Why do people with similar savings retire confidently while you still feel stuck? Stay with me for the next few minutes, and I'm going to show you the three mindset traps that keep people working years longer than they need to, and the five specific steps that can make you retirement ready faster than you think. Now, the first trap, safety in large numbers. We're terrified of running out of money in retirement, so we convince ourselves that a bigger number equals more safety. The problem, none of us actually know what we truly need, so we just pick a number that feels big and safe. Now, here's the psychological trick our brain plays on us. That number is always just out of reach. It's not based on your spending or your lifestyle or your income needs, it's based on fear. Oh, you almost had it. You've got to be quicker than that. So this is entirely a fear-driven industry. The appearance that others can retire while you can't, well, it's an illusion created by these made-up benchmarks. A study by Charles Schwab found that most Americans believe they need 1.8 million to retire. Seriously. 1.8 million. Put your number in the comments down below. What is your freedom number? What's your retirement number? By the way, this video is not sponsored by anybody, Charles Schwart or anybody else. We never take any money from any of these affiliate pushers. The Gen Z lot think that to be successful, you need$9 million. Gen X and Millennials, they say you need$5 million to be successful. Now, these are not based on their actual spending needs or income requirement. They're just some big, scary number that sounds safe somehow. But here is what happens. If you've got like$500,000 saved, you think you need$1.5 million. If you've got$1.5 million, suddenly you're convinced you need 3 million. The goalpost keeps moving and you keep working till death do us part. By the way, if you're wondering what happens to all the paper that I'm drawing on here, it goes to very good use. My name is Felix Prien. I'm an ex-investor and banker. That's Winston back there. He's been retired since he was born. So we should take some guidance from him. And I'm also the founder of the GOAT Academy, where we've taught over 20,000 students how to invest, like the professionals do, help them retire earlier. And I'm also the co-founder of TradeVision.io, where we give regular investors access to the same tools and the same news and the same data that the big players use. Our mission here is simple: teach everyday investors how to build real wealth without getting taken advantage of. And then you have trap number two. It is what we call the one more year syndrome. And this kind of breaks my heart. When I was a banker for a little while, everybody I was talking to, I said, like, you know, how are you doing? How long have you been doing this for? Um, that kind of thing. And then any tips. And they say, Yeah, it's brilliant, man. I'm um, but I'm I'm I'm quitting. And I said, like, oh really? When are you, when are you, uh, when are you leaving? And he said, uh, two more years, two more bonuses. By the time the 15th guy told me that, I was like, there seems to be a disease, an ailment. And this literally affects people who've actually reached their retirement number. They've done the math, they're financially ready, but they're convinced they just need one more year of work to feel confident. Now, there are three causes to this. First, there is fear, anxiety, you still don't have enough, even though the numbers say you do. The second is fear about what are you gonna do when you're not working? What is your new identity? And then third, there is about just how are you gonna fill my day without the work structure? Because you've been doing that for decades, right? Now, if you genuinely love your work and you want to keep going, fantastic. Congratulations. You're one of the very, very few lucky ones. But if you want to retire and you're just telling yourself one more year, you need to recognize this pattern because the tragic reality is it's never just one more year. I've seen this turn into five years, ten years, even longer. And you are wasting the most valuable years of your life, those early retirement years when you are healthy, you're energetic, you can do all the things you've always dreamt about. That was the whole point, right? Let me tell you something I see constantly in my community. People in their 50s with quite a large amount of money,$650,000 saved up and they're terrified that they can't retire. Now, according to the Fed, the median retirement account for people in their 50s, it is$185,000. That means someone with$650,000 has saved 3.5 times more than the typical American their same age. Yet these same people are convinced they need to double or even triple what they have before they can stop working. And these numbers they're chasing, well, they're just made up. And then we got the third trap. I work with a lot of people in their 40s, 50s, 60s who are burdened by responsibilities in the 30s, 40s, you know, kids, mortgages, unexpected expenses. They just couldn't save as much as they wanted to. Now, if that's you, here's what you need to hear. It is not too late. This is exactly why catch-up contributions exist for people over 50. I've seen people successfully catch up and still achieve a confident, happy retirement, but you need to be strategic about it and you need to start now. So once you understand these three traps, so the third is like, you know, behind, right? Actually, literally behind. If you understand these three traps, you can break the illusion that everybody around you knows some secret you don't, because the real secret is not about the size of your nest egg at all. Now, before we continue, if you want to learn how Wall Street actually finds wedding stocks, which could potentially make retirement easier, also more fun, if you want to use the same strategies those guys use, I want to give you the opportunity to potentially learn from those guys through a structured mentorship program. You hop on a call with us, free strategy call. You ask us all the questions that are now running through your head, and it may be the thing that gets you to your freedom. It may be the thing that helps you to retire. So if you want that to be true, then go to the link down below. It is in the description, and it is the following it is felixfriends.org slash freedom. Let me give you the exact strategies that I teach my students and everybody else. One, you need to know your income need. It's about income, not some random number. What is the income that you actually need? Stop guessing. You're gonna have to sit down, you're gonna have to figure this out precisely. Now, don't assume you're gonna need 100% of your current income. Your current income includes things that disappear in retirement. First, you're saving for retirement right now, right? You don't have to do that anymore. Uh so you're not saving for retirement anymore. Second, your tax bill should be dramatically lower in retirement if you've done some proper planning. And third, you may not have a mortgage anymore. Other debts may end at some point, right? So, how do you figure this out? The easiest thing I think to do is print out your credit card and your bank statements for the last, say, three months, maybe six. Review every expense. Two, there are budgeting softwares out there that automatically do this sort of for you. I don't really care which way you do it, whatever, whatever tickles your fancy. But there is no way around the step. It isn't the funnest thing to do in the world until it's done, at which point you're gonna be like, oh my god, I only need this amount of money. I'm free, I could quit today or in three years or whatever. Now you have clarity. We want to shift our mind from balance to income from that same balance. Yeah, you make that shift, that transition, everything just changed. Say you need sixty thousand dollars a year to live comfortably in retirement. A random number, right? It can be bigger, it can be smaller. Now, maybe you're getting thirty thousand dollars of that from Social Security. So you now therefore need a portfolio that generates thirty thousand dollars a year. So, how does the math add up? There is something called the four percent rule, and that's conservative, but I think that's the that's the number that I I use personally, and it means that you need enough money so that four percent of that money can feed your expense requirements. Now, I've done the maths for you at 4%, you want 30k a year, right? Because the other 30k comes from Social Security. You need$750,000. If you have a pension that pays, maybe a little bit extra. A lot of people have a pension. Maybe that pension pays you 15 grand a year. So now you actually only need$15,000 from your portfolio. That means you don't need$750,000. You actually only need half of that, which would be$375,000. Yeah, because it's always about the 4%. And that's why people with less money retire confidently. They've done the income maths. They know exactly where every dollar is coming from. And meanwhile, people with more money but no income plan, they feel paralyzed by the uncertainty. So they start with a big number. Most people think if I have money, they think if I have$375,000 and I need 15K, then I'm gonna burn through that in X number of years. So they think in 25 years I'm gonna run out. That's how most people look at this, but that's not actually what happens if your money is invested, because it'll continue to grow and compact. 4% withdrawal from your portfolio, that means that your portfolio will continue to grow. Because the SP 500 has over the last, I don't know, 30 plus years grown at 10%. So you are not touching your capital, you're just withdrawing a sum of the gains, and that means that your portfolio will continue to beat inflation. The second part is you want to know your guaranteed income. What's your guaranteed income? I'm talking Social Security, maybe a pension if you have them. They make a massive difference for the retirement maths, right? Now, Social Security, you can go to the Social Security website right now, you can look up your estimated benefits. It'll tell you that. If you have a pension, get the exact number, call your pension provider, find out, right? Now, next is your portfolio is gonna have to do some of the heavy lifting. And you're gonna wanna take less risk with that. So you need to be preparing for this ideally a decade before you actually retire. There is research that identifies something called the retirement danger zone. It's the decade leading up to retirement and the decade following retirement. This is when risks can destroy your actual plan here. So, what that means is if you retire and you're immediately hit by a bear market, right? Catastrophic stock market, you're withdrawing from money from a declining portfolio, which can really, really impact your long-term outcomes. Now, the way we protect against that is by having some safe money in your portfolio. That can be some bonds, that can be some fixed income products. And the research shows that that actually protects you. So you start off with a high stock allocation in your working years, right? We all know this, we all do this. But in your final decade before retirement, you might want to start building into more defensive stocks or into bonds, at least to some degree. And then if you do start to retire and the market completely collapses, well, you spend your bond money, not your stock money, right? And that gets you through the danger zone, and then you can get the gains again as the market does hopefully its V-shaped recovery. And then the one thing that I see people holding people back, it's well, I call it really a stress test. Big banks have to do stress tests. You do too. People think, oh, there could be big expenses, there could be health, there could be all sorts of stuff that could happen. And how do I survive that? Or we can actually budget that into the plan, right? So some sort of planning software might become valuable here. I don't use them myself. I'm a spreadsheet guy, but if anybody knows a good one, feel free to put it down below in the comments. Again, we're not affiliated with any of them, but I'm always happy to share stuff that works. The big concern I see with a lot of people is what if I live to like 90, or what if I live to 100 years? Isn't that gonna make it worse? No, it'll actually make it better. Because the power of compounding means that your portfolio keeps growing. You'll have more money you can withdraw every single year and every single decade. You'll be richer at 100 than you are at 90, than you are at 80, than you are at 70, and so on. So the longer you live, the more prosperous you'll be if you do it right. If you want to visualize that, go to Google, type in go to academy, that's our academy, and the word compound. Play with that. Put in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, put in the withdrawals you're planning and see how that maps out. There is another hack. For those of you who are just like stuck in the what would I do with myself, or maybe I'm not quite there yet with the money. Well, I see a lot of people they move from full-time to part-time. Can even be gig work and be freelance work and be consulting, whatever you want to call it, this all the same thing. And that's a beautiful thing to do because it transitions you towards having more time. But you still have more money coming in. You could do the same if there are two of you. Retire your spouse and you continue working for a little bit, right? It's like a secret hack to early retirement. It gives you some of your time back immediately, reduces your overall household stress, and it makes the eventual transition to full retirement well much, much easier. So many people who are retired early, they aren't actually 100% retired, right? They're in some sort of transition phase. Now, I'm retired, I don't have a full-time job, I've quit corporate, but I'm still doing stuff because I love doing this stuff. I love having an impact. I love waking up in the morning and getting a dozen emails and hundreds of messages that say, you know, my life's better because of what you do here. That's incredibly rewarding. That's why I love doing what I do here, and I keep doing it until you guys stop me, tell me to stop. So you don't have to do like nothing and just sit in an armchair and wait to die. So let's bring this all together. You understand why it seems like everybody's retiring before you, even though you've been a diligent saver. It's not because they have more money, it's because they've shifted their focus from some random arbitrary dollar amount to income. You've learned the three mindset traps: safety in large numbers, you know, the one more year problem, the actually being behind problem, which is a logistical thing which we can solve. And I gave you five concrete strategies to move forward. Know your income needs, know your guaranteed income, calculate your safe money that you need, maybe put some of that into bonds, stress test your portfolio, and then consider like the non-traditional retirement, the partial retirement, whether that's you or you know your partner. The people who are confidently retiring, they're not lucky, they're not taking crazy risks, they're not ignoring reality, they've just done the income math. And here's what I want you to understand: if they can do it, you can do it too. The question isn't whether you have enough, the question is whether you have a plan to generate the income you need. Once you answer that question, retirement stops being scary, stops being uncertain, and it becomes clear and achievable. If you want our help in potentially making your current dollar amount a little larger, then have a chat with us and see if you might want to learn from the very people that I respect and admire, my mentors. And you can start doing that by booking a free strategy call with us at phelixfriends.org slash freedom. And it's like a 45-minute call. We'll walk you through exactly what that would look like. We ask you some questions. You can ask us all the questions you've ever wanted and see whether money management, the money skill is something we can help you elevate. If you got some value out of this, imagine the value you'd get out of actual one on one sessions with guys who've done this 20, 30, 40, 50 years longer than me. And go to feedexpense.org slash freedom and share this with you. Somebody else you think might also be thinking about retirement. And I wish you all the best.