[Porsche-O-Phile]

Here's the point I was trying to make before:

My dad recently retired (summer of last year). He really wanted to retire about five years ago and most people including me told him to go for it. He didn't. He slogged out five more years miserable (he'd grown to be bitter and hated his job due to recent post-recession management changes) so he could max out his pension. He retired on the exact day he hit the max. Five months later he had a stroke and spent four months in the hospital / rehab and is now home but clearly not the same person. He's made a dramatic and great recovery but not a full one (strokes do leave a person brain damaged after all).

He should have retired five years earlier. He'd have gotten a lot more quality time to do the things he wanted probably, would have had more meaningful time with family, grandkids, etc. It's not a total loss but it certainly gives me pause to consider what's important. As a side note all of the extra money he receives out of his pension fund each month as a result of his having stayed working for the five final years gets more than eaten up (as has more than half his savings) by medical expenses, medication and therapy. Insurance helps but they deny an awful lot ("oh, that's not covered", "oh there's this or that copay", "oh there's an annual limit for that" and similar bullcrap). It wasn't worth it in my book. Personally I think he should've gotten out when he was "done" about six years ago.

Money is one of those things there's never going to be enough of no matter if you get $2k a month or $20k a month anyway. So I see the priorities as being (1) living a meaningful, purposeful and fulfilling life where you're reasonably happy, (2) spend time with family and friends, (3) cultivate ways to keep yourself engaged, stimulated, amused and entertained and lastly (4) worry about money and figure out how to make things work with the available resources.

I'm not saying money isn't important - it is. But other things are much more important. Money is a tool to help attain enjoyment in life and provide some measure of security. If you've got enough to do that from whatever sources you've set up through sensible planning, that's what matters.

I have absolutely zero desire to end up in some home someplace - particularly here in the northeast. Too many people end up sitting around pissing and moaning all day as if in a competition to out-complain each other and generally being miserable human beings. I saw it all the time with the people in my dad's rehab hospital - they complain about the weather (in fairness it does suck half the year but still...), politics, their medication regimen or generally how unfair life has treated them. No frikkin way I'm going to allow myself to end up like that and if I stay here much longer I'm afraid I might start heading down that path by default. No way. I'm getting out soon, starting my own practice and building my own future, not being a slave to someone else's preconceived notion of what ought to happen to me in my so-called "golden years". If it fails I'll get up and try again until I get it right. I wish more people would look at things the way. I certainly wish my own dad had.

The other thing to take away from this story is that retirement planning is all well and good but unforeseen circumstances (like a medical condition or a boiler failure or a leaky roof on the house - all of which happened to my parents in the last few months) can cost tens of thousands of dollars and really screw up any projections. They all go out the window once expenses like that come up - and they will.