ONCE IT LOOKED SAFE to travel again, I didn’t waste any time. I jumped on a plane and spent three weeks in the Carolinas. It was a great vacation. Staying in an Airbnb on Hilton Head Island gave me a much-needed chance to recharge while enjoying the beach. Renting a place on Lake Norman, the largest man-made lake in North Carolina, gave me quality time with two of my grandchildren. It was like breathing freedom again after the long COVID-19 lockdown. That said, the trip wasn’t cheap. Is it wise to spend so much on travel? Imagine 70-year-old twins, Samuel and Joseph, sharing a cup of coffee and talking about their different life journeys. Samuel traveled the world. When he wasn’t working for the Peace Corps, he was vacationing in a new country. Meanwhile, Joseph rarely left the county where he was born, instead focusing on building his business. Samuel doesn’t have much of a net worth, but he believes he’s lived a rich life. He can entertain others for hours with his travel stories, although he isn’t sure if his money will last into old age. Finances aside, he pities his twin for leading a sheltered life. What about Joseph? He’s a prominent member of his community and is worth several million dollars. He is proud of the mark he’s made locally and enjoys his financial security. He wouldn’t change a thing about his life because of the legacy he’s built. He can’t understand how Samuel could end up at 70 years old without financial security. Who lived “the good life?” I’ve known a lot of Josephs, who are rich financially but impoverished by their narrow understanding of the world. And I’ve known some Samuels, who have great stories to tell but worry about their lack of financial preparation for old age. The middle road is the path many of us take. We budget as generously as possible for travel but also insist on saving 10% to 15% of our income for retirement. That seems like a good compromise. But what happens in years when money is tight? I was always wired to save, so travel was an easy budget item to cut. I was more of a Joseph than a Samuel. But that changed after reading Mark Twain. Here’s one of his insights: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” A trip I took to South Africa opened my eyes to what Twain meant. I saw firsthand what life was like in an orphanage full of kids whose parents had died of AIDS. It gave me new compassion. Similarly, moving to Montana at age 50 opened me up to a whole new way of thinking about conservation of our resources. You just won’t get that perspective in the cornfields of Illinois. Even spending six months in an active retirement community in Tucson, Arizona, provided keen insight into the needs of older folks. Twain was right. Travel changes us. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] Travel can also create gratitude. How many times have you heard others say they enjoyed their international travels, but it made them appreciate living in America, with our freedom and prosperity? If I want to be thankful for my life in Montana, all I need to do is leave for several weeks. While I loved my recent East Coast experience, I hated driving down I-95, navigating the crazy traffic and road rage drivers. Give me Montana—where we have more cows than people. But while I have come to appreciate the benefits of travel, I also know failing to plan for retirement can end in misery. How do we balance those goals? Here are three suggestions for travel in different seasons of life. First, remember that the young are different from you and me: They can travel on a shoestring. My daughter educated me on "couch surfing." Basically, you download an app and have access to free housing. The father in me says, “That’s dangerous.” But so was hitchhiking when I was her age. A safer alternative: Help our kids travel for a gap year before or after college. I didn’t figure this one out until my last child was that age. But it was probably the best year of her life, in part because she got to experience the developing world. I’ve come to believe it’s a great idea to travel before we get tied down by work and family responsibilities. Second, if our career is in full swing, we shouldn’t just use our paid time-off for travel. Also consider getting a job that’ll take you to different parts of the country or the world. Military service has provided this alternative for years. Some civilian jobs also offer this perk. If a job with travel isn’t available and you’re budget constrained, look into going abroad with a religious or nonprofit mission. These trips are often considered charitable work and folks pay for them by raising money. The trips can be short term and fit in with paid time-off. In many cases, they’re more rewarding than staying at a five-star resort. Third, as we enter the golden age of retirement, take advantage of the opportunity to travel before health issues prevent it. As we age, there’s a risk we’ll get set in our ways. Travel can be a great antidote—helping us to keep an open mind to new ideas and the way that others live. Joe Kesler is the author of Smart Money with Purpose and the founder of a website with the same name, which is where a version of this article first appeared. He spent 40 years in community banking, assisting small businesses and consumers. Joe served as chief executive of banks in Illinois and Montana. He currently lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, spending his time writing on personal finance, serving on two bank boards and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Check out Joe's previous articles. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

“IT WAS THE MOST stressful time of my career, but also the most rewarding.” I heard that comment, as well as variations on it, from many bankers over the past few months as they talked about PPP, or Paycheck Protection Program, the federal loan program launched to help ease the financial distress caused by the pandemic. PPP has been criticized because not all the money has ended up with companies it was intended to help. Still, it saved millions of small businesses from going under. One young lender told me that, while dealing with PPP loan applications, she worked past midnight for weeks, had to juggle childcare and struggled to understand the program because of a lack of clear guidance, all while trying to reassure desperate small business owners that she’d secure the funding they needed to save their livelihood. And yet, despite the pressure, she wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything, because she knew she made a huge difference to her community. Bankers are like many professionals. They can grow disillusioned. We enter a profession with noble goals to provide affordable housing or bring new jobs to our community, but our idealistic thinking gets muddied by the paperwork, the sales goals and the office politics, and eventually we burn out. The FIRE—financial independence, retire early—movement, which encourages saving voraciously so we can retire as early as possible, at least partly reflects this disillusionment. But from what I’ve observed, the COVID-19 pandemic and PPP rollout has cut through the banking world’s frequent frustrations to remind even veterans like me of how important we are to our community. To be sure, not everybody has found the past year professionally rewarding. I know a doctor who actively discourages aspiring medical students from joining the profession, because he hates the red tape and the constant haggling with insurance companies. Struggling to see the silver lining in the difficulties of the past year? Here are five suggestions to leverage 2020 into something good: My daughter put my wife and me through an exercise recently. “What do you want?” she asked us. After I answered, she said, “What do you want, Dad?” After I answered again, she asked me the same question eight more times. Eventually, I began to catch on, realizing that this was an exercise designed to get me to think deeply about what was buried in my psyche. As I ponder goals for 2021, I’m going to be asking myself and my wife that simple question. Talk to your financial advisor about what you want and evaluate whether your current finances will get you there. While travel may not be the most noble pursuit or life purpose, it’s high on my list of goals for 2021. Now is a great time to examine your investment buckets to make sure you have sufficient funds and you’re planning appropriately, so you can achieve what you want. Get your affairs in order. There’s nothing like a pandemic to remind us of our mortality. My to-do list for 2021 includes contacting my lawyer to make a few changes to our estate plan. I also want to make a list of where we keep important documents and give it to one of our children. We can’t control our money from the grave—at least not for long—but we can make intelligent choices while we’re alive, so where our money goes is aligned with our goals and values. Reevaluate charitable giving. COVID-19 has clearly had an uneven impact around the world. Other than staying at home, many of us haven’t suffered. But lower-income service workers in the U.S. have suffered greatly, as have workers in developing countries around the world. I’m reevaluating our giving to see if our charitable dollars could have greater impact in 2021. Find ways to thank the essential workers in your life for what they’ve done. Gratitude is a great exercise. I sat down at Thanksgiving and wrote numerous notes of appreciation to folks who have shown great leadership or served others. It’s a good exercise for all of us—and it could prompt you not just to change your charitable donations, but also to rethink how you use your money more generally. Joe Kesler is the author of Smart Money with Purpose and the founder of a website with the same name, which is where a version of this article first appeared. He spent 40 years in community banking, assisting small businesses and consumers. Joe served as chief executive of banks in Illinois and Montana. He currently lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, spending his time writing on personal finance, serving on two bank boards and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Joe's previous articles include About Tomorrow, Prepare for Pain and Doing Good. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

I’VE HAD SOME dreadful jobs in my life. I spent one summer putting metal plates under a huge press for eight hours a day. Once the plates were in the right position, I’d push some buttons that would cause the press to crash down and shape the metal into something useful. The goal was to work fast because that meant more pay. Some of the workers disabled the safety features so they could produce more widgets and earn extra money. It was a joyful day when I walked out of that factory for the last time with all 10 fingers still attached. Factory jobs made me appreciate landing a job in finance. The industry pays above-average wages, it isn’t back-breaking work and you get to use your brain to find creative solutions for customers. But even a cushy finance career came with some curses. Granted, they weren’t physical curses, but more mental in nature. For one thing, everyone in finance is focused on the money. As a result, I think there are more fights over salaries and bonuses than in other industries. Those experiences partly explain why I find retirement so liberating. And I’m hardly alone. In retirement, many of us can, for the first time, untether the value of our work from the paycheck it generates. The habit of thinking about work as something we do to make money is deeply ingrained. We can scarcely imagine what a Copernican revolution it is to evaluate work without considering the dollars involved. Are you enjoying financial freedom or hoping to get there one day? Here are four suggestions to help you rethink the relationship between work and money. First, take the idea that work is what we need to do to live, and turn it on its head. The goal is to live to work, not work to live. In its optimal form, work isn’t drudgery, but a delight in and of itself. A retired banker I know has restored numerous old Corvettes since leaving his job. He’s now considered a world-class restorer. He doesn’t do it for the money, but because of his love of the craft. In the first half of life, when we get an idea at work, we’d ask, “Will it sell?” In retirement, we might instead ask, “Is it good?” Rather than considering what kind of profit our work can produce, we’re free to focus on whether it will challenge our spirits. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] Second, in retirement, work is no longer something we want to get done as quickly as possible. In our careers, most of us looked forward to Fridays and a weekend of leisure. By contrast, in retirement, our leisure is often found in work. I never had much time while running banks to pursue my interest in writing. Today, I write because I have more free time, but also because it’s work that I love. I have a good friend who pursued drag racing in his spare time while he was managing a company. Now that he’s sold his company, he is “working” more on his drag racing—and finding success. But it doesn’t feel like work. He doesn’t hurry to finish working on his cars so he can go fishing. Third, in retirement, there’s no longer any need to strive for the applause of others or for monetary reward. Instead, we can focus on the satisfaction that comes from looking at the results of our labor. This is a reason many retirees find volunteering so fulfilling. They see the needs of their community met because of their unpaid efforts. Similarly, it’s no surprise that many retirement communities have a woodworking shop for residents. There’s a feeling of pride in craftsmanship that comes with spending hours with chisel and lathe. Fourth, once retired, we’re able to devote ourselves to work that fits our nature. Some are gifted creatively, while others shine when it comes to technology or interpersonal relations. Retirement provides the time to eliminate the work for which we have no particular skill, and instead devote ourselves to work that matches our personality and gifts. To be sure, some people may be “tap dancing to work” every day like Warren Buffett, who is still a CEO at age 91. For those lucky ones, there’s no reason to change. But for those of us who left our careers with sufficient wealth and have other interests, this season of life can be especially fulfilling, as we rediscover the joys of work. Joe Kesler is the author of Smart Money with Purpose and the founder of a website with the same name, which is where a version of this article first appeared. He spent 40 years in community banking, assisting small businesses and consumers. Joe served as chief executive of banks in Illinois and Montana. He currently lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, spending his time writing on personal finance, serving on two bank boards and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Check out Joe's previous articles. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

GROWING UP, I WAS heavily influenced by the ideals of the Protestant work ethic. Working hard and finding career success provided great satisfaction, so I assumed I’d handle the second half of my life in the same way as the first. This wasn’t a great plan. I was around age 50 when I came across the writings of psychiatrist Carl Jung and his discussion of the two halves of life. For me, the timing couldn’t have been better. Jung saw that, in the second half of life, it’s no longer enough to find meaning in success. He knew, as we age, we find purpose in different ways than in life’s first half. Jung summed it up poetically: “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.” Jung opened my eyes to seeing our 50s to our 80s as a season of life when we redefine ourselves. We don’t need to hang onto our aspirations from the first half of life. What happens when we ignore this insight into aging, and try to do the same things in the second half of life that we did in the first half? I suspect this is a root cause of career burnout. Career success doesn’t motivate us in our 50s like it did in our 30s. For most of us, the second half is a time to find significance elsewhere. Using Jung’s insights into aging, here are three ideas on managing the two halves of life. 1. Seek future freedom. There’s a lot of advice given to young people to follow their heart, regardless of money. I wouldn’t argue with that if you felt called to be a missionary in a remote part of the world. Those that have that type of clarity of purpose early in life are fortunate. But many of us had no idea in our 20s what we wanted to do for the next 30 years. Does anyone imagine today’s 20-somethings have a better handle on that same question? My contention: Without a clear-cut mission in life, why not follow the money when you’re young? I think I found almost everything interesting in my 20s. I loved rock music and could have become a low-paid roadie. But I also found finance interesting in my 20s. As a banker, I could do interesting work and help people, while also making money and saving for the future. It worked well for me. The goal is to move toward financial independence in the first half of life. It’s wonderful to have resources set aside so we have the freedom to reinvent ourselves with a more mature sense of purpose. My point: Unless you have a distinct calling, why not save as much money as you can early in life by pursuing a fulfilling but decently paid career? That way, as you reach your 50s and beyond, you’ll have some capital built up to fund a new path if you find you’re no longer engaged in your career. 2. Find purpose. Even as we age and lose interest in our career, we may still lack focus about a new purpose. Fortunately, there are some exercises we can do to help us. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] George Kinder wrote the book The Seven Stages of Money Maturity and trains financial advisors to help clients figure out what they want to do with their life. He suggests three excellent questions to help discover what’s truly important to each of us. I find them great conversation starters for those struggling to find their life’s purpose. Here are paraphrased versions of the three questions: If you just won $10 million, how would you change your life? If you found out you have just five years to live, but you’re in good health, what would you do? If you’re told today that you have only 24 hours to live, what regrets would you have about your life? Ask a spouse or close friend to spend a little time talking through these types of questions. As you discover hidden aspirations, you might try some of them out. And if you discover these ideas are something you want to pursue, it may open the pathway to a new direction in life. 3. Give back. Consider what you can pass on to others. There’s a big need for mentors in our society. No one is better suited than those of us with some experience and wisdom to share from our life’s first half. Encore.org is an organization that has recognized that aging is an opportunity for us to redefine who we are as we age. Mentorship is one of those opportunities. Encore.org can assist by connecting those over age 50 with younger folks. Alternatively, if you’re a grandparent, uncle or aunt, you probably don’t need any help finding a mentee. Religious traditions capture this same insight. We see older men and women in the church transitioning from their first calling to teaching the community’s younger members. These opportunities continue to exist in churches, as well as in many nonprofits. For those of us still connected to our first-half profession, running development programs can be one of the most rewarding times of our career. I just got a “thank you” note from a single mom who graduated with an accounting degree because of the goals she set in a program I led. It’s one thing to succeed ourselves. But it’s hugely gratifying to play some small part in the success of others. Joe Kesler is the author of Smart Money with Purpose and the founder of a website with the same name, which is where a version of this article first appeared. He spent 40 years in community banking, assisting small businesses and consumers. Joe served as chief executive of banks in Illinois and Montana. He currently lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, spending his time writing on personal finance, serving on two bank boards and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Check out Joe's previous articles. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

COVID-19 WILL SOON, I hope, be in the rearview mirror. But as Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Here are five lessons I’m taking away from the pandemic: 1. Government spending. Some folks tell me they’re claiming Social Security retirement benefits as soon as they’re eligible because the system’s trust fund will be depleted within the next decade or so, at which point benefits could get cut. Claiming Social Security early could either be a really bad decision, because benefits go up some 8% for each year you delay, or it could be a really smart move if the politicians let the system run out of money. My reaction: If there’s one certainty that came out of 2020, it’s that politicians on both sides of the aisle excel at throwing money at people. After watching stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and Paycheck Protection Program loans flow into the economy, does anyone believe that politicians would let our most popular entitlement program run out of money? I think there’s little risk that politicians will get religion on deficits and cut Social Security—and we shouldn’t let that possibility impact one of our most important retirement decisions. You may have good reasons to take Social Security early, but I don’t think fear of possible benefit cuts should be a deciding factor. 2. Economic fragility. Remember how, just a few short months ago, we had big shortages of everything from hand sanitizer to swabs to toilet paper? My wife and I ordered some furniture last year that took more than four months to get delivered due to disruptions in the supply chain. The furniture would normally have been shipped in a week. I have friends who have been waiting months for a refrigerator. The disruptions are very real for many products. I used to read books about the “coming depression.” I’ve discounted most of the advice, such as suggestions to load up on gold. But I’ve held onto the idea that we should have several weeks of food and essentials stored up. The pandemic has reinforced that belief. Some of the cybersecurity training I’ve received has also been a wakeup call. The risk of bad actors hacking into our electrical grid and other infrastructure is unnerving. Knowing how disruptive a cyberwar could be to our economy strikes me as another reason to stockpile a few weeks of essential supplies. 3. Diversification’s benefits. The global stock market crash started on Feb. 20 last year. It was rapid and severe, but short lived. In fact, the S&P 500 went on to return more than 16%, including dividends, in 2020—an astonishing performance considering what the economy went through. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] But for some individual stocks, the bear market continues. If you own cruise lines, airlines or hospitality stocks, you’re probably still underwater compared to where you started 2020. It isn’t a sin to own individual stocks and many do well with that strategy. But for those of us who prefer to lower risk through broad diversification, 2020 provided further validation. 4. Unnecessary spending. Last year, spending on travel, eating out, entertainment and gasoline all hit rock-bottom levels in the Kesler household. Yes, our spending on books and streaming services went up, but not nearly as much as we saved in other areas. It was eye-opening to see just how much the family budget could be cut. I bet you found your expenses also fell sharply. As the pandemic eases, this is a great time to consider what things we really missed over the past year and are anxious to spend money on again. But it’s also a chance to ponder what expenses proved to be unimportant—and perhaps should be permanently cut from our budget. 5. Simple pleasures. Last year provided more opportunities than normal to enjoy the simple pleasure of exploring the mountains with my wife—and without a mask. After sitting through a day of Zoom meetings, nothing refreshes me more than being out in nature. It was encouraging to see the trailheads much busier than I’ve ever seen them. Families took advantage of a safe and healthy way to reconnect with nature. I know not every location has a Yellowstone National Park nearby. Still, even cities provide green space and the chance to get outside. I hope folks will remember how great it’s been to escape into nature over the past year—and that the increase in outdoor recreation will continue long after the lockdown is over. Joe Kesler is the author of Smart Money with Purpose and the founder of a website with the same name, which is where a version of this article first appeared. He spent 40 years in community banking, assisting small businesses and consumers. Joe served as chief executive of banks in Illinois and Montana. He currently lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, spending his time writing on personal finance, serving on two bank boards and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Check out Joe's previous articles. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

DANIEL SUELO IS ONE of the most interesting characters I’ve ever met. At dinner with him and some friends almost a decade ago, I spent the evening trying to understand his view of money—or, to be more accurate, his refusal to believe in money at all. Suelo was in Montana to talk about a book that had been written about him, The Man Who Quit Money. As the title implies, Suelo—a well-educated and articulate man—made a decision in 2000 to stop using money. At the time I met him, he had lived off the land, foraged for food in dumpsters and managed to survive without using money for a dozen years. When he wasn’t traveling, he solved his need for housing by living in a cave in Utah. The evening got even more interesting when we went with Suelo to a large, standing room-only event. He was treated as an almost god-like figure by the crowd, who seemed mesmerized by a man who had seemingly found a way to say “no” to the most dominating influence in our culture. I was reminded of the scene in Forrest Gump when a crowd began running with Gump because he appeared to have figured out the secret to life. Suelo seemed to exude the peace and serenity that others craved. The crowd was clearly captivated by the dream of an apparently happy life with no need to strive for money. Like Suelo, Chuck Feeney has also inspired many to think unconventionally about money. And like Suelo, Feeney is also drawn to spartan living. That, however, is where the similarities end. As profiled in Forbes recently, Feeney amassed billions through Duty Free Shoppers, the successful business he co-founded. Feeney pledged to give away almost his entire $8 billion net worth before he died. He just achieved his goal. According to Forbes, Feeney gave his money away over the last four decades to charities, universities and foundations. He has nothing left now and he couldn’t be happier. While most of Feeney’s gifts were anonymous, his story is now out. He’s become the inspiration for a movement among billionaires to give away most of their wealth during their lifetime. I think the intense interest in Suelo and Feeney suggests that something’s awry with our relationship with money. Why is it so fascinating to hear about one guy who quits using money and another who makes $8 billion, only to give it away? When our culture teaches that happiness can be achieved through money, it’s jarring when we see others headed in the opposite direction. As a bank executive, I worked with a lot of marketing people over the years. One of the first lessons I learned from the marketers: It’s boring and ineffective to sell the features of a product. Instead, you sell the dream. In other words, don’t emphasize the low interest rate on a car loan. Instead, encourage customers to see the bank as helping them become who they were meant to be by financing that Tesla. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] Professional marketers sell things by connecting them to happiness, life satisfaction, fulfillment and peace. The pitch is that we can become self-actualized only if we buy the products that will get us there. The logical conclusion: We need to pursue money to achieve a fulfilling life. While some products and experiences do deliver short-term happiness, and that’s a good thing, they don’t have the ability to bring long-term purpose. Our relationship with money turns dysfunctional when we demand something of money that it can’t deliver. One unfortunate casualty: With the rise of consumerism and marketing after the Second World War, charitable giving began to decline. Indeed, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave an insightful Harvard commencement speech in 1978 in which he noted that the West was exchanging the pursuit of happiness through virtue for the pursuit of happiness through material goods. I was on a radio show recently and the interviewer asked, “What’s the purpose of money?” I suggested that its highest and best use is as “a way to bless others.” This definition needs to be more nuanced. For example, one way for entrepreneurs to bless their employees is to reinvest profits in the business, so they’re able to give raises and create new jobs. The definition also shouldn’t exclude caring for ourselves, now and in the future. If we don’t plan for retirement, we may end up being a burden to our children. I firmly believe helping others with our money can be a spiritual antidote to today’s endless consumerism. But how? If you don’t have $8 billion to give away, here are five ideas: Tip generously. In Montana, hair salons were forced to shut down for several months due to COVID-19. When I finally visited my barber, I left him a $100 tip. I think he was overwhelmed, but I’m sure I got a lot more joy from the tip than he did. In this pandemic era, countless restaurants have laid off employees. As we have the opportunity to go out again, consider blessing your barber, hairdresser, waiter or waitress with an above-average tip. Revisit your will. Most of us can’t give away all our money in this life because we need it to live on. When our estate is disbursed, however, we can focus not just on our family, but also on the charities we want to support. Look at your donation budget. A friend had been giving away 10% of his income, but he decided to up that to 20%. That inspired me to look at my own budget. If you’re currently donating 2% of your income, perhaps a boost to 3% is a way to bless a local charity. Find an international charity that will stretch your thinking beyond local needs. COVID-19 has been devastating for developing countries. This is a great time to make a difference in another part of the world. When I searched for what happened to Suelo, I came across a Wikipedia update that said he moved back to his hometown in 2016 and began using money again, because he was taking care of his mother who was in her 90s. I have many friends who are sandwiched between taking care of their aging parents and helping their kids with college. It isn’t a blessing to get to old age and ask our children to care for us, because we failed to plan for long-term care. Even as we seek to help others, we should also look after our future self. Joe Kesler is the author of Smart Money with Purpose and the founder of a website with the same name, which is where a version of this article first appeared. He spent 40 years in community banking, assisting small businesses and consumers. Joe served as chief executive of banks in Illinois and Montana. He currently lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, spending his time writing on personal finance, serving on two bank boards and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Joe's previous articles were True Wealth and Life as a Loan Shark. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]