It happens one day...

You realize you are planning for a time to come. You are thinking not of the next 5 years but for 50 years from now. You are envisioning gray hair and wrinkles. You are wondering how your body will degrade.. You wonder what you will do if you retire. You wonder if someone will be looking at you and thinking it's time you went out to pasture.

Then, you think about the others around you. How will time treat them? Can you deal with the changes that are coming?

Somewhere along the way you realize that the history books won't remember you... and that's okay. The history books will remember very few. CEOs, celebrities, athletes, Medal of Honor winners, senators, will all be lost to the annals. There will be a record of them, but only a few people will be remembered.

But the people who built our country were also not listed. The men and women that died on battlefields will not be noted. I have no more right than they.

So why do it. If you will leave no mark, why continue? The answer is simple. You are just some mammal on some rock in some obscure corner of space. Live like it. There is no more grandiose goal than spending your existence happy. The only time scale to worry about is 75 to 100 years. Decide how you want to spend them. The decisions you make should be based only on that timeframe.

We spend so much time worrying about things without considering why they are even important.

Just think for a second. There are a number of reasons to buy a house. If your reason is building equity, ask why. What are you going to do with the equity? Reverse mortgage, rent it out and move to Florida, leave it to your children? Do you simply want to live rent free after you retire?

What about simply owning property? Being able to do whatever you want with it... Knowing your rent won't go up for 30 years....

No one I know was ever "left" anything. It was just not the way they and their parents lived. They all died pretty much broke. There's nothing wrong with that. It is not the job of the elders to provide for the happiness of the younger, but the other way around.

Basically, stop thinking about money in and of itself and start considering its use. What opportunities does it give you? If the only opportunity you can think of is making more money, stop whatever you are doing. Look at your life right now. Think about what you want out of it. Think about what will make you happy for the next 50 years. Go out and do it.