Parkinson's, My Retirement and YOLO

We didn’t expect to retire so soon. Things changed at a football game at Lehigh University. I had not been back to school for more than thirty years. Although I kept in touch with some close friends at the fraternity, I had fallen out of touch with many others. When we arrived at the game, actually, the tailgate party, there were about forty people there. We all looked the same. Yeah, right!

Unexpected retirement with parkinson's

It took almost no time to snap back into the relationships that we built so long ago. It seemed to me that every other person I talked to had retired. They got me thinking. I was sixty-two at the time. I thought that I would wait till sixty-five. Two years before I went to the football game, I learned that I had Parkinson’s disease. It’s a progressive disease. The rate of progress and the symptoms vary, but it’s not a contest that you will ever win. The uncertainty about my future tilted the scale toward retirement. When we got home, I cracked open the spreadsheets, read some stuff from Charles Schwab, and determined that we could retire then if we chose to. So we did. We were living in Seattle at the time. We chose Vero Beach as a retirement home for weather and family. I have two sisters near here. My wife, Jane, does too.

We agreed that we should find a financial planner near our retirement home. It would be great to have a second opinion on so many things. We were introduced to Baerbel. She is very knowledgeable, an excellent communicator, and made an instant connection with Jane. She also treats her clients very well. Sponsored ladies lunches, market updates with wine and hors d’oeuvres, a fantastic Christmas party. It is always done right with Baerbel, and you always walk away with some nugget or new perspective to help with your financial strategy.

You only live once

At one of the early client gatherings, Baerbel started talking about YOLO. I knew NASDAQ, SEC, Dow Theory, S&P, Covered Calls . . . I knew nothing about YOLO. Now I didn’t want to ask what YOLO was. It seems that everyone else in the room knew. Surely it would come to me. Well, I was just about to ask when Baerbel said, “As you all know, YOLO means you only live once. She went on to say how important it was to live for the moment. She questioned why you would have a financial strategy if you weren’t going to use the proceeds for some good or your own happiness. Then she challenged us to pick a YOLO goal—something that we would make happen for our happiness sometime over the coming year. She collected goals and promised to ask for a report back on progress the next year.
I went to The Masters when I lived in Atlanta a long time ago. My son Andrew became a pretty good golfer. I’ve always thought that it would be great to go back to The Masters with Andrew and perhaps my grandsons. So that became my YOLO goal.

Tickets for The Masters were very difficult to get. First, they were scarce. Second, they were expensive when you bought them on the open market. I wasn’t sure how this was going to come together, but I thought, “It’s worth a try.” Then came COVID. Everything stopped. The event at which we were to report back on our goals was canceled. Andrew and I continued to talk about The Masters though. That spring I got an email from the Augusta National Golf Club. I won the lottery. I had the opportunity to purchase four tickets to The Masters for the Wednesday practice round. YOLO goal achieved. I chalk the trip to The Masters that I took with Andrew and his son Will up to focus and good fortune. The good fortune part is easy. I got lucky and won the lottery. The focus part is more interesting. Simply by writing my goal down and committing to it, I was compelled to take a step toward achieving it.

What is your YOLO goal?