Enough

Last week, we talked about how quickly financial decisions can pile up when life changes without warning. This week, we slow things down and ask a much simpler question, but one that may shape nearly every financial decision you make: What is enough?

In this episode of The Real World Money Show, John explores how comparison can quietly move the financial finish line, sometimes without us even realizing it. Through the stories of two fictional households, and one very tempting boat in a neighbor’s driveway, he looks at the difference between building a life around your own priorities and constantly chasing someone else’s definition of success. He also explores how defining “enough” can influence spending, career decisions, retirement planning, generosity, and the way we think about stewardship. 

Whether you're building toward retirement, enjoying the success you've already earned, or simply wondering why the next milestone never seems to feel like enough, this episode offers a practical exercise for defining what matters to you. Because if you don't decide what enough looks like for yourself, the world will be more than happy to keep moving the finish line for you.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

My neighbor bought a boat last month. I don't need a boat. I have never once needed a boat. And yet, for four days, I found myself doing some very creative mental math about boats. Today's show is about the word that stopped me. Enough.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Securities and investment advisory services offered through LPL Enterprise. LPL, a registered investment advisor member, FINRA, SIPC, and an affiliate of LPL Financial. LPL and LPL Financial are not affiliated with Iron Eagle Advisors. Content in this material is for general information only, and it's not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Any guests are not affiliated with or endorsed by LPL Enterprise, LPL Financial, or Iron Eagle Advisors.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Welcome back to Iron Eagle's Real World Money Show. I'm John Flick with Iron Eagle Advisors right here in Charlottesville, Virginia. And today's episode has been sitting in a folder on my desk for months. Mostly because I kept feeling like I had not earned the right to talk about it yet. And here's what happened. A boat showed up in my neighbor's driveway. A nice one. Not an outrageous one, just a nice, clean lines, the kind of boat that makes you start Googling boats at 11 p.m. for reasons you cannot fully explain to your wife. By day two, I had somehow learned the difference between a wake boat and a pontoon. Information I did not previously possess, and if I'm honest, don't need. By day three, I caught myself mentally rearranging our garage to figure out where a boat that I did not own and have no real plan to purchase would theoretically go. My wife found me doing this, and she didn't say anything. She just looked at the garage, then at me, then went back inside, which, frankly, was the correct response. For about four days I caught myself doing this quiet, quite ridiculous inventory, not of my finances, of my feelings. Am I behind? Should I want a boat? Do I even like boats? Or do I just not want my neighbor to have something that I don't? And that's the whole trap. All in one driveway. Nobody sat me down and told me I needed a boat. My life did not change the day it arrived. My bank account did not change. The only thing that changed was one number in my head quietly moving, the number that measures whether I have enough. And here's the part that made me actually write this episode of instead of just complaining about it to my wife for a week. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what my number for enough even is. I could tell you what my neighbor has. I could tell you with alarming precision what several people I follow on social media have. I could not in that moment tell you what I already had decided was enough for me, because at that point I had not actually decided. And that's true for almost everybody, and it's not a character flaw. Nobody teaches this. We teach kids to read a balance sheet, sort of, eventually, if they're lucky. Nobody ever sits a kid down and says, someday you're going to need a definition of enough written down somewhere, or the world will happily write one for you, and it will always be slightly more than whatever you currently have. That's today's whole show. Not a budget, not a savings target, the actual word, enough. And what happens to two different households who answered that question in two very different ways. And before the story, here's a quick word on why this matters more than it sounds like it should. Enough is not the same thing as less. I want to be really clear about that up front because this episode is not a lecture about wanting less or needing less or feeling guilty about a boat, or in my case, wanting one. Enough is a number, or more honestly, a description that you actually chose on purpose instead of one the world is constantly recalculating for you based on your neighbor, your coworker, or somebody with a very nice kitchen on the internet. Without a definition of enough, every financial decision becomes a moving target. A raise does not feel like progress, it just resets the number. A paid-off car doesn't feel like an accomplishment, it just clears the space for the next want. I've sat across the table from households making very good money who feel behind. And I've had households making considerably less who feel completely at peace. And the difference almost every single time has nothing to do with the number on the pay stub. It has to do with whether somebody in that house ever actually sat down and decided what enough looked like for them. Here's the sneaky part. If you never define it on purpose, you don't end up with no definition. You end up with somebody else's definition by accident. The neighbor's driveway becomes the definition. The coworker's kitchen renovation becomes the definition. A stranger's vacation photos become the definition. Enough doesn't stay empty just because you never filled it in yourself. It gets filled in quite constantly by whoever or whatever is the loudest and the closest. And none of those sources have your family's actual life in mind when the bar is set. Today I want to introduce you to two households. Both are fictional composites built out of situations that I see constantly. They're not real people and not clients. Same town, reasonably similar starting points, wildly different relationship with that one word. Mark and Julie are doing well. Genuinely on paper, doing well. Mark manages a territory for a regional distribution company. He has a good salary, good bonus most years. Julie works in patient scheduling at a growing practice. Steady hours, steady pay. Combined, they're comfortably in the upper half of household incomes for this area. By almost any outside measure, they've made it. And they feel most days like they're falling behind. Not because anything's actually wrong. The house is nice. It's not the nicest house. The car is newer, but it's not the newest car. Every 12 to 18 months, something in their life quietly upgrades. The kitchen, the SUV, the vacation gets one notch more ambitious. And every single time it feels less like indulgence and more like catching up. Mark genuinely believes, and I think he'd say this out loud if you asked him, that the next upgrade is the one that finally gets him to the feeling that he's been chasing. But here's the thing, it never quite does. There's always a slightly nicer version of whatever he just got. Visible from somewhere, maybe it's a neighbor's driveway, a coworker's vacation photo. And the finish line moves the exact distance he disclosed. And here's the part that should sound familiar to basically everybody listening, because it's not really about Mark and Julie's income at all. They've never once sat down together and said out loud, here's what enough looks like for us. What they've done instead, without ever deciding to, is let enough be defined as whatever household one rung up the ladder currently has. Which means mathematically, it can never actually be reached. Because there's always going to be a household one or more rungs up. Picture a specific Tuesday. Julie is scrolling through her phone after the kids are down, and a friend from college posts pictures from a trip to somewhere with genuinely blue water. Julie doesn't think consciously, hey, I'm now dissatisfied with my life. She thinks we should do a real trip next year. Which sounds harmless and might even be fine, except it's the fourth time this year a specific purchase decision got triggered by somebody else's photo, instead of by Mark and Julie actually asking each other what they wanted. Multiply that by a decade, and you get a household running almost entirely on other people's itineraries. Now I want to be fair to Mark here because it would be easy to make him the villain of today's show, but he really isn't. Mark works hard. He loves his family. He's not reckless with money. Mark pays the bills. He's not underwater. He's not making door four mistakes. He's just never once asked the actual question. And a household that's never asked that question, that doesn't mean they're broke. It's just never finished, no matter what the number says. And it's its own kind of exhausting in a much quieter way than a layoff or a market crash. The kind of exhausting that doesn't show up on a statement. I asked Mark in the story I'm building here the same question I asked Linda. What would he do with an extra $2,000 a month out of nowhere? He thought about it for a second. He he said, probably the boat or something like the boat. Not because he sat down and decided that a boat was part of his family's actual good life, but because it was the most recent thing that made him feel behind. And $2,000 a month sounded like exactly enough to stop feeling that way. Until, almost certainly, something else shows up in somebody else's driveway next spring. Frank and Linda live about 10 minutes from Mark and Julie. And on paper, they look like a step down. Frank spent 30 years running the parts counter at a hardware store before retiring. Linda still works part-time at a school. Mostly, she'll tell you, because she loves the kids and the schedule, not because the household needs the income to function. Combined, they've never come close to what Mark and Julie bring home in a given year. They also, and I want to say this plainly because it's the whole point, seem to have a considerably better time. Their house is paid off. It's modest, and it's been the same house for 26 years, and Frank will tell you without a hint of defensiveness that he has zero interest in a bigger one. Because a bigger house just means a bigger amount of house to worry about. Their car is nine years old, and Frank does most of the maintenance himself. Not because they can't afford a newer one, they genuinely could, but because this one runs fine and a car payment sounds to Frank like volunteering for a bill he does not currently have. They take one real trip a year, the same lake and the same mountains that they've gone to since their kids were small. And Frank describes this unprompted as exactly enough vacation. If you ask Frank about the boat down the street, the same one that started my whole four-day spiral, and he just shrugs. It's not performed contentment. It's not a rehearsed answer for a radio show, just an actual shrug. Good for him, Frank says. I'd have to store the thing. It's not that Frank is incapable of wanting things. He wanted the lakehouse rental every summer badly enough to make it non-negotiable in their budget for two decades running. He just isn't running an open bid against every driveway that he passes because he already knows what he's bidding on, and a boat was never on the list. And here's the thing that makes Frank and Linda's story worth telling instead of just something charming. It is not deprivation. Nobody is white knuckling through a joyless, restricted life to hit a number on a spreadsheet. Frank genuinely and visibly enjoys his life. He just decided years ago, probably without ever using the exact word, what enough looked like for his family. The paid-off house, the reliable car, the same lake every summer, time with the grandkids, and once he's decided, he stopped negotiating with himself about it every single time somebody else's life showed up in his driveway or in his newsfeed. Same town, wildly different income. And if you ask both households right now, today, do you have enough? I'd bet real money on which one answers yes without hesitation, and the one with the bigger number. I asked Linda once in the story I'm building here what she'd do with an extra $2,000 a month if it showed up out of nowhere. She did not hesitate either. More toward the grandkids' college accounts, maybe a slightly nicer version of the same annual trip, and the rest, she said, straight to the church in the food bank downtown because we don't really need anything else. Now that was not a rehearsed answer. It's not a performance for a stranger asking a hypothetical question. It's just somebody who had already done the math on her own life and was not waiting for permission from anyone else's. Now, if you've been with this show for a while, you already know about Ray and his brother-in-law, the one who took a chunk of money and put it into a soup truck and then vending machines, and last anybody heard, alpacas. Now, I want to use him for a second here because I don't think he's an actual story about bad investments. I think he's a story about Mark and Julie's exact problem, just wearing a funnier hat. Every single one of these ventures, and I genuinely mean this with affection, arrived right around the same time that somebody he knew was doing well at something else. The soup truck showed up the same summer a buddy's food truck took off. The vending machines showed up after a cousin mentioned some guy making real money on vending routes. Nobody's entirely sure where the alpaca idea originated, and honestly, at this point, nobody's brave enough to ask directly, but the pattern holds. He's not chasing alpacas. He's chasing the feeling of having caught up to somebody. And the venture is just whatever costume that feeling happened to be wearing that particular year. And what makes it funny from the outside is exactly what makes it dangerous from the inside. Nobody watching him buy alpacas thinks, ah, yes, a well-reasoned diversification strategy. It's obvious to everyone except him, which is the actual warning here. Comparison-driven decisions rarely look obvious from the inside of your own life. They look obvious in your brother-in-law's life and completely reasonable in your own, right up until somebody else points out that you somehow ended up with alpacas too, metaphorically speaking, in whatever form your own version takes. And here's the uncomfortable part, and I say this as someone who spent four days doing math about a boat. That instinct doesn't announce itself as comparison. It shows up dressed as opportunity, as a smart move, as finally getting ahead. It very rarely shows up honestly labeled, hey, I saw what somebody else had, and I need my own version of that feeling. If it did, most of us would recognize it immediately and put the checkbook down. It is sneaky precisely because it borrows the language of ambition while running on the fuel of comparison. Frank never had an alpaca phase. Not because Frank's smarter, but because Frank decided what enough looked like early on and decided a number doesn't go looking for new costumes every time somebody else's life gets loud. So here's where this story stops being just a nice story and starts being something you can actually use this week. Because the definition of enough is not just a feeling, it's a filter, and it changes real decisions. Take a promotion, for instance. It sounds like it should be an easy yes every time with no exceptions. You get more title, more money, more prestige. But more of these things almost always costs something specific. Maybe it's more travel, later hours, a longer commute, less actual time with the people the money is theoretically for. Without a definition of enough, that trade gets evaluated purely on the gain, and gains always look good in isolation. With a definition of enough, the question changes. It goes, does this promotion move me toward the life I already decided I wanted, or does it just move the number while quietly spending the actual resource I said I wanted more of, which was time? Sometimes the answer is still yes. Plenty of households genuinely need the income and the trade is worth it. But sometimes the honest answer is no. And that is a real answer too. It's not a failure of ambition. The difference is you're answering a real question instead of reflexively chasing the bigger number just because bigger has always been the default answer for your whole life. Now, let's look at making a purchase. Nearly everything we buy falls in one of two categories, and they get confused constantly. Things are bought for use, and things are bought for status. A reliable car is for use. A car that exists to communicate something about you to the neighbors is, at least partly, status. And there's nothing evil about that. We are human, and status has mattered to human beings since approximately forever. The problem is not wanting status purchases occasionally. The problem is not being able to tell the difference anymore because buying every single thing as if it's use when a good chunk of the household budget is quietly funding a feeling instead of a function. Try this test the next time you're eyeballing something bigger than groceries. Ask yourself honestly, would I still want this exact version if nobody I know would ever see it? If the answer changes depending on who's watching, you found the status portion of the purchase. And that's fine to buy sometimes, even on purpose. It's just not fine to buy it every time while telling yourself it was about use. A defined enough does not ban status purchases. It just makes you actually aware that you're making one, which changes how often you make them and how good that you feel when you do. And let's take a big one. The one that keeps people up at night more than almost anything else on this show. How much is enough for retirement? I'm not going to hand you a number today because handing you a number would be irresponsible. Your number depends on your spending, your health, your timeline, and a dozen other things that a general radio audience and I have no business guessing at together. What I will tell you is this without a personal definition of enough, retirement savings becomes a number that's never quite large enough because it's being measured against an abstract thought. It's being measured against other people's balances, headlines about what you're supposed to have by 40 instead of against your actual life and what it actually costs to fund it. That anxiety isn't really about the account balance, it's about not having decided specifically and concretely what that number is even for. Now I see this one constantly with households who are by any reasonable measure in genuinely good shape and still can't relax because they're benchmarking against a stranger's headline instead of their own actual monthly cost of living. And I see the opposite too. I see households with less saved who feel entirely at peace because they did the unglamorous work of figuring out what their own life actually costs. And they built toward that specific number instead of a borrowed one. The account balance does matter, but it's just not the only thing that determines whether you feel like you have enough. And for a lot of people, it isn't even the main thing. So here's an exercise, and I want you to actually do this one, right? Not just nod along. I can tell. Sometimes this week take ten minutes. No spreadsheet required. Just finish this sentence in writing. For my family, enough looks like you fill in the blank. Now this is not a dollar figure, it's a description. The house, the trips, the work, the freedom, the giving. Whatever is actually on your list, write it down. Most households have never done this thing even once. And it shows constantly in decisions that quietly measure against everyone else's list instead of their own. Now, here's a shout-out to my longtime listeners because you know the show works from a simple idea that money is not something we own outright. It's something we manage on behalf of something much bigger than ourselves. One of the five pillars underneath that idea is to give first, grow second. First fruits instead of leftovers. Generosity as a starting decision instead of whatever happens to be left over after everything else gets funded. And here's the connection I want to draw today because I don't think it's obvious until you say it out loud. You cannot practice give first, grow second with an undefined enough. It's not possible. If enough is a moving target, permanently one purchase ahead of wherever you currently stand, there is never, structurally never, a comfortable moment to give generously because generosity always feels like it's competing with a finish line that keeps sliding forward. Mark and Julie are not ungenerous people, but ask them to increase what they gave away this year, and it would register as a threat to catching up because they've never defined what catching up would even mean. Frank and Linda give, and they do so comfortably and consistently on a considerably less income, and it's not because they're braver or more spiritual or better people. It's because they already know what enough costs. The paid-off house, the reliable car, the same lake every summer, and everything past that number has a clear and obvious home. Once you know your number or your description, giving stops being a threat to the goal. It becomes the goal past a certain point because there's nothing left to catch up to. And I'll be honest, this is a piece of today's show that I needed to hear. Because sitting there doing boat math, my generosity didn't get squeezed by an emergency most years. It gets squeezed by the undefined finish line, quietly borrowing from the giving line to fund the catching up line, without ever calling it that. Give first, grow second only works practically in a household that's actually decided what the second part even means. I think about it this way now, and it has changed how I look at this personally, not just professionally. Every dollar past your own to find enough was never really yours to hoard in the first place. It was just passing through on its way to becoming something else. Generosity. Opportunity for somebody else, margin for the next chapter. That's not a burden. It was actually a relief because it meant you get to stop guarding a number that was never actually the goal. That's not a guilt trip, and I don't want it landing as one. It's just an honest mechanism. Define enough and generosity gets easier almost automatically because you can finally see the part of the account that was never actually yours to hoard in the first place. So here's some quick direct words before we wrap up for the day, because today's show can feel like a reflection you had in the car and that you forgot by Thursday, and I'd rather it not be that. A financial plan, the actual kind, you know, with real numbers attached to it, is mostly just somebody's definition of enough written down and organized into a strategy. The house, the trips, the giving, the retirement, the number that lets you stop negotiating with every driveway that you drive past. Most households never get that far on their own. And it's not because they're bad at math. Mark is plenty good at math, but because nobody ever sat across from them and asked the actual question out loud and then helped translate the answer into an actual plan with real accounts and real numbers attached to it. That conversation is the seat that I sit in at Iron Eagle Advisors here in Charlottesville. I'm not telling you what enough should look like. That is for you to decide. Nobody else. Helping you turn your answer into something real once you've decided it and checking it periodically as life changes, that's what I do. Because enough at 35 with young kids does not look the same as enough at 60 with a paid-off house. A lot of what I actually do day to day is less about picking investments and more about asking the questions they get a household to their own honest answer, then building the numbers around it instead of around somebody else's version of a good life. If you've never actually written down your own definition, that first conversation is a good place to start. Go to Iron EagleAdvisors.com or give us a call at 434-465-6485. So, folks, your homework this week is the exercise from earlier, and I mean it. Actually do this one. Ten minutes, no spreadsheet. Just finish the sentence. For my family, enough looks like and you fill in the blank. Then put it somewhere you will actually see it again. Don't just keep it in your head, because in your head the world will happily overwrite it with somebody else's driveway by Thursday. Tape it inside a kitchen cabinet. Put it in your phone notes. Wherever you put it, make sure it's somewhere you'll actually run into it again in three months. Second, next time you catch yourself doing the quiet math that I did over that boat, the comparing, recalculating, feeling behind for no reason, just notice it. You don't have to fix it in the moment. Just notice that the feeling showed up right after you saw somebody else's version of more. Because naming it is most of the battle. Third, if giving generously has felt like something you need to get to once you catch up, ask yourself honestly. Catch up to what? And if you can't answer that specifically, that's worth sitting with. And here's the moral of today's show. Enough is not a number that the world hands you, and it never will be because the world's version of enough is designed to always sit one step past wherever you currently are. It has to be decided on purpose in your own handwriting, or somebody else's driveway will keep writing it for you indefinitely. Mark and Julie make more money than Frank and Linda ever will. But Frank and Linda decided what enough looked like and stopped running. That's the whole difference. And it's available to every single household listening today, regardless of what's parked in anyone else's driveway, including apparently mine. The financial world tells you money is about accumulation. Get more, beat the market, and someday you'll feel secure. But we don't believe that. Here at Iron Eagle Advisors, you're not an owner, you're a steward. And the real question is not how much can you get, it's how well can you manage what you've been given. We're not here to sell you a product. We're here to help you build a plan that fits your life and gives you real peace. If you've been carrying that quiet worry about your money, let's talk. No pressure, no jargon, just an honest conversation. Reach us at IreneagleAdvisors.com or call 434 465 6485. This is John Flick. Manage well what you've been given, and we'll see you next time.