1. Metrics. One of the things the medicos have had me doing for the last six months is a much more frequent bit of at home tracking. Blood sugar, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, everything gets tracked. It’s a fine bit of trivia and something that could theoretically be helpful for them, but all it seems to have done for me is generate a new obsession and a lot of fresh anxiety when a rogue value pops up or I see an unanticipated trend develop. While I don’t dispute the value of knowing a more granular level of detail, I can tell you with certainty that even though I was certainly less healthy six months ago than I am now, I absolutely felt better before I knew any of the specifics.
2. Time. By my calculation, it should be December 29th. Somehow, though, the calendar says it’s February 2nd. That can’t possibly be right, can it? I don’t know exactly the age I was when time started to speed up, but I seem to be noticing it speed by at an almost alarming pace these days. Oddly, it doesn’t make the work days seem any shorter, but the pace of moving from one week to the next is getting quite out of hand. I have no idea how one cuts back on the throttle there, but something must be done.
3. Taxes. I switched my Roth IRA from one institution to another this year. During the transition, I managed to add in about $50 more than is allowable by law. The penalty, if left uncorrected, is something like a 6% fine for every year the extra money remains in the account. It was easy enough to fix with a call to the company who holds the account, but the real absurdity is how little our common Uncle Sam will allow you to put away to grow for untaxed future withdrawals. There are articles posted regularly decrying how the Average American will be woefully unprepared for retirement. It seems to me that one way to get after that issue would be to dramatically increase the amount that people can legally shelter from the long arm of the tax man.
Tag Archives: IRA
Planning for the end…
I’ve been thinking alot about retirement this weekend. Not the actual act of filing my paperwork and getting my gold watch, but of all the preparation and planning that needs to go into making that moment happen. It’s the big picture questions that have been bothering me lately and that’s probably the internet’s fault for running adds screaming “will you have enough money to retire” on three sites I visited yesterday. I’m not a financial genius by any stretch of the imagination and I’m not even all that good at the day-to-day stuff. I’m not going to sell the truck for a bag full of magic beans or anything, but checking out my Target cart on any given visit will show there tends to be more wants than needs loaded in it.
I’m throwing a respectable percentage of my pre-tax salary into the Thrift Savings Plan, the government’s version of a 401(k) and have an IRA that isn’t as well funded as it probably should be. I’ve got the real estate portion of an investment strategy covered (even if the part of it that’s in Memphis will never be more than a tax deduction). Gold and precious metals were out of sight before I ever thought about stashing any money there. Still, I feel reasonably good about my allocations… but that doesn’t overcome the voice in the back of my head that keeps whispering “you should be doing more.”
The element that’s still working in my favor is the sorcerer’s elixer of investing: time. I’ll be 33 this summer. Under the current rules, it will be another 29 years until I can retire “early” and collect social security at age 62. If I wait for full retirement, now set at age 67, it’s another 34 years. Of course as social security implodes in the next two decades, I don’t have much expectation of those milestone ages meaning much. Even if the system is “saved,” I expect the age to collect will be much higher. Under any set of rules, it’s safe to assume that I’ll be working for at least as many years into the future as I’ve been alive and probably more. Assuming an uninterrupted federal career, I’ll meet my age and years of service requirement at age 57 in 2035. That’s a full five years before the current Social Security early option and 10 years before full retirement under the system. I don’t necessarily “have to” walk away at that point, but by that far off moment in 2035, I’d like to be well enough financed to do it if I wanted to. I’m pretty sure that is the working definition of having “F%#& you” money.
I suppose the good news is that I’ve got the better part of 30 years to throw money at this particular problem. The bad news is that it looks like baring a PowerBall win, I’ve got almost 30 years of bitching and complaining still ahead of me.
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