So, the money situation is looking a lot better. Just paid a couple of AMEX bills. Have a stack of incoming checks to scan and deposit electronically, with two more editorial jobs in progress.
One of those jobs has GOT to get finished tomorrow, and another, quite the tangle, will need to be dealt with within the week.
Yesterday I met with the financial adviser to discuss how I’m going to get through next year without teaching f2f courses. It actually looks surprisingly doable.
For 2013, The Copyeditor’s Desk has enough to carry me through if it doesn’t earn a dime. The amount I’ll have to draw down from retirement savings next year represents 3% of the total, so principal should continue to grow next year. Barring any more radical stupidity from our elected representatives.
OK. That one’s not a foregone conclusion. But we can hope.
For the 2014 plan, I’ve made the assumption that Copyeditor’s Desk will earn nothing. This is highly unlikely, but why not plan for the worst, eh?
If nothing — zero point zero-zero dollars — comes in from the S-corporation in 2014, I’ll have to make a 5% drawdown from savings. That’s actually an overestimate, because I’m assuming a 20% tax, which the financial guru says is far too high.
When I reach the point in my dotage that I can no longer teach even one online course and I can’t earn anything by editing, I will need a 5.39% drawdown to live in the ascetic style to which I have become accustomed. That figure will drop to 3.46% if and when the mortgage on the Downtown House goes away.
Financial Guru believes 5.39% is within a safe range, the upper end of which he pegs at 6%. Once M’jito is either able to take over the mortgage or walks away from it, the amount I’ll need to live on will drop to a level that will preserve capital until I topple over into the grave.
I hope.
Meanwhile, SDXB’s axiom that money happens continues to prove true. A fair amount of money is happening in connection with the jewelry endeavor — I just sold another piece, a rather ingenious idea requested by a customer. Will show you that whenever I’m up for fiddling with the camera and iPhoto.
His claim that one needs a great deal less to live in Bumhood than one expects also appears to be true. My savings amounts to about half the $1 million I believe one needs to sustain a middle-class lifestyle in retirement. However, I seem to be getting by on a drawdown that should preserve capital into advanced old age, without feeling unduly deprived. The keys appear to be…
• Pay off your mortgage before you quit working
• Pay off your car, too.
• Get out of all revolving debt and stay out of it — never charge anything that you can’t pay for that month.
• Develop a side gig that can be used to bring in pin money. It would especially good if said p/t gig could earn a little more than bare pin money.
This morning I ordered a vast pile of beads and supplies from Fire Mountain. The wholesale deal meant a $48 savings at checkout, significantly less than the amount I’d added up in Excel, even after the shipping charge. I think this purchase will make about a half-dozen lariats, one of which is already sold.
Welp, now that some of the banking & bookkeeping is done, a paper is graded, many hundreds of beads have been ordered, and the dog has been played with, I’m going back to bed.
Later!
I think you’ll spend less because you won’t be driving around all the time. And cutting down on the number of things you’re doing will decrease the stress. You can do nice things like listen to music, read a book, and take walks with your doggie. Those things are all free.
Well, I’ve done everything you listed in your list: paid off the mortgage, never had a car loan, have a side freelance writing job, and like you, have about a half million in savings/investments. I should be on Easy Street now, right?
Yet….I’m too young to retire (53) and have lacked a salaried job since a 2009 layoff. Seems I’ve done everything ass-backwards! Still looking for that elusive f/t job, but one thing i’ve been unwilling to do is the long commute (1 hr. plus) to where many of the jobs are here in southwestern CT.
@ fern: Maybe the answer is to move closer to where the jobs are.
The chances of getting a full-time job, however, are pretty low after the age of about 45 or 50, especially after three years of part-time work. Those of us who are over the hill are pretty much out of luck.
I suppose if I were in your shoes I’d try to get a full-time job in the undesired area, and then if one materialized, I’d move. Commuting is the pits, but so is starving.
@ frugalscholar: Hope you’re right. The way Px is laid out, it’s hard to avoid driving around all the time, especially since I live in the central city, and the middle-class infrastructure has followed the white flight into the suburbs. If I lived in Chandler, Gilbert, or even Scottsdale, I’d be fairly close to large strip malls that have all the usual suspects in the shopping dept clustered in one place: one Scottsdale strip, for example, has a Home Depot, a grocery store, a Michael’s, a Barnes & Noble, a dollar store, and several chow lines. Another has a Pier One, and World Market (side by side!), a Lowe’s, and more miscellaneous stores and restaurants than you can shake a stick at; on the other side of the main drag there’s a Whole Foods. Why, I can’t imagine: apparently if you can afford to live in Scottsdale you never have to eat in. That’s the only explanation for the number of restaurants that thrive out there. Anyway, if you lived in the suburbs and didn’t have to commute, you would not have to drive from pillar to post to cobble together the basic necessities of daily living.
Funny, I think that’s an overly pessimistic viewpoint. There are still firms that value experience over age. And while my work has been largely part-time, would-be employers can’t tell that from looking at my resume since I am self-employed.
While it would seem logical to move closer to where the jobs are, that would be difficult. I live in northern fairfield County, CT. “Where all the jobs are” is along the shoreline, south of me. This is known as the Gold Coast. It’s a very affluent area and of course the real estate prices reflect that. When i originally bought my house 17 years ago, i was looking for something closer to the job areas, but as i got closer to them, real estate prices rose exponentially. I had to keep looking further north, on what was then considered the outskirts of of a “doable” commute, to find something i could afford.
I have to say that, given the ephemeral nature of jobs these days (I have been thru my share of layoffs), I’m not sure I’d be willing to pack up and move for a job. Who’s to say how long that job would last? Maybe if you live in Japan, or worked for General Motors 30 years ago, you could count on long-term employment, but not these days. It would be a lot of added expense, not to mention upheaval in my life, to move, with no guarantee the job would last long enough to make it worthwhile.
Yeah, good point about the questionable wisdom of moving to get closer to a job that may not be there tomorrow.
What people consider to be a “doable” commute these days seems to me to be an unmanageable trek. I’m not fond of the 20-minute drive to the junior college campus…and the 40-minute journey to GDU’s Tempe campus (which on more than one snafu-wracked occasion morphed into two hours one-way) was some kind of Hell. Apparently some people don’t mind driving and driving and driving…very strange.
All the places one would like to live are too expensive. It keeps bringing me back to the possibility of retiring overseas.
MarketWatch has one of those “10 best” photo features plugging what its editors to believe are the world’s best retirement havens. Some of them have a very low cost of living. Let’s see if we can slip this past this new spam-catcher by subsituting [slash] for the character of that name:
http:[slash][slash]www.marketwatch.com[slash]story[slash]the-worlds-top-10-retirement-havens-2012-01-19?link=MW_story_insert