"The thing about growing old is that when you wake up with a new pain, you can just about count on it becoming a permanent part of your life!" -- Marjory Pay Hinckley.
Fifteen years ago we took our children to a church tobogganing party at the Smithers golf course. Late in the event I was watching the children sliding down a particularly steep, iced-over hill on the course with a mixture of delight and jealousy. I envied their sheer joy in such a simple, reckless pleasure as diving headlong on a crazy carpet and flying like Superman down the icy slope, hitting the jump at the bottom at maximum speed and crashing down harmlessly below.
Perhaps it was a denial of my encroaching middle-age. My thirty-five year-old brain commanded my overweight banker's body to sit down on my old aluminum sled and launch it with all the thrust I could muster down the slope, targeting the jump below at full velocity.
The laws of physics took over. I would have made Newton proud with my vivid display of gravitational acceleration and flying flab. The air-time was impressive for a man of my size, but, as they say at Nortel, "What goes up must come down." I landed on my tailbone with a sickening, excruciating thud, and drifted several dozen metres beyond. In great pain, but no smarter, I ran back up the hill and repeated the effort with the same painful result.
"It'll heal," I thought. "I'm still young. Give it time." That was fifteen years ago. I've consulted several doctors and even a surgeon since then. (Apparently the surgery is a real pain in the bum.) Even at this moment as I sit and type the pain in my backside reminds me how much I wish I could take back those few moments of foolishness.
It recently occurred to me that there may be wisdom in driving slowly. Many times I have been frustrated when caught in single-lane traffic behind a driver (often wearing a hat) who was meandering along, most assuredly not late for a meeting. Invariably these are "seasoned" drivers. They may be limited to some extent by fading vision, but it's more than frailty which slows them down. They seem to have accumulated a commodity (wisdom) that is only measurable by the decade. It's as if they have found an even slower hand on their clock which awakens them to their diminishing mortality, and therefore they treasure their time like a savory slow-cooked roast.
Slide down enough hills over the years and you eventually knock that chip off your shoulder. I got punched in the face the other night at my hockey game. I might have even deserved it, but there was a time, not so many years ago, when that would have triggered an instinctive response. Instead, I spoke firmly to my opponent, but did not strike back. It's not that I was in any way morally superior. It's just that I had nothing to prove - neither of us did. We were both as likely to hurt ourselves pulling our skates off after the game as trying to pull our weight in a geriatric punch fest.
Age matters when it comes to taking risk. While it's true that equities will nearly always provide better long-term returns than safer fixed-income alternatives, it is also true that senior citizens often can't always afford to plan for the very long term. It is prudent for nearly every portfolio to have a bundle of equities, but the greater the percentage, the higher the expected volatility in value. Bumps in the road jar these old bones. As we accumulate wealth, we also accrue the sorts of aches and pains that remind us what hurts, and we eventually learn the wisdom of stopping at a yellow light.
Indulge me as I carry this analogy just a little further. At some point a really slow driver is actually a road hazard. If retired persons are expected to live as long as thirty years, they may well need at least enough octane (i.e. equities) in their portfolios to allow them to keep up with the traffic of inflation. Parking on the roadway is no option, especially in this age of historically low rates.
I could tweak the analogy, and make it slightly less corny, but my bum hurts. I'm going to bed.
Mark Ryan is an advisor with RBC Wealth Management, Dominion Securities (member CIPF) and can be reached at [email protected].
