May 10, 2012
Dear Everyone:
Some decades ago, when I was running one file room
or another, with up to a dozen people working for me, I got into the
habit/hobby of decorating cakes.
Specifically,
birthday cakes for the people who worked for me.
Nothing fancy, of course; just a few edges and simple flowers.
But the workers were more than happy to scarf up the sugar.
One day, I was in the house wares department of a
store, looking for cake decorating equipment.
(You would be surprised at how much attention is devoted to this
subject alone. Like any
discipline, the same can be said of diamonds, mushrooms, and squirrels.)
I was vaguely aware of other customers around me, but didn’t
really pay much attention to them.
Until I overheard a remark something like, “Mom will love this!”
That’s when I noticed that nearly all the other
customers were men. Lots of
men. Older men and much
younger men, together. Huh?
What were all these guys
doing amidst the blenders and mixers?
It was the day before
Mother’s Day.
Even more years ago,
a woman that I worked for told me, chuckling, about the time a
(male) friend of one of her sons presented his own mother with a
sympathy card for Mother’s Day.
It seems they were out
bowling one evening when the son’s friend
suddenly realized that Mother’s Day was the next day.
It was too late to go shopping.
But he found a card in the bowling alley’s gift shop.
One can only imagine why a bowling alley would have a “gift shop”
and why it would be supplied with sympathy cards.
On that note, Happy Mother’s Day to all the lovely
Mothers out there, as well as to any soon-to-be-Mother(s).
And woe unto any husbands/children who choose to “blow off” the
occasion.
In other news…
I have been living, more or less, on the money that
I have in my various savings accounts in the credit union since I became
“retired” (spelled u-n-e-m-p-l-o-y-e-d) last July.
Most recently, I’ve been living on the refunds that I got from
state and federal tax organizations who extracted “too much” of the
year’s pay that I got in the “severance package”.
Make no mistake.
I still have enough to live quite comfortably for another year
before I will need to start drawing money from my “retirement
portfolio”. But the question
remains: How much and how
frequently will I need to draw said money?
I have kept a “budget” since “Jeannie” and I lived
started living together thirty-plus years ago.
Nothing fancy. Just a
listing of known/expected expenses and how much each actually cost.
Example:
The phone company.
How much expected and how much it actually cost each month.
Ditto the mortgage (although it should not deviate much from one
month to the next.) And the
Homeowners. And groceries.
And the gas bill.
Etcetera.
So earlier this week, I sat down at the computer
and plugged in a year’s worth of actual expenses, then did an average to
determine what it costs to live from month to month.
However, this does not include what some might call
“the Latte Factor”. This is
the cash that you shell out for lattes and other “incidental” expenses
each day. A lot of people
have no idea how much cash runs through their hands on any given day.
I heard during my “retirement webinar” that there
is “an app for that” which you can download to your cell phone, if
interested. In my case, I
just use Excel to pop in things like date, item, cost, vendor and
location. Then I can
transfer the information from the phone to my computer.
So it was fairly simple to add those up as well and
include them in the “monthly average”.
But wait, there’s more!
How about those once-per-year things like the registration and
insurance for your car? The
annual extra homeowners’ allotment to keep the “Welcome Center”
(gatehouse) in service. That
trip to London I’ve always wanted to make.
Add them all together and don’t forget that bag of
peanuts for the jays and squirrels that visit my patio each day.
(Not that they go through a whole bag in one day.
More like once a week, or so.)
Bottom line: If I
keep going the way I am now, the money will last well over 20-25 years.
Big sigh of relief.
In another year, I will know just how much to arrange with the
company that manages my portfolio to draw, probably on a bi-yearly
basis.
In the meantime, I can relax and continue to enjoy
my “unemployedness”. (A new
word, which I’ve just added to my dictionary.)
Love, as always,
Pete
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