Here is a good article on retirement strategies:

Yahoo Finance

It discusses the differences and weaknesses of the 4% rule and the bucket approach.

I feel as if the people of the Western world have become so comfortable and reached so high expectations that they are unwilling to contribute to society for more than 20-30 years. Many people work 40 years out of necessity, but few do it by choice. Perhaps it is from years of doing a job you hate working for a boss you hate and receiving a paycheck you feel is unfair.

I remember talking to someone who had recently retired from Ford Motor Co. I asked him what he was going to do now. After 20+ years of working a 40+ hour week keeping his mind sharp and using his skills that had been developed from years of schooling and training, his answer was , “What do you mean what am I going to do? I am retired! I’m not going to do anything!” After a few seconds of silence he added, “Golf!”.

I understand you probably hated your job and worked hard. Now you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor. But can one really do nothing for the next 20 years of his life expectancy after being productive for the first 55? Really? Nothing?

I do not believe this guy is alone. Many people really do nothing. Their mind becomes slow and their muscles weak. They age by choice, not by genetics. Not because they want to get old, but because they choose not to live, and part of living is learning and doing, regardless of your age. Maybe if I had a life expectancy of 75 or 80 I would feel differently, but from what I read, if I can continue to run and eat less M&Ms, I can expect at least 100-120 years of life. When I am 55 I may consider going back to school to start my second career. If I do retire early, even at 55, I can’t see myself doing nothing. With the growing apathy and laziness of people around me and the growing power of China, the decline of education, and the decline of our space capabilities, this country needs more output, and people retiring at 55 and then doing nothing with their hard-earned knowledge is not only a waste but borderline treason.

Add to that, the first 18-22 years are also non-productive years spent learning. So you sponge for 18 year, work for 47, then spend the rest retired after age 65. That was reasonable before modern medicine when, if you did manage to reach 65, you probably weren’t able to work. Age 65 was that age where people NEEDED their children or society to look after them. It wasn’t lifetime-reward-vacation send-off day.

America just spent the past decade buying consumer garbage with home equity money. That’s over now. I think it’s apparent. We won’t get that piece of the economy back. Those jobs are GONE. But don’t be fooled. That’s not the transition we need to keep our eye one. ‘Fixing’ the economy isn’t about replacing those borrowed gains which we’re now having to pay for.

It must be becoming obvious to everyone, or will soon, that our economy, the world economy, is making a transition, and has been for the last 20 years. The world is quickly moving from an industrial economy to a technology economy. Steam liberated the horse. The internal combustion engine liberated the farmer. Electricity liberated the housewife. Computers liberated repetition. Networks liberated information. And the combination of computers and networks are liberating the laborer. Liberation = obsolescence.

The new economy doesn’t need the type of jobs that low skilled workers do, the kind that tires a person out by age 65. The new economy needs people who can use their minds and work with information to create systems that do the things that used to take a human’s labor. And as long as you’re not an average recreational eater with an aversion to exercise, 65 is probably not that profound of a milestone physiologically.

We’re so pathetic now. Sponging until 25 or 30 with mom and dad, then we work for 25 or maybe 30 years, and then play golf.

People feel entitled to only work 20 or 30 years before retiring. We’ve got our philosophy on work all wacked out now days. We’re too soft and comfortable, as previously stated. Thats why medicare and SS are killing the economy, because people feel they are entitled to receive it as soon as they reach the ripe old age of 60 or 65. The greatest generation had it right. They worked their asses off until they physically couldn’t get up, then retired, not by choice, but because they had to. And even then, they were trying to do something useful like going up on the roof to fix a leak, fixing crap, etc. All the while their kids were telling them to knock it off or they would fall and break a hip.

We’re so different now. We expect to live like kings and for the government to cater to our every need and whim when the bell dings 60. And if we have to lift a finger after 60, its unjust, unfair, and makes us feel self righteous.

It’s even worse in Europe, where you have 20 and 30 year olds who live in families where no one has ever worked because the government has supported them their entire lives. Then like we saw, they go into the streets and riot saying they will show the business owners who are “rich people” that they will not be told what to do and will forcibly take their wealth because they are entitled to it.

Society has gone upsidedown. Our grandparents understood that the wealthy earned their wealth and they were not entitled to it, but rather grateful for the jobs the “rich” produced. Maybe because the technology age is not as visible as the industrial in its workings, people feel like wealth pops out of no where and strikes the lucky people.

In the industrial age, you saw Ford and edison, and these other rich guys physically using might and brute muscle to create their empires and wealth, while today, you see bill gates and Jobs sitting in their garages smoking weed, “playing on computers”, and making billions from it. So today’s rich guys seem like they just screwed around to become welathy and everyone feels entitled to the same “easy” road to wealth.

This brings up good point about welfare: It’s inherited. Wouldn’t that be weird growing up in a family where no one works? How unnatural it would be for such children to grow up and spend 8 hours a day at a job. And the real problem with people in these welfare-subcultures is, there’s nowhere to go. If all you’ve known is sitting around the house getting a meager check – how could you possible understand what a “Rich Shop-owner” actually is? “E’s goat like fi-ey tellies in e’s shop. That’s like fi-teen thousand quid! I koal that rich.”

But seriously, people in these subcultures can do two things to increase their standard of living. One, they can have more babies. Two, they can enter the criminal economy. Work should be an option too, but unskilled jobs don’t pay a lot more than some benefits, if those jobs exist in their neighborhood at all.

That poses a good question: What do we do with the monkey people? We need fewer and fewer of them every day. So, if your job is simple, if anything you do is at all repetitious, if you rely on your union to keep your standard of living, or if your job requires less than two years’ worth of training — for the love of Bob, STOP F******G AROUND WITH VIDEO GAMES IN YOUR OFF HOURS AND SPEND THEM LEARNING!!! It’s only a matter of time before layoffs come through and you’re helplessly bitching and moaning about Obama and the rich people screwing you.

Oh? Indeed? Your job can’t be replaced by a computer? You drive a fork lift around and retrieve parts per order and pack them in trucks in reverse order of drop-off? Hmmm. Maybe you’re safe… Or, maybe you’re company will do like Art Van did 10 years ago. They replaced a whole mob of warehouse workers with an automated system. Instead of having 50 guys running around, they’ve got one computer, an automated storage and retrieval system (sort of like HUGE vending machine), and one guy that can operate the computer, and a hand full of guys to do minimum wage labor. You might not get canned when that happens, but you probably will, unless you’ve been learning something about computers.

In other words, computers won’t replace people in the way people currently function. The movement, the economy, the knowledge, the way of thinking that created computers and is improving computers will also find ways to do your job without your meaty hands and the expenses and liabilities they incur.

So, to answer that question: “What should we do with this monkey-brained rabble?” Here’s my three-step solution:
1. Stop describing ‘reproductive rights’ as ‘deeply personal’ and start neutering anyone and everyone who receives government aid in any way, even temporarily, including prison inmates or persons arrested. We can set up a little stand next to the fingerprinting station or mug-shot station.

2. Legalize marihuana, tax it, and use the proceeds to fund a secret government program to develop a cheaper, more intense, and more deadly version or meth, and flood the hillbilly market with it, in addition to releasing the recipe.

3. Secretly borrow money from the SS fund in order to fund a secret program that sets up abortion clinics that, instead of killing babies, transfers them into artificial wombs. With the help of gene therapy, we can create a new branch to the military composed entirely of highly conditioned and indoctrinated young soldiers, for purposes of profitable foreign military campaigns and the revitalization of Manifest Destiny.

Darn it. I put the wrong 3-step solution in that message. That’s just my normal boilerplate universal 3-step solution. Here’s the specific solution to the concerns about, “How do we clean society of these more-ape-than-man, shitting, eating, parasitic blobs?”
1. Offer vocational training to the motivated ones.

2. Cut the unmotivated ones off of benefits so they have to take the shitty service jobs from high school kids.

3. Now that the high school kids can’t get jobs, and thus can’t afford drugs or a car to have sex in, they’ll have to learn to masturbate better and will focus on school, get college loans and focus on college, then get a job maintaining and/or developing the systems that replaced mom and dad, hopefully before a bright, young, educated, lives off $2.50 a day Indian or Chinese kid snatches it.

Professor Dove recently said to me:

“Who owns the heart and mind of our children?…  Everyone is telling them what to think and how to think.  Do you know what they are being told?  What are you telling them? “

And I responded:

I’m telling them that penises are poisonous and vaginas are haunted. It’s the only way – scare’m.
I hated that when I was a kid. Teen age boys have too much testosterone to be afraid of anything, or make rational decisions for that matter. And, from my perspective, fear was basically the only thing that ruled.

I remember a conversation that was being had where each person was stating the trauma that each of their boys endured while driving which made them suddenly start driving like they had a brain. “Such bullshit” I remember thinking. I drove better than any of them and had never had anything happen that was scary and didn’t make me want to take more chances.

Ah excess testosterone… Sure, I rubbed a few things and got the car stuck once honing my tactical driving skills, but hell – you have to learn one way or the other and if I ever need to drive in a war zone or as a wheel man I’ll have some background.

I think kids will only have their behavior affected by people they respect. Adolescents emanate their idols. The big problem is kids respect people for weird reasons, which means they have their behavior affected by weird people.

A friend of Noisy Dove had a good story to tell this week.  Enjoy..

I was talking with my employer this week about his feelings as one of the top 1% of Americans who would be surtaxed to pay for Obamacare. He began by saying he was fortunate enough that he could afford it, meaning in the grand scheme of his finances the surtax wouldn’t be a big deal to him.

He went on to state, however, what he didn’t like was some politician giving that money to some guy who didn’t care enough to work for it. He suggested a better use of that money would be to let him and others like him invest it in the economy – everyone in the 1% has to invest a certain amount in the American economy each year or have that amount surtaxed.

He then called George W. Bush a moderate. Helping me back up from off the floor, he explained that Bush’s bailouts for the auto and bank industries were bad moves for American innovation. Like all creatures, companies and their business models must die. The current auto and bank companies had their chance and after making trillions upon trillions of dollars, they finally blew it. They needed to be allowed to die so that new companies with new people and new business models could prosper. It’s the way of life; one thing must die so that another may live.

While the old dogs are suffocating beneath their debt, those newcomers could gain significant ground to take the field. Those newcomers are young bucks like us scraping to touch the American dream. Letting the old dogs live isn’t helping to spread the wealth. Letting them die so we can pick their bones does, though.