"Are You Crazy" lets get some Horse Sense

After all of the excitement about retiring in a month, I finally came down to earth and decided to met with my Financial Adviser. My FA just happens to be my Son In Law who works for Merrill Lynch. We met at his home and planned our strategies for retirement. This was done during our Hamburger and Hot dog cookout in their back yard. He started out by asking me what my assets are, how much in the 401K and my pension plan. I gave him the information needed to give me his professional opinion relative to retirement and his comments to me were "Are you crazy? Lets get some Horse Sense. Keep in mind my FA is extremely , shall we say, conservative, and feels if you don't have a million bucks in your savings account you cannot retire. Well, the possibility of me and my Hubby ever acquiring that much cash in our life time is slim to none. Now, bear in mind if we did not have this little hobby of ours, we could have had a million bucks in our savings account by now. Well, I am exaggerating of course, but it would be more than we have now, by a long shot. Our little expensive hobby happens to be purchasing our beloved Belgian Draft Horses at a very high price and selling our beloved Belgian Draft Horses at a very low price. You see, you just can't make any money when you do things like that. My Hubby has a very kind heart and thinks that everyone is honest and fair in their business dealings. Now, lets go back a step. We are dealing with HORSE TRADERS here who make their living by selling horses. Every horse we ever purchased was sound, ( in good health), eight years old (they all say that the horse is eight yrs old, because after eight yrs old you can't tell how old they are by looking at their teeth) and they all are stout and can pull like the devil. Well some of them turned out to be all of that, but the ones that were not , we really took a licking on the resale value of the horse.

So, that is my story on why my FA thinks I am crazy for considering retirement at this time in my life with my, less than impressive nest egg. In taking everything into consideration, it is the right thing for me to do at this time of my life. I could always get a part time job being the "Greeter" at Wally World. "Hello, Welcome to WalMart" A friend of mine suggested that perhaps we should considering down sizing to Mustang Pony's. We won't have to feed them grain or hay every day, but the gasoline my be of concern!