- And good evening.

You've got More Than Money.

You've got Gene Dickison, your host, your personal financial adviser for the next half an hour, giving you all of the experience that an old man has accumulated over many, many years at your service, and happy to be so.

And for all of you have been sending us your emails, thank you, first and foremost.

We answer every single email, some of which appear on future shows, but all of which are personally attended to by our More Than Money advisors.

So, if you have a question, anything that's concerning you in today's world... And Lord knows we have more than enough reasons to be concerned in today's world, then just shoot me an email, Gene@AskMTM.com, and we'll be in direct contact with you on any financial topic that's of concern to you.

Now, I mentioned that the world is a goofy place, and I don't know that anybody out there would disagree.

But in times like these that are very challenging, I understand that.

But be as creative as you can be.

As you respond, be as courageous as you can be, as you respond to all the things around you.

And, to the greatest extent that you can be, be courteous.

It's a simple thing, but sometimes, it's the little ingredient that makes everything move forward.

Now, moving forward often includes, for lots of us, the idea of retirement.

And we are very, very lucky we have a gentleman this evening who some would say is an expert on retirement.

He's certainly an expert on planning retirement.

I want to welcome to our More Than Money audience, I want to welcome Michael Smith.

Michael, welcome.

- Thank you.

Thanks for having me, Gene.

- Talk about everything coming together.

You happen to be in the geography, and you're not normally based here.

Where are you?

Where do you normally live?

- Normally in the Fort Wayne, Indiana area.

- So, for us to have you in our studio here in Bethlehem is a real treat for us.

You're joined by your wife, Jennifer.

- That's right.

- And she's having a special day.

- It's her birthday today.

- How about that?

Goodness gracious.

And it's, you know, that's a big thing.

- It is.

- And now, she's been acknowledged on TV, so... - That's right.

- PBS is going to be atwitter.

- She's a star.

- I, well...more than us.

- That's right.

- Without a doubt.

Tell me about your family.

I know that you're married to Jennifer, but tell me about your family.

- Yeah, we've been married 27 years.

We have three kids, so 25, two boys and a girl.

25, 21, and 18.

- And are they all cooked, or are they still...?

- In the process.

- In the process.

- In the process.

Yeah.

- And your...

Growing up, so to speak, Midwestern boy.

- That's right, that's right.

- Did that growing up Midwestern Indiana, did that have it...does it still have an influence on how you approach life today?

- Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I have quite a varied, you know, we lived in a lot of different places.

And coming back to Indiana is really a, you know, brings back a lot of memories.

But it's so nice to be back in the Midwest.

It really is.

- You spend a lot of time in a lot of places.

So, you can compare not just from what you've heard, but from your own personal experience.

What is it about the Midwest that... What, encourages you or inspires you?

- A number of different things.

I think it's the genuineness of people.

You know, it's the sincerity.

You know, you mentioned be courteous.

I can't tell you how many times you walk into a restaurant or someplace and there's a smile.

There's somebody there to greet you just with a very friendly "hello", which you don't, that's not usually, or not typically the first reaction you get in some other parts of the country.

So, it's nice to be home.

- Indeed.

Now, home for you now is not just family, it's also professional.

- That's right.

- And quite often on our American Story segment, we kind of cut to the end of the story first, and then, we backtrack and backfill.

You are part of, a founding part of an operation called Journey Guide.

- That's right.

- Tell everybody a little bit about Journey Guide.

- So, Journey Guide is a retirement-planning software which essentially helps people identify and help them get a feel for what retirement would look like for them.

So often, you know, as we were building it, we realized that people didn't necessarily know how much could they spend in retirement.

A lot of people, they've been saving their whole lives, and they get to that point where they're ready to retire.

"OK, what is this going to look like for me?"

You know, "Am I going to have enough?"

And I know you talk about those things all the time, Gene.

And I think that was really our goal, was to be able to build something that for, you know, just ordinary everyday people like us in, you know, really the mass affluent.

They've worked hard their whole lives and they need assistance in determining, "OK, well, what's retirement going to look like?"

- Once they know what it looks like, then they have the power to say, "Well, what if we did this?

"What if, from a family standpoint, we got three kids, "they're young adults?"

- Yeah.

This could be the time where you and Jennifer say, "Let's take that trip, fill in the blank.

"Let's take the kids.

Let's really do that.

"Can we afford to do that?"

- That's right.

- And yet, Journey Guide gives us the opportunity, whether it's a an expenditure, whether it's either a luxury or a requirement, a necessity to say, "I think with confidence, we're going to be just fine."

- Right.

- Or maybe not.

Or maybe not.

- Right.

- Fantastic.

- Yeah.

- How big a organization is Journey Guide?

- So, we're fairly small.

We're... - OK. - We just have a few developers, a few others that help kind of on the business side, on the sales side.

So, we're still a growing company.

But we have quite a few people that are using the software and, you know, across the country.

- And in the interest of full disclosure, that would be us, as well, our More Than Money advisors use Journey Guide on a regular basis to help our clients make those important decisions.

I will tell you, Mike already knows...

Number one fear of folks retiring, number one fear by far outstripping every other fear, and you can add them all up and there are a lot of them to be concerned about.

"I'm going to outlive my money.

"I'm going to run out of money at some point "and be dependent."

And the word "dependent", if you're doing your tax return, might be a good thing.

But being dependent, if you're talking about your retirement, is something that the folks that I counsel, the folks that I care about, are absolutely and adamantly against.

They don't want to be... they want to maintain their independence, let's say it more positively.

Now, speaking of independence, I'm not sure ,where did you end up going to college?

- So a small school, this small Christian school in upstate New York called Houghton, Houghton College.

It's where my wife and I met.

- Fantastic.

So, you made a foray from the Midwest to upstate New York.

- That's right.

- But then, you made foray?

- Yeah.

- After you got married, you made a significant move.

- We did.

So we decided that we really wanted to do something before either graduate school or kind of entering the workforce right away.

And so, after we got married, we spent three years in Africa.

So, we taught at a missionary school that had missionary kids and embassy kids in Senegal, West Africa.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

- Three years.

- Three years.

- You had to come out of that experience changed.

- Oh, absolutely.

- You...spending that much time in a developing country or, you know, you see things and realize that, you know, what we have here is, you know, at times, we feel like we don't have enough.

We don't have enough.

But it is...

It definitely changes you going through that experience.

- I have to ask, Jennifer's watching, so I know you have to tell the truth now.

- Uh-oh.

- Newly married.

"Hey, let's go to Africa."

Not generally a conversation a lot of young couples have.

- Was this a joint decision?

- It was.

It was.

- OK. OK. - Yeah, definitely on board.

- I would certainly hope so.

- That's right.

And you ended up having your first child in Africa?

- We did.

Yeah, our third year there.

Our son, Joshua, was born there.

- That's fantastic.

And he's got that as part of his personal history.

- That's right.

- Kind of forever and ever.

You finish your time in Africa, you come back, and you decide to embark upon further education in the one field that most people find the easiest and the least challenging in any of their academic career.

- Mathematics.

- Mathematics.

- How did you make that connection from a Christian college to Senegal, to Africa to... - So, my father is actually a college professor.

And so, he recently retired, a PhD in nuclear physics.

So, I have, kind of, that as a background.

And so, I had been considering, you know, maybe going into teaching would be something I'd like to do.

And so, I started a PhD program, Mathematics, decided after teaching a number of undergraduate calculus courses, I thought, "You know, I don't know if teaching is really "what I want to do."

But what I found was, in the research that I was doing, that I was really starting to enjoy some of the computer work that I was doing, you know, using computers to solve problems, real problems.

And so I thought, "You know, I'm really enjoying this."

And so, I ended up finishing with my Masters and getting a job offer in New York, working for Goldman Sachs.

So, a large financial firm.

- Well, this is a natural progression for a young man growing up in Indiana.

Christian College, Africa, Goldman Sachs.

- Yeah.

That's right.

- Manhattan.

You want to talk about a foreign country?

- Oh, we've joked about, you know, the culture shock was bigger, you know, going from graduate school to Manhattan than it was coming back from Africa.

- Oh, wow.

- Yeah.

It really was just an incredible experience.

- In your mathematics studies, by the way, your dad's a PhD in physics.

- That's right.

- God bless him.

God bless him.

The word Sheldon comes to mind, but that's just that's just me.

Is there a little resemblance there?

- A little.

But he's, yeah, he's just a brilliant, brilliant man.

- Which is fantastic.

God bless him.

Your study took an interest in the term, the term is algorithms.

- Correct.

- Most folks listening are going, no clue whatsoever.

For those of us that are in the business, we go, all right, we think we have a reasonable sense of algorithms.

For the layman, for the person out there listening, going, no clue whatsoever, give us the basics.

- Sure.

So it my time at Goldman Sachs, I actually was able to spend some time working on a strategy that's for asset allocation modeling.

- How people invest money.

- Exactly, and so determining, and this is for high net worth individuals, so determining really what is the best mix, kind of what's the optimal mix, and so writing computer software that helps to solve those problems, and those would be algorithms.

So there are particular formulas that help you to solve those problems.

And so that's what I spent a fair amount of time doing on Wall Street.

- So if I use the word formulas as a synonym for algorithms, am I on the right track?

- Right.

- A tool.

And for everybody listening, if you're talking about asset allocation, generally speaking, the word that you might use is diversification.

You might say, I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket.

That's what my mom would have said.

So you don't want to have everything invested in large companies.

You might want to have some fixed income.

You might want to have some real estate.

In today's crazy world, people are talking about precious metals, commodities, all manner of different things that may be protective in an inflationary environment.

And yet I've only spoken about it for 40 seconds and your head's already hurting.

So you need something, you need some guidance, some tool that will give us some sense of what's the appropriate, what's the proper way to invest.

And at Goldman Sachs, you're talking about high net worth people, folks who have accumulated serious capital and they're not interested in losing it.

- That's exactly right.

And so that was really the main focus of what I was working on there.

- Many years in Manhattan.

- That's right.

17.

- You were there for 9/11.

- That's right, yeah, that was...

So I'd just been in Manhattan just for a few years and so at that point our second son was born.

So on that morning, I had decided, and my office was actually across the street from World Trade Center, decided to, you know, the boys had come into our bedroom for whatever reason.

I decided, you know, I'll take a later train.

So I did.

So it was about another half an hour later, so I was on the train coming into Hoboken, which is just on the other side of the river, and coming out of a tunnel.

People's cell phones are going off.

And we realized, oh, there's something happening.

So we looked up at the tower, noticed there was smoke.

So I went to get on the ferry, you know, we thought, oh, a helicopter or some little...

So I got in line to get on the ferry to go across and I saw the second plane hit.

So immediately, you know, we all turned around, ran back to the train.

You know, it was at that moment we realized this is something very bad that's happening.

And so, yeah, it was, you know, I personally think it was God, you know, that had a part in why I decided to take a later train.

But it was just a horrific, horrific day.

- You mentioned God.

You went to a Christian college.

We can make some pretty reasonable connections.

And we are unapologetically Christian here.

So this makes a great deal of sense.

There are so many pieces where we've come a ways.

We still have a ways to go with your story.

But there are so many pieces that already have seen a divine influence.

- That's right.

- I don't think you'd... - Oh, I completely agree.

- OK, fantastic.

So with that kind of an influence, lots of folks, they will ask me, I run, compared to Goldman Sachs, we're a slightly smaller firm.

Is the word order of magnitude?

We're a slightly smaller firm.

But often folks will say, you know, being a Christian, does that interfere with the capitalist side of your life?

And fortunately for me, the answer is heck no.

- Right.

Right.

- Goldman Sachs is maybe the poster child for capitalism.

And yet, what, 15, 16, 17 years you were there, apparently, you coexisted pretty well.

- Yeah.

I mean, obviously, I try to allow my faith to drive, you know, who I am and the actions that I that I take and not necessarily the influences, you know, in a lot of things that were around me.

But it really was, you know, just an incredible experience being with people that you know are some of the smartest in the world.

However, you know, there reaches a point where it feels like, OK, I'm ready to try something else and maybe to start helping people that may not have access to, you know, this type of research or whatever it is.

And so that's... We had a few other things that kind of happened along the way to bring us back to Indiana.

But the primary one was my mom had a stroke.

So being an only child, I really felt like we needed to go back to Indiana.

And so that's what we did about six years ago.

We packed up, moved the family to Indiana.

- You got to tell me, the kids at that point are in their early to mid teens.

How excited were they to go from the glittering city to... - Farmland?

- Yeah, to farmland?

- It was, yeah, it was, It was a challenge.

It was a challenge.

But, you know, they completely understood.

They knew that they were going to be, you know, there to be with their grandparents, you know, and help them kind of see through this time, and so it was an adjustment.

But, you know, I think at this point, I mean, looking back, I know they've told us that, you know, it really is a neat place to be in a place where you feel like, OK, it's different challenges than it would be necessarily on the East Coast.

But there really are so many advantages.

- Are any of the children following in your footsteps or are they following career paths similar to yours?

- Not yet.

- Interesting.

- Well, not yet, exactly.

- Yeah.

- Anything could happen.

The culture shock.

For lack of a better word.

It's trite, but I guess it works, Manhattan to the farmland.

We talked about the kids for a moment, but for you, it was really returning home.

- That's right.

- When you think about home, was there one person as you were growing up that had the most influence on you?

- Yeah, I would say both of my parents, but my father.

- OK. - You know, just, looking up, I often comment he's the smartest guy I know and, physics PhD, you could probably make the connection there, but it's wisdom, you know, that he has.

And so he has a lot of book knowledge, but it's really how to apply, you know, those life lessons.

And so... - Pretty rare.

- Yeah, it is.

- You've been in conference rooms in Manhattan with some of the smartest people in the world, within a fairly small sector of knowledge.

Let's be clear.

But some of the smartest people, and yet they may not have been able to cross the street.

- It's possible.

- And sadly so.

So the combination of the two, being a PhD in physics, rare enough, let's give him his due.

But combining that with what you and I might call the real world or beyond the real world, perhaps, wisdom, pretty special stuff.

- Yeah.

- How's your dad doing?

- He's doing well.

He's doing well.

My mom passed away this summer, but it actually has been fantastic to be there for him.

- When you went back, you eventually bumped into a gentleman that I call a friend, Tim Ash.

- That's right.

- Tim heads up Ash Brokerage.

Again for everybody listening, if you want full transparency, Ashbrook Brokerage is a partner of ours on the insurance, long term care life insurance annuity side.

We do a tremendous amount of work.

And Tim heads up that effort.

It was founded by his dad, Jim Ash, 50 years or so ago, and Tim has taken over the reins and done a fantastic job.

And somehow you met Tim Ash?

- That's right.

It was through actually a connection through my dad that there's somebody that was working at a Ash Brokerage that he said, yeah, just some of your resume, I'll make sure Tim looks at it.

And it didn't take very long for Tim to give me a call.

And so I flew out and we spoke and it really was so refreshing, you know, first of all, just to be in that environment of a family business and just so many, so many things that are different from kind of the corporate, you know, feeling of downtown.

- Despite the fact it is a significant corporation.

- Oh, absolutely.

- Hundreds of employees.

- That's right.

- Yet that's not how it feels.

- No, no.

It's extremely personable.

Tim is just a wonderful man.

And, you know, I just felt an immediate connection and knew this is where I wanted to be.

- And Journey Guide is kind of the end product of this partnership affiliation.

- So not long.

So Tim obviously knew my background, you know, at Goldman, and it was just a couple of months of being there.

He connected me with really the other co-founder, attorney guy, who's an estate planning attorney, and said, Michael and Jeff, I'd like you to work on a problem.

I'd like you to take the knowledge and the algorithms, the things that you know about from Goldman working with high net worth individuals, and see, OK, can we actually include other types of products like annuities into a retirement plan?

At Goldman, annuities were never a consideration.

But, you know, it was a fascinating problem, you know, one that we're still working on.

- Of course.

- But it didn't take long, a couple of weeks.

It started with a very large Excel spreadsheet.

But we went back to Tim and said, you know what, I think we have something here.

You know, actually having the right amount of guaranteed income for people is extremely important.

For some people, it's just Social Security and maybe a pension.

- Sure.

- But needing to have at least a certain amount of that guaranteed income provides that peace of mind, provides just the assurance that they're going to be OK and that they're not going to outlive their money.

- There's no question that the ability to be confident - That's right.

- that you're not going to run out of money is the foundation of a happy retirement.

- Absolutely.

- No question about it.

Michael, we've covered a lot of ground.

Oh, my gosh.

Do you take your kids aside and give them life lessons or might you want to give them one now that they'll watch later?

- Oh, my goodness.

I probably don't do it as often as I should, but I would say that the most important thing is, as early as you can, to start saving, you know, start putting at least a small amount aside.

And so, you know, our kids do that.

They have, you know, fortunately, with the type of accounts that they have, we have been able to set aside some that they can keep for saving.

And, you know this, Gene, the earlier you start, you start getting that compounding effect and it can make just a huge amount of difference.

You'll be so surprised, - As they say in the farmland.

pay yourself first.

- That's right.

That's right.

- Michael, thank you so very much.

- Sure.

- Let me say good night to our audience.

Thank you so very much.

I hope you picked up a couple of ideas from this particular American story, Michael Smith.

And I know I did.

And hopefully you did as well.

If you're hearing those bits and pieces of that journey, if you want that confidence in your retirement, if you like access to that tool our More Than Money advisors provide that access to you.

There's no charge.

There's no obligation.

There's no pressure.

All you have to do is ask.

Pretty simple thing for you to do.

You can do it by email.

Send me that email that we talked about at the beginning of the show, gene@askmtm.com, and just simply request an opportunity to experience Journey Guide for yourself and see where that takes you.

Make sure that you build that confidence in your retirement, that you won't run out of money and all the other things that are important to you as well, including legacy.

Michael's got three kids.

They want to make sure he has a good legacy plan put in place.

Your kids and grandchildren want the same for you, and of course, you want that for them.

Thank you for spending part of your evening with us on More Than Money.

We're going to be next week with another great story and answering some of your emails right here right now on More Than Money.