Dr James, 9s:

Welcome back everyone. This is an interesting episode of the podcast because Jon and I spoiler alert, Jon Doyle features in this episode. Jon and I were catching up just before we hit the record button just now and we were going to do an episode, which is very contemporaneous, on what's been happening in the stock market. But, as the majority of educated investors out there will know, they'll know to a degree, all of that stuff is just noise. So we want to focus on the bigger picture and actually, Jon showed me a book just before we jumped on with Dan. It's called the 100-Year Life, which I'd never heard of. So this book is going to be us all learning about the 100-year life, what it means and the philosophy that's contained within, because I'm told that a lot of this stuff is practical and applicable to dentists on their investing journey. So I'm a learner here as well. So looking forward to this one, Jon, how are you?

Jon, 1m 5s:

I'm very, very well, mate. I'm very, very well. It's quite funny, isn't it, the way we go from probably talking about something that is happening over the last 48 hours to thinking about something that crosses over a century see, I'm pretty certain I've got low level adhd but never diagnosed.

Dr James, 1m 22s:

Are you in that boat, Jon?

Jon, 1m 23s:

he's got that similar suspicion everyone seems to be in that boat these days, James I'm holding on to my neurotypical uh status will be the judge of that, I think.

Dr James, 1m 35s:

But I was gonna say I think it's when two level low level adhd people try to plan a podcast, this happens. But anyway, I'm looking forward to this.

Jon, 1m 43s:

This is gonna be cool it's gonna be interesting, um, it's. It is a really interesting book. It's called the hundred year life. It's by a couple of academics um, the primary writer is Linda Gratton and she wrote it with a colleague called Andrew Scott, and it's a really interesting book because what it looks like is the challenges that are happening in society because of longevity, and they started with this really amazing statistic that just hit me right between the eyes when I was reading it the 2007 birth year have a life expectancy of 103.

Dr James, 2m 21s:

Nah really.

Jon, 2m 24s:

Yeah, now this hit me because my oldest daughter was born in 2007. And I read this book pre-covid uh, 2016. It came out right, so I read it when she was maybe like 10, 10, 11 years old, 2017, 2018, and I was reading it at one of the birthday parties. That's what I tend to do, so I don't have to talk to other parents. It's like a book that people don't want to know about. That other, that big economics book was another one I read at a birthday party. Oh, you know what.

Dr James, 2m 56s:

Fun tip for the parents in the audience. Just there they're going to the parents can be taking notes. I can hear them.

Jon, 3m 0s:

This. This is a. If you don't want to have casual conversation with that awkward dad that you don't want to get to know, really take a book that people won't ask questions about, um. And there I am at this sort of like birthday party, reading this book and I'm looking at all the kids there and go. Half of these kids will be 100 years old. And then I think about like how many hundred year olds I've, I've I know of or I've met um or who you know? We don't have any as clients. My eldest client, uh ever was 97 when she passed away. My wife's grandmother made it to 96. You're going, half these kids are going to live to 100 and it's it's a massive implication, obviously, since covid, life expectancy's leveled off a bit. But particularly when you're a financial advisor, you know you think about your clients and you think about the service of the sector that we're working in, and it'll be the same for dentists. You know, on average, above average wealth, living in above average circumstances with above average you know, in terms of early retirement or at least retirement choices. So we're dealing with people who would typically we talk about large statistical numbers outlive the average person. So I made a lot of changes to the way I think about longevity with my clients off the back of this book. So yeah, that's where it all starts with this idea we're living longer. Maybe half my daughter's class will live to 100 but?

Dr James, 4m 35s:

but don't you just love that, though? Right like you read a book and it genuinely changed your philosophy on how you do things day to day?

Jon, 4m 44s:

yeah.

Dr James, 4m 44s:

I love that man.

Jon, 4m 46s:

One of the the big interesting things that comes through this and I've seen it time and time again in my client work is this idea that as humans, we can only ever base our expectations of the future based on our own experiences and stories of the past. Okay, so most people we make snap judgments unless you read a lot outside or you kind of look to influence that we make have expectations of how our future will be based upon what we've experienced or seen in the past. Oh, that's so true. Yeah, and so if I asked you to think about your grandparents, I don't know your grandparental situation, but if you think about your grandparents, um, did any of your grandparents make it to retirement? Are they in retirement now?

Dr James, 5m 34s:

You know what? Never thought about that before. But yeah, only one of them did.

Jon, 5m 39s:

Okay, only one of them did. So I want you to think about. Well, there's an interesting statistic already, but if you think about the retirement they experience, or when you think about the retirement they experience, or that you, you know, when you think about that retirement, your view of retirement in the future is going to be completely based upon some of that experience. And then your own parents, as they're probably coming up towards retirement or thinking about their own retirement at the moment.

Dr James, 6m 5s:

Right, actually they both got over the line whenever it comes to retirement, so they both had public sector jobs, so they're just living off a pension. But my dad has a business. He's got two businesses. He's got a christmas tree farm, so you know, when you get your christmas tree, yeah, and I had never really ever thought where do these actually come from? Or perhaps like lapland or something like that, but actually they can be grown in the uk and potentially my dad. And then the other thing that he has interest in not to sidetrack this podcast too much is he's got two hydroelectric dams that run in the background.

Jon, 6m 39s:

They are two incredibly interesting businesses.

Dr James, 6m 43s:

Yeah, but you know what?

Jon, 6m 45s:

They're actually pretty cool setups actually, I think that's pretty, pretty incredible, right, but we think about the age then that your parents retired, you know, and certainly when I think about my grandparents and even my own parents in terms of their retirement, you're talking about around about 60. Okay, they retired at 60 and if you think about the kind of jobs they had, how many jobs did your, your parents, have throughout their life?

Dr James, 7m 8s:

that's a great question, you know, because they had, uh, they only really had one official job. They stayed at their public sector job but dad had various things that he did around that. He was a farmer, you know, and he's from, uh, the countryside in northern ireland. So they got this hustler mindset. They always got something on the side. You know what I mean always got something on it sounds like the apple didn't fall far from the tree. That could be where I got it from. Yeah, very, very much inspired by my dad.

Jon, 7m 34s:

Yeah, so this is, you know, when we think about traditional retirement, our first thoughts that we all go to because it's what we all have observed from generations that have come before us either our own parents and grandparents or the friends and family that we know is adolescence through to about 15, 16 years old, maybe stretching into your early 20s, working then through to about age 60, and then being retired for about 15, 16 years before passing away in late 70s, early 80s, okay, and for most of the I always get this wrong 20th century, which is the 1900s. That's right, isn't it? 20th century? Yeah, that is right.

Dr James, 8m 24s:

I did have to think on that.

Jon, 8m 25s:

Yeah, that's been the experience of most people. When it comes to retirement, you go earlier than the 20th century retirement, didn't?

Dr James, 8m 36s:

really exist. They just made it up around the early 20th century.

Jon, 8m 40s:

Yeah, now, the thing that sparked us all on this conversation was when you were talking about adolescence and modern adolescence. It's very prevalent for me because my oldest daughter has just finished school, right. So she's right in the thrust of this, and I'll be seeing a client tomorrow who's not a dentist. He has a van, a used van and car sales business. Right, he left school at 14. He's now heading towards 80. He's done very well in life. He left school at 14 and has been running van and car sales type jobs for the last 60 years or so. So his adolescence finished at 14. What were you saying about adolescence now, James?

Dr James, 9m 26s:

It extends until your mid-30s, I believe, which is great news for me, because I'm 32. No, I'm being slightly facetious, but having said that, jokes aside, it is extended for a lot longer than it traditionally was nowadays 100%.

Jon, 9m 44s:

Now again, you have to be very, very careful with small sample sizes. Right, but what age did your parents get together and settle down and buy a house?

Dr James, 9m 54s:

um, you know what? They were relatively late for their day, so they were like 30.

Jon, 9m 58s:

That was it back then yeah, my parents 19 and 21 when they got married, right. Wow, my wife's dad was 40 when she was born and she distinctively remembers him being the really old dad at school, like the really old dad, and you said it there. Your parents were relatively late and they were in their 30s right Now. From your peer group, I mean I got married stupidly young. I was 21 when I got married, right. So in my peer group I stand out as a weird oddball, having got married young. In your peer group, I mean you've been to a few weddings this year, right?

Dr James, 10m 40s:

You know what? Interestingly in my peer group I think it's yeah, we're all, pretty much everybody, and I guess this is totally anecdotal, of course. I think two have got married, three have got married and actually one of them separated sadly Outside of about 20 people.

Jon, 10m 56s:

Yeah, my group of friends are pretty much on the second round now it's happening. We've done a couple of second weddings. Yeah, we have this sort of extended and this is one of the things that comes through in the book is that we've moved from this sort of three-phase life of and teenagers weren't a thing. You know, that sort of adolescence phase wasn't a thing before, like 1900. It was you were a child, then an adult, then you were very old for a couple of years and then you died of something, right.

Dr James, 11m 28s:

Very old being.

Jon, 11m 34s:

Then adolescence sort of appeared in the 50s and 60s with the sort of rock and roll revolution and it's now become extended, where we've got this sort of teen, uh prepubescent, into sort of early teens and then that adolescence sort of extending right through to, yeah, 30 and in certain big cities maybe longer, you know, before people start settling down. And then what they're coming through in this book is saying well, our mindset still hasn't changed. You know, most people are still thinking retire at 60. And if I speak to dentists, a lot of the time it's retire at 55 is the first thought as well. You know, 55, 60 is very, very common. What happens when you try and squeeze all of that into a very short window of time? James?

Dr James, 12m 23s:

That's a good question From a philosophical standpoint.

Jon, 12m 27s:

We take this from. Let's take my dad as an example. He was a dentist, right so he married at 21. He was just graduating. He had his first child at 25. He was already a homeowner at that point, right so at 25, he's having children, buying a property, set up his squat in 24, right, squat practice, 24, 1979. Yeah, first kid a couple of years later and he was retired at 53. Yeah, okay, now he retired early. Through your health. He would have carried on to 60, right, he lost feeding his fingertips. But you're going there for a 30, 30 to 35 year career, say, where over that 35 years you're buying your house, you're having your kids, you've got a few years at the back end to catch up. You're retiring at 60. What happens with the extended adolescence is you're starting all these things much later, right? First-time buyers I mean dentists again will be unusual in the population. Most of them are first-time buyers late 20s, early 30s, rest of the population, rest of the population, 40 of the lucky. Right, it's in a lot of places settling down, having kids later. But then what you're doing is you're squeezing all this work into this very, very small window where you're still trying to come out the other side, at 60, and so, particularly when we think general population, average, average person on average earnings, those expectations have to change the whole. That's what they're sort of arguing in this hundred year life book is you cannot have a retirement at 60 on average earnings in an average job if you're not settling down, marrying, having kids, buying property until you're 35, because you can't. No one can work for 25 years, earn enough money to then retire for 40 years. The maths just doesn't math okay. So then, when we're thinking about it in terms of our work with dentists, we're then thinking instead how do we rethink this and what implications is it going to have for us? The answer isn't well, you're just going to have to be tied to the chair for an extra 15 years and work through your 70. But it's more about making sure we're providing for choice and thinking through. Retirement is a very long time. We don't want to have this retirement where we get to 55 and we just stop doing anything, because then you retire for 45 years.

Dr James, 15m 12s:

Can I just chop one teeny tiny thing in Like? This is what I feel is like. Wrong with the paradigm of retirement is that everybody thinks there's a finishing line and they're just not going to do anything, and it's idealized in our head right. There's a really real experience that we all well went through which felt similar ish to retirement, and it was coronavirus, right, and most people bored out of their flippin tree. Okay. So here's the thing you're idealizing, feeling like that your whole life. And I feel like, because you put it on that pedestal and you're constantly working towards it, when you actually get there it might be everything that you thought it was and what a what a. It's just cause for thought and pause for reflection, to think that we're potentially chasing a mirage yeah.

Jon, 15m 54s:

So I think there's a few sort of big outcomes from this. So the big ideas are that the three-phase life is done. For anyone who is born sort of post-1980, the three-phase life is done. We haven't got these sort of teen years or this sort of childhood and adolescence working life, retirement it's going to be unrealistic. So what we need to do instead is think differently about how each of these are going to play out. One of them that they recommend I use this one a lot with clients in our work is this phasing of retirement, and I'll use, instead of retirement, I'll use choice a lot with clients. This is what we're driving towards is I don't necessarily want to stop at 55, but I want it to be a choice. Yeah, I want to be able to choose to continue working at the pace and the speed that I want to, and we're even seeing some clients who are, you know, at the sort of tail end of a career, working two, three days a week in all sorts of environments. You know I've got dentists who have retired. You know who are doing part-time work in pubs or in uh, you know those sort of things just to keep active, uh, or in um. You know what my talk. My own dad worked in a, uh sort of a food shelter but um, soup kitchen type place for uh, three years after he he finished dentistry. And again it was wasn't a financial decision, it was a, um, I want to keep active, I've got more to give. I just I just can't practice in dentistry anymore. So we've got to think about actually one, not necessarily that full break, retirement at 55. For people who don't have the kind of earnings that dentists can have, they're probably thinking about working much longer, okay, but in dentistry it's more about okay, we want to be able to provide for or create this choice and then think about and imagine what that lifestyle could look like after we've achieved that, whether that is continuing with some part-time dentistry. There aren't many careers that are quite as flexible as dentistry for going down to two days a week or one day a week and or you know those sorts of things. Um, and then the other is thinking about one of the things they talk about a lot in this, which may be probably more for the parents listening, uh, than the, than the dentists uh, those are listening as parents is the the the need to retrain or not to think about careers as single career. You know it's not a job for life uh world that we're living in anymore. You know the rate of technology, technological change, the rate of um. You know jobs not existing that now exist or that now exist that won't exist in a few years. No one when I was growing up through uh school and college, was thinking I'll be a social media manager or run a podcast for a living right. It just didn't happen. Again this sort of thing is going to change so we're going to have to be willing to and part of the funding. One of the reasons why we we think with clients about having flexible and fluid um investments like our stocks and shares, ices, is that they can be used for retraining, going on a course, going on we all know dentists love courses, right, but retraining, re-skilling, retooling for whatever the world of work looks like. So there's this more sort of flexible fluid and then it's the, the actual retirement, and they also make a couple of really big, important observations about that as well. In that retirement used to be a few active years and a couple of go slow years and then we pop their clogs. If I think about my own sort of grandparents in the late 80s, early 90s. That was very much the experience there. It's very different now. It's very different. We've got a lot longer. You know, if I think about the clients of mine in their sort of late 70s, early 80s who are very, very active still, and then if we're thinking well, we've got 100 years to plan for, we need to be thinking very differently about the kind of retirement that we may have.

Dr James, 20m 37s:

Right, Well, it's living longer, but it's also living healthier.

Jon, 20m 53s:

Yeah, more years, yeah, better health, yeah, yeah, and so we need to have these, these, uh, the funds and the um options available for living that kind of life that we're going to have at that stage of our life. So, yeah, there's a sort of main sort of um. I'm just gonna have a quick flick through the chapters and see if there's any other sort of that I've forgotten from when I read this. Yeah, from recreation to recreation, this is the other thing that they talk about.

Dr James, 21m 16s:

Those words are spelled the same right? No recreation to recreation. Are they spelled the?

Jon, 21m 20s:

same. There's a hyphen. They've added a hyphen, it's a nice little title and it changes the meaning. It's about the um. What are we going to use this time for? Right, if we've, if you're suddenly having to um, instead of everything into a smaller lifestyle, but we've everything into a longer lifestyle? There's a couple of challenges that come with that. One of them is that the time off that we have um you know, in the 60s, 50s, even into the 90s and even now, to an extent where people have a we're having a sunday or a weekend off we have this recreation time where, because we're working hard, working hard, working hard, we then stop and we have recreation, but instead, as we're sort of thinking about living for longer, we maybe have more time and more time in which to do things. Technology may bring, through this ability to have more time to spend on personal pursuits or away from economically productive work, and we need to find things in our life that are not just recreational. We need to find things in our life that are not just recreational. It's not. We don't want to have that time doing nothing, but actually spending time creating and being productive in some ways that maybe aren't economically the most valuable but that are psychologically rewarding as well. Okay, so it's that idea there that uh, not necessarily just using this time to sit around and watch homes under the hammer, but to use it for rewarding experiences. And we're seeing that, if you think about once, you start to think about it, you start to see it actually already happening in in society with the way people are now spending their time and doing things, particularly where they've got, um, elements of financial, uh freedom, um, not necessarily lifetime financial freedom, but I mean, like you know, they've got the money to go, uh and spend money on experiences rather than things. Um, you know, you can already start to see recreation is not necessarily buying stuff. It's people going to gigs, going to holidays, but that are active or exploring, or they're getting into athletics or, you know, triathlon or the gym or all these other sort of areas that are more, uh, more sort of all-encompassing eudaimanic, eudaimania. Have you come across that word? Eudaimonia? It's that more sort of, uh, holistic lifestyle. You, you do. Eudaimonia, it's a, it's a greek concept, a bit like ikigai. Yeah, um, all right, we won't dive into aristotle right now, James, I won't oh, I was itching.

Dr James, 24m 8s:

I was itching to learn more about that side, though. I have that page on Instagram, stoic Daily. I love that man.

Jon, 24m 16s:

Yeah.

Dr James, 24m 18s:

Aristotle quotes from there this guy, oh, the Daily Stoic, that is it. It's not. It's not Stoic Daily, it's.

Jon, 24m 25s:

Ryan Halliday. Yeah, really really interesting guy. Yeah, yeah.

Dr James, 24m 31s:

Well, listen, you know, I I mean the reason why I love these sort of reflective podcasts, and we're not. We're not here to really drive home any one particular point or action point. We're here to say, hey, here's these things you should know that will help you make better decisions or will help you shake up the paradigm of retirement, because it is it. I have to admit it is one of my bugbears how I feel like if people develop their understanding of retirement more, they'd be able to poke some holes in what they're doing every single day big time. So that's what we're here to do.

Jon, 25m 3s:

Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things that I'd probably in terms of, if people are listening, where they might be able to apply it to themselves. And, as with all financial advice, it doesn't apply uniformly, so everyone's going to have their own sort of circumstances which will change the application of this. But one of them is, you know, the younger end of dentists often get people saying, oh, I've left it too late to start doing anything. So actually, no, if we're thinking about life as a longer experience, we haven't left it too late to start doing anything. So I actually know, if we're thinking about life as a longer experience, we haven't left it too late. We've still got. We've still got time, and the best time to plant a tree is to it was, uh, 20 years ago. The next best time is today and all that jazz, um. But I think the other one is sometimes we can feel that retirement is, or retirement planning is, a sprint, like you said earlier. Is this sprint to a line? And then we stop and we don't need to do it like that necessarily, and this is where a lot of the financial planning stuff can come into it. Is you start to think about actually, how can we approach this differently to achieve a lifelong outcome, as opposed to just this one option of sprint to the line and then finish um yeah, and whenever you ponder on that.

Dr James, 26m 30s:

Another thing that I feel is an extension of what we're talking about today. You know, when you see those funds and it's like they change your blend up until an end point, the funds that you see out there, what the hell? Lifestyling or target date, it doesn't. Those don't actually make sense in the context of all the things we were saying today and even before we talked about all that stuff we were talking about today. You don't want all your cash. You don't want all your money to be in cash all at once the day you hit retirement, unless you're maybe buying an annuity or something like that.

Jon, 27m 1s:

But people don't do that nowadays yeah, yeah, and it puts a new spin or a new way of framing your investment time horizon. Because if you're, if you're thinking I'm, you know, let's say you're a 40 year old uh, at the moment you're thinking I want to retire at 55. You're thinking I've got 15 years, so I'm investing for 15 years, all right. But if you're then turning around and say, well, actually I probably need to plan for a 100 year life and I'm 40, you're investing for 60 years. So you can think very differently about your investments. If you're thinking about a 60 year time horizon and if you've got, like new graduates listening to this who are, like you know, 24 but three quarters of a century potentially, that they're going to be investing over food for thought, man, and it just shows, you know I.

Dr James, 27m 56s:

I would just say to the audience one thing do you know when you get out of dental school and you think you are really hot shit whenever it comes to dentistry and you realize that what you know is actually five percent of what's out there? Every subject is like that, man, and retirement is one of those things in in my opinion, it's like it's not. It's not so much a thing that can be defined so much as a philosophy, really I I just coined that just then, but I actually really like that what I just said well, half the books I've got back here of philosophy yeah rather than uh.

Jon, 28m 29s:

Finance One. We've got the financial side of what do we financially need in order to live a good life. But then the next prerogative is actually how do we take that and live a good life? The two are so intertwined with each other.

Dr James, 28m 52s:

What a nice sign bite to end the podcast on today. Yeah, Jon, thank you for your time. Wisdom, knowledge as ever, I can tell without a shadow of a doubt you're a learned man when it comes to finance, not just the tick box, exams and all of that, but also reading around it as well, which is something that we share a deep passion for. So hats off to yourself, Jon. If anybody listening today wants to reach out to you, how would they be best off doing that?

Jon, 29m 17s:

Yeah, so you can find me on uh, on the Facebook group. Uh, Jon Doyle. You'll find me on Instagram at Juniper, underscore Jon Same on X, but you know it's a cesspool so I'd avoid it.

Dr James, 29m 39s:

That will costs. Really, at the moment, there's only one thing you're allowed to subscribe to an x guys, and it's Jon x. The rest of that stuff is horrible, it's a dumpster fire, it is pure brain rot. Okay, it's really bad, don't spend too much time on there. Yeah, yeah, what they're trying to do with freedom of speech, but maybe they're a little bit too far.

Jon, 29m 46s:

Anyway, yeah, yeah, uh. So yeah, instagram, although I you know I don't really post too much on instagram and on our website, juniperwealthcouk yeah.

Dr James, 29m 57s:

Teeny, tiny thing to drop in at the end, somewhat related to finance, definitely related to X. Have you seen Elon sharing his thoughts on Keir Starmer recently?

Jon, 30m 8s:

No, no, I try and ignore what Elon says, most of the time, probably for the best, probably for the best.

Dr James, 30m 14s:

Anyway, let's go ahead and round up just about there. Guys, thanks so much for listening to this episode today. I'm already looking forward to the next episode and also further episodes with Jon as well. I shall see you all there. Much love in a bit. Bye-bye.

Jon, 30m 28s:

Bye-bye.