• Tag Archives money

  • Cash Flow, Fiscal Tides

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                               Early Growth Moon

    Boy.  This money stuff doesn’t seem to get easier, even with practice.  The annoying reality of cash and its flow, in and out, never seeming to be quite enough, no matter how much is available.  A well known phenomenon at all income levels this is an area where Kate and I have grown enormously over the last 15 years, yet still have growing to do.

    We have different approaches to money, no surprise there, we’re different people and most of the time the differences seem to complement each other.  Her more detailed way, my big picture way.  Her more generous nature, my more conservative one.  (when it comes to money.)  Sometimes we work at cross purposes and that requires extra conversation, extra listening, extra patience.

    Money is very far from the point of life, for either of us, but its misuse can make life pretty damned miserable.  As we’ve experienced.  So we’re committed to staying on top of this, to stay in the conversation, to keep things clear and honest.  It’s good for us, but it’s not always easy.

    I’m proud of both of us and how we’ve become more adult, more rational, more compassionate in this area of our life.  We never stop learning or growing.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Feelings 📎and tagged

  • Live From the Front Range

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                   Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

    Ancientrails hits the road tomorrow, coming to you cyberlive from Denver, Colorado in the new and rapidly expanding area around the old Stapleton Airport.  There will be wonderful grandchildren stories, important updates on children and a report on the interior of the Denver Mint.  Don’t miss anything.  Especially those grandchildren stories.  I can already tell you how they begin:  Ruth is the most amazing 4 year old I’ve ever known and here’s why.  Same for Gabe only 2 year olds.

    We’ll be there a week, the newly liberated Kate and the still liberated me, easing in to this new full-time togetherness thing.  We took a reluctant Vega and Rigel, along with old hand Kona, over to Armstrong Kennels.  Like always, once they got out of the truck and into the lobby, ok, the entry area, they started sniffing around and seemed quite alright with us leaving.  So we did.

    Lunch at Azteca which was on the way home, a nap, a business meeting.  This had good news.  Our finances are in the best shape they’ve been in since ever.  A propitious moment at which to retire.  We sorted through the various tasks remaining before Kate’s big party on the 20th, considered the positive news of Kate’s retirement again, and finished.

    I’ve been putzing around on various computer related matters since then.  I’ve managed to create or acquire three nagging problems, ones I’ve not been able to fix and it annoys me, but we’re leaving tomorrow and they will wait until we get back.  Fortunately, my netbook, which travels with me, isn’t one of them.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Adult Activity

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    Another meeting with Ruth Hayden, our cash flow and strategy money person.  She’s so sharp.

    Kate has done so well with earning money and putting money away that we’re going to have an ok retirement.  We’re still calculating, but things look good.

    The transition from Kate working full time to casual time, then to full retirement is something I anticipate with pleasure.  I have wanted to grow old with her and now we can get started.

    Being adult, though, for a whole morning makes me want to run screaming into the streets, doing something crazy.  Gonna have to settle for handling the comcast installer.  That’s crazy, in it’s own demented way.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Shame, Guilt, Fear

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

    While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

    It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

    Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

    What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

    All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Oh, Yeah? How’d It Go?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                  Waning Strawberry Moon

    We keep our walkin’ around money at the Credit Union, Associated Health Care Workers.  I like credit unions because they’re small and friendly, unlike our mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, who has shafted us time and again.  The credit union knows who we are.  I went in today to pick up our weekly cash and the teller said, “I’m used to having Lynne pick up the money.”  She doesn’t Lynne goes by Kate, but otherwise.  “Yes, she had surgery.”  “Oh, yeah, how did that go?”  “Well.  She’s walking around.”

    I grew up in a small town and I value personal interaction with merchants.  It makes me feel known and welcome in a broad, perhaps shallow way; but a wider net of personal connections away from work or friends gives a sense of density to life often, perhaps usually, lost in the city.

    The electrician, Jeff, who works on our stuff from time to time was out today.  He lives here in Andover and we talked about bees and hemp while I tried to identify where the fence guys cut the wire to the sheds.  Again, personal.

    alexdowntown

    In Alexandria, where I lived from age 2 to age 17, most people knew who I was and I knew who they were.  Alexandria had about 5,000 citizens, but the families were much fewer and knowing a family member meant you had some sense of the rest, too.  Yes, it can be suffocating, perhaps more so as an adult, but as a kid, it meant there was no where in town I felt anonymous, a cipher, just a person paying 4 bucks for a latte or buying a new computer.  Neither of which we had of course when I grew up in the 50’s and early 60’s.

    You can take the boy out of the small town, but…


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Health Memories 📎and tagged

  • And Then Again

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                     Awakening Moon

    OK.  Turns out I had read the numbers right.  No sudden shower of wealth.  No happy Buddha of good fortune.  Also, no tears.  We have enough, more than most.  We have each other, family, the dogs, our property, our friends, our creative work.  And our Latin.  None of that changes, so the amount of money is just what it is.  Still, that brief interlude when we thought we had an unexpected windfall made us realize that we could absorb any amount of extra cash.  Big surprise there, eh?

    In for my 6 month eye exam.  A space invaders day with visual field dots and the clicker.  The machine thought I pressed the button too frequently, but I just followed the tech’s suggestion to press the clicker when I thought I saw something.  My pressures are normal, my nerve unchanged.  Jane West, my eye doc, said, “Someone else might look at this and say its physiologic.”  How’s that?  “That you were just born with unusual nerves.  Still, they’re round and they stay the same from photograph to photograph.”  They took portraits of my retina’s every once in a while.  Physiologic, eh?  Explains a lot.

    Home.  Reread my e-mails.  Oops.  Education for an exhibition I’m touring, Until Now.  So, brief nap, back in the car, back into the city.  I spent an hour after the education wandering the museum, looking at the Art Remix objects.  I have a Remix tour on May 6th.

    I also checked out two print shows, The Wild Things and Old Testament prints.  These are well worth catching.  Prints are the ephemerals of the museum, their sensitivity to light means their exhibition has limits.  They can’t be exposed to even dull light for very long.  So they come up, like daffodils, hang out for a brief time, then they’re gone, often not to be seen again for years.

    Kate went to see the back surgeon today.  He thinks her right hip pain may well respond to a hip replacement.  I hope so.  This has gotten pretty bad, too.  It’s not as bad as it was, but before was really bad.  More tests.  More doctor’s appointments.  Still, perhaps a little hope at the end of the tunnel.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family Health 📎and tagged

  • Life Is a Cabaret

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                         Awakening Moon

    When we drove over to our financial consultant this morning, I looked up and saw a crescent Awakening moon tucked in behind three wispy rows of cirrus clouds.  The moon, faint and slightly out of place, added a moment of mystery.

    It was an omen.  Ever had a really pleasant surprise?  I had one, Kate and I had one this morning.  We sat down with Ruth, our consultant, and began going over this and that as we always do.  She got caught up on matters personal and physical like Kate’s back surgery and asked questions about Kate’s impending retirement at the first of next year.  That was why we were there, to make sure about our resources after Kate leaves full time medicine.

    We tossed ideas around and looked at a 2011 budget Kate and I did last week.  It was,  in my view, tight but manageable.   Ruth made a comment about the amount of money we had coming in from social security and pensions and then how much more we needed from money in Kate’s retirement account.  Wait?  What was that?

    We add the money from the retirement account to the social security and the pension?  My mind went blank for a minute as parts of me processed what this meant.  It meant I’d viewed our post-retirement budget from a very restricted perspective.  I had, for reasons I no longer understand, folded the our social security and pension payments into the total from the retirement account rather than adding them all together.  This means our available cash after Kate retires just went up by about 50%!  50% is a big number.  That means our budget goes from being adequate to pretty damned good.

    A pleasant surprise, indeed.

    Afterward, we ate lunch at Spoonriver, Brenda Langston’s place by the Guthrie.  I saw Brenda there and complimented her on her class and the restaurant.  It was a great, healthy and damned expensive lunch.  But, what the hell?  We can afford it.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Travel 📎and tagged

  • Surgery, Money and the Electric Fence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall              Waxing Blood Moon

    Saw Ruth Hayden again, today.  She has guided us since a stressful period in our finances over 7 years ago.  As Kate’s retirement comes closer and closer, Ruth helps us with fine-tuning our retirement budget and preparing our holdings to manage the inevitable ups and downs of the market.  Her help is practical and wise.  Everyone should have a Ruth in their life.

    Kate has scheduled her back surgery.  It will take place on October 19th.  She plans for 8 weeks of recovery, 4 of pretty low key activity.  That means extra care and nurturing.  I look forward to it.

    The electric fence has become part of our property.  I check the l.e.d. two to three times a day and walk the property after heavy winds.  Thanks to the fence, Vega and Rigel now run and romp, tumbling over and over in the way puppies will.  The electric fence teaches a strong life lesson about freedom within  constraint.  Once our limits are clear, we are free to act as we are.  This seems like an oxymoron, but in fact life has limits at every turn.  Like Rigel you may be inclined to climb the fence and run free.  Like Rigel you may find that exhilarating.

    Consider this, however.  She has a secure place in which to play with her sister, get fed and hang out on the couch in the evenings.  She risked losing that when she climbed the fence.

    Not a conclusive argument and I don’t mean it to be, but it’s worth thinking about.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • No Title

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

    Yesterday and today were full of new information, new faces.  Both days challenged my capacity to sit in one place for a long time.  The 40+ Aeron chairs in the Minnesota Foundation’s board room made finding a good chair easy and did make the day more bearable than the plastic backed metal chairs in the Northstar Ballroom.  Both days were long and challenging mentally.  A good thing.  But tiring.

    Tomorrow Kate and I go see our financial planners, I call it visiting our money.  We want to discuss how they will generate cash for our payouts and have them run them run our projections using a 4% drawdown rather than the 4.6/4.7% they used.  This will give us a new and hopefully longer time horizon before our money runs out, but it will also shrink the amount of money available each year.  This is a trade-off than another consultant, Ruth Hayden, says is necessary since we’re all living longer.

    Unless you are very wealthy, living large and living longer are incompatible.  That’s not to say we will, in any wise, be hurting in retirement; it does mean the cruises, trips to Hawaii and expensive purchases will have to be truncated.  Bearable.  Our life does not revolve around luxury.

    The solution to our fence jumpers, according to Junior Lehman, the breeder and caretaker for a large pack of hounds, is an electrified fence.  I thought this was most likely the cheapest and easiest solution, but until I heard from somebody with some experience I didn’t want to spend money on it.  Now it will be off to Fleet Farm and hopefully we can begin letting Rigel and Vega outside again to romp and play, develop as dogs.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Still sinking.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                    Full Dyan Moon

    Kate can tell when I begin to submerge, move below the surface of day to day contact.  I become short, irritable.  She gets the feeling of walking on egg shells.  By the time this happens I’m not in touch with my effect on the outside world.  Distraction and self-absorption reign.

    She brings it up.  We talk.  Today I said, “I’ve moved into melancholy.”  The distance between closed.  We both know this journey and its dark side.  I ate my chirashi and she her teryaki bento box.

    “What precipitated it?”

    “I have no idea.  Chemicals, I think.”

    “No. Wait.  It began, I think on Hilton Head.  Maybe it was the weather.  I now that sounds absurd, but then, I know it happens, too.  Gloomy outside, gloomy inside.”

    “I love you.”  Said with the grasp of both the condition and the afflicted.  Therapy in their own right.

    Otherwise, the day had bees and money.

    Mark Nordeen came over and we popped the top on the second hive.  Lotsa bees.  Took a long while to get the smoker going.  The smoke calms them down.  They stop flying, go back into the hive.

    The top hive had brood on several frames and the number of bees has tripled at least.  There were three queen cups and I got to see exactly what they looked like.

    “If you ever see a queen cup that has a queen in it, don’t knock it off.  That means they’re about to swarm and you’ll need the second queen for those who stay behind.”

    We moved the bottom hive on top because there had not been as much work done down there and we wanted to encourage more frames filled with brood.

    Later in the morning we saw our cash-flow adviser.  We’ve done very well and continue to  do so, but as we move to retirement she says there is a big trick to moving from paid employment to retirement income.  In the case of Kate we’ve been lucky to have her producing large quarterly bonuses which have enabled us to do many different things:  dogs, permaculture, long trips.  After retirement, those kinds of bumps in income will disappear and we have to decide how to deal with that.  Turns out cash is the primary tool, having lots of it in liquid investments like CD’s, bonds or money market.

    The moral here is that no matter how you feel, life goes on.  Decisions have to be made.  Bees need care.  The garden goes through its season.  There is something reassuring to the constancy and permanence of natural change.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged