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Wealth Planning: Offense vs. Defense

Guest post by: C.J Lauria

Article Overview: This area of wealth planning is by far the most misunderstood and ignored. The personal finance industry which is so completely dominated by its focus on mutual funds has distracted the masses by having them focus on mutual fund rates of returns, dollar cost averaging, and other topics that get us to continue to just blindly, month after month, throw more and more money into their funds. The mutual fund industry would have you believe that as long as you put money away each month and pick the “top rated” funds everything will be great.

Wealth Planning: Offense vs. Defense

As the start of the NFL season is upon us I thought I would take this opportunity to write on one of the most important lessons of wealth planning using the sport of Football as an example. Football like most sports has an offense objective whereby the purpose is to score points and a defensive objective whereby the purpose is to prevent the opposing team from scoring. Most of the time it is the offensive players, quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers that receive much of the recognition when teams are doing well while the defensive players go unnoticed. The truth is that the defense plays a more significant role in the success of team then the offense. This may come as a surprise to you and you may find yourself not agreeing with this statement, so to test this I will pose the following question. If a football team has a perfect defense, by perfect, meaning that they never allow the opposing team to score; could that team ever be defeated? The answer is No. The worst that team could ever do is end up in a tie. Even if that teams’ offense is miserable, as long as it scored at least once by either touchdown, field goal, or a safety they would win the game. This team could afford to be very aggressive with its play calling because even if the ball was intercepted by the opposing team it would not matter because the defense would shut them down.

The lesson here is that with a perfect defense it is impossible to lose the game. A tie is the worst case scenario and a win is extremely likely because as long as the team only scores once it will be victorious. While achieving a perfect defense has never happened in football history it is very possible to create the perfect defense in your personal finances and wealth planning. How would you like to have the peace of mind of knowing that your personal financial plan was fail proof, that it provided a perfect defense…one where you couldn’t lose?

This area of wealth planning is by far the most misunderstood and ignored. The personal finance industry which is so completely dominated by its focus on mutual funds has distracted the masses by having them focus on mutual fund rates of returns, dollar cost averaging, and other topics that get us to continue to just blindly, month after month, throw more and more money into their funds. The mutual fund industry would have you believe that as long as you put money away each month and pick the “top rated” funds everything will be great.

The truth is it doesn’t really matter which funds you have and what percentage you’re earning on your funds because it only takes one incident of bad fortune to have your savings program wiped away. Just like in football you can score 50 points which is a very impressive offensive performance however if the other team scores 51 points you lose. The 50 pts you scored don’t count for anything. The game goes down as a loss. The point: It doesn’t matter how many points you score on offense because if your defense gives up more then your offense scores you lose.

In my next article I will discuss what this means in a financial context. Stayed tuned as we explore intelligent wealth planning with Invesdoor™.

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Article Tags: dollar cost averaging, finance industry, mutual fund industry, mutual funds, personal finance, wealth planning



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