It was a quiet and contented life here in the Little Pueblo of the New Mexican highlands. But several friends saw this former RV Boondocker and Explorer as living in a Fallen state, by degenerating into a sedentary lifestyle without the usual excuses of old age, bad health, or domestic servitude to a woman.
One pair of RV-based interlopers brought some embarrassing news -- embarrassing because it shows how lazy I was about studying the rules of early IRA withdrawal. By invoking the SEPP option, an IRA owner can make penalty-free withdrawals before he's 59.5 years old, with a couple catches of course. But the catches aren't bad.
Prior to this knowledge I was hunkering down to make it to age 59.5 without making any early withdrawals. Perhaps it was just a matter of pride. Early retirement is a serious game in beating the System, and eating a penalty for early withdrawal seemed like a defeat.
There was something about it all that suggested a battle between Good and Evil, as was the original effort to retire early. I had invented a non-mobile lifestyle that was pleasant, healthy, and frugal enough to win the game.
And then these two busybodies-on-wheels came along and robbed me of the Drama and Significance of human existence. Sigh. This calls for a little metaphor-mining from the cinema. An Ideal Husband is a recent movie rendition of a play by Oscar Wilde. The femme fatale, played by Julianne Moore, made a fine living by marrying rich men who conveniently died early. She wanted to extend her winning streak by convincing wealthy and handsome Lord Goring (Rupert Everett) to have a go with her, despite him being a resolute bachelor.
In addition to applying her feminine wiles she was also blackmailing Lord Goring's best friend. Her offer was that if Lord Goring agreed to marry her, she would give him the letter that provided the blackmail evidence against his best friend.
One pair of RV-based interlopers brought some embarrassing news -- embarrassing because it shows how lazy I was about studying the rules of early IRA withdrawal. By invoking the SEPP option, an IRA owner can make penalty-free withdrawals before he's 59.5 years old, with a couple catches of course. But the catches aren't bad.
Prior to this knowledge I was hunkering down to make it to age 59.5 without making any early withdrawals. Perhaps it was just a matter of pride. Early retirement is a serious game in beating the System, and eating a penalty for early withdrawal seemed like a defeat.
There was something about it all that suggested a battle between Good and Evil, as was the original effort to retire early. I had invented a non-mobile lifestyle that was pleasant, healthy, and frugal enough to win the game.
And then these two busybodies-on-wheels came along and robbed me of the Drama and Significance of human existence. Sigh. This calls for a little metaphor-mining from the cinema. An Ideal Husband is a recent movie rendition of a play by Oscar Wilde. The femme fatale, played by Julianne Moore, made a fine living by marrying rich men who conveniently died early. She wanted to extend her winning streak by convincing wealthy and handsome Lord Goring (Rupert Everett) to have a go with her, despite him being a resolute bachelor.
In addition to applying her feminine wiles she was also blackmailing Lord Goring's best friend. Her offer was that if Lord Goring agreed to marry her, she would give him the letter that provided the blackmail evidence against his best friend.
Julianne Moore character: 'Here is a chance to rise to great heights of self-sacrifice. I think you should, and then spend the rest of your life contemplating your own perfection.'Yes, 'rising to great heights of self-sacrifice' might be putting it a bit melodramatically, but it was a great challenge to retire early. Avoiding early withdrawal of an IRA was an echo of that.
Lord Goring, Rupert Everett character: 'I do that as it is.'
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