Financial Wisdom from the Scottish Bard

I’m sure there’s a few readers on Humble Dollar with a Scottish heritage and you might also be aware that tonight in Scotland, the air will be thick with the scent of haggis and the sound of bagpipes. It’s Burns Night, the annual celebration of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. While he’s famous for “Auld Lang Syne,” Burns wasn’t just a romantic; he was known as a “Ploughman Poet” who knew the weight of debt and the grind of manual labor.

Burns famously noted in To a Mouse that “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” (go often awry). It’s a reminder for any retiree. You can project a 7% return until you’re blue in the face, but life and the markets, much like the plow that upturned the mouse’s nest, rarely follows a straight line. The simple lesson? Build a plan that accounts for the “agley” moments, prioritizing liquidity and flexibility over rigid spreadsheets.

But why do we save at all? Burns captured the heart of the “being Financially Independent” mindset long before it had a name. In his Epistle to a Young Friend, he advised gathering wealth “not for to hide it in a hedge… but for the glorious privilege / Of being independent.” Retirement, to my mind, isn’t really about hoarding wealth for its own sake. It’s about buying back your time. That “glorious privilege” is the ability to wake up and own your day without a manager’s input, the ultimate return on investment. The Bard called it a “glorious privilege”, modern terminology might use a more colorful acronym involving the letter F

If I stretch the meaning of one more of the poet’s lines “it’s no in wealth like Lon’on Bank / To purchase peace and rest.” We can think of it like this: a massive nest egg is a tool, but it isn’t the end of the road. Retirement success is better measured in “peace and rest”, the quiet moments of peace and contentment with a hobby or interest that no stock index can track.

So there we go; if we squint hard enough, the 18th-century poet had a thing or two to say about 21st-century retirement planning. If you toast to the Bard tonight, perhaps you should aim for his own modest goal: to be ‘contented wi’ little, and canty wi’ mair.’ Happy Burns Night to the Scottish diaspora and enjoy figuring out the pronunciation and meaning of 18th century Scottish English!