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Economy
In reply to the discussion: Weekend Economists Examine Escape Artists and Con Men April 27-29, 2012 [View all]Demeter
(85,373 posts)49. My Faith-Based Retirement By JOE NOCERA
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/opinion/nocera-my-faith-based-retirement.html
My 60th birthday is less than a week and a half away, and if there is one thing I can say with certainty its that 60 is not the new 50. My body creaks and groans. My eyes arent what they used to be. I dont sleep as soundly as I did just a few years ago. Lately, Ive been seeing a lot of doctors, just to make sure everything still more or less works. Ive also found myself with a sudden urge to get my house in order just, you know, in case. Insurance, wills, that sort of thing. Sixty is when you stop pretending youre going to live forever. Youre officially old. Or at least old-ish. The only thing I havent dealt with on my to-do checklist is retirement planning. The reason is simple: Im not planning to retire. More accurately, I cant retire. My 401(k) plan, which was supposed to take care of my retirement, is in tatters.
Like millions of other aging baby boomers, I first began putting money into a tax-deferred retirement account a few years after they were legislated into existence in the late 1970s. The great bull market, which began in 1982, was just gearing up. As a young journalist, I couldnt afford to invest a lot of money, but my account grew as the market rose, and the bull market gave me an inflated sense of my investing skills.
I became such an enthusiast of the new investing culture that I wrote my first book, in the mid-1990s, about what I called the democratization of money. It was only right, I argued, that the little guy have the same access to the markets as the wealthy. In the book, I didnt make much of the decline of pensions. After all, we were in the middle of the tech bubble by then. What fun!
The bull market ended with the bursting of that bubble in 2000. My tech-laden portfolio was cut in half. A half-dozen years later, I got divorced, cutting my 401(k) in half again. A few years after that, I bought a house that needed some costly renovations. Since my retirement account was now hopelessly inadequate for actual retirement, I reasoned that I might as well get some use out of the money while I could. So I threw another chunk of my 401(k) at the renovation. Thats where I stand today...
SHOULD HAVE WORKED ON THAT MARRIAGE, JOE.
My 60th birthday is less than a week and a half away, and if there is one thing I can say with certainty its that 60 is not the new 50. My body creaks and groans. My eyes arent what they used to be. I dont sleep as soundly as I did just a few years ago. Lately, Ive been seeing a lot of doctors, just to make sure everything still more or less works. Ive also found myself with a sudden urge to get my house in order just, you know, in case. Insurance, wills, that sort of thing. Sixty is when you stop pretending youre going to live forever. Youre officially old. Or at least old-ish. The only thing I havent dealt with on my to-do checklist is retirement planning. The reason is simple: Im not planning to retire. More accurately, I cant retire. My 401(k) plan, which was supposed to take care of my retirement, is in tatters.
Like millions of other aging baby boomers, I first began putting money into a tax-deferred retirement account a few years after they were legislated into existence in the late 1970s. The great bull market, which began in 1982, was just gearing up. As a young journalist, I couldnt afford to invest a lot of money, but my account grew as the market rose, and the bull market gave me an inflated sense of my investing skills.
I became such an enthusiast of the new investing culture that I wrote my first book, in the mid-1990s, about what I called the democratization of money. It was only right, I argued, that the little guy have the same access to the markets as the wealthy. In the book, I didnt make much of the decline of pensions. After all, we were in the middle of the tech bubble by then. What fun!
The bull market ended with the bursting of that bubble in 2000. My tech-laden portfolio was cut in half. A half-dozen years later, I got divorced, cutting my 401(k) in half again. A few years after that, I bought a house that needed some costly renovations. Since my retirement account was now hopelessly inadequate for actual retirement, I reasoned that I might as well get some use out of the money while I could. So I threw another chunk of my 401(k) at the renovation. Thats where I stand today...
SHOULD HAVE WORKED ON THAT MARRIAGE, JOE.
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