The Example
A woman most people would have overlooked bought property one building at a time and died a millionaire
I recently celebrated my fifth anniversary of retirement. Five years. It has flown by so fast that it does not feel like five years, but it has been. I am grateful for the opportunity to have served in one position for 30 years, 10 months, and 16 hours. And I am grateful for the change in my life that made retirement economically possible.
The major change was a financial commitment I made to retirement. I started saving and investing more than twenty years later than I should have. If I had started putting away $500 a month in my mid-twenties, I could have retired five to ten years earlier than I did. But in my twenties I was busy wearing nice clothes and driving nice cars, using credit cards to finance a lifestyle I could not afford. I was not thinking about retirement. I was not reading about investing. I was not even saving for emergencies. I was living paycheck to paycheck. Poor credit and no savings. I was a broke activist.
In my thirties I was trying to climb out of debt in preparation for marriage and family. I had accumulated over $100,000 in consumer and student loan debt, and I knew I could not bring a family into that quagmire. Then my paternal grandmother, Carrie L. Soaries, died, and she left me something that changed the direction of my life. Not the money. The example.
Carrie Soaries had very little education and a husband who had been incapacitated by a stroke. She did not own a car. She did not wear fancy clothes. What she did was buy, sell, and manage real estate. She traveled all over Brooklyn to collect rent from her tenants. No bank would lend her money, so she used her credit union to finance her acquisitions. A woman most people would have overlooked bought property one building at a time and died a millionaire. She left me partial ownership of one of her three houses.
I decided to adopt her strategy. I began eliminating debt, living within my means, paying my bills on time. My income did not change. My lifestyle did. I got married, had children, and the inheritance from my grandmother helped me become a homeowner. But still no retirement plan.
When I entered my forties the word retirement became part of my reality. My compensation package at the church included a small amount for retirement, and the church expected me to invest it. Instead, they gave it to me directly, and I spent it as I received it. I had spent the whole previous decade digging out of debt. Now that I was finally free, I felt like I deserved what that money could afford me. So I kept postponing. I told myself I would start next year. I said that for years.
As I approached my mid-forties I realized that if I did not change, I would have to work until the day I died. I sat down and did the math. I needed a 25-year plan to retire by 70. I also had college tuition in front of me. My sons were nearing high school graduation, and the 529 accounts I had started for them were underfunded too.
So I built a budget that most people would find hard to imagine. I would live on 51% of my income. The other 49% would go to retirement and my sons’ education. Living on half meant no new suits. No new car. No fancy vacations. No fancy restaurants. It was a needs-based budget, and the wants had to wait. The same man who financed a lifestyle on credit in his twenties chose to live on half his income in his forties. That was the turn.
I made some strategic real estate investments that accelerated the plan, the way my grandmother had taught me without ever sitting me down to teach me. And I created a few activities that supplemented my income and later became retirement income.
The 25-year strategy worked. I walked away from a steady income and health benefits into retired life without any worries. I started more than twenty years too late, and it still worked. That is not a testimony to my discipline. It is a testimony to grace, and to a woman with no education and a credit union card who bought buildings in Brooklyn and never lived to see the man her example made possible.
Dr. Soaries, thank you so much for sharing your grandmother with us and your story.