December 2021: Better than expected

A second late afternoon traipse through the bitter cold led to a quiet night, waiting for Jane and Dena to return from Portugal.

About ten days ago -- November 29 -- I posted about points, events or decisions in my life that did not work out as well as I had hoped, or expected. Reverse the concept now, and let me try to scratch my head for examples of where things turned out better than expected. Admittedly, this is not as prominent in my mind, as I tend to remember things gone bad much more than I do pleasant surprises.

My retirement was better than expected. I had negotiated a one-year severance package only to have Loyola offer and provide two years of salary to leave June 30, 2019, a gross amount of about $360,000. Lesson: Loyola was desperate to cut payroll, willing to spend dollars off the balance sheet to save annual dollars in the operating budget.

A related "gift" was my salary when I stepped down as dean. I did some research and, using the same method I had used for offering salaries (median salary among private schools in the past year) and arrived at about $110,000, only to have Loyola offer $135,000. Lesson: Loyola is very generous with administrators, and even more generous with former administrators, e.g., Tim Snyder.

By the end of my fifty years of college life, another pleasant surprise is how well I had done in accumulating sufficient retirement funds. Although I was pretty risk averse in putting so much into fixed and guaranteed funds, a more aggressive strategy in my later years, along with a miracle of Trump-led stock value growth, the current amount in y retirement funds is well above where I thought I'd ever be. Further, by delaying my start date, Social Security has been a pleasant surprise, with monthly checks of almost $4,000, plus a less-than-egrigeous premium for Medicare and my Medicare supplement, all of my retirement related accounts have turned out better than expected.

I wish that I could say that my college and graduate choices turned out to be pleasant surprises yet, to be fair, neither Binghamton nor Penn State came close to realizing my expectations, with both falling below what I had hoped for by about the same amount.

Married life has been much better than I could have hoped for, as have been our two daughters. Much, much better than I deserved. As Terry Sawyer acknowledged about our wives, we both married above our status. My concern is not the difference at the start, rather it has been the resilience of the last thirty-one years.

The level of comfort, safety and security we have found in Wisconsin has been better than expected, especially in light of the terrible decline of public life in many American cities, including Baltimore. "Great to be gone" rings true.