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01 February 2011
A Baby Boomer Success Story
Joe and Kathy Ossmann may be the quintessential Baby Boomer couple. In fact, Kathy has the distinction of being one of the first of the Baby Boomers—she was born at 12:15 a.m. on January 1, 1946. The pair met in college at Michigan State University while working together on a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Kathy was in the cast and Joe was the director.
The couple fell in love and married shortly after Kathy graduated from MSU. Not long after, the military took them to Northern California, where they eventually settled and began raising their family. On the West Coast, the couple also started volunteering with a group called Friends Outside, which works with prisoners and their families. Joe eventually turned his work with prisoners into a career with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, taking on a variety of roles, including community resource manager, parole agent and parole administrator. For most of his career, he focused on rehabilitative programs for prisoners, especially those dealing with substance abuse. He was drawn to his profession because he felt it was a way for him to make a difference.
“It was doing things that had the ability to make a difference in people’s lives,” he says. “I know a lot of people now who are living successful lives that went through the programs I helped to create and administer.”
Meanwhile, Kathy initially worked as a music teacher and later shifted to a career helping to manage government software implementation, eventually starting her own consulting business. The projects she was involved with included helping to establish the EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card system for recipients of food stamps and cash assistance.
Though Joe and Kathy both had thriving careers, neither thought much about planning for retirement until the late 1980s, when Joe started working with the state of California and began accumulating a pension. By the early 1990s, with their two sons out of college, the Ossmanns realized it was time to get serious about saving and investing. They began working with a financial planner in Sacramento who set them on the path to retirement saving and investing. When the planner retired, he recommended that the couple work with Smart Investor.
“We’ve been successful, but we got kind of a late start,” says Joe (he and his wife didn’t start saving for retirement until they were in their mid-forties). How did they build an adequate retirement portfolio in such a relatively short time? Saving, saving, saving. The couple kept their expenses under control, even as their income grew, and in the last five to eight years before retirement they were living on one person’s salary and investing the other’s earnings.
That diligence paid off in the end. By 2009, Joe and Kathy had entered full-time retirement. Now that they’re out of the workforce, the couple split their time between their home state of Michigan and Southern California, which allows them to spend more time with their son and his family (including two grandchildren), who live in the LA area. They’ve kept up with the volunteer activities, working with the Alternatives to Violence Project doing experiential workshops on conflict management and problem solving in prisons.
They’ve also made time for some true retirement adventures. Last summer, Joe and a friend biked 4,000 miles across the country, from San Francisco to Portland, Maine. The trip took two months, and Kathy came along as part of the support crew, piloting an RV along the bike route, scouting for campsites and finding organic and locally grown foods to incorporate into their meals. They documented their trip in two blogs: http://joesbikeblog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.kathystravelfeast.blogspot.com/.
The trip wasn’t without difficulties, including a windy ride across North Dakota and a week when Kathy had to leave the caravan in order to help move her father into an assisted living facility. But the journey gave Joe and Kathy a chance to see a side of the country they hadn’t experienced before. They rode through small towns and stopped in Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Great Basin National Park. “When you’re riding a bicycle you see so much more than you do when you’re driving a car,” says Joe. “You can really appreciate the beauty of the landscape.”
“Even the places we thought would be boring and ugly were beautiful,” adds Kathy.
As they settle into their new retirement lifestyle, Joe and Kathy realize that it was the smart investment decisions they made two decades ago that have allowed them to reach their current position. “We couldn’t be doing what we’re doing…if we hadn’t started the investments,” says Joe. “We’re so grateful.”