The math has been lying to you

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_{Issue #18 — May 5, 2026}

It's now or never.

She said it like this... I feel like it's now or never. I'm still young enough and healthy enough to put some energy into what I want to be doing. I hear this a lot... because it is true.

You are over fifty. Maybe over sixty. You don't have enough to retire and you're off pace to get there in time.

You've got ground to make up and you need a plan...

Now.

Tabbi and I were driving home from Chattanooga last weekend.

The sun was warm through the windshield, and the road opened up through the Tennessee and Kentucky countryside. I had wrapped a VIP intensive with a client on Friday. The 152nd Kentucky Derby was up on her phone.

The favorite was Renegade. Five to one. Irad Ortiz Jr. in the saddle. The experts had been writing about Renegade for weeks.

There were others. Horses with the right pedigree, the right last race, the right post position. Eighteen of them in the field. Most of the attention and energy at Churchill Downs went to the front three or four.

The gate sprang open with a loud clank and the signature bell that starts the greatest race in sports.

The horses lunged forward. Renegade went to the front and stayed there. Down the backstretch he ran the favorite's race.

Around the far turn, the call still belonged to the lead horses.

Then something happened at the back of the pack.

A horse most of the crowd had stopped watching made a decision.

The horse told the jockey it was his time. It was now or never. This race was his.

He moved up the rail. Passing horses one at a time. A twenty-three-to-one long shot. Written off before the first turn was clear.

His name was Golden Tempo.

His jockey, Jose Ortiz... brother to Irad on the horse leading the race... had been waiting for the lane.

It opened.

Down the stretch he came. Threading the horse through traffic that other riders would have called impossible. The favorite still in front. The distance to first was shrinking. 150,000 people on their feet. Golden Tempo and Jose Ortiz crossed the finish line a neck ahead.

Last in a field of eighteen at the half-mile. First at the wire. In the most-watched Kentucky Derby ever run.

I was choked up.

Here's why that race mattered to me...

I'm over sixty. I'm in my peak income-earning years. And I am still making up ground.

Some of my wealth-building years went to helping my parents in their final season of life. Keeping them in their home as long as their health allowed.

Some of those years went to private school for our kids.

Some went to career disruptions because I simply didn't fit well into the corporate world and its nasty politics.

But the math is the math.

I have no regrets.

I would not trade those years for anything. They are years that “wealth-building math” can't put a price on.

Maybe you have done some version of this, too. You are 20 years in. Or 30. Or 35. Or more.

The years you gave to a parent who needed you. The years your spouse's career took priority because it was the right call. The decade you spent in a job that funded a house and a kid and a marriage and not much else.

The voice that says you are behind and will never catch up has not lied to you about the choices you made. It has lied to you about what they are worth, what they mean, and what is possible starting today.

Here's what I want you to remember:

About 75% of the race had already been run when Golden Tempo turned for home. The first three quarters of a race tells you almost nothing about who wins. It tells you who looked good in the warm-up. It tells you whose pedigree was, on the surface at least, more impressive. It tells you which horse the crowd had decided was most popular.

It does not tell you who has the purpose, the heart... the move.

Golden Tempo had the move. The crowd had been wrong about him by twenty-two to one.

The finish line didn't care.

There was more about this race that makes it so special. Cherie DeVaux became the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner. One hundred and fifty-two years. A century and a half of “not yet.”

Until Saturday.

The rest of the drive home, I thought of the years I gave to my parents in their final season... those were not subtracted from a wealth account. They were paid into a different one. An account infinitely more valuable.

I call it the Prosperity Account.

The Prosperity Account doesn't tell you how much you have. It tells you how you live.

The years my kids spent in classrooms we chose carefully... Prosperity Account. The career interruptions, the detours, the decisions to put a person ahead of a number... more deposits in the Prosperity Account.

The wealth-building math doesn't know how to price what's in that account. But the prosperity math does. And prosperity is my race.

The now or never voice is right about the timing. It does not have the math right. You start the race from where you stand. Not from where the voice doing your math says you are.

You start from here.

Dale

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉  The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #17
👉  The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #16

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