Retirewhat??!!

One of the great joys of adulthood is planning for retirement. My plan goes something like this: Try not to injure my hands and work until the rest of my body is so tired, all I have the energy left to do is write. . . . Right, then I wake up. Wee babe, wife, dog, and lots of hobbies. Smoking cigars, cruising on my motorcycle, and writing my memoirs seems pretty far off.

As part of a more practical approach, I'm told that a million won't do it anymore. I assume that my sweet daughter will go to college (she seems like she could be talking any day now). I assume that I will live to be eighty (planning means assuming the worst case right). I assume that if one million isn't enough 1.5 will have to do. I mean, I can build a house, and that's a big part of the battle right?

College will cost at least a hundred grand by 2027, so 1,000,600,000.00 it is! That give me seventeen years to be most of the way there. We've gone in with the parents on a lot, so that implies that one house will be sold. Best case, that pays for college. So, 1.5 million dollars to be saved in the next seventeen years. Tall order!! If we maintain our current average rate of savings, we wouldn't even touch that goal.

However, without revealing too much about the family finances, if we saved every penny at our current income, we would approach our goal. Problem is Wells Fargo Home Mortgage would like us to pay for our house roughly five times between now and then. What, you thought mortgage lenders were generous?! Even at todays rates, they are makin' a killing. I know, I know what you are thinking. Interest, return on investment, compound interest, the last five years. All of that is true, particularly the last part. The last five years!! You make the most from the advantage of compounded interest in the last five years before you retire.

Right, so we take advantage of the fact the the market may be correctly valued for the first time in 20 years. Buy Buy Buy! Then we get out before it tanks again. Easy for you to say. I can hear the conversation now. . . . Well we just drew a bundle for Quinn's college, we should probably stay in the market and recoup some of our losses. Damn we made a killin' last year honey, and we are both still working, making good money. Besides, the Tea Partiers back in '10 raised the retirement age to 72 to pay for bullshit tax cuts. Lets sock a little more away, and be really sittin' pretty in a couple of years. BOOM bigest recession since the Great Depression and that other Great Recession. Market tanks. All the old farts are runnin' around pointing fingers at each other--judging who was wiser, who got out first.

It's human nature, if you're making money why get out. I'm pretty confident that social security is a pipe dream for the wife and I. So, we'll save, and we will try to have the self control to get out when we have enough. But, enough is never enough. And so we will guess along with everyone else. I hope we don't guess wrong, and I hope that Quinn spends that 100,000 wisely. I also hope that she likes to change diapers. Because I'm still changing hers, and I know there's no way in hell I'm going to save enough to pay someone to change mine.

Andy Irons

Election day. Things are changing, or maybe not. Things are also changing for the Murray family, and I had planned to write about that. However, as soon as I got online tonight, I discovered that Andy Irons has passed away at age 32.

Andy Irons apparently suffered from symptoms consistent with Dengue Fever, a virus spread by mosquitoes. The virus is apparently endemic in Puerto Rico, a U.S. Territory, and certainly not a remote Sub-Saharan African location we might associate with endemic blood borne pathogens.

Irons is survived by a pregnant wife, and by his brother, also a professional surfer (among others). Irons was a surfer, like me (though obviously a much more accomplished one), an expecting father, and new husband, both of which I've been in the last year. He was also only 32. These are all reasons, that I feel like I could relate to him in some way. I certainly didn't know him, or what it was like to be him. I just know what it was like to be some of the things he was: A brother, a husband, and expectant father.

Irons was famous . . . is famous, that's why we've heard about his passing. The point his death illustrates is that life is fleeting, in old age, or youth. Sometimes, that's just a tough truth to accept.