Early one morning back in March, just after the snow started melting, I was out walking my dog when I slipped on a patch of ice and fell awkwardly, spraining my left ankle pretty badly, and suffering a small fracture at the bottom of my fibula.
I was in a walking boot for several weeks and now I’m working at getting the strength back in the ankle with the help of my physiotherapist.
Thankfully it didn’t affect a family trip to Toronto in early April which had been planned long before the unfortunate accident. We went out to visit our oldest daughter Ella, who is at the University of Waterloo.
We took in the CN Tower, a Raptors/Lakers NBA basketball game, as well as our family’s favourite musical, Les Miserables.
We had a lot of fun together, and thankfully “one-legged Dad” didn’t hold things up too badly!
The “three-legged stool” was used for years as a financial term to describe a stable retirement.
Do you know why a three-legged stool is so sturdy?
Here’s a quick mathematical explanation: if you hold a cane in your hand, you can move it any way you want. It has no constraints and can move in all three dimensions.
If you put one end on the ground, you can move the cane around in a variety of ways, but only in two dimensions. The bottom of the cane is rooted to the ground.
If you connect the tops of two canes together and put their bottoms on the ground, they can only move along one straight arc back and forth. They have one single dimension of movement.
Finally, if you attach the third cane, the tops don’t move at all – they move in zero dimensions. This is what happens with a three-legged stool.
The three legs of a stable retirement used to be Social Security, employee pensions, and savings.
Today, the one leg that you can totally rely on is YOU. Your personal savings.
Your one leg must support you through retirement to ensure that you live the kind of retirement you want… and you deserve.
Some are heading for a one-legged disaster because they are relying on the other two legs.
Have you tested your one leg lately?
Now is always the best time to test your one leg to be sure it is stable and secure! Thankfully I still had one good leg to rely on in Toronto!
When a man retires, his wife gets twice the husband but only half the income.
— Chi Chi Rodriguez
