Another reminder
On a road trip
Since I’ve retired I’ve been working with a financial planner to get my finances in order. It’s a dreary process punctuated by mild panic attacks when I contemplate never earning any more money for the rest of my life. It’s a circular thought process - the kind that makes me crazy: How much money do I have? Is that enough? Depends on how long you live, how sick you get, whatever. How long will I live? No knowing. Then do I have enough money? No knowing. And so on.
Randy was very concerned about leaving me in good shape financially. He bought life insurance, which I never bothered to do. He put much more money into his 401K than I put in mine. And he kept up with all of our money - where it was, what the stocks were worth, etc. Sometimes he would tell me about it and my eyes would glaze over, which frustrated him. But I couldn’t really think about it for too long before I went into the circular thought process that makes me crazy (see above). Hope for the best, prepare for the worst - he did the preparing and I did the hoping. Which was a role reversal for us - no one has ever thought of me as hopeful.
Of course everything we had was in both our names and I’ve spent the last several months removing his name - sad, but just business. But last week I received a big package of materials from my finance guy and he made an appointment to call and walk me through everything so I could sign everywhere and return it all to him. We were supposed to talk this morning.
I opened the package and looked at all the sticky notes telling me where to sign and I saw that all the yellow highlights were just for me - no place for Randy’s signature. And it hit me: this is my retirement, what was supposed to be our retirement. I have years with nothing but time and a reasonable amount of money (depending on how long I live). We could have been planning road trips - Randy loved road trips. Or just going to the beach. Or just the grocery store, damn it.
Money guy called and I had to postpone so I could go cry.