Month: December 2021

Do you ever tell yourself that you really need to do something yet find months passing and you have taken zero steps to accomplish it?  Guilty here.  But this week I finally did knock something out that had been on my mind for a while.  I bought I bonds from the US government.  And it was embarrassingly easy. 

This is a different kind of post for me, I’m actually writing this to try to spur on those of you who read this, who procrastinate like me, to actually go ahead and take action.  You know who you are, you’ve thought about these inflation protected treasury bonds but have allowed inertia or your busy schedules to get in the way of doing something about it. 

Here is the way to do it, and I promise it isn’t difficult.  Here is what I did step by step.  The first thing I did was to research I bonds. Just google I Bonds and you’ll find tons of information.  I found out that you can buy $10,000 per person per year.  So, my wife and I could buy $10,000 each for 2021 and then next month buy another $10,000 each for 2022.  That will give us $40,000 in I bonds.  I also learned they are paying 7.12% and that interest rate is periodically adjusted for inflation.

I also learned the place to do it is Treasury Direct, a US government website.  You can open an account there with no money and there are no fees.  I had to open one for myself and one for my wife.  When you do that, you can link a bank account to your Treasury Direct account to transfer the money to buy the bonds.  In my case I linked our checking account to both my and my wife’s Treasury Direct (TD) accounts. 

Next is the only hard part, find $20,000 and transfer it to the bank account you linked to TD.  In our case I transferred it from my Vanguard money market account to our checking account.  Then you wait two or three days for the “pending” label to come off the money you transferred.  Its amazing that in this modern connected era that transfers put your money in  “pending” purgatory for days, but that’s how banks like to roll.  Once they let you have your money back then log on to your TD account and hit the buy button, select I bond as the type of purchase and $10,000 (or whatever lesser amount you want to purchase) as the amount  and hit the submit button.  Then in my case I did the same thing with my wife’s account.

Next month I’ll repeat the process for 2022.  It really isn’t very much work and even though $40,000 isn’t a huge amount of money, you’ll be hard pressed to find any other zero risk savings account or CD that pays even close to that much. The interest rate isn’t usually this high and if it drops too much in the future, I’ll move the money somewhere else.  But for now this is a real deal.

Downsides?  Well it isn’t good for emergency fund money because you can’t cash out for a year. After that you can get it any time you want with the only penalty being you’d lose the last three months’ worth of interest, no big deal. After five years there is zero penalty for withdrawing your money.  And you can keep them for up to thirty years.

If you have cash sitting around in excess of your emergency fund ask yourself why you wouldn’t do this right now?  And right now is the best time because you only have a few days of 2021 left.  It’s the last time you can buy for 2021.  And then next month you can buy for 2022.    I don’t monetize my site, I don’t take ads and I surely don’t promote government programs.  But this is such a no brainer of a deal I just thought I’d try to encourage you think about it. 

Anybody actually take my advice on this?  Or Sam’s over at Financial Samurai.  I saw he posted on this same thing yesterday. 

If you don’t have I bonds…why?

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.  Yet low self esteem is considered to be closely linked to forms of mental illness.  It is a classic yin and yang paradox.  You want to be proud of yourself, you want others to be proud of you, yet you do not want to be arrogant or narcissistic.  You do not want to display such an inflated ego that nobody wants to be around you, yet you do not want to feel like a failure in life either. 

I have thought about this a lot because of my career.  Not my unpaid blogging career, but my old 9 to 5 one.   My persona in the personal finance/careers/retirement space is a little different than most other bloggers.  Typically they come at you with an attitude that puts jobs in a negative light.  Many look at work as a necessary evil that you tolerate for as short a time as possible, saving and investing like mad, then you transition into real life when you retire early.  Its the very essence of the original FIRE.  Financial Independence Retire Early (F.I.R.E.) originally was all about escaping the serfdom of work.  

My experience was so different from that.  I loved my job!  And I will not apologize for that, my job was one of the best parts of my life and some of my best accomplishments were things I did at work.  Many of my biggest wins in life were successes in the business world.  Although I had attained millionaire status by the time I was 50, I chose to keep working until 60 because I did not want to give up the non monetary rewards of my position. 

And this is where pride and ego become so entangled with my career.  Although the chances are high you have never heard my name, or even the name of the Fortune 500 corporation I worked for, my life was different than the lives of most of the other 7,000 people who worked there and different from most of the bloggers in this space.  It was a true case of being a big fish in a little pond.  We were the largest employer in the county and a nearly 100 year old company that had a big footprint in our small state.  Being the head guy put me on television and in the news and on YouTube doing things and saying things that sounded important. Being the boss there also meant I was the spokesmodel for the company as well as the lobbyist with the state and federal government.  I was given preferential treatment by restaurants, doctors and bankers because of who I was.  It often seemed as if everybody in my town and many around the state knew my name and face.  People wanted to be my friend just because of my status.  

You might be thinking, who cares?  Who wants the hassle of being well known, and I get that. But you would have to have known me growing up to see why that meant so much to me.  I was the smallest kid at school. I was the slowest runner in my class.  I really was the last kid chosen when picking teams for kickball at recess in elementary school. My self image was correspondingly poor.  I day dreamed up envious scenarios where I was the quarterback with the cheerleader girlfriend. Being one of the smart kids in school had no appeal to me, I wanted to be one of the cool kids.

When I graduated college with some considerable engineering skills and had eight companies make firm job offers to me a full semester before I got out of school, something changed in me.  I was popular for the first time, at least with oil and chemical companies. They wanted me! They flew me to their locations, fed me steak and lobster, put me up in swank hotels and offered me what seemed like a king’s ransom for a salary. And when I took a job it just kept getting better.  I got raises and promotions and affirmation like they were pouring out of a fire hose.  I was put in leadership positions and decided on who was hired and who was promoted within my department and eventually ran the company. I competed with coworkers for higher positions and won most of the time. I was no longer last picked for kickball, I was now the guy picking the team. 

If you don’t think there is a big difference in how the guy picking the players feels versus the last person picked (only because they had to pick you) you are not being honest with yourself.  Every single one of us wants to be desired and appreciated and admired.  Its a fundamental part of our nature.  And when you’ve had a lack of that in your life and are suddenly given a surplus, it is like a drug.  You cannot get enough of it. I was always a highly competitive person, only now I was winning.  And it felt like fun to me.  I looked forward to going to work on Monday mornings.  I had no concept of the Sunday scaries that the FIRE crowd talks about.  I’ve always said that the reason I enjoyed work was because I developed mastery, and that was true.  But there is more to it than that, there is a darker side as well. I also loved work because it fed my ego.  I loved being known and respected.  So much so that one of my friend’s wives gave me a little plaque I keep on display at home. It says “I’m Kind of a Big Deal”.  She was my wife’s roommate in college and she knows me too well.  That’s exactly how I felt and I liked the feeling. I liked it a lot. 

My biggest fear in retirement was that flow of ego boosting attention and my mild celebrity status would fade away.  I feared it so much I set up a consulting practice beginning with my first day of retirement so I could keep rubbing shoulders with my political and business friends.  And that off ramp from being a mover and a shaker to just being me helped.  It helped enough that after five years of doing it I no longer feared losing my identity .  I’ve come to appreciate the enjoyment of living mostly off the radar.  I still get some notoriety and publicity from my volunteer positions but I think I’ve outgrown the need for it, finally.  

Pampered  egos are very common among high achievers in business, in professional sports and in politics.  Our last two presidents were well past retirement age but they will likely never retire from politics until health forces them.  For some, who you are is so tightly melded into what you do for a living that it becomes your identity.  And because what you do is highly visible to others you get respect and admiration for your success.  And I think that part, the respect and admiration, is one reason Tom Brady still throws a football.  He makes millions and loves to compete but he also has fame and admiration motivating him to stay in the game.   Its why Musk keeps working.  And its why a lot of guys like me did as well.

It isn’t a good thing, its just a thing. Obviously I’m no Brady or Musk, but my job fed my ego just like theirs.  And it was hard to walk away from something that felt that good.  OK, I’m a shallow person.  But so are we all.  Its why pride made the top seven list, because we all crave that feeling.  Fortunately I had a best friend I was married to, a lot of hobbies and volunteer opportunities and the consulting to make retirement even better than working.  If I had not had a well rounded life, and many executives do not, I would still be working and not enjoying the better life I have now.

How about you, are you still working because your job makes you feel like a big deal, and you like that feeling? 

Do you see that kind of thing going on in others at your company?

As always, click on the title at the top of the post if you can’t find the comment box.

I wrote about serendipity regarding a volunteer project I’m doing and wouldn’t you know it has just happpened again.  ESI Money announced a contest to give away $500 via his readers. He sent the “winners” (with the best stories related to what they’d do with the money) each a $50 gift card.  But it isn’t for the winner to spend on himself, rather he or she is to find someone to give $50 to and then to return to the Millionaire Money Mentors  forum to tell everyone what happened.  

I was selected as one of the winners and received my Amazon gift card earlier this week.  Immediately I began looking around for someone in need I could help out in this small way, but  I was not making any progress. And then disaster struck almost in my front yard!  I got a text from my next door neighbor that she had heard a terrible crash in front of her house.  She’s my neighbor, but its a full quarter mile between our houses so I had not heard anything.  I hurried down to see if first aid was needed and met my neighbor at the wreck.  It was a bad one.  Just  one vehicle, and nobody badly injured, but the car had flipped over a few times.   Obviously she was flying down the road at a speed far in excess of what was legal or safe.  The vehicle was beyond totaled.  You could barely tell it was a car, and certainly not what kind.  

The driver was banged up and bleeding and hysterical. I think I had seen her before but did not know her name. Its a small town so that isn’t unusual.  We asked her if she needed help, got her a clean towel and a bottle of water but she was too rattled to communicate rationally.  I did spend some time helping her hunt for her eyeglasses, which we never found.   Eventually the sheriff deputies got there and after interviewing her they let her leave with a friend.  They towed the car out less than fifteen minutes later and it was as if it had never happened.  I wished I had brought my wallet because right then I realized this was the person I was supposed to give the $50. 

In a bizarre stroke of irony her car flew over and landed next to a small shrine to the victim of a fatal car wreck a year ago at exactly the same spot.  In an even weirder set of circumstances a second fatal accident had occurred directly across the road less than fifty feet away when a pedestrian was struck and killed as he walked home in the dark after an argument with friends.  Just a couple hundred yards up the street, in the very curve where this girl lost control, a woman we went to church with died in a car wreck.   I also responded several years ago to a location in the woods less than 200 yards distant to a fatal tree cutting accident that killed a neighbor’s friend.  And at the risk of being totally morbid another neighbor died only slightly further away when he overturned a tractor he was driving in his yard.  All five of these fatalities occurred during the time we have lived in our house and all the accident sites would be in easy sight of each other except for the dense woods.   These tragic events occurred in a very small and sparsely populated neighborhood.  Not a place where you’d expect anyone to die, other than peacefully in their sleep.   

By the time I got back to my house the girl was gone, even her car had been towed away. I thought I had missed a chance to do something providential.  But today, coming home from a tough tennis match, I saw a car parked in our local deadly Bermuda Triangle right where the girl had wrecked. As I got closer I saw it was the same girl picking through the debris left behind after they towed the car away.  She  was still trying to find her glasses so I stopped and helped her hunt again.  It was a futile effort, they were probably in the creek her car had sailed over while it spun through the air. It really was a miracle she lived.   I warned her about getting too close to the creek because it was overgrown and has a healthy population of water moccasins. I knew that  since it runs near my house and, well, its full of snakes.  We didn’t find her glasses, but I realized I had my wallet with me this time and fished out the fifty dollars and gave it to her.  She burst into tears.  It was obvious she had very little and that fifty dollars was a big deal in her present circumstances.  I got a heart felt hug and we parted ways.  I realized I had been given a second chance to send the money right where it needed to go.    

What a curious set of circumstances.  In my entire life this is the first time I’ve ever been tasked with giving away a specific amount of money in a short time period.  And then to cross paths with someone in such obvious need only a couple of days later seems like such an unlikely coincidence. I wonder, do I pass people in need every day and only noticed this time because I had been given the money?  Maybe we should all pretend we are carrying some money that doesn’t belong to us but is meant for someone who needs it more?  I’m going to try to adopt that mindset this Christmas season, that every day when I wake up I find I’ve been given something to give away to someone else. 

What about you?  Have you been in just the right place at just the right time to help someone in need? 

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Webster defines serendipity as “Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for.”  I’ve had that on two occasions on morning runs when I found ten dollars laying on the sidewalk.  When, a year or two after my dad’s death I decided to do a lost money search on our State Treasurer’s website and found $1,600 waiting to be claimed, that felt like serendipity too.  

A few months ago I decided to stop most of my paid consulting.  I hoped to fill that time with mentoring university engineering students and maybe with some other new volunteering opportunities.  The only problem was I did not know of any existing mentoring programs like that.  Then serendipity struck when my alma mater  decided to create just such a program and I have had a great time mentoring my group of five chemical engineering students along with my two co-mentors.  It was such a happy coincidence that the opportunity appeared right when I was ready for it.

Then earlier this week it happened again!  I’ve mentioned having billionaire friends before, its just a thing that happens when you live in a small town that sits on top of an oil field.  Some of those Jed Clampett poor people turned rich over night.  And while some frittered away their money like a stereotypical lottery winner some of those families saved and invested that money.  And a handful of those built the kind of corporate empires that beget billionaires.  And because it is such a small town you rub shoulders with them at your kids’ soccer games and in the grocery store and, yes, even in Walmart. You take your morning runs with them.  You workout with them at the gym,  and you come to realize they are just people.  Their circumstances are surely different but their lives are much the same as yours. 

What was the second serendipitous event?  Earlier this week my best billionaire friend called me up and asked if I’d meet with him at his office the next morning.  He is retired also, but he has an office and a full time assistant because that’s how they roll.  And his office  is amazing.  I think his coffee machine might have cost more than my car!  We met and he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  He wanted me to do whatever it takes to turn our little burg into a contender for a world scale manufacturing facility.  He explained we have some unique resources that ought to make landing this specific type of business a lock,  advantages that nobody else in the US has.  But right now we aren’t ready because we haven’t done the prep work to even be considered. He has put together a team he wants me to lead to get this done and will put his office, his influence and even his personal jet at my disposal as needed.

And I realized that this is that additional volunteer job I was looking for. A chance to bring high paying green STEM jobs to our city.  So, yes, serendipity again!  It is truly volunteer work, no pay, and is it is completely outside my comfort zone, I’ve never done economic development work.  I’m an engineer who ran a big oil and chemical complex, not someone who figured out where to site new plants. I also know almost nothing about this type of manufacturing.  That means I’m going to have to bring my “A” game and learn some new skills.  So for all those reasons I said “hell yes!”  I said it but I definitely didn’t feel it.  Because of the comfort zone thing, I felt afraid I’d fall on my face in front of everybody.  

My wife shook her head like she always does when I agree to something that I don’t initially want to do.  After forty-three years of marriage she still doesn’t quite get that part of me.  She has zero trouble saying no unless its a “hell yes”, but my rule is only say no if there is a crystal clear reason.  My whole career success came from not saying no to things I didn’t want to do.  Sure I’ll tour first graders around the plant, of course I’ll speak at the Rotary Club, absolutely  I’ll handle negotiating this fine with the EPA, OK I’ll take on lobbying in DC, yes I’ll handle negotiating contracts with our union employees.  All the times I did not say no,  times that landed me outside my comfort zone, stretched me and stacked more skills on top of my engineering talent.   They made me grow.  It was the difference between me and my competition.  We were all exceptional engineers, but I also became a good public speaker, a tough negotiator, a big time networker, a decent writer  and a servant leader. 

Growth doesn’t stop with retirement, or it doesn’t have to.   Taking on this project will let me work with new groups of people and I’ll learn a lot. That’s guaranteed because  I know next to nothing right now about how to do this.  It will showcase my skills to a whole new network of people.  I don’t solicit paid work any more but I do seek volunteer opportunities and this will likely lead me to more of those.  So, while I don’t feel a “hell yes” to take this on, I know its the right thing for me to do.

Is it valuable?  Well, I get to do something that just might end up providing a lot of high paying green STEM jobs in this area.  That’s got value, especially in a very low income state.   And I’ll learn a lot, provided an old dog can learn new tricks.  That’s valuable as well, to me personally.  So based on that I would say this definitely qualifies as serendipity. Who knows where it could lead?

What about you?  Are you a “Hell no” if it isn’t “Hell yes” kind of person? Or do you take on any challenge you don’t have a good reason to say no to?

Does it make a difference who asks you to do something?  I find billionaires pretty hard to say no to.  Is that super shallow of me or just smart networking?  Honestly, I’m not sure. 

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