@LuckyGuy That would be cool tho swing by your house and learn a few new things about wood stoves. My wife is in training for the Boston Marathon in 2016 when she will be 65. so perhaps I could visit you then. I don’t do full marathons anymore. I’ll jog with her from the start for a few miles and then take a bus to the finish.
Working hard and doing the right things does pay off. I love to talk to and work with young people. They are so full of life and had have the world of opportunity in front of them. I try to offer my advice whenever they ask for it.
Here are some of my thoughts for young adults:
As Benjamin Franklin said, “Failure to plan is planning to fail”. Believe me you will be at my age (64) much faster than you think. It’s important to plan even though no one knows what the future will look like AND there are no guarantees. You can invest in the stock market all your life and then lose everything. You could do everything right for decades to maintain good health and then have a terrible accident or get cancer. But you have to try for financial and physical success, because if you don’t then failure is pretty much certain. We see sad, weak, overweight, disease ridden older folks all the time in our clinics. Think about how they got that way. Each patient will tell their own story but likely it comes down to years of personal neglect. Many or most just let themselves go with too much bad foods, alcohol, tobacco, other recreational drugs and not enough physical exercise. So I suggest that you take charge of your health and investments now and make it a part of your routine and continually work on them.
Here’s the simple basics:
1. Study hard in school.
2. Take advantage of our company’s 403B plan.
3. Start and maintain an IRA.
4. Maintain other savings and investments.
5. Do at least a little physical exercise everyday, not a lot occasionally.
6. Eat a healthy diet and get your sleep.
7. Lay off the recreational drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
There is nothing special about me. As a lab tech I’m no big success story and my wife is a dietitian. My heart problems are due to too much running. Remember too much of any good thing is bad for you. But I have always maintained good physical fitness as well as relentlessly investing in the stock market strategy for the last 34 years. Yes I admit that I still get sick and injured but my high fitness level helps me to get sick/injured much less often and I recover more quickly than a weak sedentary person.