Making a major life change? These financial steps can help
Making a major life change? These financial steps can help
There are life milestones like graduating college, moving into your own apartment or house, or retiring. The conventional financial wisdom for these kinds of things is to save, keep a nest egg and then you’ve got the money you need when that milestone comes along.
But one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is that while traditional milestones might be great, life often has other plans. And so whether you’re setting out to make a big change or you’re caught reacting to whatever gets thrown your way, now seems like a good time to review exactly how you might prepare for the next stage of life. A major part of that review is keeping track of your finances and figuring out exactly what kind of money you’ll need to get where you need to be.
Jill Schlesinger, CBS News business analyst and a certified financial planner, is out with a new book laying the groundwork for that planning. It’s called “The Great Money Reset: Change Your Work, Change Your Wealth, Change Your Life.” She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: You think about planning for these milestones in a different way, don’t you?
Jill Schlesinger: I think that milestones are wonderful, but then life happens. And I’ll give you the best example that literally just happened to me five minutes ago before I got on the line with you. I had a guy who contacted me through my podcast, saving for a while now, in his mid-40s. He and his wife had been excellent savers. They have two young children, and his 4-year-old child [was] diagnosed with lymphoma, and it’s blowing up their entire lives. And the financial aspect of their lives actually plays a part in this, because they have a home that is not actually conducive to what this child’s condition is likely to play out to be. They’re going to have to use some of the money they thought they were going to use for retirement to manage this. And while that is the most extreme case, the less extreme case is that you might change, in your life. You may have different priorities when you’re in your 20s or 30s. Or maybe something comes from left field that encourages you to maybe say, “Is this actually the way I want to continue living? Is this the pace of my life that I want to continue? And is there something different for me?” And if the answer is yes, and you kind of get a sense of what you think that thing is, how can we help you use your money to achieve whatever that new goal or milestone might be?
Brancaccio: Well, it comes up a lot for a lot of people during pandemic, right. I mean, certainly not everyone had this kind of leeway in their lives. But, in many cases, it gave us time to think about what we really want. It also gave us a new sense of the capriciousness of life. And that, if we’ve always wanted to do something, we should do it. So how do we think about setting ourselves up to be ready when we want to change, or life forces us to change?
Schlesinger: OK, step one, calculate the resources at your disposal, including your assets and your current income. Step two, calculate your debt and other liabilities. Step three, consider your housing situation. The fourth step, and I spend an entire extra chapter on this, is considering your spending habits. But I have to say that this is not a pleasant part of the experience. For someone like me — I mean, this is really exposing yourself. And you know, what’s funny about it, it’s not so much that it stinks to have to list out all the things you spend money on. But what happens is you almost get embarrassed. I was talking about this with somebody recently. And she said, “You know, I know I can afford it. But it’s almost embarrassing for me to look at this, I feel ashamed of the money that I’m spending.” Don’t make a judgement about it. Just list it out. You can make the judgment later about whether you want to continue spending as you’re spending or not. But really just do it.
Brancaccio: Jill, I will try on that particular point. We’re pretty economical in the household. Except I don’t even want to look at the list of the restaurant meals, right? “Really? We had to go out that often?”
Schlesinger: The reason why you should put aside the value judgment is like, you are where you are. There’s no reason to get yourself worked up in this part of the process, you really don’t. You will have choices later about whether you wish to continue those spending patterns or not.
The last part that I think is incredibly important is what kinds of promises or obligations did you make to others? What do I mean by that? If you’ve got a 16-year-old kid, and you said to your kid, “Mom and I are going to help you pay for college.” And now you want to do this big money reset, and you realize, “Wait a minute. If I didn’t have to pay for college, this would be great, I could do it.” You already made that obligation. The kid’s 16, you’re not going to pull the rug out from under her at this point. Have you made an obligation to your aging parents? Have you made kind of a pinky swear with your siblings about what you would do around that?
I would just say this, that when people think about their obligations, as you age, at different points in your life, your obligations and your your feelings change around this. And, as I said, going through the pandemic really made many of us feel like, “I gotta pay attention to this, this and this,” whatever those things are, and pay attention to those things. And don’t let this horrible, horrible once-in-a-century pandemic go by without taking some lessons from it.
Brancaccio: It’s hard though. I was so delighted to see in your book, this one detail, because it’s one of my things, too, this clumsy term from economics. I don’t even think use the term, but the concept’s there: hyperbolic discounting. You know, this week and next month seems super clear to human beings and the future seems almost always out of focus and hazy. We’re bad at envisioning ourselves in the future. And you think about “now” versus “then” in an interesting way in the book.
Schlesinger: I think that when you look at your future, you have to do the best you can do, right? In that, you’re making a guess. When I was 21 years old, here’s what I thought my future was: I thought, “Well, I’m a commodities options trader right now. I’m working on the floor of the COMEX. I’m going to do this for a few years, and then I’m going to go work for my dad’s firm on the American Stock Exchange. I’ll end up being in his firm, eventually, I’ll take it over, I’ll be a specialist on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. That’s how I will live out my career. And then that’ll be that.
I mean, there is no floor of the American Stock Exchange anymore. That’s number one. Number two, I didn’t like trading. Three years into the mission, I was like, “Wait, this is a terrible job for me. I thought it was the right job for me, it’s a terrible job for me.” And what I mean to say is that it’s great to have some future goals and aspirations. I worry that sometimes we get trapped by that, that hope and that dream of what the future is. And that, you know, you do have to live for today, but you have to try to plan — I would hope that part of the idea of having a great money reset is that you do have the ability to change things. It may be working out well for a few years, or five years, or 10 years. But it may be that actually, you cannot do what you are doing anymore, you must find a new path. And if that’s the kind of feeling that you have, the book and my experience is that if you can just weave your way through this, it is simply a process and process is great. And so what I would hope for people is to know that you don’t have to feel out of control with this.
Brancaccio: We can briefly go back to the conversation you had just before you and I talked in which you had a family that had been saving, it sounds like they were good savers. But then a medical emergency seems to be changing that, the health of a child. I mean, thank goodness they saved, right?
Schlesinger: Yeah, I mean, if you only live for today, then you have no options in the future, right? So the thing that’s fascinating to me is that I don’t really find that I encounter a ton of people who are saying, “Oh, my God, all I want to do is save as much as I possibly can today and never do anything ever again as quickly as possible.” I feel like that’s an old-fashioned notion of what retirement is. What I do think is, where we are today is, as we have a workforce that is kind of shrinking, because baby boomers are retiring every day, right? That there are people who have a lot of opportunities later in their careers. And if you want to take advantage of a lot of those opportunities, you have to do some preparation in advance. You have to do some saving, you have to do some responsible activities where you say, “Well, you know, I could do this. But if I saved a little bit of extra money today, that opens up a ton of opportunities in the future.”
And so what I think is kind of cool about taking control of your financial life and really starting to try to squirrel away some money is that you’re not doing it because you want to live a monastic life today, and then essentially never work again when you’re 56 years old. Maybe you do. But what you’re really trying to do is say, “How can I balance what I want to live today, how I want to live today, generally, and then say, “Well, wait a minute, if I were to defer some of my fun, and I were to save some money, and I were to kind of put a generalized plan in place, I might have many more opportunities when I’m 40s, 50s, 60s.”
I can’t tell you the number of people who contacted me amid the pandemic and said to me, “It’s not that I don’t want to work. I just don’t want to work like this.” And if that’s you, if it’s the “like this” part, or I don’t want to do this particular job, but I do want to keep feeling grounded and contributing to some larger effort beyond myself — if I have something that I really want to do, it will likely require that you’re putting some time and effort into what you’re doing today, and deferring some fun, saving for the future. And instead of thinking like, “I’m going to end up saving for this nondescript period of time called retirement,” essentially you say, “No, I’m just building my opportunity fund.”
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