Let’s Collaborate: Is your retirement account failing you?

 

I looked at my retirement account today.

It has lost $150,000 value since I last looked at it one month ago. This is the effect of the losses in the stock market. The talking heads on TV want us to hang in there. Don’t panic, don’t sell, you really lose if you sell. Right now it is all just paper losses, right? What if you needed the money now?

I am sure that many of you have 401K’s or some other type of retirement account that is not entirely in your control. How are you feeling? Have you looked?

I just listened to a journalist on TV say that— if you are not a professional practitioner, you shouldn’t look at your retirement account for a few months.

Seriously?! OK well, there is not much you can do about that money anyway, it is out of your control.

Is there anything that you can do? Yes, of course there is. There are a lot of things to do to hedge the stock market.

Here is what I did to get my money back in my control. I rolled my money out of my 401K as soon as I could. This way I can invest in what I want to invest in, stocks, real estate, even precious metals.

I am reading an article called Retirement Plans are Deadly Traps, by Janelle Orsi of The Next Egg. You can find it in the resource section of our website.

The article is quite interesting and eye opening. Most of us are control freaks to some degree. We went into medicine to help people and it gives us a good amount of control over a lot of things.

Many of us shy away from that control when it comes to our money. We hand it over to someone who may have convinced us that they know better and they can help you grow your dollars. The article points out that even with self-directed accounts we have little control.

I highly recommend the article, as there are some solutions given and Janelle points out how they do not work. Others, in conversations have pointed out that it is the system that is at fault. Everyone just needs to figure out how to work with it until we can change it.

The system will never change as long as the majority of us blindly follow and do as we are told without a thought. It is a very easy trap to fall into.

Financial capital is a big part of our lives and will be for the foreseeable future. We can change our narrative, we can change the system to work for everyone. It will take a lot of cooperation and collaboration. What the system becomes may not be what any of us can visualize on our own.

Let’s work together to make the system work for everyone.