> Okay, I have archived your response, but I want more. This thread started
> out with you and James advising against stock investments and then you
> included real estate investments, with which I disagree. My question above
> relates to the investment plan to provide future cash needs, and it still
> requires an answer.
Right, Gene, but mainly advise against *relying* on it. If I might restate
your question: What could you invest in today while you can still earn
surplus cash (today while the blossom still clings to the vine) that later
when you can't earn any cash will provide you with a *reliable* source to
meet your even very modest cash needs? My thought on the question is that
there might not be anything that will do that. Of course I know you are not
asking about certainties, but only what are the odds and how best to stack
the deck in your favor. Things change. The things which one might invest
in their youth might cease to exist by the time of the person's geezerdom.
The more in a state of flux society, ethics, and technology are the more
this is true. And now of days we are on every shifting sands in those
areas. DOW fell below 10,000 again today.
A few years ago the truism was that technology was the thing of the future,
you can only expect more and more of it. So the thing that logic cried out
for at the time was to invest in the ground floor of the dot-bomb.com's.
The results were disastrous for a great many people. Recall how the mystic
oracles always gave a cryptic answer, "If you go into battle, a great army
will be destroyed!" Like that pronouncements of "thing of the future" are
dealt in a like manner by the gods. Sure, it was a true prediction that
technology has expanded unabated and that itself has made it so that
technology is cheaper and cheaper so did not return much of a payback on
investments.
The often heard pronouncement that "God only made so much land" so real
estate is as close to a sure investment as you can get - is an equally
cryptic saw and the gods surely have something nasty up their sleeves for
that as well.
I was reading that from the late middle ages until just before the
industrial revolution a working man typically paid about 70% of his income
to buy bread for his family. The remaining 30% went for the rest of the
food, church fees, taxes, clothes, 'trinkgelder', and .... housing.
Housing did not cost much. So how much was housing real estate worth? Not
so much as now of days. The point I'd make is the relative value of housing
has varied very greatly in human history.
Now days residential real estate has two components in its 'value', the real
or pragmatic component and speculative component. This has always been
true to some extent, but now the speculative component seems to be inflated
beyond all reason. That speculative component is just like playing the
stock market, that is, it is gambling. A million things could happen to
radically change the value of any give piece of residential real estate.
Outlying property only commands high value so long as fuel is cheap and oil
is flirting with $50 a barrel again today. Likewise large houses only have
high value so long as the price to heat and cool them is affordable. In our
present society it is customary for there to be only one generation of
adults in a household and only one immediate family under one roof. But
circumstances could change that quickly, especially with the influx of
people from other cultures for whom that is an unfamiliar and wasteful idea.
My parents are in Florida just a little north of the place hit by two
hurricanes this season. Right now undamaged real estate in Florida is
worth a fortune because of all the displaced people needing a place. But
the 1-2-3-4 punch this season (so far) has put the fear of God into many
recent Floridians and after the damage is repaired, much of that same real
estate will be worth far less than it was before the storms because of
people changing their minds about living in the path of such storms
(meteorologists are saying that Florida has been enjoying a 40 reprieve from
typical hurricane seasons until this year and the reprieve may be over for
some decades).
So it isn't that investing in real estate (other than what you need for your
own use) is any better or worse and idea than any other such investment.
But relying on being able to sit back at some juncture in one's life and say
"Soul, take thine ease." (Even if that just means paying the taxes,
utilities, and insurance) and not doing anything or producing anything to
ensure that very modest income, relying on that is risky business from any
quarter.
Far better, I am thinking, is to equip yourself to do something, preferably
several things, that you could continue to do even in a decrepit geezerdom
to provide the modest cash needed for the homestead. I got a good lesson in
this recently. Twelve or fourteen years ago I was earning a modest bit of
cash as a luthier. The unholy voice of technology whispered in my ear and
by degrees I set it aside and took on more and more easy and lucrative (if
unreliable) technical work. Preference and necessity have combined of late
to make me clear the cobwebs and junk out of the shop. There I find a
surprising number of parts and subassemblies I had abandoned in the past,
plus stock and blanks and most of my jigs and tools. When the latest round
of trade magazines and flyers arrived in the mail, I flipped through them to
see what the finished pieces brought now of days ... wow! ... the prices
have almost quadrupled in fifteen years. Turns out that those parts and
assemblies (and even the hardwood blanks and billets) have drawn interest
along with the rise in prices of the finished instruments [as it were].
It's all a matter of odds and taking one's best shot at stacking the deck in
one's favor. But the way I see it, it is better to rely on the perennial
ability to do something like add value to, say, a piece of wood than it is
to cast your bread upon the waters and hope to find it after many days.
James
[Homestead] "the best of all possible worlds :",
Toni Hawryluk, 09/27/2004