Last Words

Leaving my house just before daybreak today I heard something on the radio that made me change the article I had drafted. It was for me at least, poignant. It is now nearly two years since my late wife Lindsay passed away. I’ve written previously about the dreadful period that we go through just before death, but I have never considered, beyond her compassion for me when speaking her last words, the power those words held.

Sitting at my desk now as the sun attempts to break through the gloom provides a wonderful metaphor for the passage from poignant sadness to hope and future excitement.

It almost seems disloyal to consider those last words as holding a future of promise. I always took them to be permission to move on and live my life. To find love again to do the things I had always dreamt of, but I had not taken those words to be encouragement. Now I can see that is exactly what they were.

Like any married couple Lindsay and I had our ups and downs, but throughout we had a simple pact that I would do all I possibly could to help her riding career and once she had retired all our energy could be directed at my business. In her last words to me Lindsay gave me the one last push she could.

My working life is dedicated to helping people solve problems, plan for their futures and to navigate the unending complexities of our legislators, the financial markets and more besides.

At no point has it ever made sense to me to attempt to draw up financial plans until first you have your own plan. Put simply, where am I now, where do I want to go? Some call it goal setting, personally I would ditch the word, however in such a short piece it serves a purpose.

Reading this you may way well think, “oh no not another diatribe on the importance of goals..”, well it isn’t, I promise. I simply want to highlight that financial planning is devoid of value if it is not connected to you and what you want.

Value is only created by gaining clarity over a much more, making sure you have purpose and meaning in life. Taking care of yourself physically, emotionally, managing your lifestyle and engaging socially. These are all things we need to live a more fulfilled and enjoyable life. A fulfilled life is also one that provides the fuel to give to others, to share our knowledge and experience, to provide guidance and encouragement to others. Money is but a tool and like all tools it should be well cared for but kept securely in a box and only checked occasionally. 

As we approach middle age most of the important non financial things in life become clearer to us, perhaps when we are young it is all too much to consider when the necessity of finding our own way in the world can be all consuming. Life’s journey throws up a number of challenges as we find our feet, marriage, first homes, children and a multitude of others. So perhaps it is understandable that gaining balance, finding meaning and purpose simply sounds like “good things to do when I have the time…”, but ironically the more we embrace these things from an early age the greater our chances of success in life.

Success does not need to be measured by financial reward, clearly it is one measure, but most people when asked to recall the most enjoyable or memorable points of their lives mention things with no or little financial cost. No one on their death bed ever says I wish I had more money. Trust me this is true.

The majority of my work as a financial advisor has been to help people plan for retirement. After nearly 35 years I have had a considerable amount of experience of those planning for and living in retirement and I can say without fear of contradiction that retirement with out money is grim, but retirement with only money is dim.

As the title of my, soon to be published second book on the subject, Don’t Retire Rejuvenate implies I do not believe in retirement per se. It simply makes no sense in the 21st Century (not sure it made sense in the 20th, but that’s another story..) to think about life as having stages that run from childhood, through adolescence, early adulthood, middle age, retirement and death. I prefer to consider that we are born, grow older and then we die.

Life is merely one long continuum, a series of transitions. To get the most out of it we simply have to make sure we recognise the need to think through and plan our lives, life in the present not the past and you can’t live in the future.

Success is not waiting for tragedy to strike, for someone’s last words to be the cause for you to get on with it. Find the time, make a plan and take action, success awaits.