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Happy Thanksgiving 2018

Last update on: Nov 22 2019

Happy Thanksgiving to all my subscribers and readers. I’m thankful for the opportunity to help each of you establish and maintain your financial independence.

Most people believe the first Thanksgiving took place in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

I don’t want to upset any of my readers and friends in the Bay State, but the first Thanksgiving in the United States took place elsewhere. As a longtime Virginia resident, I learned the first Thanksgiving occurred along the James River on what now is called Berkeley Plantation, outside Richmond, Virginia.

This first Thanksgiving took place more than a year before the Pilgrims even landed in Massachusetts.

Each year on the first Sunday in November, there’s a Virginia Thanksgiving Festival to commemorate the event.

You can learn more about the first Thanksgiving here.

I bring this up partly because this is Thanksgiving week, and I like history. But I also bring it up because there’s a lesson here, and it’s one that can be useful in managing your personal finances.

The lesson is that something might not be true or accurate, even if most people believe it and repeat it. That’s particularly true in complicated areas, such as your finances. The complications cause people to seek shortcuts and rules of thumb. There’s also a tendency to rely on what other people have done, believing they did their homework.

That’s why at Retirement Watch I focus on independent, objective research. It takes more time and other resources. But the results are better than simply repeating what others are saying. Sometimes I find that the consensus view is accurate; other times the consensus is way off.

I’m bringing this special Thanksgiving edition of Bob’s Journal to a close. I’ll be back next week with the usual format.

I’m grateful to the many readers who let me know, through email or conversations at my speaking engagements, the ways Retirement Watch helped them achieve their financial goals.

My wife, Elaine, and I hope you, as a member of our Retirement Watch family, have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving Day.

George Washington declared the first official Thanksgiving Day in the United States, but Abraham Lincoln is credited with establishing it as an American institution. That’s why I close this Thanksgiving Day message with the last part of President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, issued in some of the darkest days of the Civil War:

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union. It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

– Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation October 3, 1863

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