Afraid of death, taxes, and talking about money?

Let's help you get over these fears. By the time you read this bit of writing... countless changes will occur in the world around you. Countless. How many exactly? How many will have direct impacts on you? Your life? Your wallet? Your portfolio? Your tax bill? Your life? No one can say.

No. One. Can. Say.

So...

Don't let the fact of uncertainty in the world scare you to death.

Maybe your fears manifest as analysis paralysis. Maybe you suffer from buried-head-in-the-sand-ysis (I made sand-ysis up to sound like a diagnosis, sorry). Maybe you just might read this blog as my prescription for you, and it just may cure your heightened fears around financial life eventualities. Ok. Let me try anyways... Let me start like this to address these often-taboo topics:

You will die.

You will owe taxes before and after your death.

You will talk about and have to read about money matters along the way well more often than once. It will be uncomfortable at first. But like public speaking, it gets a little less scary each time you practice it.

Do not fear these unavoidable facts of life.

They are among the few certainties we all can count on in life. These do not change! "There are no certainties in life except death and taxes" is an old adage for a reason. These are constants every human pays the price of. You will die. You will owe taxes. My advice? Get as good a price on both as you can.

The best thing you can do is to take an accountable stance, accept these facts like you accept gravity on earth as an unavoidable part of living on earth, and get on with making positive things happen while you're here before you die.

Don't let things happen to you in your life. Own it. Make positive things surrounding your financial life happen for you, because of you.

Here's a fun picture of me and my bestie at the office many full moons ago making the most of Halloween, making people laugh at us, and laugh/breathe a little more lightly when it comes to these tougher topics. She and I took first place that year in the campus costume contest. We often spent Halloweens at the office dressed up in ways that carried a positive message that we wanted people talking about. This was one of my faves:

Work besties dressed for Halloween as Mrs. and Mr. Could A. and Should A. Saved-for-Retirement

Raising awareness is step one of any change you want to see in the world. Once you are made aware, you can then begin to understand. From there you can build on your understanding to make the knowledge you're gaining personalized, and then go forth to act in your own best interest because, when it comes to money, no one will look out for you or care about your money outcomes with the same regard you will for yourself. Not ever. Never going to happen. It is up to you. You can pay people to care. But still, they won't care as much as you care.

Again, no one will ever care about your money more than you will. You're it. [Side Note: I'm working on a new post about the merits of paying financial advisors. Stay tuned.]

Our costumes, that lovely prize-winning autumn, carried money messages and inside jokes from the mothership. The costumes were a reminder not to end up dependent on an employer for food, income, and health care forever. And I think the subpoint was, as we crossed the stage as exaggeratedly slow as possible, to aim to take your physical body out of the workplace grind as early as you can.

You may love your job. I did. Until I reached a point where I didn't want to love working it 60+ hours every week anymore, taking it on vacation with me, watching its toll on my health. I began to want to contribute in more meaningful ways, passion projects that could make an impact beyond the walls of this one mega corporation. If you see me and feel that for me, thank you.

The company always kept the audacious goal of "enriching the lives of every person on earth." While working there, I tried to help do that from the seat I occupied, by starting up a Club with a handful of its workforce, on a personalized fellow employee level. It caught on. And I do feel by leading this Club for well over a decade and a half, I've enriched a lot of lives just by boosting financial literacy. That wasn't my day job there though. Well, I wished it was. Sometimes I didn't wish that at all. And anyway, the company was never going to employ me to do that. But in all, running The Money Matters Club on my own free time was ultimately how I felt I could best live up to the company's mission from the seat I was in. And on the outside, now, talking about money matters with others, blogging, and trying to empower people's best financial lives no matter where they're at, is still a great way for me to give something back.

As today is El Dia de Los Muertos and we're also in the midst of Diwali too. Let me give something back and pay respects with a nod to both these important holidays that are in and of themselves focused on enriching lives.

One holiday is a chance to give an ofrenda in memory of those loved ones we've lost on earth who helped teach us to appreciate living, family, fortune and blessings, the other is a chance to bring light and prosperity to our lives, where light is celebrated for overpowering darkness, where good overpowers evil, and knowledge overpowers ignorance.

In honor of these important values and holidays that are celebrated spanning many cultures and faiths, I give you this blog to let light in, raise awareness, remove ignorance, unbury heads from the sand, and learn what we can from those who've been on the journey ahead of us.

Talking about death, dying, money, and taxes should be where we are all gaining more comfort, fluidity, literacy, and shining more light on difficult topics to overpower darkness and uncertainty anyway.

I am not perfect at all this. But I'm out here, tryin' to shed light!

So, I wish you a happy one-day-belated Halloween, happy Dia de Los Muertos, and happy Diwali. Let's remove the scary taboos, let's honor the inevitable, and let's shine some light (love and laughter too) to remove the darkness at each stage of one's financial life...

These are the financial life stages most of us will pass through:

1. When just starting out in your earning years - learn all you can about earnings, income, income tax, and the various types of taxes withheld and why, and what you need to do at the end of each earning year about all those withholdings. Learn how to strategize what from your income gets taxed in the first place and what doesn't, or what you can prevent from being taxed. Learn not to pay forward on your tax bill too much too soon before it's due, just enough to avoid underpayment penalties each quarter. Learn how to reduce or defer your taxable income for the year. Learn why hoping for a large refund check and not to have to owe more on your tax return is actually costly to you. Learn to shelter your total tax bill within the legal boundaries of the tax code by leveraging pre-tax benefits, tax credits, deductions, and business/educational/health expenses. Learn how putting at least 5-10% of your income from every paycheck received at your very first job is important to your life at every stage moving forward. But get how that much won't be enough; you will need to spend the majority of your best earning years putting 10-15% or more into investments for your future because employer and government sources of retirement income will be slim. The real wealth you end up with will be your responsibility to earn and compound. The rub is you won't care about any of this when you're young, though you should. You can't fathom getting old yet. You love to spend your own earnings on fun stuff in this stage of life. But you most certainly will age. So, age rich!
   

2. When you're in the mid-career stage - just keep learning all you can about how and where your money is being saved, invested, and growing for you/working overtime for you. Learn even more about what's being taxed, by when, and how. Especially learn about insuring and protecting your wealth as it compounds for you along the way. A bit more on these last two concepts:

   • More than employing strong passwords, you've got to be using multi-factor authentication protections on your most valuable financial accounts, start locking down your financial life, your identity and sensitive personal information, social security number, and your credit. Additional important protections include employing back up plans that help keep money coming into your financial house during an accident, health incident, security incident, short- or long-term disability, or worse. As you add beneficiaries (technical jargon for listing your loved ones in life), there's tons to think about to protect them too, like how to get them well covered, get yourself a Will, if not an entire estate plan with a Trust, and how to not leave a single beneficiary form blank or out of date on their behalf.

   • Employing the "Rule of 72" helps you see that if all you choose to invest in is the sort of safe cash-like/stable-like/low-risk-like investments throughout your time spent on the first stage (bullet one above), then you'll be far from retirement ready when you're facing the next stage (bullet three below). If you want to retire with $1,000,000 it will take you 18 years to double $500,000 at a 4% annual rate of return. Are you starting with $500,000 and do you have 18 more years before retirement to wait for your half million dollars to double (to compound)? If not, I'd want you to be thinking about how to realize a larger average annual rate of return over those years and how to invest differently to at least create the opportunity to double your money (compound its growth) much faster and starting as early as you can start earning and saving. The more doubling periods you have left ahead of you the better. But it's never too late to start your last doubling period. If you're reading this early in life, get started right now and rack up as many of them as you can.
     

3. When you're ready to contemplate offboarding from your career (you know you no longer will have to rely on an employer or self-employed paycheck) - prepare to live on your investments and passive income streams alone by really looking at your budget, for a couple years before you plan your exit from work life, pretend to live on that paycheckless budget every day for a year or two. You can do the pretending easier if you create a forcing function to disappear as much of your earned income as possible into beneficial pots you aren't going to touch for a while to try to get your take home pay down to near nothing for a long stretch. Maximize as much of your income as you can into your retirement funds, into building equity, creating passive income streams, getting rid of all your debts, and leveraging catch-up contributions you put into Health Savings Accounts (different than flexible spending accounts), IRAs, and 401(k)s and other workplace retirement savings and deferred compensation vehicles. There are at least another 5 paragraphs I'd add here to help you choose how to save and invest like whether Roth vs. Traditional sources will be best for you depending on your age, income, and other structures, and there's lots more conversation around the cost of mortgage debt vs. investing. We could spend another few scrolls discussing asset classes and diversification's role in your success. And there's tax implications to unpack on all these twists and turns too. This Club tackles these topics and this life stage more than any others (historically speaking) in one-hour sessions from time to time, in past or upcoming blog posts, and in soon-coming sub-Club forums relevant by audience and topic and life stage (stay tuned, I'm going to figure these types of forums out for you soon, I think, and hope you'll take part, one will be dedicated to mothership veterans, by popular demand, I hear you, I do).
   

4. When you're finally retired (no matter how early you achieve it) - you'll want to nurture your money in this stage just to ensure you do not outlive it. You could always go to work again if you were bored and able to. You could always create passive income streams if you're willing and able to. You will likely have social safety nets deliver minimal retirement income streams too if you paid into them along the way (those pesky paystub withholdings you saw coming out of your paychecks were for a reason). You'll have social medicine after age 65. And you'll hopefully have the ability to bridge it or complement it up to your needs. You'll want to prepare to die in this stage too, if not take prep steps earlier in stages one through three because you want to accept the inevitable way ahead of your time and get on with readying a plan. We're all going to die. Death's likelihood begins to grow larger once in this life stage step, this is not when death's likelihood starts to exist, it's always been there, just becomes more likely to occur in this stage. So, think about and carefully document your end-of-life plans and keep these up to date as your feelings and wishes evolve. How will you be remembered? Ask yourself if you want to be remembered as someone who forgot to complete their beneficiary forms? Or as someone who leaves behind an amazing financial house and legacy built over a life well lived?

I'm always challenged by keeping my blogs short. There's more to say than I've outlined in the 4 steps above. But they're a good general summary and starting place to get you unstuck from any fears that are holding you back, fears of the unavoidable truths you will eventually face as you keep moving through these life stages.

I am myself already, in a blink of an eye, living squarely in stage 4. I recently returned from a couple very reflective weeks in Spain too. I took my family there for their first time, not mine. I returned to the town where I learned to first speak Spanish in an invaluable immersion program that I had put myself through my second year of college. I was embraced by many friends who I met there 32 years ago when I was a very young person just beginning my adulting journey. These dear friends embraced me again like a long-lost sister and immediately loved on my family as if they were their own. I felt/feel so blessed.

Obviously, we returned home in time to avoid a disastrous storm that just took way too many lives too early in Valencia, Andalusia, Spain, this week. One of the deadliest storms in modern times across Europe, with people still missing today, with deceased bodies still trapped in homes with their survivors, I am emotional with sympathy and compelled to grow this blog a little longer with a side bar for you about my love for Spain and Valencia:

I recall many successful travels in Spain and my countless memories of a warm and welcoming country that have built my love for it.

One trip to Spain was with my same bestie who is costumed with me in the above Halloween photo. We adventured together to the magical and spectacular city of Valencia a little under a decade ago now. We watched the sun set to silhouette a local family's fresh caught seafood paella being made by fire on its beach and we took a private cooking class in one of its beautiful green and orange spotted orange groves taught by a happy Valencian chef in his private farm home kitchen.

To try to imagine those scenes and those folks overtaken by water and a deluge of mud and detritus is heartbreaking for me. Valencia's caught-off-guard devastation and losses are being calculated right now. And those who were spared are counting their blessings.

I was once caught off guard in an Andalusian village as a young student, when the sun was setting, on a mostly dry summer evening, at the very moment a still-unexplained flash flood occurred. I'm still confused why after seeing and feeling no rain falling from the sky above me, that frightful moment even happened. I vividly recall fighting to walk against the power of the rushing water barreling through a tiny, cobbled street as it rose to my shins and then my knees and then threatened to knock me off my feet. But suddenly the flash deluge of water barreling through my braced stance just up and ended almost as quickly as it began, and strangers all around the soaked little street looked around at each other in that moment happy to be alive and wondering whatever was that about!? It wasn't even raining out! We were lucky then.

I took pause today to reflect on that (with you if you're still reading) and my life's luck, the loved ones I've lost, what they've taught me, and on my capabilities still going strong for me today. To have been ready to retire early, to have been able to take a portion of my wealth built over my career and show my family one of my favorite countries for two weeks of immersion, culture, language, love, and fostering well-aged bonds of friendship. I don't think I talked about a single money matter for those two weeks. But the undercurrent was unmistakably ALL about the money matters I'd maneuvered well enough over three decades to make financing such a dream trip come true.

It's not lost on me that had we stayed longer or been passing through Valencia a few weeks later or had this week's storm hit Spain weeks earlier and caught us off guard where we were in Andalusia, we may have been among those gone too soon being remembered now by their survived loved ones. And that would have been sad, but okay with me. I suppose just like I readied myself to retire from the mothership early, I'm readying myself too for the ultimate retirement. It's what we all must face some day. Why not proactively?

That's the kind of ready-for-life-or-death type of financial life that I want for you too. I don't tell you about my financial life readiness to brag. Not ever. Fortunes are all relative anyway, aren't they? I share because if anyone's reading this, maybe it inspires or empowers you anew to own creating your own best financial life.

Empowers is how I'd mostly like to be remembered. Hope you feel me!

Today, just after a lovely Halloween, on El Dia de Los Muertos, and amid Diwali, it's as good a time as any to remember to please honor yourself, your loved ones, and your lifelong friendships. Live your best life. Especially your best financial life.

Weed out harmful factors that hold you back or hurt you and your desired financial outcomes.

Ask for help. Look for the helpers. Vet them carefully but look for 'em and ask 'em for help.

Overcome your fears of money, death, taxes, and life stage changes.

Get out of your own way if necessary to get serious about overpowering darkness and uncertainty surrounding money.

Don't fear uncertainty so much that you aren't as prepared as possible to be caught-off-guard.

Get well positioned to see as many of your dreams come true as you can before your day comes to depart this life. That day will eventually come that your loved ones are going to be remembering you (maybe every November 1st at a minimum), and they'll be contemplating your life, and celebrating your legacy.

If you do nothing else as you finish this read, go open all your financial accounts right now (the ones at work, within your workplace benefits, and the ones in your personal financial accounts outside of work too) and shine a light in them to ensure that you're using unique passwords and multi-factor authenticators in those important accounts, also ensure your beneficiary forms are not blank or sorely out of date. If you have a Trust, you might consider listing it as a primary or as secondary beneficiary on the beneficiary forms. There are considerations for both scenarios to research for your personal situation depending on the account type and your family structure, marital status, and who your beneficiaries are. Seek out rules and get inputs then based on your research update your forms with your best money move. Get all that done so your loved ones will remember you fondly for the way you left them cared for with as much love, light, financial upside and wealth transfer efficiencies as you could design into your departure plans.

You got this. Stay safe out there.

Because money matters,

el

Postscript thoughts...

I'm made more and more aware that I've been writing about money matters for some time from the perspective of a white woman with a higher education, an excellent career, and a degree of self-made life privilege for an audience of largely fellow corporate workers, highly educated (some of the best and the brightest on earth), with very good incomes and a high degree of future earning/employability potential.

I am aware some of you have been through a lot of scare and uncertainty recently with your jobs on the line and other corporate high-tech woes, takeaways, and impacts.

I'm so sorry; I hope it too shall pass, and hope you'll be okay if not thriving through these times once again soon. I relate. I see you. I know the woe.

Also, I've just spent the last one year focused in a new and different direction, wrought with other kinds of woe. This included helping survivors of domestic violence (DV), sex trafficking, and other violent sexual assault (SA) and financial abuse crimes--and the angelic non-profit staffers who serve these survivors at my county's local rape crisis and domestic violence and sexual assault center.

I'm now balancing the care and feeding of this Club (you all), with my family, and with my new calling: I'm aiming to also help a more vulnerable audience access financial literacy which can hope to help them enrich their lives too, to stay safer from DV and SA crimes, and to achieve/sustain/restore financial independence from all they may be surviving in their rapidly changing worlds today.

As I wrote about life stages above for you, reader/Club friend, I realized how I would have to completely revise the assumptions and priorities for this newer audience I'm also focused on helping. Our local communities have survivors of violent exploitations we may not fully comprehend. These cases almost always include financial abuses where victims of these exploitations then experience housing and food insecurities, employment and childcare challenges, and immense physical safety risks that are so severe, just talking to them about saving and investing even 1% of their money has to land entirely way down the list of their immediate priorities in life--and yet somehow might be the very key to unlocking their ultimate freedom from their perpetrators/abusers. It's delicate.

So, Club Friends, I welcome you to take stock in your blessings if you're in safe relationships, able to harvest your immense earning potential, and able to invest for your future dreams. Please try to pay it forward. Talk to the folks in your life who are further on the journey than you. And talk to those who are coming up on the part of the journey you've already seen. You never know who will need your kindness, understanding, and helpful words or coaching about money matters. So many aren't nearly as fortunate as us. Yet.

WEAVE stands for When Everyone Acts Violence Ends. I just spent a year doing a bit of work at WEAVE on a part-time basis. And I'm continuing. I've seen firsthand that when victims of violence can boost their financial literacy and financial power from a place of safety and housing security, they are more in control of achieving gainful employment and financial independence from their perpetrators and abusers.

When every one of us acts to help boost financial literacy and empower those around us with more money security knowledge, it helps foster financial independence among our most vulnerable, that's when violence and financial abuses such as public benefits trafficking, coerced debt, credit and financial fraud, identity theft, and other forms of financial abuses will have less room to exist among us and when talking about money matters will become normalized and not feel so scary or taboo. If every child were to be immersed in financial literacy (just as with learning a second language, cultural immersion is key) from early ages, we might hope to break the cycles of violence where preying on the vulnerable is not possible. That's how light will overcome darkness.

Sure, I want everyone to be able to retire early. But even more so, I want us all to live in a way that will leave no room for violence or financial abuse in our communities. That's another very worthy way we can seek to enrich the lives of everyone on the planet.

I invite your comments. What do you think about the money matters that matter most at each life stage? Or please share what do you think we can each do to lift more folks up who are surviving financial abuse at the hands of their traffickers, perpetrators, or domestic abusers?

You may think you don't know enough to talk to anyone about money. But just start a conversation. Talking about money won't feel so scary once everyone's doing more of it and your next conversation may just save or enrich a life. Let's shine our lights to overpower this kind of fear and darkness.

You can learn more about WEAVEInc.org -- or seek out your own local community's rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence crisis center to see how they're serving your community and what kind of help may be needed. Tell the others!

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E.M.Powers ("el") is just a regular person with no particular financial credentials or expertise who happens to be a money enthusiast and the founder of The Money Matters Club, a virtual watercooler for like-minded individuals with a thirst for building their own financial health. Since 2006, she's helped thousands of co-workers build their financial literacy and wealth by participating in The Money Matters Club, a community she built on her employer's internal network. Since 2023, she's been attempting to scale The Club's reach through its second home on the World Wide Web. Her opinions--as well as the opinions of all participants--are just that: opinions, which are subject to flawed logic, math, typos and correction. She keeps a growth mindset and is also always learning something new or bolstering her own understanding after discussions at The Club. All information shared is done so with the best intent to inspire and empower others to learn more about money considerations toward building their own financial muscles. Nothing shared is meant as individualized advice that anyone should act on without doing their own curious research and personal decision making. There are no dumb questions at The Money Matters Club. Your financial health and literacy are what this Club cares about. All investing involves risk. All results can and will vary.

Copyright: ©The Money Matters Club, all rights reserved (2024).