Preview:

Spring is in the air and for some, that means it’s time for spring cleaning. Marie Kondo is considered an expert in tidying and decluttering, and wrote the book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” In today’s episode, Ryan brings a Marie Kondo-inspired approach to finances, helping you declutter, get organized, and let go of what no longer “sparks joy.”

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More About This Episode:

Ryan walks through common financial messes, from overlapping investments to the fear-based decisions that keep us stuck.  Just like our closets and garages need spring cleaning, our money management could use a fresh start too. Whether it’s emotional attachment to stocks, scattered old 401(k)s, or just not knowing where everything is, it’s time to start decluttering your financial life.

Here’s what we cover in this episode:

💸 Why emotional attachment to stocks could be holding you back

📦 Organizing investments by category, not location

🗑️ Letting go of fear of the future

⏰ One of the most valuable assets in retirement planning

0:00 – Intro

2:34 – Who is Marie Kondo?

3:32– Does This Spark Joy?

5:09 –The Financial Junk Drawer

10:17 – Why You Can’t Let Go

13:29 – Take Action Now


Resources:

Retire Pilots – https://retirepilots.com

Get your FREE Retirement Toolkit – https://bit.ly/3ZmZsaX

Pilot Tax – https://pilot-tax.com/

The Pilot’s Advisor Podcast is also on video. Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3EIEBW2

Connect with Pilot-Tax: https://pilot-tax.com/

Episode Transcription:

(Note, this is an automated transcription. Please forgive any errors.)

Walter Storholt 

Well, spring is in the air, at least it will be soon, depending on where you live, but that also means that it’s time for maybe some spring cleaning or some tidying up. Well, if you have ever followed Marie Kondo, she is considered an expert in tidying up, very popular in Netflix. A couple of years ago with her series, she also wrote the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. So what we’re going to do is take some of her ideas and concepts on today’s episode and talk about how we can also tidy up in our financial life. All right, it’s gonna be a good episode today on the pilots advisor Walter Storholt alongside Ryan Fleming, the pilots advisor himself, helping pilots prepare for their retirement future. And Ryan, we’re talking spring cleaning today. Have you kind of gotten to your honey do list, or cleaned out the garage, or done any of those steps yet, I feel

Ryan Fleming 

like that’s always never ending, like spring cleaning, you know, it’s always the next step all year round cleaning for you? Yeah, well, in South Carolina, there’s, like, goes through this time period where there’s all this pollen in the air, and you’re almost like, all these things that you can’t do until the pollen is gone. Like, you know, I have to pressure wash all this stuff outside, but we got to wait till the pollen is done. So, yes,

Walter Storholt 

yes. All my years living in North Carolina, very familiar with that. I really like the last house that we lived in, the pollen was absolutely insane. But I had one of the we lived had had a couple of acres and so tons of trees, lots of leaves, so we had a pretty robust backpack, you know, you know, blower that we would use in the fall. Well, I loved busting that thing out in the spring and getting all the pollen off with the with the backpack blower. So great tip for anybody might want to wear a respirator doing it, but, but it was a great way to clear the driveway in the house and get stuff off of all the surfaces. I don’t know if my neighbors appreciated the cloud that probably drifted over to their

Ryan Fleming 

properties. Was it a still?

Walter Storholt 

No, it was. It was like a, I don’t remember the brand, I don’t know, but, but in that vein, you know, yeah, well, I just know this was very loud and wore ear protection because it was such a, such a beast.

Ryan Fleming 

I think it’s a German brand, but S, T, I, H, L, and, yeah, one of my buddies had one of those backpack blowers, and it was so awesome that I’d actually go. I have one now, unfortunately, but I, before I moved, I would drive, you know, a couple blocks to his house. And but hey, man, can I borrow it? He’s like, Oh yeah, yeah. Chance is a delta pilot now, but chance, thanks for letting me borrow your backpack, leaf blower all those years. It’s

Walter Storholt 

pretty awesome. I love it. And we are going to talk a little bit more about tidying up on the show today. And so this is all from Marie Kondo. Now, does that name mean anything to you? Ryan, have you Walter?

Ryan Fleming 

You throw me curveballs all the time. But I honestly have no clue who that person is at all. I might have to get out the Netflix and to search for that. You said it was popular on Netflix back in the day. It was

Walter Storholt 

like it went through this phase where it was huge on Netflix. I want to say a couple of years ago, I don’t know if it was during the pandemic or maybe even before that. Maybe it was pandemic related, but I don’t know back when we everybody was watching everything they could, because there was nothing else to do. Maybe that’s when it was popular. But it was just a lady that goes into people’s houses and then just kind of eviscerates them about their clutter and helps them declutter and clean up their house. And people got a lot out of watching it, so Well,

Ryan Fleming 

I’m gonna ask my wife about this, and if we can dig it up, maybe I’ll watch an episode or two and see but either way, we could, we could do a podcast about this. Let’s see how it turns out. Let’s

Walter Storholt 

rock. Yeah, you don’t have to have seen the show to to have some fun with this one. So she was very famous for saying, Does this spark joy? That was kind of the go to tagline that I know came out of the show. Even if you didn’t watch the show, if you just talked to anybody who did like that’s that was kind of the catch phrase that came out of it. And the full quote from her book, is the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away when you’re cleaning is to take each item in one’s hand and ask, Does this spark joy. So what do you think about that, and how do you relate that to the financial world? It

Ryan Fleming 

makes me think of a couple things. It makes me think of, you know, some people getting emotionally attached to stocks. Is one like, Ooh, it brings me joy to own this particular stock. But also those individuals that watch their account like a hawk, like they’re, they’re, you know, if the if their portfolio is up and they have this much saved, it almost tells them that they’re a good person, you know, or that they’re successful, or they’ve arrived. And then, of course, the alter, the alternate to that, is when the markets are down and it’s down 15% you know, the life, life’s exploding, blowing up. We have nothing to live for. You know, I feel like I’m losing so for those that are that emotionally attached to their portfolio, and it doesn’t spark joy at times, just stop looking at it. It’ll it’ll correct itself over the long term, it’ll go up, I promise you. But, but the more you stick your fingers in. There and worry about it. It’s just gonna make things worse. So I don’t know if I got a good job of relating that to investing, but that’s what I think about when I say, you know, does it bring you joy? And yeah, I mean,

Walter Storholt 

I think that’s a good perspective when I think too about, like, trying to hold on to things, or what you’re what you’ve got cluttered up in your financial life. You know, definitely have been in those phases of life where you’re holding on to that, that screw, because one day I might need this, and then you end up with 10,000 of those screws in in your garage, right? Or extra pieces of wood, and yeah, one day I’m going to use that piece of wood, but it might not be for 20 years.

Ryan Fleming 

Well, that makes me think of a couple things. Number one, a lot of prospects will come to me, and you know, talking about it, bringing them joy. One of the things that I hear all the time is, I don’t like this stuff. I don’t know anything about it. I need your help. So 100% if that’s you, we can help you, and we can get you going down a better path than you probably are right now. But the other thing that it makes me think of is I find a lot of individuals that, I call it the financial junk drawer, where they have stuff spread all over the place. They had 14 different jobs previously, and they’ve, don’t even know where those 401 ks are anymore. Or they have, you know, an account at over at Charles Schwab. I got an account at Vanguard. I got one at fidelity. I got one at Robin Hood, I mean stuff all over the place, where you can’t make sense of what you even have, and it’s definitely not working together. So I see that all the time where I call it the financial juncture, where, hey, you need to get your stuff consolidated. Having it all over the place is not diversification. That’s that’s just not being organized. Yeah,

Walter Storholt 

scatteredness probably doesn’t cause much joy, so in our financial lives, let’s get things decluttered, but also just organized or eliminate duplicates those kinds of things, and you might start sparking Joy a little bit more. So that’s interesting because it dovetails nicely into our next one, where Marie said tidy by category, not location. And so I guess she’s kind of saying, instead of just tidying up one shell for one drawer and saying, I’m just going to like that junk drawer, like, I’m just going to do the junk drawer today, she’s like, Hey, instead get all the books into one place and then declutter by that category, what books do I really need to keep, rather than doing it by location? So that’s kind of an interesting, interesting thought.

Ryan Fleming 

Yeah, I could see that too, where if you have stuff all over the place, at different custodians, different accounts, you’re not really being diversified. I’ll see this a lot, where people are actually stacking the same strategy on top of each other. You know? It’s like, okay, I bought the S, p5, 100, then I bought us large cap, then I bought the prime cap, and then I brought, you know, and I’m like, well, all of those are US large cap, and you’re just kind of stacking them on on top of each other, yeah, on top of that, none of them are talking. So what you’ve really created here is a a very inefficient portfolio. And I see that a lot.

Walter Storholt 

That’s a good point. I kind of noticed that with my wife’s 401, K and my 401, K, the investment options are called different things in the two portfolios. But then when I look at the performance of them over the last year, they’re mirror each other. They’re like each individual investments, like home. So these must be in pretty much the exact same thing, yeah. Well, then that layering you’re talking about makes a lot of

Ryan Fleming 

sense, and it’s crazy, because I see it all the time, like, okay, Vanguards, you know, S p5 100 fund, and then we got fidelities, and then you got schwabs. And so all you really did was bought the S p5 100, even though you have six different, you know, funds that are doing the exact same thing. It’s like, what are we actually doing? Yeah, I see, I see people laddering target date funds too. That’s another big one. Like, Oh, I bought the 2045 then the 2040 and then, yeah,

Walter Storholt 

interesting. Any reason behind that, like why people chose to do that?

Ryan Fleming 

I think a lot of it’s just not knowing what what they’re doing number one, but then trying to maybe blend some risk tolerances or time horizons. I will, I will put a plug out there. If you’re investing in target date funds, you need to reach out to us. We can do a much better job and get much better returns, and I’ll show you via the numbers. But if you’re if you’re doing a target date fund in your 401, K, there’s a much better way

Walter Storholt 

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Ryan Fleming 

world, for sure. I mean, I see, I see people that have owned a stock for 2030, years because their their father or uncle, or whoever bought it, or they worked at that company. I worked at Caterpillar, so I bought all this caterpillar stock, and I just can’t let it go, even though it’s not very fiscally responsible to have that much money tied up in that stock. Fear of the future. You know, that could be anything, but I see many people hold on to something because of tax consequences. So, you know, we talk about, you know, don’t, don’t let the the what’s, what’s that saying about wagging the dog? You know, where the tail actually wags the dog. The tail wag the dog. Yeah, that. Or, I always like to say, you know, I watch pilots all the time cut off their nose to spite their face, right? You know. Or I can’t see the forest through the trees. Well, a lot of this happens with taxes, you know, and capital gains tax. No, I have the most horrible portfolio ever, and I’ve lost my you know, what on this one stock, but it’s going to come back, and I’m going to hold it till it comes back. You know, at what point in time do we cut our losses and reallocate it and build a diversified portfolio and move on. You know, where I’ve been waiting on 10 years on this stock that I lost, and it’s crazy, I see it.

Walter Storholt 

Yeah, a lot of this comes back to the why, you know, the purpose of the dollars or the why of the investments. And so if you find yourself looking at your portfolio and not being able to really explain, why did I buy that stock? Why am I invested in this, in the in these target date funds. And if you don’t have great reasonings for those things, that’s a nice, like, red flag not to be dramatic, but like, that’s a good personal red flag to say, hmm, I should take a step back here and investigate a little more

Ryan Fleming 

well, that. And I mean, I hate to say it, but so many actions we talk about it being emotional when what people do with their investment portfolios or picking stocks, but I really think it comes down to to the way people hurt themselves is because they make an emotional, short term decision, and what drives that is one of two things, and I think Warren Buffet even brought this up in a lot of his comments throughout the years. But it’s either fear or greed. Okay, you buy that stock because you’re greedy and you want to make all this money and get rich overnight. And then, of course, whenever the markets turn or things are bad, that that fear takes over, and you’ve got to run for the hills. And one of his, that I remember, one of his quotes. And of course, like everything else on this show, I’m going to bastard, you know, bastardize this whole quote, but it was something like, when be fearful when everybody else is greedy. So that’d be like, you know, during, let’s say COVID, you could pick anything and everything was going up, that might be a time to pull the throttles back. Or, like, right now, with all these tariffs, everybody’s freaking out, okay? They’re freaking out the markets, you know, pulling back because these tariffs, this is the time to be greedy. This is the time to go buy flood in the streets. This is where you’re going to make your money. And I think, you know, when you look at those things, that’s how people do the exact opposite of what they really should be doing in the markets.

Walter Storholt 

Yeah, all great points. It leads us to Marie Kondos final quote here, from the moment you start tidying, who the hell?

Speaker 1 

What’s that? I’m just still laughing. Maria condos, last point Marie condom, from

Walter Storholt 

the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life, and as a result, your life will start to change. That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. I like what she’s saying here. Like, if you decide, hey, I need to fix this and I need to get something in order, do it quickly, because life gets better as soon as

Ryan Fleming 

you do well. And pilots are really bad about this. They they like to kick the can down the street. They like to get to that next week. Or, Hey, I’m on a trip. I’ll do it when I get back. And guess what? It never you know, never happens. Yeah, if you have a problem with how you’re investing your money, or you’re not investing or you don’t know what you’re doing, you need to take massive action and fix it as quickly as possible. It’s funny, because it’s probably one of the most important things that we do in our lives, is saving for retirement, and people put it on the back burner and just ignore it for years. And the biggest factor with retirement savings is time. Time is the one thing that you can’t change, and it’s the biggest factor with letting your money work for you and grow and compound over the years. So if you’re sitting there and you know, you are kind of ignoring your 401, K plan, and you’ve been ignoring, hey, maybe I’m not doing the most tax efficient things, or maybe you don’t even know about how to be more efficient with taxes. Once you get to retirement, you need to reach out and stop being one of those do it yourselfers, because you’re. Have a really, really bad problem later on, and it might be too late. Good

Walter Storholt 

points all across the board. Thanks for playing along with this Marie Kondo stuff today, Ryan, despite not having seen the show years ago, if you’ve got questions about anything we’ve talked about today, check out the retirement toolkit. Ryan put this together specifically for pilots. It’s got his two books in there, plus great reports, information, all the starting points that you need to start getting education about retirement and financial planning. We’ve packed it full of good stuff, and you can get it for free. All you have to do is go to retire pilots.com and pick it up today. That’s the starting point for everybody. And then you can start working one on one with Ryan and talking about your portfolio and your financial plan once you’ve checked out that toolkit, but that’s where everybody begins. And so check it out today again. Retire pilots.com We’ve got it linked in the description of today’s show to take you right there, and don’t hesitate to do that and reach out with your questions beyond there. Ryan, thanks so much for the help. We’ll talk to you soon. Well, I

Ryan Fleming 

just want you to know and all my listeners out there, if you don’t know who Maria Kondo is. I wrote her name down. I’m gonna go ask my wife. We’re gonna research her on Netflix and try to watch an episode or two, and I promise you, I’ll report back. Everybody fly safe.

Walter Storholt 

Maria Kondo, that’s like the that’s the temu version of Marie Kondo.

Ryan Fleming 

Don’t worry. Walter will link a YouTube at this in the show notes, you can actually see what she looks like or watch one of her episodes. There you go. We’ll do that. We’ll do that. I’m sure there’s clips out there. Talk to you next time.

Speaker 2 

Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax investment or legal advice, always consult with a qualified investment legal or tax professional before taking any action if.