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What Is Financial Intelligence?, When I was five years old, I was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. As I understand it, I had a serious infection in my ears, a complication from chicken pox. Althouth it was a frighening experience, I have a cherished memory of my dad, my younger brother, and my two sisters standing on the lawn outside the hospital window waving to me as I lay in bed recovering. My mom was not there. She was at home, bedridden, struggling with a weak heart.
Within a year, my younger brother was taken to the hospital after falling from a ledge in the garage and landing on his head. My younger sister was next. She needed an operation on her knee. And the youngest, my sister Beth, a newborn baby, had a servere skin disorder that continually baffled the doctors.
It was a tough year for my dad, and he was the only one out of six not to succumb to a medical challenge. The good news is that we all recovered and lived healthy lives. The bad news was the medical bills that kept coming. My father may not have become ill that year, but he did contract a crippling malady - overwhelming medical debt.
At the time, my dad was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. He was brilliant in school, receiving his bachelor's degree in just two years, and had dreams of one day becoming a college professor. Now with a family of six, a mortgage, and high medical bills to pay, he let go of his dream and took a job as an assistant superintendent of schools in the little town of Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Just so he could afford to move our family from one island to another he had to get a loan from his own father. It was a tough time for him and for our family.
Although he did achieve tremendous professional success and was finally awarded his doctorate degree, I suspect not realizing his dream of becoming a college professor haunteed my father until his dying days. He often said, "When you kids are out of the house, I'm going back to school and doing what I love - teaching."
Instead of teach, however, he eventually became the superintendent of education for the state of Hawaii, an administrative post, and then ran for lieutenant governor and lost. At the age of fifty, he was suddenly unemployed. Soon after the election, my mom suddenly died at the age of forty-eight due to her weak heart. My father never recovered from that loss.
Once again, money problems piled up. Without a job, he decided to withdraw his retirement savings, and invested in a national ice-cream franchise. He lost all his money.
As he grew older my father felt he was left behind by his peers; his life's career was over. Without his job as the head of education, his identity was gone. He grew angrier at his rich classmates who had gone into business, rather than education as he did. Lashing out, he often said, "I dedicated my life to educating the children of Hawaii, and what do I get? Nothing. My fat-cat classmates get richer, and what do I get? Nothing."
I will never know why he did not go back to the university to teach. I believe it was because he was trying very hard to become rich quickly and to make up for lost time. He wound up chasing flakey deals and hanging out with fast-talking conmen. none of his get-rich-quick ventures succeeded.
If not for a few odds jobs and Social Security, he might have had to move in with one of the kids. A few months before he died of cancer at the age of seventy-two, my father pulled me close to his bedside and apologized for not having much to leave his children. Holding his hand, I put my head on his hand and we cried together.
