Rethinking Retirement: The Rewirement Approach and Future Planning with Jamie Hopkins

Meet Jamie Hopkins, the visionary behind the “Rewirement” concept, as he sits down with host Amber Stitt at the NAIFA e3 conference in Newport Beach, California. 🎙️

In this episode, Jamie reveals how he’s redefining the retirement conversation by focusing less on numbers and more on mindset, behavior change, and visualizing your future self. From naming your next chapter (hello, Bumpy’s Burgers food truck!) to reverse engineering your goals, Jamie shares actionable insights on embracing evolution—not just in your finances, but in your life.

If you’ve ever wondered what it really takes to design a fulfilling future (with or without the 4% rule), this episode will challenge your thinking and spark new possibilities.

Let’s talk about rewiring your path, building true financial confidence, and finding meaning at every stage. 🚀

🎧 To watch this episode: https://youtu.be/9WNimYmqM5A 

🔗 To connect with Jamie Hopkins:

📲 Website #1: https://www.bmt.com

📲 Website #2: https://finservfoundation.org

📲 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiehopkinsfinancialservices

📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retirementrisks

📲 Amazon Link for Jamie's Books

#financialservices #naifae3 #retirementplanning #pathwayswithamberstitt #amberstitt #jamiephopkins #brynmawrtrust #finservfoundation

📻 Thank you for tuning in to Pathways!

🔗 Connect with Amber on Social Media:

• AMBER’S INSTAGRAM
• AMBER’S LINKEDIN
• AMBER’S FACEBOOK

📲 Be sure to visit Amber's website:

www.AmberStitt.com

🎬 And remember, let's take action today!!!

=====================

💻 Content Creators, Here Are Some Must Have Apps:

🔥 Opus Clips AI Creates Short Videos From Your Full Length Videos: https://www.opus.pro?via=909178

🔥 Find Hosts & Guests for Your Podcast: https://www.joinpodmatch.com/pathways

🔥 For Blogs, Descriptions, or Any Type of AI Generated Text Needed for Your Project: https://www.castmagic.io/?via=amber

Transcript

Jamie Hopkins [00:00:00]:
I've got this concept, "Rewirement", and I've been working on that for probably about 13 plus years now. And the whole idea of rewirement is this reframing the way you think about retirement income planning, the distribution period over the accumulation period. And we talk about it a lot in the sense of saving and then spending, but we don't spend a lot of time on, "How do we change the behavior of people?"

Amber Stitt [00:00:24]:
Hello and welcome to Pathways e3, a special edition of Pathways with Amber stitt. The Pathways e3 podcasts were recorded with special guests who were attending and collaborating at the NAIFA e3 conference in Newport Beach, California in September 2025. Let's join the conversation. All right. We are live. We are (laughing)...

Jamie Hopkins [00:00:48]:
I thought you wanted me to do the script. We're live at NAIFA e3.

Amber Stitt [00:00:51]:
We are live. Jamie, are we live? We are live, you guys. Well, you're watching it post production live, but we are at NAIFA e3. Thanks for being here, Jamie.

Jamie Hopkins [00:00:59]:
Thanks for having me on. It's great.

Amber Stitt [00:01:00]:
So we have the famous Jamie Hopkins here. He was just on main stage, so we are so excited to have him on the show. And if you don't know him already, he's famous for a lot of things. And we're gonna put a lot about him on the description box. We'll save that for later. But Jamie, you spoke today about, we'll call it a retirement presentation, but it's way more than that. Rewirement is something that you focused on. There's been an evolution that you shared today.

Amber Stitt [00:01:25]:
So can you just talk a little bit about what was important to bring to NAIFA e3 for their 3rd year?

Jamie Hopkins [00:01:30]:
Yeah, absolutely. And you did a great job on stage today, too, so I shouldn't forget that before I get going. But I've got this concept, "Rewirement", and I've been working on that for probably about 13 plus years now. And the whole idea of rewirement is this reframing the way you think about retirement income planning, the distribution period over the accumulation period. And we talk about it a lot in the sense of saving and then spending. But we don't spend a lot of time on, "How do we change the behavior of people?" We talk about the math and science of it and the 4% and all these other things.

Jamie Hopkins [00:02:05]:
But it's mostly to me a change management situation of somebody going from this time period of working and then retiring, which is the change moment and then being retired. And you do have to think about life different now, how you're going to spend your money, how you're going to spend your time, that's one that probably everybody who works with retirees knows is, you've had that client or family member that's just like, "I did not know I was going to have that much free time." They can only golf, or play chess, or garden, or spend time with their grandkids so much in a week.

Amber Stitt [00:02:36]:
Yep. So then this leads me to a question I didn't tell you I was going to ask of you, but, when are you retiring?

Jamie Hopkins [00:02:43]:
So when am I retiring? No idea. First of all, we don't really know that in general, but I used to always think that I would never retire and I'd become a writer. I wrote some screenplays early on in my life and I kind of wanted to do that. They did not become movies. So I worked on one comedy film and one horror film and worked on those...

Amber Stitt [00:03:03]:
Interesting.

Jamie Hopkins [00:03:04]:
Yeah. So that maybe will still exist. I'm not really sure what's going to happen there with AI, but I do feel like books are going to kind of disappear. They're mostly going to be written by generative programs. And so I'm wrapping up one book now and I've got one more I'd really like to write before, in my view, there's going to be the death of the author, as we know it. So I have to reframe now and rewire how I think about retirement. I have thought about a food truck.

Jamie Hopkins [00:03:29]:
I really want to buy a burger food truck.

Amber Stitt [00:03:31]:
You like burgers?

Jamie Hopkins [00:03:32]:
Called "Bumpy's Burgers" and it's a dino, I actually have the drawing of the dinosaur and the outline of the food truck side already. So I have thought about this a bit. I love making food and so that's a possible outcome.

Amber Stitt [00:03:42]:
Yeah, you do.

Amber Stitt [00:03:44]:
Okay, so I feel like you're a little forward thinking. I only know that because we've had talks and conversations with you just being in the industry so long. I met you through American College, taking your course, or you are part of different courses in the education modules. But I think that you've been instrumental in putting together actionable steps that the industry's been following for years. I mean, that's actually true. Say you're implementation. You've done different things. You talked about a little bit about almost like "I am" statements.

Amber Stitt [00:04:09]:
It was almost like something you were saying, like putting it into your mind to be something different in the future. You talked about kind of reverse engineering. But can you articulate...you might be doing something different, it might not be retirement. It might just be an evolution of something else. And that's okay. Any advice there on how to figure that out for yourself?

Jamie Hopkins [00:04:27]:
Yeah, absolutely, Amber. One of the things that I talked about was this evolution of yourself, that the you tomorrow is actually somewhat different than you today. Now when you go out a really long period of time, you're a lot different. For athletes, I use this example is like they want to become the best in their sport, or win something. And so there's this future version of them that's achieved this outcome, has become a better player, a better team man, a champion Olympian. And actually the best way to do that is actually to envision you being there at the finish line, you being on the podium, you having the gold medals, and then actually work back from that goal. So you don't say, "What am I going to go do tomorrow?" You actually say, "What did I do right before I stepped up on that Olympic podium with the gold around my neck?" And business owners can do this, too. You're a builder of businesses and you can think about it as well, "I'm going to go build this awesome media company and it's going to hit this goal."

Jamie Hopkins [00:05:19]:
Well, what did I do the day before? And it was probably delegate. It was probably not do all the sales calls the day before, and you work back. And this actually creates an anchor point that is that successful you, that new you in the future versus anchoring off you today then hoping we're going to change. Because every time you anchor off the present, we're more likely to keep the present going tomorrow.

Amber Stitt [00:05:40]:
Future self-connectedness. Future self. You mentioned that.

Jamie Hopkins [00:05:45]:
Yeah. So that is the idea of...so let's just say that future version of us, us in 30 years. It's an interesting concept because the first time you bring it up, do you really think about yourself in 30 years very often?

Amber Stitt [00:05:56]:
I did a leadership lunch with Gino Wickman's "10 Disciplines" and that was 10 years out. And I was like, "Well, Vivian will be only a certain amount of her age." I probably won't be doing a ton until she graduates because it kind of landed like I was a 12, 14 year plan.

Jamie Hopkins [00:06:13]:
Okay.

Amber Stitt [00:06:13]:
Once I started working on that, it was interesting.

Jamie Hopkins [00:06:17]:
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things, I had somebody come up after I talked and said, well, she was pretty young. She goes, "Well, at first I thought, 30 years out, I'll be like myself, but just older." And then she was like, "And then as you kept talking," she was like, "Oh, I'm not going to be much like myself today. In 30 years, I will be a very different person with different interests and different hobbies, and the world will have changed around me, too." And so as much as we think about that person, we can draw goals out.

Jamie Hopkins [00:06:42]:
We can actually name things, too, which I think is really cool. So, for our kids, when I think about my kids, think about your kid, naming if you want them to go to college, naming their 529 plan like your favorite university.

Jamie Hopkins [00:06:56]:
So if you...like I'm a Notre Dame fan, so if I name my kid's, Rebecca's Notre Dame fund versus Rebecca's 529 fund, I get more connected with that future version of myself and that account. If you say retirement home fund, don't do that. Pick the town you want to be in. Like if you want to be in Cape May, New Jersey, you want to be in Hawaii, actually visualize that and create that point. And then you become more connected to this future version and you're more likely to follow along with those actions to get you there.

Amber Stitt [00:07:27]:
That's why you've already named your food truck?

Jamie Hopkins [00:07:29]:
Yeah. So Bumpy's Burgers. That's exactly why. So it wasn't always a dinosaur. Dinosaur came later. It was a chef that was holding a burger and it's going over the road. So it's Bumpy. And Bumpy's Burgers, I felt like it was easy to say.

Jamie Hopkins [00:07:43]:
And then I kind of wanted to swap out the chef with the dinosaur. That's a little bit more fun. So it's kind of like one of those long neck green dinosaurs, right? Yeah, the brontosaurus-esque dinosaurs. So there's some variations of that one, but we'll call it a brontosaurus today.

Amber Stitt [00:07:58]:
Okay. So you kind of glossed over this new book, and I noticed some doodles on it. So I saw the cover, I don't know if you're...But it's...I think it's coming up for pre-sale, pre-order.

Jamie Hopkins [00:08:08]:
Yeah, it is on pre-order.

Jamie Hopkins [00:08:10]:
It's not a labradoodle, though. It's hand drawings. So, you know...

Amber Stitt [00:08:13]:
I said Doodle. Did I say Labradoodle?

Jamie Hopkins [00:08:15]:
Okay. Yeah, so see...

Amber Stitt [00:08:17]:
Good point! Those are everywhere. In Arizona.

Jamie Hopkins [00:08:20]:
Yeah, I have a labradoodle also, named Baxter. He's wonderful.

Amber Stitt [00:08:25]:
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Pathways. Please consider giving us a "Like" and subscribing to the channel. Your support goes a long way towards helping us bring you more compelling content. Remember, let's take action together! Now, let's jump back into the conversation.

Jamie Hopkins [00:08:44]:
But yeah, the new book is something I've wanted to do for a while now. It's been a couple year concept in my head and it's called "Your Retirement Sketchbook". It's 125 different topics on retirement, going from saving for retirement to investing for retirement to retiring to spending in retirement and then end of life planning. So it does the whole kind of arc of preparing and going through it, but it's 125 topics across those domains, or time periods. And then we did sketches. So if you've ever seen like sketch art when somebody's talking, we had those kind of all drawn out. So every page is like a topic and then sketch art.

Jamie Hopkins [00:09:20]:
So that came out of my really terrible drawings where I did a little videos and I said, "I think there's a way to do a book around this." And so I actually wrote the book in an Excel file, which is super weird because every chapter follows a formula of a quote, a fact, a citation, explanation, advice, reflection, question.

Amber Stitt [00:09:39]:
Like a huge library.

Jamie Hopkins [00:09:40]:
Yeah, so Bonnie Trichel...then I said, "Hey, I need somebody if I'm going to ever get this done." And I called her and said, "Do you want to do it?" And she said, "Yes." And so the book's all done. It's publishing with Herriman House. Officially goes live March 31, 2026. But it is up Barnes and Nobles, Target, somebody sent me a link for, which is funny, you don't think about selling your book at Target.

Jamie Hopkins [00:10:02]:
Amazon obviously, where most people buy books today.

Amber Stitt [00:10:04]:
So you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go to Target and take a picture next to it. (Camera sound)

Jamie Hopkins [00:10:09]:
Yeah well you'll have to wait a couple of months to do that in person. But it will be cool. It's fun to see the book in real life. I'm going to be doing the...I kind of got an opportunity to do a book signing release party alongside something else actually at Nasdaq, when it goes live. So we'll do that the night before, which will be really cool.

Amber Stitt [00:10:27]:
That is neat. Okay, so I wanted to...well, do you think we have enough time to talk about the 4% rule and your opinion on it?

Jamie Hopkins [00:10:34]:
Oh, quickly. So I always say the 4% finding is not a rule. There's a little meme out there that makes its way around the Internet of me holding a sign that says, "It's Not A Rule". It's kind of funny, but yeah, so it was a finding. It was a historical research based on...

Amber Stitt [00:10:50]:
Aren't they teaching it everywhere, like in CFP or...

Jamie Hopkins [00:10:53]:
So that's the difference from a rule and a finding. A finding is something we found to be true in the past. That's like saying, my sports team won every game last year. That does not mean your sports team is going to win every game this year. That's not a rule. A rule is, you hike the ball and your players are offsides, you get a penalty. That's a rule.

Jamie Hopkins [00:11:11]:
Every time it's the same. Yeah, but this is really a finding. It's what happened in the past. It is not required to be true moving forward. And that's the difference from a finding and a rule. And so it really is a finding. It's a historical fact. Around a 50/50 bond/stock portfolio, 30 years.

Jamie Hopkins [00:11:27]:
What could you distribute and not run out of money, inflation adjusted for 30 years? It's a very specific, finite research pool. But what you find is there's a lot of things you can do to vastly increase that. If you add international stocks, you add more equity, you include your home equity, your reverse mortgages into it. You can start to move this to where 6% is a much more sustainable distribution kind of rule of thumb. Now, again, if the market tanks for years early in retirement, bonds go back to zero. It is very possible that it doesn't work, even at 4%. Historically, across the globe, the US and only a couple other countries, 4% really worked.

Jamie Hopkins [00:12:05]:
We've had such outperformance in the equity markets in the US it's really carried it. Now, could that be the case for the next hundred years? Absolutely. But could we also have a flat decade of returns and it just doesn't work? Of course it could. I think the 4% finding is super useful for Americans, so they understand a rule of thumb. I don't think it's a rule. And I do actually think people can actually spend more than the 4% says. Although you'll see Morningstar and others say, "Hey, it might be too aggressive," but I think most research points to it's probably too conservative for most people.

Amber Stitt [00:12:38]:
Well, and we also have history. And you talk about, you're the first person that looked at the Monte Carlo. And that's where my head exploded, back in the day when I was learning financial planning, I was like, this is stressful. Looking at all these waves, this just feels like anxiety and something really bad is going to happen over there. I think you're the first person that's kind of brought that to light and maybe re-identified or assessed this rule over the finding, getting people to really think about what do they want, because numbers, we don't even know what technology could do. We're going to go into some new historical times that we've never charted before.

Jamie Hopkins [00:13:15]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, every day is a new day. It's different than it was in the past, but we have to learn from the past and try to use it the best we can. That's why it's a guideline, not a rule. And Monte Carlo, it's a very useful kind of modeling to show outcomes, but it shouldn't be relied upon, again,

Jamie Hopkins [00:13:32]:
like it's a rule. Like it's some in-stone commandment. It's a helpful guideline. One of the problems though, in the way that Monte Carlo has been expressed has been mostly in success and failure rates. Now, Monte Carlo does not have to be expressed that way.

Amber Stitt [00:13:46]:
Sure.

Jamie Hopkins [00:13:46]:
But it's mostly how our industry has looked at it. I think that is very harmful because retirement will not be about success or failure. It'll be about adapting. It's not linear. We will move all over the place. Our life will change, our goals will change, and people are very resilient.

Jamie Hopkins [00:14:01]:
And we find a way.

Amber Stitt [00:14:02]:
Okay, so to wrap this up from your perspective, do you want to win the game, or change the game? If you had to pick between the two.

Jamie Hopkins [00:14:10]:
Oh, that's a really good one. I'm probably change the game. I tell my kids all the time, I coach and I say the two things you can control is your attitude and effort. You don't always win. And winning, there is probably a debate what that really means half the time anyway. I'd rather change.

Jamie Hopkins [00:14:26]:
I view myself as a builder of things. So it's about building and developing. Not always about winning.

Amber Stitt [00:14:32]:
Sometimes you have to yell at the ref, but not all the time.

Jamie Hopkins [00:14:35]:
I sometimes get in, you know, loose arguments with people. Yes.

Amber Stitt [00:14:40]:
And all good fun. Well, I really appreciate spending time with you this week and I love that we could do the podcast again and maybe more to come.

Jamie Hopkins [00:14:48]:
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me on. You do such a great job with this.

Amber Stitt [00:14:51]:
Thank you. All right, so look for his book! We'll have information in the show notes. Thanks you guys. Thank you for joining us for this special edition of Pathways e3 recorded at the NAIFA e3 conference in Newport Beach, California. Join us for more insightful conversations with the experts and leaders of their industries. Until next time, keep taking action on your unique path!