If you read the Daily Journal you are old, wealthy and beginning to wonder what to do with all the money, houses, sets of China, bitcoins, Krugerrands, bongo drums and National Geographic magazines you’ve accumulated.
Can’t take it with you, as they say, and what’s the point of being the richest guy buried out at the Ukiah Cemetery? Faint comfort, that.
So people our age look at their options, and the first one is to give it all to their spawn, an investment of dubious value given the li’l darlin’s expensive tastes and sloth-like ambitions. Alternate options: give everything to a megachurch in Texas, or send it to Washington to help reduce the national debt. Or set everything on fire in your backyard.
If the idea is to donate your hard-earned money to a charity go right ahead, but first do your research. Don’t mistake a do-gooder “nonprofit” agency for a charity. Giving money to nonprofits is dubious and edging toward insane.Your tax dollars already subsidize these bloated agencies, and most provide nothing beyond big salaries for politically connected loafers with less initiative and good sense than your children.
I have a better idea. Sell your house and cash in your savings. Now take most all your money and give it away. Give hundred dollar bills to anyone you meet, and $10,000 to someone who could really use it to help her family, start a business, get out of debt or pay a bill at the veterinarian.
You’ve got nice neighbors and you have a rough idea on how difficult it is for them to get by. How could a few thousands bucks hurt any of them?
Tip the bartender $100. Per drink. Think she’s getting rich working in the kinds of joints you and your friends hang out in? Do you think she enjoys the clientele and the hours? Make it $200 a drink.
And give $5,000 to whoever does your yard work. You never worked half as hard for twice as much money.
Give your car mechanic(s) lots of money. They keep your family safe in that cheap car you drive. Tip the cashiers at Safeway and Raley’s and Grocery Outlet whatever you have in your wallet at the time, every time. What do you need it for? Your next dozen eggs?
Scour the internet twice a week looking to reimburse hard luck folks whose corn or potato or pot crop was devastated by lousy weather, or give cash to someone who just got out of prison and needs the elusive first and last month’s rent, a deposit and a suit of clothes to go hunt down a job. Why not?
Give cash to your friends. Ask if they know anyone who needs money (under the table; no IRS) to meet a mortgage payment or would like to spend a weekend in Las Vegas with a few thousand bucks for cocaine and hookers.
Plus, if you hurry up and give your inheritance away you’ll be impoverished and thus eligible for free Medicare room and board at one of those old folks’ homes.
Give money now. Help your Ukiah neighbors pay increases in monthly sewer taxes they’ll soon be shouldering, courtesy of our beloved leaders.
Or go grocery shopping
Inflation continues to roll along at three percent according to the imaginative calculations of creative economists who pretend any increase in the price of gasoline is offset by the fact oxygen remains available at costs comparable to those of four years ago.
Not so the price of, say, a 16 oz. package of ground beef at Safeway, now $10, or a smallish cabbage at the Ukiah Co-op. Take a deep breath and read on.
One cabbage, on the small side: $6.50. I kept the receipt because I knew no one, least of all my wife, would believe I had spent most of a ten dollar bill on what was once peasant food, and at prices like these will soon be again.
This inevitably brings us to Costco, a store I shunned for many years because I assumed it was cheap junk in bulk. Wrong two times in two assumptions.
Costco is where you go to save money and you do, except you have to spend an enormous amount to save a few bucks. In the long run you’re ahead, but in the long run you’re also dead.
Being dead is one reason I load up at Costco every week or two. It forces me to shop in vast quantities, which means I’ll have something to leave the kids when I’m gone.
“To Lucas goes the eight Goodyear tires that would have fit our 2007 Cadillac and 26 jumbo jars of green olives. Emily gets three pallets of paper towels, rotisserie chickens and 96 cans of salted Virginia peanuts. And there’s a check for $10,000 in case you need to pay rent or make bail or whatever.
“You can split the cabbage.”
Tom Hine has been writing this weekly column 52 times a year since 2006 . He is assisted (Please hold your applause) by his imaginary playmate and voluntary typist, Tommy Wayne Kramer. Thank you.
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