The theory is a bad habit I’ve had for years. I hook my right foot around the leg or brace of a chair. It cramps after a bit and I shift balance. Well, this time I fell asleep for nearly four hours in that position. Got up, when to bed, no prob. Then came the morning. So I had warning something was coming.
Internet scams. Don’t bother with “gorentooown”. They present themselves as purveyors of properties where the owner is willing to finance on a rent-to-own basis. Your first tip off it is a scam is they won’t tell you anything until they have positive ID on you. They then redirect you to a page that says before you shop for any property, it is “vital” that you know your credit score. And they are only too ready and willing to oblige. Of course, it is all so incredibly free that you won’t hardly believe it.
I’m comparing rentals against buying in Belize, purely out of curiosity. And Mexico slips in there, particularly Baja. And man, is it difficult to get straight answers off the Internet. The glitzy American sites have once again crowded out the local sources. When you search on rentals and a Caldwell-Banker web site appears, the deals are all gone. If you want to know what things really cost, you may have to take a trip there yourself. (This was before bad news started pouring out of the area.)
Then I drop in to see Miguelito. He has a welder now and he’s got quite the suntan using it without safety gear. He showed me a small work stool he’d built and the workmanship is excellent. I was there because the muffler on my red scooter is working itself loose again, but the conversation quickly turned to sidecars. There are scooters with sidecars but they are frightfully expensive. When I lived in Thailand I saw many scooters and small Honda motorcycles with cargo bins on a sidecar frame, but none with a passenger seat. Taking their lead, we talked about converting a scooter to take a sidecar. I saw kits for sale, my task is to find them again and see if they will fit a scooter.
While here, take a gander at the 2014 Urals. They finally decided to add a few features, such as electronic fuel injection. Even my cherished Goldwing doesn’t have that. I only looked, as $15 grand for a Russian motorcycle is still three times what it is worth. In case you wondered, the sidecar kits on the market seem to start at $1,600 for just the frame, axle, and wheel. The sidecar on my unit is 5’ 6” long by 18” wide by 21” tall, all approximate as the thing is odd-shaped. And Miguelito and I know a steel box doesn’t cost that much.
What struck me about such photos as I saw was how similar the sidecar assembly looked like “the left side of a small trailer cut in half”. My isn’t this blog just full of observations like that? Makes me wonder if I should write a book. But who'd read it when this blog reads so much easier.
While this blog is not a forum or debating society and I have no compulsion to justify my statements, I choose this time to explain some basics to a few who still live in some kind of fantasyland concerning the Internet. I didn’t tell you that on my trip out west last autumn I set up a new and unrelated e-mail account at each little local library I stopped at. There was nothing to tie them together or back here. Yet, by logging on from the libraries here, all have been traced back to this locality and linked together.
It turns out later this was the Google system of trying to force all users to have "One Account". I didnt' fall for it. I’ve always maintained Google and MicroSoft have been selling your information behind your back (actually, it is meta-information, which is how they get away with it). The bottom line is these people spend a lot of time and money to track and store your personal activities. This costs a lot of money so you can be certain they are not doing it for your own good. What's good for Google is bad for you.
It makes you wonder how much proof some people need before they admit they were wrong to call others “paranoid”. Whiz kids, what a joke that is. I am continually horrified by how little the current generation knows about computers. That’s not surprising, since long ago computer design has been side-tracked into selling gadgets to men who need their daily porno and social media fixes. It’s been a long time since computers were scientific instruments.
Google and MicroSoft are so insipid they think they are helping America fight bad guys by supplying private information to the non-elects. In fact, they are bent and twisted, causing erosion of the very freedoms they think they are supporting. Very sick-minded individuals.
Having been through the wringer myself, I can readily tell how far along the computer learning path people are. Even young Jag was shocked when I showed him how easily I could crack MicroSoft passwords, read hidden files, and display pretty much any file I wanted. Yet I would have thought he and his generation would have a complete, if informal, network sharing such information. Not so, nor is he even aware of whether such ties exist. Fact: If you don’t know how computers do such things, you cannot protect yourself against them. It is as plain as that.
And here is a picture of the middle rack in my fridge. That’s a roll of chocolate apricot layer cake in the lower left foreground. How can you tell I am friends with a bakery? Does your fridge look like this? I have no idea if this photo will make you feel better or worse. But around supper time tonight, you know where I’ll be.
ADDENDUM
Next came a shot in the arm. John, the lady I chummed with at the company, was on the phone for a half-hour. She is eligible for a retirement package and of course I totally support that. I’m the spreadsheet guy who got it right 30 years in advance. After age 55, the money put into the pension plan is barely worth it. You work another entire year to get an extra $60 per month because you worry you will need it one day. Quit worrying, you will need it no matter how well you plan. So plan alternatives, retire, and enjoy the years when you can still walk to the market. Old people will always have trouble with limited incomes but you don’t see them dying in the streets by the cartload. The system doesn’t work that way.
In fact, I would suggest that the “trick” to retirement is to set up the following situation.
Outright own a place to live, free from all encumbrances
Have a spare room you can rent out
Learn a “cash” skill that you can work at even when you get old
Have a nest egg of some kind that is “off the grid”
Get every free service you can from the system
Have the above, and you won’t work until you are 65 and try, like some other fools, to live thereafter on dwindling resources and declining health at the mercy of the system in constant fear of inflation. That’s not a goal, that is called wasting your life. As Thoreau said about saving up a whole lifetime for the least enjoyable part of it.
But yes, it does come down to income. I always paid more attention to mine than most people, and I’ve had a sincerely better life because of it. I miss some things, but I don’t have to bust my ass to pay for them, like a new car every four years. It was only minutes before John and I were discussing Belize and Mexico. We are in that tiny percentage of people who will never have to worry about starving or living entirely on social security. No, no, people that dumb wind up living in basement suites and moving back home in their fifties.
Let me tell you how it used to be. Dutch. We were never an item but we went everywhere and did everything--dutch. And we got to places and did things most people only talked about. Breakfast uptown every Sunday and downtown every other weekday. We rented condos on the Oregon coast, drove luxury cars; we were the first run movie crowd. She’s as sensible as I am impulsive about new things. Like I said, others talked, we really did. Drive all the way to Whistler for a coffee. Spend two weeks in Montana to read books. Drive to Spokane to shop at the army surplus. No, we were not hoity-toity types for she kept us down to earth. Besides, I laugh at rich people who did the same things we did and they think it is a status symbol—but then they fall asleep during the second act.
The thing is, and this is the thing: I’ve got a (relatively) massive eleven years’ experience being retired and I’m nowhere near sixty-seven, my normal retirement age. I know the ins and outs of getting by on a budget and still manage to operate a vehicle and go where and when I please. I have no illusions about what is needed to get by and compared to others, John and I have very little to worry about. Mind you, nor do we behave as a team and we will never be boyfriend-girlfriend. She prefers a mortgage in the fancy part of town, I believe in buying only what you can afford. Things like that. Therefore, I am more likely to be the one who gets to Belize first.
So there, if you thought her and I were planning our future, you guessed wrong. Here’s what came of the conversation.
Scenario A: If I stay here, I have only the down payment for a place. I would still have to live there for years making monthly payments, probably three or four years. But if I don’t, future rent and price increases will mangle my budget. Sound familiar? But the good news is when I turn 67, my biggest expense will be food. A stroll down the Winn/Dixie aisle tells us most people are not going to have to wait that long.
Scenario B: Go live in Belmopan from 2015 to 2019. If I like it, stay. If I don’t, I’ll have saved so much in rent that I can head back here and buy something cash. And across that border, I would be living like a prince. Not a king, just a prince, but still. And of course, having learned Spanish in my early forties would pay off handsomely.
