Patience
Here’s the hardest part of the financial plan: waiting for it all to come to fruition. We’ve made a number of plans over the years, only to change them a few months later. We were always tweaking. It occurred to me the other day that the reason for all the tweaking was impatience. The plans may have been good but we would get impatient for results.
We’ve spent the better part of the past 2-3 months coming up with our new plan. Both my wife and I love it. But now that it’s in place I’m gnawing at my fingernails. It’s hard to just sit tight and wait for the money to come in and the bills to be paid off. But this time no tweaking. The plan is good. We’ve already seen concrete, positive results. I just need to relax and sit back and wait, because now I really think we’re on the path to wealth.
I do the same thing! I’m not content to just sit and follow my financial plan for the next 40 years. So I continually tweak.
What’s also helped me is opening a brokerage account with a relatively small percentage of my money. I also opened an account at Prosper.com where I can lend money to other people.
I now can put all the time and energy I want into researching, trading stocks, and managing my loans. That way I don’t put any of my “real” investments at risk, and I’m not tempted to tinker with my retirement or other (boring) savings.
September 26th, 2007 at 11:16 am