what's worth worrying about?

let's face it, we're facing an absolute firehose of information about bad things happening in the world.
A bomb goes off in Sri Lanka, and we here about it. A child is taken by the gypsies and we hear about it. The wheels come off at congress and they send the entire federal workforce home for 2 weeks. No way you're not going to hear about that!  You wonder about your job, your bills, whether your child is getting bullied at school. Maybe you have cancer and don't know about it!
God, just let me live until my boy graduates from high school....no, college...or maybe grad school!

In the last 10 years, one of the biggest stressors I have experienced is money. Interesting, because the last 10 years have been the my highest earning years.  So what's to worry about, then?   Well, everything.
Too much obligation...too big a house, too big a mortgage, too many ventures, too much leverage.

That's a lesson you can only learn by experience. I can't imagine a personal finance class in junior college that will bring home the impact of having signed up for obligations that make the things you own end up owning you.

What does that have to do with retirement investing?   First, it has to do with living within your means. You get used to your lifestyle and it's hard to give up stuff. Better to have never reached for that extra luxury when you're buying on credit. Second; it has to do with following the right metrics.

Running in the background are the security things...insurance, savings, dental appointments, vaccinations. You have to have these things in order, or your foundation is shaky.

Then, there's the worry about whether your savings and investments are doing at least as well as expected.  I have a very hard time understanding whether my wife's company plan funds are doing well or not. I have a hard time with the TIAA CREF account ( all 10 grand of it) where I invested 3K in 1994-5. That's 18 years ago, so I guess it's doing a bit better than 5%. Hmm.... I cashed out the annuity; clearly not doing well when they charged yearly fees and it wasn't worth a dime more than the day I bought it.  
Since I took over the management of my retirement plan, the performance is purely my responsibility. I find that anxiety easier to manage than the constant concern about the performance and trustworthiness of the adviser. I could see he was earning commissions; whose interest came first? 
Well, I aligned ALL the interests when I hired me for the job. 
I'm still in the process of switching my focus from the size of the account to how it is growing income.  After all, the nature of the value of a stock portfolio is to fluctuate. Dividends blunt the dips by a few percent, but they aren't adequate to hide a "market correction".  One problem is that all of the brokerage reporting is designed to look at capital gain/loss, realized or not. There isn't a screen that tracks the current value of the dividend stream, computed to a yearly income. That' a shame for us dividend growth investors. After all, along with the monitering of the health of our companies' earnings growth, profits, payout ratio, dividend growth, it's the yearly dividend income that is the primary metric for success in DG investing.  If that number is rising, most likely all else is well.

I've learned to live with some uncertainty. I've learned the hard way not to over-leverage. I have learned the true meaning of "margin of safety" where it comes to personal finance. It's not worth sleepless nights and financial brinksmanship to reach for a few more dollars of investment gains.

Those are worries you can easily avoid if you see them coming. That's the trick, to see them coming.

More on that later....