Welcome to 2026!

Do you ever say to yourself how each year seems to move faster than the previous one?  How time flies as we age?

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains that time seems to speed up as we age because our brains process fewer new memories; childhood is packed with novel experiences, making time feel slow, while adulthood becomes more routine, causing our brains to compress familiar events, making years feel like they fly by, especially since a year becomes a smaller fraction of our total life.

What does this have to do with investing and financial planning? If you mix in our perception of time and some emotions, with our actual time horizon for our financial goals, it may distort the strategy. 

If you're thirty-five years old, it may be difficult to vision a thirty-five year plan of investing within a retirement account. Staying disciplined and dealing with the emotions that comes with market swings is paramount to help reach goals.  Whereas people who are closer to their retirement age may find time as more of a commodity and may look to avoid volatility and risk.

Of course time always moves at the same rate (unless we are moving extremely fast, like close to the speed of light, but that is for a discussion on physics!).

The point is, let’s not lose the precious value of time at any age, whether we are considering our financial plan or any critical facets and people in our lives.

Peter Janowsky