The Christmas Ham Analogy
When I was in high school biology, just before we were to dissect a fetal pig, my teacher told us this story that I have since come to realize wasn’t her own. You’ve probably heard it.
Every Christmas a certain lady made a ham for her family gathering. In an effort to pass on this family tradition, she began including her daughter in the preparations. They got the pan. They got the ham. And then…mom sliced off the end of the ham.
Not seeing a reason for this, the daughter asked why. The mom had learned the tactic from her mom, and she had just always done it. Together, they call up grandma only to find out that she only sliced her hams as such because her pan was too small to accommodate the entire thing, and they’d been needlessly trimming hams for decades for nothing.
The point, other than not wasting ham, is that you might need to question some of your traditions, or at least know the reason you do those things. Just because your family has been doing something for years doesn't mean you should keep doing it forever.
Tradition is a vehicle for knowledge of a different sort. It’s not academic, it’s a connection to the past; to your own history. By and large we think you should keep them and be sure to explain the provenance of your tradition, lest it be dropped out of an assumption of pointlessness.
But financial traditions are a different animal and let’s be honest, some of our financial traditions are kind of harmful. If you’re the child of parents that carried high interest debt in the name of keeping up appearances, you may not see this thorn pushing its way into your own life.
Or, if you were, say, a child of the Depression, you may be unwilling to part with any cash whatsoever. Your children may mimic this to the point of misery. Or maybe your family didn’t talk about money at all, and you’ve been flying blind in adulthood.
These traditions shouldn’t be passed on. But humans tend to repeat their experiences regardless of intention. Be aware of how you handle money and what you say about it to your progeny.
The most pervasive traditional logic in finance says that you need a million dollars to retire comfortably. Most of us don’t believe that anymore because we’ve heard that a million dollars “ain’t what it used to be”. But you can’t just leave it there. You need an answer to the unspoken question: what do I need to happily retire? And even more importantly: what will make me happy?
Your desired future has a cost and its proximity to a million dollars, or any other touted watermark, is irrelevant. Our holistic planning process eschews traditional boilerplate advice in favor of custom plans oriented to your specific vision of the future. In other words, we don’t cut the ham to accommodate the pan. The ham leads the way.
If you’re on board with this philosophy, give us a shout and see what we can do for your family.