I guess what I'm trying to say is that my 20s are over, but I'm comfortable with that. Good riddance. What a shitty decade.
Anyhoo, now that I'm a "responsible adult", I find my thoughts turning more and more towards the future; specifically retirement. Yes, I am already looking forward to retirement. Working is for suckers. However, as I have become quite partial to food, shelter, clothing and Impressionist art; work will be mandatory for at least the next 35-37 years. . . if not longer. The government keeps raising the retirement age hoping that most of us will be dead (or damn near it) by the time we're old enough to collect full benefits. As if you can live solely on social security anyway. At the rate the cost of living is going up, retirees are going to be torching their houses to get their hands of some of that sweet, sweet insurance fraud cash.
As of this year, I have absolutely nothing saved. There are several reasons for this, the biggest being that I had a string of crap jobs in my 20s that a)had me living from paycheck to paycheck and b) were independent businesses that didn't have retirement plans for employees to pay into. Now, as I've said, at this point in my life, I have roughly another 40 years of work ahead me. That is assuming, of course, that I'm not bussing tables until the day I drop dead. But time flies. One day you're in high school and the next day you're crashing through the front of a KFC because you thought the accelerator was the brake and your kids were too chickenshit to make you stop driving sooner. It's time for me to really start thinking about how I'll be funding my golden years
With the markets being what they are, 401Ks and IRAs are iffy right now. Not that I have any money to put into either one of those anyway, but I can think of much more entertaining ways to piss money away than watching it evaporate in a stock market free fall. And I think a lot of people are in the same boat. Either they've just not been in a position to save money or have had to dip into their savings during the recession (you know, the one that allegedly ended in 2008/2009) just to get by.
For myself, unless some things change, I'm going to have to get really creative. Tin cans of cash buried in the yard and Crown Royal bags full of pennies are just not what they used to be fiscally speaking. Unless, of course, I take that money to my local Indian casino and bet everything on a hand of blackjack. Hey, you never know. One lucky night could get me a nice little hoveround and buy a condo in Florida, all in one fell swoop.
Then, of course, there's the backup plan of three or four generations of lower and middle class Americans: lottery tickets. An investment of a couple dollars a day could potentially see me with a big house, five cars and my very own episode of "The Lottery Ruined My Life". And what have I got to lose, really? Sure, I could put a dollar a day in a savings account for 40 years, but even with interest I'd barely end up with $16,000 by the time I retire. If I have to bail even one grandkid out jail, that cash is history. Then, in the event that no one in the family ends up being a felon, I could have the misfortune of being one of those people that lingers on and on well into her 90s. $16,000 isn't going to last very long. Then what? I end up in a state nursing home where the nurses occasionally forget to wheel the old people in out of the rain, that's what.
Then there's always the good old have-a-bunch-of-kids-and-see-if-anyone-makes-it-big strategy. NBA/NFL/MLB/RAPPER/SINGER/NASCAR kid could set me up really nice. Hell, I'd even take WWE kid. There's guys in there that have been successfully "wrestling" 20-25 years. By the time the kid is Ric Flair old and not really making money anymore, I'll probably be dead anyway.
Finally is the last (and least attractive) resort of actually continuing to work well into my 70s and 80s.
I suppose it's lucky for us all the demand for drug mules never seems to decline.
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