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[quote=scaredyclassic]I find myself in a position today where I could never work again and enjoy the same lifestyle even accounting for high medical insurance with no worries, even for scaredycat.

The problem for me is I could not afford large future expenses I might want to make. I couldn’t afford to pay cash for a kids medical school. I couldn’t give large cash down payments for houses. I couldn’t help out with free cars and stuff. I also need to send money to the Escondido Buddhists…

I’d like to be able to do all those things. If I kept working, I could, and not feel impact about future anxiety. Also, I sometimes like work and don’t want to be a useless old man who no one listens to. Worse, I could turn into an old guy who talks about prior work days. Ugh. I hate old guys like that

Therefore although I do not feel like working on Tuesday, or this weekend, I’ll be heading in later today.

Even if I were to die tomorrow, I would feel about this life direction it is correct[/quote]

Sounds like you are in a similar boat as I am, scaredy. Have hit my goals early but not sure I am ready to retire.

My original goal was to retire at 65, but I’m beginning to question whether I want to stay in that long. My wife and I have been talking about that.

The house is close to being paid off. We could live better than anyone in either of our families – ever! – even if I retired now.

The problem is – once I exit the workplace, if I decide a year or two down the road I shouldn’t have it would probably be hard to reenter. It is probably a one-way door.

So for now, I decided to stay. It will afford us more $$ to do with what we want in retirement – in reality it will be more money to pass on to our kids. My wife’s still working anyway, so even if I retired it would not mean more travel right now. Inflation has kicked up and if that continues, it could be that we’ll need that extra few years on income to keep pace with inflation. I’ll probably be re-evaulating every six months or so.

I’ve also been returning to genealogy and recently updated the family tree with the ages they all died. It’s all over the board as one might expect, but out of the 28 ancestors nearest us in the family tree (through great-grandparents):

– 4 passed in their 90s (93, 93, 90, 90)
– 5 passed in their 80s (89, 83, 82, 82, 81)
– 12 passed in their 70s
– 2 passed in their 60s
The other 5 passed before that.

How much time do we have left? How much of it do we want to spend in retirement? The answers are unclear at this point.

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[quote=sdrealtor]

It’s Utah! He can marry a few![/quote]

Lol. Half of my family tree is Mormon, starting with my great grandparents. As I do genealogy, I’m running into quite a few polygamists. Which is making for some complex family tree diagrams.

I’m also finding my relatives from Idaho and Utah were no saints. Quite a few interesting events back in the late 1800s, early 1900s that were never passed down to me. I’m only now finding out about them through century old newspaper articles.

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The longest downturn in the 20th century was about 10 years – The Great Depression.

Therefore at 20 years out, I would keep the pedal to the floor…keep virtually all the money in the stock market and maximized 401K contributions.

At 10 years out, re-evaluate. How is their health? Do they plan to retire early? Does the job market look good in their chosen field(s)? Is the stock market way overvalued? If poor health, early retirement, employment problems are imminent, or an extreme stock crash looks likely then move to a more conservative position.

At 5 years out, I would start moving to a more conservative position. Most financial planners would recommend 60% stock 40% stable, Warren Buffett recommends 80-90% stock 10-20% stable. They should shoot for something in that range at 5 years out, depending on their risk tolerance.

The above is what I’ve been implementing in my own life.

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[quote=gzz]It is kind of jarring to see a new development of close-in detached 2-floor suburban homes street full of cookie cutter modernish houses. Driving home and driving through three streets of these?

https://www.live3roots.com/homes/brio

It looks like something you’d see in the hollywood hills, but it will be in a symmetric row of dozens.

[/quote]

They are getting ready to do a similar development in San Marcos in the area called North City. It looks a bit claustrophobic to me, but then a lot of new developments do. Guess I’m not the target demographic so doesn’t really matter.

Times they are a-changin’.

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[quote=Coronita]
Also John Hine Mazda is closing down for good in September 6. (owner sold to Carvana and carvana doesnt want to keep the mazda franchise).[/quote]

I just read that Carvana is building a Carvana car vending machine at the corner of I-15 and 78 in Escondido. We had been seeing the structure going up and couldn’t figure out what it was.

So I read up on the car vending machine thing. What a gimmick! But I guess if it makes car buying fun, who am I to judge? I just hope they don’t regret building that thing next to RR tracks, with brake dust and all.

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We’re not much of a price shopper for insurance, if we find a good company we stay with them. Which is why we were with AAA for auto insurance forever.

That is, until our car purchase last year. It was an expensive car, granted, but they insured us immediately then put the car on a “pending” list. I called and asked what that was and they said it hadn’t received final approval but I was covered in the interim. It was like that for a month before I lost my patience and started calling around.

Turns out that, by transferring auto insurance over to who held our home insurance (Liberty Mutual), I could get the house, cars, earthquake, AND umbrella insurance and still pocket $800/year over what I was paying before. AAA was putting the screws to us! Or maybe I’m talking too soon and LM will jack up the rates when we renew in a couple of months. We’ll see. I will say this: the LM agent was a pleasure to work with. We’ll see if that is true if we ever have to file a claim. 🙂

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[quote=barnaby33]How about just using a cloud backup service. Why mess with a local drive at all?
Josh[/quote]

A few reasons. Privacy, reliability, and cost for me in that order.

There have been so many data breaches that I really don’t trust anyone’s ability to safeguard my information.

Reliability – I have seen backups fail way, way too many times. Either they are misconfigured so that they weren’t storing what I thought they were storing, or the mechanism or media failed, or on and on. I’d say as high as 25% of the time that data needed to be recovered, it was unrecoverable. I don’t trust anyone but me with my data redundancy. I never do incremental saves…I wipe the disk and make an entirely new copy of everything. Time consuming yes, but I’m 100% sure all of the files are there and the latest version.

Third, it does cost a bit. However, 12TB drives aren’t cheap either so its not a major driver in my decision.

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[quote=Coronita]
Your concerns about code stealing, licensing, etc are overblown. The code isnt important enough or revolutionary enough to be worth stealing in most of these fintech startups….and you wont be able to tell if you are the guy obtaining the code from the the cheaper outsourced labor, do the code review, and the gitlab/github checkin, which you would do if you were trying to pass if off as your own code…at these fintech startups, no one gives a shit… thats why these people can get away with what they are doing…its one of the reasons why i got out of these fintech startup bay area pushes i generation ago. the goal is short term exit strategy and to cash in…different for the few of us that are in the game trying to make a difference, where we use our rental income to pay the bills so we can try to find an opportunity we enjoy doing … hopefully ill get there one day.[/quote]

Yeah that sounds pretty unrewarding…prototype code to entice investment. There was a point in my career about 10 years in when I realized that none of the code I had written was still in use – none! It was kind of depressing.

After that my batting average was much better, but looking at the shelf life of most code it is only 5-10 years in my experience. Then it gets replaced. If it doesn’t get replaced, it really falls into the “technical debt” category.

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The first guy mentioned (holds jobs for 2 months, does nothing, gets paid then fired) would never be hired by me because I’d trash-can his resume as soon as I saw the length of his stay at his prior employers.

The hire-folks-to-do-my-work path is riddled with problems. What if those folks steal code and pass it off as their own work? Many companies today check very closely the licensing of software they reuse out of fear of being sued. Not knowing who is “writing” your code and therefore whether any of it is proprietary to another company or covered under some sort of license (BSD, GNU, GPL, MIT, Apache or more restrictive types) leaves the company wide open.

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[quote=Coronita]one thing about backup usb drive. i dont leave it connected. A RAID usb backup drive mitigates against hardware failure with your main storage, and the dual RAID drive mitigates against a single hard drive failure in the USB RAID drive….However, these backup drives wont do anything against a computer infested with a virus. So i only have the backup drive connected when im backing things up.[/quote]

I use similar strategy. None of my data is stored on the computer – only software I install which isn’t much nowadays.

All of my data is on external USB – I have a 12TB drive and two 12 TB backup drives plus a 12 TB backup sitting in a safe deposit box which I swap out every 4 months. I will lose a week’s worth of work if my 12 TB main USB drive fails. I don’t keep any drive past 5 years of age – all failures I have seen have been on drives 7-10 years of age. Backup drives are plugged in only while backing up data.

If my house burns down I’ll lose 4 months of data, but if my house burns down I’ve got bigger problems than data.

If my computer goes belly up, all I do is unplug my 12 TB drive from my old computer and plug it into my new computer. Install 2-3 sw packages and I’m good to go! Easy.

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[quote=sdrealtor] The shift is happening in Phoenix and in Dallas[/quote]

Truth be told, Phoenix party registration by percentage of voters is moving away from both the Democratic and Republican parties:

GOP, Democrats losing ground to ‘other’ in metro Phoenix voter registration

There are still more Republicans that Democrats registered there though Republicans lost a few voters and Democrats picked up a few. “Other” is picking up the most ground and taking a bigger slice of the Phoenix voting population…the Rep and Dem shares are both dropping.

Texas doesn’t require voters to select a political party when registering, so the Dallas/Ft Worth metro area is harder to measure.

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[quote=sdrealtor]You just made my case for me. While Phoenix could come back to GOP the trend is clearly blue in what was once Goldwater country. Dallas and Texas are behind them on the curve but again the trend is clear. Whether it gets to a blue majority is irrelevant. Prices are being driven by immigration from blue states. Even if we send red folks they are far more liberal than the old time conservatives in those states and politics will shift left as we export weed smoking, socially liberal Republicans.[/quote]

Actually I didn’t. You’re reading things into the move from blue states to red states. EconProf is a prime example, as are other republicans I know who are currently migrating to Arizona/Utah.

“Whether it gets to a blue majority is irrelevant” is an amazing statement in the context of what I wrote…I said there was a mixture of red and blue cities in the list and you disagreed. Now you’re saying yeah well the red cities are more liberal now because republicans are more liberal. Apparently you are saying red = blue. Can’t disagree more.

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[quote=sdrealtor]Huh? The top markets are either turning blue or already blue.[/quote]

Phoenix metro area – which is the only city with higher yoy home prices that San Diego – did indeed vote Biden in 2020 (50.1%), but it voted Trump in 2016. I think the Trump hatred is an anomaly and that Phoenix will return to red voting in 2024 (unless Trump runs).

Dallas/FW metro area – while it is true that Dallas is very blue, Ft Worth is very red. And it is the same with this area – 50.6% Biden in 2020 but voted Trump in 2016.

In my opinion, we’ll have to wait for another election cycle to see if they really are turning blue.

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San Diego housing prices rose second highest in the nation.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/story/2021-07-27/san-diego-home-prices-now-up-25-in-a-year

And if you look at the list of top rising metro areas, looks split pretty well between blue and red. I notice no trend.

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My parents had septic for 20 years, it was just fine too.

And I’m sure there are horror stories about sewer connections. I think a few have been described on this site: remember the neighbor whose construction compromised a shared sewer line?

All things being equal, I’m going to take a house on sewer over a house on septic. Same with city water over well. gas line over propane tank. wired internet over satellite.

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