Slightly Early Retirement

A common retirement theme is the danger of loneliness. It makes sense that leaving a busy work environment where you are forced to interact with coworkers, customers and bosses is going to instantly remove most of the people you talk to on a daily basis from your life. Replacing nine hours a day of human contact with…what? Television and the internet are not the best solutions. My recommendation is to join a few tribes.

I’m no expert at living life, in my late sixties and eight years into retirement I’m still learning as I go. But one of the lessons I have learned is I need social contact with others. Preferably time with others spent trying to achieve common goals. And that is where joining tribes makes all the difference.

Some of these tribes feel noble, because they are focused on helping others. The people I volunteer with serving on the local college board are like that. We get zero pay and devote a lot of hours each year steering the mission and vision of the college. I’ve watched our school give a young Mexican immigrant the tools to climb from a minimum wage housekeeping job to obtaining four nursing degrees and making a large six figure income as a PhD level Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. Watching someone change their stars, that’s magical.

That tribe is quite diverse and includes many I would have never met otherwise. But we are bonded by a common goal of changing lives through education and we have become friends in the process.

The foundation board is an entirely different group of people. But one also focused on helping others, primarily in improving healthcare in our county. We manage the foundation endowment, decide which programs should be funded and what new missions we should undertake. Most of our effort over the last year has been in funding and building a new nonprofit organization to buy and run the local hospital.

Being a part of that project landed me on the board of the reinvented local medical center with a group of committed business leaders and medical professionals. We have had to become hospital experts starting from scratch, with most of us having no prior experience in that business, and it has been a wild ride to get to where we are today.

Both the foundation and the hospital are nonprofit corporations whose mission is improving the health and saving the lives of people regardless of their ability to pay. There is no pay for the hours donated to helping these organizations fulfill their missions, but when you see the results first hand the emotional rewards are priceless.

All three of these boards have provided me with many hours of social interaction, lots of laughter and acquaintances who are now fast friends. I also mentor university students at my alma mater and am involved at our church in various ministries. And I’ve made new friends at both.

But lest it appear that all tribes involve hard work and hours of meetings that’s not at all the case. In fact my favorite tribes are all about fun. It’s the people I play tennis with several times a week. Both my local tennis buddies and the two tennis teams I compete on. Then there is a group of around 40 pickleball players who meet at the courts three times a week. I haven’t met all of them yet, but I have become friends with many. There is the running group I’ve been in for over twenty years who meet at 5:30 AM three mornings each week. There are my fishing buddies who are constantly swapping texts and photos of what we’ve been catching. The same for our off roading friends, cyclists, hiking pals and kayakers. I’m also one of eight mostly retired guys who take baseball and football trips each year, Cardinals and Saints games. We’ve been doing this for years and we love the time spent together.

I’m a member of two tribes who are not local. One is an alumni group of chemical engineers of all ages who graduated from our state university. That group sponsors the tutoring I mentioned earlier but also helps the department in other ways. We get together once a year for a mass meetup and it’s a lot of fun.

The other is the Millionaire Money Mentors forum. I’ve been a mentor in that group for several years but just attended their annual meet up in Florida for the first time. It was so interesting to put faces with the pen names I had corresponded and swapped forum comments with. I’m on the upper age end of the bell curve for that group but I never felt left out. They were the warmest and kindest group of folks. I will be going back next year for sure.

So what is the point of all these tribes? The point is I’m not lonely because my life is filled with social interaction. Even on a slow day, like today, when my wife is out of town, I’ll see plenty of people. I skipped the group run and slept in, because my knee is pretty sore. But I’ll still ride my bike and play tennis this afternoon. I’ll see a number of people since I’ll ride a bike trail that also has a lot of walkers on it, many of them old friends. I have a lunch meeting with an advisory group that oversees a low income medical clinic, that’s one I failed to include above. And I have a zoom call to go over some medical education scholarship requests with the foundation committee.

And I’ll still have plenty of time to post this. All in all it should be a very good day, and a very typical one in my retired life. I’m not advising everyone to take up volunteerism. But I am suggesting that if your retired life has too much empty space in it, consider joining a tribe or two that you share common interests with. It certainly has added much to my retirement. And if you can find one or more that is centered on serving others you might be surprised at how good that feels.

What about you, what are some of your favorite tribes?

I’m on the outskirts of a small town of under 20,000 people. Do you think finding tribes to add value to your life is easier in small town America or in an metro setting?

I get approached occasionally by financial advisors who are fishing for new clients. I am always polite and I’ll do lunch or have a coffee with them, but I always tell them up front that I’m not a good prospect. I have my investments managed by big national discount advisory services who use modern portfolio theory strategies and am happy with their performance and their low fees. I know I could avoid fees altogether if I managed them myself, but I prefer to outsource it. The latest encounter was with a genuinely nice young man who made a pass at my accounts a year ago and then suggested I virtually attend an event being held by the CEO and founder of his employer. Since I’m interested in continuing education in a lot of areas, finances being one, I agreed. Partly because of my own nest egg but also because the foundation I chair has a large endowment that I help manage.

The weather was inclement and my wife was up at the cabin with one of her college roommates and I really didn’t have anything else to do, so I agreed to devote two full days to being enlightened with the theory and practice of what the CEO referred to as “Academic Investing principles”. So, what did I learn?

I’m tempted to say I learned zero, nada, zilch. But that’s not really true. I did not learn much of anything about investing strategies that I already did not know, but I did get to observe hard sell and emotional manipulation on a grand scale. I’m not going to identify the particular company, nor its founder. He has achieved a good deal of success building his assets under management from nothing to nearly ten billion dollars and his investment philosophy is pretty much standard Markowitz modern portfolio theory, eschewing market timing, the buying of individual stocks and concentration risk. I agree with all of that, however he skimmed over that part of the presentation and concentrated on what felt a lot like televangelism at its worst.

There was a big emphasis on patriotism and a fair amount on faith and family. I’m all for all three of those but I had a major disconnect on how that related to investing. The real nuts and bolts of investing did not make up more than about one of the sixteen hours of content. The other fifteen hours were mostly about all the mistakes “we” were surely making without his guidance. If the presentation had only occupied one hour of my time it would have been reasonable. But as it was, I had the other fifteen hours of listening to ponder what the presenter was trying to do to me and the other 900 people attending the virtual seminar. And this is what I decided was going on.

First, he was trying to establish a cult of personality by appealing to our love of family and country with a heavy dose of guilting. He presentation was full of endearing personal family stories. He spoke like a reformed addict who had been there and found the light. He knew that all of us must have made many bad investing decisions just as he had. But hope was here, he was going to save us from our own bad choices if we would just change the way we saw the world. All of us were slaves to our lizard brains and incapable of making wise long term decisions because we were programmed to run from saber-toothed tigers and not to buy and hold index funds. But he could fix us, if we just had faith.

I found the concept more than a little off-putting because I’ve been investing using the same Nobel prize winning strategies he uses, for many years. Its not anything new. Its exactly the same strategy that Wealthfront, Betterment and Vanguard use in their managed accounts. In fact its what almost every robo advisor in the business uses. Its become common knowledge that active investing fairs poorly compared to passive investing and that day trading or even buy and hold stock picking is a losing proposition.

The statistics and studies back that up, its why Vanguard has over eight trillion in assets under management. Its also why traditional money managers and storefront brokerages are struggling. They have higher fees and lower returns, which makes them a bad deal. If you don’t believe it then just Google who the top performing mutual funds were ten years ago and then check out how they are doing now. If even one of them is in today’s current top ten I’d be shocked. That part of the CEO’s message was fine and accurate. But its hardly earthshaking, life changing news. Anyone who is investing their own money already knows that.

I know why the CEO has resorted to his emotional hard sell tactics. Its because he doesn’t have anything special to offer to justify his high fees. He can’t offer better performance than an inexpensive robo advisor, so all he has to justify his fees is himself. He is selling confidence and faith in a person. And that’s appealing to a lot of people. If it wasn’t cults would not exist. Multilevel marketing schemes wouldn’t happen and ponzi schemes could not be pulled off. Now in this case he has a solid product and sound theory. He is just overpriced. So he is doing the only thing he can to differentiate himself from lower cost providers. He is selling himself.

That’s kind of a profound concept, its not so different from the way charismatic politicians woo us. And perhaps spending sixteen hours observing that in action had a prophylactic effect, an inoculation of sorts against the next huckster I run into. That’s a little harsh I suppose, because this guy isn’t selling snake oil, he’s selling a good product that’s just overpriced. As for the young man who talked me into the two day commitment, he’s a nice person who has drank the Kool-aid his company is serving. I run into earnest young men and women selling whole life insurance, over priced annuities and, of course, multilevel marketing schemes who are all sincere and who have all been mislead by their employers. And there are people who need an authority figure to give them the resolve they lack. I am just not one of them. So I’ll nicely explain to my friend that I’m happy with my current providers and to keep in touch.

How about you? Have you sat through a lengthy sales pitch that left you unimpressed?

Am I wrong about investing, is a personal advisor valuable to you even if they come at a higher price or are you a DIY or robo fan?

How long has it been since you’ve been totally alone for a day. How about for a week? For me it has been a very long time. I’ve been married for decades and we are generally together much of every day. Plus there is my tennis buddy and our pickleball crew that I see several times a week. My church friends, my hospital board friends, my foundation friends and my friends and fellow trustees at the college I see at least weekly. The engineering students I mentor and the widow former neighbor I provide tech service calls for are in my life regularly. My four mile walking buddies I spend an hour with three days a week feel like family. We also keep in touch with our three grown kids though they are scattered far from us. My life is full of social contact with people I genuinely enjoy. But not this last week. For the last nine days I’ve been totally isolated from the physical presence of every one of the people I care about. I can thank, or blame, an unusually harsh winter storm for that.

Arkansas gets a little snow, very little in the southern part we live in. But last weekend the entire state got hammered, by ice in the south and snow in the north. We have recently gotten our cabin finished, or nearly so, in north Arkansas near the Buffalo National River. The forecast was for 6 to 9 inches of snow and subzero temperatures in that area. We were understandably concerned for both of our homes so we decided to split up. I’d carry a large generator up to the cabin and she’d be prepared to run the one at our house and we’d both be able to leave trickles of water flowing to keep the pipes from freezing. Neither of us realized that the cold would hang around as long as it has and that there would still be snow and ice present nine days later.

So much time to myself. I have done some solo hiking, even tried to catch a fish but its been too cold to get too far from the cabin and the roads have not been in good condition. I have all the comforts of home here, high speed internet, central heat, a fireplace with lots of wood, all the appliances of any modern house, plenty of food and have not had to run the generator because the power stayed on. And for the most part I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time alone. I’ve cooked some good meals and keeping the small cabin clean is a snap because of its size. I’d hike more but the trails are still treacherous with icy patches and the terrain here is extreme. Solo hiking is pretty sketchy even in good conditions but it would be all to easy to break a leg in the middle of nowhere. With no cell signal to call for help and no satellite beacon that’s potentially life threatening.

Today I’ll have a good bit to do getting ready to drive back home tomorrow. I do have to admit I’m a little bored with too much Netflix streaming and audiobook listening. And I miss my wife, today is her birthday. We’ve been best friends for 47 years, married for 45. And while we do travel separately at times, her on gal trips and me on guy trips, I’ve never been this isolated when she was traveling. If this experience has taught me anything it has reinforced the fact that loneliness is not healthy in large doses. Knowing this is temporary makes it very tolerable, even enjoyable. But if I didn’t know I’d see my wife soon and my friends, then I think life would feel bleak and perhaps hopeless. I feel just a twinge of that, and it isn’t a pleasant feeling.

It occurs to me that many people are lonely and isolated. They have outlived their friends and family, or are estranged from them. And they can’t look forward to a warm hug and a kiss from their spouse tomorrow like I do. They don’t have enjoyable hobbies and friends to share them with. They don’t have purposeful tasks and roles to fill helping others. They may well be hard people to love. And if I get nothing else from this week of solitude, I hope I get the motivation to make a difference in a lonely person’s life.

What about you. Do you ever struggle with loneliness or isolation?

Is there someone you know whose life you could improve just by being their friend?

I haven’t posted anything on this site in quite awhile. My volunteer work consumed a lot of my free time last year and I think that’s why I was not motivated to write.
But it really was a monumental year for me and my family in a lot of ways. Lots of big projects. We built a new house! You might remember that my wife and I have ever only lived in the one house we still occupy. We’ve been in it for over 40 years. However we decided to buy or build a cabin in the Arkansas wilderness near the Buffalo National River. We spent months looking at available land and cabins and finally found a 25 acre tract that was perfect. Completely isolated and out of sight of any other dwellings but with water and electricity easily available and only ten minutes away from groceries and restaurants. It was a tremendously enjoyable project designing the house, watching it grow from a foundation to a finished, private retreat. Its perfect and we’ve already spent quite a bit of time up there. It was our first pass at building a house and we learned a lot.

On the volunteer side, I bought a hospital. That’s definitely a first for me! In truth I wasn’t the only person involved in the purchase and I didn’t spend my own money to buy it. Rather the foundation that I’m board chair of partnered with three other entities to form a nonprofit corporation to purchase and operate the hospital. Much of the money came from our foundation’s endowment. I’m now chairing the hospital board as well as the foundation and its been quite an experience for an engineer to absorb everything I need to know about health care. There have been countless meetings and decisions to make during 2023, at times it has felt like a full time job. Just without the pay. 2024 will be just as busy with much hospital related work to do.

I also am involved in our local college as the chair of its board of trustees. Our beloved college president chose to move to another college in our state for very sound family reasons. That was great for him, but not for me. I’m beginning my fourth presidential search in the 20 years I’ve been a trustee. It is a tedious but important task, which like the hospital work, will consume a lot of time in 2024.

My mentoring of chemical engineering students continued for the third year. I worked with some great mentors and the students were outstanding. It’s a fun way to give back to the university that gave me the tools to have a wonderful career. I also continue to work with the engineering department as an Academy member, donor and advisory board member.

Our son finished residency and became a full fledged credentialed attending physician in 2023 and we watched one of our daughters graduate with her PhD last month. We are very proud of all of our grown kids. Now if they’d just figure out how to produce a grandkid. With all that education surely they can figure out how that works?

We took our second adventure tour with Backroads. They have dozens of locations and activities all over the world and if you like to be physically active they know how to work that into a vacation tour. In our case we are avid hikers and we met our son in Patagonia to do a week long hiking tour. We saw massive glaciers, did some pretty intense hiking and had some great food.

We’ve always travelled economy or economy plus when we flew, but this one time I convinced my wife that we should go first class, now called business class. We had the full deal, with individual pods that felt like tiny hotel rooms with seats that converted into beds. Constant attention and unlimited wining and dining included. It was fun even if the two tickets cost as much as a pretty nice used car.

We did several multi-thousand mile road trips including out west to the Tetons and Great Basin National Park in Nevada and up north to the UP in Michigan. We did a cycling vacation in Virginia which included my favorite bike trail in the world. The Virginia Creeper, which goes downhill for the entire seventeen mile trail. That’s seventeen miles that you can coast without pedaling at all! It was luxurious cycling for sure.

2023 was a great year health wise. I had surgeries in each of the previous three years, not fun. Nothing where I had dire odds of survival, but still significant events that interrupted my tennis and hiking for weeks. But in 2023 I stayed away from the scalpel and was extremely active. Everything that was previously fixed has stayed fixed and that’s awesome because I’m not a happy camper when I can’t play my sports or go fishing.

It wasn’t all good. I lost two dear friends, a fishing buddy and athlete who dropped dead from a heart attack at 53 and a lady I had mentored for decades. I had encouraged and cheered her on as she rose from being an administrative assistant to getting a college degree and later becoming a corporate director of a multinational corporation. And she was a spouse approved platonic pal. I was so proud of her, and then cancer took her life just as she had achieved her career dreams. Both were quality friends that I’ll miss for the rest of my life.

My wife and I celebrated our 45 wedding anniversary in 2023. She might could have made a better pick of mates but I could not have. She’s been a great wife for all these years and any success I’ve had has come because I had a full and equal partner standing with me, no matter what the situation was. And her incredible child raising skills gave our kids a huge head start in life.

Life is good, and the only thing lacking is the knowledge that at 68, most of my time has already been spent. However, I’m a live in the moment guy and hope to stay that way until my very last moment. So far so good. I hope 2023 was a mostly good year for you too and offer you my best wishes for 2024.

How about you? Was 2023 a great, good or not so good year?

What do you think 2024 will bring into your life?

If you can’t find the comment box, click on the title of the post.

I’m an old guy. At 67 I expect to lose friends. In fact when I scan the obituaries in the local (digital) newspaper half the people listed are younger than me. That’s sobering, and when you get to my age you’ll understand what that feels like. But what I cannot come to terms with is losing friends much younger than me. And this year has been the worst. I lost one of my tennis, pickleball and fishing buddies earlier this year. The last time I saw him alive was at our normal Tuesday night pickleball group gathering at the park. He played one game and told me he wasn’t feeling well, that he was headed home. The next day I texted him a photo of a nice string of fish I caught and got the last word he ever told me, via text, “Wow!” A couple of days later he died of a heart attack. He was 57.

Yesterday, another friend in her fifties succumbed to cancer. She was one of my heroes and one of my protégés both. I worked for a big oil company and she worked for the big chemical company just down the road from our refinery. We were always at the same local events and became friends over the years. We both worked for our corporations for over thirty years never changing employers. When I met her she was a young woman with no college degree doing clerical and administrative work, but she was ambitious and wanted to do much more. So she took classes at the local community college and earned an associate degree in business. Then she started working on her bachelor’s degree from the University of Phoenix. It took a lot of time and effort but she did receive her four year degree. She was bright, positive and eager to advance, and advance she did. Her final position was Director of Governmental Affairs for the same multinational chemical corporation where she started her career as a secretary. She traveled the country and the globe in that role and was living the dream she had always hoped for.

I loved her, not romantically, but like the kid sister I never had. I always encouraged her as she worked to advance her education and career and told her I was the president of her fan club. She was blessed with stunning beauty, and in some ways that made her career advancement more difficult. I think one of the things she appreciated from me was friendship with no hidden agendas. I just wanted to encourage and support her. While her work path was mostly one success after another, her personal life was like the biblical story of Job. She took great care of her health, was always very fit and slim, but her list of medical issues was long and complicated. And her relationships were no better. I can’t go into detail here because she was victimized in such a rare and terrible way that it would identify her if I was specific. I’m not going to destroy her privacy, because she was a very private person and very concerned about how others saw her. But she was damaged deeply by a unscrupulous man in a bizarre scheme that left emotional damage even worse than the physical slings and arrows she endured.

And then, just as she was beginning to recover fully from the severe emotional trauma, she was diagnosed with cancer. It was a form of cancer that advances slowly but eventually morphs into a terminal condition. She told me it was pretty benign and very treatable. I believed that because I needed to, but the truth was much different. In her case the disease went rogue early and there was no earthly hope for a cure. She continued to maintain she would beat it until her last day, which was yesterday. She was 58, and she’s gone. I’m a person of faith and I believe I will see my two friends again but I still grieve their passing. I’ve lost others, it comes with the decades I’ve been around. But losing these two hit me much harder than most. Especially her, she worked so hard to get to where she was and then life bludgeoned her with a ferocity few of us will ever experience and that I’ll never understand. The emotional and physical assaults she suffered were truly unimaginable, or at least unimaginable to me, a guy who has led a tranquil and happy life.

Just as I still have my fishing buddy’s last text on my phone, I also have hers. She said “Love you friend!”, followed by a string of sweet emoji. It has been months and I can’t delete his. And I won’t delete hers. And I know I will be able to read them some day without crying, but not today.

We often hear financial independence described as financial freedom. But freedom from what? You might think that’s too obvious to bother addressing, but I think it is much more complex than it sounds.

Take the last week of my life, for instance. Last Wednesday my wife and I got up early and trailered our fishing boat to a local lake about fifty miles from our home and caught a bunch of nice big bass. My wife and I had a fun time with the fishing and enjoyed a tasty fish fry the next day. And that recreation was made possible by our financial freedom. But I think I need to explain why that is the case.

First, I have a fishing boat. In my case a bass fishing boat I bought when I retired seven years ago. It’s on the low end of those types of boats, smaller and slower than many of my friends’ rigs, but perfect for the small area lakes and rivers I love to fish. I paid right at seventeen thousand dollars for the brand new boat, motor and trailer, in cash. No payments, no worries. I could do that because that cost was a very small part of my net worth, and an expense I could write a check for any day of the week. That’s an example of financial freedom. I also had to put ten gallons of gas in the boat and another fifteen gallons in my 2011 Toyota 4Runner to tow it. OK, I admit it, my boat is worth more than my car. That’s twenty-five gallons at three dollars per gallon or seventy-five dollars worth of fuel. And that isn’t something I have to think about either, seventy-five dollars is just not a material cost in my world.

I was fishing with soft plastic lures that don’t survive very long when the fish are biting and they cost about ten dollars for a small bag. I have to have a fishing license, some rods and reels and the boat requires annual maintenance. I just replaced the propeller and that cost over three hundred dollars alone. It’s an expensive hobby any way you look at it. But I never have to consider the impact of those costs on my budget. Because after saving and investing my entire adult life my wife and I have more than enough to support our fishing hobby. In fact, I went fishing the next day too, and I’ll likely go tomorrow!

Friday and Saturday, I played tennis with my buddy, Randall. We played at 1 PM at the Country Club. I could play Friday, just like I fished Wednesday and Thursday, because I don’t have to go to work. Not having to work forty or fifty hours a week feels like financial freedom to me. And all the tennis hobby entails, the price of the tennis racquets, athletic apparel, tennis balls and Club fees do not amount to a figure that creates any friction in my life. After tennis I played pickleball with seven friends. That’s not expensive but we played when most people were trapped at work, so that’s freedom too.

Sunday, after church I drove one hundred miles to the big city and played a team tennis match. We lost, as usual, but we did win a set and nearly pulled off an upset against a much better team. We had a great time competing. My new partner is a very cool guy. I spent that night in a nice hotel and the next morning drove a similar distance further up the road to the wilderness property my wife and I purchased last year. We did that with one hundred sixty thousand dollars in cash, because we could. We are spending about that much more for the cabin that is currently under construction. No mortgage, just paying cash as usual. That trip was over four hundred miles of driving. Add in the hotel cost, meals and snacks and those two days cost me about three hundred dollars, not counting wear and tear on the vehicle. But we can do that without worry because we have enough. While three hundred dollars is not a significant expense at this stage of our lives the three hundred fifty thousand for the vacation place is quite significant. But twenty five acres of land and a two bedroom two bathroom cabin are also assets that should, at the very least, hold their value. So that’s almost an investment, as opposed to something like our boat. Being able to do something like that, building a vacation place, that’s possible only because we are financially free to do it.

Today is Tuesday and I’m typing this from home, because, I’m not working. I am playing tennis after lunch and then my wife and I are taking an elderly friend out for dinner tonight, our treat. Tomorrow, I’m taking another friend fishing. I have to admit, I’m living my dream life. In the interest of full disclosure, I left out the parts of the week that involved volunteer work because those don’t cost anything but time. But we both have a lot of that in our weeks as well. But only that which we enjoy and have selected for ourselves.

So, what is financial freedom? It’s the freedom to live the way you want to live. To work or not work, to pursue volunteerism, to play when you want to play and to catch a fish or two. Money is not going to make anyone happy, but it definitely gives already happy people the freedom to live rich lives. And that’s what financial freedom means to me.

What about you? What does the concept of financial freedom mean to you?

If you are there what do your weeks look like?

If you aren’t there but are on your way, what does that dream look like to you?

When I was a grade school kid I judged my worth based on how good I was in sports and how fast I could run, and that led to me feeling quite mediocre about myself. I was either the slowest or next to the slowest boy in elementary school. I was nearly a year younger than most of my classmates and one of the smallest boys. I was very shy, and until the second grade, nobody realized I was nearly legally blind. Even though I was one of the smartest kids I wasn’t smart enough to figure out why I couldn’t see the blackboard and my teacher thought I had some kind of learning disability. Once I got a pair of eyeglasses I became one of the teacher’s pets smart kids. But I was far from cool. Being able to do math brought zero street cred to Boomer generation kids in school. Through junior high (this was before middle school was a thing) I continued to see myself as a nerd. Smart, but lacking much other appeal.

It took until my junior year in high school until things began to change. I hit a growth spurt and caught up with most of my classmates. I gained a lot of confidence after some real spiritual growth and agreeing to star in a musical play that our youth group preformed on a cross country tour. I was accepted by popular kids as a peer for what felt like the very first time. I fell in love with a gloriously attractive girlfriend and worked some good paying part time jobs. All of that led me to a major insight into life. There are no cool kids! I had envied and day dreamed about being the high school quarterback with the head cheerleader beside me at the prom. I thought those popular teenagers had it made, and that it was pretty unfair that the genetics fairy had blessed me with a nice brain but not enough of the stuff that impressed other teens. But when I got to know some of the “in” crowd it was glaringly obvious that they were at least as insecure and self conscious as I was. They were good at projecting what they thought everyone expected to see, but they were as angst ridden and imposter theory beset as I was, on my worst day.

I learned that all it took to be cool was to act as if you were cool and confident. As Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. And although I didn’t have much self confidence at first I really was a natural when it came to acting. And I found that by focusing on the things I had done that seemed impossible at the time such as acting, dating, making a sports team and excelling in school, that I was able to build confidence to shore up my performance and give it bones. That carried me through college and then when I landed a job that let me leverage my intellect, my life really took off. It wasn’t about being the fastest or the strongest anymore, but the most mentally agile and intuitive. Suddenly I was winning and winning big in the work world. They hadn’t seen an engineer with more talent and I was fast tracked to bigger things. I truly had a joyful career.

I’ve often wondered, if I had never acted in that play because of the fear I felt, would I have taken a different path. If I had never had that amazing girl friend, so out of my league, would I have been an underachiever for the rest of my life? Without the confidence that I could be as good as any of the cool kids would I have stepped out into the high risk high reward situations that made my career successful? It was more than just those two choices, but they started me on a path to consistently say yes to things that felt terrifying. Because I could look back and see that almost every time I took the big risk I got the big reward. And when I did fail, it was never fatal, and usually taught me something very valuable.

I’m not sure why, in my senior retirement, I thought back to my adolescent and teen years today. But I’m glad I did. Life turns on the smallest of decisions. We lie to ourselves when we say, “It doesn’t matter if I turn this opportunity down. There will be others.” Because just like acting with courage makes you courageous, acting in fear makes you a coward. And every time you let fear stop you from stepping ahead you slip further behind. There is a point, I think, where you will no longer even notice the opportunities because you have turned so many away. Conversely, I don’t have to weigh the fear of failure or embarrassment any more when an opportunity presents itself, because I’ve conditioned myself to grab on to opportunities. It’s a habit anyone can build. It’s starts out as the scariest thing you’ve ever done, but the rewards are bountiful.

There are no cool kids who are destined from birth to have it all. We all face fear when opportunities show up at our door. And we all get to decide to push past fear or to surrender to it. What are you going to do?

Do you think that some people are destined to be popular, wealthy and outrageously happy with no effort expended? The Cool Kids?

Or are the Cool Kids just the same as the rest of us. With the same fears, and perhaps not a bit happier than everyone else?

Did you ever grab on to a frightening opportunity and have it change your life for the better?

I was listening to Wes Moss on his podcast yesterday. He was reviewing a survey of retirees who claim to be the happiest and he made a statement that I found surprising. According to the survey results the happiest retirees had at least $500,000 in liquid assets. Meaning stocks, bonds, CD’s, savings accounts, REIT’s and/or cash. Not $500,000 in net worth, which can include house equity, possessions, land, etc., but just things you can turn into money quickly. In other words the happiest retirees have a half a million dollar retirement nest egg, or larger.

I don’t know about you but I found that surprising. If you use a rule of thumb like the four percent rule then retiring with half a million dollars invested means you can only withdraw $20,000 a year the first year and then $20,000 plus inflation in future years. $20,000 isn’t a whole lot of money to cover housing, food, transportation, medical care and all the fun things I want to do in retirement. In my case I retired with considerably more than that and still don’t feel like I am wealthy.

So how can that be? Wes is one of the most credible experts I know of and I do not doubt that the information is correct. But how? One thought is that many happy retirees do not live only on the income their portfolio throws off. They may have a part time job that supplements their income and also adds purpose to their lives, I think that is very common. In fact I did that for the first five years of my retirement to ease into a non working lifestyle. If a retiree makes another $25,000 on the side then instead of trying to make it on just $20,000 they would have $45,000, which is a much more livable number. Particularly since these same “happiest” retirees also reported they had little to no debt, including their house mortgage.

Get rid of your house payment and life gets more affordable for certain. You also no longer need to invest, so that money you were putting into a 401K or other retirement accounts isn’t needed any more. No more daily commute to a distant office saves wear and tear and fuel for your vehicle or train fare. Much less need for business casual or in some cases dressy apparel to satisfy the office dress code. Much more time is available for DIY repairs or yard care, that can save a bundle of money. There are also sometimes pensions and in most cases Social Security.

As I’ve shown before Social Security often provides much higher benefits than most people think. It’s typical to see people state that the average Social Security benefit is only $1,500 a month. But they don’t go on to say that there are usually two people drawing the benefits if they are a retired couple, so that adds up to $3,000 a month or $36,000 a year. And even if one of them never paid much into the system they still automatically qualify for half of the other spouses benefits, which would be a total of $2,250 a month or $27,000 a year in retirement income. And that income is totally or partially tax free. I’m not drawing my Social Security yet but in four years when I do, my wife and I will get over $70,000 in today’s dollars according to the Social Security web site. That’s a lot of money in a low cost of living state like Arkansas where the median family income is right at $50,000. In our case if we were using the four percent rule and had exactly half a million dollars invested we would be able to spend $90,000 safely each year and increase that amount right along with inflation. We could do that for the next thirty years with a very high probability that we’d never run out of money. So in a way my family is evidence that $500K is enough in invested assets to fund a rich retirement.

Medical costs are another reason that people think they’ll need millions to retire safely, but when you are on Medicare, other than the premiums, there are not a lot of expensive costs. Much of the time my prescriptions are free because my supplemental insurance covers the cost. As far as expensive procedures go, I’ve personally racked up over $400,000 in medical bills in just the last year. Total cost to me was maybe three hundred dollars. Fortunately that is behind me, but the point is that even with very bad luck in terms of needing expensive care, the system covered me completely. Maybe I just got very lucky but the coverage seems excellent and affordable to me.

Also for someone to have accumulated half a million or more in investments they have practiced intentional good money habits for a long time. The median retirement investments of 65 year old Americans is only $88,000. To have half a million puts you at almost six times that amount. You don’t get there by accident, it took years of discipline and living below your means. After living with smart money habits your whole adult life you are not likely to suddenly become ridiculous over spenders. So because you’ve always lived within your income that habit is very naturally carried into retirement which makes raiding that half a million dollar nest egg very unlikely.

I also started thinking about the retired people I know. Most of them are pretty happy and I know enough about them to know most don’t have millions of dollars, but they probably do have half a million. That supports what the survey showed, because most retired people I know are happy and most are not millionaires, at least in terms of investments. The survey makes me feel better about the outlook for retirement for many people. I do worry about those with only the median amount invested of $88,000 or less. I suspect those are not the happiest retirees, because they have almost no margin. $500,000 is an achievable target for a great many Americans, and not nearly as daunting as some other numbers I’ve heard that range from one to five million as the bare minimum needed.

So considering that happy retirees have more than one source of income, have learned to control their expenses, have a reduced cost of living, have no or a managably small amount of debt and have affordable government provided health care, I believe that having a $500,000 retirement nest egg is enough for them to be financially secure.

What about you, are you buying into the idea that half a million dollars is enough in investments to fund your happy retirement?

Why do so many people feel like they need much more than that to be safe in retirement?

I spent six hundred and forty-three dollars over the last two days for a one hour and ten minute meeting. What’s more, I could have had the same meeting over Zoom and not spent even a single dollar. Yet I loved it, it really stands as a shining example of why financial and time independence is so important to me!

That sounds a little strange, so I will fill in some of the details as to why it was so expensive and why it was worth it. I’m a habitual volunteer, one of my friends who has the same problem calls us pathological volunteers! I spend a lot of time chairing the board of a small local college as well as the board of a non-related large local nonprofit foundation. Plus I’m helping a couple of big economic development projects get off the ground in our area as a nonpaid volunteer. There are times when it feels like I still have a job, maybe several of them.

Last year I added another pursuit, that of mentoring chemical engineering students at the university that I, my wife and our three grown kids all graduated from. Unfortunately, while I live in the same state, I now live on the other end of it, so to travel to the campus and back requires a round trip drive of over 600 miles. It also requires a two lunches, a breakfast and a dinner meal and a night in a local hotel. Since finding a parking space on campus is next to impossible it also requires a couple of Uber rides from and back to the hotel. All that adds up to the six hundred forty-three dollar expense of having a one hour and ten minute face to face meeting with my six students. And while most of the time I plan on Zooming the meetings and avoiding the trip, I feel that for at least two or three of the meetings I need the face to face contact to build a relationship with these young people.

Now, six hundred plus dollars is not a lot of money, generally speaking, but it’s a very large amount of money for an hour and ten minutes of time. At my maximum consulting rate I never made more than about $300 an hour, only half that much. If you could find a way to earn at the rate the meeting cost me on an hourly basis, then your regular year’s wages would be just over one million dollars! So why in the world spend that kind of cash just to improve on the quality of a volunteer service to 19 year old students?

There are two reasons, it’s because I enjoy it and I can afford it. Which takes me back to where I started. Being financially independent and time independent let’s you spend outrageously on what you value. Personally, I value being able to pass on what I learned over a 38 year career. And I love to teach young people. I know a lot of Boomers in my age group like to disparage millennials and gen X and Y and Z, but these gen Z kids are incredible. They are so smart and so capable, yet much of what they will face in the corporate world is the same as what I faced. Most of the skills and traits that will get them ahead in their careers are exactly the same as the ones that served me well. Plus I have two co-mentors I work with who are younger than me, so the combined wisdom of three people at different stages of their engineering careers really is priceless to these students.

My co-mentors are around thirty and around forty years of age respectively. I do not expect them to make the trips in, it’s too expensive at their points in life, and they have young children and demanding jobs. They are neither time independent nor financially independent yet. But I am, so I have the time to plan the meetings, handle the Zoom scheduling, and to document the meetings afterwards for the university.

It would have been a real burden to try to do this back when I was a younger engineer with three kids, and working a demanding job. Now, in retirement, it takes barely enough time to notice. And that’s what is so great about life after retirement. I can still get in my active sports and recreation activities and even the occasional consulting gig without having to miss priceless opportunities to give back in ways that are meaningful to me and that actually help change peoples’ lives.

It is a piece of what gives me purpose. And just like I believe in diversified sources of income and a diversified portfolio, I believe in having a diverse set of ways to give back to people that I’m uniquely positioned to help the most. The bulk of my volunteer time is directed at helping people climb out of poverty by providing them a higher education or trade skills through my work at the college. The foundation I volunteer at also provides free health care and fitness training to low income clients. But I’m also one of the right people to help young engineers become successful so that they too can become time and money independent. And then they can be positioned to give back out of their surplus.

We are all different, but we all seek purpose. And having time and money you can spend on things that give you purpose is a great place to be in life.

Is there any amount of money you’ve spent that doesn’t make math sense but makes perfect sense in your heart?

Do you think you’ll volunteer much in retirement? And to me that doesn’t just include something like mentoring students, it also includes helping with grandkids, keeping an eye on your elderly neighbors or doing random acts of kindness for strangers.

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Have you ever been part of a group where you did not know anyone? Maybe a tour group in another country or a project team at work or in a volunteer organization? One of the ways facilitators try to form some cohesion in situations like that is to ask everyone to introduce themselves and to include something unrelated to their work or volunteer role. This is called an ice breaker for obvious reasons, and for the last three decades of my life I would usually choose one of my active sport hobbies of tennis or running to represent who I was. I was a runner, it defined me.

At the age of 35-ish I started losing tennis matches to players with lesser skills but better fitness and decided I needed to develop more endurance. Running seemed like an easy way to do that so that very first morning I got up early and decided to start out slowly by running two miles. It’s funny now to realize the hubris I possessed. It was a shock when after a hundred yards I was totally gassed. I had to stop. My concept of me as a superior athlete was severely challenged by the fact that I couldn’t run even a quarter mile, much less two miles. While disappointing, it also motivated me to keep trying. I decided I would just run as far as I could, then walk until I caught my breath and then run some more. Each week I ran a little further and walked less. It took a full two months before I actually made it the entire two miles! I remember how that felt like such a big win. I kept up the running three or four times a week in addition to my tennis. For the first few years I ran alone in our neighborhood, but the summer horse flies were so intense I was forced to find a new route. We had a nice high school stadium with a quarter mile warning track around it and that became my new warm weather course.

There was a large group of runners who met at the stadium parking lot that I would exchange greetings with before I would head to the track and they would take to the streets. This went on for a year or two before one of the street runners, a very wealthy and imposing attorney, stopped me on the track and told me I should be running with them. He had been watching me and judged my speed would put me in the faster group of their runners. What a change that was, running with other people and having conversations and friendly races to the finish. I got drawn into the camaraderie of the group, pizza parties, 5K’s and road trips. They urged me into my first ten mile run, and later into running my first full marathon. While I never truly enjoyed the act of running I loved seeing myself as a runner, and I loved the fellowship of a truly amazing group of people who ranged from billionaires to school teachers. And I became quite dedicated. There were times I was up at 3 AM to squeeze in a twenty mile run before heading into work at 8AM. I know that sounds crazy. It was crazy, but I was committed.

My running speed started to deteriorate about ten years ago. I had some mysterious anemia, a knee injury and, unknown to me at the time, some internal issues compromising my heart and lung performance. The anemia resolved and the heart and lung issues were repaired with surgery about a year ago but both knees were now protesting the abuse of so much pounding on the city streets. A second surgery a couple of months ago restricted me to just walking for six weeks and I found the knees were much better for it.

Since my first love is tennis and my second one is pickle ball I depend on being mobile. I have come to the conclusion that if I keep running it will likely push me into knee replacement much sooner than if I don’t. Orthopedic surgeons do not recommend playing singles tennis after that and singles tennis is what I love to play. So backing away from what I want to do and objectively choosing the best path to keep my favorite hobbies viable is where I am. And it is so frustrating to have to let things go in life. As I get older, and I’m already ancient compared to most of you, it’s part of life. I never let my skis leave the snow now and I stay off most of the double diamond expert runs. It’s just common sense, you don’t bounce at my age, you just hit the snow like a sack of cement when you fall. But I never saw myself as a skier, I was a runner. I ran fifteen marathons and a thousand miles a year for decades. While a lot of people my age are couch bound and sedentary I am still beating the high school tennis team players in singles. I feel like running is what has let me keep my tennis skills into my sixties.

So this is it. I’m saying goodbye to running for good. It hurts to type that. Even though I do not enjoy running, especially now with aching knees, I hate to change my mental label from “runner” to “walker”. It’s just another lost item, like much of my hair and some of my friends. I’m whining, I know. There are many (old) people who would trade their bodies for mine in a heartbeat. I can hike and climb and play my favorite sports. I never have a problem with gaining weight even though I eat anything I want and as much as I desire. I’m not a bad looking guy for my age and I have no chronic health conditions. I have plenty of investments to fund our lifestyle and an amazing healthy active wife (for the last 44 years). I’m a leader in our community, have enjoyable and important volunteer roles and three grown self sufficient kids. I can work, if and when I want, at some well paid and interesting projects. It is ridiculous for me to feel sorry for myself when I’ve been so blessed for so long. Life is very good. You adjust to change. You pick your best options and you accept the realities you cannot change. But part of getting to acceptance is grieving what you’ve lost. That’s why I wrote this, to help me let go. And it has.

Everyone has lost things that were once a big part of their life. Have you had to say goodbye to something difficult to let go?

How would you deal with losing part of your identity?

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