Wildly Wealthy Words: Eggs, hunts and your wealth
Happy Easter!
Easter Sunday is the day millions of kids, big and small, go hunting for chocolate eggs and treats in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
They fill up baskets and celebrate their bounty - having magically been given a free pass to overload on chocolate.
Ok the last part was just wishful thinking.
I’m not sure what Easter Sunday is looking like in your home today. I’m with my love at my bush home and there is absolutely no chance of hiding any chocolates outside because:
- It’s too hot
- The monkeys will be feasting before the chocolate eggs have a chance to melt!
So it’s an indoor hunt here.
Today has gotten me reminiscing about all the easter egg hunts in my past…
Between the ages of 4 and 9 I spent most Easters on a farm.
Yep - thats me with my belly sticking out
On Easter Sunday my twin and I would each be given a basket which had to stay on the kitchen table while we were sent outside to go hunting.
The instructions were clear…
… Find ONE egg wrapped in shiny paper at a time and bring it back to said basket.
These instructions were very important and had to be followed explicitly!
Off Andrew and I would dash in the direction my folks and older siblings would point us in where a handful of eggs had been carefully hidden to ensure we worked hard to find them.
Deep in the vegetable garden, an egg would be burrowed under the red and green of a rhubarb leaf or at the end of the long driveway in the crook of the old oak tree’s branches.
Bounty is NOT meant to come easily!
I remember a fair amount of jostling too as Drew and I competed to get the eggs, a cacophony of cheers and encouragement from our seemingly very supportive siblings and mad dashing back and forth to the kitchen to place our bounty safely in the basket one at a time.
Little did we realise it was all a set up!
In order to keep us in the hunt and make us believe we had loads of eggs, my siblings would pilfer the found eggs from the basket and re-hide these in another area.
They would point to that new zone and have us scurrying off in a frenzy to find those eggs again.
We were so caught up in trying to beat each other in the hunt and finding more eggs that we never stopped to see how we were actually getting on.
We thought the laughter and ‘egging-on” of our siblings was because we were doing such a great job. Besides, we couldn’t stop and check on things because if we did the other would get ahead of us and might then get more.
Over and over this would be repeated until eventually we would get tired (or bored), slow down and actually look in the basket to see whether we had enough to stop and enjoy some of our treasures.
Confusion and disappointment would sweep in as it dawned on us just how few eggs all that dashing about had resulted in.
Despite being young, there was also a fair dose of anger and bitterness as we noticed the tell-tail chocolate around our siblings mouths and they hadn’t even done any of the hunting!
While this ruse may have been lovingly created to increase the joy of the egg hunt for 6 year old twins when there were only a few eggs to go around…
While Drew and I genuinely loved the dashing about with our siblings giving us masses of attention with their whooping and cheering us on…
… reflecting on this “game” got me thinking about a far more sinister ruse that looks pretty much the same as this crazy basket filling illusion - a ruse 95% of the adult population is currently caught in.
I’m talking about the ruse of “nest-egg” savings, investment and retirement products.
- The ruse of you being told that investing is scary and confusing and that you won’t understand what is happening anyway so just go out there and work hard like a good hunter bring those eggs back here without looking in the basket;
- The ruse that you should just trust what type of eggs the financial industry tells you to get despite not being able to see what is actually inside them because of the glossy wrappers;
- The ruse of financial advisors and actively managed fund managers helping themselves to 70% to 80% of your basket because you didn’t read the small print and understand the compounded effect of all those “little” fees and charges;
- The ruse of “smoke and mirror” investment returns so that even if you do glance in the basket or ask a question it is all so misty and vague that it’s hard to know if it is doing okay;
As much as we all enjoy the hunt, finding the eggs and dashing about in the big garden of life, the whole point of making money is so you can:
- Have what you need to live a great quality of life now;
- Stock up for the important milestones and big events along your life’s journey, and
- Stop dashing about and relax and slow down;
- Live life fully on your terms with the proceeds of your hard work serving you, not others.
To do this you’ve got to have an assortment of baskets and an assortment of eggs to put in them.
Then you need to give your baskets and eggs some attention and ensure they grow and don’t get eaten up by others' greed.
Enough of metaphors…
Let’s check in...
🪺 Do you understand the different between your tax deferred and your tax free investment baskets?
🪺 Are you clear on what is available to you in your country and how to make the most of them? Accounts such as ISA’s & SIPPS in the UK; IRS’s, 410k’s & ROTH’s in the USA, RA’s & TFSA in South Africa and Canada, SUPERS and maxi Savers in Oz and New Zealand?
🪺 Do you understand why you would want each type of basket and what type of “egg” to put in it to maximise your returns? (it is much simpler than it sounds)
🪺 Have you worked out how much you need to have in your baskets to be able to stop all the dashing about?
🪺 Can you see what type of eggs you have or are they covered in shiny wrappers which make them look sexy but you have no idea whether they are rotting inside?
🪺 Are the people you have entrusted with your eggs looking after your basket and you or are they looking after themselves only?
When last did you stop and look at what type of baskets you have and the quality of the investments you have in them?
If all this sounds overwhelming, confusing, complicated, difficult, boring… (anything that will stop you from looking after your eggs and ensuring your financial wellbeing); or if you have no idea where to start or how to do this…
I’ve got great news.
I recorded a free masterclass on How To be A Savvy Investor and you can catch it at a time that works for you.
This masterclass will help you get clear on what type of “eggs” read investments you need in your baskets, where to start and how to ensure the investments work for you and not the financial industry.
I hope you stop dashing around for long enough to create the wealth you need to live life on your terms.
Go HERE to watch the masterclass.
And today…
Wherever you are, whoever you are with, whether you celebrate Easter or not - know that the greatest hunt there is, is the hunt to determine what a wealthy life is for you, creating the frameworks to make it happen and setting off on the adventure to live it.
From my chocolate haze to yours…
P.S. My easter egg folly continued…
A few years later as a Civil Engineering student, learning more about boys and beer than bending moments, I invented a brilliant drinking game called the “Egg and Booze Race” (my creativity has been applied to many fields throughout my life).
Here’s how it goes:-
The object of the game is to see how many drinks you can have out of a chocolate egg before it melts and starts falling apart at which point you quickly eat the egg before it drops down your cleavage in a molten mass. The person who has the most drinks from an egg is the winner. Once eggs are consumed you start again. My research showed that the best vessels are those white candy eggs with a hard outside candy shell lined with chocolate on the inside. You bite off the top (not always an easy feat) and fill your chocolate chalice with your favourite liqueur and keep going until it’s a marvellous sticky mess - both you and the egg. Dark 80% cocoa eggs are particularly good with a Shiraz or similarly juicy red wine and research also shows eggs don’t last very long with coffee ;).
It doesn’t need to be booze. I’ve played this with great delight (for the kids not the parents) with many of my nieces and nephews over the years. The added advantage of using a chocolate egg as your drinks vessel is you don’t have any glasses to wash up.
Never say the Wealth Chef doesn’t give you loads of juicy living tips ;)
