Do You Still Think You'll Retire?

Sorry, that was just a Boomer thing

Photo by Elena Rabkina on Unsplash

Last week while my husband was home sick, he saw an elderly man pushing a utility cart of groceries down the middle of our street.

We could see that he wore a plastic boot to stabilize his left foot, and his left arm hung free, so he made very slow progress. And the weather was frigid and windy.

Because my husband is a genuinely good person, he wanted to run out and offer the man a ride, but he was the sickest I’ve ever seen him, and obviously infectious. So I stepped up instead.

I was just able to wrestle the man’s cart into the back of my small car and on the way to his apartment building, he told me he’s had two strokes that have affected the left side of his body.

That kind of future could be waiting for any one of us, and nobody is coming to save us. Certainly not the government.

I was once an optimist

Like many of you, I once assumed I would work hard until I was 65 and then I would head to a beach.

Hahahahaha!

Fun retirements, as it turns out, are largely a Boomer thing. It was never meant for Gen Xers like me, and if you’re a Millennial or Gen Z or Gen Alpha, you can absolutely forget about it. Unless you’re in the top 5 percent or so or work for the government, you may never retire completely. And government jobs that seemed secure are being clicked away daily by Elon’s army of cruel misfits.

You can forget about 65 – and maybe 70

My full supposed retirement age is now 67 – which will set me up for $1,672 per month in Social Security benefits. If I were to retire early, I’d get only $1,177, and if I delay until I’m 70, I get $2,073.

My husband’s numbers are similar, but we have to keep in mind that it’s unlikely that we will both die at exactly the same time, so we need to have a plan to take care of whoever lives longest. That probably means never fully retiring until we lose all ability to work due to physical and/or mental disability.

I could subsist on S.S. dollars – millions do – but there would be nothing available for anything like travel. There would also be nothing available for niceties like owning a car (there’s no public transport where I am) or paying for any medical needs not covered by Medicare.

That’s even assuming S.S. and Medicare will still exist. The Republicans are currently hacking away at such programs in order to provide a tax break for billionaires, and inflation may eat away at whatever you have.

I used to think the idea of S.S. cuts was crazy talk, but if you persist in believing major changes can’t happen in the blink of an eye right now, you aren’t paying attention. (See also: “No, the Republicans will never outlaw all abortions. There will at least be exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother!”)

Good luck getting a job in a new field after 45

I always assumed I’d work straight through. Except for my decision to stay home for several years when my children were small, I intended to work and save. I’ve always been very thrifty, so I expected that once I’d built my career back up after the baby years, I’d be able to invest a lot of what I earned.

This works for some people. But as John Lennon and others have said, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans. I did not anticipate that my first husband would choose to leave the marriage. We divorced in 2002, and I was a single mom for four years. At that point, I needed every penny I could get my hands on to cover basic bills.

I was working in newspapers, and by the time it became clear to me that the industry would implode long before I’d be ready to retire, I was locked into that career. Several years before I was laid off from my job as editor of a daily newspaper, I began applying for jobs in fields like communications and public relations, but nothing worked out.

After I was laid off, I eventually landed a part-time position at a marketing and advertising agency. But the job was unpredictable. As the agency’s business waxed and waned, my hours were sometimes full-time and other times part-time. I needed a full-time career. I’m grateful for the skills I learned, but there was no future for me there.

Had I been a bit younger when the newspaper business died, I probably could have pivoted more easily. Had I been older, I probably could have at least partially retired. As it was, I had to completely reinvent myself and accept that I’d need to keep evolving. Getting a job anytime after 45, and especially if you need to pivot to a new field, is hard.

Everyone will reassure you that you will find a job eventually and you just have to keep working at it. Despite doing all the recommended things (even having my resume and LinkedIn professionally reworked) I had to accept that nobody was going to hire me at my age and I’d have to make my own job. Which I did.

I’m writing on platforms like Substack and Medium, self-publishing books and doing some freelance work for a different advertising and marketing agency. This is work I can do for the rest of my life, but AI could swallow any of these things at any time so I take nothing for granted.

Already, Medium has changed considerably. In the good years, it was a juicy writers’ paradise bursting with high-quality writing but most of the best writers have reduced or ended their presence there, driven off by dramatic changes in the pay structure and algorithm. I had to adjust to the new reality.

For now, Substack is where I’m dedicating most of my efforts – here on Untrickled, I talk about income inequality and money in general. On my new second Substack, The Indie Author, I write about self-publishing novels, something I’ve learned a lot about while publishing 20-plus novels. (Most are under pen names.)

Yes, my husband and I have retirement accounts

But they contain a teensy fraction of what experts say we are supposed to have at our age.

And, again, we live in what might be called interesting times. I don’t know how much we will be able to draw from our accounts or if they will happen to be worth much when we need them. I am not counting on anything right now.

My second husband is an immigrant (another significant vulnerability these days) and when he came here to marry me in 2006, he had to leave behind a business he’d started not long before we met. He has put everything he had into it. I don’t waste time thinking how different things might have been had we met before he started the business.

He knew that when he started over in the U.S., he would need to be flexible about getting a job. He did manual factory work until a couple of years ago, when he transferred to the office. He is uncommonly strong, but as he ages, I feel better about him being off the factory floor.

Your body can only handle physical work for so long. But he can perform office work without subjecting his body to wear and tear.

At least we won’t have to pay any rent

We live in Cheaphouselandia, which means our mortgage for a big old house is far less than most people in other areas pay to rent a small apartment. We currently owe so little that our interest payment this month was a mere 10 bucks. At some point we’ll downsize to a smaller place to save on utilities and to reduce the hard physical work that goes into caring for a big house and yard.

We will still pay quite a bit for insurance and property taxes, however. Both those numbers just keep growing. Very soon, that monthly insurance and property tax expense will exceed the principal payment. We will have to move if we want to get away from that.

We also own a second house – again, we live in Cheaphouselandia where that’s possible – and both my houses together are worth dramatically less than one house would be worth in most parts of the country.

In 2008, when we bought the house we live in, we couldn’t sell the house I’d downsized to after the divorce. I had no choice but to begin renting it out, losing money on it every year. Today, my son is grown up and chooses to live there. It’s nice for him because he spent part of his childhood there and how he has it to himself. He’s the first tenant I’ve ever had who has always paid the rent in full every month without fail and has never damaged anything.

He’s also the only tenant I’ve ever had who has urged me to increase his rent, which I reluctantly did once. If he ever decides to move, I’ll put that house on the market so fast it will make your head spin. Landlording is so miserable that my rule now is never rent to anyone you did not give birth to.

Have you done a similar accounting?

I hope you have. Ask yourself these questions: How AI-proof is the work you do? Can you keep doing it for your whole life? Are you going to be one of the rare people who can actually save enough money to fully retire, or do you have plans to do some kind of freelance or part-time work indefinitely? Would you consider moving to an area where the cost of living is cheaper? What about emigrating to a more affordable country with better healthcare? How’s your health? If you’re married, how’s your marriage doing and is your spouse healthy?

Most of us need to stop daydreaming about golf courses, beaches and cruises and start considering things like part-time work and a paid-off house in an affordable area.

Ideally, S.S. would cover a comfortable retirement for all of us when we’re still young enough to enjoy ourselves a little. It’s nuts that we have to try to put together enough money to cover the rest of our lives, when none of us knows how long that will be.

My husband’s aunt and uncle – his aunt is the one who moved here from the Netherlands after World War II and is the reason my husband and I met – lived to 98 and 99. They just died a couple of years ago.

But my sister died three years ago at age 52. She never got to enjoy one day of retirement or collect one penny of what she paid into S.S. Neither did my mother, who died at age 50.

How are you supposed to plan for such unknowns?

It would be so much better if we thought of it like house insurance: My house probably won’t burn down, but some people’s will. So we will all pay into a fund. None of us will know which of us will end up collecting but we’re all protected. The alternative would be everyone having to save up enough to rebuild their house, which would be impossible.

Similarly, I probably won’t live to be 100, but some people will. All of us are supposed to try to save enough to cover the cost of living into extreme old age even though most of us will not end up needing it.

Of course, if we had a robust S.S. fund, the non-wealthy would not be pouring money into the stock market. People like me honestly should not be doing so. We need our money to live on now.

I don’t know what would happen if middle-class people stopped investing in private business because they were instead “investing” more in a government-run S.S. fund. But I’m pretty sure this question has a lot to do with the far-right’s actions right now.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My new book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. And yes, those are my husband’s actual boots on the cover! My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

Did you know that originally the term “bootstrapping” was used sarcastically to describe an impossible task? Yet now, the meaning has morphed into the opposite.

I invite you to give it a try. Reach back, grab your bootstraps and pull with all your might. How did that work out for you?

There’s a reason we tell people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps even though we know it can’t be done. It’s one of the ways people in power keep the rest of us from complaining that we’re being screwed. We keep trying and trying and blaming ourselves when we have trouble. Of course we blame ourselves. Who else can we blame?

This is not a self-help book because you cannot single-handedly fix what’s wrong with the system by working harder or working smarter. There’s a good possibility that some of your problems are out of your hands.

This book was not written for the top 10 percent or for anyone who had life handed to them on a silver platter.

Instead, this book is for every working-class, lower-class and even middle-class person who has done everything right but still feels strapped.