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Strategies & Market Trends : Retirement - Now what? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gregor who wrote (230)	6/13/2009 10:36:07 PM
From: Steve Felix	Respond to of 288

Must be a good question because it made me think! Although the wife will have a pension when she retires Nov/Dec 2010, I do not have one. Talking nontaxable, my retirement consists of an IRA currently earning 10k in dividends a year. At almost 55, SS is a good ways off, and so is taking that 10k in dividends. Although I mostly own dividend paying stocks I do like to trade stocks. Not really a profit motive other than the challenge. I have a few money quirks. I don't like paying any more for utilities than necessary. Our electric company will knock $5 off of our bill per month if I let them put a time of day control on our water heater. Heck, I'm retired. I save much more by walking into the garage and flipping the switch. If someone needs hot water they can have it in fifteen minutes. With the wife working 11pm to 7am, we take showers and run the dishwasher and washing machine in the evening. My water heater is never on more than an hour a day. Another little quirk is my garden. I like to eat out of it for free and also make a little money on it. Seed, supplies and fertilizer cost me $120 this year. Hostas and strawberries have made $109 towards that. Blueberries and raspberries coming in within the next two weeks, then sweet corn, Indian corn, gourds and pumpkins. Should be my best year by far. After all I will need a new rototiller one of these days. I guess chicken feed is another quirk. It dawned on me that I have the land to grow my own so why am I buying it? Made the garden bigger and am growing cowpeas, buckwheat, field corn, sunflowers and broom corn. The wife sells a few dozen eggs a week to friends at work for .75 a dozen. So again, I won't be making money but eating free eggs. And the wifes friends are getting a bargain on much better than store bought eggs. I'll do a small carpentry job occasionally, but only for friends. And I don't go looking for them. Even though I don't want paid I usually am anyway. So I guess I am not so much into profit, but into cutting expenses or at least keeping them the same. More self sufficient. "and he is able to help out his grown kids" That seriously bothered me for a while. The wife and I talked about it and she told me that when she retires she isn't going to feel guilty about not being able to help our girls out more. She says if we do any more for them we will have to live their life for them. lol!! We are in a position to, and would help them borrow money if they have any trouble when they decide to buy houses. One has three years as a Spanish teacher under her belt, lives for free at home, has 40k in the bank, a three year old car that she paid for in ten months with 20K miles on it now, and a Brazilian boyfriend who will finish medical school and be a qualified doctor in Brazil next May. If he passes the tests to be a doctor here they can lend me money! The other is 30 and married to a Navy pilot who will have twenty years in at 42. He goes half on renting a house with another Navy pilot, two and a half hours from here where he is stationed. They are into the profit motive!! Unable to find employment there, she has just taken a full time job here as a French teacher after serving as a long term French teacher sub last semester. So nine months a year she will live here all house expenses paid. His strongest point has always been saving in tax deferred accounts. He wisely set it up to be automatic, but saving besides that didn't really matter to him. A while back she brought him around to her way of frugal thinking and they have saved 50k. Knowing her, that will seriously grow the next few years. Now that I have written this I realize that not only did we get them through college debt free, we are still footing the bills. Oh well, without family what would life be? They did look at me very strangely when I first told them that if they wanted to take a shower to let me know and then wait fifteen minutes. lol!!