Hello David,

For about five and half years we had chickens, and for some misinformed reason I stored the feed in our garage. We took a break from the chickens and haven’t had them in 19 months. A persistent problem has remained though: Mice!

For some reason Mallory doesn’t like mice too much, and our garage looked like yours may have at one point: Filled to the brim! It was a rat paradise. I told you about the trailer we bought a few weeks ago. Well, truth be told, the reason we got it was to clean our garage out in order to work on our mice issue. Amelia is officially done with K-5! We're pictured below at her awards ceremony.

A couple of weekends ago I had the trailer loaded up with stuff to haul off to the dump. I was proud of myself for effectively backing the trailer up at the dump to unload it. As I was unloading it, I saw something darting out of the corner of my eye.

I looked closer and there was a mouse scurrying around the trailer trying to hide in what remained on it. Finally, when the trailer was unloaded, I thought he’d do the logical thing and jump off and head for safety. Nope! He backed himself into a corner of the trailer between the wood planks on the floor of the trailer and the metal frame. Amelia finished dance up this past weekend with her recital.

The mouse would not get off the trailer. So, I drove away. Judge me if you will, but I accelerated fast to try to get rid of him. I got out at a stop sign to see if I had flung him off. No luck. He was hanging on for dear life.

I decided there was no way in the world I was taking this mouse back to my house. I stopped at a big parking lot and opened the back hatch. We had a brush that you remove ice from your windshield with. The mouse finally met his match with bristles of the brush and hopped off the trailer and darted for the shrubs close by. Ansley had a enough dancing at the recital and wanted to hang out in the foyer with me.

I have to admit we knew we had a problem for a while in the garage but we had chosen to punt on doing anything about it. Excuses are easy to come by. But we still had a problem whether we chose to acknowledge it or not.

Sometimes when we meet with folks for an initial discovery session, we identify areas of opportunity where by making some changes they would benefit. Subconsciously, we know if we’re reaching out for help by attending a workshop or filling out a form online to ask for help, we are indicating we’re not getting all the help that we need or desire. What she really needed was to get some energy out at the playground!

Examples of this may be our advisor isn’t offering to help us with Social Security or maybe our advisor isn’t looking for ways to lessen our lifetime tax burden or maybe we’re concerned about how much we may lose in our accounts. Whatever the case is, we’re trending in the direction of getting help.

It’s kind of like when we decided to talk to the exterminator about our mouse problem or when we bought traps. We were trending in the right direction but we ultimately knew that if we had all our junk in the garage the mice would probably stick around.

The hurdle that some people have is taking the next step. They reached out for help, issues have been identified, a plan of action to better the circumstances has been presented, but we sometimes worry about what comes next.

I’ll tell you, it took hours to get the garage in order and the better part of a day. But the results are worthwhile. Moving on from an old advisor who isn’t helping you get to the next stage of life is in my mind a lot easier than cleaning out a garage!

Here’s the other thing; just because someone helped you get to one spot, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the right person to get you to the next spot. Investing and financial planning when we’re within five years of retirement is a lot different than when we have ten or twenty years before we are going to retire.

Until next week,

David C. Treece,

Financial Planner

864.641.7955

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