You are correct Pete. Your generation hit the retirement "sweet spot:" the best of all worlds. Four of my aunts and uncles have died in the past twelve months. Each of them was fortunate to have an "ordinary" career with different companies starting immediately after WWII. Each was blessed with a couple of million in retirement plans acquired simply by going to work for the right company at the right time through the "boom" years. I tend to believe that the best "retirement plan" available to people my age and younger is to try and maintain one's health as diligently as possible and to begin preparing in other ways, more education, developing different skills, discarding "grandiose" ideas of retirement. (I need to make some more changes in that arena.) I have an unpleasant theory on what's going to happen to existing "private" retirement plans when push comes to shove. Can't elaborate. MichaelAT

It seems that some of us are retired but many are not quite there yet. A couple of tips from my own experience: - DO a budget. Even if you're terrible at that kind of thing (I am and we are). You need a good idea of what your real outgo is and what you are spending month to month on your personal 'splurges', which we all have. Accept that housing is an expense you will always have, whether you rent or own a home. Property taxes go up, water heaters go out, roofs leak, cars die of old age. Always assume you're going to live long enough to encounter major expenses of some sort. - ALLOW for inflation. Never mind the CPI, you know how prices increase and new taxes are passed that hit your pocketbook even if they never get included in the official statistics. - PRACTICE living on your retirement income. Don't assume your expenses will go down in retirement. That isn't automatic. Our expenses went up drastically in the first year, when we traveled extensively around the West. There were new casual clothes and shoes to buy, travel accessories we hadn't needed before, and a lot of very happy poor people got our expensive work clothes from free donations. We didn't even get a write-off: the standard deduction was bigger than our charitable totals. - ANALYZE the biggest risks to you NOT achieving your retirement goals. Is your health impaired? Does your family medical history send up red flag warnings? Have you budgeted for long term care costs? Is your home suitable for universal access, or would a broken leg make it impossible for you to manage by yourself for three months? Do you have sufficient retirement savings? Pensions or annuities? Social Security and Medicare eligibility assured? Did you work for any company long enough to be fully vested - because if you did, they should have sent you a letter at age 50 telling you how much you'll receive in a monthly annuity they purchased on your behalf, for which you are eligible at age 65....but they have to be able to FIND you to send you the letter. - MAKE new friends. Boomers are really the first generation to have defined themselves by their work, and to have made most of their friends in the workplace, not from community or church affiliations. It has been shown the happiest elderly are the ones who not only retain good social ties, but who develop new ones to replace old friends that move away or die. - IMAGINE worst-case scenarios. The Boomers I know who retired (or meant to) and got into financial troubles, didn't stress-test their assumptions. Playing ostrich with your retirement planning almost guarantees life will slap you in the face with a wake-up call at some point! Everyone has risks in their daily lives. It's your retirement, and therefore your responsibility, to figure out how to mitigate some of those risks. You can't eliminate all risk, but you CAN, and should, research how to lessen the bigger risks. For example, our biggest risk was the death/disability of a spouse. Being in our late 50's at retirement meant a sizable financial hit if one of us died or was disabled by serious illness/injury. Therefore, we mitigated that risk as best we could, in several different ways. Anticipating things going wrong means you will feel better prepared and more able to cope, if something does go wrong. Like being aware of the "Exit" signs in a theatre or on a plane, having a mental plan is very reassuring.

nomoreblue - I know that you know this already but just remember that it's only a house (a vessel for all our wordly crap, really!) and we're all blessed to be able to take on these dumb projects and see them through. I stupidly went on vacation about 1/3rd through our project and right before I left I discovered that to me some wall measurements were way off - I kept arguing with my project manager that something was off and that it was impacting the mudroom and powder room. He took the path of "leave the framing details to us, nothing's wrong, we're the professionals" route which did nothing but piss me off and make me worry further (losing loads of sleep). I left out of town out of family necessity but was a wreck most of the trip. I was so convinced of problems that I brought my blue prints with me and digital pictures for a reference point. Suffice it to say, too much time was spent on the phone continuing to argue the point long distance until one day my lead carpenter stepped in and realized "lo and behold" I was right! Yes, I was quite smug and had a few harsh words for my project manager. I returned to town over the weekend and was curious what our interaction would be come the next Monday. When the carpenters arrived, they were suspiciously quiet but I figured they'd heard about the exhange of words and were keeping a low profile. Soon my phone range and it was the owner of the company - I tried to lighten the moment by asking whether my project manager was hiding from me or trying to avoid eating crow. He hesitated and asked me if I had a moment....I realized that work around me had stopped and my carpenters were all looking away...the next words I heard were "He's dead." After the room stopped spinning, I learned that my PM, who was truly a great PM and wonderful guy on whom I had selfishly unleashed my stress, had taken his daughter to the beach over the weekend, was playing in the waves, felt ill, went back to lie on his towel and suffered a massive, fatal heart attack at age 50, right in front of his 9-year old and wife. I can honestly say that it no longer mattered whether the powder room was 12" wider than framed let alone whether the kitchen would be done for Thanksgiving and the arrival of my big extended Greek family. It was a tragic, tragic situation and one that really made me step back, release all my stress, frustration, disappointments, etc and take myself and the project out of the "center of the universe" role that I had allowed it all to be! So, hang in there but keep your healthy perspective and give thanks that you can be in the position you're in :-)

Those grasshoppers are not worth a broken bone, so please do be careful. Even when we had 20-25 guineas for many years, they couldn't control all the grasshoppers, so I understand. Our guineas would work their way from the front of the property (a little over 14 acres) to the back. While they were out back eating hoppers, new ones were flying into the front area. We had the biggest, fattest guineas you've ever seen, and we still had thousands of grasshoppers. In a dry year, the hoppers fly in from dry rangeland to any little spot of green that they can find. If they cannot find green plants close by, they travel and travel and travel until they do. I have seen as many as 15-20 grasshoppers per square yard in drought summers. One guinea can eat a pound or more of grasshoppers per day if they choose, but that barely makes a dent in the population in a bad year. At some point, even the guineas get tired of eating the grasshoppers and often start ignoring them and eating something else. In our worst year ever, which I think was the drought year of 2003 when we had a little under 19" of rainfall the whole year (half our average annual rainfall), the grasshoppers ate the fruit on the fruit trees, the bark on the young fruit trees, every garden plant whether it was a veggie, herb or flower, the cotton rag rugs on the front porch and even the cotton pillows on the porch screen. Oh, and they ate the fiberglass window screens on our 4-year-old house. Nothing like having to replace screens while the house still felt brand-new otherwise. We had tons of chickens and guineas and they just couldn't keep up with the endless onslaught of hoppers. Our chickens that free-range will eat some grasshoppers, but their desire to eat grasshoppers diminishes greatly as the season goes on. In the beginning, when the first hoppers show up, any chicken that catches a grasshopper has to run away with it while all the others chase behind hoping to steal it. Later on, they're all tired of grasshoppers and just walk past them on their way to find something different to eat. Mary, I hope the little calf makes it. I'm sure y'all are doing anything and everything possible to save it and I hope you succeed. I know, from being surrounded by ranchers, that sometimes you can do everything humanly possible and still have an undesirable outcome, so if the sweet little calf doesn't make it, just be satisfied that you did your best. Please keep us posted and know that I'm thinking of you and sending positive thoughts and energy your way. Dawn