I was recently meeting with some clients who have had a lot of medical procedures recently. They were sharing with me how they have had a wonderful experience with their health care providers. The husband had recently had knee replacement surgery and hip replacement surgery. He pointed out the health system they belong to has specialists for each of these surgeries. The surgeon who does knee surgery only operates on knees. The surgeon who operates on hips only operates on hips. My clients pointed out  this is all these folks do all day and because of that specialization, they are very good at what they do. They said we live in the age of specialization. It is so true.

At our firm we only see people who are just about to retire or people who are already retired. Because of this we hear the same questions and concerns over and over again. As a result everything we do is designed to address the issues people face as they prepare to retire and transition through retirement. At Parker Financial, we are not general practitioners. This focused area of work allows us to see what others may not see. We are not necessarily smarter than others, we are just extremely focused.

I am committed to being a life-long learner and some of my greatest teachers are the people we serve. I don’t want to sound like I have all of the answers, but because I spend all day working on retirement issues, I feel I have an obligation to share with our community what it is I am learning from the people we serve.

On a side note it is just amazing what doctors can do these days. Because our firm works with pre-retirees & retirees, we see and hear about a lot of these procedures. Often times once people get one knee replaced, they say I can’t wait to get the other one done. It is hard to imagine where the medical world will be by the time I may need these procedures. What was science fiction for me growing up has in many ways become a reality. I sometimes wonder if we didn’t have the science fiction writers to inspire possibility, then would our world have progressed as quickly as it has. When I was a boy growing up my parents had a poster hanging in the garage with a quote that read “what the mind of man can conceive, and believe it can achieve.” It make me wonder. What can we conceive? What will we believe?

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