Family Finance Blog

There is a lot of talk in my family at the moment about money. No one has died or anything, but there are some things going on that have us all talking about it. And at the end of the day, I come up with the same conclusion that I always have. I am not counting on anyone other than my wife and me to contribute to our financial freedom.

That means I don’t think about whether my parents or my wife’s parents will leave us anything, whether we’ll win the lottery or whether a rich aunt we don’t even know about will bequeath us $100 million (or even just $100). We aren’t counting on social security or our children to support us. When we calculate how much money we need to be saving and try to adjust our lives accordingly, we are assuming that what we are utterly on our own.

Will this be the case? Will all our parents die penniless and will our children throw us out on the street if we can’t support ourselves? Not likely. But by making sure that we are putting enough away now to cover those expenses later, it is not something we have to worry about. Anything that we do get above and beyond what we put in is just gravy and will make life that much easier.

So unless you already have a large trust waiting for you, try not to count on any other form of support. You might get it, and that will be great, but you’ll be prepared if you don’t, and that is even more important.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Retirement, Investing, Goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.