LUCK
Today I prepared a brief set of questions for my 30 year old financial advisor who I am going to meet tomorrow. She is a young woman who has been trained as a financial advisor working for a group that are part of a much larger company that is presumably investing my retirement money more to avoid the next recession than to make me rich. I am sure she is a good person, but I am wonder what kind of advice she can give me. I am guessing that she can only give me generic advice and try to prevent me from doing something cuckoo such as spending all my savings on some foolish scheme.
But the problem with advice and my own personal financial planning about what I should do is that she can only make suggestions based on the average lifespan and projected earnings of people like me. She has no way of knowing what will really happen and neither do I.
But as I think about it I realize that what has happened in my life, the major things, have almost always been a result of chance, of luck.
I am lucky to still be alive when so many of my friends have died from one cause or another and I haven‘t. But my luck started when my parents married which was a chance event and then when one sperm among millions fertilized an egg and I turned out to be male rather than female. I was born in India, pure chance, but of American parents inheriting a high living standard, pure chance, and grew up in a missionary family in India, pure chance. And so it went through my life. I was sent by the Army to Germany, chance, met Kathe through the wildest of chance, had a son and daughter who themselves came into the world by chance, got a job at Warren Wilson College by chance, made almost no purposeful financial choices but ended up with enough retirement money to live and travel, again by chance. Kathe died by chance two years ago changing my financial picture. And I have no idea what is coming in the future. I have no control over the national economy, over the ups and downs of the housing market, over whether my world will end in atomic conflagration, over whether I will live for one year more or ten. So how can my 30 year old financial advisor give me advice and how can I plan? All I can do now is live as frugally as possible and travel as inexpensively as possible and hope for the best, hoping that my good luck continues to hold.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 