Blessed by the Potato

There have been lots of stories in the media over the last year or so about people having to postpone retirement because of the effects of the stock market crash on their nest egg (indeed, my dad was briefly afraid he was going to have to come out of retirement, sell the cottage, sell the house, or all three). JC makes an interesting point above: working longer has the double effect of letting you postpone touching your nest egg as well as building it up bigger.

However, I just wanted to run some very simple numbers to show that this is not a very good backup plan. I mean, if you have to, you have to, but just look at what I’m getting at:

Let’s say that you wait until you turn 40 to get your act in gear, your salary has pretty much plateaued, and you start saving 20% of your salary per year until you turn 65, when you plan to retire. Simple math says that you have 0.20(salary) * 25 years = 5 times your salary as your nest egg, assuming that there’s no compounding going on. Compounding at just 3% per year (real return) and you’d have a decent 7.3 times your salary to work with — using the 4% withdrawal rule of thumb gives you about 30% of your working salary to retire on. Not great, but you’ll probably survive, and this is being quite conservative.

Now let’s say that just before you take the golden watch, the market crashes by 30%, and your nest egg is now left at 5.1 times your salary. How much longer would you have to work to get back up to ~7 times your salary? If you keep saving at a 20% rate, and you can’t rely on a bounce in the market (i.e.: no further compounding) — whether that’s because you got scared and sold out, or because you’re just scared enough to not factor it into your plans — then simple math shows that you’re looking at a good 10 additional years of work. True, the real-life situation wouldn’t be that bleak: you wouldn’t need to recover all the way back to what you would have needed to retire at 65, and additionally you could probably manage to save more than 20%/year by cutting back on your spending; saving 50% of your income would mean you’d only need to work an additional ~3-4 years.

Still, that’s a pretty long time to delay your long-planned retirement, and as JC points out, you might not be able to keep it up. So to make sure you don’t get stuck in that situation it’s probably better to plan ahead: include a margin of safety in what you figure your nest egg should be, maybe even plan to keep working for one or two years beyond what you have to just to make sure you have that cushion — after all, if the meltdown came after you’d already retired, it would be that much harder to get back to work. Starting your savings just three years earlier would increase that nest-egg to 8.6 times your salary before the market crash, and if your portfolio crashed 30% you’d still have 6 times your salary, or an extra four and a half years worth of savings thanks to compounding, and that of course gets magnified if you have a greater return than the conservative 3% I arbitrarily picked here.

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There was a horrible, rotten stench in my parents’ basement the last day or two. I noticed it when running down there to grab a drink from the downstairs fridge. I thought it was a turnip that had gone rotten — it was looking a little wrinkly, but my brother said he noticed it too, before, when the fridge door was closed. We were afraid that the smell from all the garbage that’s been rotting in the garage had seeped into the basement, and unsure of what we could do to get the smell out if that was the case. I envisioned that liquid rot, garbage run-off, what we used to call “tracks” as kids, seeping into the drywall or the very foundation, impossible to get out short of a semi-major renovation.

Tracks, of course, being what the garbage trucks left behind, especially after running the compressor — pressed, pure, liquid, stench. It was always way worse than the garbage itself, and lingered sometimes for days after garbage day, visible as tracks down the road…

Anyhow. It turns out the union isn’t to blame for this unholy smell. The freezer in the basement stopped working, weeks ago by the look of things, and my dad’s collection of over 150 lbs of meat rotted in situ. That amount of meat was supposed to help us last through the zombie apocalypse; ironically, I fear it may start one. The meat dripped, and the formerly frozen berries were fuzzy, so things had got on for a while there.

The freezer is less than 4 years old, so I’m mighty unimpressed that it died so soon. What’s weird is that first off, it does still have power — the interior lights come on when the door is opened, and the weird status light I’ve never understood on the bottom is on too. There’s a huge block of ice on the bottom (not enough to keep anything except one or two things that were touching it cold; they’ve been thrown out to be safe of course), which is all the more curious. I don’t know if it’s a symptom, or perhaps even the cause (if it iced up so much it stopped the air circulation somehow).

My brother says that something similar happened once before with that freezer, when the door was left ajar for a few days: it wasn’t powerful enough to keep the food frozen with the door open. That I think speaks to the wisdom of the design of the old-fashioned chest freezers, with the doors on top, or even of freezers with drawers.

It’s possible that even if the compressor was working, with the door ajar the humidity from the outside air would continually condense where the cold air came out, forming a large ice dam before any of the food could be chilled; the defrost cycle might have added insult to injury by baking the rest of the food… It’s so disgusting though that I’m not really going to spend much effort in playing freezer forensics.

Well, I’m back from the trip out east. I didn’t take a single photo while out there, not even of the rental car I’m about to talk about. I fail at vacation.

While there I rented a Ford Fusion (a free upsize from the “cobalt or similar” I had reserved since it was the only car they had left). It cost me $350 for the week, which was pretty good — I had to wait a month for the price to come down to that level, the first few quotes I was getting were over $800! Oh, and if you are going to fly into Charlottetown in the peak of tourist season and will need a rental car, be sure to reserve one in advance. There was more than one person hoping to just pick a car up, and between the four rental counters there were only two cars available (I heard them all yelling about it :).

The Fusion was a nice ride, I must say the things I’ve heard about Ford improving (especially with the new Fusion) seem to be true: the car was fun to drive, quite responsive, and everything seemed to fit together well, no rattles or even much engine noise. The seats seemed to hug and support us quite well. I’m sure it’s a standard feature on most cars now, but there was a USB port inside the centre armrest to plug in an iPod so we didn’t have to listen to the radio.

However, the visibility was ass. The rear end seemed to be sprung up in the air a bit, which combined with the spoiler and large C-pillars made backing up really hazardous. The rear-view mirror was also oddly low on the windshield, so even with my seat lowered as far as it would go, I just couldn’t seem to see under it to look out to anything right of centre. In fact, the car was oddly proportioned: I’m only 5’8″ tall, and when I first got in, my head hit the ceiling. Even after lowering the seat I only had about 3″ of headroom, and felt like I was too high up relative to the rear-view mirror… I don’t know how anyone over 6′ would ever be able to get in it. Despite that, the dash and “beltline” (bottom of the windows) were very high, making the car seem somewhat claustrophobic (and it also made the steering wheel feel too high, like I had to reach up for it rather than straight out; my arms couldn’t quite get into a natural position to hold it). Wayfare also complained that the passenger seat wouldn’t recline very far, making it hard for her to nap. The experience was valuable though, since it helped give me an idea of the sorts of things that can start to drive me crazy after a week of living with them, so I’ll have a more watchful eye when it comes time to start test-driving replacements for the Accord (the number one choice needing no mention here, of course).

Some of those issues are just subjective things, but it was the numbers I was perhaps most disappointed in: the fuel consumption. Pretty much the only driving we did was between the cottage and Charlottetown, a ~20 km drive on rural highways with speed limits of 80 or 90 km/h. There are only 3-5 stops along the way (depending on your luck with red lights). This is about as close as you can get to mimicking the government test cycle, so the car should have achieved (or even beat, with luck, since driving conditions don’t get better than PEI!) its highway rating:

Flex fuel SEL AWD flex-fuel: 7.8L/ 100 km HWY. (The I4 FWD is rated at 6.4L/ 100 km HWY.)

So we should have been getting roughly 8 L/100 km on the trip, but instead averaged over 10 L/100 km. I know my Accord would have got at least (most?) 7 L/100 km in that kind of driving, and I can’t figure out why the Fusion did so poorly. Yes, it’s got AWD and a flex fuel engine which is going to hamper it relative to the Accord, but that’s factored into the rating above: why the 25% miss? It’s possible that Ford gets a “credit” towards its fuel consumption rating for having the ability to burn ethanol/E85, but I doubt it — that sort of stuff can get figured in for things like overall fleet consumption goalposts, but I don’t think it actually affects the sticker rating above. Beyond that though I’m at a bit of a loss: perhaps the rental agency filled the tank with ethanol… but I can’t find any mention of stations in the Charlottetown area that sell E85. Maybe the rental wasn’t in very good condition, despite only having 6000 km on the odometer? Maybe the tires were soft, or the engine hadn’t finished breaking in… Whatever the reason, I was not pleased by the mileage. Perhaps Ford should sell their “ecoboost” engines to the rental agencies over the flex fuel options…

Whatever it was I just wasn’t satisfied with the car in the end, and was actually happy to leave behind the brand new, sparkling clean car to get back into my 13-year-old Accord.

(Though I do miss the instantly-cold air conditioning).

Consider this: you go to the washroom, you undo your belt, then your button, and your fly, pull your pants down, do your business, then back up in reverse order. You go to the sink and wash your hands (if you work in a hospital or your hands are grody, this may be the second time washing your hands in that visit to the washroom).

You get home, free yourself from the oppressive prison that are your pants, throw them in the laundry basket, and proceed to rock guitar hero in your undies, risky business style. As the laundry basket fills up, and later overflows towards the end of the week, you eventually get around to washing your clothes, and your pants are clean.

But when does your belt get washed?

In a recent comment, Rez asked what I thought about Cold-FX. To be honest, I haven’t read much of the background about it: there are placebo-controlled studies out there, but I’ve only read their abstracts (if that).

For those who haven’t heard, Cold-FX is a product that used to claim it could prevent colds/flus, and reduce the duration and severity if you did catch one. At first I have to admit I thought it was the highest form of quackery, as they claim that they have a patented process that extracts the “active ingredient” from ginseng to make it more potent at preventing colds. Sounds pretty fishy, and their initial sales pitch was via a shouting Don Cherry, which didn’t lend it scientific credibility in my opinion. However I know numerous people who swear by it, and more still who swear by the near-equivalent natural cold prevention of ginseng and echinacea. Health Canada has said they only have proof to advertise reducing the frequency, duration, and severity, so that’s all they claim now (i.e.: they can’t say “immediate relief” anymore). Still, there is some decent evidence that it works in that respect, or else it wouldn’t have Health Canada’s blessing.

Wayfare takes it pretty much every day, and when she does catch a cold it does help somewhat with the symptoms. It can also help delay a cold from coming on full-strength: if she’s at that point where she can feel a cold coming on, she claims she can load up on Cold-FX (what is it, 9 pills a day at that point?) and prevent it from knocking her out completely for a few days. However, even taking the recommended 3 pills a day it doesn’t seem to be able to prevent them completely.

At $1/day for the recommended dosage for prevention I find it a little pricey considering most of the time I wouldn’t be at risk of catching a cold anyway, so I only take it preventatively from late October through December, when flu season is worst at the hospital. That “three times a day every day for the rest of your life” part is where I think it slips over from “useful tool in the fight against colds” to “nice racket if you can get it.” Even during flu season I only take one or two a day instead of the recommended three, which has as much to do with the fact that I think they purposefully set their daily dosage high to sell pills as it does with the fact that I don’t like the coating — the pills seem to stick on the way down, it’s not very pleasant. There’s also the issue of just having too many damned pills to take every day. I’m more convinced of the benefits of loading up on a B-vitamin and D every day, so I’ll take those first, and by then I’m getting sick of throwing pills down my throat when I’m not even sick!