By Gary Silverman, CFP®

I saw the future…sort of.

Granbury is a very nice town to visit, and I have a number of clients in the area. When I found that there was a half-marathon coming up, Michelle, our company president, thought we could combine the two and off we went.

(Fear not, this is not a column about running.)

The hotel we stayed at had the Fort Worth Star-Telegram available in the morning for my reading pleasure. On Saturday, the day of the race, I was going through it and noticed that it was dated: Sunday, October 20, 2019.

Now I knew it was Saturday. The race was on Saturday. I could see them setting up for it across the highway from my hotel room. Yet here, on my desk, sat the Sunday edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Being a sci-fi aficionado, I immediately knew what had happened. There was a rip in the space-time continuum, and tomorrow’s newspaper ended up in the hotel lobby.

Flipping madly through the paper, I looked for the results of Saturday’s sporting events. I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity. I had enough time to drive up to DFW, hop in a plane, head to Las Vegas, and make a lot of money at the Race and Sports Book area. My dream retirement in Kauai was only a bet away.

But when I got to the sports section, they only had Friday’s results. I checked again, going over every column of every page: nothing but Friday’s news. Frustrated, I closed the paper and then saw it: In a blue box on the upper right of the front page read, “Early Sunday Edition.”

So much for my dreams. Apparently, in some sort of sadistic marketing strategy, this edition, instead of being called Saturday, was called Early Sunday. I can only surmise that for hotels and such, printing two weekend editions just wasn’t economical.

Still, there was no mention of Saturday on the front page at all. I figured this was the “fake news” that everyone seems to be all upset over. Later I found out that “fake news” means something else entirely. To me, the news seemed fine, except for that darn date.

I was about to laugh the whole thing off when a color section dropped out of the paper. Oh, they have color comics on Saturday, I thought. But no…here splayed across the floor next to the hotel desk was the SUNDAY comics.

No mistake there. Before opening the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the first place I had read the Saturday edition of the Times Record News online, so I knew what the Saturday comics looked like. These were the Sunday ones.  So, apparently, your hometown paper here is staying rooted in reality, unlike the big city papers teasing us with manipulations of the time-space continuum.

I’m still trying to figure out how I can take advantage of this in Vegas and make my Kauai retirement a reality. If I can’t figure it out, I’ll be back with a column next week.

Gary Silverman, CFP® is the founder of Personal Money Planning, LLC, a Wichita Falls retirement planning and investment management firm and author of Real World Investing.