Larry Weidel explains the money game and why financial planning matters at every life stage. Without a plan, you risk financial hardship later. He walks through common challenges people face and how to build toward financial independence and retirement.
Let's talk about the money game. Here's where we are set up to fail. As we go through life, nobody tells us we're playing a money game. How can you win the American dream if you don't know the rules, the foundation, Forget about all your morals and your this and then the other. If you can't pay your bills, it doesn't matter what else is going on in your life. You got to be able to survive financially. Nobody tells us in all of our preparing for being out on our own, really how the game works, certainly not in the educational system. And so let's look at the first 20 years of your life. You're out there and you're studying and you're growing and your parents are taking care of you. You're just going after all the growth things. Sure, you got your little problems, but one of them is not worried about supporting yourself. Your parents, ideally, anyway, your parents around there taking care of that for you. Now, the next 40, 50 years of your life, things change. Now you're out on your own, things change. You're out working, you're out supporting yourself, and hopefully you're out saving because what say thing? Yeah. And the idea is you want to reach this point down the road where you don't have to do that anymore. You want to have accumulated a pile of money. So the idea in life, you only have two sources of income. Either you working or you having money that's working for you. So you start off here, not a big concern of you making money. You're just trying to get ready to get out on your own. Then the idea is you're going to work and you're going to save, and it's going to take a while for it to start to compound, but then it's going to, you know, you might have some ups and downs, but then, boom, this thing, you're going to accumulate enough money where one day you can reach that point where you retire and you may keep working, but you don't have to. And then at that point, you'll take this pile of money you've accumulated and let it work for you. And then over the next few years, maybe you're not richer than your wildest dreams, but you got enough money in there to last you to the end of your life, where you can go out there and you can do the fun things with the grandkids or with a little travel or things you've never had time for. See, these are the good times that we all want to get to. Now, what happens to us usually is something quite different. We get out started in life, we get married, we have kids and we're puttering along and you know, you buy some furniture, your car tears up, you need a new roof for the house, get some kids, they've had some expenses, maybe they need the dental work. And then all of a sudden, you know, you're getting your loans, you know, you get them paid off a little bit, then you get a little more loan. And as you find you go through life, what happens is where you should be up here, you wind up being down here. And with most people, the reason for that is the big flaw is lack of a plan. See, you're playing a game, you don't know you're playing. You don't have a plan. And until you get a plan, until you wake up and the reality, you know, unfortunately the reality kicks in too much, too late. Where people are way down here, they've got too little time left to do anything about it. And so this is why you, you know, unfortunately you say, well, that's not a problem for me, I'm going to work all my life. Yeah, but your body may not feel the same way. And although in your mind you're going to keep working, your body can say, that's it for me, you brutalized me long enough, I ain't working anymore. And then you're at the, you know, you come to where you got to get charity from your kids or for the government or whatever. Not a good place to be folks. What you want to do, if you're somewhere along this way, you want to get a plan and you want to turn this thing around and get yourself back on track to get as far back up towards where you need to be as possible. That may be getting a part time job, that may be getting rid of some of your expenses. But first of all, you got to get control of your finances because it doesn't matter that you didn't know the rules, it didn't matter all the things that happened to you. What matters is the clock is ticking. And if you want to be financially independent and you want to win the money game, then end of your life you've got to take charge and make it happen for yourself. Get a plan, get started as fast as possible. That's the money game.
