Here I am on the porch this morning. I’ve eaten breakfast, and I am getting ready to pack up my stuff so I can leave to go back to our house in Southern California. It is with mixed emotions that I try to get all my stuff together. The issue is that Southern California really is our home. I relax more there. It is comfortable. It has beautiful weather.
However, I can understand why my Dad like his place in the Port Orchard area. He has built a phenomenal house. It was a shell from a modern type house that he completely rebuilt. If I put the old and new house side by side, you wouldn’t recognize that the two were related. He spent 25 years rebuilding his house. Before he came, the tree were grown up so high on the bank that you could not see the sound. Now here is the view from his front living room.
He built an enormous porch in front of the house, where barbecues happen, and summer afternoons, if you ignore a few mosquitoes, are like nothing you every had.
The crowning achievement of the house would only appeal to those that are of the piano class. You must know your pianos, but if you do, you will be amazed. In the living room is two (not one) Model D Steinway Pianos. One is a black Steinway bought new in 1980. It was completely redone on the inside by Edward J. McMorrow, who is one of the best piano technicians in the US. The other one was a wonderful walnut Steinway bought from somebody else inside of the Apostolic Faith church. The black piano is a wonderful boomy piano. It has a heavy action and a growling sound. It really could play any concerto anywhere.
The walnut piano has a diminished sound and a very light touch. It is a piano for the most delicate of Sonatas.
I am seriously thinking that I should retire in my fifties just so I have time to play these beauties. I do play the piano a little bit, but at a very low grade level. I compose and do music, as you might have heard by the links on this page, and it is almost as if these pianos call to me asking me to play them as they should be played.
Speaking of retirement, every time that I come to Seattle, I start to think about this. How much is required for retirement? How much time do I have on this earth? How much momentum do you need to have what you need.
Both sets of parents have done very well in their retirement. Of the two sets of parents, my Dad has done the best. This is by way of a series of brilliant moves when he turned 50. He had known for a series of years that his job was going to provide a retirement pension, but this was not strictly what he wanted to live on for the rest of his life. My grandfather told him that he never wanted to be a burden to my Dad, and he wanted the same principle. It will not surprise you to know that I feel the exact same way.
My Grandfather had a series of apartments that gave him much needed funding in the later years. He also sold his farm to my Dad. At the time, the cost of the farm was 3 times my Dad’s salary, who was a director at the time. While Dad had over a thousand people working for him, it is interesting that both he and I will end up having roughly the same title inside of our respective positions. Dad had a Sr. Director Level.
At 50, he bought a 10 unit apartment and had my mother and me to take care of a lot of work at the place. He then sold the apartment to buy a nursing home as an investment. After this, he sold the nursing home and used this money as his second retirement fund. Now, while this lasted a while, the nursing home, which he sold for the unbelievable amount of $1M dollars, gets eaten away by inflation. Inflation is only about 3%, but this mixes a lot of consumer goods into the mix. In many areas, prices go up much, much faster.
Finally, last year, Dad decided to sell half of the farm that he bought from Grandpa. Over the last years, the land had skyrocketed in value. Now, Dad has a whole new set of funding to do stuff around his waterfront property.
My father-in-law has something very, very similar. He did not do the bold moves that my Dad did, but he made one very, very smart move when he was selling commercial real estate. He found a piece of property that was in downtown Seattle. He bought this property with a close family friend. A grocery store bought the rental rights, and for the last 15 years, this has been the bulk of his retirement income. This has allowed him to have a very comfortable life. To live near his grandchildren, and to be able to buy things like cars and computers. Without this inflow of funds, he would have a very, very difficult time indeed.
So, as I go home, I am wondering what I should be buying for my retirement. Right now, the bulk of my money is in the stock market. I have been doing just fine here, and over the last 50 years, the market has returned close to 10% for those that invest in dividend stocks. Those that thought they were going to do better by pursuing growth stocks have been deeply burned.
But there is no better long term investment than land. The question is when do I go land based.
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