Fame & Fortune: Author Stephen Pollan His motto: Live rich, die broke and stiff the undertaker
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Bankrate: You had a life-changing epiphany at age 48, right?

Pollan: Yes. I was diagnosed with lung cancer, I was smoking three and four packs a day, and they found out a couple of weeks later that it was a misdiagnosis and it was actually tuberculosis. I was out of work for about a year and a half but I had a bout with mortality, a Jungian bout with mortality, and I started a whole new life because of it. I became a born-again husband, a born-again father; I began to appreciate each day and would just squeeze the hell out of each day, which is what I do now.

Bankrate: Do you look back on that experience as a gift?

Pollan: Oh sure, it's the best thing that ever happened to me. It absolutely was a gift. I will tell you, there is nothing in the world that will have you appreciate life more than if you think you're going to be losing it. I thought I was going to be taking my final exams.

Bankrate: It ushered in a second act.

Pollan: Oh yeah, and a third act and a fourth act. I've just resigned from the law firm that I'm at and I'm moving to another place, I've gone back to college to study coaching and last semester I took an acting course. I just want to show my daughter I'm as good as she is.

Bankrate: You do have enormously successful children.

Pollan: Yes. In addition to Tracy, my son Michael Pollan has written three best-sellers and he has a chair in journalism at Berkeley. And my wife works for Gourmet, the food magazine, and prior to that worked for New York magazine and had a signature column for about 15 years. I'm chopped liver in my family. I'm way down at the bottom.

Bankrate: What changed your mind on money?

Pollan: I started to believe in God. I started doing the rowing and let him do all the steering. I was totally not raised in a religious household. My kids are all spiritual but I was not and neither was Corky. But this (experience) made me profoundly believe that there was a higher power that pulled my chestnuts out and gave me a couple of warnings: don't ... (fool) around anymore.

Bankrate: You spent most of your life inside the money world. Were there moments when you asked yourself what you were doing there?

Pollan: No. I was driving. I was driving so fast that I didn't see the scenery. Have you ever been in a Streamliner, the thing is going 150 miles an hour? What do you see? You don't see anything. I wasn't seeing anything because I was going too fast. I have slowed down significantly. I do 100 rpms, that's all, no matter what is happening in the exterior. I've just slowed down; I process slowly, I do everything much more slowly. I can take little sips of life, which is great. I feel like a gourmet cook now.

Bankrate: Financial advisers routinely counsel us to do this or that based on our age. You not only take exception with that, you've all but eliminated age from the equation.

Pollan: I've gotten the calendar out of my life. I'm only using the calendar to tell me how many candles I need on my cake. I also stopped comparing myself to others. You're a custom job, and it's totally stupid to compare your success or how you're doing against somebody else. I mean, God didn't make us similar.