Retirement Planning Calculator, Tables

Max spending per $100K assuming 5% inflation-adjusted return
Needed income assumed 30K/year

Years	Max Withrawal	Savings needed
5	28200	106K
10	14069	213K
15	10102	297K
20	8274	363K
25	7246	414K
30	6604	455K
35	6175	486K
999	5000	600K

Recently I've been mildly obsessed about retiring (early, very early) or at least, achieving financial independence (=you don't have to work anymore to sustain your lifestyle). I am a stong believer in living below your means as a tradeoff for freedom.
Anyhow, how much money do I need? I assume 10% average return on investement (average stock market returns have been 10.7% in the last 50 years or so). I also assume 3.5% inflation, so that's 6.5%. then you have to take out taxes, such as capital gains. Great. but it isn't so bad, if you plan on spending 30K/year - since part of the money is capital, only part of it is considered income. In some scenarios I ran, that was a 15K income, which would mostly be covered by standard deduction. SO I use 6% as net returns.This means that I believe on average 6% would be my return.
However, most of us don't care about averages - 50% of the time we'll be below average (umm, kinda). To achieve 90% complex analysis of market ups and down, I calculated a return of 4% should be assumed; 5% would give you an 80% chance - fail enough.
The last question is - how long do I plan to live? so here goes - the table below shows, for each number of years, what's your max withrawal per $100K. Obviously you can withraw more than the interest unless you plan to live forever - but how much more?

(Summary Part IV) - What Color Is Your Parachute?

Secrets of Salary Negotiation

1. Never discuss salary only at the end of the
interviewing process, when they have definitely said
they will hire you.
2. The purpose of salary negotiation is to find out
the most that an employer is willing to pay to get
you.
3. Never be the first to mention a salary figure.
4. Decide in advance/research how much you will need per
month.
5. Research salaries in your field or
in that organization.
6. Define a range the employer may have in mind, and
a range for yourself.
7. Don't leave it hanging. Bring the salary
negotiation to a close. Get it in writing.

.......[-----]..... : Employer range
...[-------]....... : Your range
.......[---]....... : Possible agreement range
..........X........ : where you want to be
........X.......... : where the employer wants to be

(Summary Part III) - What Color Is Your Parachute?

Twenty three job tips
1. No-one owes you a job, you have to hunt for it - hard.
2. Job hunting success is proportional to job hunting effort.
3. You have to change your tactics if they don't work
4. Talk to successful job-hunters you know
5. You already have a job - job hunting. treat hunting as a fulltime job.
6. Be prepared for your job hunting to last longer than you expect - mentally and financially.
7. Persist until you find a job
8. You won't necessarily be able to find exactly the kind of job you had,m or you wanted.
9. Forget 'what's out there'. Go after the job you really want.
10. Tell all your friends that you are looking, and what you are looking for.
11. You can use your answering machine to advertise you are job hunting.
12. Team up with other job hunters.
13. Go after many different organizations. Don't stop hunting until your first day at work - some promised jobs just evaporate.
14. Try any place you want to work, even if there is no known vacancy. Many vacancies are not published immediately.
15. Concentrate on smaller organizations - 20 or fewer people
16. Meet 4 employers a day, or call 40 a day, or send hundreds of resumes. Most job hunters do much less.
17. Use the phone. Before calling, write out exactly what you'd say (script). Talk when standing up and smiling (use a mirror to verify). Try calling before 8am, before noon, or after 5pm - you'll get the boss. When connected, ask to speak to the manager. Have a one liner top achievement to start. "Your name was given to me by X. I am an experienced Z". Deal with objections using "I understand/I see your point/Of course..however".
18. Knock on doors.
19. Look at different kind of jobs - parttime, contract, etc.
20. Most of us think we have some handicap that would prevent us from getting the jobs we like. However, everyone does, and a major group of employers wouldn't care about your specific hump. Don't worry about the other group.
21. Expect many, many, many, many rejections.
22. After every interview, write a thank-you note and send it that same day. Use it to remind the interviewer who you are, and if there was anythign you forgot to say. Do it even if the interview went bad. It's crucial.
23. Treat every employer with courtesy.

(Summary Part II) - What Color Is Your Parachute?

Notice - 96% of all job seekers found their job offline
Reason 1: everyone and their system is posting their resume online, too.
Reason 2: you should expect tens or hundreds of rejections before a successful response.
You risk having you self-esteem crushed if you expect quick or mostly positive responses.

to succeed in your job search, you should avoid misplaced energy by focusing your energy where it helps most.

[notice the advice is for general jobs. IT jobs might do better on the internet]

Worse ways
Post on the internet: 4%
mailing out resumes at random: 7% [estimated one jobb for every 1400 resumes sent]
Answering ads in trade journals: 7%
Answering ads in the local newspaper: 5%-24%
Going to private employment agencies: 5%-28%

Best ways
Ask for leads from friends, family, people at the community, people in the local career center, etc - 33%
Knocking on the doors of every employer that interests you, whether they are known to have vacancies or not - 47%
Using the yellow pages to identify relevant employers, then call them to find out if they are looking for employees - 69%
Using the yellow pages in a group of job seekers - 84%

Conslusion: rely on more than one method, and make sure you use at least one active method in your job search.

Employers prefer to hire in a different way than employees want to get hired. Their preference is:
1. Hire from within - promote a fulltime or a parttime employee, or hire a contractor.
2. Using proof - seeing a proof of the prospective employee work
3. By reference of a best friend or a business collegue
4. Using an agency they trust
5. Using an ad they placed
6. using a resume

Many employers want you to find them - they prefer you email them from their website or to an ad they placed, rather than read a resume you posted.

(Summary Part I) What Color Is Your Parachute?

This post summarizes the first two chapters of the book,
and covers very basic job-hunting tips.

Identify if you are looking for a job change
or a career change
If a career change (referred to as 'life changing career move') is desired, consider going gradually (e.g by changing title but not industry or changing industry but not title) first.


Prepare your resume well
Recommended urls:
jobstar
capital
damngood
professional (=for fee) resume writers: http://www.resumewriters.com/


Emphasize archievement, such as an obstancle, means to tackle it, and the result.

Post resume on a career website
www.monster.com
www.careerbuilder.com
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com
www.eurojobs.com

Open Source Shoes

If you bought Open Source Shoes:
- The shoes would be free, given to you by people who want to be paid $150/hr to help you put the shoes on

- Everyone in the street would be allowed to take your shoes

..and

- If you wear the GPL shoes, all your clothes are public property

Ideas provided by friends and .. more friends? let me know if you have more 'if OSS were shoes' ideas

The Open Groceries Movement!

Open Source. What a great idea - work on software for free, and give it to anyone - for free.
And of course, all this is done by developers - the people who would like to make a living writing software. Hmmmm.

Seeing the success of the OSS movement, I propose the Open Groceries Movement (OGM). Groceries want to be free! free like freedom, free like Fritos. I call on all grocery store chains to offer their groceries for free - they can charge on support - if you aren't sure how to fry your free steaks, you can call, and for $4.99 a minute, a chef would explain the secrets of pan-frying.

Some people on ZDnet agree. What do you think?

What is Art?

This definition is based in part on one of Tom Wolfe's articles in "Hooking up". While I have a lot to say about this book (and most of it less than flattering), that specific article made me think. so here goes:

Art is the use of skill to create a new thing of beauty

Did Your Waitress Screw You Over?

You know how, at the end of a meal out, you spend a few painful seconds deciding on the appropriate tip? it might not matter.
This happend to me in a restaurant somewhere in Texas. After disappointing service, I left a 10% tip, about $2.50. The waitress, it seemed, thoguht a $4.50 tip would make her happier. And you did notice they swipe the card *before* you write the tip? which means, of course, that they -manually type in- the new total amount. Guess which number she typed in?
A month or so later, reviewing my credit card bill, I found the petty theft. It was obnoxious. Of course I got my $2 back, but hey, this would probably go undertected with most people. Probably does.

Why do I mention this -now-? recently I found a very simple way to keep your mind working while ensuring this is not likely to happen.
What I do with restaurants now is use the cents digit as a 'checksum' digit.
To do that, I sum up the digits (not including cents), and take the singles digit as my checksum. An example would explain this:
Original amout including tip: 24.32
Checksum: 2 + 4 = 6
Amount I write down: 24.326

Original amout including tip: 29.18
Checksum: 2 + 9 = 11 (use '1')
Amount I write down: 29.186

As you can see, if a waitress/waiter/whomever writes in a whatever number, I have 9/10 chance of spotting this. And if they simply (as most people would do) add a dollar or two, the checksum would -always- not match, alterting me to this.

Of course, if they changed the checksum digit, they'd be able to fool me. But people with the brains to do that (and the knowledge of my system - whcih is now public, but still) have the brains not to risk jail time over a theft of a few dollars.

if you have javascript enabled (most people do), I created this calculator - enjoy

What color is my parachute? - book review[1]

I've read the 2005 revision recently, and I have mixed feelings.
Pro: The book offers some excellent advice
Cons: The author now added 'look at me I'm so great' testimonials, making one feel he is reading a sales presentation. Also, he started adding his religious views - specifically, shoving them down my throat, both in a whole 2 chapters about 'spirituality' and throughout the book. that's not what I paid for.

Solution: I will post a summary of the good advice in the book soon. Really, there isn't more than 2-5 pages of good advice in this book, so that should be enough so you don't have to actually buy that book or fully read it.

Dating: Job Interview or Sales on Commission?

The ideas behind this post were formed over a long time, but they just crystalized when a friend of mine told me her latest lovelife plight (Thanks D!)

Dating: Job Interview or Sales on Commission?
It has long been clear that men and women approach dating differently.

For women, a date is like a job interview, with the woman as the interviewer. The woman tries to decide whether the guy qualifies (handsome enough, rich enough, successful enough, funny enough, trustworthy enough, nice enough, and not-nice enough). The prize - immediate or delayed - is sex. She might go home with the guy at the end of the date. Or she might not. But womens usually are the arbitrers and gatekeepers of sex - partially, of course, because a man would not even ask out a woman they are not attracted to (translation for readers of the fairer sex: "men would not ask out a woman he would not want to have sex with").

Men, on the other hand, have to push their case, with some level of subtelty. Men are supposed to initiate - in other words, sell the women on the idea of their attractiveness, encourage them to make a buying decision ("lets go to my place and listen to some music") and stir clear of objections ("yeah, it might be late, but you don't have to work until 11, do you? besides, you arent tired enough to sleep").

The result is - women feel like they have just walked into RadioShack, where every sales person is on comission - try to shake one and you'll see what I mean. But they do buy - when you go shopping, a purchase is certain, it is the logo on your shopping bag that is in question.
And men - men feel like this is much too much effort. And it is - interviews are hard, and in the dating scene, just like in many interviews, the results of the interviews may be determined in the first 5 minutes. Not the way for a stress free gettogther!

Interesting article: Shamnesty International

This article is worth reading. I had long had misgivings over the motivation of Amnesty, and I fear people just do not understand what is involved in engaging war. I will post about this topic soon.

On job performance reviews and promotions

Performance reviews are a common event in today's Corporate America.
So common, in fact, the we stopped thinking whether it measures what we think it's measuring.
To get promoted to a more responsible position, you are expected to show a track record of excellent reviews. Sounds reasonable.
Or is it?

Skill set
The set of skills needed to be, say, a team lead, is not similar to the set of skills that make a junior employee. For example, in the software industry, a development lead needs leadership and managerial skills that are irrelevant to a programmer. A good leader who is an OK programmer would see slow promotion; an excellent programmer with no people skill would soon be in management. This is the flip side of the Peter Pyramid.

Motivation
But that's not all. Junior programmers get the 'junior' tasks - the repetitive, less inspired, and less interesting. If a person with the skills and creativity is a junior developer, he is less likely to be interested and motivated, and thus will get at-best average reviews. If the same person were to start as a senior developer, his reviews would be better.

Employees as numbers
The root of all evil, of course, is employers treating their employees as numbers. "I want five level-IV developers" can be heard in management meetings. But developers are people, with skills, aspirations, and strengths, and should be managed as such.

Jump a hurdle
Of course, performance reviews do serve some purpose in determining performance - it's the ol' Hurdle Principle. If you put whatever hurdle, those who can jump it would be better motivated, and probably more qualified, than those who do not. But this is such a wasteful way
to sort the winners from the losers!

And a personal lesson
So what's the personal career note people should take from this? simple.
Don't undersell yourself. Taking on a lower position because 'you'd soon prove yourself and move up' is a fantasy. If you must, job markets being as they are, take a lower position. But don't get comfortable. Move on as soon as you can, before you start believing, as your boss does, that all you are is indeed a level-IV developer.

Democrats and Teachers

A quote from
Jerry Pournelle - I really have nothing to add.



It won't be that hard to narrow the minority gap in educational achievement, the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act, though actually closing it is far beyond any educational technology the schools can adopt. The reason is that Democrats do not genuinely care about racial equality. Rather, they care about jobs for teachers, since a major part of their support is teachers' unions. So, teaching jobs are protected. But too many incompetent teachers in middle-class schools would provoke a revolt from the middle class. What happens is that the most incompetent teachers, as well as the most incompetent administrators, are never fired but safely sent to the what are called underserved schools (a term never given an operational definition), whose parents go to the polls in far lesser percentages than middle-class parents. Every now and then, some oversocialized (the Unabomber's term) liberal observes the hypocrisy, but he is ignored. What counts for voter support is the promise of equality, not the results.

I really liked this art blog

the one on http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ - my favorite is:

Why I love Walmart

People keep the hatefest against Walmart based on ignorance, malvolence, and socialism.

..now that I've upset half my readership, I should go on and upset the other half...

Walmart is portrayed as evil and abusive by not paying the so-called living wages unions demand. Walmart rewards its customers with lower prices. Those facts are not disputed. But is it moral?
Taken the other way, is it moral for Target, one of Walmart's competitors, to charge more for the exact same can of Campbels soup? I think not. Is it moral for some small stores, the proverbial mom and pop stores, to charge twice as much for the same can? they used to do just that in rural areas, before Walmart and other like-minded chains expanded to prevent this robbing the public blind.

Case in point- Hawaii. Stores in Hawaii charged me (May/05) 50%-60% or than mainland stores did. Walmart in Hawaii, however, was only 5% more expensive than the Walmarts I know in Washington state. Love Walmart? I sure do.

One last issue is the so-called living wage. This new branding attempt for increasing the minimal wage (which economists showed time and time again to be detrimental) makes no sense to me.
Someone would, by definition, be paid the lower wages, however you arrange the economy. Should it be the highly-productive members of society who took jobs requiring skills, gifts, and high motivation? or should it be the Walmart employees of the world? you tell me.

Yaniverse blog created

Hello all!
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