The Moments That Changed Everything
Everything up to this point in our story, the wedding, Hawaii, all those trips, makes it sound like Jeff and I just decided one day to travel more. We didn't. We were pushed.
Jeff's dad was getting ready to retire when he was diagnosed with cancer. Treatment took everything out of him. He went from working full time to part time, and eventually he couldn't work at all. Retirement wasn't a choice he got to make on his own terms, it was made for him. Not long after, he was diagnosed with dementia, and within a year he moved into a care facility. He's still with us today. But most days, he doesn't reliably recognize his own family anymore. The retirement Jeff had pictured for his dad, the fishing trips, the slow easy years, never happened. And this isn't a story with an ending yet. It's a loss we're still living through, a little more each year.
Bran and Dad
My dad died in 2023. Very suddenly. He'd barely had two years of retirement before he was gone. He and my mom had talked for years about buying an RV and driving to all fifty states, they'd taken a few smaller RV trips here and there, just never the real thing, never the big one. They always figured there'd be time. There wasn't. That dream died with him, and my mom was left to figure out who she is now, without the future they'd built together, and without a new dream of her own yet to replace it.
Two different families. Two completely different kinds of loss. But the lesson landed the same way for both of us: retirement is not guaranteed to wait for you to be ready for it. We'd already learned, back in 2009, that money could disappear overnight. What Jeff's dad and my dad taught us, in two very different ways, is that time can disappear overnight too. And no amount of saving fixes that one. You just have to stop waiting.
That's the real reason this plan exists. Not because travel sounded nice for retirement. Because we watched two people we love lose the future they were counting on, and we are not willing to make that same bet with ours.
