Category: General

How much do you need to retire?

Here is a simple paradigm (from a comment BenE posted) for quantifying how much a person needs to retire successfully*:

Divide your life into three thirty year periods. During our first 30 years, we have limited means for savings. During the next 30 years, we work and save. We spend the last 30 years retired, spending our savings.

To spend as much in retirement as we did during our working years, we must save half of our income during our 30 working years so that we may spend that half during our 30 years of retirement.

Read that again. Pause and reflect on that.

Afterword

There’s plenty of factors that influence how much one must save. This paradigm excludes them so that the raw scale of savings can be easily grasped. Some of the most notable factors that can influence how much it is necessary to save include:

  • Start saving early
  • Postpone retirement
  • Social Security income
  • drastic reductions in living standards
  • Be born to rich parents/win lottery
  • Die early
  • Retire at the beginning of a long bull market.

* Successful retirement is defined as not outliving ones nest egg, or as not having to eat Alpo in ones golden years (William Bernstein).

Green built houses

With house prices and interest rates low, we are considering homeownership again. We have looked at hundreds of houses in the past year and found a half dozen that we really liked. What we haven’t found is a house we like at a price we like.

In 2011 we learned about three standards in the green building industry:

  • Passive House: limits household energy consumption to 120 kWh per cubic meter. A Passive House is very efficient and there are tens of thousands of houses built to this standard in Germany, Scandanavia, and Canada.
  • Net Zero: consume zero energy and zero carbon emissions annually.
  • Energy Plus: produce more energy annually than is consumed.

In 2011 we attended several green energy festivals. We toured a couple Passive Houses and the only Net Zero homes in the Puget Sound area. The cost of getting to net-zero is 15% more than building a traditional home. Our goal is to get as far as we can towards net-zero. A net-zero home has a monthly gas and electric bill of $0. Getting to net-zero requires reducing energy consumption through:

  • an efficient building envelope (super insulated, tightly sealed, oriented for beneficial solar gain)
  • highly efficient fixtures and appliances (LED lights, induction cooktops, solar water heaters, heat pumps)
  • a heat recovery ventilator (recover heat from ventilation air before exhausting it)

The other ingredient required to achieve net-zero is energy production. Solar has long (at least since the Chinese & Greeks oriented their buildings to face the winter sun 2,500 years ago) been the first answer for harvesting energy. Until the 1970s, the best available technology was exposing internal masonry to the sun. The thermal mass of masonry would warm up in the day and then give off the stored heat at night.

Using solar exposed masonry is still an excellent and highly efficient way to collect heat. The obvious limitation is availability of sunshine, which is often meager in Seattle’s heating season.

Retrofitting an existing house to achieve green building standards is more complex than building the house well initially. This has made choosing a house more challenging. I desire the ability to retrofit a house up to at least the Passive House standards. Some house designs make this more challenging than others. For example, I can’t easily change the orientation of a house to capture beneficial solar gain. Generally, houses are sited for the convenience of the builder rather than the long term benefit of the occupants.

In the meantime, we aren’t waiting for a new house to be more environmentally aware. We have reduced our household waste to less than one kitchen bag per week. The majority of food waste is diverted to my compost pile and the rest is recycled. I have replaced all our household lights with LED bulbs. In areas where lights were typically left on, I installed motion sensors with timers. We have a hybrid Ford Fusion and a Nissan Leaf, greatly reducing our gasoline consumption.

Recipe Management

On Sunday afternoons (with the family) and wrapping up on Monday, I plan our meals for the week. Once completed, I post the menu on the fridge. With the menu established, it’s easy to update our shopping list and always get exactly what we need.

What I lacked was a good method for keeping track of recipes. How would I find that amazing recipe for Brazilian Black Beans? Which strawberry cake recipe did I use for Kayla’s last birthday? Which of the 3 blueberry pie recipes from the summer of 2011 did we like the most?

I created a spreadsheet to help me answer those questions. After cooking each recipe, I record our family rating of the recipe in the cookbook margin and/or on the menu. As part of meal planning, I update our spreadsheet with the previous weeks recipe names, sources, dates of preparation, and ratings. Now I have a list with every recipe we’ve eaten. I can sort by date, source, or rating, as well as searching.

The Joy of Cooking – redux

After a multi-year hiatus, I have resumed my quest to to cook my way through every recipe in Joy of Cooking. Notable things I’ve learned in the past few weeks:

  • I like tomato sauce. This greatly surprised me, as I’ve had no special affinity towards foods with tomato sauce. What I learned is that I don’t dislike tomato sauce, I dislike Prego, Ragu, and other ‘canned’ tomato sauces. When made fresh from raw ingredients, I like tomato sauce. I really like it.
  • I learned how to make a good puffed pastry. The secret is persistence. Just like with making bread, accept that the first few times will end in disappointment. So start with something like an apple turnover, so even a disappointing result is good.
  • (My) kids don’t like soups. It don’t recall liking them much as a kid either, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’ve found a greater affinity towards them in my middle years.
  • Kids love, love, love familiarity. I’ve made a dozen types of pancakes and several were excellent. But they still prefer “my” whole wheat banana buttermilk pancakes.

 

My solution for robocall bill collector

This morning at 5:05 AM I got my third call from 877-384-0290, “If you are not Evelyn ____, please call 877-384-0290 and have your number removed from our list. If you are…”

At 9:34AM, when the call came in again, I hung up and called the 877 number to inform them I have no idea whom that person is/was. Not surprisingly, I was placed on hold immediately. While I was holding, my level of annoyance rose as I was repeatedly informed their call volume was “unusually high.”  And I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell them.

So I logged into my BroadVoice control panel, and configured “Call Forwarding Selective.”  Now, when they call me, their calls go directly into their own switchboard. I doubt it will make any difference to them, but at least they won’t wake me up at 5AM.

iPhone 4 reception

For the past two years, I got accustomed to not making phone calls while driving to or from work. It’s an 18 minute drive and in the middle of the drive, around 99 & 105th, my call would get dropped. Every single time. During those two years I used an original, 3G, and 3G S iPhone.

I picked up my iPhone 4 on June 24th. I used my phone a lot that day, calling via FaceTime and normal calls. During my drive home from work, I stayed connected all the way home, for the very first time.

A few days later, I was at a lecture at the Mountaineers on Sand Point Way. AT&T coverage there is meager at best. I experimented there with a SSH session to my home computer, and kept the connection up for almost an hour. That would never have worked with my older iPhones.

This last weekend I climbed Mt. Rainier again. Most of the climbers in our party left their phones in the truck at the trailhead. That is generally wise. Trying to use a mobile phone in the mountains is typically an exercise in frustration.

I had preloaded my iPhone with topo maps of the area and took it out every hour or so to capture waypoints. While pocketed, I had the iPhone in Airplane Mode, which disables all the radios (phone, GPS, wifi). To take waypoints, I’d toggle off Airplane Mode, let the GPS sync, take the waypoint, toggle Airplane Mode back on, and put the phone away.

The surprise was that nearly every time I turned off Airplane Mode, I had an AT&T signal. Getting a signal is one thing. Being able to use it is entirely another. None of us climbers believed it was usable reception until I was able to send out a SMS to each of our wives, letting them know we had gotten permits and were on the route we had hoped to climb.

I can replicate the signal meter issue that so many people have made a big deal about by holding it the wrong way. Then my reception is comparable to previous iPhones (a single bar of coverage in my downstairs). When I avoid holding it that way, I can get outstanding reception. I am quite pleased with the reception of my new iPhone.

bottomless pits

This morning Jen was in the kitchen pitting Rainier cherries. I’m in the dining room, stemming Rainier cherries. Lucas trotted into kitchen, saw mommy pitting cherries and started to help. Mommy swelled with pride at her little helper. When the last cherry was pitted and dropped into the bowl, a burst of laughter erupted as Jen realized exactly who Lucas was assisting.

Lucas pranced around the corner with his prize, a bowl of pitted Rainier cherries cradled against his chest, with one hand shoveling cherries from the bowl to the mouth. He placed the bowl at his place and climbed up into his chair, intent on consuming an entire cherry cobbler’s worth of cherries in a single go.

I think that boy and I may be related.

 

Flash stumbles again

In November 2009, Palm announced Flash support for WebOS in the first half of 2010. In February 2010, Palm released WebOS 1.4 with support for Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta, which would be available for download in the Palm App Catalog. On April 18th, Adobe’s CEO announced that Flash for Android and WebOS would be delayed until the second half of 2010.

Today, Palm announced that they don’t know why Flash for WebOS is not yet available. Perhaps, like Steve Jobs pointed out, after years of trying, Adobe still cannot deliver a version of Flash that runs well on any mobile phone. Look at how poorly Flash performs on the HTC EVO, a brand new phone with super-sized hardware specs.

Goodnight Flash. You will be remembered fondly as a relic of another time. Just like floppy disks, token ring networks, and Helen Thomas.