The *MONEY* Issue

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

Martin Luther King Jr.

US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968) 

(Click here to listen to an epic classic "MONEY" by Pink Floyd while you read the blog below.)

June 21, 2012 in Amsterdam

Money is often time a sticky issue.

This thing can make or break your closest relationship.

It is that one more thing that can be added to the list of things that's certain for humans:

death and tax

I still haven't met anyone who has never touched a form of currency that we know of now.

It seems that it is unavoidable to be under its effect & circulation
if you live in a human society on this planet.

Money can take up so much of your time & energy.

Thinking about making more, dreaming about spending it,
and
worrying about losing it.

These are the 3 things people usually use their head around money.

But if you retire on some fixed income guaranteed to make you survive in style
for the rest of your life,
wouldn't that helps to save lots of energy we use around money?

So, early retirement is one of the key factors to be happy in this world filled with doom & gloom theories about the imminent global economic bust.


A friend of mine is an economist.

He used to be a senior banker at a well known national bank in the U.S.

The guy knows the world of Money inside out, like that rabbit hole of investment included.

The tiny stash that I totally forgot about turned up recently
so the question was how to play with the mula.

So I turned to the man, Ramsay, who now runs his own company that 
helps people retire early to enjoy life.


On the side note,
he lives in San Francisco with his lovely Russian lady
who is also my dear friend.


Early retirement does not come from winning a jackpot or coming upon a trust fund from your grandma.

It's something any commoners like me can handle
with a free tool like an online calculator that snaps out
the amount of mula you need to retire at the age you decide.

Yes, Ramsay made it easy for you. 

Here's his company's website:

Green Retirement

As one of the blogs from the website says,

retirees are usually better consumers, meaning they don't waste their stash casually.

That means a lot of saved resources including the energy & the environment.

The less you buy, the less footprint you are leaving on the planet.

For instance, if I want to buy a pair of leather shoes made in Indonesia, hypothetically,
they have to be made there using materials from natural resources using precious human energy, and they have to be shipped to Amsterdam using precious fuel.

If I decided to buy a second hand pair, I am recycling not only the shoes themselves but all the resources that was used while they were originally made & shipped.

And most of all, I save that resource I usually like to save, money, so that I can retire earlier.

Check it out.  Ramsay's site is filled with the information many of us cannot afford to miss in this turmoil world of economy, the money situation that involves almost everyone on the planet.

Yes, the situation is changing so quickly & critically.

Don't be blaming your alarm clock malfunctioning when shit hits the fan in the world as we know it now.

Be awaken & proactive to whatever suits your plan as much as you can (amap).

But Ramsay, bro, one more thing, you gotta give me more precise justification for
your portfolio sample you said in the blog to me last week:

70% on S&P 500 Index and 30% on the U.S. T-bills.

Eh?

The time like right now, I have seen and heard so many talks of

the U.S. economy completely tanking and

defaulting as a nation.

If such instance prevails,
what would happen to the U.S. stocks and bonds?

A bunch of printed papers that they are?

That is precisely my question, my friend.

Really, it bugs me to think there is a solution for it
and I don't know about it.

That's all-

Okay brother,

You and I shall prevail-

Love,

marina saga

P.S. Do you know why I spell my name in lower case letters?
It's because I am a human being, not a fuckin' corporation.

P.P.S. Here's the free retirement calculator from Green Retirement again

A Nail that Sticks Will Be Pounded

It is a Japanese proverb.

---Means:

If you don't behave according to the unspoken code of conducts that fits your obvious profile such as gender and/or age, you will stand out like an un-pounded nail and will be pounded.

So you play that role that was assigned to you by the societal expectation, other than your expectation of what your world is like.

Things like a kind of job you work, a kind of house and neighborhood you live in, clothes you wear, a bike you ride, everything is a tool to make you look *me* according to your programming of the idea of who you think you are and how you should look because of your gender, age and perceived societal expectation based on these two factors.

Or, you can just be YOU.

I heard someone said this once:

"All clothes are all uniform or costume."

Makes sense, doesn't it?

So I chose to go between:

"I become as me as possible, by mixing and matching clothes that I received through friends, family, 2nd hand stores, street finds, flea markets so I will not support particular brand but instead, I choose to shop at thrift/2nd hand stores to boycott sweatshops and consumerism that supports it as much as possible, as somethings are harder to come by in 2nd hand, like undies & socks.

I said, "As Much As Possible," AMAP, that is.

Use Your Money as Your Voting Power

Yes.

That's right.

Whenever you are buying stuff - vegetables, furniture, shampoo, juice, clothe & etc.,
you are voting for the company that produced it,

meaning,

you are supporting the company's corporate decisions

such as

environmental or humanitarian decisions.

Say, you buy 1 lb of Costa Rican coffee beans.

If it does not have a logo that reads:

Fair Trade

it means the foreign corporation that made coffee available to you
actually took advantage of the local people
to increase their profit unfairly to them.

Usually it's done through
cheap labor, cheap sales of their ancestral lands to the foreign big corporation.

So when you are buying non-Fair Trade coffee,
you are an active participant of the company's
exploitation of the local people who make the coffee beans.

Some food products that you may find in Fair Trade:

coffee, tea, chocolate, fruit juice,

Your purchasing power is your voting power.

Every time you are spending money, you are voting for the company and its environmental and human rights policy.

Let's use it wisely and appropriately.

Be more informed.

What is really important to you in life? Really.

"Jeeeesus, what is really going on in this world now?"

Have you asked the same question after watching American TV news recently?

I hear about unprecedented degree of natural disasters like mega flood and earthquakes happening and the ungodly heatwave in Tokyo set its record straight for those who are still in denial of the rapidly changing world's climate pattern. It's been above 35 c degrees everyday in Tokyo since June and it sure is the hottest summer since Japan started to measuring temperature 113 years ago.

Could it be the end of the world as you know it?

Or could it be just business as usual with a little touch of the unusual nature's business?

Either way, it made me think about what really matters in my life if the world as I know it is going to hit the fan soon, I mean, very soon?

The faces of my family flashed like a lightening in a twister. Some of my friends were smiling in the purple sky in this vision.

Oh yeah. It's them. Yes it's them that showed up in the vision. I care about them. My family and friends.

None of the material stuff made appearance in the lightening vision.

How is your perspective about the world in these days?

To be honest, sometimes it is hard for me not to feel very, very despair to the point that I throw my hands in the air because I don't see the point of trying to be a help to steer away its collision course that we see everywhere in these times - mainly, the destructive corporate practice of promoting irresponsible consumerism which causes destruction in our environment from excessive use of its natural resources and damping toxins from manufacturing process and as decomposable trash like used mobile phones and alike.

 Not to mention that being too tired to relate in a meaningful way to your family and friends from working too many hours to pay for things you think you need can create irreversible rift between you and them.

So anyway, I'd love to know what you saw in your lightening vision when someone tells you that the world as you know will end next week ?

What was it?

3 Simple Things You Can Do To Save Earth For Our Children

I now live in Amsterdam which enjoys one of the most *advanced* social systems in the world. 

The people here tend to be more down-to-earth and they keep it real so to speak, as you might have guessed from the expression like, "Going Dutch."

One of the things that they often do to "keep it real" is to use heavy-duty plastic shopping bags many times over as opposed to using one-time-tosser like those frail white plastic shopping bags you sometimes see catching air and flying across a four-lane freeway aimlessly before landing somewhere to be buried for eternity because plastic takes like an eon to decompose in the ecosystem.

It's mainly a foreign object to any ecological system on earth, like cancer in the human body.

Well, I know. We all depend heavily on them.

Shampoo bottles, cleaning solutions, salami packages, soda bottles and those white shopping bags!

But we can still try to *keep it real* as much as possible while receiving the convenience that plastic offers to the modern society by following the three simple things:

1) Buy less plastic products
- No ZipLock, use tapperware or better yet, glass jars from pasta sauce or other empty jars to store food. It's a good idea to re-use empty containers from pasta sauce, olive spread, or anything that can be cleaned and re-used.

2) No more plastic shopping bags
- I know this can be a habit hard to kick. So do it like the Dutch: Carry your own heavy-duty cotton bag or plastic bags from other shopping, like those big, heavy and fancy plastic bags from clothing stores. They are usually strong enough to be used for your groceries, many times over. The Dutch people do it here and so do I. You just always keep an used plastic bag nicely folded in your purse and use it when you are shopping.
- Refuse plastic bags when you are shopping for a few things, like a soap and a toothpaste. You can slip those in your bag easily.

3) Buy less packaged products
-Avoid those food products if they are over-packaged, anything that are individually packaged snacks or whatever to that extent. You know what I am talking about. Instead, why not buy bulk products? You save money and the environment at the same time!

Okay, that's it for keeping it real like Dutch.

Do it As Much As Possible, AMAP, that is.