This makes me sad

It makes me sad to think about peo­ple who’ve worked hard their whole life, but due to lack of edu­ca­tion or the right exam­ples in their lives did­n’t pre­pare for retire­ment. These peo­ple, as they approach retire­ment age (or beyond) sim­ply can’t retire.

I try to under­stand the thought process behind the lack of prepa­ra­tion. I real­ize it’s easy to judge; there’s always some­thing else that needs our atten­tion now. As my wife likes to say, every­thing ends up being more expen­sive than you think it will be at the time. And, before you know it, 30 or 40 years has gone by, and it’s too late to take advan­tage of the best asset we have to help us with retire­ment prepa­ra­tion — time.

With time on our side, com­pound­ing helps to make very dol­lar we save work to our advan­tage. The invest­ing blue­print I’ve devel­oped has four unique met­rics that help peo­ple under­stand how time impacts their invest­ing results. These met­rics, out­lined in chap­ter 3 of my book, help peo­ple feel like they’re mak­ing progress towards their goals and keep them moti­vat­ed to stick with their plan.

Millennials attitudes towards investing

It’s one thing to be 50, 60, or 70 and real­ize you haven’t pre­pared. It’s a whole oth­er thing to be 20 or 30 and ignore the exam­ple of the gen­er­a­tions before us.

The baby boomers saw their par­ents, and their par­ents’ pen­sions and did­n’t have the sense of urgency I would expect from the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion watch­ing their boomer par­ents unable to retire.

This opin­ion piece in the Wall Street Journal is trou­bling. Especially towards the end where they quote that 2/3 of mil­len­ni­als think invest­ing is like gam­bling. It dri­ves me crazy. Investing is some­thing every­one has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to under­stand, for them­selves and their fam­i­lies. You can’t just wing it and be unem­ployed for 35 years and be like “oh well”.

It real­ly trou­bles me. It’s why I wrote The Elephant in the Room has a Paycheck, and why I work with friends to coach them on set­ting up a plan to cre­ate a side income stream from their invest­ments. People under­stand the idea of free­lanc­ing, and cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple income streams. It’s easy to set­up, easy to ignore the fear-based news that makes you think you’re not good enough, and easy to track your progress so you can focus on what’s mean­ing­ful to you.

The book is sell­ing well, and has sold in five dif­fer­ent coun­tries already. I hope I can help make a dif­fer­ence in your finan­cial life.