Jason D. Barr

Ever hear someone talking about a dog with a bone and they say, “That dog was worrying that bone to death!”? I always find that an interesting turn of phrase, because it’s such a great mental picture of what worry actually is. It’s a gnawing feeling around the edges of your consciousness. It doesn’t send you into a panic (most of the time); it’s just always there, causing you to be distracted and not focused on what you need to get done.

I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to worry. Now, I don’t really like to admit this (even to myself), but it’s true. I’ll call it by any number of other names (”I’m just focusing on solving a challenge!”), but it boils down to something on my mind that causes me to lose sleep.

I lost a lot of sleep while I was in the military. I couldn’t just lay down and fall asleep, I had to wait (sometimes for hours) for my mind to settle down enough to allow me to relax. I was always thinking about something: deployments, responsibilities, how much I hated having to wear the same thing every day, etc.

Then, one day, someone suggested that the reason why my mind was always racing was that there were thoughts locked up in my subconscious that couldn’t get out. She further suggested a technique which I began to refer to as a “brain barf”. I would sit down every day (sometimes two or three times, when I first started) for a set amount of time and either write on a piece of paper or type into a Word document everything that ran through my head. No filtering, no editing, don’t even go back to read what I wrote. Just keep writing (or typing) until I totally ran out of things to write, or the time ran out. If I couldn’t capture a specific thought or articulate what I was thinking, I just wrote “I have nothing to write” over and over until the words started flowing again.

What a relief! If I did this exercise just before I went to be every night, I found that I could fall right to sleep. No restless thoughts running through my head, keeping me awake for hours. Some type of psychological release occurred during my “worry time” that allowed all my pent-up anxieties to spill out on to the page. I’m guessing it had something to do with verbalizing (i.e. - acknowledging) the challenges that I knew (or didn’t know) I was facing.

Once you face your challenges head on by writing them down, you’re going to realize that most of them are really fairly trivial. However, if there are some that still worry you, you can take a further step of singling them out, and one by one, writing what the worst thing is that could result if your worry came to pass. Then, assign an actual “how likely is this to happen” score to it. For me, it always served as a wake up call to point out how inconsequential my challenges were, once they were brought out into the light of day. If there are still some outcomes that frighten you, you’ve established some concrete situations that you want to avoid (not some nebulous fears that you can’t put your finger on). Armed with this specific information, you can take steps to establish a contingency plan to prevent any of your worries from coming to pass.

I found out that, once I made this a habit, I needed to do it less and less. I’m to the point now where, if I have some difficulty falling asleep, I’ll just grab my journal and head out to my family room for ten minutes or so. I’ll barf all my worries out on the page and head back to bed. It’s a great tool to use when you need it. Give it a shot the next time you’re fighting insomnia due to a tough day at work.

Re-reading through one of my all-time favorite books of any genre (let alone self-improvement), The Magic of Thinking Big, by Dr. David Schwartz. I’d like to highlight a little of what he’s talking about in Chap. 2, just to give you a taste of some of the topics he covers. Though this is an older book (first published in 1959), the principles are timeless.

He mentions four reasons that people allow themselves to be defeated in the pursuit of their dreams, terming them different forms of the killer disease excusitis. These four are:

1. Health

2. Intelligence

3. Age

4. Luck

We’ve all met someone who’s constantly bemoaning the state of their ingrown toenails, the air quality, the pollen count, their fair skin that’s subject to burning, etc. etc. These people are probably in generally good health, but they allow themselves to think their way into every imaginable ailment known to human kind. What’s worse, these are the same people who will pass on this habit to their unfortunate, impressionable children. The kids don’t have a chance; they’ll grow up to be as big, if not bigger, hypochondriacs than their parents were. I realize that there are genuine health challenges that certain people face. However, there are those individuals (such as Mark Zupan, the inspiring paralympian from the documentary film, Murderball) who conversely face greater limitations to their ability to function in society than most of us will ever dream. These people don’t waste time pitying themselves; they go out and find ways to circumvent their challenges and thrive and achieve at the highest levels of society. Helen Keller, anyone?

There are very few people willing to publicly admit that they feel intellectually inferior to their peers. However, there are many who harbor these thoughts privately. The truth is, a few points on an IQ test matter very little (and can often be a hindrance). What’s crucial to success is not having all the answers, but the commitment to success itself. As long as one is willing to never give up, you can encounter as many learning opportunities as you can stomach.  Very often, those with a high IQ (and are aware of it) suffer from analysis paralysis or the habit of waiting for the “perfect time” to begin a new endeavor. Sadly, that time never comes.

Age is viewed as a hindrance not only by the old, but by the young. Our more mature readers must always remind themselves of the story of Ray Kroc (founder of McDonalds), who didn’t buy the restaurant from the McDonald brothers until well into his 50’s. One should consider this: a typical college graduate enters the workforce at 22, and the most successful leaders of companies and organizations will typically work well into their 70’s. This leaves a span of over 50 years to accomplish something in the business world truly worthy of the word success. A person really doesn’t even hit the midpoint of his or her effective working life until they’re around 50 years of age! Maybe this causes some of you to shudder, but it’s true. If you are one of the ones who shudders at that thought, we’ll discuss later how to find a calling that will excite you when viewed in conjunction with that last statistic.

Finally, luck; the most bogus of all nouns. Much like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, only the very young or the sorely misinformed believe in it. I’ve heard, as I’m sure you have, that luck is where opportunity and preparedness meet. If you’re ready for the opportunities that come your way, you’ll be one of the luckiest people around, and people will envy how you always seem to land on your feet. Be always ready through constant application of your current skills and the never-ending effort to gain new ones, and luck will find you.

So, these are the four strains of excusitis. Take note of the way you speak for the next week, and see if you catch yourself making excuses for why you can’t accomplish what others seem to do easily. Then, if you do see it, replace your excuses with affirmations. Much like Stuart Smally, you are good enough, smart enough, and, dog gone it, people like you!

Read this post today, and I was pretty skeptical. Any time you don’t consider tax consequences pings my radar pretty good. Anyway, I wrote Jim (the author of the blog) an email that I’ll reprint here. All in all, I like his blog; I’ve got it on RSS and read it all the time. I just didn’t agree with this particular post of his.

Hi, Jim,

I’m a reader of your blog, and was curious about your post today, stating that you could save $700/month and retire in 40 years, withdrawing $5000 in 2007 dollars. No offense, but I was immediately skeptical when your first assumption was no tax liability. I think your assumption of 3% inflation rate is low, as this is pretty close to CPI, which exempts food and housing (unfortunately, real people can’t exempt those things). And, just to make things smooth, I assumed an 8% return on investments for the entirety of the scenario. This also assumes that the entire amount saved for the year is placed in the account on the first of the year, to capture the full compounding.

I’m attaching an .xls workbook which shows two scenarios: the first assuming the funds are invested in a taxable account (such as a standard 401k, IRA, or just a normal brokerage account), and the second shows a tax-advantaged saving plan (such as Roth IRAs or a Roth 401k). These Roth vehicles currently have contribution limits ($15,500 for the 401k, and $4,000 for the IRA, for a total of $19.5k a year contribution limit).

As you can see, for the Roth vehicles, you’ll need to save close to $17,750 a year, and that assumes that you deplete your nest egg down to near 0 at the end of the 25 year window. I’m assuming that with advances in medicine and science, one could probably expect to live beyond age 85 (assuming this is the 65th year of the scenario) by the year 2072, and you may want to ensure more length to your balance. A bigger balance will require more savings, obviously. With the fully taxable withdrawls seen in a regular 401k or the like, you’re looking at closer to $2,000 a month contributions; again, depleting your nest egg to 0.

I think you underestimated the amount necessary to withdraw, as inflation will continue throughout the scenario, not just ending at the 40th year.

Anyway, take this for what it’s worth. I didn’t want to post a comment, as I wanted you to have a chance to take a look at my calculations; it’s quite possible that I goofed something up. Enjoy your blog; wouldn’t be a repeat reader if I didn’t. Hope you have a good day, and I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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Regards,

So, anyway, there you go. You can see the file I put together for Jim here, if you want to look at it. The moral of the story here is: be serious about your retirement savings. You’re gonna need a lot of it.

Trent over at The Simple Dollar wrote a great piece yesterday that kind of dovetails with what I touched on briefly in my previous post on the 10% Myth. You can read his post here.

I’d like to quote his closing thought on this topic, then ramble a bit on my own:

“Different people have different talents and different ways to give of themselves. What matters is that you actually do give, whether it be working hard so that you can make a donation to help a cause or directly working for that cause. What matters is that you put your talents to work in the end for a cause that is important to you. To me, that’s what a spiritual life is all about.”

Now, I will disagree with him on his comment that living the spiritual life is concerned with DOING something. But, not knowing Trent or his personal views on religion, I won’t quibble on semantics. That’s not the point here. I do think, however, that he captured a truly important concept in that paragraph that I feel too many “spiritual” people skip right over.

You not only owe it to yourself and your family, you owe it to the world at large and to God to be financially successful to the point where you can share some of your wealth with others. Some of you might think that you don’t have “wealth” to share, but I assure you, you do. Per capita income in developed countries is so far being the imagining and dreaming of residents of developing countries, it’s unbelieveable. Dollars a month (”the price of a cup of coffee a day”, as the Christian Children’s Fund commercials tell us) can guarantee one child food, immunizations and an opportunity at education. How in the world can we, as compassionate people, not find some change rolling around in the couch cushions for this?

So, as I mentioned previously, I was raised by a financial advisor. My dad made me save 50% of everything I ever earned, and I didn’t get to decide what I was saving for. It was just gone. I didn’t get an allowance; I had to do work. Not household chores, mind you, but mowing lawns or paper routes. Nothing was given to me. I didn’t appreciate it at the time (boy, did I hate handing over 50 cents on every dollar), but, when I cashed out a mutual fund to pay for my first year of college, I discovered my dad was pretty smart after all.

Will I make JD Jr. save 50%? Probably not. I felt it was restrictive, and it really didn’t give me a lot of money to learn how to spend wisely. It took too long to save up for anything, so I just frittered it away on nothing. My money problems came when I started college. I got a credit card (heard this story before?) and ended up running up a pretty big bill that I didn’t have any way to pay for. Due to some other choices I made, not related to the credit card at all, I ended up having to drop out of college and get a job half way through my junior year. Not having a degree meant I wasn’t qualified for much except manual labor or factory work. I chose the latter, because I could work nights and earn shift differential.

Let me tell you, $9 an hour does not go very far when you have to pay for rent, food, student loan bills (those showed up after I had exhausted my savings mid-way through my sophomore year), a car payment for a crappy used car, and credit card debt. I distinctly remember depositing a $600 and some odd check at my two week pay day and still being overdrawn at my bank by over $100. Those were not fun days.

When I was 25, I joined the Army (it was just after 9/11, and I wanted to do my part). I met my soon-to-be wife in basic training, and we were married 9 months later. She had debt, too, but we resolved that we were going to get out of it as soon as we could. We got married five years ago next week, and combined, we had over $40,000 in consumer debt. Today, I am proud to say that it’s less than $10,000, and that is on one car payment. We carry no credit card debt and live very frugally in an attempt to pay that off as quickly as possible.

So, I believe it can be done. For us, it came down to understanding that we really were in control of our lives. Both of us want to travel, work in foreign countries where we’re considered the outsiders, and give back to the world. We realize that those types of jobs don’t typically pay very much, so we know that we have to develop a lifestyle that’s rather spartan in order to be able to subsist on substantially less than what we currently make. It all comes down to crystallizing in one’s mind what is truly important to that particular person. Not everyone has to have my dreams, but everyone needs some dream. Once you decide what’s so important to you that you can’t live without it, then you’ll start doing what you need to do to make it happen, no matter how (temporarily) painful the process.

The Motley Fool says you need to suck it up, and I agree. 10% is a bare minimum, and most of us need to be saving more. Especially in the past few years, the real estate run-up has caused many people to discount the need for savings and view capital gains as a means to ensuring your retirement income. The plateau (and in some places, precipitous decline) in real estate prices caused by a glut of inventory on the market, coupled with the slowdown in sales may have opened some eyes, but I still worry that some folks view it as a temporary speed bump on the highway of home appreciation.

So, what can we do to free up some cash flow for savings?  The usual: cancel your cable, don’t eat out as much, quit drinking lattes, blah blah blah.  All good advice, but it seems to me that, unless you’re actually redirecting that money into some type of investment vehicle (your emergency fund stashed in an ING Orange Savings account, some index funds, or the like), you’re not really improving your financial future.

My counsel to myself was to learn to live on 75% of my income.  Honest confession:  I’m not there yet.  I’m only at 80%, but I’m working my way to 75%.  I believe (especially if you didn’t do what you should have been doing in your 20’s and started with the 10% savings from your first post-school paycheck) that I probably want to put away 15% of my pay every pay check.  I don’t plan on spending my raises, either.  Those go right off the top (as do bonuses) into savings.  And, I give 10% to a charity I believe in.  Every pay check, without fail.  The tax deduction is great, but the intangible benefit I get by sharing a part of my income with those less fortunate than I goes far beyond the reduction in my Adjusted Gross Income.

Later on, I’ll be explaining how I got to where I am today financially, and where I’m going from here.

So, check this out. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a case of wanderlust that keeps getting in the way of me truly focusing on my 9 to 5. I’d much rather be hanging out in Costa Rica or seeing the sights in old Europe than watching JD Jr. grow up in pictures on my desk. There are plenty of companies out there today that offer remote working arrangements (Best Buy has everyone in their corporate headquarters on a flex time program, what they call ROWE, or Results Oriented Work Environment), where all you really need are a laptop and a wifi connection. Teleconferencing can work from anywhere in the world, even the most remote locations (if you have a sat phone). Why do we need to be tethered to a desk in order to prove our productivity?  Granted, this article is aimed at folks with more maturity and time in the workforce than I have, but still…

Tim Ferriss, in his book, The 4 Hour Work Week, talks a lot about strategies for liberating yourself from the 9-5, allowing you to work on your terms wherever you want to. Be honest: how much time do you really waste sitting at a desk, reading email, or being distracted by conversations going on around you, or sitting in meetings in which you have nothing to add? Maybe you couldn’t get everything done in 4 hours a week, but Tim makes a pretty convincing case through the power of the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule: 80% of our results come from 20% of our activity) and Parkinson’s Law (tasks expand in time required to complete to the extent that we allow them to) that we could get our stuff done a lot more efficiently than we do without any loss of effectiveness. I’m not sure I totally agree with everything he says about how to go about freeing yourself from a scheduled working arrangement, but the core nuggets relating to freedom from a schedule certainly are appropriate.

So, here I am, typing away, looking to bare my soul to you folks. “What?”, you ask. “Another self-absorbed personal development blogger? Why in the world do we need any more of those? What does he hope to accomplish by this?” Well, I’d like to gain some semblance of a readership, have a little fun, exchange some ideas on what it takes to be truly happy and content. I’ll tell you about my goals and dreams, and maybe we can drum up enough common sense between all of us to make our goals realities.

“No get rich quick schemes?” You won’t find many of those here. I do believe that people can and do get very wealthy through many different vehicles in this life. Slinging rock on the corner, donating plasma, even Amway and other MLMs have generated funds for certain people to subsist off of (some methods of moneymaking generate more funds than others). However, for the vast majority of us, the only thing that makes sense is to find a need and fill it. Does that mean starting your own company? For some it does. But, even those of you/us with a J.O.B. (my dad, entrepreneur that he is, won’t even say the word) are filling a need for someone, and being compensated for it. Find what makes you happy. I’m a big believer that what you do should not identify who you are, if you don’t want it to. If your self-worth and primary source of happiness comes from being an attorney, that’s cool. However, if you’re only a financial analyst to pay the bills, and you would rather do something else with the rest of your time, more power to you.

“So, what qualifies you to talk about this stuff?” Same thing that qualifies you to ask the question; it’s a free country (at least, it is where I live. Sorry if you live in North Korea [but kudos on finding your way to my site through all the censor-ware!]). As I mentioned, my dad’s owned his own business since almost as far back as I can remember. He’s a financial advisor. Got a lot of good info from him, as well as an interest in how people use their money to plan (or not) for their future, and why some of the most financially well off people I know aren’t really happy with where that money’s gotten them.  I’m a corporate financial analyst myself (with a Fortune 500 company, no less), and I’ve got an MBA in Global Management from Thunderbird School of Global Management. Well, depending on when you read this, that is. I graduate(d) in April of 2008. I’ve also got half a bookcase full of personal development and PMA books. Everything from Dale Carnegie to John Maxwell, and a bunch of stuff in between. I won’t be giving any advice, but I will be telling you my opinion on what makes sense in my situation. You can apply it however you’d like.

“Is it all going to be personal development?” Ehh, maybe. Probably will be split between finance and personal development for the most part, but there are other things that may come up, as well. I’m constantly fascinated by leadership development, personal finance, baseball, you name it. I’m just like you (I would assume); I’ve got lots of diverse interests. I was a philosophy major in college, so I might slip in some quotes from Plato every once in a while. When something strikes me as being able to improve our enjoyment of the time we have on God’s green earth, I think it’ll fit with the nature of this blog.

So, that’s what we’ll be doing here. The title of the blog is “Personal Development”, plain and simple, because I feel like so many of us young(ish) careerpeople aren’t really taking life seriously enough. “Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail”, remember? Paying attention to bettering yourself, be it financially or through personal development, doesn’t have to be drudgery. On the other hand, it doesn’t just happen, either. So, take a little time, each day, to think about how you can get down to doing the things you need to do to improve what’s going to be a great life.