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Wilson, Wyoming | Jackson Hole Sothebyâs International Realty
Hot property: five ranches in the US â Financial Times
From the Hamptons to Hawaii, homes for those with agricultural or equestrian aspirations.
Gill Huff Ranch in Wilson, Wyoming, is a newly renovated property featuring original log cabins on 199 acres ideal for trail riding. The estate includes a three-bedroom main house, a two-bedroom guest house, and a spa cabin, all accessible via a private road.
My meals got healthier and tastier thanks to this 13-in-1 Ninja Foodi dual-heat air fryer that I swear by.
âThe place of true healing is a fierce place. Itâs a giant place. Itâs a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.â ~Cheryl Strayed
My memories of my sister are much hazier than they used to beâsomehow less crisp and colorful than before. But time has a way of doing that. Images of her that used to show up in bold, bright colors in my mindâs eye have slowly faded to black and white, with various shades of gray and silver popping in from time to time, almost as if to keep me on my toes and keep her memory alive.
I can still remember her last days, the light slowly dimming from her eyes as she lay bound to her bed, no longer able to move or eat on her own, with feeding tubes in her nose and various devices surrounding her for those inevitableâand fear-gripped moments when she needed help breathing.
Like the rest of my family, I would take my turn staying in her room, checking on her to make sure she was still breathing. It was always the same routine. With anxiety creeping into my chest, I would place one hand on her belly to make sure it was still rising and falling while leaning in close to her nose, listening for the soft sound of her breath. A sigh of relief would pass through me every time I heard her gentle exhale.
The night she passed, I had just finished performing that very ritual, rising to leave only once I felt the repeated slow, steady rise and fall of her belly and the soft whisper of her strained breath on my face. I can still remember walking back into the family room and gratefully announcing, âSheâs okay.â
Maybe it was motherâs instinct, but only moments later my mother rushed back into my sisterâs room. Her sense of urgency took me by surprise since I had just left the room and everything had been fine. I assumed she didnât think I could be trusted and needed to see for herself.
It wasnât long before I heard the sound of my motherâs screams through the thin walls of our small duplex. I knew right away what it meantâmy sister had stopped breathing.
For a long time afterward, I blamed myself for not having been in the room when she took her last breath, and for leaving her alone in those last few seconds. If I had just stayed another minute, I could have been with her. Instead, I had left the room right as she had been getting ready to leave the world.
The months that followed were a blur of pain, confusion, and disbelief as I tried to make sense of a world without her in it. At ten years old, I was too young to understand how much my parents were hurting or how deeply my sisterâs death affected them. I mistakenly thought their withdrawal and anger were because of something I had done. Maybe I was the one who had messed upâmissed the signs that could have saved her night. Or maybe I was the one who they wished had died instead.
Those thoughts became the foundation for years of self-punishment after my sisterâs death. I found myself struggling with feelings of self-hatred and inadequacy, which often showed up as eating disorders, self-harm, and feelings of unworthiness.
Survivorâs guilt and the belief that I was the âbadâ daughter who didnât deserve to live only added more shame and self-doubt that I couldnât shake off. But as I got older, I learned to shut the painâand the memoriesâout.
Soon, I stopped thinking about that night altogether. I convinced myself that I had moved past it, telling myself that time really does âheal all wounds.â I couldnât have been more wrong.
It would take me decades to understand that time hadnât actually healed anything. I had just pushed the memories so far down that they became buried under layers of guilt, shame, and unresolved grief, waiting to resurface when I was ready to face them.
The truth is, time doesnât heal all wounds unless we do the work to heal them ourselves.
My own healing came in an unexpected way after years of trying to prove my worthiness through constant people-pleasing, overworking, over-committing, and deliberately taking on more challenging projects and activities, both personally and professionally, just to prove that I mattered and was deserving of my life. I still hadnât forgiven myself for being the one that lived when a soul as beautiful, bright, and loving as my sister hadnât.
I finally realize now that it wasnât even the rest of the world I was trying to prove my worth toâit was myself. And if it hadnât been for my dog Taz, Iâm not sure if I would have ever come to that realization.
When I first rescued him, I was unknowingly bringing Taz into my life as yet another way of trying to prove I mattered. Having been severely abused and fresh off a major back surgery, he could barely walk when I first took him in.
His (understandable) anxiety had created severely destructiveâand, at least initiallyâfear- and pain-based behavior that made him particularly challenging. I can still remember countless friends saying to me, âYou know you canât do this. What are you trying to prove? Heâs too much for you.â But my self-punishment game was strong, and their words only pushed me to try harder.
For his entire first year with me, I would carry him around in his special harness like a suitcase, setting him down for short spurts so he could get the feeling of putting weight on his legs and paws and build enough strength to start walking.
In the beginning, he couldnât understand that he had to lift his paws and set them down again to walk, so he would drag them instead, scraping his paws until they were raw and bloody within seconds and prompting me to pick him right back up and carry him again. (I can only imagine what others thought when they saw my 5â2 frame carrying a seventy-pound pitbull around like a duffel bag!)
That drill went on for months. Inside the house, I would bring him into the carpeted rooms and teach him how to place his pawsâdown on all fours and crawling along the floor with him as my other dog, Hope, did her part and pranced around showing him how she did it. Slowly, he started to understand. And even more slowly, he started to walk.
A year later, he was running, which turned into sprinting a few months after that. Another three years after that, he was (cautiously) able to go up and down stairs. And seven years after he came to me, just when it seemed that he was at his strongest yet, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
âHe has hemangiosarcoma. The tumor is on his heart, and every pump is spreading it throughout his body. Thereâs nothing we can do. He has about ten days before his heart will stop pumping.â
What had started as an emergency visit for his stomach issues had turned into a death knell for Taz.
The thought of this being the end of his story, when he had already been through so much and finally made it to the other side, seemed unfathomable. In some ways, it was the biggest challenge I had faced yet, and I was determined to save him.
I didnât sleep the night of his diagnosis. Or most of the nights after that. Instead, I found myself waking up almost every hour, gazing at him sleeping by my side, tears gathering in my eyes, and wondering how I could save himâand what else I needed to sacrifice to keep him by my side.
I initially failed to grasp that his illness was the beginning of my healing. And the darkness that would ensue was actually the beginning of the light that would start pouring into my childhood wounds.
As the pain eclipsed me in those dark, late-night moments, I didnât even realize what I was doing at first. What started as just trying to soak in every moment with him had triggered the very ritual I had performed for so long as a child. Only this time, it wasnât my sister I was watching overâit was Taz.
Every time I woke up and gazed at him throughout the night, I would place my hand on his belly to make sure it was still rising and falling and lean in close to see if I could hear him breathing.
Just like that, I had brought myself right back into the unresolved trauma loop that I had buried and ignored so long ago. When the realization hit me, I immediately felt transported back to that night decades agoâto that last moment with her, the last time my hand had been on her belly.
I understood then that I had never truly healedâI had only learned to suppress it. I also realized that the shame, blame, and guilt I had carried for so long had never really left me and were still huge parts of who I was and had been for decades after she died.
All the unshed tears, anger, and grief that I had never processed came pouring out. I wept for hours. And every time I thought I was out of tears, a new stream would surface.
That ritual lasted every night for thirty-four days. Courageous as ever, Taz had outlived the ten days he was given, and on the thirty-fourth day, my Tazzie Bear left me. Only this time I was in the room.
Somehow, we both knew the time had come, and as he lay his head in my lap one last time, gazing lovingly one more time into my eyes and proceeded to take his last breath, I felt his soul leave his body. And somehow, an unexpected sense of peace seemed to have entered mine.
That beautiful, amazing soul of his had taken my pain with him, and in the process, he had somehow broken the trauma loop I had unknowingly been caught in all those years.
His death had helped me heal years of pain I didnât even know I was carrying. As I sat there, holding him in his final moments, I realized that his presence had been the biggest gift I had ever received.
For animal lovers, this next sentence will make perfect sense: Taz had been far more than my pet; he had come to me as a lifeline, guiding me into my next chapter of healing and self-discovery.
Because of him, I had officially started a new chapter of my life. One that was free from the debilitating shame, guilt, and pain I had carried for so long. And in that quiet moment, I understood that healing isnât linearâitâs a journey, often led by the most unexpected teachers.
And I will forever be grateful that I was lucky enough to have him as one of my teachers.
Afsheen Shah is a lawyer-turned-life coach who helps women over 40 reconnect with themselves and create a life that that feels more meaningful and fulfilling. Blending mindset work, spirituality, and intentional lifestyle shifts, she guides women to rediscover their joy, reclaim their voice, and build a life that aligns with who they truly are. Visit her at www.afsheenshah.com and on Instagram @afsheenshah.
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Entering adulthood and the job market for the first time with student loan debt can be stressful. But watching that debt balloon with interest as you navigate through your 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond can feel completely overwhelming.
And yet thatâs the experience for many borrowers. While the governmentâs âstandardâ repayment plan is 10 years long, many borrowers are in plans that extend their terms up to 20 years or longer. If unmanaged, the burden of student loans can weigh on your potential to build an emergency fund or jumpstart retirement savings. It can delay your ability to buy a home or reach other financial goals.
But it doesnât have to, especially if you focus on paying your loans off swiftly, allowing you to accrue less interest than peers who only make minimum payments.
Hereâs an inside look at how four borrowers paid off their student loans quickly.
Erin Adams Chanler, 35, based in Portland, Maine
6.5 years
Erin Adams Chanler grew up in a blue-collar family and was raised with very limited wisdom on how to manage her personal finances.
âThere was a lot of emphasis on if you work hard, you can do anything,â Adams Chanler says. âBut there was not as much emphasis on how that might be paid for.â
So when she attended an expensive liberal arts college, she graduated in 2012 with roughly $100,000 in debt. A postgraduate move to San Francisco â one of the priciest places to live in the U.S. â for a non-profit job that paid her $40,000 didnât help with paying off her loans. But Adams Chanler says the trick to paying off her debt quickly was to avoid âlifestyle inflation,â which is when your spending increases because your income does. She got a new job in tech with a salary that continued to increase â $70,000 when she first got the job and $130,000 by the time her debt was gone. But she stayed living in a âless cool, less nice neighborhoodâ where she was sharing a bedroom and had a long commute. She cooked at home and limited her traveling, which she loves to do. At one point, she was throwing an average of more than $3,600 per month at her student loan debt.
At times it felt isolating. Her friends who were also working in tech were moving into better apartments, going out to eat and booking flights.
âIt was hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel,â Adams Chanler said. That is, until she paid off her largest loan, which was also the one with the highest interest. âIt felt so good.â
In hindsight, she says she wishes she had been less ashamed about her debt and more vulnerable about it. She says she thinks people in her life would have been more understanding than she feared at the time, and explaining that she was working toward paying off her loans would have made turning down costly plans more easier. But in the end, she got there â and much faster than it often takes people to pay off $100,000.
âItâs really heavy holding that much debt especially when youâre young and just starting out,â Adams Chanler said. âI am actively grateful all the time that I donât have that anymore.â
Erik Vargas, 32, based in Memphis, Tennessee
3 years of solid work (8 years total)
When Erik Vargas decided to get married and combine his finances with his wife Amanda, the pair agreed on the first financial goal of their marriage: pay off all their debt as fast as they could. While Vargas was still paying off his car, most of their debt was student loans.
Vargas had been making the minimum payments on his $29,000 in student debt since he graduated roughly five years before they got married. Amanda had about $47,000 in student loans herself, so together, they implemented a strict budget and the snowball method. The strategy entails making minimum payments on all your debts while putting as much extra money as possible toward your smallest debt until it disappears. You then use what you were paying on your smallest debt and tackle the second-smallest debt, and continue the process until youâre debt-free. Itâs a popular method because it can help you see some fast results compared to other paydown strategies.
Vargas, who worked for the Navy at the time, had nine separate loans while Amanda had two larger ones, so they were able to start seeing their progress quickly. They also had the advantage of being in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic and benefitted from the pandemic pause on federal loans that put interest at 0%. Traveling, eating out with friends and most of their usual activities were off limits, and they were able to put the money they would have spent on fun toward their loans.
They identified their recurring bills â internet, rent, appliances and their cell phones â then allotted a certain amount of money for fun and the rest went to debt payments. (They still use this method, though now the money that would have gone toward loans goes into savings for a house). The stimulus checks that they received from the federal government during the pandemic went straight toward paying off their loans. If they wanted to do something specific, like a ski trip, they would save for it while making sure they were also making progress on their student loans.
âThe last two big loans that we had were probably the hardest to get through,â Vargas says. The couple was able to tackle several smaller loans every few weeks, but then they got bigger and bigger. âIt just became a slog at the end.â
But in 2023, Vargas and his wife finally hit the debt-free milestone â and they even appeared on popular personal finance guru Dave Ramseyâs radio show to celebrate it.
Evan Louey-Dacus, 23, based out of New York City
1 year and 1 month
When Evan Louey-Dacus graduated from college with $11,000 in student loans and moved into his own place, his new job fell through. He found himself with rent to pay and no income, and he accrued interest on his student loans for around four months before he made his first payment.
But at the end of 2023, he landed a new job in marketing for corporate events and started aggressively paying down his loans, earmarking a quarter of his paychecks â and sometimes up to a third â every month for debt.
âDebt dictates dependency,â Louey-Dacus says. âIf I had student debt it meant that I was dependent on the government in some way and I donât want to be any more dependent on the government than I absolutely have to.â
His father is the child of Chinese immigrants and both his parents are entrepreneurs, so Louey-Dacus says he was raised in an environment that emphasized frugality. That mindset motivated him to pay down his debt quickly.
âI had to humble myself and get used to the fact that my life was not going to be super extravagant or built on the schedule that I had in mind until that loan was paid down,â Louey-Dacus says. For instance, he set the heat on a timer so it would only run at night and not rack up a huge bill. But he also found the positive in having to make such a lifestyle shift: a love for cooking.
Louey-Dacus says he stopped eating out and almost exclusively made his own meals at home. While he had cooked prior to leaving his parentsâ home and having student debt, it wasnât something that had been tied to his identity before.
âNow that I had to do it on a regular basis to affordably feed myself, I really started to enjoy it,â he says. âI didnât consider myself a cook, but now I do â and I donât think I would have done that as quickly if I didnât have student debt to pay down.â
That love for cooking paid off. Louey-Dacus just scheduled his last debt payment.
Brett Holzhauer, 31, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
7 years
When Brett Holzhauer graduated from college with roughly $73,000 in private student loan debt, he was looking for balance. He wanted to pay down his debt quickly, but he didnât want to completely upend his lifestyle.
He turned to side gigs to generate extra income he could pay toward his debt. Holzhauer delivered groceries via Instacart, resold items online and picked up freelance writing projects . He sometimes made as much as $5,000 a month.
But Holzhauer says another key to finally paying off his debt was refinancing, which essentially replaces your loan with a new one that (ideally) comes with a smaller interest rate.
âItâs not the balance thatâs the evil, itâs the interest rate,â Holzhauer says.
His first refinance was in 2016 with SoFi, and he was able to lower his interest rate from around 7% to 5.34% (coincidentally, he later briefly worked for SoFi). He then refinanced three more times over a roughly three-year period, getting his loan down to 2.2%. He later unofficially ârefinancedâ by having his then father-in-law pay off his student loans that he would pay back without interest. When he had to pay that back ahead of schedule after he and his wife divorced, he took out a personal line of credit with a 2.25% interest rate to pay off the remainder of his debt.
âI just started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel become brighter and brighter and was like âWait a second, I can kind of play this game and really get [the rate] down,ââ Holzhauer says. âI was extremely proactive. I was checking every couple months to see if there was any way I could keep whittling this thing down.â
In the end, he did. Holzhauer, who now writes about small business full time for Biz2Credit, an online financing platform for small business, has been free of his student debt for a couple years. He paid off his last loans just before he turned 29, reaching the goal of having no student loan debt by his 30th birthday that heâd set at graduation.
Editorâs note: While SoFi is the sponsor of this story, Money reported and wrote this story, including the section with a former SoFi employee, without any influence from the company.
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Laurent Delaunay, representing the fifth generation of a family of winemakers and negociants, is reappropriating his familyâs history. Though it had progressively declined over the last several years, the House of Edouard Delaunay, an old Maison with a rich and unique history, has always been closely connected to the Burgundy wine trade and was considerably involved in the epic intercontinental expansion the industry experienced throughout the entire 20th century. Bought back in 2017 by Laurent Delaunay, the great-grandson of the founder, it strives to regain its place within the inner circle of the great houses of Burgundy through the meticulous and precise vinification and ageing of exceptional wines from some of Burgundyâs finest terroirs.
Our family has been in winemaking since the 19th century. Delaunay has been a well-established name in Burgundy across the whole of the 20th century. I grew up with my father and my grandfather in the cellar and the vineyards and I started to work there with my father in 1989 after my studies in the US (Napa Valley). After a few years we were obliged to sell for various reasons. One was that my father was ill with Alzheimerâs disease, so he made some wrong decisions in terms of investments. The other reason was that it was in the early 1990s, and the economic situation became very complicated with the cost of oil going up with the first Gulf War. The business was therefore sold in a friendly transaction to a leading Burgundy negociant.
Indeed! I stayed with the new owners for a couple of years, but I decided to branch out in 1995 with my wife Catherine, also a trained oenologist. We wanted to recover our independence, so we left and started our own company in the south of France. This is how we started Badet ClĂŠment to make wine in the Languedoc, RhĂ´ne Valley and Provence. The company became known for its âLes Jamellesâ brand of varietal wines from Pays dâOc, its high-end label Abbotts & Delaunay, and for selling more than 15 million bottles of wine around the world. It was a boom time in the south of France in the 1990s. Yet I always kept the dream of coming back to Burgundy and creating my own brand, my own range there.
It is an amazing twist of life. The first step came in 2003 when our company Badet ClÊment purchased DVP (Domaines & Vins de PropriÊtÊ), which distributes Burgundian domains. But the big step actually came in 2017 when we purchased the Edouard Delaunay brand name from the Burgundy negociant we had sold the brand to back in 1993 and some other buildings from relatives. We carried out extensive refurbishment at the château (Château de Charmont), which dates from the 19th century, the vaulted cellars and the buildings next door, which date from the 1950s and 60s and have been renovated in the style of factories from the 1920s and 30s. The metal beams and pillars, for example, are reminiscent of the metalwork used in the Eiffel Tower.
Indeed, this has been a project very close to my heart and a dream that has come true. My grandfather used to say that the House of Edouard Delaunay was âthe smallest of the great Housesââ. My ambition is to return it to its former glory and make Edouard Delaunay a leading Burgundian wine house once more. We are on the right track to achieving such a goal.
As mentioned, the first thing needed in January 2017 was to restore the château and winery in time for that yearâs harvest. Next, we needed to put together a team, and I was able to hire a young and talented winemaker, Christophe Briotet. But the most complicated was finding grapes as we didnât have our own vineyards. We were fortunate to have many friends and family members in the trade and obviously our connections with many small producers thanks to Badet-ClĂŠmentâs DVP marketing arm really helped us. I was highly surprised that so many of them accepted our offer to buy their grapes, but then they all saw it as our âRenaissanceâ (rebirth), and for them it was also an amazing and rather unique story. A family that had ventured a few regions away and who was then truly back to Burgundy!
This is correct. From 2018 onwards all ranges of Edouard Delaunay wines have come in âluxuryâ packaging. We have paid a lot of attention to packaging because in Burgundy the wines are expensive and so it means that â worldwide and especially in Asia â people who can afford Burgundy wines are also people who purchase luxury goods. I feel that in Burgundy, very often, we pay a lot of attention to the quality of the wine but all that is around the wine â the packaging and the service â is not of the same quality. We wish to change that specific perception. We actually take our inspiration from Champagne or Cognac for the packaging as well as for the servicing and marketing to the consumers.
In Burgundy, we see the Hautes CĂ´tes as a prime place for expansion, especially because of its high altitude which makes the grapes less prone to weather problems. The Hautes have actually much-unplanted land that is not classified and we can see the eventual production of single-vineyard wines from the region.
My philosophy is all about listening, reading the terroir and the vinesâ condition; trying to understand, and gently accompanying the natural evolution of the wine.
The need to keep track of trends in the wine trade worldwide. The need to understand the impact of climate change on the Burgundy region. I also keep stressing the need for Burgundy to keep open lines of communication with customers and the duty of the region to practice social responsibility. On a lighter tone, I also wish that people across the globe know how to pronounce Bourgogne and not only Burgundy.
My grandfather established a presence in Singapore as early as 1932. Asia and Asian consumers have always been highly regarded in our family. I am very impressed by the level of knowledge Asian drinkers have about Burgundy. The US market has been a leading purchaser of Burgundy wines for over a century, yet Asia is catching up fast, and the wine audience is avid to learn and understand our complicated region classification. It is quite refreshing for a winemaker to know that the ultimate consumer knows what he or she is drinking.
Badet-ClĂŠment has a regional bureau in Hong Kong with a highly active, experienced and mobile team headed by Olivier Hui-Bon-Hoa. We also have a presence in Singapore, South Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam and lately in the Philippines.
My wife and myself truly enjoyed Cedric Klapischâs movie âCe qui nous Lieâ. It is a movie that is very touching for the local community because the story it tells is very realistic. Every wine-growing family has had to face the difficulty of arranging the transmission of the estate to the next generation, and it is a challenge we all must live with, especially at a time of rising land prices (inheritance taxes are on the high side in France). Cedric Klapisch shows these difficulties in a very straightforward light.
Yes, speaking in public. But I have progressed rather well on that matter by taking courses at the famed Cours Florent in Paris.
I learned a lot in terms of entrepreneurship and business from Jean-Claude Boisset, one of the smartest wine entrepreneurs I have met.
I also learned a lot from Aubert de Villaine. What I like is not only his wine philosophy but his life philosophy. I appreciate that he is not only one of the most emblematic producers of Burgundy but he has a vision, his thinking is across several generations, and he is very sensitive of the fact that in a traditional region like Burgundy, we do not inherit, we simply pass the land on. This gives you a vision and a perspective across centuries. You have to think and consider the consequences in the long term.
Website: www.edouard-delaunay.com
Contact details: Gabriel Camphuis â gabriel.camphuis@edouard-delaunay.com
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The post Winemaker Laurent Delaunay: Spotlighting the House of Edouard Delaunay appeared first on LUXUO.
This water bottle is the real deal, and you can save some money on it during Amazon’s Big Spring Sale.
In a city of exciting contrasts, designers get creative with craft and culture, merging styles and solutions, writes Angela Hui
Organic materials and lines at M.R. Studioâs 1111 Ones Restaurant & Lounge. Photograph: Steven Ko
Every March, the global art fair Art Basel takes over Hong Kong, bringing together collectors, travelers, designers and artists from around the worldâand highlighting the cityâs unique creative identity. Hong Kong is one of the worldâs best examples of the confluence between east and west: where old meets new, temples stand alongside skyscrapers and tong lau walk-up tenement buildings live next to shiny penthouses.
Continue reading Inside Hong Kongâs Unique Design Scene at Sotheby´s International Realty | Blog.
Reports say the SSA workforce reductions are making it harder for Social Security beneficiaries to contact the organization or access their account online.