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.
