Although it’s my birthday today, I’m building a business and working on marketing that will attract new clients, so I don’t see that I’ll be taking much time to “celebrate”. I meet with friends regularly, and even had coffee with a friend planned this morning, but that got moved. In my opinion, true friendships aren’t like batteries, they don’t lose their value because you haven’t charged them recently. At least they shouldn’t be like batteries. If I liked and respected you last year, I don’t see a reason that I wouldn’t like and respect you this year, or next decade; despite us not finding time in our busy lives for one another.
Well, as time passes and I get older, its easy to see just how quickly it flies by. My nephews, each like younger brothers when we were young together, are 40 and 38 and have their own families. Motorcycles, which used to play such a key role in my getting around sunny and warm Phoenix, are getting older and I’m wondering if its time at 12 and 21 years old to replace them or let them go. I ride less since travel more often is for business and I’m wearing a suit and sometimes a tie despite temperatures at 100-degrees plus. Not so effective an impression upon my respect of a client’s financial future is the suit when it shows up on a motorcycle… Fun? definitely; but all things in moderation.
When you’re planning your financial future, time is the most potent factor in growing your retirement savings or your family wealth. While it’s never to late to start planning, it can only be too late to achieve the results you’d like to see within the given time frame. More importantly, it is never too early to start planning to grow your savings and your wealth. The more time you leave yourself, the easier it is to achieve your goal. If you start late, you can sometimes “catch up” with good cash flows or lump sums, but financial growth is truly most effective with compound interest over time rather than using just your own capital.
The time factor in investing is very much like climbing a mountain. If you start early enough, you can take the long, gently increasing grade up the mountain wearing only hiking shoes and carrying only water and and a granola bar. The later you start, the more work you must do in shorter time, and climbing the same mountain to achieve similar results involves climbing gear, a mountain axe, ropes, tents, a base camp… When you need to climb just as high in a shorter amount of time, it may feel like your climbing straight up a sheer rock face. So when you’re planning your financial future for retirement, building a family legacy, or saving to start your own business: do it now, do it now, do it now! Even if you don’t have money to invest, sit down with someone you trust, fine tune your budget, gather the information you need to plan a strategy, and set some financial goals. You’ll get farther and you’ll get there faster.
Retirement has nothing to do with your age. When you have enough money to cover your living expenses through your foreseeable future, you don’t need to go to work and trade time for dollars anymore. I am fortunate and blessed to have left a job that wasn’t a healthy situation for me emotionally or spiritually and (once again) learn yet another new skill set that has allowed me to be in business for myself, control my own calendar, and spend time on things that are more important to me than earning a living. The government through Social Security (or the “socialist insecurity system”) leaves everyone with the impression that you qualify for retirement at 65 or 67. I have news for you: you qualify for retirement at any point you have enough money to cover your living expenses.
The markets are not nearly as “booming” as the mainstream media hype would have you believe. Browse the news feeds under my Publications tab and see what millionaires and billionaires who send their money out to work rather than trade their time for dollars have to say about current market values and stability. The hour is late indeed to seek a safe haven from the coming storm.
I encourage you to join my website (free membership) read the articles, watch the videos, scan through the news pages, and associate yourself with the mindset of people that look beyond trading time for dollars. Your real wealth in this life is in your time and how you put it to use and invest that time for a “return”. Currently, our educational system and our government have our people working more and more hours for less and less value that we can use to care for our families and our futures. I hope that the time I’m spending here on my website, on my Youtube channel, and on social media helps you and the community I’m building here both realize and bring to fruition their true value by freeing up more of their true wealth: their time.
In recent years I’ve come to the conclusion that I do what I want to do on my birthday. Today, I’ve chosen to communicate an important message to those that might read it. I very often call those that I want to speak with, because that’s what I want to do on my birthday. I’ll spend time playing my guitar, I’ve taken a walk in the sun, and later today I have a meeting with a young man to discuss how I can help him retire up to 10 years earlier than he may have expected. … and those are a few of my favorite things! Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to call my sister!
Warm regards,
