retirement- revised

The issue of what someone needs to retire on and how much that might cost is always a topic of discussion on expat forums. So what is my ideal of the essentials?

Books (this is about one book per month) 180,000
Internet ( I’m estimating this, I hope it’s less) 300,000
Website Server 144,000
Indovision (satellite tv so I can watch baseball) 300,000
Tech Stuff (software, hardware, ink, etc.) 250,000
Car registration (due yearly, saved monthly) 120,000
Motorbike registration (same) 19,000
Motorbike 2 registration (same as car) 19,000
School fees (for the 4 kids) 400,000
Visa (my retirement visa) 500,000
Clothes (for the kids) 500,000
Phone (my phone that I use for the internet) 120,000
Medical (whole family) 900,000
Insurance (me) 1,000,000

All this totals to 4,932,000 per month. It’s not exactly living like a hermit, but it’s what I see as living a fairly conservative lifestyle. My 7th/8th grade Social Studies class is just finishing a unit about economics and creating a budget was one of their assignments. They found my budget fairly barebones.

I had a comment from Brandon of The Java Jive blog about a few of the figures in my retirement budget and, while meaning to get an answer out, I’ve gotten bogged down in the quarterly migration from Sumbawa to Bali. So here’s my clarification about the above.

Brandon noted that the budget for books seemed rather slim – he’s a big reader and according to my relatives so I am. While living in Sumbawa and teaching and tending to the kids and animals and doing house repairs, I tend to only read for about 15 minutes before bed so finishing a book takes forever. I know that I’m going to be reading a lot more when I’m retired, but I spend several hours a day sorting through the various feeds from wire services, newspapers, journals, websites, and blogs and all of that is free. During the early days of the web I used a little slogan at the end of my emails that read, “Information wants to be free” (it wasn’t my creation, I grabbed it from a number of people that were using it as well) and I’m still of the opinion that the real revolutionary function of the internet is to provide free information so that the playing field is somewhat leveled from what is was in the past. Well…

Travel. I was asked about this as well. I’m not planning on doing much travel other than some local travel around the island. I’ve never been a very good tourist. I know people who can (or believe they can) charactize an island or country after a few days or weeks. I can’t do that and if I can’t get at what life is life on a daily basis for people, travel is only marginally interesting. But I am interested in spending time in various parts of the island just for information purposes.

Food. Ah, we do need to eat, and anyone who lives with an Indonesian knows that a large part of their time is spent either discussing food, preparing it, or consuming it. Food falls under my wife’s budget that isn’t included here. I also don’t have electricity costs or water or land taxes down in my budget because my wife deals with those. She gets 11 million a month to pay for all of that that includes the kids jajan requests and all the miscellaneous stuff that I don’t want to deal with.

So we have a total budget that really equals about 16 million a month. This is a fairly conservative budget for an expat. Getting down to local realities, this is probably about 8 times what our neighbors have to spend (if not more). This is something that I regularly remind the kids of – we’re fairly lucky in that we have some money. Oh yeah, zakat isn’t included here – that comes out of my slush fund.