Short version: At 51, the value of my time is too important. My wife and I are gym rats, very healthy and I am not willing to trade this time in my life for more money. My health is not going to be better in 5 years statistically. Not that we have any debilitating illness, but no one beats aging.

The tradeoffs would be too great. I’m my parents only child. While they are as healthy as an 83 and 81 year old can be, time catches up with all of us. I’ve enjoyed the past 5 years (Covid times excepted) being able to see them and spend a couple of weeks with them multiple of times a year.

When the time comes that I do need to pack a bag and see about them for an extended period of time, my wife and I can do that. There is no amount of money that I would trade for that.

It’s the same about travel. I wouldn’t give up our travel now and put it off any longer than we already have because of financial and family obligations (raising my two step sons).

What would more money do for me right now? Allow me to travel more? Allow me to get a bigger house even though we already had the big house in the burbs and sold it for twice what we had it built for and downsized to a 1250 square foot condo in a vacation community in Florida where everyone ride uses their home as vacation home.

Nicer cars? We sold both of our cars when we traveled for a year and bought the cheapest new car that we could stand when we settled down.

A better retirement? By the time I retire, we will have traveled to every place we could possibly want to go and plan to go back and forth between our current home and spend extended periods of time in other cities both domestically and internationally. We are experimenting with that now. But in US time zones.