We're taught our whole working lives to save. Nobody teaches us how to stop.
That's the blind spot my guest today has spent the last several years staring down. Jean Chatzky has been one of the most trusted voices in personal finance for as long as I've been in this business, and she just published what she says is the best of her fourteen books, because it's solving a problem she's actually living through herself.
Her new book is called The Forever Paycheck, and it's about the moment nobody plans for: the day the direct deposits stop and you're left staring at a lump sum that has to somehow last the rest of your life. Turns out most of us are terrible at this. Even people who did everything right, who saved diligently for forty years, freeze up when it's time to actually spend the money. Jean found that people with guaranteed income streams spend nearly twice as much as people sitting on identical savings, and that confidence to spend is tied to better health and longer life.
We get into why our brains treat a shrinking balance like a loss even when it's working exactly as intended, what she's doing with her own money at 61, and the uncomfortable math behind long-term care that almost nobody wants to run.
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