driving it. And he said his favorite drive was this driving dip from Calgary to British Columbia and he said it was just the open road and nobody could really see him driving. And so for him what was really kind of odd and sort of a midlife crisis in reverse because he started driving it less and less frequently and he eventually sold the car just because he didn't feel comfortable with it. And I like coming back to my desert island or deserted island litmus test, because if Rob could have bought that car and no one would ever see him drive it. He probably would still own that car. Like he bought that car for other reasons. He didn't buy that car so people could see him, so he could look successful. He bought that car because he truly respected the German engineering, but it did kind of embarrass him. And so I think that when it comes time to you know, we're thinking about purchasing an unnecessarily, maybe luxurious item, we have to ask ourselves would I still buy it if nobody else could see it. And if the answer is yes, then buy it. But the answer will most often, for most people, that answer will be no.

Evan Neufeld: Well, that's interesting. The way that you tell the story, because I think your story, I don't want to disagree with you necessarily, but your story is kind of confirming a different point. Whereas some people, many people buy things to impress others and your friend buys something with the unintended consequence of aligning himself with those people. Right. And that was so in my mind, the fact that he had even considered parking the car or not getting it in the first place almost proved his success in that, that he didn't want to be aligned with someone that didn't think the way that he did, you know? I think of the Rolex watch, where who likes the Swiss engineering and the story and the history of the watch and whatever, but it's also a fancy man's product, right. And you're scared to get mugged on the street, wearing your Rolex. So you buy three of them and put them in your safe and you never wear them. It's I don’t know. It's I don't really have a question that comes out of that, but I think there are two different things that come out of that same behavior.

Andrew Hallam: Yeah. I think your right, that's absolutely true. It is really interesting when a person can be super honest about their intent, then you ask them about the litmus test, for example, to be like you say, some of those people with those watches, wouldn't be having them stored necessarily, for them it doesn't really matter. They loved the engineering of it or what have you. During COVID during 2020, I was cycling and I mentioned this in the book. I was mountain biking and I met this woman in Cumberland, British Columbia, as we were mountain biking there. And I started talking to her about my litmus test. And she said, that's so interesting that you bring that up because she said, I just bought two months ago, I bought top of the line Tesla. And she said, if I'm really honest with myself, I don't think I would have bought it if nobody could actually see it. She said I would have bought an electric car, but it would have been much more modest. And I thought, wow, just the honesty there. And she was really coming to a point where she had been previously talking about how COVID had made her perhaps realign some of her priorities where she started spending less money. She spent more time just with her immediate family, doing things with them and getting less fulfillment or recognizing that there really was no fulfillment in going shopping as a sport. I mean there are people that just that's their recreation too. I will go shopping, shopping is fun, but it took something like COVID for her to recognize that she didn't get lengthy or lasting fulfillment from that, that was just like kind of like a quick little sugar fix and it cost her money and it was the relative cost and your money. You're spending money on something. It doesn't give you lasting fulfillment that's money that you could be putting elsewhere, like investing for your future.

Evan Neufeld: Right or giving to others or any number of other things. Well, could I maybe dovetail one of your previous books with your current one or even just a concept? I don't know if you can relate to this, but the idea of the Millionaire Teacher and I would say the vast majority of people who have read that book are already kind of aligned with the direction you wanted it to go. But when you see it on the headlines of social media, the idea of a millionaire that typical person thinks of a millionaire as someone who spends a million dollars as opposed to lives with and survives off of a million dollars and so on and so forth and gives away as if they have, you know, where I'm going with this.

Dovetailing that thought into the idea of balance. And you said, you know, we don't need to be cheap skates necessarily and things like that, but what are some of those things? If you can be practical, if the research shows, what are some of those things that you can spend money on, to actually get satisfaction and feeling of success. Versus the line of, this is just frivolous for someone else for another purpose type of thing. Maybe I'll lead you on with this Harvard business review study that I saw a few years ago, maybe you saw it too, but one of their studies on money and happiness talked about spending money not on things you think might provide you happiness but spending money on eliminating things that you hate. So, yeah. I don't know. Have you seen any research on that and I can relate to that because as you said, we don't know very well what brings us happiness, but we sure know what we hate. And if you hate cooking, eating out is your thing. If you hate shoveling, I'm in Saskatchewan here, we get a lot of snow. If you hate that, hire somebody to do that, you know, all those different things. Have you found similar research or can you elaborate on that at all?

Andrew Hallam: Absolutely. And I love that research because, you know, when I think about life, life is finite for all of us. It's like, as I describe in the book Balance, I say life is like a dark hour glass and we can't see the sand and when we're born, it gets tipped. And so at no point, do we know how much sand we have left? And that's really, I think really important for a successful life, a holistically successful life to recognize that our time is running out and none of us know how much time we have left. So, if we can control pieces of our time and if money and spending money in certain areas allows us to control pieces of our time. Then this is fabulous. So for example, you hate mowing the law. You just don't like it. Well, when you mow the lawn, there's a piece of your life that you're not going to get back. So if it's an hour and a half or two hours or whatever it might be, and you don't enjoy. And you have a choice. Obviously, there are these things that we do that we have to do. We have no choice, but if mowing the lawn is something that you hate. Yeah, paying someone to mow the lawn. I mean, this is where you're literally buying time that you could spend then doing something that you really enjoy doing, playing with your kids or learning guitar or something like that. That’ll enhance your life satisfaction.

Evan Neufeld: Yeah, very interesting. There’s always a fine line there between a laziness as well too, that I always have to be careful with myself, but, yeah, the point is well taken. So, as people make more money. I've heard it said that, you know money only solves money problems. But lots of people have money problems. So is there kind of a balance or a point to which your happiness actually does increase with your income and does it plateau after that? Is this a diminishing returns type of thing? Or is it just, is there no correlation whatsoever.

Andrew Hallam: Yeah, it's an awesome question because you know, most people, in fact probably just about everybody. If you ask them, you know, do you want more income, regardless of how much money they make? They'll say yes. Ask them why and again, just like when I ask people why about anything that they do or want their answer will come down to life satisfaction. Somehow, it's going to solve something for them or make life better for them, even if they're a billionaire and you ask them, do you want to earn more money? They'll say, yes.  It's just, it's a really bizarre thing about human nature. But when it comes to income, as it relates to life satisfaction, of course, it does correlate to a point. So if you're really poor and you're struggling to make ends meet, then yes, more money will make you happy. So Richard Easterlin was one of the first really examined us and he started looking at how as income levels rose in the United States, happiness levels rose along with it.  But then there was a plateau and the most recent study was done by Purdue University. It's been replicated by so many studies and international, which I think is so fascinating. The most recent study at Purdue university suggested that the happiness satiation point was about $105,000/year. So that's the happiness satiation point at which added level of income did not increase levels of contentment.  But then what happens beyond that? It really interesting because once the income level hits $160,000 a year and more, life satisfaction trends downward. And of course, you know, somebody's listening to this might be earning 250 grand a year. And they might be really, really happy. They might say, well, Andrew, that's complete bunk, that's not me.  And I'll just respond with, well, that's your anecdotal situation. So you're one person and that's awesome if that doesn't affect you. But on aggregate, when we look at the research. These are the aggregate results. So, you know, this study was done in 132 different countries, and it was so consistent how happiness increased to a point with income, plateaued, and then eventually that income rule is further ended up dropping. And that was theorized, there are a couple of theories as to why. So why is it, is it more money itself that makes us miserable? The theory is that one, more money actually makes us more materialistic. So most people that we know who make more money, buy more stuff. So we don't know a lot of high-income people and we know that. I know a few and I'm sure, you know a few of really high income people who live in very simple homes and they don't drive anything extravagant. They don't live extravagantly, but those people are rare. There are most people who earn more, spend more. And again, as we talked about before, material acquisitions, don't enhance life satisfaction. There's a really strong correlation between higher levels of material and dissatisfaction and actual misery. So when you have more money, if you're spending more money to becoming more materialistic, the odds of life satisfaction, taking a downward trend are relatively high.

The second example, or the second theory behind this, and again, these are just theories. The second theory relates to time. So people earn high, generally work longer hours. They have jobs that put them in positions of high responsibility. There are levels of stress associated with that and if you're working longer hours, that means there's less time for you to exercise and we know that exercise boosts our mood. So there's less time to spend with our friends and family and we know that has the strongest correlation with life satisfaction, quality time that we spend with friends and family.

Evan Neufeld: So can we turn that last thought into a good news story at all? So like say you are in a typical high earning career and what if you come right out of college, right at that income plateau, and the only thing up from there is your income and your hours worked. Is this all a bad news story or what are some ways that we can actually turn greater income and career advancement into greater success? Or is that just one of those things that we have to adapt to?

Andrew Hallam: That's an awesome question and I like to bring in to compliment that some research done by economics professor named David Blanchflower.  He looked at happiness, general life satisfaction as U shaped, did a variety of different studies based on a world gallup polls of life satisfaction. And what they found was that people generally have two peaks of life satisfaction in terms of overall levels of happiness. One is early twenties and the second one is in their fifties.  And so the theory here, or at least one of the theories is that we have high expectations. When we're in our twenties, we have super high expectations of things we want. We think we can accomplish anything and then as we get a little bit older, obviously we end up getting more and more responsibility placed on us.  We have children, we have to save for our future, but also we end up falling short of some of those previous expectations, which kind of bum us out. We end up also falling victim to FOMO. We see people who have more than us. We see people doing better than we are. Theoretically, they drive nicer things or they're making more money or they're getting promoted and potentially we aren’t.   And I think when you look at things like Instagram and Facebook, that accelerates this, it perpetuates this idea that we're not measuring up. But then once we get a little bit older and we are in later forties and fifties, life satisfaction trend starts to increase. And a theory behind this, one of the big ones is that we get to a point in our early fifties where we say, screw that I'm going to be who I am.  So now this is what I like coming back to your question. I don't think we need to be in our early fifties to get to that point where we say to heck with what's expected of me. I'm going to be true to who I am. I'm going to recognize that material acquisitions don't enhance my life satisfaction.  I'm going to choose, I think I'm making $300,000 a year, but I'm going to choose not to pursue the latest Maserati every couple of years, because that's not going to enhance my life. Instead, I'm going to use that income and participate in pro social giving, helping other people out, buying experiences and bringing people together. If you have money, one of the cool things, I mean, not that I'm a gazillionaire, but one of the things that I've really enjoyed, I happen to have more money than my other siblings, but what I've enjoyed is bringing them to me.  So I'll be in a really cool spot, whether it's Thailand or Singapore, or here in Panama City and I'll fly family members to me and we'll do something super cool. Like we'll spend that money in a social way that enhances our relationships and it brings us together and it builds memories for us. And I think that people who are in high income bracket, when they start to recognize what it is that enhances their life satisfaction, and they start to shun some of those things perhaps, or temper some of those desires that they might have for things that don't enhance life satisfaction. Wow. You know, the world is the oyster for those people. They can end up living an awesome life. Right.

Evan Neufeld: Okay. So you kind of lead me into an interesting topic from there, which some people will take on a few extremes. So you know spending money on family and bringing family together and whatnot. I've got a young daughter at home and I want the best for her and whatnot. Do you find that there is good research talking about how you can give to your kids? Or should you actually be doing that? Should you kind of let them figure out the world on their own or what have you found in that regard?

Andrew Hallam: Yeah, there's a Chinese proverb suggesting that wealth doesn't pass three generations. One generation builds the wealth. The second generation maintains it and the third generation tends to squander it. And it's an ancient proverb that has actually stood the test of time. When you actually look at, let's just take the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, a vast majority of those people on that list are first and second generation wealthy.

Evan Neufeld: There’s no Vanderbilts or Rockefellers or they're not on there anymore.

Andrew Hallam: Exactly. Like life was made too easy for them. And so, you know, when I look at a sense of purpose, like when you're given everything and you don't feel like you've accomplished anything on your own, when you do that to a young person, when you do that to anybody, you actually deny them the satisfaction of accomplishment, which affects them in terms of their esteem. It affects their levels of resilience so that when things end up happening to them, that is negative, they have a harder time actually dealing with it. So if you do have money now, one of the things many people do is they look at the power of compound interest and they say, well, I'm going to set my son or daughter up with an account and I'm going to invest the money for them. The best tool we can give them is a tool of education and that let's teach them to be financially literate and show them how to make their own money. So that they can feel empowered and I think it's okay for parents to say kind of like a, like a US 401k plan where there's an incentive for people to save because your employer will match a percentage of what you're putting away.  And so I think it's okay for a parent to say, up to a point I mean, before the children adults, right? So they're still young. They have their job and the child likes to save. I think it's okay to say, you know, I will match a percentage of your contributions to an investment plan, but I won't fully contribute to it.  I think that's really, really important because it’s empowering.

Evan Neufeld: Yeah, that's interesting. I work with a number of clients on our RESP strategies and registered education savings plans for kids and there's a lot of different ways to do it. It's tough to not impose what I think would be good on some people, but also encouraging them that, you know, you can give them a lot without giving them the world, you know, and a lot of that is spending the time, like you said, to teach them kind of the pros and cons of doing some of the things on their own too.

So, Andrew, maybe we'll wrap up on this topic here. So if we're kind of going through someone's life cycle here, we talk about giving back to kids and whatnot, and happiness maybe peaking again in the fifties. What about retirement?  What are some ways that people can have a fulfilling retirement? Because that is one of the challenges that a lot of people have because they find their purpose and their identity, as we've alluded to before in their work, in their kids, in their kids' activities, even I'm a hockey dad, you know, like that kind of philosophy.  But then when the kids are out of the house, when they have their own kids, maybe you live in different places, you know, talking about retirement a little bit more and, and how we can be proactive about a fulfilling, successful retirement.

Andrew Hallam: Oh, I'm glad you asked that question because there are so many people who aspire so strongly to retire early.  If they have the financial resources that they want to set that goal, I want to retire early. And the research on this is compelling and somewhat frightening in that again, this is on aggregate. But if you retire early on aggregate people that retire early die early, and that was something that's really interesting.  And one of the things is that, and I'm not suggesting that people continue to work at a full-time job that they hate, but to dial it back and to continue to work part-time, is so important for our human longevity. The Japanese don't typically aspire to retire the way North Americans do. Japanese want to maintain what they call a sense of ikigai.

They want ikigai, which basically means a sense of purpose. So in Japan, they have more than 1600 silver haired employment centers. And these are places where older people of retirement age who have decided they're not going to work full time anymore as a doctor or full-time anymore as a lawyer, but they want to do something.  They earn a little bit of money, they stay involved in the community. They work with people of different age demographics. It keeps their minds active and gives them a reason to get up in the morning, even if it's just two or three days a week. So the research on this is so interesting in that when we look at things like Alzheimer's and Dementia, people who end up retiring early, on aggregate are the people that, and of course anyone can get Alzheimer's at any time. So that's not what I'm saying, like retire early and get Alzheimer's. But when we're looking at odds, the odds of getting it are higher, if you actually retire early, because we stop. Your brain is like a muscle and it has to be used. So I think on two different levels, working during retirement years, as long as we can and I say not, full-time not at what we hate. It's something we might enjoy doing, something we do part-time, it also alleviates a little financial stress for people because you and I both know, we see the headlines that tell people how much they're supposed to need to retire. Those numbers themselves are super dumb anyway, because it's like, where are you living? Do you have a defined benefit pension? I mean, some people like they don't need to save anything. Like, I mean, I know a lot of school teachers, school teacher friends of mine who pay off their house. They both got defined benefit pensions. How much they need for retirement. I'll tell you they need zero. They have an awesome, defined benefit pension, but that number is all over the place, but it freaks people out and it makes people think I need this set amount. And so what I really love about the idea too, of continuing to work, keeps your mind sharp. It helps you, on aggregate, research suggests helps you live longer, but it alleviates some financial stress too, because even if you're only earning $50,000 a month or sorry, yeah, I've never earned $50,000 bucks just for the record, even if you're only earning $50,000 a year. You know, if you're looking at an investment portfolio and let's say you're doing that kind of inflation adjusted 4% withdrawal rate, I think you need. And just, you know, top of my head, I think it needs something like, you know, $350,000 in an investment portfolio, something close to that to give you $15,000 of annual income went with trying and inflation adjusted 4% per year. So this alleviates so much for a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Yeah. So my recommendation is find something you're passionate about that you can do part-time and you can continue to do for as long as you can.

Evan Neufeld: I would probably agree. I've heard it said that going into retirement, you should try to have the mentality of retiring to something as opposed to retiring from something, you know, having a purpose throughout your retirement, whether I'm retiring to be a volunteer or, you know, something like that.  Even if it isn't for pay, like, I totally agree with you with the working for pay, but there's gotta be a purpose beyond watching the weather and playing golf every day. You know, it just doesn't happen for people. Right.

Andrew Hallam: Right. It gets old and volunteering is awesome because it's a form of pro social giving as well. So you can can see what you're doing to help other people. And this affects us on a cellular level. And that's what, when I dug into that research for my book, there's an awesome book. I'm going to give a plug for a book that I just referenced her primary research so often in my book, Marta Zaraska is a Canadian Polish science journalist living in France and she wrote a book called Are you growing younger? I believe it's called something like that. How to live, how to increase the odds of living to a hundred, but anyway, amazing book, but she referenced this a lot. So many of these studies on longevity and I thought, wow, it's so important to bring in those studies on longevity and happiness into that realm of personal finance.  Because again, why, you always have to ask the question why? Why are we doing what we're doing? Why do we have the plan that we have? And it will always boil down to life satisfaction.

Evan Neufeld: Awesome. That's a great way to end the interview here, Andrew. I'll give you one more opportunity to plug the book. What's the name of it? Where do we find it? And when does it come out?

Andrew Hallam: The book is called Balance, How to Invest and Spend for Happiness, Health and Wealth. You can find it at all major retailers online or brick and mortar stores. The official release date is January 18th.

Evan Neufeld: Awesome. Well, we'll just miss Christmas here, but maybe people can get a little IOU in their stockings for January 18th, but, looking forward to that coming out.  Thanks so much for joining me, Andrew. I really appreciate the conversation today.

Andrew Hallam: Thanks so much, I love talking about this. So thank you so much for giving me the opportunity on that. I really appreciate it.

Evan Neufeld: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Canadian Money Roadmap podcast. Any rates of return or investments discussed are historical or hypothetical and are intended to be used for educational purposes only. You should always consult with your Financial, Legal and Tax advisors before making changes to your financial plan. Evan Neufeld is a Certified Financial Planner and Registered Investment Fund advisor. Mutual funds and ETFs are provided by Sterling Mutuals Inc.