Daily Archives: August 16, 2013

Writing

Energy Gathering

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Lugnasa                                                                      Honey Moon

 

Feeling, I don’t know, untethered.  I’ve been regular with the garden and bee work, doing the usual home based things, but since I let Missing go and Latin, too, I’ve not felt like I have an anchor in my day to day.  Weird, since all the other stuff is part of my life, too, but the writing is core.  Yet I’ve wanted some space from it. Kate gave me back the manuscript a couple of days ago but I find myself resisting sitting down and entering the edits.  It feels like I’ve touched it maybe a bit too much.  I will do it though and soon. There is a sense I have, a lingering back of the head tickle, that I set stuff aside and ignore it to build up, what?  Motivation?  Impetus?  A strange kind of energy, almost guilt as a form of power.  Of course, I may have the cause and effect backwards.  It may be that the energy and the almost guilt highlight, underline, emphasize the time I spend away from a project.  Anyhow the two are mixed up together somehow and I have an odd confidence in them, that these forces will impel me back to the work I need to do without doing psychological damage in the process. Expect to see progress notes at the beginning of the week.  I can feel it coming.

Family, Retirement, Third Phase

Visiting Our Money

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Lughnasa                                                                   Honey Moon

Our financial planner has an office across 169 from General Mills.  When we go see him, we call it visiting our money.  The reason for going today resulted from thinking about retirement money in a somewhat new way.  It involves recalibrating expectations currently set by an “abundance of caution” approach, an approach that understandably conservative advisors use.

According to the best projections our money can buy, under current conditions (not guaranteed to continue) our assets should last well past my 100th birthday with a sizable nut still available.  In fact, a nut larger than our current assets.  Now this is good news of course, but I view these projections as a speedometer and this one tells me we’re going too slow.  That is, we’re leaving money on the table that we could be using to see the grandkids more often, do more work on our lawn, take a trip, whatever.

So we went into negotiate some ground rules with RJ about withdrawals.  By making certain conservative moves years ago, at the advice of yet another financial counselor, Ruth, we have put together a fairly large savings account which we hold in a low volatility mutual fund outside of the IRA and under our immediate control.  This account allows us to self-fund any shortfalls from our IRA withdrawal in case of a correction and, even, a crash.  This is necessary because we have set our withdrawal rate at a steady 4%, no matter what, the 4% number arrived at in order to preserve capital over the long term.

With this safety mechanism in place it then becomes possible to identify an asset floor, if you will, above which we do not need to retain the money in investments.  Which we did today.  When our assets move above this floor, we’ll make occasional withdrawals that exceed our monthly draw.  Below it we won’t.

Feels good.

Politics, Sierra Club

Mining

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Lughnasa                                                               Honey Moon

On a similar track to the post below, though in a different direction, all those mining proposals have begun to gnaw at me. (They’ve concerned me at a deep level for a long time, but they’re emerging again in my heart.) Managing the Sierra Club’s legislative program taxed me even though it was satisfying work.  I’m beginning to wonder, just wonder at this point, if a more targeted engagement, say around the sulfide mining proposals might be a way to continue to make a contribution without the administrative load of a committee chair.

Politics is largely a matter of the heart for me and these proposals trouble me both for what they are and what they portend.  They are a dangerous technology proposed for siting in a fragile ecosphere.  More.  They predict a future hungry for natural resources stored in the commons and willing to override natural catastrophe for temporary gain.

Great Work, Our Land and Home

Prairie on my Mind

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Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

I have an itch that I’ve waited now some twenty years to scratch and it may be about to happen.  When we moved in, I wanted to nix the lawn and sow prairie grass instead.  Now Kate is open to replacing most of our lawn with prairie grass and perhaps some new tree plantings as well.  I say open because she’s agreed to think about it.

We already have two large swatches of prairie on either side of our lawn, our compromise as we did the initial landscaping.  This notion came to me again while I walked in the eastern side of prairie grass and realized how at home and comfortable it felt: insects buzzing around, wildflowers blooming, a few trees popping up, milkweed ready to burst its pods.