A mentor passes on.

The knock on the door was unexpected, after all it was 8 AM on a Saturday, it was raining hard outside, and we were leisurely enjoying the morning in bed.  But up the steps to our beach house they came,  it was all we could do to get my clothes on and get to the door before they were headed back down again.  The person introduced themselves and in my morning fog we did not fully catch the name.  But when we asked again the name "Pace" came through clear as in his father's son.  In the car below was his mother and he began to tell us his father had passed on late the day before.  Shock hit me hard as we began to deal with the death of another mentor, but also a very good friend.  Our decision a year ago to move into Tom's neighborhood now meant we were one of the first to know of his passing. 

Tom Pace, as many use the wording, had forgot more about municipal bonds than most people know.  We were blessed to get to know him early in our investing life and sought his advice regularly for over three decades.  We also purchased the vast majority of our municipal bond portfolio from Tom, most of which we still hold.  As one mentor told us how to get the money, another told us how to make the money, and yet another told us how to keep the money from being ravaged by taxation, Tom is the one who taught us how to "put our money in salt".   In other words how to not lose what we had worked so hard to make and then let our money work for us. We encourage you to revisit our series in early 2011 on mentors. 

The last few years the lunches we had at Jordan's Seafood and Rucker Johns on Emerald Isle became a good bit of discussing family and still some discussion of stocks and bonds.  Tom still enjoyed conversations about what each of us considered the ups and downs of the stock and bond market and it was frankly a boost to our ego Tom occasionally considered OUR advise and thoughts worth acting upon.  The student had come a long way from "what is a municipal bond".  

We remember during the financial crisis of late 2008 and early 2009 when we made the decision to buy up several hundred thousand dollars of bonds at fire sale prices the teaching Tom had brought to us over the decades and how to price bonds according to their true future value. We sit on lots of capital gains today due to those decisions. 

We will miss Tom as we have our former deceased mentor Andy Augustine.  Fortunately they will live on in the teaching we got from them and how they have made our life so much better.  God bless you Tom and his family during this time of sorrow.