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REMINDER: All investment, economics, and finance related material now appears at the new IaconoResearch.com. For the time being at least, this has become a personal blog covering a variety of mostly unrelated topics.
Spotted over at the Huffington Post the other day was this funny list of 50 state stereotypes by a Paul Jury, a collection that should insult about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
If he goes a bit too fast in spots (which he does), the complete list can be found here. Montana gets off fairly easy – “Speed limits don’t matter when you’re drunk” – compared to states like Missouri, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, the Dakotas and others.
Speaking from experience, there is absolutely nothing wrong with working part-time during retirement at something you rather enjoy doing. In fact, if I didn’t have this little ‘ol blog and the companion investment newsletter Iacono Research (that, incidentally, is doing quite well so far this year), I think I’d get terribly bored from time to time. I mean, there’s only so much travel, yard work, home improvement, and outdoor sports activities that you can do before it begins to get old and virtually none of this can be done at 5 AM every morning.
Anyway, it seems that a growing number of Americans are resigned to working during retirement and this Gallup survey provides a pretty good summary of how much and why.
A combined 8 in 10 American workers think they will continue working full or part time after they reach retirement age. Proportionately more of these workers, 44% to 36%, say they will do so because they “want to” rather than because they “will have to.”
Overall, most workers expect to work part time after retirement age (63%), rather than to work full time (18%) or stop working altogether (18%). Those who expect to work full time are twice as likely to say they will do so out of need rather than as a choice. In contrast, those who expect to stop working overwhelmingly say it is because they want to. Workers who expect to work on a part-time basis are more likely to say they will want to work than will need to do so.
The key here, at least in my view, is to do something that you enjoy, rather than continue doing something that you don’t particularly like in a part of the country where you don’t particularly want to live. And if you enjoy greeting customers at a WalMart in a densely populated part of the country then, hey, more power to you.
Could there be any better way to celebrate Memorial Day here in 2011 – with the gold price hovering comfortably above $1,500 an ounce, perhaps ready to go higher – than by sharing a cold beer with friends while standing beside a gold grill? This report at Bankrate.com provides the details of what is, apparently, a very real, very gold-plated, gas grill.
If you really want to pull out all the stops, the most expensive barbecue, of course, has to start with a grill that embarrasses that thing rusting in the corner of your deck. It has to simultaneously make no sense whatsoever and all the sense in the world. This why a gold-plated barbecue was made.
Introduced by BeefEater Barbecues, apparently because they can, they had the state of mind to hand-plate every square inch of this grill in 24-carat gold except for the cooking surface — just in case someone actually wants to use a gold-plated barbecue. The value of such a grill? A mere approximate $164,000.
Though no one would question BeefEater’s claim that the grill is “the ultimate in backyard bling,” perhaps you like your remarkably expensive barbecues a little more understated. Thankfully, there’s the Outdoor Kitchen Center, also from BeefEater Barbecues. Maxing out at four burners and about $50,000, there will be no mistaking that a statement is being made, in addition to burgers.
I wonder if the price of the grill goes up and down along with the spot price of gold. That second grill doesn’t sound like much of a better deal, though I do remember a guy in Southern California about six or seven years ago who may have spent about half that much on a built-in barbecue, mustering a bit of his home equity for the cause before it vanished.
Amazingly, he also added a room onto his house for his cat.
The AARP surveyed(.pdf) over 5000 American workers aged 50 or older and confirmed what many have believed to be true for some time now – that the Great Recession has radically changed the financial situation for many aspiring retirees and that the outlook for their golden years now looks grim. It seems that counting on your home equity to finance a life of leisure didn’t exactly work out as planned in our bubble economy.
The recession seems to have eroded confidence about the retirement years. Overall, more than half (52.6 percent) of those surveyed were not too or not at all confident that they (along with their spouse or partner) will have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years.
…
Moreover, the 50-plus population—at least those surveyed in October 2010—were worried about managing in retirement, and a variety of money matters concerned them: retirement income that might not keep up with inflation (44.8 percent very concerned), not having enough money to pay for long-term care (44.3 percent very concerned), depleting their savings (39.3 percent very concerned), and not having enough money to pay for health care (39.2 percent very concerned) (figure 11).But not being able to maintain a reasonable standard of living in retirement was the one item they were most concerned about, with 26.5 percent of respondents citing this as their top concern. Not having enough money to pay for adequate health care was a distant second. Few placed leaving money to children or other heirs at the top of the list. Nor was a surviving spouse or partner’s ability to maintain the same standard of living of most concern to many (figure 12).
I’ll never forget that look on my dentist’s face in 2006 in California when I suggested that home prices might not continue to go up and that, they just might fall. And they might fall a lot. Echoing the view of many at the time, he said, “They better not fall, my retirement is depending on it”. He’s probably had to juggle his plans at least a little bit…
It was a bad day for the GOP yesterday as the loss of a special election in upstate New York served as a referendum on Paul Ryan’s budget blueprint and House Republicans clashed with Elizabeth Warren during an oversight subcommittee hearing for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, during which subcommittee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) accused Warren of lying, at least according to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD).
For more on this contentious hearing, see:
- Elizabeth Warren and House Republicans clash over consumer agency – LA Times
- Why Are Republicans So Keen to Persecute Elizabeth Warren? – Naked Capitalism
- House Republicans Pummel Warren’s Earlier Testimony – Fiscal Times
For those with an hour to kill, you can watch the entire hearing here.
It seems that while we were away, Matt Taibbi penned another piece in Rolling Stone about everyone’s favorite investment bank - The People vs. Goldman Sachs – and he’s been out doing a series of interviews on the subject in recent days, the one below appearing late last week in which he makes the case that lying before Congress shouldn’t be too hard to prove.
Also see this one with RT’s Anastasia Churkina where Taibbi characterizes U.S. politics as a reality show put on by Wall Street. In rereading parts of Griftopia over the last couple weeks, he makes a number of excellent points on this subject, castigating the Tea Party for focusing on the national debt rather than the relationship between Washington and Wall St. that, among other things, has contributed to income inequality rising to dangerous levels.
By Tim Iacono, Since 2005
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