Once upon a time I helped a poor chap out who was drowning in debt…
His daughter came to me and asked if I could help him out because… well… he needed help and I… like a true White Knight sap… laid my cape down in the mud for him.
He had something like… I think $350,000 or something ridiculous… I can’t remember. His annual payments… just to service that debt… was something like $20,000.
I could clean this up by reorganizing some of his debt, getting him a refi on some of it… and then putting together a nice insurance plan that would accelerate the debt payoff…
And I would do it all at no charge to him…
And so I went to work.
I spent over a month coordinating everything.
Presented the plan… he was ecstatic… and a little shocked that his situation wasn’t nearly as hopeless as HE thought it was.
He didn’t see a way out of his mess… and here I come with a solution (or rather a series of solutions) he never thought of.
But he mucked it up.
He took my plan… did the refi… and instead of starting a savings plan… he threw the second half of my plan in the garbage and decided to go back into debt.
Now… one thing about my plans is… I always build an “escape hatch” into them so that clients who follow through on my instructions will always (ALWAYS) make out over the long-term…
BUT…
… a weird quirk in those plans is that they are also inherently “boobytrapped” by design… not like I am TRYING to do it… it’s just the nature of the plan… meaning… if the client mucks it out of sheer stoopidity… doesn’t follow through on my instructions… they will end up in a WORLD OF HURT the likes of which they have never before imagined.
It kind of reigns in do-it-yourselfers and rogue clients who suffer from bright-and-shiny-object syndrome… as well as filters out the nincompoops who defy logic and good sense by refusing to follow simple instructions.
These are long-term plans… and, as such… they are the arch enemy of short-term thinkers.
Now, if ye be a short-term thinker… this is a fair warning… please please please do not ask me to design anything for you.
It will turn out badly.
If you’re a long-term thinker… well then… hop onto my email list.