Joan’s Boomer Blog

Creative Commons License photo credit: Gastón Nievas

How to you get rid of chronic inflammation? Here are some tips from Body Ecology, including foods to eat and foods to avoid.

I’ve been busy traveling for most of December or busy with the holidays, so I haven’t given an update on my

Natural Neuropathy Treatment

trip to the neurologist for test results. I had some blood tests for possible causes of the small fiber neuropathy I’m experiencing.

Nothing can wreck havoc on retirement like developing health issues as we get older. Actually, those issues have probably been developing for many years, but they can grow debilitating in our senior years.

Thousands of people suffer from some form of neuropathy, which causes tingling, pins and needles and numbness, mainly in the hands and feet. It can be caused from a medical condition, such as diabetes or a thyroid problem, vitamin deficiencies and other reasons. Small fiber neuropathy can cause the tingling sensation throughout the body. For some forms of neuropathy there is no obvious cause.

Treatment depends on the cause, if it can be determined. If not, a neurologist will prescribe various drugs which work on the nervous system to dull the symptoms (and they dull some of the rest of you too!) but don’t really treat the cause.

As it turns out, all the tests I took (and have ever taken for neuropathy) were totally normal so I was back to square one as to cause and treatment. As always, my neurologist couldn’t offer me any real advice, except that at some point, if I wanted to try drugs, he could prescribe some. Having spent some time looking up possible side effects to those drugs, though, I think I’d have to be pretty bad off to actually subject my body to that.

As readers know, I believe in researching our own health issues so we know the latest on alternative treatments and remedies which might be helpful. I decided to try something called Nerve Support Formula for Relief of Peripheral, Diabetic & Poly Neuropathy Nerve Pain, which is a natural remedy.

I did my own test for the effectiveness of Nerve Support on my neuropathy symptoms. I took one bottle per the directions for 30 days and my tingling did seem to be better. I decided to stop taking it to see what happened and the tingling got worse in a few days. I decided to order another bottle and start taking it again and, after a couple days, the symptoms diminished again.

You’re supposed to start by taking four capsules per day and over time, when your symptoms lessen, you can decrease the dosage to maintain the improvement.

If you suffer from neuropathy, it’s important to see your doctor to find out if they can determine a treatable cause. In many cases, though, even if you do know the cause and are treating it, the neuropathy symptoms remain.

The information on this product says it can help many people, no matter what the cause of their neuropathy. It did work for me and I think it would be worth it for anyone with neuropathy to try before taking medications which only handle symptoms and don’t really treat the cause.

Ordering through Amazon, you can also get free shipping.

When I was growing up, my teenage crushes weren’t on musicians like the Beatles, although most of my

World Series 2010 National Anthem

friends loved them. My secret passion in high school was the Los Angeles Dodgers, and watching Sandy Koufax pitch was the highlight of my life. I was raised on the West Coast and back then, all you got to watch was the Saturday game of the week and play off and World Series games, unlike today when you can watch any team, any day of the week.

I would have given anything to go to a live World Series game back then and seen Sandy Koufax pitch in person. I even had a scrap book of newspaper clippings that is probably still floating around my parents house.

Since those years, we’ve become Texas natives and have gone to quite a few Texas Ranger games. This year was THE year for the Texas Rangers. We went to one of their playoff games against Tampa Bay and it was a thrilling experience! In this particular game, they didn’t start losing til the 8th inning so the crowd was wild with every pitch.

Fast forward to now. The Texas Rangers are actually going to their first World Series appearance ever and my daughter’s boyfriend managed to get four tickets. I had a chance to go but, of all things, I also have airline tickets for my semi-annual visit to see my parents in Oregon. When I made the airline reservations, I never dreamed the Rangers would actually make it.

Rangers in the World Series 2010

I looked into changing my airline reservation and it was going to cost over $200 to change it - a rip off by the airlines, by the way! I gave up the idea for a while but then my son-in-law (who would have gotten my ticket if I didn’t go) convinced me I should go ahead and do it and hang the cost. He said they’d even pay half as a Christmas present. My husband also wanted me to just pay the money and change the ticket so I could go to the World Series with him - what a nice guy!

This morning I checked with my parents to make sure they wouldn’t mind my putting off my trip. After all, even the World Series isn’t worth upsetting my parents for. However, they too were very supportive, as long as I came at a later date.

So, here I am, $273 poorer but going to the World Series, game 4. If there is any justice in the world, the Rangers will sweet San Francisco and I can actually see them win!

I think in life, sometimes you just have to go for it and hang the monetary cost! You can’t put a price tag on some of life’s most thrilling experiences and I think this is going to be one of those experiences for me.

When you retire, you may need some extra retirement income and what better way to make it than doing

One of my most recent beaded creations.

what you love? Turning a hobby into retirement income may seem like a good way to go and there are many ways you can go about it.

Retirement gives us lots of time, hopefully, to pursue those hobbies we’ve picked up over the years. But after you’ve knitted a dozen scarves, made a bunch of woodworking do-dads or turned your beautiful photos into posters, what do you do with all of them? Everybody in my family now has a knitted scarf and hat so turning my passion for knitting into profit might be the next step.

Keep in Mind:

1.  If you want to turn a hobby into a business, once your hobby becomes “work” it may not seem like as much fun.

I used to have a passion for bead work and created some beautiful (if I do say so) pieces. I worked in a bead store and taught classes and soon I was sitting at a booth at a craft fair selling my wares. Production work isn’t like beadiing, or doing any craft, for fun. If you’re going to do a craft fair, for instance, you need a certain amount of stock. Your wrists and hands begin to hurt, your shoulders have knots in them and your eyes are burning. Not so much fun.

2.  If you are going to rely in any way on the money you make from your hobby, realize that you still have to spend money for supplies, entries into craft fairs, etc, so your profit margin may not be that big.

I spent more than I ever made, I think, on beads, yarn, etc, for any hobby I tried to turn into a business. If you have a real passion for your hobby, you’re likely to spend more. The flip side of this, of course, is that if you want a real business and you make some money, you can deduct many of your supplies on your taxes.

If you’re still sure you want to turn your hobby into an income producing business. Here are some steps to take.

Start by Assessing:

1. What is your skill level? – Whatever your hobby, can you make them quickly, in quantities and make your product look professional?

2. How much time do you want to devote? Making enough items for a craft fair, for instance, is very time-consuming. If you decide to create a website or online store, you also have to devote time to that as well.

Next:

1. Find a Niche market – Rather than trying to be all things to all people, it’s easier to make a profit if you cater to one niche, or group of people, and be specific. Take knitting, for instance. You could make your pieces from organic yarn. You could stick to baby clothes or blankets. You could specialize in prayer shawls or knit only with hand painted, hand dyed yarns.

Specialize in knitted baby hats

Knitting examples are easy for me because that’s what I love doing but if you are a photographer you could specialize in nature photography, scenery, animals, cute puppies, whatever. If you do woodworking, you could specialize in wooden toys, fancy shelves or cradles.If you make candles, you could make only soy or natural fragrances.

4. Research your market – Who is your competition and how do they manage their businesses? Visit some craft fairs and see if you can spot a niche that needs to be filled and talk to others who are doing what you want to do. Crafters are generally very helpful and nice people. Try to find a  niche that is popular but where the competition is less.

5.  Decide HOW you will sell your product. Are you willing and able to spend your weekends holding down the fort at your craft fair table? Are you willing to travel to get to craft fairs? You can also sell with a website such as Etsy.com or Artfire.com. Setting up an online store is free on these sites which feature only handcrafted items. They just take a small percentage on what you sell. Keep in mind too that people are paying through pay pal usually and pay pal also takes a percentage of your profits so price accordingly.

6. Once you decide on just what you will make, set up a plan and choose some goals - How much money would you like to make? Just enough to pay for your own materials? Enough to pay for one of the household bills or give you some money for that extra trip? It’s important to know the purpose for your hobby business.

Other Ways to Profit from Your Hobby

Write about Your Hobby

Even if you don’t get into production, you can still profit from your hobby. One way is to create a blog or website and put some affiliate ads on it. You can talk about books or products you like or don’t like and if giving a good recommendation, sell it via the Amazon.com affiliate program or a google adsense account, or find your own companies to represent.

If you would like to create a for profit blog, I can highly recommend the program The Niche Blogger. The Niche Blogger is a subscription site so you can set up your blog, or blogs, and then cancel anytime. The Niche Blogger takes you from step one, day one, through the entire process of creating a self-hosted wordpress blog. A blog like this will only cost you about $10 a year to keep online.

The Niche Blogger can help you choose a niche topic for your hobby as well so it is most likely to be profitable.

Write an ebook About Your Hobby

If you’ve been doing your hobby for a while, or you’ve gotten into a good niche, you probably have a lot of expertise in that area. Consider writing an ebook that will help others enjoy the same passion for the hobby that you do. The Niche Blogger program does into exactly how to create an ebook and market it, I think around month 4-5 of the program.

Teach Classes

If you’d like interacting with others and sharing your hobby, contact your local craft store, like Michaels or Joanns, or your local hobby store. Find out if they have a need for a teacher or there is a special technique that they don’t currently offer, that you could teach.

You can also create podcasts and teach online (again, this is covered in The Niche Blogger Program)

Other Resources for Starting a Craft Business

How to Create an Etsy Store to sell your knitting online

How to Create An Artfire Store to make money knitting.

If you’re interested in knitting for profit, Liz Raad has written a terrific ebook on Knitting for Profit. Liz also has a helpful newsletter for those wanting to learn how to make a living from knitting and sign up is free.

The Savvy Crafters Guide To Success: Turn Your Crafts Into A Career

Another good resource for turning any type of hobby into income is Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making Money with Your Hobby which takes you from A to Z.

If you want to turn your hobby into retirement income, realize that there will be work involved in making it successful. However, the fact that you are able to spend your days focusing on your passion, makes it different than any other “job.” You’ll have fun and probably make a lot of new friends along the way.

Broken Birds - The Story of My Momila by Jeannette Katzir is a book about author’s life up in a dysfunctional family of five siblings, headed by her mother Channa and her father, Nathan, both Holocaust survivors. The premise of the book is that the many problems of the children were the direct cause of the suffering her parents endured when they were young.

As baby boomers, most of us had parents who grew up in the shadow of World War II and the Great Depression. During the early years of Katzier’s story, my mother was one of 6 children whose family struggled with too little money and the prospect of war looming. To this day, she keeps an over-flowing pantry and two freezers full of food stored up for some possible day of shortage. Those years affected her views of money, family and many other things.

My father too was a survivor of the depression years and a 17 year old Marine at the start of the war. He survived three years in the Pacific Islands, seeing more death and horror than anyone should ever have to see in an entire lifetime. He was physically wrecked for most of the rest of his life from those three years of starvation and deprivation. All his life, he suffered from what would now be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but back then, men were just told to buck up and get over it.

These experiences made my parents stronger, if less tolerant of weakness in others. They are toughened and hardened but when it came to family, my parents were determined that we would never suffer from anything they’d lived through in the past.

I’m sure most boomers have experiences and memories passed down to them by their parents which helped to form them into the people they are today. The question that arises from Katzir’s book is what causes some to rise above the suffering and horrible memories of their past to become better people and parents and what causes others to pass their bitterness and anger to the next generation, continuing that hold of evil from the past?

Another point that came up for me was - when do you stop blaming your parents for your own miserable life and take responsibility for how you live each day?

When I was studying for my degree in history, World War II and Nazi Germany was one of my areas of interest so the early story of Channa and Nathan was a familiar one to me. Channa was born in a small town in Poland and was just a young child when the German army took over. She was 12 when her father was taken away, never to return, while her mother and sister and her brother Issac, with his wife and small children, were forced into a ghetto. When Issac’s wife and children were killed in a pogrom, he took Channa with him to join the partisans in the forest where they survived for two years.

Returning to their home town, they found all their family gone and eventually, brother and sister made their way  to America.

The author’s father, Nathan, was born in Czechoslovakia and his experiences are condensed into a fairly short chapter. His family was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where his entire family perished in the death camp the first day. Nathan survived the gas chamber selections and beatings and eventually sent on a work detail to the Warsaw Ghetto, to clean up the rubble left by the Jewish uprising there which led to its ultimate destruction. The allied army was coming closer so Nathan was sent to Dachau, where he managed to escape.

Nathan and Channa eventually came separately to America, where they met married. This background information on the author’s parents would be a story all unto itself if it were delved into thoroughly but it actually takes up only about 75 pages of this 373 page book. The rest is devoted to what happened to the author, and her family relationships with her two brothers and two sisters.

The author’s premise is that the dysfunctional nature of their family (constant fighting and bickering over seeming petty issues) was caused by her parents being Holocaust survivors. One way you could look at this book is how horrific experiences early in life affect your life and parenting skills later on. Channa lost all her family, except for the brother she ended up fighting with continually, so she clung passionately to her husband, constantly in fear that he would leave her. Her jealousy and constant complaining put a wedge in their marriage and harmed her children.

On her husband’s side, when he hit her and put bruises on her, Channa told her children and their spouses that it was just the lot of a wife to endure this treatment. What’s more, she told her daughters that they should expect such treatment in their own marriages.

As a mother, Channa was sadly lacking. She actually told her children she didn’t want them to be successful because then they wouldn’t need her anymore. She loaned money to certain children to buy homes and start businesses and not to others, setting up rivalries between them as they learned to equate money with love. Channa told the author if she wanted to catch a man she needed to “look trashier.”

Channa’s five children had battles with each other all through their lives but some of that was also brought about by greedy spouses whose parents presumably were not in the Holocaust. These siblings entered into business agreements with each other and then fought over them, going to petty levels to get back at each other. It seemed they constantly expected more from each other than they could ever get.

At one point, the author was using her sister’s addrss to send her children to a better school. When the sister got angry over something, she informed the school that these children did not live at her address, causing a rift that was brought up again and again as the author continued to be angry over it.

The final part of the book is actually about what happened after Channa’s death. When she dies, she totally cuts her husband out of her will, leaving the entire estate pretty much to her youngest son - who in the view of the author was always her parents favorite child. Left destitute by his wife, Nathan quickly marries again, setting off another set of problems.

Once Channa is dead, the author finds out that actually the father she’s pitied all these years because of her mother’s treatment of him, isn’t really a very nice guy after all and by everyone focusing on the mother, he got away with being a petty, angry person in his own right.

Since the family had settled in southern California, just one of the homes Channa owned was worth over $1 million dollars and for the rest of the book, we are treated to a blow by blow description of the legal procedures and even the emails these quarrelsome siblings exchanged, spewing anger and hate at each other as they fought over the proceeds of their mother’s estate.

Most of the book, this part included, is a “he said, she said” sort of thing, seen only from the author’s view point. As a person who has been involved in various family disputes over the years, I know there is more than one side to any story and it would be interesting if each sibling wrote their own book, I think, because we aren’t getting their side in this story.

All in all, I think the author is trying to analyze the reasons why her family is so dysfunctional and the fact that her parents are Holocaust survivors is a convenient rack to hang that hat on. I imagine all of her life, she’s made excuses for her parents based on this fact of their early lives. As she gives them this excuse, she is also giving herself and her siblings an excuse for their own behavior. Her parents were “broken birds” who passed their brokenness on to their children, who, apparently had no say in how they live their own lives 65 years afterward.

The book is interesting in that most of the time, we read about Holocaust experiences but not about what happened later to the survivors - how they raised families and handled their terrible memories. However, I would be willing to bet than a great many survivors managed to rise above these experiences to become loving parents to their children, trying to make their own children’s lives better than their own had been.

Granted, my parents experiences would be considered mild to a Holocaust survivor but the fact remains that many people have difficult and even horrible experiences in their younger years and it doesn’t turn them into petty, quarrelsome people who would stab their brother or sister in the back for a few dollars.

Perhaps  the way each individual handled the Holocaust and its aftermath has more to do with the kind of person they were to begin and how they decided to live their lives than it did the terrible experiences they lived through. That is a decision each and every person must make in their lives, Holocaust survivor or not.

What kept me reading this book? Honestly, I was hoping that the author and her siblings would realize they needed to forgive - both their parents and each other - and move on to some sort of healthier resolution of their family issues but alas, this was not to be.

Did your parents’ past affect the kind of parents they were? Do you think your parents’ past can still affect you today?

About a month ago, my husband and I started taking a Tai Chi class for beginners. For baby boomers Tai Chi is the perfect form of exercise because it builds muscles, keeps joints flexible, reduces stress, helps you sleep soundly at night and improves balance - all through breathing and a series of slow, smooth flowing movements that are easy on your body.

Tai chi is an ancient art, often described as meditation in motion. The focus is on practicing the precise movements which flow one into another without pause, in coordination with the breath. Besides these postures or forms, there are also many exercises to help move the chi, or life force energy, throughout your body, creating good physical and mental health.

I’ve always wanted to try tai chi and our first series of classes was in the Qigong, which, I think is less precise in the movements than other forms of Tai Chi. We learned some wonderful meditations in this class too, which focus on clearing chakras, or energy centers in the body, and bringing chi to the various organs of the body.

I found another Tai chi class for beginners at the local Y where I also take yoga. This is Tai Chi in the Yang style which is extremely precise and really makes you feel like a klutz at first. I can do the arm movements and the foot movements pretty well but do them at the same time will take some practice!

What I’ve found in learning tai chi is that this is a journey which has no ending. Many spend months on just one movement to perfect it. One of the important benefits of Tai Chi is that besides being a physical journey, it’s also a spiritual journey and you learn some surprising things about yourself along the way.

If you haven’t tried Tai Chi, or you are a beginner, you may see it being performed and think “How could Tai Chi really be good exercise?” Let me tell you, you definitely feel it in every muscle but the body moves as one piece so there is never strain put on any one muscle or joint. Along the way, you also focus on deep breathing.

After a few classes, you find you’re standing straighter, breathing deeper, feeling stronger and more energetic. I’ve been sleeping better than I have in years.

Besides taking a Tai Chi class for beginners, you can also learn the basics of Tai Chi and receive the benefits from Tai Chi DVD’s. Here are some that we’ve collected and use daily:

Qigong Beginning Practice -A 2 cd set featuring instructors Francesco and Daisy Lee-Garripoli. One cd is a PBS special on Francesco’s journey to China and his discovery of the QiGong exercises in his video. Done with voice over before a beautiful lake, the exercises are easy to follow and perform. You definitely feel the benefits of this Qugong work out. We’ve been doing this one twice a week but you could certainly do it daily for more benefits.

We have two Tai Chi dvd’s by David Dorian Ross:

A.M. and P.M. T’ai Chi With David-Dorian Ross and CJ McPhee

T’ai Chi Beginning Practice

David Dorian Ross is a wonderful instructor and between these two Dvd’s we have several practices for daily use. The AM/PM dvd also has a great option for morning when your body needs waking up, and evening, when you need calming for good sleep.

We don’t yet own Energy Boost for Seniors With Chi but it’s next on our shopping list.

One thing about Tai Chi for beginners is that your practice becomes about perfecting the moves and making them second nature so you never really get tired of any one dvd or workout.

Tai Chi is one form of exercise that you could do well into your elder years.

Read more about how lack of sleep can make you obese and forgetful!

Read more about the benefits of Tai Chi for stress management.

I just discovered a terrific website where you can find out, not only what happened in your birth year, but in the decade of your birth. I was born in 1950. All About Eve won best picture, Judy Holliday won best actress for Born Yesterday and Jose Ferrer won best actor for Cyrano de Bergerac.

Beat the Clock and Jack Benny were on TV and the song Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy topped the music charts in my birth year.

The credit card was invented the year I was born too. In the 1950’s people mostly lived on the cash they had, which wasn’t always much but they weren’t in debt either.

In 1950, Snoopy the cartoon character, Jay Leno and Stevie Wonder were born the same year as I was too.

There is some info about the decade of the 50’s too when the economy was on the upswing and the Cold War and Anti-Communism consumed the news.

Reading about what happened in the year and decade I was born brought back some great memories! Not the Cold War part, of course, but looking back, even the Cold War seems kind of tame compared to terrorism. At least we knew who the “enemy” was then.

I look at the 1950’s as the last time of innocence for young people. I was a teen in the 60’s and by the end of that era, there was the Viet Nam War, drugs and a social revolution going on that forever changed that youthful naivete we used to have.

What happened the year you were born? Just click here and type in the year you’d like to revisit.

If you’re a baby boomer, your kids have left home and you have a dog, you know you’re getting older when

We have photos of the grandkids in the bluebonnets too so why not our dog?

your dogs become your “kids.” We always had a family dog when the kids were growing up. She was a great dog and we loved her but she was always just kind of “there.” In our household though, as the kids progressively left home, we started filling it up with rescued dogs and cats, until, at one point, we had 4 cats and 2 dogs. I even volunteered at the local animal shelter.

When I started volunteering, my husband told me specifically, “Don’t bring any animals home with you!” I did a very good job of ignoring all those hopefully doggy faces until our youngest daughter left home for college then I got hooked by this one little wall-eyed puppy, the last of a litter of six puppies which had been at the shelter for a month. In that county shelter, dogs and puppies who had been there too long were routinely put down on Fridays, which was the worst part of volunteering there. I never helped with that, of course, but I knew about it, which was bad enough.

As a reporter for an Oregon online new website, I’d attended a seminar on pet therapy and I thought that would be a great way to spend my time now that the kids were gone. Surely adopting a puppy was a good way to get into this, although you couldn’t be sure you’d get a dog with the right personality for this type of work.

Who could resist this little face?

Anyway, with the best of intentions, I decided to take this one little puppy home for the weekend, telling myself I just wanted to socialize it and see what happened - or if my husband would make me take her back to the shelter:)

Needless to say, my husband not only fell in love with the puppy, Molly, he was soon out buying her her own bed, toys and other things the other dogs sure hadn’t gotten when they moved in! We always said Molly was our daughter’s replacement when she went off to college.

Fast forward 5 years and the rescued pup is still with us. During that time, my husband, daughter and I even moved lock, stock and barrel to Texas from Oregon with the four cats and now, three dogs. Would never want to repeat that trip! Also, in that time, one of our dogs and two of our cats died of old age and we somehow acquired another kitten.

Back to my original premise though - You know you’re getting older when your dogs become your babies - My husband and I aren’t the only ones in our age group to start acquiring dogs that we pamper tremendously once the kids are gone. In fact, most older baby boomers we know have some pretty lucky dogs as part of their households.

There are some negatives about adopting a dog when you’re facing retirement. If you want to travel or if you

Playing with your dog is good exercise too!

have to live on a tight budget, having a spoiled dog can sometimes be difficult. Our dogs eat high quality dog food, go to the vet regularly and have even had their teeth cleaned (never thought I’d admit that.)

On the other hand, dogs offer companionship, they love to be walked, which gets you out to the park or out to exercise on a regular basis, and you can take them traveling with you quite easily if you want to. We’re even getting an RV to travel with, just so the dogs will be comfortable!

You know you’re getting older when your dogs become your babies, yes, but in our later years we also have lots of time to devote to a dog, which we didn’t have when the kids were young and life was more hectic. Everybody needs a smiling face to greet them expectantly whenever they come home and having pets is a proven factor in healthy aging.

Do you have a dog you love like another child? I’d love to hear about it. In the meantime, if you love dogs, you might be interested in Molly’s Dog Blog. You can read about her journey from being alone and forgotten in an animal shelter to being a pampered pooch in a loving home.

I was a teenager in the 1960’s and still love listening to the music of the 1960’s. Petula Clark, Herman’s Hermits, Gary Lewis and the Playboys and the Dave Clark Five were some of my favorites back then. I even got to see Gary Lewis and the Playboys in person, wearing my white go go boots, of course!

The late 60’s were a good time to be a teen in a small town. We spent our weekends at the skating rink where they had a dance with a live band from 10pm to midnight. We cruised the strip when gas was still 25 cents a gallon and cigarettes were 25 cents a pack. Smoking was about the worst thing you could do to “rebel” and be cool.

There were a lot of good things about the 1960’s. Back then, we thought there was nothing much to do but looking back on it now, it seems like the last time when kids were allowed to be naive and innocent as they grew up.  Most mothers still stayed home with the kids, my mom made most of my clothes and I actually loved them! No name brands, no expensive toys like iPods and cell phones. We put a dime in our shoe every time we went out so we could always call home for Dad to come and pick us up if we got into trouble.

If you’re feeling nostalgic, you should check out the 1960’s hits on YouTube. Listening to that music takes me right back to those years, which seem to get better and better the older I get.

I loved this video, which covers music from 1965 to 1969, the exact years I was in high school. It shows random images from those years, like album covers, to go along with it.

Enjoy! YouTube also has music videos from other eras too so it’s easy to find your favorite.

They Can’t Tax Voluntary Simplicity - Yet!

What is Voluntary Simplicity and How Can it Help You Avoid the Coming Economic Crisis?

Voluntary simplicity has a different meaning to each person who practices it. In a nutshell, voluntary simplicity goes against the commercial culture of America which equates material possessions with happiness and fulfillment. Advocates find fulfillment in saving money, downsizing, living simply and finding ways to do for themselves.

Many who embrace voluntary simplicity live debt free, clip coupons, cook from scratch, live closer to nature and try their hand at pass times like gardening and sewing or raising their own chickens.

Maybe this isn’t you but each of us can simplify our lives and focus on saving money, rather than making money. They can’t tax you for saving $20 with grocery store coupons but that is $20 you still have in your pocket.

Is Economic Disaster and Double Dip Recession Coming?

Life as we’ve all gotten used to it may soon end. For the past 20 years, the economy has been booming mostly, real estate prices shot up, the stock market was going great guns. Then it all fell apart. My 82 year old mother recently told me when she hears the term “new normal” in relation to the high unemployment, volitile stock market and near depression-like economy, she can’t help but think that the years of the booming economy were the abnormal years.

Most of the years of my mother’s life, she knew depression, war, pinching pennies. I grew up learning thrift and tried to teach my kids the same thing, but young people really have no clue about living through a real depression.

Are you worried about what the looming economic crisis will mean for you? Are you worried about the huge tax hike coming in 2011 to pay for the exploding national debt and President Obama’s health care plan. Perhaps you have one of those “Cadillac” insurance plans, where your companies’ contribution will now be taxed as income. Dick Morris says America is facing the same financial disaster that is now occurring in Greece.

President Obama campaigned on the promise of tax cuts for those earning less than $250,000 (really all Congress would have to do is keep President Bush’s tax cuts in place - which saved our family $2,000 in taxes each year.) Yet, on June 22, 2011, House Majority Leader, Rep Steny Hoyer, acknowledged that it would be difficult to reduce long-term deficits without breaking President Obama’s pledge to protect families earning less than $250,000 a year. (See New York Times article)

My husband wants to retire. He has a military pension and a good job, which already puts us in a tax above $88,000. Anyone earning over $88,000 will be taxed to pay for the health care of those who cannot afford it. I am trying to earn extra income to supplement our retirement but unfortunately, the more I make, the more taxes we will pay.

So what is our plan? How will we protect ourselves from economic collapse? I’ve decided that I can limit my hours of working on my multiple streams of income (which is pretty much on autopilot now) and focus on pinching pennies.

• I search coupon websites and grocery ads for the best deals, buying only what we need and what is on sale.
• I rejoined our organic food co-op to get fresh organic produce for our green smoothies.
• I planted tomato plants in pots for the first time since we moved to Texas. We are currently buying land where we can grow a bigger garden.
• I dusted off my dehydrater so I can preserve food and not waste anything.
• I bought a sprouter to I can grow fresh sprouts for our smoothies. You can grow tons of sprouts for pennies, providing fresh greens for your diet.
• I am making my own kefir with kefir starter instead of buying sugar-laden and expensive yogurt.
• My husband and I are putting major purchases on hold and going on a spending fast, after reading Jeff Yeager’s Guide to Cheapskate Living (a great book with lots of voluntary simplicity tips and advice)
• We’re buying an RV to put on the land and if we need to live in it for a year or two to save money, we can do that.

We are in the process of purchasing 5 acres of land where we can have a huge garden, raise chickens and build an energy efficient house with wind and solar power. (President Obama admitted that his cap and trade bill will cause electricity prices to skyrocket and trying to break our dependence on oil could cause gas prices to go to $7 a gallon.)

All is not gloom and doom, whether the nation experiences economic disaster or not. What each person must do is be ready to live in the worst of conditions and become more self-sufficient. Try saving, not spending money. Try saving instead of increasing your income. Give voluntary simplicity a try and you will have the satisfaction of knowing you can face whatever happens.

One thing our government officials have not considered is what will happen when more and more people are willing to earn less, do more for themselves and pay less taxes? They’ve made it the sensible solution but how will the government machine survive once they’ve destroyed our economy?

Resources:

Making your own kefir is easier than you think.

Sprouting seeds at Home

Raising Chickens in Your own back yard.

Check out the many coupons and money saving articles on this blog as well.

Learn more about Living Simply