March is Madness

More than a basketball tournament.

The Lady Terps have been a relatively consistent hoops powerhouse in the NCAA tournament. The Maryland Men claimed the NCAA Tournament championship in 2002. In 2018, UMBC achieved a historic victory by defeating the tournament’s top-seeded team, Virginia.  Of late, however, Maryland loyalists have had their brackets busted and hopes dashed by recent hard wood disappointments under the sport’s brightest lights.

March is unpredictable.

But it is more than just basketball. March may indeed be the calendar year's most unpredictable month. March is a double agent. It is wedged between the extremes and inconveniences of winter and the joy and colors of spring. As such, March has a dual personality and an identity crisis that results in drastic shifts. Weather can swing from inches of snow and harsh winter winds to a handful of 80-degree days batched together, often within the span of a single week and then back again. This volatility makes it difficult to know which to expect when, the lion or the lamb, only being certain that you will get both. As a matter of climate history, March rarely follows the adage sequentially. Data analysis from this study routinely contradicts the axiom. In fact, over the 10-year study, only 2019 strictly followed the "lion in, lamb out" pattern.

March is somehow always surprising, even though it happens every year. Which is why March may well be qualified to be recognized as the official month of retirement savings. That is to say, preparing for the future and all the surprises along the way.

MarylandSaves is a retirement savings program that has been designed with March in mind. If this fickle month has taught us anything, it is that the unexpected should always be expected. Nasty surprises like flat tires, or sick pets can be expensive and derail our savings plans. The simple knowledge that another surprise always lies around the next corner has the power to dissuade many of us from saving at all.

This is why MarylandSaves provides savers with a $1000 emergency savings fund for use on those unexpected, and often costly surprises. The first $1,000 saved in a MarylandSaves Roth IRA is available to the saver without penalty to handle necessary immediate expenses. The MarylandSaves Emergency Savings Fund is an automatic, paycheck-deducted, voluntary savings feature. It directs the saver’s first $1,000 into a secure, guaranteed investment account, designed to provide immediate, penalty-free access to cash for unexpected expenses.

Oh, and let’s also thank March for the chaos wrought by the daylight-saving time shift, putting our analog and digital timepieces into a temporary standoff and confounding our sleep and commute schedules.

Suddenly, the tournament doesn’t seem mad at all, once you just prepare yourself for the unexpected.