It’s All About Perspective

March 27, 2015

Perspective can sometimes be situational. Our perspective today can be very different than it was a decade ago. I have a friend struggling with her birthday right now. She is about to turn an age that ends with a 0.

When she was 20, she had plans for her life and set some goals for the future. By 30, she was well ahead of the pace that she had set for herself and financially, she had done far better than even her most optimistic projections. She worked hard, saved a lot, paid off debt quickly and lived a very fiscally responsible life.

Sadly, her husband had a far different view of how money worked, and unbeknownst to her, he was (in joint name) working as hard to blow up her plans as she was working to build them. Somewhere along the way, she discovered that she had married someone who wasn’t on the same page and along with some other issues she discovered, she made the decision to pull the plug on the marriage and file for divorce. In a hilarious stream of consciousness rant over a glass of wine, she said that she’d rather sleep on a pillow made of Limburger cheese for decades than allow her financial life and her soul to be further damaged by her husband.

The divorce was long and costly, nearly every issue was contested and the legal bills were nearly the cost of a college education. Not to mention, there were the debts that he piled up during the last several years that needed to be paid off. After the divorce was final, her financial life looked worse than it did when she started setting goals in her 20’s. She was positively deflated.

So, what’s a friend who happens to be a financial planner supposed to do in that situation? I have no idea!!! But here’s what happened. I went out to the Interwebs and found stories of people who had it worse than she did, stories of people with sick kids (her daughters are awesome and healthy), stories of people overcoming all kinds of odds to reach great heights, and stories about overcoming adversity. None of that worked!

She fired up her laptop to check her email and this article about a couple living on a very small income while helping to care for their adult son with autism was on her homepage. We read it and a light bulb went off in her head. All of her prior goals were about building more, saving more, and continually moving “up.”

Sitting in the living room of her house that was 1/3 the size of her prior home with her kids and her friendly financial planner, she realized that what she needed wasn’t her prior level of wealth in order to be happy. She simply needed a change in perspective. The article about a couple living on just over $2,000/month in retirement and enjoying where they are gave her the perspective that I couldn’t with my attempts at reframing the conversation.

Whether it’s about your financial life, your health, your kids, your job or any other aspect of life, there is something that you can do to gain a perspective that you may not have on a daily basis. We are all so busy with life, it seems as though things in today’s world fly at us at 1,000 miles per hour. Ask yourself a few questions:

• Am I measuring myself vs. a realistic goal?
• Am I making the best effort I possibly can? If not, what will it take to improve the effort level?
• Why is this goal a goal? Is it still relevant in my life today?
• If I don’t reach this goal, what’s the worst case scenario? Can I live with that?

If you find that you aren’t tracking toward goals that you had set for yourself and it is impacting your level of happiness, impacting your stress levels, and impacting areas of your life in a negative way, it might be time for you to find inspiration somewhere and change your perspective.