iRetire4Him Show 110: Surprises Bring Grumpiness
Jim Brangenberg: Hey, did you know that when you retire, your calling doesn't retire? If you still have a pulse, you still have a purpose. Your calling is a lifetime calling. If you're around, God isn't done with you yet. I know you're aware of what you retired from, but what did God have you retire to?
You've tuned into iRetire4Him, the voice and resource of the Retirement Reformation, a podcast dedicated to you around a conversation that the Retirement Reformation is all about.
We all want purpose for all of our days, especially the ones ahead of you in those quote unquote retirement years. Bruce Bruinsma joins us today as the founder of the Retirement Reformation. He's here to encourage and walk with you through retirement. I'm your host Jim Brangenberg. Check us out online at Retirement Reformation dot o r g. Retirement Reformation dot o r g and on facebook Retirement Reformation, got a lot of resources out there for you.
You know, I lived in Florida for 20 years. It's true. Older people are grumpy. I lived around them and many of them were miserable, but were they really? They lived far from family. There was a lot of traffic and life was getting harder by the day. Today, we continue the three part series covering the topic of why old people are grumpy and everything we talk about is either from Bruce's observations as a financial advisor or my experience as a caregiver.
Relax, this isn't an attack on those people who tend to be chronologically superior to us. It's a reality and a wake up call to check and help us see what God's really got in store for us during these retirement years. And we're going to talk about Bruce's latest book. We're all going to try to understand today before the end of the day, why the old people in our life are grumpy and how we can help them not to be grumpy.
Bruce, what makes you grumpy?
Bruce Bruinsma: Life is complicated, Jim. And I'm reminded of that almost every day. There's something new coming at me and if I'm prepared for it, I'm then able to deal with it in a positive kind of way. When I'm not, my reaction is typically an emotional one that's not based upon God's fruit of the spirit of my life.
And so I react in a way that, maybe another way to say it is: surprises bring grumpiness. And I don't care whether we're talking about health or financial, or relationships, or whatever. But, I remember, one of my early bosses at the corporation where I worked in my early years, before the entrepreneurship bug got too strong, was that he used to say to me, he would say, Bruce, do you know what I'm paying you for?
And I go, No, Bob what are you thinking? Says I'm paying you to make wise decisions on behalf of the company. I'm paying you to make wise decisions. And I said to him, so Bob, you got any ideas on how I can make sure that I'm making wise decisions? And his answer was learn from every experience and don't respond to your initial reaction and don't act on your initial response. And I just, it took me a long time to really internalize what it was that he was saying, but I think we can find similar thoughts in some book, what's it called? Proverbs. That's what it is.
Jim Brangenberg: I think it's, as believers, we need to understand that everything that happens, God's never surprised. None of the stuff is a surprise to God. And yet we can be surprised, but when we recognize the fact that God's not surprised by this, it seems like it's sometimes easier to handle. Don't you think?
Bruce Bruinsma: I do think it is easier to handle in those circumstances. And there's so many things that are just, they're just disrupting to our lives. And, lack of sleep, for example. I don't happen to have the problem, but my wife Judy does. So often I'll reach over and see if she's still in bed and I look at the clock and it's 3. 30 in the morning and, Judy's up and out. Yet at 5. 30 or six o'clock at night, she's saying, man, I am just exhausted and I need to go to bed. Those kinds of things are not what the first 60 years of our marriage were like. And so for her, it's disruptive and she says to me in the morning, she says, this is really strange. I don't quite know how to deal with this.
And I'm thinking, yeah, it's dumb. And so it's the real life activities that come. And so the side effects of medications, for example. I remember my mother, when one Thanksgiving we drove down and she'd been a widow for, oh, probably 12, 13 years at that point. And so we arrived at her home and in Phoenix.
And we went in the house and, how are you mom and so on and so forth. And I walked into her bedroom and on the bed were, I don't know, must've been 150 pills of all various kinds. I said, Mom, what's with the pills? And she says, Bruce, I don't know. I don't know which ones to take anymore so I'm afraid of all of them. So I'm not taking any of them. And there's a real life change. She was 80, probably 86, maybe 87 at that point in time. And that was a whole new mom to me. And I wanted to be grumpy with her. I wanted to say, Mom you put the pills in the right bottles and take what you're supposed to be taking because that's important.
And yet that was the circumstance. And then you go, I said, mom you've got an extra bedroom here in the house. Maybe we could have someone come and live with you that could be of some help. She says, I'm not living with anybody. And okay.
So it's these real life changes that some are just normal part of aging. Some because of events or circumstances. She did have a car accident. She wasn't hurt, fortunately, but she was never the same after that car accident. And so these are the real life things that we, that as children, we need to deal with our parents and know that we are going to become our parents.
Jim Brangenberg: No, we're not! None of us want to become our parents. We're all like, I don't want to be like my parents. But you talk about the sleep thing. I wanna make a comment on it because I have noticed that a lot of people who are chronologically superior - so people in retirement years 65 to 100 - they don't sleep as well as they used to. Or they don't seem to go to bed earlier, but they get up earlier. It just seems like it's totally different. And I think if I was tired, I'd be grumpy. And maybe that was the problem with people in Florida.
They were just grumpy because they were tired. But the drug thing concerns me because it seems like there's no end to the numbers of drugs that doctors want to prescribe people who are older. And, so I'm not sure, is it the cost of the drugs that make people grumpy? Or the drugs that make people grumpy? Or the fact that they gotta fill those little buckets every, for every day of the week, for morning and evening, for all the drugs they gotta take? It's just frustrating. Martha spends half an hour every other week just fixing my dad's pills up so he knows what to take. That would make me grumpy.
Bruce Bruinsma: I think part of it too is the realization that we are - and that I don't think a lot of seniors would say this, but I think this is the feeling that there is that I am dependent upon those drugs for my well being and I don't feel really well. What the heck? And so it's an expectation that it will help whatever the problems are that it deals with.
And then the doctors. Oh, my gosh. When you're taking more than seven different kinds of pills at any given time, plus vitamin C and calcium and...
Jim Brangenberg: Don't forget that fish oil! Everybody's got the fish oil.
Bruce Bruinsma: You find out you've got a, you've got a handful of pills that you can't even swallow all at one time. And so you're looking at those and you're going, you gotta be kidding me. Has my life come to the fact that my wellbeing is dependent upon this handful of pills? And there's some part of you that does not want to accept that and say that can't be. I'm not that sick and yet they keep adding them, they keep adding them on and it's yeah it's a cause of grumpiness.
Jim Brangenberg: I love that. But we want to talk about how do we not be grumpy, especially if we're tired or we got to be in drugs. We want to talk in the third segment more about your brand new book that's coming out, Living the Fruitful Life. But in this next segment, we're going to be talking with Brad Watt and he's got a creative solution he's going to bring to our audience about how to take on income producing property and make it income producing in order to help pay some bills. I just it's amazing.
You're listening to iRetire4Him. We'll be right back. We got lots more left. Don't go away And if you're grumpy, don't be grumpy. We're going to talk about that in a minute. We'll be right back!
Jim Brangenberg: Hey, welcome back to iRetire4Him. As we do every second segment of every show, we always bring on a special guest for somebody to share their story. Bruce, who do you have for us today?
Bruce Bruinsma: I've got a special guest today because as we deal with the subjects of why are seniors grumpy, one of those, one of those reasons is because it changes in their finances and it goes from that accumulation stage to the distribution stage to that an asset was valuable and now it's not so valuable, or I don't know what to do with it.
And Brad is someone who is very much connected with that piece to the puzzle. And so while I don't want to talk about all the solutions, I do want to ask you, Brad, what was your journey? What is the journey that God had you to the point of beginning to understand the needs that seniors particularly and others to have in terms of adjusting to new circumstances in their finances?
Brad Watt: Sure. Like most people, I think that come into the investment business for many of us, it's very experiential. And for me, it started years ago when I took an interest in helping people discover that they can invest and own the same type of real estate that the large institutions own, the big pension funds, the insurance companies the the private equity firms.
And so as I began to build out my career in the real estate industry, which has been almost 40 years now, my overarching theme has been democratization of real estate. So allowing wall street, if you will, type of activity and transactions to now be made available to the main street investor. And for many people that includes what we call the everyday man, the everyday woman who have real needs. They have real income needs. They have real lifestyle needs, and they're not able to address all that sometimes through their normal income stream. And they may be sitting on property that they can actually sell and defer taxes and convert that income into passive streams of monthly income that can now be used to fund things like home care services, health care services, maybe helping your kids out financially with college tuitions, maybe to buy their first home. So the whole idea is to help people finish life well by repurposing real estate income that they may already be sitting on, but they just don't want to actively manage those properties anymore.
And they want to convert that to passive income with a hundred percent tax deferral. So it really starts with understanding the needs of our investors, particularly older investors who are at a point in life where they've worked a lifetime for money. Now they need money to work for them.
Bruce Bruinsma: Brad, as we chatted the other day, the retirement time when I was growing up, somebody worked till 65 and they died at 67. If they lived to 70, they were really old and that is all turned on its head. And so the issues of finance and changes in their finance and going into these different stages can really be frustrating and confusing and irritating for the average person or the person that has significant assets, but he doesn't have any cash. And so while you have a solution to that and people can contact you by the way, what's the name of your firm?
Brad Watt: Petra Capital Properties. We can be reached at petracapitalproperties.com.
Bruce Bruinsma: You can connect with him there but I wanted to ask you about do you have any stories of people, of a couple or individuals that have made the transition or in the middle of the transition? Because there's three stages of retirement too. It's not just people in their sixties, but it's people in their eighties and even in their nineties. So do you have a story of anyone that comes to mind that can illustrate both the frustration and the fact that finding a solution was really helpful?
Brad Watt: Yes. The problem is narrowing it down to just one, but we have so many. And I'm very blessed. We are blessed as a firm to be able to help so many people, but I'll give you one example. There was a a gal who presented about a year and a half ago. She was at the time was 80. And she had been a widow for 20 years, her husband had passed 20 years prior.
They owned a family farm that was no longer being farmed. And it used to be an old goat farm. And so today it was a lot of parched ground, no water rights or anything on it. So it was a non working farm, and it was not producing any income. And classic example of a farmer, rancher, a lot of times the kids don't want to take it over or even inherit it. They would prefer mom and dad dispose of it before they pass. So mom the widow, her name was Ann, she came to us and she said, look, I'm going to sell the family farm. The kids don't want it. And we think we'll get X dollars for it. What can you do with that, those proceeds on a 1031 tax deferral?
So long story short is we took at that, I think it was almost 2 million dollars. It was a smaller farm. We took that 2 million and reinvested it into a portfolio of income producing properties - Amazon distribution facilities healthcare facilities. We had some government guaranteed leases that were part of that.
Bruce Bruinsma: How did that exchange impact her life?
Brad Watt: About $60,000. I think it was closer to, let me think. It was 5%, about a hundred thousand dollars a year of income going from zero income to roughly a hundred thousand dollars or 8,000 a month, which needless to say, will change the life of anybody, let alone an 80-year-old widow and reduce a lot of stress.
Bruce Bruinsma: When you met with her, was she at a point of frustration or was she very calm about the whole thing?
Brad Watt: She was confused because a lot of people are unfamiliar with the whole 1031 tax deferral in general. The fact that you can defer taxes and not pay the government a big chunk of your sales proceeds by using a 1031 exchange. So part of our edge, part of our the majority I should say of our platform is education. 1031 exchange starts with education. So once we educated her on the benefits of tax deferral, then we get down to the strategy of the investment strategy. What can we do with that tax deferred money and how would we reinvest it for income? So she was confused and a little scared.
Bruce Bruinsma: The story of Ann - how did that change? Impact her children and her relationship with them? Were you able to observe that in any way?
Brad Watt: Incredibly. She actually named a few children, as most people do in their trust with their beneficiaries. So she had designated the children that she wanted to receive what portion of the income once she passed. So the kids were ecstatic that she a got out of that property that was not producing any income and they got to see the benefit of it eventually and now she could also give more. She's a very charitable woman and she loved to give to ministry. So as we tell people with this 1031 exchange passive income, if you will, that we're generating for people they can use it for living, for giving, or for legacy planning. So living, giving, or legacy planning, she planned to use it for all three.
Bruce Bruinsma: That makes a huge difference. And I would tend to believe that the frustration that she felt with knowing that she had an asset, but didn't know what to do with it and then being able to find a solution, would change her attitude and would change not only her capacity, but any grumpiness that she might've had over that. And we find that not knowing what to do with either assets or a change in the way income is coming in goes from there. Most people are unaware of the fact that typically when you retire, you end up with more streams of income for all kinds of different reasons that have to be managed than any time during the, during the accumulation phases.
And so when we think about that, we realize that in retirement, managing our resources in God's way and doing it creatively and with wisdom and appropriate support is absolutely critical. Brad, thank you very much. Jim. Do you have any questions?
Jim Brangenberg: I love that you took a non income producing property and started using it to produce income because so many people have stuff like that. Brad, we're out of time, but if people want to get a hold of you and find out more, where do they go?
Brad Watt: Sure. You could visit us at our website petracapitalproperties. com petracapitalproperties. com. Or feel free to call me directly. My number is 719 649 8255 7 7 7 0 And all of our contact information, all of our managing directors, we have a full team, a theme and a track record, as we like to say. So if people would visit our website, they'd get a lot more education about DST 1031 Delaware statutory trust, this passive income strategy or wrapper that goes around a 1031 exchange. And they get to know more about our team and our experience.
Jim Brangenberg: We just cram so much in 10 minutes, but if you've got, if you've got property that's making you grumpy cause it doesn't produce anything for you, Brad Watt, somebody you should talk to. PetraCapitalProperties. com. Brad Watt, thanks for being with us here and iRetire4Him.
Brad Watt: Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate you.
Jim Brangenberg: Hey, welcome back to iRetire4Him. What a great conversation with Brad Watt. Man, we covered a lot in those nine minutes, Bruce. I want to talk more about this your brand new book Living the Fruitful Life. We talked about maybe people are tired and that's why they're grumpy, people have drugs coming out of their ears, and they got so many bills. They have no idea what to take, that may be making them grumpy or paying the bills. I know one of my parents drugs is four hundred dollars a month. That would make me grumpy So Bruce, how can, how can your new book, Living the Fruitful Life, can help me not be grumpy?
Bruce Bruinsma: I think for each, for every Christian, and we're talking about, that our message of the Retirement Reformation is aimed at the 48 million Christ followers who are between 60 and 104.
And so I think there's, for many of us, we have life experiences, but I think there's some major holes. And one of the things that I talk about in the book was the lack of understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit. Matter of fact, I talk in there about, and I heard someone just the other day, when you're growing up as kids and the pastor talked about the Holy Ghost, and you're going, I don't know if I I don't know where that Holy Ghost is, but don't have him come anywhere near me. And you mix it up with Halloween and you just get all confused and he talks about the Holy Ghost, and in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, oh my gosh, why do we want to include him in this deal?
And so there's a total lack of understanding, lack of appreciation, and a lack of connectivity with what Jesus said pretty much during the whole book of John. And so we don't know who the Holy Spirit is. We don't know what his role is, and we don't know how we can access the fruit of the Spirit that is there. And it's really not complicated.
God's spirit that he makes available to us, man, when I say that and I think about that, wow, what a benefit, what a great opportunity. And yet so many of us ignore it or don't understand it or just simply set it aside. And so understanding who the Holy Spirit is and its potential role in our life is one of the keys to moving from grumpiness to gratefulness.
Jim Brangenberg: We're talking about Bruce's brand new book, Living the Fruitful Life, which you can get on Amazon, you could get on retirement, reformation. org. Get a copy today. Read this. I always thought Bruce and I'm not a theologian. But I've been a Jesus follower for a long time. I always thought that it wasn't that we had access to the fruit, but that as followers of Jesus, the fruits of the Spirit should be flowing out of us as a natural reaction to our relationship with our Heavenly Father. That the closer we get to Him, the more naturally those things flow out of us.
And I know a lot of people who are in their 80s have incredible relationships with the Lord. So shouldn't those fruits automatically be coming out of them because they've been walking with the Lord so long?
Bruce Bruinsma: I would like to think that is true and I think for some people they have been walking with the Lord for so long and that in fact it is a just a an outpouring of God's wisdom and Holy Spirit through their lives. There certainly are people that act that way. Unfortunately, I think the majority do not and so it again, like almost everything else in our lives, there comes choices and decisions that we will make. And so for example the choices that we make determine the life that we will live. And so if you are not connected to God's power - Now, when you became a Christian, the Holy Spirit became part of you, but you still have the choice of whether you're going to listen or not.
How are you going to respond? When Judy and I get into a difficult situation, am I going to become angry and verbal and so on and so forth? Or am I going to demonstrate love in that context? That's a choice that I have to make. Now, I can make that choice and have it have amazing impact because I'm drawing on the power of the Holy Spirit that's available to me, but I have to be aware that is true.
I have to be aware that is true, and then be able to apply it. This whole issue of choice, and we've talked about it often, plays such a role in this whole grumpiness issue, because if we are not aware of that is available to us, it is one more step down the pathway to loneliness. There's one more step down the pathway to loneliness.
Jim Brangenberg: Wait, you're saying grumpiness leads to loneliness? So let's talk about that because I know, like I said, I lived 20 years in Florida around a lot of people who were losing spouses. They weren't losing them. They were dying and passing on. And so people were lonely, they were alone, even though they were surrounded by neighbors inside the walls of their home, they were lonely. And we did a whole series, we did a seven part series on the impact of the things that are really causing despair in seniors and isolation and loneliness is right at the top there.
Bruce, how can loneliness make us grumpy and how do we overcome that?
Bruce Bruinsma: Let me give you just a real practical example. And so let's take person X, woman or man, who as part of the growing older that the early, early, early stages of dimensions, so on are starting to show up. And so the woman that I was talking about in our last podcast, where she prided herself on that she was, she could remember everything, never missed an appointment, was always right on top of it, those things are changing.
So now in the last, let's say last two months, she's missed three social engagements. Two, lunches, one with a son and one with a daughter. She has forgotten major event in her husband's life and she doesn't wanna acknowledge any of that. So she has a choice.
She can start using a calendar and look at it every day to make sure she doesn't forget, or she can say those things really aren't important anyway. And what will happen with that decision, that denial is that, in fact, she will continue to make choices that the net result will be she will be increasingly alone.
Because people will stop inviting her, right? They won't schedule lunch, and it's her choices that create that, and so the choice idea is so critically important. And then when you add the power of the spirit that's available to us, it means that we have the opportunity to create wise choices, and to have a positive impact on people, not a negative one.
Jim Brangenberg: Really, it's almost a self perpetuating thing. She's starting to lose her memory, and it's, and because she's missing appointments, she's getting, she's more lonely because she's missing appointments And I imagine this is something that a lot of people struggle with because eventually, I've missed appointments.
I've missed zoom calls. I'm like, Oh my word. I totally forgot this zoom call. And it is on my calendar. When we get older, we don't have the ability to just jump in the car and drive wherever we want to drive. Cause we don't like to drive at night or whatever. We don't like to drive in the rain or the snow.
Bruce. I just, I guess I think I'd love for you to end the show today with some encouragement for people that are struggling with that loneliness that makes them grumpy or really just being grumpy overall and how your book, getting a copy of your book's going to help them out.
Bruce Bruinsma: I am totally convinced that God's love for us means that he has provided the tools, the opportunity, and the support so that in fact our lives can be filled with joy and happiness. And that we can exhibit that, we can exhibit that love. And so that's what he designed us for in relationship, not to be grumpy with each other, but in fact, to be able to be supportive of each other, to be understanding of each other, to be loving towards each other - and, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control.
Think about that gentleness piece. And that's what Jesus was. And the Holy Spirit's role is to help us to be more like him and the more like him does not include the grumpiness gene, but in fact it includes the love gene and it's available to all of us and it's there through the choices that we make.
Jim Brangenberg: And you can get it - Living the Fruitful Life. By reading that book, Living the Fruitful Life by Bruce Bruinsma, get it on retirementreformation. org or on Amazon. You've been listening to iRetire4Him, the voice and resource of the Retirement Reformation with your host, Jim Brangenberg, and of course, Retirement Reformation's very own founder, Bruce Bruinsma.
We're Christ followers journeying from retirement to reformation, so we can ultimately say, iRetire4Him.