14.3%

If you’re a numbers person like I am, you will instantaneously see what the percentage of 14.3% is.  

It is a percentage that I have come to think of frequently of late.

Almost everyone from grade schoolers on can automatically identify one-half as fifty percent, one-quarter as twenty-five percent and one-third as thirty-three point three percent, with a bar over the three going on forever, meaning 33.333333333….%

Numbers people immediately identify 14.3%, or 0.143, as I thought of it for many years as a decimal, as one-seventh.

I first came to instantly identify one-seventh as .143 thirty-three long years ago at the age of fourteen, in the summer of 1985.

I was a Pony League baseball player at the time, a pitcher who would ultimately go undefeated that season, eight wins and no losses, for a championship team.  I was a middling outfielder when not pitching who did not stroke a home run all year and struggled  to raise my average above .300.

Being a middle-aged man now but just a fourteen-year-old stat nerd at the time, I was constantly thinking about my batting average, earned run average, RBIs and other baseball stats.  Jewish kids are especially prone to obsessing over their statistics and I was the only Jewish kid on my team.  Over half of the kids were Black, as we called them back in the eighties and nineties, and the rest of the kids were of Mexican or Irish descent.  One Polish kid. 

The first time that the statistics were published by one of our assistant coaches, I was about eighth out of the fifteen or so kids on the team, sporting a .286 average.  I had eight hits in twenty-eight at bats after eight games, midway through our sixteen-game regular season.  I probably had about ten walks since I typically batted sixth on what was the highest-scoring team in the league, so I probably had about five plate appearances per game.

If I had to guess, I think that I had two doubles and six singles.  I expected to do much better after stroking a double on the first pitch that I saw all season, but after eight games I had that one extra-base hit and possibly one more that I hustled out.  I was fast back then if not very strong.

My close friend at the time, a muscular Black kid named Michael who I hung out with quite a bit in those days, was batting over .500, getting hits in over half of his at bats, and had at least five home runs midway through the season.  I recall him giving me quite a bit of grief over my sub-.300 average.  I also recall getting the old calculator out to verify my average and ever since that day I have instantly known that one-seventh is 14.3% or a percentage of .143.

A two-out-of-seven clip multiplied by four was, indeed, a .286 batting average.  Not bad for a big leaguer, not so good for a Pony leaguer.

Six years later I served as my father’s assistant coach for the Pony League team that my brother played for.  His team needed a coach at the beginning of his thirteen-year-old year, and my father volunteered and brought me on.  My father being more of a supportive, kind and understanding coach, I was the fiery ultra-competitive coach who could not stand losing or even playing poorly.  I ended up being far more stressed out as a coach, when I had to consider every player on the roster, every inning pitched and every at-bat, than when I was a player and mostly worried about my own performance.

My younger brother won the Pony league triple crown when he was fourteen.

My brother was a monster in Pony League, and I mean a monster.  I could go into great detail of what kept him from becoming a household name in the big leagues, but suffice it to say that when he was fourteen, he never had to worry about what percentage two out of seven came out to.

As a matter of fact, he won the League’s triple crown as a fourteen-year-old, going four-for-four in the last regular season game, raising his average to .586 (which I still recall well) to go along with his fifteen or so home runs and forty-eight runs batted in in sixteen games, an even three per game.  He also had a very low ERA and more wins than I had at the same age as he led the team to its second consecutive championship.  Our team won it the next year, as well.

So now you know.

14.3% is the same as one-seventh or .143.  If you want to go out more digits, one-seventh is .14285714285.  Let's just call it 14.3%.

Why I Think About it Now

Sometimes it is as if I live a double life.  Possibly even a triple or quadruple life depending on what I am doing at a particular time.

Most Mondays through Fridays, I am a highly stressed yet competent and professional economic developer.  I have worked for the same community for over thirteen years and worked in the profession five years previous to that.

Before that, I spent about seven years as a P.O. or Adult Probation Officer if you will.  I described the experience the best that I could in my e-dusty old book, The P.O.

On evenings (besides ones when I have night meetings) and weekends, I am a devoted father, doing things with my two children, one of whom is now a twenty-year-old young man and the other a fifteen-year-old high-achieving, popular and beautiful rising sophomore daughter in high school.

I am also one of the more devoted dog owners you would know although I hesitate to refer to my Baby as a dog.  But if you saw her, a dog is what you would see her as.

Besides being an economic developer most of my week day hours and a devoted family guy when not at work, I also see myself as an upcoming writer, but it has mostly been in my fantasy world to date.

True, a few dozen readers will happen across this, but not yet the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands that I dream of.  More like twenty-five instead of twenty-five thousand.

By the time Sunday night rolls around most weekends, I have become so involved with my would-be businesses that I want to launch, eBooks that I want to write and post-IMRF jobs that I think about doing that it is always a huge let down when Monday morning rolls around again and I am forced to eat my pride and report to the Millennial boss who still knows little to nothing about what it is that I do and how I do it.  He’s a good guy, but he’s learning how to be a good boss as he goes and is learning economic development as I teach it to him.

Which leads to both of the ways in which I have started to think about sevenths, or 14.3%.

The first one is so simple.

Like my .286 batting average, or a multiple of two out of seven, thirty-three long years ago, I have come to realize that I mostly live for .286 or 28.6% of every week, i.e. Saturdays and Sundays.  I do try to take some pleasure and enjoyment out of my Mondays through Fridays and, of course, there are eight official holidays for my employer and I do try to take at least fifteen vacation days per year. 

However, for the most part, I really only enjoy two out of seven days in any given week.

Writing this on a Saturday, my favorite 14.3% of any given week, I plan on enjoying this one-seventh of this week.  I will enjoy tomorrow, as well, but not as much as today when late Sunday evening rolls around and I begin thinking about the mountain of work awaiting me this coming week.

The second way that I have started to think about sevenths is a bit of a stretch, but I have thought of it, anyway.

I will be turning forty-eight right before Thanksgiving this year, 2018.

I am squarely a Gen Xer and, with that, come many of the hopes, dreams and passed over nature of many of my cohorts.  Many of the guys who I grew up with are highly successful multi-millionaires. 

Quite a few are regular middle class guys like me.  Others never amounted to much of anything and, sad but true, at least a dozen of the guys who we graduated high school with in 1988 are no longer with us.   I know of at least four guys that I knew in high school who died by their own hand.

Why that makes me think of sevenths is because I commenced my career in local government employment way the f*ck back in 1993, a quarter century ago.

Seven years from this November, God willing I will reach the age of double nickels.

It is not that I will be set up financially by any means or that I would be able to fully retire.  After all, the health insurance costs for my wife and I could run in the thousands per month by then.  By the way, for any of you #FIRE readers, I hope that you factor in healthcare costs when you calculate how much you may need decades from now.  Rent, mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance costs, utilities, food, transportation and entertainment costs are only part of the pie.

So what I am really thinking about long-term, meaning seven years from now, is coming up with a way or several ways to generate several thousand dollars of income to supplement the $6,500 or so pension per month that I could begin collecting in January of 2026, or a little over seven years from now.

I would have thirty-two and a half years into the system by that time, thirty-three years if I can remain relatively healthy since IMRF will add one month of service for every twenty sick days that you have on the books at the time of your retirement.  That is, unless I change employers and lose all of my sick time, but never mind that for now.

While it is true that this post would be better written two years from now, and I probably will write one like this in fall of 2020, detailing how each of the five years that I have left to toil in municipal economic development in Illinois would comprise twenty percent, or .200, of the years that I have left to contribute to the system, I prefer to start thinking about it this November in terms of sevenths.

For a guy like me, mensch or not, I am forced to bite my tongue quite a bit, keep my viewpoint to myself often, and kiss a major amount of tuchus when it comes to my job.  Even though I have over eighteen years of experience in economic development and have been a certified professional in the field for nine years, any elected official who gained a few hundred votes automatically knows my job better than I do, what I should be doing, the businesses that I should be going for, and that it is my fault that both Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have not come to town.

If that sounds seriously sarcastic, that is because it is.

Anyway, the way I see it, as time marches on closer and closer to Thanksgiving of 2025, even though it is quite a few years off, I will become more and more comfortable stating my mind year after year.

If I had to put a percentage on how much more comfortable I will be stating my mind in the coming years, I would put it at, oh, about 14.3% per year.

I know that I will most likely continue working for The Man after November of 2025 if I am physically and mentally able to and if someone, including my current employer, allows me to.

My former boss, the one who hired me in 2005 and is one of the few people who I both respect and admire, will be retiring at the end of this September at the age of sixty-five.  I mention this because that is obviously ten years more than I am writing about until I pull the plug on IMRF and because times have changed so dramatically over the forty years since he began contributing to the same system.

There are at least three big differences between my own so-called retirement from municipal government and that of my former boss: One is that he has been a fairly high earner as a government guy.  He is retiring with a final average salary over his four highest years, the number that IMRF uses to calculate your pension, close to $150,000.  With forty years in, plus the extra contributions that he told me he has made for years, his pension will be fairly high in my opinion, about $10,000 per month, more than I make now.  Between his wife’s pension, his own and their huge amount of investments, he has nothing to worry about in retirement.  Plus, both of them can begin collecting social security on top of their pensions.

The second difference is that he is no longer going to work.  He does not have a side hustle, blog or a retirement gig lined up as far as I know.  He will not have to publish eBooks, take consulting jobs or scoop ice cream or greet shoppers at Walmart.  His plan is to kick back, travel the world, spend time with family and future grandchildren, all while collecting ten grand per month from his pension, a slightly smaller amount for his wife's pension and social security whenever they elect to begin collecting it.

The third difference is that even though he is proficient enough in computers, he has little to no knowledge of the many side hustles that are out there now.  Unlike Yours Truly or perhaps you, he does not have any interest in self-publishing, in developing mobile applications, in launching an e-commerce site, delivering packages for Amazon, becoming a personal shopper, online editing jobs, house sitting, dog walking or the myriad ways that someone who thinks like you and I do may make some extra scratch.

His way of thinking about making extra money is getting another job where he would have to drive into an office in the morning, sit through endless meetings, write reports and answer endless emails, texts and phone calls.

Me, I would rather hustle to make an extra two grand per month doing a combination of any gig that I could land at the age of double nickels and older than spend five or ten more miserable years doing what I do now, or worse.

For those two reasons, this Saturday being my favorite one-seventh of the week and next year, 2019, being one out of seven more years that I must toil and serve as a municipal economic developer in Illinois, I was thinking of that odd percentage.

And now you are too.