For the past several years I have dutifully scanned the various job listings Internet for a good part time job. I think I have wasted enough of your time griping about the seemingly nonexistent demand for skilled professionals who are only willing to work 20-24 hours per week.
So it is that I remain on a fixed income (SS) plus the few occasional shekels I receive from oddball projects and selling my original works of sheer genius, humor and pathos as fillers for mass media. The additional income barely covers my Starbucks and bar bills, so I am relegated to funding the bulk of living expenses against the SS pension. I call myself a FFIY (Frugal Fixed Income Yankee).
"What about your nest egg?" you are probably asking. You assume that I have stashed away a couple of mil against the future. Or maybe you think I have a hidden trust fund like Paris Hilton. Well, dear reader, we are Irish, so instead of inheriting a trust fund, we had to chip in to bury my widowed mother a decade ago.
As for the nest egg, well some [expletive deleted] is probably living in Rio de Janeiro sitting on a beach surrounded by semi-naked young women, with an ice chest full of Sierra Nevada, puffing on a Cuban Presidente on the money we had invested in AIG before the big crash. I am not jealous.
I am confident that the Almighty has a plan for me too. That's why I dutifully buy Powerball tickets, every week.
=========
Unfixed Prices.
Americans are not accustomed to haggling over prices. Somehow we have been instilled with the idea that it is insulting to the seller for us to offer a drastically low price for a product or service. We tend to think all prices are fixed. Well, honey, they aren't!
At the Mall a few weeks ago, I happened upon a kiosk that was selling Dragon Software. For those who aren't familiar, this software lets you talk into a mike, and the computer types out the text into a document that you can store and save. Pretty cool stuff for a writer, eh? Especially one who types with two fingers, who has twenty years' worth of handwritten journals to transcribe...
Well, I decided I needed this software. The list price for the basic home edition is normally $99, but they were selling it on a holiday special for $75 (plus 6% state sales tax). I resisted the urge to buy it n the spot, mainly because I am a frugal fixed-income Yankee who needs to check out all the details before I buy something. There were questions: will it play on my operating system? how much training is needed, yadda yadda. Can I run it on more than one computer? What if I want to write in french?
I checked out a few of the usual internet sales outfits, and found various prices for the same item.
Last week I ordered a copy of the software online at Amazon for $39 free shipping, no tax. It was delivered three days later. (I haven't loaded the disk yet. Stay tuned for my product review.)
The point is that the price of things is so relative as to be shockingly disparate. I checked today, and Amazon has raised their price to $49 plus $4.99 for shipping.
I wonder what the price will be tomorrow.
*******
UPDATE:
I attempted to load the software, but the disk could not be read. My DVD plays music disks so I think it still works for data. I called the help desk, and did not have to wait. The Tech Support guy (Rod) gave me a link to download the installation files via internet. This failed, the error message says I do not have enough RAM to run the software. Fine tiime to tell me.
Humph! Now I will have to spend hundreds to use my new $40 software package. Time for a new Laptop?
******
Showing posts with label nest egg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nest egg. Show all posts
12/01/2010
10/04/2010
Soft Landings
In today's Boston Globe there was a nicely done essay by Susan Trausch. You can read it if you click here. She took a buyout from the Globe five years ago at age 59. After 32 years at the same company, her transition from work to retirement was "complicated." She has written a book* about her personal period of adjustment, (which I plan to read if I ever have any free time.)
The op-ed piece titled "Retirement's Soft Landings" offers a bit of tongue-in-cheek advice to celebrities who have publicly announced their imminent retirement (Oprah, Joe Torre, Richard Daly).
Trausch nails it when she talks about the bitter-sweet transition after waving goodbye to your career and workmates,
As faithful readers of this blog well know, your humble scribe has been wrestling with retirement issues since he escaped from the hellhole several years ago. As one who has never been bored, I found retirement to be exceedingly liberating. Suddenly, no one is telling you what to do, where to be, what time to show-up, and how to get there. You think: This is how life should be!
I changed the name of the blog from "Hellhole Update" to "Escape from the Hellhole" to celebrate the new found feeling of having emerged from a cage. I was happy, delighted and at peace. Now I was free to do anything I wanted to do. Fishing, traveling, reading, meeting friends for lunch, catching up on the lengthy to-do list... And I did enjoy doing those things.
But having all that freedom is not without it's drawbacks. When people ask me, "How do you like retirement?" my answer is: "Overall I am delighted to be at leisure. However, every few months, I get this vague feeling that I am missing something, that I am not doing anything important. I start to worry (again) that the missus and me will outlive our nest egg."
I have probably bored my loyal readers with the recurrent observation that most normal adults do not experience unqualified happiness for very long (and this is well explained by Maslow's theory, The Hierarchy of Needs). Our brains are creative goal-seeking mechanisms, so we cannot be satisfied with the status quo, because new goals keep forming as long as the brain is functioning. (Hmmn, maybe this last condition explains why some people are deliriously happy in retirement. )
Fortunately, this "uncertain phase" does not last for very long**. I usually respond to the vague noodgy feelings of insignificance by looking at part time job ads for high paying opportunities within walking distance of home. There are virtually no part time jobs, unless you want to become a replaceable part, working for an indecent hourly wage, on the worst shift. So, I usually get over this phase pretty quickly. Then, I make some lunch plans or go fishing.
And, for a time, all is right with the world.
---------------------------------------------
*Trausch's newly published book: "Groping Toward Whatever Or How I Learned To Retire, Sort Of.’’
** My wife attributes this "uncertainty" to mild seasonal depression. She was an English major in college but feels that she is fully qualified to diagnose my mental state.
The op-ed piece titled "Retirement's Soft Landings" offers a bit of tongue-in-cheek advice to celebrities who have publicly announced their imminent retirement (Oprah, Joe Torre, Richard Daly).
Trausch nails it when she talks about the bitter-sweet transition after waving goodbye to your career and workmates,
" Oh the tyranny of time managed poorly. The tyranny of time at work was so different, mainly because time was in charge and knew what it was doing. There were bosses, assignments, schedules, deadlines, and a gross domestic product to consider. At home there is complete freedom and an easily distracted human being can spend days drifting from leaky garden hose to unread New Yorkers to hunting for the grocery list that must have blown off the counter to e-mail to the daily crossword puzzle that is supposed to keep the mind focused"
As faithful readers of this blog well know, your humble scribe has been wrestling with retirement issues since he escaped from the hellhole several years ago. As one who has never been bored, I found retirement to be exceedingly liberating. Suddenly, no one is telling you what to do, where to be, what time to show-up, and how to get there. You think: This is how life should be!
I changed the name of the blog from "Hellhole Update" to "Escape from the Hellhole" to celebrate the new found feeling of having emerged from a cage. I was happy, delighted and at peace. Now I was free to do anything I wanted to do. Fishing, traveling, reading, meeting friends for lunch, catching up on the lengthy to-do list... And I did enjoy doing those things.
But having all that freedom is not without it's drawbacks. When people ask me, "How do you like retirement?" my answer is: "Overall I am delighted to be at leisure. However, every few months, I get this vague feeling that I am missing something, that I am not doing anything important. I start to worry (again) that the missus and me will outlive our nest egg."
I have probably bored my loyal readers with the recurrent observation that most normal adults do not experience unqualified happiness for very long (and this is well explained by Maslow's theory, The Hierarchy of Needs). Our brains are creative goal-seeking mechanisms, so we cannot be satisfied with the status quo, because new goals keep forming as long as the brain is functioning. (Hmmn, maybe this last condition explains why some people are deliriously happy in retirement. )
Fortunately, this "uncertain phase" does not last for very long**. I usually respond to the vague noodgy feelings of insignificance by looking at part time job ads for high paying opportunities within walking distance of home. There are virtually no part time jobs, unless you want to become a replaceable part, working for an indecent hourly wage, on the worst shift. So, I usually get over this phase pretty quickly. Then, I make some lunch plans or go fishing.
And, for a time, all is right with the world.
---------------------------------------------
*Trausch's newly published book: "Groping Toward Whatever Or How I Learned To Retire, Sort Of.’’
** My wife attributes this "uncertainty" to mild seasonal depression. She was an English major in college but feels that she is fully qualified to diagnose my mental state.
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