Stretching Your Retirement Savings

There is what we call in the business world called a “paradigm shift” when you move from the working world to the world of retirement.  A paradigm shift means that the rules we live by and the economy that regulates our lives will change dramatically.  Whether you have a large retirement package or you have retirement savings that are going to take some care to stretch out, you will begin to live on a fixed income and stretching your retirement savings will become a hobby, a passion and a lifestyle that you will get good at over time.

If you are just stepping into the retirement paradigm, learning the ropes from the old pros at the skill of stretching the retirement dollar will serve you well.  It will be these old experts that will know how to have a fun evening out on the town for under twenty dollars, when the right time is to buy at the supermarket and how to leverage coupons to your best advantage.

If you have left the active working world, you may need a way to focus your attention since all of that business energy can be used well to focus on how to use your retirement funds to your best advantage.  One way to use all of that business expertise is to take on the challenge of what is commonly called “home economics” to learn the best ways to economize and cut the expenses of daily life.  Home economics is something that is commonly associated with young women preparing to become housewives but the wisdom of how to recycle household items, how to take care of household utensils and tools to reduce the amount they have to be replaced and other important economic tips can go a long way on cutting down on expenses, so you see that retirement nest egg gets depleted more slowly.

Little things mean a lot when it comes to home economics.  Turning off lights and not running the heater when you can put on a sweater seem like petty savings but by not consuming power, you are not only saving on utilities, but you are also living green as well which is good for the earth.  Similarly, you may be able to do more without going out in the car than you thought.  Perhaps you can walk to the store rather than drive.  Perhaps you can take public transportation for a low cost rather than use up expensive gas and cause more wear and tear on your vehicle.  These little things can do a lot to stretch your funds, so they are there for the important things.

 

Another way to use your business sense is to find ways to supplement your income or use your retirement savings intelligently.  With the internet, you may be able to find ways to invest your savings more shrewdly so you can actually generate revenue by making your money work for you.  You can even find part-time jobs that can be done from the internet or perhaps in town that do not put stress on your “retirement status” but bring in a nice little revenue stream while giving you a chance to get out and be with people.  Lots of businesses like to use senior citizens in this way so everybody wins.

By taking on the challenge of stretching your retirement savings by both becoming a guru of home economics and finding new revenue streams, you can protect that precious nest egg, so it continues to be there for you year after year assuring that you are cared for and have everything you need to live a happy and productive retirement lifestyle.

Signs and rules

Someone once said: “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools.” Rules replace thought. If you know the rules, you always know what to do. Rules are comfortable. If you know the rules, you never have to stretch too far. Rules are safe. You probably will not get in trouble for following the rules. Unfortunately, you probably will not make much progress either.

When I was working, one of the areas I had responsibilities for was relatively new program and had no history or regulations to guide how we should carry out what we thought was correct. Therefore, I became a rule maker. I saw myself as a trailblazer setting guidelines so others could follow and not make the same mistakes I made. Over time my successful actions became rules for doing and my unsuccessful actions became rules against doing. Those, rules became regulations and then those regulations became procedures. 

After I left my position, the person who I had selected to replace me, took all of the information and created a handbook full of rules, regulations, procedures, which others working in our area had to follow. Over time, this handbook became the only rules to follow to be successful. The programs I started were successful not because of the rules, but because we broke the rules that were in place at the time. 

People, I find tend to follow rules if they make sense to them or if they benefit in some way. We often ignore rules or signs that do not seem to have major consequences: keep off the grass; do not pick your nose; no loitering. Laws are rules that require stricter observance. We obey laws because if we do not, we are punished. Nevertheless, if over time, the law becomes irrelevant to the majority, the law will be ignored or will be removed from the books.

Then there are customs, which, are not really rules but we tend to obey them so that we aren’t frowned up by our peers. For example: eat with a fork, do not burp in public, and wear your gang’s colors.

Finally, there are the rules or paradigms on how we live our life and which shape our attitudes toward life. We learned these personal rules of living from our parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and other extended family and from our friends as we were growing up. As we matured, we learned to question societies rules, our laws and societies attitudes, which is a good thing, in my mind. 

However, many of us have failed to question our own way of looking at the world and it would be a good thing if we did that sooner as opposed to later in life. If we do not question that or our  way of viewing the world, or our rules we will certainly not make any progress, but we will remain comfortable and safe. Being comfortable and safe in an ever changing world is dangerous to your health.

Change is

Why Some Change is Scary Part One

First let me say that people are not afraid of change. People change all the time. Human beings are wired to change. We’ve been changing for millions of years. And our capacity for adaptation is only accelerating. The impulse to evolve and the motivation to improve are wired into our brains and bodies. We are more naturally oriented to change than resist. When you study unsuccessful change efforts up close, one common pattern emerges:

1. The more obvious, tangible, and relatively easy-to-address aspects of the change are tackled. So I want to change, I will focus on the aspects that I want to change. What will it cost me and what will my reward be for changing? How will I know that I have achieved change? What do I have to change in my life to be successful? Is it my thinking, my diet, my friends, my home, my personal beliefs?
2. Once I have settled on what I need to change then I can start the process of deciding how I will make the changes.

All these elements are tangible, hard stuff, factual, and objective and so I start to work on these elements but if I don’t pay attention to the intangible aspects of change then I will fail in my attempt to change. The invisible, intangible, risky, and ultimately most powerful Aspects are ignored at my peril.

The intangible aspects of change are factors are:

Purpose

Values

Passion

Alignment

All these elements are intangible, emotional, and subjective. These intangible elements make or break change our change efforts. When we ignore them, they come back to bite us. This soft stuff has a real, hard and tangible impact on results. When people are passionate and committed to a result, they make it happen. When people are aligned around a common purpose, they move mountains.

Part Two tomorrow

Predicting the unpredictable--part one

The following article is by By Dr Amantha Imber  and it deals wih the idea about what makes a person creative at work and I would submit creative in their social and personal live.

About 12 months ago, we set out to see if it was possible to do what was previously thought to be impossible - accurately predicting whether a person would be an effective creative thinker at work. To our knowledge, there was not a single scientifically validated process to do this. We found that in the majority of cases, most companies were not using any method for assessing creativity, despite claiming it to be a critical competency for staff to possess.

There were a couple of exceptions. In “creative industries”, such as advertising and design, recruiters would typically look at a job applicant’s portfolio of past work to see how creative they were. Of course, we all know people’s tendencies to stretch the truth. I used to work at the advertising agency that came up with the idea for Earth Hour. And despite the fact that only one person came up with the idea, I heard about many people from the agency claiming that they were the one who gave birth to this idea and had put it in their portfolio.

In other industries, creative thinking is sometimes assessed by giving people a difficult problem to solve and observing how they answer the problem. For example, Microsoft famously ask job applicants how they would move Mount Fuji, and use people’s answers as a test as to how creative they are. However, this process has never been scientifically validated and is only testing a small component of workplace creativity.

So 12 months after we set ourselves the challenge of measuring the unmeasurable. We tested over 1300 people, across industries as diverse as advertising to engineering, through to insurance. And we have found out that yes, we could indeed predict a person’s ability to think creatively and work. Moreover, we could do so extremely accurately. It was all a matter of identifying the right variables to measure.

There are several components to creative thinking that we found that our test could predict. These included a person’s ability to:

• generate new and effective solutions.
• collaborate well with others.
• sell and communicate ideas to others.
• think creatively under stressful situations. 

 Our test incorporated over 25 “predictors” - things that we knew were predictive of creative performance as shown by leading researchers in the field. Here are some of the variables that came out as the top predictors of creative performance in the workplace that you can use to help your own predictive powers.

1. Openness to Experience 

There are hundreds of different personality traits, but we found that there was one trait in particular that was most predictive of creative performance. This trait, called ‘Openness to Experience’ is all about our inclination to seek out and appreciate new experiences. People who score high on this trait tend to enjoy having a lot of variety in their life, have a high level of curiosity, and use their imagination a lot. As a result, they perform significantly more creatively at work. 

If you want to try to foster this trait in yourself or in others, start by becoming consciously aware of routines that you have in your life - it might be reading the same types of magazines, gravitating towards the same types of movies or restaurants - and actively encourage yourself to try something different. Being open to experiencing new activities, and following through on this, will help improve your openness to experience and thus significantly boost your creative performance.

About the Author 

 Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium and the inventor of the Inventium Creative Aptitude Tool, the world’s first psychometric tool designed to measure and predict creativity at work. Amantha can be contacted on amantha@inventium.com.au or go to http://www.blogger.com/goog_964162633

Social Media

Interesting Youtube presentation on the current state of social media and its use. This is a must see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Food for Thought...

Some musings on a wonderful BC day,

Let's put the seniors in jail, and the criminals in a nursing home.

That way the seniors would have access to showers, hobbies, and walks, they'd receive unlimited free prescriptions, dental and medical treatment , wheel chairs etc. and they'd receive money instead of paying it out.

They would also have constant video monitoring, so they could be helped instantly ,if they fell, or needed assistance. Bedding would be washed twice a week, and all clothing would be ironed and returned to them.

A guard would check on them every 20 minutes, and bring their meals and snacks to their cell. They would have family visits in a suite built for that purpose. They would have access to a library, weight room, spiritual counseling, pool, and education. Simple clothing , shoes, slippers, P.J.'s and legal aid would be free, on request. Private, secure rooms for all, with an exercise outdoor yard ,with gardens.

Each senior could have a P.C. a T.V. radio, and daily phone calls. There would be a board of directors , to hear complaints, and the guards would have a code of conduct, that would be strictly adhered to.

The "criminals" would get cold food, be left all alone, and unsupervised. lights off at 8pm, and showers once a week. Live in a tiny room, and pay $5000.00 per month and have no hope of ever getting out. Justice for all.

Creative Loafing

Have you tried creative loafing? It is a good excuse to relax, and also a great way to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems. How does one creatively loaf? Just relax, open your mind, and use one of the many idea-generating techniques.

A Creative Loafing Technique

My favorite technique is one that is best for generating new ideas rather than solving specific problems. It can be used in any area of life. It is simply the imagining of new applications for existing ideas.

Once, while laying on the couch, I saw an advertisement for a company that uses a dog to find mold in your house. You may know that dogs can be trained to sniff out almost anything. There was even a news story a year or two ago about a dog that could detect if you had cancer.

What was my first thought? "I wonder what else dogs could find by smell?" The first idea that came to mind was to use dogs to find other pets. They find lost people so well, so why not have a service to find lost pets? just one sniff of the cats favorite rug, and the dog is on the trail.

A Creative Loafing Example

You can certainly use your relaxing times to just randomly ponder things, but why not put creative loafing together with a good idea-generating technique. Then you can lay under a tree and have an endless stream of creative new ideas. For this "new-application technique," just start with the essence of the idea, and look for new ways to use it.

For example, you might lay there and think about the pneumatic tubes that deliver your money and papers at a bank's drive-through. The essence is a cartridge that delivers things through a tube using air pressure. I imagine the same thing would work for human transport. Could you ride "the tube" to the next city, or maybe make this into an amusement park ride?

Look other aspects of an idea too. For example, these tubes allow several customers to be waited on at once. Where else do they need this? A fast food drive through comes to mind. Perhaps pneumatic tubes would spill drinks, but the idea of multiple car lanes can be used. Several drive-through windows, radiating out like spokes, at different angles, would allow three different lines of cars.

If you want to practice using this technique, just lay back and...

- Imagine three new uses for pedal-power.

- Imagine two new uses for magnets.

- Think of a new application for Darwin's theory of natural selection, outside of biology.

Can you see how easy it is to come up with new ideas? Why not learn a few more techniques? Then apply them to personal problems. Finally, to make the best use of your creative loafing time, keep a notebook or your personal recorder ready.

understanding

Do you have a dream, a hunch, a desire, or something that just has to be done, but for some reason you never start it, here is some interesting advice.
And it may make you hate me.
And you're going to say, this is nonsense and childish and foolish.
You're probably not going to follow it anyway.
But if you do, I'll give you my personal guarantee it will be the most intelligent decision you'll ever make.

Take your list of ideas you plan to do "someday".
Write each idea onto it's own Post-it note.
Stick each Post-it note on to your bedroom wall.
Ask your significant other to blindfold you.
Take a dart and throw it at your wall.
And whatever Post-it note your dart hits, that's what you do.


The problem with you is you're waiting for something that's never going to happen.
You're waiting for the right moment.
You're waiting for the right project.
You're waiting for the right set of conditions.

But you know that's not the way life works.
You will go further and faster by working on something rather than nothing.
You need to do something because doing nothing is just plain wrong.
Your answers will comes from taking action.

The number one secret that is the most difficult to understand is that it's never going to be right time to get started

Let me repeat this as difficult as it is to understand; you have to understand that it's never going to be right time to get started.
The time is never right.
It's never going to be the right time to get engaged.
It's never going to be the right time to get divorced.
It's never going to be the right time to quite your job.
It's never going to be the right time to . . .

Claim What's Yours.

So whatever your project is.
Whatever you want to do.
Or don't want to do any longer.
No matter how high on your list.
Get it started today.
Get failure out of the way.

Thank you

I have spent the last two  months working in a Learning Center and just want to say thank you to the teachers at the center for making my time enjoyable. In another life I had some district responsibility for helping Learning Centers when the first started in our district. I worked closely with the staff and leadership to help them create the culture of learning, their goals, and their approach to working with the students who end up at the centers. It was a fun time as well as challenging. I am glad to say that the ideals the approach and the goals of the centers. although refined, have not changed that much since the centers were started. As I sat in out lunch room and listened to the teachers talk about the students and their success and their frustrations with students who were not trying, I thought these people really care. The teachers in the centers do not have the luxury of working with the best and the brightest, they work with the students who are one step away from leaving. These students have all arrived at the centers with histories of bad marks, attitudes, drug use, or other problems that make it impossible for the student to be successful in the mainstream. The teachers and the staff at the center work really hard, to make sure the students are successful. I appreciated my time there and wish them well next year

We are stardust, we are golden, Woodstock

Acknowledge your unpleasant feelings - you're their source, and only you can release or replace them once their presence is understood.
I think it is important for us to realize that  we make our own realities, the paradigms in which we view the world, we have control over our own fate, but the choices we make and we own our luck.  Controlling our own fate is, in my mind, is based on the paradigms in which we see the world. Each of us in unique and special, As Joni Mitchell said we are stardust and we have to get back to the garden; but in order for us to get back to the garden we may need to shift the paradigms in which we see the world. The first step, I believe in making the shift is to acknowledge that we are the source of not only our unpleasant feelings but the source of all of our feelings.  If in your paradigm of life you find too many negatives, remember you are the only one who can shift your paradigm to start seeing the positives in life. Not easy, but worth the struggle.