July 2020

A couple of weeks ago, my husband, Roger and I undertook quite an arduous home project. Since we moved into our home 5 years ago, a large cavity in our backyard plagued us. It was difficult to mow around and provided no sledding entertainment value for me. After much talk, we finally put our words into action and ordered a copious amount of dirt to even out the yard.

Roger, like many men, is a yard fanatic. He feels as though our yard is in competition with every other yard in the neighborhood, in terms of looking good. In particular, the retired neighbor across the street has a yard much like a golf course, smooth and pristine. Our yard, although nice, ranks closer to the middle of the pack. With that being said, Roger decided that having a large dump truck deposit our dirt into the cavity, would cause too much damage to our yard, and thus, we had two large loads dumped in our driveway. We’re both in good shape and were confident we could move this dirt ourselves. We planned a day off to complete our goal and the following is what I learned:

• The best plans leave room for change. We had planned to get all of our dirt moved in one day. It seemed reasonable; we did the math! Little did we know how strenuous it would be. It was hard work on a hot day and we had to adapt our plan as the day progressed. While we moved a lot of dirt, we only got about ½ finished, and so we needed to continue to do a little at a time throughout the rest of the week and weekend. We wanted to finish in one day, but it wasn’t the worst thing to spread out the work. Sometimes your retirement plan needs some tweaking too. Things change and we have to be able to adapt your plan to fit your needs. We want to be able to do all we have planned, but when life takes a different direction, we need to change too.
• Accept help when offered. After telling our son, Christian, about our plan, he offered to come and help us for the day. We accepted and thank goodness, we did. Two truckloads (30 cubic yards) of dirt is a lot! Without his help, we wouldn’t have gotten the 1/2 of a pile moved that we did. Later in the week, Roger’s friend offered the use of his ATV and trailer – we accepted! It helped us to move so much more dirt that much quicker and saved our bodies some work too. When Cliff and I offer to look at your big investment picture, or help you figure out some of your options as you navigate changes in your life, it’s because we want to help. We are here to walk through your many stages of life with you. Retirement, social security, estate planning, these are all a big deal. We want to help you make the best decisions for you.
• It’s good to re-evaluate. When we first started moving the dirt, we didn’t really have a routine or system in place. We finally got the kinks worked out and things moved more quickly and efficiently.   Sometimes we thought what we were doing was working great, but then we changed things up to make it better. Investments can be like that too. Cliff and I give investment recommendations based on your situation and what we think will work best at that particular time. Things change, and so we are regularly re-evaluating the investments we are utilizing, your portfolio, and entertaining other options to make sure we are providing what we feel are the best recommendations for you.
• There is a reward at the end. When we finished moving the first half of the dirt on day one, it was hard to see an end in sight. There was still a lot of dirt left and we were tired! As we continued through the weekend, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and it helped to boost our energy and get us excited about what’s next. The reward for us was not just moving the dirt, but accomplishing our goal: filing the cavity, planting new grass and moving our yard status up to maybe a close third place. That neighbor across the street just has a lot more time on his hands! Working on your retirement plan and visualizing different scenarios with Cliff and me might feel like you are in the middle of the weeds. There are many moving parts but we are here to help you realize the reward at the end of years of hard work – living in retirement!

When you are moving a lot of dirt, you have a lot of time to think. These were just a few of the things I took away from our endeavor. I can’t say that I would be excited to take on this project again, and we hope we will never have to. Just as your hope is to work hard now so that you only have to plan to retire once, because planning for retirement is a project too. Cliff and I have worked with many people from saving for retirement to planning for retirement and living in retirement. We are here to help, we know sometimes plans change and thus we are constantly re-evaluating, so that you can experience the reward at the end.

Any opinions are those of Stacy Caudill are not necessarily those of RJA or Raymond James. The information contained in this report does not purport to be a complete description of the securities, markets, or developments referred to in this material. There is no assurance any of the trends mentioned will continue or forecasts will occur. The information has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but Raymond James does not guarantee that the foregoing material is accurate or complete. Any information is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision and does not constitute a recommendation. Investing involves risk and you may incur a profit or loss regardless of strategy selected.