Okay, so I’ve decided on the metaphor for helping Andrea as her Battle Buddy, and it works mostly. Yet in the same way that I said I didn’t know what my role was, I’ve also noticed that my compensation for some of that is to be in problem-solving mode.

When we were at the hospital on Tuesday, Andrea needed some bloodwork done plus an ECG. So she gets her form, she’s checked in, #94 or something and they’re serving #86 or something. So not too long a wait, probably. Except the number is for both the bloodletting and the ECG, and yet they’re in two different rooms, it’s not really clear how it all works, so I leave Andrea at her chair in the waiting room and I go investigate.

I check out the ECG room and there’s a sign that says, “Yeah, we’re not always here. If you need an ECG, go to the blood room and they’ll call us.” Okay, I wander back to the blood room and say, “Excuse me, my wife needs both done, should she wait until the blood call and then you’ll call ECG or should we call them now while we’re already waiting?”.

The woman in the blood room looks at me like I have two heads. “What, nobody’s there?” So she walks me over and knocks on the door. The one with the pre-printed sign on it that says “We’re not here.” She reads the sign, twice, and says, “Oh, I guess I can call someone.”

Now I would like to tell you that she is reacting to their absence, but she wasn’t. She was honestly puzzled WHY I WAS ASKING HER. Except that’s where the sign said to go. Anyway, she calls someone, they come down, they do A’s ECG while she’s waiting to go in for the blood, while the guy is keeping an ear out in case they call her number for bloodwork. And it is clear that he is winging it for coordination. He’s worried that her number is going to be called, and maybe stressed that we’ll be stressed, so he’s making sure that if the number is called, he’ll flag it to make sure she’s not missed (although he tells us that even if we ARE missed, we won’t have to get a new number, we’ll just go when done).

It does NOT seem very organized, and this is the main lab for a busy hospital. But whatever. I had found out what to do, pushed them to do it, my job was done. I found a problem to solve and I “solved” it. I could have done nothing with the same result, just was a bit faster with me confirming details.

We go back to the room to meet the project coordinator, and she’s not there. She said she’d meet us there, but we’re done, and we have NO IDEA how to contact her to let her know we’re ready. I wander back to the main check-in area where we met her — and the guy there has NO IDEA who she is. None. She works with two of the main doctors in that section, but no idea who she is, how to find her, etc. I don’t have her last name so that doesn’t help, but I tell him what she is doing and who she works with, no help. Ten minutes of that and she wanders down the hall just as he’s decided maybe he knows who to call. Problem solved, exactly as if I had done nothing in the first place.

We finish with her, they’re going to have someone wander by to meet us, but we have to go pick up Jacob so I nudge her to take us to the Centre that we’re going to go to the next day, we do the tour, Andrea meets the nurse who will help us next week. I have a small win here in that my pushing managed to squeeze in the tour and a meet-and-greet before we had to dash.

We went today for another diagnostic appointment, and while I was on the official list to get into the hospital (even though they checked me after waving me through the last time), I was NOT on the list to go in for her appointment. I end up having breakfast in the cafeteria (cuz that’s always exciting), then leave to take Jacob to school late and back to pick up Andrea to bring her home. Tonight, I took her to another appointment where I wasn’t allowed to go in.

Supposedly, it’s all set for next week for me to join her for her first all-day treatment. I’m supposed to be on the list to be with her. Am I on the list? I have no idea. I’m supposed to be, but I was supposed to be today too.

I’m “solution-oriented” right now, let’s find whatever is not working and fix it fast. Need a decision that doesn’t have to be made by Andrea? I’m the guy to take that one. Mostly because I can’t control the rest or help on most of it, so I’m compensating elsewhere.

Originally, I was thinking of titling this post, “My wife has cancer. So there’s that.”. But that seemed a little stark, harsh even. Aggressive. I need to step back from that point for a moment.

I frequently say to people, when we’re talking about mental health and stuff, about how I’m doing with COVID-related isolation protocols and things that “we’re a high-risk household” and/or “I tend to carry a fair amount of stress.” But I can’t share much more than that usually as it is not entirely my story to tell.

Let’s start with me though. For me, the issue has often been that I am obese and with my weight gain, I’ve hovered on the edge of pre-diabetes and diabetes numbers for my A1C level. And, because I don’t want to admit to myself the seriousness of some of it, I avoid saying, “I’m diabetic”. Instead, I say things like “My A1C numbers are high.” Or “I’m in the pre-diabetic stage”. Never “diabetic”. Until my last set of blood results jumped significantly. So I can clearly say “I’m diabetic” or that “I have diabetes”, but I’m still more tempted to use weasel words around it. My leg issues of a year ago are related, but not completely causally linked. There’s other stuff going on too. But it’s enough to raise my stress at times. And diabetes does raise our health-risk levels in the household, particularly when I was struggling with infection issues, etc.

For Jacob, he has “spastic diplegia of unknown origin that presents as mild Cerebral Palsy”. That’s a LOT of formal wording to say he has mild CP, but they can’t find the cause from MRIs or genetics. But while I talk about some stuff related to him, and what I’m dealing with as a parent, or a challenge in helping him, his story is not my story and therefore not my story to tell. I am not obsessed with privacy or secrecy, but I don’t advertise everything he goes through. I hope that at some point in his life he might share some of that stuff himself, but until then, it remains his call. Occasionally I ask him if it’s okay if I write about something specific, but most of the time, I focus on me and my reactions, not on him. However, when he was young, he had some asthma and breathing issues, so COVID scares the bejesus out of me. I can say, no word of a lie, that I have fully believed until vaccination that if Jacob got sick, it was 50/50 if he would beat it. I suspected about 60/40, maybe 70/30 for me, but probably about even money given his lung and breathing issues already. That raises the household risk level too.

But both situations pale in comparison to Andrea’s world. She was diagnosed formally five years ago with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a version called Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia. Normally, people wouldn’t know they had WM until symptoms show up as something else. But she was having other medical stuff done, and they noticed enlarged lymph nodes. They did a bone marrow test, and confirmed as WM.

When is cancer, not cancer? It is, there’s no “out” on that, but when the doctor tells you that if you’re going to get lymphoma, the non-Hodgkin’s version was the better / more treatable kind, and even within NH lymphoma, WM was a really good choice because it responds well to treatment, goes into remission well, and the treatment can be done multiple times over the lifetime. In short, it’s not an automatic death sentence. On the downside, it’s not something you can remove easily through preventative surgery. Instead, you do a “wait and see” approach, monitor proteins and symptoms, and hold off treatment until the symptoms start showing up.

So she got her diagnosis in 2017. Then crickets.

There was nothing to do. I was working for the government in a unit that deals with a lot of health issues. I told my boss “our” news (I’ll come back to that later), because I thought I might be missing work to help her and because I was also in a bit of a daze, and he mentioned that the doctors in the unit were good at explaining things sometimes. I nudged the oncology expert, and she came over to my cubicle the same day with all the latest medical research, best treatment protocols, lessons learned, etc. She had access to internal “experts” databases and she shared all of it with me, walked me through a bunch of it, gave me an outline of what to expect. The same way as if someone had said, “Hey, you’re going to set up a new database for outside client data? Let me tell you what you need to know.”

It was presented all matter-of-fact, no drama, just “hey, I’ve got info you don’t have, let me give it to you”, and then she went away with an offer to chat anytime I had questions. I never did, but I sure appreciated the opening salvo in the information war.

But after “we” worked through the initial shock, and got to the point of “okay, so I guess we’re waiting, nothing to do now”, the question was simply “who” would she tell and when?

And really, that’s an interesting paragraph. “We’re” waiting, but “she” would tell.

Because when you’re having a baby, it’s considered okay to say “we’re pregnant”. But when one of you gets cancer, regardless of the support and interaction, it’s still “she has cancer”, not me. It’s her disease, her issue, her domain to decide what to do or not. Her decision who to tell or not. In both situations, it’s still “her body”, but in this one, I have no ancillary role. I’m just along for the ride.

And yet.

It obviously affects both Jacob and I. In my case, I talked about it with my social worker / therapist, and I shared the news with some close friends. I had to, because I needed support in figuring out my role, how to support her. Her call overall, but I needed to be able to share my part of it too. Not with any of her direct friends or family, of course, but I had talked to my bosses about it, purely to explain potential absences etc. I am a firm believer in sharing that info with bosses as it makes their approval of leave so much easier. I don’t mean just that it’s procedurally easier, it’s that it takes any guesswork out of the equation. And they’ve had training on this stuff, they know what they’re supposed to do, which is whatever I need, and it’s just easier to say, “Okay, so if something happens, we’ll deal with it, but it probably won’t”. And then I have to take her for a test in the middle of the day, and since they know why I’m asking, they’re not doing the official due diligence dance of wondering if it could have been scheduled at a better time, as some bosses might. Information vacuums make for bad HR management, so I share transparently what’s going on. My side of the news, with a nudge of hers.

She told her family, a couple of very close friends. And two coworkers who have dealt with or are currently dealing with similar issues. This past week, with news that she has to start treatment soon, she told all her family the treatment news plus she posted on Facebook. She told her coworkers since she’ll be off, and it came as a shock to many of them. After all, she doesn’t seem “sick”.

But early on, the biggest question was what to tell Jacob and when. And it was always going to be her call, but we were not on the same page with it. He was 7 at the time of diagnosis, and I fully agree that his age would limit any detailed discussion. “Inform to age-appropriate levels”, as they call it, seemed the way to go to me. But for her, and her doctor, the view was that she wasn’t going to be in treatment anytime soon, so did he need to know?

I watch a lot of TV and movies, I read a lot of books. We all know “revelations” of health status is a popular plot point. And more often than not, the plot point is around the person who doesn’t know something feeling betrayed when the health issues become manifest and they find out the sick person knew for years and didn’t tell them. While I don’t base my life on pop culture treatment, there is a reason that is a popular trope in stories. Because it happens.

The shock comes when they find out that you are sick. It’s big, there’s no way to soften that much. And they are hurt, angry, confused, and to be honest, complex emotions are the norm. And then they find out that you didn’t tell them something much earlier. That you have been keeping a giant secret from them. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for selfish reasons. But now they feel betrayed, and all that hurt, anger and confusion gets a target. You. Because YOU’RE the one making them feel this pain. Maybe it’s only temporary, maybe it wrecks the relationship, yet it isn’t uncommon in situations of serious illness.

For me, 99 times out of a 100, if I know something serious, I will share it with Jacob. I don’t hide things from him. I adjust for his age, sure, but he’s a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders and a heart on his sleeve, and I do not shield him from truth, if I can help it.

It was clearly Andrea’s call to make, and she made it, she wouldn’t tell him yet. I didn’t agree with that, but it wasn’t my call to make. Fast-forward a couple of years, Jacob was older and more able to understand things, and I suspect Andrea was then more comfortable with her diagnosis, so she shared the info with him to let him know she had lymphoma but they were just monitoring for now. I was hugely relieved, and over the last few months, even more so.

She’s had things going on for the last year or so, although more the last six months, and not all of them screaming “cancer symptoms”. Again, the details are not really mine to share, that’s her story if she chooses to share the details and her worries. But she got a bunch of recent tests back, it was more serious, more tests, confirmation, and she starts treatment in two weeks.

It’s definitely a paradigm shift.

If you read the above paragraphs, you’ll regularly see that I say she has a diagnosis, or lymphoma, or symptoms. I rarely say, she has cancer.

But yes, my wife has cancer. So there’s that.

I’ve known for five years, and after the initial shock, and limited attention to treatment protocols that would come at a much later date and might change considerably between now and then, the message was generally “wait and see, treatable but not curable”.

So I felt like an idiot last week. When we were briefed five years ago, I understood that she would be taking pills. Almost exclusively, I thought. It would be some sort of regimen that had a couple of intense days of medications, then four weeks wait to round 2, etc., for six months. I don’t want to underestimate that, but it seemed manageable. Yep, cancer treatment. But I thought it mostly meant pills. I knew from the material that I saw at the beginning that some people didn’t even miss work. This was obviously not your grandparents’ cancer regimen. It didn’t sound like fun, but it sounded, I guess, manageable?

Nope. I didn’t have any of that right. She’s off work, probably 6-9 months, maybe a year. It’s full cancer treatments, 6 hour treatments on day 1.1, 3h on day 1.2, 26 days of interval then round 2 (2.1 and 2.2). It’s two complicated-sounding drugs, B and R, and they do both on day 1, only one on day 2, and they do six rounds. She starts in less than two weeks. So, as they say, there’s that.

We really have no idea what to expect. The chemo is not the worst form of chemo, if that matters much before you start, and she’s unlikely to lose her hair or have much in the way of extreme side effects. Most people respond well to the treatment, and the meds are “well-tolerated” by most patients. She’s enrolling in an extra pilot that will likely mean extra pills twice a day for a year. The hope is everything goes well, she’ll start to notice a difference in symptoms in the first month, and she’ll be in remission for 5-10y, with likely another bout at some point with better protocols and treatment options.

What does this mean for me? I have no freaking clue, to be honest. I was not mentally prepared for Andrea to need to be off work for 9m, and I was not even mentally prepared for the word chemo. That was not what I was expecting at all for treatment, and I wasn’t even sure until about 2w ago that treatment was even likely yet. There could have been other things causing her latest symptoms. But no, the lymphoma is active and the most-likely cause of it all. Yet I wasn’t “worrying” about treatment needs for the last two weeks even because I didn’t know what to expect…or rather, what I expected was wrong. So while Andrea knew it was “start chemo”, I thought it was just “start pills”. Should I have handled that conversation or this issue differently? Was I supportive enough? I don’t know. Asymmetrical information is bad for HR, but it’s bad for being a supportive spouse too.

As mentioned, it is lymphoma, “a cancer of the lymphatic system, which is part of the body’s germ-fighting network. The lymphatic system includes the lymph nodes (lymph glands), spleen, thymus gland and bone marrow”.

So the obvious things need to get done. I’ll go with her for treatments, and hopefully be able to sit with her for it (if COVID protocols allow). I’ll be driving her back and forth anyway for all appointments and tests, since she doesn’t drive, even if she was able to take herself for some things. I don’t know quite how we’ll manage timings with Jacob because, well, he’s struggling with walking very far these days, so I’ve been taking him to and from school. We’ll adjust home life, routines, roles, whatever. We’ll figure it out. I’ve told Jacob it will be a tough time for mom, and well, for six months, he and I have to suck it up. He regularly gives her a hard time with his “duties” and schedule, and I told him I will be a pretty tough taskmaster for the next six months. It’s tough on him too, we discussed that, and he can bitch to me about anything he wants. But if he gives her a hard time on anything, I’ll deep-six his computer. We’ll also try and schedule more appointments for him with his social worker to talk about anything he doesn’t want to talk to us about right now.

For Andrea, she has joined a local support group online, and some of them have had it for years, with most of them a lot older than Andrea (which isn’t surprising as Andrea only knows she has it by accident, some people have it and won’t know until it kicks in 10-20y from now). Some of them scheduled their treatments on Thursday/Friday and went back to work — wait for it — on Monday. So we don’t know what to expect for her.

For me, I’m currently on an acting assignment at work as a Director, and as much as I’d like that to become permanent, it’s not much of a priority over the next six months. Jacob is up for surgery himself potentially in the next six months and if they come forward to do it, I’m inclined to push them off until the fall at least. Andrea’s treatments should be done by her birthday in September.

Oddly, the thought that keeps popping into my head is that I’m hopeful that we’ll get to use the gazebo and BBQ in the backyard a lot this summer, while making sure she has good options out there for comfort and for simple access to things like her tablet or phone while in good shade. If she can even be out there during the day, we don’t know much yet. But I also don’t want to assume she’ll be an invalid during the six months either.

I have diabetes with some active issues we’re resolving, Jacob has CP with pending surgery, and Andrea has cancer and is starting treatments soon. So we carry a high-level of risk and stress/worry.

But I no longer have to worry much about blogging and letting a veiled reference to Andrea’s health slip through that prompts unnecessary questions that she didn’t want to answer yet.

The cancer is real, and the privacy part still remains an issue. But the “secret” is out. Hell, I can even blog about it if I need/want to, as I do (almost) everything else.

I skipped my 7 questions exercise last week, so now I’m catching up. I’m also going to change the approach a bit — six Qs that I answer “short and sweet” and one that I elaborate more on as it intrigues me.

029. What is one big thing you could do this month to expand your comfort zone?

I’ve been working on my HR Guide, and I didn’t want to commit to sharing new drafts until I finished the full update. There are segments that I am going to have trouble sequencing, areas where I touch on it Chapter 2 but would be more relevant in Chapter 4, yet if I don’t explain in Chapter 2, I’m going to struggle in Chapter 2, 3, 4 to build off the content. Anyway, my thought was to wait until the full update is done before I start sharing. Instead, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and published the first chapter this week.

030. Write down one or two experiences from the past that had a life-changing influence on how you see yourself?

Those are easy, because I feel it is always about relationships, seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes. So any number of romantic relationships amongst the literally thousands (hah!) handful that I have been part of over the years. On top of that, getting married, having a kid, and losing parents all changed my “status” as an individual (to husband, father, “orphan”).

031. If you could share one message in a TV broadcast for one billion people, what would it be and why?

Simple, given the times. Pull your head out of your ass and get vaccinated.

032. What is your mind’s favorite way to stop, belittle or diminish your enthusiasm?

Pessimism that my “best” won’t be good enough to get me the outcome I want. That I’ll have to “settle” for less than I want, or than I want for Jacob or Andrea, because I’m not good enough at something. I’d love to build an observatory in the backyard, exactly to my specifications, and to make it look like something that Andrea won’t see as ugly. But I can’t build it myself, I don’t have the skills. I tried ordering one, and that got me nowhere. In the end? I can’t keep beating my head against that wall. If it isn’t going to happen, I do not have the mental ability to shake it off. If it is someone else’s “fault”, no big deal. I can roll with that. When it is because *I* couldn’t get it done? My mental health takes a beating.

033. What does wealth mean to you?

034. When it comes to money, what beliefs you hold would you like to let go off?

035. Make a chronological list with the moments that made who you are today when it comes to money.

This is utterly fascinating to think back on how certain events affected me.

1968-1980…I had a small allowance, and most of the time we would use it to go get snacks and stuff at the convenience store. Occasionally a toy. But we also used to go out for dinner — that was a “treat” that cost real money. But we rarely spent much money on clothes. Cheapest place we could get stuff. I wasn’t a saver.

1980-1987…I had varying paper routes of different size and remuneration and I stopped asking my parents for money. If I wanted something, I paid for it myself most of the time. Clothes were still parental-purchased, mostly, in the beginning, but later more me. Not that it was a grand change, I didn’t have much cash. Again, not a saver, most of my outlays were for regular expenses. I remember using my own money to buy presents at Christmas, and that was a big thing for me. That I could use my money to express my love for others.

1987-1991…I chose to go to Trent University because I didn’t have much money. I got a job at the university library just before starting school, and I kept it for four years. But I didn’t go elsewhere as I didn’t think I could afford it. I didn’t really know much about other universities, costs of living on my own, how to manage for myself if I did, and I knew there was no tuition help coming from my parents. That was on me, as perhaps it should have been. Not that I didn’t see other families ponying up money that had been set aside over the years and feeling a bit slighted. I don’t regret Trent, it was the right decision for me in a lot of ways, I wish somewhat that I didn’t feel like I had a choice. However, I lived at home rent-free during that time, which was nothing to sneeze at, let me tell you, I was quite grateful. I could also drive the car most nights, just had to put gas in. I did get some grant money and student loans and a small scholarship for first year. But I still tended to spend what I had.

1991-1993…I was at the University of Victoria, and I was making a go of it. Between working part-time in the school year, co-ops, etc., I could cover my expenses including enough to live on my own. I was stressed about tuition costs, like everyone else, but I could manage. My needs weren’t high.

1993-1997…I lived in Ottawa, worked for DFAIT, and struggled with bills. I was making okay money, but it was hard to juggle costs with student loans, living on my own, etc. I had a curve-ball thrown at me in 1995, and I had to make a choice on short notice about my financial situation. Under the rules, I actually qualified for bankruptcy on paper, but I had been doing okay. My situation was slowly improving until the curve-ball, but I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t have any reserves, they were gone, I was paying my student loans, and I had what looked like a really good option coming up. If I got the job, I would be fine for money; if I didn’t, I’d be in trouble. But the rules were about to change on student loans too — if I declared bankruptcy before the change, I could include my loans; if I waited another three months, I couldn’t. I felt like a complete failure but, well, it was the right “financial decision”. Still sucked. I was still in the bankruptcy period when my father died, he never saw me get out, he never saw me get my permanent job, he never saw me “whole” again.

1997-2004…I’d love to say that I became a saver, but I didn’t. I bought RRSPs, I didn’t go into debt, I owed nothing to the credit cards ever. I’ve been solvent ever since, but not a giant investor or saver. I kind of lost interest in money in many ways. I had a permanent job, I had a roof over my head, my personal needs were met, I didn’t care much about my future. I remember having one moment in there where I actually thought, “What if?” and that was about a cottage property near Cantley that was relatively cheap. But to me, the idea that I would ever be able to own something, buy a new car, plan, invest? Those were out of my ken.

I started dating Andrea in 2002, and we were pretty good at sharing expenses. I tend to like to pay for dinners when I go out with someone, it’s a way of expressing my affection to buy something, to treat someone, but we managed more equitably. As we neared 2004, we decided to take a trip, and while I had taken trips before, they were always tied to other arrangements. I had gone to the Bahamas in 1995, but we stayed in my sister’s timeshare; we went to Florida one year, but it was a girlfriend’s motorhome; I’d been to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, but it was on the margins of work trips; I’d lived in New York for 3 months, been to Barbados. Jamaica, St. Lucia, Guyana, Rome, Paris — all through work. The trip with Andrea to the Bahamas was more intriguing — it was a luxury that I didn’t have to save for, didn’t have to plan for, I had the money to go, so we went.

2005-2008…Andrea and I lived together, even bought a house together, and we were very fastidious with our expenses. We had a complicated spreadsheet that listed all the various expenses, who paid, and based on our relative salaries, and that I made more than her, we worked out a share of expenses that matched it. It wasn’t huge, something like 57%/43% split at one point, I think, but it was a pain in the ass. I hated it. We hadn’t decided to merge our finances yet, but I was desperately looking for ANY way NOT to have to keep track of those breakdowns. We kept track of separate expenses even after we had been living together for a number of years AND bought a house together. How stupid was that?

2008-2017…We merged our finances finally, and everything just comes out of the joint account. We try to max our contributions for various things, but I’m still not a saver, not really. We have extra money / improved lifestyle for the simple reason that our income has gone up without a corresponding increase in ancillary expenses. We have conservative savings, a safety bump that is more relevant to my insecurities than hers, money set aside for Jacob, etc. We did a plan in there with a financial planner, and well, I won’t say it changed our life. It more reassured us that we were comfortable. We see friends paying off mortgages, taking more trips, doing more things with their money than we do with ours, but it hasn’t motivated us much to drastically alter our ways. We eat out more than we should, and that’s almost always on me. I don’t scrimp on groceries, I don’t optimize purchases like a friend does, I don’t clip coupons. Generally speaking, I do nothing with our money, all the bills are generally paid by Andrea. Except for a credit card or two that I keep for online purchases or gifts for her. She could have a gambling addiction and have drained all our accounts, I’d never know.

It’s odd…I saw how my mother was when my father died. She had managed many of the bills over the years for the house, but dealing with a bunch of stuff, she had been out of the loop. I never wanted Andrea to be in that situation, that she didn’t know where the finances were at, I thought it was a horrible remnant of toxic masculinity. Now, I think I’m just lazy. She does the taxes, pays most of the bills, moves money around. I do little to help with that, part laziness and partly because I feel like I’d do it badly. If I fucked up my own life, that was one thing. Screwing up someone else’s finances? That can never happen. I know how that works, not an option.

2017-2020…I’m not 100% sure I have the right date in there (2017) but we did the retirement course together and well, I realized that our investment strategy over the past 10-15 years has been relatively crap. The stuff we were advised by banks and planners never took into account our true pension situation for Andrea and I. We have, as they say, a gold-plated pension based on good jobs and good income. I have made more money per year than my father ever did, and that started about my fourth-year of full employment. Even allowing for inflation, I’ve vastly outstripped him. I don’t know why that is relevant, but it is. He worked way harder, but as I look forward to retirement now, I know I don’t have the same financial limitations he did. We are in our “forever” house, most likely, and I doubt I’ll live past 80 years, so Andrea and Jacob will have decent finances up to and after I’m gone. We could have had far more aggressive private savings risk levels than I did. I felt like I understood the basics of the risk profiles we did, it always made sense, until we did the retirement course and got a reality check from someone who knows our pensions inside and out. Doh!

2020-2022…I feel guilty saying this but, well, we’re accumulating extra cash. We go nowhere, we do nothing. So we’re saving money like bloodsuckers. Not because we’re actively trying to, we just ARE. We have some home renovations planned, and normally we would do a simple budgeting shuffle, maybe tap a low-interest home equity loan if need be, some sort of line of credit to avoid having to shift investments, but right now? We could likely do it for cash. Not all of it, but a dang good portion of it. Alternatively, we could potentially wait and add it to our mortgage if we decided to move out of Centerpointe (we’d need to ADD money as where we would end up afterwards would be equally if not more expensive). But I’m spending a lot of time thinking about retirement in 4-5 years.

Yet to go back to #33, what does “wealth” mean to me? It would mean owning something more than we have now, like a cottage or a cabin somewhere. Or having a pool and an observatory. None of those are likely to happen, not without radical altering our savings and financial picture somehow. When my mother died, I inherited $25K. I spent some on a telescope, some on our RRSPs, partly for travel, and the rest into our normal bank account. It gave us some nice cushion, but it didn’t change our lives. I know others who have inherited houses, large sums of money, etc., and so the “wealth” came from others, often parents. But often it also comes with their own sense of good money management, which I don’t have.

I often feel like the same kid doing his paper route and having some cash in his pocket…that’s what I have to spend. When it’s gone, it’s gone. But I’ll earn more. I have food, I have shelter, I have transport. I buy entertainment toys, but we don’t have other expensive vices. My lifestyle comes from having a second earner who has a good salary, someone without extravagant tastes anymore than I do, and that our incomes have gone up over time. Not because I’m good with money in any way, shape or form. Heck, we’ve been planning a new financial plan meeting for going on close to five years and we still haven’t got around to doing it, partly as we know there are lots of questions they’re going to ask about our future that we can’t answer because of health and other issues. Hard to plan without knowing what you think the future could, would, or should look like. Instead, we muddle through, albeit with good jobs and good salaries. I don’t feel “wealthy”, but we have a lot more resources and options than most.