Managing YOUR Finances & Emotions

Managing your finances, and/or investments, is a key component to any financial plan. However, managing our EMOTIONS around money is the far larger task!

The media’s constant haranguing about what the market did (or is doing) today, plays a HUGE part in investors feeling that they must ACT on the media’s ‘news’. These precipitous actions derail financial plans, so why do investors fall prey? The media is expert in their mission and too few investors have their own plan in place to combat these addictive, high pressure admonitions to ‘do something now’.

We’re here to help! We’ll distill what’s important to know about sound investing, allowing you to ‘escape’ the 24 x 7 ‘financial noise’ of the radio, TV, internet or any other ‘breaking news’ venue.

I certainly understand, and fully appreciate, investors’ penchant for wanting to know more about investing. My Investing Smart; Investing to Win speeches drew overwhelming responses of hunger for knowledge such that I sifted through myriad financial terms, and culled out which ones I feel are relevant, in my Ms. Morrison’s Dictionary of Useful Financial Investment Terms, because so many of my new clients didn’t understand the financial terms. And, just like visiting a foreign country, where the language is different from that which you speak each day, it’s helpful to understand a few nouns and verbs in that ‘foreign’ language, right? So also with investing; best to start with identifying terms that may otherwise be ‘foreign’ to you. You can pick up your copy here for a whopping $2.99.

It follows then, that once we know the ‘language/jargon’ we’ll be a step or two closer to understanding financial strategies, AND why they work.

At Empowered Retirement, Inc., we provide what we feel is important to understand about the markets, and how to construct an effectively diversified portfolio, yet we do so ONLY in tandem with discovering your target.

No bowler tosses the bowling ball down the lane without knowing their target in order to score big. No skeet shooter pulls the trigger without aiming directly at the bullseye of their target. No parent enrolls their child in school without a target/goal of that child completing that school year. Why should your investing be any different?

Too few investors have identified whether they are saving for:

Their child’s (or grandchild’s) education at a State College or Private University
A second home where the family would spend vacations, and entertain friends
A rental property where the rental income and possible tax advantages provide an income stream
A private secondary school for a child’s education
Establishing your own business
Padding your retirement nest egg
Annual travel, or extensive-round-the-world excursions
Paying for flute, piano, karate, etc lessons
Providing for a special needs child(ren)
Paying for a parent’s elder care
Pre-funding a wedding or bar/bat mitzvah
Insuring your life to plug the ‘lost income hole’ to those they love
Buying a boat
Hiring a personal trainer to regain your health
Buying a new car
Buying a new wardrobe at your new reduced size
Contributing to your favorite charity fundraiser
Tithing & giving offerings to your church or synagogue
Providing gap income for when you morph from full time to part time
Providing daycare for your newborn(s)
Funding alternative health scans that aren’t covered by insurance
Transferring assets to your kids and/or grandkids
Creating your own bitcoin dynasty, etc. – you get the point.

Clearly, we may be saving for ANYTHING, yet it needs to be SOMETHING! It’s astonishing how much the mere act of defining what we’re aiming for, stokes our commitment to achieving it. At Empowered Retirement, Inc., we help you formulate a plan to achieve your goals, and then we congratulate you on your victories, it’s really that simple. Yet absent a PLAN, too many investors can get side tracked, especially during turbulent markets.

You’ll identify your short-term targets and some long-term targets; we’ll discuss appropriate timelines and priorities for each goal, and then we’ll build a portfolio that we believe–based upon decades of research–will have the best chance of getting you there, always with an eye to tamping down short-term volatility.

Because each investor is different, each investor’s goals have different price tags, and ‘due dates’. So it follows that each investor’s portfolio should be built exclusively around matching those goals, and future goals, again, all the while limiting short-term volatility.

Need there be any more proof that generic ‘financial plans’ or worse yet ‘best investments now’ plastered on magazine covers are nothing more than advertising hype? One size doesn’t fit all in investing, so avoid getting swept up into the media noise. The media has ONE agenda; to retain your eyeballs. clearly the media is not a source for financial advice.

The sooner investors recognize that the media’s agenda is NOT aligned with their agenda, the better.

While some investors may be equipped and disciplined to manage their finances on their own, We’ve not met them in our collective 60+ years of professional practice.

Typically, mature women realize that they don’t have the expertise, training or time required to:

Perform surgery on themselves
Dare open the hood of our car to pinpoint that darned clicking noise
Fill a cavity in their mouth
Rewire their house’s electrical system
Coach professional basketball players
Draft their own will & powers of attorney
Excel at most anything professional, outside their area of expertise

The education, training and discipline that is required in each of these specialties is obvious, yet particularly in the area of investing folks seem to be lured into thinking they not only CAN, they SHOULD do their own investing, since, after all, there’s an overwhelming amount of ‘financial advice’ abounding everywhere from TV, radio, print, social media, and cocktail party banter, to infer that ‘investing is easy’ and moreover anyone who’s not doing their investing themselves is otherwise ‘stupid’.

After all, everyone SHOULD know what they’re doing with so much information at our fingertips, right? Wrong! The proliferation of information is actually costing us not only significant financial returns (and the lost compounding on same) in addition to costing us valuable time since few people know what they need to know, or where to find it; hence, allow me to grant you permission to turn off and tune out the ‘financial news’/noise stations. Become deaf to their marketing chatter, for your own financial sake and success.

Some investors try their luck at day trading stocks, or looming over Value Line or Morningstar reports, or Kiplinger’s, Forbes, Money Magazine’s latest hot ideas, identifying yesterday’s winners, and, invariably, investing at the top. Think of it, when do investments get good ink? When they’re at their top. And given the cyclical nature of the stock market, what goes up will surely come down, and generally what is down may indeed rise in value. So we, as women, need to think BEYOND what appears obvious to understand the need for a carefully thought out financial PLAN; one that will weather any economic climate, and one which we will ADHERE to, especially when the markets are embroiled in chaos, and less educated investors are panic-selling, locking in permanent losses.

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