A big ranch and your life's work

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Have your seen what is for sale in Texas? There is a ranch for sale for $250 million. Hard to imagine. The ranch has everything that you would want on your ranch. It has a big creek that runs through it. The property has a big house, guest house, 11,000 square feet of dog kennels. There is even a 400 square foot room just to store guns. If you think the place is too far away, there is a 6,000-foot runway and an aircraft hangar. The place has lots of dirt roads to give it that rustic feel. This might be the perfect hunters retreat. Oh, it has a total of 65,000 acres. That is quite a spread. Don’t worry about decorating and all that. The only thing the owner is taking is the art collection. He is leaving the furniture and all the equipment to keep the place in tiptop shape. I’m sure you wonder why anyone would sell a place like this, other than the $250 million. The owner is 89 years old and thinks it is time to get his affairs in order. He claims this ranch has been almost like his life’s work. Every time I see something like this, I wonder how the owner managed to acquire all this. He started with buying a parcel of land in 1971. OK, the first parcel was over two thousand acres. Still he has been working on the place for nearly 50 years. Some of the neatest things we see and admire appear to come overnight. The truth is a lot stranger. Maybe the vision of the ranch was what it is now and it took fifty years to get there. Maybe he got the first tract and then the vision just changed little by little until it grew to what it is now. Just a while back a friend said he was planning to re-imagine a tract of land he owned. He was planning on moving there and building a new house and dig a pond. He was concerned about what a big undertaking he was contemplating. I told him it might be his life’s work and he better get started. It’s that time of year again when I talk about all those secret projects I want to do. Somehow, I think that I’m really talking about my life’s work. You never know where this crazy life will take or how it will end up. This can be true of what you want, where you live or what you drive. The people that you spend time with and don’t spend time with We are all in this together. How can you know where this is going? We are all really in the midst of our life’s work. If we want that to be different than what it is today, we better get to work. An auctioneer friend told me that when he sold an estate, he got a percentage of a life’s saving. Think of it. When you die, everything you own is what you have worked your entire life for. Standing back from that, that was your life’s work. Makes you wonder if it was worth it. After all, you had to give your whole life for it. I’m not going to bid on the big ranch in Texas. Even though it sounds like an interesting place to live, I probably don’t have a chance of getting there. Still, I plan on working on the things I want and hopefully my life’s work creates an accurate vision of what I really wanted to do. It’s that time of year, start planning for all those things you want to do and get busy. Bobby Jonte is the president of the Bank of Greeleyville.