Dialogue

This comment was received (on my other blog) in response to my first post:

Anonymous said...

seems difficult to me to have an exit strategy in life. You don't have enough facts to plan one. In marriage and raising kids there are too many variables. And when would you implement your plan?

October 10, 2008 3:57 PM

I would first like to address the comment made in the fist sentence.

I perhaps was unclear in my intention. While ultimately, a life exit strategy will be required by each of us (lest we deliver to our heirs the job of cleaning up after us), I meant to say that exit strategies are a necessary part of everyday life. The problem is that few seem to realize the importance of them.

Let me provide an example:

Little Johnny is hit on the playground by Big John. Little Johnny tells a teacher. The teacher tells them to go to class.

After class, Big John has several of his friends with him, finds Little Johnny and he and his friends proceed to inflict severe bodily injury upon Little Johnny.

Perhaps Little Johnny's action was not the best course of action to take.

(For more on bullying, and effective ways to deal with it, check out the Bullies to Buddies web site.)

In essence, developing an exit strategy, whether dealing with a bully or dealing with another country, a spouse or co-worker, at its core requires critical thinking. Unfortunately, critical thinking is not really taught in school. Critical thinking must be developed on our own.

Secondly:

You don't have enough facts to plan one. In marriage and raising kids there are too many variables. And when would you implement your plan?

Rarely (in fact, I might even say never) are we in a position of having all the facts. Decisions must, by necessity, be made with the information that we have available at the time, or a decision will never be made.

An example is retirement income. How much will I need? I have no idea, so I put off developing a retirement plan. The longer I put off developing a retirement plan, the more difficult it will be for me to develop the amount of income that I will need upon retirement. It is better to start a retirement plan early and contribute an amount (any amount) to it regularly. That way when you do reach retirement, you will have something, rather than nothing because you could not decide how much to contribute, because you did not know how much you would need. I have never heard anyone complain because their retirement account was too large, only that it was not large enough.

So if one were to develop an exit strategy for their life, in essence, what they would need to do would be to develop exit strategies for various aspects of their lives. If you have a family, you will need to provide life insurance to protect them in the case of your early death. How much? First, at least as much as it will cost to bury or cremate you so that the cost of your death does not increase their burden. Beyond that, whatever you can afford to assist in replacing your value to the family. That is just one aspect. Perhaps we can discuss others in the future.

In the end, a life exit strategy is constituted of many exit strategies strung together to form a cohesive whole.

When is it implemented? As soon as you recognize the need.