January 15, 2016

fears and goals of the future

My #1 goal in life is to retire with dignity. I grew up extremely poor. The kind of poverty rarely seen in the US outside of the deep south, which is where I grew up. I was usually hungry. I'd have to eat paper in school to make the hunger pains subside. I got one pair of shoes a year from a 2nd hand store, if I out grew them I'd have to cut the toes off the end so my toes could poke out the front. To survive i taught myself to hunt and skin squirrels, frogs, snakes, ducks, and rabbits with a bb gun and a pocket knife at 7 years old. I was homeless in my teens. My greatest fear is to end up having to live the same in old age as i did when i grew up. I've stayed at the same government job my entire adult life so i could earn a pension. I was eligible to retire from that job last year. I've worked really hard the last decade to pay off all of my wife's debt. We became debt free last year. The last year has been great to my family and I. Since we became debt free I've been putting as much as we can afford into a savings account for a down payment for a home, and investing in a ROTH IRA. For the first time in my life I'm not afraid of my future. I've done what I needed to do to ensure my wife and I can retire with dignity. We did most of this thanks to knowledge I gained through a book, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I've been thinking about buying a bunch of copies of that book for my friends and family. I could change the future, the legacy, of the people I care about most by simply buying them a book. So, if I know you, and i care about you, be expecting the book The Total Money Makeover sometime in 2016. If I don't know you, buy the book. You won't regret it.

1 comment:

coach dion said...

Small steps to a big future...