Tag: Retirement
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Who wants to be a two million dollar-aire?
I’ve been watching our net worth. It’s just a number and an inexact number at that. Your real net worth isn’t known until you are dead and your estate is settled. There are lots of vagaries when calculating your net worth, such as the value of your house, cars and other possessions. I use the…
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Unstacking the deck
I’ve decided life is much easier if you are rich. This is hardly surprising. While my wife and I don’t consider ourselves rich, at age 60 plus we are out of debt. No mortgage. No car payments. Now, precisely when I don’t need credit, I’ve discovered my credit score is 832 out of 850. I…
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Want to be rich? Earn more money and work to unrig the system
Dave Ramsey is an American businessman and motivational speaker trying to get people rich by motivating them to get rid of their debt. There is certainly nothing wrong with being debt free. It’s a state that I happen to be in at the moment, which gives me a leg up on some surprising people, like…
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Financial management on a fixed income
My stepmother says that retirement is just another stage of life. After two years of retirement I’ve learned that she is right. It’s definitely a new stage of life for my wife and I. Many of the old rules no longer apply. For one thing, the rules of managing our finances have changed pretty drastically.…
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Retirement is great (for introverts)
So what’s it like being retired? I can faithfully report that it’s great! But it’s only recently that I figured out why it’s great. It’s great because I’m an introvert. Doubtless you have heard stories about how many people are miserable in retirement. There is nothing to do, you hear. That is not a problem…
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Give us a real retirement (or the 401K/IRA trap)
There are some proposals afloat (from progressives naturally) to increase social security payments. Social security used to be enough to marginally live on with Medicare helping by reducing health care cost spikes. Social security is supposedly indexed for inflation but it’s clear that the index doesn’t measure the true cost of living. If you depend…
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Open season on a fixed income
It’s open season time and you know what that means. For most of us it means not bothering to take the time to see if there is a better medical, dental or vision plan out there. And by “us” I definitely mean “me”, at least until this year. Although I retired in 2014, I was…
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Retirement’s first year
Certain people get paid breaks during their careers. They are called sabbaticals. It’s basically an extended period of paid downtime, usually at least six months, to get away from a 9-5 job and recharge. It’s a privilege apparently given to a vanishingly few of us: ministers, scientists and professors for the most part. The rest…
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Affording retirement and running the numbers
I’m a bit anal about money. It probably comes from being a child of someone who lived through the Great Depression. So our retiring last year was a leap of faith. Of course being anal about money, I spent some time with our financial adviser basically to hear him tell me we could actually afford…
Occam's Razor 