Why does an 1878 pocket watch run our show?
October 22, 2026
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Show Notes
Eddie and Betty's Conversation
Welcome to The American Retirement Advisor. I'm Betty, Eddie's here with me in the studio today, and we are talking about something I did not expect to be this interesting when I first read it. It's a piece by Ian Schaeffer, the COO here at American Retirement Advisors, and it starts with a pocket watch and ends up somewhere that genuinely surprised me. Eddie, you ready?
I am, and I'll say, not every article about estate planning opens with a train crash in Ohio in 1891, so this one earned my attention early.
Right? So let's set the scene. David Schaeffer runs Fiscal Fridays, which is their live educational event, and he has this prop on the desk. A pocket watch. And not just any watch.
An 1878 Rockford. American-made. He uses it to time the advisors during the lightning round. Thirty seconds a card, and when the buzzer is close, David is tracking every second on that dial.
Which I love as a format, but okay, why does it have to be a railroad watch specifically? That's where the history comes in.
So here's something I did not know before reading this. For most of the 1800s, there was no standard time in America. Every town set its clocks by the sun. Every railroad ran on its own schedule.
Each one had its own time?
Its own time. The Library of Congress describes it as time that could be different depending on where it was measured and by whom. So two trains on the same track could be operating off completely different clocks.
That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
It did. April 18, 1891, near Kipton, Ohio, about 40 miles west of Cleveland. A fast mail train hit the Toledo Express. Nine men were killed, six of them postal clerks.
Nine people.
And the investigation pointed to a watch. The engineer's watch was possibly four minutes slow. The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum put it plainly: a mere four minutes was the difference between life and death on the line.
That's shorter than most people spend scrolling their phone before getting out of bed.
Which is why the railroad brought in a Cleveland jeweler named Webb Ball to figure out how this was allowed to happen. His work led to actual watch performance standards in 1893. And here's the one that stuck with me: a railroad watch could be off by no more than thirty seconds a week. Miss that mark, it got pulled and reinspected.
That symmetry is actually what Ian Schaeffer calls out in the piece. He says they like it.
It's a good bit of writing. And David's 1878 Rockford is older than the standards themselves, which means the watch predates the rules it now enforces. Ian calls that a promotion.
Ha, I love that for it. Okay, but before we got to all of this, you mentioned the railroads actually fixed the time zone problem themselves. Congress didn't do it?
Not for a long time. They switched to five standard time zones on November 18, 1883. Every railroad clock was reset that day, including clocks that had already passed noon. So some places had noon twice.
Wait, they literally had two noons in one day?
That's exactly what they called it. Congress didn't make standard time federal law until 1918, the Standard Time Act. So the private railroads beat the federal government by 35 years.
I feel like that story belongs in every civics class in America. Okay. So there's also a pen in this article, which took me a second to connect.
David has a video where he holds up two pens and says, there is the Bic answer and then there's the Montblanc answer. Both write. One of them makes you feel different.
And his point is that in retirement decisions, the cheap option and the right one are not always the same thing.
And knowing which one you're buying, his phrase, is half the job. He and Thea just visited the Montblanc workshops and the watchmakers in Glashütte, which is this small town in Germany where they've been building watches by hand for generations.
He promised the whole story with pictures in the November newsletter, so keep an eye out for that if you follow them. But the pen and watch framing, I think that's really about value versus cost, which is a conversation that comes up constantly in retirement planning.
And it's not just about fees or products. It's about whether the answer you're getting fits your situation, or whether it's just the fastest answer that technically works.
Okay, now here's where the article turns a corner and becomes very much about something that affects almost every family listening. The watch itself, as an object, and what happens to it.
This is the part that got me.
Say more.
So Ian points out that most households have a drawer. A watch, a ring, a pen, something with a story attached. Your retirement account has a beneficiary form. The watch has nothing but a memory.
And memories don't settle estates.
That's the line from the article. And it is a sharp one. Because the legal machinery that handles your accounts when you're gone is very clear about where that money goes. But that watch? If you haven't done anything in writing, it just sits there and whoever is left figures it out.
And that can cause real friction in families, especially if more than one person remembers being told they were getting it.
Which is so common it's almost a cliché.
So what does the article say you can do about it?
There's a specific Arizona law for this. Arizona Revised Statutes 14-2513. It lets your will refer to a separate written list that directs where tangible personal property goes. A watch, a ring, things like that. Not money, but objects.
And that list lives outside the will?
Separate from it, yes. It has to be in your handwriting or signed by you, it has to describe the items and the people with what the law calls reasonable certainty, and here's the part I liked: you can write it before or after the will, and you can change it later.
So it's not locked in stone the moment you sign your will.
Exactly, you can update it as your life changes and as your collection of meaningful objects changes.
Now the article mentions that Nevada and other states have their own rules. What if someone is listening from somewhere else?
Ian's answer there is pretty clear: ask your estate attorney how it works where you live. I'd say the same thing. The concept, a separate personal property memorandum attached to a will, exists in a lot of states, but the exact rules vary, and that is a question for an estate attorney or for one of the advisors at American Retirement Advisors who can point you to the right person.
Don't guess on that one. Because the whole thing is legally binding, and if you do it wrong it might not hold up.
Right. Get the mechanics right, and the list does what you want it to do.
Okay but there's one more piece to this, and it's the part I keep thinking about. It's not just about writing down who gets the watch.
Write down the story.
Ian writes, a watch with meaning is an heirloom. A watch without one is just a watch.
Who wore it, where it came from, why it matters. Because the object by itself is just metal and glass. The story is what makes someone treasure it instead of sell it.
That part might matter more than whatever the watch is worth on a resale site.
Almost certainly. It has a dollar value. But the fact that David Schaeffer uses it to hold advisors to thirty-second answers, and before that it was built to keep trains from killing each other, that's not on any appraisal.
Okay, so let me ask you the practical question that I think a lot of people are sitting with. Where do you even start? Like, you hear all of this and you think, yes I should do something, but then what?
The drawer. Literally. Open it. What's in there that has a story? Write the story down first, even before you figure out the legal piece. That part costs you nothing and it might be the most valuable thing you do all month.
Because even if the legal form doesn't exist yet, you've created a record that at least tells the family what you intended.
And then you take that list to your estate attorney and figure out how to make it official in your state.
How many people do you think have never once thought about this? Like the retirement accounts are handled, the house has a plan, but the jewelry box is just... whoever gets there first.
Probably most people. Because nobody sends you a form for the watch. The financial stuff has reminders built in, beneficiary update notices, account statements. The watch just sits there looking beautiful.
Until it doesn't. And then it's a family argument.
Which is the kind of thing that could have been avoided with one piece of paper.
In your handwriting. That's it.
In Arizona. Again, check your state.
Do that, talk to your attorney, and if you want someone to help you start the conversation, that's what the team at American Retirement Advisors does.
And while we're on the subject of Fiscal Fridays, for anyone in the Phoenix area, there's a live event coming up.
October 23rd, 10:30 AM Arizona time, in the Scottsdale studio. Doors open at 10 for coffee, twenty seats, and there's a guest they're describing as a Medicare health plan executive, which I'm curious about.
And the 1878 Rockford will be there timing the lightning round, which I find oddly delightful.
You would. The number to call for a seat is 602-281-3898, or there's a link in the article. Twenty seats is not a lot, so if you're local, don't wait on that one.
And the coffee is on at ten.
Okay, let me land this plane. What I'm taking away from Ian Schaeffer's piece is something pretty simple but easy to ignore. The financial parts of your estate have systems around them. The meaningful stuff, the watch, the ring, the pen, the thing that a person in your family will cry over, does not have a system unless you build one.
And building it is not complicated. It's just a list.
A list with stories attached. And the legal wrapper around it, at least in Arizona, is simpler than most people assume. The hard part is just starting.
The thirty-second answer there is: open the drawer this weekend. Write down what's in it and why it matters. That's the Montblanc version of the job, not the Bic.
See, he lands those.
Occasionally.
If today's episode made you think about something in your own drawer, that's a good sign you should sit down with one of the advisors at American Retirement Advisors and make a plan. You can find them at the number in the article, or through their website. You don't have to have everything figured out before you call. That's what they're there for. Thanks for spending this time with us.