Are You Ready For Some Financial Football?

Are you ready for some football? The college and NFL football seasons have kicked off and there are plenty of football games to watch every weekend (which now starts on Thursdays and ends on Mondays). 

If you are a college football team, your goal is to win the CFP National Championship Game on Monday, January 20, 2025 in Atlanta. If you are an NFL team, your goal is to win Super Bowl LIX, which will take place on Sunday, February 9, 2025 in New Orleans.

To accomplish these goals requires a winning playbook, which is a collection of tactical offensive and defensive plays. Typically, a football playbook is strictly confidential and is only shared within a team.

To win at retirement, you need a playbook to create cash flow and time to enjoy life. The playbook is used by the financial quarterback, that’s you, and your financial planning coach to create a game plan of offensive and defensive plays.

Autumn Is Time To Review Your Financial Playbook

The autumn football season is a great reminder to review your playbook. To help your review, here is our Safeguard Investment Financial Playbook, which is not strictly confidential, and we are happy to share:

Play No. 1 is deciding if you are you taking too much risk, or not taking enough. Risk is an important part of the game, and you need to understand it.

Play No. 2 is to factor in taxation.  The biggest expense you will have in retirement is taxes. So, you need to have a defensive game plan for Uncle Sam.

Play No. 3 is to reduce what you are paying in fees. The dirty little secret of the financial industry is hidden fees. The financial industry is marvelous at hiding and disguising fees.

Play No. 4 is a Roth conversion.  There is a miracle opportunity in the tax code, and it is not the 401k or the IRA; it is the Roth, and you need to understand how to use it in your game plan.

Play No. 5 is to have an income plan set up that is separated from the market. The stock market can be a roller coaster ride, and that is no fun. Also, it’s unnecessary. You can have a retirement income that is not dependent on the ups and downs of the market.

Play No. 6 is to have a long-term care plan. It’s sad to say that many of us are going to need long-term care during our retirement years, and many people have just accepted that long-term care insurance is too expensive or is not offered. There are solutions to this dilemma.

Play No. 7 is to protect your beneficiaries. There are easy mistakes to make regarding designating who your beneficiaries are or arranging affairs so that the money that you have remaining after you die will be covered. You can defend against this.

Play No 8 is to protect yourself from scammers and identity thieves. This is a defensive play. There are bad people out there who are clever and sophisticated, and they want to steal your money.

Play No. 9 is to remember that financial plans are not set-it-and-forget-it. We live in a volatile world. There’s volatility, new discoveries, and great innovations. This will require you to adjust your game plan.

Play No. 10 is to monitor the financial future trends. Educate yourself. Become a student of the financial game. You need to know where the economy, politics, and science are headed so you can adjust and play to win.

A Final Piece Of Advice On Financial Playbooks

A coach who revolutionized playbooks was Knute Rockne of Notre Dame. Rockne hasn’t coached a football game for nearly 100 years, yet his legacy lives on. He coached from 1918 through 1930, finishing with a 105-12-5 (.881) career record that still ranks as the best winning percentage in the history of big time college football (for what is now called Division I).

There is an anecdote that Rockne, famous for having open practices anyone could attend, allegedly taking pity on a visiting college scout who missed a train connection to a Notre Dame game. Because the scout was not able to see the Fighting Irish play that day, Rockne gave him a copy of the Notre Dame playbook to take back home.

The next week Notre Dame used those plays to beat the scout’s university. A sportswriter caught wind of this and asked Rockne why he shared the playbook. Was it some form of psychological warfare?

Rockne reportedly replied: “No, it isn’t the plays that win; it’s the execution.”

The same is true with your retirement playbook. It isn’t the plays that win; it is the execution.