My Dad is My Retirement Hero!

My father has this retirement thing dialed in.  He has done it, and done it well, for 36+ years.   Thats a long time to get out, travel, enjoy life, and keep moving.   He, along with my mother, made sacrifices in certain areas, but they never hesitated to go on a vacation or participate at a high level in an activity that interested them.

How did he manage to pull this off?  Did he spend time with a financial planner, develop a tax strategy, work through complications of health care, downsize intentionally, or put large chunks of his pay check in both taxed and pre tax investments?  Hardly.  He did something even better: he worked for the Federal Government!

You can’t discount his frugality and thought process.   He entered into retirement years with no long term debt, a house in a resort town with skyrocketing real estate prices, and a pretty good stock of tools to enable his activities.    He drove cars until they would not go anymore, and did not take lavish vacations.  When he retired, both him and my mother pursued things they always wanted to do, at very high levels, and paid whatever it took to enable those activities.  For a few years, Dad pursued side hustles for income boosts.   He cut and sold firewood, and did seasonal driving service as a sub contractor for the USFS.

At 91 years old today, with a bum knee that limits his walking range to a couple hundred yards at a time, you can still see his nervousness build every afternoon.  If he has not gotten out and done something like a drive, walk at the mall, gone to the store, etc, he becomes almost intolerable to be around.   His DNA is Move or Die, and he does not apologize for that.   If you can go with him, that is great, but he is also not waiting around for you.

My mother and father explored the country in a car, which was their preferred method of travel.   Mom entered cooking contests, competing at national levels.  This was really strange for me.  When I grew up I had the option of cold scrambled eggs or cereal for breakfast, and dinner was invariably some piece of meat fried with vegetable oil in an electric skillet to a consistent grey color parlor, accompanied by potatoes.   After I moved out, my mother became a gourmet baker, and due to her participation in Idaho Beef Council cooking contests, an amazing chef of meat products, none cooked over medium rare.  WTH?

Dad became a professional level fishermen, specializing in spin casting for migratory ocean going trout, Steelhead.  He was bringing in 35+ fish per year, and releasing more than that.   I knew because he was continually distributing fish to the family, and I got to a point where I could not stand another morsel of that oily, stinky fish, even if if was smoked extensively.  He also pursued something he had done his whole life, hunting.   He acquired working bird dogs and hunted with them regularly, and moved to bow hunting, successfully bagging large game with a flying stick.  After my mother passed, he visited me in Europe, touring Italy and Germany, fished the inland straights with my brother, and mined for gold in Alaska.  

In retrospect, it has been an almost manic retirement, but its one we should all consider.  The mantra of Move or Die is the core.   If you spend any time at an RV park, and I mean weeks, not days, you see it.  There are people striving to stay active, and those people looking to pass the time.   Dad had the unfortunate experience of the early death of his father.  Grandpa was 58 years old, and died from a heart condition while starting a chain saw.  The result of that was that Dad refused to waste a single moment of time.

He managed all this with a retirement that he contributed little to, other than working hard and being very successful within the government.   He started part time doing trail maintenance and fire fighting as a teenager.  He could manage a pack string and had back country sense, having grown up in remote ranger stations, and tells a great story of bringing back his ‘adult’ guardian on the crew when he could not hack it anymore.   He then joined the Marines at 17 years old in 1945, and was part of the build up for the invasion of Japan.  Fortunately for both him and me, that did not happen.  After he returned from occupied China, he went back to the USFS until the age of 55.   Using my retirement model, in reverse, in todays dollars, he will have extracted over $2.4m from the US government.   To some extent that is not fair because I did not know how to value his Double Platinum Unicorn Health Care Plan. The DPUHCP has never shown up on any list of choices for my health care, so I have no real data on that cost. 

The Federal budget now makes up almost 40% of our economy.  There is no chance this decreases, and a large chance it increases.  Federal employees rarely, if ever, experience corporate layoffs, business failures, cost cutting, etc.  There is no zero based budgeting, no demands to cut 25% of the budget or go away, no worries about available cash to make the payroll, or incentives to cut cost.  Quite the opposite, where the end of year rush to spend funds is legendary, to ensure they next years budget does not decrease!  Few, if any, would consider the government to be ‘fiscally responsible’. There is a reason why congress, Right, Left, and Middle,  become strangely silent when when the topic of them participating is real world health care comes up.  They know thats a personal disaster.    Don’t get me wrong; I am not bitter about this and if you can get a gig with the government, I greatly encourage it.   That is an excellent life decision.

For most of us, its not going to go like this.  We have to plan pre and post tax retirement savings, develop tax strategies, get part time jobs, have a very clear health care strategy, and actually manage finances.    Those are just requirements in the real world.  

There is one place where we clearly have a choice:  Move or Die.    I think back to a quote from the Shawshank Redemption,  “Its a simple choice.  Get busy living, or get busy dieing”