I doubt if he would have thought of it in those terms. He surely was aware that a hundred grand (his coveted goal) was a lot of money for a working-class guy. But a MILLION BUCKS’ worth? Probably not a concept that would have presented itself to him.
He did it, y’know. No kidding: He stashed a hundred thousand dollars in savings — that was his life’s savings goal — and then quit his job.
Shortly thereafter, the stock market crashed.
So much for his hundred grand, eh?
Oh well. He went back to work for another couple years and then…soldiered on.
My mother died: the love of his life killed herself with tobacco sticks. He sent me through college. Then he quit his job, figuring at least to live ever after without having to work his a$$ off.
Frankly…I cannot imagine that he would have kept at his savings goal if he had thought of it as the equivalent of a million dollars. It would have been beyond his comprehension. But to tellya the truth, that is what the man accomplished in his lifetime.
He may have intuited that there was no way in Hell he could ever earn & save the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a million bucks. But I doubt if he actually knew it, at least not at a gut level.
I sure hope he didn’t.
That is what it amounted to, y’know. His goal of a hundred grand, by the time he retired, would have equated to just about a million dollars, in the change of his time.
Okay…no sign of Pool Dude. That’s not surprising, though. We’ve arrived at a Saturday in one of the hottest months of a Phoenix year. If you were a Pool Dude, would you be busily running from backyard to backyard?
So presumably, it’ll be Monday before the mess gets cleaned up. At the soonest: that calculation depends on the assumption that he hasn’t decided to can his freelance pool-cleaning business. The mess: remains of palm fronds, with their accompanying burden of dust and dirt, dropped into the drink when Gerardo’s boys climbed up there last week to prune the accursed palm trees.
My neighbor drained her pool. It’s been empty since she moved in, several years ago. And y’know…hmmmmm….it’s a thought.
Personally, I like the pool too much to convert it to a hole in the ground in which to breed mosquitoes. If I didn’t expect Pool Dude would show up at any minute, I’d be out there in the altogether, loafing in the cool water right now. Or at least sipping coffee and listening to the birds carrying on in the brush that surrounds the thing.
And speaking of those from whom we have no word: Mijito still has the Dog Chariot and is emitting no sign of returning it.
And y’know what?
Hang onto your hat….
The longer he keeps THAT hole in the ground into which to pour money, the less likely I am to demand to get it back.
No kidding.
I had no idea how easy it would be to get by without a rolling cash-burner. And that is in the middle of an Arizona summer, when it’s hotter than Hell and a bitch to move around outside. Not only that, it’s an assessment that has occurred before I’ve even started to take advantage of the new public transit system here. Two blocks from my front door we have a kewl, shiny, sleek light-rail train, gliding past silently on shiny new train tracks.
So the question arises, like Marley’s ghost slithering through the window: Why do I want to own a car?
Several times a day, that spook materializes and moans again: Why do I want to own a car?
And y’know what? About 99% of the time, I don’t have a good answer to that question.
Truth to tell: as I sit here, only about three or four things that I need to do would be majorly facilitated with a car…and that’s in 114-degree heat. Let the weather cool off, and you can cut that list to two or three.
1. I do need to go by the pool store and get Harvey fixed.
But y’know what else? I’m gonna foist that job on Pool Dude. Let him earn his pay, by gawd. Let me loaf, as I deserve to loaf.
2. I crave another bottle of halfway decent white wine.
But y’know what further else? That object can be had at the local Albertson’s (about three blocks to the south), at the Sprouts (two blocks down the street and across Main Drag West), at our vast Mexican supermarket (two blocks to the north), and at the local liquor store (a block to the north and a block to the east). So…uhm…I should own a $35,000 rolling hole in the asphalt into which to dump money? Really?
3. If anything happens to Ruby — she gets sick, she eats an oleander, whatEVER — she will need to be seen by a vet ASAP.
But y’know what? M’hijito has a car and always will, at least until he reaches retirement age. In a real emergency, he can schlep the dog to a vet. But why break up his work day, when an Uber driver lives right across the street? Very likely that guy or one of his colleagues could whip us over to the nearest vet in a matter of minutes… Hmmm…for a lot less than 35 grand…whaddaya bet?
See what I mean?There really may not be much of a reason to own a car here in lovely North Phoenix, other than
* ego trip; and * convenience.
The “convenience” part is balanced away by the repeated (and increasingly expensive) trips to gas stations, by the regular visits to the Toyota place for maintenance, by the taxes on the damn thing… Hmmm….
Really, you hafta wonder: why do any Americans keep their own cars? At the very least, why do any Americans who live free of commuting keep the damn things?
The other day I was reminiscing about my father and his times.
Born in 1909 in Fort Worth, Texas, he was a change-of-life baby. His mother apparently was in her late 40s, and, having raised two sons to adulthood, his father decidedly did not want to bring up another child. He walked out, ran off to the Chisolm Trail and waypoints. After some time (how much time, I do not know), he was found by the side of a road, a bullet in his head and a pistol in his hand: presumed suicide.
The mother, however, prevailed. She had inherited what was then a handsome fortune from her father, who’d struck it rich freighting buffalo hides out of Oklahoma into Texas, there to be shipped to the East Coast. By the time her husband ran off, she not only had that substantial chunk of dough, she owned a gas station (in 1909 that must have been a novelty!) and a large home. Fort Worth was a wide spot in the road, where the family presumably enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle.
My father’s two brothers were adults by the time he came along. One was a cowboy who eventually became a ranch manager, and one went to work for Metzger’s Dairy, where over time he became a mid-level manager or executive.
In her husband’s absence, the mother fell prey to any number of opportunists and con artists. She got into spiritualism, which was quite the rage in the early 20th century. Adherents to this nouveau-religion believe the soul persists after death, and that it is therefore possible to communicate with your deceased loved ones. This activity drew the woman right in: my father described séances conducted by supposed mediums…who really acted not as a medium to chat with the dead but to funnel the credulous client’s money into their own bank accounts.
Then she got taken in by some building contractors, whom she had hired to make a few improvements on the family manse. Next thing anyone knew, she was paying them to construct grand additions to the house.
By the time the absent father was found, kaput, she had diddled away all of the money she had inherited from her father, including the gas station (which she sold to help fund her spiritual advisors and her construction crews). My father was still a teenager, but his two older brothers fell to blaming each other for not keeping an eye on her. This led to a permanent alienation between the two men. At 16, my father dropped out of high school, lied about his age, and joined the Navy.
Naval service started him on a decently-paying career in the Merchant Marine. By then he had formed a lifelong ambition: to earn back the entire amount his mother had squandered, and, once he reached that goal, to retire and live the life of Riley for as long as he had left to inhabit this earth.
That amount was $100,000, and that was his target. He worked, he scrimped, he saved, and he invested every spare penny.
By 1962, he had stashed away that amount: the cache he figured he could retire on.
So the other day I was contemplating the absurd rise in housing prices that has taken place recently — a house just down the street from my first house here in the ‘Hood, for which I paid $100,000, is on the market for $640,000. Same model as mine, a block closer to Conduit of Blight and its crazy-making noise. For a middle-class tract house, apparently it was underpriced: it sold in a few days. Six and a half times what it was worth when I moved into the neighborhood!!!
This led me to wonder how much that $100,000 of his would be worth today.
To live in the style to which that amount would have supported my father — just about in my present rather modest middle-class style — you would need $923,185.43…almost a million dollars!
And how much would he have needed to replace the buying power of his mother’s hundred grand in the year he retired, 1962? $173,563.22 when he bought their little house in Sun City.
He wasn’t so far off: only $23,563 short.
What it means is that in the time since he retired — 60 years — inflation has vastly devalued the dollar’s buying power — much more so than during the time he worked: 37 years.
So what does it mean to us, here in the first third of the 21st Century?
My guess is that if you’re a young adult today, you would need to calculate how much you need to earn now and how much you need to save to retire comfortably in middle- to old age, and then multiply that figure by a factor of two to ten. Depending on the style to which you hope to remain accustomed…
You can’t rely on today’s dollar to support you tomorrow.
If you were your kid and you were an American, come of age in a time when America the Great was rapidly turning into a Third-World Country, what would you do differently from what your parents did? From what your kid him- or herself is doing right now?
Do strange little thoughts like that ever cross your mind? They sure as Hell cross mine.
My father planned carefully for his retirement and his old age. Thanks to his planning — and to his lifetime of amazingly hard work — I haven’t had to put in that much single-minded effort: he left me enough to live on comfortably through my dotage. But that’s not so true of my son.
Although my son’s dad is affluent, like me he also no doubt will live (expensively) into advanced old age. My son’s grandmother just died at the age of 106 (no, that is not a typo), having spent the past 20 years wasting away ruinously in a nursing home. The new wife is a good 20 years younger than me, and though she has a highly competent son, she also has a feckless, dependent daughter who never will be able to care for herself and her offspring. Thus most of whatever my son’s father has now will be dedicated to supporting the less gifted occupants of that side of the family.
My son, the recipient of a spectacularly expensive private education, has a decent job but not one that will make him rich. It can, however, allow him to work remotely from just about anyplace that he chooses.
My mother smoked herself into the grave in late middle age. We have no clue how long she might have lived had she never picked up a cigarette. Her father died of Hodgkin’s disease, an acquired cancer not uncommon in his part of the country: we have no idea how long he might have lived had he dwelt someplace else, never smoked, and never drank. Her mother chippied herself into the grave: we have no idea how long she might have lived had she never been exposed to the kinds of reproductive viruses one acquires during a wildly misspent youth. But the other women on her mother’s side of the family were Christian Scientists who lived into advanced old age: we do know that in the absence of alcohol and tobacco, they lived into their mid-90s even without ever going anywhere near a medical doctor or a patent medicine.
So what we have here, in the planning department, are two people — me and my son — each of whom have a shot at living into advanced old age. Or not.
What can be done for my son — by me or by him — to ensure that he will be financially secure into his dotage?
We know that I absolutely positively do NOT want to spend my last years in a “life-care community,” a rabbit warren in which to lock up old folks. My father consigned himself to one of those places after my mother died, and I have several friends who are now living (expensively) in similar prisons. I will take a swan-dive off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before I allow that to happen to me…and that also is neither a joke nor a typo. My house is paid for: if I die tomorrow my son will inherit a piece of property worth about $400,000, free & clear. My son’s house will be paid for in another 10 or 15 years; it will be worth around $325,000 to $350,000, if all things remain equal. He lives frugally and invests in IRAs, and so he presumably will have some retirement savings in hand, if he lives into his dotage.
BUT…
The Covid-19 fiasco has shown his employer, clear as handsomely chlorinated swimming pool water, that there is no reason to maintain expensive office space to support a profitable insurance business. He believes the company will never re-open its pricey new digs in Tempe, a dreary suburb of Phoenix. Shortly before the Covid fiasco began, he was promoted to a managerial position. He remains a manager: remotely.
What this means is that there’s really no reason for him to continue living in a dump like Phoenix, a vast, ugly, crass bedroom tract that we might kindly call L.A. East. If the company settles permanently into a mode in which most or all of its mid-level employees can work online, he could in theory live anyplace he pleases.
And there are many, many better places to live.
In Arizona alone, for example, towns such as Prescott, Bisbee, Patagonia, the outskirts of Tucson, and even Payson have far more temperate climates and are nowhere near as grubby and crime-ridden as Phoenix. Nor is there any reason to stay in a culturally backward hole like Arizona. If you want to live in the Southwest, there are many better places to live in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico. If you don’t mind jumping on a plane to visit your employer for monthly staff meetings, Oregon, Washington State, parts of Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and waypoints are highly desirable venues. With a fistful of cash from the sale of two houses, you could easily install yourself in the Low Countries, Ireland, the south of France, Italy, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, or parts of Australia.
Why stay in a declining economy with a corrupt leadership and a moribund health-care system?
Why not use the capacity of electronic telecommuting to ensconce yourself — now, while you still have some years to enjoy life — in a better place?
If I were my son, I would be so gone. Right now: I wouldn’t wait for retirement, certainly not given the wacksh!t direction into which our country’s politics have dragged us. I probably would leave the US, given half a chance to pull it off. But even if I chose to stay in the this country, you can be sure it wouldn’t be in Phoenix.
Speaking of the which: as we scribble a cop helicopter is buzzing its way toward us, the dog has flown into a batsh!t frenzy, and I suppose I’m going to have to get up, dig out a pistol, and lock the security doors. So much for the scheme of taking a moonlight dip in the pool.
Where would you want your kids to spend the best years of their life?
What do you want, financially? What should you want? Me, I know what I don’t want: I don’t especially want to be rich. I’m content to live in modest comfort, with no debt obligations to anyone.
Owning more money and possessions than I need doesn’t interest me, though I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more cash in savings now than I estimate it will take to carry me through to the end of life.
Obviously, this is a subjective thing: each of us needs to weigh what really matters in our lives and decide what will make us content. Our friend Evan, for example, premises his excellent blog on his goal of reaching multimillionaire status. Yet we see that as he celebrates his thirtieth birthday, he reflects on treasures that have nothing to do with money.
There’s a difference between contentment and happiness. Would I be happy if someone gave me a million bucks? Well, sure: I’d be tickled. Would I like to have a Jaguar and a cute little BMW roadster sitting in the garage? I suppose. (Ever had to take care of a Jag or a BMW? You need an apartment over the garage for the live-in mechanic).
But would those things make my life better? I doubt it. How would a fancy car that requires constant upkeep improve on an eleven-year-old Toyota that after 106,000 miles still runs like a top and gets me where I need to go with minimal maintenance? Would a million dollars buy peace, or just give me something else to worry about?
Contentment is being at peace with one’s surroundings. It’s a long-term thing, whereas happiness is a short-term thrill.
What I want is to reach a state of serendipity. By that I mean I wish to reconcile what makes me content with the demands of the culture around me. To the largest extent possible, I would like to be free of those demands, or at least to be able to pick and choose the demands worth complying with. I can do without being badgered to pay bills, to pay taxes, to drive through homicidal traffic every day to show up at a miserable job, to care for a lot of unnecessary junk, to respond to this and that and the other requirement imposed by someone else.
While having some money helps to achieve that goal, having a lot of it is irrelevant. At some point, it’s not money that matters; it’s attitude.
To my mind, one crucial way to spring free of societal demands is to get free of debt. All debt.
Another is to reduce your psychological and social dependence on the possession of things. If debt is slavery, stuff is the slave-master.
“We got more places than we got stuff. We’re gonna have to buy MORE STUFF!” The other day a friend who’s a mortgage broker spoke of some incredible bargain a client landed when he bought a 12,000-square-foot house in the present depressed real estate market. Think of the amount of STUFF that lucky purchaser will have to acquire!
The time wasted chasing down the stuff.
The energy wasted cleaning and maintaining the stuff.
The landfill space wasted when the stuff wears out.
Of course, if you can afford a 12,000-square-foot hovel, you can spare some of that square footage for the Jaguar mechanic who lives over the garage. And you can afford a staff of house cleaners to dust and polish your stuff.
Now you have to hire, pay, remit taxes for, and supervise those people. And you get to deal with the mountains of paperwork, workplace rules, and taxation the come the way of every employer in this country. If stress is your pleasure, now you’re in paradise: there’s nothing like management and HR tasks to add stress to your life.
How much more peaceful to own only what you really need: to have just enough around you to fit a human-sized life.
To my mind, money is another form of stuff. It’s something that has to be acquired, stored somewhere (not under the bed but in arcane spaces like the stock market, bonds, real estate, and bank accounts), and managed. It has to be dusted off, cleaned, and put back away—often by paid agents with whom, like household staff, you have to deal in ways that consume time, attention, and energy.
It’s not that we don’t need money, nor that we don’t need a little stuff. Obviously, we need a roof over our heads, a table to eat dinner at, and some pots and pans to cook in. My point is that none of us needs more than enough provide a comfortable home just large enough to house us, a healthy diet, adequate transportation, and the tools to educate ourselves and stay in touch with the people around us.
That amounts to a great deal less than a pile of junk sufficient to fill 12,000 square feet. Or even, for most families, 3,000 square feet. Or 2,000 square feet. Stuff may make us happy, but that’s temporary. Contentment is permanent, because it’s based on the things that matter.
The things that matter are, by and large, free: a growing child, a bouncing puppy, a good friend, a beautiful day, a lovely sunset. And freedom from stress.
A comment from reader KML on my recent “bag lady syndrome” piece moved me to think more about this subject. I was going to enter a response as a comment to that post, but by the time I finished typing realized the result was itself a post. And so, more on women’s fear of a destitute old age:
Says KML: Thank goodness! I thought I was the only one who has this “syndrome” I seriously worry about being out on the streets simply bc I am single and have no one to fall back on. I have a comfortable house, good job and a few dollars in the bank, but I still have this irrational fear. Thanks for your post, I feel better just knowing that I’m the only one who wories about this. . . .
@ KML:It’s unclear whether a real psychological condition fitting the description of “bag lady syndrome” exists. It’s a pop-psych/pop-soc term. When you try to track down a little science on the subject, the best you come up with is that some psychologists think it’s a type of anxiety disorder.
Well, to my mind it’s perfectly rational to be concerned about whether your resources—savings, Social Security, kids who can help support you, whatever—will cover you until the end of your life, especially in a time when many people now in their 50s and 60s can expect to live into their 90s…and maybe beyond. It becomes a “disorder” when worrying about your financial security begins to inflict damage on your quality of life. Fear of destitution seems to have been observed among Americans , when psychologists Aaron Beck, Gary Emery, and Ruth Greenberg noted that one man anxious about the future was much helped simply by setting up arrangements to care for his family: talking with financial advisers, writing a will, taking out insurance policies.
A father’s concern about the well-being of his wife and children should he die, of course, is different from a single woman’s concern about her own future. To take advantage of a life insurance policy, you have to die…and that seems counterproductive.
However, whether you’re a man or a woman wondering about the future, I do think you can take a number of steps that help to alleviate that nagging worry:
• Plan your retirement income with the help of a financial counselor. • Budget intelligently. • Try to get yourself into a paid-off dwelling, if at all possible. • If that’s not possible, seek comfortable, safe lodging at a reasonable rental. • Try to get a reliable, paid-off vehicle that will last for a long time. • As long as you’re physically able, arrange an ancillary income stream with a part-time job or by monetizing a hobby. • If you can afford it, buy long-term care insurance. • If you have a partner or a family member who will require care after you’re gone, buy life insurance. • Schedule time once a month to reconcile bank accounts and pay bills; avoid thinking about finances at other times. • Get out of the house frequently, so you don’t sit around stewing.
Most of us can do many or all of these things. And really, maybe the best thing we all can do for ourselves is to recognize when we’re worrying to much and decline to continue with it. As Scarlett O’Hara reminded us, “Tomorrow is another day.”
