98 • MARTIN H. RUBY
My Daughter, the Procrastinator My daughter, Rebecca, is very efficient. Every morning, she manages to get her kids up, dressed, fed, and out the door with everything they need for a day at school. At the same time, she gets herself ready for a day at the office, makes sure all the permission slips are filled out, all the bills are paid, and everyone (including her husband) has their lunch. But there’s one area where Rebecca is a bit of a procrastinator, and that’s making big financial decisions. After we met about IUL, Rebecca was pretty excited. But she was also busy. She was changing jobs, taking care of my grandchil- dren, repainting her kitchen, and serving as chair of two different community organizations. So, she told me what many people tell me when it’s time to act: “I really like this plan. Can we talk about it in a few months when things slow down?” Now, because Rebecca is my daughter, I was blunt with her. And because you and I have been together for more than eleven chapters now, I’ll be blunt with you, too: No, you cannot wait. You have to start saving the right way, right now. Rebecca is very practical. I knew if I could quantify how much she’s giving up by putting off this decision, she’d come around. So I ran some numbers and here’s what I found. Let’s say you’re forty-two years old and put off the decision to start saving the right way for five years. Do you know how much income you’ll be giving up when you retire? Forty-two percent. That means every year in retirement, you’ll have 42 percent less money to spend than if you had just started saving today. But wait, Rebecca told me. “I’m not going to put it off for five years. Maybe just a few months or a year.” Okay. Here’s the bad news. If you wait even just one year to start saving the right way, you’ll have 10 percent less income to spend . . . every year of retirement.
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