Retiring or tiring?

What's the same? Both can be tiring. But, one give you less tiring future while the other sucks your energy away.

When I was still under employment, I made a point that I must continue with my personal development amidst my busy schedule demanded by my job. While that was a right thing to do in my opinion, I did not realize that I have overlooked one more important aspect - personal wealth. The recent event of me not under employment opens up my mind on the importance of personal wealth. There's this book that I have been reading that manage to throw some light and challenges into my own retirement plan.

Here are the questions that may make us think again about our retirement plan.

1. Well, to start with, do we plan to save sufficient money by certain age & then stop working and slowly chew this retirement fund? If this is the case, we are planning to be poor. Why not we make sure this fund is big enough to take care of itself and because of that it gives us money every day so that you can retire?

2. Some of us save our money in mutual funds and are assured by financial advisors that the fund value is projected to double in 10 years time. Ask ourselves one honest question, how much control do we really have over this growth? None actually except that we can sell or buy. Don't we think it's risky to leave our savings in the hand of market forces & all we can do is buy, hold & pray?

3. For those who applaud point 2 & proudly claim that 'that's why I put my money in fixed deposit!', think again too. We work hard to earn our money. But then when we have the money, we let our money sort off 'retire' in FD instead of making the money work harder for us. Who's the master here? You or your money? By the way, how many of our earlier generation saves & saves for retirement and until today, still looks a bit screwed up financially or are still leading a mediocre life?

Well, if everything seems to be lousy, tell me what to do, einstein??!! The key word here is 'leverage'. Leverage in physics simply demonstrates how you can use less effort to lift a heavy object if you can find yourself a stone and a long pole. The longer the pole, the more the leverage.

Step #1
Hence, the first step is to understand our own leverage in our own environment. For a person which has more spare time. time naturally becomes the leverage. For those in IT, knowledge will be the leverage. For those who want to pursue training and consultancy at a younger age, age and energy become the leverage. Some guys know more people than others. That's a leveragable network. Like a kungfu master which can transform everything around him as weapon, we too can look around us and develop something as a leverage.

Step #2
However, leverage only provides us the 'machine' but without the manual and the key, we don't know how to operate this machine to make money. So, come along with leverage is another key word called 'context'. Context is something like a pail that keeps our contents (reality). If we do not expand the pail, we could not expand our own world. When we expand our context, we actually trying to learn more about a subject and our reality naturally expands in this subject. Remember that what we think is real becomes our reality. If you think earning a million a year is real, that becomes a reality to you. If you think investment is risky, that becomes your reality too. But how do we expand our context?

Step #3
You expand your context by asking the right questions. You probably have heard,"ask, and you shall receive". But to expand your context, you must "ask the RIGHT questions and you shall receive the RIGHT answers". A small example that I use quite often nowadays. If you ask, "if the economy is down in '87 and '97, then 2007 shall be a downturn too?". Your mind will answer 'Yes''. Questione is satisfactorily answered but unfortunately context is not expanded at all. If you ask,"what I need to do if 2007 is a down turn?" Your mind will naturally answer "don't spend too much, save for rainy days". Question is satisfactorily answered as well BUT context is stil not expanded.

Now, ask this question,"How can I make more money in 2007 if economy is down?" Your mind will now pause for a while to look for more answers as this question is now more challenging. The answer finally comes, "Save more now. Be prepared to buy better property deals next year" Here, I'm not demonstrating that property is the way to go. But you can see from these questions, the answers are all good answers but vary depending on HOW you ask.

Step #4
Well, if you have the context, the leverage and the way, what's left? Your Plan. How to plan is totally a different subject. But I'm very sure all of us know how to plan. Many times, it is not the plan that fail us but we fail ourselves. So rather than talk about how to plan (which most of us know), I'll keep it simple to a few points why we fail ourselves.

First, it is not painful enough. In other words, the pain of not changing is less painful than the pain of changing. So what happen? We become a 'dragon'. We drag-on. How long ago in the past and for how long in the future are we going to repeat these same bloody words "there's a long holiday coming!" and then not long after that followed by "how nice if the holiday can be longer!" So, think of all the negative elements you have now and instead of using them to kill your holiday mood, use them as dried branches to start a fire to boil your emotion, until it's painful enough for you to change. Once you are at that stage, planning becomes natural.

Second, it is about self-blame. What if I fail? What if people call me stupid? All this will go away if the first point is painful enough. So will be 3rd and 4th if any...

Step #5
However, once you are boiling with passion to change because it's now painful enough, you must see where you are going to and how the end results will make you the happiest person in the world. With this vision, you are then no longer motivated by pain but by pleasure. Imagine this: You don't wait for holidays but you DECLARE your own holiday!

So, what do you do? Check you retirement plan to make sure that it is still a good plan. If there are some concerns or a lot of your plans are based on hope rather than facts, than you need to increase the SPEED of your plan. To increase the speed is to leverage. You will find the right leverage if your leverage can answer this simple question, "How can I do what I do for more people with less work and for a better price?"

Happy leveraging and retiring!!