What keeps you up at night?  Money problems?  North Korea?  Your most needy child?  I have chronic insomnia, so a lot of things keep me up at night.  No worries, just stuff I process.  When I took my Information Systems class in Business School (30 years ago!), we learned about the difference between Batch and Real-Time processing.  My brain Batch Processes at night, thinking about all sorts of things, most of which are positive, but it still causes me to have chronic insomnia.  At some point during the wee hours I figure everything out and I fall asleep.  My insomnia doesn’t happen every day, but it frequently does.  Despite my insomnia, I am very healthy.  I eat a lot of vegetables.

Call to Action

If money problems are keeping you up at night, then your sleeplessness may be your body’s way of telling you that you need to do something about your issue.  When I say “keeping you up at night”, I mean that you have a worry in the most general sense.  When I say “problems”, I mean issues that you haven’t yet resolved with someone else or even with yourself.  If you have something troubling you about your finances, don’t just stand there, do something!  Contact an investment advisor or financial planner (such as me or another qualified person that you are comfortable with) and they can help you.  If you are able to articulate why you are troubled, your advisor/planner can probably recommend a new course of action that will help to alleviate your anxiety.  For instance:

• Worried that you will lose a good chunk of your savings if the stock market corrects?  Maybe you have too much of your portfolio allocated to stocks and you should reallocate into safer assets such as bonds, CD’s, or even cash.
• Worried about caring for aging parents?  Perhaps your planner can work together with you and your parents to come up with a plan.  It is difficult to talk about these issues one-on-one with your parents, so a qualified planner involved in the process can be very helpful and can help maintain a good parent/child relationship.
• Sick of your job, its politics, and your commute?  But you are holding on to your job because of the healthcare benefits?  Maybe you already have enough money to retire with some minor adjustments to your lifestyle.  Your financial planner can help you figure that out.

IMO

Some people are compulsive worriers.  I’m sure you know people who are if you aren’t yourself a worrier.  When it comes to personal financial issues, help is readily available.  Can’t afford a financial planner?  I bet you can – there are a lot of planners out there with all kinds of different compensation models.  Planners are not as expensive as you may think that they are.  Don’t be a victim, and don’t continue to suffer insomnia caused by financial issues.  Easier said than done, I know, but, as someone has already probably told you about a health issue, you really should get that taken care of.