"Beet Thinning" Your Retirement Planning…

We have too much information available to us today, especially when it comes to retirement planning.  This gives us a false sense of confidence, so we think we can “do it ourselves.” But human nature shows that when we have too much on our plates of which we don’t understand, we procrastinate making decisions. Having lots of information often causes confusion.
Let me illustrate what I mean with an experience I had growing up in Idaho with beet-thinning. Our neighbor had planted a big field of beets and hired some of our family to thin their beets.  They explained to us that if we did not thin the beets, by cutting out two for every three beets growing, none would grow big enough to eat.  I tested this theory and left a few beets over in the corner of the field untouched, just to see what would happen.  Sure enough, the beets got so crowded in the dirt with each other, that when I harvested, they were all stuck together and tiny. By contrast, the beets we thinned grew big and were wonderful upon harvesting, so large as to dwarf the small ones.
Thinning beets taught me a grand lesson about planning for retirement. The secret to good retirement planning is not in the gathering and collecting of adequate information but in thinning out all the stupid and wrong information that will do you no good.  It is the process of “thinning” where we learn the most and can make the best decisions.  Do the research to gather information about retirement, but then thin it out until you have the few golden nuggets that make the most sense for your personal situation. Not everything that you read about applies to you.  Think thin, to have more!