Do you remember the retirement investment seminar I told you I would attend last week? I went to it thinking I might learn something new. (See You are Never Too Old) As it turns out I did learn something new. I didn't learn anything new about investing, but I did learn something new about selling financial planning services.

I realized how important it is to see investing as the boring activity it is. In fact, investing really isn't much of an activity at all. Investing is mostly inactivity.

The financial planner conducting the seminar did a great job keeping the audience engaged as he went along with his presentation. There were plenty of questions from the attendees, and many of them showed the audience was listening and learning.

One question in particular had to do with keeping a long term perspective when it came to saving for retirement. Maybe it wasn't so much a question as a protest. She didn't like the idea of sitting and waiting for her nest egg to grow. She felt like she should be doing something, taking some kind of action, doing some work to make her investments grow.

The answer the financial planner gave was probably right on the money. He replied that investing doesn't have to be boring. He said if you have the need to be a more active manager of your retirement savings you shouldn't shy away from it. He said he urged his clients who feel that way to keep 10% of their savings in a separate account they can actively manage. He even used the term "play" in referring to this account, the money in it and the account owner's actions having to do with it.

He gives these seminars for a living. His job is to sell people on his services. Part of that means telling people at least some of what they want to hear. If he'd told this group of people they had to give him all their money and could have none of it to play with, not one of them would do business with him.

My own answer, the one I responded with inside my mind, was that investing is boring. It should be boring because investing is money at work. You don't do any of the work. Your money does the work. Playing around with some or all of your money when it's trying to work is like distracting your plumber when he's trying to fix the leak that's flooding your basement at 2am.

Put your money to work. Put as much of it as possible to work. Don't interrupt it. And there's no real point in letting ten percent out to play. But that's not what you tell prospective clients when you're selling financial services.