MONEY - THE GREAT DISTRACTION – THIS NASTY INTERRUPTION

A NEW LEARNING
This would be a good time to be a billionaire.
I’m serious. Of course I won’t make it into the top 100 Canadian billionaires club any time soon. These billionaires have each taken a financial hit this year, a few billion dollars – gone! But then there is a bit of a cushion upon which to fall back. And the wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffet is 80 years old. “What will I do?” is not an expression anyone hears him say.

In this reality show called My Retirement I am spending more time thinking about money than I have ever wanted to do. My issue is that this preoccupation is forced upon me, first by the reality of a pension income and second by the reality of the Great Disruption. This toughening economic time, this darkening cloud does not have an immediate silver lining on my show.

So believe me I am more annoyed than I am jealous that entertainers and sportsmen and big business people are pulling down enough money per year to capably support every household in my very large housing development. And still people like us curiously clamour to read how much she earned for starring in that movie, or how much he is earning for each basket he makes or how much she brings in for countless chips being installed in Blackberrrys.

This has been a depressing week for Christine and me.
We received our year end RRSP investment statement and learned that within a couple of months as stocks went slaloming south we had lost thousands of dollars from a meager portfolio we had worked our butts off to assemble. I keep looking for someone to blame but it’s futile. My commitment to a God who transcends all of this, and has more resources than we imagine keeps refocusing my gaze and ratcheting up my dependence upon Him.
Mark Zuckerberg is 23 and is the world's youngest billionaire. He designed Facebook a few years ago from his college dorm room. Good for him.

Freedom 85

A NEW LEARNING
Yea, yea, yea, the world economy sucks and North America’s is becoming suckier as bureaucrats realize the size of the hole we are in. Change champion Barak Obama is now sounding like gloomy gus and he hasn’t even been sworn in. But he did get elected on the theme of change. Harper and Flaherty are trying to prepare us for the new budget with dark warnings of things to come. The national economic crisis comes at the worst time for me. I am retired. I have no idea quite yet how this crisis will affect me but I was certainly under the delusion that things would remain constant when I retired.

I am supposed to be golfing. When I was 55 years old it was apparent to me that Freedom 55 was out of my reach. Then I turned 60 and Freedom 70 seemed a vapory dream. Today I am 66 and retired. So was the retirement a mistake? My reality calculator projects Freedom 85 for me because then my needs will be considerably reduced if existent at all. I probably will have the resources for Freedom 85. Oh it’s not that I didn’t see this coming. One doesn’t work in a not for profit field for forty-five years and still hold out hope of finishing with a residence, a beach house, a chalet, a motor coach and a yacht. Decade after decade there is an overcast prospect of coming to the end of my working life with only the monies that the governments provides and what I have managed to RRSP from meager wages.

We are definitely in a recession. Whether we are in a depression remains to be argued and proven. Economies have generally rebounded from recessions without government intervention because equity prices pick up. A depression is different because it does not self correct and requires help. As we see in the USA, huge monetary help. In Canada Harper and company have already given fiscal assurances. Harper was here in BC this week standing with our Premier to champion a new highway which will provide 7000 jobs. Oh yes and it will cost BC in excess of 700 million dollars while the feds put up 300 million. (Photo is of a Depression bread line)

Christine and I have saved money for a glorious vacation in 2009 with its bleak forecast. Should we sit on that money and wait out the downturn for all its dark possibilities? Nope, we are vacating. We are going to pump our monies into the economy and have a blast. Freedom 66 I call it. When we return I don’t think I will be forced to living on the street. If I have to, I will go back to work. Tim Horton’s is looking for part-time and full-time employees. Seriously. It has to be Horton’s. Starbucks speak is like speaking in tongues to me. Or I can serve pizza at Pizza Hut. Buon appetito.