Please don’t consider me impolite. Would it be impolite of me if I simply said, “I love money”? I never want to be impolite. Of course, I wouldn’t want that statement taken out of context. It is equally true that I love my wife and my family and I love my belief in God and I believe that good health is paramount. I don’t think any of those topics are mutually exclusive of each other. What I mean by that is I might love money but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to have good health and continue to believe in God and love my wife and family. I think you can do all of that and doing one doesn’t mean you can’t do the other.
I and we. In this message, I will use “I” and “We” somewhat interchangeably. Often, “I and We” means both Carol and me and sometimes it doesn’t. Carol don’t like money as much as I do. However, she won’t turn down the benefits of my loving money when I lay them at her feet. She’s a blonde but she ain’t dumb. Please don’t take things out of context or you will be missing the point. Again, I caution the reader not to take my statement of “I love money” out of context. Actually, “money” doesn’t mean a thing to me. Importantly if you can get money and then use it in the right way that can make your life much more comfortable. It’s a little bit akin to being able to manage technology well. When you can do that technology makes your life easier and more comfortable.
I don’t do politics in public. I am on Facebook. Facebook certainly has its pros and cons. I don’t allow people to comment about politics on my Facebook page. I’m not interested in hearing anyone’s political philosophy on my FB page. I’m not going to bore them with my political beliefs either. If my 2,400 Facebook friends want to private message me on the topic, I told everyone to go for it. It’s the same with my newsletter. I’m laid back. Two of our lady friends, one in California and one in Georgia, mentioned independently that they think I’m the most laid-back guy they know. I think they’re probably right but I’m not sure Carol would necessarily agree with their assessments. But I can get riled up. There is one thing that riles me up. It’s people who complain. I get so riled up that I want to complain about people who complain! Some of the folks on Facebook have been complaining about inflation. I think they really have a hidden agenda. No one ever blames themselves when things aren’t going well, they always want to blame others.
Speaking of complainers, I’m a huge sports fan. Not only do I enjoy auto racing but we have season tickets to UCLA basketball and football. We’ve been season-ticket holders over the years to the Cubs, the Bengals and the Rams to name just a few. When I watch a game even if my team is playing, I don’t say much. I’ll clap and cheer when appropriate. But invariably I get seated in front of someone who thinks first, they are a play-by-play announcer. Secondly, they seem to think the referee is missing every call during an entire two or three-hour game. How can any rational human being think the referee made 25 bad calls, every one of them against THEIR team, and never made a bad call against their opponent? Like I say the only thing I complain about are complainers.
Carol says I’m lucky but she don’t really believe that. Sometimes when good things happen to us Carol tells me that I’m lucky. Of course, when good things happen to us that I had a part in making happen I never really think I’m lucky. So now whenever something happens that I was responsible for that turns out really well I tell Carol, “I guess I’m just lucky”. I think she gets the point. How can you control your own financial life? Prices have certainly gone up on some things. There’s not a lot I can do about that. On the other hand, I believe there is so much I can do daily, weekly, monthly and annually to put myself in a good financial position. Then when something like inflation sometimes coupled with a falling stock market and/or rising interest rates comes along it’s really no big deal. To me inflation truly is no big deal. I’m gonna take some time and tell you why I feel that way.
I don’t have many good ideas but I know how to use other people’s good ideas. By the way, none (almost none?) of what I will mention in this post was my idea. I interact with a lot of smart people. Then I take their great ideas and mold them to fit my situation. Here goes. I will talk about “little” ideas and “big” ideas. If you’ve got a pencil and paper you might want to add up all of the savings these little and big ideas have generated. If you do that you might have a better understanding of what I’m talking about. I’ll start with a little idea but as you will come to find out I work with a lot of big money ideas as well. Sports tickets Not including auto racing, I probably go to 50 college and professional sporting events every year. We have season football and basketball tickets for UCLA home games. We catch (get it…catch) about 10 Los Angeles Angels games a year. When I’m on the road I will seek out basketball, football, hockey and baseball games whenever I can. I almost never pay face value or buy my tickets from the event itself. I’ll use my “Need 1” sign which gets me a FREE ticket about half the time. I’ll use ticket brokers like StubHub to get low-priced tickets. This year UCLA has been ranked in the top 10 in college basketball most of the year. They had 19 home games. I bought season passes to those 19 games for Carol and me for $169 each. Less than 10 bucks a game? How could I pass that up for such a top-ranked program? Then when we enter the arena, I use the seat location on my ticket as a “recommendation” and sit where I like. DirectTV I thought we were paying too much for our cable TV services. Doesn’t everybody? Our monthly bill was $150.17. Just a couple of days ago I called up DirectTV. Most recently Greg Robbins gave me this idea. I needed to get to the retention department. I had to convince them, that unless the price was lowered to match or beat where I wanted to switch my TV services too, I would be dropping DirectTV. I told the attentive fellow I was thinking about switching to YouTube TV (which I still might do) because their monthly rate was $65, which I believe it is. I will never lie to anybody about anything. I like to get ahead by being clever not by being dishonest. Once the retention gentleman believed I would leave DirectTV he came up with options. I did NOT want to extend my contract to get these savings. We settled on the DirectTV “Entertainment Package”. We have nine TVs in our house with 3 DVRs. The Entertainment package, in our case, has 181 FEWER channels than what we had before at our $150 rate. I had the guy read through every one of those 81 channels. I didn’t want to do without any channel we enjoyed. Most of what was being eliminated I had never heard of. The biggest “names” were A&E, BBC and the Weather channel. We really don’t listen to any of those and certainly not enough to pay $93/month more. One of the $25 discounts that got our rate to $57/month (yes, I said $57/month) expires in six months. Another $45 discount expires in 12 months. I will have to call back in six months and “do the dance” all over again to keep our price at $57. This is exactly what I do every year with my SiriusXM satellite radio account. If I don’t do that my $8-9/month top-of-the-line SiriusXM account renews at about $35/month. My advice to others who want to do what I did? Be firm. They will find a lower price for you. Don’t accept their first offer. Simply tell them your plan is to go to a competitor at a lower price. Let me know how you do. Here’s a bigger idea… Real estate They say that homes have gone up in value by about 20% in the past year. Homes in California have gone up that much or more. Real estate prices are normally a function of supply and demand. The demand for California real estate remains so high that it’s one of the most expensive if not the most expensive states for real estate in the country. In the past year, our home value has gone up somewhere around a million bucks. Just lucky? Maybe. Our real estate says “all money flows to the sea”. We live at the sea (ocean). I guess I could have gone back to my hometown of East Peoria, Illinois for my real estate situation if California was too expensive. I lived there for the first 15 years of my life. Yes, if I had enough winter clothes, I could have bought back my old family home and lived there into advanced old age. I would have “saved” a lot of money by doing that, right? Maybe…but not really. Take a moment and go to Zillow.com. Check out the address at 411 Doering, East Peoria, IL 61611. Today that home is worth about $45,000. The real estate taxes each year on my boyhood home are only $350. Think how much money I would have saved living there. Then think again on how much appreciation I would have lost living in that little 666 square-foot yellow house. Social Security. Can you believe those folks in the government increased our SS checks by almost 6% (5.9% actually)? That’s a bigger raise than I got when I was working. I don’t even work and SS gives me a big increase just for cashing their checks! I would gladly give back 1% of my annual cost of living increases every year as I’ve been told that would go a third of the way to “saving Social Security”. However, I could never get very many of my tightwad fellow oldsters to agree to do that. So, I guess we won’t “saving Social Security” as we know it. Covid Cash. Since Covid officially began on March 11, 2020, I have traveled overnight away from home for 226 nights. I’m going to guess you don’t know anyone who has traveled that much during the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, I did stop traveling for 12 weeks. I was as scared of the impact of Covid as anyone else. Then just before the vaccine came out, I took another five weeks off from traveling. I figured I’m so close to getting the vaccine why press my luck any further. That’s 17 weeks that I didn’t travel because of Covid out of about the 104 weeks that the pandemic has been hassling us. I normally travel 3-4 days a week on average every week of the year. My travel schedule calls for 175-200 nights of overnight travel each year. Can you imagine my travel expenses every week? Then can you imagine how much money I saved by NOT traveling for 17 weeks over the past two years. One of the few positives to come out of Covid for me was “17 weeks of Covid cash”! Oh yeah, I qualified for every one of the Covid stimulus checks as well. Just lucky, I guess. Credit Cards. We have six or eight of them. I don’t know how many. I had a good buddy who has just one credit card. Frankly, I couldn’t believe that. I try to charge everything. I’m not exaggerating but I think I charged something that cost three cents the other day. I have my credit cards synced with my Apple Watch. I use my watch to pay most of the time with Apple Pay. Yep, it’s sort of a Dick Tracy thing going on there. We have never ever carried a credit card balance. That’s just about the dumbest financial move that anyone can make. I don’t want to offend anyone with that comment. I just wanted to be as factual as I possibly can. Why do we have so many credit cards? When I ordered each of them, they all had their special reason. I just got an Aviator MasterCard that was promoted by American Airlines. For a $99 annual fee they gave me 60,000 American Airlines AAdvantage miles. I just redeemed those miles for a round-trip ticket to Germany. I had to pay $130 + 60,000 miles to get the ticket. That meant that I would be flying round-trip in economy plus with no charge for checked bags for $229 ($130 + $99). That’s a pretty good deal. I have another credit card, Chase Sapphire Reserve, where I saved more than $10,000 in one year. They gave me free airport restaurant meals and admitted me to some of the best airline clubs all around the world for no charge. The pandemic slowed the cash flow source down on that idea but it was also one of the best deals I’ve ever gotten. When credit cards no longer offer these benefits I “shit can them”. That’s a common Marine Corps term (my service dates 1971-1977) and not to be confused with “If you shit in one hand and wish in the other which will fill up first?” I hope that I didn’t offend anyone by this language. Just know that the people defending you from Russia and others talk this way. When credit cards no longer provide a special benefit, they are gone faster than a San Clemente sunset. I Bonds. I got this idea from some of my P&G friends and then J.J. (our son) helped me the rest of the way. I invested $10,000 for both Carol and me into U.S. government-backed I Bonds. These bonds are guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the government. They currently pay a 7.12% interest rate. It was a no-brainer to move some money from an online money market fund paying 0.4%. I never like to leave a crumb on the table. Maybe that’s from growing up power. As a kid, I was couch surfing for coins one day. When I removed my hand from the cushions, I had a fist full of dead baby mice. Folks, that proves we were poor or didn’t have a very good exterminator or both. The limit per person for I Bond purchases is $10,000 each year. Unless, (here’s the crumb) you OVERPAY your income taxes by $5,000. Who wants to do that? Me! I can buy $5,000 more of I Bonds from doing this and earn the current rate of 7.12%. Google it. TurboTax I have always enjoyed paying my tax accountant anywhere from $600-$1,000 to do my taxes. I have always paid my dentist to fix my teeth and my podiatrist to operate on my foot. I begrudgingly went to TurboTax tugging and screaming. I don’t like doing some things myself. Taxes is one of them. J.J. has talked me off a ledge a few times with my frustrations with TurboTax. I’m saving $600/year. I just hope that I don’t regret that with future penalties and interest! I know that lots of my friends use TurboTax. I also know the mindset of the American people as regards taxes. I will simply say this. I’m pretty sure that people “doing their own taxes” aren’t quite as hard on themselves when push comes to shove as the IRA would be. I say those folks are lucky the IRS doesn’t audit more returns! Mortgages and refinancing. They say opinions are like elbows. Everybody has one. Should everyone have a mortgage on their home? No. Should just about every older person with home equity have one? Probably, would be one answer. Yes, would be the other answer. It doesn’t do much for my home to appreciate and then just let that money sit there, does it? I’ve mentioned many times that having too much money in home equity is a really bad financial idea. I haven’t worked or earned a single dime of work income for 20 years. Nevertheless, I have refinanced our mortgage six or seven times during that period. Some folks might think that if you have no work income then nobody would loan you money in retirement. I am living proof that somewhat uninformed belief is not true. In my last refinance I took “cash-out”. You can do that? Yes, you can. How much? I took $300,000 out of my home’s equity in cash. You knew there is no tax when you do that, right? Folks, that’s pretty good walking around money, isn’t it? What did I do with that money? I invested most of it. Then I went to McDonald’s as often as I wanted. It’s easy to get “lazy” with your money. About 18 months ago I was cruising along with a 3.1% 10-year interest-only loan. I thought that was fantastic. Then J.J. told me he was refinancing and thought that might be a good idea for me. I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy recliner, O.K., that’s a lie. I love recliners but our designer when we built our home was so “upscale” that she said it would be a bad idea to have a recliner… so we don’t. Instead of keeping that 3.1% loan I went out and got a 2.25% loan on another 10-year interest-only loan. That reduced our monthly house payment from $5,783 to $4,796. What did I do with that extra $987 that I wasn’t paying every month? I invested most of it at rates much higher than 2.25%. Then I continued to go to McDonald’s as often as I wanted. How much will I earn by investing most of that $987 that I got from the refinance savings every month over a period of 10 years? A lot. Real estate taxes. I checked our local newspaper back in Peoria (Peoria Journal Star) to see what the highest-priced home had sold for in the last couple of months in Tazewell County, where I grew up. That price was 550,000. Stuff don’t cost much where I grew up. People out here put pools in that cost more than that. I’m not one of those people. The real estate taxes on that place cost 2/3 of what the real estate taxes cost on my place. But…that place back in Tazewell County is only worth 1/10 of what my property is worth in Orange County, California. What does that mean? The guy back in Illinois is paying some pretty heavy-duty real estate taxes or California real estate taxes are pretty cheap. Maybe both of those things are true. Ever hear of Howard Jarvis? Howard Jarvis was the driving force behind Proposition 13. Prop. 13 started back in 1978. Howard figured the demand for real estate in California would continue to go up and up. He was right! If real estate taxes were tied to the current value of someone’s home (like they are in many places) then real estate taxes might become so high that long-time California residents couldn’t afford those taxes in their later years of life. They might be forced to leave their homes because they couldn’t afford the real estate taxes! Essentially Proposition 13 limits the growth of real estate taxes to 2% per year forever. If you don’t live in California what is the annual increase in your real estate taxes? To make sure that proposal didn’t hurt California in the long run, anyone who buys a home in California will pay just a little bit more than 1% of the purchase price when they buy the home. Then THEIR taxes will be capped at 2% for the lifetime homeownership of their home. All of this is a pretty good deal for a long-time homeowner in the Golden State. Solar. You’ve heard me talk about the benefits of solar at our house many times. Here’s the bottom line. After-tax credits we paid $21,400 for our solar system. Our system reduced our monthly electric expenses to zero. Today, if we didn’t have solar our monthly electric bill would be about $500/month. As it is with solar, we pay zero. It took us 4.4 years to pay back the $21,400 the system cost in electricity sayings. Now, with our solar system nine years old (we have never had a SINGLE maintenance issue with the system) we have accrued $25,500 in savings for the past 4.6 years. Every month we don’t pay a $500 electric bill. What do I do with those savings? I invest the money and use some of it to go to McDonald’s. I guess I was just lucky in making the decision to get solar. Oh, one more thing about solar and we can move on. Think our property, compared to others, will be more valuable and sell a bit quicker when the buyer realizes our 6,000 square foot home aka “modest seaside cottage” has an electric bill of zero? I think so. Movies. I like movies. I watch some of them on my TV and I watch some of them at a movie theater. Carol doesn’t like movies as much as I do because she would prefer to stay home and work. I don’t prefer to stay home and work… ever. I will drag Carol to a movie by the hair if I have to. I have a special deal with Regal Theaters. For 23 bucks a month I can see as many movies at one of their theaters as I want. I figure if I see two movies a month I will break even. On average, I always see at least two movies a month. I don’t get rich with this program but a smile does come across my face when I’m seeing my third or fourth movie of the month and I know I didn’t pay anything to walk through the doors.
Cars/Fuel I own several pairs of shoes. I probably have a couple of hundred T-shirts. I bought them all new. Are they worth today what I paid for them? No. I use the same strategy in buying cars that I do in buying shoes and T-shirts. I buy them new. I own a Tesla Model X. It’s an electric car. I don’t pay anything for fuel. When I bought the car, they gave me free supercharging for the life of my car ownership. I have never ever paid a single penny for electricity to power my car in the 30,000 miles I’ve driven it. Just lucky? I guess. Prices for gasoline in some parts of California have now exceeded seven dollars a gallon. Do I fret about that? Honestly, the answer is no. I once paid $20 a gallon for gas. It’s a true story. As a matter of fact, I DEMANDED to pay $20 a gallon for gas. Why would I do that? Carol and I were in Florida. We were headed to Miami for a cruise. A hurricane had come through Fort Pierce, Florida. It was 10 o’clock at night, we didn’t have any gas. We were passing through Fort Pierce where the hurricane had hit two days before. We were still more than one hundred miles from Miami and we needed to get on that cruise ship by the next morning. In Fort Pierce everything was shut down. No restaurants, no hotels…and no gas stations were open. The National Guard was cruising the streets. I found a taxi driver and pleaded and tugged on his heartstrings until he was willing to break the curfew and bring me a filled five-gallon gas can. For that, I paid him 100 bucks. Was I lucky? I thought I was lucky.
Elvis Presley and the twenty-dollar bill. A few years ago, our daughter Kristy and her family gave me a two-foot-high plastic “bottle/bank” shaped like an Elvis Presley guitar. It was filled with popcorn. I ate the popcorn. Now, what was I going to do with an empty Elvis Presley plastic guitar bottle/bank? I started putting a $20 bill, and sometimes more, in it every Monday morning. I did that every Monday morning for quite a while. I vowed that someday I would take the money out and just “blow it” on something wild and crazy. A few months ago, I withdrew the contents of that plastic guitar! $5,600. Not bad. I didn’t put the money in so I could lower a future grocery bill. I put that money in so that someday I could be wild and crazy. I bought an 85” flat-screen TV with the money. I love the TV and I love Costco. Carol don’t love it quite as much as I do. She thinks she has to sit across the street to watch it. I sit just ten feet away and am mesmerized by the picture quality. My learning? A little bit every week adds up. Priceline/Hotels. I mentioned I travel an average of 175-200 nights each and every year. For 95% of those nights or more, I have stayed in a hotel. Most of those hotel stays were in Marriott and Sheraton properties. I would estimate that with 80-90% of those Marriott/Sheraton stays I have used Priceline.com. I normally get 30-40% off the best rate Marriott is offering by using Priceline. I rarely reserve a hotel before the day of my arrival. When I check-in, I tell Marriott that I am a “titanium elite” member of their frequent stay program. That gives me plenty of “juice”. Despite having paid the Priceline rate the hotel will usually upgrade me, offer free breakfast, waive any parking or Wi-Fi fees and probably give me a couple of free-market items when I check-in. Sometimes the value of their upgrades is worth more than what I paid to rent the room. Just lucky? I guess. Car loans If you’re gonna buy a new car I think you need a car loan in today’s environment. Could I have paid cash for my Tesla Model X when I bought it? Yes, I could have. But that wouldn’t be a good idea. I wanted to get a car loan at the lowest possible interest rate and for the longest term possible. I did just that. My car loan is fixed at 1.99% for six years. My car payment is $1,480 a month. Is that the highest car payment I have ever had? No, it is not. I once leased a 2004 Lexus LS for three years. My lease payment for that car was $2,008 a month. I remember walking out of the Lexus dealership after getting that car. The woman who worked in the finance department said something to the effect of, “that’s the highest monthly car payment I’ve ever seen at our dealership”. I was kind of proud of that even though I don’t believe her employer would have approved of her comment. Was this a good deal? I thought paying $2,008/month for that Lexus was one of the very BEST financial deals I ever made. It had to do with government write-offs and stuff like that. I won’t bore you with those details right now. I’ll just say the government paid for about as much of that Lexus as I did when it was all over. With a 1.99% Tesla auto loan almost every penny of that $1,480 goes to reduce the principal and build equity in my car. Should I have paid them $100,000 rather than getting a car loan in that amount? I certainly don’t think so. Over the next years, if I can’t invest my money at a return greater than 1.99% and walk away with all of that excess money, I don’t deserve to be writing this message right now. I really need to point out that each of our three kids and the folks they hang out with are great people. Every one of them has different skills. J.J. is the “financial” guy in our family for me. I get lots of ideas from him that I try to put in place with my limited skill level. I got the car loan at an educational credit union up in Fresno. This credit union is mainly for teachers who live in Fresno. I’m not a teacher. Fresno is a five-hour drive from where I live. However, for about 10 bucks they’ll let “outsiders” like me become members and get low rates. Just lucky? I guess. Every time I see that an electronic withdrawal has been made in the amount of $1,480 to make my monthly car payment I just smile. That means that $1,480 that just went to pay for the car has been sitting in an investment account. Up to this point that $1,480 was just making more and more money compared to if I had written that check for a $100 grand to begin with. Rental cars I rent some 50-75 cars every year. For domestic rentals, I get the very best deals from having worked for Procter & Gamble. As a matter of fact, I owe P&G a huge thanks for putting me into a position to retire at the age of 52. I took what they gave me and did all of the things I’m telling you about today over the last twenty years. Cash discounts/Senior discounts We built our own home in the early 2000s. We had 80 subcontractors and I paid every one of them. For any of those contracting bills that were above $5,000 or so I had a special “payment offer”. By way of example, each job would have been contracted for a fixed amount of money, let’s just say $30,000. When the project was finished or even in the midst of the project, I would ask this question. “If I paid you in cash what would the price be?” As we all know cash is king. Frequently the contractor would lower their price when I paid them with cash. The stories I could tell you about these situations. Sometimes I felt like a drug dealer. I might point out that it is not illegal to pay for things in cash! You’ve probably seen places where they want to charge you more if you pay by credit card, right? Sometimes to avoid those credit card fees you paid by cash, right? That’s what I did with many of our construction expenses. It never hurt to ask if I could get a discount by paying cash. What did I do with all of those savings which were substantial? I invested a lot of that money and I went to McDonald’s as often as I wanted. Oh yeah, senior discounts. I ask for ‘em. I do feel a little sheepish in the drive-through lane with a $100,000 car asking a minimum wage worker for a senior discount. But, as they say, they do say this, right? Every 75 cents counts. What have I learned from asking for senior discounts? As you get older you can say just about anything and folks will let you slide. It’s time to summarize. I mentioned I haven’t worked in 20 years. It’s not that I don’t like work. It’s that I don’t like the restrictions of work. I’d rather be doing stuff that I want to do. For the most part, I’d rather be playing. I have a friend who insinuated that I was “offering unsolicited financial advice”. I didn’t think that was even possible. I have never thought of anyone as offering me unsolicited financial advice. Someone may offer me financial advice that I don’t think is of much value. However, I’ve always found it very important to listen to anyone’s advice and then make a decision as to whether or not I could benefit from it or not. Speaking of advice…here’s my thinking. I want to take advice from people who are doing better than me in whatever area their advice might be coming from. I have taken hundreds of golf lessons. In the beginning I was terrible. Later, after spending literally thousands of dollars on golf lessons I shot a 68 on a course with a slope rating of 132. If you play golf, you know what that means. Was it worth all the money I spent on golf lessons to shoot that score? You betcha! What was the learning from all of that? Listen to people who give you advice when they are better than you are in whatever area they are giving you advice. Make sense? One of my basic financial tenants which I try to employ in virtually every situation is this. “I don’t want to buy cheap stuff cheap. I want to buy good stuff cheap”.
I want to drive around in a Tesla trying to find a Marriott and using my very best points-earning credit card to pay for that hotel. I don’t want to stay in a Motel 6 even though I do at times. I don’t wanna buy a used car where somebody else has already soaked up all the new car smells before I got there. I don’t want to buy second-hand powerwalking shoes. I grew up poor but I don’t want to act like I’m poor when I’m not poor anymore. In closing, I will simply say this. I love money. But on the other hand, I don’t like the FEEL of money. You will never EVER find me with a coin in my pocket. If I need to flip a coin I simply say to Siri on my iPhone, “Hey Siri, give me heads or tails”. I can be out on the road for a week and not spend any cash whatsoever. That’s what credit cards are for. And every dollar spent with a credit card is earning “something” in free stuff. Speaking of phones, I always have the very latest iPhone. Why? Because for $30 a month Apple and AT&T will keep me with the latest and greatest iPhone in existence for the rest of my life. Money gives people options. Having multiple options when it comes time to make a decision is the very best thing that can happen. When a person is out of options they have just died. Speaking of death, do I expect to spend every bit of my money by the time I’ve taken my last breath? No, I would have to be really lucky to do that and I’m not that lucky. I do expect to have some money left over when I die. But in the meantime, I want to trade as much of the money that I have for stuff. Money ain’t worth nothing except for the fact that you can trade it for stuff. As you get older you don’t need that much new stuff. As you get older, you’re not buying a new refrigerator or a new sofa or a new wine rack (we never bought a wine rack) as you did when you were much younger. If you’re not buying that kind of stuff then what kind of stuff can you buy when as you get older? Hopefully, you have more money than you had when you were younger? I guess at that point when you’re not buying hard goods you can buy soft goods as in “experiences”. Experiences come from travel. Since the pandemic began as this is written I have traveled 226 nights away from home. I doubt you know anybody who has done that. But you know me. One more comment about your capability of acting on anything I’ve mentioned. If you’re as old as me and you didn’t do this stuff over the years…sorry you have likely missed the boat. You might be able to see the boat leaving the dock but you’re gonna have to run probably faster than you can run to get on that boat. But…just because you missed the boat it doesn’t mean that your kids and their kids can’t benefit. Something to think about. If you’ve made it this far, I offer my thanks and congratulations. If I had some frequent reader points to give out, I would give them to you. I hope you’ve picked up a pointer or two. If you have, I hope you’ve taken the time and effort to employ them for your benefit or for the benefit of someone that you love. I think I’m pretty good with money. I’m not very good with a lot of other stuff. I don’t own an electric drill. I don’t know how to shut off the water in our house. If anything goes wrong in our house, I don’t fix it. Sometimes Carol fixes it. In every other instance, I have somebody to fix stuff. But, I’m pretty good with money. I love the country song that goes like this “Money can’t buy everything. Well, maybe so. But it could buy me a boat”. I don’t own a boat. I have never owned a boat. I had one fellow tell me he thought I was bragging when I talked about money. I didn’t think so. What I “heard” when he said that is “I’m so friggin’ jealous of what you did and that I probably can’t do that I will try to hurt you with that comment”. Folks, I have a thick skin and the ability to “translate” criticism. I go by the Dizzy Dean adage. Don’t know Dizzy Dean? Google him. Ol’ Diz used to say, “It ain’t bragging if it’s true or you can do it”. I ain’t bragging. What I say is true and I can do it. I’ve already done it in most cases. Let’s not forget this is a newsletter about finance. I get a lot of my money ideas from others who are better in this or that particular money area than I am. When that happens, I take their idea and run with it. Are you pretty good with money? I hope so. Please don’t do without if you aren’t as good with money as some other people. Just take their ideas and run with them. Maybe you will buy yourself a boat. Carol sometimes says I’m lucky. She’s usually right about most things. Sometimes I find a lucky penny lying on the ground. I ALWAYS stop to pick up that penny. I do smile when I think of the person who dropped the penny. I’m not smiling because they lost a penny. I’m smiling because they didn’t stop to pick up their penny. When I was about 10 years old, I peddled my bike more than a mile to a Ben Franklin store. I was hell-bent on buying a 1960 Mercury Comet plastic AMT brand model car. That car kit was priced at 97 cents. With tax, it came to $1.01. I only had a dollar. The lady at the register, a real hardass I might add, told me I could complete the purchase if I asked someone else in the store for a penny. I wouldn’t do that. Where is that lady now? I’m going to guess she’s dead. God sometimes takes things into his/her own hands. Speaking of pennies…I still find those lucky pennies on the ground. I always stop and pick them up which isn’t as easy to do as it once was. I don’t keep those pennies. I don’t need any more luck. I am lucky enough. I will keep that penny in my pocket until I pass the bed of a pickup truck. Then I’ll toss that penny in the bed of the truck hoping it brings the owner good luck. Fortunately, for me, no pickup truck owner has beaten me up yet for throwing stuff into her truck! We’re back where we started. I love money. I also love my wife and family and God and my country and my good health. Talking about one of those important topics doesn’t mean that you love any of the other topics that you’re not currently talking about any less.
Randy said all of the above and he meant it. P.S. If anyone reading this is thinking…well that’s all good and fine…for Randy. He lives in California and his son and friends help him with money and Carol does all the work…I’m just gonna scream! It is true that Carol does all the work. However, I grew up as poor as a “church mouse” as my mother used to say. I won’t even tell you about the Christmas morning when we woke up to realize that not a single Christmas gift had been purchased for my mother. It was only with the generosity of a local hardware store owner who opened his shop on Christmas morning that allowed us to get our shit together.
