In an earlier post, I mentioned my husband's father as having taught the kids to buy stocks. He got his 4 children started out early in understanding about investing. I don't know what the other 3 kids did, but I know my husband and I picked up on those lessons and started investing as best we could early in our marriage.
Nearly 32 years after I married into that family, my father-in-law has been retired 22 years this week, and he and I have become an investment/financial chat group of two. When we visit, Pop and I sit with our morning coffee, watching the stock ticker run across the bottom of the TV screen, moaning or cheering as the ticker moves us.
When he visits us, we both do the Saturday morning "counting of the shekels," as I have come to call it, where we both log into our respective retirement accounts and see what's up -- or down, as the case may be. We discuss investing strategies and have a good ol' time. Well, at least I do!
Because we got started out sharing this information, in this way, it became natural for me, then, to ask Pop questions about Social Security, Medicare, and other investment issues in retirement. He has opened his annuity files, his trust files, and anything else that I have questions about, because he knows I am the Retirement-Planner-in-Chief for this branch of his family, and I can learn from him how best to manage funds leading up to and in retirement.
What I have learned from these interactions is this: Although I can read lots of articles, book, blogs, whatever -- there's a whole world of stuff out there to read -- for me there is nothing quite like the concrete fact of a financial statement in my hand, or a Social Security Direct Deposit pay stub in my hand to help me understand that No, Medicare is not free, and Yes, those premiums are deducted from Social Security.
That sharing makes me understand what difference the yearly raises -- or not -- can mean to a retiree. I learned about the higher Medicare premiums that came about as a result of Pop's having a higher income one year.
It takes a lot of trust for a person to open his financial life to the inquiries of someone else, and it means a lot to me that my father-in-law trusts me to that extent.
It also means a lot to me to have him as my Retirement Mentor, and I suppose that my reason for blogging here is not just to write about things of interest to me. More important, I would like to be able to reach others and teach others, even in a small way, about some of the questions and issues that will arise when they get closer to retirement -- whether they are quite ready or not!
There is so much to know, and I would love to be able to share knowledge in a way that will at least prompt people to start asking some of the questions they should be asking. The problem is, they don't even know what they don't know but need to know!
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