It Takes More Than Money To Be Happy

The handy-dandy retirement planner that arrived in the mail, courtesy of a company selling retirement investments, lays it on the line:

Happiness is $1.47 million.

That’s what the company estimates this 52-year-old writer is duty bound to accumulate in the next couple of decades to underwrite his adjusted-for-inflation and ever-rising health care costs in the golden years.

In fact, investing had been on my mind because of a modest sum of money that had unexpectedly come my way.

It was a lot more than I am used to dealing with at one time, though it still left me about $1.465 million short of happiness.

Goaded by the responsibility to do something with my little grubstake, I plunged for a time into the world of 401(k)s, 303-B annuities, money market funds and other investment vehicles.

It was a useful exercise, but, in the end, I decided to use the money for current expenses, to let myself work a little less for the next few years.

The kids are growing even faster than the Dow Jones and will soon be gone from the home. More time with them now is somewhere between Treasury bonds and grain futures as an assured return on investment, but it seemed a pleasant enough risk of my capital.

My investment planning exercise had recalled the time my wife and I took a combined pay cut of $35,000 to move from Baltimore to Smith Island for two years.

It was one of the best investments we ever made - no idyll; just one of the most interesting experiences a family could have.

People then would say they wished they could afford to take a family timeout like that, and some would wonder, did we have independent means?

What we had was no trust fund. We had a Baltimore rowhouse with a tiny mortgage and no new-car payments or other significant debt.

We had more or less kept our finances that way in case an opportunity like the island came up, and we liked our rowhouse neighborhood.

I wouldn’t even suggest the way my family handled things is a model all should emulate, but I’d venture most of us could stand to think more broadly about investments.

You don’t just invest money, you invest time and energy. There is financial capital, but also the capital that is your life.

Certainly, one ought to put aside for retirement more than Social Security. But a person should consult with more than financial planners.

I take my cue from something the great conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote decades ago in a lament about overzealous parks planners:

“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”

In other words, learn to better appreciate what is already around you; fully love the world you have, rather than longing too much to have everything in the world.

I already have invested in not one, but many million-dollar views. There is one place where every June, eaglets fledge and fragrant lilies bloom, cream and pink and golden across hundreds of acres, their green leaves and wine-red stems splendidly contrasting with the dark, tea-colored waters.

Another place I enjoy strolling on a hot afternoon is down a corridor nearly a half-mile long, overarched its full length by huge Osage oranges.

Emerging from this great, green tunnel at twilight, one can watch fireflies across an adjacent sweep of marsh compete adequately with the stars.

In another spot, in the cove of a river, I’ve invested whole days doing nothing. Nothing except watching the light and the colors move from sunrise through sunset, from first light to twilight, from moonrise to moonset.

Nothing much happens there, except storms approaching and departing, the wind and sun texturing the water a thousand different ways, and swans and geese visiting, carp rolling.

It is a pretty boring place, except tides ebb and flood there, as do the seasons. Warblers migrate to and from South America.

Ospreys build nests and perform half-mile-high courtship dances and dive for eels, which they drop as a great black-backed gull bullies them.

And loons call hauntingly as they fish; and a great blue heron, motionless for three solid hours, uncoils like spring steel and spears a silken, glistening soft-shell crab; and an occasional horseshoe crab couple heaves up from the waters to spawn on the shore in the moonlight, as their kind have done for more than 300 million springtimes.

All of the above, and much, much more I own already, as do you. These places are public lands and legally protected tidal marshes. They were not won without public open space bonds and years of environmental battles - excellent investments that most of all benefit those prudent enough to have become rich in time.

I am bullish on the opportunities for natural investment. I have friends reaping lifetime income from maintaining a green corridor along an urban stream.

It may never harbor a lot of fish life, but it threads through and sustains a whole community.

I confess I did put a bit of my grubstake into an IRA, against times when it’s too cold or rainy for fireflies. And I sent a bit off to some environmental groups (call this investment insurance); also I bought a mighty fine canoe, as well as “purchasing” time off to use it.

As any good investment counselor ought to tell you, the real secret to accumulating wealth is a balanced portfolio.

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