Torn between investing and digesting

<p>We are of a certain age where we frequently receive invitations to dinners at nice restaurants hosted by people in suits who would like to advise us on how to financially prepare for retirement.</p><p>If that’s not exciting enough, we also frequently receive invitations to preplan our funerals, buy burial plots or consider cremation plans.</p><p>What do you do for fun?</p><p>Let me just say that even though we have a retirement plan in place, we have been to several of those free financial advisement dinners and what we have learned is this: Italian. Go for Italian. By far, the best meal was at the Italian restaurant. Family style, nice sampling of entrees, interesting people at our table.</p><p>We’ve also learned there is a distinct pattern to every interaction with any sort of adviser, and it is this: No matter what question you ask, the answer is, “Excellent question.”</p><p>“Could you explain mandatory withdrawals?”</p><p>“Excellent question.”</p><p>“Do you think we might be better off just burying what money we’ve saved in the backyard?”</p><p>“Excellent question.”</p><p>We were recently invited to a webcast offered by the company that holds some of our retirement savings to hear what they had to say about the market outlook in lieu of recent volatility. It was a lot of the usual talk about diversifying and balanced portfolios interspersed with a few football phrases like “going long, short runs and long runs.” This was followed by talk about high-yield bonds, government bonds, Barry Bonds and James Bond.</p><p>Then they opened it up for questions and anyone could send any question they liked. Of course, every question was an excellent question with a few variations like, “Wow. Great question!” and “Isn’t that an excellent question?”</p><p>I typed in questions as fast as I could:</p><p>“Where did the woman reading submitted questions get her necklace?”</p><p>“Do we get coffee cups with the corporate logo like the ones on your desk? They might help ease the sting of our losses.”</p><p>For some reason, my questions weren’t read. Instead, they continued with talk about ranges of outcomes, distribution of returns and chatter about medians, divided medians, roundabouts and four-way stops or something like that.</p><p>I’m not saying they were filling time, but they began talking a lot about “break out to the upside” which I am pretty sure was a hit song by some boy band in the ‘80s.</p><p>In any case, they all agreed that though the market is uncertain and will probably continue to be uncertain, yet not even that is certain, they feel good.</p><p>Me typing: “Of course you feel good, you have our money. We’d feel good if we had your money. Wanna swap?”</p><p>That question wasn’t read either.</p><p>My favorite part was where one of the advisers told viewers not to make decisions they would regret without calling them first.</p><p>Me typing: “How do you know you’re about to make a decision you’ll regret until after you’ve made it and lived to regret it?”</p><p>Excellent question, right?</p><p>The bottom line is, nothing is ever certain, but we feel good, too. Why, you ask? Because we’re having Italian for dinner and I’m making it at home.</p>