How to retire on $10,000 a year

I can't believe the gall that Financial Advisors and their Institutions have when they tell us they want to help with our retirement planning, and they say it with a straight face. There's an army of useless university grads spending hours every day tracking stocks and bonds and funds and trends yada yada. I'm sure its all so very important to them but it doesn't mean a hill of beans to any of us with real jobs. These self-important so and so's have so many ways to help us increase our little nest egg and separate us from our money to the tune of 8 or 9 trillion dollars in the US and Canada alone. These banks, fund and Income Trust companies spend millions of our dollars advertising their services and trying to scare us into investing or purchasing RRSP's so that we can have a comfortable retirement when we grow old. Some advisors will tell you that you will need 70% of your total yearly income to live at an approximate lifestyle that you enjoy today. Others say you will need at least a million dollars for your 20-30 years of retirement.(Because we are all living longer these days.) Whew, some of us will have strokes and coronaries stressing as we save save save, invest invest invest. What happens is your snot-nosed kids get all the cash and you end up as worm food.

I am going to tell you how you can live simply and stress free and retire earlier then you thought. (You may have to move away from your city you grew up in though.) First, you sell everything you own except your car, it's all materialistic junk anyways. Buy 30 acres of wooded property with firm ground and lots of medium to mature trees. It should have some wild birds and assorted game of course. Hire some company to cut down a whack of mature trees and for payment, offer half of all the trees cut down. Get a bunch a buddies to help you build a log cabin with a sweet porch and fix it up nice inside, don't forget to purchase a big honking wood stove to keep you toasty warm at night and in the winter. Purchase a ton of seeds and a rifle, that's going to be for the bulk of your food. For the finer things you can make yourself a potato still and a mini greenhouse for your herb. Nudge nudge, wink wink. You're almost there. Now you buy yourself one of those 5000 watt Cummins diesel generators and get a sunken fuel storage tank to load up for future situations and then hire somebody to dig a fresh water well right there in the back yard.

You will be looking at a modest cash outlay at the start, but if you have a little gumption and intestinal fortitude you will be alright till you're 80 or even 90 years old. I think thats how they did it a 100 years ago and there is NO reason why you can't do it right now.

You're welcome.

Just wait for the update.

I've been reading a lot about the new Windows Vista since it's grand inception Jan. 30th and I had to laugh when I heard just about every sales person tell me, wait for awhile till most of the bugs get ironed out. Wow, and new becomes old again! Being a senior service tech for a very large global office equipment company I have seen more then my fair share of bugs.

When you are under the gun every day making sure that brand new connected, digital multi-function products work properly, it can be a very stressful and frustrating endevour. These technological wonders are very expensive and people expect them to work flawlessly. You have fax, colour copying, network printing and high speed scanning to desktop or email, these babies can do it all. Well they're supposed to anyways. What's running all these wonderful features is a mini harddrive loaded with specialized software programs that work in harmony with each other. For the most part anyways, that is the idea. But things can go horribly wrong and a lot of times they do. The compatibility of this system software, bugs that lock up or freeze a portion of it or a corrupted file at install can all spell disaster for the company. And the svc tech is usually stuck in the middle, pissed off and fuming. Let's see, there is fax version 19.20 and scanner ver. 21.90 then there's Language ver. 23.20 and of course system ver. 12.80. Months later, you are told that to solve that nagging hang when sending booklets that are double sided and larger than 11X14, you have to install system ver. 15.70. And look! Here is a new version of the fax software so that the damn machine won't dial New Zealand all night after everyone has all gone home.

Wow, I love progress. I love technology, and new electronic gadgets and their operating systems that let them do all sorts of wonderful stuff. I know its just as difficult making the programs that run the toys as it is to create those very toys themselves, maybe even more difficult. But those people that do create the software, get paid more then the engineer dreaming up these neat toys, so they should take their foqueing heads out of their ass and get their shite together!