Better late than never

Sorry to keep you waiting folk, but today has turned out to be a very busy, but good day.  Whereas yesterday was a relatively relaxed opportunity to visit the surroundings and to enjoy some of the sights, today was jammed with not one, not two but three sessions (one of which was the requisite AGM that we hold every year), and then a social (you know the kind that is celebrated when good friends have spent some time together and then must part).

Continuing the theme of Serving Well ... Taking Responsibility, this morning gave us an opportunity to learn from two men who have at least some (and probably a lot more than some) experience in the field of financial planning.  The theory is that we priests spend a lot of time caring for others' well-being but often pay little or no heed to our own, financial health being one of those aspects.

Admitedly, our guests found it somewhat difficult to present the normal run of the mill exposé because we just don't fit the mould, but then again that gave them a challenge, and probably put them in some uncharted water, and that's not always a bad thing.  Retirement planning, including setting goals for ourselves, and planning our investments so that we might just have enough money to make our goals realities ... is just not something that many of us have thought a whole lot about.  However, without at least some thought and perhaps a bit of foresight, we would run the risk of finding ourselves penniless (or pretty close to it) and I for one am not convinced that I'd be too comfortable with that.

In addition to retirement planning (which includes estate planning and thoughts about Last Wills and Testaments, as well as Powers of Attourney and Health Care Directives, not many of us have truly taken the time to understand such tools as Critical Illness insurance, Long Term Care insurance or even insurance against the occurence of Catastrophic events such as serious and life-threatening disease.

All of this is only part of taking responsibility for ourselves and for our own evenualities.

Another aspect is the whole arena of gerentology and aging successfully.  With the help of a local gerentologist, we were invited to consider various strategies for understanding the process of aging, the importance of regular exercise, diet and other factors such as social networks and their impact on the prospects for living life fully, not merely for long-term survival.

This latter session fits hand-in-hand with the session on the Canada Food Guide and healthy eating and dietary practices which we saw earlier in the week.  In a sense, all these facets are connected.  The trick is understanding them, and the role they play and the overall effect they can have on our lives.