Plan on purposeful planning means just that. Have a plan — execute it on purpose. Oh, and ya might wanna add, ‘be boring’.

Download Audio

 

Transcript:   You know, nothing has had more traction and more of a draw to the average investor than what I call Purposeful Planning because it hits people where they live, because they want to do things on purpose and they want to have a plan that points out what they should be doing. I want to just talk now about the most important part of anybody’s plan as far as I’m concerned as an advisor. You should look at your plan as not being exciting. The results should be very exciting. Retiring maybe sooner than you thought was possible or at least was maybe more income than you thought you might be getting, that’s exciting. On the journey to retirement, you want everything to be as boring as yesterday’s mud. You don’t want things to be exciting because 9 times out of 10 in my experience, and I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, excitement isn’t fun. It’s because things went awry. Things that Murphy brought into the picture. Now we all know what Murphy said: “If anything can go wrong, it will and at the perfectly wrong time.” It was a buddy he had named O’Toole. O’Toole’s corollary to Murphy’s Law was even better and I think more realistic. O’Toole said that Murphy was an optimist, and I think he’s right. In almost 45 years of being licensed, I have learned that not only if it can go wrong, it often will and at the most horrific time, but that a lot of times, even though you might have anticipated that possibility, you never really anticipate the potential consequences for how horrible they might be. When you’re boring in plan, everything’s vanilla, never any chocolate topping even, it’s just ice cream in a bowl with a spoon and you alone in the room. That’s the kind of boredom you want in your retirement plan. You’re not trying to be a pioneer. God forbid you’re being on the bleeding edge. Lord, I hate that, and this whole thing about well yeah, we’re thinking out of the box. Well, when you’re out of the box a lot, you’re alone. There’s the box because the box works. Nobody’s going to really ask you how you got to your retirement until they find out the income you created with your plan was way more than the average. When somebody says, “Well, you’re going to retire in six months, huh?” “Yeah, I am.” “Well, what’s going to be, if you don’t mind, I’m a good friend, what’s that going to be?” “Well, we’re going to be doing around $16,500 a month.” All conversation stops at that point, doesn’t it? Now they want to know how you made that happen. Make your plan boring but just make it dynamic. Use synergy whenever you can. Stay away from the cliff’s edge. Don’t walk close to any red lines, and just be boring. You do that for long enough and you’re going to retire better than 98% of Americans.