The stock market doesn’t care about our need for instant gratification. More than ever today, we live in a society where we need immediate fulfillment – we immediately go to our phones to answer a question, we assume the point of an article just by reading its headline, and we try to express our thoughts in a short Tweet. The internet is amazing, but it made us so impatient. And long before we had the internet, we had the stock market. We cannot apply today’s standards of expectation of immediate gratification to our retirement portfolios.

To be a stock market investor means we have a several decade outlook to build our wealth. If our timeline is six months, or even a couple of years, stock ownership is not for us. Stock ownership means we have to be able to tolerate long periods of sideways markets and we have to be able to stomach down markets, too. Investing for retirement purposes will not give us immediate gratification; rather, it is a long slow and sometimes volatile rise towards wealth building.

When it comes to the stock market, stop looking. Stop looking at it, stop looking for that instant buzz, and check in on your portfolio once a year. There is no instant gratification to be found there. And if you are getting that immediate jolt – whether it be positive or negative – then you are not properly planning for retirement. If this is you, I can help. Reach out to me at my Contact page. And check out this blog as a video.