Hot Tub Time Machine It’s Day 1 of my May trip to California. I’ve already had two meals with relatives, catching up on life as we know it in California. I’ve woken up at the butt-crack of dawn to get on a conference call with our London investment bankers (Always Something – the name I will one day call my yacht). And now I have spent a half hour in my luxurious spa, set amongst…
The Blue Horizon Life is about setting stakes out ahead of yourself and then fooling yourself into thinking that it’s a fun game to strive towards that stake. I chose those words quite carefully because all of those elements are at play. The operative words are Setting, Ahead, Yourself, Fooling, Thinking, Fun, Game, Strive, and Towards. When I was eight-years-old I got sent west by my mother with my childless aunt and uncle in their…
Urban Nocturne Youngtown, Arizona started the retirement community concept in 1954, the year of my birth. Sun City didn’t open until 1960, but by then, age-restricted communities meant for those who wanted to be with other retirees, were well-rooted in the sun states. That is not an official starting gun or anything, it’s just my simple handle on when thinking about how to retire came into vogue. It’s like saying pensions began after WWII when…
Division of Labor As I approach retirement age I am forced to wonder what my days will be like. Everyone I speak to says they have no problem whatsoever filling up their days. What this tells me is that as people move into retirement, their comfort with lying about how they spend their time goes up. I will conjecture that what was allocated for lying about the length of their commute and their take-home…
Le Weekend When I was in high school I learned that in France they had adopted the English word weekend into their language and culture, which had not previously existed (and therefore had not single word to represent). This became Le Weekend. It seems the concept has more going on with it than I had realized. The designation of years, months and days connect to cyclicality of the heavens. Solar orbits, lunar cycles and terrestrial…
Emeritus Status In the days of the Roman legion, when soldiers earned their wages some suggest it was at least partially paid in salt, hence the word salarium and eventually the English word salary came into being. There is little or no evidence to support this myth even though it is part of modern etymological lore and is somewhat supported by sayings like “worth your salt”. However, despite this debate, it is true that many…
The Old and the Restless Our semi-annual gathering of the BT Legends group was held last night. There was a total of fifteen of us in attendance. We were a group of ex-bankers, so we were not terribly diverse even though there were three women in the group. The rest were old white guys. Doing some approximate polling, I would say the age range was 61 to 81, but the mean was likely around 71…
It’s a Rich Man’s World Money, Money, Money was written by ABBA in 1976, the very year I graduated business school and started a forty-three-year (so far) life in the business world. The song is ostensibly about a woman (presumably a lithe young Swede) trying to find a rich man to take her out of her misery of working all day and all night to pay the bills. She wants to go to Las Vegas…
The Princess and the Grain of Rice In 1992 I was asked to take over the Retirement Services Department of Bankers Trust Company. At the time, Bankers Trust was the leading retirement services bank with more 401(k) participants being serviced and more pension funds being serviced than anywhere else. I had been involved in the space indirectly by buying the largest pension company in Chile for the bank and buying, creating, and building an array…
Road Trip Who doesn’t remember the thrill in college of sitting around in the dorm or fraternity and discussing some distant spot (usually somewhere warm like Florida) and hearing someone yell, “Road trip!”). It was immortalized in the movie Animal House and very specifically in the 2000 classic, Road Trip. In Animal House it was only a trip to a nearby women’s college (Wells College?), but in Road Trip it was the “full Monty” from…