I regularly have folks come to my office that have experienced a number of financial setbacks.
Perhaps they are now in their 50s with very little saved for retirement. Their past looks bigger than their future. They know they need to do something, but every time they allow themselves to think about it, they feel overwhelmed with discouragement. In fact, the discouragement seems to almost paralyze them.
Their soul is out of air. They are deflated.
One thing I know they don’t need is another lecture about what they’ve done wrong. And they don’t need a magazine article taped to the mirror about 401K catch-up provisions.
These people need hope.
Hope is not just a vague wish. It’s a confident expectation that something good is coming in the future. It isn’t even necessarily certainty…it’s just a feeling that you’ve got a good fighting chance.
And too many people have convinced themselves they don’t even have that. They think of themselves as dead in the water. Some version of “let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die…” is playing in their head.
When people come to me in this state of mind, a pep talk is just irritating to them. They don’t believe pep talks. What they need to see (and desperately want to believe exists) is a road map.
That’s what a financial plan ought to provide: a road map of how to get out of the quagmire you’re in.
You know you can’t work forever, and once you’re retired, fired, let go or put out to pasture, you’ll experience what I heard someone call “cliff retirement.” That is, you retire and your lifestyle falls off a cliff.
If you are in this situation, my suggestion is to find a financial planner who will help you do a realistic assessment of where you are and what it will take to retire.
Unless you’ve got a rich uncle on his deathbed, this will probably involve some combination of saving more now, spending less now (and perhaps in the future), working longer and possibly working some in the early years of your retirement.
So yes, it is a complicated puzzle with many moving parts. But it’s your puzzle and you need help putting it together.
You don’t need this sugar coated. You need to see the facts laid out in all their dire reality. Then you need to understand just what it will take to get to the place you need to be financially. And then you need someone to help you do the things necessary to live out the plan you and your planner put together.
That process—involving reality and a road map—might just be what you need to give yourself permission to believe that you might actually make it.
And that belief… is called hope.
