Packing My Gear, Headed For The Rear

I’m moving on. Tired of shelling out serious money to home insurance carriers plus coverage of our contemporary art collection, which is earmarked for our foundation and then its liquidation.

I see Treasury notes in my future, not Apple stock. With 2-year Treasuries pushing in a  5% yield territory, I’m a buyer. Nobody as yet can’t explain the near 50 basis points variance between 2-year paper and 10-year maturities. Are investors hiding and 10-year Treasuries because they see recession around the corner with low yields for everything in sight? Yes, maybe, no. 

But the penalty for being wrong on a stock keeps rising. Check Salesforce.com It used to be 5% but past week American Airlines took a 20% shot to the 

kishkas. Their headman no longer saw a steep turnaround in traffic and therefore profitability. No dice! Business is crappy.

It’s time for everyone to have a conversation with himself and take stock of the situation. Steer clear of the wealth management arms of our major banks, too.

They’ll snow you with their pie charts on debt equity constructs. If stocks and bonds both decline in tandem your annual loss could tot up to 20%. Being a conservative can cost you plenty. Nobody ever discusses this,  but 2021 was a pressure cooker for wealthy families who couldn’t sniff trouble in the air.

I feel it’s time to reduce our family overhead, severely. My wife disagrees, so I maybe going through it as an academic exercise. Let’s first deal with home insurance bills, which have escalated to the point where I bought stock in the underlying carrier, AIG, American International Group for its offset potential. (The stock is buoyant.)

Next couple of years I expect to give away almost all our financial assets, and a sizable collection of contemporary artwork. I crave an overhead as close to zero as possible, and still rest comfortably. Our grave sites are prepaid, and my wine cellar filled with reds and whites of distinction.

I’d be happy in a double wide trailer surrounded by intimate family photos covering the past 60 to 70 years, including my dressage horses and our show poodles, both toys and standards. Over 100 dogs have passed through our kennels with plenty of Best-in-Show blue ribbons.

Our newly conceived overhead is quite manageable. We’ve got around $65,000 in Social Security checks per annum . Then there is more serious money in my IRA distributions. I hope to land a job as a weekly financial columnist, won’t work for under $500 per article.

Such income should cover our medical bills and prescriptions for the children and grandchildren. 

We’ve a closet full of shoes and boots, enough to choke a horse. I’ll ship back my Bloomberg console and follow the market on my iPad. Dinner out is “cut” to once weekly.  Slash travel and entertainment. Tell me, I’m wrong and crazy and won’t get to first base. 

All such angst is shown in this graph on price-earnings ratios over decades of decline.