Determining if you are living below your means

[Senator]

i look at the results from the retirement calculators and plan around worst case. i use the fidelity one often.

the calculators do not include real world spending pattern changes as we age.

With Fidelity RIP, you can adjust spending or income. Look at the variable expenses and income. Start/stop any variable at a given year, or age.

 

[mathjak107]

yes you can alter spending budgets but it is not the same thing since you really have no clue yet what to alter.

spending is smile shapped through retirement. higher spending early on , a big drop in retirement spending in the middle ages and ramping up again in the later part from healthcare.gifting and charity.

that big drop off offsets a whole lot of inflation adjusting., in fact historically while 3-4% a year has been a ballpark actual studies show 2% in the early years , zero to 1% in the mid years and 2% in the later years would have been just fine.

that leaves quite a bit of slack in a plan built around 3-4% increases every year.

 

[dallas27]

Copper would probably be better than gasoline as it has industrial uses but does not go bad or burn down your house.

Where are you going to put $100,000 of copper?

So the chinese have been selling copper to retail consumers as a long term investment. The vendors store tons of copper in large warehouses, and theses consumers have been blamed for high copper prices for the last few years.


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[Fermion]

So the chinese have been selling copper to retail consumers as a long term investment. The vendors store tons of copper in large warehouses, and theses consumers have been blamed for high copper prices for the last few years.


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Seems a reasonable thing to do. It is a fixed resource with relatively high extraction costs and will be in high demand as the world transitions from a coal/oil powered grid to a wind/hydro/solar/geo/fusion powered grid and all of the millions of miles of wiring needed (plus the 100 or so pounds of copper used in electric vehicles for motor windings and battery interconnects).

I would be a lot more comfortable right now with a warehouse full of copper than an equivalent monetary amount of rubles in my bank account.

 

[dallas27]

I would be a lot more comfortable right now with a warehouse full of copper than an equivalent monetary amount of rubles in my bank account.

You would have lost you arse over the last year. As the Chinese had artificially inflated it, when their housing bust started they began selling. It's plummeted like oil. Copper was a bubble if you ever saw one.


All you want to know about copper....
http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html

 

[freebird5825]

I'm still banking part of every month's pension check. So, I think I'm in LBYM territory.

Ditto. My income stream is very predictable (pension and fixed annuity).

The quick and dirty method...no spreadsheets for this girl.

I look at my beginning, middle and year end credit union cash balances in 2 different accounts.
Account 1 is the income repository account. I transfer cash from Account 1 to Account 2, the expense account which is linked to everything I can pay through direct ACH and all of my credit cards for online payment.

I can roughly guess how well I did with spending on an annual basis.

I use that difference to see how well or poorly I stayed within my means.
I've been at this for 7 years now, so very close tracking of monthly expenses is no longer necessary.

Fall is a big payout time for me, with school/property taxes and auto/house insurance policies due. I know what I need for these items, so I make sure that amount is already in the expense account by June.

K.I.S.S.

 

[haha]

I've been in a lot of discussions over the last few years about gold. My position is that it's a commodity worth what someone will pay for it. I could stockpile coffee beans for the same effect.

You'd need a pretty large stockroom, and the coffee would soon be stale and worthless.

Ha

 

[meierlde]

Copper would probably be better than gasoline as it has industrial uses but does not go bad or burn down your house.

Where are you going to put $100,000 of copper?

Actually at the current price it would be about 35,000 pounds which given that copper is about 559 lbs per cubic foot would 62 cubic feet. (assuming it was all ingots) So a substantial volume but not that hard to get a 4 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot cube would do, so a standard storage unit would easily hold it.

 

[harley]

You'd need a pretty large stockroom, and the coffee would soon be stale and worthless.

Ha

I'm for stockpiling whiskey. Cheap hootch for trading and good sipping whiskey for personal use. Of course I'll need a large stockroom too.

 

[meierlde]

I'm for stockpiling whiskey. Cheap hootch for trading and good sipping whiskey for personal use. Of course I'll need a large stockroom too.

Actually a good store of value. Recall that the whiskey rebellion occured because the farmers in western PA converted their corn to whiskey and shipped it east because corn was not worth shipping over the excuses for roads that were in place in the 1790s. They did not like the government taxing the whiskey they made.

 

[aja8888]

Seems a reasonable thing to do. It is a fixed resource with relatively high extraction costs and will be in high demand as the world transitions from a coal/oil powered grid to a wind/hydro/solar/geo/fusion powered grid and all of the millions of miles of wiring needed (plus the 100 or so pounds of copper used in electric vehicles for motor windings and battery interconnects).

I would be a lot more comfortable right now with a warehouse full of copper than an equivalent monetary amount of rubles in my bank account.

I worked for Anaconda Copper in the 1970's and early 80's and watched the trend towards substitution of copper and copper alloys destroy that company and its competitors. I was smart (lucky?) enough to leave and get into a big oil company at the right time (1982). Copper is a raw material that is constantly under pressure for substitution:

The housing industry uses much less copper than it used to with the advent of PVC drain pipe and now that's going to the pressure side of the plumbing.

We saw the U.S. Mint contracts fade away when they eliminated copper pennies and copper in clad alloys.

The next big elimination was with Harrison Radiator and other radiator producers when the radiators went aluminum for tubing and fin stock.

The rest of the vehicle industry now uses less copper and smaller diameter in wiring with low current lighting and other applications.

The only thing that makes copper and copper bearing alloys successful for short periods of time are when the U.S. gets in a war (cartridge brass, other armament) or when the undeveloped countries start building and the economies improve substantially.

All the major water tube, sheet, and wire mills in the U.S. are now closed permanently due to poor economics for copper products and foreign competition. I worked in several of them and they are boarded up for good. Copper mining in the U.S. is practically non-existant. Most copper is mined and processed outside of the U.S. and those mines are mostly nationalized (Chile for example).

Think about the above before making any investments in copper.

When I worked in that industry, the saying was.."the only way to make any money in the non-ferrous metals industry is be a scrap dealer".