Don’t Just Retire! Graduate to a Richer Life

Eric Brotman [00:00:00]:
You know, so many people have money come in. They spend whatever they spend, and they hope something’s left over at the end of the month. That is not a recipe for for good planning. In fact, it can be a a really awkward way to put yourself back in a hole. So Yeah. If you pay yourself first, if you take that percentage, and that includes money you’re getting from an employer match or from other, from other grants, other things, if you look at how much you need to put away and you have a legitimate accumulation plan that you wanna be financially independent when you’re 58, and here’s how you get there. And if you do that and you spend whatever’s left on anything you want, then you have a a trajectory to get some place, and it’s exponential, not linear. So I think you start with inventory and then you create good habits.

Eric Brotman [00:00:43]:
The best thing you can do is not to wait. This this will not get easier tomorrow or next week or next year or in five years. It will always behoove you to start today because you can’t start yesterday.

Adam Zuckerman [00:00:54]:
This is the Buried in Work podcast, where we share tips and interview experts to help you simplify estate planning and end of life tasks.

Adam Zuckerman [00:01:04]:
Today, we are thrilled to welcome Eric Brotman, a certified financial planner. He’s an author and the CEO of BFG Financial Advisors. He has nearly three decades of experience in financial planning, and he’s helped countless families and businesses achieve financial wellness, which is a pretty broad term, but we’ll get into it. He’s also the author of a book, Don’t Retire, Graduate, which I think is great. It’s a groundbreaking book that reframes how to think about retirement, and he’s also the host of a podcast by the same name. Maybe we’ll catch you over there sometime. Now we’ll talk a little bit about financial literacy today, the importance of financial wellness programs, and also Eric’s unique approach to making retirement the start of an exciting new chapter goes really well with estate planning. Eric, good to have you here.

Eric Brotman [00:01:46]:
Adam, it’s great to be here, and that that introduction was terrific.

Adam Zuckerman [00:01:49]:
No. We we did a little bit of research, and it looks like you’re actually an English major that Yeah.

Eric Brotman [00:01:54]:
Transitioned over to financial planning. Why and how? Well, I was an English major mostly because everyone said, what are you gonna do with an English major? And I said, anything I want. So, yes, I actually went through school, and I studied, this is true, I studied late eighteenth century romantic poetry, which at the time was, first of all, very enjoyable, and second of all, it made women swoon. And that was very important to me at 19 and 20. In all seriousness, I I was an English major thinking about law school and, you know, whether I wanted to teach, whether I wanted to go to law school, and I was giving a lot of thought to estates and trusts and tax law and those kinds of things. So I had a a background with math, but really enjoyed the English and also took a bunch of psychology courses. And I took my first job out of school in Downtown Baltimore at Legg Mason in the legal department. And I was working with, essentially working with their investment executives and their clients at that time when there was a tragedy most of the time.

Eric Brotman [00:02:48]:
Sometimes it was somebody’s turning the age of majority, but most of the time it was somebody had died. And during that time, I realized how little, how powerless I was to help these people who were not only under duress and bereaved, but who were receiving news from the firm that was disastrous. For example, I’m sorry you lost your husband, but his first wife is still his beneficiary. And when I tell you that that doesn’t land particularly well, it it doesn’t land particularly well. Or, you know, I know you have three siblings, but, you know, the beneficiary was set when when they only had one, so your your brother and sister are not included in this IRA or in this account or whatever. And the the mistakes were so obvious and so rampant and so frequent. And I’m not throwing I’m not casting shade at the firm. This is true everywhere.

Eric Brotman [00:03:35]:
I mean, we do financial wellness programs for companies, and when we go in, half of the people do not have beneficiaries at all on their various accounts. And the ones who do haven’t looked at them in twelve years, and they’re wrong. So it the simplest things and and people think, well, I have a will, and I’ll that’ll take care of it. And, of course, we all know that that’s not true and that the beneficiary designation supersedes a will, and it’s it it so I fell in love with not only the estate planning side, but the financial aspect and said, I wanna be on the front end of this. Mhmm. So I applied to law schools, took the LSAT, applied to law schools, got into law schools, paid a deposit to law school, and didn’t go to law school. That was the best thousand dollars I ever set on fire in my life. Because I I you know, you you seem like a very happy attorney, but most attorneys don’t seem happy to me.

Eric Brotman [00:04:21]:
And and so I I started I I started working in the life insurance business, and I started doing some basic estate planning, getting my CFP and all the credentials. And in the late nineties, I had a chance to start, an independent financial advisory firm with a more senior guy who became a mentor. And I learned how to do this, and by 02/2003, I was ready to launch, started a firm with one full time and one part time person, borrowed money from everywhere to do it. Mhmm. And now twenty one years later, I’m working a succession plan and, and preparing to step down as CEO over the next two to three years and and be a growth officer and a podcaster and an author and a speaker and trying to to do one to many instead of one to one and and help this narrative get out. And it it’s really it’s become a, a labor of love, and that’s why I say I’m not retiring. I’m graduating into the next phase of my life, which is part of why I wrote

Adam Zuckerman [00:05:11]:
the book. We we really need to just chop this episode up already. I mean, we’ve talked about succession planning on other episodes. We’ve talked about the importance of payable and death beneficiaries and having those right. We told the story of the individual that we helped in Virginia that his, his ex wife was going to receive all of his assets because he only updated his will. And you are right on the proverbial money. You’ve got your book and your podcast, Don’t Retire, Graduate. Yes.

Adam Zuckerman [00:05:37]:
It challenges that traditional view of retirement. What do you mean to reframe retirement as graduation? What do people need to know in tangible steps? And what I mean by tangible steps is a lot of people come on the podcast, they go on other podcasts and they speak in generalities that, yeah, it’s great. I should get my affairs in order, but that doesn’t help anybody. So let’s try and frame this in a way that listeners, they they really can walk away and go, okay, I’ve got a few things that I can do that’s not going to kill me, that’s not going to intimidate me. Make it really accessible

Eric Brotman [00:06:08]:
if you can. Okay. Well, let’s start with what not to do. What not to do is to give your two weeks notice because you feel like you’re done, without any kind of plan. And I don’t mean financial plan. I mean life plan. And then go from fifty or sixty hours a week to daytime TV and shuffleboard, and, change your LinkedIn profile to just say retired. That that is what not to do.

Eric Brotman [00:06:31]:
That is essentially a premature death. You’re done. There’s no good reason to take all of your vitae, your professional network, your acumen, your experience, and to just say to heck with it. I’m done now, and and the price is right. I I think there’s so many better ways to spend that time. And so if you even think about the word retire, to retire means to retreat or disappear or to withdraw. In The UK, you retire every night when you go to sleep. How many people wanna sign up for a thirty year nap? I mean, I I could use a nap sometimes, but not for thirty years.

Eric Brotman [00:07:05]:
So I think we have to redefine retirement, and I have used the book to redefine retirement as the absence of needing to work, not the absence of work. Because once you’re at a point where you’re financially independent, which I think is a fantastic goal for anyone, whether they’re 27 or 77 when they get there is immaterial. If you’re financially independent such that you get to do things that are passion projects, that bring you joy, that get you excited to get out of bed every morning, you’re already retired even if you’re still making money.

Adam Zuckerman [00:07:33]:
Is that nut? Is that amount different for each individual, for each family, and how do you figure that out?

Eric Brotman [00:07:38]:
Absolutely. Well, it it begins with determining your lifestyle. But not a lot of people want retirement to also be a pay cut. You know, historically, those rules of thumbs, oh, you only need 70% of your pre retirement income. Well, that’s true if you stop buying clothes, eating out, traveling, and leaving the house. That’s not a good plan. I I think you should get as close to a % of what you’re used to living on. Mhmm.

Eric Brotman [00:07:59]:
Net of savings because if you’ve reached that, if, you know, if you’re making a hundred thousand dollars a year and you’re saving 20,000, then you’re living on 80. And I’m I’m gross to gross because we don’t know what taxes are gonna be, and that’s a whole different episode. But gross to gross, if you’re making a hundred and you’re saving 20, then you’re living on 80, you need to replace that 80 adjusted for inflation for the rest of your life. And there are there are rules of thumb out there that I mostly don’t like, but the withdrawal rate is what will determine your income trajectory. You know, if your withdrawal rate’s under 2%, if you have, you you have $8,000,000 and you need to live on $80,000 a year, it’s 1%, and you can do that till you’re a hundred and 50 six years old and leave a ton of money behind. That’s easy. If you have $800,000 and you need to live on $80,000 a year, that’s 10%. That will not work very long, and you will outlive your money.

Eric Brotman [00:08:49]:
And and those are extremes, but there’s a lot of nuance in there. And so having an income plan is completely different than building the mountain chart. You know, we we are taught from the day we get our first job to put money in our four zero one k’s or to start saving for a rainy day or start putting money into various things, or to pay student loans down. There are lots of things to do, but building wealth is actually very simple arithmetic. It’s not simple behavior necessarily, but it’s simple arithmetic. Income planning is a different thing, and and people only do it once. You know, we’ve been saving for forty five years. Now we have to figure out how to use this nest egg, and every aspect of your nest egg is treated differently when you take it as income.

Eric Brotman [00:09:30]:
Is it ordinary income tax? Is it capital gain? Is it tax free? Is it tax deferred? Is it perpetual or is it, you know, are you spending principal? There’s so many different nuances, and that’s where I think I think the do it yourselfers, and there’s lots of reasons why most financial planning, particularly wealth building, does not require a financial adviser. But determining how to do the income planning and when you get to that stage in your life, having the legal and the tax and the financial advice, I think, can pay real real dividends at that point.

Adam Zuckerman [00:09:59]:
Is that a difficult process? Is this something that someone can do in a single session if they needed to use an adviser, yourself, someone else? You know? Yeah. World world’s your oyster lots of ways to do it, or is it something that you need to you know, similar to an estate plan, you do it today for tomorrow and update it every single year going forward?

Eric Brotman [00:10:16]:
Well, estate plans get updated periodically, whether it’s at a life change or whether it’s at a certain cycle, which makes total sense. The income planning actually is an ongoing process. It’s not really a a set it and forget it because interest rates change, life changes, markets change. You know, you’re not gonna get you know, it’s one thing if you’re living on a a 3% of your nest egg, and every year your nest egg grows by 6%, and every year inflation’s 3%, and everything’s perfect. Your portfolio goes six six six six six six, and you get a 3% raise every year, and you’re living happy. And that would be a interesting and delightful simple solution that everyone could do themselves. It’s just not how life works. Mhmm.

Eric Brotman [00:10:54]:
So weathering the the tech bubbles and the recessions and the global pandemics and whatever else life throws at you when the market drops 40%. And by the market, I mean stock markets, real estate markets drop more than that in some cases. When markets drop that way, you better have a plan for not only sustaining your income, but for not chopping branches off your orchard. Mhmm. You know, if if we consider the money that we build to be like an orchard where you pick fruit every year, that’s a glorious plan. If you start chopping branches off, you will get less and less and less fruit until you’re you don’t have an orchard anymore, and that’s the simplest thing you look at. Yes. The money tree.

Eric Brotman [00:11:31]:
It is the money tree. Pick the fruit, enjoy as much fruit as you want, use it wisely because that’s how much fruit you have. But if you start chopping branches off, there’s a it’s a recipe for disaster truly.

Adam Zuckerman [00:11:41]:
Alright. So you start this process. You begin the plan. You sit down with financial advisor. You figure out that DIY solution. You revisit it regularly. What’s the need of bringing in multiple experts that help you out? So we believe in collaboration

Eric Brotman [00:11:55]:
rather than competition.

Adam Zuckerman [00:11:56]:
Is that something that that you think is a good idea, or do you think that this should actually happen in a bubble?

Eric Brotman [00:12:01]:
Oh, no. A %. I collaboration not only with other advisers in other industries, but sometimes with advisers in your own industry. There are reasons why we can work together. If I you know, I we work with a lot of other financial advisers for a lot of various reasons, and I don’t see any, any competition there. I I think there there are people who will choose us for for comfort reasons and trust reasons and people who choose somebody else for a different reason. That’s fine. I think I wanna go back though because we talked about the financial readiness for retirement.

Eric Brotman [00:12:28]:
There’s also the psychological, behavioral, and personal readiness for retirement, which I think it’s lost in the shuffle. The fact that you can afford to quit your job does not mean you should quit tomorrow. You might want to, and and there’s a a beautiful thing about take this job and shove it. I mean, they’ve been singing songs about that for as long as I can remember. But it’s important to have a plan, not just financially, but for what you wanna do. And so I ask every guest on our podcast I’m not gonna put you on the spot, Adam, but I ask every guest on our podcast what they wanna be when they grow up. So here’s the thing. I think

Adam Zuckerman [00:12:59]:
that the reason why people ask kids what they wanna be when they grow up is because they’re still looking for ideas. And

Eric Brotman [00:13:04]:
be right.

Adam Zuckerman [00:13:05]:
Most people have already heard I wanna be a fireman or an astronaut, but they’re always asking because they

Eric Brotman [00:13:10]:
go, hey. Maybe there’s something I haven’t thought of. When when you were eight, what did you wanna be? I don’t know, to

Adam Zuckerman [00:13:16]:
be honest. I don’t think I ever had a a vision of it. This is what I’m going to do. My vision’s always been, I’m going to do something that helps other people.

Eric Brotman [00:13:25]:
I I wish that had been my vision at eight. It’s my vision now. At eight, I was gonna play for the Baltimore Colts. And, you know, there’s lots of reasons why that didn’t happen then and why it couldn’t happen now. So I had to rethink my path. That that one didn’t work.

Adam Zuckerman [00:13:37]:
Yeah. You did were you actually around when the Mayflower trucks pulled up to the stadium and and moved everything out?

Eric Brotman [00:13:42]:
Oh, oh, yeah. In fact, my grandfather worked for the team, and we you know, I knew the players and was in the locker room and and, like, I was around football as a kid. And, I was a teenager when they moved. And this is a true story. The Colts moved the same time my parents split up. And the Colts leaving was far harder on me than the divorce. I’m not making that up. That was a a thing that this town will never forget, and and, you know, folks who’ve been through it have been through it.

Eric Brotman [00:14:06]:
But but, no, that was that was my dream. And now, you know, I ask fully grown humans what they wanna be when they grow up, and I’ve had 80 year old people come up with different answers. And some of them are profound.

Adam Zuckerman [00:14:17]:
Mhmm.

Eric Brotman [00:14:17]:
Some of them are funny. Some of them are pithy. You know, I’ve had I had somebody say they wanted to be Tinkerbell. I I hope that works out. There’s been a lot of different kinds of answers, but I think this idea that you’re helping people and changing the world materially in some way in for the good is is really a terrific thing. And to to do well by doing good, I can think of no higher honor as a career, as a life well lived than to really do well for yourself, for your family, for your charities, for your loved ones, while also doing a lot of good work for a lot of people. And it it just it’s it’s nice to be able to make a living that way.

Adam Zuckerman [00:14:53]:
Yeah. I I think that’s right. One of the things that I’ve had conversations with with friends and family and others about is that concept of legacy. It’s just a little bit of a sidebar, but I personally don’t believe that anybody is going to remember your name, my name, 90% of the people that we know, actually 99.999 in three hundred years. Right? If I ask you what’s the name of your great great great great grandfather, you might know because you’re a history buff. But the vast majority of people, they’re not going to know. They’ll remember, you know, Trump. They’ll remember Elon Musk, maybe Joe Biden because of everything that’s in the news now, but likely not.

Adam Zuckerman [00:15:26]:
So the question then is if you are going to leave something, what is that legacy? And I think that legacy is literally just leaving the world a better place than how you find it, and that really shapes the the pathway forward. But back to the the more important conversation. Well, I don’t I don’t what could be

Eric Brotman [00:15:40]:
more important than legacy?

Adam Zuckerman [00:15:41]:
It’s true.

Eric Brotman [00:15:42]:
You know, I I actually think you hit something right on the head. And, you know, the the book is written in a way where there’s a freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year of your financial life, and the senior year is really a lot about legacy. And it’s not about just leaving money. It’s about what’s more important than money. Leaving visions, leaving values, leaving opportunities, leaving and doing some philanthropy to the extent you wanna do it. I mean, helping people, make those kind of decisions is a huge deal. And I think it’s more than slapping your name on a building.

Adam Zuckerman [00:16:09]:
Yep.

Eric Brotman [00:16:10]:
You know, I tell people all the time. I you know, when I went to college, every building had a name on it. I didn’t know who those people were. I didn’t care. I just needed to know where my 10:00 was. And so I think slapping your name on a building while helpful and the institutions require that in order to thrive, I think doing, for example, endowing a scholarship is far for me, is far more impactful because every year for the rest of time, you are helping someone get an education or get medical care or get whatever it is that’s important to you. And and so I think legacy is hitting the nail on the head. I mean, this this whole idea of retirement is legacy is not how much money can you leave behind.

Eric Brotman [00:16:48]:
Mhmm. It matters. Sure. It matters. But, you know, we’re living longer. And if we, in fact, live to our lifespan, it’s like a 20. If we live to our life expectancy, it’s 80, 80 five, whatever it is for for a lot of us. And if that’s true, then you’re leaving money to your kids in their fifties and sixties who ideally don’t need it because they’re they’re thriving.

Eric Brotman [00:17:09]:
Mhmm. So in fact, sometimes when you leave money behind to your kid who’s 60 or 65, it actually hurts them. It creates a tax problem and Medicare issues and stuff. We’re not talking about leaving money for an 11 year old for their care for the rest of time. We’re talking about adult people who might be grandparents when they receive assets, and there’s a different it’s a whole different game.

Adam Zuckerman [00:17:28]:
And oddly, if we could leave money for the 11 year old that doesn’t need it and invert that that transfer triangle, you know, going to the largest wealth transfer in the history of humanity over the next twenty years of the aging boomers

Eric Brotman [00:17:41]:
Yes.

Adam Zuckerman [00:17:41]:
You know, age out. 10 to 12,000 Americans turn 65 every day. That then is the opportunity for them to take advantage of rule of sevens and see compounding interest. But you’re right. Later on in life, it’s dollar for dollar. We talk about the book. It’s about graduation. You separated in chapters based on where you are in that in that journey, freshman, sophomore, you know, junior, senior, x, y, z.

Adam Zuckerman [00:18:04]:
What can people do to set themselves up for that graduation? We talked a little about the holistic, about legacy, and thinking about that. Let’s talk about those those real steps again. Let’s give people some knowledge.

Eric Brotman [00:18:16]:
Sure. Absolutely. Each section of the book is broken into different almost like they were courses, and it’s not a textbook. This is a fun read. But taking risk management or cash management or debt management or a chapter’s about buying your first home or getting married or thinking about children and, you know, life stages and things that we do and and how it impacts us financially. But every chapter ends with a a brief quiz. I don’t mind quizzes, but there’s no homework. There’s an extra credit assignment.

Eric Brotman [00:18:42]:
And if you go through every extra credit assignment, by the time you’re done, you will have a financial plan. Now that’s not to suggest you shouldn’t have some professional advice. In fact, there’s lots of areas in the book where I suggest get legal advice on this or tax advice or financial advice, but it will give you the the bare bones at least of a financial plan that begins with, you know, if you’re if you’re graduating from school or even if you’re finishing high school and you’re making college decisions. Your life will be very different if you come out of school with a $200,000 loan than if you don’t. Because you’re talking about climbing a mountain, and you you talked about compound interest, and you talked about the way money grows. You’re talking about climbing a mountain, and if you’re starting in a hole, that is a really tough way to start climbing because it might take you five, ten, fifteen years just to get to to sea level before you can start building real wealth. So trying to avoid some of those, the big loans, if you can, figuring out other ways to get out of debt. There’s a a significant amount of time spent on freshman year about choosing your first employee benefits, making sure you have some of the basics in place, some budgeting, some cash flow.

Eric Brotman [00:19:50]:
And I I refer to budgeting as the b word. Nobody likes it. I think budgeting is more around how much do I need to put away to get where I wanna go, and what you do with the rest of it is up to you. I’m not gonna tell you you can’t go to a a nice steakhouse once a month. You can’t go every night necessarily. But if that’s what you wanna do, I don’t care how you spend your money. But if we know that you need to put away 15¢ or 20¢ or 25¢ on the dollar in order to get to where you’re trying to go, once you’ve done that, what’s left is gravy. And so the the strategy really starts with inventory.

Eric Brotman [00:20:23]:
Be real honest with yourself. Where are you? And some people pick this book up, and they’re not young people. They’re folks who are in their forties, fifties, sixties, whatever. And so you don’t necessarily have to read the whole thing. You might jump in and say, I’m already a sophomore. I’m a transfer student. What do I need to do? But starting with inventory, being real honest with yourself, with your significant other, your spouse. I mean, this is a time for transparency and vulnerability.

Eric Brotman [00:20:46]:
And whether you have an advisor with you or not, it’s a time to be to put it all on the table and say, where are we? You cannot build a journey to get to anywhere. You can’t Uber. You can’t hike. You can’t get anywhere until you have a sticker on the map that says you are here, or you’ll have no idea where you’re how to get where you’re going. So figure out where you are, inventories first, and there’s strategies in here to to help you figure out what do you what do you include in that, And then paying yourself first. You know, so many people have money come in. They spend whatever they spend, and they hope something’s left over at the end of the month. That is not a recipe for for good planning.

Eric Brotman [00:21:20]:
In fact, it can be a a really awkward way to put yourself back in a hole. So Mhmm. If you pay yourself first, if you take that percentage, and that includes money you’re getting from an employer match or from other, from other grants, other things. If you look at how much you need to put away and you have a legitimate accumulation plan that you wanna be financially independent when you’re 58, and here’s how you get there. And if you do that and you spend whatever’s left on anything you want, then you have a a trajectory to get some place, and it’s exponential, not linear. So I think you start with inventory and then you create good habits. The best thing you can do is not to wait. This this will not get easier tomorrow or next week or next year or in five years.

Eric Brotman [00:22:02]:
It will always behoove you to start today because you can’t start yesterday.

Adam Zuckerman [00:22:06]:
Alright. Now that assumes that people have enough after they pay bills to pay themselves first, though. Correct?

Eric Brotman [00:22:12]:
It does. A %. And there are only two ways to improve your cash flow

Adam Zuckerman [00:22:17]:
Mhmm.

Eric Brotman [00:22:17]:
If that’s not the case. And we do talk about that in the book, but you either have to make more income or you have to spend less money.

Adam Zuckerman [00:22:24]:
Yeah.

Eric Brotman [00:22:24]:
And this is not about figuring out how not to have that latte in the morning is gonna change your life. You know, I’m not sure that that’s the solution for for most people. It might be for a few, but, you know, that’s where the side hustles come from. That’s where having some fallback comes from. A lot of the big financial disasters that happen out there, first of all, a lot of them are medical. People get sick and it messes the whole plan. So there are things to do to protect yourself there. And the other is people wind up unemployed.

Eric Brotman [00:22:50]:
And a period of unemployment, you know, I defy most people to take three or six months off and not have it dramatically impact them. And so being prepared for that, knowing what the emergency fund needs to look like, how much cash do you need to build before you really start putting anything at any type of meaningful risk? You can’t avoid rules of thumb. And I I don’t love them, but you have to start with a barometer and then and then adjust it for an individual family. But, you know, if you have two working spouses and they’re both making the same amount of money, unless they’re working for the same company, the odds of them being unemployed simultaneously isn’t great. So you plan for the possibility that one of you is out of work. If you are in a single parent household or a single working parent or a single earning parent, I should say, household, then you have to prepare for something completely different. Because if that parent or if that, adult winds up having a period where they’re not making money, it can sink the ship. And so you need a much different nest egg based on your personal circumstances.

Adam Zuckerman [00:23:49]:
So you’re unique just like everybody else?

Eric Brotman [00:23:52]:
Everybody. And and we you know, when we engage a client, of course, we start with a questionnaire as many professionals would and a document checklist and here are the things to bring. And, you know, I I always find that people people who do that work wind up in a better place even if we never do anything together because they’re they’re organized. It’s nothing else, just knowing what the inventory is.

Adam Zuckerman [00:24:11]:
That is literally the approach that that we take. You know, leave it generosity. We’ve got on our website the free estate summary worksheet. Do you have a will? Do you have a trust? What are your assets? What are your liabilities? What are your income sources? It’s free to download. Everybody should use it. And then that goes into our larger organization kit, called the clear kit. It’s a very similar process to what you all are doing. And the reality is if you don’t know what you have, you don’t have a place to start.

Eric Brotman [00:24:34]:
Right. And that’s that’s the the inventory piece of this. Yeah. And then being real honest with yourself. And, unfortunately, none of us learn about money in school. And money is taboo. Terrible. It is terrible.

Eric Brotman [00:24:47]:
And and I’ve done everything. I know we’re both Marylanders. I have testified before the state senate in Annapolis and said we need to get this in schools. And for so many reasons, it just isn’t happening. Yeah. And some most of them are political and and have to do with everything from teachers unions to to capacity to how you’re teaching to the test, to how people are paid. It’s a lot of nonsense. I’ve never met a single person who didn’t say it was a good idea.

Adam Zuckerman [00:25:10]:
Yeah. No. Financial literacy, cooking, the basics we need to get back to in in high school. Absolutely.

Eric Brotman [00:25:17]:
Absolutely. No. I’ve never met anyone whose life is better because they can name the planets in order. But if you can feed yourself, you know, it’s a life skill.

Adam Zuckerman [00:25:25]:
Oh, I don’t know about that. I I know several friends that that work at NASA and having the planets in their order. That’s that’s fighting words.

Eric Brotman [00:25:32]:
Fair. But they’d have gotten that on day one at work. Probably. Or they would have gotten

Adam Zuckerman [00:25:37]:
the job if they didn’t know it.

Eric Brotman [00:25:38]:
Anyways. Maybe. Maybe. But we can debate whether Pluto’s a planet or not all day. When I was a kid, it was a planet. Now it’s been downgraded. It’s really it’s for all the folks living on Pluto, that’s really a shame.

Adam Zuckerman [00:25:49]:
It’s really difficult. Yeah. 02/2006, renamed as a dwarf planet. You know? I don’t I don’t know.

Eric Brotman [00:25:57]:
I’m not even sure that’s politically correct. Can you even say that? Like, I I a small pot planet? I I’m I’m uncomfortable with everything about that, and I think, you know, once a planet, always a planet. I don’t think you lose that status, do you?

Adam Zuckerman [00:26:08]:
Okay. Fair enough. And for those that wanna go visit, Pluto does have multiple moons. It’s about half the size of Pluto. It is definitely not a planet, but we can we can talk about NASA stuff in in another episode. Alright. Eric, this has been absolutely fantastic. If people wanna find you, where can they do that?

Eric Brotman [00:26:24]:
I’m gonna give you two different ways. One is our our company website is b f g f a. That’s b f g financial advisors. So bfgfa.com. And I would also tell folks to check out brotmanmedia.com. That’s where there’s podcasts and online courses and and a lot of free information. We have a BFG University, a BFG library like you, Adam. We we try to to provide a lot of value to folks, even folks who either don’t or can’t or shouldn’t hire us for various things.

Eric Brotman [00:26:52]:
And so there’s a lot of resources out there, and and I would start at those two spots.

Adam Zuckerman [00:26:55]:
I love it. Eric, thanks so much for listening. Listeners, go check out his book, Don’t Retire, Graduate. Go check out the podcast. I bet you know the name. It’s Don’t Retire, Graduate, and we will see you on the next episode.

Adam Zuckerman [00:27:07]:
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Buried in Work podcast. Remember, you can save 10 percent on our estate preparation package and games with code podcast 10 at buriedinwork.com.