Losing out on my pension and the value of time and money 💵

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Losing out on my pension and the value of time and money 💵

The other day I was reminded of the high cost to my pension of taking a year away from my state job to persue other non state work duties. That said, between my greater experiences and additional pay doing alternative activities it really came out to a wash after doing the math. It really wasn’t a year lost.

And I’m less concerned about my state pension than many other people. The 20 year mark and the jump from 1.6% to 2% per year of service is nice but it’s also kind of icing on the cake. I’ve been maxing out my Roth IRA and the 458 plan to the tune of around $25k for a few years now. I’ve also been aggressively investing and saving well over a thousand a month.

The truth is that I plan a fairly frugal semi retirement when those days come in around 15 years. I want to have my homestead, which I plan to pay for with cash in a low tax state and be able to avoid many of those costs of a typical suburbanite home owner. I want to live in a small, off grid cabin without a lot of furniture and appliances, produce a lot of my energy on site, raise and harvest a lot of my own food, heat with wood, shun expensive internet and television services, burn – compost – scrap my trash rather than paying for expensive landfill hauling and dumping services.

I don’t expect to be fully retired until 65 but I want to own land well before then – and will need a job with health insurance. But if I build up enough assets and trim my budget down enough, the actual income won’t be as big of a deal. Farm tractors, implements and land are expensive but the ordinary throw away suburbanite life is more expensive. Making a life at least partially off the land with livestock and a garden.

I often find myself deeply conflicted by my semi-working class upbringing 👪

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I often find myself deeply conflicted by my semi-working class upbringing 👪

I am the child of two college educated parents, but they were homesteaders, and I grew up in a very working class rural neighborhood – and my parents had very working class jobs at the Center for Disability Services.

Having college educated parents that grew up in the suburbs always put me in a different social class then most of the more working class folks who parents graduated high school if even that. My parents had a professional mindset that really wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the hillbillies who lived in trailers down the street.

I was and still am super jealous of them. They always had four wheelers, lots of guns, and livestock. Pigs and cattle. Big bonfires. I’m well aware of what pig manure smells like or for that the distinctively pungent smell of kerosene used to keep their mobile homes warm in the winter – besides the woodstoves they had jerry rigged up. To say nothing of those slurry trucks from Stanton’s Dairy in Coeymans that would traverse the road a few times a year to fertilize the field up the road.

But at the same time, I found it difficult to find connections with them as they were so culturally different in their upbringings and beliefs – the hillbilly way of looking at the world was so foreign to the world I knew with post graduate educated parents. At the same time, despite my college education and professional career I find it difficult to connect with the more professional and educated types with my redneck and small town upbringing.

I want to go back to the country and not just for a weekend trip. Do real hillbilly shit, although I know damn well it will take money, as I don’t have the skills or even the grit and family connections to make it alone in the country. Now I don’t want to live in a fancy house – I’d rather have livestock and junk in my front yard and a garbage burner out back – I just know how important having money is to survive out in the country when you lack so much else that true country boys and girls have to survive and make a life off the land.