What to do when you’re waiting to die.
Me, I do a lot of reading. I also try to do a lot of writing, but fall down on the job. It’s so difficult to do when you fall asleep in the recliner, only to wake up minutes later to find yourself staring at fourteen pages consisting of nothing but lower-case “f” characters.
I try to get my family to talk about my impending death and focus their attention on planning what to do when it happens. I have a will, everything goes to my wife, Linda, and all but one of my pensions are indexed to inflation and go to her as well. She should suffer no more than a 15% reduction in net income, and her costs go down from there, reducing the net-net to about seven or eight percent. We currently put more than 30% of our income into savings. I have a prepaid cremation and interment plan.
I try to get my wife and our disabled adult daughter to consider trading in our 15+ year-old sedan for a used one-year-old Mitsubishi Crossover from Carmax that still has four years of manufacturer’s warranty. The cost is less than ten percent of our monthly after-tax income for four years. It will make it infinitely easier for me to get into/out of the vehicle, and my wheelchair has a place to go.
I spend time advising a business owner, a public relations professional, whom I mentored through her MBA classes. I occasionally review contracts from a business perspective, something that makes lawyers apoplectic. I’ve completely rewritten one with a Big Four nationwide television network; they signed the rewrite. I talked her through the pandemic problems of her clients, most of which are parts of the music industry. She and they survived and became stronger. And, I’m mentoring an entrepreneur, a pure mathematician who wants to become a consultant and middle-man in 3D printing for small-volume critical parts for manufacturers and maintenance companies that have to idle $200M pieces of equipment for a $3 part that is no longer manufactured.
Time for my late-morning nap.
Bill
That is rich gravy. The kind that nourishes those you welcome to your table.
We're all waiting to die though, aren't we? Some of us just have a better approximation of their timeline.
Do you feel any desire to leave something for those folks you'll never know? Specifically, for your progeny who may one day be doing genealogical research? I've been doing some family research recently and found the letters and what-not to be very interesting. It will be interesting to see how and if our strange footprint left on the internet will be stored. Also, what tools will be available to folks in the future to reconstruct the records we leave.