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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