Archive for November 2011
Financial Planning Akin to Root Canal
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
If you think preparing and maintaining a financial plan is akin to a visiting your dentist, you’re in a big club.
More than 80 percent of Americans hate or only do financial planning because they have to, like cleaning the garage or the toilet bowl, according to a nationwide NFO Research Inc. survey of 1,000 adults aged 19 – 64.
More than half said they don’t feel confident about making good decisions, don’t understand numbers, or are afraid of what they might find if they examine their financial picture too closely.
“It’s hard to feel confident in your ability to manage your finances if you feel like you don’t make enough money,” said Randy Schuldt, a vice- president with IHate-FinancialPlanning.com, a website designed for people who dread financial planning. The survey was conducted by his firm.
Rather than shut down your economic engine, the company suggested you prepare for you financial future just as you would for a cross-country trip.
Just as you wouldn’t leave on such a trip without a road map, you should prepare and maintain a household budget to track daily spending, saving, and investing, and a financial plan to map out long-term financial goals.
Fifty percent of Americans maintain a household budget and only slightly more balance their checkbooks monthly, according to survey results, and more than 65 percent have never worked with a financial planner.
We hire plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics to handle complicated repair problems but avoid seeing a financial professional to help with one of the most important aspects of our lives – finances, according to company spokepeople..
Survey figures present a rather bleak picture. Almost 20 percent of the respondents said they never learned how to do financial planning. Less than 5 percent actually took a course or seminar on the subject. The remainder said they learned about financial planning on their own by watching their parents or television, reading books and magazine articles, or from a friend or sibling.
Thirty percent said their parents never talked to them about money.
The survey revealed it often takes a serious life-altering event, such as a job-loss, having a baby, winning a lottery, or sending the children to college, to make people focus on their finances.
The purpose of financial planning, Holman said, is to reduce the stress in such situations.
While many Americans try to save money, they sabotage their efforts with too much debt and not investing in the best financial vehicles.
Almost a quarter of the survey respondents admitted they had too much credit-card debt, 14 percent do not have any money saved anywhere, and 12 percent are not putting anything away for retirement despite the fact that more than half said they’ll need at least $1 million for retirement.
Less than half contribute to a retirement account at work and 30 percent save money, whether its in coins or dollars or in a cookie jar at home — about the same amount that invest in stocks.
To curb the amount spent, nine out of 10 respondents said they clip coupons, 70 percent eat leftovers, and 60 percent buy items only when they’re on sale. What do they spend their money on? The number one financial pleasure is eating out, followed by spending too much on holiday gifts, and splurging on clothes.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
Well, they’ve opened the cages…
… and those critters who didn’t make it into Congress are now trying to occupy something. Anything!
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Regarding these early Christmas tunes…
… I love the music, but I can’t get a Handel on them.
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Legends Thrive off Italian Coast
By Igor Lobanov
Mature Life Features
VALLETTA, Malta ‑‑‑‑ Long popular with vacationing royalty and artists from across Europe, this rock‑bound bastion 50 miles south of Sicily remains an enigma to many North Americans.
A balmy year‑round climate bathes a land whose legacy is rooted in temples a thousand years older than Egypt’s Pyramids at Giza and branches through classical Greece and Rome to the palaces of a patrician unit of Christian crusaders.
The Apostle Paul was shipwrecked here. Arabs occupied the outcropping in 879, followed by the Normans. Napoleon dropped by for six days and his troops hung around for a couple of years until sent packing by the English. Britain’s Royal Navy operated out of the island’s superb natural harbors for a century and a half before the Maltese finally attained their independence in 1964. But it was the Sovereign Military Hospitaler Order of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as the Knights of Malta, whose influence is most heavily felt.
Our cruise ship arrived after dark and we made sure we were on deck as the harbor pilot led the vessel to the quay. As we nosed past the breakwater into the island capital’s narrow harbor entrance, we were confronted by the massive spotlighted star‑shaped Fort St. Elmo to the right and the spear‑like walls of Fort San Angelo to the left whose towering ramparts take on a creamy yellowish glow.
The Knights of St. John, ousted from the Holy Land by the Ottoman Turks and then from the island of Rhodes by Suleiman I (The Magnificent), were invited here in the mid‑16th century by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who saw Malta as the pivotal bulwark to blunt a Moslem invasion of Southern Europe. The newcomers fortified the island and withstood a brutal four‑month Turkish siege in 1565. Over the next 2 1/2 centuries, they created a place that Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott called “a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen.”
The Renaissance grid of narrow streets holds palaces, municipal buildings, and churches, many still honeycombed with secret passages. The soaring Co‑Cathedral of St. John, with its high‑baroque ornamentation, has a marble floor quilt‑pattern of mosaics that covers the tombs of some 350 knights. A museum houses treasures “liberated” from all over the Mediterranean by the far‑ranging cavaliers. On a wall of the Oratory is Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio’s chilling masterpiece, “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.”
Perched on a mountain spur 160 miles away high above the Ionian Sea on the northeast coast of Sicily is Taormina (see map). Medieval stone buildings hug cobblestone streets and unexpected portals reveal views past flowering gardens to the deep blue waters where Homer set his tales of Neptune, Ulysses, and the Cyclops.
A favored residence of wealthy Roman patricians for centuries, its quixotic Piazza IX Aprile overlooking the sea is its social center where folks gather in coffee, gelato and marzipan or participate in the lassiggato, the traditional Latin evening stroll.
The piazza is framed by a couple of churches and a clock tower dating from the Middle Ages that serves as a gateway to the medieval sector. Narrow lanes lead to views of the villa‑strewn hillside above and the sea below. A few small squares with bars and other meeting places are interspersed with shops catering to the chic crowd.
Carved into a hillside on the northeastern fringe of town is the town’s treasured Greco‑Roman theater that dates back to the 3rd century BC. The Greeks built it for classical plays and musical events and the Imperial‑age Romans transformed it into an amphitheater for gladiator contests, hunting spectaculars, and even naval battles on a flooded stage.
Today”s audiences at summer concerts and other events still have a grandstand view past the stage to the sea and the largest active volcano in Europe: Sicily’s Mt. Etna.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
‘Tis the holiday season …
… better known as “It’s Debt Time of Year Again.”
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Slip-Sliding into Park City
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
PARK CITY, Utah —- It’s simple to assess whether or not you’ve achieved Success here. It’s the title of a trail at the world-renowned Deer Valley Resort that lets you know when you’ve graduated from beginner to intermediate skier.
I arrived as a senior hoping to stand up all the way down a hill and left as an intermediate skier after enjoying Success several times. The 20-or-so-minute run also is embraced by clusters of multi-million-dollar condominiums designed to accommodate those considered to have mastered financial success.
Such moneyed manifestations should not deter you from considering this mining town-cum-ghost town-cum ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains as a focus for fun and, perhaps, a site to settle down.
That’s what a sizeable – some estimates reach as high as 500 – ex-Delta Air Lines crew members decided who have re-located here, according to ex-captain Rich Dolan. During a break in his day as a volunteer Mountain Host at Park City Mountain Resort, where you can grab a lift that begins right in the heart of town, he explained that he retired here in 1991 after visiting for a dozen years. His remuneration for volunteering a day a week to assist anyone who looks dismayed or dumbfounded is a season’s ski pass, which runs around $1,500.
During the no-snow season, he resorts to tooling around on his motorcycle. “The weather here is great,” he said. “There are no bugs — no flies — because of the altitude. You don’t need air conditioning. And it’s not as cold as Colorado or Montana or British Columbia. It’s a dry cold. You can’t make a snowball here,” he said. It’s been reported that you can clear your yard of snow with a leaf blower, all 500 inches – more than 40 feet – that falls each year.
Should skiing and snowboarding become boring, you can slip off for fly fishing in the nearby Green River to catch your lunch. Yep, they don waders and slosh into the frigid waters at any time of year to snag tasty trout for their plates and palates.
You can do a triple play here in one day: ski in the morning, golf in the afternoon, and then go fly fishing. That’s usually about March. While this kind of life and living draws folks here, the accessibility of both the bright lights of Salt Lake City and its airport just 30 minutes away are also attractions.
For the lazy or less adventurous who still hunger for fish, the Deer Valley seafood buffet is lauded long and loud by both neighbors and newcomers. Deer Valley has been described by some as a cluster of fine restaurants with ski slopes attached to them.
But you don’t have to ski to the dining lounge. You can drive up. Or you can hike or bike up in summer when the ski lodges surrounding this community are open to an array of non-snow-season activities that include rock-climbing, and horseback and scenic lift rides.
Deer Valley limits the number of its daily ski-lift tickets in winter to 6,500 – the number of seats in its restaurants – so no one will have to pass up a comfortable lunch or dinner. It and neighboring Alta do not permit snowboarding on their slopes.
For the more sedate, a stroll through the community is a hike through history. There are the mines that flourished after federal troops were sent here in the 1850s to quell any possibility of a rumored secession. As many as 350 mines were producing silver, copper, lead, zinc, and a little gold. All this activity dwindled to dust in the late 1800s and the community was little more than a ghost town when it sprang back to life in the 1950s as winter sports began growing in popularity.
A mine elevator still takes skiers to a summit and many of the mines now produce “liquid gold” – water that has filled several tunnels and is piped into Park City faucets.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2009
Beware of Greeks …
… receiving gifts, to apply a present-day twist to an ancient adage.
Instead of disarming their foes with the legendary gift of a large wooden Trojan horse, their leader turns his back on a bailout by their friends in the European Union and threatens to topple the entire global economy.
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Mature Life Features 