Blast from the Past

It was around this time of year when we decided to unretire. Two years ago sitting in the sun room of our apartment in Cuenca, Ecuador, Barb and I started talking about missing the changes in the seasons back in the U.S.. I had just gotten back from a week of working on the place in LaPaz when I mentioned that the same weather every day was getting to be a bit of a drag after almost 2 years. As it turned out that innocent comment was the straw that broke the camels back. We talked all night about the things we missed in the U.S., the idea that Obama couldn't possibly be re-elected after all the damage he had done, what the implications of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, if we stayed in Ecuador, would have on us and could we really start all over again back in the States. In the following weeks we figured out where we would like to live back in the U.S. and started to research the areas we liked. The process went from sending Barb back to the States on an exploratory mission to forget about thinking this thing to death, lets just go. If we land in the wrong place we'll go somewhere else. By June we were gone from South America.

That's the way it happened almost two years ago, it was a fun experience but no way for us to live out the rest of our lives. As it turned out Obama was re-elected to inflict even more damage on our economy and raise our taxes and ruin our health care system. We have started over and we are doing pretty well but we have had to take a offensive posture in our re-building and financial matters, especially in the arena of equity management.

The biggest problem we see in the future is that the change everyone is hoping for in the market place and standard of living ( the economy ) will never come. The change has already happened - a much larger entitlement population, higher prices, more taxes and a lower standard of living for most of us who work for a living. It's mostly down hill from here. There are alternatives, we just have to work on them, instead of thinking things will change somehow by ignoring the facts.

http://youtu.be/7Bhdpooop0U
You can click on the link above to check out the stair building on the house project.