Do you find yourself dwelling

Do you find yourself dwelling on the unimportant, stressing on the unintended, and freaking over the unknown? When you do this does it work for you? I doubt it, dwelling on the unimportant, or freaking out over the unknown simply doesn't work. I know because when I was younger, I did this from time to time and I found it was like lighting a match, in a dark room, to make sure no one spilled any gunpowder on my bicycle, under the stairs, near the back porch, in the dark of February.

Actually, some of what I just said was intentionally unimportant, to hopefully distract you from feeling any stigma for freaking out over earlier unknowns.

Why do we think stressing on the unintended or freaking out over the unknown will work, perhaps it because it allows us to be distracted from doing something rather than doing nothing? If we attempt to do something and something unintended happens, this means we have not considered all aspects of our plan so we are now faced with something we had not thought of that has happened. One way to face this issue is to embrace it, learn from it and incorporate it into what we do next. The other way is to stress about it, run from it and reject it, or we could just stress about it and do nothing. The best way to prevent this from happening is to think about what you want to do and consider all possibilities and how you will react to them.

What does freaking out about the unknown do for you except to increase your blood pressure, your anxiety and cause grief for people around you? If you don’t know what is happening or there is an unknown confronting you, get information about it before you act. Asking questions is a good method and a good way to start to find out what is going on, try it, it works.

Dwelling on the unimportant things in your life is a coping mechanism to help you hide from dealing with the important aspects of your life. We all know what is important to us and we need to deal with these first.

How do we get people to save?

How do we get people to save for the future, is a question that has no easy answer?  In England there is a group called “The Money and Pensions Service (Maps)” which has just launched its 10-year financial wellbeing strategy, which includes the aim of getting five million more workers saving for later life.

As well as its plans to get 28.6 million people understanding how to plan for their retirement by 2030, five million more than currently, Maps’ UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing sets out four more “agendas for change”.

By the end of the decade, Maps said it wanted 6.8 million children and young people to get a meaningful financial education, and to increase the number of working-age people who regularly put money into savings.

The organization’s other goals were ensuring two million more people get the debt advice they need and reducing the number of people relying on credit to pay for food and bills by two million.

This is a wonderful initiative and a worthwhile goal and one that I hope they achieve. If you do a search on how do we get people to save for retirement, you will get hundreds of posts along the same ideas:

·  It's never too early — or too late — to start saving for retirement

·  If you are just starting out, focus on saving as much as you can now

·  Focus on starting today

·  Meet your employer's match

· Take advantage of every government program open to you in your country

· Automate your savings

· Rein in spending

· Set a goal

· Stash extra funds

· Consider delaying Social Security as you get closer to retirement

However, many countries are facing a retirement savings crisis. In the United States, for example, the fraction of workers at risk of having inadequate funds to maintain their lifestyle through retirement has increased to over 53%. 

One reason for the savings crisis is the ongoing shift in the private sector from defined benefit pension plans (DB, where retirement benefits are formulaic and known in advance) to defined contribution plans (DC, where benefits depend on investment outcomes). Making some type of payroll-based savings plan available to everyone is essential because it is the most effective way for the middle class to save. But having a plan offered at the workplace is not sufficient. Even for those with access to an employer-sponsored plan, almost a quarter fail to join, and among those who do join, many save too little.

Behavioural Economists tell us that there are four essential ingredients to any comprehensive plan to facilitate adequate saving for retirement: availability, automatic enrollment, automatic investment, and automatic escalation. These ideals are hard to implement due to regulations, union agreements, and peoples’ ideas that they can do better than any plan. 

In Canada we are fortunate because we have programs that are designed to help us replace up to 33% of our work income. This means that if we want to save for retirement, we only need to save to replace 37% of our income. Experts tell us that we should have enough savings to give us about 70% of our work income when we retire, since our government programs replace 33% of our income or soon will, then we only need to fill the gap and save the remaining 37%, So, if your employer does not have any plan, then follow the advice given at the beginning of the post and you should be in better shape than having no savings.

The path less chosen

Memories are made of this, is a refrain from an old song and it talks about how we make our memories. As we get older, time flies and it could be because of how we see time and how we make memories. In a new book, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments by Meik Wiking. Published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2019 by Meik Wiking the idea of how to make memories is explored. According to the author, there is something called the reminiscence effect, or reminiscence bump. This bump is caused by the fact that we remember better new and novel things, and since those new and novel things decrease for us as we age, our memories are stronger of times when we were younger.

As teenagers, we experience our first breakup, our first love, our first kiss, our first time driving and these stay in our memories. In our twenties, we also experience many new events that also stay with us over time. In another post, I talked about how time flies and how we can change our perception to slow it down or speed time up. The way to slow down time is to experience more firsts and break out of our daily routine. When we were teenagers and 20 somethings, we had many firsts but as we hit our 60’s these firsts are harder to find. We may have become jaded and this causes live to speed up. Experiencing firsts and changes of the scene play an important role in organizing the way we remember our lives.

If we want life to slow down, to make moments memorable and your life unforgettable, try to harness the power of firsts. In your daily routine, it’s also an idea to consider how you can turn the ordinary into something more extraordinary to help you remember the event. It may be little things. If you always walk down the path well-trodden, it might make the day feel a little more extraordinary if you walk down the path less chosen. If you are always walking the path less chosen then perhaps it would be nice to travel the path well-trodden.

Leap year

 Some fun facts to start the day

1. On a leap day, a man can't refuse a woman's plea to get married. Queen Margaret of Scotland was apparently five years old when she came up with the notorious February 29 proposal trap.

2. If a man did refuse the proposal, he would be fined a kiss, a silk dress or twelve pairs of gloves.

3. Women either have to wear breeches or a scarlet petticoat to pop the question, according to tradition.

4. One in five engaged couples in Greece will plan to avoid getting married in a leap year. They believe it is bad luck.

5. People born on February 29 are called "leaplings" or "leapers".

6. The poet Lord Byron was born on a Leap Day.

7. So was the rapper Ja Rule.

8. The plot of Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance revolved around Frederic's discovery that, because he is a leapling, he must remain apprenticed to pirates and serve another 63 years before he can join Mabel, his one true love.

9. Anthony, Texas is the self-proclaimed "Leap Year Capital of the World". It holds a festival which includes a guided trip to Aztec Cave, "fun at the horse farm" and square dancing.

10 Parties are sometimes thrown to celebrate leap days. There is no special leap day food but if there was, it would probably be frog’s legs.

11 Matthew Goode, the British film star who acted in the film Leap Year, said he knew the movie would be remembered as the "worst film of 2011" but wanted to be "close to home and able to visit his girlfriend and his newborn daughter."

12 February 29 also marks Rare Disease Day.

13 Today you are working for free if you're on a fixed annual wage.

14 Astrologers believe people born on February 29 have unusual talents, such as the ability to burp the alphabet or paint like Picasso.

15 Mitsukuni "honey" Haninozuka, the manga and anime character born on a leap day, likes sweets, cake and stuffed toys. 

16 Hugh Hefner opened his first Playboy Club on February 29, 1960.

17 The character Leap Day William who appeared in an episode of 30 Rock wears blue and yellow.

18 The French call leapfrog "saute-mouton", which translates literally as "leap sheep".

19 The frog is a symbol associated with February 
20 The Australian rocket frog can leap over two metres.

21 Being born on February 29 is extremely unlucky. While this myth is prevalent in India too, the Scottish believed that if you're born on the Leap Day, your life will have an everlasting stream of suffering. Well, the only bad luck we can think of right now is not having one's birthdays recognized by computer systems!