The Golden Years? Planning for Retirement

Have you seen seen that warm and cozy snapshot of Grandma and Grandpa sitting on their porch looking out over the horizon, sun on their faces, Grandma with a cup of tea, Grandpa playing the banjo? (Yes, I know, could be us.) This lovely portrait may not be as idyllic as it appears. Maybe they are content, or maybe that’s all those old folks can afford to do.

Having spent 10 years in the hallowed halls of retirement I am often asked, “How much money do you need to retire?” 

And I always say, “Well, it depends on how you want to spend your time. Are you planning on a quiet life or do you want to get out and travel, do things you never had the time to do before? How much do you spend now? That amount is not likely to go down.”

Being debt free at retirement and owning your place of residence will help - a lot. If, however, you have no company pension, no RRSP’s (mutual funds, stocks, GIC’s), no source of revenue other than OAS (Old Age Security) and CPP (CanadaPension Plan) to draw on, you could be in trouble. 

How much pension money you will receive when you first retire is also very difficult to determine. Government websites are hard to navigate. 

How much money do you need per month? Difficult question. Government pension income is fixed and essentially goes down every year because the response to inflation is pretty unrealistic. The increase received this year is more like $20/month than the 57 cents claimed by that continually streaming meme on FaceBook, but rising expenses far exceed such a small monthly increase. Just look at the price of gasoline and heating fuel! Being rural and 40 miles from everywhere, those two items, plus insurance and maintenance of our farm truck and car, pretty well swallow up close to half of our combined government pension income. 

People who are not new to reading my blog know that we live a fairly simple life on a small farm. We are essentially a pair of  “back to the landers” right out of the early 70’s. We are partially retired now, running only about 1/8 of the number of sheep that we had when we were younger. Sheep sales (including putting one or two in the freezer) and our garden help us to keep our heads above water. Farm and pension income could be sufficient if nothing ever went wrong. IF - if we never repair or improve anything, if the ram hadn’t died, if my dog didn’t suddenly need a vet, if we don’t need new tires, if the well pump doesn’t seize, if hail doesn’t devastate the garden, if our health manages to hold up... There are an endless number of possible “ifs”! So far our government pension comes up short, on average, by about $1000/month.

What works in the beginning may slowly become insufficient. If you are depleting your savings rather than maintaining a sufficient balance to cover inflation and withdrawals you’ll have little choice but to pull back from all those little extras that make life special, and may eventually have to reassess what is essential. Inflation and circumstance can easily cause you to become financially marginalized.  Plenty of people these days are forced to work well beyond 65 in order to make ends meet. So, when planning your retirement, if at all possible, make sure you have an extra source of revenue to draw on. Assess you desires, your needs, and don’t forget that plenty of monkey wrenches will get tossed into the mix. Access every subsidy, insurance plan, discount, etc. for which you are eligible. These are not entitlements, you earned them through employment and taxes over your entire working career.

As you grow older you may, like me, prefer a simpler life style, close to home. You may even want to be that old couple on the porch I described above, smiling because they are truly content. Good planning, sprinkled with a healthy dollop of good luck, will provide you with a choice.

Traitor or Peacemaker?

Wow! Unbelievable! An American president taking the word of a Russian president and apparently turning his back on the witch hunt conducted by his own security services. An American president willing to sit down and talk with a Russian president, agree on some things, agree to disagree on others - how shocking is that? An American president willing to talk with North Korea as well! This just can’t be. He must be a traitor! 

Or should he be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize?

You can’t say it didn’t take guts (some would say stupidity) to call America out in this way, to say, “Look America, Russia is not the enemy. Isn’t it time to put this election interference issue to bed?”

I am no supporter of President Trump. Readers who are on my personal FaceBook page* are well aware that my opinions differ greatly from his on practically everything. But Russia is not responsible for his win and Hillary’s loss. She and the Democratic party are responsible. Hillary Clinton lost the election because she was just another one of those “establishment” candidates (and a woman) and she simply did not appeal to voters who are sick and tired of the politically correct, lying through their teeth, sneaky politicians they’ve been dealing with for so long. So, instead of choosing Hillary, Americans voted for a rich reality star, a businessman with shady dealings, a misogynist, a climate change denier, a man with the vocabulary of a twelve year old and startlingly childlike behaviour. Why? Because they are sick and tired of the elite dynasties that have been in control for so long, because the rich have failed to allow enough wealth to trickle down to the peasants, because the not so rich are tired of being buried in broken promises. So they chose a man who was able to make himself appear to be “one of the ordinary guys”, even though he’s far from ordinary.

Did Russia, under the direction of its president, attempt to sway the election by trolling the internet with both true and false statements about Hillary? Doubtful. As an interested party, I frequently express opinions about American politics and I am not a US citizen. If I sway an American voter’s opinion am I interfering in their election? People choose who they want to listen to, who they want to believe. We are all inundated with both true and false information. We have to read between the lines, keep an open mind. Heaven knows there is not one single news outlet out there that has no bias. Canadian news is no different. They are delighting in this new shocking story - Trump a traitor!?  What a juicy bit of fodder to chew on until the sensation wears down and another story surfaces to spark our interest for awhile. This story should up the ratings! Advertisers will be pleased. 

Does the media influence voters? With their descriptive words and the stories they choose to air they most certainly do. Perhaps someday media will take responsibility for the awesome power they wield.

Russia is America’s traditional enemy, always has been, always will be. The “Russians have been coming” for a very long time. I’m not entirely sure why they are so frequently singled out, why saying anything good about Russia is tantamount to political and/or business suicide. The past is riddled with enemies who are now allies and trading partners, so the past should not be blamed. Having diametrically opposed opinions as to which regime should stay, which should go, and why, and what business is it of ours anyways, that should not single out a country to be an “enemy”.  A country with a nuclear arsenal? Maybe it would be better if that country were a friend. But no, Russia bashing is so prevalent in American society that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were somehow blamed for the failure of Grandma Fiona’s tea cake recipe!

As much as I barely tolerate the current US president, his policies and the people he has chosen to work closely with, this time I feel I should say, “Thumbs up. Good on you President Trump.”

Kill Them, or Watch Them Suffer...

Small is beautiful they say. I once read a book, Small Is Beautiful* by E.F. Schumacher, which discusses the economics of just that. Here in rural Alberta, after farming for over 40 years, we are still small, even smaller than we were a few years back, and yes, we think beautiful. But we are more and more running into livestock regulations favouring large and larger, making it increasingly difficult to survive as a small livestock producer. The latest ruling from above has crippled our ability to manage the health of our sheep flock. Imagine our surprise when we went to the vet’s office prior to lambing and discovered that we could not purchase any broad spectrum antibiotic to have on hand should the need arise. Once again, Ottawa’s bureaucratic fat cats have handed down a regulation which on its surface appears to be for the good of the people, but lacks any concept of the negative effect on those who are expected to accept and adhere to their decree. This new federal regulation** has been set in place because overuse of antibiotics, mainly in the human population, has had the result of creating “super bugs” (mutated bacteria resistant to currently available antibiotics). Health Canada’s regulators, sitting behind their comfortable desks with their secure salaries stuffed in their wallets, have decided that livestock producers are contributing to the creation of these super bugs by using too many antibiotics. (I doubt if any of these people have ever set foot on a farm.) Their solution? Don’t let the farmers buy antibiotics over the counter. They must be prescribed by a veterinarian. Only a qualified vet can make a decision as to when an antibiotic is needed. Hmmm.

Obviously, Ottawa is unaware that livestock producers do not all live within a few miles of a veterinarian. Nor do producers go wild and inject antibiotics just in case an animal may become sick. Vaccines are used for this. Profit margins are small. Antibiotics are expensive, even more expensive for small producers because they are unavailable in small quantities. This necessitates the purchase of over-large bottles that are barely touched in a season and expire with about 90% of their contents unused. But wait, that’s no longer true! We can no longer buy antibiotics at all! Now vets dispense syringes with only the amount of drug required to treat the one animal they see! And they must see that animal, or at the very least they must come to your farm annually, inspect your flock and discuss management practices, then make a judgement as to whether or not you have the intelligence to recognize when an animal is sick and needs an antibiotic injection. It should be noted that veterinarians are not happy with these regulations either, though they may profit by them.

So my bottle lamb with the weepy eyes and running nose, the lamb with navel ill, the ewe that managed to tangle twine in her foot, cutting circulation and causing infection - any animal in need, well, Ottawa says too bad, Mr. and Mrs. Farmer, you’re too dumb to know when an antibiotic is required. You must get the vet out to check on them. 

In our situation this essentially means shoot your animal or hope he manages to recover on his own. Why do I say that? Isn’t that a bit extreme? I don’t think so. We live 40 miles from the nearest vet office. The vet charges $4.95/mile, both ways, just to come out. That’s $396 before he even looks at the flock, for which I’m quite sure there would be a good sized price tag with an additional cost for any drugs prescribed. So say $550-$600 annually for this legislated process to take place. For our small flock that produces about 25-30 lambs, that’s about 1/6 of gross income!

And net income? Sometimes I wonder if we are just kidding ourselves as to there being any profit after input costs. Ewes eat hay in winter, grain before lambing and during lactation, many producers also creep feed the lambs with grain to give them a boost. Fixed costs - buildings, fences - need maintenance. We spent $4000 on fencing just this year to repair our corral and sorting system. Besides all of this I can quite honestly say every sheep we ever loaded onto a truck and took to the vet died, with a hefty price tag attached.

Large producers can afford to get a vet out once a year. They will get the antibiotics they need. Their profit margin, based on volume, may take a small, insignificant drop. Feeds lots, intensive pig barns, chicken barns, where animals are crowded together in unnatural circumstances, are, I suspect, where antibiotics are used on a large scale. Small operators, where animals are kept under natural conditions, are less likely to need antibiotics. We use them sparingly. This year we are using an expired bottle of Bio-Mycin when an antibiotic is needed. Next year...Well, I guess we and our sheep are out of luck.

It’s a way of life. We produce our own meat, we produce our own vegetables and much of our own fruit. If we did not do this we could never manage. I’d like to close with a quote from the preface by John McClaughry, added in 1989 to Small Is Beautiful. He quoted from a British magazine called Resurgence, where Schumacher was an associate editor. The magazine called into question “the existing power structures of the world, not because they are Capitalist or Communist or Fascist or whatever, but simply because they are too big. ...We envision a Fourth World, where government and economics are under genuine human control because the size of such units are small, sensible, and human scale, where there is a maximum of decentralized decision making, and where the pace of change is regulated not by the appetites of an overmighty minority for profit and power, but by the day to day needs of small-scale human communities and the psychic capacities of their members to adapt.

*Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher, London: Blond and Briggs,1979

**Responsible use of Medically Important Antimicrobials in Animals - Canada.ca

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