by Joe Kirkpatrick

For the past 30 years that we have been married, Elaine and I have been  planning on building a beach house on an ocean front lot we bought years ago in  South Florida. We had found the lot when we were visiting her aunt who lives on the beach down the street.  We know with today's construction prices,  the cost of the house we plan on building now exceeds over one million  dollars.  To be quite honest, we  haven't saved quite that much, so we came up with an idea we presented at our  last family reunion.  We asked all of the relatives to commit to paying a certain amount every year to help us out with the mortgage, and in return, whenever they come to South  Florida, they can stay for free.  Some of the relatives said they never plan on coming to South Florida, but we quickly explained that really didn't matter, we could still use their financial support, and they should pitch in and help us out.

Well, not two weeks after our reunion, Elaine's aunt, who was now over 80  years old, suddenly passed away.  When her will was read, we could not believe it when we learned Elaine had inherited her aunt's beautiful $2,000,000+ beach house and lot right down the street from where our lot is.  The only stipulation was, that if we accepted it, we could not sell it, but it must stay in our family.  Elaine and I were overjoyed, but then we began to think about it.  We had owned our other lot for almost 25 years, and it had always been our dream to build on it.  Even though our payment will be more than we

can afford, especially if we don't enlist the  financial help of our other relatives, we finally decided to follow our dream  instead of accepting her aunt's house.

Since this happened, a lot of people have questioned our judgment, and a couple of people have called us stupid.  A friend of ours from Florida had heard about what we had decided from a mutual friend, and called to ask us why we had done it.  I quickly explained that Elaine and I  are not the smartest people in the world, so we have always tried to follow the example of those who are supposed to be smarter than us.  We went on to explain that there are two very intelligent groups of people on two different school boards up here in Tennessee where we live.  They had both recently been faced with a  similar decision to ours, where a very kind lady had offered them a very nice  piece of property right down the street from where they were about to buy a similar piece of property.  It would  have saved them almost the exact same amount that Elaine's aunt had saved us  with her gift.  Since those really intelligent people made the decision they did, we decided that must be the smart  thing to do! 

Don't you all think we did the right  thing?
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