By Kathy Longo, CFP®, CAP®, CDFA
If you’re thinking about retiring, now is a great opportunity take stock of your life as a whole, with your career being only one component. Too often we look at our lives in black and white. Job and spouse. Children and friends. Fun and duty. It is important to look between the lines to identify the aspects of your life that make you feel successful and joyful.
By Kathy Longo, CFP®, CAP®, CDFA
This might come as a shocking statement from a person who looks at numbers as part of her profession, but we can get too fixated on numbers to determine success or happiness. My discovery of number fixation wasn’t necessarily in preparation for building a new financial plan or working with a client. In this case it was related to an online shopping experience. My first question was about the quality of the item given the low price. The second question was my hesitation to buy clothes that didn’t meet the “vanity sizing” standards we are used to if they arrived with tags with a larger size number. (Did you know that the sizes we see in stores and on-line are larger in the US than elsewhere, so we can make a purchase and feel good about it?)
By Kathy Longo, CFP®, CAP®, CDFA
In a current society that is as fast paced as ever, people often wonder which came first; success or happiness? The real problem is determining what makes us truly happy and remembering to value that the most. Carl Richards asks us to really think about the people we know who are successful, and then think of those that are happy. Are they the same person? Most of the time they aren’t. So what makes these 2 individuals so different?
Carl Richards is the Director of Investor Education for the BAM Alliance.
This commentary originally appeared October 9, 2014 on www.behaviorgap.com
For the next few minutes, I want you to focus on the most successful person you know (and yes, it may be you). What makes this individual successful in your mind? Professional accomplishments? Personal wealth? Now, I want you to think of the happiest person you know.
Did you come up with the same name?
No doubt some of you did. However, I suspect many more of you ended up with two different people. We often ignore it, but we live in a world that doesn’t always make it easy for success and happiness to coexist. My sense is that the problem comes back to something fairly basic.
