health

Do Health and Wealth Start with Gratitude?
photo shows a small heart pendant with the words "i am grateful"

The Harvard Medical School published an essay some time ago on the power of gratitude, explaining:

“Gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”

Relish, improve, deal, build… Those are verbs we can get behind! Gratitude can be about past blessings, current conditions, or reflect a hopeful and optimistic attitude about the future. One of the best things about an attitude toward gratitude is that it can be cultivated.

In one cited study, three groups of people were directed to write a few sentences each week. One group was instructed to write about irritations or things that had displeased them. The second was directed to write about things that had affected them. The third group was directed to focus on things that had happened for which they were grateful.

After ten weeks, one group was more optimistic about life, and had a greater sense of wellbeing. (That group also happened to exercise more and make fewer visits to the doctor.) You can guess which.

We believe there are interesting implications for the work we do together with you. Short-term fluctuations in the markets may cause irritation, but gratitude for long-term returns might give us a broader perspective. The economy and markets always seem to be a mixed bag, but gratitude for opportunities may help us avoid a focus on problems that might prevent us from investing effectively.

At the heart of all this is a simple truth, that we get to choose what gets our attention. Does choosing gratitude make us healthier, wealthier, and wiser? No guarantees, but we might have more fun while we find out together.

Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.

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Play the audio version of this post below:

An Attitude of Gratitude: Get Yourself a Slice – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services

This text can be found at https://www.228Main.com/.

An Attitude of Gratitude: Get Yourself a Slice
photo shows a small heart pendant with the words "i am grateful"

The Harvard Medical School published an essay some time ago on the power of gratitude, explaining:

“Gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”

Relish, improve, deal, build… Those are verbs we can get behind! Gratitude can be about past blessings, current conditions, or reflect a hopeful and optimistic attitude about the future. One of the best things about an attitude toward gratitude is that it can be cultivated.

In one cited study, three groups of people were directed to write a few sentences each week. One group was instructed to write about irritations or things that had displeased them. The second was directed to write about things that had affected them. The third group was directed to focus on things that had happened for which they were grateful.

After ten weeks, one group was more optimistic about life, and had a greater sense of wellbeing. (That group also happened to exercise more and make fewer visits to the doctor.) You can guess which.

We believe there are interesting implications for the work we do together with you. Short-term fluctuations in the markets may cause irritation, but gratitude for long-term returns might give us a broader perspective. The economy and markets always seem to be a mixed bag, but gratitude for opportunities may help us avoid a focus on problems that might prevent us from investing effectively.

At the heart of all this is a simple truth, that we get to choose what gets our attention. Does choosing gratitude make us healthier, wealthier, and wiser? No guarantees, but we might have more fun while we find out together.

Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.

Want content like this in your inbox each week? Leave your email here.

Play the audio version of this post below:

An Attitude of Gratitude: Get Yourself a Slice – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services

This text can be found at https://www.228Main.com/.

Got To Do It? Get To Do It!
photo shows a bunch of balloons against a blue sky

Sometimes the business of life feels just like that: business. The business of staying healthy requires an occasional trip to the dentist or a plateful of greens when you’d rather eat something else.

But we’ve noticed a curious thing lately among some financial planner types. One related that a client said their meetings were like going to the dentist. Another compared the task of financial planning to eating your vegetables. Both talked about the planning process as something that is unpleasant, necessary, but good for your long-term welfare.

Our business with you does not feel like that.

Clients, we wouldn’t pretend to speak for you, but we often find both relief and joy in finding order in life’s chaos. It’s a pleasure to come to understand the meaning of your wealth. It seems we all get a little giddy when we check in and confirm you are on track for your long-term goals or can get your investments better aligned with your values.

What a treat!

As time goes by, the product of investment gains is sometimes wealth beyond expectations. (No guarantees, of course.) Reviewing a long history of beginning balances growing over time feels more puppy dogs and rainbows than dental appointments and bitter veggies.

Psychologists say attitudes are contagious. Some people have told me that I myself have a positive outlook. But that probably would not fully explain the difference in the tone and tenor of our meetings, compared to those dental appointment types. Maybe it comes down to these things:

  • We look for a good philosophical fit before we even begin a working relationship.
  • We believe that those not born with good investing instincts can learn.
  • We trust people to be the experts of their objectives and what they want to accomplish.
  • We strive to meet people where they are, to talk about our areas of expertise in only those ways that everyone participating has a grasp of what is going on—and what we are doing about it.
  • We keep our focus on the long term, to increase the chances that people get to their most cherished goals.

People working together, in mutual respect—that’s what we strive to be about. And what a joy it can be.

When you’re ready to collaborate on your plans and planning, email us or call.

Want content like this in your inbox each week? Leave your email here.

Play the audio version of this post below:

Got To Do It? Get To Do It! – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services

This text is available at https://www.228Main.com/.

Financial Inflammation

© Can Stock Photo / staras

Inflammation is one of the ways the human body deals with harmful stimuli. It keeps us healthy. Chronic inflammation is something else: it is thought by some to be at the root of many health challenges. It seems to be a factor in heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other serious problems. Complex processes are difficult to manage, but some things have been shown to reduce chronic inflammation.

We use the concept of chronic inflammation to think about other areas of life, as well. Sometimes we meet people who have conflicting goals, plans that are unlikely to happen, unsatisfying spending habits, or ineffective use of wealth.
All of these are a form of financial inflammation.

The first step in dealing with inflammation is understanding its role in keeping us from healthy bodies or working financial plans. Then we can work on the things that are aggravating it and the things that may help control it.

1. Clarifying goals provides a focus that may guide our decision-making and reduce uncertainty.

2. Figuring out a path to get to your goals provides a roadmap to move you toward that desired future.

3. Fixing the things that interfere with progress, and finding ways to improve your progress, are ways to systematically reduce the financial inflammation in your life.

Vitality is a good thing in your financial plans and planning, as well as in life.

Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.

Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Where Did the Decade Go?

© Can Stock Photo / Konstanttin

We experience life as a series of moments. The future approaches, then becomes the present for a moment, and passes into history.

The dawn of the third decade of the 21st century is upon us; the current decade is nearly history. The moments we had!

In the first days of 2010, my wife Cathy flew to Florida to furnish and outfit a newly purchased condo; I joined her after a couple weeks. We began our life as snowbirds, skipping some cold weather weeks in Nebraska. (Planning to work to age 92, we had to figure out how to have some fun along the way.)

Our Office Manager Greg Leibman agreed to help in the office here at 228 Main during my absence, January 2010. It did not take long for me to get a glimmer of the potential of that association for the business.

Our planning, disruptions, and adaptations led to surprising growth and development. We focused more tightly on investment advisory business, performed under the auspices of LPL Financial’s RIA (registered investment advisor). That side of the business now accounts for over 70% of assets, $70 million now. That structure elevates our desire to serve your best interests to a binding obligation upon us, the way we like it.

The family health challenges we worked with for most of the decade brought us to a revolution in communications, forced me to learn how to delegate effectively and figure out how to build a team to serve you. The lesson I learned from my life with Cathy, make the most of what you have, enabled us to keep things running so we had the health insurance and resources she needed in her illness.

We had more than full measures of pain and joy in the decade. That is what life is made of.

And now a new decade looms. We hope to be able to make an interesting report to you about it, ten years hence.

Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.

Make the Most of It

© Can Stock Photo / AntonioGuillem

All seven billion of us have the same job. Whether we are among the poorest or wealthiest, sickest or healthiest, a single task unites us: wake up every day and make the most of it.

Taking that one step farther, we each can increase our ability to do things, to be better, to be stronger. Beginning each day a little better, a little stronger than the day before, that helps us make the most of it.

I won’t pretend to know or prescribe what you should eat or drink, how you should live, whether to exercise, or give you health tips. My professional expertise is devoted strictly to striving to grow your buckets, for use in your real life.

When you entrust me to help you with your wealth, I owe you the effort to make the most of it. Wouldn’t it be better for you if my brain was a little bigger? After all, thinking is how I do my job. The Harvard Health Blog recently cited studies that show exercise boosts the size of parts of the brain involved in memory and learning.

So exercise may be helping me make the most of it, in ways that help you, too.
This is a win-win choice: I have other, selfish reasons for exercise that have nothing to do with you. But if Harvard is correct, you get an advisor with a bigger brain out of the deal.

This essay began with a focus on the day to day, making the most of it. Oddly, my longest-range goal brings me to the same choice about exercise. It will help me serve you until I am 92 years old.

This congruence between my fondest ambitions and my daily life is good for you, too. Win-win.

Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.