Speaker 1: 1:12

All right, welcome back to the Make the Most of your Money podcast. As always, colin Page is with me. Colin, how are you Great, taylor, how are you? I'm good, I'm a little fired up, per usual. Something that's been coming up a lot, actually, with other advisor friends that I think is relevant to our listeners to think about is this idea of projecting your financial life. I think what a lot of people think of financial planning. They think of projections. They're used to seeing some math and kind of like here's what life's going to look like. And you and I both have some thoughts on this of you know. We think it can be helpful, but we think it can be overused or used incorrectly. So I thought let's have a conversation around financial projections the pros, the cons, how to do it, what we would consider to be right. Conversation around financial projections the pros, the cons, how to do it, what we would consider to be right.

Speaker 2: 2:00

And yeah, what do you think? Yeah, I'm here for that. I got a joke for you, though to kick it off. Yeah, always yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:08

So the classic telling of the joke is a mathematician, statistician and an accountant are at a job interview, but I think you could put in like a financial analyst instead of the accountant, and the joke still works. So the interviewer calls him in and he calls the mathematician first and he asks him one question what is 2 plus 2 equal? And the mathematician says 4, of course he says okay, thank you, that was a great answer. And he calls in the statistician and he asks him the same question what is two plus two equal? The statistician says well, it's such a small sample size. Give or take 3%. I think the answer is four. I've got about a 95% confidence. He says okay, thank you. He calls in the accountant or the financial analyst asking the same question, and you know what the answer is, is it? What do you want it to be? Exactly? Yeah, what do you want it to be? What do you want it to say? And guess who he hires.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Well, I mean that's incredibly accurate, but I think if to continue the joke if they ask the financial advisor, it would be. It depends, yeah that's right, it's true, like I mean, that's how I advise. What do you? What do you think? It depends, it depends, which that's a good one, though I like that, so maybe I thought it was funny.

Speaker 2: 3:35

We'll see how many other.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So I thought it was funny. We'll see how many other people. No, that's great and that's actually kind of a good way to highlight this whole conversation of, like, different people view math and projections differently. But in the context of projecting your financial life for planning, let me just say I get the appeal of it. I know like it's a human thing to kind of want that certainty, to have that confidence, like okay, here's what things are going to look like. So I fully get the appeal of it. Like we said, it is helpful, it is yeah, but there's just limitations to it.

Speaker 1: 4:11

So you know, at its simplest, like our financial life, at the end of the day, no matter how much complexity is going on, there's money coming in, there's money going out. That could be income, expenses. The money you save is either growing or shrinking based on what it's invested in, and this is happening over time. So there's money in out, it's growing, shrinking over time, and then you'll have some taxes and some inflation. That's really like any projection is just projecting those variables. Now you could take each of those and slice them up a whole bunch of ways of like where all your money's coming in, where it all is going out and how much it's growing and why. But like that's it. At the end of the day it's money coming in, going out, growing, shrinking over time, taxes and inflation going to affect it. So you could do a very, very simple projection of say okay, here's how much I'm going to save, here's how much it's going to grow, here's how much I'm going to withdraw when I retire, here's how much I think I'm going to earn, how much will I have left or how long will it last. This is all very, very easy math and I do think there's value in seeing like how that looks Like. If you said okay, if I'm going to save $10,000 a year, I'm going to earn 8%. How much will that create in the future? That's great. What if I save $15,000 a year? What you're seeing is like kind of the sensitivity of those projections.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Most people would know that a simple projection like that is going to be wrong, right, like life's just not that linear, it's not that clean. So what do we do If you can't say you know you're going to earn 8 percent every year, you're going to earn somewhere around 8 percent? Well, we need a different way of calculating these numbers and the most common way a term that a lot of people have heard of is like a Monte Carlo simulation, right, and Monte Carlo at its simplest is just a random number generator. You would generally I mean you could use it for a lot of different things, but in the context of financial planning it's usually used for, like investment returns, where you would define an average return and a volatility metric, standard deviation, and it's going to do the calculations, to project the money out, all your inputs, and then run it through a whole bunch of scenarios and create this.

Speaker 1: 6:18

It's an audio podcast, but you call it the cone of uncertainty of the different possible ranges of outcomes. That's nice. Well, first of all, anything you would add or subtract to what I've said so far.

Speaker 2: 6:34

Yeah, I mean I would say the advent of or the application of the Monte Carlo analysis to financial planning was kind of a revolution in the space. I mean, I think before that it was hard to do serious financial projections and have it, you know, carry any weight beyond just like copy forward the average, you know.

Speaker 2: 6:58

return and see where we land, you know. I think the Monte Carlo analysis does introduce into the problem. Well, these variables are uncertain. We can't bank on getting the average every year. In fact, everyone knows that's not going to happen. Some years you're going to be up 20%, Other years you're going to be down 15%, and so on the positive side, what Monte Carlo does is allow you to show how a plan might work out under these uncertainties.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Yeah, absolutely yeah. So there's absolutely value to that. A couple of ways we could go from here. I would say, well, let's talk about okay. So that's one way that we can get a little more precise. The other way to get more precise is to, like I mentioned, chop up those different money in, money out, growing and shrinking. You could say here's my income, here's how it's going to change, or, like you know, different expenses. You can just continue to chop these up. You can project tax rates, see how tax rates are going to change, have inflation assumptions, add more details, add more variables.

Speaker 1: 8:08

Yes, if you think of like, if it's a spreadsheet, and like columns and rows, you're just chopping them, adding columns for more sources and dividing the rows by more time, and go, let's do monthly return analysis, something like that. I think the point I want to get across is that, generally speaking, the more variables you're going to project, the more areas you're going to be wrong. And there can be this feeling of like, the more I project, the more accurate my model is going to be. I generally don't think so.

Speaker 1: 8:38

I mean, there can be some like simple things that it's worth like, maybe like a different tax rate pre retirement and post retirement, but like there's just a limit to all of this of like, yeah, I, yeah, I'm trying to get home with a clean example here but like you know the example of like, well, I'm going to sell my house in 20 years and move to Florida and buy a downsized house, well, my property taxes be on that property in 25 years. You know that's just you're. You're not going to be accurate and so, um, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself a little bit. But I think the point is that there's a balance. Like more projections, like that illusion of certainty is not actual certainty. The more you project, the more variables you allow control, for it's not going to add any more accuracy to the model.

Speaker 2: 9:17

Yeah, I mean I think of it like a forest in the trees scenario. Really zoom in and a lot of these financial planning tools or software that advisors use allow you to get really down in the weeds and fine-tuning these different variables and turning these different knobs. But I think what you get when you do that is not a more precise outcome, because you're playing with the fleas, you're, you're the, you're playing with the fleas on the elephant's back. I mean, the elephant is like gonna do what it's gonna do. That's the market return. That's the big variable. How's the market going to return?

Speaker 2: 9:58

And and in some, in some ways, you know tweaking these little dials here and there you, you lose the forest for the trees, um, or there's this like false sense of precision um that can arise.

Speaker 2: 10:12

You know in, in, in, I would say, in unskilled hands. Or you know because, because there can be value in looking at different detailed scenarios, say, you're trying to game plan out, you know one specific variable, or you know decision, um, it can be helpful to like, let's run a whole bunch of simulations and and look at the plan if we do this plan a, or look at if we do plan b, and that gives us some kind of educated way to make a decision, choosing between those two choices. But I think you can get sucked into those details and forget like we're not doing these things in a vacuum. There are so many variables that go into this and the actual outcome is going to be different. You know you're only going to have one actual path of time through your financial life. This cone of uncertainty is just a way to illustrate that we don't know what's actually going to happen.

Speaker 1: 11:17

Yeah. So I think the way I would think about it is like what variables are worth adding If you are highly confident that it is going to change, like let's, let's use taxes, for example. Like you could, you know money in out grow, shrink time tax rate. If you know you're going to be in a different tax rate in retirement, that's a that's a fair thing to assume for Um. But trying to project it changing every five years or something like that is where you get into like that's just probably not worth it. And so I think that's a good way of thinking about it, like things that you know are going to change and you can like have confidence like that there will be a directional change, not just like there might be some change I don't know what it will be but like, yeah, my tax rate is going to be different, that could be worth allowing for. But I want to transition to talking about, like how to actually use projections, because there is value in all of this, and you talked about a little bit like comparing scenarios.

Speaker 1: 12:15

I think the biggest thing is not necessarily to take the results literally. Like if you build in a financial plan, whether it's the simplest plan or the most detailed one and it goes oh, you're going to have $1.8 million or $2,000 when you retire. No, you're not. You know what I'm saying. But if you work two years longer, you'll have $2.1 million. The takeaway is oh, if I work longer, I'll have a little bit more money. And then maybe you say well, what if taxes are 25% instead of 20?

Speaker 2: 12:56

Well, now you only have $.4 million. Okay, the takeaway is that taxes are going to decrease. How much I'm going to have? Not, I'm going to have 1.4 million. That's how I view this, this dial. What's the impact on the plan? And that's super valuable information, especially when it comes to things like you know how long, how much longer am I going to have to work? Or, you know I'm looking for, I would like to move into a bigger house. What's my budget for this? Like, we can actually, you know, put that lump sum payment into the calculator and see okay, well, that means you may have to work two more years in order to afford this bigger house. Is that tradeoff worth it to you?

Speaker 2: 13:49

Showing people the sensitivities to these different variables, or you know the main one I, I find you know that you keep coming back to all the time is like, what happens in different market scenarios? Like so the s&p has averaged, you know, 9.7 percent throughout its entire history, 9.7 returns. Well, what happens if, like the next 30 years, returns are not 9.7? What if they're 30%? Worse, what if they're like, six and a half percent? You know what happens to your plan then. Are you still going to be able to meet your goals. What will your life look like, or, you know, what will your retirement age be in that scenario, and so so using it as a tool to like understand those sensitivities, I think, is where it's well yeah, and also I like identifying the sensitivity.

Speaker 1: 14:37

so like, if I go back to my taxes, yeah, but like taxes are going to be higher, right, and like the base assumption is like 1.8 million and tax are going to be higher than you have 1.775. You go, okay, that's not actually a huge risk, yeah, it's not a huge risk. But if it's 1.2, you go whoa, whoa, whoa. This is something we need to look out for. So the takeaway from there it's not you're going to have 1.2 million, it's that we're going to. We're we have a tax rate exposure issue here.

Speaker 1: 15:02

And like that. That's the value of playing with the numbers. It is not anything about you're going to have $1.8 million. You have no freaking clue what you're going to have. You're going to have money depending on, anyway. So but I really like that to like identify what are the key drivers in this. Like just working two years more drastically change how much money we'll have, or just a little bit, that's it, and it is all sensitivity, but maybe just defining what that sensitivity actually means a little bit more, because something else I would say it's, and maybe just from running thousands of these. But like I don't need a calculator to tell me if I work longer, I'll have more money. You know what I mean. And if taxes are higher, I'll have less money.

Speaker 2: 15:43

Especially sitting here in your 30s, working a couple extra years instead of retiring at 62,. I'll retire at 65, and that means I can go buy this bigger house. That kind of thinking can be abused too.

Speaker 1: 15:58

Yeah, I mean I'm going to bring up a couple of conversations I had with advisors last week about this, where the advisor had a client who was wanting to take a year off, take a sabbatical, and he was trying to build it into the model. And I said, like did your client ask you to do that? No, what are you wanting the model to show? You're going to have a little less money. This client, like what are you wanting the model to show? Like you're going to have a little less money? This guy was like 32 years old, and so I just, you know, I think we can get in our own way of like we want to have this precision and this certainty. But I think clients are smart. They know like, yeah, for a ticket, you're off. Now they may want to know, like how much it derails things, I guess.

Speaker 1: 16:34

So I'm kind of talking in circles here. I'm kind of talking in circles here. I'm on the fence, I get the value, but we can overdo it. And I think the biggest thing I want to just communicate is there is value, especially in understanding those sensitivities, but just don't take the results super literally. And maybe that's a good chance to talk about the way that Monte Carlo simulations are often presented. We've been talking about an ending balance here, but a lot of times they're presented in a probability of success. Right when, like in generally, it's based on the probability uncertainty is into a single number, which is your probability of success.

Speaker 2: 17:27

And I have a problem with the framing of this as success or failure to begin with. But you know, essentially it's out of these 100,000 scenarios we ran, how many of them did our plan work in and you didn't run out of money, versus how many did it not? And I think the first problem with it is, you know, we've been trained since grade school to think you know a 90% and above is an A and 80% is a B, and everybody wants to get an A, and so you know, framing it in terms of a percentage, I think, automatically leads people in their heads to want to shoot for a higher number without really understanding what does that probability even mean? What is success? What is failure? If success is not running out of money, that's a pretty low bar. It's pretty nonspecific.

Speaker 2: 18:26

Okay, you didn't run out of money. Did you die with zero in the bank? Or did you die with $10 million in the bank that you could have spent Otherwise? Probability of success doesn't tell you that. Likewise, if you think about it as failure versus probability of failure, it's not like Failure isn't really an option. We adjust when things are not going according to what our plan was, we make adjustments, and so in things like retirement planning where failure is not an option. Maybe we will dial down our spending in the future if it looks like we're in the red zone of maybe where we need to make some changes here. Nobody just continues blindly on the initial plan they set out without thinking about how are things going, and updating the plan. So I mean the whole, I mean I think that's the Monte Carlo analysis has a presentation and a communication.

Speaker 1: 19:34

Yeah, two thoughts there. One that, yeah, failure in this term just means like the exact plan didn't work. So like, if you said, like I want to spend $40,000 a year in retirement and it fails, that could mean that $39,000 worked though, yeah, for the last year, you know, like, so it can be a little too binary in that sense, and I know that's where the range of outcomes supposed to account for that. But, yes, failure can be overstated. But your point about adjusting is huge and that's like, um, you know, this is not like we set a plan. We forget it forever. The way to use these tools, if you have a model that you kind of trust or like you feel like is is showing you the sensitivities, update them every year, just like, okay, do things seem good? Are we on a decent enough track? Update them every year. It's not a one-time thing. I forgot that.

Speaker 2: 20:25

You know what's going to say on that, but good, I'm gonna say but, but with the updating, you know, I think the other uh issue I have with this, the way that monty carl presents is like okay, so we update your plan a year from now. We started with an initial probability of success of 90%. Maybe there's been a downturn in the market. Your probability of success has dropped from 90 to 80. Now most people are going to say oh no, that's not good. 80% doesn't sound good and it's dropping. It's going the wrong direction. So there's an open question of when do I make that change? And there can be like a that creates pressure to like okay, now we need to make a change. That creates pressure to like okay, now we need to make a change. And so in the real world that that, I think, has it doesn't. When you play it out over many years, you end up being, you end up overreacting to, to small changes. Uh, in the plan.

Speaker 1: 21:32

That's a great. That's a great point. And well, there's some, I agree. Um, the other thought I was going to say about the probability of success, like the way I would use that there, is similar to what I was talking about earlier, like, look at the directional effect, don't take the percentage super literally either. Like did I go from 78 to 83? Or did I go from 78 to 93? Okay, that's a really big. It's the same thing of identifying what really moves the needle. The 78 and 93 are irrelevant and wrong. It's not actually 78% chance. Well, I guess if world is exactly like your model, then it would be, but that's the point. The next point I wanted to make is just some of the limitations of any form of projection. Where are these numbers coming from, especially on the investment returns perspective? Generally speaking speaking, all historical data averaged out, find a standard deviation. Project it forward.

Speaker 2: 22:24

Yeah, what happens if the future is not like the past?

Speaker 1: 22:26

Yes, exactly, and that's what you're talking about too. There's just so much. You know the technical term. There is survivorship bias. Like this is one outcome of what could happen over the last 150 years of data we're using. Now.

Speaker 1: 22:41

Even we talked a little bit off camera of like showing like historical scenarios, like stress testing, a plan showing it through like the great depression or something like that. I fully, fully get the value of that, but that doesn't mean you can survive anything. There can always be a worse situation, and that's not to scare people, just like. There's a limitation with all of this. That's the number one thing I want to get through.

Speaker 1: 22:56

So, if you're using projections to like get a high level understanding, make sure you're generally on track, identifying sensitivities fine, don't take them super literally. At the end of the day, control what you can, which is you know your savings, your investment allocation, how much insurance you have, state planning decisions like the do the basics. The plan will kind of be what it will be in a lot of ways. I know that's crazy to say, but I would love to talk about. I think this is great because we've talked about a lot before. You deal generally with retired folks. I would deal with a lot of people in the 30s. I would love to talk about how you actually use projections in your planning with clients, and then I'll talk about how I use them.

Speaker 2: 23:32

Yeah, I mean so when I'm working with a client who's nearing retirement, in some ways the deck is already set. They've been saving their whole life. They've accumulated funds in retirement accounts. There's not going to be a huge change between age 55 and age 60 in terms of the path that they're on. There's just not enough time to make big changes to that trajectory.

Speaker 2: 24:10

So where I use projections in retirement is mainly around the question of how much can I afford to spend in retirement. So I've got this pile of assets in my 401k, in my IRA, in a brokerage account. I don't know how long I'm going to live. I don't know what the market's going to return. Those are the two biggest variables, I would say, in determining your spending capacity. And so where it's helpful for clients and where I would use, you know some, some kind of projection model, whether it's a Monte Carlo analysis or whether it's running a plan spending amount through you know historical return data is figuring out that that spending capacity number Um, you know what? Uh, how much can you afford to withdraw per year and not run out? And not only that, but like, let's understand and build into the model you know we've talked about. When things aren't going well. We make adjustments. Let's build into the model. When exactly are we going to adjust and by how much?

Speaker 1: 25:17

I love that. Proactively defining when you'll adjust. That's awesome, exactly.

Speaker 2: 25:20

Yeah. So it's not like oh no that we. You know we were at 90% probability of success. We're down to 80%. You know, should we make a change? You know we set clear thresholds. You know, based on the data, based on, yes, historical returns and variability, but we set a very clear number. Okay, if your assets go from 2 million down to 1.4 million you know they've gone down 30% Then we're going to change your spending, we're going to reduce your spending by 5% and then reset those. They're called guardrails, but then we'll reset that. And that's something you know. That kind of dynamic plan is something we can run through a Monte Carlo engine and see okay, well, how would this plan have performed in this range of outcomes? And that's very helpful to clients to understand, like, what are the sensitivities of my plan? How much of an adjustment would I have had to make in this adverse scenario? Or how would my plan have actually behaved if the market did this instead of that?

Speaker 1: 26:23

Uh, as much as any area of planning, like, retirement planning is one where adjusting each year, updating, is so important because, like, there's a couple of states you're you're right that a lot of like the deck is set for folks retiring, like they're probably not going to 10 X their net worth in the next five years, or something like that.

Speaker 1: 26:39

Uh, so you have to make a very big decision of, like, how much should I start drawing on my assets?

Speaker 1: 26:46

And there can be this like you can build a plan day one, and there can be this thinking of, like, oh, this is it, this is my spending plan for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1: 26:55

No, like, the next five to 10 years are going to be massively important for, like how much you can spend. So that's where, like, yeah, the work you do up front is huge, but you've got to keep adjusting. Because if you had a great sequence and you actually maybe have more money than when you started, but now you're going to live even less, you can spend a heck of a lot more, and I know you're talking about you can ratchet that up and down, but yeah, I just think, like that retirement projections is much more sensitive and, I think, a little bit more important. So, even though everything I've said about projections being wrong, like I do think at that stage, it's important to run through it and be like can this survive? You know, we know this isn't every single outcome but, like you know, with some crazy stuff, if we make these adjustments, will this portfolio last. That's great.

Speaker 2: 27:35

Yeah, and it's important to say, like you did, it's not just adjusting if we're in an adverse situation, it's like, as time unfolds and we find that we're actually doing better, like we should feel confident in increasing the spending. You know where we've taken maybe those those worst case scenarios off the table, now that you know that bad sequence of returns early in retirement okay, we've made it through those early years and markets have been great like we should feel comfortable turning up spending a little bit, you know, and so we're using a projection. You know we're using a model to help make those informed decisions and understand, like, the sensitivities to them. But I think I still like I cringe when I hear an advisor like well, I put this into the model and this was what it said, and like you need a model's only as good as the person using the tool who can understand how it works, understand the sensitivities, what drives it.

Speaker 2: 28:41

You know garbage in, garbage out. You know you have to kind of understand how this model works. And yeah, I mean that's. There's a saying that all models are wrong. Some models are useful. You know, I feel, like the retirement modeling I do with clients, like it's going to be wrong.

Speaker 1: 29:02

But it's still, Especially when you get into trying to model a long-term care event how long you're going to live. Yeah, you can swing the analysis. So, yeah, you're doing the best you can and I understand it helps clients feel like they've at least thought through their spending. But yeah, you're going to keep adjusting that.

Speaker 2: 29:18

Yeah, yeah, flip it around on you. How do you think projections are different for younger?

Speaker 1: 29:25

Yeah, so so my thoughts are pretty simple. I do plenty of calculations. I just don't do a lot of projections and I don't know where you draw the line on that. So I like to start with, like, okay, where are you current? Well, you know what's your current situation. Where's your? How much money do you have currently? Where's your money going? How much are you?

Speaker 1: 29:40

Um, then just some simple goals, calculations. Be like okay, you're 32. You have no clue what you want to be, what you want retirement to look like. You might think you do, but you probably don't, unless you're one of those where, like, I want to retire at 45, you have some clear goals, but like, let's, like, let's get a rough number for what do we think we want to spend in retirement? Um, we'll do some math for, assume a tax rate, that's going to be wrong. Um, you can have social security or something like that. We'll try to figure out, basically, how much income they need to generate from assets.

Speaker 1: 30:06

And um, then some math to figure out, like, how much that would require to have saved. And then, uh, so that can create, like what you would need to have retired. Um, and then look at what your current assets are. You got to assume a growth rate and, uh, an inflation assumption that would calculate how much you need to save for retirement. Now I'm like cringing saying that because there's a hundred things that are going to be wrong in that, but we want to get a rough idea of like, okay, if we follow this path, here's how much we would need to save to retire.

Speaker 1: 30:38

Check that against what they're currently doing and what they're even able to do, because I think sometimes the value is like, when you start, including retirement goals, education goals, other stuff, most people can't a hundred percent be saving for, you know, saving for a hundred percent completion, and it comes down to trade-offs and so really, that's what's funny is like, okay, it says you need to save 40. You can only save 20. What are you going to do? We're going to do the best we can If we're going to adjust later on in life, and so it can be helpful to get like a um, a rough number.

Speaker 1: 31:13

But um, really for me, like I like to, I like to do that math to like, see, just generally, like what it might take, given a set of assumptions, and then we can play with it and be like, if you're in 6%, if you're in 10% just to see again, like what are the outcomes? We would need to happen, so do plenty of calculations like that. I don't think I've ever and probably never would show like a chart projecting what somebody's financial life is going to look like at 30. Like I might just for kicks and giggles, but like it's going to be horribly wrong. You know, life changes, stuff's going to happen.

Speaker 2: 31:39

And I've seen some of those charts for younger people who are, you know, healthy earners and savers, and and, like gosh, the chart says they're going to retire with a hundred million in the bank.

Speaker 1: 31:50

No, I lied, I lied to you. I have built that before and I stopped doing after. This is because it was literally I just said, like you're going to be a billionaire or broke, but that was literally somewhere in the middle a billionaire or you might run out of money.

Speaker 1: 32:03

I was like, oh my gosh, like, yeah, like, if you save more, you'll have more. You know, what can we control today? Are we saving the right amount? Do we have the right liquidity? Are we investing properly? Returns are going to be what they're going to be and we're going to continue to adjust with time. And so, yeah, I mean, that's where you know all this is helpful, and I think maybe we're a little biased because we've just looked at this so many times, I do think I forget that like, oh, people may not actually understand that math, and so, from that perspective, I think it's great.

Speaker 1: 32:31

And that was one last thing I want to mention is that sometimes, projecting and like showing like where your income is going to come from in retirement, like here's what your employment, income, social security, pension, maybe investment withdrawal it may not be about literally like the numbers, but more of like visualizing where it's going to come from and change that can be absolutely great too. So I think that's like the synopsis of all this that it is. They are, it can be helpful. Um, don't blindly rely on them. You need to update, use them as a guide and to identify sensitivities but probably don't take them super literally. Uh, these projections and just yeah, I mean um, that's probably not much more to add to that yeah, you um user beware and and understand you know, understand what goes into it.

Speaker 1: 33:18

Yeah, you should beware because, I mean, some of these models are incredibly powerful, like you can project darn near anything and it can give that illusion of like wow, I know what my life's going to happen, and even like where the numbers are coming from. Like this look at this intelligent way that it calculated this. It's still a guess, still a range of outcomes. You're still going to only experience one of those in the range and so do the best you can today with the variables you can control, adjust. Final thing, I'll say this is where, if I can pump an advisor, they can hopefully help you make intelligent assumptions, because I've seen some do-it-yourself tools where people put in you know, market average is 12% a year.

Speaker 2: 33:53

It's like yeah, so that's where you know having an intelligent set of eyes to not intelligent is the right word but an experienced set of eyes to look over those variables to make sure they are not complete garbage. I think it's very helpful. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. And and um, yeah, that that great, great discussion. I can so much more to say well, keep bringing the jokes, enjoyed it.

Speaker 1: 34:19

See you next time. See you next time.