Behind the Book: The New Edition of Plan on Living, a Conversation with Scott Peterson

Behind the Book: The New Edition of Plan on Living, a Conversation with Scott Peterson – (0:00)

Alex Call: Scott, I am looking forward to talking to you today. Yeah. Sounds like fun. Yeah. So anyway, the purpose of the—whether you want to call it a webinar or more of an interview, today is just to go over the book that Scott has updated, his “Plan on Living” book, and kind of talk about some of the changes and some of the lessons that he’s learned. Not just with updating the book, but also really throughout your career. Yeah. This is 40 years, right?

Scott Peterson: Yeah. We’re celebrating 40 years of being in the investment industry, and so things have changed a lot. So it might be interesting to kind of make comparisons and see how things have changed for the better. Anyway, yeah, let’s do it.

Alex Call: So this will be fun. Just a couple of quick housekeeping items: Carson Johnson, he is in the background, and he will be looking at any of the questions that you might have. And so you can go ahead and do that. Do not go through the chat feature, but there’s a Q&A feature that you can ask any questions, and Carson will be either answering them online and typing the answers back to you, or potentially asking them to us throughout the webinar or at the end of the webinar.

So please, if you have questions, we want to hear from you. Well, with all that being said, I’m just going to, Scott, just start asking you some questions. Yeah. And the first one is:

What originally inspired you to write “Plan on Living” – (1:45)

Scott Peterson: We came up with some new processes that were not well known or used in our industry, way back 2006—well, 2007. And I thought, “You know what?” They worked so well during the downturn of 2007 and ’08 that I thought, “You know what? The world needs to know about this.” And so, anyway, that’s what motivated me to write the book.

Alex Call: Okay. Excellent. And I know this is the third edition of the book. Yeah. Why do you feel the need to write those extra editions?

Scott Peterson: Okay, so if this were a history book or a book about religion or philosophy or something like that, things don’t change every day. But with investments, they do. They do. And I’m thinking about when I started my career back in 1986, there were no cell phones, there was no internet. We did things a lot differently than we do now. And so, yeah, things change. We have to update the book. The markets change. Tax laws change and so forth, and so we have to update the book.

And I also think it’s interesting, even in the last couple of years, all of a sudden, we have AI, which we haven’t had previously, and how that impacts our industry. Cyber, cryptocurrency, those kind of things. Things that are different that we’ve never had before. So there’s always a need to update this book. So I will tell you a couple things, though, that haven’t needed to change, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about this, I believe. You’re going to ask me about the Perennial Income Model™ in a minute, but our modeling hasn’t changed. The way we manage money, we put that whole program together very thoughtfully back in 2007, and it was immediately tested out of the gates with the ’08 and ’09.

And you know what? Thankfully, we haven’t had to change the model. The model works. So anyway, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

Alex Call: And I definitely want to get back to that model and kind of how that happened. Yeah. But before we do that, tell me about the name, Plan on Living. How’d you come up with the name?

Scott Peterson: You know what? It was kind of an interesting time, is the book was written, it was at the publisher, and I put it off as long as I possibly could. I could not think of a name for the book. And so I’m driving down there, talking to my assistant, and I says, “We got to have a name.” They’re waiting for a name. It’s holding everything up.

And so we’re just kind of buzzing through things, and I thought, Plan on Living. Yeah, that’s what this is about. We need to plan on living a long time in retirement. We need to plan on living a wonderful lifestyle. The baby boomers, we have been blessed with these wonderful retirements and wonderful opportunities that really no previous generation of retirees has had. And so we need to plan on living a very full life. Plan on living a long time. Make sure our investments are going to help us to live that long time, too. So anyway, that’s where we came up with it.

Alex Call: That’s great. I love the name Plan on Living. I love how it is a very optimistic way of looking at it. And the whole book itself has a very optimistic point of view.

Scott Peterson: I’m glad you like it because you know what? At first, I didn’t know if I did or not. It was just like, “We have to come up with something. Let’s just run with it.”

Alex Call: When the original book that you wrote was, how long ago was it? Was it about 10 years ago?

Scott Peterson: I should look that up because I was wondering. I thought you might ask me that, and I can’t—Yeah, let’s say 10 years ago. Probably 10 to 15 years ago.

Alex Call: Is there anything that you believe differently today than you did when you wrote the original book?

Scott Peterson: Not a lot. I’ll tell you what’s happened in our industry, though, is that when I started back in the ’80s, everything was commission-based. We didn’t have this fee-only platform that we have now, where we just charge a flat fee for our services. And so we had to always sell something new. And that’s the only thing we knew.

That’s all there was. And thankfully then, the fee structure came along and made life better for everybody. And so, yeah. So we were transitioning away from all that commission stuff way back when to the fee-only stuff that we do now, and I think this made life, again, it’s a much fairer, better way to do business.

Alex Call: And when it comes to the book, one of the things I like, there’s a lot of analogies, and it’s very simple to read, very easy to understand.

Scott Peterson: Oh. You know what? If you read the book, you’ll think, “Okay, this guy must live in Lake Powell” because I have a lot of analogies in regards to the Colorado River. Volatility versus risk. I always like to point that out. Volatility is not the same as risk. When you think about it, volatility is just a synonym for unpredictability. And where risk is actually a chance of losing money. Right?

And so I just got back from Lake Palace last week, and every time you go down, you’re going to have some stormy days. And if you’re on a houseboat, believe me, if you’re not properly anchored, you could lose a houseboat or other boats. In fact, this last week was particularly horrible down there for this. But those people who are anchored, they’re fine. They do well. And the storms last but a short time, but they could do a lot of damage. And so I compare that to people in investing. If you’re properly anchored, you have a plan you’re following, you do well. You do well. And you can get through the financial storms that we have every once in a while.

And so, anyway, that’s just one that I like. But I tend to use a lot of analogies from the Colorado River, and anyway, maybe I need to broaden my horizons.

Alex Call: No, I think it’s right. The difference between risk and volatility definitely kind of paints the picture and helps you understand that a lot better.

One of the things that I’ve noticed when it comes to the book is it seems like that the first two thirds is more about kind of the timeless principles and the investment philosophy.

And then the last third is really what separates it from any other book out there about retirement income or about finances. Right. And that’s all about the Perennial Income Model. And so for those who have not heard about it or know about it, can you just explain the Perennial Income Model very briefly?

Perennial Income Model – (9:25)

Scott Peterson: I thought the first two thirds of the book, we just need to spend some time talking about the fundamentals, the investment fundamentals and principles. Because what I found is, and what we find still is people, they have misconceptions on how markets really work and how things should really be done. And so I thought, well, we need to at least build that foundation.

Once that foundation’s built, then we can say, okay, now, given the principles that we’ve learned, how are we going to build a sustainable income plan? Something that’s going to last throughout your life, something that’s going to keep up with inflation and so forth. So, that’s where we built the Perennial Income Model. And I’ll give you the shortest version I know how to give on this.

In fact, let me just take a minute. I want to tell you how it came about. Okay. I think that might be the best way to do it. Okay. It was 2005, 2006. In those years, I was really frustrated with the whole investment process. I was working with retirees back then, and at the time I was thinking, the way you’re supposed to invest is you’re supposed to find a good economist, okay?

And you listen to the economist that you can trust, and then you invest accordingly. So basically, the economist is trying to forecast the future, trying to figure out what the direction of the market is and so forth. Well, that whole thing blew apart back when the.com bubble bursts unexpectedly. Then you had a couple of years later, then you had 9/11 come along, and I thought, you know what?

This doesn’t work. And trying to forecast the future and trying to put together a plan for people, this does not work. And so we need something else. So I was looking for something and I came across a white paper from Dr. William Sharpe. He was an economist at Stanford, and in his paper he basically said, “You know what? Whenever you retire, what a retiree should do is they should kind of parcel their money out or split their money up into 30 separate investment portfolios.” Now he didn’t have to put together this nightmare, okay?

So he’s a theory guy, okay? But he said, “Yeah, you got to break your money up into 30 separate investment accounts, and each account would represent one year of your retirement.” And I thought about it. I thought, well, conceptually, this makes sense because the money I need for year number one of retirement has to be invested much differently than year number 30. Okay, year number one, we’re worried about volatility, whereas in year number 30, our primary concern is inflation. And I thought at the time, I kind of let it go. I thought, yeah, it’s a great idea, but man, how can we set up 30 accounts for each of our clients?

I mean, clients don’t want that. I don’t want that. The expense and the hassle of that endeavor just made it impossible. So, but the more I thought about it, I thought, you know what? If we simply were to change it from a one-year time period that the accounts are responsible for providing income to a five-year time period, this might work. So we’d have an account covering years one through five, a second account years six through 10, and so forth, till we build this out over 30 years. And as we played with it and kind of transitioned it to an actual working program, all of a sudden, it did make sense. And there’s a couple of tweaks we had to make to it, but anyway, that’s the premise of this.

So basically, we’re just trying to match people’s investment portfolios with their future income needs. So. No, that’s it. You mentioned that when you were coming up with that, that it was different accounts. Mm-hmm. And so- Yeah, when it first started, were you actually having different- Yeah, the people had different accounts? Yeah, and thank goodness for technology. Yeah, so yeah, we had one account for the first five years of retirement, a second account for the second five years, and so on. And it was cumbersome and it was difficult, but it was manageable, and we could do it. But not long after we came up with that, there’s technology was developed called sleeving technology, where you could actually take one account and you could break that account into six different portfolios.

So if you had this one IRA, you wouldn’t have to split it up into six IRAs. It’s just one IRA and you could split it up internally, and that’s what we’ve been using ever since, and it works wonderfully for the program that we have. Yeah. No, that’s excellent. It makes it possible.

Alex Call: And so you’ve used the approach now for about 20 years. What benefits do you appreciate today that you didn’t really fully understand when you first created it?

Scott Peterson: Okay. So when we first created it, let me just kind of back up and say what our objectives were. The objectives were to I felt like we needed to have some kind of a framework for investing. How should you have your money invested once you retire? Okay, that’s number one. The second thing, we needed a framework for dispersing. For how much do you dare take out of your retirement funds?

I think people still today, they have a big wad of money in their 401Ks. They still don’t even have a plan as far as how much they can or should take out of their retirement funds. So, that’s number two. We needed to have a program to limit risk, to reduce risk. You’re entering retirement. This is not a place for speculation. This is something where we wanted to make sure we address risks when all risks are accounted for. So risk of volatility, I think for the retirees, that’s a big risk, managing volatility. But the other one is the risk of inflation that I think so many times, especially the annuity sales guys forget to talk about inflation, but that’s a huge risk for retirees. And so you have to keep your money up with inflation.

And then, the last thing we wanted to do is create some kind of a format for tax efficiency. Okay, so those are the four things that we did as we created the model. Those are the things that were in mind. But now we’ve had it 19 years and there are other benefits that we experienced that when we built the Perennial Income Model, I did not even contemplate these benefits. And there’s two that I can think of just—Well, there’s more than two, but two I want to talk about. It tends to be help people, I call it a guardian. Guardian for as we age. We’ve all seen it as we get older, especially in our job.

We meet with our clients, just two or three times a year sometimes. And, as time goes on, we see the bright 65-year-old morphs into the not so with it 80-year-old as time goes on, or 90-year-old. And you know what? I think this having a program to follow throughout the years, I think is really a great benefit. As sometimes people start slipping a little bit mentally, this I think brings great reassurance. So we set up the program when they’re at the top of their game, but as time goes on, we just have them stick with the program. So that’s it. And then also, of course, when there’s a death, the spouse, and maybe it’s the non-financially savvy spouse, has a program to follow.

We don’t have to shake up their whole world. It’s such a difficult thing with the death of a spouse when they’re dealing with situational depression and there’s so many things coming at them. And it’s just, I think, a great benefit to have a program that people can start together, follow, and then when one passes away, then the surviving spouse can continue on with the same program.

Alex Call: You mentioned one of the areas that kind of one of those pillars that you had was taxes. That wasn’t originally in the first book as much. But it kind of came out in some of the other editions. Tell me a little bit more. How does that help from a tax perspective?

Scott Peterson: So I think that’s a great question, is how does this help for the tax planning? In my mind, I think, how can we really do good tax planning without projecting a future income stream? How do you know if you should do a Roth IRA conversion or not without seeing what the impact will be on, number one, this year’s taxes, but also taxes into the future?

And with the Perennial Income Model, that’s already done. We project income into the future and, therefore, having done that already, then we can take a look at ways we can say, “Well, if you were to take your IRA distribution at this point in time versus this point in time, it would be better for you tax-wise.” So we can project out income for many years and then we can kind of start figuring out ways to save on taxes. And I find this interesting that it’s just part of the model. It’s how it works, and I don’t see anybody else in our industry that really does this.

It seems like when it comes to taxes, they’re trying to figure out how to save taxes this year, but sometimes missing the big opportunity by trying to figure out, okay, when do you take this kind of withdrawal? How much do you take? Should we do a Roth conversion? Because we have it mapped out over many 30 years in most cases, I think we can come up with great tax savings ideas.

Alex Call: One thing I wanted to ask you is, is there anything that you wanted to include in the book, but you either didn’t have time to do it, or you ultimately were not able to get it in?

Scott Peterson: Carson, who’s helping us today, and myself, we teach classes and other people in the office teach classes at—We teach at BYU, and we have some other ones lined up. We teach things at Intermountain Health, for example. And we’ve come up with kind of a matrix. I’m kind of in a unique situation, having done this for 40 years. When it comes to retirement income, I have tried everything possible, okay?

For the first 20 years of my career, I did not have the Perennial Income Model. And so as far as, well, do annuities work? How about 60% stock, 40% bonds? That’s a popular way people do things. Does that work? Then we have some people that put money into short, intermediate, and long-term type of investments. Does that really work? And so I’ve lived it. I’ve done all those. I tried all those years ago and know what works and doesn’t work. So I’m not trying to vilify all other advisors out there that are doing different things. But personally, I’ve tried these things and know what works and what doesn’t. And so we have a matrix. I have a matrix that I put together that we use in our classes that seems to work well, that kind of shows you the pros and cons of these different ways of creating retirement income.

So anyway, in the next version, stay tuned. In version number four, I think we’ll have a chapter about that.

Alex Call: Just about more like comparing it to the other different plans that are out there. That’d be awesome.

Scott Peterson 40 Years – (21:48)

Well, so I want to not shift so much away from the book. I’m going to talk a little bit about your career, being 40 years in the industry. Without sharing anything confidential, what would you say is the craziest or most unexpected situation you’ve come across?

Scott Peterson: You know what? There’s this weird stuff that happened, and I guess that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? If everything was just standard and everything went according to plan, but I remember early in my career, we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have internet and those kind of things. You’d meet with people oftentimes at their houses. Okay. And so I remember going to the house and these people are retiring from Geneva Steel, which was a big deal back in the ’80s back in Orem, Utah. And I remember sitting down on the couch and I sat on something kind of hard, so I just reached back and picked it up, and it was a big chunk of deer gristle, like fat from a deer.

I’m a hunter. I know what this kind of stuff is, so I’m like, “Okay, so here you go.” Just put that out on the table. They said, “Oh, yeah, we butchered our deer last night here, and we must have missed that piece.” And so it was at that time that I decided maybe I don’t want to meet with people in their houses anymore.

I’ve been invited to meet with a client’s shaman and come over and sit in the teepee and smoke peyote with him, and I passed on that. But anyway, there’s interesting good people, but with different ideas.

Alex Call: And with that, as you’re talking, as you’re going back through all the different people you’ve met with in the past, is there a particular experience or specific client that you’ve met that really changed the way that you advise people? That gave you a little bit of a paradigm shift?

Scott Peterson: I think of one that was one of my favorites was Jim Fossgate. He’s now deceased, but if you’re into Wi-Fi, high-end audio stuff, you’d recognize the name. But Jim was great to work with. He came up with a—I still think that the world, it’s a big loss when Jim passed away, and he was the top of his field. Yeah. And whenever I went to his house to review things, we’d sit down and talk for 5 or 10 minutes about the investments, and then he’d usher me off to his sound room. I’d put on the headphones, and he’d want to test his newest stuff on me. And I remember one day talking to him, he’s saying, “Yes, Steven Spielberg was going to come listen to his things,” because he might use some of his audio in a movie he has coming up.

And I thought, wow. So I was the guinea pig for Steven, I guess. Because Jim wanted to make sure it was all dialed in really well. That was fun.

Alex Call: That’s awesome. I’m curious, because you mentioned that Jim, you’d only talk like 5, 10 minutes about the actual finances. Did you find that that was normal throughout your career? Did that change the more seasoned you got as an advisor?

Scott Peterson: Yeah. It’s so interesting. So people, they just want to know things are taken care of, and this gentleman is a genius in his own rights. And I talked five minutes with him because I think his wife forced him to talk for five minutes. But frankly, his wife kind of ran the investment thing because his head was on producing other stuff. And I’ve noticed that, but it wasn’t a five-minute meeting. Usually, five minutes with Jim and an hour or so, or an hour or two with his wife.

Alex Call: So one thing, as you’ve been a financial advisor, what gives you the greatest satisfaction?

Scott Peterson: You know what? I’ve been doing this now for so long. I’m actually on my second generation in some families of working with retirees. So I worked with mom and dad way back when. They’ve deceased. They’ve died, and now I’m working with their kids as they retire. And I think the greatest satisfaction I get is just seeing somebody go through the whole process that they retire, they invest, we provide income throughout the years and tax advice and so forth, or tax recommendations. And just seeing the plan through every stage of retirement, and then they die and the plan is just—Then their investments are distributed accordingly, according to their wishes, according to their trusts and wills and so forth.

And just seeing the whole process, I think is true, is there’s a lot of satisfaction. I know oftentimes, when there’s death in the family, as an advisor, you know this, Alex, that we’re one of the first phone calls that are made after somebody passes away. Sometimes even before their clergy is called, they’ll call us and let us know. And it’s just we become a very important part of their family, and they, in turn, are a very important part of our lives. And that’s I think the hardest part of this job is we get to know and love people and work with people, and then they pass on, or they get dementia or something like that. That’s just kind of hard to see that.

Alex Call: I know it can be very hard to see that. I want to ask you a little bit about this because I know when they do pass away, it can also be very satisfying when it goes to their kids and all the kids are happy. But that’s not always the case. And so what have you seen to why that’s not the case? We do all this work to make sure that the money goes to the kids and everything’s nice and neat and everybody’s happy, but then it doesn’t always happen that way, unfortunately.

Scott Peterson: Sometimes just to let people know, we have a great motivation to make sure things go smoothly, because what happens, we’re in the middle of it when it doesn’t go smoothly, right?

And there’s a couple of things that, just practical advice that I’ve been able to figure out over the years. Oftentimes, parents unintentionally put their children in business together upon their deaths. And when I say that, business together, I mean the kids will own a cabin together, or they’ll own a houseboat together or something like that. Well the kids have these different personalities, and then you bring in the in-laws to the whole mix, and they’re forced to make decisions together. And that’s where I see a lot of turmoil.

In my own estate, we have a second home and that kind of stuff that we have, and I have instructions that the kids just sell everything. I don’t want you guys in business together to sell it. If somebody wants to buy the second home or whatever the case is, they can do that, but I just don’t want to force them together because that seems to be the core of a lot of problems.

The other thing I noticed, it’s not the amount of money. Sometimes it’s just the perception of something not being fair, where it causes problems, too. We have a family that we tried very hard to work it out. So when Mom and Dad passed, everything went smoothly, and it did. All the money stuff went equally. Everything’s good, until it came to the BYU football tickets. That was the thing that caused the problem in the family.

And I’ve seen this over, Dad played professional baseball, and one of the sons got his mitt, and one didn’t. It wasn’t about money. It was about a baseball mitt.

So anyway, there’s just things like that. I will recommend, though, use your Schedule A, folks, on your trusts, to write down where you want things like baseball mitts or guns or whatever that to go because putting a piece of tape on an item doesn’t really work. And also, as time goes on, I see people forget that they promised the piano to one granddaughter, but they also promised it to another granddaughter, and another granddaughter, and so upon death all the granddaughters think the piano belongs to them, and it doesn’t. So anyway, that causes problems.

Alex Call: I think just the more clarity that you have with those. Money can be split very easily, but those more precious items, the family heirlooms, making sure that people know who those are supposed to go to.

Carson Johnson: Hey, Scott. I had a question come in I thought was a really good one I think you should maybe address is, you’ve been doing this a long time, and we were talking about how the Perennial Income Model has been around for 20 years. Maybe could you talk a little bit as to what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen with the people have faced in retirement or with the Perennial Income Model specifically? Just what challenges have you seen in retirement, and specifically the Perennial Income Model that you’ve seen, that you’ve run into?

Scott Peterson: So challenges here, and help me out, Carson, if I’m not answering this or I’m not making sense. So challenges in general with retirees, I think the big deal is they don’t have a plan. And I think the Perennial Income Model is a plan people can follow, but most retirees, they accumulate a lot of money in their 401 s or substantial amounts of money, and then think, “Well, I’ll be okay. I accumulated a lot. I’ll be okay with this.” But if there’s not a plan, again, we talked about the plan, a framework for investing, a framework for distributing and so forth, that causes problems.

And what happens, too, you might be a very good investor now and might understand that when markets go down, that’s a short-term thing, which indeed, it lasts for a year or so, then bounces back up. But the older we get, I think the more susceptible we are to making errors in our investing. So markets go down and think, “Okay, it’s different this time. It feels a lot different. I’m going to pull out. I’m going to sell at the bottom of the market,” and so forth. And then, of course, markets inevitably go back up, and you’re sitting in cash, and you’ve just locked in a bunch of losses. So I think the big deal is, in my mind, is not having a plan to follow.

Carson Johnson: Yeah. That’s awesome. Thanks, Scott. And one more thing, Alex, if I can jump in. I thought this was a good question because people read your book, Scott, and it talks a little bit about annuities, and I think we got a question here that came in that said, “I understand you guys kind of steer away from annuities,” but the question was, “Why?” There’s so many of his friends and people that this person knows that bought annuities, and maybe you can speak to as to why annuities is something that you didn’t go to when you first came up with the plan.

Scott Peterson: And that’s what most advisors do. So that’s a very legitimate question. Why do we not like annuities? And I’ll tell you, I think the two biggest risks retirees face are inflation and then market volatility. I think I’ve mentioned that before. And annuities, they solve the market volatility problem just fine. So when you have an annuity, basically you’re trading your lump sum for a stream of income, a guaranteed stream of income. And so people feel very comfortable with that. But the problem is, annuities never have, never will, keep up with inflation.

So you might have 5,000 a month coming from your annuity. You’re feeling really good about this, but that $5,000 a month is going to only have 2,500 worth of purchasing power towards the end of your retirement. And so it doesn’t work out well. So I think the key is to have your money, to keep the magic of compound interest working throughout retirement, and it doesn’t work with an annuity.

You want your money to continue to grow throughout retirement, and annuities kind of stop that growth. So that’s why I don’t like annuities. The other part about annuities, too, is they’re the biggest commission item in the investment industry. The guy’s getting paid 8% commissions to sell an annuity. So they’re sold a lot. And these are salesmen. They’re not financial advisors. Our guys who are CFPs, we’re tax planners, investment planners, life planners. We talk about Medicare with our clients and so forth. So that’s the difference. I think you want somebody that’s going to be there for every step of the way versus just being there to sell you an annuity and then be gone.

Carson Johnson: Thank you, Scott. I think that’s a big thing that commonly comes up with people every time they get bombarded in their emails and chicken dinner invites and so forth.

Alex Call: So as we’re ending up, I just want to just hit a couple more questions, a little more rapid fire. But before we do that, you told me before that at one point you were at a crossroads in your career of what you should do. I believe it was just you, you’re the sole advisor, managing a good business, a good lifestyle. Yeah. And tell me a little bit about that crossroad, how we got to where we are now.

Scott Peterson: Well, I got to a point where I could see I was kind of tapped out. I had myself and my assistant, or maybe two, and I’m the only guy that was meeting with the clients. And you can only grow so big that way. And so I came to the point where I thought, okay, and I’d invested well, and I thought, I can just kind of run this out. I’ll have enough money to retire on. I don’t have to really build that much bigger. Or I can build it into something significant. And then we had just come out with the Perennial Income Model, and I thought, this is so good, and this worked so well during ’08 and ’09, that I thought, more people need to have this. And so I made the decision there to not take the chicken approach, so to speak, just to kind of, yeah, I’m good enough. We’ll figure this out.

I thought let’s build this into something meaningful. And I’m so thankful we have. We manage almost a billion dollars now, and we work with about almost, I think, 700 retired families across America. And people like you and Carson, and this keeps our clients happy, and they’re enjoying the Perennial Income Model. The company’s growing fast because the word is out about the model. People need to take a look at this because it truly does work. So anyway, I made the choice back then, and so thankful again that, let’s expand this. Let’s make this into something bigger than it was.

Alex Call: Well, I, for one, am very happy that that’s the choice you made. And as you look back on your career and your professional accomplishments, what is it you’re most proud of?

Scott Peterson: I think the Perennial Income Model, the model that, again, it’s withstood the test of time. We started in 2007. By the way, a heck of a year to start. Right before the biggest stock market crash in our lifetimes. Okay. But it tested the model. It tested the model, and we could see that it worked, and now we’ve been through several other big downturns since then, and it works. This works. So I’m proud of that, that we took the time to kind of think through the whole model. I’m proud of the fact that we’ve been able to develop this into a larger company and help a lot more people.

And again, I’ll reiterate what I said before. I think that if I look back on my career, the best thing about it is seeing things from the beginning to the end. Helping a new retiree through his life, and then distribute money, and then actually then work with their kids as they retire, too. So that’s been very satisfying.

Alex Call: And now as you’re been in the industry for 40 years, how will that shape your retirement and what you feel a successful retirement is and what you hope to accomplish?

Scott Peterson: You know, whenever that time comes. Again, I think so many times when the people talk about retiring, they’re always talking about what they’re retiring from, not what they’re retiring to.

I’ve just learned as I worked with so many retirees that I think we really need to spend more time considering what we’re going to do. And also talk to our spouses as far as how’s this going to work? How much time are we going to spend together? How much time are we going to spend on our individual projects and things in interest versus spending time together?

I think it’s just a good conversation to have because sometimes there’s misalignment, and that causes problems and so forth. But as far as my retirement, I want to be anxiously engaged, and so you guys have to put up with me for a little while. I might have a diminished role as time goes on, but I teach at Education Week, plan on continuing to do that, and different forums and things around that I’ll talk at.

My advisors are, you guys are better at managing clients’ money than I am because you know the technology better. But anyway, I’ll stay engaged, and if not, my wife will get me engaged. But I’d rather manage money and talk to clients than clean the house and watch the grandkids every day.

Carson Johnson: One more question I think would be really good for everybody. We’ve had a few people mention this is, specifically coming back to the book, Scott, your revised version of the book. There’s several people that have mentioned. What’s actually been changed or added with this new version of the book?

Scott Peterson: Thank you, Carson. Yeah. So if you have an old copy of the book, I think that’s legitimate. The concepts are the same. It’s just we just had to update the numbers. That’s what the biggest change is in the book, we just want to bring you up to speed. The book that you have right now, the old book, I should say, we’re still talking about the Biden presidency and so forth, and what the S&P did back then.

And so the concepts and the principles are the same, but we just wanted to bring it up to speed. So that’s what the new book has.

Alex Call: And have you found that as you’ve updated the numbers, has it solidified the principles or has it made you change your mind on the principles?

Scott Peterson: No, it solidified the principles. So the model’s not changing. The way we manage money is not changing. It’s just we just want to bring it up to speed. So the new book will be available on Audible. I just see a note from Kirk. It will be on Audible. Again, it’s at the printing press right now as we speak. And so we don’t even have it in the office yet. This next couple of weeks, we’ll get it.

Alex Call: Well, Carson, any other questions that you have seen, that you have on your end?

Carson Johnson: Will you be emailing updated pages? I assume she’s talking about the book. I’m not sure, Alex. I think it’s just part of the book. I don’t think we’re doing just a separate thing.

Alex Call: This one, just so you’re aware, so we had the original book about 10 years ago, then there was another edition about five years ago, and that one had a new chapter in it, and so we did email those. But this one, all of the changes are kind of built in with the entire book. There’s not specifically new pages.

Carson Johnson: And what if somebody wants to get a copy of this new version of the book? Just you want to answer that?

Alex Call: So if you’re a client, just please reach out to your advisor, and we’ll get you a new copy of the book. And either for yourself and also if you’re wanting to share it with somebody, we’d love to get you a copy of the book. Just email us. We’ll send it to you. We’ll either mail it or you can come pick it up. Whatever works best. And then if not, if you’re not a client, then you can go to the website, and get a copy of the book, or you can email us at, you can email me at alex@petersonwealth.com. If you email me with your address, and go ahead and we’ll send that over to you.

Carson Johnson: And then Alex, do we want to hit a couple more questions, or what are we good on time?

Alex Call: Carson, if you have more questions, I just have one final question for Scott, but if you have any more, please. Maybe you hit yours, and then if we’ve got some time, we’ll address these last couple of questions.

More in closing. Scott, if you could have people remember one thing from today or one piece of advice that you would give over the past 40 years, what would it be?

Scott Peterson: I think the most important thing is that when people retire, they need to have a plan. They need to have a retirement income plan. Just winging it doesn’t work. What happens is, usually if we don’t have a plan to follow, then it’s our emotions and current events kind of rule the day. That determines your investment decisions, which, those two things combined never portend good investment decision-making. Okay, so the idea is to have a plan, figure out, okay, how am I going to manage this to keep up with inflation?

How am I going to make sure it lasts for the rest of my life? And I think that’s what the Perennial Income Model does.

Carson Johnson: Well, Alex, I think we actually had a few people ask this, Scott, and maybe if you wouldn’t mind talking about it, is they mentioned about what is the succession plan for Peterson Wealth? Maybe you can go into a little bit of detail there. Just think people recognize that you’d mentioned retirement at some point, and so anyways, maybe telling your thoughts on that.

Scott Peterson: Well, Carson, Alex, and others are partners already, and they’re just gradually buying me out, so they check on me, check on my health. They see how I’m doing. But they’re taking over, but they do a great job. They do a great job. And so that will happen at some point in time. Again, I bought two suits yesterday, and I wouldn’t do that if I weren’t planning on being in this business for a while.

So anyway, so I’m going to be around for a bit, but these guys, the interesting thing is we’re not these silo practitioners. We all believe the same thing. We all use the same model and are pushing in the right direction. So Peterson Wealth Advisors is in very good hands.

Carson Johnson: And for the record, we’ll take Scott for as long as we can have him. So Scott, you can keep those suits up, and we’d be happy to have you.

Scott Peterson: Well, what happens, too, is they give me the chance to kind of pursue some of my dreams even outside the office when I’m still involved in the office, too, which is my daughter’s the goalie on the BYU soccer team. I bring that up simply because this fall, I plan on chasing the BYU team around, and these guys are going to be here taking care of business while I’m out playing, so anyway.

Carson Johnson: Then I think we pretty much answered most of them, but maybe one last one, Alex, I think was a great one was we talk about the Perennial Income Model and how that’s really helpful for somebody who’s close to or in retirement. But any advice, Scott, that you would share about to someone who’s maybe still accumulating and saving for retirement, maybe 5, 10, 20 years away from retirement?

Scott Peterson: I think it’s helpful to, even if you’re 5 or 10 years away from retirement, to maybe contact us. Let us plug your numbers into the model so you can see kind of what retirement looks like. I think that’s very helpful because that helps you as you’re accumulating to know how you should maybe structure your 401k. How much you should have in stocks versus bonds and so forth. And I think the model could really help you out. So anyway, don’t be shy about reaching out with us. We could run some numbers for you. We’re believers that as you’re accumulating, you probably got to keep your money in your 401ks for the most part because it’s cheaper there as you’re accumulating.

But I think still you can kind of plan on, with the model, it’ll give you an idea kind of if you have to step up how much you’re saving or how you’re investing and so forth before you retire. So it does help to catch up to us here early.

Carson Johnson: And I’ll just add my little two cents in is the principles that Scott talks about in his book are timeless. So even if you’re 20 years away from retirement, a lot of the principles about investment fees and keeping those as low as possible and diversification and even some of the tax planning things that Scott has talked about in the updated versions of the book, are really great principles to consider even well before retirement, as well as in retirement. So lean on Scott’s book for that.

Scott Peterson: We’ve had a lot of people read the book and say, “Yeah, my kids need this.” And when we wrote it, we’re writing it for those who are approaching retirement. But again, the principles that Carson’s talked about are good for every age. So Carson, Alex, you need to write the next book.

Alex Call: We’ll throw a little plug into Carson. Carson’s got something coming. So just a matter of time, which we’ll let everybody know about when the time comes here soon. Well, everybody, thank you very much for this time. I hope you were able to enjoy getting some wisdom from Scott.

Scott Peterson: Thank you. Thanks for attending.