Writing About Nothing

With an inspiring title like that I have pulled my favorite psychological trick on you, I have set your expectations as low as possible.  Now I’ll try to live down to them.  Usually, I only post when I’m inspired by something, another blog post, a commenter or just a personal experience that shook up my world.  But none of that has happened since my last post and I felt I still needed to put some content “out there”, so, here goes.    

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, always a good holiday.  We had plans to drive cross country to New Mexico to see our son and daughter-in-law but their house is a disaster right now due to a major remodeling project way behind schedule.  So plan B is to go to the rustic farmhouse my wife grew up in to enjoy a southern feast with her sisters’ families.  The food is always amazing, as if Paula Dean were hidden away somewhere in the kitchen.   The next day we are going to take a niece and her two girls on a mountain hike nearby.  We mid-sixty boomers are in much better shape than our niece so the oldsters and the youngsters are going to have to go pretty slow for the middle aged one.

Fortunately, none of my wife’s family knows about this blog so I can say things like that in relative safety.  However, my brother does read this so if I mention the $1,799 Samsung Galaxy ZFold3 5G phone he bought yesterday he won’t let that stand undefended.  It is the one with the glass screen that folds out to almost tablet size.  He’ll immediately text me to say he got it for half price or less because like me he has a serous phone addiction/denial issue.  I only spent $1,299 on my last phone, so see, he’s much worse than me.

In other unrelated meandering I checked our Social Security estimated benefits again, to see if the big cost of living adjustment had changed them.  And it had, by a bunch.  The last time I logged in to the My Social Security website we were set to receive annual payments totaling $66,400 starting in four years.  Now the SSA is projecting $71,544 in combined annual benefits for my wife and me. And that number is in 2021 dollars.  That’s kind of staggering if you think about it.  I’d guess half of the FIRE community plans on living on less than that.  And some of it isn’t even taxable.  We will still withdraw about 1% from our portfolio in addition to fund our current lifestyle but we struggle to spend more than that.  I guess I could buy a new phone like my brother’s?

Since it is Thanksgiving, it is the perfect time to reflect on what we are grateful for.  For me this year it is very easy to zero in on one huge area of gratitude.  Finding a surgical cure for something that was destined to end me someday was far and away my big win of 2021.  Thanks to super magnets, a rocket scientist surgeon, robots and titanium I’m as good as new again and free from a few quite unpleasant symptoms.  I’m back on the tennis courts, the pickleball courts and back to hiking and bushwhacking severe terrain with more horsepower and a bigger gas tank.   I’m running my morning miles faster and breathing easier, and believe me after you turn 60 you generally stop seeing any kind of improvement in your physical abilities. Its kind of like getting a few years back!  If I sound happy, well, that’s exactly how I feel. And very grateful.

Oh yeah, almost forgot I also got that bobblehead doll of myself for getting into the Motley Fool All Star Money Hall of Fame with my Get off My Lawn post, that’s a pretty big deal for me. And it made my professional journalist brother jealous! I’ll hear about that too.

I got to kick off mentoring college engineering students as a new volunteer activity.  It’s been a lot of fun and will continue for years, I hope.  While they are living in a world much different from the one I graduated from college into, there are a lot of things that haven’t changed at all in the work world.  I am learning as much from them as they are from me and my two mentoring partners.  I had been looking for one more volunteer “job” and this showed up almost exactly when I decided to shut down my consulting projects. It was perfect timing. 

While I did plan on no longer doing any paid work it hasn’t quite gone that way.  I can’t find it in me to turn down new and interesting work when it finds me so I am doing one more expert witness case, it’s a lot of fun even though the money isn’t important. Plus I’m helping a friend avoid paying for a much more expensive expert when I’m expert enough for his needs.

And my wife, my best friend for the last 43 years of our marriage and my grown amazing kids are always at the top of my list of the best things that ever happened to me.

It has been a great year for me with some unexpectedly good outcomes. 

How about you?  Has this been a banner year, a terrible year or something in between?

In a virtual version of going around the Thanksgiving table and sharing one thing you are most grateful for, what’s yours?

 As usual, if you don’t see a comments box you can find it by clicking the title of this post up top.