I turn 72 in a few weeks and I’ve been living out here for six years, which means I’ve been retired for at least five years. Retirement is one of my favorite topics to write about for some reason, and always has been since I started writing for fun forty years ago. I am not sure where this obsession with retirement comes from, but it probably originated just about forty years ago when I took…
I am totally into my fitness program now and I’m really glad to say that none of it is linked to any New Year’s resolutions. In fact, the only New Year’s resolution that I made this year was not to make any New Year’s resolutions. My success rate with them in the past has been 0%, so I wanted to avoid confusing myself and my intentions with some flaky cultural norm of thinking that starting…
There is something about these years when Christmas and New Years fall in the middle of the week (this year it was Thursday) that make the holidays feel like they are somewhat extended. I don’t want to sound like the Grinch, but they seem to be dragging on. Truth be told, our relatives (other than son Tom) left quite briskly on the 26th and Tom did his usual departure on New Years Eve, all of…
Buddy has never had to struggle a day in his three-year old life, as best I can tell. Granted, he has only been with us now two of those three years, but I doubt his prior life as Beau Cartier, as painful as that name may have been to his masculinity, was so horrible either. Clearly, he was too feisty by nature for those pseudo-refined folks who so willingly gave him up to us two…
This morning I got an email notice from my friend Steve in Phoenix announcing that he and his lovely wife Maggie have moved into a new rental apartment as part of their aging/downsizing progression. As in most families, tribes and animal groups, there is always a lender of the pack, and that family seems to have Maggie as its leader. As the mother says in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “the man may be the…
There’s a biblical proverb reference we’ve all heard and that is often quoted as “Pride goeth before a fall” or more fully, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). It’s a timeless warning about how arrogance and overconfidence can lead to one’s downfall. When people become too proud or self-assured, they often stop being cautious, stop listening to advice, or overestimate their abilities – which sets them up for…
Every time I get asked on some form or other about my employment status, I am forced to wonder whether I am really retired or not. When I moved out to this hilltop at age 65, I was technically still the CEO of a small venture-backed company for about another year. Then I stepped down and also started taking my Social Security payments at 67. I was also teaching and doing my expert witness work.…
Yesterday was a dark and stormy day here on the hilltop. The weather report says that we got 0.42 inches of rain, which in an area that averages 10 inches per year, that’s a healthy rain day. Hidden Meadows (of which we are technically a part of even though it is not an incorporated village) receives between approximately 5.6 and 13.6 inches of rainfall per year , with sources varying somewhat. One source reports an…
Everything you read that seeks to give advice to our demographic bulge known as the Baby Boomers, tells you to avoid the sedentary life at all costs. A sedentary lifestyle is thought to be remarkably harmful to human health and is considered one of the most significant preventable health risks in modern society. There is an evolutionary mismatch between being sedentary and good health. We’re built for movement. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, walking 5-10+ miles…
I started in business school during the spring of my senior year in college by taking a few of the first-year courses. To be fair, I had taken economics courses for four years already by then, but economics, while connected to business, is simply not the same. So, for all intents and purposes, I have been thinking about the finance business since 1975, a full fifty years at this point. Wall Street tends to bifurcate…