Houston Smith: Fully, happily employed at 75

You can almost hear the cicadas as Houston Smith, a certified public accountant and personal financial specialist in Decatur, GA, describes a scene that explains why he still works fulltime at 75.

As a child, Smith loved playing basketball and would play well into darkness until he'd hear his mother call, "Houston, come in for supper, son!"

"That tells me the kind of guy I am," Smith says in a soothing voice dipped with the honey of North Carolina and Georgia. "Once I find something I like, I hang on to it."

He loves Mary, his wife of 41 years, "and I haven't turned her loose yet," he said. And he loves his profession, which is founded on numbers but has expanded to much more. He teaches younger CPAs to add financial planning to their practices, and he's almost as much counselor as accountant to clients struggling with the emotions of dealing with money.

If a long-time client comes to him for advice on selling her home, for instance, he will make sure she is emotionally ready for such a change before dealing with the tax ramifications and investment options.

He tells of a college counselor who wanted to go into private practice in psychology. Smith crunched the numbers and they added up. As a bonus to her career switch, the woman met a colleague who became her husband.

"We help people change their lives," says Smith, who describes himself as immensely blessed - and not just because he does his work "indoors with no heavy lifting.

"I could not have a better client base if I hand picked them."

As a fee-based financial planner, Smith is the architect for helping people make financial decisions, but he does not manage investments. He leaves that to other experts.

Not that he always takes expert investment advice himself. Paul Merriman has told Smith he could retire without courting any financial disaster, said Smith, who has been a Merriman client since the early 1990s. But nobody can convince him he'd be happier knocking a golf ball around "some forlorn golf course" than working, he said.

"Am I enjoying life more by working?" Smith asks, answering his own question with "Absolutely, yes! I love it dearly. And making a living on top of a retirement income is nice."

When Smith travels to seminars to teach for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, he is actually on the road for every mile since he has no interest in flying.

"You have to be known for something," he says with a laugh. "I guess it's better to be known for phobias than not to be known at all."

He and Mary are an intimidating sight on the road in their Lincoln with Georgia license plates, Smith says, describing the look as "a white-haired fella and his beautiful young wife."

They've driven to conferences as far flung as Boston, Dallas, Chicago and Fort Myers, Fla., for more than two decades. With Mary riding shotgun to keep her husband awake, they stop at their favorite haunts along the way, including a restaurant where George Washington once ate.

If the ground offers more security than the air to Smith, it's only fitting for a man whose world is unusually well anchored.

He was teaching at Georgia State University (then Georgia State College) when he gave up his faculty parking and restroom rights to return to student status to get his doctorate degree. The bonus: He was then free to date Mary, a beautiful co-ed a dozen years his junior.

"Where you park your car didn't make much difference, but meeting Mary and being her husband made all the difference in the world," Smith says.

Mary today works overflow for the business, helping at tax time and when the administrative assistant takes a vacation. Her respect for other people has never waned, her husband says.

"She sees dignity and worth in every human being," Smith says. "You couldn't pry gossip out of her, and that makes life wonderful."

Both Smiths have deep faith - but not the same denomination. She is a communicant at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church; he belongs to the Westminster Presbyterian Church (PCA), where he's an elder.

"We like to think what we do complements each other rather than distracts from our ultimate goal," she says.

Smith believes life's events happen according to a master plan. Other than his wife and children, his biggest blessing was being born to his parents, he says. Once again, the theme is security. He never worried about his next meal or a place to stay, despite limited family income during the Great Depression.

"I spent every minute of my life growing up feeling secure and feeling loved," he said.

His father directed him to accounting as a stable profession, and Smith added the financial planning aspect when it took him six months to find information on whether he could put his two kids through good colleges and still retire at 65.

Two lessons came from that quest. One was that decisions he makes today have direct bearing on his security tomorrow. The other was that other people must have those same questions.

So in the 1980s, he added a second business, financial planning, and now he helps younger CPAs understand that "a lot of tax decisions clients make are not purely tax questions."

Today many of his clients are 50 and older, and ask, "Will I have enough to retire?" Smith helps them find the answers and act on them.

"If you think of an accountant as an introvert with a little green eyeshade, that's not my husband," says Mary. "He has a knack for making friends, and they remember him."

When Mary decided to tie the knot with Houston, she was charmed by his intelligence, his kindness and the way he treated his mother - a sure blueprint, she figured, for how he would treat her. He also had his own business and he told her he was staying put.

That benefit keeps paying off. The Smiths' children lived within three miles of their grandmothers, growing up to know them "as living, breathing human beings." As adults, their son and daughter still live within 10 miles of the Smiths. Now Houston and Mary get the same pleasure with their three grandchildren, when "Papa Smith" isn't working.

Someday Houston may retire, but he says that will come only when the good Lord sends word: "Houston, it's time to hang it up."

"Are you getting better with practice?" he asks himself, answering: "I hope so, but I'm not the one to judge that."

Is he cutting back and being more reflective, working shorter days and thinking about the big picture?

"No, ma'am," he says. "We work an 8 to 5 p.m. schedule. We're here and the clients are here, and thank God they are."