O-Dark-Thirty

We wrote our book, Preparing for the Fiscal Cliff,  at the end of 2012. At the time the term "Fiscal Cliff" kept popping up in the news, but nobody defined it, so we wrote a short book about what it was and what you could do about it. Since 2012, nothing much has changed in our governmental financial status. Well, not for the better, anyway. Congress - you know, those wonderful guys and gals supposedly working FOR us, the People? - keep kicking the financial can down the road. In July of this year, the government lifted the nation’s debt ceiling and raised the limits on what the the federal government can spend over the next two years. In other words, while most US citizens struggle in their day to day lives, our government decided they could spend more money. I guess they figure it doesn't need to come from anywhere. After all, the Treasury Department can just print more dollars. Here's an aside: Now Mr. Trump just wiped out a few hundred million do...

As most of my readers know, Darling and I published our first book on Amazon last October. In Preparing for the Fiscal Cliff we outlined some of the issues facing our country at the beginning of 2013 and listed some ideas to protect yourself from the consequences of the government-induced Fiscal Cliff. As far as I know, we were the first book on Amazon to address the issue. Very few of those issues have been addressed by our representatives in Congress, so the book is still relevant. You can get a copy free from Smashwords, but it's still 99 cents on Amazon. I published my book, My Mother-in-law Misadventures , on Smashwords last May, following it up with a version on Amazon shortly after. Both books are available on Smashwords and Amazon now, and you can even get them in paperback. Indie publishing was quite a learning experience. Smashwords just published an author's interview on me on their site . If you have other questions for me, please feel free to post them or ...

I just finished publishing the   Smashwords   edition of   Preparing for the Fiscal Cliff . Smashwords allows you to download books in multiple formats, including the Kindle format and PDF. If you didn't get the book that Darling and I wrote back in October, now's a good time. It's free, and according to my research, Amazon will eventually match the price, so it will become free on that site as well (though I have no time frame for that). So far about thirty people viewed the book and a half dozen downloaded it. Although I wanted to make the book free for quite a while, the impetus was really a learning step for my second book. I need to bring you up to date on my second book, right? I mean, I've babbled about it for a half dozen posts, so you should at least be able to follow my exploits. I'll go through the self-publishing steps in the next post, but let's talk about   FEAR . I've been writing for decades, literally since I was about five...

A million dollars for a couple of days in London and Paris for the Vice-President? Are conservatives crying wolf again? Let's remember the conservative pundits who claimed President Obama's trip to India in 2010 cost $200 million per day. That quoted cost was ridiculous and thoroughly debunked by Anderson Cooper. No one knows the actual costs, but it was probably closer to $50 million for the whole trip. We do know some figures that are not in dispute: 04-Feb-2013 Hyatt Regency London for $459,388.65 and 05-Feb-2013 Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand for $585,000.50 . Okay, I'm trying to be fair here. Mr. Biden is the Vice-President of the United States. We respect the office and that respect should reflect on the person in office. We elected him, so we owe him that. He deserves protection. A lot of people in this world are unsavory characters and might try to harm him. It probably won't be anyone working in those two hotels, though. He deserves so...

Work seems tedious to me. Don't get me wrong - I like the paycheck and I still do a good-sized workload, especially now that the Sequestration tumbled the government expenditures. Contracting companies like mine will certainly get hit hard by the government cost-cutting measures. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats. The bottom line is that most of our representatives, regardless of their political affiliation, have forgotten what it means to be a normal US citizen. They forgot how hard it is to make a living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It does seem the government wants to step in and control more and more of what we do in our private lives. Gun control? Impossible - quit pandering to the supposed poll results and try to find something you   can   do to limit the danger to the citizens. Drones? Are you kidding me? Shades of Big Brother   and   Terminator. Irresponsible spending? I wasn't a big fan of M...

I know that I have a couple relatives who read my blog regularly (thanks, ml and my great kids and my awesome brothers and Wes) but I am pretty sure that's about it. I don't understand the stats page for Blogger, so I think what I'm looking at is probably the number of times I log on and correct typos.  I don't think I'll create a big stir if I simply quit posting on my blog. I won't entirely quit. The original schedule of posting on Prime Days just isn't working for me right now. I don't know what the issue is, exactly. It feels as if there are dark clouds hanging over my head, and I don't know exactly why. So I'll try to post once or twice a week. Maybe I can get past this cloud that hovers over me. Even my happy place (Costa Rica) isn't very happy right now. I finished reading both of Nadine 's books and decided I really like the luxury of the USA. I wonder if I can afford retirement here, though. We all wonder that, don...

On a personal note, let me congratulate my friend Congressman Randy Weber on being sworn into the US Congress today. Now get to work! President Obama signed the new Fiscal Cliff bill (via autopen from Hawaii ) so it is now law. Officially the bill is called The American Taxpayer Relief Act , though I have to admit I don't feel very relieved. The PDF is 157 pages long. How does it affect average citizens?   I'll use myself as the basis for most comments - 'cuz I can't speak for anyone else, can I? By the way, this isn't intended to be entirely comprehensive. I'm not a tax guy, and certainly don't want to be. Top of the list is the two percent the government takes back after giving us a break for a few years. For the last couple years we've only paid 4.2% payroll tax on our first $113,700 earned (which is everything most of us earn). That was nice, but it's gone now, and the tax is back up to 6.2%. So if you're making $48,000 per year (or...

I tend toward Conservative, as most readers and those who know me are aware. I also try to be balanced. I won't read an article on Fox News and start spouting about the Liberal Media without also reading the same information on CNN. Sometimes it isn't in both places - and that is Liberal Media at work! Did you know Congress hasn't had a pay raise since 2009? I didn't either. You know what? Neither have a lot of teachers I know, my brother included. And a lot of other workers haven't either. And don't economists now refer to the years from 2000 to 2010 as the "lost decade" since family wealth and buying power essentially stayed stagnant for those ten years (if the families were fortunate)? President Obama feels badly for Congress and Biden and signed an executive order giving his Vice-President and members of Congress a ½% to 1% raise in salary . Now you could argue that isn't much of a raise, and I'd agree. It bumps Mr. Biden up from $22...

  Your first payroll check in January, 2013 will be two percent less. Actually, the amount the government takes out could be considerably more than that, but the 2% is practically assured. Did you know that? There’s more. A few weeks ago Darling and I attended a prophecy conference where we heard the term “fiscal cliff” from Joel Rosenberg . I’d heard the term before, but hadn’t really considered what it meant to us. Darling and I were concerned and started doing research. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of web sites that discuss the fiscal cliff, the inevitable financial crisis currently facing the United States. I read hundreds of these sites and compiled information from them. After a few dozen sites they started saying the same thing, repeated in different orders with a different emphasis (depending on the site). I read dozens of other related sites, many of them I would consider “survivalist” sites. Some of the information was good, some of it was radical ...