Oh How Time Flies
By Paul Morrone, CFP®, CPA/PFS, MSA
The old saying goes, ‘time flies when you’re having fun.’ I recently realized that I must be having a ball because my 10-year college reunion came and went in the blink of an eye. It’s a strange phenomenon, but some days I feel like it was just yesterday that I was roaming the Bentley campus, armed with books, a laptop and likely a slight headache from the night before. Other days, it feels like a lifetime ago. The carefree college life was a period I was happy to have experienced but even happier to have left in the past.
I’m not sure when I made the transition from recent grad to full blow adult (some may argue I haven’t even made it there yet!), but my guess it was somewhere between the second and third year after graduation. During that time, I still had the youthful stamina to manage happy hours, late nights and 12-15 hour working days, all while not feeling burnt out. My weekends were the just as busy, if not busier, than my work-week schedule, and there really wasn’t much downtime. As my mother said, I was burning the candle at both ends.
It also was the first time in my life I had ‘real’ money, not summer job or internship money, but a salary. In retrospect, maybe I was being naive, but the reality was that I felt I was entitled to spend my hard-earned money. Work hard, play hard, right? Maybe that was the millennial in me, but at the time it seemed like really the only option. I was far from rolling in the dough, but the fact that I lived at home kept my housing costs to zero, so I had some spare change to have fun with. This meant I had discretionary income, and what made it even better was that my friends did, too! This meant lots of travel, a new car and plenty of dinners out, all without worrying that I would overdraw my checking account. Times were good.
While my schedule now looks a lot different, that certainly doesn’t mean I’m bored. Work is always a constant, which is a good thing, and Jill and I still manage to have a very active social calendar. We may not be traveling as much, going out during the week or staying out late on weekends, but with an 11-month old at home there really isn’t any time for that. Kyle has changed our life forever and I’ve noticed that almost instantly our priorities changed overnight. Now, I’m fortunate to get a round of golf in every once and a while, much to the detriment of my handicap, and I've learned to accept that. The funny thing is though, these past 11 months have been, by far, the quickest of my life. If the saying ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ is really true, maybe I’m enjoying this ‘new normal’ way more than I thought.
