Call it inspiration, as I read a half dozen or so other bloggers accounts of their last ten years I realized that my own story over that time period encompassed perhaps as many changes as theirs. So I thought, why not join the parade and review those years in my life?
Ten years ago it was 2009 turning into 2010. In 2009 AIG lost record amounts of money, Bernie Madoff confessed one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever and Sully landed his stricken jet in the Hudson River with no loss of life. Michael Jackson died, General Motors filed for bankruptcy and medical marijuana became effectively legal as the federal government announced it would no longer prosecute those cases. Alabama won the college football national championship, again.
I was in my early fifties and was working as the lobbyist/government affairs VP for the same family owned company I had filled various rolls at for 24 years. I had recovered from a brief funk when I had been moved from running the company’s operations to what I viewed as a less important regulatory role, with no change in pay. But I was finding I enjoyed commuting from Arkansas to the state capital and the nations capital in DC to work for better regulations for my industry. I was already beginning to appreciate that the lobbyist lifestyle was very easy compared to running a large chemical complex where I was on call 24x7x365 and always tethered to my phone. I was financially independent but had not yet recognized it. Both my mother and my father were still alive and living in assisted living quarters. My son was out of college working as an engineer, my middle daughter was in engineering classes at the state university and the youngest was graduating from high school.
That’s a completely different world than my current reality. Now my youngest child not only completed her bachelor and masters degrees but has had four different jobs at four different universities working as an academic specialist in their athletic departments. My middle daughter has two engineering degrees and has worked for years as a state regulator. My son left engineering, went to medical school and is now a medical doctor. We are now totally empty nesters and all three kids are off our payroll! And I retired slightly early four years ago. I’m a blogger now too, for most of the last four years.
Ten years ago I was a faster runner and was running two marathons each year. In fact my personal best marathon finish time was in my fifties. Now my knees are not in favor of runs longer than ten miles. My slightly older than me wife is training for her next marathon right now though, so one of us is still in the game. Ten years ago we were hiking to our first waterfall on my wife’s birthday, this year we hiked to number 120, the final falls in our state exactly ten birthdays later. In that time we lost both my parents and my wife’s. We inherited a million dollars which we invested, because we were already debt free multimillionaires and already had a paid for house.
At work I got to experience the second time our company would sell, this time to a large Fortune 500 corporation. The new management team had known me for a long time and they put me back in charge of the company operations again, which I have to admit was a lot of fun, at first. I was awarded Fortune 500 sized stock awards and bonuses for the first time in my career and it began to become clear to me that unless I was just working for fun there was no longer any reason to work for money.
After a couple of years I felt like there wasn’t anything new to do at work that I hadn’t done or wanted to learn about. So for the first time in my life I stopped loving my job and decided I should go. And so I retired four years ago. I did engineer my retirement enough to get a significant amount of extra cash on my way out the door. Nowhere near as much as Financial Samurai, but I’m not nearly as clever as he is so I think I did pretty well considering. Plus I maintained a friendly relationship with my former employer which has helped earn me another $500K over the last four years as a consultant for them and others. Since I’ve only worked one and sometimes two days a week that’s pretty decent income.
My net worth, well I wasn’t recording it ten years ago. I was a multimillionaire before I inherited the extra million and my net worth has gone up about $350K in the last year but I still am reluctant to publish exactly what I’m worth. A couple of friends have figured out who I am and I’m afraid eventually more will and I’m just not wanting that information widely known by locals. I think about half the people I know would be shocked that I am worth as much as I am and the other half would be shocked because they think I have much more than I do. But my friends come from wide ranging economic environments, from paycheck to paycheck types to honest to goodness real billionaires with jets and islands and all the stuff you see on reality TV.
My daily life consists of running, tennis, pickle ball, fishing, consulting, running a college board and a charity board, travel, church, blogging, family and friends. With new work hours of only about eight per week and volunteer work taking about another eight to ten hours I now have about four or five free days a week worth of time. So far it hasn’t been hard to fill up with things I enjoy.
So how is life now versus ten years ago? I’ve got much more time that I control, and much more money. As a contractor I do not answer to anyone directly and set my own work schedule. Every year at this time I decide if I want to sign up my clients for one more year of my services. I haven’t decided that yet for 2020, but probably I will. But there is no stress over the decision, it is kind of a coin toss because I do not need the money.
Today the morning four mile run was the same as ten years ago, except for being slower. After that though its all a new rhythm. I cooked breakfast for my wife and myself and I started blogging while she drove to a neighboring city to play tennis. It is almost noon and I’m still in my robe after my shower! Ten years ago I’d have been at work dealing with so many problems. Now, not so much.
I’m older now, and I can feel it in my bones. I don’t care how much you work out, when you hit sixty you can literally feel your system starting to fail. Joints, muscles, even reaction time is slowing down and while you can fight a strategic retreat there is no winning over aging, it is inexorable. I can still do anything I could do in my younger years, from tearing down extreme ski slopes to pulling myself up cliff-like hillsides by tree roots. But I can see the day coming when I won’t be able to. A day when a flight of stairs may seem insurmountable. I’m not there yet, not even close, and I will not go there without a fight. But nobody wins in the battle against time.
Ten years ago I had been married 31 years, now it is 41. I think our strong marriage is nothing but stronger now. We have so many shared hobbies and also ones we do apart with other friends. It is a good balance and I think you had better have a lot of fun together if you plan to stay married for life. There are plenty of stressful things in marriage and family and without shared fun times I’m not sure how people could make it.
Ten years from now I hope I’ll be posting something like this again. I’ll be in my seventies and I currently play tennis with guys older than that, guys who still hike and fish. I am pretty sure I’ll be like them and will still be doing most of what I do now, a little slower and more carefully. But it is sobering to think that ten years after that I might not even be alive. Or if I am alive in my eighties I might be severely limited in what I can do physically or mentally. And ten years after that? I don’t really even want to go there in my mind. But who knows?I saw a local guy died this week who was 110 years old. I’d have to live another fifty years nearly to survive to his age, so anything is possible.
What has changed over the last ten years for you?
Are you satisfied with your job or your retirement over the last ten years or do you feel a need to make a change?
Can you project out to a day ten years from now? How old will your kids be? Will you still be working?
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I really enjoyed this way of looking at changes over the past 10 years – it’s a snapshot of so many things in life compressed down to a short paragraph for each. You’re concise and to the point – I see why you’re able to make such an impact (and compensation) from working even a day or two a week.
Going through the acquisition process with a fortune 500 company must’ve been something for sure. Having the little startup I worked at acquired was stressful enough.
As for the last 10 years for me – it’s been a lot for sure. Aging from 27 to 37 – slowly growing a little smarter about what I want out of life (but with a ways to go I’m sure).
Looking forward 10 years what stands out is becoming the healthiest version of myself. I ran my first half marathon this past year at 37 and hope to run my first full one this year. Want to take advantage of the time my body has and do the best to make it last! Other then that, developing deeper relationships with people in my life. Leaning towards fewer deep relationships as opposed to a larger number of skin-deep friendships.
The hard one for me (and I’m curious how you’re handling this one) is distancing myself from the idea of productivity = success, or making money = success, after a career focused on it. Have you had any mindset shifts, or things that have helped with that transition? Or was that never an issue?
Great questions, first on fitness. If I could do it over again I’d reduce my mileage. I really think running over one thousand miles a year from your age to mine now was too much and my knee problems, bone on bone contact, are due in part from overuse.
Relationships, that’s a good insight, but maybe harder to pull off than it seems. Some of my closest friends moved away or even died and distance makes staying close very difficult.
On identity. I was a fairly big dog in a small city. I had gotten to be well known across my entire state and even in DC testifying before both the House and the Senate and all that was heady stuff. I had the cell numbers of governors, senators and congressmen and billionaires in my phone and they’d take my calls and we were on a first name basis. So I was riding that ego train in the first class section and I loved that part. I was afraid of giving that up frankly and that kept me at work two years longer than it should have. I decided I didn’t want to go cold turkey so I eased my way out by building the consulting gigs. So now the governors and senators, etc. still are on a first name basis and I’m still known across the state, but not so much in DC anymore. I also chair a college board and a major foundation board and both of those get me some press time and allow me to rub elbows with wealthy and politically powerful people. That might sound shallow but powerful friends are a huge advantage and one I didn’t want to leave behind. Plus the college and the foundation ministries change lives and they let me give back to people who really need it. So while I can feel my star power diminishing a little each year my need for it also is fading pretty fast. I think having an off ramp has helped, I can see myself being perfectly content to drop all of these things at some future point but if I had dropped everything at once, I think I’d have felt a little lost. That’s probably more than you wanted to know!
The past 10 years have been great for a number of US investment asset classes. Equities, fixed income, and real estate all generally went in one direction and that is up.
I’ve been fortunate to have some of my money in those assets and they have performed nicely over the past 10 years.
Hopefully, the next 10 years can even be even greater.
Happy New Year!
It has been hard to mess up investing this last ten years. Could be different the next decade or more of the same!
10 years ago i was just starting to seriously slay the debts of my youth. i was a terrible investor but got much better and fast forward to now debt-free is a great place to be. i doubt i’ll be working a regular 40 hours in 10 years.
i’m intrigued by your daughter’s gig and an athletic academic adviser. we had one of those when i ran D1 cross country very poorly. he was a classic good ol’ boy and completely no-nonsense. i could hear his frustration while waiting for the appointments when he was yelling at some of the basketball guys back in the day. i’m guessing you can’t take that same tough love approach in this day and age but i always thought he was a treasure.
She’s a Summa Cum Laude graduate who never made a grade below A from kindergarten through grad school. She isn’t any kind of sports fan but she lectured those world class offensive linemen at Arkansas, Maryland, Clemson and now a smaller East Coast school. I knew she’d do good in any job where she could boss people around, wow, I hope she hasn’t figured out this is my blog like her brother has. She runs the program but still has some contact with the athletes. The only way to move up in that arena is to move from one university to another, so that is why she’s done four schools in five years.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It’s a good recap.
10 years doesn’t seem that long, but life can change a lot over that time.
I was an engineer then, no kid, made okay money, but life was a slog.
Now, I’m a SAHD/blogger, one kid, and I love it. Life improved tremendously over the last 10 years for me. The only thing that got much worse is my parents’ health. Now, I’m worried about them a lot more often.
Life will be a lot different 10 years from now too. Our son will be in college and we’ll have a lot more freedom. We’ll be 55+ and probably will be a lot closer to real retirement than now. I suspect there will be less blogging and more traveling.
Good luck in the next decade.
You’ve got an interesting decade ahead of you! And some of that will be painful and some of it will be great. Good luck to you too!
I love the 10-year recap! Hopefully the more flexible retirement schedule helps with running health. My husband and I are in our first year of empty nesting and our third year out of corporate life, and my husband’s running improved a lot b/c he was able to pay more attention to cross-training, chiropractic when he needed it and health in general. I haven’t been in corporate for 12 years, opting to consult, and my health improved a lot by virtue of having my own schedule. The stress of 9-5 (or 7-7 in Type A NYC) is very real.
I also loved your observation about how some people would be shocked at how much you have and how some would expect you to have more. I have found the exact same thing, especially in a locale like NYC where you have so many variations living right on top of each other!
The only problem with running now is getting older. My 65 year old wife is training for a marathon right now but my knees get very unhappy with those kind of distances so I guess I’m through with twenty mile training runs. I bet in NYC that false expectation that others apply to your net worth is quite exaggerated compared to my small town. Thanks for reading and commenting! And best wishes for a great upcoming decade.
I know you like marathons and running. Curious if you ever tried weight training? I remember watching a documentary wrt muscle building and how lifting weights improves the quality of life.
Guessing in the next 20 years we would have life extension and although it might not increase lifespan it would certainly keep us healthier.
I have done that, it really seems to aggravate the repetitive motion injuries I have from 50 years of tennis so I stopped. I am relying on tennis to give me the core and upper body work I need. It may not be ideal but I love tennis too much to quit.