York's Log Village

My parents met in the early 1950s at York's Log Village on Loon Lake in Rangeley, Maine. My mother was at Colby College at the time and worked as a waitress one summer. My father was at Dartmouth and was a cabin boy.

We vacationed there a couple of times in the 1960s. I remember the lakeside cabins, paddling canoes, swimming off the dock, and mostly, the loons' languid wails over the water. My father taught us to cup our hands and blow through our thumbs to mimic the loons.

The Yorks sold the property many years ago to photographer William Wegman, best known for his anthropomorphized photos of his Weimaraners. A condition to the sale was to welcome customers who had a special relationship with the place to come back and stay in the rustic cabins. My parents are among those fortunate few.

The Golden Years

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has issued a new study and an index - the National Retirement Risk Index or NRRI - that projects how long Americans will need to work and save to ensure financial security in retirement. It's not a pretty picture. If you're among the minority who are prepared, get ready to spread your wealth around and accept the fact that you won't see a "return" on your years of paying social security taxes.

The study does not comment on government's failure to responsibly invest and protect trillions in workers' and employers' paid in social security taxes, or to reign in meteoric health care costs. It does, however, fairly put the final responsibility for retirement preparedness on the individual. The study's "comforting" conclusion states:

"Working longer is the key to a secure retirement for most households. Often people respond to such a proposal, however, with “I don’t want to work into my 90s.” Today’s workers should derive comfort from the calculations presented above, which indicate that the vast majority of households – more than 85 percent – would be prepared for retirement by age 70. While this finding suggests that today’s workers will need to work longer than their parents, they are also healthier and better educated, generally have less physically demanding jobs, and can expect to live longer. In short, working longer is feasible for most households, and it does not mean working forever."

A related op-ed in Sunday's New York Times - Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement - was less comforting:

 "Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.

 "To maintain living standards into old age we need roughly 20 times our annual income in financial wealth. If you earn $100,000 at retirement, you need about $2 million beyond what you will receive from Social Security. If you have an income-producing partner and a paid-off house, you need less. This number is startling in light of the stone-cold fact that most people aged 50 to 64 have nothing or next to nothing in retirement accounts and thus will rely solely on Social Security.

"If we manage to accept that our investments will likely not be enough, we usually enter another fantasy world — that of working longer. After all, people hear that 70 is the new 50, and a recent report from Boston College says that if people work until age 70, they will most likely have enough to retire on. Unfortunately, this ignores the reality that unemployment rates for those over 50 are increasing faster than for any other group and that displaced older workers face a higher risk of long-term unemployment than their younger counterparts. If those workers ever do get re-hired, it’s not without taking at least a 25 percent wage cut.

"Not yet convinced that failure is baked into the voluntary, self-directed, commercially run retirement plans system? Consider what would have to happen for it to work for you. First, figure out when you and your spouse will be laid off or be too sick to work. Second, figure out when you will die. Third, understand that you need to save 7 percent of every dollar you earn. (Didn’t start doing that when you were 25 and you are 55 now? Just save 30 percent of every dollar.) Fourth, earn at least 3 percent above inflation on your investments, every year. (Easy. Just find the best funds for the lowest price and have them optimally allocated.) Fifth, do not withdraw any funds when you lose your job, have a health problem, get divorced, buy a house or send a kid to college. Sixth, time your retirement account withdrawals so the last cent is spent the day you die."

 Would you like fries with that?

Redistributing Rauschenberg

Excerpted from the The New York Times:

"The object under discussion is “Canyon,” a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that Mrs. Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007.

"Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.

"But the Internal Revenue Service takes a different view. It has appraised “Canyon” at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes.

"The family is now challenging the judgment in tax court and its lawyers are negotiating with the I.R.S. in the hope of finding a resolution.

"Heirs to important art collections are often subject to large tax bills. In this case, the beneficiaries, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem, have paid $471 million in federal and state estate taxes related to Mrs. Sonnabend’s roughly $1 billion art collection, which included works by Modern masters from Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol. The children have already sold off a large part of it, approximately $600 million worth, to pay the taxes they owed.

"Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders long before the 1940 law went into effect.

"The I.R.S. declined to comment."

Red Sky at Morning

Taken at 5:18 this morning. It's raining now at 8:58 am.

Looking east at Upper Makonikey

Split Rock on Makonikey Head

Our boys scaled the Vineyard Sound side of Split Rock for the first time. I wanted to as well, but thought better of it and settled on taking pictures instead.

You're going to need a bigger boat

It's that time of year again. The local and national media are reporting a great white shark sighting off Cape Cod with obligatory references to the movie Jaws.

A good photo helps make the story.

Walter Szulc, a first-time kayaker off Nauset Beach on Cape Cod, had a close encounter the other day. He paddled quickly to safety.

Reminds one of Chief Brody's foreboding line in Jaws.



If you want to know everything about the movie, and I mean everything, a fun book titled Jaws: Memories from Martha's Vineyard was published last summer and tells the whole story.

Living Large

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal reported on Jim Ferraro's 23,000 square-foot home on Martha's Vineyard's West Chop. It's stirred a lot of reactions, pro and con. The reader comments make hay about his trial lawyer riches and political affiliations.

 

The house porn stats include: $27 million to build, 61 rooms, 14 bedrooms, 20 bathrooms, pool; basketball, tennis and bocce courts, putting green . . . all shoe-horned on 2.68 waterfront acres.

In an earlier article in Martha's Vineyard Magazine, the builder Gary Maynard of Holmes Hole Builders said:

"It’s very difficult to limit size or to control aesthetics without a real fight that involves a landowner’s basic rights. The question is really whether large homes have a net negative impact on the community, and what can be done to mitigate that impact. The first step in mitigation is to define exactly what is objectionable: Is it an aesthetic problem? Is it environmental impact? Is it cultural impact? These are all important issues that have very complex roots, legal and social ramifications, and some very personal answers."

By comparison, the new Martha's Vineyard Hospital which opened in 2011 has 24 rooms, is 90,000 square feet, and cost $48 million.

Independence Day