Discovering The Mature Lifestyle Written financial plan key to cutting stress at retirement Page 6
Finance
February 19, 2015
February Issue
When the unthinkable happens. Early training, values help Minnetonka widow chart her course BY SUE WEBBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
J
erry and Bev Carlson were building a log cabin in Nevis, Minn., with plans to retire there eventually. But no one was prepared for the future that was thrust upon them tragically and very unexpectedly. Jerry died suddenly in his sleep in 1993, at the age of 55. In addition to coping with her total shock and grief, Bev was left to sort out a plan for her future. “Our big plan had been that Jerry would build the cabin and rent out a condo we bought in Scottsdale, Arizona,” Bev said. “We went to Arizona once or twice a year to get it ready to rent and spend a few weeks.” “Jerry’s dream was to sell our house in Minnetonka, spend May through October at the cabin in Nevis, and then be at the condo in Arizona for the winter.” Building the cabin took three years, and it was near completion when Jerry died. The first thing Bev had to do was to sell her house in Minnetonka and find a condo for herself. The first break came when her home sold even before it was put on the market. “Our next-door neighbor had friends who wanted to buy the house,” Bev said.
The next lucky break was when Bev’s son, Steve, found a foreclosed condo at a good price in Minnetonka because it needed a lot of work. That left the cabin in Nevis and the condo in Arizona. And Bev needed to get a job. During her move to the condo, she took some clothing to sell at a suburban consignment shop, and the owner told Bev she was looking for help. After Bev took the job, a customer one day came in to consign her clothes and talked about her lake home in northern Minnesota. Another lucky break: her lake home wasn’t far from Bev’s cabin, and she owned a gift shop there where she needed some sales help. “I had to move to the cabin for two years to homestead it, or I would have had to pay a penalty,” Bev said. “And I ended up with a job in Walker, Minn., from May through October.” While she lived and worked at the cabin, Bev had to get it ready to sell. It needed a wooden floor and new roof, plus a better entry road to the cabin before it could be put on the market. “During those two years, my older son got a better job and was able to get a loan and buy the cabin,” Bev said. The Arizona condo, in turn, was sold to one of its renters, a couple from Brainerd, Minn.
Once she moved into her refurbished condo in Minnetonka, Bev continued to find a series of part-time retail jobs to bring in some money. Looking back on the ordeal now, she is grateful first of all for the help from her two sons, Steve and Mike. “They were like my bookends; they kept me together,” Bev said. “I don’t know what I would have done without my sons.” And she’s doubly grateful that the real estate transactions all progressed quickly and fortuitously. Even so, she said, “The first 10 years were really tough. We’d had a wonderful plan and a wonderful dream, and I had to let it all go.” “We’d never thought about a long-term plan,” said Bev, who noted that her husband had been a traveling salesman who had some profit sharing, but no life insurance when he died. But her growing-up years and early years of her marriage may have given her the strength to do what she needed to do once she was widowed. “Jerry was an old-fashioned traveling salesman who covered five states Monday through Friday,” Bev Bev Carlson of Minnetonka learned at an early age about saving said. “I had a weekend husband. I and living frugally. (Photo by Sue Webber) was alone all week to raise the boys myself.” CARLSON - TO PAGE 5