Wednesday, August 29, 2018

and all I got was this T-shirt 1 of 4


AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS T SHIRT
Let’s take a short break from end ‘o da world doom and gloom.  Not that this isn’t a necessity anymore.  Because even if there is never any true collapse, you can bet the farm that the ‘Murican Empire is toast, as a very minimum in bad news.  And it won’t be a gentle exit into that good night but a spoiled child screaming in agony as we implode.  It is going to be a very violent break up.  As those smarter than myself say, it is Balkans times Rwanda.  Once again the media, nobodies friend but themselves and the elite, has distorted reality to convince everyone All Is Well, and when everyone isn’t delivered all the promised goodies very soon ( and I don’t just mean the Free Crap Army, but everyone used to Happy Motoring ), it is going to be Knock Out Game times John Brown.
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Anyway, as important as this prepping stuff is, and if you don’t think it is Saving Your Life important you haven’t been paying attention and need to go back to buying FLIR scopes, sometimes we can take a short break and talk about related but less important subjects.  Today, I’d like to discuss “I worked all my life and all I got was this T-shirt”.  What do you have to show for all your labor?  And more importantly, how much of what is preparedness related?  Because I’d wager a high quality-say, Entenmann’s-jelly filled donut that you have at most 1% total of all your wages in assets and of that amount hardly any is in preps.
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I don’t know why this popped into my head while walking the dog ( having your best ideas in the shower means you are wasting water.  If while jogging or biking it means you are about to be run over from lacking of awareness ), but I’m thinking back on my thirty five years working and I started thinking how little is actually in preps.  How little time I actually needed to work for all my super neat-o tools to embrace the apocalypse with a big offal eating grin.
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My last eight or nine months working, it was generally recognized that if we didn’t go out of business it would be a miracle ( after I quit, a miracle happened and some damn fool donated a hundred grand to the place.  Management promptly started pissing it away rather than invest in reducing expenses ).  I started saving literally every spare penny.  From a take home pay of eight grand I saved about six.  This was the best thing I could ever have done since it showed me how little I needed to live on, it gave me, literally, a five year cushion of unemployment which gave me the peace of mind to go self-employment, and it made me sad and mad I hadn’t done this so much sooner.
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Not that that I really could have.  I was barely a few years from the end of my near twenty years of child support payments that at times was 70% of my gross pay when added to taxes.  I don’t think I ever slacked off saving and investing while living ultra-frugal, ever since 2004 or so when I declared bankruptcy to get rid of credit cards ( which I had been using for a lot of bills as all money went to said child support-not a practice I recommend.  And I got lucky filing only a year prior to the law being changed regarding bankruptcy ).  So from 2004 to 2012, I had awoken to my dire predicament and knew I needed to get serious, deadly serious, on my writing and choice of lifestyle.
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I was lucky, having done all the research previously.  I knew exactly what needed doing ( from 1994 to 2004, I didn’t know as much, nor did I have as many resources to do so.  And I was just plain ignorant.  A lost decade ).  In 2005 I started buying land ( I didn’t know where the best place to live was, and at $300-$500 a lot, I could afford to spend like a drunken sailor and figure it out later ).  I started buying precious metals.  I doubled and tripled my arsenal.  I forced myself to write every day, and actually wrote my first honest to goodness book.  It was a time to stop dreaming and start doing.  I can’t even say it was all that hard, because I finally decided to crap or get off the pot.
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So, I worked from 1983 to 2017 ( I worked two jobs at a time  from 1992 to 2017, so I feel justified in rounding out my salaried career from 34 years to 35 ).  For the first nine years I spent all my money on beer and doing as little as possible, pre-marriage/children.  The ten years after that was wallowing in poverty and feeling sorry for myself, writing but never seriously enough to make a career out of it ( I think I was also feeling sorry for myself since I gave up drinking ).  I was one of those pathetic visitation dads living a sad sack life, doing nothing concrete to start digging out of the hole the ex had thrown me in.
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The only thing I can think of that lit a fire under my ass was moving back West.  Back home.  Away from the deafening crowds that never allowed you to think.  Away from the constant danger of the nearest ghetto, away from the claustrophobia.  Looking back, goodbye about $300,000.  The next dozen years, I made about $200,000 ( gotta love inflation! ).  After taxes and child support and rent and living expenses, I think I walked away with about $20k in assets.  All land, PM’s and cash savings and preps.  35 years of working, making a half million, and I’m sitting on $20k.  4% of my lifetime earnings.  And I think I’m doing better than most people.  Once awoken to the true danger of NOT bailing the Rat Race, I did save/invest 10% of my gross, and that was WITH a fifty percent tax withholding, but the total average falls because of my wasted youth.
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Note that while I prepped rather well, the whole point of the exercise was to free me from ever repeating the experience of extreme poverty from the rapine of divorce.  I needed to lessen my susceptibility to economic vulnerability.  Survivalism and prepping were secondary.  Always important, and that importance ramped up significantly as the housing bust started, but you can never sufficiently prep until you are financial less vulnerable.  I knew long term money will be meaningless, but short term I needed to resolve the issues.  I’ll continue and conclude this tomorrow.  I’d like to cover how to help you get to that 5-10% ( as opposed to the normal, if lucky, 1% ) gross career savings/investment in very little time.  Mostly already covered in my book “6 months escape & prep” ( contained in BBBno4 ), but it has been awhile so it is almost a fresh subject.
( .Y. )
( today's related link https://amzn.to/2obqe5c )
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note: a minions book effort.  My highest recommendation.  When I checked, it was free click here 
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27 comments:

  1. Rosie O’Dumbbell’s parents went somewhere nice and exotic, and all she got was a lousy freight parachute with a hole for her head cut in the center :D

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    1. Ha! Yeah, when you give Moo-Moo's ( spelling? ) a bad name, it might be time to eat three less Big Mac's for breakfast.

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  2. I was given very good advice by my father in my youth about how to save money and the perils of spending all of your paycheck, living paycheck-to-paycheck, because of getting over-committed for rent/mortgage, car payments, etc. I listened, thought I got it and was smarter than the average bear, and spent the first 20 years of my adult life making all the mistakes he described. Then, with life (failure) experience in hand, figured out over the next 15 years how to make better decisions. I'm guessing this is the way for most people who figure this stuff out. It takes life gut-punching you to learn, and after you learn, you think about all the resources you could have put to better use. But you are right. Once you figure some stuff out, you learn it takes a lot less than most people think to have some safety, security, and comfort in your life.

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    1. I blame hormones and boobs for distracting us.

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    2. Well Jim, one also does want to live life a little bit. Get a motorcycle, ride around, have toys, hobbies, go places and explore. Be a minion living like devout monk and die of cancer young or killed in accident and wished you had some fun and got some pussy. Just saying.

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    3. Oh, I hear you. Why do you think I'm living in town now instead of out at the B-POD? Enjoying my twilight years, regardless if it is the smartest prepping thing to do. I've never been one to try to live forever, just better.

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  3. My working time line is almost identical. Graduated in fall of 83, and went to work at the same place as my father. Worked consistently up until the layoff of 2015. As a white, hetero male, now in his 50’s, I knew that my options would now be pretty limited. I did get lucky in that a relative hired me part time, under the table, to help out with his invalid wife.

    Getting itchy feet and now considering the Dakota’s. I still have my Nevada land, but I’m starting to worry that I need to be much more isolated for what’s coming. I’m not even talking about the collapse at this point, but the increased hostilities that you are seeing with regularity in the cities, directed at those of us that oppose the leftist agenda. I suppose that I could give my isolated Nevada lot a chance to get a feel for it. But I do wish at times that there was more of a buffer between myself and the loonies in west coast.

    Have you seen this reprint of this old classic? It was a book written by a 19th century architect. He wrote it with those in mind that were traveling west, and had no resources such as building supply outlets, and were forced to make due with the natural resources that they had on hand, once they got there. I have the book, but to be honest, haven’t read it yet. It might be of use for those minions considering the west, and that are on a limited budget.

    Homestead Builder: Practical Hints For Handy-Men: C.P. Dwyer

    https://www.amazon.com/Homestead-Builder-Practical-Hints-Handy-Men/dp/159921153X

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    1. I had enough credit to order a copy. Thanks for the heads up.

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    2. Get the videos of that Dick Proeneke (spelling may be incorrect) into the wild or some title. Went into deep Alaska and built cabin, etc. Was up there 30+ years and only came back to civilization living when he was 80 something years old. PBS commie network had it on years ago before they went all gay with their anglophile programming.

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    3. I think I saw some of the video. Or I just read the book. Can't remember which. I do remember having a discussion here on the problems with permafrost up there, as underground was difficult ( his cabin with roaring fire never got it all that warm inside ).

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    4. maybe you will review the homestead book when you have read it?

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    5. i fell in love with dick proeneke when i saw that film.

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    6. Most likely I'll just skim through the book. But it all depends on my mood and its tone. I can give a general impression, anyway. Look for it in the after article notes.

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  4. Cont.

    Just saw the little house pilot again the other day. Pa left Wisconsin for Kansas, and a 160 acres, free and clear. A chance to be his own man. Must have been nice when the common man still had a shot at a decent life, prior to wage slavery at the expense of one’s self, and to the benefit of the few.

    I’m going attempt this to my best ability that this is still possible in today’s world. The first step is to get as far away from the masses as possible. Probably a good idea to sever one’s digital footprint as well.

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    1. The digital footprint is going to sever us, soon enough. In addition to the web site I'm going to go back to books on cd-rom through the mail. It will probably be another failure but I have to fight the good fight.

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    2. Jim, have a payment method that folks can charge online, and you can either ship out yourself or like a lot of web business does they have fullfillment centers, publishers, middle man companies, handle their merchandiae and ship out. Vegas and Reno have tons of warehousing operations due to attractive tax environment. Just spiff balling it at you.

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    3. That sounds like what someone with any kind of volume would do. :)

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    4. anonymous,
      my worthless advice is, try to be near enough to a clinic, if not a hospital.
      and have way to communicate with necessary help, if need arises.

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    5. That almost presumes Too-Closeness.

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    6. Not worthless at all Deborah, and thanks. But as James has pointed out, luxuries such as hospitals, museums, police stations, etc, would presume close proximity to far more people than I choose to be near. I suppose that the best that I could hope for would be that the distant hospital has an emergency airlift service. Otherwise, I figure that if my health declines to the point of needing regular hospital visits, I’m just being patched up enough to buy a little extra time, so at that point it’s time to be honest with myself. Though if I stick with my Elko land, I would be fairly close to a hospital (I’m assuming that Elko has a decent hospital).

      The pioneer building book does sound interesting, as I’ve thumbed through my copy before. Maybe I’ll just put it on my to read next list, as it’s not that big of a book. Someone like Jim can probably get through it in a few days, but I can’t read something that fast and retain the information.

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  5. I don't know how you plan to finish this tomorrow after promising a 4 part series. I'll be cross I tell you, darn cross, if I don't get my moneys worth :-)

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    1. Money back guarantee always in effect, it isn't just for new guys the first thirty days :) Actually, I did two parts, part three is a wide detour, then part four is really part three which may or may not have been necessary. It was the only way I knew to keep you all on your toes. Okay, it was an accident, but that way sounds better.

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  6. Every man that has ever breathed earthly air has paid dearly for the privilege one way or the other. Wasted money? I've spent plenty and there are lot's of things I would have done differently. But I don't see a point in looking at things from that angle as it brings me down and I'd prefer to just learn from my mistakes and not look back too long, focus on the future and now.

    My biggest regret is that I didn't become self emplyed a lot sooner than I did, but honestly, I just didn't know that you could. It wasn't until someone took the time and told me about it. I was 28 years old. I wish I had skipped the army and become self employed at 18 years old. That whole 10 year period was a waste of time and resources. I have earned a couple $mil and right now probably have less than $200k worth to show for it. But I'm better off right now than I have ever been in my life so I'm not complaining....much. You know what old doodz like me say, "At least I got my health!".

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    1. I try to minimize my Regret Woolgathering, except to alter plans based on experience. I'm usually naturally future orientated anyway ( have been most of my life ). You just can't avoid it completely. And yes, after a point health is really all that matters.

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  8. say you are mad that you didn't learn sooner.
    since most of us never learn at all, be glad that you have already beaten the odds.

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    1. Trying to be smarter than the average bear, here, so I tend to chastise myself severely for any perceived shortcomings ( I KNOW I'm not all that smart-but just like exercise you must keep pushing harder and trying more )

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