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sat posted: Sat 2017-08-26 16:00:46 tags: motion
Checked out Bonnie's pics from Scotland
Gave up on having the theater experience of "Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets"

For a long time I had "lottery savings match" on my "to-do" list. But $3 or even $10 per week to savings is underachieving. Retired that action item, and started the process of linking accounts preliminary to a scheduled cycle of automatic transfers from checking to brokerage.

I've put a lot of thought into budgeting, retirement savings, how much would I have to have stashed to live off the interest, etc. The bottom line is - by far the biggest single chunk of living expense is housing, and "pile up savings until the interest pays that expense" is the WRONG model for housing expense planning. The RIGHT model is mortgaging a homestead and paying down the mortgage aggressively so you own it by retirement. As a corrollary, it does make sense to build an income-generating investment fund to cover property taxes and inevitable home repairs (depreciation) - plumbing, hot water heater and A/C breakdown, periodic extermination etc. And then as a homeowner there are utility expenses that we take for granted as renters - water, internet. (The solar cat is out of the bag - electricity will collapse or shift to a home depreciation factor.)

Had a good chat with Miss Cupcake's mom about advancing our relocation dialogue.

Picked up Haugk's grief book 2 "Experiencing Grief" again. It wasn't saying much to me until I reached chapter 8, "The Year of the Firsts", and upcoming is my first birthday that Mom won't be sending me a card, then her first birthday I won't be calling her, the first Christmas etc. That opened the emotion valve for a bit.

Transcribed a couple pages of 1993 journals

Thinking about what makes one area better than another, strictly economically - it comes down to median income vs. cost of living. Lifehacker has a 2015 article that breaks it down. Obviously these numbers shift over time, but barring massive disaster, no place is going to slip from top-tier to a bad move in just 2 years.

The Lifehacker article, or rather the Experian static infographic it points to, doesn't do much to let you sort by the most desirable piece of information: the ratio of local median income to local cost of living. A slideshow-type article on Forbes' really freaking annoying site says the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro area is #11 among the top 15. Austin TX topped CBS News' 2016 "Moneywatch" top-10 report; Durham NC was #4.

Tinypulse blog: 25 Cities with best cost-of-living ratio
#17: Charlotte, NC; #25: Raleigh, NC