This is Dan Thompson and welcome again to our Wise Money Tools podcast. I want to ask you a question here. So if you could go back in time and see yourself, let’s give ourselves, 15 or 20 years—what advice would you give yourself? Sometimes I think, if I could go see myself 20 years ago, what advice would I give myself? You remember that show Back to the Future II? This is where Biff, since he goes forward in time, and he gets this almanac of every sport winners, the winners of every sport. Then when he goes back to his normal time, he’s able to bet the winners for the next decade and becomes a cagillionaire. So, barring being able to go back and tell yourself that hey, buy Google when it first comes out or Yahoo or Amazon or something like that, nothing really financially striking as that. But just what kind of advice would you give yourself? Maybe something on as far as marriage, be a better person. I don’t know. Take out the trash, whatever that is, or maybe something like cash. You buy a lot of cars, maybe cut down on your cards and save some money or buy a smaller house or invest and save more. Ok, now, here you are at your particular stage in life. Are there some things you wish you would have done differently? Did you over commit to debt? Did you under commit to investments? Were you too risky with your investments? Did you not take advantage of opportunities as they came along? So, what would that look like if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice? What would you do differently? Well, sadly, none of us can go back in time. All we can really do is start from here. Doing what we wish we would have done maybe years ago, but we can at least get started at this point. Let’s not get too discouraged over some of the mistakes that we might have made, but let’s be encouraged that we live in a country, we live in a time where we’re able to make those changes and do better. I always find it interesting when I meet people. One of the things that seems to plague everybody at some point in their life is that darn debt—whether it’s a house forever, too many cars, credit cards which are a killer. But that seems to be something that I think if people could go back and change and do differently, they would. Maybe they would have to do without something for another year or two while they save or got their finances in order, who knows. But that debt just seems to be a burden that a lot of people just get tired of carrying around. Here’s my challenge to you for this week. Go back and think about some of the things that you would have done differently, some of the mistakes that you might have made, and write them down. And then just see if there are ways that you can combat that for the future. Make sure that before you go into debt or buy that next car or before you decide how much you want to invest and where to invest it. That you’re really thinking it through and making a good strategy and a game plan. Because again, we don’t have that winners’ almanac where we can go back and do everything perfectly but we can tell our self, right now, right today, what we want to do differently going forward. So this is a short podcast, I know, but it kind of struck me. It’s something that might be useful to everybody out there to think about what they can do going forward a little bit differently. Well, that’s about it. I will talk to you on our next podcast. Until then, take care.