“There’s no crying in Baseball!” A League of Their Own, 1992

The baseball season is long and strenuous. Players, coaches and teams have to pace themselves. They recognize that one game in a long season – win or lose – is less important than consistently winning more than they lose. More importantly, a team has to win more than the other teams in their division if they want to get to the playoffs, compete for the league championship and make it to the World Series. We’ll get back to that in a paragraph or two.

The baseball season is like your financial season from the time you wake up to the reality that your financial future is in your own hands, till the time you pass on to the next world and pay forward the wisdom and wealth you accumulated during your earthly existence. So, like baseball, you don’t expect to win every time you make a decision about money and investing. What you aim for is consistently winning more than you lose – right?

Wrong. In many baseball seasons a team that lost its opening game and chanted the mantra, “It’s a long season; you can’t win ‘em all,” ended the season one half game out of first place, missed the playoffs, the league championship and the World Series. Every game counts and every financial decision counts.

Moreover, when a team prospers through the season and gets into the division playoffs, they are subject to defeat in the short term. And so it goes through division play and into the Series; victory or defeat is just the swing of the bat away. There are thirty teams in Major League Baseball but only one winner in the end.

So, also, when you get to the point where you want to live off your money and investments instead of your labor, you can have a great season right up to the end and lose in the short term. So, conclude for yourself that the short term is both more important and more manageable than the long term. Having money that you control in the short term is more important than having “long-term” investments that you don’t control, and that someone else – perhaps with motives that don’t serve you - does.

Every baseball team knows that winning or losing a single game could well leave them in front of their TV instead of in the dugout during the playoffs. Americans need to recognize that managing their money so that they don’t lose it is more important than hoping that some investment over which they have no control will miraculously get them into the playoffs and make them winners in the World Series of wealth building.

America has been duped into believing that is OK to lose money, that waiting out ‘the market’ is a strategy that serves them; that the future is assured if only they ‘stay the course.’

BUNK!

Americans need to wrest control of their money from the Behemoths that have seduced them into believing that bigger is smarter or better than they are, and that the Behemoths should be the custodians of Americans’ money instead of the individual Americans themselves.

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www.TheMoneyForLifeBook.com

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