This Stuff is Hard

By Brad Thomason, CPA
 
 
There is a common response to learning what is actually involved in doing an adequate job of planning, preparing for, and managing a winning retirement effort.
 
That response is something along the lines of, “Man, this stuff is hard.”
 
What people mean when they say that is that it will be time consuming and it will require some effort.  First you have to get a feel for all of the things you need to be paying attention to.  Then you have to pay attention to them while making decisions, moving assets, reacting to life happening as the years go by.
 
So, yea.  If hard is synonymous with not-easy, then I would agree:  this stuff is hard.
 
But here’s the thing.  So what?
 
Anyone who has been on the planet for forty or fifty years (or more) and has been even modestly successful at anything, has behind them a long record of working through things which were not easy.
 
I bet you have plenty of your own war stories that you could share.
 
Facing the prospect of doing something hard?  How is that any different from what you have already been doing now for years?
 
We spend a lot of time and effort trying to provide resources to help you focus in quickly on the major moving parts, discuss the details as efficiently as we know how, and organize your thoughts as your knowledge base grows.  But as much as we would like to, we can’t do a lot more than that.  Retirement is a big thing: and in this context that’s not a reference to the importance of the impact, but just the sheer size of the quantity of stuff you have to deal with.
 
We can’t make the topic smaller.  You can’t master the topic without putting in the time and effort.  Doing so won’t be easy.
 
But you’re an old hand at not-easy, already.  Plenty of hard things have already folded under your effort and persistence.  You can handle this hard thing, too.  Right?