Now seriously folks, who wants to get old?
This question, randomly thrown like a stand up comedy club punch line amateur night routine, can suddenly stop someone dead on their tracks. Because the answer is that nobody wants to grow old, at least not as an ultimate goal in life.
Sure, you can talk o somebody – the younger the better – and they’ll want to be “old”. Old enough to drive a car, old enough to drink and smoke; old enough to “enter the system” in the form of student loans and furthermore, 30 year mortgages to pay for the house in which they will raise their families.
In these instances, of course you will find people “willing to be older”, albeit with a total different conception of what growing old is. To “grow old” even as a way to part from the limitations of early livelihood is considered a wish healthy enough to nurture when we are in our teen years and even after that, as society expects an “adult” behavior from us. You know, go to college or get a job, save and settle down, find someone, have kids, pay debts, die of a heart attack. That old chestnut…
From another point of view, some people desire to “grow old” with a special someone, as the result of love. This wish then becomes a sort of “Life Joint Venture” in which an individual will openly and willingly accept to share his or her life with somebody else until “death do us part”. And it is here, in this specific topic, in which I believe a halt has to be made in order to set the boundaries of a true and useful analysis: Apart from the love and the desire to be with that person, to have a family, to have children and a dog and a white picket fence house, do we really plan on how to get old when this happens?
Is this post a hidden sales pitch?
I know, I know…this sounds too much as a sales pitch, with a couple of grandparents sipping Margaritas in the Caribbean, while their 401k’s produce all the rent they need to keep being old and happy. But the hard truth is that today, most people can’t afford to compare themselves to their fictional counterparts in television ads, and they can’t afford for many reasons, one being the fact that with all the sudden changes in the financial world, there is no safe haven for investments and everybody can take a hit.
Today, people that worked for over 40 years face themselves with the monthly decision of having to let go of certain necessities to make ends meet and pay the bills, including the ever-growing medical ones. As more children are themselves facing the aftermath of the Foreclosure chaos from 2007 and 2008, many parents are now supporting their own children, in a blend of two different generations facing the same problem: lack of proper ways to save money.
In a world of constant change boosted by technology, the traditional 30 year-old job, in which a person works for a retirement and gets a gold watch and a lapel pin at the end of their careers is pretty much disappearing. As the retired actuary manager of an insurance company in the movie “About Mr. Schmidt” with Jack Nicholson, many people walk into retirement without enough “saved” time to accrue enough to retire thus forcing them to seek jobs after their actual jobs are finished. A sad collateral damage of globalization, but a reality nonetheless.
However, not everyone faces a situation like this, and you most definitely, should not. Most of us, younger generations, still have a chance to avoid this, because, let’s face it: to grow old is a pain, but to grow old without money is an illness.
Saving for those so called “Golden Years” is not hard, seriously. It takes, as in everything, some discipline. I am not the one who will tell you about the Ferrari you could had bought if you hadn’t eaten on those fancy restaurants all those years, but we both know saving is something we need to address, and we need to do it as soon as we feel we can put something “aside”.
You see, here is where the system is broken down. In a system where saving is always a desire but never a chore part of our duties, people tend to face their later years in the least favorable conditions: old, tired and without enough money to retire and therefore, in the necessity to keep working to pay rent, even if the energy that comes with youth is gone. In those occasions in which a kind of equity exists, major threats like depreciation or the reappearance of another mortgage crisis can eventually jeopardize traditionally considered safe investments, such as Real Estate.
Okay, so you scared me enough to ask, what now?
Well, now, in my opinion, we are going through extremely uncertain times which carry the same useful content most crisis carry: opportunity. In situations of financial discomfort many opt to go their own entrepreneurial way, while others decide to stay within the safe zone of the paycheck to paycheck routine. Whatever way you decide to go, remember you only got enough fuel to make it to where you want to go, or, in the case of old age, life takes you, and the necessity to develop a savings routine will increase as time passes.
Call it a retirement plan, a pension fund, a piggy bank for future times, saving money via a financial instrument, as simple as an insurance company, can effectively establish that fuel you will need when the strength of the young years has left you, as it leaves everybody, day by day, silently.
So stop worrying and get busy. Put this in the list of pending stuff, and get the knowledge you will need to decide how much you want to look like those models in the television ads we see each night.
After all, is your life.
Andreina Maneiro