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2. The TerraLiner: Dedicated to the Active and Adventurous Elderly of Duck Key, Florida
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When I was a kid growing up, most of my vacations (including the summer) were spent on an island in Florida: Duck Key in the Florida Keys, an island packed with sporty retired people -- see
http://www.clubduckkey.com and
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place...2!3m1!1s0x88d0d177df110247:0x5ac8f4d458180ea3 . On Duck Key I got to know lots of retired people who were still windsurfing at age 70, scuba-diving at 75, and still out on the reef fishing every day at 80; retired people who were absolutely determined to
never enter an old-age home before they finally passed away. These retired people were great, simply fantastic, and if I were to dedicate the TerraLiner to anyone, it would be to the
“active elderly of Duck Key, Florida”:
Retired people today are very different than retired people 50 years ago. This is something that sociologists, demographers, marketers, real-estate developers, and real-estate agents have long recognized. For one thing, retired people today live much longer. They can look forward to another 30 years of fun, active living,
if they have kept fit and healthy, and have kept up a regular exercise regimen. The wealthier ones also tend to be sitting on huge piles of accumulated capital, so they can afford to buy homes that cost millions. Whereas even young doctors, lawyers, or executives simply cannot. The big homes with big boats in the images above are not owned by people in their 30's or 40's, and not even in their 50's. Rather, most are owned by retired people in their 60's, 70's, and 80's. And the same is true for most (albeit granted not all) luxury Class-A American motorhomes.
Think of it this way: even Richard Branson talks eloquently about how at the start of his career, he wasn't sure whether Virgin Records would work out. When he bought Necker island, he put in a ridiculously low offer, much lower the asking price. A year later they called him up because he was the only one to offer anything at all for the island, and it became his. But he had to wait a bit before developing it, and Necker Island was built up only gradually, as his businesses flourished and became the "Virgin Empire".
The fishing boats in front of Duck Key homes also signal very loud and clear
why these people chose to retire to the Florida Keys, as opposed to other oceanfront communities elsewhere in Florida, or retirement communities in Arizona. In a word:
Fishing.
It's relatively easy to get to the reef and fish in the Keys. In the opposite direction, passing under the bridges of the Overseas Highway, it's very easy to reach Florida Bay and the islands of Everglades National Park -- see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Bay . Until recently the fish were abundant, but fishing bans are now in effect in many months, because stocks are in serious decline -- see
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/us/31fish.html?_r=0 . The average size of big trophy fish is also declining -- see
http://scienceblogs.com/guiltyplanet/2009/04/27/fish-photos-from-florida-keys/ , and
http://www.livescience.com/3342-photos-document-dramatic-decline-trophy-fish-size.html . Although I am now a Buddhist, when I was a kid I caught and filleted literally thousands of fish: everything from grunts, grouper, snapper, and hogfish caught inshore or on the reef, to mackerel, bonito, cobia, wahoo, swordfish, and dolphin fish (i.e. mahi mahi) caught via trolling. I was also especially fond of fishing for tarpon in Florida Bay. But with tarpon it's the thrill of the chase, and tarpon are strictly catch-and-release. Back then you didn't even need a fishing permit, whereas now things are much more tightly controlled. Perhaps because I am now a Buddhist, my dreams are haunted by fish looking up at me in astonishment as they gasp for water, flopping around on the bottom of the boat....
Unfortunately the reef is dying, and may be completely dead in as little as 50 years --
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/fl-coral-bleaching-20150928-story.html and
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...reefs-dollars-into-south-florida-florida-keys . Florida Bay is also dying, because nitrogen runoff from agriculture north of the Everglades reaches the bay, and creates huge algal blooms that swallow up all the oxygen, making it impossible for anything else to live. The Everglades -- a vast slow-moving "river of grass", 60 miles wide, 100 miles long, and 6 inches deep -- was once sufficiently replenished on an regular basis when Lake Okeechobee flooded its southern bank. When the river of grass reached Florida Bay it mingled with salt water to create one of the most diverse and productive estuarine environments on earth. But in the 20th century engineers constructed a berm across the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee to stop its flooding, farms were established south of the lake, and canals began diverting much of the water to support agriculture and urban populations in South Florida. With all that farmland now in place south of the Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades have become an enormous sewer for agricultural chemicals, and the desertification of the "the river of grass" is a real possibility -- see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Bay ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everglades , and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Okeechobee .
So who knows if the "active and adventurous" retirement community of Duck Key will still be flourishing 50 years from now, once the surrounding ocean has become as dead as much of the Mediterranean coastline in Italy, France, and Spain. And 100 - 150 years from now, all of it will be under water because of global warming.
In any case, such environmental horror stories aside, in future let's use the acronym
AARCWPOM: "Active-Adventurous Retired Couple With Plenty of Money". Let's ditch the "
O" at the beginning of your acronym,
Iain, unless it stands for something other than "old". Calling retired people "old" is a bit age-prejudiced, if only because the active elderly do not think of themselves as old, just because they are retired. Many of them also don't like to be called "old" because they feel newly young again, once retirement begins. "Old" is really more a state of mind than a quantitative age-category. Or at least that's what the active elderly on Duck Key taught me.
Note: Duck Key has changed since I spent lots of time there as a kid, because the Hawks Bay resort built condos on what was formerly a golf-course, and has thereby massively expanded the real estate available, especially at the lower end of the market. Duck Key is now much more accessible to families with kids, and much more tenable as a weekend family vacation destination for those who live in Miami. The houses on Duck Key that have ocean-views still cost millions, but it's now possible for families with very young children to buy vacation homes on the island that cost a fraction of that.
Also note that the "Middle Keys" are
great in the summer. During the summer the humidity on mainland Florida becomes unbearable, and enormous cumulous clouds form over the mainland due to of adiabatic cooling. The hot ground generates thermals, and as air rises it cools, forms clouds, and dumps loads of rain. By way of contrast in the Middle Keys, where Duck Key is located, there is not enough land relative to the surrounding water to generate clouds and rainfall. Climatologically speaking the Middle Keys have a semi-arid or even a near-desert climate. The humidity remains very low, even during the summer. Whereas further south Big Pine Key is large enough to generate some adiabatic clouds and rainfall of its own. For me summers were spent always marveling at the enormous 35,000-foot high wall of cumulous clouds hovering over the Everglades and mainland Florida, as I basked in endless sunshine and low humidity on Duck Key.
Incidentally, this is another reason why retired people love Duck Key: because the humidity level year-round is as dry as Arizona. If they suffer from arthritis it's a major plus. But unlike Arizona they won't be gazing out at boring desert landscapes, but rather, they will be gazing out at the ocean, if they have an ocean-view property. And on Duck Key even the ocean-view properties have canals in front, where they can park their boats.
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3. Designing for the World's "Frugal Millionaires"
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There is a great deal of mythology surrounding wealth, much of it created and fomented by the media. Particularly egregious is the myth that most millionaires "make it" and become rich before they turn 30. This is sociologically and statistically false -- see
http://uk.businessinsider.com/it-ta...t-least-32-years-to-get-rich-2015-3?r=US&IR=T . Lots of studies have shown that perhaps 80 % of self-made millionaires (i.e. those who did not inherit their wealth), only made their first million after age 50. So too, there's lots of evidence to suggest that the secret to becoming a millionaire is not how much one earns, but rather, how much one saves -- see
http://livingstingy.blogspot.it/2011/05/millionaire-next-door.html . Furthermore, millionaires also tend to be owners of small businesses that are on the face of it quite humdrum and boring. The owner of a chain of used car dealerships is much more likely to be a millionaire than a high-flying doctor or lawyer. And so too, the owner of two or three small local hotels, or a small local contracting business, or three or four funeral homes, or a local sawmill.
Typically these small-business owners will have less education than the "professional class" of doctors and lawyers, and the latter will often earn higher salaries. But the high-consumption lifestyle and elaborate expectations of doctors and lawyers often mean that they save very little, so they do not become millionaires. About half of those who are millionaires continue to live in working-class or middle-class neighborhoods, and not prestigious neighborhoods. And as already stated in the previous post, the typical millionaire marries just once, often to his high-school sweetheart, and has a close-knit family -- see
http://www.thomasjstanley.com/2009/12/the-low-profile-millionaire-next-door/ ,
http://www1.cbn.com/portrait-millionaire ,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising/dp/1589795474 , and
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/06/y...-the-splurges-even-as-a-millionaire.html?_r=0 .
People today do not like hearing sociological facts such as these, because they make wealth seem less glamorous and magical. The media tend to focus their attention only on the handful of tech-entrepreneurs who get rich quick when they are young, or the handful of people who get rich doing something fun and creative, like acting or directing movies. The media also focus their attention on the comparatively small number of people who are truly rich, those who have 30 million or more in assets.
But while the mean or "average" wealth of an American millionaire is 3 million USD or thereabouts, the median or 50th percentile is much lower than that, somewhere between 1 - 2 million. The average skews things upwards because of billionaires like Warren Buffet. As one moves up the wealth pyramid the number of people shrinks logarithmically. Of the 30 - 32 million people worldwide who are millionaires, 28 million have between 1 - 5 million in assets; another 2 million or so have assets between 5 - 10 million; and 1 million have assets between 10 - 50 million. According to the
Financial Times, there are 199,235
“ultra high net worth” individuals worldwide, of the kind that money-managers like to cultivate, who have assets of 30 million or more – see
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-...net-worth-people-world-over-30-million-assets . Let's call it 200,000, and these constitute just .002 % of the world's population, or 1 in 35,000. Of those who have 30 million or more, 85,000 have between 30 and 50 million, leaving about 115,000 people worldwide with more than 50 million in assets – see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individual and
http://www.wealthx.com/wealthxubswealthreport/ . This works out to 1 in 60,000.
So when I think of the TerraLiner's target market, I am thinking of "low-flying" and "frugal" millionaires in the 1 - 5 million range. Traveling by motorhome is a potentially low-cost form of travel, at least once the initial capital cost of the RV is out of the way, because the motorhome serves simultaneously as hotel and restaurant -- see
http://www.rvia.org/?ESID=vcosts . Motor-homing with a large Class-A is a form of travel that often appeals to "frugal millionaires" who have finally retired, want to travel, want to travel comfortably and slowly, and who also want to continue cooking and cleaning for themselves, in their own home.
I want to address the needs, wants, and preferences of these people, and no others. I want to address their financial capacities, their level of free time available, their calendar, their sense that they can “slow down” and “slow travel” the world not just for 2 years, but rather, for 20 or 30 years.
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