In our last two blog posts, we introduced you to Your 4 Financial Futures. In our first post, Your 4 Retirement Futures – Which Line Are You On? we talked about the four situations people find themselves in after retirement. Then, in When Is Now Going To Be The Right Time To Jump Retirement Lines?, we showed you that there is no better time than now to jump the line from where you are today to happy.
If you missed these posts, we encourage you to check them out:
Post One: Your 4 Financial FuturesPost Two: When Is Now Going To Be The Right Time To Jump Retirement Lines?
What Retirement Overwhelm Looks Like
If you had a fever, that’s a symptom something is wrong in your body. If you had a runny nose, that’s a symptom you might have a cold or allergies… or you could be suffering from Wegener's granulomatosis.
What the heck is that? It’s an inflammation of the blood vessels that can ultimately lead to problems with the kidneys, lungs, joints and other areas of the body.
The thing is, the early stages look just like the common cold. Most doctors and healthcare professionals would completely miss it.
And that’s important because how you treat those symptoms matters if you want to get better.
Same is true in financial and retirement planning.
What Are The Symptoms?
In fact, most people don’t even recognize they are having symptoms until it’s too late. For instance, two of the most common symptoms we see new clients exhibiting are actually signs of a much more serious problem: overwhelm and apprehension about their financial future.
Too many people are simply overwhelmed by the thought of financial planning. They just don’t know what they should be doing, or how their finances will look in the future.
For them, it feels an up and down kind of experience, with more downs than ups… They're not even sure their trend line is heading upwards and they're going to land in a good place in retirement.
From a planning perspective, they’re in a fog with no direction. They're really taking a piecemeal approach in their finances, and what kind of results does a piecemeal approach get you? Piecemeal results.
Move Past the Fear and Ignorance Line
The 4 Futures
The consequence is they get stuck beneath what we call the fear and ignorance line. They're never taught how plan and save for retirement. Because of this, they get trapped below this line. They're frozen by fear or ignorance and don't know how to get out of this space to make their way forward. Overwhelmed is a very stressful. The myth here is you just have to worry about your money all the time whereas, the truth is that it is possible to not worry about your financial planning, your financial future.
There are specific things you can do to know that you’re moving forward, and people who can act as your guide. Then you can put yourself in a position where you're not worried about your financial future in the same way and move to the next level.
The moment you recognize there's a process, and it's about having a plan and following it, you can jump that fear and ignorance line.
What often happens though, as people get over the line, they may move into the apprehensive space. This is where a very large portion of the population live, where they don't know quite yet if this is going to work out.
They probably have an idea or some goals, but the plan is to do what everyone else around them is doing. For instance, retiring at 67 because that’s when they want to start taking Social Security …
Those stuck in this space are always chasing the market, and they're not too sure where they're going to land. They're seeing some positive growth trend in their money, but can’t help but worry is it enough? Are they going to have enough when they need to retire, when they need that money in the time? The key here is to have a really crystal-clear plan that they use to keep moving forward.
The post will help you self-diagnose but it won’t give you everything you need… like the right prescription to get you better, faster. For that, you may want to jump on a call with our team. Book a free 15 minute call with us. There’s a quick form to see if it makes sense for us to talk, then you will be able to book in a time to chat.