Working Wealthy – It’s Not Easy Waiting

This past winter, I built an ice rink in our backyard.

It was a labor of love—for every hour of work that went into it, we probably enjoyed about 10 minutes of equivalent ice time. Even with that trade-off, it was entirely worth the effort.

Attempting to be a good neighbor in our new home, I drained, dismantled and packed away the rink before any of our famous Midwest spring rains (floods) hit the area. There’s nothing like flooding your next-door neighbor with hundreds of gallons of rink water on top of rainwater that says, “I’m your new neighbor!”.

And so, the other evening as I was using a sledgehammer to break-up 12-inch pieces of ice at 8:45 pm (sorry, Joe), I wished I could have been patient and let mother nature melt and drain the rink for me.

Being neighborly, I didn’t have that option. But swinging that sledgehammer gave me time to think. What else should I be patient with in my life that maybe I’m not being patient enough with these days?

Normalcy

I, like many of you, am anxious for life to go back to normal.

Hopefully, there is some relief in sight for students everywhere, graduates starting their new lives and the endless work teachers have done. However, depending upon where you live, it will still take some time for our country to get back to full speed.

Our clients in retirement, and all the deprived grandparents in the world, have waited so long for life to be regular again. It’s taken bottomless patience and resolve to make it through the pandemic.

Our Economy

Without question, there has been a tremendous toll on our economy the past 12-plus months. We’ve all experienced or witnessed the hardships that go along with double-digit unemployment and mass job losses.

Our patience with the economy will pay off. We’ve been forced to innovate to almost wartime levels. Businesses have gone far beyond what they’ve ever imagined when it comes to working remotely, and work-life lines are blurrier than ever.

But the patience of all of us to slog through the grayness of it will pay-off as we hopefully see the effort and vaccine take hold.

Interest & Inflation

Many are concerned with the looming threat of inflation and the normalization of interest rates. So many of us felt this same twinge ten years ago as we started to drag ourselves out of the Great Recession.

And through patience, practical oversight of interest rates and a balanced approach, we made our way out of the past recession in decent fashion. But again, it’s the endurance to wait out the rise in rates and potential hike in the cost of goods that will be the challenge.

Discipline and sound financial planning will win that struggle.

It’d be great to end this blog with the rah-rah slogan that “we’re almost there,” but it’s probably unfair to tease you with that. It’s still about patience—as annoying as that may sound.