Susan's Scoop

What if Later Never Comes?

As much as I love writing about tax strategy and financial topics, I thought I would write about something a little more personal today. This past weekend I attended a family wedding and saw relatives that I haven’t seen in a long time; most of them had heard through the grapevine that my husband and I “early retired” from our W-2 jobs a few years ago, and a lot of them had opinions about it.

One of them accused us of being “reckless”, a few said we were “brave”, and a couple of them said it was “awesome”. All of those are probably at least a little bit true, but honestly, I feel like we were being “realistic”.

As most of you know, my mom passed away 16 years ago, when she was only 55. Out of my group of six childhood friends that I am still close to today, I am still the only one who has lost a parent.

My husband Brian lost his brother when he was in college.

Having those early losses shifted our perspective about the amount of time we may or may not have on this earth. We went from “oh, we’ll have plenty of time to do all the things when we retire at 65” to “oh crap, we need to do all the things now while we still can”. Both of those experiences were horrible to go through, but in a lot of ways this new perspective has been a gift. It’s given us the bravery and resolve to forge a different path for ourselves.

That same group of childhood girlfriends and I have been talking for years about taking a weeklong trip to the Greek Islands, and we had finally decided next year would be the year. But lately life keeps intervening, and one friend suggested we push it to our 50th or even 55th birthdays. To me, waiting feels uncertain; since I lost my mom around that age, those birthdays don’t necessarily feel like a ‘given’ to me. And the odds that all of us will be alive, healthy, and free enough to take that trip together aren’t improving with time.

When Brian and I made the decision to step back from our jobs, we felt like it was time to get off of the hedonic treadmill of “more, more more” and make do with “enough”.

There’s a useful retirement calculator I recommend that incorporates expected longevity into the calculations; for me, as long as the chance of me being broke is lower than the chance of me being dead, I’m going to call my plan good enough!

Society teaches us to optimize for more: More income. More stuff. Bigger houses. Fancier titles. More years before we finally begin living.

But the relevant question is when “more” stops improving your life.

Wealth is recognizing when you have “enough” to start choosing time.

Something to reflect on as I close this out: What are you postponing for ‘someday’ that might be worth doing now?

Misadventures in Real Estate

Caitlin and I used to include this section in every newsletter, but we stopped because although we had an abundance of material, we felt it might drive people away from ever investing in real estate again. 🤣

But I had a first at my AirBnB this week – a complaint about a ghost in our cabin! 👻 The guest had first messaged me that the TV spontaneously stopped working that evening and that she was going to bed. Then later that night, I get a message from her that she’s hearing voices, the TV has turned on again, and there must be a ghost! I of course apologized profusely for the inconvenience (??!) like a proper host and hoped to avoid a bad review. (I considered Doordashing some sage, but I already had to deal with different guests setting off the smoke alarms the previous weekend in the middle of the night.)

What I suspect actually happened is that the guest hit a button on the TV remote that started a software update, and once that update was done (after she had gone to bed), the TV came back on, making her assume there was a ghost. Gotta love technology! 📺

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