Thursday Two-fer

The other day I watched the Coma As You Aren't episode of The Sopranos which is the one where  Tony is in the coma and in the coma portion of the episode he is actually Kevin Finnerty on a business trip in Costa Mesa. It all goes wrong for Kevin and at one point in the middle of it all he asks rhetorically "who am I, where am I going?"

Answering these questions can help investors properly target their savings rate, investment allocation and then their withdrawal rate. If you make $15,000 a month, just get by on $10,000 (figure $5000 goes to taxes and 401k such that $10,000 is what is left over) and part of the equation is leasing a new Mercedes every three years you're going to have a much tougher time than if you make $15,000 and can get by on $6000 as one example.

And on an unrelated note, a couple of times in the past I have titled posts The Right Tool For The Job where I make some sort of analogy to investing inspired by something from everyday life. I mentioned a few months ago that we moved within Walker to a more secluded location but that the house needed a little work before we could move in.

The other day we heard the sound of something falling, I went out side and found the above DeWalt drill on the ground after it had just slid off the roof. We obviously didn't know it had been up there since November. It stayed up there through a winter's worth of snow storms and subsequent melt offs and somehow conditions were just right from the current melt off that it finally fell down.

Fortunately it didn't fall on any people or any dogs. When I picked it up I checked to see if there was any juice in the battery and there was which is pretty amazing for being on our roof for four months. The joke of course is to wonder if we paid our contractor too much if he could afford to not look for it until it was found.

Short post, long day.