Friday, February 6, 2015

Financial Planning – Part 6 – Looking back

The decisions I’ve outlined above spanned about 60 years of my life.  Some of them seemed like simple decisions at the time, but they may have had long-term consequences.  I can’t think of any major financial decisions I made that turned out badly, and if I had my life to live over, I don’t think I would have changed any of them

But of course those decisions were all made in the context of my own life.  For someone else the decisions may be entirely different and the decision for you may be even the opposite of what I chose. 

Perhaps you are younger and don’t work for a company who offers a defined-benefit pension but you instead have a defined-contribution pension (which is like a 401K that the company contributes to – thus you assume the risk of any investment decisions, and the company has no long-term obligations to you).  But since people these days are more and more mobile and they do not stay with the same company for most of their working life (as I did), having this type of defined-contribution pension that you can take with you can be very beneficial.


Other people may have additional things to consider – such as college loans (much bigger than the relatively small one I had), two incomes (in the above I chose to ignore the much smaller income that my wife had as a preschool teacher in a private Christian preschool), or larger/smaller families.  But the general principles that I’ve outlines could still be a good starting point.

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