Join Al Smith as he explores the inspirations from Atul Gawande’s insightful books, ‘Being Mortal’ and ‘The Checklist Manifesto’. This episode underscores the necessity of long-term planning and the practical use of checklists to navigate the intricacies of retirement. With examples from real-world scenarios, Al highlights the importance of structured planning to ensure a joyful and secure future while offering valuable insights into comprehensive retirement preparation.
Welcome to Retirement Unpacked with Al Smith, owner of Golden Eagle Financial. You want a retirement plan that alleviates your fears about the future so you know your money will last. As a chartered financial consultant, Al Smith will help you find a balance between the risk and reward of the market and the safety of your retirement income. And now, here’s your host, Al Smith.
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Welcome to another program of Retirement Unpacked. I want to thank you for tuning in. I’m sure there’s other things you could be doing. There’s a lot going on in the world. It’s the big announcement of President Trump’s tariffs, and there’s some uncertainty in the markets as a result of that, but I think the best thing is to wait and see what happens. As far as your own circumstances, that we need to look beyond certain events that are taking place over short periods of time and look for the long haul. look for what’s going to happen in the future not because of economic circumstances or political circumstances but what are you going to do to plan to make your future a little bit better Create a future so that it’s not dependent on financial resources, but it’s dependent on what you choose to do to make your life a bit more fulfilling, a bit more full of joy. There’s an author whom I really like to read. I’ve read a couple of his books, and I found that actually two of his books are tremendously helpful to people as they get closer to retirement. One of them is especially helpful to people who may be caring for an aged parent, or maybe providing a place for an aged parent. The author is named Atul Gawande. He is a cardiologist who lives in Boston, and he is second generation from India. His father was born in India. Their family moved to the United States. And when Atul Gawande’s father began to age, He began that search to look for what’s the best arrangement for him. Where should he live? How can we make certain that his needs will be taken care of? And it’s in the form of this search that Dr. Atul Gawande began to realize that for all of the wonderful things that our country has done, the tremendous things in technology and growth of the economy and education, all the wonderful things we’ve done in our country, we don’t do a great job caring for our elderly, which is what he discovered. And his book called Being Immortal is a story about the path that he went on when he learned of the difficulties finding a suitable place for his father when his father began to not be able to take care of himself very well at about age 85 and so forth and the book is full of amazing examples including one example of like the leader of the village in India and and how he was highly regarded, even though he was like 100 years old or something like that. But this book I highly recommend if you are either a caregiver or if you have parents for whom you may be looking for a suitable arrangement, either have someone to come in and help with them, or you may have a parent who’s transitioning from living in a retirement community independently to a more appropriate arrangement where there can be certain services that they used to provide for themselves or perhaps you used to provide it. And so I believe you’d find it tremendously interesting. Anyone who has worked in that field would find it tremendously interesting also. And again, the name of that book is Being Mortal by Dr. Atul Gawande. But what I was going to talk about today on today’s program is another book that he has written, which I find tremendously helpful for many folks, not just people who are planning for retirement, But this book is called The Checklist Manifesto. It’s also written by Atul Gawande. Obviously, that’s what I made mention of. And he, as a cardiac surgeon, obviously had to go through certain checklists, and he began to realize that the life that most of us live is very complex. We do extraordinary things, and we can predict storms, explore distant planets, and save people from life-threatening diseases. And yet, in spite of that, People make very avoidable mistakes. People who are highly skilled. Biggest example I can think of recently is when President Trump and his cabinet members were meeting in what they thought was a… A secret, a clandestine chat, a text chat on the app Signal, and yet there was a journalist present. And he was certainly not entitled to be there, but he was there anyway. And people make mistakes. But the whole point of his book is that the reason that knowledge and complexity in many fields, it’s exceeded the capacity of everybody to get everything right. And we, when I say we, I mean people who have certain complexities as part of what they do in their occupations. We’re under pressure to get things right. And sometimes it becomes difficult to get things right. And in his book, he really dives deeply into how checklists work and why they can be important. And I think the bottom line of the book is that things that we do that require a great amount of skill are also, because of all the steps and everything else about that, in that nature, because of those complexities, a checklist almost becomes mandatory. I have one of my channels that I watch on television is the Smithsonian Channel, and it has some very interesting programs. It has some programs about flying over all 50 states and some of the interesting things historically about each state. I find that interesting, especially with the aerial flyovers of various states. But they also have a show about air disasters. Now air travel is extremely safe there are literally millions and millions of people who travel by air every day and serious accidents are rare but they are often the result of human failure and in watching the smithsonian channel and also referring to atul gawande’s um book the importance of checklists is incredible there are so many minuscule things that can go wrong with an aircraft that pilots and co-pilots they have a manual and each manual has a checklist for anything that could possibly go wrong and these aren’t obviously things that they can memorize but they’re things that need they need to go through in the event something goes wrong with the aircraft. And some of the episodes that I have seen, the crash was the result of skipping some items on a checklist. And in spite of how negligent that may seem, that’s occasionally the result of a very serious air crash. But I think what’s incredibly important is that we can draw lessons from things that have happened in the past where a checklist perhaps should have been used, but for one reason or another, it wasn’t. In medicine, for example, an Israeli study showed that the average ICU patient, ICU in the hospital, of course, required 178 actions or procedures each day. And I can only imagine of… the potential for errors when there’s 178 actions, all that would be necessary for something to go wrong or for the patient to get sick or something of that nature is for one of those tasks to be either skipped or done improperly or something like that. And the reason checklists are important is our memory, we can only remember about six or seven things. If you really train your memory, you can learn more if you learn certain tricks and so forth. In order to take the complex and break it down into things that are simple, that’s where checklists become incredibly important. And that’s one of the few ways that we can manage complexity. And that’s a great deal of… What the book covers, managing complexity and using checklists isn’t the only thing, but I think one of the more important things also is who designs the checklists, who creates the checklists. The three major components that Atul Gawande talks about in his book, the three areas, are medicine, aviation, and construction. And in the case of aviation, we talked about the checklists a little bit and how important they are. And I think one of the main ones that I recall from watching one of their episodes is when flaps and strats, those are things that attach to the wings that raise and lower in order to give aircraft more lift so that they can take off and land at a slower speed. And there is clearly a checklist for every takeoff that those be lowered. Flaps and slats are lowered. And one of the episodes I saw, they weren’t lowered. And under those circumstances, a plane can never take off. And in the ensuing investigation, there was chatter in the cockpit and there were distractions and the checklist didn’t go through. So rather than being 100% on task, they were distracted. They avoided the checklist. and the plane crashed. More about checklists after the break, and we can also take a look at how they can work to make your retirement or your preparation for retirement work a little bit better on your behalf.
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Retirement planning with Golden Eagle Financial isn’t about products or spreadsheets. It’s about you. Al Smith spends more time listening than talking when he meets with clients. He understands that before he can build a strategy, he must understand the person for whom it’s designed, fears, dreams, wants, needs, and comfort with risk. That’s why clients trust Al Smith with comprehensive retirement planning, from pensions and Social Security to owning property or donating time and money. al wants to know the things you really want to do with your money in retirement once he understands you he will use tools to help you understand different scenarios to fine-tune your plan al smith says it’s easy once he knows someone the planning is simple call al smith of golden eagle financial if you’re ready to make your dream a reality No pressure, no upfront cost. Just a conversation and a unique plan crafted for you. Find Golden Eagle Financial on the KLZ Advertiser’s page to start the relationship your nest egg deserves. Investment advisory services offered through Brookstone Capital Investment LLC, a registered investment advisor. BCM and Golden Eagle Financial Limited are independent of each other. Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM, but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents.
SPEAKER 01 :
welcome back to retirement unpacked we were talking about atul gawande’s book the checklist manifesto i read it and i’ve read it more than once and i found it incredibly interesting and there’s quite a few reasons that checklists are important the obvious reason is the example I was giving in aviation. Aviation is so complex that when something goes wrong, the only way to troubleshoot that problem, whatever it is, is by using a checklist. And also checklists are extremely important in every flight because the procedures they go through are complex. There’s a lot of those procedures. And if even one is skipped, that can result in disaster. Now, some other reasons besides complexity that checklists are important is that people have a tendency to become distracted. and people can often be forgetful. And sometimes when people are doing things over and over, it’s easy to skip a step of something. Now, depending on what your work involves, that may not be disastrous, but in the fields of aviation, construction, and medicine, they’re obviously extremely important. important. One of the things that they offer or one of the things that’s done in aviation is for nearly everything, there is redundancy. So that means if some particular step is forgotten and it creates a danger to the aircraft, there’s often an alarm that goes on. But if you’re baking a cake, there’s really no alarms that go off. And if the cake has 14 ingredients, but you relied on your memory, let’s say, and you only used 13 ingredients, and you don’t understand why the cake has not risen. It’s kind of like a brick in the oven. Well, you may have forgotten to add the baking powder or the baking soda, which causes it to rise. Now, that’s not a disaster when it comes to baking a cake, but if your task is sending a rocket into space in order to rescue astronauts, that involves a great deal of complexity. And the way that can be done with NASA or with Lockheed Martin or any of those if it’s broken down further into its component parts so that each task is broken down into its own checklist so that there are checks and balances so that those complex tasks can be accomplished. And I think if we look at our own successes or failures, those things that worked out best would be where we had a specific structure. And you may not have thought to yourself that you did create a checklist, but you probably did create some kind of a checklist or a to-do list or something like that. Now, if we break this down and see, well, how does that work for retirement? Well, if you’re 15 years from retirement, a checklist is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s less urgent than an overall general plan. I think the time at which a checklist could be Extremely important is if someone is making a transition from work to retirement because there are certain time crunches that are involved there. People have certain time frames during which they need to make a change in their company’s retirement plan. Any other changes that people make when making that transition from work to retirement, that would be a good time for a more specific checklist. And the checklist can include a timeline. Some things have a certain amount of urgency and other things not so much. So as we sit back and think about checklists, how can they benefit us? well if you have a longer period to prepare for retirement i think what would make sense is to crunch some numbers sit down with your advisor and take a look at what’s it going to look like if i save this amount of money every month and if i do that for 30 years How much will my nest egg be? Well, these are computations that you can certainly do. But I think what would be good is to put those into context. In other words, that might amount to a significant sum, maybe $1.2 million or something like that. But to put that into context, let’s take a look at what your expenses are now. and add an inflation factor, and then you may realize that $1.2 million may be adequate, but if you want to do some extensive traveling or anything of that nature, you may want to readjust that because 30 years from now, that may be adequate for a certain standard of living. But if your standard of living includes travel and some other things, you may want to readjust your level of savings. So what other ways can we benefit from checklists? Well, let’s say if you want to improve your health, what I would do is I would create my own checklists with what things that I want to do to improve my health. If there are certain supplements that you believe you should be taking and you’re not, check with your physician or your doctor. whoever provides your care. And ask him or her about that. If you’re trying to lose a little bit of weight, use a checklist for that. And that may include a little more exercise, a little bit fewer sweets, things of that nature. But my whole point is that Atul Gawande’s book, and I would highly recommend it. There’s one chapter about how Walmart did a fantastic job helping right after Katrina took place when the government hadn’t hardly stepped in at all. They did some enormous things for the folks who were suffering from Katrina long before FEMA and any of the federal government assistance was there to help out. And in that case, it wasn’t an example of a checklist, but it was an example of helping right at the very base tactical ground level rather than from 30,000 feet where the bureaucracies often reside. So what does that mean for all of us who are listening today? How can we benefit from a checklist? Well, sit back and think about some things that you’ve done in the past that went really well. and contrast that to some things in your past that you think about maybe didn’t go too well. And what I think you’ll find is that the things that didn’t go as well as you wanted may have not included enough planning maybe there wasn’t enough thinking about what if this happens or what if that happens some alternative to scenarios to the one that you were hoping to plan i’ve heard some stories of people wanting to get certain projects done and they hadn’t allowed for certain contingencies and sometimes a checklist if it’s everything is within your power to do everything on the checklist then success is far more likely but if the checklist includes the cooperation of others or some governmental entities or something of that nature, then the checklist can become a guideline rather than something that can really work solid to help your project get going. Now, if you’re concerned about your own retirement because with the things that are going on in the world with economic uncertainty, with how long the medical community is keeping us alive, I think it’s really important to sit down and take a look at your own retirement, your own plan, and see if you are on track. And we can use in part a checklist for that, but we can also run some numbers to see if you were on track. And I know a lot of the people who come into my office when we have a conversation, we’ll find out that maybe 80% of the things that People were hoping to prepare for retirement are all completed, but there are some things that are left undone. That might include thinking about an alternative location to live. It may be thinking about, well, how would we pay if I or my wife needed care For a couple of years, do we have adequate resources for that? So there’s a lot of things to think about as we make that transition toward retirement. I want to thank everybody for listening. And if you would like any more information about the checklist manifesto, I have a copy and I have a summary. We can create a checklist for your own retirement. Call my office at 303-744-1128 and we can have a conversation. There’s never a fee for that. And we can find out if you are on track and if there are some things that I might be able to do to make your retirement a little more joyful and fulfilling. God bless you. Thank you for tuning in. And let’s continue to pray for peace in the Middle East. Bye now.
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But are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents.
