Anybody in Denial Yet?

Most men probably won’t admit this but I will. My wife has triple the amount of money than me. You got that right! Now, that may or may not say much for me (especially with my supposed expertise in financial matters), but it kind of echoes back to an episode on the “Bill Cosby Show” in which the son, Theo, is talking about the fact that his being rich is used against him at school. When confronted, Bill, of course, in his usual somewhat sour demeanor (and keep in mind that I went to high school with him and he was always a reflective kind of person), looked right back at his son and proclaimed, “No, son, you got that wrong. We—your mother and I—are rich. And you, you have nothing!”   I only bring this up because yesterday my wife opened a few quarterly statements and blanched, if that is the right word. Now, she comes from a long line of financial people which includes bankers and CEOs of major utility companies, and knows money very, very well. I waited for an eruption of profanity but nothing came. I only heard a big sigh, a nod of the head, and she very quietly and stoically, ripped those statements into the smallest pieces imaginable.   I raise this reaction because I just read an article in Forbes by Tom Scott, who has written for my publication, CPA Wealth Provider, and has always given us entertaining and worthwhile advice. In his piece, which he calls “Time to Batten Down the Hatches,” he talks about a disaster he experienced some 34 years ago and which he also detailed in his feature for us. He was a flight attendant on a 747 that crashed on takeoff at Nairobi airport. He was able to get more than a dozen people out of the broken fuselage before it exploded.   He remembers quite vividly watching a woman sitting on a smashed suitcase on the runway searching for something in her purse, completely, it would seem oblivious to what had happened a few hundred yards away where 59 people had died.   Scott says that two hours after the tragedy, he was in a Nairobi drug store looking for toothpaste and found himself completed fixated on what brand he would purchase.   He says it is not too dissimilar with what is happening today and as a financial advisor he find himself trying to work with clients who, he says, are either in shock or in a state of denial. His advice is pretty much the same as my extremely knowledgeable wife offers: Tuck it all in. Let’s step back and give us time to lick our wounds. We can still pay our bills and if we still want to retire right now, we can.   That may pretty much say it all. It’s really a time to go behind the bunkers, to hunker down if you will. Let’s not panic.   BTW (note the texting expertise here), Scott is a registered principal with LPL Financial and CEO of Scott Wealth Management in Irvine, California. And, he’s got a book coming out “Fasten Your Financial Seatbelt,” which I can imagine will be quite a good read.