Five Financial Benchmarks to Achieve by Age 40

In this episode of the 'Retire Early Retire Now' podcast, certified financial planner and Palm Valley Wealth Management owner Hunter Kelly discusses the financial goals high-income earners should aim to meet by age 40. He explores benchmarks such as creating and tracking a financial plan, building an emergency fund, reducing consumer debt, saving three to five times annual income for retirement, and investing outside of retirement accounts. Kelly also offers actionable steps, including automating finances, prioritizing tax efficiency, increasing income, and avoiding lifestyle creep, to help listeners achieve these goals and gain financial flexibility in their 40s.

00:00 Introduction to Retire Early Retire Now Podcast

00:21 Challenges of the Thirties

01:55 Setting Financial Benchmarks for Age 40

05:01 Goal 1: Have a Financial Plan

08:32 Goal 2: Build an Emergency Fund

11:46 Goal 3: Eliminate Consumer Debt

16:25 Goal 4: Save for Retirement

20:22 Goal 5: Invest Outside Retirement Accounts

25:01 Actionable Steps to Achieve Financial Goals

33:03 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

0:00

And welcome to the Retire Early Retire Now podcast. I'm your host, hunter Kelly, certified financial planner and owner of Palm Valley Wealth Management, and I do this podcast every Tuesday morning to help high income earners maximize their wealth. And today we're gonna talk about five goals or five benchmarks that you should achieve to hit by age 40. Um, and so what brought this along my birthday was, uh, a few weeks ago and, uh, I started thinking about the thirties and how my 30 decade is going right. And I would say that the thirties are probably one of the most difficult times of my life. Yes. For those that are a bit older than me, you're probably laughing and saying, wait until you get to 40. Um, but, uh, thirties are difficult, right? And, uh, not just my own experience, but with my clients, uh, with friends and family that are kind of in the same age group and different demographic and things of that nature. Uh, they have all, uh, their own struggles and, and why it's difficult. But, uh, when you turn age 30 likely you're, you're still waiting on. That big jump in, increase in salary, maybe you're still kind of in that starter position, you're working your way up. Um, so you don't have as much cash flow. Or it could be that, Hey, we just got married, we're having kids. Um, now those kids are going to daycare. Uh, or my spouse or I decided to cut back on work or stop working so that we could stay home with the kids so we're losing income. Um, whatever those cases may be, you're buying homes. And so everywhere you look, it seems like, um, your friends are doing well and maybe you're not. So you're starting to compare yourself. And the temptation to keep up with the Joneses is, is fairly strong, right? You start making a little bit of money, but should you be actually spending that much money? And, and is lifestyle creep taking too much of your, your. Income increases as you achieve them. And so, um, what we'll talk about today is let's forget about what other people are doing. Let's talk about how to maximize your thirties, right? Let's look at some key benchmarks that we should be hitting so that, you know, um. At age 40, hey, I'm on track to meet these goals. Right? Or at least I'm making progress.'cause it can, it can be tough, right? Even if you're making a very healthy salary, 2, 3, 4,$500,000 a year, a million dollars a year. Um, if you don't have benchmarks to compare yourself against your. Your previous self or your past self, then it may be difficult to seem like you are making progress, um, because you're comparing maybe someone else's situation that you know a good bit about. If, if you're friends with them or whatever, um, but you don't know their whole situation, right? Sometimes. Uh, their situation can be a little bit different. Maybe they have a lot more debt than you do. Um, and that's how they're able to maybe spend a little bit more, maybe they're not as good with their money or maybe they have, um, some sort of trust fund, right? That they get, uh. Uh, income off of each year that maybe they don't disclose to you. Um, or maybe they're making more, uh, than they, than they lead on, right? There's tons of situations. Everybody's situation is different. So the only thing that you can control is, is uh, the things that you can control, right? And so hitting these benchmarks or something that you can say, Hey, this is what I should be hitting. By age 40, uh, to know that I'm progressing right? And so most people don't wanna work forever. They want flexibility. Um, and as you get into your forties, maybe you want to cut back on work or switch to a job that is more fulfilling, but less money. Um, and so hitting these key five goals or benchmarks. Will help you get there and honestly reduce stress. If you can look at these benchmarks and assess them every year or twice a year and see that you're making progress, uh, that will give you a, a bit more, uh, peace of mind to, uh, where you are financially. So in this episode, you're gonna learn, uh, and we're gonna break down these five financial benchmarks that you should be hitting by age 40. Ideally, uh, and how to get there. Uh, and most importantly, give you some actionable items, uh, to assess if you're on track or not. And even if you're, maybe you're a little bit older and, and you're right around the corner to 40 and maybe you're already 40, these are still some great benchmarks to, uh, compare your, your past financial self to, uh, your future financial self, right? And so all we're doing is creating a baseline, right? Find that zero, find that baseline, and. As we move forward, use that baseline as our comparison versus your neighbors down the street, your friends down the street, um, and their situation being different. That would be like comparing apples to oranges, right? Or going in and getting blood work and comparing your blood work to somebody else when you're. Your situation, your health situation's completely different. So let's jump right into, uh, the first goal to hit, right? Um, and I don't, I guess this is not necessarily a goal, but a benchmark, but have a plan, right? Have a way to track your plan, right? Because if you want to become financially independent at some point, whether that be in your forties, fifties, or sixties, you need to have some sort of plan. And that plan may not be. Uh, Uber clear, right? Or, um, you may not have exact numbers, especially in your thirties. If you say, Hey, I wanna retire by age 60, you may not have an exact number, but what you can do is you can start to dial down how much percentage wise, maybe I should be saving for retirement. Um, am I making progress on my debt? Maybe I have student loan debts or credit card debt, or whatever that case may be, right? We wanna have a clear plan so that we can track, uh, what we're going to be, um, trying to achieve over the next foreseeable future, right? So have a clear financial plan that aligns or is aligned with your goals, uh, whether that be early retirement work flexibility or financial independence, right? So what, what are the values that you and your family have? Um, and, and. Creating a plan around those values. So if you value charitable giving, if you value you time with your family, so maybe that would call for cutting back on work, whatever that is, define that. And now we can start to say, okay, from these goals, what is that going to take financially, uh, to get there and achieve those goals? So understand your work optional number, right? And so how much cash do I need in retirement or investments or. Um, what do I need to be able to cut back on work? Or what do I need to be able to retire? Whatever that goal is, right? And then track your savings rate. So we want to track things like our savings rate, our debt to income ratio. So how much of our income is going to debt versus going to spending or savings or anything of that nature. Um, what are our investment returns, right? If we know that we need a 8% on average each year, are we achieving that? Are we taking enough risk? Are we taking too much risk to achieve those investment returns? Um, and then have an idea of what we think our projected expenses are. And yes, these will change periodically. You'll have emergencies or you'll change your goals, whatever that may be, which we'll talk about here in a second. But have an idea if you know that you like to go on vacations. Once or twice or four times a year or more, have those projected into what you think you'll spend every year. And this will help you back into what you think your work optional number is, your retirement number is, and then it will ultimately give you a number that you need to save. Right? And we will, again, we'll talk about, um, most of this here in just a second. And so, um, consider working with a financial advisor to stress test this if you're like. I don't know what a savings rate is. I don't know how to calculate that. I know I put some stuff in my 401k or 4 0 3 B and my IRA every, every month or whatever that case may be. Um, I don't know if I, my debt is actually healthy or too much debt, or how do I pay off these student loans, whatever that may be. Get some professional help, right? Um, that's the easiest way. And they can start to help build those systems, build that track to help you, um, put these things in place so that you can track them over time. And so one of the things I see most people in their thirties fail to do is build a emergency fund. A proper emergency fund, right? And so this will be number two, have a fully funded emergency fund. And this is one of the first things you want to do, uh, in your thirties, right? Uh, is have somewhere between three to six months worth of cash and a high yield savings account, a money market account, something that is fully liquid. So that. When you blow a transmission or, uh, you have something bust in your house, your dryer breaks or whatever the case is, you don't have to dip into your Roth IRA or your retirement accounts or other long-term investments to, uh, fund these sorts of things, right? Always have that little bit of extra cash three to six months so that, um. You're not pulling out of your long-term investments of emergency fund, again, provides financial security in case of job loss, unexpected medical expenses, and other unforeseen uh, circumstances. So keep this fund separate. I would almost, most of the time I tell people to put it in a different bank, like make it di somewhat difficult to get to. Um, especially with, uh, most people have credit cards and, and, uh. A lot of people or a lot of financial gurus are against credit cards. I like credit cards for a couple of different reasons and we won't get into that now, but most expenses you'll be able to put on the credit card and then go to that other bank account a couple days later, get that cash out and pay the credit card bill off. Um, and so keep that emergency fund maybe at a different bank or. Uh, in maybe a brokerage account with a, a better interest rate, uh, wherever you can find that high interest rate. Right? And then make it difficult to get to. So it's not tempting to go, well, we do have 20 grand in here. We can go ahead and buy this car. Well, that's actually your emergency fund, so we wanna leave that alone. The other thing that people fail to do, um, and it kind of sneaks up on them, is, uh, increase that emergency fund each, each year likely right. Your expenses are gonna go up just because of inflation. Uh, as you kind of increase your lifestyle, you may be, uh, spending more, right? You buy a bigger house or a nicer car. You have kids and daycare and, and all, all the things that are involved with that, and your expenses will gradually creep up. So if your three to six months was$15,000 right, and you felt comfortable, well five years later when you add in kids and all the things I just talked about. It may be 20 or$25,000. So each year need to assess what does my emergency fund really need to be worst case scenario, right? And if you're self-employed and you have varied, uh, income, right? Uh, we wanna make sure that we have a larger emergency fund. So if you're in sales or your, a bunch of your commissions based off of, uh. Sales and things of that nature, right? We wanna make sure that we have a higher one. If you're a government employee or um, something that's salaried and you feel pretty confident that you'll have that job long term, you can go a little bit less, right? So from that three to six. Uh, the next thing that I would, uh, make sure that I'm working toward is to become debt free, at least consumer debt, right? If you have a mortgage, we can talk about that, but, uh, high interest debt. One of the worst things you can do is start to build up credit card debt. Uh, generally these interest rates are anywhere from 18 to 30%, right? And so on a thousand dollars, you're gonna be paying. Uh, 180 to$300 over a year on that thousand dollars. So if you compound that to$10,000,$20,000, it can easily add up to thousands of thousands of dollars just in interest to these credit card companies. So we wanna make sure that credit cards, uh, credit cards, auto loans, personal loans, all of this, uh, is starting to get paid off. And by 40 it's either paid off or you have some sort of plan. The biggest thing that you want to make sure that you're keeping low is that debt to income ratio. If you, 30 to 40% of your income is going to credit card bills, student loans, personal loans, HELOCs, things of that nature. Then that's going to take away from your ability to save and honestly continue to increase your lifestyle because you're paying this debt, right? And so in your thirties, if you have things like credit card bills, student loans, things of that nature, you need to really create a plan to get some of that stuff paid down. So as you pay that down now, the amount of money or amount of income going to debt, uh, is starting to dwindle. And if you can get that down to under 10%. You are doing a fantastic job. You're, you're better than most, right? So less than 10% of your income going to debt each month, consumer debt to each month, uh, would be ideal. Um, and best case scenario obviously would be zero. And then if you have student loans, again, have a clear payoff strategy. If you're. If you have student loans and you are on some sort of forgiveness plan, like the public service loan, forgiveness plan, things of that nature, you may not wanna pay it off early because you know you're gonna get forgiven, but you have a clear plan in that, uh, scenario, right? Um, but outside of that, we wanna make sure that we're getting that paid off. So again, that we're having more of our income freed up to go to lifestyle, not just to save for retirement and be retirement poor, but. Go to lifestyle, um, and then also be able to save a little bit more as well. And so as far as your mortgage, we just want to keep our mortgage. Um, so our principal interest taxes, uh, our kind of monthly bills that maintain the house, we wanna keep that under 28% of our income, right? Ideally, we, I would like to see it a little bit lower than that just because, uh, you can get in a situation where. Things get expensive and, and, and again, you just don't want to be house poor. You don't want to have most of your income going to paying for a house, especially maybe you wanna travel and if you don't think about step one or goal one, being, being able to track this type of stuff and, and see progress and you, and you don't have a goal in mind. And next thing you know, you buy an expensive house and it's. 30, 35% of your income and now you feel like you can't do anything'cause your cash flow is, is low because you're paying the mortgage and taxes and, and all of these sorts of things. Um, it just makes it difficult to, to do other things. If, if your priority is to travel, then maybe you want to not buy as big of a house, um, that the, the mortgage lender says you can get because you have other goals. So keep that, uh, debt to income ratio low. Right. Now we still, by age 40, we want to have a plan to see that house get paid off. But, um, for the most part, properties real estate is an appreciating asset. So, um, having that mortgage is not necessarily a terrible thing. Um, with interest rates rising and still being around six and a half, seven, seven and a half percent, depending on credit and what bank you use and things of that nature. You may wanna look at potentially paying that down, uh, a little bit early. Um, just because you, you're starting to get into, uh, the, the return that you could probably get in your investments versus what you're saving on. The interest paying off is starting to. Lean more toward let's get this mortgage paid off, uh, quicker. There's less risk, uh, than having to go out and try to find a higher return somewhere else, right? And so, uh, consider that now. Number four, uh, having three to five times your annual income saved for retirement. Now, that does not mean having all of that in a 401k or IRA, things of that nature, ideally from a tax standpoint and. Uh, how those investments will grow, that, uh, the vast majority should be in that. But if you want to retire early, things of that nature, you need to find a good optimal balance between what's in my 401k and IRAs and things of that nature. And then what's in maybe a brokerage account, which we'll talk about here in a second, right? So a good benchmark would be to have at least three to five times your annual salary by age 40, right? And so if you did a good job in your twenties. You're gonna need to save less per year, um, to get to that number. Um, now if you've did not do a good job in your twenties or maybe your, your income just wasn't, uh, didn't have an ability to save that much in your twenties, and now you finally graduated at residency or became a partner at your law firm, whatever the case may be, your business took off. Uh, now we can start to save and most of the upfront. Uh, money that's gonna come from those accounts are your contributions. So the biggest return rate of return that you can get, which I guess technically is not a rate of return, but the biggest return that you can get on your money is just putting more money in there and getting a into a, a, a great portfolio, right? Um, and so as you kind of work to your, to your forties, um, you'll start to see that compounding interest toward 38, 39, 40 start to really take over. If you've been investing for, let's say. 10, 15 years at this point, right? And so that's where we start to see that three to five. So if you're in that 15 to 20% of your income, going to various accounts like your 4 0 1 KIR, a Roth IRA, um, brokerage accounts, then you should likely be hitting that three to five times your salary. Um, and so. Uh, we wanted to take advantage of your employer match, so we don't wanna forget that. That's the most important thing. That really is a hundred percent of whatever they match up to. So if they match 4%, if you put in 4%, they give you 4%. That's a hundred percent on returning your money. So we don't wanna miss that. Um, and then there obviously is tax advantages to putting into your 401k, whether that be Roth or pre-taxed. Um, so getting the deduction now or having it tax free later, whatever that case may be. And then depending on your, your income, consider a backdoor Roth. Um, there's all kinds of strategies that, that we've talked about, but the, the biggest thing here is we want to try to achieve three to five times our salary. This will give you so much flexibility in your forties and fifties, um, having, doing the heavy lifting upfront, I know early in your thirties, especially if you have a young family and daycare and all those things is very tough. Do what you can do upfront because it's gonna pay dividends literally and figuratively later on in life to give you more flexibility. How easy is it going to be if you have several hundred thousand dollars in a brokerage account or your IRAs and things of that nature to go, oh, I can slow down. Versus feeling behind because you didn't do some of this stuff up front. And so make sure that you are at least doing something early on in your thirties. And as those daycare fees drop off and your income continues to increase that each time you're kind of adding, whether that's percentage wise or dollar wise to these accounts so that you're, you're, uh, getting to the point where you're getting to that 15 to 20% of your income. And then ideally, like I said, we want to get to that three to five times your annual salary. Or annual income, uh, saved for retirement. And then last but not least, number five. This is the most underrated part of, uh, being in your thirties, or not being in your thirties, but kind of financially is investing outside of retirement accounts. If you want ultimate flexibility in your forties, having a taxable brokerage account is going to give you that, uh, flexibility. So how do I do that, right? If you're saving 20% of your income into a 401k or an IRA, why would you not consider taking two to three or four, potentially 5% of that, that savings? So 5% of your income and putting it into a brokerage account. Now we can label it as a long-term investment. We can still be aggressive. We don't have to touch it. Yes. Is it gonna be a little less tax efficient than it would be in your 401k or IRA? Of course. But being able to build that up, uh, will give you so much more flexibility in your forties and fifties. Uh, because if you have, let's say you have 2, 3, 4 years worth of. Of, uh, investments or expenses in that account when you're 43, 44, 45, whatever. Um, and you wanna start a business, well, now I know I have a three year runway to get this business started. Um, or I wanna take a sabbatical with my, my kids because they're graduating high school and I wanna go. Uh, travel around America or Europe or, or, or maybe they're in athletics and they, they're playing at whatever, uh, state university, right? You can go see their games. And so having this taxable brokerage account is gonna give you a ton of flexibility. You don't have to worry about the 59 and a half rule and tax penalties and all this. Now, will you owe taxes as you sell those holdings off and things of that nature? Yes. But it's going to be. At a preferential rate. So either a zero, depending on your income, a zero rate, a 15% rate, or a 20% rate. Um, and there's ways that you can mitigate some of that along the way, like we talked about in my last po last week's podcast episode, uh, with direct index investing. So you can do things like tax loss, harvesting, asset location, um, different types of bonds that you can utilize for tax efficiency. So, um, the biggest thing is having it in this. Taxable brokerage account so that you'll have, um, flexibility down the road. Now the only caveat to that is if what you need to save, let's say you're 15 to 20%, um. Is is north of what you can actually contribute to, um, your IRAs and 4 0 1 Ks and things of that nature. Then you may want to earmark some of this brokerage account for long term and not want to touch it until you officially retire. But. If you can kind of bucket those things out. We talk about three bucket system all the time on this, uh, podcast. There's a great episode called, uh, three Bucket Strategy. Go check it out. But if you can kind of bucket these things out, maybe you have a brokerage account that is specific for, Hey, in my sixties and seventies, this is what this account is for. And then this other brokerage account is more for. My forties and fifties to go start that business or slow down so I can, uh, go travel with my kids or go see them in college when they're, they're playing athletics or whatever, the number of things that, that you want to do. Right? And so again, investing in an outside brokerage account, outside of retirement is going to give you the most flexibility, uh, to doing some of these things in your forties. And, and the key here again, just like when we talked about saving for retirement. Is do it earlier. The earlier the better you. Uh, you're gonna reap the benefits of that compounding interest. Um, and you're gonna get in the habit. It's just gonna become another thing that you do. It's gonna be like your property tax that you pay every year that you do, maybe you gripe about, but you do it because you have to, right? And you're gonna, you're at least gonna read the benefit of the, the brokerage account and the retirement accounts because you'll have, uh, be able to use that in retirement. And so now. Those are the benchmarks that we want to hit, right? We wanna have a plan. We wanna be able to track that plan. We wanna build an emergency fund. We wanna work on our debt to get it under our consumer debt. Under 10% of our income going to debt each month, we wanna have three to five times our annual income saved. Four retirement by the time we are 40. And then in that time, hopefully open up a brokerage account so that we can have more flexibility in our forties and fifties. So, um, yes, I can tell you to do these things, but how do we do'em? What are some actionable item items that we can do to get there? What are the steps that we need to take? So the first thing that I find that most people, um, can easily do is just automate these savings or automate your finances. Set up automatic contributions, and so everybody's on a different level. So if that means setting up an automatic contribution to a different bank account. For a few hundred dollars a paycheck or whatever that may be, to get you to having that fully funded emergency fund. And that's what you need to do and automate it. Forget about it. It's just again, another bill. Uh, maybe you're kind of past that. Maybe you already have a fully funded emergency fund, but you haven't opened up that brokerage account. Make that automated, whether that's a percentage of your income or a specific dollar amount. Get that going and then you can reassess that. Every few months, two times a year, every year. And then you increase it as needed, or maybe you back it off as needed. Maybe expenses get high for a short amount of time, right? And so increase these annually. And then as, as your income increases. And if you do that, let's say you're 32, 33, even 34, you do that for the next four or five, six years. You put your head down, you pick a, uh, keep it stupid simple, and pick some ETFs. Which is not my advice, but, um, could be a good plan for you. You pick a good portfolio and you pick your head up and you're gonna have a, a surprisingly more money than you would think, um, in those accounts, right? At first it's gonna feel like these accounts are not growing. And then once your investments take over that compounding interest, you'd be very surprised on, uh, what you can achieve in that four or five, six years, right? The next thing is prioritize tax efficiency, right? If you're hitting these goals, if you're automating your investments, then we want to make sure, um, that we're kind of minimizing again, what we can control. I can't control what the market does year to year, um, but I can control from a state, from, I control mostly what my taxes will be, right? And so are we maxing out our tax advantage accounts if it makes sense for us. Including employer sponsored plans, IRAs, Roth IRAs, um, are we making sure that the brokerage account that we open, uh, is optimized for tax efficiency? Are we taking advantages of tax loss harvesting? Are we making sure that we're not in mutual funds and maybe we're in ETFs or single holdings depending on. What your situation calls for so that you can minimize taxes on the long term, right? We're not just looking for a few extra deductions each year. We're thinking about, Hey, how does this help us year over year for the the next 10, 15, 20 years so that we can save not a few thousand this year, but we can save hundreds of thousands over our lifetime? Because as I say all the time in this podcast, your biggest expense is not gonna be your mortgage. Your biggest expense is not gonna be your kids. Your biggest expense is gonna be Uncle Sam. And so we want to do what we can within the laws of the IRS and the tax code, uh, to minimize that as much as possible. Um, number four, action item is focus on increasing your income, especially early on in your thirties. I hear a lot of people complain about, oh, I don't have cashflow. I don't have this or that. The easiest way to negate that. The caveat, as long as you don't have bad spending habits, increase your income, whether that's, uh, getting a side job for, uh, a period of time to pay off some debt, um, or just get asking for a promotion or going to a competitor and getting a raise because, uh, your, your current job won't give you that raise. Right? Do the things that you need to do to create more income. And then once you take that income, it's not, Hey, let's go spend it on a new pool or a new car, or things of that nature. Put it towards your goals, right? So whether that's increasing your savings, paying down debt, just funding an emergency fund, whatever that may be, we want to really focus, especially from age 30 to 35, your main focus after you automate those savings should be let's hone in and figure out a way to increase our income. Faster than the rate of inflation. So whether that be 10% a year, 20% a year, 30% a year, whatever that is, uh, by creating a business or, um, getting some sort of new degree or whatever that case may be. Focus on income, uh, increasing your income that's going to to help you the most. Right. And that's the thing that you can control. You can't, you can't control, like, you can't go out and hope that you find the next Amazon or Google or Apple. Yeah. Some people may get lucky on that. But the vast, the, the thing that you can ultimately control is investing in yourself and going in, out, and, and creating value in the world. And that, that world, that market will give you money back for that value, right? And so, whether that's being an engineer or a doctor, or an attorney, whatever that may be, um, investing yourself and increase your income, especially early on in your thirties when you have the time and energy. As your kids get older, as you get older, you may not have that time and energy. So focus, focus, focus on increase in your income. And then the last thing, the most sneaky thing. I've created a whole podcast episode on this. Avoid lifestyle creep as much as you can. It is really easy. You spend all that time, you focus and you increase your income is really easy to go buy that fancy car. Go buy a big house that maybe you shouldn't have. Um, things of that nature. And now you're making double what you were making. Maybe you're making 150,002 years ago, now you're making 300,000, but you've increased your lifestyle and such that you're literally saving the same dollar amount that you were three years ago, right? So as your income increases, create a plan to go, okay, I increased my income 50%. Well, a portion of that 50% needs to go to savings. So that when you turn 40, again, you have that flexibility, you have that financial freedom, and you create a way, um, you, you just create more flexibility, right? And so, um, the last thing and kind of bonus here, track this stuff, track it, track it, track it. Whether you gotta hire a financial advisor, whether you, you have to track it yourself and create spreadsheets. Whatever you gotta do. Track this stuff so that when you look at it on January 1st, 2025. Versus, uh, July 1st, 2025 versus January 1st, 2026, you should see progress. Whether that's a little bit of progress or a lot of bit of progress, you want to see progress, um, and this is how you stop feeling behind, right? Again, I work with very high income earners, very modest earners, and they, generally speaking, those, those earners that are in their thirties, they feel behind because they're not comparing themselves. Against what they've done the last couple of years. They were comparing themselves against their friends that maybe make a little bit more, or had less debt coming outta school. So they, they were able to save a little bit more, whatever that their situation was different. And so compare yourself against yourself. Track that. Um, whether that's two times a year is three times a year. And if you're feeling like, oh, that's a lot of stuff I gotta do and track, and I'm not sure. Uh, how I want to do this and, and I just need help find a financial advisor. That's what I do. I help people, high income earners, uh, kind of work their way and help them have that peace of mind that they are on track, they are achieving or working toward their retirement goal, their, um, whatever goal that they want, helping their kids in college later on down the road. And so, uh, the best way to, to reach me if, if it's something that you want to do, is. Go to Palm Valley wm.com. You can schedule a call. You can see my process. I call it the Palm Valley Pathway. Um, it's, I've been doing this for 10 years and it is, uh, a process that I've refined year over year, uh, to make it efficient for you and to make it most valuable, uh, for you guys as well. So, uh. If you feel that you need help, go ahead and go to Palm Valley. Do wm.com, schedule a time. If not, uh, hopefully you like this episode, and if you did, go ahead and leave a five star review on your favorite podcasting app. And if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe to my channel and like this video, uh, and we'll see you in the next one. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not meant to be financial, legal or tax advice. Please seek a professional about your specific situation. Key Palm valley wealth management in mind when making those considerations.