Retirement Investing - What Would Jesus Do?

Papabear — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:07:23 +0000

This blog seems to have taken off in a direction of its own. It wasn’t my original plan to devote so much space only to how-to financial issues. I meant to write a post on the subject of retirement planning and the steps for determining how much you need to save in your retirement savings account to fund the retirement lifestyle you want. When I typed up that little piece of advice, even covering the steps briefly, I realized it had grown into over 1,500 words of advice. Because it got so long, I divided it into 3 parts.

So before this blog begins to sound like a dry financial planning textbook, let’s talk about some related things. What about retirement planning and planning for the future in general?

In the Sermon on the Mount in the Kings James version so many of us are familiar with, Jesus says:

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” (Matt. 6:25)

When most of us hear these words, we understand them to mean Jesus was saying you don’t have to plan ahead. I even heard a man once who was bragging that he didn’t have any life insurance, and he justified it based on this Bible verse. That might be fine for him. He wouldn’t be around to suffer the consequences, but what about his survivors?

I got out my copy of Dale Carnegie’s great book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” because I remembered he discussed this. Dale Carnegie says that when the KJV was written 400 years ago, “thought” frequently meant “anxiety”. So the verse is really better translated “have no anxiety for tomorrow” or “don’t worry about tomorrow”.

The New International Version puts it this way in :

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Matt. 6:25-27

What does this mean for retirement planning? Dale Carnegie says, by all means yes, you should think about tomorrow and do some careful planning and preparation. What Jesus was saying was - don’t spend your time worrying about tomorrow.

Planning is productive, both retirement planning and other planning for the future. Worrying is not. That was great advice 2,000 years ago. It’s still great advice today.

money and life