Many of us are in the phase of winding down and looking back. We are now eating the fruit of the the seeds we sowed from decades past.

As a clueless immigrant kid brought up in poverty in the 70s, life was rough and guidance non-existent. Spent my 20s figuring out how life worked in the U.S. outside of the hood. Girlfriend came from exact same background and we figured this shit out together.

I got a couple college degrees. Had a couple different false-start careers before I found my way. We married, got a house and had a kid before we turned 30. We scrimped and saved; especially when me made the difficult decision 25 years ago for my wife to quit work to raise the kids. Rarely having any family vacations beyond places we could drive. Told both kids that they have to finance college themselves through loans, because we needed to fund our retirements; in return, I promised that they will absolutely never have to financially support us in our old age.

10 years ago, it was looking like my life was on track for a modest, but frugal, retirement if we kept our penny pinching ways of buying only used cars, cooking at home, and fixing what was broken.

But after Covid, my stock market investments shot up dramatically and only very recently let up. I sat my wife down about 3 years ago and explained that we were now considered upper-middle class wealthy, even without equity in our house.

Before y'all think this was all a build up to a humble brag, the other thing that happened a couple years ago is that my wife was hit with a degenertative back condition that puts her in severe chronic pain and unable to walk for more than a few steps at a time. So, she has lost the life that she knew and I am now her care giver. We can't really travel or do much besides go out for a few hours at a time. Yes, she is going through different procedures and treatments, but given that she's nearly 60, it's not likely that she'll ever be close to "normal."

Yeah, so a bunch of fucking ups and downs we never predicted.