This is not a bad sign to see on the way home. I’ll get to that in a bit. In case anyone needs reminding that advance planning pays off, the videos are now digitalized and they are remarkable. The errors are all over the place but can be easily edited out and the lo-hat is visible just often enough to make matching the tracks a snap. Of 119 minutes of footage, over half is production grade. I’ll probably use about half of that, so as soon as I have a few extra hours, and I’ve got a demo should I ever be asked for one.
Chalk up a wasted afternoon. I’ll speak to Marcus about it, but the job interview he lined up was a sales seminar. I specifically told him in advance I was not interested except in a job interview. They had him convinced that anyone who didn’t sign up was “mentally retired”. Beyond that, it was the same old buyer’s club from the 1950s if anyone has parents who fell for that one. These don’t work and never will.because the “discounts” don’t apply unless you tell the merchant up front you have a card. Which is tantamount to tipping off a used car salesman you have a surprise trade-in.It was amusing at first, the way nothing has changed in decades. The pitch is still the tired “fear of loss/hope of gain” where they spend the first hour conditioning you that your job is a mindless rat race which you could escape by joining up. I balked at filling out the “profile” which was another set up anyway. (“What do you mean you don’t like it?”) I would have stayed for the second half except the boss man said he “didn’t understand” that I was not going to fill out any questionnaires. Wrong thing to say, chum. Guess I’m mentally retired, okay? My family income and number of leisure hours per week are not anyone’s concern, particularly not those who hold Sunday seminars in Florida.
They want you to join the buyer’s club, then go out an recruit other members. Of course, they vehemently deny that this is MLM. Heaven’s no! But they would say that, wouldn’t they? It returns to the basics that if you can’t say up front what you are doing, then you are doing the wrong thing. I timed the speaker, she took 45 minutes to even mention a “membership” was involved.
Since I didn’t go to Miami, that was the big event of the day. I toyed around with several video editing packages. Most of them only accept weird or unique formats that, of course, my capturing software does not use. Pinnacle is the only thing that will read Pinnacle, and it is one dumb piece of work. It regularly locks up your system until you reboot. It imports and names files what it pleases, and will overwrite your first file no matter what it is named. I lost an hours work just when I got something to mesh.
In a marathon of pro forma planning, I must again conclude that the formulas used to determine retirement income are wonky. Why is it they say you need a million? It is more dependent on whether you have a place to stay that is paid for. (JZ’s sister’s (the other sister) house taxes are $7,500 per year, so a house is not necessarily a good plan either.) Take the simple example of Wallace and me. Between us we pay $1,980 in monthly rent. If we purchase the trailer we experience a direct dollar savings of $1,580 every month.
That is more than the [projected] purchase price saved in rent alone in the first year ($18,960). I now distrust the formulas and trust my three years retirement experience. That is why I did the retirement experiment now, not when I turn 65. Ownership is paramount because without it, rent becomes the single most wasteful expense. For the extra $1,580 per month, we can order a lot of Chinese. It is not lost to me that the house is a limited risk and is probably far beyond the reach of any troublemakers. When you strip away the mumbo-jumbo from the equations, nothing beats a free place to live.
Tell you what. If anybody can find me a comparable deal, I’d like to take a look. It must be two bedroom, clean, large, downtown in a popular city with low crime, quiet neighbors, two parking spaces, within a mile of beaches and warm year-round and cost less than $20,000. Oh yes, and it has to be in the US. Get looking, because if I had not been an avid bicycle rider, I would not have found the place myself.
Thus, I will try to get a copy of the articles of the trailer park. The Canadians are leaving in droves, much like they arrived. The vultures are swooping in. Adam caught some guys measuring his hurricane shutters. He chased them away saying they are supposed to at least wait until people are gone before scrounging. Ha! Well, there are just a few of us left now. Jose across the way is very worried, he cannot find a place and has no credit.
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