Coffee heat rising

Personal Finance

UN-Be-LIEV-able!

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Literally unbelievable, as it happens today.

This afternoon, in came a hustling piece of snail-mail, trying to get me to Send Money Now and HURRY to sign up for that wondrous product. It looked like BS to me…sort of. But..but…sort of NOT.

Actually, it seemed to be trying to say my homeowner’s insurance is expiring and I need to renew a policy…right now!

Fortunately, the WonderAccountants were home. They live right across the street.

So I took the wad of paper over there. They looked at it and shortly decided it was a scam. Out with it!

Actually, it took them a few minutes of studying the thing to come to that conclusion. You can be sure that if they were given pause, I would never have been able to figure out that it was a scam.

Lordie! This stuff just comes avalanching in on us! When you need a professional to assess the validity of a piece of junk mail…ohhhh gawd! What kind of world DO we live in???

What incredible luck that those two wonderful folks moved into the house across the road! They’ve saved my tail feathers more than once!

Work Life: Movin’ On

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A middle-aged man of my acquaintance — early middle age, but still: no kid — recently lost his job. Canned for no great fault of his, but you may be sure the ex-employer will try to foist blame on him by way of minimizing post-employment payments.

{sigh} I think what would I do if I were in his work boots? 

Well: obviously, my goal would be to move on in the most efficient and effective way: a) to get into a new job ASAP, and  b) to land a salary that would be as much as I was earning in the former salt mine — and preferably more.

Whew! We don’t ask much, eh? /eyeroll/

First thing to do, IMHO, would be to give myself a couple weeks of vacation time, simply to decompress. And during that time, think about what I’d really like to do and how to pull it off. Continue in the same line of work? Change careers? Go back to school for a degree that might open new doors? Apply for a job as a dog-catcher? Or…what?

This would be the time to look carefully at what’s out there: what kinds of jobs are available in your area, what openings exist, and what qualifications do you need. Also it may be a good time to consider whether you want to get a new degree or course of vocational training that would aim you in a new direction.

Next would be to network…network…network. Let all your friends know you’re in the market for a new job. But also join trade and professional groups (if you’re not already in at least a couple of them), show up at their meetings, and let those folks know you’re looking for fresh work, too.

Neither of these strategies, of course, guarantees that you’ll get any new opportunities…but sitting on your hands certainly will guarantee that.

Another avenue might be to go back to school: get into a graduate program or sign up for a new vocational training course. Several obvious advantages here, above and beyond keeping yourself busy: strong potential for networking opportunities, easy way to spiff up the résumé, and something constructive to keep your mind off your troubles.

Then…just keep on keepin’ on!

If you’re wanting to get hired by a new employer, start applying for jobs and keep on applying.

If you think you might like to start your own business, join a couple of networking and business groups. Show up: make friends, tell them what you can do for them, follow any leads they give you.

If you want to change careers, figure out what you think you want to do next, learn how to establish your qualifications for it, and dive in!

As you might have guessed, none of the options will be easy. But all of them are better than sitting on your hands. So…  Forward! Head on down that lonesome road…

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.