Trying to Retire

 Recently I have been thinking ahead to retirement, getting up when I want, staying up till whenever, freedom.  My wife had pointed out a bit of soffit on our house that needed repair inferring that I might want to take care of this since I wasn't doing anything all day anyway.  I am smart enough to know better than to say anything to that so off I went to the lumberyard to collect up the needed supplies.  What I saw there was very enlightening and I don't mean that in a good way.  My soffit repair requires 1/4 inch plywood about 2 feet by 3 feet and some dimensional lumber to frame it in.  I figured I would get enough plywood, 3 sheets 4 feet by 8 feet and replace the entire section at one time so that it would appear nice and new after I had painted it.  The last time I had any exposure to the price of plywood sheets like the ones I was after they were priced at about $11 each.  Today's price was a hair over $40 each.  I wisely chose to cut my own dimensional lumber from

Let's Give Peace a Chance       'When others are fearful, be aggressive.  When others are aggressive, be afraid.'-(paraphrasing Warren, not Jimmy)  Like I have said, I don't want to wait around a lot if I don't have to, I look in places I think no one else would look for a good deal.  Get in early and get in cheap.  Legalization.  Fair trade.  Political turmoil.  That is my kind of party.        I am buying an array of marijuana related securities,  tossing a wide net as it were, second and third tier suppliers, research into medical use, production supplies and equipment and even financial assistance providers.  Don't want to leave anyone out, besides that the positions I am taking are all hail mary plays, I am not trying to get on base I am swinging for the fences.  Now if only the Congress would play nice and slide through the appropriate legislation, or not, half of my plays are north of the border where it is already 100% legal in any and all forms

     Someone, somewhere made a rather tongue in cheek statement that is almost infallible when describing people that trade in futures. 90 percent of the people lose 90 percent of their net worth in 90 days, this is the 90/90/90 rule. When you think about it, there was a very good reason that margin trading was made illegal post crash in 1929. The moneyed class would do favors for each other and the bankers let the speculators trade on margin, asking that only 10 percent be put up as collateral for a trade that leveraged 10 times as much of an equity/commodity. The problem with margin trading is that you always trade at a disadvantage and eventually you lose. Greed will force you to leverage more than you can cover and you go broke. In 1929 the banks that let you do this ended up holding the bag on all of the bad margin calls and they went broke too. Nowadays, margin houses do this: whatever contract you buy, put or call, they buy the opposite, then when yo

Help! I Forgot to Plan My Retirement     I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do until it was too late. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t have dreams because we all do, sometimes life butts in whether we want it to or not and we have to move in directions vastly different than we would like. When I was in high school my forward looking plan was to attend the Air Force Academy and become a jet fighter pilot. I had the grades, I had someone who would sponsor me, not naming any names here, but what I didn’t have was 20/20 vision. When asking your country to borrow the keys to a multi-million dollar, faster than sound jet fighter loaded with live ammunition, it’s the simple things like being able to read the gauges that they obsess about.      It’s my fault that that particular criteria slipped through the cracks until my junior year in high school but then I didn’t follow through with a plan B, at least a credible one. I went into the military as an aviation mechanic, th