Are you into bloodletting? Believe it or not there was a time, and it doesn’t really seem like that long ago, only a couple hundred years ago, that if someone was ill the doctors, at the time, thought that they could make the patient well by getting rid of bad blood. They would actually let blood out of the system. In fact, a lot of people don’t realize that the barber poles that have the red swirl around them was because barbers at one point in time were famous for bloodletting to try to keep you healthy. Who better to go to than someone with a very sharp instrument to help let blood? In fact, George Washington did not die of an illness or a disease, but it was due to the bloodletting that his doctor performed on him.
The reason I’m talking about bloodletting is that there can be purposeful bloodletting and bad bloodletting. This last week I gave blood, as I do three times a year, to a local blood drive. I like to do double reds. It takes a little bit more time, but it is a very impactful thing to do, if you can do it. Currently, I am nearing 7 gallons of blood that I have given over my lifetime. I don’t pat myself on the back for that because I know of many people who have given double or triple that amount. This is just something that I can do several times a year where hopefully I can take a little bit of my time and make an impact in someone else’s life.
The reason I bring up bloodletting is because I know a lot of people that unfortunately do that with their retirement accounts. They bleed them dry whenever they can because there is something they want today that they believe is more important than having the “banked blood” for the tomorrows when they really need it. Let’s say in their retirement years we will see this when someone cancels a 401K when they go from one job to another, and they think the money can be available for them to do something other than planning for old age and retirement. Instead, they do some bloodletting and the blood is not there when they need it in the future.
I thought about that this morning as I was reading some of the instructions from last week that I got (for giving blood). I know this is very important for women, but also for men, it says that most blood donors need to pay attention to their iron levels, especially those individuals who are frequent donors (for women, those who give two times a year and for men, those who give three times a year). It’s about making sure that your blood supply, the blood supply that’s going through your body, is as healthy as possible.
Are you doing that with your money? Are you making sure that you are being as healthy as possible? In this case they are making the recommendations for iron supplements, it says: “replace iron lost by taking an oral iron supplement daily for 60 days immediately following your blood donation” and then they just recommend an OTC iron supplement or multi-vitamin that contains a lot of iron. Yet, if I use the example of people bleeding their retirement accounts dry before they get to retirement, not only do we not want you to be bloodletting, but let’s make your blood supply i.e., your money supply, as strong and as healthy as it possibly can be. As red as it possibly can be. As powerful as it possibly can be.
If you have thought about pulling some money out prior to age 59 ½ or I’ve also seen people who have just retired that immediately start pulling huge amounts of money out of their retirement accounts without any backup supply, and I worry about that individual who may be anemic someday. What I mean by anemic is that they are short of iron, they are short of blood, and at that point in time as we all may not qualify to give blood, we have to live on our own supply.
You and I, we want to be reliant upon ourselves, and not rely upon the donations of others. There are those individuals that do need our help. That’s why we should be there for those individuals. But, it’s also important that you take care of yourself. Take your financial multi-vitamin. Don’t bleed yourself when you should be keeping the blood supply for yourself and for your future self.
