Thanksgiving

The long week-end. Turkey. Family. And more turkey.

When I wasn’t eating turky, I was working on two major activities: the Arizona photo shoot and the retirement plan.

The Arizona trip resulted in roughly 1,500 frames. I shoot RAW which means that each image is about 16 Megabytes. I get 120 frames per 2GB card. Roughly 25 Gigabytes of storage for the Arizona shoot.

When I travel, I carry a 100GB external hard drive. The images get downloaded from the Nikon to a laptop and and then backed up on to the drive.

When I get back to my office computer, my first step is to take all the RAW files and burn them to DVDs. Critical step. I now have my digital negatives secure.

I have a Terabyte of storage for my digital photos. And I keep a simple directory structure: one folder keeps a chronological collection of RAW images, the other keeps a chronological collection of processed images.

I use Adobe’s Bridge as my image management software. With digital photography, I find it absolutely essential to manage the data. I have tens of thousands of exposures on disk. And I fully expect to go into the hundreds of thousands. I know of photographers who manage into the millions.

I also spent time updating the retirement plan. This took a major effort as I plotted scenarios and performed various forms of analysis against the data.

I am targeting retirement in my mid-fifties. And I have to assume 30 years to draw from capital. The good news is that we have prepared well. I have been tracking progress of my portfolio since I turned forty. I turn fifty next year. I am currently ahead of plan.

During my planning, I referenced numerous websites on retirement. I came across several sites that focused on early retirement. Silly me. I thought early retirement was 55. There are folks who called retirement in their 30s.

Most of the sites were quite negative about work. “Wage slaves” was the term most often used to describe those who choose to work.

No doubt that debt and consumption requires an income. However, work also provides an opportunity to build character through discipline and effort.

But what happens when you stop being a “wage slave”? Candidly, I expect to be just as engaged in life as I am now. The only difference is that I will have more control over my calendar during the week.

It was wonderful to spend time with family. I enjoyed having my two oldest children home. I do miss them when they are away.