Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 08.04.26 Ask An Advisor With Wes Moss About this episode 5 Questions BEFORE You Claim Social Security &
College vs. Retirement Savings
Should you claim Social Security early or wait? While the math says waiting guarantees a bigger check, the real answer goes far beyond the numbers. In this episode, Wes Moss breaks down how to determine the right Social Security claiming age for your specific lifestyle, health, and portfolio. Also, Wes shares ideas to help you balance saving for your kid’s college without ruining your own retirement.
Plus, Christa shares your #AskWes questions and Wes gives his take. All this and more on the August 4, 2026, Ask an Advisor episode of the Clark Howard podcast. Submit your questions: WesMoss.com/ask
We hope you enjoy our weekly Ask An Advisor episodes. Let us know what you think in the comments!
Mentioned on the show:
When Is the Best Time To Collect Social Security? - Clark Howard
The Math On When You Break Even With Social Security
If You Have Enough To Retire Comfortably, Should You?
How To Balance College Savings and Retirement - Clark Howard
Clark Howard: Avoid This Costly College Debt Mistake
Learn more about Wes:
BOOKS BY WES MOSS
Wes Moss, CFP®
Wes Moss - Clark.com
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1:04 Speaker 02 Welcome to Ask an Advisor. I am Krista DeBias here, not in person, with Wes Mazz. Hey Wes.
1:12 Speaker 03 Krista, I miss you in person, but it feels like we're almost, you know, we're kind of right next to each other. So it feels good. It's okay.
1:19 Speaker 02 True, true. You're in Michigan this week, one of your favorite places, and I think that's awesome.
1:25 Speaker 03 Northern Michigan, northern Michigan. The first question I always get is, are you in the Upper Peninsula? And no, I'm in the regular peninsula, just the upper part of that.
1:35 Speaker 02 But we're moving forward because we have a lot of questions for you. So we're going to do an episode this way. I'm back in the studio solo and you'll be back with me next week. So that'll be super fun, but I hope you keep enjoying it. In the meantime, you're going to talk about a couple of things that we get so many questions about. First of all, timing on taking social security. You have sort of a different angle. It's not just about the numbers, right?
1:58 Speaker 03 Beyond the math. When to take social and look at the variables beyond just the math.
2:04 Speaker 02 And then how much to save for college? This is so hard for so many parents. And grandparents.
2:12 Speaker 03 I think of this as a green zone dilemma. Saving for both is great. We want to do both, but if you can't do both, how do you approach it?
2:21 Speaker 02 So if you have questions for Wes, you can submit those at wesmoss.com/ask. And let's go ahead and talk about social security.
2:32 Speaker 03 All right. So when to take social beyond the math? And if you start searching around the web or you go to YouTube and you start asking that question, part of the reason I wanted to do this segment or this topic is that you get really different answers on both sides. There are folks that are super adamant about the 62 camp. Take it as soon as you can get it. And then there are a lot of folks that are pretty adamant about waiting until age 70. And most of us know the math. If we, every year we wait beyond age 62, when we could start taking social security, the monthly amount goes up by about seven, almost eight percent per year.
3:14 Speaker 03 So it's this really nice guaranteed increase once you start taking, but it's a tough decision because you are not taking it. So there's the 62 camp. Ramsey's in that camp. There's a Florida YouTuber who's an actual retiree who does a great job, usually from the cabin of his boat. Great example of two brothers. They both start taking social, one at 62, one at 67, and they both end up with the same amount of money when they're in their 80s essentially. But at the same time, we know that if you can afford it mathematically, doesn't it make sense to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait? And then you turn it on at 70, you have a higher payment for the rest of your life. Those are the two camps. You can't argue with math.
3:56 Speaker 03 If you want to maximize social security and get the highest monthly payment, the answer is really easy. It's just wait to turn it on at age 70. Now, of course, the one math variable that we can't, we don't know, and is ultra important when it comes to social security is when are we going to stop taking it? Meaning, when are we going to die? And then we have to think not only about us, and this is one of the non-math variables to some extent, there's math in all of this, Krista. The question is, what about your spouse? And your spouse's income. So we've got the two camps. I think the way to look at it is that it's easy to think about it as maximization.
4:39 Speaker 03 I think of it as not that word because we already know what to do. We just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then, by the way, you've got to live a long time to make up for the money you didn't collect. That's the math on waiting and maximizing. But for the vast majority of people, it's not about just maximizing, it's about optimizing social. And it is about taking social security when it works for you. So there's a couple of ways I'd look at this is that the right claiming age will present itself to some extent if you're doing retirement planning. Meaning if you're doing a full-blown retirement plan and you start putting in the variables that matter, which are, hey, when do I want to stop working?
5:22 Speaker 03 How much can my assets support me from an income perspective? And then what are my other income streams? Then to some extent, the answer is presented to you when you're doing that retirement plan. And you can say, well, if I wait till 70, what does the plan look like? If I start at 65 or four or three, then the numbers to some extent will give you the answer. If you're going through the retirement planning process. So I think that's the first thing to think about is that I think it becomes more clear if you're doing actual planning. So number one, are you still working? And there's five of these. Are you still working? Number two, does claiming early protect or help your portfolio?
6:04 Speaker 03 Three, are you the higher earning spouse? Four, what's your health and your family longevity history, if you will? And then what's your, your stress and your cash flow comfort level? Because part, part of, let's start there. Part of the stressor of retirement is that when you've stopped working, you no longer have wage income coming in. And there's something about wage income that we get extraordinarily used to, almost as a psychological crutch, because we are working from our teen years. Until our 60s, when we stop for most people. And so you go 40 years of collecting money from your work.
6:49 Speaker 03 And then without doing that, we get, there's an unsettling feeling to say, okay, now I've got all this money saved and I've got social and I've got maybe a little pension, but now there's no more wage. So to some extent, it's very hard for people to not be getting another paycheck beyond their portfolio income. So there's a psychological aspect of that and we need to ask ourselves, what's our comfort level not having the social security paycheck right out of the gate? And if you're very uncomfortable and feel as though you'd be able to sleep better at night and have less anxiety, then you would lean towards taking social security earlier. Number, I'm gonna go backwards on this list. Number four, what's your health and family longevity?
7:34 Speaker 03 If you've, if Aunt Joan is 102 and your mom lived until she was 99 and dad is still running around or maybe wheeling around in his late 90s, then you've got a really good shot. And as long as your health, that you don't have any major known health issues, you're able to start weighing in on that missing variable, which is longevity. How long am I going to be able to take social security once it turns on? If you've got a really long family history, make that as one of the variables. I'll have folks say, gosh, neither of my parents made it past their 70s. And that is one of the main variables where they say, let's, I want to take social security now because realistically, nobody in my family lived past 79.
8:19 Speaker 03 So I'm not going to collect for 40, 30 years. So let's take it now. Really important and harder thing to think about, but an important variable beyond the math. Are you the higher earning spouse as we go backwards on this list? So if you're delaying until 70, it's not just about your own check. It's about if you pass, what does that mean for your spouse's income? And if, let's say your spouse has a much lower social security payment or the spouse is only collecting half of what your social is, it might make sense to wait longer so that when something, if and when something happens to you, then your spouse collects
9:02 Speaker 03 your higher payment, which is the way it works. Number two on my list, does claiming social security protect your portfolio? There's a lot of times when I've, and this goes back to planning will reveal the answer. Once you stop working and now you're relying on portfolio income and it's a number, a withdrawal rate that's a little uncomfortably high, seven, six, seven, eight percent. And you have to do it for many years. That can take such a big chunk out of your portfolio and put you at risk of running low on money or running out of money. So turning on social, if that's able to get your withdrawal rate back to a more manageable
9:43 Speaker 03 level, even if it's a little high, a little higher than the 4% level, that's another reason to think about taking social security a little earlier. If there's too much stress on your portfolio without it. And then number one, are you still working? If you're earning significant income before full retirement age, for a lot of folks, that's 66, 67, now for most people, there's an earnings test. So if you're earning 40, 50, $60,000 a year and you're claiming your social security, then there's a huge offset there. And for the offset starts to make it so that your social security check gets cut. Now, the piece that most people don't understand about that is you eventually get that money
10:26 Speaker 03 back, the penalty from the earnings test, but it gets spread out over the course of your lifetime, once you start again with social. So it takes forever to get that money back. So for most folks, it comes down to when are you going to no longer have wage income? That's the first trigger to say, okay, maybe it's time to start taking, but maybe not. Secondly, longevity, if you have a shorter family history on longevity, again, lean towards taking it and then thinking about what it means for your spouse. So it's not just about maximizing, Krista. It's very much about optimizing it for you, you and your spouse, and what makes the plan work. And I don't think people should feel guilty. I, yes, it's great to wait to 70 and some people are able to do that.
11:11 Speaker 03 And for high net worth folks that have a lot of savings, maybe that makes total sense. But I don't want people to feel guilty if they start turning on social security in their 60s or even early 60s, if it works for you.
11:25 Speaker 02 Right. Okay. Well, we'll get some questions now. And again, you can go to wesmoss.com/ask if you have a question for Wes. And this one's from Kat D. in California. Wes, I'm surprised to hear you say that you thought income tax rates would not go higher in the future. Considering the state of our national debt and seeing that the highest rates were 92% in 1952 and 1953, help me understand how keeping rates where they are would be likely. Thank you for making this retiree even happier and smarter, too. I love your show and the information you share. And Clark has said the opposite as well, that he believes tax rates are going up. So I think the audience would love to hear your perspective on this.
12:08 Speaker 03 Hey Kat D. in California. This is just my opinion, and obviously, I don't know if I'm going to be right on this. There's two things that I really think about when it comes to tax rates. And you can't deny that we have a deficit issue and a debt problem. And we're underfunded at the US Treasury, which is funded, of course, by our tax dollars. So it would stand to reason that the government needs more money to pay their bills. For most of economic history, the money, the government's always needed more money. And even though it's today arguably worse than it's ever been, I think we live in a time of what I would consider populism. And maybe it's cable news, maybe it's podcasts, maybe it's 24-hour
12:53 Speaker 03 news cycle, or maybe it's social media. But the appetite for uncomfortability and taxes are one of the most uncomfortable things on the planet when it comes to money. I think there's so much unwillingness for Americans and then our representatives to materially take tax rates higher. I think that we live in a time where a little bit of uncomfortability creates this giant backlash, more so than it ever has. So that's the one reason why I just don't know if there's ever going to be the appetite to do it in a material way. That's number one. Number two would be something that is a little more economically philosophical,
13:36 Speaker 03 and that's something called Hauser's Law. Hauser was an economist that decades ago did a study on the amount of tax revenue collected by the US government relative to tax rates. And you're totally right. Back in the 50s, there was a top rate of 92%. And we collected, as a government, or the US government collected, about 19.5% of GDP in tax money. Then we lowered tax rates, and let's say the 80s to the 2000s, to the 28 range and the 39.6 range, and we still collected about 18% of GDP. In 2022,
14:15 Speaker 03 we had 37% tax rates. And what did we collect? 19.6. So Hauser's Law says, and not everybody fully agrees with this, even though these are the numbers. The US Treasury only really collects between 18 and 20% of GDP when it comes to taxes, no matter what rates are. So to some extent, I don't think that there's an appetite. And I think that politicians who rate, that would make these decisions, understand that that just raising tax rates doesn't necessarily raise the tax revenue like they would like it to.
14:49 Speaker 02 Okay, Brian in Virginia and Wendy in Texas, I'm going to tell you about in a little bit, both wrote in about your core pursuits, segments that you've done, and all of your research, of course. And that's all in Wes's new book, which is coming out very, very soon, right?
15:07 Speaker 03 The Retire Sooner Method.
15:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:09 Speaker 03 It's coming up very soon.
15:10 Speaker 02 Brian in Virginia says, Wes, according to your research, how finely should you slice core pursuits? And how important is diversity of pursuits? I listened to your recently list your five core pursuits, and I only heard two, sports and music. I asked because my local fire group was discussing our core pursuits sparked by your segments. I listed the top five that I was most passionate about. The group threw a flag on the play because they were all fishing, despite the fact that each flavor of fishing is a totally different pursuit. Which requires different expertise and equipment. Fishing from a kayak on a river for small mouth, offshore fishing for pelagics from a powerboat, fly fishing, mountain streams for trout, et cetera, et cetera.
15:53 Speaker 02 I could go even more granular since each flavor of boating is its own thing and isn't always used for fishing. Is a cocktail cruise a core pursuit?
16:03 Speaker 03 Sounds good to me.
16:04 Speaker 02 The ironic thing is, I don't even really love fishing, but I love being on the water and experiencing new things. I could list non-fishing and boating hobbies, but they could all be lumped into the great outdoors, so maybe I only have one core pursuit.
16:19 Speaker 03 Just note, I remember we did a segment and I realized that I think one of the coolest questions that you can ask someone, and then you took this in a different light, Brian, is that you brought it up in a group discussion with your fire group. So what, just what a cool thing to talk about and an important thing to talk about. And my research is super clear on this and I'm shocked. I'll give you a little insight beyond what I even wrote about in the retire senior method. What's in the book, it talks about you need at least five unique, and that's the point of your question, unique and different core pursuits. The happy retire group has five or more, on average, unhappy group four or less.
17:00 Speaker 03 But I was shocked, people listed out eight, 10, 12 different, unique core pursuits, which I think is amazing. The list that people come up with can be really extensive, which I think is very cool. And that gives them lots of optionality. As for the specificity of it, I think that anything that has its own descriptor prior to the word deserves its own category. So deep sea fishing, or I'm up here in Michigan, we went deep lake fishing. That's totally different than fly fishing. Totally different group of people might want to do one and not do the other, which by the way, is a totally different group that would do kayak fishing.
17:43 Speaker 03 That maybe is somebody who's super comfortable in a kayak, on a boat, out in the water, maybe even more quote outdoorsy. Sure, they're all outdoors, but they're all unique and different things, activities. They require their own level of planning and you may have a different social group that does all those different ones. So I think they all deserve their own category.
18:05 Speaker 03 If you think about exercise as an example, walking group may be different than running group versus yoga, different people like to do one versus the other. So when you have a unique descriptor on something like fishing, which is a cool question, I think of hunting, deer hunting, and I'm not a hunter, but I know that deer hunting is very different than quail hunting or bird hunting. One, you sit in a tree and you gotta be super quiet. The other, you're out in the field with a bunch of guys roaming around the bushes with dogs. They're different. So in my opinion on this is that if you can make a case that they are unique, then they absolutely are different and unique core pursuits. And they
18:49 Speaker 03 all count towards that five number. Guess what? 10 is even better.
18:54 Speaker 02 Wendy in Texas says, I'm retired for 10 years now. I have only three core pursuits and I'm very happy. I garden daily, I foster dogs, and I make quilts that I donate to our local county's foster care kids. I am absolutely fine with only three core pursuits because I'm an introvert. I get to do what I want to all day long and I don't have to go meet the world every dang day. You sound like an extrovert. Please keep the introverts and extroverts in mind when you tell people how many core pursuits they should have and how social they should be.
19:28 Speaker 03 So Wendy, Krista, she said quilting, which she does, she gives some of these away.
19:34 Speaker 02 She gives them to foster kids. That's so awesome. She fosters dogs and she gardens daily in addition to the quilting, which quilting is very time consuming, by the way. I don't do it, but I've seen it done. I could never have the patience.
19:49 Speaker 03 It's funny, I think of a good friend of mine, I asked this question, who is an introvert? And I pushed him to have five or more. I'm going to say the same thing here, Wendy. I don't care if you're an introvert or an extrovert. I think that that shouldn't impact the number of core pursuits you have, because these are things that we are all as humans looking forward to doing, and they help create this great structure and purpose to our non-working years.
20:20 Speaker 03 And whether you're intro or extro, I don't know that it has to matter all that much. Not every core pursuit is social, not all of them. I mean woodworking, that's just you in the shop and gardening can be you, which very popular core pursuit of happy retirees, by the way. Core pursuits can also come and go a little bit. And there can be a season of life where one makes a lot of sense and you can spend time doing it and then it fades. Now, all of these, I don't know why you couldn't do these forever, Wendy. So I think you're off to a great start, but I would still challenge you to come up with another two. And that's my assignment to you for the, over the next six months, or by the end of this year, let's say, I would love to
21:05 Speaker 03 hear Wendy trying out two new core pursuits. I did this thing called the core pursuit finder, where I'm listing out, there's 120 different core pursuits and it, it matches to your personality and to what you'd like to do and how you'd like to spend your time and give your time. I would challenge you to find two more. I highly doubt, now I could be wrong, you come back to me in a few months or in six months from now and say, gosh, Wes, I wish I would have never added those two core pursuits.
21:36 Speaker 02 I don't know. She sounds pretty happy. We'll see.
21:40 Speaker 03 That's my challenge. I think, I still think you need five, Wendy. Thanks for the question.
21:45 Speaker 02 All right. And we're going to come straight back and talk about how much you need to save for college.
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23:22 Speaker 03 Welcome back to Ask an Advisor. I'm Wes Moss here with Krista DiBiase on the Clark Howard Show. Krista, are we ready to talk about college?
23:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
23:32 Speaker 03 And savings relative to your own retirement savings?
23:37 Speaker 02 Definitely.
23:38 Speaker 03 Isn't that a tug of war?
23:39 Speaker 02 It's crazy. I mean, the college tuition is unbelievable at so many of these private schools now. It's just out of control.
23:48 Speaker 03 I think of this as a money green zone issue. I want to do both. They're both, I want to get into the green zone and save enough for college and I want plenty of money for, to hit the money green zones for retirement. They're both great. The reality is though, we, not everybody can do both. Which one do I save for? The answer is both, but if you're already saving 15% for your own retirement, then anything above that, feel totally free to go ahead and be saving for college. I think that's, to me, that's take care of yourself first because one, retirement has no loan office. For most people in America, if you're going to college, you can get a, you can get student loans, not that we want them, but we can attain them.
24:31 Speaker 03 Number two to think about is this your own 15-point checkpoint first, get there first. Oxygen mask plane, you get it first before the kids. Three, when we're thinking about saving for our kids, if we're doing it early, I think of the year zero savings, this number stands out to me. Two grand a year for 18 years equals what at 8%, 80 grand. Now that's not enough to pay for even a year of a super swanky, blue blood school, but it goes a really long way for most options. So again, two grand a year, 18 years, 8%, that's 80 grand. That doesn't pay for everything. But that leads me to the way I've always thought about college
25:12 Speaker 03 and paying for college in trying to make the puzzle pieces fit with your own retirement is splitting up the cost. Split, split the check for college in thirds. And I think that why most people do not retire until their kids are out of college is that they're using their current income to pay for, let's call it a third and have the a third as savings and then a third responsibility for the child, even if, of course, that's usually student loans. But imagine how slicing it up into those three pieces makes the whole equation a lot easier. It's easier to get the dishes done when there are three people doing it
25:53 Speaker 03 versus one. So think of it that way. My last point about thinking about college and saving for your kids' college, your children's college, as much as we all want to do that, and I still am a huge believer in the value of an education, is that how we approach it, the continuum is vast. People complain about like, oh, my, I'm out of my kids out of state and it's $65,000 a year and it's a pretty good school. No, we're not talking Ivies here. We're talking out of state. It's not high to say that a school's 50, 60, 70 grand. And when, if you
26:34 Speaker 03 live in Georgia or South Carolina or North Carolina or Florida or Louisiana or New Mexico, and there's a long list of states that are a lot like Georgia, where if you get into these Georgia in-state schools, the tuition can be virtually free if you maintain a certain grade point average. And even if you don't, the cost is de minimis, it doesn't even scratch. The high elite private schools are out of state tuitions. Even though the higher cost in states like Pennsylvania is an example is still, if you choose to be in state, you can do it for less than 20 grand a year. That's not insignificant, but it's not Duke, which is now at over 100K per year.
27:19 Speaker 02 Wow.
27:21 Speaker 03 $104,000 per year to go to Duke, University of Chicago, 98 to 103. I always love this one that shows up, Harvey Mudd College. It's the most expensive university on the planet, over 100 grand per year. So think about if you are going to do that and you're going to be able to support that for your kids, that is an ultimate, ultimate luxury. We can't complain about that. It's like if you complain about the cost of an out of school elite university tuition, it's like complaining about the cost of your seven series BMW. Like, I don't want to hear that. You don't have to go to Harvey Mudd. You don't have to go to Duke.
28:03 Speaker 03 You can choose to be in state and it's extraordinarily more affordable. So just keep all of that in mind, but as long as you're taken care of first, because there's no loan office for retirement that I know of, then the rest can go towards the kids.
28:23 Speaker 02 All right, we'll go to questions now. Bruce in New York sent this one in. Wes, I'm a soon to be retired math teacher and I love the way you always dive into the numbers. So here's an equation for you. I have several options to choose from for my pension. One of them is a pop up survivor option. Basically, I can either take the entire $63,000 yearly amount and when I die, my pension dies with me, or I can receive $61,000 and my wife would get 31,000 when I'm gone, or I get $60,000 and she gets $45,000, et cetera. How do I know what amount to leave for her or do we keep the full amount?
29:03 Speaker 02 We have two kids who are 20 and 21 and we have about 750,000 in Roths, brokerages, et cetera.
29:10 Speaker 03 Bruce, you're a math teacher and this is one of those equations where you just, you don't have all the variables and you're never going to get them and you don't want them. We don't know, we don't want to know when we die. And that's what this is about. That's the missing piece. It's not only, it's not just when you die. It's when, how long your spouse lives too. Those are the two missing variables. The numbers that I just wrote down sound very much like what is a typical choice? When it comes to your pension amount, the highest amount, that's 63K is the life only. Zero for the spouse, but you get more money because you are not protecting two lives. The next one you said was 60 and 30 approximately. That's the 50% survivor option.
29:56 Speaker 03 And then the third one was the 75. You take a lower amount around 60, but she would get 45. So in each case, your amount from the life only goes down, but then it continues for your spouse. If something happens to you. And we don't know the right number mathematically. This kind of goes back to maximization versus optimization. What's optimal here? Maximization is take the life only and live until you're 100. But we don't know that that's, that can happen. Vast, vast, vast majority of the time, Bruce, in real life, working with a family, if they've taken the life only option, let's say this is before I met them, because I usually would not tell people to do that, the room gets really quiet.
30:41 Speaker 03 Hey, that, that $50,000 a year, does, what is the survivor benefit on that? If you pass away, Jim, at 72? Zero. The room gets real quiet. And the wife usually looks over and says, why, why did we do that? Why did you do that, Jim? I've seen that. Most of the time though, the in-between choice is to take at least the 50% survivor option. And in most cases, at least the 75%, if not the 100. There's probably another option you have. It's maybe it's 40, 58,000 a year. And that would last for your life and your spouse's life. Here's the problem. 63 grand, you guys are living along, that thing's great.
31:25 Speaker 03 You're, you're getting 63 grand a year, then you, you die. That means your wife, Bruce, would need about a million and a quarter to make up for that annual income. That's probably too big of a lift for your spouse. So the way I'm looking at this is that you should heavily consider taking one of the options that continue on a significant payment for your spouse.
31:50 Speaker 02 Okay. Jay in Alabama says, Wes, what is the best side dish for my crock pot entree? I'm 47, single and without children. My retirement 401k is around 620,000 with about 95% of that in pre-tax. The current contributions are 13% pre-tax, 3% Roth 401k. I'm currently consumer debt-free and my first goal is to remain that way. My question is, is it more important to have two to three years of dry powder or a paid down mortgage going into retirement? Assuming that both aren't feasible, which is the best side dish? You have to explain the crock pot again really quick.
32:29 Speaker 03 Jay in Alabama, he is using, I think of a retirement account, 401k or an IRA, as a crock pot because everything stays in the crock pot and only a little bit leaks out until you're ready to pull it out. And then when you pull it out, that's income. It's food or income. It's your dinner or it's income if you actually take it out. But once the money is in the crock pot, everything stays in the crock pot and you don't have to worry about capital gains, dividends, or transactions, as long as the money's staying inside the account. That's what Jay's talking about. I love that you're remembering and using that analogy. I would say this, though, to your question, it's another green zone
33:11 Speaker 03 dilemma. Both are great. I want no mortgage. I want my mortgage paid off, but I also want dry powder. The question is which one, Jay, has a more immediate timeline? And the answer is the dry powder. If you're in flow of getting rid of the mortgage within nine years, you're already in the mortgage green zone because you're eyeing the payoff relatively soon. But if we go into a bear market that six months after you stop working and retire, then and you don't have any dry powder, now you're digging into your stocks while they're down. So that's a more immediate need to have that as a buffer because we never know when a market correction will come. And you just don't want to have to deal with that and no dry powder in the early stages of retirement. So I would, if I were to choose
33:56 Speaker 03 which one to make sure, what takes priority in my book, it's that three years worth of dry powder, because it sounds like you're probably already close enough to being mortgage free.
34:08 Speaker 02 Okay, John in Washington says, I want to preorder Wes's book, but I would like to do it through my favorite local bookseller here in the Seattle area. Is there a way for me to preorder the Retire Sooner Method from a local vendor and still get the bonus materials that are offered through the preorder on Amazon? And we put this in because we have had several people ask questions about this, the bonus offer that you have, Wes.
34:32 Speaker 03 Totally, John. There are things that are called bookstores. They're beyond, they used, there used to be a lot of them before Amazon came along. And it's a miracle to me that there's so many still in business, but they're wonderful to go to. And a lot of cities will have, still have plenty of local bookstores that are still alive and well. So I'd love for you to support them and you can go in and preorder the book. All you need to do is go to retiresoonermethod.com. And the form where you get those four different bonuses, the live webinar, the day of the launch, the video I do explaining the book, the signed book plate, the color workbook, which I think is super valuable and super
35:13 Speaker 03 helpful. All you need to do is in the where you bought it section, just put other, we should probably add local bookstore, and just put the name of the bookstore in the section that allows you to put in your, instead of your receipt, put in the name of your local bookstore and you're good to go.
35:29 Speaker 02 Okay. Well, that does it for us on this episode of Ask an Advisor. Clark will be back tomorrow with a brand new episode and Wes and I will be back next week answering your questions and talking about how you can keep more money in your own pocket and save more so you have a secure retirement.
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