Money and Its Management

I was dreading our meeting with your financial planner, Larry. 

After all, I had not been opening  the 401K statements for the past six months because I didn’t want to know just how much we had lost.

Our “nest egg” for retirement,  the money set aside to pay for college tuition, the money we had faithfully been  withdrawing from our pay checks every month, all of this had taken a huge battering.  All this on top of J’s job loss and the  sudden stopping  of all contributions to our 401Ks.

 I had been fretting over the numerous mistakes we had made. Why hadn’t we done as some of our friends who after they had inherited money or sold a house had just  left their money sitting  in  a CD’s while they were waiting to figure out what to do next and had  not been  impacted by these losses... Or others who had seen it coming, and had taken out of their money from the  stock market before this latest unprecedented collapse?

 I was no longer  sure where to direct my anger. At the boss who had laid off my husband, or the CEO of this corporation, or at the mortgage industry and all the bad loans that had been made and sold, or at the hedge fund managers and their crazy gambling or the banks managers who were compensated even as their business failed with yearly salaries that were ten times more than what we would make in a life time. 

Or should I be mad at our financial planner who did not advise us to  pull all our money out of stock before they fell?

 I was mad at all of them.  We  had been the responsible ones, the ones who knew we would need to save in order to retire. The ones who  had  faithfully been paying off our home loan, not borrowed from our house, not taken lines of credit,  not run up credit card debt.  We had carefully drawn up a plan  with  the services of a financial planner  and what came of it?  Wouldn’t we have been better off not paying that  percent for Larry to manage our money only to  see so much of it lost like this?

But there he was, the real man, starting right into  his presentation by putting in front of us reams and reams of papers covered with numbers. This was our life.  I might as well have been looking at a foreign language. It was so different from the words I’d been writing about in this blog. But in it’s way it was actually weirdly comforting.

 This  gray haired, balding man, his desk  cluttered  with binders, his walls covered with old diplomas,  educating us about  the last 80 years of the market, what it had taught us, as if he were  someone who had seen it all  and knew  what had happened,  how the bursting of the housing bubble was one thing but no one had predicted the credit market crashing as it did, the major institutions all falling at once.

I heard him saying the words I thought about every night:We don’t yet know where the bottom is  but it’s going to get worse, and the market may go down even further before it stabilizes.   There will be more blood  letting.

 And somehow even these words were comforting, because there was someone else talking to me about IT: this biggest fear of mine.

 The comfort flooded me finally. I was in a conversation that could help me.

 You must keep perspective, keep level headed, look at what’s in front of you. There will be  more deflation, and then, massive inflation. So put on the seat belt, buckle in, hunker down, get your values straight, hang in there and support your family. Do what makes sense so you can feel good about what you are doing.

I sit back and breath, realizing  that we are no longer just talking about J and me, about a job or no job, but about planning, about stabilizing,  about our  kids, and  our future. 

This was reality therapy, money therapy. Something all of us needed right now. A sobering, clear headed talk about figures and planning.

 Larry was saying:  It is  not how much you make but how much you don’t lose in bad markets.

He was  talking  about  the wisdom one  gains from experience, and finally I realized why I am feeling more comfortable.   We want  this in our advisors.

 Larry puts it this way.  In this profession gray hair and no hair are a good thing because you know you are with someone  you has seen it all before and knows that  there is no short cut. 

So here it is, the story I have been telling, about why it’s important to turn to those who have experience   and learn these lessons.  We will survive the bi-polar cycles of the market , and find our way to back to doing the right  thing.

 Numbers are  numbers.  We can’t argue with them. It helps when there is someone who can explain them in a way that  actually makes sense.  In the midst of all this upheaval we are going through,  someone who helps us  feel that in the end it must all mean something.