Hello world!

[WithAPurpose]

Hi every one,
I joined yesterday after lurking for about 5 years. I thought I had thought of everything until I caught a new insight on Roth conversions last week. I realized that being a part of a community of likeminded people can really help, especially by introducing concepts I had not imagined. I either found this site through Nords, or found Nords’ site through this forum. Either way, both have been critical in the development of my readiness to retire.


About me:
I am 43
Recently reduced my Megacorp job to 32 hr/week, pay is acceptable but not overwhelming, benefits are minimal and decreasing.
I have $1.5MM in rental real estate- 20 units, $20k remaining on mortgage, Cash flow of ~$80k/yr after mortgage is finished this year.
$800k in investments (500 trad, 175 Roth, 125 taxable)
I will have a reserve pension (w/ COLA) at 60 from the AF as well as a not-COLA’d small pension from Mega Corp at 60 as well
DH is 57, his retirement from his MegaCorp is scheduled for Feb 2017 with a COLA’d pension after 30 years of ~$35k/yr, with retiree medical at low cost
He inherited his family farm, any cash flow will be plowed back into the farm
His investments of $500k (400 Trad, 100 Roth)
Our home and cars are paid for and the cars will last us at least 5 more years.

Our current expenses of ~$50k/yr will be more than covered by his immediate pension and the rental income(our investments will not need to be touched for income). I think that we will be trying to spend the balance each year on our vacations and his kids and grandkids.



I don’t really have any questions about being FI enough to retire, I just find this community to be supportive in my transition from type A pilot/engineer to relaxed early retiree on the golf course. I am not ready to pull the trigger yet, but my comfort level increases each time I gain a new insight from the boards here.


I also appreciate your input (positive and negative) as I know that I struggle to reach out and ask for help.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

Welcome to the forum! Former Big-Blue dude here too...perhaps a little Type A as well, but I have transitioned to "Type B" just fine!

 

[papadad111]

Welcome. This group is level headed and the advice is well worth the price Hopefully the community here will increase your confidence beyond the money aspects to pull the trigger ! Congrats for job well done too.

 

[NW-Bound]

Why, someone just ran the 1st C program from Kernighan and Richie's book?

#include <stdio.h>

main( )
{
printf("hello, world\n");
}

 

[ERD50]

Why, someone just ran the 1st C program from Kernighan and Richie's book?

I also assumed the OP did some programming in their career. "Hello World" is pretty much burned in the memory of anyone who's done any programming.

Even though I'm a pack-rat, I'm pretty sure I dumped my K&R book about a decade ago.

Wow, it's still on Amazon - 1988 edition!

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/0131103628

And - Welcome to OP!

-ERD50

 

[Fedup]

@NW, too funny, that was my first reaction reading the title of this thread.

 

[neihn]

Why, someone just ran the 1st C program from Kernighan and Richie's book?

No. I think it is Java given OP age

public class HelloWorld {

public static void main(String[] args) {
// Prints "Hello, World" to the terminal window.
System.out.println("Hello, World");
}

}

 

[MRG]

I also assumed the OP did some programming in their career. "Hello World" is pretty much burned in the memory of anyone who's done any programming.

Even though I'm a pack-rat, I'm pretty sure I dumped my K&R book about a decade ago.

Wow, it's still on Amazon - 1988 edition!

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/0131103628

And - Welcome to OP!

-ERD50

K&R is a classic. I was used to seeing brand new copies still passed around.

Yes that is what I thought too. More former IT, welcome to the forum. From a guy who loves not being paged anymore.

 

[WithAPurpose]

K & R is the exact book from which I started. I appreciate those that recognized the reference.

My programming turned into Engineering, and now my engineering is turning back into programming at my MegaCorp Job. I may soon be learning Java to stay relevant.

I feel like retirement (and forum posting) is another language to learn. I am certainly motivated by its impact on my future, but daunted by possibilities and the unknown unknowns.

 

[retire2020]

Why, someone just ran the 1st C program from Kernighan and Richie's book?

+1. I remember that very well. My first ever programming was with Fortran 77..Then moved to Pascal, C/C++ and JAVA. Once the pointers/reference came in I lost interest. Now...one thing I can not do is - programming. UNIX/Database and Storage where I turned next and avoided scripting as much as possible...

 

[jcretire77]

That is so true. I have a CS degree and first job was Fortran at TI in 1982. Fast forward and too many years as a manager. Other then shell scripting something very small I don't do any programming. A couple years ago my 'manager' wanted to know if I wanted to get into programming again. Not for anything!

 

[NW-Bound]

Fortran 77? That's the 1st language I learned in freshman year. Next programming course I took was assembly language. The university required all engineering students to learn Fortran. And there was no CS department, as it was just a specialty inside the EE department. I was a true EE, and did not take that many computer related courses (I learned on my own much later, and did some hardware design too).

Note that the "real" Fortran code would be all in upper case, as punched cards and line printers back then did not have wimpy lower case. And Fortran existed long before 1977, but that was the year a standardization effort took place.

program test​

c This program prints a greeting

write (*,1000) 'Hello, world'​

1000 format (A)

stop
end​

Much later, learned C on my own, liked it so much so used it exclusively for all programming like scientific computations, simulation modeling, and also embedded software for microcontrollers.

Still have several dozens of unused microcontrollers and many miscellaneous chips in my junk boxes. I am setting up the hobby room to play with them again some time.

Sorry to the OP for the thread hi-jack. But you cannot walk into a room full of nerds, announce "Hello, world" and expect people to stay quiet.

 

[MRG]

I was a tech school guy in early '84 school had a wicked S-370 assembly class. I was in love. Started at Megacorp doing new development in assembly. First big project was a distribution system for a stock transfer agency. I didn't know what a distribution(or an issue) was but I wrote a lot of the calculations. Got pretty good at keeping tracking the decimal.

Really didn't like most 3 and 4gl. All the machines cared about was the OP codes. Seemed redundant to use all those fancy high level language statements when the machine never saw them. Made a living for a while by being the person that got thrown in for crit sits. I got to see the inside of computer rooms all around the world.

 

[MBAustin]

I learned a little Fortran in HS but the intro CS class at Duke was IBM Assembler based. Came in handy on my 2nd megacorp assignment when the guts of the order/invoice system were in assembler (with the rest in COBOL, which was easy to pick up after PL/I and Pascal). I was the assembler guru for a couple of years before moving on to management. Haven't coded much since.

 

[ERD50]

...
Note that the "real" fortran code would be all in upper case, as punched cards and line printers back then did not have wimpy lower case. ...

Dilbert Comic Strip on 1992-09-08 | Dilbert by Scott Adams

- ERD50

 

[NW-Bound]

Just so some youngins do not think that I was BS'ing, here's a sample snippet of Fortran 66 code I stumbled across on the Web.

Yep, all uppercase, no code indentation, lots of "go to" because of lack of "If ... then... else" construct... And look, no declaration of variables or anything. This programmer uses no parameter list for the function, and everything is shared on a common block. Nowaways, that's considered very poor programming practice, with no structure and which results in spaghetti code.

Oh man! Now looking at this, all the old memory is coming back.

 

[ERD50]

Just so some youngins do not think that I was BS'ing, here's a sample snippet of Fortran 66 code I stumbled across on the Web.

Yep, all uppercase, no code indentation, lots of "go to" because of lack of "If ... then... else" construct... And look, no declaration of variables or anything. This programmer uses no parameter list for the function, and everything is shared on a common block. Nowaways, that's considered very poor programming practice, with no structure and which results in spaghetti code.

Oh man! Now looking at this, all the old memory is coming back. ...

I think a bad programmer can produce 'spaghetti code' in any language!

I also read something just recently (but I'm pretty sure it was an old reprint), defending the GOTO statement. Sure, it was abused and misused, but it was ridiculous to 'ban' them, and then claim the result was always better. Short GOTO jumps like that can actually be clearer than other constructs. GOTO's jumping all over a long program though - a nightmare!

I won't defend the lack of a parameter list or not declaring variables though. Some things are just plain wrong!

-ERD50