Dad wrote:The savings amount to thousands per year. This year alone, I saved approximately $9500. What that amounts to, is I can go where I want, when I want. I rarely have to ask myself, "Can I afford to do this?" My line of work also is ideal for this kind of life style. I firmly believe that this is a crucial part of life that is severely lacking for most people. Money troubles cause stress, divorce, anxiety, depression and so on. As a victim of the family court system in this country, by all rights I could be so deeply in debt at this point I would never be able to get out. What I do is not only for selfish reasons. I intend to leave my kids one very healthy chunk of change. With the direction this country is headed, they're going to need it.
As far as being physically capable, I've had my spine fused and pinned, my hips are going on me, and my knees are starting to give me grief. My body protests every move I make, all day, every day. I just tell it to suck it up and do what I say. When the day comes that my body no longer listens, I'll deal with it.
Excellent!
I appreciate your forthrightness and candor. I also desperately approve of your attitude toward working with pain and otherwise chronic and debilitating injuries to do a man's day's work without complaint.
I apologize in advance for the following and hope you can forgive me my presumption. Unfortunately, your writings read like an all too familiar American tragedy. One I hope is distant from your reality. In the next paragraph I'll spin an altogether tragic American tale and please tell me it isn't yours.
A young man, either still in high school, just out of high school, or while working out what to do with his life after high school, meets a girl. He falls in love and becomes a husband/father (or the other way around). He learns a trade to support his family and maybe expands the family one or more children more. Things get rough and man and woman are not as in love as they once were. Pressure gets to them and they decide to split up. The courts in this country, being woman/mother oriented requires our not as young man to be burdened with what could be impossible monetary commitments. After a valiant effort to comply with the impossible our more worldly wise man fights bureaucracy WITH bureaucracy and uses the cumulative injuries obtained while performing his strenuous work to declare that they make him unable to do his work without tremendous pain. Our government, being generous and kind hearted, expecting him not to endure such agony just to survive, classifies him disabled and provides for him a recurring stipend to live off of while he is presumably unable to work. This being his only officially recorded source of income, the one bureaucracy tells the other bureaucracy they can no longer expect the monetary commitments it imposed to be rendered as our tired and broken man is no longer fit to meet them. Without that burden our man is able to continue his previous career, gutting out the pain his continued work produces while collecting his unreported reduced pay. The opportunities in his trade are less and the pay less significant, but both still plentiful. They allow our wily man to live a life that is hard, but secure and free from the stresses that once plagued his existence. With a government check and a contractors cash he can go where he wants, when he wants and rarely has to ask, "Can I afford to do this?"
Now I'm NOT saying this is your situation or anything resembling it. But the truth is, it is an all-together too frequent story.
(listen to this report: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits?act=0#play )
Again, I apologize for what might seem like presumptuousness. I'm trying to quell my prejudicial anxiety over your writings. Please take a moment and let us know that this is NOT you. I will believe you if you say it isn't so.
)... Hoping I can get an academic scholarship,
