Greg Todd [00:00:00]:
What I want to do is I want to present to you the act of Retirement formula. So instead of me having a goal to do something that God has not ordained me to do, which is to not work, not to serve his children, right, I want people serving me. I need to serve other people in my capacity with whatever physical capacities that I have. Okay, I'm going to work with people, I'm going to serve people, but I'm going to do it in a way that allows me to not have to create, create earned income in order to make a living. So if physically my body can't do it, I can still bring value to people. This is Secrets for Success. Welcome to the Secrets for Success podcast. I'm your host, Greg Todd.
Greg Todd [00:00:49]:
Thank you as always for joining me today. I want to talk about how to achieve active retirement, because I personally think that is the best place for every single one of you to be. Now, there's a couple things I need to say before we get into that. Number one, I don't believe in retirement in and of itself. I don't believe in it because I believe that God put us on this earth for a purpose. And I don't believe our purpose and the goal to achieve on earth is for us not to help each other and to bring value to each other. Because we're also different. We all have different gifts, we have different skills, we have different experiences.
Greg Todd [00:01:29]:
And I believe we're supposed to help others with that until the day we die. Now, I do believe that it will change because we are a. We're physical specimens and our body physically deteriorates over time. But I don't believe in retirement. I do believe in active retirement. And I love being in active retirement, which is you being in a place where you are making enough money passively to where what you used to make earned income, your passive income, is now replacing that. And when I say passive income, I just mean that you don't have to physically be in front of someone in order for you to generate money. And so I like that.
Greg Todd [00:02:11]:
And so I like that every single morning, 30 to 31 days in a month, I make enough money before I get out of bed so that I can take care of all of my expenses for myself, my wife, our four kids, and the organizations that I give to before I actually start working. That's a great feeling. It's an awesome feeling. And it gives me the ability to have true freedom, meaning that I don't have to take opportunities that I don't want to take. I don't have to take anything that compromises my faith. I don't have to take anything that compromises my morals, my values. I'm in active retirement, and that's what I want for every single one of you. And so I want to use this episode to talk about, like, what does that actually look like? I want to do some of the math behind it.
Greg Todd [00:02:54]:
I want to talk about three different methods that I believe every single one of you could do to get into active retirement. And then I want to talk about, like, the process of, like, how do you actually do it? How do you pull this off? So I know it's a lot of things and I'll probably forget some of it. And if you're like, Craig, you forgot stuff, then just go ahead and you can text me or message me on Instagram, say you forgot to talk about all those things that you said. Okay, well, I'm going to do my best. So, active retirement. So what? Let's talk about the calculations first. Okay, so let's talk about the traditional way that the world and society wants us to think of retirement. Okay, so I love numbers.
Greg Todd [00:03:33]:
So let's kind of break this down. All right? I wish I was at a whiteboard, but I'm in my podcast studio, so you just got to roll with it. Okay, so let's just. Let's just consider that you were able to save, I don't know, a couple grand a month, which is very hard for people in today's world. But let's just say that by time you got to the age of 65, you were able to save through 401k, through IRAS, through all the different investment vehicles that you have. Through your typical job, you're able to save a million dollars.
Greg Todd [00:04:03]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:04:04]:
And if you were, the whole premise of retirement is that you're making. You've accumulated enough money passively. Dang it. Let's start over. Start over, part three. Here we go. Three, two, one. Welcome to the Secrets for Success podcast.
Greg Todd [00:04:22]:
I'm your host, Greg Todd. Thank you as always for joining me. I think this episode is going to serve you all so well because it's going to show you how you can achieve active retirement instead of doing this 40 to 50 year thing of working so that you could get to retirement. Let's talk about how you can do that in about 95% less time by going into active retirement. And so I want to talk numbers. I want to talk about what active retirement would look like for you and how would you get started? What are the ways that you can pull this off. And so I think the first thing I want to talk about is retirement. Notice I said active.
Greg Todd [00:05:01]:
I didn't say retirement. Okay? Because I don't. Well, first of all, retirement, I'm. It's not a term I believe in. Retirement is not something that I'm trying to achieve. I have my reasons for it, and I will share that with you on today's podcast. So in 2020. A lot of things were going on in 2020 that were quite disturbing.
Greg Todd [00:05:23]:
But one of the big things that happened with COVID is it made me finally say, hey, look like I was kind of hitting my wits in. I was like, enough is enough. I need a break. And so for the first time in my. I think at that point, I was an entrepreneur for 15, 16 years. I actually took a break. I mean, I had the ability to take a break. Now I didn't know where I was at truly financially, until I took that break.
Greg Todd [00:05:49]:
And so I took a break. I wasn't going to run any programs. I told my business partner at Renewal Rehab, I'm not working. I told my business partner at Smart Virtual Staff I'm. I'm not going to be available for three months. And during that time, it was just kind of time for me. And. And during that time, I met with my financial advisor and my financial advisor.
Greg Todd [00:06:12]:
It honestly, guys, was the first time that I actually sat down and looked at my finances. You know, I mean, I know my finances. Like, I know my bills, I know this, I know that. I know I make good money and have, you know, da, da, da, whatever. But I'm talking. We sat down and it was. Myself, my wife and my financial advisor basically said that you don't need to work for probably about 20 years. And.
Greg Todd [00:06:39]:
And, you know, we talked as a family. I was like, just take off like a little time. And I wasn't very happy in the things that I was doing, or at least the way that I was doing things. And so I ended up taking off the remainder of that three months. I gotta be honest with you, at the end of three months, I want to tell you that I was feeling amazing, feeling refreshed. I was. I was so depressed. I was depressed because I don't believe that, like, I realized from there I was 40 years old or, I don't know, 40.
Greg Todd [00:07:08]:
No, that's not true. I was like 42. I guess I was like 42. I was 42 years old. And the society would tell you, like, that's your dream, is that 42 years old. Like, you live intercoastal you live like right by the beach. You have this multi million dollar house. Like all these things.
Greg Todd [00:07:24]:
Like, oh my gosh, you'd be so happy. You could fish all day, you could boat all day, you could do. And I wasn't, I wasn't happy because. Because I don't believe that's what God put me on this earth for. I. I truly felt it. I felt like this is what it feels like to not have to serve people every single day, just to serve yourself, have fun. And I was miserable.
Greg Todd [00:07:42]:
And so I realized that, like, retirement is not what I want. And then I started looking like, does this match up with scripture? There's nowhere in the Bible where it talks about retirement. Retirement is something that was made by Western culture. Like, it's. It's not, it's not, it's no good. And so I believe in active retirement, though. An active retirement is where I don't have to work. I can choose the type of work that I do.
Greg Todd [00:08:10]:
I can choose who I work with. I can choose to say whatever it is that I want to say. I can honor the name of Jesus Christ on this podcast platform. And if you're one of my clients and you don't like it and you want to cancel, then you can go ahead and do that. Just reach out to Brittany, reach out to Andrew and cancel, and that's it. Okay, I can do that and I don't care. I can do that because I know that deep down my responsibility is to be a disciple of Christ. And if you don't like it, then too bad.
Greg Todd [00:08:38]:
No soup for you. Don't listen to the podcast. But if you don't mind it, cool. And if you don't agree with me, that's cool too. But I'm going to say what I need to say because I'm in active retirement. Active retirement is that I make more money getting out of bed in the morning than the amount of money that my family and I spend per month before I get out of bed, before I actually generate earned income. I make enough to take care of my family, to take care of my obligations that I have to my community, to my church, my kids, my wife. That is where I'm at now.
Greg Todd [00:09:15]:
I'm not saying that to brag. I'm just saying that because that's my reality. And so that's active retirement. I don't have to actually generate earned income anymore for me to live. Now, if I decided to hang this up and not have the business anymore, I would scale down my life a little bit. You know, I have property, I have this, I have that, whatever. And I could. But I don't have to work anymore, but I do want to work, and.
Greg Todd [00:09:38]:
But I just want to work on the things that I want to work with. I don't want to work with clients that are going to disrespect me or disrespect my team or make me have to do things that are not in line with where I want to be. I don't mind working hard, but that's active retirement. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay, cool. So let's talk about how the world makes us think of it. The world, I believe, conditions us to want to go into a retirement. Something that is not biblical, and it is where the goal in life is to no longer serve others.
Greg Todd [00:10:06]:
The goal in life is by the time you're 65, 70, 75, which is not happening anymore, by the way. You can't. Because the numbers don't add up anymore. But the goal is like, okay, you can make enough money in interest to where you can live year after year after year after year, and hopefully you will have enough money before until you die. Right? So I think the goal is, okay, if I retire at 65, if I live another 20 years, will I have enough money to last me for another 20 years or so?
Greg Todd [00:10:35]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:10:36]:
All right. I don't believe in that because I don't want to not do anything. I just know that I'm not going to work as hard as I'm working in my 30s, but I'm going to still work. Okay, so let's talk about the numbers. Let's kind of break down the numbers. All right? And I want to just break down some stuff for you. So if you want to do this, pause the podcast right now, go get yourself a pen, go get yourself a piece of paper, and let's just put some numbers together. All right, so I'm going to just do some basic generic numbers for you, and then I want to show you that there's probably better ways to go into active retirement if that is something that you want.
Greg Todd [00:11:12]:
I think most of you would like that. You would like to know that if you didn't want to treat 20 patients this week, you didn't have to.
Greg Todd [00:11:19]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:11:20]:
And that your bills would be all taken care of, but you have to have other ways of bringing value to the marketplace. So let's talk about the traditional way. All right, so let's say that you are 25. Let's just say you work for 40 years. Okay? So you work from 25 to 65, right? Or you start your career late, 30 to 70, 40 years. And during that time you are able to save up money. You have 401k, maybe you have an Iraq. And over that time you have been able to collect $1 million.
Greg Todd [00:11:51]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:11:52]:
By the way, that is not easy to do. Okay, that's not easy to do. It means over 40 years, that means that you have to, you're going to have to save about $25,000 or about $20,000 a year. Call it, you're making about 6% interest, so about 20k a year.
Greg Todd [00:12:11]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:12:11]:
Which is around $1,500 a month. Okay? So that's what you're going to have to do in order for you to be able to get to the point where you have close to a million dollars. Now, let's just say that you are earning 6% interest off that million dollars. A million dollars. 10% interest would be 100,000, 6% interest would be 60,000.
Greg Todd [00:12:29]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:12:30]:
So that means that every single year you would have $60,000 in interest that you earned and you lived off that $60,000. So you took $60,000 out, you earned on average six percent. So you'd earn 1,060,000. The next year you would take $60,000 out, YOU earned six percent interest. That keeps on happening. That's the goal.
Greg Todd [00:12:54]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:12:55]:
That's where you would like to be. Alright, so what would have to happen in order for you to pull that off? So number one, if it was at 6%, you'd have to save about $2,000 a month. How many people are in that position? Most people aren't. Okay, so you have to say $2,000 a month. You have to do it for 40 years. How many people have worked the same job for 10 years? Very few. How about 20 years? How about 30 years? And how about 40 years? You're not going to work that long for any. The times are different.
Greg Todd [00:13:26]:
We can barely keep a job for four months, much less four years, much less 40 years. Okay, all right. So are you seeing how unrealistic this is? All right, so can you save $1500 per month for 40 years? It's very unlikely. So the traditional way of retirement is extremely hard to do. And if you were able to do that, you would probably bring home passively about $60,000 in interest per year. Okay. Which means that you're bringing home $5,000 per month is what you would live off of. I'm not saying you can't live off of $5,000 a month.
Greg Todd [00:14:02]:
I probably could live off of $5,000AMONTH. I just don't want to live off of $5,000 a month, especially when I have responsibilities. The kid, my kids, this, that, da da da da da. But let's just say you could. Okay, now what I want to do is I want to present to you the active retirement formula. So instead of me having a goal to do something that God has not ordained me to do, which is to not work, not to serve his children, right? I want people serving me. I need to serve other people in my capacity with whatever physical capacities that I have. Okay, I'm going to work with people, I'm going to serve people, but I'm going to do it in a way that allows me to not have to create earned income in order to make a living.
Greg Todd [00:14:45]:
So if physically my body can't do it, I can still bring value to people. So what does that look like? Well, there's a few ways that you can do that. You can do that as long as you create recurring revenue models. So what's a recurring revenue model? A recurring revenue model is where every single month people pay you money in return for the value that you bring them. So what's that value? Well, that value can be in a few different ways. It can be guidance, it can be accountability, it can be by building a community, and it can be tools. If you give people some version of those things, people will pay you money month over month over month as long as you're giving them that value. Month over month or month or month.
Greg Todd [00:15:26]:
So let's talk about what that looks like, okay? And in every single example that I'm going to give you, I can tell you that either myself or people that I know, students of mine, clients that I work with, even people that I'm in masterminds with, have done these things. And this is how they are making their money and how they've been able to go into active retirement. And many of them have been able to do this not in 40 years, not in 20 years, not in 10 years, most of them being able to do it between a year to four years. Okay, so let's talk about these different ways. Okay, let's talk about how you would do this with guidance.
Greg Todd [00:16:04]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:16:05]:
If you are giving guidance to people, they will pay you money month over month over month over month. Okay, so what does that guidance look like? That guidance could be through a blog, that guidance could be through a newsletter.
Greg Todd [00:16:18]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:16:19]:
Those are ways that if you're giving people this value in the guidance through a blog or through a newsletter, in return, they will give you money. So what does that look like? Okay, let's talk about a newsletter first, okay? Because I think that's such an awesome way, especially for those of you that have expertise and you really have a lot of passion for a subject or, you know, people that are passionate about that subject. But you created a platform where people would listen to you based on your guidance.
Greg Todd [00:16:53]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:16:53]:
So there are people that have created newsletters on how to do proper documentation. There are people that have created newsletters on the best types of jobs that you can find in a certain area. There are people that do newsletters on how to basically find the best deals for cars. There are people that do newsletters on the financial ramifications of things that are going on right now. There are people that do newsletters on how to find the right stocks to be able to invest in. There are people that do newsletters for Parkinson's. There's people that do newsletters for other different neurological conditions. There's so many ways that you can take your knowledge and the expertise that you have, and instead of creating like a traditional group, you actually can just say, hey, I'm going to send you a newsletter.
Greg Todd [00:17:40]:
I'm going to send you a newsletter. I'm going to send maybe one newsletter a month, maybe one a week, maybe one every day. I've seen them all. And basically, in a newsletter, what you do is you get more subscribers. You have two ways of making money in a newsletter. You can make money by charging people a monthly fee for them to get the newsletter and get the guidance and the information, or you can actually give the newsletter out for free. You start to get many people into the newsletter because it's free, and then you charge companies monthly for them to be able to advertise in your newsletter. You are the authority.
Greg Todd [00:18:20]:
You have the eyeballs. They have the product. They pay you money to be able to be in your newsletter. Okay, just think about that for a second. Now. Remember what we said about the million dollars, okay? $1 million at 6% interest is $60,000 a year. That's $5,000 a month. 5,000 times 12 is 60,000.
Greg Todd [00:18:39]:
So if you had a newsletter where it was $50 a month to be a part of your newsletter, how many people do you need? $50 a month. $50 a month. You need 100 people to be in your newsletter. In order to make $5,000 a month, do you have to wake up every single morning and call those 100 people and say, hey, here's what I have for you today. No, it's a newsletter. It's sent in a one to many format. Okay? You're like, whoa, that's too much money. All right, fine, let's do five dol month.
Greg Todd [00:19:10]:
$5 a month means you have to have a thousand people that have passion for that thing that you're giving guidance and information on.
Greg Todd [00:19:17]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:19:18]:
And you have that month or a month or a month. $5 a month. It's about $1.25 a week. Okay? That's a newspaper. That's why I call it a newsletter. Okay? So that's one way you can do it. All right, That's a newsletter. That's guidance.
Greg Todd [00:19:30]:
Okay, how about a blog? A blog is guidance as well. The difference with a blog is that the blog is not being distributed via email. The blog is being distributed via an actual site. So you're still giving really good content on a specific subject. I have a student that does geriatric, geriatric dietetics and so helps older people teach them all the different strategies and ways for them to be able to gain weight. Because that problem, as you get older, you lose weight when you have different conditions. This that da da da da da. And makes anywhere between 4,000 to $7,000 a month on her blog.
Greg Todd [00:20:13]:
That's it. That's simple. It's guidance. It's just one form of how you can make recurring revenue. And she makes it through courses, she makes it through advertising money, she makes it through affiliates, through Amazon partnerships. And there's just many different ways to make money. And more importantly, she makes it consistently month over month over month over month.
Greg Todd [00:20:36]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:20:36]:
So 4,000 to $7,000 a month. It's a blog, so that's guidance.
Greg Todd [00:20:42]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:20:43]:
That is not the only way for you to make money month over month over month. There's another way, and that is through accountability and community.
Greg Todd [00:20:49]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:20:50]:
I know that I pay money to be in certain communities where I'm getting accountability. I have like minded people that we're trying to do something similar and we are in communities together because we are passionate about something and we love it when we can talk to other people that are passionate about that thing.
Greg Todd [00:21:09]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:21:09]:
I pay as much as 4 to $5,000 a month to be a part of some communities. I know that's a lot of money, but I also pay 20 to $50 a month to be a part of other communities, okay? So as long as that community is giving me value, I will pay the money. You can add what I just talked about. You can add newsletters and communities together.
Greg Todd [00:21:33]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:21:33]:
So if it was $50 a month, again, that's 100 people in that community that are active members that you. It would allow you to make $5,000 a month. And the beautiful thing is that when it is a community, it is not dependent on you. The bigger the community gets, the more people can converse with each other. And really what you're doing is moderating. That is what I'm talking about with active retirement.
Greg Todd [00:22:00]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:22:01]:
It's amazing ways for you to be able to bring value to people. Okay, how about tools? We had talked about guidance, talked about community. Community and accountability kind of go together. We'll talk about accountability, you know, separate, but tools. I have someone that has a community and inside of their community. One of their biggest reasons why people stay in their community is because they get different tools, they get different gadgets, they get different widgets. That's going to help them with the thing that they are passionate about. We have so many different people that are doing that.
Greg Todd [00:22:32]:
Okay.
Greg Todd [00:22:33]:
You know, I was talking to a client the other day. I don't know if they have followed through with it yet, but they're in the lymphedema world, okay? And so they're going to create a community and a membership. And part of their membership is people are going to get different, like the wraps and those things that help with the drainage and whatnot. So that's part of being in their community. You get that included. It's just a tool. It's a tool to help people with decreasing their lymphedema symptoms and the issues that they have. These are all ways that you can make money month over month or month over a month.
Greg Todd [00:23:03]:
And it's not all tied to you physically having to do something with the people.
Greg Todd [00:23:08]:
Okay?
Greg Todd [00:23:08]:
So in all of those ways, those three different ways that I talked about, and by the way, that's not the only things that you can do. If you wanted to do accountability here, I'll tell you this. I was paying money, saying I was paying $19 a month to be in a group where it was accountability. And it wasn't even people. The accountability was I was going to get a text message every single morning to do the things that are tough for me to do. So it gave me like. Like there's like 10 different habits that I wanted to put in my life and when I wanted to do them. And this platform, it was a software, would text me that time every single day and said, okay, giving your reminder to go ahead and do this thing.
Greg Todd [00:23:54]:
And I paid Money for it. It was brilliant. It's accountability. So just understand that these are all ways for you to make recurring revenue month over month over month over month. One of the best things I heard, and it was from Dan Kennedy, and he said that if you don't have recurring revenue in your business, you really don't have a business. You have a hustle. And I want you to think about that month over month over month over month. Do you have money that you know is going to come in? Like, you know that you've got to give value and that money is going to come in, but you got to give value, guys.
Greg Todd [00:24:25]:
That's such a stable way of doing business and that's a way for many of you to take active retirement, not in 40 years, but to be able to do it in one to four years. So that's what I recommend, and that's what I recommend for clients. So. Okay, so how do you pull that off? Well, if you heard my episode when I was talking about how to create info products, it really is the same way. Okay, the five P's come into play. All right, Obviously it's got to be a big enough audience, okay? So audience has to be large enough to where there's enough people that actually want this of whatever it is that you're going to, you're going to bring to the world. But there has to be a passion for the people behind this. Okay, so if there's not a passion, why am I going to go pay money to be in a newsletter? Why am I going to pay money to be in a group? There's no passion behind it.
Greg Todd [00:25:11]:
That's not going to happen. Right? Okay, but if there's passion, okay, then people are in. All right, cool. The problem's got to be not only a problem, but it's got to be a big enough problem for them that they're willing to pay money for. So it's passion problem. There's got to be a profitable problem. There's got to be a presence, meaning that you can be the go to person or, you know, the people that can be the go to people that need to be a part of whatever newsletter, community blog that you create. And then the pathway, you got to be able to create a pathway to where the people are going to congregate in the medium that they want to congregate in.
Greg Todd [00:25:52]:
Some people like text, some people like email, some people don't like text, they don't like email. But you know what they like? They like a Facebook group. Some people don't like Facebook groups. They love text, they love email, and they love any group as long as it's not on Facebook. Some people, they like TikTok. They like. You got to figure that out. And once you figure out what's the pathway, that's how you can create the monthly recurring revenue vehicle so that you can make enough money to go into active retirement.
Greg Todd [00:26:18]:
So I hope that helps you. And I actually created a calculator. I didn't create it. A team member, you know, created called smartsuccesshealthcare.com arf it's your active retirement formula. And I highly recommend for you all to use this calculator. It will tell you exactly how much money you want to retire on, what that would mean for you monthly passively, and then how much would your monthly recurring revenue vehicle be and how many people would you need to get over the next six months if you wanted to do this six months. If you want to do this in 12 months, what would you need to do? I think it's really powerful. So smartsuccesshealthcare.com arf I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
Greg Todd [00:27:02]:
I think that'd be really helpful for you guys to look at. So anyways, I hope this episode helped you. I hope it served you. If you need any help in this stuff, you know how to reach out. Till next time.
