Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Big shift in strategy

What would motivate me to make a big shift in strategy?
longest bull market in modern history is one possible reason. The real reason is simplicity.

May 1st;  a traditional day for protest, demonstration, renewal, transformation.

My transformation is two-fold;  focus on those things most necessary to make my start-up businesses successful, and live in the present.

I spent 12 years learning to manage my own retirement portfolio. I did a reasonable job of it. I know the drill. But, this is, perhaps, the most complex time in my adult life in a couple of decades. Why? I'm doing stuff for which I don't have prior experience. It's taking a lot of time. I need a break from managing retirement assets. So,  our retirement assets are split roughly in half, and placed with two professional managers. It hurts my heart to watch the professional management fees flow out the door, but I am weeding out the majority of my financial reading, spending far less time managing the in-box as the inflow gets simpler and simpler, giving me less distraction as I focus on my businesses. One can only manage so much complexity.

I am truly tired of ruminating over the past and what happened to me. I have an eye on the future, but mostly on the present. What needs doing now? Today, tomorrow, next week.

I have created 4 streams of revenue;  The largest is locums, about 0.5 FTE and worth perhaps $14k/month. The next is medical directorships, which together should be worth another $1500/month. A third is the partial retirement distribution at about 5k/month. 20k/month gets us to about 2/3 of what had been our past experience had been. It's far more than we should actually need to survive. However, the laser scar and design studio cost about $8000/month, so we're still scraping along.  It'll all work out, I believe. More attention to the present is the key.