To be comfortable saving for retirement and spending savings in retirement, your investments must satisfy both your financial and emotional needs. When your investments are lucrative, but you and your investments are not emotionally compatible, you will either get rid of them and look for something new and possibly more incompatible or stew in your misery. Yet it is difficult to even know what your needs are in this relationship. You are subject to great cultural pressure today to own U.S. stocks, especially the latest fad stocks. It is not just that everybody at the office claims to own them and is checking the results online all day. There are whole institutions devoted to this: CNBC, The Nightly Business News, The Wall Street Journal, a thousand Web sites, and chat rooms. The pressure to own stocks so you can converse about them is high. But are you happy with them? Is anybody happy with them? How many of your colleagues have stopped to ask what their emotional needs are in their investment relationships? Do they act like they know what their emotional needs are? Let’s return to the question that started this chapter and look at the emotional dilemma apart from the financial. What emotions are triggered by having to choose between retirement savings and vacations? Do you find yourself feeling guilty when you go to Hawaii instead of putting the money in an IRA? Or do you get depressed when you cannot go to Hawaii because all your extra savings are tied up in IRAs and other retirement plans?
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