Most people assume retirement is expensive, but here’s the truth: Your lifestyle costs actually go down once the mortgage, school fees and investment debts disappear.

In Chapter 2 of the How to Retire on $3K a Week audiobook, Bryce and Ben unpack one of the biggest mindset shifts in the entire book:

You don’t need to replace your full-time income; you just need to replace your post-retirement expenses.

Inside this episode, you’ll:
✅ Discover the Seven Grades of Financial Wellbeing, from Survival to Peace to Contribution
✅ Identify which stage you’re currently in, and
✅ Learn why your “number” is not as impossible as you might think

While the best-selling book gives you the blueprint, this audio series gives you the lived context; the real-life coaching you’d get if you were sitting across the table from us.

 

P.S. Ready to design your own path to financial freedom?
Grab your copy of How to Retire on $3K a Week now! 👉 howtoretireon3k.com.au

Timestamps

  • 0:00 – Welcome back: Chapter 2 is all about Lifestyle by Design
  • 0:45 – The Seven Grades of Financial Wellbeing explained
  • 1:32 – Why the bottom two levels are “one wave away” from disaster
  • 2:20 – The real price of retirement
  • 3:05 – The Rule of 25: how to reverse engineer your retirement number
  • 3:52 – Why money without purpose is pointless
  • 4:25 – Survey results: What do Aussies actually strive for?

 

Transcript

Bryce
All right, folks, welcome back to the How to Retire on $3,000 Per Week podcast, and we’ve just finished chapter two, Ben, which is largely all about lifestyle by design. look, we introduced the concept of the seven grades of wellbeing, and the idea there was for people to really assess where they wanna be, but also have a realistic understanding of where am I actually now?

Ben
Yeah, so I set this up by saying, “Okay, we’ve given you a target of money, but what does that money look like in terms of lifestyle by design?” And so we went in there to sort of, you know, try and frame that up in terms of the status of where you are. And the seven grades do that really nicely, you know, survival right through to contribution just gives you a pathway, you know, sort of a mountain to climb as you’re going through that.

Bryce
Now, when you and I were getting together to do the illustrations for this book, if you got a copy or get yourself a copy, you go to howtoretireon3k.com.au. The image that we’ve got there, and we’ll try and describe it, is the bottom two steps of the seven grades have a wave next to them. And that’s a really important metaphor because you’re only a stroke of God away from being fully underwater. So we really wanted to drive that home. But on page 23, there’s this diagram, which I think I’d love to unpack with you. It shows what your expenses look like during accumulation and after retirement, and how understanding that actually unlocks whether 3,000 a week is enough. Cause some people go, well, I earn more than that now.

Ben
If you’re in a household, you potentially got a mortgage, you potentially got dependent children. So they are potentially eating up a fair bit of your coin, right? So we are always saying during that accumulation phase that you’ve got to work out what those essential bills and those discretionary are. But you’ve also got to be mindful of what goes away, whether you pay down debt or you don’t have those school fees or those general commitments when the kids leave the nest and I think that is important because once you sort of know that number, you’re going to be clear in terms of whatever target of income you want to have each week in retirement.

Bryce
Now, the rule of 25 is we want to make sure our listeners realise it’s a starting point. We’re going to get to the back of this book later. The case studies actually go into a lot of detail, but in this early stage, just grab a napkin, the old classic back of the napkin, and write down the income you want. If it’s $3,000 a week, you do $156,000 times 25, and it’ll actually tell you how much you need in retirement. and first of all, the number is quite stark, you go, ooh, but you’re gonna do it through a combination of capital growth, you’re gonna do it through a combination of building over time, so don’t be intimidated by that, but ultimately it’s a good guide for us to set a north star, and as people are reading through this book if they can remember that as they’re going through, it’s just building the skill set that allows them to work towards that.

Ben
It’s effectively, if you reverse engineer it, it’s 4 % yield. So if you’re getting a 4% income from that. If you’re getting 5 % or a little bit higher, it’s the rule of 20, not the rule of 25, as part of that. So I think that’s important. But also, how we’re building the book at this point is really about directing the money toward the purpose. Because again, being the richest person in the graveyard isn’t gonna be a thing, it’s not something you should be aspiring to, right? So ultimately, what we wanna be doing here is saying, all right, what is the purpose of this money? How’s that money going to allow me to have the lifestyle by design and the experiences, and give me those things that really fill the bucket in terms of who I am and the experience that I have with my loved ones? You never see a hearse towing a trailer. No you don’t. And that’s the important bit.

Bryce
Hey look, we ran this out by saying, look, of all of the people that we’ve surveyed, and we’ve surveyed a lot through our platform on more, M00RR.com.au, the most common responses by far, the top two were security and freedom. There weren’t toys, there weren’t extravagant, the top two, like they’re in the list, and they go down. The top two were security and freedom and I think for anyone who’s reading this book or who’s listening to this, I think it’s really important to understand that’s why we’ve made it 3000 a week, not how to retire on $20 million, not how to, because for most people, they’re not aspiring to have the Instagram social envy lifestyle that they see. They want security and freedom by far. They are the most important, then a bit of work-life balance, followed by time with the family. So if we get super dialed in on that, then we go, we don’t, you know, it’s not who dies, we’re the most toys we. (It’s not an ego book. It’s not a book for ego. Ego maniacs, is it, Bryce.) It’s just about living a great life.

So there you go, folks. Hopefully, you have seen where you are in your seven grades of financial well-being. As we move throughout the book, we’re going next to talk about what is wealth. But thanks for listening to the podcast. If you want to play along at home, we encourage you to go to howtoretireon3k.com.au, get your own copy, or you click on any of the links in our description here, audio book, whichever way you like to consume that have been the link. until next time, when we go through chapter three, this is how to retire on 3K per week.