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We will alternate the cooking and everything involved in meal prep and clean up every week.  So for two of the weeks, like this week, I’ll be responsible for the meal plan, grocery shopping, cooking and after meal clean up.  This is harder than it sounds, because for over 40 years my wife has been doing all of that.  She was a stay at home parent when we started having kids and she’s much more proficient at the whole cooking thing, plus, all that experience.  But I’m getting better even though I have a long way to go. It is always fun on my weeks but it also consumes a lot of time, because I’m a slow cook and I’m usually experimenting with new recipes.  

Three times most weeks we will run with our running group at 5:30AM.  That means we get up at 4:50AM and get dressed and drive to the starting place.  I know, we are retired and could run whenever we choose.   But we’ve been part of this group for years and its a fun social time before, during and after the run so we just get up and go.  Also the same three days we play two hours of pickleball with a totally different group of 20 pickleballers.  All levels of skill and we are always recruiting new players.  Generally I’ll also play tennis singles three or four times a week with my tennis buddy.  We are pretty evenly matched and both pretty good players so it is a hard work out, harder than running or pickleball.  My wife spends more time playing tennis than I, she is on the courts almost daily.  She also walks with a non running friend almost every day as well as accompanies our 80 year old next door neighbor when she walks her dog.  

On top of all that I have board meetings and committee meetings for the college board and foundation board I chair.  Plus I have meetings set up for my volunteer industrial recruiting project, followed by more meetings I am sure.  Most, if not all, of these will be virtual ones so I can fit them in without messing up my other plans. 

If that sounds like a crowded schedule, it is, but it is mostly crowded with fun pursuits done with my friends and with my best friend, my wife.  Unlike my former career  there is next to no stress involved in these thing.  At least, unless you count the stress of returning serve in a tiebreaker with your tennis teammates watching. Or the stress of a 15 mile day hike in the Texas high dessert.  Or the stress of getting down the Birds of Prey at Breckenridge without cracking some aged ribs.  All of  that is good stress in my opinion, the feeling of being fully alive.  It is going to be a very good month!

Does the thought of not having a job to occupy your time or to define who you are scare you just a little? 

If you are retired have you found that most of the fears you had going in never materialized?  

Do you find that the things you worried about before retirement, having enough money, having purpose and having enough social contact are no longer worries because you’ve got more than enough of all of them? 

As always if you do not see a comment box just click on the title at the top of the post, and presto, it shall appear!

I’m a mentor on the Millionaire Money Mentor's forum and we were discussing a post by adimesaved that had some very interesting takes on millionaires. In fact there were 16 of them and four in particular caught my eye.  These are all characteristics that Chris Hogan, formerly of the Ramsey clan, and Tom Corely, the uber famous author had identified:

1. Millionaires Seek Feedback and Have Mentors

2. Millionaires Persevere 

3. Millionaires are Consistent

4. Millionaires are Conscientious

And while these all sound good on the surface there is something wrong with the list, at least when it comes to my own millionaire journey.  Because they don’t describe me very well at all. 

I agree that most millionaires I know, including the handful of nine figure and ten figure ones do share the first characteristic.  They seek honest feedback and advice. They look for quality mentors because they realize they are not the smartest person in the room on every conceivable topic.  

It is hard to argue with Number 4, because you cannot succeed unless you are conscientious about your work product.  You have to have a high standard for quality in what you do  and have to have pride in what you create. At least in the creations that matter the most.

Those two I agree with, I cannot think of any self made millionaires that cannot check the boxes on them.  But it is Numbers 2 and 3 that give me pause.  Millionaires persevere, or do they?  It may be more semantics than reality but when I think back on my career, especially the early days when I was in head to head competition with many other engineers, the thing that separated me from my competition was not perseverance.  It was my ability to leverage my natural lazy streak to find new solutions to old problems. I worked in a small engineering group alongside similarly trained engineers who were all about having a strong work ethic.  They would pound away at problems with brute force.  I didn’t.  My intuition told  me that the best path to resolve a problem was the easiest path. So instead of fixing the impossible I would back way up and find a solution that did not fix the problem but instead rendered it irrelevant. 

My example is a little arcane, the world of chemical engineering doesn’t translate very well into other career domains, but let me try.  Often the chemical processes we utilized at our oil and chemical complex couldn’t perform at peak efficiency because of contaminants in the feedstocks we were processing.  Typically we, as troubleshooters and process optimizers, would be tasked with figuring out how to get the most product produced in spite of the contaminants.  That was a losing game, the problem isn’t figuring out how to minimize the contaminants impact, it is too late to solve that.  The real answer, the easy path is to back up and figure out how to eliminate the contaminants from the feedstocks so the process doesn’t have to deal with them at all. 

And that is what I did.  I found enough surplus process equipment sitting around unused, to cobble together a process that would remove all the contaminants from the feedstocks.  With cleaner and purer feed stocks the process started making more premium products.  That was thirty years ago and that process is still saving my former employer  millions of dollars a year.  It sounds like something Captain Obvious would point out,  but it wasn’t at all clear to my co-workers.  They were told to find a way to tolerate the contamination.  So that is exactly what they did.  They did what they were told.  And it was a hard path because it had very limited potential upside.  But they were persistent at doing what they were told, they persevered.  However, they could not back up and look at the real problem with no restrictions.  They could not conceive of a world where their bosses did not understand the problem.  So no, persevering is the worst thing in the world if you are trying to solve the wrong problem.

I did not share the illusion that my bosses knew best.  I knew that often the higher ups would poorly define the problem and I felt that where I could get the most recognition and provide the most value was by changing my job assignments to better ones. I did not persevere on the wrong path, I got off of the assigned arduous path and got on Easy Street where the real money was. And it did not take a great work ethic to produce when you are aiming at the right target.   The less successful engineers had a Don Quixote mindset, and their solution to tilting at windmills was to find a bigger horse and to keep charging.  Persevering, in my opinion, loses out to talent every time.  The original post used the tortoise and the hare fable as support for perseverance, but really, has a turtle ever outrun a rabbit?  Never going to happen.

The other characteristic I don’t relate to well was Number 3, millionaires are consistent.  I am not so sure about that.  You have to be conscientious, your important work product has to be consistently excellent, but you do not have to have consistent effort, in my opinion.  I tended to work in flurries of accomplishment followed by periods where I did not get much done. And guess what?  Nobody cared about my mundane daily activities, or at least they did not penalize me for mailing it in on unimportant work.  That stuff did not matter to the bosses, they cared about those grand slam home runs that made big money for the shareholders.

In any organization a lot of what passes as work: meetings, reports, budgets, etc. does not really make the company any money. At a facility like ours what made money was anything that either cut costs or increased throughput or product quality.  So if my idea of getting the contaminants out of the feedstocks without spending a lot of money worked, which it did, then my boss looked like a superstar because he got at least half the credit for it. And his boss looked like a champ because his facility was now the profit leader of the corporation.  That one big hit of an idea, and the follow through to get it into production, was worth ten years of grinding away at budgets and reports. 

I do not want to give the impression that one good idea made my career successful, I had dozens of similar ones over a long career, some even more profitable.  So why did the other engineers so often miss the low hanging fruit I consistently found?    They were intelligent, they were diligent, they persevered and they were consistent.  They just were not as talented at reframing the project assignments.  They had too much faith in their superiors’ abilities. And they liked the comfort that comes from doing exactly what they were told to do.  I knew I was better at my job than anyone else in the company so I felt authorized by my own talent to change my job assignments at will.  I will make one caveat.  While it is imperative to alter a bad project assignment to a better one, you also have to do the original assignment.  What I mean is I not only solved the contaminant problem by thinking out of the box, but I also presented a report that detailed how to minimize the effects of the contaminants, I fulfilled the original assignment as well as rendering it moot by solving the root problem.

That is critical because your bosses have egos too, and if you dismiss their instructions out of hand they are going to take that as an attack on their competency. I saw that first hand one time when my boss, myself and one of my engineers were on the company plane.  My subordinate, a very bright and intuitive engineer, had realized my boss had passed down a flawed project assignment.  He immediately reframed it into a better project and did an amazing job of coming up with a better outcome.  But he completely neglected the original assignment, which he could have completed in a day or two.   When he presented his bright new idea to my boss and brushed off the original assignment as being unnecessary, my boss blew a fuse.  When he calmed down he looked at me and said that I would have never done that.  I would have done the assigned work in addition to freelancing a plan B.  It was a big life lesson and my former protege was better for it. In fact he is a senior VP now at a large corporation.

You are supposed to be better at solving problems than your boss because they have too many other things to do besides micromanaging you.  But you have to have some tact about it.  If you present the answer to the original assignment first you are showing respect and honoring their position in in the company.  Then you can show them this other thing you came up with and ask what they think about it.  If you have a good boss they’ll see it as a win-win solution that will make you both look good.  That will make you indispensable to your boss and will motivate them to keep you happy. Rinse and repeat and you’ll be running the whole company in time. 

So are millionaires mostly people who have mentors, persevere no matter what, consistently produce and are conscientious?  Or can enough talent and creativity make up for lacking two out of four of those? 

Can being an extremely fast and extremely lazy rabbit beat the consistent and persevering turtle? I don’t even think its a contest, personally. 

Do you see yourself as mostly checking the boxes on millionaire characteristics or are there a few that do not fit at all, but have not seemed to slow you down? 

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

For my entire adult life I never saw the value in having a vacation getaway house on the lake or a cabin in the woods.  It seemed impractical to maintain two places and would tie you down to just mostly going there when we like going everywhere.  Some of my friends have multiple homes or apartments and while they can easily afford them it still seemed like a strange way to live.  However I now find myself joining the two house crowd, or at least taking the first steps toward that lifestyle.  

My wife likes projects, remodels, yard improvements, building furniture and redecorating.  And she was intrigued by the possibility of getting some land up in the remote wilderness area of Arkansas that is very popular among hikers and river floaters.  We spend a lot of time in the woods, bushwhacking to water falls and hiking on the hundreds of miles of Arkansas wilderness trails, so we are in that area often.  She recently brought up the idea of buying land and a cabin, and for the first time it started to make sense to me.  What I had not considered was that it isn’t just a luxury expense, like a tricked out Mercedes Benz, its a luxury expense that might not actually cost us anything. 

I know it will cost several hundred thousand so I’m not in denial about that, but it still could make us some money.  This land has gone up in price steadily as it is a reasonable drive from the only two metro areas in Arkansas.  As we began looking around we were surprised at how many cabins, homes and vacation compounds have already been built there.  It is extremely difficult to find private land for sale that has utilities accessible and does not require some sort of easement to get to it. A large amount of the land in this area is government land and part of either the national forest or the Buffalo River National Park.   The Buffalo was the first National River in the US and all the land the river runs through is part of the park, and is not for sale.  So land that is very close to these protected wilderness  areas is becoming highly prized. 

We found an area that was being developed  with very large lots.  The last two lots totaled 25 acres, completely wooded and quite steeply sloped except for a very small yard around the cabin site.  The views are spectacular. This part of Arkansas is as remote and beautiful as many Western mountain states, without the feet of snow each winter, although we usually get a few inches.  We decided to buy both lots and leave one empty as a buffer so that the closest cabin to ours will not be visible.  If we later change our minds we could sell the empty lot or sell both lots and the cabin.  In any case the total cost isn’t enough money to impact our retirement finances.  We will probably VRBO it just to make sure it is occupied and not just sitting empty when we are not there and the income will help offset utilities and taxes if we decide to do that. I think that will be another adventure in itself.

I’ve long known we do not spend enough, we just are not spendy people.  But this kind of spending on an appreciating asset, that feels fine to me.  And the whole thing will be a multi-year project for my wife.  I have a lot of projects with my college and charity foundation boards I chair.  Plus other volunteer activities  keep me challenged.  But this is right in her wheelhouse and that alone makes it worthwhile.  If it pays for itself, fine, if it doesn’t, still fine.  In the big scheme of things is it small money.  Plus, maybe it will give the kids something to fight over when we are gone?  And it surely will give me some blog fodder.  I’ve only owned one house in my life and I know nothing about the process of getting one built, so we will learn a lot and make more than a few mistakes. 

What amazed me is how lightly I was holding on to the “I’ll never have two houses” mantra.  Now it doesn’t bother me at all that we are about to do just that. I wonder how many of my other principles are not as fixed in concrete as I think they are?  Maybe next time I buy a car I won’t buy a used one? I’m on the crazy train now!

What about you, have you ever completely changed your mind on something you were certain about?

Would you ever consider a second place on the beach, or in the mountains or at the lake?

Work is funny.  Not fun, but odd and weird and strange. This epiphany came to me just minutes ago after I got off of a phone conversation with an urban planner at an engineering company.  But first let me place this in context.  I stopped working a meaningful number of hours a week nearly six years ago when I turned sixty and retired.  I did still keep earning money doing light consulting but it only took about eight hours a week of my time.  I think eight hours a week qualifies as being fully retired in spite of being highly overpaid for it.  I quit most of that consulting last year, and maybe work an hour a month now. I only do that for friends when they need an inexpensive expert witness or lobbyist.  My rates make me the Costco of the consulting business.

The reason I quit my original retired consulting gigs last year was because I did not enjoy the deadlines and rigid schedules it placed on me.  Eight hours isn’t much time in a work week but it wasn’t evenly or regularly distributed.  One week I might work forty-five hours and then not work at all for the next six weeks.  And I had no control over when I worked and when I didn’t since that was set by hearing dates and docket schedules.  It was kind of a grind having arbitrary deadlines pop up and mess with the time freedom I wanted in retirement. It was fun at times, and it kept me relevant with business and industry leaders and government officials.  But it just wasn’t fun enough to make up for the constraints it placed on my life. 

I thought I had finally escaped most of that by no longer working any paid jobs.  But not so.  I still have lots of arbitrary deadlines and meeting dates I cannot escape that come with my volunteer work.  Chairing a college board and a charitable foundation board, both with multimillion dollar budgets places the obligation on me to attend every committee meeting either board schedules as well as leading the board meetings for both groups.  I still have to do annual performance reviews and salary recommendations for the president/CEO of each organization.  I have to get continuing education credits and have to attend multiple commencements and grants award luncheons each year.  I even have to get finger printed and sign affidavits and financial disclosures as part of the deal.   I need to attend some of the college basketball, baseball and softball games as well as college foundation fund raising events. And in a similar fashion I have church commitments and student mentoring commitments with my former university engineering department.  Finally, my billionaire friend has me running a local team to recruit some industrial jobs to our area.

That last one, the industry recruitment gig, that’s the one that led to my epiphany, the “work is funny” one.  Because that project ground to a halt during the holidays.  It is mostly a matter of outreach to economic development experts and you cannot reach out to anybody reliably during the three weeks that encompass the Christmas and New Year holidays.  That part was good, I had a complete break from just about everything, and I enjoyed it.  But part of me was dreading going back to my volunteer responsibilies, just like working people often spend Sunday evenings dreading Monday morning. And today was the day I decided to get back on the industry recruitment horse.  Truthfully it was kind of painful to have to do that. Yet as soon as I had made my last call of the day and was back to “my time” that feeling went away and I got a little dopamine rush from having made some progress I could report back to my team next week.  And that’s the odd, weird and strange thing about all my volunteer work now.  I kind of dread it a little, just like I always have some misgivings before getting behind a podium to give a speech.  But when it is over, I always feel great about having done it.  I like the things that accompany the completion of these tasks, but at the time I’m not particularly thrilled about having to do them.

My nine to five was different.  I enjoyed both the details of the work, the tasks involved and the thrill of completing them successfully. It is why I kept at it so long.  But it did stop being fun at the end and what I do now is much better.  However, I have come to believe I need the deadlines and the small amount of anxiety that my volunteer commitments create to make the leisure time and the hobby time more meaningful.  I don’t really understand why that is the case, but I think my life would be less than it is without those commitments.  It would be nice if they were as exciting and as much fun as work was back in the day, but I’m not sure that is possible.  I’m fine with how things are now, but still, it is a little weird that some of  the things I do to increase my overall joy are not that much fun in themselves.  

What about you, if you are retired do you feel that you need some deadlines and required tasks that resemble work to add to your overall happiness, even if those very things create some stress?

If you are nearing retirement, early or conventional, have you decided how you will spend your time each day? 

Some people see retirement as endless golf or fishing or pickleball.  I do all of those (except substitute tennis for golf) but without the volunteer duties or some kind of part time work I do not think I would be happy.  Do you think you will need something similar in your life or is endless leisure a sustainable lifestyle?

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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?

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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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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.

I opened up a piece of snail mail yesterday.  To say I was a little bit shocked is an understatement.  This was the first bill I’ve received after a fairly intense medical procedure five weeks ago.  I’m fine now, things could not have gone better.  But the bill was, let’s say, a little on the high side of my expectations. 

At the very top it had one eye catching line labeled “Total Charges”.  Great, no wading through pages to get to the crux of the matter.  So how much were the total charges?  That three hour surgery and the eight hours I was a guest in their stage one post-op ward resulted in total charges of $249,320.50.  I didn’t mistype that, it was just a few dollars short of two hundred fifty thousand US dollars.  Or stated another way that’s nearly twenty-three thousand dollars per hour!  Man, I’m glad I did not stay overnight.  

That’s a lot of money.  And while I feel its a heck of a bargain in exchange for keeping me alive and kicking, that’s still very nearly a quarter of a million dollars.  And I’m not even sure there won’t be more bills trickling in over time (although I think this is the grand total).  

This is also my first real test of how Medicare and my Medi-Pak supplemental insurance work when facing a major medical expense.  I haven’t had many health scares in my life and the times I did run up a sizable bill I was under my company medical insurance plan.  Obviously I won’t be facing the entire $250K out of my pocket.  But just how much of that is going to have to come out of my retirement nest egg?

The answer was just as surprising as opening the bill, but in a much happier way.  Total out of pocket expense for yours truly was zero.  Zero, nada, zilch.  Not even a single penny.  How wild is that?  No co-pay, no deductible? Not a single penny for this extremely expensive medical care?  The other five pages of the invoice offered an “explanation”.  At this point I was feeling like there had to be a catch and I was afraid I might be facing an unpleasant surprise hidden somewhere in the fine print, so I kept reading.

The bulk of the “Total Charges” showed up on page 3. That was the portion  that was from the hospital surgical center and post-op ward.  Those added up to over $225K.  And of that Medicare applied a “Member Discount” of $215K.  In other words Medicare told the hospital, “Sorry, doesn’t matter what you think it cost, we are only paying you ten thousand.  You can eat the rest, the other two hundred thousand plus dollars.  And by the way, you cannot go after Steveark for any of that, he’s golden.”  Of that $10K that was paid to the hospital, that was split 80-20 between Medicare and the supplemental policy I purchased.  It could not have worked out better for me if Don Corleone had handled the “negotiations” with my provider and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

As far as the rest of the costs which included anesthesia, oxygen, robots and my rocket scientist surgeon, they were not as bizarre.  Medicare only disallowed a small part of their fees and they and my supplemental policy paid that with zero out of pocket from me.  

What a great deal for me, I got a little health issue fixed forever and paid nothing.   I know everyone says our system is totally broken compared to the rest of the world, and maybe they are right. But I got first class care where I wanted, when I wanted and with no cost to me.  That doesn’t feel broken.  

I said no cost to me, but that is not entirely correct.  Medicare charges me and my wife premiums, our supplemental policies do also and so does the prescription plan we use.  Those six premiums total up to about $8,000 a year for the two of us.  That isn’t free but it is affordable and only about half of what I paid for private insurance before we hit age 65. 

But something is broken.  I don’t think my procedure cost anywhere near a quarter million dollars.  Pretty sure the hospital made that number up, that it is pure fiction.  But it certainly cost a lot more than Medicare agreed to pay.  So I got a pretty big free ride.  Except, there are no free rides in life.  And that medical center is a for profit business, it is not a charity.  So they have to make a profit or they will shut down, right?  If I didn’t pay for my surgery, who did?  

That’s the question  that points to the where the brokenness lies.  It is you, kind reader, you who are on private insurance, employer provided insurance or health share plans.  They do not have the power of the federal government and while they certainly would have negotiated the total charges down to maybe half of what the hospital asked for, it still would have been a six figure surgery instead of the small fraction they got from Medicare for fixing me.  

I have one additional data point that gives me confidence that I’m right about how this works. I was on a hospital board for a locally owned hospital back in the day.  I remember the CEO explaining how the thing that determined if the hospital made money or lost money was the patient mix.  He used this example.  He said a standard heart surgery at our hospital actually cost about $20,000, that was the amount the hospital needed to recover to break even.  He said if a patient had insurance through their employer or any other kind of private insurance they would get paid $40,000 for the procedure and net a $20,000 profit.  However the same surgery for a Medicare or Medicaid patient would only result in a $10,000 payment resulting in a loss of $10,000 for the hospital.  Therefore you needed one private insurance patient for every two Medicare patients just to break even.  That’s a broken system and that’s a big reason private and employer provided insurance is so expensive.  You are paying a big share of Medicare and Medicaid patient costs.

It is broken on many levels.  But a main one is it sends a perverse signal to the provider.  If they know they are losing money on me as a patient, they have a huge incentive to underserve me, to rush me in and out, to provide the least post operative care possible.  I’m not a opportunity for them to make money, I’m a drag on their profitability.  I’m more like a tax than an income stream.  That’s a terrible business model in a capitalistic economy.  Plus how can the government tell you to operate your business at a loss, how is that moral?  It is like telling a car dealership that they have to give away one third of their new cars for free each month.  What does that do to the price of the cars they don’t give away?  Exactly.  

What is the answer, socialized medicine like our neighbors to the north?  Or just keep things like they are?  I mean it worked great for me, I can’t complain.  I got an incredible bargain even though I could have paid the full quarter million and not seriously impacted my net worth.  I do think any kind of “Medicare for all” is asking for disaster the way things are now because  hospitals generally  cannot make a profit just with Medicare reimbursements. They have to be able to overcharge private insurance companies to offset the low Medicare payments.  At the same time giving wealthy boomers free medical care paid for by the insurance premiums of Gen X, Y and millennial patients feels unsustainable and unfair.  I have no suggestions at all.  How about you?

OK, maybe you stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, how would you fix this mess? 

Have you experienced something bizarre in terms of medical bills and insurance?