We’re back in Florida for our fourth year snowbirding from cold Minnesota. We toured models at the giant Latitudes Margaritaville/ Daytona Beach development yesterday. A weird thing happened when they asked us where we were from. Being from Minnesota, we had to sign an “Out-Of-State Non-Solicitation Affidavit” to acknowledge that we arrived “voluntarily”. What? Yes, apparently it is against Minnesota law for a Florida developer … Continue reading Wait, Sign What?
This may be the shortest post that I have ever written. It’s one of my first experiences with artificial intelligence. If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet, it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) program that seems to be a real breakthrough. To test it out, I asked 5 common retirement questions and am posting the ChatGPT answers. All were copied word-for-word, from the first answers provided. … Continue reading ChatGPT Retirement Advice
I spent the evening of New Year’s Day (observed) tallying up the ugliness of our 2022 year-end financial performance. The returns weren’t great. Not at all. It looks like our retirement savings took a huge dive. Our retirement nest egg fell a whopping -16.9%. That’s much worse than I had imagined. Our losses were all centered in the plunge in our equities. The S&P 500 … Continue reading A Bad Year, A Good Place …
I often complain how slowly the future has developed. When I was a kid, I thought by 2022 we would all live in streamlined skyscrapers, have parks under glass bubbles, and monorails whooshing us around the city. Our life isn’t quite that seamless and elegant today, but sometimes incredible change happens right in front of us and we don’t even notice. This sign I saw … Continue reading Easy To Forget How Far Things Have Changed
When I first started working in the late 1980s/early 1990s, we would keep our meager savings at the MegaCorp Employee Credit Union. I would walk down to the lobby of our 40-story tower almost weekly to make a deposit, transfer some money, or buy a CD. Buying & cashing Certificates of Deposit is something it seemed like we did all of the time back then. … Continue reading The Savings Rate Game
Tech stocks have weighed so heavily on the market in 2022, there is a strange disconnect between the Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500, average, and the NASDAQ index. – Dow Jones -5% YTD – S&P 500 -15% YTD – NASDAQ -27% I am guessing we have not seen a split like this since the ‘dot-com boom’ busted in the year 2000. Statistics show … Continue reading Time For A Santa Rally?
When I was a kid in the 1970s our family – like many Americans – followed President Nixon’s ‘Project Independence’ national energy plan, which included lowering our thermostat to 68-degrees during the day. In 1977, new President Jimmy Carter went 3-degrees lower, asking Americans to cut the thermostat temperature down to 65-degrees. That was cold! We wore sweatshirts indoors, quilted “polar slippers” from the JCPenney … Continue reading Keeping Warm This Winter
The Big Man – Santa Claus – is back on his throne at our local shopping mall after a two year, pandemic-induced absence. It’s great to see him back. Unlike most guys, I love going to the mall and looking around. A UK study from a few years ago said most guys get ‘fatigued’ after just 27 minutes of shopping, while women don’t reach that … Continue reading Mega Shopping @ Mega Mall
Winter came relatively early this year. Snow fell every day for 4 days this week and now we have about 5” on the ground. With high temperatures falling into the teens today, there’s a good chance we’re stuck with the snow cover until next spring. I was ahead of the cold blast in getting the lawn mowed one last time and putting the Christmas lights … Continue reading Money Blowing In The Snow
We shopped early for our Thanksgiving Turkey this year. Our 20+ pound Butterball Premium has been safely ensconced in our freezer for almost a week now. A friend of ours – who runs a big poultry business in Iowa – told us to grab one early as prices will be way up and selection way down due to the Avian Flu this year. Sure enough, … Continue reading The Early Bird Gets The Turkey
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