Our Golden Years

[rumrunner]

The past is gone, the future far away, and now only lasts for one second. Poetic as it may sound, it's crap, but it can be difficult to dissuade people from thinking this way. The main reason for this, I think, is that it is nearly impossible to count on the future. Not just, as Munchie said, that you'll be alive, but that anything will be as you planned. No one can guarantee that your savings will be intact, or that the plans for travel or whatever will be possible in the far off mystery that is the future. Just look at all those retirees who planned to see Egypt not so long ago, and were sent back home due to the uprising there. Sure they can always try again later, if they're alive and healthy, or have the time. For some that is a big if. The trick is to balance living in the moment with planning to live in the future, or something.

[GGT]

Well said, rummy. Balance, yes that's the trick.

When I was younger, my enthusiasm and optimism for Today included a shorter window for Tomorrow. Y'know, planning in chunks of months or four-year increments --- get through HS, get through college, work here for five years to promotion, that kind of thing.

Having children (and a mortgage) helped me extend that Tomorrow window into decades. 30s, 40s, 50s.... Getting older has me back to the shrinking Time window again, and time moves so much faster when there's less time left ahead. It gets harder to turn this boat around or change course while it sails forward.

[kowalskil]

So much has changed in recent decades. Particularly our ideas about aging. ...

Yes indeed, I am 80 and still strong and healthy for ice skating, skiing, lang walks, etc. When I was a kid a person of 60 or 70 was considered to to be very old. The picture shows me at the age 5. It was taken in 1936, in Moscow, two years before they took my father and sent him to Siberia. He died there two years later, at the age of 36.

Ludwik

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[GGT]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/bu...irementspecial


"Golden Years Losing Luster"

This year, the first of the nation’s 79 million baby boomers turn 65, and while millions dream of comfortable retirements, perhaps in Boca Raton, Fla., or Palm Springs, Calif., many will discover they will have a tough time in retirement.

“The baby boomers will be the first generation that will do worse in retirement than their parents,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor and retirement specialist at the New School for Social Research in New York. “And the next generation of retirees will do a lot worse; they fall off a cliff,” largely because so few of them will have the traditional pensions that many of their parents and grandparents had.

Americans planning to retire in five to 10 years could see their golden years tarnished by a confluence of circumstances, including depressed housing prices, soaring health costs and a fitful stock market that has pummeled 401(k) plans. Not only that, company after company has frozen or eliminated its pension plan, and many members of Congress are pushing to scale back Social Security benefits — even though half of the nation’s retirees receive at least 90 percent of their income from Social Security. Its benefits average $14,000 a year. So perhaps it should not be surprising that 45 percent of America’s baby boomers are “at risk,” without enough to maintain their living standards after they retire, according to the nation’s leading center on retirement studies, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Even one development that might seem to be good news — longer life spans — could worsen retirement woes, because more and more people will live for years after they have spent their nest eggs. For couples retiring now, the chances are 50 percent that one member will live to 92.

A 60 year old friend of mine just returned from her annual ski trip in Utah. Her artificial knees worked just fine. She was telling me about the 89 year old woman from CA on the lift, skiing black diamond trails. For current (American) retirees with enough money and good health insurance, things still look peachy. World cruises, second homes, golf and sports vacations. Viagra, Vesicare, color-coordinated adult diapers just like underwear!

For everyone else.....how optimistic are you.....?

[Being]

"Golden Years Losing Luster"

401K was a reasonable experiment but now it's time to try something else. The markets are for gamblers not people who can't afford risk. Most people fit the latter.