Today’s Prep:
What does retirement planning have in common with growing a garden? Both need patience, vision, determination, and the proper tools to succeed. Eric Peterson explores all the comparisons on this week’s podcast.
Equipping Points:
1:06 Plants don’t grow overnight
- If you want to have a BLT for dinner, you can’t buy a tomato plant and stick it in the ground and expect to eat tomato that evening.
- A lot of clients who retire want to go into gardening because it’s something that you do almost every day but also something that makes you focus on a longer-term goal. Some people struggle, however, with that level of patience. This is true in a lot of younger people who don’t have enough of a long-term focus and don’t see how they need to build up their financial future.
4:18 Keep the weeds and pests away
- If you don’t pull the weeds in your garden, they’ll take it over and choke out your plants and prevent them from growing.
- In the financial world, hidden fees are the weeds.
- Keep in mind which investments carry fees. If you’re investing in things like stocks and mutual funds, there are fees present and you need to be aware of their existence.
- You can’t always eliminate weeds or fees, but you can at least keep them under control and in check.
- Unlike weeds, which aren’t really ever helpful, fees can still be worth paying if you’re getting good value from the service or strategy to make them worth it.
7:00 You need the right tool for the right task
- Your neighbors would laugh at you if they caught you trying to use a water hose to dig a hole or if they found you watering your plants by scooping tiny amounts of water out of a bucket with a shovel and dumping the water on the plants.
- For a financial parallel, consider CDs and money market accounts. These aren’t designed for long-term investing or keeping up with inflation. That doesn’t mean they’re terrible tools, they just aren’t right for that job or responsibility. So, don’t shun a tool just because you don’t understand it, or you’ve used it for the wrong function in the past.
Related Podcasts:
Today’s Takeaway:
“A lot of times people will come in and be close-minded about tools, saying they only want to be invested in stocks, mutual funds, ETFs. Then you’re only using half the toolbox to accomplish your goals. – Eric Peterson“
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