How Inflation Is Affecting Your Retirement

One million US dollars used to be the gold standard for wealth. If you made a million dollars, you made it and you can comfortably afford your lifestyle, travel, have a nice car, and retire without having to worry about money. But a million dollars isn't what it used to be, and in this video, I want to walk through those numbers of why one million dollars isn't even close to where you actually need to be if you're in your 20s, 30s, or 40s right now to retire, and why and what the new number actually is, and we'll touch a little bit on how and get there, which is ultimately what this channel is about. That's going to be the video. Let's go. Now, before we continue, I want to talk about something that actually saves me hours per week, and that's having AI handle tasks that used to eat up my entire day. And here's the reality. I work or consult across multiple businesses. I run this YouTube channel, manage social media, respond to comments, work on scripts, do research. And if I was being honest for YouTube, I was spending more time on admin work than actually just creating content. I would sit down to film a video, but first I would have to email some people about the video, work out something in the script, maybe discuss some title options. And suddenly, two hours are gone before I can actually go ahead and just film the content. And that's why I started using AI to help myself and my team manage workloads across YouTube and my other businesses and work. And the specific AI tool that I want to share here to help you and myself do that is Sintra.ai. And Sintra is a platform with AI helpers. Think of them like virtual teammates who each handle specific tasks just like a real human worker or assistant would. And these AI helpers can analyze data, automate workflows, and they work 24-7 without breaks. And I'm specifically using two workloads on Sintra that help a lot that I want to share. So number one is Soshi, which is the social media helper on Sintra. And I can give Soshi my video content, and it creates social media posts, captions, hashtags, and more, so it used to take an hour per video can now be done in five minutes. And so Soshi handles some of that creation like hashtags in the description and that redistribution automatically. And second is Cassie, the customer support. Cassie monitors comments and DMs, categorizes questions, and even drafts responses. So I still review everything before it goes out, but Cassie filters out the spam, organizes the real questions, and saves me from spending an hour or more just scrolling through different media sources like comments. And Sintra overall as a platform has over 12 different types of AI helpers for different kinds of work. That includes social media, e-commerce, customer support, content creation, and more. And each individual helper is trained on over 100,000 data points and powered by the most advanced AI models available today. So you just pick the helper you need, give it instructions in plain English, and then it handles the task. And it's not just English, it works in over 100 languages. Their data is stored securely with encryption, and Sintra offers 24-7 support. And for me personally, Sintra helps in saving time and turning chaos into consistency. So it helps me not to drown in the admin work and just do the core high-value tasks for this YouTube channel, which for me is creating the content. And so the deal is this video was sponsored by Sintra.ai, and they gave us an exclusive discount code to try out the AI helpers. And so here's the deal. Sintra.ai sponsored this video, and they gave me an exclusive discount code just for you. So you can go to Sintra.ai forward slash J-O-N-L-A-W and use code JOHNLAW to get an exclusive 72% off all plans with a 14-day money-back guarantee that is 72% off all plans just for you for watching this video. So if you're overwhelmed with tasks or spending more time on admin work than you would like, or if you just want AI helpers that actually feel like a team and help be more productive, then go to that link to use code JOHNLAW to get 72% off all plans risk-free with that 14-day money-back guarantee. That link is in the description and pinned in the comments. Again, completely risk-free to try out. So go do that now. And that said, I hope it helps you out, and let's get back to the video. The largest demographic of my audience is between the ages of 25 and 30 years old. So let's say you're aiming to retire, stop working at age 65 in the year 2065. Let's imagine for a second that you did end up with $1 million in the year 2065. Well, we need to adjust that for inflation, and inflation right now is about 3% per year on average. And so by 2065, $1 million is equivalent to about $306,000 in today's money. So for most of you watching this, saying that you could have a million dollars and retire is like asking, right now, could you retire comfortably with $306,000? Using the 4% rule, which we spoke about in another video, and it's kind of the golden standard for when you're not working, that's an income of about $12,000 per year. Even with social security and benefits, that's basically poverty-level wealth. It's definitely not any kind of gold standard to aim for wealth accumulation or financial freedom. So yeah, $300,000 is the new $1 million. And that means if you're under the age of 40 to 50, you have to aim a lot higher than a million dollars. And this is why a general thesis that we go over in tons of videos on this channel is to focus more on growing income when you're younger versus saving or reducing expenses. And of course there's, you know, be reasonable there, don't waste the money that you earn, but going from $50,000 to $100,000 a year income is going to get you a far better place long-term than saving some of that $50,000 and getting your expenses down by 20, 30% over the period of 5 or 10 years. But the thing is, it's not just 3%, which is the CPI index or kind of the big inflation index that people use, healthcare inflation historically, which is more important as one ages is 5 to 6% a year inflation. For example, assisted living today, that's about $5,000 a month in 40 years at 5% interest will be about $35,000 a month. So yeah, a million dollars could buy maybe two years in a facility like that. Now very few of us actually think or plan or want to think about our lives that far ahead, but what does matter is just in your 40s, can you buy a home? In your 50s, if you want to take a few years off to work on your book project or your movie script, can you do that, right? And so aiming and having certain levels of wealth kind of inducts backward from the time of retirement into then what you're doing now and what you're going to do in your 30s, 40s, 50s. So what's the real number? Well, using the logic of the $300,000 to the $1,000,000 and just doing that in the opposite direction. To have the equivalent purchasing power of $1,000,000 in 40 years, you need about $3.2 million by that time. Now the good news is, hey, your salary is also going to rise with inflation over time. And generally that just means you need to save more than 500 bucks a month. We're talking more like $1,000 to $1,500 per month as the bare minimum to hit that kind of number in the next, say, 40 years. And also you just need to pursue more aggressive returns, right? Bonds at the age of 20 and let's say even $1,000 a month there is not going to get you to that point. You need a focused around things like stocks, real estate, and so on. And that again is why we focus here more so on raising your income. If you make $50,000 a year right now or $30,000 or nothing, you probably aren't living like a king. You're probably already relatively frugal with your money. And so if you can put a lot of effort into going from making that amount into making more money, whether entrepreneurship, whether a job, in whatever way or fashion that you want to do it, which is again a large part of why this channel exists. And if that lets you invest $2,000 a month instead of 500 bucks before, those are the kind of numbers you need to hit to be able to hit that new $1,000,000. And so if we're lucky, $3,000,000 is the new $1,000,000. And I'm wishing you luck and skill in your journey to get there. That said, thank you all for watching and I'll see you in the next one.