One year ago today: June 29, 2025, WIP
Five years ago today: June 29, 2021, by the thousands.
Nine years ago today: June 29, 2017, WIP
Random years ago today: June 29, xxxx, WIP
If you are reading this, I am on the road to Franklin, TN. Via Gainesville, Valdosta, Macon, and if the mood hits me, through to Montgomery to get on Hwy 65, a slightly more scenic and sane route. This trip will be incomplete before I start. I require a document I cannot find. It is in my black travel case—but were is the case. I tore my place apart this afternoon, so I know where it is not. I probably left a 6:00AM this morning, the good news is I found that clasp with the $35 worth of postage stamps that went missing last year. That helps.
You’ll have to return later for the ever-popular trip details. It’s the turnoff at Tipton I’ve never been west of. Gas is $3.89 per gallon, so we’ll need at least 102 gallons for this [journey], which may have to be repeated within 60 days. But by August I’ll be over the scrunch. I contacted Tonio in Valdosta, but no reply yet. I put his box in the Hundy just in case, or maybe catch him on the way back.
Monument, Custer’s Last Stand.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
ADDENDUM
Going over the budget reveals while we are doing better than average, another Biden Administration puts everybody in the doghouse. This November could end the empire, with both sides planning a knockout blow. And if the Democrats try their old tricks, it means civil war or the equivalent. The budget that endured the best is the one here, at the cabin in Florida. It is based on the expenses of operating a household of one or two people.
As such, it includes gasoline, but not the cost of the vehicles. But even those limited categories of food and entertainment, allow for only $1,000 per month. This is why I mention categories that spill over as warning signs. My telecom costs have gone from $20 per month to $133. Gasoline from $66 to $156. Yet the only year in which my “household” income actually fell was 2025, due to a disastrous second half, and even then by just $150 (kudos to my financial resilience).
Now, these do not include investment or business income which has suffered badly for some time. Zero sales, zero gigs—and don’t underestimate gigs just because some items are not recorded. I once lived years on just my tips, but don’t want to be a Boomer accused of trying to turn back the clock. Note both sales and gigs are earned income (an accounting designation), and I drew the line on that. The Reb has not learned to manage financials, yet that is the only portion of the equation I would even bother to trust.
The diagram of this would look like a giant circle. I started off in the early 80s massively in student debt. I bought my cars with loans, paid rent, and relied on credit cards as emergency funding. I knew by 1990 there was no getting out of that in a lifetime without drastic measures. I took those measures, by the way. That includes no mortgage and thus no marriage and children, but as I would point out, even those people who had these things wound up no better than I. What good is an ex-wife, alimony, support, and children who don’t know them? But that is a different issue.
The facts are there, time to presume I’ll live another ten years. That the completion of the giant circle, back to the original starting point where you get rich by getting poor slower than everybody else. My projections show that with my traditional abilities to average 7% per year, a quarter-million is needed to move the needle. But a smaller investment of $50,000 would pay my groceries and gas.
I would point out that I do not directly withdraw investment money to pay such bills. Rather, equate the income to money I would have invested if I had not spent it on, say food. This may sound dumb to outsiders, but it works for me. If I did not have to buy food, there is a 100% chance I would invest that money, since I know it is a sunk cost either way. Shall we say, there are some who would not make it 100%. They know who they are. I got little use for them. They are usually troublemakers as well. Not big trouble, more the water-dripping-at-night variety.
My investments are further conditioned by political “bewareness”, a term you have not heard me use directly. You cannot protect your money from determined clutches, but you can take measures that give you at least some warning before they kick in your door. Like, for example, your big-mouth neighbor with nothing to hide? Watch his door, the government picks the easy fruit first. Ask Bernie. The end result is my curious attitude about privacy. Not secrecy, but privacy. Secrecy implies you have something to hide that is somebody else’s business. Privacy means none of their business.
This also discloses why I relate often back to my formative years. Simple, my upbringing was divided. It was capitalism for anybody who showed initiative, but communism for the lazy. Folks, I was on to today’s America long before the current strife. I had learned by age 8 a number of lessons, which lucky you, I will share at the level where they happened.
a) If you do not spend money as soon as you receive it, that is proof you never really needed the money, therefore you will receive no more.
b) If you invest, that asset becomes the first target of envy and greed. All the lazy see is the cash, never the value.
c) Showing aptitude is folly. Driving a nail could obligate to driving nails for everybody who, it seems, never become as good at it as you, ahem.
d) Do not volunteer for anything unless it extends you the right to exclude those who did not volunteer.
e) People would like nothing more than for you to fail so they can pick your bones clean.
f) Learn your personal limit to getting ahead. When it comes to money, the trick is to out-think Shylock without becoming one yourself.
