Preparing a retirement budget

 If you are thinking about retirement, it is important to think about preparing a budget. Many of us understand or should understand how much income we will get when we make the decision to retire. If not, there are many tools to help you determine that amount. However, many of us do not consider as thoroughly how much we will spend. Here are some categories of expenses that should be considered when planning your retirement budget. Many of these may not be needed when your final budget is complete. I think it is important to consider them all and keep those you need and reject those you do not need.

Categories of Spending.

•  Home-related expenses include mortgage, property taxes, homeowner’s or renter’s insurance, rent, utilities, home repairs, home furnishings, household cleaning supplies, housekeeping and laundry services, gardening and yard supplies, and gardening and yard services.

•  Food expenses include food and drink, including alcoholic beverages that are bought in grocery and other stores (dining out is not included).

•  Health expenses include out-of-pocket (uninsured) health insurance costs (including Medicare supplemental insurance); out-of-pocket costs for prescription and nonprescription drugs; out-of-pocket cost for hospital care, doctor services, lab tests, eye, dental, and nursing home care; and out-of-pocket costs for medical supplies.

•  Transportation expenses include car payments (principal and interest), vehicle insurance, vehicle maintenance and gas.

•  Clothing expenses include clothing and apparel (including jewelry), and personal care products and services.

•  Entertainment expenses include trips and vacations, tickets to movies, sporting, and performance events; hobbies and leisure equipment (photography, reading, camping, etc.); dining out in restaurants, cafes, and diners; and take-out food.

•  Other expenses include contributions to religious, educational, charitable, or political organizations, and cash and gifts to family and friends outside the household (including alimony and child-support payments).

Preserve Family Recipes, The Easy Way

The following was written by Bill Rice. Bill Rice is founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories through customized printed cookbooks filled with treasured recipes. His site is worth a visit.

Think about your favourite family gatherings. Often the event was memorable because of the people there, a special location or the wonderful bounty of food being served. Our food traditions are apart of the fabric of our family traditions.

Traditionally collecting of family recipes has often been on handwritten on note cards in a recipe box, hastily scribbled on napkins during family gatherings or jotted in lovingly preserved notebooks, yellowed with age. Like everything else it touches, the Internet is revolutionizing family-recipe gathering.

Today, with computers and online publishing systems, family cookbooks have emerged as an easy sharable way to help preserve family memories and food traditions for future generations. There is nothing like seeing a recipe from a family member that you remember or even never met, but whose recipe is still used today.

Recently I was looking through my grandmother’s recipe box and came across a recipe for Scottish shortbread that was attributed to my Great-Grandmother May Ann McDougall Peatie who was born in Scotland in 1883. This recipe was lost to our family for many years but is now part of my family cookbook so everyone can enjoy these traditional Scottish shortbread cookies.

Here are some tips for creating your own family cookbook from FamilyCookbookProject.com:

·  Go through your recipes collection and pick the most meaningful recipes that make you remember a family gathering or event that it was served. Remember quality over quantity.

·  If you don’t want to do it all yourself, invite other family members to contribute their favorite recipes and food memories. It’s fun to see what others remember most about past family gatherings.

·  For those recipes that you never wrote down because you made them so many times you knew it by memory, make it again and this time write it down step by step as you make it.

·  Measure the ingredients! Even if you use a "handful" of something, take a handful and put it into a measuring cup and write it down before throwing it into the pot.

·  Remember to write personal notes about why this recipe was important, who gave it to you or any special memories of meals that it was served.

·  Including lots of photos is also a great way to make your special cookbook and help preserve the special memories.

·  When your cookbook is complete, be sure to share copies with all your family members. Your own cookbook makes a great personal gift.

Remember, behind every recipe you love is a story you want to share and a family cookbook makes that sharing a lasting heirloom.

 

It is a wonderful world

I was listening to the great song by Louis Armstrong, It’s a Wonderful World and I thought it is not only the beauty of the world expressed in the lyrics below that makes this a wonderful world.

I see trees of green

Red roses too

I see them bloom

For me and you

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

I see skies of blue

And clouds of white

The bright blessed day

The dark sacred night

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow

So pretty in the sky

Are also on the faces

Of people going by

I see friends shaking hands

Saying how do you do

They're really saying

I love you

I hear babies cry

I watch them grow

They'll learn much more

Than I'll ever know

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

Yes, I think to myself

What a wonderful world

Ooh, yes

I was looking at the increase in life expectancy around the world and came across the following chart. This chart is the World historical and predicted total life expectancy at birth (1950–2050)

Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB): total World population: 71.4 years

Total male: 69.1 years, female: 73.8 years

 

Years               LEB         Years               LEB

1950–1955      47.9         2000–2005      67.2

1955–1960      49.3         2005–2010      69.1

1960–1965      51.2         2010–2015      70.8

1965–1970      55.5         2015–2020      72.0

1970–1975      58.1         2020–2025      73.0

1975–1980      60.3         2025–2030      73.8

1980–1985      62.1         2030–2035      74.7

1985–1990      63.7         2035–2040      75.5

1990–1995      64.6         2040–2045      76.2

1995–2000      65.7         2045–2050      77.0

As you see it is a wonderful world because even with the pandemic, our life expectancy as a race is going up. So, children born in 2020 to 2025 can expect to live until they are 73. Bear in mind that this is an average for the world. There will be countries where life expectancy at birth is higher than 73 and countries where the life expectancy at birth is lower. But since 1950 life expectancy has grown on average 24.1 years. This speaks to the advances we have made worldwide, in medicine, infant mortality and understanding of what we need to do to live longer. It is truly a wonderful world.

 

Race

I saw this the other day on Facebook and thought It interesting.

If you could fit the entire population of the world into a village consisting of 100 people, maintaining the proportions of all the people living on Earth, that village would consist of

·       57 Asians

·       21 Europeans

·       14 Americans (North, Central and South)

·       8 Africans

This is a very simple illustration used by the author of this Facebook post to point out how we are different. So, does this mean anything of value? I am not sure. What does it mean that there are 14 Americans (North Central and South)? Does that signify something of importance, I am an American, but I am Caucasian American, but I know there are Asians who live in North America, are they counted in the 57 Asians or are they counted in the 14 Americans? What about the 21 Europeans do any of them live in America, Asia, or Africa?

To me, the comparisons made above are not valid. It would have been better to perhaps divide us up by ethnic group and that was done in the early 2000s according to the Washington Post story published in 2013.

The problem is that the idea of ethnicity can change over time; the authors of the study note that this happened in Somalia, where the same people started self-identifying differently after war broke out.

Ethnicity is a social construct and that means that when we look at ethnicity people in different countries might have different bars for what constitutes a distinct ethnicity. Finally, as the study notes, "It would be wrong to interpret our ethnicity variable as reflecting racial characteristics alone." Ethnicity might partially coincide with race, but they're not the same thing.

When five economists and social scientists set out to measure ethnic diversity for a landmark 2002 paper for the Harvard Institute of Economic Research, they started by comparing data from an array of different sources: national censuses, Encyclopedia Britannica, the CIA, Minority Rights Group International and a 1998 study called "Ethnic Groups Worldwide." They looked for consistence and inconsistency in the reports to determine what data set would be most reliable and complete. Because data sources such as censuses or surveys are self-reported – in other words, people are classified how they ask to be classified – the ethnic group data reflects how people see themselves, not how they're categorized by outsiders. Those results measured 650 ethnic groups in 190 countries.

That is a lot of groups and so it does not fit easily into a simple story. The story goes on to talk about which countries were the most and least ethnically diverse, but closes with the following:

Here's the money quote on the potential political implications of ethnicity:

 In general, it does not matter for our purposes whether ethnic differences reflect physical attributes of groups (skin color, facial features) or long-lasting social conventions (language, marriage within the group, cultural norms) or simple social definition (self-identification, identification by outsiders). When people persistently identify with a particular group, they form potential interest groups that can be manipulated by political leaders, who often choose to mobilize some coalition of ethnic groups (“us”) to the exclusion of others (“them”). Politicians also sometimes can mobilize support by singling out some groups for persecution, where hatred of the minority group is complementary to some policy the politician wishes to pursue.

Some perhaps would like to divide us by race, the problem is that the early research on race, which talked about 5 or 6 different races was wrong. There is only one race. If someone talks about different races, they are using information that is not accurate and false.  The research I have seen suggests that racial categories as socially constructed, that is, race is not intrinsic to human beings but rather an identity created, often by socially dominant groups, to establish meaning in a social context. Different cultures define different racial groups, often focused on the largest groups of social relevance, and these definitions can change over time. As humans, we love to put people into categories but putting people into categories of race or ethnicity will not work. The best course of action is to treat each of us unique.