Episode 98 – Retirement mindset: Jon
Retirement planning looks different for everyone. And as a Retirement Specialist, Jon shares what he’s learned from talking to people at different stages of their careers. As a result, this means that preparing for retirement means saving as early, but also keeping your mind sharp. And while retirement maybe be a few decades away for Jon, he hopes to inspire others with his curiosity and passion for learning.
Episode transcript:
[music intro]
Jenny
Welcome back to Fund your Future with DRS. Well, today we’re interviewing Jon, who is a Retirement Specialist here at DRS. And he’s been with our agency for four years and talks with members all the time about their retirement plans. And so, we thought it would be great to interview you about your experience here and then also your own personal financial habits. So welcome to the podcast.
Jon
Thanks. Thanks for having me. It’s always fun to join the podcast. Get my little shot at internet fame.
Jenny
Yeah. And before we get started, I wanted to put in a plug for our 100th episode that is coming up. We’re doing a big question and answer with a bunch of our staff and then also asking for questions from you, our audience. And so, if you’d like to submit a question for our 100th episode, send an email to drs.podcasts@drs.wa.gov.
And so just to start off, tell us a little bit about your role here at DRS.
Jon
Sure. If you want to get fancy I think I’m a Retirement Specialist 3 in our contact center, which really means when someone calls in with the difficult question or a confusing one that maybe doesn’t come up very often, that gets brought to me. Good amount of research, content expert, kind of get to play assistant manager occasionally with moving schedules and getting everything covered.
But it’s a fun spot to be in where I don’t exactly know what work is going to be, but I get to be knowledgeable on all the RCWs, WACs, the nitty-gritty of retirement. My friends happily tell me to stop being a retirement nerd when we’re hanging out, and I’ll be like, “wait, did you know?” They’re either not public employees or just are 30 and don’t care about random bits of retirement.
Seth
Give it 10 years and then when you’re in those sorts of environments, you will become the most popular person in the world. They will have lots of questions about: “oh my gosh, I’m behind. What do I do?”
Jon
Yeah. What do I do? It’s funny. I’ll be hanging out with like, my father in law’s friends and that’s always like, “oh Jon, we need to have dinner.” I’ll be like, “hours are 8:30 – 4. You can call me. I will happily talk at work.”
Jenny
Not over dinner.
Jon
Yeah, right.
Seth
So, Jon, I’m assuming you grew up just always wanted to be a retirement specialist.
Seth
But what drew you? Was there something that interests you about DRS?
Jon
That they were hiring. [That] was a key one to start off, right? I had been in the education world as a para educator. I was in charge of a detention room, and I knew I wanted to get out of that world. It wasn’t exactly my calling. And so, I was looking at different state pieces and I read the job description.
There was a level of like, that sounds really interesting and also something that I have zero knowledge on. So that mix of I’m intrigued, but also scared. And then going through when I applied, there was a big orientation of like, okay, here’s what you’re going to do. There’s going to be a lot of training. And it became very comfortable with like, okay, they’re going to teach me. Like, I don’t have to be a financial advisor first to come here.
And then once I was here, just fell in love with people that were calling in and emailing and asking questions. It’s really fun to kind of be that support piece of like a lot of people don’t think about retirement way in the future. And so, getting to be there and excited with the people that are or at the end, kind of making those plans, learning what retirement is going to look like just became very fun to be a good support piece. Yeah, I’ve loved it.
Jenny
Do you feel like you had a lot of financial conversations with your parents growing up? Was that a thing? Did you ever get into budgeting as a kid?
Jon
I feel like the budgeting my parents did a good job teaching me, like current spending, like how to make sure that you’re not living outside your means. Some of that stuff. I don’t feel like we talked much about retirement or kind of those long term plans of finances. Yeah. And so it was a weird mix. The thought was like, oh, the future problems will worry about themselves.
And so for right now, just worry about paying your rent and affording everything that you need and some of the things that you want, and then it’ll end. And so then coming here, it was funny like, I’m going to admit this to the internet. I didn’t join DCP for like two years after joining. And it’s funny because we encourage people to do that all the time, but I was very much in that mode of like, no, I’m trying to buy a house.
I’d been married for a few years. Like, I need to build some other things first and then everyone here is great. No one was trying to pressure me into it, but it was very odd. Just because this is what we do. And what do you mean you’re not putting extra money away for retirement? I love to, when I’m on the phone, to be able to tell someone like “it’s okay that you’re having to withdraw right now, like you have to pay your bills.”
Yeah, it’s very important. You know, sometimes I’ll say “retirement does, you know, good if you don’t reach it.” And so, yeah, that’s a long winded answer for you. But yeah, we had some conversations. Current skills, not necessarily retirement related.
Seth
You mentioned kind of navigating, you know, your own personal finance as you’ve been working at DRS and kind of thinking about how what are your financial priorities maybe at different stages of life as well as things move.
But I’m curious if you have any financial habits or any sort of techniques or things that you’re proud of in your overall financial life? Are there things that you want to work more on? Yeah. What are the things that you think about around your own personal finance?
Jon
This is a time commitment. I’m not saying I recommend this for other people, but I actually sat down at one point and built a spreadsheet where I could track every single dollar that is spent from my bank account in a month and then categorize that. And it was a lot of work. But it was fun to see kind of that outcome piece and then also eye opening for me to go like, “oh, I did spend that much on food.”
Which, you know, food is a good category to spend money on. But also, you know, maybe that’s “I might be overspending there,” especially if I’m throwing away, you know, a lot of groceries at the end of the week type stuff. So, I’m pretty proud of that one. I don’t keep up with it because it’s a lot of work to transcribe that, especially now with apps that will kind of do some of that for you.
I’m cheap. I like to not spend money when I can spend time on it. And so I would say I’m extra proud of that one. Probably things that I would like to work on. I’m going to go back to DCP. Someone here, I’m not taking credit for this one myself, but said like, “oh, well, when you get your annual step increase or if there’s a COLA, if you put some of that towards DCP, then you never see it come out of your bank account.”
And that was great advice. And it got me to sign up at 1%. And I really need to work on getting that up to more. Which ultimately just comes back to priorities, right? I want retirement to be nice, but also, I like vacations. So, got to balance that. Where’s the money going?
Seth
Yeah I really like the idea of everybody like doing their full like spending tracking once. It’s not exactly budgeting. You’re not thinking about what’s happening in the future, but like looking at what happened in the past. Because that’s probably more accurate than what you think you’re going to do. And I did something similar I probably decades ago and then recently did something similar with like all of our credit card statements and just dumped it into an AI tool and just said, put these on categories for me, create a spreadsheet.
And it was not perfect. I’ll tell you that. And had my wife look at it afterwards and she’s like, no, that’s not right. But it did help maybe speed up the process a little bit and think about. Oh, that’s a category I hadn’t even thought of before or didn’t realize. I remember when I was doing this in my 20s, I was like, I was really curious how much I was spending on donuts.
Like, that was the thing for whatever category was in my head. Like, man, I’m buying a lot of donuts. And like in my overall scheme of budget, probably wasn’t that expensive. But it got me thinking about kind of trying to prioritize spending.
Jon
Yeah, I need to go add a donut line to my…
Jenny
I was going to jump in and say, I will say that there are a lot of free apps out there and like website services that’ll do that for you. You have to link your credit cards and your checking accounts, and they do it all very securely. But that’s what I do. I go in and once a month and kind of that looking back at like, okay, what did we spend last month? Where were the categories? And then, you know, making informed decisions from there for next month about how we might spend.
Jon
Yeah, absolutely. Having something to kind of take yourself back to. I remember at one point someone told me about the envelope method, right? They play in what they’re going to spend. They put that much in envelope of cash and that’s all that they have. And I remember looking at it and I’ll say this was like 2014 roughly. I mean, like there are so many internet items, [and] we’re going back to cash in envelopes?
I know that works for a lot of people. I’m not knocking that part. It does not work for me. Yeah. And so I like the way you phrase that kind of a point in time. Like, “okay, is this what we want to be doing? If not, then we can change it.”
Jenny
On that note of advice. And now that you’ve been working at DRS as a Retirement Specialist for a number of years. Has there been any pieces of financial advice that have stuck out to you, or that you’ve received, or that you would pass on to, to other people you mentioned your friends are too bored to think about retirement at 30, but what would you tell them if they would listen?
Jon
Gosh. Definitely. Just the amount of time that things have to grow is a lot easier than trying to make up for it in the long run. Right? Like, we all like to imagine that when we hit 60, we’ll be maxed out on our steps of our pay scale, and we’ll have all this extra money. And I have not seen… I don’t talk to many people that have extra money lying around that they’re like, “oh no, I got this.”
Yeah. I think it’s the there’s a rule with a fancy name is a 7% rule for money to double or something along those lines. Like if you can put it in now into the market or, you know, into those safer structures like, it will have more time than if you try and max things out in the three years before retirement. Which is also a special program. People can call us and we’ll help them set that up.
But yeah, sometimes it’s not as helpful. I think that’s the biggest one there. And then secondly is again when you get COLAs and step increases, put that into DCP at the time. Right? If your pay is going up 3% and you put 1% into DCP, you’re still getting a bump in your pay and saving for retirement. You don’t even notice it.
Jenny
Excellent.
Seth
I mean, you sort of touched on this a little bit already, but like, retirement still a long ways away.
Jon
Yeah. Thanks for the reminder.
Seth
Yeah. Have you thought about what that looks like for you? You and your spouse? I mean, like, there are a lot of a lot of unknowns between now and then as well. And so it is hard to like fully picture, but I’m curious what you would like it to be.
Jon
Yeah. I think the biggest like single word is comfortable. I think that’s a lot of people that I talk to even. It’s just like, well, I don’t need to be rich, but I’d love to not be trying to pick up every odd job that I can. If I’m going in a dream mode. Right? I’m sitting in Hawaii, sipping on a drink with an umbrella in it, and it’s all just nice and easy.
But you’re right, there’s a lot of things between now and then. I have no idea what’s going to come up. And so just right now, in order to mitigate that, it’s: what things can I predict? I can predict that I will need money. And so I should save for it, I don’t have a whole lot to go on beyond there.
Like there’s that big dream like, “oh, I’m going to own a bunch of property and it’s going to pay for itself, right? I’ll rent it out some of those different pieces.” But the realism side of me goes: “Meh, might not happen.”
Jenny
And then so we also talk a lot about around the retirement mindset of, you know, retirement and life goals and a lot more than just, yeah, sitting on a beach in Hawaii, like, we all want to do that, but maybe just tell us a little bit about some of the activities that you enjoy outside of work. And what are some activities that you would focus on if you had more time available to you?
Jon
Yeah, I am into CrossFit right now. It’s a big time commitment, just that idea of staying at a functional fitness level. I like to say, you know, everyone makes fun of burpees because they look terrible until you realize it’s teaching you to stand up off the ground. So, it’s a very good skill to have. Kayaking. Disc golf. Things that get me outdoors and also in a leisurely way.
Right? Like I know Seth is a big runner. Props to you, but absolutely not. I will be outdoors at a slow pace, that type of stuff. Learning is also a big piece for me. I get bored of the same stuff over and over. I went over to the Tumwater Falls and got to learn about all of the salmon stuff going on down there.
Had never seen that large of a salmon before or gotten to go like learn those pieces. I think it’s fourth grade up here, goes there regularly, and I here I am at 30 going, “oh, this is really cool.” So, any of those little opportunities to just kind of gain more information, make connections with people. And I think there’s always something to be learned from whatever situation you’re in.
And so just embrace it. And it might be useless, it might be random, but also be fun to hear someone, especially if they’re passionate about it.
Jenny
Yeah, I love that. The mindset of curiosity.
Seth
Well, especially a lot of what you’ve described throughout this conversation, are things that are not heavily financially dependent, going to the park or going to a local community event. It doesn’t take a lot of financial resources. It does take time. And I think that’s one of the things that many of us look forward to in retirement is like, “oh, I’d really like to go do that thing.”
You mentioned running. There’s a Tuesday morning run group that’s a bunch of retirees. And every time sometimes I’m like driving across town for work and I see them and I just like, “oh, I want to be that person.” Like, I want to be able to like, go run it Tuesday at 9:30 in the morning and then go get coffee afterwards.
Like trying to figure out what those things are to think about helping motivate saving in DCP or increasing your retirement contributions. So that way you have a vision of what that future is so that you don’t have to. I was just watching a presentation from one of our colleagues about DCP and she. Oh gosh, I can’t remember the term she used exactly, but it was something like DCP being your like, ‘get out of a bad job fund.’
Like if I if I need to pull the plug on this because something’s not working, I have this, you know, I don’t want to describe exactly some emergency fund, but like, I’ve got this cushion, this safety net. And I think sometimes that can be a motivating reason for people to save sometimes as well. And think about all the all the other things you wish you were doing.
Jon
Yeah, I like that phrasing for the time is the thing that you’re really saving for. My father-in-law is getting ready to retire in May, and I everyone keeps saying like, oh, what are you going to do now that you’ll have so much time? And I think at some point it might become not quite stressful, but a little bit of that, like, oh my gosh, I am going to have so much time.
Yeah, it’s crazy. We spend so long working and putting in our 40 hours a week, and sometimes we’re not thinking about “what do I like to do?” So, I’m glad that that’s you know, we talk about more than just money. This is personhood.
Seth
Yeah. I was listening to somebody talk about this when, like, thinking about your non-financial retirement plan, the non-financial side of retirement. And the person was saying that you will always get the generic answer, like, oh, I’m going to spend more time with family. I’m going to hang out with grandkids. Like whatever the person was really getting at was like, I want you to tell me six months from now, what are you going to do on Tuesday?
Like try to get a little bit more specific, because that’s usually what’s scaring people. Is that like complete unknown. Like right now I know what I’m going to do Tuesday. I’m not going to be running with those retirees. Now, if I’m retired, I might know what I’m going to do on that day. But yeah, thinking about just a couple of months down the road when you kind of get over the new shock and maybe you’ve spent a couple of weeks on a beach somewhere and like, but when you get into that normal routine, what is that normal routine look like?
It doesn’t have to be a routine, but like, what are the things that you’re going to really like jump into? And, and I think for a lot of folks who are approaching retirement, there’s a lot of exploration around that. And I think it’s easier when we’re in our 20s and 30s and were exploring like, well, I’m new to an area just like you were describing, like, I’m new to an area.
There’s things I can go explore, but I’ve, you know, once you’ve lived here for 30 years, you’ve seen the salmon enough times maybe, right?
Jon
Yeah. It’s not as interesting when I do this every year. It is funny, as you were going over that, I did hear my grandpa in the back of my head: “on that Tuesday, I’m gonna do whatever I want to do.” Like, yeah, there is an excitement level there even, of just going like, I’m gonna do what sounds fun.
Seth
Yeah, I think it’s fun for a few months. And then it’s like, oh gosh, what is this? The rest of my life? Yeah. Yeah, sure.
Jenny
Yeah. Well, that’s why we ask these questions, to have these conversations now. Well, Jon, is there anything else that you want to share with those who are public employees and maybe in the middle of their career and are maybe either thinking about retirement or not thinking about retirement?
Jon
If you’re not thinking about retirement, spend a few minutes thinking about it. When I first joined, I thought it was a little funny. I would hear people say like, oh, you joined state service for retirement? And I had no idea what they meant. Now, being here and I don’t have any experience with the private sector, but I hear people’s experiences when they have both us and somewhere else, and it’s like, oh yeah, like this is going to be nice.
And so, spend a few minutes realizing how nice it’s going to be, maybe make some sort of plan and then just go for it, enjoy everything on the way to it and enjoy it once you get there.
Jenny
Excellent. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing your story and talking about your experience with DCP and opening up about that and just your own personal financial habits. It’s why we started the podcast is the more that we can have these conversations, the more that people can hopefully think about that for their own personal life.
Jon
Absolutely. It’s been fun. Every once in a while, I get somebody that calls in on the phone and they’ll say, “oh, I have this question from the podcast,” or even I’ve had a couple of people, like, nearly cut me off, and they want to share that they already know what I’m going to say because they’ve been listening and studying and I’m like, “okay, great. Great job.”
Jenny
Ohhh! We love to hear that!
Jon
To a degree, I almost don’t have anything to tell you because, you know, like you have learned, young Padawan, you’re doing great. All that good stuff. So, it’s been fun. Oh, I really love that we do this.
Seth
That’s great to hear. I think that’s one of the things we try to reinforce is like, we don’t want to keep secrets. We don’t want people to think we’re keeping secrets. We want to share all the information we have. And then still, like as we’ve been talking about today, it’s up to people to make their own decisions, figure out what path makes sense for them or what actions they want to take.
And having more of these conversations, I think, helps people think through those possibilities. So really appreciate that you came on the podcast, Jon.
Jon
Absolutely. Thanks, guys.
[music outro]
Disclaimer
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