I recently cancelled my subscription to ARPA (not to be confused with AARP), a premiere magazine for retirees and anyone over the age of 50. Their benefits include discounts for hotels in Rwanda, rental cars in Tokyo, restaurants in Malaysia and private golf courses in Hawaii. They also offer health insurance programs that start at $983 a day to cover routine checkups and are a bit more if you need surgery. They did however offer exclusive hang nail coverage for a mere $25 extra a month. After joining I realized that I simply didn’t fit the ARPA profile of a typical retiree or person over the age of 50. No one in their pictures is bald, has wrinkles, sags here and there or looks exhausted from watching the 11:00 news.
I also didn’t realize there are qualifications for retirement that I fall far short of. Did you know that you must be able to play 36 rounds of golf non-stop in a hot climate like Arizona? Tennis will do as a substitute for women but you must look like Maria Sharapova with a few grey hairs. Did you also know that you must drive a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus? Other requirements include having grown children that have taken over your business, downsizing from one large house to three villas in various foreign countries, and having a personal banker. I don’t have a personal banker. I have a personal teller and she is very nice, but mostly our conversations are just about deposits and withdrawals.
The final straw came when I used the online “retiree calculator” ARPA has to determine retirement eligibility. I eagerly entered all the information asked for, thoughts of exotic travel flashing through my mind, and hit the “calculate” key. The result said that I was just over a million dollars short of what I would need to retire, but that if I contributed just $17,473 a month to a high-yield investment, I would have a chance of making that goal by age 113. My other option, according to the chart they showed, was to simply die in another few years and save everyone a lot of trouble. Obviously the idea of retiring (or dying) in the manner portrayed by ARPA was just not for me.
All of this got me thinking about the whole concept of retirement. I know some people who are retired and they seem happy enough. They don’t run around to exotic locales and sip mojitos on the beach with a gorgeous sunset in the distance, but they don’t work either. So what if I have to work? What then? I know a guy who is 72 and works as a bagger at the grocery store. He definitely doesn’t drive a BMW but he also seems happy enough. He once told me he had to work now because he used his money to pay for kids and grandkids rather than invest in a 401-K or high-yield stock funds. He muses that the cost of 27,000 toy cars required to raise a son could have paid for a villa in Spain.
I turned to the NY Times for answers. You can always count on something in there to give insight into the deeper meanings of life. They always have opinions about everything. Sure enough, a recent article delved into the topic of whether the retirement age should be pushed back further than the current age of 66. A panel of distinguished academics pointed out that the benefits of delayed retirement for Boomers would help relieve the burden of social security payments on the working young, who are dwindling in numbers. According to one pundit, by the year 2020 most social security payments for the entire Boomer generation will rest on the contributions of just one young worker at Burger King.
Since I can’t retire until I reach 113 anyway, this was not a big deal to me. But apparently there was a strong reaction by NY Times readers to the idea of delaying retirement as late as age 70. Irate Boomers wrote in by the hundreds to protest that they were due their share of social security after paying for the benefits of the current retiree generation, golf in Maui and BMW’s notwithstanding. There were even some voices from current retirees pointing out that not everyone currently over the age of 65 drives a BMW or travels six months a year to exotic places. In short, it’s all a muddle.
One NY Times reader, sounding quite despondent at his prospects, asked the question, “if we can’t retire, who’s going to give us jobs?” That’s a good point since companies generally don’t like to hire anyone who is old enough to subscribe to ARPA. It’s an unspoken rule and of course it’s illegal, but it’s also impossible to prove that any employer is actually showing age discrimination. Employment ads often give it away though. I saw one recently for a computer position that read, “maximum of two weeks prior experience.” Another one offered free time for video games as a sign-on incentive, and yet another touted “acne treatments” as part of the health benefits package. So, to paraphrase Jethro Tull, “now he’s too old to work but he’s too young to retire.”
It seems like just yesterday I was too young to get a job and needed something called “working papers” that entitled me to do the same work as an adult but at half the rate of pay. With the current economy a lot of Boomers who can even find jobs at all are working for half what they used to earn. Gee, things really haven’t changed that much have they?
(Happy Birthday to friend Bill who finally made it to the big 50 on August 7th!)
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