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_{Exploring engineered optionality, champion mentality, and rearranging things}

Happy Thursday! Thanks for reading Intentional Dollar — where we look at old money ideas through a new perspective.

What’s inside?

• One idea to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.

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_{One idea to experiment with:}

Engineered Optionality:

Are you saving too much for retirement?

It sounds like a strange question, doesn’t it?

Too much in a retirement account? Isn’t that the goal?

Actually, saving too much for retirement is not only possible, it’s common.

When all your savings funnel into tax-deferred retirement accounts, your financial life becomes unbalanced. The tax advantages feel smart in the short run, but the long-term tradeoff is less flexibility, less liquidity, and potentially a pile of taxable risk later on.

Retirement accounts are intentionally illiquid. They’re designed so you can’t access your money easily. Sure, there are loans, hardship withdrawals, and a few exceptions. Those are band-aids to an illiquidity problem. In reality, your money is locked away until age 59½, and touching it early often triggers taxes and penalties./2 , and touching it early often triggers taxes and penalties.

The risk isn’t just about early access. It’s about having too much money trapped in tax-deferred accounts, where every future withdrawal could be taxed at higher rates, and where you have little control over timing or flexibility. Meanwhile, you’ve shortchanged other accounts that give you freedom.

I’ve seen it too often: people overfund their 401(k)s and IRAs, feeling responsible and disciplined, but end up with small pools of money outside of retirement plans. They’re retirement rich and optionality poor.

The smarter goal isn’t to maximize retirement savings.

It’s to maximize flexibility, or engineer life optionality. Thats what cash is. Thats what money in a brokerage account is. Engineered optionality. Building wealth across different tax buckets and timelines, so you have control over your money both before and after retirement.

All financial people will say too much cash is a bad thing. They’ll say cash drag, opportunity cost, those kinds of things. But cash and brokerage assets give you options, and options are good.

If you want to retire early, or take a sabbatical, or take a lower paying job, you need the flexibility to do so. Too much in retirement will gate your ability to make the moves you want to make from now to 59½.

What’s the composition of your net worth? How liquid are you? How much optionality are you engineering along the way?

_{Two quotes on champion mentality:}

What are the winners doing?

_{Three questions on rearranging things:}

1. When’s the last time I rearranged things to get a new perspective?

2. What if the things fit, but the current location doesn’t?

3. What new solutions are illuminated from the new layout?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

Contact Me:

Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.

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