Financial Impact Factor Radio: 04.06.12

The other day I was invited by a friend of mine Gretchen Peterson, a rather talented artist and founder of Lemonwoodcourt.com to attend a meeting of the Toastmasters. For those of you who have never been to one of these gatherings, the group critiques the delivery of the spoken word in the hopes of helping its members overcome the daunting task of speaking in public. After a member gives a prepared speech on the subject of their choice, the group gives their members the opportunity to give an ad hoc speech on the topic of choice for that particular day. The topic for this meeting was dreaming. As I sat and listened to the fledgling toastmasters offer their take on what this was, I couldn’t help but think that dreaming is something more, something darker.

One woman suggested that she had dreamt about winning the lottery, one shared the dream of her daughter to become a ballerina, another suggested that simply determining whether one was awake or asleep added context to the dream. For some reason, perhaps due to my years of writing about the subject of money, I began to think that the thought that dreaming was just some sort of manifestation of what worried them. Is the dream of more money simply a concern about their job or making ends meet? Was dreaming about what your children might become a worry that that life might not turn out the way they had hoped or you had wished? Was trying to define waking and sleeping as two different events the worry that we might not be able to tell the difference?

We dream of retirement. Or do we worry about retirement? We dream of owning a home. Or is really the worry that we might not be able to afford one or keep the one we have? We dream about the future. Or do we worry about something we have only fleeting control of?

So today on the Financial Impact Factor Radio we confront those worries and talk about a product designed to help with those fears: the annuity.