I read a quote recently which is attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt which goes ‘You’re the oldest you’ve ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be again.”
As I mulled over the meaning of this my thoughts turned to my recent 55th birthday. Age is just a number, right? This is another phrase that gets banded about a lot but I think it is crucial that we believe this and don’t just pay it lip service.
As we grow older and theoretically wiser, we should be living our best lives before we end up ‘too old to enjoy ourselves’. This is a phrase you should recognise from our planning meetings but frequently that’s not the case.
Instead, we continue to work and be busy, busy, busy preparing for that moment further down the track when life really begins or at least that’s how I feel at times.
I now have a jar full of marbles in the office boardroom with every marble representing a weekend up until I reach the age of 75. I can hear some of you saying he’s already lost his marbles, to which I’d have to concur but the idea is that I remove a marble each Friday and keep it in my pocket over the weekend. This is to remind me that there will never be another weekend exactly like this one and I only have a finite number.
Do I remember to do this religiously every Friday? The honest answer is no and from time to time I find myself removing 2 or 3 in one go. In general, though, does it remind me to live life a bit more fully? The answer to that is 100% yes.
Going back to the quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, at the start of this blog, my interpretation of what she means is don’t live in the past or for some imaginary tomorrow but try to live in ‘the now’ which is all we really have.
This is where I believe we can add the most value to our clients. By fully understanding your numbers and what “your bucket” can provide for you, our clients can have the freedom to make the most of ‘the now’ without the fear of running out of money or, possibly worse, dying with too much!
Have a great day!
