I had an interesting meeting recently with a teacher who is getting ready to retire. We were talking about the retirement planning process and the similarities to teaching a classroom of children. She went on to use a couple of analogies that I thought might be helpful to other teachers about how we teach teachers how to make smart retirement decisions. One example was the math curriculum her school district uses. It uses a spiral type approach where you learn and then come back to it later to reinforce what you learned. That’s financial planning! Financial planning should go on forever – you keep coming back to the plan and change assumptions as stages of your life change. The other example came up as it relates to lesson plans. You know what they say about the best laid plans don’t you? Life doesn’t happen in a straight line just like things very often get derailed in the classroom. As long as you can recover from the distraction and get back on track everything eventually will be okay! Interesting to think about how you have probably been faced with financial challenges at some point in your life.
So next time you wonder whether it might be worth working with a financial advisor, look at yourself and wonder where our children would be without you!
