One year ago today: April 7, 2015, giving you the gears.
Five years ago today: April 7, 2011, a generic day.
Nine years ago today: April 7, 2007, beat the heat.
Random years ago today: April 7, 2008, memories of first calculator.
Time for some urban philosophy. These days everyone over 40 is concerned about the future of our institutions. I’ll chat about my own “retirement” experiences. Don’t read too much into it, since my earliest real retirement date is at the end of this decade. By retirement, I mean the situation of being happy, healthy, and having food on the table without being a wage slave. This is a double-edged sword. When you don’t work, you have more time. Contentment has a lot to do with how you deal with that time. I miss not having grandkids, but I don’t miss that I would have had to sign my life away at 21 for that, nor do I particularly admire the attitudes and claims of any one who did that. They are glossing over the bad parts or outright lying.
national debt
I like being retired and I have now eleven years practice at it. Since nothing happened today (of any consequence) I’ll tell you a bit about what I’ve learned. Foremost, if you are at all worth much in the universe, retirement should be the most productive time of your life. Boring people may not find being left to their own resources to be much fun at all. Myself, I love to take the day off and do nothing. Like to day, frinstance.
Here’s an old statistic. I don’t fit into any category here, except maybe between the middle two, but more toward the independent side. At the worst time of my life, I never had to borrow any money and that must qualify as independent by most sane definitions. The stats say the average retiree spends 35% of income on housing. My plan is to spend 5%. And it’s a real plan, there, Theresa, you know, a plan. P-L-A-N. It’s something you decide now for future . . . ah, just forget it.
Retirement is, in one major sense, like being born well-to-do. That sense is the steady income, in most people’s case it will be the shaky social security system. However, as long as it covers your living expenses and you’ve arranged your affairs to minimize those, things get comfortable. Now I did not say it is like being rich, just well-to-do.
You still have to think ahead. This is a lot easier to do once you no longer have to crawl out of the sack every morning and drag into the office. It further helps immensely if you paid into the pension plan or equivalent, since every penny helps. Myself, I paid into everything to the max. The major change with retiring is that you now live to a more natural schedule.
Natural? Yes, and what a difference. You sleep when tired, not because you have to get up and go to work. Food is a pleasure because you have the time an inclination to be picky within reason. But the real question is money. There are no effective courses on how to manage it right, only the school of experience. Nobody wants a retirement of constant worry over rent and food. Yet that seems to be the destiny for so many.
North Pole area.
This upcoming May 26th, it will be twenty years since I’ve heard an alarm clock, except to catch a plane or make a rare early appointment. It would be wrong to think everything went my way by virtue of superior planning. For example, I still do not own property to live on, I pay rent. That is not how to retire, and when I say rent, I also mean condo fees. Same thing if you ask me. I grasp the theory that even if you own property, the taxes are a form of rent. But land taxes are the cheapest rent you’ll ever pay.
Within the following fifteen months, I learned I was not going to get that house I wanted on Las Olas Blvd. You remember, I had a plan to wave cash under the nose of some bragging Yuppie and scoop his beachfront property for $15,000. I even calculated I could get something in that area for $5,000 if things went really bad. Which they almost did. Instead, I learned that my days of working for a living were solidly over—and I’d best get down to learning to behave on a budget of a third what I’d projected.
That’s where you find me today. Looking once again for that elusive property, still in Florida, but well away from what South Florida has become. Miami is a festering rat-hole, the Detroit of Dixie. There are enclaves, but like any third world city, they are across the lane from crime-ridden slums. The one time the Liberal press tells the truth it is that the former middle-class is gone, plucked like a chicken from both ends. It is the presence of a middle-class that defines a great nation and now that’s gone. The death was prolonged for forty years by the easy availability of credit.
It’s not all doom if you don’t do things my way. You’ll just need more income and once you cross the line into borrowing, well just say it is hard enough to get out of debt when you are working. Don’t try it when you are not. I think working ages you prematurely as well. Myself, I know now if I had kept working, I would be dead by now, no question. It took a bit to realize there is no such thing as a job that does not involve stress. You only think there is.
There, is that enough bloviating for a quiet day? I was hoping the motorcycle shop would call and say there was an opening, but no. Saturday morning, and due to the nature of the repair, there is no certainty it will be ready same day. Pretty please, I can’t spend another four days sitting here. What? Oh, didn’t I say? There has been a terrific windstorm and I don’t recommend driving the scooter. Hence, I will have been cooped up here for five unplanned days, minimum.
It’s not idle time, I finished some projects and I finished reading the book “Gold Of Our Fathers”. By the end, I realize there is a familiarity with the style. Have I read anything by this same author before? And yes, it was a surprise ending. Well except for the corrupt police chief with his fingers in the cookie jar. That’s a made-for-movie standard. The killer is not the usual suspect, but since this book is worth reading, the only clue I’ll give you is never trust a woman. They have many a purpose, but among those is not trusting them.
Second last, I’m keeping an eye on silver. It would be such a boon just now to have something happen there. As explained, the banks are tramping the price down by insider trades at agree-upon prices. I don’t always use the correct terms in this blog for the sake of clarity, but this process is called “cross-trading”. Since they are legitimate trades, there is nothing illegal although it is collusion by any standard. There is a third major party involved and that is the press, or in these days, the Internet. All this fixed-price trading has to be published or it won't work. And we know the same people who manipulate the silver market own the press. They've made sure of it.
It is easy to spot. Commodity prices vary every day. When they remain fixed for weeks or months on end, there is complicity—and silver hasn’t moved since what. 2013? The price of choice these days seems to be $15.20 per ounce.
Trivia, y’day’s video of the world revolving as was taken by a satellite. Why? Because thanks to the contaminated mentality of what used to be a real space program, NASA has not had a human in orbit high enough to take this photo since 1972. Mr. Trump, time to fire NASA wholesale and start hiring back on a case-by-case basis. And get us to Mars. Enough NASA feather-bedding for 40 years.
Last, I’ll touch on finances, the money-thing. Put house-buying on hold as prices continue to fall $146 per day, although not the houses I seek. Is this another crash-dive or just a ripple? The prices began falling March 2, though I can’t find any correlation in it. For buyers it is still a good sign as prices have now been dropping over a month and we know after two months it begins to affect everything. It’s actually fun to watch people panic over this entirely predictable circumstance. And this time, unlike the droop in the market 11 months ago, I will be ready.
And I’ll say it once more to make sure it is carved in stone. The entire real estate industry and its practices needs to be investigated. It is completely contrived and without ethics. The “agents” who were formally bound by law to represent both parties are now totally consumed with greed and duck behind due diligence clauses to avoid any responsibility for the knowledge of defects. In most cases, they have never even visited properties with price tags below $100,000.
Where at some point the American real estate industry may have served a good purpose, today all of it is disgusting. You have to dig the truth out of those scumbags. Oh, they know, they know.
Last Laugh
Problem solved. (Flying squirrel?)
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