THE SPOILED ROTTEN TEST

I propose here a test to see how spoiled rotten you are, and I offer this mostly for Americans.  My exposure to the everyday variety of citizens here in Texas is that the majority of them are spoiled almost beyond belief . . . and I'm one of them.  I'm married to a spoiled rotten woman, and I have spoiled rotten kids and grandkids.  None of us are rich or even what could be called "well off."  Most Americans aren't either, but they're still spoiled.  We're so badly spoiled that we're starting to stink up the place.  Here's a test to determine your personal extent of rottenness.

1) How old and how expensive is the vehicle you drive?  Do you have more than one vehicle?  If you drive a new car (big payments) and have a second older car, you're rotten to the core, even if you can justify a need for two cars.

2) Do you live in a big house, say like 3,000 sq. ft. of living area?  Do you have nice furnishings?  If so, you're spoiled rotten, even if you can afford it.

3) Do you own at least three televisions or have more than one cell phone in the family?  Do you spend extra money on jewelry, recreation, and sporting equipment?  Do you have a budget for recreation?  If so, you're spoiled rotten.

4) What would it take to get you to live less well, say for instance half as well?  An act of God?  If so, you're spoiled rotten.

This isn't part of the test, but if you had to live on far less money could you do it?

Look, we're all under pressure to spend money, and it comes at us from all angles.  Anyone offering a service or good wants to sell it to you, and they work hard at it.  You get family pressures to spend money, and again, from all angles.  Everybody seems to need or want something, and those pressures aren't about to go away.  No, they're here to stay, and you can't go away from the pressures either . . . at least not easily.

I have a budget only in my head because I spend as much as I need.  Doing that makes life more of an obligation than a pleasure.  I wonder what it feels like to have a decent savings account?  I wonder what it feels like to have a safe supply of money left over at the end of the month?  It's not a mystery to me; I just wonder why I allow it to happen to me.  I don't have to do that.  I'm a willing victim to all the demands for my money, and that's stupid.

During my quiet hours, usually late into the night, I amuse myself looking for ways to save money, to get out from under the money mandate.  Last night I was checking our the housing market in San Felipe, Baja California.  It's a town of about 30,000 only about a two hour drive into Mexico, and lots of Americans have discovered it.  I started looking at San Felipe quite some time ago but wasn't much interested because I'm not a desert person.  There are deserts, like the lovely desert around Tucson, and then there are butt ugly, desolate, bleak deserts, like the one around San Felipe.  But there's lots of development there, quite a few homes for sale and at very reasonable prices.  Forget the fancy resort towns of Mexico because that's not what you'll find in San Felipe.  It's recreational, for sure, and the Sea of Cortez is really nice, lots of beautiful beaches.  But then, there's that desert.

I found several houses there selling for under fifty grand, and they were nice smaller homes.  Not fancy, but nice enough . . . if you can live in about a thousand to twelve hundred feet.  I see a few small houses I could simply buy outright, which is the way to go.  Just plunk down the money, and it's yours.  So, I spend fifty grand on a place like that knowing my property taxes will be almost nil, that my utilities will be a fraction of what they cost here . . . and I'd still be in a gated community where HOA fees are like fifty bucks a month.  Property and car insurance is less, and if I decide to keep using my medicare, American doctors and hospitals are not far away.  And, my outgoing money demands suddenly drop by 75 percent.  But, I'm still in that desert, so the question is:  Just how spoiled rotten am I?  I have a quick answer, which is:  Not that much.

I could do a lot of things to a property under conditions like that.  I'd have several thousand bucks a month left over, or maybe more.  Even if I jumped in big, bought one of the nicer homes in that area, I'd still be far better off financially.   But alas, I have a wife who has demands.  Have you ever tried moving a woman from a really nice house to a lesser one?  Or, try this statement on for size:  "I'm buying a house in a bleak desert in Mexico, and we're going to live off less than two grand a month."
And then, make sure your earplugs are in place.

HOW TO PISS OFF A BILL COLLECTOR

Phone rings, and you say hello.  On the other end is a bill collector.
          "Our records show that you owe us $180,000, an amount for services our hospital rendered that are now long overdue.  How do we resolve this problem?"
          "What are my options?"
          "Your option is to pay us in full."
          "Then the problem is yours because I don't have any money."
          "Then you'll have to liquidate some assets to pay us."
          "I don't have any assets either."
          "Then we'll set up a payment schedule for you to pay so much a month."
          "I don't have a job either."
          "That's your problem and not ours.  We still demand payment it full."
          "No."
          "What do you mean no?  You can't just walk away from this."
          "No means I'm not going to pay you.  If you check my records you'll see that I'm almost eighty years old.  I owe you money because of cancer treatments that didn't work.  I've got just a short time to live."
          "Then the debt will fall to your heirs."
          "How does someone who inherits nothing pay bills for a dead man?"
          "It's the law."
          "Here's a law for you called the law of averages.  I have no money or assets to leave anyone, and I don't have a wife or kids.  What is the law of averages on your chances of getting paid?"
          A long silence.  "I don't believe you.  We'll go to court to collect the money."
          "You do that, but don't be surprised when I don't show."
          "You'll go to jail if you don't appear."
          "So, who's going to dig me up?"
          Another long silence.  "This isn't the end of this."
          "It is for me."

THE PROBLEM OF TECHNOLOGICAL LAG

When a society logs behind technology we call that technological lag, and that's exactly what the U.S. and other countries are dealing with these days.  We've lived through a age of great technological advancement, and we're just not smart enough to know what to do with it.  All these modern conveniences of advanced technology are in fact killing us.  I can start off the the car, that mode of transportation that gets us around town or takes us on trips.  It's more than we can handle, and it's not like we haven't had it around for a while.  You'd think a century of dealing with cars would have taught us to use it properly, but we're still catching up.  I blame that partly on technological advancement in the industry.  It's not enough to have a vehicle that will take us where we need to go; it's all about the gadgetry these days.  I own one of those advanced machines and have developed a love/hate relationship with it.  For one thing, I don't want a vehicle that talks to me, especially when it gives me orders.  I'm not a gadgetry person.  Gadgets have robbed us of our ability to reason out how to get things done.  We don't have to do that now because the gadget does it.  They should rename the cell phone a "brain in the pocket."

Here's a good one, the social media gadgetry.  So, I got stupid and had a Facebook account for about six months.  I disabled it not long ago, and now I'm getting calls because some scam artist cloned me and is using my pic and profile to scam people . . . and, I can't do shit about it.  I can't get back on that account, but still some hacker was able to steal my identity.  Ever try getting Facebook to stop this? Forget it, they have no ears or eyes for your complaints, which makes them the real scam artist.  It's my fault because I should've known better.

Few people have learned to use the new technology without it somehow corrupting them.  So, Facebook has been ruined by scam artists, and Twitter is obviously for twits.  Electronic gadgets stole away much of our privacy, and we gave it up willingly.  Technology has turned you into a number, and the individual has been lost.  We no longer have real store clerks, just button pushers who're told what to do by the gadgets the work with.  School teachers and professors are being replaced by technology. We've even had a presidential election decided on the misuse of gadgetry - emails, texts, calls, and those infernal voting machines that can be hacked.  Are you starting to feel stupid now? You should, but you probably don't because the gadget hasn't given you permission yet.  So, go ahead and fiddle with your brain in the pocket thingie.  Look up technological lag, or check out the facts about a dumbed down public.  You can do it, so come on and look it up . . . and then we'll see if you can figure it out.

The next time someone asks you for your number, regardless of what number they want, just say, "Zero."  You'll get a dumb look, and, "No, the real number."  And you can say, "That is my real number because that's what you've reduced me to."  I paid my car payment this month using the telephone, never talked to a real person, just punched in numbers when an electronically produced voice ask for it.  Slick operation, got it done quickly, and easily . . . and I felt stupid for the rest of the day.  And, I felt a little sad that a bunch of numbers own my car instead of me.

LOOK TWICE, AND THEN LOOK AGAIN

At first glance, it might look good, but your second look is more revealing.  The reverse is also true. First looks might be negative images, and when you look again, it looks better.  I got good advice as a youngster from an old uncle who said, "Never fall in love with anything that's for sale.  If you want it too much, you'll overpay for it."  I've tried to remember that, but I've still overpaid for a lot of things, among them houses and cars.  And it wasn't necessarily the first look that got me.  I've looked at an overpriced car a half dozen times and still ended up buying it.  I did the same thing with a house, and not so much because I fell in love with the house.  The price was too good to turn down, and later on you discover why.  It was in a crappy town, and that means when you sell the home it's worth about what you paid for it.  Maybe you look at a house and get blinded to the neighborhood.  Or maybe you like the neighborhood and don't see problems with the house.  The best looking car I ever owned turned out to be a lemon.

Some years ago a friend went through a divorce, and he said, "I sure didn't divorce the woman I married."  And I said, "Who does?"  The word here, however, is projection.  We tend to project certain things onto things and people that strike our fancy, and we may or may not see the real thing or person.  We know what we want, and we mistakenly project qualities onto something that looks good.  Sometimes we do that no matter how many looks we take, and we end up disappointed. Hindsight is better than foresight, but we can make hindsight better if we do a better job with foresight.  It's a simple as asking yourself the question, "Why do I want that, and can I afford it?"

I want a house in Mexico, and I want it badly.  And yes, I'm guilty of projection when it comes to making such a move.  I know how bad I want it; I just don't know if I can afford it.  This is where the looks become very important . . . not just looks, but some old fashioned common sense brought about through intensive research.  You can never ask enough questions, and you need to ask the right people.  And then don't be too reluctant to take some good advice.  I found a place in Mexico that looked good, almost too good.  I studied as much about it as possible for a week, and started seeing things I didn't like.  It was beautiful but too remote.  It was full of American expats who were hard to live around.  It was too humid.  I found people online who'd been defrauded by opportunistic locals, and they were more than willing to talk about it.  And, I scratched it from my list.  Earlier, during the the first stages of investigation, I found a place that didn't look good.  Nice enough town and on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, but the desert was bleak.  Almost no rain, very little vegetation.  And then I find information about the developers there, Americans who've created a nice environment for retirees.  I took a second look, and then a third, and even more . . . and the more you look, the better it looks, even that butt ugly desert.  It went on my list of places to visit, and that's the best look of all. See it in person, find out all you can, and do that without the intent of falling in love with it. Sometimes you find some good things, even in a desert.

And if you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find the right deal.  Be wary of the great deal because it's usually not as good as it seems, and it's smart to take close looks at what seems overpriced.  Larceny starts in the heart of the buyer as often as it does the seller.  Somewhere in the middle there's a solution.  I'd have to say that I have few regrets about the things I paid too much money for, but I have quite a few regrets about foolish money I spent on what looked like great deals. In the end I'd rather say, "Yeah, I probably paid too much, but I still got a good deal."

THE NUMBER ONE LEARNING DISABILITY IS THE ASSUMPTION YOU ALREADY KNOW ENOUGH

Smart people, meaning the intellectuals of this world, are thought to be arrogant and snobbish by those of less intelligence.  This is a myth because the shoe is on the other foot.  I've never run across arrogance like you find with people of little education.  They seem to believe they were born with access to a smarts bank and they could write checks on it.  They believe they know enough about most things when in fact they know little about almost everything.  And they think this manifest of ignorance is all they need to claim an even footing with everyone else in society.  It seems to me that the real conservative base in this country comes from exactly this group of people, and they're no longer a minority.  Conservatism is in itself a learning disability, regardless of your educational status, but it's a good hotel for ignorance as well.  If you can't figure much of anything out on your own, especially the intricacies of government and society, you go the easy route.  You take a very narrow view of it all, and then go with that.  Couple with that the conservative's tendency to be religious, and the problem is compounded.  If there's any group out there that loves ignorance, it's fundamentalist religious groups.

All you need to do to see how easily this works is analyze a few things.  Selling Christianity to a smart person isn't easy, or at least it's a more difficult sale.  Selling conservatism to an intelligent person is likewise difficult because they see through the ruse, the total bullshit of conservative ideology.  To call something "conservative ideology" is an oxymoron because conservatism isn't based on ideas, just reactions to ideas.  Just look up the definition of the word, and that alone tells you something.  To conserve means to hold back, to save, and that also includes saving thoughts, the ideas that can generate good government and a better society.  Attach to that the impropriety of religion, and you've got a dumbed down citizen.  Are these vicious people we should worry about?  Not usually, and perhaps just the reverse is true.  Dumb dogs are lovable, and so are dumb people.  One could present a decent argument that people gravitate to what they know best - dumbness.  When I think of all the frustrating things around me, the arrogance of dumbness comes to the surface.  I suppose that's because it's so hard to ignore.

A REFRESHER ON WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER MEXICO AS A PLACE TO LIVE

I've said before, but it's always worth repeating.  Consider Mexico as a home, regardless of what your age is or what you do for a living.  It all starts with:

1) Abandon the notion that you just can't do it.  Necessity is the mother of invention, and you might need to leave here for a better situation somewhere else.  Mexico is the best option.

2) Purge your mind of almost everything you know about Mexico through American news sources.  It's mostly all bogus.  They have crime, yes, but many places there have far less crime than you live around here.  Their government is corrupt, you say?  Can you hear me laughing?  Like the one you live under here isn't?  Mexico is poor, you say?  Have you looked around lately?  It's here too, you know, and it affects upwards of half our population.  Mexico is backward?  Think of it this way: They didn't just elect a misogynist, xenophobic jerk to the highest office in the land, and we did.  I could go on and on about this, but the bottom line is:  Don't believe what you hear here, not from our press. Do your own research, go take a look for yourself.

3) Don't dive into the deep end of the pool without your floaties.  Plan adequately, make contacts, form alliances, and again, do the research.  You'll find out some interesting things.  All of them won't be good, but you'll know what you're up against and can weigh the costs of moving there against the benefits.  You'll find the benefits enticing.  I did, and it only took a short while to do that.  We all have different situations and circumstances to deal with.  I'll reveal mine, show you the difference, and you can go from there.

I live in a nice house in central Texas and am on a fixed retirement income.  We, the wife and I, have a steady bankable income of about $4,600 a month, but she still works to help make ends meet.  On a monthly basis we spend about a thousand a month just on various insurances.  A move to a nice town in Mexico cuts that in half, even a little more, and we're just as well insured.  We spend over five thousand a year here on just property taxes, and for the same kind of house in Mexico, that goes down to more like two hundred.  Utilities here can run as much as $1,000 a month, almost always around $800 (that's for a home and my wife's business), and in Mexico that would be no more than $100 a month.  Three things, folks, just those three things would save this family around $20,000 a year.  With other reduced cost of living there, that number edges up close to $30,000 a year.  I fact checked it all; it's not a myth.

4) Be prepared to give up some things, and one of them is your spoiled American attitude.  Be prepared to change and adjust to another culture.  Mexico is mostly a pay as you go society, and if you go there and try to live like you do here (credit cards and big debt), you're very little better off. You won't have to sacrifice in lifestyle, just mostly in your style.  Don't be the ugly American.  One of the hardest adjustments you'll face is to shake your fearfulness, something you've been trained to be here.  You can't be fearful of people who're not like you and get along well anywhere.

5) Relish the adventure.  What do you really have to lose?  Nobody leaves a place that's working well for them.  They go looking for a better life, and that doesn't just land in you lap.  I'm trying to make that move, and I'm 75 years old.  If I can do it, anybody can . . . if they need to, and want to.  My need to move there is greater than my wanting to be there.  In in a position to say, "I'd love to stay, but they won't let me."  Too many people want to take too much here.  I want out from under that.

SOCIAL NETWORKING IS A BAD IDEA

We now live in a world of computerized gadgetry, and it has opened doors to a fascinating array of adventures.  It has also opened doors to fraud, and lots of it.  I disabled my Facebook account, but it got cloned anyway.  Trying to get Facebook to do anything about it is difficult, mostly because they're only easy to contact if you still have an account.  Try calling other numbers, and you get recordings . . . or nothing.  And it's not just social networking, it's the emails and texting and all that. Did you ever think you'd see a presidential election decided over the improper or careless use of these devices?  Well, it happened, and that in itself is a fraud.  What it is, in my opinion, is just theft and should be punished the same way.  Hackers should go to jail just like some dude that knocks over a convenience store . . . but they don't.  We let Russians get by with hacking sensitive information, and we even often make heroes out of jerks like Julian Assange and Wikileaks.  This makes the fraud even worse, and it makes governing agencies look like jerks.  Rights to privacy are involved here, and that should be reason enough to do more to stop the misuse of technology.  We're not smart about some things.  Emails became an issue in the campaign, but people thought Trump's tax evasion and refusal to release tax returns was acceptable.  Our we turning into a bunch of idiots?