Save for Retirement? ahh shit

I'm not that good with money. I can be impulsive even. Sometimes I might as well just throw it away. My relationship with money has never been one of reverence. What's a dollar. Spend it on pleasure or to avoid pain. Fuck! you get much deeper into thinking about it and you might as well just call it quits. Money, Money, Money... I won’t bore you with all the details and instead will concentrate on my portion of the household income. My wife works too. She makes a bit more than I do. We keep our finances separate, but share household expenses. Anyway…

I make approximately $50K per year. I have approximately $62,000 in total debt from student loans. I contribute $1,100 per month toward the mortgage payment and other household expenses. I put $400 per month into deferred compensation for retirement. I’m 45 years old. I don’t presently have a car payment and I don’t have any credit card debt.

I am required to make payments for approximately $450 per month toward my student loan debt. I have limited misc expenses; mostly gas, gardening, a clothing budget, dogfood, entertainment, and other expenses. Let’s say I spend approximately $250 toward such personal misc. expenses.

My net paycheck each month, after deductions including deferred compensation is approximately $2300 per month. Minus $1,100 mortgage/household leaves $1200. Minus $450 leaves $850. Minus $250 leaves $600. $250 for personal expenses is very conservative, but let’s stick with it. Now, I want to pay off my student loans faster. $450 per month will pay the loans off in 30 years, approximately (I think I have been paying for approximately 3-4 years, so actually its about 27 more years). I’d like to take all $600 and put it toward my student loan debt. This would pay off all my student loan debt in under 10 years. But, I need to put some money into savings for an emergency. Plus, I’ll need to get a car some day. Plus, my son goes to a private school and each August we have to pay tuition for approximately $10,000 dollars. Any savings I have helps towards this payment. Once I get my student loans paid off that’s an extra $450 dollars per month. If my salary keeps going up on schedule, in 15 years or so I should be making a bit more money and taking home an extra $500 or so a month.

I think about this a lot. I keep track of my budget. I have begun making extra payments toward my student loans. My goal is to pay off the entire amount before I am 55. Then I can really begin to save for retirement. But my son is 8. He’ll be 18 then and getting ready for college. More debt. Damn, what is this all about?

I keep thinking I’ll be able to not work someday and really begin to live. Put more time in the garden and take more vacations. Go camping and hiking in the woods. I’ll have so much fun once I get my shit together and by shit I mean once my finances are in order. Fuckin’ A, this is really all bs. Who the hell am I foolin? . What kind of life is this? Pleasure and suffering. There is no escape, man – just pleasure and suffering and getting absolutely no where. There are no special insights. There is no understanding. Age reveals little if you walk the path laid out to us by those who pave the way. None of it makes any sense. Work until you die. Your money means nothing. Pretty sure this means they own us. Pretty sure this is some form of slavery. Pretty sure nothing much has changed. Pretty sure happiness is not related to paying all the bills, because they will never all be paid and if they are, somehow this won’t lead to fulfillment either.

What is the choice? There is no choice but acceptance and there is no way to persevere but to endure.

Memory of a Fishing Trip

It was spring and the sun was coming up earlier and earlier. Daylight Savings time came later in the year back then and it seemed as it was light by the time I made my first delivery. I usually awoke about 4:30 am and left to the central garage with my two older brothers to stuff ads into the papers before beginning my route. We opened the garage door, grabbed our Schwinn Stingrays, affixed the delivery bag to our handlebars and drove in a line two blocks to the High Schooler's (Gerard) garage who was in charge of our area.

I did Saratoga Lane, and Trenton Avenue. My older brothers did the four streets in the line – Union, Vermont, Washington and Xerxes. We would ride up the driveway of each house, run the paper to the front or side door, then run back to our bikes and ride it to the next delivery. If we were quick we could be back by 5:30 am and during the spring it was already light out. On this particular morning, we had a quick bite to eat and then got ready to drive our bikes to a little pond, about 5 miles away, where we had been killing the bullheads for the past few weeks.

I went to sleep every night seeing bobbers in my head disappearing below the surface. We came home with stringers of 1 to 2 lb bullheads. We had a 2 x 6 board set up with a large nail poking through. We would slam the bullheads down, one at a time, onto the board so the nail stuck through the head. Then we’d make an incision behind the head and skin the bullheads with a plier. Then we would walk into the kitchen, while our parents were still asleep in the bed (perhaps my father was recently awakened and sitting at the kitchen table reading one of our extra papers), mix a bowl of flour, salt and pepper and in another bowl crack a few eggs. The frying pan with vegetable was heating up and each skinned bullhead would get dipped in egg, flour mixture, and then fried several minutes on all sides till the bullhead meat was white and flaky.

These delicious breakfasts were almost as good as catching the bullheads, despite having to remove the meat from a large skeletal framework. I was strapping my rod and real to my Stingray. The rod ran from the back frame for my banana seat and through my hotrod handlebars at the front of my bike. We looked like three knights on horses with our Jousts protruding outward as we road down a back country road to the small pond near a park reserve.

I fell behind as I became distracted by a muskrat type animal on the side of the road, as I watched him scurrying through the grass. I looked up and noticed my brothers a quarter mile or more ahead of me. I rose to a standing position and began to pump my legs to catch up. No sooner than reaching a standing position, my rod somehow came loose in back falling to hit the pavement. As it bounced up, the front came loose from between the handlebars and the tip somehow became tangled in my front spokes. With a loud snap my fishing rod was sliced in two and the morning fishing trip was over.

I stopped my bike and looked at the disaster before I began to sob uncontrollably. My brothers were disappearing out of sight as I turned my bike back around and walked it home as I held my fishing rod in my hands. I was nine years old.

Fall, Grief and Despair

I still have potatoes, broccoli and kale left to harvest in the garden. Soon, I must begin applying compost and mulch to prepare the soil for next spring and plant the garden along with other fall plantings of flowers and herbs.

Fall always arrives in a rush and I, as usual, am unprepared for the wave of hopelessness that overcomes me. The tomatoes, peppers, beans, flowers, and the lush colors of the summer suddenly give way to browns and decay leaving one in a general state of despair. Luckily, this feeling is only temporary and can be assuaged through the hard work of preparing the garden in anticipation of the following spring when the plants will once again begin to sprout and grow to full bloom. There is also the work in the kitchen of preparing and storing the harvest from the summer and fall. It is a time to grow closer to family and community.

I, like many people living in suburban communities, feel a disconnect with my neighbors. I am treated as a sort of oddity by my neighbors. They arrive in amazement during the summer to witness the bounty I have managed to grow, but seem puzzled by my efforts and slightly taken aback in wonderment over my motivations. Am I a survivalist, hippie, malcontent, liberal, conservative? All these questions seem to be forming in the backs of their mind as they make comments on the amount of work and time my efforts must consume.

Fall is a time for reflection and with the wave of hopelessness that accompanies the end of the harvest, one can be overwhelmed with grief. I don’t see a need to run from this grief or feel a need to medicate it. Rather, I let it flow through my veins and contemplate the loss I am experiencing with the fall while being aware of loss and death in the world that surrounds me. Life and death go hand in hand and the experience of fall should prepare us for our own deaths and help us learn to live with our mortality.

As someone who follows and sometimes obsesses over political and global events, fall can amplify the hopelessness of our times. But, it is only by experiencing the despair and working through the misery that accompanies the life cycle that we can retain our sense of hope and put it to use to build a more sustainable world beginning with our own lives. But, we are a society that treats depression and grief as a disease rather than a perfectly natural response to our changing conditions. Rather than experience this grief we medicate and dull it so we can forget about it. But nothing we do can erase the fact that we are all mortal and our death stalks us every moment of our lives.

What many of us do not realize is that medicating and forgetting about our inevitable death may prolong our lives and keep the physical body alive, but it creates a spiritual emptiness. Most of us spend the majority of our waking moments in a trance that might as well be death for the experience it gives us. Our lives are not killing us, our lives are already dead. This is why we must experience grief, taste it and glorify it. That is what fall reminds me, anyway.

Sell out.

There was a term we used for bands that had gained commercial appeal by sacrificing their integrity. It was something we all realized was necessary to some degree, but some bands managed to pull it off more gracefully than others. For a local scene, if a band made the transition to a more national audience, there was no greater scorn than for a band that sold out.

What exactly does it mean to sell out?

In our society today, everything is measured by price. The only recognized value is price. Even our time has a price on it - time is money. Some people's time is worth more than others. My time is not worth quite as much as my bosses, but more than our office secretary. Yet, intuitively, we all know that some things in life our priceless. We sell our time to pursue some things that cannot be valued in a marketplace. Eight hours a day, five days a week buys us a few precious hours a week for such pursuits if we can make all of our payments necessary to maintain our lifestyles. Sometimes we dream about combining our priceless pursuits with our work. We think about making our hobbies into profit-making adventures. What would it take to profit off of our hobbies?

Selling out, of course.

This is the dilemma. As many jobs I have had, I have also had hobbies, dreams or goals. Each time my hobby has run up against the market, it has evaporated into a fine mist and blown away with the wind. For anything to have integrity and value that is long lasting it has to be motivated by something close to the heart and not by what can be obtained in the market.

This does not mean that anything that has sold for a price in the market is automatically crap and of no value. There are many examples of successful artists who have made a good living off of their art. However, their chosen craft would still be the same whether they made money or not off of it - for they are motivated by something that comes from within.

Right now I garden when I am not working. Someday I would like to farm, but this notion of value and markets has me worried. I can see what happens to farmers and the economics of agriculture. There is an incentive to get into organic farming because right now there is a large demand for organic products. Walmart, Target, Sam's club and many other retail stores are devoting several aisles to organic products. However, farmers should never forget that these outlets and buyers of their production are forever in search of selling at the lowest price to their consumers and generating profits for their shareholders. When agricultural products are in large supply, the market place will lower the price. Eventually, the market for organic products will bottom out and farmers will get lower and lower prices for their ever-increasing yields.

The temptation to produce one crop on a farm is huge. Even local organic farms selling their produce at Farmers Markets are in search of products that will sell. If a farmer just follows the seasons and sells only what is in season, they will always have competition from other area farms and the price for their products will be driven down. Everyone loves tomato season, but it is the farmer that brings the first tomatoes to market that gets the highest prices. Tomatoes in the fall are going to sell for much less. So, one farmer begins growing tomatoes in January in a greenhouse, so they have ripe tomatoes in May or June. Soon everyone has a greenhouse and is selling tomatoes in June. This is wonderful for tomato lovers, but works contrary to what the farmer seeks - high prices.

This is where farming for the love of farming comes in. The first priority of the gifted farmer is producing good food to eat, while taking care of the soil and land. The wonderful thing about farming and gardening is that cornucopias amounts of produce are generated during the season. It is an awesome task to put all the tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, garlic, onions, etc. to good use before it spoils and must be returned to the compost heap. The kitchen is filled with activity this time of the year - cooking, canning, freezing and fermenting. The same goes for dairy, meat and poultry production. What throws all this out of balance is when the farm is devoted to the market and yields of selected crops are emphasized over more diversified production using holistic practices. Of course, farms require land and land costs money that often necessitates debt owed to banks that only care about the profits of the farm. What this means for me is that I can't think of farming as a livelihood, but must instead devote my energies to a garden that produces vegetables and fruits for seasonal consumption of my family and friends. An expanding garden can never come at the expense of "selling out," or the next in my line of hobbies will dissipate into thin air.

The drive with my Grandma

“You wouldn’t even believe it, Andy. The wind, it was blowing. Where there were fences was a mound of dirt and the pigs and cows would walk right over the fences. People were starving in the cities. We had food. We always had food. But, Dad worked so hard. He would have to go to the county and pick up feed for the cows. Just a little handful a day – enough to keep them alive, and then in the winter he had to repay them for the feed by working all day putting gravel down on the roads. He found a trucker to take the horses to a field near Granite Falls, because they had some rain, see? And, then we heard that one of the horses had sleeping sickness. So, they sent him home and he died. Dad worked so hard.

He had two brothers in California, Uncle Ervin and Uncle Elmore, who owned lumber yards and they wanted him to move there because they knew he was getting old. So he decided to go and Martin and I were just married and Grandpa wanted to go with him. So, we all went, but the work for the lumber yards was even harder. They drove trucks and they didn’t know where they were going. Sometimes they had to go to LA and deliver to the Negroes there. They worked all day. Dad wanted to go back and Martin wanted to farm. So, we moved back and bought the grocery store and Dad retired soon after.

It was hard during the depression, you would never believe it – how it was. But, we had so many pets and we were happy. The cats would line up on that board every morning and wait with their mouths open for Dad to squirt the milk into their mouths right from the cows. I had to help Dad with the chores too, cause I was the oldest, so I was the hired hand. I did the man’s work. I drove since I was twelve to deliver Dad his lunch every day in the field or wherever he was. And we had a garden, Mom kept a big garden. We’d can tomatoes. And an Apple Orchard in the back, a couple cherry trees. Oh, we had fun. WE were never hungry, Mom only had to buy sugar and flour, otherwise we had everything. One Christmas all we got was we each got a new outfit for our dolls – that was it. We didn’t have money, but we were happy.

Oh, I’ve been talking your ear off.”

“No, Grandma. Tell me more.”

And she did. Farming is a hard life, there is no doubt. No one should ever think it isn’t. But, once my grandpa and great-grandpa left for California – left their homesteads – they spent the rest of their days pining over the old days on the farm.

Harry Potter

I was reading in my daily scribe, which isn’t much of a daily scribe anymore with the takeovers by Wall Street investment groups and profit speculators and the sell-offs and the layoffs, about what makes Harry Potter a success. It seems there is a formula for the hero that the series follows that has proven effective. I didn’t read it closely, but I was struck by the observation that Harry was orphaned and raised in a school without parents – apparently a common theme for the protagonist of successful tales.

I hate when I have these ideas about family values that make me think the adage about being a liberal when you are twenty and having a soul, while being a conservative when your 40 and having a brain seem true, because I still identify as a liberal. I am not talking about family values though. I am an independent person who is not particularly close to my parents. I appreciate my parents for their role in raising me and bringing me into the world. I just wonder if there is something deeply and inherently wrong with our culture and if there is, since I am a part of this culture, then I can discover it by looking deeply at myself.

My Grandfather left the small town and moved to California during the depression. His family stayed home on the farm. He was part of the first major exodus from small towns to urban areas. Eventually, he returned to the community, but not as a farmer. He ran a small grocery store. My father left the small town and raised our family in the suburbs of Minneapolis. He was part of the last exodus that doomed small towns for good. But, as a child, I made many trips to visit my grandparents grocery store in the small town. It was a four hour drive and I have many cherished memories of time spent with my grandparents and small town living in an agricultural community – albeit a dying one at that. These trips required a 4 hour drive one-way, but still we made frequent weekend drives.

I live less than 30 minutes from my parent’s townhome. My son visits my mother and father about 3-4 times a year at their home. This is much less than I spent with my grandparents. His other grandparents operate the beautiful hay and alfalfa farm near us as well. My son cannot get enough of spending time with my father-in-law and his tractors.

Part of the appeal is the land, I am sure. But, I wonder how long this will last. Eventually, the farm will be associated with work for my son and without a love for work and the time spent with loved ones working together this love for the farm will dissipate as it has over and over again amongst rural families.

My friend is a sixth-grade teacher and he tells me that he tells his students on the first day of class every year that he is going to be spending more time with them than their parents. Public schools have taken over the role of raising our children. Who needs parents anymore? Public schools in rural communities educate the children to be productive members of our economy. This has nothing to do with preserving the community these schools are in. Graduates like my father left the community to work in the cities rather than toil away on the farms in the area.

Myths like Harry Potter only add to this message that parents and families are not needed for the development and maturation of our children. All we need to do is send them to school. I have recently come to believe that sustainable economies can only be found in small rural communities where wealth is produced from taking care of the land and community and not by speculative ventures where profits are made through buying and selling commodities. This wealth has not been appreciated in our present economy, but it will eventually be necessary to return to our rural roots if we wish to live in harmony with our environment and in a sustainable manner.

For this to happen we are going to need new ways of educating our youth and alternatives to Harry Potter for myths to raise our children on.

The Hayloft

My father-in-law asked me to meet him after work at a horse farm to help unload two wagons of hay. I arrived at a small farm and was met by a distinguished older lady who showed me to the stables to change from my office clothes to my work clothes. My father-in-law showed up 20 minutes later with a wagon of hay which we promptly unloaded.

The woman’s daughter arrived while we were unloading the hay and was the owner/operator of the small horse stable. She was about 35 years old, had long dark hair, and was attractive with a nice figure. I am a married man and I have been out of the game of playing the field for several years. Still, it is nice to look at women from time to time and wonder about alternative lives imagining different scenarios for partnership. These thoughts have never gone beyond my imagination since I’ve been married and I don’t suspect they ever will.

We finished unloading the hay from the wagon, tossing it on the ground in front of the stable. My father-in-law drove away to pick up the other wagon and would be gone for an hour. Lisa, the daughter, gave me instructions on where to stack the hay in the stable. I worked on stacking the hay in one spot as she loaded up a small trailer attached to an all-terrain vehicle with bales to stack in another stable a short distance away. I finished stacking all the bales I could fit in the stable she showed me and went to lend her a hand.

I could handle loading, throwing and stacking the bales easier than Lisa. As I was helping Lisa made comments to her mom. “Oh, look at how he can lift them so easily up high.” And “He is soooo tall and strong.” I kept working, feeling proud and manly, and made quick work of stacking the bales in both spots.

It was an innocent line. I don’t think anything was meant from it, other than the practical aspect of showing me the next area to stack bales in. “Why don’t we go up in the hayloft?” Well, I’ve never been invited up into the hayloft by an attractive woman and as I followed her up the stairs, with my eye staring at those long legs tucked into tight jeans, my mind raced from one fantasy to the next as I considered the possibilities of what could happen in a hayloft.

Nothing happened in the hayloft and I kept my composure as we reached the top and she explained to me where we would stack the bales from the next wagon. When my father-in-law finally arrived, I worked up a sweat high in the loft with Lisa watching and commenting about how hot it was and what a good thing it is to have a man’s help around.

I left when we finished and said goodbye. When I came home, I had a beer to quench my thirst. I laid down to bed and my head was stilled filled with thoughts of pretty women and haylofts. I was unable to relieve myself of those thoughts and fantasies until I awoke in the morning and took a shower. Thank God, we have imaginations because they are wonderful. I’ll take it over a porn-site any day.

Making Hay

My wife called me at work yesterday. My father-in-law needed help putting up the hay. My voice betrayed my disappointment. I had some work to do in the garden I was planning for the evening. Everything was planted in my raised beds, but I was hoeing up the rows and planting in clover between the beds. I am a perfectionist in my garden, and I strive to make it look as pleasing as it is productive. Fresh Dutch White clover in the rows between the beds, not only adds nitrogen in the soil, but also adds more greenery and is a soft footing to tread upon.

But, I only tend a garden. My father-in-law is a farmer and when the hay has to be put up, he transforms from a good-natured and laid-back farmer into a crazed and hyper man transfixed upon finishing a job before the rain inevitably moves in to spoil the cut. So, when my father-in-law calls, I do my best to help. My garden can wait – the hay cannot.

I got off of work at 4:30 pm and drove out of downtown St. Paul. It is about an hours drive to Marine on St. Croix, where my in-laws have 240 acres of beautiful real estate that they use to grow alfalfa to sell to area horse and dairy farms. It was 92 degree out when I hopped in my car and I was not looking forward to the back-breaking work in the heat until sundown on the second longest day of the year (about 10:00 pm in these Northern latitudes). I turned on the radio and heard the weather report. A massive storm was moving in from St. Cloud and would be in the Twin Cities sometime this evening. The closer I got to Marine, the darker the clouds became looming on the horizon.

After stopping for gas and an ice cream cone (it was hot and I was hungry), I arrived at the farm about 6:00 pm (traffic was heavy). My father-in-law was on the tractor with my five-year-old son sitting proudly on the fender next to him. He was expectantly and noticeably in a panic as I stepped out of the car and he pulled up and asked me if I needed to change. I was still in my work clothes and I guiltily nodded yes. He said, “We’ll go rake a couple of rows and meet you at the wagons on the alfalfa field across the road.” I said, “Okay,” and waved hello to my son as he returned a big grin.

I put on my jeans, sun hat, t-shirt, boots and gloves and then walked to the wagons. I watched as they finished raking and then left to the building to unhook the rake before coming back to switch tractors to the one with the baler. My father-in-laws hurried panic gave me concern for my son’s safety, since usually he was very cautious and attending with him while doing work on the farm. With the dark clouds rolling in, I could see my father-in-law had greater concerns at the moment. However, my son was soaking and basking in his grandpas focused work on the tractor and was attending his every move on the tractor. I could see from his inspired face that he was deeply involved in a learning moment, so I said nothing.

They stopped and got off the tractor and my son ran to me and told me we had to stack the bales in the wagon before it rained. He hopped on the wagon and I guided my father-in-law back to the hitch and then hooked the wagon to the baler and then hopped in back with my son. I don’t look forward to the heavy work of stacking square bales on a wagon as they are thrown back from the baler and breathing in mouthfuls of hay dust. But as we drove away to the field and I looked across the farm at the beautiful fields surrounded by stands of hardwoods and pine with the dark clouds looming on the horizon and lightening stretching across the sky, I could not help but notice the beauty and feel the calm in the wake of my father-in-laws hurried work in front of us. My occasional glimpse of my father-in-laws eyes revealed that he also noticed this and, really, this is what kept him farming at his 70 years of age. He had put up four wagons himself, before I arrived. There was still a calmness in his eyes behind his exhaustion from the hurried work.

We circled the field and the bales flew back. I stacked them as my son heaved against the large bales to little effect. But, he nimbly moved around me and out of the way of flying bales as we bounced along through the field. My father-in-law had the tractor in a higher gear than he normally bales in, due to the limited time-frame we were working in. As the wagon filled, the sky grew darker and lightening strikes became closer with the thunder heard over the hum of the tractor. I adjusted to the rhythm of the baler and my son grew more excited as we climbed higher and higher upon the stacked rows of bales below us. There were five rows circling the field when we began that we had to put up and this would approximately fill the wagon with 150 bales. I could feel the first drops of rain as we rounded the last turn in the field and the sky grew almost as dark as night.

A couple claps of thunder and I noticed the concern in my father-in-laws eyes. My wife came running out warning of a tornado in a neighboring county and my father-in-law said my son should probably get off the wagon for the last go around. The disappointment in his eyes was noticeable, but he climbed down and ran to my wife’s arms and buried his face in her hips as he began to cry uncontrollably. We circled round and finished the last row and then I unhooked the wagon as my son came up with tears in his eyes. My father-in-law called him to the tractor and told him to get on quick before the rain comes. His sadness soon dissipated to pride once again as they drove away to the building and I started up the other tractor and backed it up to the filled wagon.

I made the short drive to the building and backed it in with my son, my wife and father-in-law watching. The rain came down hard just as I got off of the tractor and we stood in the doorway of the building together, covered in hay dust, and watched it coming down. It ended up being a shorter evening than I expected, but I was exhausted and exhilarated standing with my family and taking in the rain and work we had just completed. My father-in-law limped on his bad knee and laughed as my wife chided him over his putting up four wagons by himself earlier in the day. “What is a farmer to do,” he asked? Then he put his arm around my son and patted him on the head. “Right, Ian," he said, as a grin came across my son’s face that lit up all the rest of our faces. We laughed and waited for the rain to subside before running to the farmhouse to eat warmed-up pork chops and muskmelon, chased down with spritzers and beer. It was a grand way to spend an evening after work.