On 5 years of Blogging Retirement Finance

You may have noticed that I have been remiss in attending to the blog. I have my reasons.  Among the many I can think of is the location of where I am in the lifecycle of blogging Ret Fin.  Here are the stages of blogging as I see it strictly for me:



My Stages of Blogging 

A. Blog is conceived in fear.  Somewhere around 2012 I had a revelation on the abyss of retirement risk. I didn't even really see it, I felt it.  This moment of the abyss set in motion all the wheels that have ended up churning out blog content.

B. Blog is gestated in anger.  The analytic portion of the blog came from my pique at my banker-advisors who wanted to charge me 4 grand for one run of what was basically a dressed up Monte Carlo. Jfc! Hell no.  It took me a few months of thinking about it and, one day, folding laundry, I was like "yeah, I know how I can do that in Excel." So I did. Worked fine if slow. Later re-wrote it and a bunch of other stuff in R. That first run revealed that my advisor estimate of 80% success was more like 20%...or less. Big fail by me, bigger fail by them. Spur to action.

C. Ramp up into curiosity.  Once I had a basic toe-hold on the subject, It was just a matter of "ok, what else can I figure out?"  Since retirement is the "nastiest problem in economics," there was no shortage of territory to cover.

D. A desire to "see it."  Once I had a basic command of the subject, I had a desire to do what I call "see the shape of the problem and the related processes." How do things flow, how are they described in the math, what are the shapes of the lines or surfaces, can I internalize the domain so my my mind's eye can see it and more or less put "stage A" to bed?

E. Momentum. At this point in my development I had a bevy of tools: mental models, snippets of R-script, chunks of software, spreadsheets, relationships and correspondence, previous problems solved.  What does one do with all that? Leverage it, extend it, integrate things.

F. Senescence.  Can't do this kind of thing forever. I mean really, no one is paying me for this.  I once asked Dirk Cotton if he made any money on his blog.  He said "well, neither one of us is going to get rich off this."  Also I'd say while Feed-burner says I have 260 subscribers, most of those are russian AI porn bots I think.  Maybe 25-30 are legit. I keep a correspondence and dialogue going with maybe 3 of those.  Comments on posts are infrequent to zero.  This dull response either says something about the topic or my delivery of it, or the size of the market. Inattention to self-promotion did not help.  The most cogent advice I once got was if I wanted more traction I'd have to dumb it down and broaden it. Sure, but that dumbed down space is already covered like kudzu covers the south. Lucrative though, I hear.  In other words, mere curiosity and work ethic and self-motivation seem to be finite for me or "reaching a limit."  TBD

How I Spend my Un-Blog Time

So, given that framework, where am I now in my "blog senescence?"  Maybe it's better to ask what I've been doing that keeps me away from the blog in this phase. That I can answer.  Stacks up like this:

1. Travel.  I've been spending more time on the road with family and gf.  Beats golf.

2. Relationship. In the last post I glibly noted the inverse correlation between the quality of relationships and my analytic productivity.  In 2017 I was wickedly, eerily productive in reading, writing, coding, modeling and testing.  In reality, I was actually trying (and knew it at the time) to escape a broken and hostile relationship I should have ejected from long long before.  Now? I'm one year into something that compares not at all to what I've experienced over the last 30 years at least (better).  So, productivity went to almost zero.  You understand this, right?

3. Training.  In late 2017 my daughter was frantic about my health. She begged me to do something. Newly single and dreading the online apps that can solve that kind of problem, I obliged.  I put in 6 days a week for 2 years at a couple hours a day.  All that blog-energy went into the gym.  Worked, though. Lost 35 lb and carved myself up a bit.  BF down a lot (< 15%).  I have a page on the blog about the journey (top /\) but here is the basic idea:

left to right: age 58 200lb to age 61 165 lb and under 15% body fat.  Vanity? Yes, of course, but this is, I hope, self reinforcing.  Here is the weight chart over the last year that correlates to the pic:

This shows the dramatic effects of fasting, caloric restriction/counting, protein-focus, and periodic abstinence from alcohol.  Highly recommended.  Hmmm blog or gym? On the margin I've lately been choosing the latter.  The biggest downsides, other than all the compliments ;-) has been shoulder injury and the need to buy new jeans.

4. Move.  This idea is only just starting to take hold but it is taking a big new chunk of my attention. In 3.5 years my youngest graduates HS.  At that point I may or may not provide a forwarding address to her but I will most certainly move. The current target is Montana and I am, let's say, 96% committed.  In other words it's highly likely.  The problem is that I am a procrastinator and slow on some decisions.  Yeah, 3.5 years seems like a long time but it'll take me four to get ready. Plus I still have decades of marital property from a larger house than I live in now and I plan on an even smaller one up north. Time to cull the herd of objects. Blog or cull? Blog or cull? Cull.

5. Reading.  How many quantitative retirement finance papers can I read before diminishing returns (in terms of what I learn or what interests me) kick in? Evidently a lot. Here is about half the collection in my garage...

but as fascinating as the subject can be, I do actually have other interests and on the margin one more paper is an opportunity cost on my reading time and capacity. Oh, and I have kids, too.  And a nice gf.  What else would I read? Well, it's all over the place. Stuff like:

- The Sanction series
- A brush up on the Old Testament (e.g., Isaiah, Job) and some Christian apologetics
- A book on the history of the English Language by JL Borges
- A book on some lectures on Proust given in a soviet prison camp
- A work on a weird political philosophy
- Some intro statistics
- Some misc holes in my reading of the Canon (though the canon is so maligned these days)

Basically at this point it is a queuing problem.  My in-pile is growing faster than the out pile and Ret-fin reading intrudes into the black-box in the middle. Here is my in-pile, or part of it anyway:

That's the ret fin stuff I pulled out and put on the floor. My painting is in the back. Forgot about art.  That's another post.

6. Living. What is the point of retirement if not to live life rather than write another R-script and cower in the closet of fear.  So I've been doing that living thing. If I were to tie 1-6 into one tidy summary, it'd look like this:

While I am quite proud of what I have accomplished as an un-credentialed and un-PhD'd amateur, I'd also have to say the pic above beats blogging by a long long mile.  Hence my remiss-ness. Might be back, might not.  We'll see....