Dear Friends and Financial Partners!
How can you improve your savings and investing before and during your retirement? Here are some nifty (some might say awesome) tips to immediately change your personal money paradigm.
Change Your Money Mind-set: Chris Reining, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, became a millionaire at age 35 by doing one thing differently. Chris started working to save and invest, rather than working to spend. By going through a self-imposed paradigm shift, your life can also transform from a working-to-spend environment to a savings-and-investing world. The outcome speaks for itself. This is one powerful idea.
Get Professional Financial Help: Ours, of course. When you are accumulating assets in your 401(k) or 403(b), you are in an automatic investment mode. If you don’t know what the sequence-of-returns risk is or how dollar-cost averaging works against you during your withdrawal years, you are already behind and need our help. Social Security has over 2,700 rules and hundreds of exceptions to these rules. Medicare is filled with land mines. Distributing assets during the decumulation phase is exponentially more complex than adding assets.
Take Charge of Your Emotions: Don’t let your emotions take charge and dictate your actions. Specifically, when the stock market is dropping or has dropped, don’t lock in your losses! Remember: Stock market drops are temporary. Locking in losses is permanent. Locking in losses by selling at or near the bottom of a market may be a mistake you and your loved ones will pay for the rest of your lives.
Ignore the Media: Call us. We know your specific financial goals. We manage money and segment your accounts by time to avoid the sequence-of-returns risk. Even when the media is all doom and gloom, there’s a good chance your accounts will be doing just fine with respect to your own financial goals. “The Sky is Falling” mentality illustrated by Henny Penny, more commonly known in the U.S. as Chicken Little, may cause you to want to lock in your losses. Don’t do it. Even well-meaning friends and family members can push you away from financial goals.
Remember: Contrary to many, investing is not about beating the market. Financial planning and investment management are about meeting your goals, including having a sustainable income stream during retirement. At Smedley we strive to help you forge a powerful, yet personal financial paradigm. As always, we are on your side.
Bullish Best Wishes,
Roger M. Smedley, CFP®
CEO
