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Most of the bloggers in the personal finance space are younger than me and either have no children or have kids that are still at home.  For them the question of whether they should share their financial wealth with their kids once they are grown is purely hypothetical.  For me and my wife it isn’t, because our three grown children are in their thirties.  

That’s the time people are getting married, paying off school loans, buying houses, having babies (or at least pets) and those things tend to all be somewhat costly.  I’ve seen many young bloggers write about how they plan to help their kids some day make a down payment or even to pay for their future grandkids’ college.

Personally, the plans my wife and I made together regarding our kids, years ago, were to pay for their four year degrees. After that other than normal birthday and Christmas gifts we did not plan to give our adult children any money until both of us died, hopefully at the age of 120, or older. And that is what we’ve done.  Except for the college part, that ended up being free.   Each of our kids managed to get merit based free four year degrees with everything, books, tuition, fees and room and board provided.  So we gave them a few thousand bucks when they graduated but nothing like paying for their college would have cost.  

Two of them have gotten married and we again gave them a few thousand dollars because they basically both eloped and there were no wedding costs to foot.  And the only other time we gave them significant financial gifts was once, when we gave them each $10,000 as a surprise gift with no strings attached.  We have no idea how they spent that or if they invested it.  

But as time has gone on our assets have started to pile up.  We’ve got about three times as much in stocks, bonds and cash as we need to provide us our lifestyle of choice.  So practically, we could give half of what we have to them now and still have a 100% safety margin of extra money.  All that is to say it isn’t a hypothetical question when it comes to what kind of financial gifting is appropriate for grown children, at our stage of life.  

I hear the arguments all the time, why make your kids millionaires when they turn 60?  They could use the money much more now.  And that does make sense, I mean I’ve lived this.  My parents were the prototypical millionaires next door who amassed a million dollar inheritance for both me and my brother.  I was 58 and he was 60 when we received the inheritance.  We both retired two years later. In my case the extra money was only a minor factor. The fact is, I was already a multimillionaire, and adding another digit in the seventh column didn’t really move the needle that much.  It was a little more of a factor for him but he’s in great financial shape too.

I never expected to get money from my parents before they died, and I can’t imagine it would have made a positive difference in our lives if we had.  I do think it might have changed the relationship if a significant part of our net worth was flowing in from them, at their discretion.  Also I think we were good with money, and never felt a need for more than we had in our early married years.  I was kind of proud of us for being frugal, having great kids and my having a stellar career.  We felt the camaraderie of a winning sports team.  We were all in on building a great life together, on our own.  We got along  great with our parents and had no expectations of either them or us ever needing any monetary assistance.   

If they had given us a down payment for a bigger house then we would have never paid off this one and only house we’ve ever owned, so early.  We likely might have bought nicer, more expensive cars and maybe taken more exotic vacations.  But would any of those things made life better?  I doubt it, life has been very good.  I don’t regret not having a fancier house or fancier cars.  I love what we have, and part of that is we earned it.  And we didn’t need the Bank of Mom and Dad chipping in.  

There are a lot of what if’s when it comes to a topic like this.  What if one of your children just can’t support themselves due to an illness or disability?  Then I’d say you have to step in and support their needs.  But often life isn’t so clear.  What if they just are not very successful and can’t seem to get past minimum wage jobs, does that change your responsibility as a parent?  And if it does how do you know if they are simply lazy or really trying at life and have had a lot of bad luck? When is stepping in with money helping and when is it enabling grown kids to stay on the couch all day playing video games?  Or maybe worse what if substance abuse is involved, then it is really hard to know where that line is between helping and throwing gasoline on the fire. 

That’s hypothetical for me so far, my kids are doctors, engineers and college educators.  They are all solvent and are middle to upper class earners.  While none of them has our kind of wealth yet, none of them have trouble making ends meet.  And the doctor married to another doctor will likely blow past my net worth in the future.   Because there is no serious need for money I’m not inclined to hand it out to my kids.  We might do another surprise gift at some point but not in any kind of repeated pattern that would create an expectation of a future income stream.  

There is also the whole matter of how different cultures view the obligation of parents and grown kids.  In much of the world a parent’s retirement plan is their kids.  They raised them and there is a return obligation to provide for your parents in their old age.  Also in many cultures there is an expectation that any family members with excess money have an obligation to all other family members who have financial short falls.  One of my running partners is from the Philippines.  She complains frequently how many of her relatives ask her to send money to them because they can’t find work.  The United States is kind of unusual in terms of the degree of self reliance that is built into our culture.    It is almost considered shameful to request help from parents or from your kids or to take financial assistance from the government. That’s also very different from other cultures.  Yet this is my culture and it leads me to feel that providing monetary assistance to my kids when they are doing OK financially is simply the wrong thing to do.    Being the safety net of last resort is one thing, helping them buy an 80 inch 4K television is something else.  

While we have our plan and have stuck to it I am not 100% sure that it is the optimum way to handle the transfer of wealth to our kids that will inevitably happen someday.  I lean on the fact that I never felt like my parents cheated us by hoarding money until they died.  I feel like our kids feel the same way, but that still doesn’t mean we are doing things right.  

I am curious, some of you are on the adult child end of this issue and some of you may be facing this from the parent’s perspective.  What do you think is the right way to handle passing money down to grown kids?  

Have any of you gotten a significant piece of your future inheritance while your parents were still living?

As usual if you don’t see a comments box, click on the title of this post at the top.  

First things first, I’m not a gambler.  I don’t have any moral objections to it, but I have some logical problems with it. Casino games, all of them, are set up so that the casino, the House, always makes money.  On the slot machines about 93% of all the money fed into the machine is returned to the winning players.  In blackjack you have about a 49% chance of winning if you play optimally.  Those sound pretty good but in fact they mean the house gets 7% on average of all the money you feed into the machine and in blackjack you lose 2% of the money you bet, on average.   If you play a lot and don’t cheat you’ll most likely lose money, just like most lottery players.   Of course since the odds are far better than a lottery you’ll win fairly often.  And like the lottery some people will be lifetime winners.  But in the long run the House wins a lot of money and the players lose a lot of money, otherwise the casinos would go out of business. 

I’ve had trouble keeping in touch with my old college buddies because we all ended up in different states.  One guy though, Jeff, has off and on been my fishing partner over the years and he’s wanted us to get together with our spouses, who have never met each other.  He gambles at the casinos a lot, and I mean a whole lot.  He’s an engineer too and understands the odds and the smart bets much more than I do.  Because he plays a lot he gets free rooms whenever he wants and he suggested we all meet in a Gulf Coast casino town.  My wife and I  were a little skeptical about how much fun we’d have as non-players,  but the relationship is important so it would be worth it.  Plus the seafood is outstanding all along the coast and we’d at least have that to savor!

We met and the hotel was very nice, the rooms run about $500 a night on weekends, if you have to pay for them, but for us and for him and his wife they were provided free of charge.  The food was awesome, just incredible, so that was fun.  The first night I ran through the free ten dollars I was given by joining the casino’s membership program and five of my own dollars at slots.  That took about five minutes and after that we just watched Jeff play blackjack.  I know the blackjack rules and most of the rules of thumb on how to play smart but I didn’t play the first night.  The second day we hung around the pool and the beach and ate more incredible food.  After that I told him I’d commit $200 to play blackjack.  So he and I sat at table with four other guys and played for a couple of hours.  The minimum bet was $15 a hand but the maximum was much higher, I think it was $2,500 on a single hand of cards.  I always bet $15 but some of the other guys bet as much as a thousand dollars on one hand!

I expected to lose because of the 49% thing.  But surprisingly I was up two hundred dollars after awhile and ended up winning $232 for the night.  Not a huge amount at all, but better than losing.  It pretty well covered our share of the food for the two days but not our gasoline for the six hour drive there and back.  And it was fun.  I am no more likely to go to a casino and do this again than before but I do see the way it captivates people.  Every time I won a hand that $15 dollars in chips the dealer stacked in front of me released a shot of dopamine into my system and I felt a tiny little rush.  If I blackjacked (was dealt an Ace and a face card or a ten) I won three dollars for every two in my bet, or $22.50, I’d get an even bigger rush of excitement.  As my stack of chips grew I pulled my original $200 off to the side to insure I wouldn’t lose that and just played with my winnings.  When my winnings topped $200 I pulled those off to the side so I would insure I won at least that much.  You can take an engineer to a casino but he’s still an engineer, after all. 

As this mini-vacation and reconnection with my old buddy and his new (to us) wife went on there were some odd things going on in the stock market that had far more impact on my net worth than my gambling.  The day we arrived our net worth was at an all time high, the next day it dropped by $15,000.  During that time I had lost a total of $5 at the casino and felt worse about losing the five dollars than I did about my portfolio losing fifteen thousand!  What was that all about?  And the next day it came back to exactly where it was before it fell, so on paper I made $15,000 back. But that day in the casino I won a little over two hundred dollars and I was ecstatic about it! 

Something was clearly different about the way I “lost” and “won” in the stock and bond markets and the way it worked in the casino.  The five dollars I lost and the two hundred and thirty-two dollars I won at the casino are tiny amounts compared to the fifteen thousand bucks down and up that  my portfolio experienced at the hands of the stock market. Yet the pain and joy of the relatively tiny casino game outcomes felt much more significant than the five figures I lost and then won back on Wall Street.  

Over the last fifteen months my net worth has increased by well over a million dollars due to the recovery from the March 2020 crash.  Yet I lost seven hundred thousand in that crash in thirty days. I’m only partially exposed to the stock market so neither of those amounts really threatened my net worth, but still, those are mind boggling numbers to me, years of what we spend in living our lives. Yet I would rank both of those as having stressed or thrilled me just about the same amount as my teensy little slot machine loss and my slightly larger blackjack win this week.  Which is to say I didn’t get particularly excited about any of them.   That’s both a good thing and a bad one.  The good thing is that I’m never likely to panic over stock crashes because I’ve lived through so many of them.  The bad thing is that I enjoyed winning at blackjack and can maybe barely begin to understand how gambling addiction ruins so many lives.  Its a drug, and the thrill of that natural opioid (dopamine) hitting your blood stream when you win is overwhelmingly more of a rush than the mild depression that comes from losing.  

We know financial behavior is largely emotional and that most of us have made emotionally driven money mistakes many times in the past.  We are human animals and it is what we do.   I tend to think as a logical professional engineer that I’m above that.  I overestimate my ability to be rule based in my behavior instead of emotion based, and you probably do to.  I’d have never realized how good it felt to win at gambling versus how neutral I felt watching hundreds of thousands of dollars go in and out of my portfolio if the two things had not happened simultaneously.  To me it is a cautionary tale, day trading on Robinhood, the lottery, blackjack and slot machines will eventually take your money.  Investing in low fee funds or dividend stocks and diversifying your portfolio will eventually make you wealthy.  But your emotions will lean toward the gamble and the chance of the big win, even if your logical mind tells you its a sucker bet.  My advice, gamble if you want, with strict limits you can afford, for fun.  But invest in the most boring way you can devise, for wealth.  

What about you?  Do you casino? How do you limit your losses, or do you?

Do you have experience with someone who has a gambling addiction?  I do, not Jeff, he’s fine, but one of my former employees.  It was pretty tragic how it controlled his life.

Do you think day trading is like blackjack or is it just as legit as index fund investing? 

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently extolling the virtues of grit. Usually, they are associated with Angela Duckworth’s popular book.  I get why the philosophy appeals to people.  It is a very fair way to look at the world, because we aren’t all smart, beautiful, fast, strong, artistic or charismatic.  Some of us are just average, or less, in most areas.  Saying grit is the important thing is a great equalizer.  Because your DNA will determine if you are NBA material, and if you are not there is nothing in the world that can get you a starting spot on the New York Knicks.  But anyone can work hard, can hang in there, and if grit is linked to success, then there is hope for almost everyone.

I do not know the particulars of Ms. Duckworth’s research and I’m not about to confront it from a psychological standpoint.  It may well be grit has a lot of value in a lot of situations.  But I do have my own personal three decades plus career in the corporate world and I can tell you what my experience is regarding grit. 

I’d rank grit very low in terms of aiding success in the business world.  I have worked with a lot of extremely successful people and I, not so humbly, include myself in those ranks as well.  And I have never seen a single person rise above a mediocre middle management job by relying on hard work and perseverance.   The people that rose into the middle and upper six figure compensation ranks, and higher, did indeed work hard.   But they were never motivated by grit.  They were motivated by ambition. They were motivated by goals.  They were motivated by power. They were motivated by fame.    They were motivated by money.  They were motivated by a successful track record of beating out their rivals.  There was zero of the idea that you just work hard regardless of results and it will be OK.  Life is far too short to waste it that way, in the minds of the fast movers. 

I can think of one of my classmates who also came to work at the same company I did just a few months after our graduation from college. We had similar grade points, the same chemical engineering major but we were very different people.  Glenn was full of grit.  He was a great athlete, ruggedly handsome with a deep booming voice and an infectious smile.  I was smaller, a good tennis player and had a degree of charm.  But there were stark differences.  Glenn studied like a maniac in college, I barely studied at all.  He attended every class, I skipped every class I could get away with, although you could not skip classes in your major, so I went to all of those.  But when we got to our jobs at the chemical complex, I  saw what happens when grit takes talent on.  Glenn out worked me by ten hours a week but I outproduced him by 100%.  I literally could finish a project in less than half the time and produce much better results.  That happened because I knew I was gifted and I viewed it as a fun game I could win.  Glenn viewed it as a hard and deep ditch to dig.  When I retired early, Glenn was still working in a middle management job, long hours, decent pay but not what I made. He was and is a great guy and we remain friends, but he relied on grit and I relied on gamifying work and finding ways to make it feel like fun. Fun wins! Grit is basically the opposite of fun, it loses.

Later in my career the big boss called me and my chief frenemy and rival, Roger, into his office to tell us something very unusual.  He said the family that owned our company, and many other companies, had decided that one of us would run the company and the other would take a staff position in the corporate office in another state.  Both were great promotions but both of us wanted to run our company site as our next job.  We had a year of time to prove who was the better choice.  Well, that played directly into my wheelhouse.  I loved competition and had more than my share of confidence.  The other guy was close to equally talented but not nearly as sure of himself, and I think Roger approached things with some fear.  In any event there is no question he was grittier than me, but the race was never close.  He went to the corporate job and had a great career but he never got that job he wanted, the job I got.  Again, I was far out gritted by him, but I had an edge in people skills, trustworthiness and problem solving.  And I was clearly having fun at work.  When the decision makers are looking to put someone in charge of the business, they aren’t looking for someone who will put their nose to the grindstone, they want someone who can make it rain.  Grit is all grindstone and no rain.

I have often wondered why the world works this way.  You would think hard work would win more than it does.  I think maybe I know.  Grit, perseverance and endurance are all about fighting through who you are and keeping going anyway.  There are physical and mental health limits to how long you can do that.  I ran 15 marathons and 23,000 miles as an experiment in trying to develop some grit.  Decades later I remain grit free.  I still hate running but the experiment continues.   Mastery and genius on the other hand are fun, you get caught up in a sort of ecstasy when you are in the flow, in that deep work zone.  That activity requires zero grit, its like a drug and you don’t even want to stop to eat lunch or go home.  Its intoxicating.  I get that same thrill playing tennis, fishing and blogging now.  Playing to the pleasure centers of your brain absolutely destroys what you can get done by gutting something out.  And to me that’s what my CEO did, what the best people I worked with did and what my billionaire owner did.   They enjoyed their jobs, but they wouldn’t have lasted a week slogging it out in something that did not motivate them.  They were manic about work, in a good way. 

Do not get me wrong, grit is not a bad thing. Its very handy when you are required to do something that is not fun in the least, as we all are called upon to do.  But nobody is going to excel in life by doing things they hate.   Doing distasteful work longer and better than others is not the path to anywhere you want to go.  The secret is to be able to endure icky stuff just long enough to find a way to avoid it, and to find a path where you do not need so much grit. A path where you can be world class and be rewarded for it.

I suspect a lot of you will not agree with this, so feel free to let me have it. It is a sacred cow after all. My opinion is solely based on my experience and absolutely zero research. Do you think grit is overrated or is it a go to prerequisite for success? 

Have you seen anyone achieve great things in their career or financial lives purely through grit?

As usual, if you can’t find the comments box then just click on the title of this post up at the top.  Comments should appear.

My wife and I love to fish.  Freshwater, salt water, trout streams, farm ponds, every kind of fishing we’ve tried has turned out to be a lot of fun.  I also fish with some of my buddies both in my boat and in theirs.  One of my fishing friends has had all kinds of boat problems lately that culminated in him needing to have his outboard motor rebuilt.  Boats, to put it lightly, are high maintenance items.  

That probably sounds like a minor expense to you if you aren’t familiar with fishing boat economics.  While you could buy a $1,000 aluminum john boat and rig it out for another $500 and have a perfectly functional fishing boat, that’s not what most bass fishermen do.  They buy a boat already rigged out for bass fishing.  The “essential” equipment for that is a fairly large 16 to 21 foot boat with a large outboard engine, a couple of depth finders with color view screens, an electric foot controlled trolling motor for using while you move around silently casting for fish, a live well to keep the fish you catch(essentially an aquarium built into the boat), storage compartments under the floor and seats and a trailer to transport the boat to the lake.   And as crazy as it sounds these boats range in cost from about $20,000 on the low end to almost $100,000 for a top end rigged out bass boat.  That’s right, you can spend more for an open top fishing boat that only holds two people than you’d spend on a Porsche Cayenne turbo SUV!

I’m financially independent and retired and my  boat is on the cheap end of the spectrum.  I own a  16 foot aluminum bass boat with a 70 horsepower outboard motor and it cost me $20,000 when I bought it five years ago.  I could afford a much more expensive boat and a Porsche SUV to haul it too, but no way I’m spending that much on a boat or a car when I can spend a lot less and still have nearly the same experience.  My friend has fancier tastes and his boat is on the upper end of the scale, around $60,000 I’d estimate. 

That is a lot of background information in a story that isn’t really about fishing, but I’m known to ramble so forgive me, please.  Plus, if you aren’t a boat owner then you probably did not realize that most of those fishing boats you pass on the highway on their little trailers cost twice or maybe three times as much as the car you are driving.   The point is, my buddy’s outboard motor needs $7,000 worth of repairs which isn’t out of line for a major rebuild of an expensive fishing boat motor.

Now in a country where 40% of the population can’t handle a $400 expense, my friend fits right in, he’s distraught that the boat repair shop won’t touch his motor until he prepays the $7,000.  And from the way he said it I believe it is because he doesn’t have that much “float” in his finances.  He is waiting on an insurance check before he can get the repairs done, meanwhile the awesome spring fishing is going by without him.  

That brings to mind a lot of thoughts.  First, why would you buy such an expensive toy if you can’t afford to maintain it?  Second, I wonder how much that fish I have in the freezer costs me per pound, yikes!  And third, how different is my life from his because I don’t own anything that I can’t afford to repair or replace with cash on hand.   

I was discussing this with my wife at the kitchen table yesterday.  I pointed out how it seemed odd that my buddy couldn’t get his motor fixed due to the cost.  She pointed out that $7,000 was a lot of money and few people kept that much extra in savings.  And that got us to thinking about how lucky we were.  This month alone we will have spent $6,000 on a replacement HVAC unit for our home, $12,000 for shingles and skylights replacement on the roof and $39,000 in cash for her first new car in 15 years.  And none of that caused us to sell any investments.  And rather than seeing our financial position get worse from all that spending, our net worth actually went up due to the growth of our portfolio in the last few weeks.

When her new Baby Bronco showed up she put her 2006 Nissan Exterra out on the driveway with a for sale sign and listed it on Facebook.  The first caller really wanted it for the $5,100 price but after a few hours called back and dejectedly said she just could not come up with that much cash.  The second caller got the car.  Again, needing a car and not having the money, I’ve never been in that situation in my life.  Yet I know it is normal for a majority of people in this country.  And it might not just be a luxury item like a boat that they can’t afford to fix, it might be something critical like needed surgery or a car about to get repossessed.

After further reflection, it occurred to me that in 42 years of marriage I can’t remember a time when money was so tight we couldn’t have replaced anything we owned with cash on hand. And we started out with zero assets, but we were lucky that my wife’s school loans were only a few thousand bucks and I did not have any school debt.  Even when we bought our first and only house, we had enough in savings to pay it off after maybe five years.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to not have enough money to handle life’s inconveniences because I’ve never been in that situation.  We’ve never had a money fight or deferred any purchase because we didn’t have the money.  On the other hand we have deferred almost every sizable purchase we have ever made, because we do not buy things on impulse.  My wife spent three years trying to decide to buy a replacement car for her 2006 vehicle.  I never had a nice new fishing boat until I was a multimillionaire and still pull it with a used Toyota SUV that has 175,000 miles on it.  

Living a life where financial worries do not exist is not normal, I know that.   Part of it was I’ve always been a high earner, not mega but still way better than median for where I’ve lived.  But we were also a single income family with three kids so it wasn’t like we were rolling in money. Another part of it was we controlled the costs of the big three, housing, transportation and food.  And the biggest part of it was we maxed out every retirement account we qualified for every single year and invested 100% in mutual funds and index funds.  Plus we saved and invested on top of that in taxable accounts.  We lived in a smaller house, drove poorer cars and limited our toys to low priced used items that stayed broke a lot of the time. That, along with a good income, made us financially independent over time. 

Could we have done it on a more modest income? I think so, but we wouldn’t have as much or have gotten it as quickly. But I look at our parents, mine who handed down a significant inheritance to my brother and me.  And my wife’s who died debt free leaving a farm of hundreds of acres to their kids. Neither of them made large incomes but both sets of parents were frugal people who passed that lifestyle down to their kids, none of whom have any problems covering unexpected financial emergencies in life. 

I used to manage a place with lots of employees.  Part of being the big boss was being an unlicensed therapist to my coworkers when life turns on them.  As a result I’ve seen lots of people making far above median wages who were dead broke, getting their checks garnished over consumer debt.  And it is sad, but often those people lived in bigger and nicer houses and had better cars and trucks in the parking lot than I did.  When I would run into them fishing they would be in their top of the line boat and I’d be in my used POS fishing rig.  Other employees were better at money than I was, they had side businesses and were millionaires in their 30’s and 40’s.  They made the exact same union wages as the broke people but they lived differently and made different choices.  And that’s what it comes down to.  Assuming you are making more than a subsistence level living wage you can choose to live below your means and save and invest the difference.   That will lead you to a life where you will still have problems, but money problems won’t be among them.  

So, what do you think? Am I just rich guy who is clueless about how real life works, or is financial independence a matter of choice for the majority of us? 

Do you stand out among your circle of friends for having a less expensive lifestyle? Does that ever cause you to not fit in? 

As always, if you don’t see a comment box just click on the title of the post up above.

Today is my last day of work.  That might seem strange for someone who has been blogging at a site named Slightly Early Retirement for the last five years.  But when I “retired” five years ago I did not stop earning money completely.  I just scaled back a 45-50 hour work week to about eight hours of consulting.  Eight hours a week is barely working by anyone’s standards even if it did make me a full time income of six figures a year.  But for a number of reasons that I won’t fully disclose, I felt it was time to move on to actual full-time retirement, and today is the day.  My consulting contracts all end at midnight tonight.   

A couple of days ago my brother pointed out that this might be a very strange time for me.  He was my first boss at the age of 12, by his recollection. I think I actually was throwing newspapers for him even earlier than that, but he’s usually right.  And as he stated I’ve been employed continuously ever since.  I started out my employed life getting one dollar a day from my brother, a sum he defends as more than generous at the time.  My last year of full-time employment I made north of $400K.  And my five years of consulting averaged a little more than $100K per year.    So, what in the world is it going to feel like to not make any money.  After all, making money is something I proved extraordinarily good at. Will I miss it? 

In the words of Captain America:

Why can I say that with some confidence?  It is pretty simple, I used the off ramp plan to exit the world of work.  I went from a high pressure, highly paid career to a much lower pressure and much lower paid existence.  And now stepping off the treadmill to zero earned income is a pretty small step compared to going from a large income to nothing.  Using the gradual slope of an offramp has totally dampened any money fears that might have been lurking in my mind and heart.  Financially I have total peace, and that’s a priceless feeling at any age. 

But life is more than financial abundance, a lot more.  And that’s another area where taking the offramp has paid off.  Just as it trimmed my big compensation down to something still nice, but much smaller, the off ramp of my consultancies accomplished the same thing for my view of work.  My career had been my biggest single hobby.  I wasn’t one dimensional, I had lots of other hobbies including distance running, tennis, hiking, bushwhacking, fishing, travel, skiing and off roading.  But work was among my favorites and I feared I’d miss it.  And it wasn’t fun just because of the work but because of the environment it placed me in.  I was the boss with hundreds of employees under my leadership, I was in the news and sometimes on TV and YouTube in my work role.

I was treated a little better in everyday life because I had that minor celebrity status and I enjoyed that. Who wouldn’t?  And I’ll admit nobody wants to give up the advantages life and luck have presented them.  Being a consultant/lobbyist is a fair step down from that.  I still was on a first name basis with the Governor and many political and business leaders but everyone knew it was in a diminished role.  I did not have a billion-dollar company backing me anymore, I was just running errands for them and making deals for others.  After five years of that I no longer miss my former status at all and do not feel any pangs about leaving the consulting role either. I owe the off ramp of my part time consulting for making this next step much smaller.

There will be a void though, the eight hours a week is not so much an issue. The structure of having projects and deadlines and problems that had to be resolved quickly is the part that needs replacing. That structure and those demands added to my life and I need to fill it with something similar, or something better.  I’m working on that already, but not yet sure where it will lead.  My first idea is to volunteer with engineering departments at the two universities in easy driving distance from my home.  If those don’t materialize then I’ll move on to something else.   Plan B could be something financial like helping people do their taxes for free, or mentoring through the public school system.  I am a little sensitive to anything that could get me sued because I have a very attractive net worth that could make me a fat target. I even thought being a paramedic might be fun but again, easy lawsuit target and hard to get enough insurance for that.

Another possibility would be some kind of quest, an Appalachian Trail kind of thing, except I’m sure that’s not it, its just an example.  For one thing I don’t want to spend months of my life doing something that isolating and I’m more of a hiker than a backpacker.  But it could be visiting every National Park or driving to Alaska, something my wife and I can do together, she is after all my best friend and loves the same kind of adventures I do.  We are empty nesters with no grandkids and no jobs right now and plenty of money, there couldn’t be a better time to go on a quest. 

What do you think?  More volunteer work that ties me down but benefits others?

Or an adventure quest that mainly benefits my wife and me?

Or a different kind of paid part time work, not for the money but because it imposes some structure into my life? 

For primary or joint income providers in a family, paychecks are a big deal.  Or perhaps I should say direct deposits, I’m not sure anyone still gets a physical paycheck anymore. Being me, I had to interrupt this post and find out. Kind of surprising, it appears 93% of workers are paid via direct deposit now.   I do still get pay checks for my consulting gigs, but most everyone with a 9 to 5 just has money show up twice a month into their bank account.  And that is still a big deal because that’s the money that fuels their daily lives.  Since this post is becoming a stream of consciousness thing today, I interrupt the post for a second time, this time to tell an anecdote from my past.

I started work way back in the last century and at that time just about everyone people was given paper paychecks.  We actually had a guy who walked around every two weeks and handed each of us an envelope with our check in it.  And that wasn’t unusual, in fact it was the norm. And I remember when that changed.  First, we offered employees direct deposit or a check, their choice. The incentive however was that the deposit would show up at least one day earlier than the paycheck.  We thought everyone would jump at that, but some workers declined and asked to keep getting the envelope handed to them.  Eventually it became a hassle to maintain two separate systems so we insisted that the only way to get paid was direct deposit.  And there was an uproar over it!  Why, you might ask?  Well, thanks for asking, it turns out a few employees were cashing the paychecks and secreting some of the money in another account or a cubbyhole unbeknownst to their significant other.  This left their spouse thinking their income was significantly lower than it really was.   With direct deposit the veil of secrecy was lifted and the hypocrisy was exposed.  I’m not sure if there were any divorces over this change in payroll practices but the consensus opinion was it factored into several of them. 

That has nothing to do with this post but it’s a great story and I don’t get many chances to tell it.  This post is about how your perception of your pay changes as you change and as your net worth changes.  We all talk about the time value of money a lot.  How ten dollars today is worth much more than ten dollars ten years from now because inflation will eat away at its purchasing power.  But there is a whole other kind of the time value of money too.  And it is one I’m only now beginning to understand. 

Initially, when you are fresh out of school you are leaving a very controlled environment where money was fairly hard to come by.  You lived in a dorm or an apartment with roommates or at home where you didn’t need much money.  But with your first real job (not the barista gig you took until you could find a real job) came a real paycheck, OK, a real direct deposit.  Real money anyway, more than you had ever experienced assuming you aren’t a trust fund baby.  Immediately you noticed two things.  You noticed that you earned a lot of money!  And you also noticed that FICA, Medicare and the IRS had already grabbed an overly large chunk of it away before you even got to touch it.  At least I did when I got that first paper check, because all the thievery was documented on the stub attached to the check. 

You noticed a third thing a couple of weeks later, and that was that even though you had just gotten a bigger chunk of money than ever before in your life, that by the time the second payday got there you were out of money! And that’s when it hit you how expensive life really is. 

After a while, you were grooved in on the whole income and expenses thing, and if you were fortunate to earn good pay and disciplined enough to spend less than you earned, you started making some progress and increasing your net worth. You likely had to clear some debt for that new car you just had to have and for those student loans.  But eventually you became smart with your money and started paying off your debts, building an emergency fund and investing for retirement. 

As time went on the dual pressures of inflation and career advancement increased your pay.  As you looked back on your starting salary it began to seem like you started out barely at minimum wage, even though at the time you felt you were making bank.  And as you progressed in your financial journey you became debt free, or at least free of the bad kind of debt.  You might well have some business or real estate debt on cash flowing properties but you are past the credit card debt, high interest car payments and have finally retired those student loans.  You might have a crazy low interest or even zero interest car loan, because, why not? But you aren’t spending a huge  part of your budget on cars you can’t afford, because you are smarter than that.  Pretty soon you find you have a net worth of six figures, something you couldn’t have imagined when you got that first payday. 

If you are very lucky, as I was, or very skilled, as others I have known were, then you’ll see your income continue to increase.  In my case, as improbable as it would seem for someone almost terminally lazy, my income went from my starting rate to twenty-four times that amount.  Admittedly some of that was due to crazy inflation during my early career, and it would be very hard to match that kind of geometric increase in this low inflationary era we are in. But still you can think back to when you were making only half what you now make. And you feel some pride for having grown your income that much.  And if you’re the smart one who has saved and invested 20% or more of your gross income all along the way, your net worth may be approaching seven figures.  It surprises you that it took forever to hit a six figure net worth but that it seemed to take less time to increase that to seven figures.

If you enjoy what you are doing in your 9 to 5 you may just choose to continue to work full time and not retire yet.    Then you’ll really be surprised as you add another million to your first, seemingly in a fairly short time.  And if you get an inheritance along the way like I did you could add yet another million overnight.  At some point you will retire at least slightly early from full time work. But you will still earn some money because you like having productive things to do and you think, “why not get paid to do them part time?”  Five years of that semi-retired life and you may add yet another million to your net worth without even trying. And at that point, which is the point at which I exist today, you’ll see earned income in a totally different way than you ever have before.  You will see it is meaningless. 

I can only use me as an example because I have my own data and I don’t have yours.  But here is what I see when I open my Personal Capital app on my phone.  A disclaimer here, Personal Capital doesn’t pay me anything, nobody does, because I don’t do ads or affiliate links.  But they do manage some of my money and I do like their free app as a way of aggregating the 18 different financial accounts I have into one simple dashboard.  Right at the top of the screen, directly under my Net Worth total is a number in green type.   It is the amount my net worth has changed in the last 365 days.  This morning it showed $1,032,113.  That means my net worth changed by over a million dollars to the good side in the last year.  That equates to $86,000 per month of new investments.   My part time consulting income is far less than that, maybe $8,000 in a good month.  When what I own increases by $86,000 dollars a month what difference does earning $8,000 dollars a month really make?  It simply doesn’t move the needle in comparison.  Today, for instance I deposited four checks from consulting clients into our checking account.  The total was $5,328.  The same app tells me that my net worth dropped $15,000 since yesterday.  I earned what would have seemed like a fortune to younger me but still lost ground to the tune of nearly ten thousand dollars, in one day, for nearly a months work?  That’s not very motivational.

There is always some kind of truth in numbers but it can be a little hard to discern.  Am I making $86,000 a month like my app tells me or did I just lose ten thousand dollars in one day in spite of earning what it used to take me several months of work to earn? Did the $5,328 I earned even matter?  The numbers tell me that by the time you get to be the owner of a few million dollars, then what you earn makes zero difference in what you can afford to spend.   It also tells me there is no reason to prioritize work that pays from volunteer work that doesn’t.  It tells me my priority should be on work that matters to me.  Which is why I’m retiring from paid consulting this month. It isn’t that much fun and the cash is about as useful as Monopoly money to me. 

I have to admit that I began to start noticing this several years ago and that it took much of the fun out of my career the last couple of years of my 9 to 5.  That’s when I began to seriously consider retiring.  I had already added an inheritance to my substantial investments and even though I was earning a high salary it wasn’t having much impact on my ability to fund my family’s life.  Realizing this I was able to take my pay out of the equation and simply weigh the satisfaction of work against the hassle, and work was found wanting.  Up until that time pay weighed heavily on my decision, so I kept working, but once it stopped mattering the choice was obvious. 

I can still remember my very first paycheck and the elation I felt when I looked at that impossibly large amount of money.  It was so exciting!  And now, my net worth sometimes swings by more in a single day than I made in gross pay that entire first year of work!  And when it does, on a volatile market day, it seems inconsequential. Making or losing $50,000 on a digital screen doesn’t impact my life.   Imagine if a whole year’s pay meant nothing to you.  And then realize that will prove to be true at some point in your future, just as it has for me.

 If there is another lesson here it probably is that we should stop and reframe money from time to time.  We are all creatures bound to the past.  Those past numbers still carry weight they do not deserve, decades later.  My pay and expenses were low when I first started yet those values are burned into my mind.  I still look at twenty dollars like it is a lot of money when compared to current prices and to my ability to spend, it is nothing, it is small change.  You are gradually and assuredly becoming the same as me, some of your financial anchor points from your past probably aren’t relevant anymore.  And if that isn’t the case now, it will be in the future.   Don’t make life and financial decisions based on what money used to mean to you.  Reset what a dollar means to your current financial condition.  It might help you retire a little earlier.  It might make spending more money make more sense, instead of ending up the richest guy in the cemetery.

What about you, can you remember when what now seems like a small amount of money seemed enormous? 

Have you ever let an outdated value of money steer you into making a bad decision or delaying a good one?  

Is this just a problem for fossils like me or does your financial past still impact your current financial decisions more than it should?

I just read a great post on work life balance on the Savings and Sangria blog.  And while I was reading it a thought occurred to me about the whole concept of balancing your career with the rest of your life.  What struck me was that almost every blogger, including me, feels it is critically important that you don’t invest yourself into your work to the point that the rest of your life suffers.  Life is made up of a whole lot of pieces beside work.  Your health, spirituality, friends, spouse, kids, parents, hobbies, volunteering, giving, education, self-improvement and probably a dozen more things all make up how you spend your time and energy and generally are not directly part of your job. They matter too!

We all agree that it is not a healthy choice to devote so much of your focus to work that your availability to the rest of your life is lacking. We all want to have a well rounded life.  Then why do we reward  people with terrible work life balance with the highest pay and honors?

Maybe you disagree, surely we do not give all the best to people that neglect family and friends to single mindedly pursue one goal?  But we do!  Let me see if I can convince you with the facts.  Exhibit one is the elite of the elite in the business world, the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officer, the CEO.  I happened to work for one of those and have met quite a few others, but I’ll use survey data to make my point.  The average work day for a CEO of a large corporation is about 10 to 11 hours on week days.  Plus, they work another 8 to 10 hours, or more, on weekends.  My CEO used to text and email me at 2AM on weekends! They live on corporate jets and much of that travel time is in addition to the crazy work hours I just listed.  Many CEO’s get by on 4 to 6 hours of nightly sleep.  That much time spent working does not lend itself to having a great family life, attending your kids’ soccer games or parent teacher conferences.  You don’t get to play enough golf to stay good at it and you eat way too much comfort food.   I wasn’t quite at that level but I remember being out of town 240 days in one year. 

How do we reward these one-sided career fanatics?  Well, average pay for a Fortune 500 CEO is $12.3 million.  My poor CEO only got $6 million a year but the averages are pulled up by the really big corporations and we were only a middle of the pack Fortune 500 member.  In exchange for owning most of their waking hours the board of directors grant them millions and millions of dollars.  If they were only making $30,000 a year, we would consider them fools, chumps and losers for trading their entire life for money. Yet they are envied and the fight at the top of the corporate pyramid for that prized position is almost medieval in its brutality. 

But that is business, it is Wall Street, what could you expect from that cold hearted neighborhood?  Let’s look at something way more fun, sports.  People playing games, it must be more rational and less serious, right? Exhibit two is the power five US college football coach.  And if I have any global readers, I mean football with a ball that isn’t round.  I live in SEC territory, and football is as big here as it is anywhere in the country.  And what do we pay a college football coach in this neck of the woods?  In 2020, a lower paid year for many coaches, due to Covid, the SEC head coaches’ pay ranged from a low of $3 million to a high of $9 million per year.  The average was around $6 million a year. The  same astronomical sum that my CEO made.

That is a ton of money for running an amateur sports program, I’m sure we’d all agree.  In a sport where we don’t even pay the players, though that is coming, the coach makes more money in a single year than most of us will make in a lifetime.  What is the typical life of a coach like? Unbelievably, coaches have an even worse work life balance than corporate CEO’s!  Surveys of these coaches show that they work an amazing 14.28 hours a day, seven days a week!  That’s during the football season but the fact is the season never really ends because recruiting, fund raising and other football activities go on year round. Can you imagine a life that has week after week of 14 plus hour days?  Just how much balance is in that kind of life?  No balance, zilch, not happening.  Yet we idolize these people.  Nick Saban is at least on the level of a demigod in Alabama.  If you aren’t a football fan, Nick’s Alabama team habitually wins the national college football championship.  And while he is 69 years old he has not announced any plans to retire.

Maybe it is better in the public sector. How about professional politicians, people like presidents and senators?  Elected congressmen and women work around 70 hours a week when they are in session and about 60 hours when they aren’t.  And when they aren’t working, they are fund raising. Those hours do not include travel time to all those fund raisers or the occasional junket.  I was a lobbyist for about seven years and worked with a number of congress members.  They basically commuted to DC from their home state and when in session, they did not see their families much.  Ironically in their case the pay isn’t in the millions. Most senators and representatives make around $174,000 with leadership making a little over $200,000.  That isn’t even close to coach or CEO money.  You could argue that the contacts and networks that these elected officials garner are pretty much a lifetime income source and you might be right.  Certainly, the other benefits they get are generous but they aren’t making bank like Nick Saban. 

This elevation of maniacal workaholics is not a recent phenomenon.  I think you’ll find that throughout history those who are held up as giants generally became great because they focused on a single goal with such intensity that their lives lacked balance in other areas.   Thomas Edison had to nap during the day because he never made time in his life for a full night’s sleep. Yet our lives are immeasurably better for his inventions.  He tried 10,000 possible materials for his incandescent light bulb filament before finding one that worked.  The fact is that most people that are held up as great, whether they were scientists, generals or artists, devoted most of their waking hours to work.  And that means they usually did not have the kind of work life balance that we feel is a prerequisite to having a full life.

I’d maintain that becoming a world class elite at anything almost prevents you from having a balanced life and that if you choose balance, you probably will not maximize your career. I know I did not maximize mine because I was not willing to pay that high a price.  You can still be very good and rise pretty high, I was and I did. But you won’t be as good as someone who sells out completely and neglects other aspects of their life, like my CEO.  Yet, where would we be without people who were willing to give everything they had to achieve one single minded goal, even if it came at a great cost to their families and other relationships? 

What do you think, does Dabo Swinney have a full life, did Steve Jobs?  Does Joe Biden?  Did Mother Theresa?  

Is having a commitment to having a well rounded life going to exclude you from the ranks of greatness or can you have it all?

You’ve seen the blog posts about calculating your true hourly wage, haven’t you?  They take a hypothetical $100,000 annual salary and start adjusting it for how long your commute is, how much gas you burn getting to work, cost of work clothes, the extra hours you work outside of normal hours and other costs associated with your job.  By the time you finish you find $100K is barely equal to minimum wage.  This is a prime example of making the data fit the story you want to tell. I think I can do much better.

So, let me take a shot at this.  Let’s take some hypothetical worker making $100,000 a year, me maybe in the middle of my earning years.  $100,000/2080 hours worked per year equals $48.08.  2080 hours comes from multiplying 52 weeks times 40 hours per week.  It isn’t exact but its close enough for my purposes.  So Pat, as we will call our imaginary earner made $48.08 in 2020.  We are assuming the pandemic did not disrupt Pat at all.

This is where the normal writer would start to deduct all the indirect and hidden costs of having a job to show you poor Pat didn’t really make $48.08 per hour in 2020, instead Pat made much less.  But nobody ever called me normal so lets look at the other side of the coin.  Maybe Pat made more than his how much more Pat made instead.  Pat works where I did so I know the inside numbers.  First every paycheck Pat get his employer, Megacorp, pays 6.2% into Social Security.  If Pat were self employed he’d have to make that payment.   Pat’s pay just went up from $100,000 a year to $106,200 per year.  Pat’s employer also pays 1.45% into Medicare so that brings Pat’s pay up to $107,650. 

Next, there is the little item of health insurance.  Megacorp opens its corporate wallet to pay $14,563  per year to pay for Pat’s family’s coverage.  Pat’s salary is now up to $122,303 per year.  Megacorp doesn’t offer all that much in terms of life insurance but they do insure each employee for two years coverage regardless of their health, that is worth $432 per year increasing Pat’s salary to $122,735.  Like almost all companies, Mega trains their employees, that makes money for the company but it also keeps Pat’s skills marketable.  That’s a direct benefit to Pat worth $1,096 per year.  Pat is up to $123,831.  Since Pat works where I did I also know Pat has two kids in college right now and Mega provides $1,500 per enrolled college student for employees children.  That’s another $3,000 bringing Pat to $126,831.

While this might be rare, when I had Pat’s job I also was provided a company car and free gas, insurance and maintenance.  Cars cost $0.56 per mile to own and operate, according to the Internal Revenue Service, and at the average US driver’s mileage of 13,500 miles per year this is worth $7,560 per year to Pat.  Pat is now up to $134,391 in annual compensation!  My imaginary friend is ambitious and pitched getting an MBA online to his boss last year.  His supervisor came back with the news that the company would be happy to cover that through their tuition reimbursement program.  That is a big win so Pat enrolled in a nearby university’s distance learning program and obtained his MBA in less than a year for a total cost of $12,474.  The company reimbursed 100% of that as soon as Pat graduated which upped the effective total annual salary to $146,865. 

Then there is free coffee at work, that’s about $0.27 per cup at three cups a day.  $0.27 times three times 250 work days per year equals another $202.50 a year.  Plus, lets say four lunch meetings a year where work buys the food at $12 per meal for a total of $48.  Add those two  and we are up to $146,865.  And I saved one of the best for last, Megacorp has a 6% match in their 401K program.  That’s $6,000 a year in free money to Pat.  Add that to the compensation and that brings Pat up to $152,865 per year.  But wait, there’s more.  Mega is slightly unusual in that every single employee gets a bonus and a stock award every year the company is profitable.   Pat’s bonus was 4%, or $4,000.  Pat’s stock award was worth $8,000. That’s an additional $12,000 in annual income which brings the total to $164,865!

Now what about those hours?  2080 hours per year is based on 52 weeks at 40 hours a week.  But Pat gets 11 paid holidays and four weeks of vacation which amounts to another 20 days off.  Eleven paid holidays at eight hours a day is 88 hours not worked and the 20 days of vacation are worth another 160 hours.  Therefore the total hours worked is actually 88 plus 160 hours less than 2080.  The math is 2080-88-160 = 1,832 hours actually worked.  If you divide that into the $164,865 it turns out Pat’s true hourly rate is $88.99 per hour.  That is nearly twice the The $48.08 per hour we thought Pat was making! 

What is my point to all this?  I have two, actually.  One is that it is pretty easy to slant things in the direction of the story you are trying to tell (or sell).  I was/am a lobbyist some of the time, for entertainment purposes, so I’m used to seeing people sell things by only telling half the truth.  But the other is that 9 to 5 employees often have no idea how much money their employers are spending behind the scenes in ways that directly benefit them.  My wife and I will receive nearly $75,000 a year in Social Security when we claim in five years half of which is due to the fact that my employer contributed a lot of money in my name.  My million dollar plus 401K got that big, in part, because of the generous 401K match funded by Megacorp.

If you think I was reaching too far and exaggerating the add on benefits of a corporate job you are wrong, I’m being conservative.  I received bonuses and stock awards way more generous than Pat did in my examples.  I also received closer to $15,000 a year in training  when I was at Pat’s level.  I didn’t just get four company meals a year I got closer to 100 of them a year.  Plus, I got to keep a lot of frequent flyer meals and hotel points.  I also got to go on some vendor sponsored trips worth thousands of dollars. 

But I was a fast mover being groomed for senior management, Pat, in the example, is much more typical of the middle managers I worked with, and even at that the example is conservative. If you take a balanced look at the corporate 9 to 5, at a six figure level, I think you’ll find the extra incentives that come with the job do adequately offset the extra costs that come along with having the job. And yes, I picked Pat based on the SNL character because that way I could totally avoid any gender issues with my protagonist.

What do you think?  Do most company jobs provide a lot of benefits that employees overlook?

Was my experience at Megacorp a unicorn of the job world, are benefits much worse at other companies, or are they much better?

Am I low balling the value of a job because I left out things that my company did not provide but other companies do?  Things like onsite daycare, free breakfast and lunch, free health and fitness centers, free snacks and exotic coffee services to name a few. 

As always, if you don’t see a comment section click on the title at the top of the post!

I cannot remember another time in my fairly lengthy life when there was so much talk about colleges and money.  And it is spread over a wide spectrum of topics.  There is the student loan crisis, student loan forgiveness possibilities, the out of control inflation of college tuition prices, college admission bribery scandals, discussions about whether a four year college degree is becoming irrelevant, arguments over private versus public universities, whether elite colleges really pay out over time, community colleges versus four year institutions, and the value of online universities versus brick and mortar institutions.  

What I don’t hear much about is people whose experience has been as positive as mine.  I went to a public university in my own state.  It was less than fifty miles from the home I grew up in.  I majored in chemical engineering because I was that nerdy kid that never had to study. Tuition my first year was $250 a semester for a full load of classes, but I didn’t have to pay that since anyone in the top 5% of their high school class had tuition waived for the first year.  I think my dorm and food fees totaled less than $1,500 a year.  Books were maybe sixty bucks a semester.  My parents, middle class earners, just easily cash flowed those costs.  My brother went to an elite university, being the National Merit Scholar that he was, but that horrendous $1,400 a semester tuition was offset mostly by scholarships. We both graduated debt free with debt free parents who had already paid the house off early.  They were that kind, the kind that put cash in envelopes and bought absolutely nothing on credit, not even cars. 

When I graduated mid term there were 120 companies scheduled to come through the placement office looking for chemical engineers.  There were five or six of us graduating and almost everybody I interviewed with offered me a plant trip to interview for a job at their office or industrial complex location.  Almost everybody I interviewed with offered me a job.  It was like being a five star high school football player being courted by colleges. Business was booming and they were very short on engineers.  So, yes, I think my four year degree was an awesome value.  It made me millions of dollars in compensation over my career and allowed me to have jobs that were a lot of fun, most of the time. It didn’t put my parents or me in debt.  

But that was then and not now, so let us consider my three millennial kids who range in age from their late twenties to mid thirties.   What was getting them through college like?  Because I was a high earning millionaire when they graduated from high school we intended to cash flow their education at the same public university my wife and I attended.  Tuition, fees and room and board added up to about $16,000 a year per kid.   Or they would have if we would have had to pay for them.  But because my kids were genetically predisposed to be good learners and because my stay at home wife(her choice) made learning fun and held them accountable for their results, my kids were naturals at scoring high on college entrance exams and AP courses.  They generally were the curve setters in a very effective high school.  They weren’t National Merit Finalists but they had nice enough scores to make them attractive to State U.

 Something not everyone knows is that universities are desperate to grow their rankings in the US News poll,  often desperate enough in a poorly educated southern state like ours to offer free rides to gifted students.  And by free, I mean free.  Free tuition, free fees, free books and free dorm rooms and meal plans.  All from the state government coffers. Plus there were also smaller scholarships from my company, from young democrats or republicans(we had both) and from any number of other sources.  And these were not needs based or tested.  We were millionaires and I was earning well over $100,000. It did not matter. 

Another unique scholarship that only came along in time for our youngest provided free tuition and fees for five years to every student that graduated from our public school system.  Everyone got it, again, it wasn’t means tested.  A lottery scholarship also was created that helped on our last two kids, again, no means testing.  All three kids had to turn back money every year because there was no way to spend it on eligible expenses.  As an aside, I had informed our kids they could attend any college they could earn admission to. However, if they chose an institution that cost more than State U. then the extra cost was all on them.  They wisely chose State U.  

So that was the financial part of the equation.  What about the value of their degrees?  Kid one chose chemical engineering like his old man.  He excelled at it because he actually did study.  He graduated with zero debt, because, it was free of course. He got a job, got married and proceeded to put his wife through medical school.  Then he decided to become a doc too and put himself through medical school.  His four year degree did not lead to his career but chemical engineer is hella difficult and that no doubt helped him gain admission to medical school.  He is a cancer doctor now.  

Kid two also chose engineering, in fact she got two degrees.  The bachelors degree was free and she paid her own way through a masters in engineering by working for the university.  She is now a regulator in an environmental agency.  Its a good job with a lot of great benefits.  I think the free education was a solid investment in her case. 

Kid three was the rebel.  No way she would become an engineer.  She majored in business, graduated Summa Cum Laude and is an education specialist at a division one University where she helps athletes maintain their academic standing.  After the business degree she got a masters in adult education on her own money, and like her sister she worked for the university to pay for that. She even graduated with money in the bank.  She is working on a PhD at her university now so there is no telling where her career will go after that, but like her dad, she loves her job. Was college a good deal for her? No doubt, loving your job is not that common.  

You might be thinking this is just too weird, nobody gets free college for all their kids and then sees them go on to have meaningful and rewarding careers.  But that isn’t true.  I’ve met quite a few other parents and when we discussed what college cost I’ve found it was free for many of their kids.  A lot of boomers and Gen X parents never had to pay for their kids’ college. Much higher than the number who have received free college because of prowess at some type of athletics.  

But there are some choices you have to make to improve your chances.  You have to indoctrinate your kids with the idea that learning is fun.  They have to realize pretty early that nobody they know is going to make a living playing sports but that if they apply themselves to the hardest subjects in school then they are very likely to earn a much better than average living.  You also have to have conversations about why there is very little difference in the value of a degree from a school costing $50,000 a year and in one costing less than half of that. And they have to work hard at applying for scholarships like it is a paying job.  It is also important that they understand that all degrees are not equally monetizable.  If they choose a low paying field then they need to understand that going in.  I pushed engineering pretty hard because it has reasonable job satisfaction rankings and it also pays bank.  But my business major/educator is doing just fine and really loves her work.  And she made informed choices that led her there. 

 I realize college is not the best choice for every child.  You may have a child who would be better served by going into a skilled trade, coding bootcamp or entrepreneurship. It is up to you to encourage your child to pursue the things that they are most likely to succeed at.  My experience is you don’t chase passions, you chase what you can excel at and that will cause passion to grow.  As a parent a big part of your job is to help your kids figure out what those areas of excellence can be for them.  But if college does appear to be something that your kids will benefit from then try to do it for as little cost as possible, maybe even for free.

What about you, did any of you get free four year degrees or know of others who did?

What about the parents of millennials, what was the college experience like for them and you? 

Do you know people that chose not to attend college but are killing it anyway? 

As always if there doesn’t appear to be a comment box on your screen click on the title of this post at the top and it should appear.

Today is a bad day.  Not because the stock market is down or because something bad has happened to me but because in the space of just two hours I received word that two long time friends had died.  One from injuries sustained in a ski accident out west and one who collapsed on his morning exercise walk from a heart attack.  In two hours, two guys I had known for well over thirty years and with whom I had some indelible memories were gone, just like that.

We live each day scarcely facing our mortality and while you might think older folk like me surely think about death more often, we don’t.  Why would we, its not a fun subject.  It is dark and cold and full of grief.  And sudden death, unexpected death, violent death is always a shock.  Even as senior adults we expect death to be the logical conclusion of a series of events.  Cancer, then chemo and radiation, then remission, then reoccurrence, then a slow downhill slide to the end.  Or Parkinson’s or a series of heart stints and bypasses followed by  gradual congestive heart failure.  Or dementia where the personality dies then the body eventually follows. 

But that’s not what happened.  My ski buddy was robust, not quite 60, wealthy and happily married with everything to live for.  He was a great skier and he skied a lot.  He had a house on the gulf coast and another in ski resort country.  He had done well, so well they named the engineering college we graduated from after him.  And yet in the blink of an eye he went from flying down a snow covered hill to literally a dead stop.  A tiny mistake in planting the downhill ski, or a moment of looking across the hill instead of looking out in front of his line, I’ll never know.  But he’s gone.

My other friend worked with me, for me actually, for a very long time.  He was hilarious, always kidding and usually happy.  He was a small guy with a big personality.  And a big heart, until this morning when it stopped, and he was gone too.  He was maybe 70, so you can’t say it’s a big anomaly when someone that age passes.  But he was slim, and he walked several miles every morning.  My and my running buddies would pass him often since we ran a similar route in the mornings.  Like me he was retired but unlike me he was always subject to more stress and drama from various sources.  But still, the times I had seen him recently he was the same old guy, funny, happy, friendly.  And now he’s gone, too. 

This is where your writer should say something profound, something that pulls meaning from the meaningless. And I can’t.  I’m empty.  I can only think of two hurting families who were blind sided by life today.  Those who never saw it coming and can never say those things they wish they could say to their father, husband or friend.  Because they are gone.