What I've Learned

As I prepare for winding down this blog, I've been thinking about what I've learned over the past 7 years from writing posts about our personal finances..   Here are some of my key learnings:

Successful wealth building depends on skill and luck.  Part of our success was due to good personal finance habits, e.g. saving and living below our means.   However, luck also played an important role.  I was fortunate to work my entire 27 year career for one company with outstanding retirement benefits and great compensation.  In addition, the stock market (and my company stock performance) played a large role in building our wealth. For example, if I had worked for Enron, or the stock market didn't recover, our financial situation would be much different.

There are many paths to building wealth.  However, I wrote mostly about the path with which I had experience: Getting a college degree to work in a higher paying profession and living way below our means.   I didn't have much experience in other paths, e.g. owning a business or real estate, so I didn't post much about those paths.  

Doing what I love for work doesn't pay much.  After retiring, I tried jobs that I "loved" to test drive potential second career options.   It turned out doing what I loved didn't pay enough for me to start a second career. I found there was no perfect retirement job for me.  So in early 2013, I stopped doing part time jobs.

It's time to move on and really retire. Doing this blog and the part time jobs was probably a subconscious effort on my part to keep working and delay fully retiring :-) 

So it's off to the next adventure  - full retirement.  I know now that is a lot more for me to learn.  However, I won't be blogging about it.  That would be too much work :-)

For more on Reflections and Musings, check back every Saturday for a new segment.

This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

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