Ben Carlson, who writes at A Wealth of Common Sense, took to his blog to write an incredibly moving tribute to his older brother who just passed away.
Writers need a way to express their pain and feelings in the best way they know it is possible.
I have a weird relationship with reading about the case study of someone passing away. On one hand, you don’t want to read about it. On the other hand, I was curious about how the process to death was that is different from the death process of my mom, dad and uncle.
I also cannot help it since I am in a vocation that is suppose to provide good advise in this field. You want your advise to be tethered more to reality than to lean towards useless when most needed. There is probably two things that I have stronger thoughts on.
Different People Tackle a Medical Crisis Differently.
I was too entrenched in the math of critical illness previously. I think going through a couple of these experiences fxxk your brain up about how much is enough because it relates very much to how far do you want to push it.
Ben’s brother experience is colored because this was not the first time he had to deal with a medical crisis. He was diagnose with a rare form of leukemia when he was in 6th grade and had to undergo chemotherapy and radiation. The whole family had to move for that.
In his 20s, he contracted pancreatitis and there was a lengthy surgery which seem to affect the inside of his body for a long time.
“Something never felt right after that.”
Jon was diagnose with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year.
I am not sure how fine of a line between fighting and giving up. If you have seen how the end result was for those who lost the fight, that line gets weirder.
“Jon was a tough son of a bitch and went out swinging.
The original plan was to manage the pancreatic cancer with chemo until Jon died but he didn’t want to just wither away. He called specialists all over the country, finally finding a doctor who would give him an experimental drug that allowed him to stop receiving chemo.
And it actually worked for a while. The cancer spread slowed. Eventually it would stop working but it gave us an extra six months or so.
He looked normal again — started riding his bike, traveling and living life. You wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking at him that he was sick.
A surgeon in New York said they would operate, which wasn’t on the table at the outset. It was a very low chance of success but he didn’t want to sit around waiting to die. Jon was going out fighting.
All of the treatments and illnesses finally caught up with him and he died from complications in surgery. No regrets. It’s what he wanted.”
I don’t think I am the only one facing this struggle about what we would do if it happens to us. I think our responsibility to our family may play a part if we fight. It will be weird if a person does not have that responsibility and how that will affect his or her choice.
But I learn that beyond first suggesting, it might be better to ask “what do you want?” in different ways.
The math brain in me likens this to someone asking if they should invest in a 100% equity portfolio with a goal in three years time if you really need your money to grow. The standard answer is of course not, but in reality there is a few threads in this spectrum of investment outcome that will be okay. What makes the choice tougher is if you cannot find any alternative to get the money but to put in 100% equity.
More importantly, we ask because a person under that kind of situation has got enough things to worry about, has his or her own situation and I just hate it when people give me advise, pretending that my situation is always similar to standard, and therefore standard advise will work.
How You See Life Leads to How You Manage Money (Most of the Time), Which Some May Not Understand.
The standard blueprint of managing money works for most people but each of our situation is slightly different. Each standard finance widgets should work for people with different situations but our overall plans are always different.
Jon’s life with illnesses probably influence how he thinks about money in non-standard ways:
“So when he got diagnosed this time around, Jon and I immediately jumped into his finances. That’s my thing and he speaks the same language. It was the number one priority. Money and finances take a back seat at a time like this. That stuff really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But it also does matter.
Jon is leaving behind a wife and three children. He needed to ensure they would be taken care of. Jon has always been a saver and planner like me but I was surprised by the margin of safety he created.
As we worked through his financial situation it became abundantly clear he was more than prepared for something like this than I ever could have imagined. There was a large life insurance policy. He was holding far too much cash for a person his age.
Jon why do you have so much cash?
Ben, I knew something like this was going to happen. I’ve known it since I was 12 years old.
That bout with cancer changed his entire perception of risk. He’s been working and saving since age 19 because there was always a voice in the back of his head telling him something like this could happen again.”
“Jon was insanely smart and could have done just about anything he wanted in life. I always said that if I ever appeared on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Jon would be my phone-a-friend. Yet he decided to hold a stable job with the federal government because he knew they had excellent healthcare and retirement benefits. He never wanted anyone else to be on the hook for him if something went wrong.”
Our good and poor life experiences color our perceptions of money. Not all of it is correct. Sometimes we fxxk our money life up because of these perceptions, shaped by these experiences.
And to fix that, we got to reprogram them.
But the worst feeling is to go “you should do this” without understand enough of where that perception comes from. That may lead you to be seen as a less understanding person.
I think in both of these examples, it emphasize my point that wealth management is made up of numerous widgets but to have sound but plan that work for us, we have to construct different setup using sound widgets for each of us.
If you like this stuff and wanna tap into my money brain, do join my Telegram channel.
I share what I come across in:
- individual stock investing
- wealth-building strategies
- portfolio management
- personal finance, financial independence.
I would also share some of the thoughts of wealth advisory, financial planning and the industry that I don’t wanna put out on the blog.
Would probably share some life planning case studies based on the things I hear or came across as well.
Kyith is the Owner and Sole Writer behind Investment Moats. Readers tune in to Investment Moats to learn and build stronger, firmer wealth foundations, how to have a Passive investment strategy, know more about investing in REITs and the nuts and bolts of Active Investing.
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Kyith worked as an IT operations engineer from 2004 to 2019. Currently, he works as a Senior Solutions Specialist in Insurance Start-up Havend. All opinions on Investment Moats are his own and does not represent the views of Providend.
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