livingdeb | Entries tagged with retirement

After four years, the first college that asked me to help them move their programs to the new degree audit system asked me to work for them again. Last time, they kept extending my contract, over and over. Until a whole year had gone by. It was a big job.

Victory Is Mine

This time, they were just coding the new catalog, but they were down two advisors, so they asked me to help. They were hoping to be done by May 23, but they couldn't get me officially approved until May 11, so I was contracted for May 11 - 31 (20 hours per week). I finished everything available to me (none of the new programs had codes assigned yet) 2.5 hours before quitting time on the 31st. I was so, so glad to have actually finished in the time budgeted this time. Okay, not "glad," exactly, more like victorious!

Useful Drudgery

I didn't have to cut corners, either. I made things more efficient, especially by making one college-wide restriction against pass-fail courses so that I could delete the hundreds of requirement-level restrictions that got ported over from the old system.

Puzzles

And I solved some puzzles. In one case, they switched from asking for a certain number of hours from one big list to also asking for a minimum number of hours from a subset of that list. I got to figure out how to structure the course lists so I could use the same ones in both catalogs. (This way, any time a new course is approved, you just add it to one course list and it works for all the catalogs.)

In another case, there was a requirement that could be modified for students in another program, but there was no way for the degree audit system to know who is in that other program. I figured out how to make it so that the audit would not ever wrongly say that the requirement was filled and so that to override the rule for the students in the program, all you had to do was change one single-digit number. (And I explained it in the comments so non-experts could easily figure out what was needed.)

Teamwork

There was another requirement where some additional options are always approved but not publicized. But it was a puzzle: my first idea meant you would have to do a lot of overrides and my second meant that before people had completed the requirement, part of the pre-approved unpublicized option would appear on their audit, which would be confusing at best. So I talked to the person who knew the most about this other option and we figured out that I was confused about the other option, and so it was actually possible to just make it work perfectly for everyone. Woo! I almost never get to participate in real teamwork--neither one of use could have come up with this solution on our own.

New Things

While I was gone, the new certified minors and certificates have been added to the degree audit system (in addition to majors), so I got to see how those work.

Co-workers

All the people I worked with in the college were great. My supervisor at the college was there for me to ask questions of daily to make sure that I was coding thing the way they actually wanted. For example, when a course is mentioned in the new catalog that was not mentioned in the last catalog, is that because the requirement has changed to allow the new course or, more likely, is this a course that didn't exist before but is acceptable in all catalogs?

I also met the two people who have my old role in the Registrar's Office. One has only been there a couple of months, but shows promise. The other is also pretty new and still learning but asks lots of questions and mostly got back to me (with perfect answers), so I'm feeling really good about him. (The questions he didn't answer regarded minutia about which I could easily just assume the worst.)

There were some other people in the Registrar's Office who I contacted because I needed to see another part of the catalog that had some university-wide degree requirements. Radio silence. Until the last day when I said, "today is my last day" and when I gave them three possible options (send me the text, give me a link to the text and permission to access it, or let me come over and read it). They set up a keyboard and monitor in their office so that I could come over and read it online. They had been waiting for their supervisor to tell them how to help me because they couldn't imagine how until they got my e-mail. They also didn't realize it was urgent. They still don't realize that it would have been urgent even if it weren't my last day because we were trying to get the degree audit programs live in time for summer orientation.

The people in charge of assigning the degree codes, omg. Actually, it was the people assigning the institutional codes that backed up the process for four months, but those folks weren't even mentioned in the long list of steps required for new programs until I dug into it. Fun times. (Actually, it is fun. I don't like bugging people to do their jobs, or worse, telling them how, but it feels good doing so as a favor to the whole group of people who are in my same position. And if people get annoyed with me or think I'm a bad apple or whatever, I don't have to care, and I save full-timers from getting stuck with those labels while still sometimes getting them results.)

Salary

They asked what my salary requirement was. I am so terrible at salary negotiations. Last time they could only afford $17.50/hour. This happened to be almost at the very top of the "Assistant Advisor" range. Inflation calculations showed that this was equivalent to $19/hour in today's dollars. So I answered that I wanted $20/hour negotiable. And they agreed to $20/hour. It turns out that the top of the "Assistant Advisor" salary range is still within pennies of $17.50 so this time I was an "Administrative Associate." So, even though I am a terrible negotiator and salary ranges have not kept up with inflation, I still got a better salary than had I been maximally doormattish. Another victory!

Except for the part about how I never got properly authorized to use the time reporting system, ha ha. I'm not too worried. I know I'll get paid eventually.

Summary

I really enjoyed helping out my old coworkers, meeting the new versions of me, getting to see the new features of the degree audit system, and coding the new catalog (and fixing up parts of the previous catalog(s)) as well as I could, with lots of help from competent and conscientious people. Even working half time, though, was a bit much. (That's partly because I also worked a couple of weekend jobs that Robin was doing where they needed more help.)

Commitments

Even when you're retired, it's hard to juggle all your commitments. This summer I have basically 2 commitments: 1) a one-week trip to Cancun and 2) a friend and I are going to go to a water park for exercise in the early afternoon of some weekdays.

Easy, right?

Except the college that hired me heard that another college could really use me and gave them my e-mail address. That second college hasn't yet contacted me, but I've heard things are so dire that their advisors don't even trust their audits, so they don't use them. Their degree audit expert retired recently, and the new guy is having really tough time figuring things out. So I would love to help them (and would ask for $25/hour, negotiable), but yikes, they would probably want me to work on weekday afternoons!

Actually, the new bus system starts next week, which means there will be a bus to the university every 15 minutes instead of every 35 and the route will be much more direct, and therefore (surely) shorter. So in the past, I would do 20-hour work weeks by working three days a week, but maybe working 8 - 12 would be just fine now. That could totally work.

The Finance Buff recommended While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis, and because I have a pension, I thought I'd check it out and get educated.

Right away the book made me feel guilty. "New York's public servants now stand a fair chance of collecting a pension for longer than they worked, and in many cases they earn more in retirement (including Social Security) than they did on the job. Thus 'retirement' has expanded from a modest sinecure at the sunset of life to a long and lucrative second career."

The shoe fits. The current rules of my pension will let me retire at age 52 with a little over 60% of the average of my highest five years. That's more than I made when I started. Add Social Security (eventually) and that gets quite close to my higher-earning years. And I only have to live to be 79 to collect the pension for as long as I collected a paycheck. That really does hardly seem fair to the state taxpayers.

I read on.

Some things I learned were less scary than I expected. For example, the biggest problem I hear about Social Security is that there is no trust fund--today's workers are paying for today's retirees and the ratios are going wonky. With pensions, today's workers are paying for their future selves, so there's much less room for wonkiness in that ratio. There is some room because when the calculations are done based on one average life span, but then the actual life span increases, you're still in trouble.

Another problem with Social Security is that although it's supposedly getting funded, that money is then being borrowed for other purposes which means it's being unfunded again. GM would just plain underfund their pension when they were short on money. NYC and San Diego also borrowed from their funds. But I'm pretty sure there is no borrowing going on with my pension.

Some things were more scary than I knew. At least in the three cases described, once you promise a pension benefit, you can't by law go back on that promise. (This is not true for Social Security, by the way.) No matter what. Which means businesses and tax payers who are already squeezed have to pay. That's not as reassuring to me as one might think--it feels more like the sort of promise that could bring down civilization. I'd rather have to go back to work than to lose my civilization. (I know! Where are my priorities!)

Also, there's even more strangeness going on with politics than I suspected. I knew that anytime you have a large pile of money gathered in one spot, it's just begging to be stolen. And I knew politicians love to promise things, even if they don't intend to keep the promise and even if it's impossible to keep the promise. What I really didn't quite get is how certain crimes either go unpunished or the punishment (such as an extremely large fine) is just part of the calculations for politicians and labor unions. If a union strikes illegally, its members do not all get arrested and taken to jail. Even if they also stole public property to prevent things from working in their absence. And companies did not even have to include a category for pension promises in their accounts until fairly recently, let alone show that they were actually funding them fully. And this is even though the government has promised to back up corporate pensions.

Well, it's another area where I wish people would be responsible for their actions.

After reading the book, I still feel about as confident in my pension as I did before (pretty confident but not totally). I'm still saving as much as reasonably possible in other accounts, just in case. I just feel less confident in my civilization.

When I first opened the book I remembered that I hate social science books because they're poorly written and exceedingly repetitive. But this book isn't. The author, Roger Lowenstein, actually makes the history of the pension at GM fun to read. It's interesting and all the wackiness makes perfect sense in his hands.

The part about NYC transit wasn't so well done and could have been left out completely with only a little loss. The part about San Diego was in between.

Then at the end he promises recommendations. The first seven pages of this chapter are not about pension recommendations, in the tradition of bad books, but then he really does present a variety of recommendations:

* "[Reform] ERISA so that pension sponsors would be required to keep their funds solvent," although it would still be too late to save the private pension system. Companies are switching to 401(k)s.
* "[S]ponsor new, national 401(k) accounts and offer matching credits to lower- and middle-income earners" as Hillary Clinton proposed. (This lets companies compete more fairly with companies in other countries that do not have to fund pensions.)
* "[Require] 401(k) sponsors to offer annuities to employees as they retire. Even better, they could make annuities (as opposed to stocks, bonds, and other investments) the default option for new retirees."
* "[States] should require (by means of laws similar to ERISA) that every dollar of state and local pension benefits is funded as the benefit is accrued--not when the legislature or city council happens to feel like it" as suggested by Michael Aguirre.
* Expand Social Security "to the point where private pensions would become unnecessary" as suggested by Walter Reuther. Change Social Security from a pay-as-you-go system to one where benefits are paid for as they are earned, even though this will require a long expensive transition. Quit borrowing SS surpluses.

I've always thought we needed to increase the retirement age, too. Social Security and other pensions were created so that if you got too old to work, you would still get to eat and live indoors. Now people like me want to retire long before we're too old to work and we want to not only eat and live indoors but also have air conditioning, watch movies, go dancing, and travel, all on our pensions. People like me should have to save extra to do that.

All in all, it's a good book. It was mostly enjoyable to read, though a little slow in parts, and I feel like I have a much better understanding what's going on with pensions. I decided the author probably isn't a social scientist but a historian. Historians are much better writers. Then looking at his other book titles, I decided maybe he's an economist. Then I actually found the "About the Author" page which says he's a former Wall Street Journal columnist and regular contributor to financial magazines.

I recommend the first section and last chapter and, if you want a little more, the third section. Here's a typical excerpt (p. 26):

Reuther found clever ways to extract more in every round, both higher levels and new types of benefits. Companies watched their cash wages closely; they found it easier to say yes on items such as pensions, disability, and health care. The UAW exploited this by negotiating wages first; then, as Fraser recalled, "we fit in the programs, pensions, health care." The seemingly routine process of "fitting in" higher benefits began to build daunting future obligations. But to the companies, pensions seemed painless. The near-term cash expense was small, the day of reckoning distant. The accounting was primitive; a pension sweetener didn't necessarily "cost" the company in terms of reported profits.

Today I went to the meeting the local state employee union held to discuss the fact that a state legislative committee is discussing the possibility of switching our retirement plan from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan.

There were many things about this meeting to hate, such as spending way too much time at the beginning discussing why you should join the union and such as emphasizing that the solution to this discussion of pension changes is to join the union.

I had two questions, one of which I hoped would be answered at the meeting. (The other question, what the details of this new defined contribution plan would look like, are, I assume, not yet decided.) I wanted to know who would benefit from the proposed change.

They had one answer: the stock brokerages that are hoping to get our business. They hinted at another possible answer: people who are worried that the market will plummet as the boomers retire leaving the state without enough funds to make the promised payout. Supposedly twenty percent of people in my state are participating in this pension plan. I'm sure many of them accumulated just a few years of savings and don't expect the plan to cover their retirement, but it's still a shockingly huge number.

I also learned something much more concerning to me. Our retirement health coverage is not mandated by law or by any kind of promise at all and it is generally assumed that this will disappear soon. This is assumed not just by the union members, but also by other, less excitable folks I talked to. And I didn't even get any hint that joining the union would help with that.

Suddenly, my salary feels lower, my retirement savings feel minuscule, and I feel like a sucker.

**

In other news, my jewelry making supplies are now stored in Robin's old sewing kit (a small fishing tackle box). I'm not sure it's better than my old system (a big plastic bag). Certainly it's less malleable and takes more space. And most of my stuff is still in smaller plastic bags at the bottom of the box. Advantages are that I can now get to my pliers and tweezers more easily and that it's now easier to stack things on top of it. Which means I'm moving it from a drawer to a shelf.

Warning: there's nothing really exciting in this entry unless you're interested in the issues of diet and/or finance yourself.

A co-worker told me that her current eating plan began with two weeks of eating no sugar. Based on what she said afterwards, it sounded like the diet where you can eat anything so long as it's not white (no white bread, no potatoes, no sugar, and, I assume, no marshmallows). This works great for her and she can lose ten pounds during the two weeks. Wow, that's a lot.

Those numbers stuck in my head for some reason. My current all-time record is losing seven pounds in ten months. And I thought I could maybe use a little jump start like that. But then I thought, no, I couldn't eat like that. I mean I could, but I never would if I had a choice.

But then I started thinking that I wonder if I could go on a no-sugar diet. No white sugar, no brown sugar, no corn syrup, no honey, no agave nectar. Fruit should still be allowed (in spite of the fructose or fruit sugar). But not if it's canned in sugar water. And milk should still be allowed (in spite of the lactose or milk sugar). Maybe a no-processed-sugar diet. Also no fake sugar (no running around buying sugar-free ice cream and sugar-free chocolates). But no. I really wouldn't want to do that.

But then I thought maybe I could do it for just a week. One week isn't very long to give up something. And after eating differently for a week, I might even have learned some things that I wanted to keep doing. And it might be interesting to see if I felt any different.

The two main problem areas would be breakfast and snacks. Current I usually try to have cereal for breakfast. Most of it is a perfectly reasonable high-fiber raisin bran. Maybe there are sugar crystals all over the raisins, but that wouldn't be so bad. The bad part is the granola I pour all over the top of it to make it taste good.

The thing I have for breakfast when I'm in a hurry is chocolate milk.

Well, I could make eggs and sausage and cheese and English muffins, when I had time. Or I could make up burritos like Tam. Or I could have yogurt, with maybe a banana mixed in. Or some berry sauce made by putting raspberries or mixed berries through the blender with just enough water to make it a sauce. I already know this is good, say on chocolate cake, with no added sugar.

For snacks I usually have some kind of granola bar with plenty of fiber and also some sugar. But I could have yogurt instead. Or peanuts. Or a bagel. Or pretzels. Or those pre-made burritos.

This might be possible. I'm thinking of really doing it sometime when I've bought enough groceries and when I don't have any parties coming up (like the two I'm going to tomorrow). My rule would be no processed sugar except for any minute amounts that come in things that I can't even taste. I would allow myself up to one or two cheats for the whole week in case someone brought in donuts or gave me chocolates or something like that. But no solo sugar eating. No dark chocolate. No super-dark chocolate with hardly any sugar at all. I would let myself eat other white things and probably way too much butter and cheese and other yummy fats. But I think I might like to try that.

**

In other news, my workplace is about to start offering Roth 403(b)s. These are like 401k's except that they are offered by different kinds of employers and the money is contributed after taxes (like a Roth IRA) so you never pay taxes on the growth of that money. I like that part because I think the tax rates are going nowhere but up during my retirement. Also, I'm still in the 15% tax bracket, and I'm unlikely to ever find myself in the 10% tax bracket, so it's a no-brainer to me.

I'm already contributing the max to a Roth IRA, which is even better because it has a lot fewer restrictions on it. For example, I can take out all the money I put in (just not the extra that has been growing since I started) at any time with no questions asked. And more importantly, no penalties. So you can risk putting too much in and still get it back out.

But meanwhile I've started researching the options my employer has. There are two things I'm looking at: fees and options. The providers we can choose from are AIG VALIC, Fidelity Investments, ING, Lincoln Financial Group, MetLife Resources, and TIAA-CREF. I've heard bad things about AIG VALIC fees. The fact that I know a slogan from MetLife (Get Met. It pays.) and that they have Snoopy imply to me that they spend a lot on marketing, and I have a bias against companies who do that because I can't help suspecting that this is where their priorities lie. I've heard good things about Fidelity as a regular (non-retirement plan) broker with low fees. And I remember that Lincoln impressed me with a presentation once. I've heard all kinds of good things about TIAA-CREF, which is known for having low fees. Another interesting thing about TIAA-CREF is that it offers its own mutual funds. They say their only fees are the fees charged by their funds.

I looked up their financial ratings and TIAA-CREF has the highest ones. I really thought there would be some ties. And they do have plenty of offerings, too, so I think I'll go with them.

The only problem is how I'm going to find extra money, and how much? The minimum is $25 per month. Surely I can afford that. So that will be my default plan.

**

I've just been realizing lately that my budget could use some revamping. I set up a budget many years ago, and each year as I get a pay raise, I just raise the amounts in various categories by three percent (for inflation) and that's it. But now I'm realizing I want a separate category for home renovations and a separate category for health and now a new one for this Roth 403(b) thing, and it occurs to me that I might want to update the proportions of my other categories occasionally. I like where they are, but I should probably think about shrinking them so I can expand these new categories a bit.

Link of the day - My recent budgeting realizations are due in large part to the long and informative article "How to Create a Zero-Based Budget" presented in the blog "Getting Finances Done: Your Guide to Stress-Free Financial Control."

You'll probably miss an expense or two at first and find yourself part way through the month saying "shoot, I forgot to budget for that." To address this scenario, be sure to budget a "cushion" account (last week I called it a "grease" account, but I think cushion is simply more understandable and descriptive, so I'll stick to that). I recommend starting at about $100 at first. Over time, you'll be able to get a feel if this is too much or not enough.

It's just another one of those resources that reminds you of stuff you really don't hear much about. It's good for people who like to play with spreadsheets, not so good for people who like to budget by just having the right amount of money in their pockets. It's also the article that taught me there's such a thing as Google Spreadsheets, which is what made me look up Google Calendar.

My company invited someone to speak to staff about nonfinancial retirement planning. She was working with old people and became fascinated with the fact that some people retired well and some didn't. She said there are three keys to retiring well:

1) Stay active.
2) Stay connected.
3) Reach beyond yourself.

Those are actually three of the six areas I decided I need to focus on to be happy:

1) physical
2) social
3) achievement
4) intellectual
5) creative
6) helping others

She described what happens after you retire.

First you have a honeymoon period. You sleep in, do whatever you want, hang with your significant others all the time. But then you start to grieve for your old job. This is because there are certain things you can get from a job that you might not realize until you don't have them:

1) structure
2) purpose
3) status
4) social interaction
5) challenge

So you need to figure out other ways to get these things. This reminded me of what I've read about people adjusting to become stay-at-home parents, except that they still have plenty of challenge and they miss social interactions with grown-ups.

She mentioned that if you stay in the grieving stage for more than two months, you might need to see a professional to help you through.

One odd thing was that even though she used the word "Planning" in the title of her seminar, she made it sound like you can't really plan for it. She talked about one lady who enjoyed quilting in her spare time. She knew that after she retired, she would be able to quilt as much as she wanted. She knew she would be making and selling quilts.

In fact she lost interest in quilting almost immediately. What she ended up doing is setting up a program at a theatre where disadvantaged youths would get to perform plays that addressed controversial issues of concern to them such as teenaged pregnancy.

The lesson is supposed to be that you can't know what you want to do until you have some quiet time to be able to really pay attention to yourself after you have been doing what other people want or what you've needed to do to survive.

I don't want to have to wait until after I retire to figure out what I want to do. I feel like that lady probably enjoyed quilting as an antidote to a stressful job, and once that job was gone, she didn't need the antidote. On the other hand, I have to know there is some truth to the idea because even though I knew the career I wanted when I was five years old, I didn't have it quite right until age 43, after having started working.

Link of the day: Blanton Art Museum Extremely Grand Opening - I'm not really into art museums, but I want to go to this grand opening. Of course like all openings, there are special plans, such as munchies. But this place is going wonderfully wacky. For one thing, the celebration lasts twenty-four hours. Check out some of my favorites:

Glover Gill - Enjoy the tango styles of this legendary Austin performer. Dancing is encouraged!

Iron-on t-shirts - Use images from the museum's collection to create a one-of-a-kind t-shirt

Improv for insomniacs - Art is funny--and the Austin Improv Collective will show you how in this tour of the Blanton's collection

Random acts of brilliance - Experience impromptu appearances by artists, musicians and performers througout the Museum

Blanton CSI - Use your sleuthing skills to discover what work of art committed a murder in the Blanton's galleries.

Yoga - Focus on art that explores color and shape while engaging in some simple but relaxing body movements

Aren't these guys the coolest? (If you are or will be in Austin this weekend, it's Saturday night through Sunday night.)

Yesterday I did my presentation on retirement at the student affairs conference I talked about before. I'd say it went well.

I had felt I should prepare for up to fifty people. I had a plan for people to break up into five or more groups, with at least one for each theme (creative plans, physical plans, social plans, intellectual plans, and spiritual plans) or we could have one giant brainstorming session if it was a tiny group.

Twelve people appeared--the wrong number for either plan. I had them pair off and talk for ten minutes. But then I wasn't in any of the groups. At first I wandered around, trying to listen in. But I think that weirded people out. So once I confirmed that everyone was involved, I joined a group that had someone I knew in it.

Afterwords we all took turns talking. We had a couple of uncomfortable silences, but everyone participated and we started really getting into people's concerns, though no one seemed to have magic answers. The main concern seemed to be a fear that they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. And of course money and health concerns.

Traveling and gardening seemed to be the most popular ideas for things to do. Then volunteering and working part-time.

Afterwords a co-worker told me, "You should become a stand-up comedian." Although I should become no such thing, I took that as a fabulous compliment and additional evidence that the seminar went well.

**

I also met someone at the conference who didn't know she could contribute to an IRA. She thought she was limited to the plans made available by our employer. She had been hoping to get approved to use an investment company other than the nine allowed in our plan, so I recommended an IRA for the same benefits. You can add "only" $4,000 per year to an IRA, but that's generally not a problem for my co-workers.

I met another person who didn't even know there were additional retirement savings vehicles available and didn't even suspect that someone might want such a thing. Our employer has a pension plan to which we are required to contribute, and that's all the thought he'd done.

**

In other news, I've heard of that thing where rumors go around that layoffs are imminent, and then the company president sends out a memo that says no, they're not, and then layoffs begin almost immediately. It's so common that I feel if you ever get one of these memos, you better start seriously job hunting right away.

Here's a new tactic I just learned about. Tell an employee that they are in trouble, and if they don't prove themselves by finishing a new project in a few weeks, they will be fired. Give them a nice project that they like and that they can just finish and do a quite good job on. Compliment them on their work. Then fire them anyway.

Fortunately, the person who enlightened me about this tactic began serious job hunting with the first news and has had interviews and has attracted some exciting attention from another employer. I enjoyed telling this person that collecting unemployment compensation will cause the company's unemployment insurance rates to skyrocket, so it is practically a moral duty to collect unemployment between this and the next job.

Today I mailed in my proposal to lead a session at the student services professional development day, so it probably really will happen. The theme is something about paving your own yellow brick road and one of the three sub-themes is "transitioning to retirement," which is something I think about a lot during my many fantasies.

Most of what I read about retirement is how no one could ever save enough money, even if they tried, which no one does, so I guess we'll never retire. And it's not like anyone would know what to do with themselves anyway, because who wants to rock on the porch all day, anyway? So we'll all work until we're too sick to work, but we won't be able to afford medical care, so then we'll lose all our assets trying to pay off the nursing home, and then we'll die. The end.

That's not a very good fantasy, though, is it? I plan to take a different approach.

So my plan for the first half of the session is to have people brainstorm goals for retirement in the areas of creative, intellectual, social, spiritual, and physical goals--everyone picks one subset and brainstorms with others within that one subset. Then a spokesperson shares some of the results of that with everyone else.

[I have too many goals of course. I want to keep having all the fun I'm currently having only moreso, plus do more hobbies, do some volunteer work, do more traveling, more reading, more exercise, some gardening, more cooking, etc.]

For the second half of the session I'll talk a little bit about ways to prepare. Of course I'll mention the "three-legged stool" of retirement, composed of pension, Social Security, and personal savings. (My employer actually still has pensions.) Then I'll talk about a few retirement investment vehicles for the personal savings: 403bs and 457s (like 401Ks for my type employer) and IRAs. Then I will continue the boring traditional advice by mentioning the three types of investment: stocks, bonds, and cash.

[I'm using pension, Social Security, a Roth IRA, and other (non-retirement) savings. I have some stock mutual funds, some plain stocks, and a few savings bonds (some I-bonds from back when the fixed percentage was 3% instead of the 1% it is now).]

But then I will talk about other investments. Like buying a house and getting it paid off, researching health problems you're prone to (genetically and based on your lifestyle) and working on improving your odds in that area, developing hobbies if you don't have any, building a social support system (church, friends, family), and my least favorite, keeping up job skills (and professional organization memberships). I'll also make a brief mention of real estate, REIT's, and the guns-and-canned-goods strategy (preparing for armageddon).

[I'm paying off a house, trying to eat more fiber, keeping an eye out for symptoms of diabetes and hypothyroidism--two family favorites, taking extra calcium--against osteoporosis--another family favorite, wearing sunscreen more often (since my skin tone--pink--is highly susceptible), thinking that I should get back to my ideal weight and blood pressure (at least they've stopped going up), learning funner job skills, and working on becoming publishable (with nonfiction articles). Of course maintaining friends and hobbies goes without saying.]

Feel free to share comments about your retirement fantasies and/or strategies.

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On Time and Under Budget
Review: While America Aged
The Incredible Shrinking Retirement Benefits
Sugar and Dough
Nonfinancial Retirement Planning Seminar
New Career Suggestion, New Low in Business Protocall
Sharing the Fantasy

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Note of the Living Deb

Entries tagged with retirement

On Time and Under Budget

Review: While America Aged

The Incredible Shrinking Retirement Benefits

Sugar and Dough

Nonfinancial Retirement Planning Seminar

New Career Suggestion, New Low in Business Protocall

Sharing the Fantasy