One year ago today: June 15, 2013, Aventuragrad,
(for those that get the connection).
Five years ago today: June 15, 2009, Ranger Leslie.
Ten years ago today: June 15, 2004, music triva.
MORNING
Look what I found. A nest of light bulbs. I drove over the Agt. M’s to see if he wanted coffee up at Senor Café but he was out bike riding. Probably to the tennis court. I thought to wait around in the gazebo but I’ve underestimated the summer heat before. Naw, I’ve got some intense planning and thinking to do. Stick around, if you see a long post here, it’s because I did the thinking part.
Nobody wants to be homeless in their old age. There is also a tendency to stay near to where you grew up or worked, you have your contacts there. It may sound harsh, but those are illusions. We all want to be the exception, the go-go seniors who are active and there for those who might look up to us for guidance and support. But it is instead a long slow slide into oblivion as others finally concede that their own worries and cares supersede visiting the old folks. And this is promulgated as technology changes that old people don’t keep up with. You no longer talk the same language.
The problem usually starts in one’s mid-fifties. This, I might add, is far too late to start planning a retirement, but at the same time, that is when most people try. The first order of business is to get and buy a house while you still have a job. The problem is, if you are 55 years old this year, you face the entire last wave of boomers who are thinking the same thing. Prices will lurch upward when you buy and begin to plunge as the first wave begin to die off.
The motive is the same. If I can just have a place to live bought and paid for, then I can use my old age pensions to live on. But I need that secure place to shield me from rent increases and all the other horror stories I read about seniors who get swamped by inflation. You see them pick up the apple at the market and put it back because they can’t afford it. Well, here is the compromises I made.
First, no investment is secure enough to guarantee a future. Like it or not, you will be primarily dependent on your government entitlements. Yes, those could be cut off, get over it. If you have any type of secured private pension (and refuse to commit it to anything but your own enjoyment), you will be the lucky ones. Second, forget the big fancy house. It will become an albatross around your neck. The rent won’t go up, but the taxes and maintenance will. Rule of thumb is you can only afford taxes of one month’s retirement income per year. That’s not much of a house.
There is no correct amount of money you can put away. It will always run out—that’s why it is called money. Nor is there any safe or carefree place to put it. The papers regularly carry stories of seniors losing hundreds of thousands in life savings to con artists. Why? Because those seniors knew their bundle wasn’t enough so they risked it. Instead, here is what you do.
Lop off say $50,000 of the cash you were going to use to buy that retirement house. This isn’t much money, but you use it to buy a place that is outright yours. Land and building. It won’t be what you want or where you’d planned, but when money and family are gone—as they will be—there is your place. Then you’ve freed up the hundreds of thousands the bank wanted you to borrow and can use it for having fun. And you’d best have most of that fun before you hit seventy. Then after that, you can write your memoirs. Come back this afternoon for more on this topic.
AFTERNOON
This is a picture of Agt. M’s old place getting a complete interior job by European contractors. Shown here are the 60cm tiles going in place. This photo has no relevance to anything over here. It is to balance this post, to make it look a little better. Hey, not every day is blogworthy.
That’s fine, one day soon you will read here that I’ve got a place and am packing to move in. What’s more, in another seven months, I’ve beat the odds of living a full ten years. Not only am I still here, I’m still kicking. If I have another ten years, I intend to make the most of it. And to me that means travel and adventure, not writing imaginary memoirs or moving into a retirement home.
Should I make it to February, and there is no reason why not, I have a long-term plan that swings into place. Nothing works out perfectly, but I would like to buy a car again. Once I get my place to live in, I will quickly acquire a second place to rent out. But this time, no cranky partners to get greedy. If all goes well, I should be wheeling and dealing like the good old days all over again. The reasoning is simple, despite all that has gone wrong, I’m still operating at a surplus.
That’s enough money, except to say house prices are not going up faster than my ability to afford them. That’s important these days.
Thinking I just have time to throw my clothes in the washer, every stitch I own goes in there. An hour later I find out the both dryers are jammed. The office is closed. I’m stuck with two loads of wet laundry and no way to take them to the nearest Laundromat in one trip. So, I go up in two trips, but by the time I get there, all the $1.50 washers are taken and my clothes have been wet six hours. Yep, soap is made from fat and it will ferment in the Florida heat. I was too late.
They came out of the dryer but with a faint but detectable wet-clothes aroma. Now I have to do them all over again. That cannot happen until tomorrow. So here I am, stuck at home with nothing to wear.
EVENING
Welcome summer. When I stepped out of the bedroom this morning at 9:00 AM, it was 92° inside my place. I don’t have central air, which is a good thing because weather like this cranks your bill up to $250. I cancelled all plans other than band practice and went up to the coffee shop for a couple of hours, reading my paperback novel. That’s plan A. If you are going out for coffee anyway, hit the places with ice-cold air conditioning. This kind of heat brings everything to a halt.
But every Mennonite boy knows how the Brethren committee sent fifty Fordsons to the Ukraine during the 1920s famine. The tractor was a dog, but it worked. There was no way to get it running except to jam it into gear and it would leap forward about three feet and keep going. Many farmers were killed this way.
This is the only picture I can find of the Fordson model I remember. It looks like a big tractor, but it small and could easily get stuck in farm mud. Right down to both damn axles. Then another tractor, such as a Massey-Furgeson, was required to pull it out. I spent many a wasted day walking miles up to the neighbor’s farm to ask for a tow. The neighbor, exasperated by my father’s refusal to get a real tractor and to quit driving it into the muck, would make me wait for hours in the sun at the edge of the field. He knew I didn’t dare go back without him. And yes, everybody in the community knew it was going on.
Band practice was wearisome, as we are now in an endless cycle of trying to keep current with our over-extended song list. We have twice as much material as really needed so at any given rehearsal, half of it never gets played. Over time, the lack of focus on core music causes the band to slip subtly toward what is easy to play. By now, most of our intros and endings have a characteristic repeat of three musical phrases and somebody is always playing that extra chord that isn’t there.
As predicted, the totally new material we were slated to learn fell by the wayside when it proved too much like work for the others to learn it. Instead, we are moving past it to every more “guitar specials” that were learned years ago and nobody saw how long it took. That’s a secret. It probably took months, but if others find that out, they’d be justified in saying things like “Lead is easy. Just follow me” And any guitar-player in town knows you don’t ever want that to happen.
ADDENDUM
Look at those airlines squirm, they are defending their misleading pricing policies by screaming that they aren’t the only ones doing it. Their best defense is that there are other assholes in town. That, folks, is modern American business ethics for you. I found they will even lie to you if you ask whether the price quoted is “complete and revealing”. They want to trick you into committing to the trip, then hit you for extras as you walk up the gangplank. If it was up to me, I’d force business to include any compulsory taxes in their pricing. I was looking at that riverboat tour up the Columbia River, shown in this picture. I found a site that spelled out their true fares and they are much higher than listed at usarivercruises (no link on purpose).
It is a nine day cruise, but the true price is some kind of secret, at least until you are several steps into the process. For example, the fine print says you must pay a compulsory $16.50 each day for service—whether you like the service or not. And you can just bet the staff, on top of that fee, will have their mitts out for more every time they even look at you.
And when they say their staff is “All-American”, they really, really mean that. In the Washington, DC sense of the word. I’ve often wanted to start a web-page called “What it REALLY Costs”. And let majority rules show what people are really ponying up over ads that are blatantly false and misleading. Here’s another idea. To find out what sort of people you can expect to meet on any of these cruises or vacations, take a quick look at the independent reviews. (TripADvisor, Yelp (Yellow Pages), etc.). This Columbia River tour is for large groups of old ladies. Like 100 at a time.
The casino band last evening, ah, found it. They are the Fabulons, south Florida’s favorite party band. I never heard of them until y’day. The promos show a six piece group with a female vocalist who did not perform while I was there. My guess is they probably charge a thousand bucks a night but that also means they won't get that much work.
For some reason, you take an ordinary tune and add a trumpet, some people think they are now listening to high-brow music. The bass player in this band sang, which I’m not used to seeing, so I watched quite closely. He’s doing it, but there is something not right. Some shortcut he’s taking but I could not spot it because he did only two songs of the same type, a walking slow Blues. It's like McCartney. He is playing and singling at the same time, but yet he isn't.
I did not recognize most of what they played and there was a distinct feeling they were there because somebody was told to get out there and “hire a good band this time”. This band totally pushes the “accomplished jazz musician” aura but can’t quite shake the “bar mitzvah rock” image. I mean, band uniforms? They made the colossal error of playing “at” the crowd. The guy doing the singing was lively, but he could not make up for the whole band. The bass player is the tall skinny guy in the background.
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