Tag Archives: Retirement

1,147 Mondays…

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22 years, 24 days, 6 hours. That’s the amount of time between this evening and my first date of retirement eligibility. I didn’t start out the day with that stuck in my head. What I was really focused on is what an utter disappointment Mondays are in the grand scheme of things. Monday is the week’s little way of pissing on your leg and calling it rain.

Maybe somewhere there is a happy group of people who leap out of bed on Monday mornings excited and ready to get back to their cubes to get started on the exciting week ahead. It’s a good bet that I’m never going to be that kind of person. The best I can manage on Monday is a grudging acknowledgement that at least Friday afternoon is a few hours closer… and if I really want to put on my optimist hat, I can always do some quick math and find out that there are only another 1,147 Mondays standing between me and having the right combination of age and years of service to qualify to retire. Eligibility, of course, doesn’t mean that it makes financial sense to hit eject, but that’s going to have to be a separate discussion.

But hey, looking on the bright side, in less than three years, I’ll have whittled down the number of Mondays into the triple digits. Wow. Yeah. That’s depressing. Stupid Mondays.

I am the 99%… and I’m ok with that…

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A few months ago the world was making a big stink about the 99% versus the 1%. A quick run of the numbers told me that I was very safely part of the larger group and in no practical danger of ever reaching into the ranks of the smaller. It might shock you to know that I’m actually ok with that. Not as happy as I might be as a Powerball winner, mind you, but mostly content to live the life of a white collar working stiff, even if that means I’m going to have to do my best to stay employed for the next 30-ish years.

Look, no one wants to “work.” I’m fairly sure that all of us have some happy place that in our heads we’d all rather be on a daily basis. It’s no secret that mine is some out of the way beach with a slightly dilapidated tiki hut rum bar on some backwater tropical island. In this particular fantasy land, I don’t do much other than read and write and sample the fruits of the local distillery. Maybe I’d finally get around to learning to dive or be more than a passenger on a boat, but that’s not strictly necessary. OK, so I basically want to be Hemingway minus the unfortunate run in with the business end of a shotgun there at the end. As cool as I think that life would be, I also like eating on a regular basis here in the real world. Since civilization basically collapses when we all decide to stop being productive and follow our dreams instead, I think I’ll stick with a job that actually pays the bills for the time being.

So there’s the rub. I don’t particularly want to work, but I definitely like getting paid. That’s the devil’s bargain we all make when our parents decide that it’s time for them to stop supporting our bad habits and questionable decision-making skills. That’s the price we pay for being a legal adult and more or less controlling our own destiny. I can still see a few life paths that may well lead me to that little bar, on that little beach, on some little slice of heaven in the Caribbean. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to remember that I’ve got a job that isn’t 1/10th as batshit crazy as the last one, because honest to God, that never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Azimuth check…

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Tomorrow I’m going to a class titled something like “Mid-Career Retirement Planning Seminar.” Aside from the less than creative naming, it took a while for what that really means to sink in to my thick skull. This coming January, I’ll have ten years on the job. Admittedly, that’s on the low side of the “mid-career” range, but it still doesn’t quite seem possible that I’ve been hanging out with Uncle Sam long enough for a decade to slip past more or less unnoticed. Apparently I have. As a reward, Uncle wants me to find out what it’s going to take to retire to something other than an old age of dining on cat food and choosing between paying my electric bill and buying my medication.

I’ve got my own theory on how to do that, of course, and a guy who makes good money to give me advice and keep an eye on my retirement nest egg, but I’m an open minded kind of guy (stop snickering). I’m open to hearing whatever brilliant ideas this bunch of contractors came up with. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt until someone mentions Social Security being the “third leg of the retirement stool”, or working past 70 to offset potential market losses and as a hedge against accidentally living long enough to hit the century mark. Since I’m under no delusion of Social Security being anything more than a happy memory by 2040 and the prospect of dropping dead at my desk isn’t particularly appealing, I think I’ll plan for the more traditional route.

Either way, tomorrow could be anything from passingly informative to mildly amusing. That’s mostly going to depend on the performance of whoever is giving the pitch. In any case, I’ll keep my snark at the ready in case it’s needed on short notice.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The Maryland Transportation Authority. Dear Asshats, if you’re going to chance what lane collects which kind of toll it might be a good idea to go ahead and let people know that in advance instead of surprising everyone with the new and improved layout during afternoon rush hour. That would have saved you from receiving many of spontaneous hand gestures and it would have saved us from sitting on the bridge banging our heads against the steering wheel while everyone at the front of the line tried wrapping their tiny little minds around what was happening.

2. Retirement. If I had to figure out the most talked about issue I’ve heard discussed since joining the workforce it would be retirement without question. It’s possible that it’s a national obsession. I’m looking forward to that happy day when I can tell The Man to shove it just like everyone else, but I don’t have an overwhelming need to talk about it at every opportunity. Maybe it’s because even after eight years I’m still usually the youngest guy in most rooms, but I don’t get the obsession these old codgers have with agonizing over every detail of the how’s and what’s. Check back with me in about 27 years and 332 days and maybe I’ll be singing a different tune, but for now, I think just quietly disappearing one day may be the best approach.

3. Donald Trump. Does this really require an explanation?

4. Thursday. For no other reason than it’s so close to the weekend yet still not Friday. It use to be passable back when Thursday was thirsty, but now that it’s just laundry night most of its allure has worn off. Now it’s just a second helping of Wednesday and there’s nothing cool about that at all.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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I’ve been told that some people can get through a week without being annoyed by anything. Those people are apparently suckers. Want to know what annoys Jeff this week? Here they are, as always, in no particular order:

1. The Maryland Transportation Authority. A week after the news from Annapolis reported Maryland’s budget was in surplus this year, the board members of the MTA unanimously voted in favor of the largest toll increase in the state’s history. Nice move asshats.

2. 30-somethings who complain about the stock market dropping. If you were 60 years old and contemplating retirement, you’d be right; a declining stock market would profoundly suck. If you’ve got 30+ years before you can even reasonably contemplate hanging up your career, the bottom falling out of the stock market is the best thing that could happen for you. You see, the whole point is to buy low and sell high. In case you’re wondering, this is the “buy low” part.

3. People who think that a satellite is going to fall on their head. OK, I’ll admit that a bus-sized satellite is hurtling back to earth, but A) It’s most likely to come in over South America (i.e. it’s someone else’s problem) and B) Even if it were coming in directly at the good old US of A, what do you realistically thing that chances are of it falling directly on your head? For you as an individual, the odds are 1:21 Trillion in case you were wondering. Please perform an immediate reality check and then go sit quietly somewhere.

4. Douchebags who hike near the Iranian boarder. You know what? You deserved to go to jail if for no other reason than being stupid. At what point did setting out on foot anywhere close to the boarder of a nation that’s a sworn enemy of your country strike you as a good idea? Well, two years later, I guess you could say lessons learned. In this one case I’m in the incredibly uncomfortable position of thinking the Iranians did the right thing.

Mentor…

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I had lunch this afternoon with the guy who I consider my first professional mentor. While there was plenty of talk about what circumstances brought me back to Maryland, but what I really noticed more than anything is how much retirement seems to be agreeing with him. He actually looked rested and not at rumpled in the way that you do when your clothes have spent too much time flying around in the belly of a regional jet. I’ve got to confess that I sort of had him pegged as one of the ones that would come right back as a contractor. Though he always talked about all the things he wanted to do when he hit eject for the last time, I didn’t think he’d actually go that route. Apparently I was mistaken.

With yet another government shutdown/default starting to gin up on the horizon seeing him in actual retirement mode really got me thinking about what, if anything, retirement might look like in Spring 2035. Looking off into that distance from Summer 2011, let’s just go with things don’t look particularly promising. With that sightly depressing thought in mind, I can still safely say that damn it was good to at least see someone from the old gang.

Perspective…

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There’s nothing like a retirement party to put a career in perspective. We all like to think of our working lives as being productive and valuable and perhaps that maybe after 30 years of work, we’ve left our mark. Most of us, of course, would be wrong in thinking that. Sure, there are exceptions – Hyman Rickover is the father of the nuclear submarine force; Henry Bessemer made steel economical; Watson and Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA – but for the average schmo sitting in a cubicle there aren’t going to be entries in even the most obscure history book – unless you create your own entry in Wikipedia.

I attended a retirement luncheon – a function that no one ever really wants to go to, but that guarantees a long lunch without anyone getting on your case – and had the dismaying realization that even the people working next to you don’t really have a clue what you do on a day to day basis. The highlight of the “ceremonial” portion of the event was the soon-to-be-departed employee’s supervisor saying a few kind words. One would hope to hear how they made the workplace better, or contributed to the war effort, or saved homeless kittens in their spare time.

What this particular career boiled down to was this: A supervisory musing about how he’d “always remember the great report you wrote about the problems in Peoria.”

Wow. That’s perspective.

For most of us, that’s how a career is going to end. Think on that next time you’re working late on an “important” project or skipping vacation days to make sure a project is finished on time. In 20 or 30 years when your middle of the road colleagues are sitting around a table at a middle of the road restaurant bidding you farewell it’s likely all you’ve done is written a great report about Peoria.

Live your life accordingly.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Planning for the end…

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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.

The Long Game…

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As you’ve noticed by now the pace of posting has slowed a bit lately. To be honest, I’ve been absolutely engrossed in watching the ongoing economic meltdown. I’ve sort of moved beyond the point of being stunned to the point of being fascinated in seeing how the market unravels from a more academic point of view. I want to try to understand the fundamentals at work – particularly those that failed. Obviously, the overextended home lending market has a significant share of the blame here, but I can’t make the jump to that being the only or even the root cause. I have to think there is something more basic at work here. So far, I’ve seen a lot of “the sky is falling” from the media, but they’ve been a little short on the serious economic analysis. Hopefully as we gain some perspective on the events of the last two weeks, someone with a far more developed sense of economics than mine will connect the dots.

While I’m thinking on the overall economy, I can’t escape the precipitous fall of stock prices over the last seven days. I’m the first to cringe when I look at the daily carnage inside my retirement account, but then I realize that I have 25 more years before I can even consider retiring and it starts to dawn on me that having the market down 50% means my IRA contribution is buying almost twice as many shares as I could a year ago for the same amount of money. Given that the historic trend of the market since its inception has been to move upwards and the ridiculously long horizon involved, the long game is looking pretty positive. Yeah, I know that thinking like that probably makes me a bad person, but I’m OK with that.

26 Years, 10 Months, 23 Days…

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On weekend mornings, the background noise in my houses is most often the FoxNews business report. One of their major talking points for the weekend just passed was the impending collapse of Social Security and what it would take to put that program on a solid fiduciary footing. If my calculations are correct, I can retire from government service in 26 years, 10 months, and 23 days. With that kind of time horizon, I don’t know why anyone in my age bracket would even contemplate Social Security in their calculations on what they need to do in order to retire comfortably. Without a massive infusion of cash from a tax increase, a dramatic reduction in benefits, and an increase in the age when the “pay out” begins, the program is, for all practical purposes, a dead man walking.

Even if some semblance of the program is salvaged, those of us in our 20s and 30s can count on receiving only a return of pennies on every dollar we “contribute” to the plan. Since it’s a government program, we don’t have the choice to “opt out” and invest that portion of our retirement into a sector that actually provides a positive return on investment. Effectively, every dollar our generation is forced to contribute to Social Security is a dollar that is lost to us and is nothing more than a tax by another name.

I was asked not long ago what I would do to fix the system… I don’t want to fix it. I want to tear the mother down. Sixty years ago, Social Security was a stop-gap measure that has been elevated to the lofty status of an entitlement. I don’t want to fix it. I want the government to allow me to be accountable for my own retirement planning and stay out of my way. I don’t want to fix it. I want Americans to start taking responsibility for what happens to them.

I don’t know how or when exactly we became a country of whiners, of men and women too infirm of mind to make our own decisions, of people terrified of the successes and failures that come with making your own decisions and being held accountable for them. If you are in the dawn of your career, it is your responsibility to make yourself smart on your options. Contribute to 401k, Roth, or other investment vehicles until it hurts. If you don’t make any provisions for how you plan to live out (and pay for) your golden years, don’t come bitching to me when you’re eating cat food and living under a bridge. I’ll be too busy playing golf to give a shit.