What Thanksgiving Traditions Teach About Retirement

From the Macy’s parade to carving the turkey, Thanksgiving traditions can teach us a lot about what makes a great financial plan. Let’s match some of the most loved parts of the holiday with the money lessons they represent.

 

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Transcript: 

Speaker 1:

From the Macy's Parade to carving the turkey, Thanksgiving traditions can teach us a lot about what makes a great financial plan. So let's have some fun this week here on Plan with the Tax Man.

 

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. It is Thanksgiving week that we are putting this one out. So maybe you're catching it before or after Thanksgiving. Hopefully you had a good holiday. And we're going to talk about what Thanksgiving traditions, how they might mirror smart financial planning. Have a little bit of fun here with Tony Mauro, who is the Des Moines professional alternative. And at Tax Doctor Inc., he is the tax man. So we're going to have that conversation, my friend. What is going on? How are you doing?

 

Tony Mauro:

I'm doing great. Getting ready for Thanksgiving. One of my favorite holidays of the year.

 

Speaker 1:

You and me both.

 

Tony Mauro:

Yeah. The staff's getting excited too. They get a little time off around Christmas, so it's all good.

 

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Favorite dish?

 

Tony Mauro:

At Thanksgiving, I'm still a traditional turkey guy, but my favorite at Thanksgiving is probably the pumpkin pie with a lot of whipped cream.

 

Speaker 1:

Okay. All right.

 

Tony Mauro:

How about you?

 

Speaker 1:

Mashed potatoes. My wife's mashed potatoes are killer.

 

Tony Mauro:

Oh yeah.

 

Speaker 1:

They're killer. That's probably why I have heart problems, but they're good. Well, let's have some fun. We'll talk about these traditions. We'll kind go through the day. We'll kind of run through the day a little bit and see if you can spin a financial yarn to some of these items.

 

So I don't know about at your house, Tony, but she starts working on all the stuff in the morning. It's her and my daughter have this tradition of doing all these things together, even though the kid's in her late 20s now, they really enjoy kind of working through the process together. That's a tradition in and of itself. But she has to have the Macy's Parade on in the background as they're prepping and whatnot. So what kind of analogy can we make to the prepping of the parade and the financial prepping and planning?

 

Tony Mauro:

Well, the parade, I used to watch it, I haven't watched it in several years, but it always does come off, just like every other giant event, as fairly flawless and looks like it's effortless. Just like I always use the golf analogies. Those guys make it look so easy. But what everybody doesn't see is everything that goes into the setup and the organization of that parade.

 

And really, no different in your financial life, whether it's your retirement plan or any other plan that you have that you're saving for. You do have to do some work behind the scenes. You've got to get your plan in place. You've got to understand what's going on, have communication with your advisor, and really monitor that plan in order for it to later, on when you're out bragging to your friends that, hey, I'm retiring at this age, or whatever, and telling them you're going to do all these fun things, to them it looks like, boy, somehow you made it so easy, but they don't understand the things that go into it. But you do need to do that with your financial plan.

 

Speaker 1:

That's a good way of thinking about that, right? The choreography, if you will, of the planning and of the parade as well as your retirement is pretty important. So, all right, so you're watching the parade, you got that going on, you start cooking the feast. So when it comes to obviously getting the turkey in, timing's got to matter here.

 

Tony Mauro:

Got to matter. I'm not a good cook, so I would probably be burning it. So I leave that to my wife. But I know that there's been several years that in the past, actually, it used to be my mom, she would put it in too late or cook it too long and it would burn. So the whole thing was kind of ruined. And so in your planning life, I never think it's too late to start, but obviously the sooner you start, you don't have to rush or you don't have to feel as much pain of saving because you're starting on time, you're doing it for a long time. And just like cooking the turkey, you want to make sure you're monitoring it while it's in the oven, or in this case, while your m