Coffee heat rising

Personal Finance

Hiking to Pretoria…

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Well…to Dogtoria, actually. Ruby and I just got back from a seemingly endless trek around the’Hood, not only all over the interior regions but up and down the east and south main drags. Traipsing traipsing traipsing.

Neither of the two lawyers I’d consider engaging were in their offices…not surprising, considering that this is a Sunday. 😀 Tomorrow I must take off into the urban wilderness and see if either of these guys will talk with me. Not about anything drastic…just quotidian stuff like copyright and ownership deeds and such-like.

At this point, I want to review  my will, to be sure that M’hijito  will get everything I’d like him to have after I croak over. That would be…everything I have. And that’s a fair amount, actually: investments, real estate, on and on and on. I want this stuff to transfer smoothly to him, without any hassle.

And with my beloved long-time lawyer consigned to the Other World (how dare he croak over!), we need to get a new attorney in place and set to go for M’hijito with a minimum of headaches and tax problems.

Tomorrow I’ll call Dear Ex-Husband (in his heyday one of the top corporate lawyers in the region) and see if he can aim me at someone who will get everything firmly and smoothly in place.

Meanwhile… Yes: the ‘Hood…  

The piles of apartments to the west of our environs are…mmmm….possibly not going in the direction one would like. They’re getting old. Rents must have come down, one surmises: the apparent quality of the residents (as seen from afar) is nothing like what it used to be.

So that puts the ‘Hood right on the border of a slummifying district.

And that makes this ‘Hoodie right nervous.

Seriously: I don’t like the look of it, and I kinda think I should sell the shack and move into a more credibly stable neighborhood, one likely to hold its value until after the Kid inherits his share of it. But before doing that, I need to make sure M’jihito’s interests are already protected.

Oh well.  We shall see. Eventually. 

My poor father!

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He would have been trying to save the equivalent of something over a million dollars in today’s money.

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.

Shhhh! Don’t tell him, though!

Over the Hills and Through the ‘Hood…

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Beautiful morning!  Edging on to 10:15 as we scribble: a warm mid-morning, “hot”by some standards. Hmmmm….  Wonder what the mechanical opinion is?

{tap tap tap…Enter...}

Gosh! It’s only 82 degrees out there! Feels a LOT warmer than that.

Which implies some humidity is lurking around… Oh, yeah: 20 percent!

Whew: A fifth of the atmosphere you breathe in as you stumble around the streets is…water!

What a kick, though: roaming through the reaches of the ‘Hood! I’ve lived here for one helluva long time. I think SDXB and I had been here around 10 years by the time he decided to move out to (un)lovely Sun City. Having lived there before, with my parents, I refused to go. To my mind SC defines “miserable place”….

And it defines “static”: as in unchanging and unchangeable.

The ‘Hood, however, has evolved. 

When SDXB and I moved here…what?15 or 20 years ago, maybe? — this was a mid-middle class collection of look-alike ticky-tacky tract houses.

Today?

My goodness...what a difference!

Over the past decade, the homes here have been gentrified, re-gentrified, and mega-gentrified. These 1960s plugs of boredom have been updated, fancified, and turned into”classic” — even “historic”– houses. Lawns and trees have spread across the gravel landscape. Ticky-tacky Nineteenth Avenue has taken on the spiffy, ultra-modern light-rail trains.

And now…what a place it is! I dunno what these houses are worth today, but you can be sure none of them will go for the hundred grand SDXB and I paid!

Well, hell! We have the freakin’ Internet to tell us what the thing is worth now. Let us look up the Shack’s address…

holeeee mackerel!

The “Zestimate” for the Funny Farm is $522,700.

Seriously?

And my old house, a block east of Conduit of Blight Blvd???

Gasp! Zillow thinks one of ém is worth $568,700. It’s the SAME MODEL, the SAME SIZE as our first house here!

And how much does Zillow think that place,located handsomely where you can be serenaded by car, bus, and train noise 24/7, is worth? $522,700. 

Most recently sold for a mere $389,000.

Good grief.

And yet, it must be admitted: as the area has matured, it has grown more handsome. Hiking up and down the old avenues was a pleasure. The houses have been well maintained. The city has kept up the streets.

And that fact alone: the place has gone uphill, not downhill; at the worst stayed steady in quality and value — that has gotta be worth A LOT. 

My father would faint dead away, if he could see these prices.

Y’know, when he retired (for the first time…) in the early 1960s, he figured a savings pot of $100,000 would see him and my mother through the rest of their lives in solid, middle-class comfort.

By the time I graduated from college — just four years later — he had to go back to sea. That’s how much the dollar’s value fell in just four years!

Makes it damn hard to plan for retirement. Or to figure you’ll ever really be able to afford any retirement.

How, really, do younger people manage to afford any kind of life at all, long-term? Really, today in calculating for retirement, you’d have to figure you just weren’t gonna retire. Not until you were hopelessly infirm, anyway.

Welp! I can’t stand it another minute! Gotta pick up the Funny Farm’s litter collection. Then fall face-first into the sack for a stupefied nap.

What Does Inflation Do to Your Savings Goals?

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Every now and again, I think of my father and his goal to earn back the substantial fortune his mother had squandered that her father, the 19th-century buffalo hunter, had accumulated in the process of clearing the Plains of Indians and wild livestock.

She herself was an Indian woman: Choctaw. If you happened to know that and you looked at my father closely, you’d realize “yup! Injun lad.”

Not surprisingly, she had no inkling of what money was or how to manage it.

When she refused to accede to her husband’s demand that she abort the unplanned, late-in-life pregnancy that produced my father, said grandfather(again!)-to-be climbed on his horse and trotted off into the Texas boondocks, never to seen alive by her again.  Supposedly, he shot himself, but when you get into the facts of the story, it looks suspiciously like he was murdered by a guy who had been an inmate where he — the father — had been a prison guard.

WhatEVER…the whole drama essentially burned a brand into my father’s psyche. It produced an obsession:

He would earn back the entire sum that his mother had squandered: $100,000.

Today, that wouldn’t seem excessively difficult.
Hell, I’m worth three times that…and what am I? A freakin’ teacher!

In those days, though, a hundred grand was a LOT of money. By 1962 (when he tried to retire), it would have been something in excess of $300,000.

Understand: my father dropped out and joined the Navy a year or two before he finished high school, out in the Texas boondocks. So his target actually represented much, much more money and MUCH more work than he understood. In today’s dollars, it would come to $3,131,660.

Can you imagine? For a guy who doesn’t even have a high-school diploma…

Well, he did it. By dint of canny investment and a lucky choice of investment counselors, when I went off to college in 1962, he had his 100 grand in the bank, and he retired from his job with a pocketful of dollars.

That didn’t last long.

Remember: this was a guy who did not understand the first thing about economics.

By the time I graduated with a BA, we had hit a recession and his vast fortune went down the tubes. He panicked, packed his bags, and went back to sea, leaving my mother in Sun City…a hole in the middle of the Sonoran Desert into which to dump elderly folks.

That which he did not understand — the mechanics of inflation and deflation — eventually came to pass, and by the time he died he did have a pile of dollars to leave to me, despite having moved into a rapacious old-folkerie.

All very nice…but the point to the story is that the workings of the larger economy have a much greater significance for the individual’s savings and retirement plan than most of us realize.

For one thing, you need to bear in mind that the absolute value of the dollar slips and slides over time. Sometimes, yes, over time the value goes up. But more likely, it will go down…and down…and down. By the time you’re ready to retire, a hundred grand will be worth….far from a hundred grand!

This implies, of course, that you need to inflate your savings goal by some extravagant factor if you are to arrive at a sum that can be expected to support you through your dotage. Take the amount you think you need to live in retirement and multiply it by about 3: that will probably be the minimum you’ll need to have on hand when you finally quit your job.

Because, y’know: inflation.

 

Such Good Pay…

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Ah, yes. I remember it well: My mother landing a job at the business office of the apartment development where we lived in San Francisco: Park Merced. It was a pretty place to live — even a beautiful place: upper-middle class, with handsome, modernistic high-rise apartments and sweet little garden apartments. Priced on the high side of San Francisco’s ever-pricey middle range. My father agreed to let us live there while he went back to sea, pretty much as a reward to my mother for spending ten years in the Hell-hole that was Saudi Arabia.

He was a cheapskate of the first water, though. Resented having to spend any of his (truly!) hard-earned cash on much of anything. And so, though I never heard them arguing about it (they didn’t argue in front of the brat), I’m sure he objected to the cost of the rent there.

No doubt feeling guilty (if not bored), my mother took a job in the development’s rental office, as a receptionist.

She earned $300 a month…and was downright awed! “Such good pay for a woman!” she crowed.

My father was less impressed. As a sea captain, he earned a living wage and then some. There really was no need for her to go to work, and the peanuts they paid her made little or no difference to our living standard. That, in general, was true of what most women were paid, back in the Day.

But y’know…this afternoon I had cause to reflect that even today I would have serious trouble living on what I could earn, with a Ph.D., a string of published books, and a track record of university-level academic jobs.

I happened to peruse real estate ads in our neighborhood. And…

hooooleee shee-ut!

Prices have gone through the proverbial roof!

The first place I bought here, about a block to the north and a block to the west of the present Funny Farm, cost a hundred grand. That amount equaled the my father’s lifetime goal for the savings he figured he would need to retire on. Just for the house alone!

  • Not for a car.
  • Not for living expenses.
  • Not for taxes.
  • Not for locking myself away in a nursing home when I get too decrepit to take care of myself.

My house is now paid off, over my financial advisor’s objections. And I think there’s enough left in savings to support me until they cart me off to a nursing home.

But…

But…….

Meanwhile, the alleged value of this house has gone SOOOO high that frankly, I’m not sure I can pay the taxes on it. Real estate prices have Californicated madly. Realtor.com thinks my house is worth $528,700. Redfin begs to differ, pegging the reasonable price at $629,873.

You understand: I paid an even $100,000 to get into this neighborhood — in a house that is the same model as this one. And thought that was ridiculous. It’s less than 1900 square feet. It’s magnificently crime-ridden, thanks to the slums just to the north of us. And if you give a damn about your  kids’ education — and would just as soon not have them tripping over a dead body on way into the local school (yes!!) — you would put your kid in a private or parochial school.

And supposedly this place is worth almost SIX TIMES what I paid for it????

SDXB moved to Sun City partly to get away from Tony the Romanian Landlord (a threat who lived right next-door to him at the time), but partly to escape the soaring property taxes in this area.

Prices have shot up over in Sun City, too, but not into the stratosphere….largely, I think, because most people in our generation don’t relish living in a ghetto for old folks. Plus it’s pretty remote from the central part of the city, where those things that are of interest in these parts take place.

If in fact this house is worth what the real estate sites claim, when I croak over my son will inherit assets totaling well over a million dollars. And that doesn’t count the value of his house. Or the amount his dad will leave him.

If he sells both places, he can move to Colorado and live like a king — secretly, he’d like to retire to Grand Junction, whence his grandparents came. He not only will get the value of my house and his, he also will get whatever remains in my investment accounts. Plus whatever his dad leaves him.

{chortle!} The kid will be a freakin’ millionaire.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean what it used to. It may not mean very much, come to think of it. But…better than a hit on the head, I guess.

Real estate values in Grand Junction aren’t much less than they are here. In fact, some of them by comparison are outright crazy. Right: to live out in the middle of fu**in’ nowhere!

Come to think of it, though…. Given a choice between Sun City and Grand Junction, I’d take Grand Junction any day.

Mercifully, that is not I choice I have to make. Not at the time being, anyway.

*****

Another NOT a Disaster…waiting to be proven…

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LORDIE what a day!

Driving from pillar to post, chasing after the truth, bathing in nostalgia, getting…essentially nowhere.\

Gaaahhhhhhh!

In comes a notice from American Express. They think I owe them something well in excess of $2,000, and I haven’t paid it. This alleged bill is said to be massively overdue.

My records say that yea verily, I certainly DID pay them, and did so electronically.

But…but…FIRST we learn of some other snafu at the credit union. Frankly, at this very moment I’m so tired I’m well beyond describing it. Just be assured: it was silly.

Get into the Dog Chariot and drive out to the credit union on the ASU West campus. Drive and drive and drive. It’s a bitch of a drive out there. They examine the evidence and agree that yep: the whole thing is silly. It’s declared fixed.

Stop by the upscale Sprouts near the university on the way home. Grab food.

Drive home: driving driving driving…

There I find the bizarre notice from AMEX.

Call AMEX. Reach a CSR who hasn’t a clue. She doesn’t get it that I indeed paid the bill and nothing should be owing. Finally she seems to figure it out, but…this li’l lady, I do not trust.

Pile all the AMEX paper into the car.

Drive to the downtown credit union, where they have CSRs who work with business executives, not with retirees and ASU faculty. Drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and…

Finally make it down there.

Show their teller the paperwork. Explain that AMEX thinks they haven’t been paid.

She pulls up the month’s records of payments and income.

“They certainly have,” says she. And she pulls out the paperwork to prove it.

Gather the incomprehensible paper trail. Stumble back out to the car.

So tired I can hardly see.

Drive homeward homeward homeward…this time through the heart of Phoenix’s Willo district, where DXH and I lived for ten years or so.

Such a beautiful area.

How I miss it!

Drive past the street where both our beloved babysitters lived: two women who had raised their kids handsomely and set out to raise other people’s kids, for a fee. Miss those two wonderful ladies.

Past the street where my dear friend and editor at Phoenix Magazine lived. Miss him and his wife a lot.

Northward through haunts and shops that we used to patronize. Miss the Willo neighborhood. Miss it very much.

Still…as the years go by, driving in Phoenix gets more and more like driving in Southern California. In some places, I’d’ve sworn I was driving around (un)lovely Long Beach. Never having been fond of SoCal, said state of affairs does not speak well for my mood about this place. Driving driving driving driving…finally get back into the’Hood.

Spot WonderAccountant just heading out as I pull into my driveway. Waylay her and let her know I’d like some dibs on her time tomorrow, by way of figuring out…WTF happened with American Express and how to handle it.

Tomorrow, then, I’ll have to get on the phone to AMEX again and do battle again. This time I have evidence that the bill was paid. But just now I’m to tired to even contemplate that upcoming squabble. Besides, by then with any luck I’ll have WonderAccountant on my side…and she’s still young enough to have a functioning brain.