Going Solo.
A dozen years ago, Mary Anne realized in her heart of hearts, that the man she had been with for twenty years was just no longer her soulmate. So, she ended the relationship, and retired from a successful career as a marketing executive. She was ready for a long-term change but lost on direction. Until someone gave her a great idea…
Fiduciary Advice.
So, Mary Anne decided to call her financial advisor and ask for help. She talked about her plight, the end of her relationship, her lack of interest in another one, a sense that she was done with your home state, and a vague restlessness that she just couldn’t put her finger on. After listening for a while, her advisor said, “how about just putting your tourist belongings into storage, getting rid of the rest, and just driving around the country to explore new locations?” Mary Anne hadn’t consider this. “But where would I live?” She asked. “In your car,” he replied. “What?!” Mary Anne was shocked. “Are you telling me to be homeless?!” “Yes,” her advisor said. “It’s fun. I’ve done it more than once, as have many of my clients. If done correctly, it can be very freeing, enlightening, and cathartic, with minimal true financial risk.” He sent her home to consider it.
Life on the Road.
When Mary Anne returned two weeks later, she was bouncing off the walls with excitement. She had done it. She put every cherished thing in storage, sold everything else, and had a long list of places she wanted to visit. Yet she had tremendous anxiety about how to get mail, use insurance, credit cards, cell signals, or even the Internet. So, over the next few days, her financial advisor shared all the tools, techniques, services, and strategies he and many of his other clients had used to manage logistics of just such an adventure. Further, he offered to be her lifeline if she ever got into a jam, and gave her his personal number to call him anytime day or night. She left in less than a week.
Three Years Later.
It took Mary and almost three years to find her forever home. She and her advisor worked through several good ideas, albeit false starts, along the way. At the end of the day, she realized she liked to be warm instead of cold, liked to have the bright sun on her face instead of the freezing rain driving down her neck, and wanted to be close to the ocean beaches instead of stuck in a gray farm landscape. When she did finally buy a property, it had fantastic view of inter-coastal waterway. She turned out to have a nose for outstanding locations. As several years later, her financial advisor who employed a very data driven approach to the same problem, and without realizing how close he actually was, bought a property less than a mile away…