Here comes the end of the year. The time for reassessment. This year I’m taking a hard look at my budget. Where have I been spending money and where do I want to spend it in the future. Not really fun, but it might mean a lot to my retirement, the first part of which I spent taking care of my late wife, and then grieving her loss. Not the way either one of us imagined that happening. Of course, to be honest, I never really spent a lot of time in my younger days thinking much about how I’d spend my older days. They just happened.

Now that I’m here, of course, it behooves me to think about such things. Luckily, at my age and trying to be realistic about my life span, I’m dealing with something approaching finite numbers. That will make the math a lot easier, plus I have children who are good with numbers and they’ll offer advice. Teamwork, the family way. I wish I had been better educated about money growing up, but that wasn’t the family background. We were just lower middle class Americans riding the great bubble of post-world War II prosperity, children of the Depression. I figured some things out along the way, obviously, but I could have done better.

Of course, who among us couldn’t have done better? There’s always room for improvement. I mean, I have a lifetime of bad decisions, but that was then, and this is now, and I’ve also made good decisions, and I made those by letting past mistakes inform me. So, here we are, making my way through the tricky landscape of life, doing the best I can and trying to have a little fun along the way, as I embark on my Guadalupian Period that started when I came down off that mountain in November. And I have to confess, things seem promising, and that feels good. But I’ve also learned to take things one day at a time, and therein lies the conundrum of planning and living. And I may have to go back to bed.