Philadelphia Reflections

The musings of a physician who has served the community for over six decades

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Financial Planning for a Long Retirement

How should individual investors ensure they have enough money for retirement?

Such a person is often a professional or entrepreneur who has worked to accumulate the wealth. Legions of "advisors"line up to take this money and manage it or else to sell "products" that promise to solve some problem or other. Without this background, extra savings will be needed, to buy advice. And advice is not invariably reliable.

A person who has created his/her career and its wealth from scratch, can likely manage investments themselves, or at least supervise the process from a position of strength from observation. Reliable advice is not always cheap.

This collection of articles explains to the individual investor how to take control of their wealth. They may eventually decide to look for help from an advisor but they will retain control of their assets and they will know what to do.

Financial Planning videos on YouTube

Old Age, Re-designed
A grumpy analysis of future trends from a member of the Grumpy Generation.

Right Angle Club 2017
Dick Palmer and Bill Dorsey died this year. We will miss them.

Reflections on Immortality

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Notions of Immortality

When we are children, we have childish notions of immortality. Perhaps we still nourish them for lack of replacement, busying our thoughts with premature death, instead. Most of us forget the dreams of robbing candy stores or marrying a princess, and never bother to replace them. After all, everyone has to die, don't they?

So put it this way: we now have semi-realistic plans to end our lives with a thirty-year paid vacation, but what can be said about a fifty-year paid vacation, or even a hundred? Life itself is degraded by seventy years of loafing, as those who could afford it will tell you. All notions of purpose to life eventually disappear. No longer defining ourselves as soldiers and housewives; we're just cats, dogs and lice. And all our yesteryears have lighted fools the way to welcome death. As that day approaches, it will be marked by waves of awesome but fruitless literature. The Calvinist worship of work gets the last laugh of the comedy.

Subsequent generations of would-be hedonists have certainly given Calvin a hard time. Harder, in a way, than dunkings and pillories. Perhaps harder even than burning at the stake, because Calvinists had the audacity to get rich and comfortable by their effrontery. Perhaps poor and comfortable is better, and comfortable is the real goal, as Quakers were executed for advising. Once you get over the ambition to be King, what else is there?

Originally published: Wednesday, December 23, 2015; most-recently modified: Monday, June 03, 2019