#24 – Uncork Your Bottle of Happiness With Steve Hoffman

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:56]:
Do you ever wonder who you’ll be and what you’ll do after your career is over? Wouldn’t it be nice to hear stories from people who figured it out who are thriving in retirement? I’m Ryan Doolittle. After working with the retire sooner team for years and researching and writing about how they structure their lifestyles, I know there’s more to be learned, so I’m going straight to the source and taking you with me. My mission with the Happiest Retirees podcast is to inspire 1 million families to find happiness in retirement. I want to learn how to live an exceptional life from people who do it every day. Let’s get started. Steve Hoffman, thank you so much for joining us on the Happiest Retirees podcast.

Steve Hoffman [00:02:38]:
I am super glad to be here. Surprisingly glad to be here.

Ryan Doolittle [00:02:41]:
Well, tell us a little bit about your story. You’re not retired per se, and you may not ever want to in that classic sense, but tell me what you do and what you’ve been doing and what you want to do.

Steve Hoffman [00:02:54]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve had sort of a wandering professional career. I got my degree in French, ancient greek, and English, and so that required me to actually find a job. I was. I was qualified to not do very much to make actual money, so I became a handyman. I worked in real estate for a long time, and then at some point, my mother in law had a tax business that she wanted to hand off to somebody in the family. I seemed like a weird candidate for it, but in the end, it worked out really well. I really actually liked the kind of, you know, I’m kind of a funny dual brain person.

Steve Hoffman [00:03:29]:
I really like, you know, language, literature, kind of the arts and humanities, but I also have a very kind of linear way of thinking about things. And so the tax preparation side of my life actually worked quite well. It was memorize a bunch of rules and apply them, and I was good at it. And compared to real estate, I. There was a very short sort of effort reward turnaround, whereas real estate, you could show people 100 houses and they might never buy one with tax preparation. I have a client across the desk for me. An hour later, we’re done. I submit a return they pay me, and that just suited me well.

Steve Hoffman [00:04:08]:
So that was great, and everything was going beautifully. But there’s this other part of me that was always, again, sort of interested in creativity and arts and languages. I speak French. I’ve spoken French for most of my adult life. At some point, we decided to go to France back in 2012, took our kids. Our kids had gone to french immersion school in the twin Cities. They spoke French pretty well, but we wanted to kind of cement that, and we put them in schools in France, in French, in a tiny little winemaking village in southern France. I’m just about to publish a book on that, publishing a memoir.

Steve Hoffman [00:04:44]:
And that’s. That’s kind of taken up. That’s sort of. It’s been a rediscovery of old loves. That in the context of this conversation and the thoughts of retirement, I think is interesting because it was, on my wife’s and my part, a very deliberate time in our lives where we’re like, okay, we want to do this because the kids are around and they’re not going to be so in some sense, retirement wise, you know, we’re sacrificing some future wealth here in exchange for this intense time together that we’re going to have. But additionally, it was, as a tax preparer, I’d just seen a lot of my clients look forward for this entire career to what’s going to be supposedly the promised land of retirement. And they get there, and they kind of don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re on the night t with some Naabi, need friends, playing golf in Tucson, wondering whether what this was all about.

Steve Hoffman [00:05:36]:
And so part of that France trip for us, Washington, a deliberate effort to reconnect with some earlier parts of ourselves. For my wife, who was art and photography, for me, it was writing books and reading and kind of started practicing that in France. I started keeping a journal, started publishing some food, writing in local and national publications. Mary Jo started a blog. Now, we’ve arrived at this point where we’re on the cusp of retirement, but not really seeing it as retirement. We’re seeing it as the stepping into this new phase rather than kind of stepping away from everything that we’ve done previously.

Ryan Doolittle [00:06:10]:
Well, there’s so much I want to respond to there. I’m trying to figure out what first. So, first of all, you mentioned the dual brain, and I think it’s probably pretty rare for someone to be a tax preparer and a food writer. I don’t know if there are too many of those double threats out there. So your writing has won an award that just sounds like it’s probably one of the best awards. Cause it’s got James Beard’s name in it.

Steve Hoffman [00:06:32]:
So the James Beard awards are. They’re kind of the Oscars of the food world. Chefs, restaurants, bar programs, as well as food journalists and people in food media kind of have an annual ceremony similar to the Emmys or the Oscars. Winning at James Beard is sort of the pinnacle, other than maybe a Pulitzer or a national book award or something like that. But in the food world, a James Beard award is sort of the highest honor you can get. And one of the articles I wrote for, actually, for a local publication won that James Beard. It’s called the MFK Fisher Distinguished writing Award. So it’s the award for the most sort of literary, successful writing of the year.

Steve Hoffman [00:07:19]:
Of that particular year. That was back in 2019.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:21]:
Oh, I’m sorry. Was that for the Minneapolis Star Tribune?

Steve Hoffman [00:07:24]:
No, that was actually for Artful Living magazine, which is based locally, although it is more of a national magazine. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:29]:
Oh, okay. And you’ve also written for food and wine. The Washington Post.

Steve Hoffman [00:07:34]:
Correct.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:34]:
Yeah, I’m trying to think. I live in Los Angeles, and the most famous food writer here I can think of. He passed away. But did you know Jonathan Gold?

Steve Hoffman [00:07:42]:
I did not know him, but everybody knows of him.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:44]:
Okay.

Steve Hoffman [00:07:45]:
Yeah, yeah, no, he was. He’s a revered figure in this. In my circle. Somebody who had an incredibly unique voice, but also did really incredible work to seek out and publicize the kinds of chefs, cooks, food, people who didn’t normally get the kind of press that the national press gives.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:04]:
Yeah, it seemed like he would go to. I mean, I don’t know if he went to Tito’s tacos, but he seemed like someone that would go to a.

Steve Hoffman [00:08:10]:
Place, like, literally, exactly like little strip mall places where some. Somebody in the back room was doing something special. And he would call this out in a really cool way. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:19]:
Right. Which. And maybe you had a bit of that experience when you went to France, and I. It was like a gradual acceptance into the wine world. I don’t know if I saw a movie once about how Napa Valley emerged, and at first, the French were sort of like, who are these people? You know, this isn’t. Who would normally be good at wine. Right, right. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:08:43]:
I think the french wine world versus the american wine world is interesting in France. It’s just such. It’s so much a part of the culture.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:51]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:08:51]:
That it’s actually remarkably unpretentious. Certainly, where we were in. We’re in the languedoc region of southern France. So it’s down south near the Mediterranean, just across the Rhone river from Provence. But it’s an agricultural. It’s the second poorest region in France. And the wine component to life there is very simple and straightforward. It has a lot to do with making wine, with tending grapes, with being farmers, and then wine just naturally integrates into food and meals as kind of a part of life.

Steve Hoffman [00:09:24]:
But I think, really, the food and the wine there are both considered much more agricultural products as opposed to a Bordeaux or a burgundy, where, you know, it’s also considered sort of. You’re making art and high art. That’s also going to be very expensive. But even there, that’s really integrated into a community, into a landscape. And sometimes I’ve been to Napa a couple of times, and sometimes I kind of refer to it as, like, wine Disney. You know, it’s like. It’s like this. This thing came in out of nowhere and sort of like, they slapped a grid down in the high desert.

Steve Hoffman [00:09:54]:
And called it phoenix. And I feel like to some extent, they did a little of that with Napa. The climate was right, but there’s so much money there, and it feels just a little bit artificial in all of that. Our experience in southern France did not.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:08]:
Well, and to the point where there’s now a place in central California, south of Napa, by, I don’t know, 4 hours called Paso Robles, that is now.

Steve Hoffman [00:10:17]:
Yes, sure.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:18]:
Okay. I know people who say we go there. Cause it’s not as snobby as now.

Steve Hoffman [00:10:23]:
Exactly. Exactly. Yep. Actually interesting. At Paso Robles, it’s kind of interesting because there’s a wine culture there. They were very popular in the end of the last century, but eighties, nineties, I think early two thousands, I don’t know the exact era, but they called themselves the Rhone Rangers, and they were actually trying to recreate in California the types of wine that was made in south. In the southern Rhone valley, which are these very specific grapes that are the grapes that we were working with when we were in our village as well. It’s Grenache, Syrah, and Warvedra, primarily.

Steve Hoffman [00:10:58]:
They’re referred to often as sort of shorthand, as GSM wines. And. And so they. There is this. There is this winemaking community that actually was. Was inspired by the Rhone, by the. By the french style, making wine in the road, and they tried to import that mentality into the Paso Robles area in a very successful way, I think.

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:16]:
Okay, so I could go on with wine. I will say this. In our happy retiree research, we found that a lot of the happy retirees we surveyed drank white wine and gin. So I was just curious, could you speak to why they might be drinking white wine and what that might have to do with happiness or healthiness?

Steve Hoffman [00:11:34]:
That’s a really interesting question. And, no, I don’t. I mean, there, you know, there’s been some of. Some research showing that, that red wine can lead to longevity because there is veratrol. But here’s what I would say. I would. I think of white wine and gin as sociable drinks.

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:49]:
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:11:50]:
And so they’re not something that you go off necessarily, and go get plastered by yourself in a basement somewhere.

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:57]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:11:57]:
And I wonder if maybe there would be a relationship there with the fact that those tend to get. Get drunk in company with other people. And I think there’s a whole lot of. A whole lot of research that shows that having good people in your life and having good relationships in your life really leads both to happiness and longevity.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:16]:
I think you might be onto something. And that leads me to another topic that I wanted to speak with you about, because I know one of your core pursuits is tennis. You’ve always played, and you continue to play. Did you ever read that? There was a study that came out from the Copenhagen City heart in Denmark that I think it was around 2017, where the results came out, and it was saying that tennis extended life by 9.7 years, people who played.

Steve Hoffman [00:12:45]:
Absolutely. I just run into that in the last couple of years, and it seems like now that’s a little bit all over, now that that’s being confirmed over and over. Okay. That racket, sports in general, and tennis, of all of them the most, so tends to increase your lifespan. And again, they do believe that part of it, part of the reason for that is that you have to play with somebody else. So there’s a. There’s a built in community, but then there’s also, I think, something about judging the flight of the ball that actually kind of keeps a part of your brain developed that would not stay developed otherwise. It’s like the spatial awareness or whatever.

Steve Hoffman [00:13:21]:
So I think it also has to do with, like, keeping your brain active in a good way. And obviously, there’s the exercise itself, but.

Ryan Doolittle [00:13:28]:
Really?

Steve Hoffman [00:13:28]:
But, yeah, I’ve heard the same thing. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:13:30]:
I assumed the social aspect and the exertion and even maybe that short, quick bursts were better than long plotting exercise, but the judging of the ball, I hadn’t thought of judging of the ball might help extend life.

Steve Hoffman [00:13:45]:
Yep. There’s some part of the brain in the back of the brain that actually stays more developed, and that, I think, can combat the effects of dementia, Alzheimer’s, if that stays sort of stimulated. And so, yeah, badminton, table tennis. Tennis, all those where you’re. There’s. It’s like a multi part math equation. You know, it’s coming at me. I’m swinging this fast, I’m moving this fast toward the ball.

Steve Hoffman [00:14:11]:
All of that spatial awareness, apparently, is. Is good for our brainstor.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:15]:
Wow. Okay, well, how often do you play now? I want to crank up my tennis.

Steve Hoffman [00:14:20]:
Yeah, I know. Honestly, I try to play two or three times a week when I can, you know, during tax season. That’s not possible. Tax season is a grind. But when I can, I like to try. I would love, you know, looking forward to the, you know, decades to come. I would sure love to be playing two or three times a week for the next, you know, for really, for the rest of my life.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:39]:
Do you think so? I know you don’t want to retire in the classic sense. But do you think you’ll just do less tax preparation or you’ll stop completely?

Steve Hoffman [00:14:50]:
That would be the goal. Yeah, that would be the goal. It’s fulfilling enough, but it’s still a little bit of checking the box of this is what I have to do to pay all the bills. And writing at this point is not doing that. If you help me become a bestseller, maybe that will change. But.

Ryan Doolittle [00:15:05]:
I can guarantee.

Steve Hoffman [00:15:08]:
You that is what I need to make sure that were financially stable. But yeah, I think retirement, quote unquote, would involve a transition slowly away from that and into the writing and collaborative sort of creative work with my spouse, with my wife Mary Jo. That would be the ideal is if we didnt have to have that early grind in the first half of our year and could do more of that kind of thing over the full year. That would be wonderful. But I’m not unhappy with my situation now and I think I could extend it for a very long time. And there is something about being engaged professionally. I feel that’s good for you. It keeps you in touch with people, with their lives, with their stories.

Steve Hoffman [00:15:51]:
My tax clients, they’re not friends, but they are relationships. And it’s remarkably intimate. I often know almost as much about them as their doctor because, you know, if they get sick, I know about it. If they lose their job, I know about it. If they have kids, I know about it. If they lose kids, I know about it. You know, it’s a remarkably intimate thing. It seems like it’s just this linear career where you got your green shade on and you’re just plugging out, you’re just sort of plugging numbers in.

Steve Hoffman [00:16:21]:
But to do it well, you have to engage in a true relationship with your clients. And I be a counselor to them and be somebody who can talk about their lives in a way. And I do. I actually think that, and I say this a lot. I feel like my early humanities training, an ability to communicate, ability to write well, having encountered literature early, where literature is really a lot about stories of people and stories of relationships and having that be part of how my brain works early in my life, I think is part of why I’m a good tax preparer. Anybody really can memorize the tax code and apply it. That’s not that hard to do. But dealing with people is hard to do.

Steve Hoffman [00:17:01]:
And a lot of what you do as a tax preparer is deal with people. They’re terrified of the IR’s. You need to help calm them and deal with anxiety. And again, people’s lives. There are dark periods in everybody’s life, and if you’re working with somebody for most of their adult life, you’re going to go through those dark periods with them. And being able to empathize and be able to communicate is really, really important.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:23]:
I don’t imagine that a lot of tax preparers have this same wisdom that you’re talking about or this are good with people. Maybe I’m wrong. I just assumed they were.

Steve Hoffman [00:17:33]:
I can confirm that 100%. A, I go to the annual continuing education, and that is not an exciting room full of people, but b, I get a lot of my clients who have left a previous repairer, and so I get feedback that this is not how things were with my other guy, that you can speak English, you can talk to me, you could translate IR’s speak into plain English and that kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:03]:
And you mentioned you’d like to eventually do more creative work with your wife, Mary Jo. What does that entail? What kind of creative work?

Steve Hoffman [00:18:12]:
To be determined. But we collaborated. So she also published a book this year. So my book comes out on July 9. Her book came out on May 1. Her book is an art and photography book based on a really cool project that she’s done since 2012. On January 1 of 2012, she started taking one photo of a day, one photo a day of a natural object found around her, you know, organized or laid against the white background. And she has never once missed a day.

Steve Hoffman [00:18:38]:
So that’s 4500, and I don’t know how many straight images. Never missed a day. Didn’t miss a Christmas, didn’t miss a birthday. Didn’t miss the date of her dad’s death. Every single day. She’s done this and just published a book about that project. So it’s the photos, which are beautiful, but it’s also six or seven essays about what she’s learned about the creative process in the course of this creative pursuit of hers.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:03]:
What’s the name of the super cool?

Steve Hoffman [00:19:05]:
It’s called still. Still. The art of noticing. And her project is called still. So she has a blog called still and that, stillblog.net. and that is where she posts every single day. She’s also active on instagram, but sort of the place where she posts with the gallery of her images is on her blog. So in the process of her doing this and me basically kind of slowly establishing a writing career, over the last decade, we’ve been moving in a fun way, in the same direction, and kind of toward each other and so I can see that collaboration taking the form of writing a book together or maybe even doing some teaching together or some appearances together.

Steve Hoffman [00:19:46]:
But we’ve already kind of done that, and I just think it would be more of the same. We’ve come to a lot of our conclusions by talking. A lot. We spend most evenings, we have dinner together and we sit on the couch or we sit on the deck and we talk. We don’t have a tv and we don’t. Generally, we like movies, but don’t often watch them. And so there’s very much a daily interaction that I think has been really healthy for the relationship. But it also means we’re very much on each other’s wavelength.

Steve Hoffman [00:20:12]:
And that leads naturally to a desire to collaborate in some official way as well.

Ryan Doolittle [00:20:17]:
Well, and that leads me to something I wanted to ask you about, because when I had mentioned what is a perfect day before, you know, before today’s interview, you were kind of giving me some information about it after you got enough sleep and got three or 4 hours of writing done. As the day wound on around four, you strap on an apron and cook a meal that you share with Mary Jo with a bottle of wine, maybe a petite syrah, maybe not. But then you just have. You finish the night with good conversation. If it’s cold, you sit by the fire. If it’s not cold, you sit outside on the deck and listen to birds and frogs.

Steve Hoffman [00:20:53]:
Yep.

Ryan Doolittle [00:20:54]:
So I’m listening to this and I’m just thinking, am I a bad husband? Because, like, sometimes I want to look at my phone. You know, you have something riveting to talk about every single night.

Steve Hoffman [00:21:05]:
It’s not always riveting, but it is the baseline, I would say. It’s like the. It’s like the. How would I put it? It’s the baseline of our life. It’s the. It establishes the rhythm of our life. And so, no, it’s not always situated conversation. Sometimes it’s sitting and looking at each other and playing footsie.

Steve Hoffman [00:21:24]:
And not much gets talked about. Okay, I don’t want to oversell what this is, but what I do think is, and this has been. This goes. Kind of goes back to the idea we talked about earlier of when we went to France. This is a deliberate attempt to be with our kids and in our kids lives. And one of the things that I feel really strongly about about parenting, which I also feel strongly about, as in a marriage, is it’s really hard to bond with your kid between six and 08:00 p.m. after school and sports and before bedtime, because they’re not always ready, and you’re not always ready. And that can be hard to squeeze in and to really have a relationship like that with anybody, but certainly with family members, you have to be there all the time, and then you have to be there when that person is ready to do the bonding with you.

Ryan Doolittle [00:22:16]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:22:16]:
And it takes a lot of time. And that’s, you know, in answer to some of your questions, in that sort of preparatory questionnaire, I found that very interesting. And they, they triggered some of these thoughts, which is every yes, you say is a no to something else. And so I think a lot of people feel extremely busy, but they also sort of embrace busyness because it’s, in some ways, in some context, it’s an easier way to live because you don’t have to go very deep. You don’t have to think hard thoughts. You don’t have to wonder about yourself. You don’t have to work toward real self knowledge. And so I think while we complain about busyness, we also really embrace busyness in a lot of ways.

Steve Hoffman [00:22:54]:
And I think there’s something important about being a parent, being a spouse that requires that you be less busy, that you do fewer things and you say yes to fewer things, because then hopefully, you’re there when that moment comes that you can’t control and you can’t schedule it, that your kid really needs to talk and you’re there. And that’s what I feel like the couch time is with my, with Mary Jo. It’s not always great. It’s not always super interesting, but it’s dependable. And there’s a space in most days when we can talk something through, if something needs to be talked through, whether it’s logistic lifestyle, or emotional and relationship wise. So, anyway, I found those questions of yours very interesting, and it really led to a lot of reminding me a lot of this kind of thinking, which I feel very strongly about.

Ryan Doolittle [00:23:41]:
Well, the way you answered them reminded me that you’re a writer, because you really, you almost made me realize some of my questions were more profound than I knew. You had more wisdom than I do. I’m just. Yeah. And I love that you. So you basically create space for the bonding to happen, but you don’t expect it to happen, and it’s fine if it doesn’t.

Steve Hoffman [00:24:04]:
Absolutely.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:05]:
Because I think if there’s that pressure there, it may not happen, at least for me. You know?

Steve Hoffman [00:24:10]:
That’s right. It’s really hard, you know, I mean, I. You know, you’ve got you’ve got, like, I’m feeling it more now with my kids. Cause they. One lives in San Francisco, my son is at NYU, and I’m getting less time with them. And I’m feeling that urge to cram the bonding or the deep talks into those smaller windows of time. And it’s harder and it feels forced and it doesn’t work as well. And so.

Steve Hoffman [00:24:33]:
But I think the flip side is that you have to embrace the fact that there are going to be these parts of your life that are. That are inactive and almost a little bit boring. You have to be willing to invite some boredom into your life, because it’s in the midst of that boredom that suddenly this moment arrives, and it may be the moment that you needed to happen for you to get a message, to send a message to your kid or your spouse or a friend or whatever.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:58]:
Yeah, that reminds me, my brother in law was going to be watching his daughter an extended time that he didn’t normally. And he was asking his wife, I feel like I should do something with her. What should I do? And his wife just said, just be bored with her. It doesn’t have to be some. And I’m watching this children’s show, Daniel Tiger. Cause my son’s almost two, and there’s a song they have that’s like, it doesn’t matter what we do, I just like to do it with you or something like that. It seems like exactly what you’re saying.

Steve Hoffman [00:25:32]:
Yeah, I’ve actually heard a really good line. I heard. And it’s particularly good, I think, for your stage of life with young kids, toddlers, the best way to be a parent with a young child is to sit in one place and look comfortable.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:46]:
Oh.

Steve Hoffman [00:25:47]:
So don’t look at your phone. Don’t look like you want to be somewhere else, but you don’t have to be doing anything. Just look comfortable. And they will want to be a part of that. They will feel comfortable in that setting. If you look like you’re happy to be there.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:02]:
Oh, my gosh. I can definitely sit somewhere and look comfortable. That’s definitely within my range. Okay. Thanks for that advice.

Steve Hoffman [00:26:11]:
Yeah, yeah. I thought it was a really cool thing.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:13]:
Sometimes when I’m just sitting there and I’m. And I’m just there and I’m watching, he’ll come up to me and. And, like, laugh, and then he’ll run off and play with his truck, and then he’ll come back or whatever.

Steve Hoffman [00:26:24]:
Or that’s why they want to cuddle, you know, or they want to come in for a head rub. And those are, those are, those are the best times. You know, those are two incredible times.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:31]:
Those moments are just, those can’t come. Honestly, don’t come enough.

Steve Hoffman [00:26:36]:
I think you can sense, I mean, as you’re, as you’re interacting and, you know, spending time with other parents of young children, I’m sure you sensed that there are some parents who give off an anxious energy, and they often do what Mary Jo and I call parenting out loud, where it’s performative. They’re performing active parenting to prove that they’re good parents to everybody except the children themselves.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:56]:
Yeah, right.

Steve Hoffman [00:26:57]:
I really feel like if I can sense that anxious energy, you know, the kids can, and they sense that their parents aren’t comfortable. And so I think there’s really something important about being okay with just being there and knowing that your kid’s going to be okay with that. And the fact that you’re there and you’re together, that’s good enough in most.

Ryan Doolittle [00:27:15]:
Cases, I have to be careful. I have that anxious energy. Yesterday, my son was getting too close to one of the cats that tends to swipe, and I went diving across the room, like. And my wife was like, calm down. I was monitoring the situation. My son’s probably like, who’s this freak? That’s right.

Steve Hoffman [00:27:36]:
Right?

Ryan Doolittle [00:27:36]:
Jump. Land on. Oh, man. Yeah. So my boss, Wes Moss, he has his own podcast called retired sooner. So I’ve studied a lot of his research. And anyway, we’ve talked a lot about earning versus time with family and how happiness tends to increase up to a certain income, and then there’s a plateau effect. But you really explained something in a way I don’t think we’ve ever talked about.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:04]:
You almost talked about spending time with your kids and friends and family, almost like compounding interest. You could have made more money, but you chose to invest in that time with the thought that it will compound and then later pay off even more. Did I say that right?

Steve Hoffman [00:28:25]:
Yeah, I think that’s a great way to put it. And I haven’t thought of it in that specific term of compounding interest. But, yes, in both cases, you’re building something that is going to have a payoff later. And if you’re building an economic or financial nest egg, then that is going to buy you freedom and fulfillment and ease or whatever later in life. But you need to invest in other things. And part of this idea of practicing for retirement was really an investment of establishing a nest egg of a couple skill sets for Larry, Jo and me that we could build on, and then that would pay off later. And I think that time that we delivery deliberately chose to spend with our children and do, do fewer things and earn less money as a result was investing in a different kind of wealth, which is this, which is deep relationships that absolutely pay off later. But it’s a very long game and often it seems like it’s not going where you want, especially when the kid’s a teenager, won’t talk to you and won’t get off his frickin phone.

Steve Hoffman [00:29:23]:
Right. You know, I mean, yeah, it’s a long game, but yes, it’s very much the idea of that being an investment as well, I think is a really, really cool way to think of it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:34]:
Well, it’s just such a cool, it puts it into perspective because the way we’ve sort of talked about it before is the goal of how much you should make and then maybe take your foot off the gas and look elsewhere. But you really shined the light on that love and family aspect of it. So you figured out what you thought you needed and then you sort of focused on the relationships.

Steve Hoffman [00:29:57]:
Part of the thinking here was watching. As a small business owner, you end up talking to a lot of other small business owners, you know, their coaches and so on. And there’s a lot of talk about, you know, make the money, make the money, make the money. Because you could always give it away later, you know.

Ryan Doolittle [00:30:10]:
Right.

Steve Hoffman [00:30:10]:
You can do great things with it, and you can’t do great things, those great things if you don’t have the money. So in some sense, the foundation is to make enough money. And that never entirely made sense to me because, again, if you, if you think of your life as a whole, everybody says the biggest part of their life is their family. But if you spent most of your working years away from them making money, and then now you’re going to spend your retirement with them not around nearly as often, but also now concerned with managing all that money and possibly even giving some of it away, it seems as if you spent too much of your life thinking about money, is the way I would put it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:30:44]:
Okay.

Steve Hoffman [00:30:45]:
I feel as if there is, yes, a problem. An epidemic of too many people retiring or dying without enough money. I think there is a parallel epidemic of people dying with too much money. If you die with too much money, it means you spent too much of your life making and saving money. I think what can often happen is that, and I’m sure you see this with people you interview, you get into accumulation mode and you see, you watch your net worth grow, and it is really cool and it’s full of all these promises about what the future is going to hold. And at some point, what should have been a means to an end, which is money buys the rest of the life that you want. The increasing net worth becomes the end in itself. And I’ve seen a lot of my clients get to a point where they can’t stop and go into spending mode.

Steve Hoffman [00:31:36]:
They are always in accumulation mode, and I feel as if that is a waste. And what’s not recognized is, again, every yes is a no to something else. All those yeses to the opportunities to make and save more money were an indirect way of saying no to other things that theyre now impoverished in. Their saving muscle is strong, but their spending muscles and their relationship muscles of atrophy. And I think part of what we try to do is look at it holistically and say, what are all of the things that were investing in, not just money? So that when we get to the point where we don’t necessarily need to make any more money, we have an infrastructure of pleasure and fulfillment and creativity in relationships that is going to pay off for these, for this third act of our life.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:25]:
Yeah, that’s such a great way to put it. I think that accumulation mode is so hard to turn off once. It’s almost like you need to turn it on for survival. It’s really hard to turn off. I see it with parents. They, you know, things were difficult when I was little in terms of having enough money and they got so focused and now they have enough money, but it’s hard for them to not feel guilty when they spend it, you know?

Steve Hoffman [00:32:51]:
Exactly, exactly. I agree. Yeah. And, but, but if you ask them explicitly, everybody will say, well, no, it was never just about the money.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:59]:
Right.

Steve Hoffman [00:32:59]:
And yet it becomes about the money because that’s the habit that you’ve got into that you can’t somehow break.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:06]:
Yeah. And the hat trick I pulled off is I can be focused in accumulation mode and not watch my net worth grow. So I don’t know how I figured out how to do that. So I’ll have to write, congratulations, Ryan.

Steve Hoffman [00:33:22]:
That’s quite an accomplishment.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:23]:
Thank you. So you mentioned you have two kids, is that what you said?

Steve Hoffman [00:33:30]:
Correct. Yeah. My son has just finished his sophomore year at NYU. He’s 20 and my daughter is 26 and she is in San Francisco. She’s got a job in design, basically.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:41]:
Okay, so this brings up a topic that we also have studied with some of our happy retirees. The happiest ones report that they live near at least one of their, or at least half of their adult children. So how do you manage the distance in that sense?

Steve Hoffman [00:33:58]:
It’s a dilemma. You know, we have part of what Mary Jos creative projects is very centered in place. Right. It’s about the bioregion that surround us. My writing is very much about the Great Lakes north and the food culture there and Mediterranean France. And now we’ve got two kids in two other places. And I agree very much with what you said, which is I feel like it’s really important to be present with family for long stretches rather than just visiting over the holidays. And we happen to, currently at least, we happen to be in a position where we actually like our kids and they seem to like us, and I’m going to take advantage of that as long as it lasts.

Steve Hoffman [00:34:36]:
Milk that. Exactly. So if they both end up on opposite coasts, that’s going to be tough, and we don’t know what to do. But it’s not something that we’re taking lightly. I do think my son is going to, he really likes Minnesota. He likes the outdoors. He likes sort of the quiet bittersweetness of Minnesota and its seasons. So I think he’ll come back.

Steve Hoffman [00:34:56]:
My daughter is very much a California girl. She loves the ocean. She loves the beach. She loves San Francisco, loves northern Cal. And so if I had a guess, I would say that we would hopefully have our son near us, and this would be the home base for our daughter as well. Like, this is where you come back to when you want to stay for a while. You want to visit or for holidays or whatever. And so we’d at least be close to one, to two.

Steve Hoffman [00:35:20]:
And then ideally, I think we would also try to spend a little bit of time in Mediterranean France, because that’s just such a fulfilling part of the world for me. I feel very much, there’s a part of me that’s missing when I’m not there. And so I really like being there because I feel like there’s this aspect of who I am that is activated when I’m there that is not anywhere else.

Ryan Doolittle [00:35:41]:
Right. And when you’re there, do you feel at a certain point you feel like, ready to come back to Minnesota or you could be there all the time?

Steve Hoffman [00:35:50]:
Rarely. I mean, I shouldn’t say that France is an interesting thing for me because my first encounter with it was in Paris in my twenties. What it turned into was that as a kid from the Midwest, a not very interesting suburban upbringing, suddenly I have this guy walking the streets of Paris and I really felt as if I were a different person there and that I wanted to be that person. I didn’t want to be the person that I’d been for 22 years leading up to that experience. So there’s still an element of that to being in France. It’s. It’s. This is the Steve that I like.

Steve Hoffman [00:36:24]:
I love that. I love this Steve.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:26]:
You like French, however? Okay.

Steve Hoffman [00:36:29]:
Yeah, I do. I really like French Steve. On the other hand, that is a. That it’s a way of also, like, not accepting yourself.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:37]:
Oh.

Steve Hoffman [00:36:37]:
I mean, most of the time I’m here, and so if I’m spending all my time here wishing I were somewhere else because I’m a different person there, there’s something problematic about that. And I guess what I would say is, I don’t know the answer, but I’m very actively wrestling with it right now because it feels as if being here, this is my life, this is where I am, this is where I spend most of my days. It doesn’t make sense to be here and constantly be wishing I were somewhere else and was someone else. So trying to understand how being in this place is somewhere that I can find some self acceptance and some peace and some acceptance of this being my home, I’m in the middle of that process. And, in fact, that may be the next thing I write about, is having found what felt like the perfect place for me and a place where I was my best self, and then leaving that place to come back to a place that I’ve always had mixed feelings about. And how do you come to a form of self acceptance when you do that? And again, I don’t know the answer. I’m working it out and wrestling with it in real time.

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:41]:
Well, I think how aware you are that it’s a thing you need to work out is probably ahead of where a lot of people are. So you would sort of like French Steve to also exist in Minnesota. You like that, Steve?

Steve Hoffman [00:37:54]:
I think what it would be more like is that I need to learn to appreciate the Steve that’s not in France.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:00]:
Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:38:01]:
There’s, like a fundamental. There’s a little bit of a. More of a boring element to this kid who grew up in the suburbs of Minnesota, and yet that’s who my wife married, that’s who my kids grew up with. Other people have accepted that version of me. Why am I struggling to accept that version of me? But part of it is actually living here. And I think it has tangentially to do with retirement, because I also think a lot of people, the dream of retirement is you’re going to go somewhere else. You’re going to go retire somewhere else, right?

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:31]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:38:31]:
Go to the coast. You’re going to go south, you’re going to go to Florida, you’re going to go to, you know, North Carolina. You’re going to go to New York City. And I’ve always mistrusted that a little bit because I feel as if who you are is who you’ve been over all these years, building up to the time that you then leave. And when you go to that new place at the end of your life that wasn’t a part of the rest of your life, you’re leaving a part of yourself behind, and you’re not really, you’re not really somebody whole in that new place either, unless it’s a place that, you know, like, you’re Georgia O’KeEffe and you discover New Mexico, and it’s clearly just this deep, deep part of your vision of life and where you want to be and so on. But the idea of escaping somewhere else, I feel as if, I don’t know, there’s something problematic about it that I can’t put words to. So what I’m saying, I think, is that part of what I feel my job is, or my struggle is going to be in the coming years is I don’t feel like other than maybe other than France, where I found this just weird unicorn of a place that fulfills so much of what I love about life. Yes.

Steve Hoffman [00:39:40]:
I could go move to LA or I could move to Big Sur, and it would be physically beautiful and it’d be dramatic, and it would feel as if that was a little bit of a cop out. I feel as if I need to find a way to accept the person who’s here in this place, because this is the place that’s made me who I am, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:00]:
You should be able to be you along Turtle Lake, Minnesota, rather than having to be on the Mediterranean or something.

Steve Hoffman [00:40:08]:
Exactly. Exactly. In theory, that should be true, but it’s hard because it is undramatic. And in theory, that should also be true for Des Moines and Fargo, North Dakota. Yes. If that’s the place that formed you, in theory, you should be able to find a way to be fulfilled because people are fulfilled all over the world in the places that they were born, you know, in Karachi and Paris and. But also, you know, in tiny villages in Namibia, you know.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:34]:
Right.

Steve Hoffman [00:40:34]:
So. But there is. There’s this strong impetus, I think, to associate retirement with either travel or with going somewhere else. And I guess I’m here saying I mistrust that, and I’m in the process of trying to figure out why exactly.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:51]:
Yeah, I think that might relate to, because some people think with retirement that just not working anymore, you know, running from the work, they’ll be happy automatically, and then they realize they have to deal with who they are and what they want to actually do.

Steve Hoffman [00:41:07]:
Exactly. Exactly, exactly. Yes. Yeah. And they haven’t done the work, and that takes years to figure that out. And if you’re starting it at 65, you don’t have much time left to figure that out.

Ryan Doolittle [00:41:18]:
Yeah. That’s why we’re always hoping people will get a start on that before so they can kind of go into it instead of starting from stop.

Steve Hoffman [00:41:26]:
Exactly. Exactly. Yep. And I would say that’s a little bit of what Mary Jo’s and my couch time at night is.

Ryan Doolittle [00:41:32]:
Oh, okay.

Steve Hoffman [00:41:33]:
That’s integrating that kind of thing into our relationship and our lives earlier so that when we get to retirement, we’ve already had all these conversations. Instead of the day you retire, you sit across a table from your spouse with a cup of coffee and going, who the hell is this? And do I even like them anymore? You know, and I actually, it sounds like a joke, but I think it happens a lot, you know?

Ryan Doolittle [00:41:54]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:41:54]:
There was that episode of yours recently where the. The marine retired and announced to his spouse that they had enough money to retire, and she was horrified.

Ryan Doolittle [00:42:00]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:42:01]:
And said, no, no, no. Yeah, you can retire, but you got to go get another job, dude.

Ryan Doolittle [00:42:04]:
Right.

Steve Hoffman [00:42:05]:
You know, and I think that really does actually happen a lot, and it’s because, again, you feel like the retirement is going to be the answer to your problems, and it’s not. It’s just a new stage of life that you enter with all the same problems and all the same issues that you had leading up to it. And so I really like the idea of retirement as thinking of it not as an escape or a new phase, but as an extension of everything that has come before.

Ryan Doolittle [00:42:28]:
Do you think this relates because you said something really powerful about finding, muddling through, and I, you saw that your son had some anxiety, and that sort of forced you to admit that you did in a way that helped you get past the ego of maybe saying, I don’t have anxiety because you almost chose to do that because you realized you weren’t doing your son any favors. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Steve Hoffman [00:42:53]:
Yeah, I think that’s. Yeah, that was another great question that really released something. You know, I think the question was, you know, how should are you an example that people should follow? And my first instinct was, no, I’m just like anybody else. I tried to figure it out and failed half the time and maybe succeeded some of the time. But if I proud of myself in a way, I guess that I could offer as an example to follow. It was that moment of being sort of what’s called. Have you heard of the term a transitional character? It’s a person. It’s a person in the genealogy of a family who says, the buck stops here.

Steve Hoffman [00:43:35]:
There’s brokenness, there’s sometimes abuse, there’s mental health issues, there’s financial mismanagement. And the transitional character is the person in the line of dissent in that family who says, nope, not going to happen on my watch. And that character, I’m not claiming that I am that character, but that character is some. Is something that excites me. That’s, that’s. I think that’s a beautiful thing for, to be able to be that. And often it involves accepting what’s, what’s not so great about yourself or what’s not been not so great about what you’ve inherited from your family. And I feel as if that, you know, my, I had this little bit of denial.

Steve Hoffman [00:44:12]:
I had this blind spot that, yeah, I was riddled with anxiety in many ways that I covered up very, very well, but then suddenly started to watch my son struggle with it. Having my wife say, this isn’t coming out of nowhere. Resisting, resisting, resisting. And then at some point saying, I’m actively right now modeling what my son is going to do with himself and how he feels about himself. And if we’re saying, joe, you have anxiety, but dad sure doesn’t. That’s when I, when in fact I do. That’s a way of saying I don’t actually think it’s okay because I’m not willing to admit it about myself.

Ryan Doolittle [00:44:48]:
Right.

Steve Hoffman [00:44:48]:
And so the minute I said, you know, I do, and I have to deal with it, I feel like that was, that was a transitional moment that was really important and very undramatic and not very romantic, but it was a letting go of ego. And it was also a way of saying, of accepting that it’s not just what I actively say I think you should do, son, as your parent. And I’m conveying all this wisdom to you, really, the best that, you know, what you’re, I feel like what you’re mostly doing as a parenthood is modeling behavior. And if, like, I said, if I’m saying no, it’s okay, Joe, to have anxiety, and we’re going to work with you, and it’s not a problem. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. And yet I’m acting as if I’m embarrassed about it in. Within myself. Yeah, that’s sending the opposite message for what I’m saying and a more powerful.

Ryan Doolittle [00:45:38]:
Message than the words I would think, for sure.

Steve Hoffman [00:45:42]:
I would hope so. I would hope so. Yeah. Yeah. I do feel like he was a letting go of ego to some extent. And that, and that there was fear and love in conflict in that incident. The fear was fear of admitting this about myself, fear of being less than perfect, or I’m a perfectionist. And so there was a fear of admitting that I was something less than what I hoped the world saw me as waging war with love for my son and wanting that to, and wanting to be able to express that in a way that he felt.

Steve Hoffman [00:46:17]:
I feel like it was a moment of the love winning out over fear. And winning that battle felt like a really important turning point in my life and an important episode and something that, again, if I were to say, should you follow my example in anything? I don’t know that there are many parts of my life that I would say, yes, absolutely, you should follow this example. But to the extent that anybody can let love win out over fear, I would say, yes, absolutely, that’s an example to follow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:46:44]:
I can tell you’re a perfectionist because you’re in France and you’re happy and you’re still thinking, I should be able to be happy when I’m not here. I mean, some people would probably not even get to that. They would just think, I’m happy, end of story. But you want to set the bar higher for yourself. And I wonder, too, if that ever. I know. For me, does that ever prevent you from writing because you think, oh, this thing I’m working on isn’t good enough, so I’m just going to.

Steve Hoffman [00:47:10]:
Oh, 100%.

Ryan Doolittle [00:47:11]:
Yeah.

Steve Hoffman [00:47:12]:
There’s a reason it took me eight years to write this book, Ryan.

Ryan Doolittle [00:47:14]:
Yeah. And I wonder if that drew you to the tax preparation, because it’s more. It’s more like I did it. It’s done, you know?

Steve Hoffman [00:47:21]:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, it very much fulfilled that. That perfectionism. This. There’s a right answer and a wrong answer, and that makes tax preparation easier for me, and that did definitely make writing harder for me. And really, on the subject of ego, I really feel as if there was also a turning point in the evolution of this book, which was at some point I realized that I didn’t need to become a better writer to write the book that I wanted. I needed to become a better human being.

Steve Hoffman [00:47:48]:
Oh, and that really involved also, I have always loved beautiful surface writing, so very eloquent, poetic, kind of lyrical surface writing, and I wanted to write that way because that’s what I admired. And I got to a point in writing this book where this book doesn’t need any more of that. I don’t need to get better at that. I need to get better at things that I’m currently bad at, and I need to get over myself and admit that I’m bad at them, and then I need to get better at them. And one of those is how to tell a story compellingly, where maybe not every scene is going to blow your socks off when you read it as beautifully lyrical writing, but it is in service to the reader who wants to be given a story that they’re interested in. And that’s intriguing to them. It makes them want to turn the pages. And so there was also a simultaneous.

Steve Hoffman [00:48:38]:
And this was really about the same era as dealing with anxiety. In fact, I think the two are related. In fact, I think anxiety and perfectionism are very related.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:45]:
Oh, very much.

Steve Hoffman [00:48:46]:
Perfectionism is a way of holding off anxiety, because if everything is perfect, then I got nothing to worry about.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:51]:
Right.

Steve Hoffman [00:48:51]:
So, yeah, there was. There was also this getting over myself and getting over ego and, and accepting that there are things I’m good at and things I’m not good at and, and starting from a place of accepting that first and then working on the things that I’m not so good at. But the first thing you have to do is admit it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:49:07]:
Yeah, I was listening to Ira Glass, who hosts this american life. He was saying, so he hosts his show and writes it, but he’s also the boss, so he’ll procrastinate the writing by working on the business. It’s like, well, that has to get done so you can kind of justify it, but it’s the same.

Steve Hoffman [00:49:23]:
That’s like, yeah, I do think that we very often will pick the bus. That’s another way of talking about busyness, as we were talking about earlier. It’s easy to pick the busy thing because you can get that done. You can check it off your list, but that’s not the important thing. That’s not the thing that probably really should get done, but it’s the thing that you can get done soon enough that you could check it off your to do list, and that feels like you’ve accomplished something, but really what it’s done is deferred some harder work that probably was more important.

Ryan Doolittle [00:49:54]:
Exactly. Where I live is never cleaner than when I have some project I’m trying to not work on.

Steve Hoffman [00:50:00]:
Yes. I’ve never looked into more possible software solutions than when I was stuck in my book. I can tell you that for sure.

Ryan Doolittle [00:50:07]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So, Steve, tell us, give me the name of your book again and tell us where people can find you all that.

Steve Hoffman [00:50:18]:
Yeah. Great. So the title of the book is a season for that lost and found in the other southern France. It is available anywhere you buy books. It’s available for pre order right now when we’re talking. It will be published on July 9, available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and it will be at, you know, all local bookstores. It is the story of that time in France that we talked about where, you know, our family went over there. We, we immersed ourselves into a tiny little winemaking village in southern France.

Steve Hoffman [00:50:48]:
And that sort of external acceptance is half the story, and the other half of the story is this attempt to move towards some self acceptance internally for me as well. So I’m pretty active on Instagram, and I’m at Sjrhoffman on Instagram and my writer’s website, where you can get some of my other writing on food and wine and the northern North America is just www.sjrhoffman.com.

Ryan Doolittle [00:51:13]:
Fantastic. Well, I can’t thank you enough for being here. You make me want to get my taxes done and drink wine and be a better person. So you pretty much hit all the spots.

Steve Hoffman [00:51:23]:
It was a blast. As I said, let’s talk about retirement. Doesn’t necessarily sound like let’s all get super excited about it. And yet it’s a very exciting topic to me. And as you can see, I think it encompasses so much of the rest of life and a lot of thoughts about what makes a good life. I just really, really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.

Ryan Doolittle [00:51:43]:
Same here. Well, I think the problem is we need a new word for retirement, but we don’t have one yet, so we’re doing our best.

Steve Hoffman [00:51:49]:
If you come up with it, let me know and I’ll pass on the word.