Retire? That's rich

A recent survey reports that that while Baby boomers are only worried about achieving a comfortable retirement, Generation X expects to work until someone wheels are our corpses away from our PCs (or whatever replaces them by then). Small wonder we don't have much pity for boomers worried that they won't be able to retire comfortably.

My wife and I have been stocking away money like mad, and have 401(k)s in the six figures, not bad for people in their late 30s. According to projections we receive from our 401k folks, we're well onour way to having enough to live on when our working days are done -- except for one little detail; it expects social security to still be around when we "retire" sometime in the mid to late 2030s. As if. I'll be happy if Medicare/Medicaid is still around and there are still doctors qualified who decide to for a career in geriatrics over plastic surgery or some other more lucrative field.

We were told by "experts" that we should invest all we can, which we've done since we started working 10-15 years ago. Our first round went bye-bye in the dot com bust, but fortunately we weren't making that much yet, so we didn't lose much. Unfortunately the chance for us to come back with the next bull market ran right into our reproductive/house buying years. So, instead of investing "discretionary" income in stocks, we bought babies, and their accessories and houses. I don't need to expand on how well the later investments are doing these days.

So, in a nutshell, those of us who were stupid enough to listen to the experts didn't do too well. Oh, we may have some money stashed away and we may have some equity in our homes but we're nowhere near where our parents were. And, now that we're approaching our 40s, we see the big social security expense coming and we feel powerless to stop it. Heaven forbid we even suggest investing the social security fund in the stock market (not as individual accounts, but just a small percentage as a whole) or raising the retirement age to account for our longer lifespans.

Sure, some of us have wasted money on things our parents didn't such as HDTVs, DVDs, cell phones, SUVs etc, that we don't need, but I'm sure my grandparents said the same thing about the color TVs my parents and their siblings purchased in the late 60s. However there are other facts aside from those discretionary purchases. We are paying much more for our homes (at the moment) then our parents did, even adjusted for inflation. While food and fuel costs, again adjusted for inflation aren't too bad at the moment, some of us are still paying our college loans (we had to go to college since the college degree somehow became our generation's high school diploma) on raises that average 3%, while contributing to our retirement, paying more for health insurance, and trying to save for our own children's college educations. That of course is assuming that our jobs aren't outsourced to India and we find ourselves working at $10 an hour McJobs.

But all that said, I can't see myself retiring for one other reason. The thought of spending the last 20 years of my life not growing, but just sitting somewhere seems incredibly dull. Oh, I don't plan to be doing what I do now, nor work as many hours, but I don't plan on doing nothing. Fortunately, unless I get some illness that affects my ability to read, write and analyze, I should be able to do some sort of work well into my golden years.

So I'm not really complaining, however, the next time I hear a retiree complain how the cost of tee time on the golf course should be reduced so they can afford to golf at the expense of something else, like parks, schools or libraries, don't be surprised if I tell the retiree where to stick the golf clubs. Same for the retirees who complain about high taxes, ignoring the little fact that if they had paid while they went, instead of voting for politicians who left huge defecits, and dealt with the corruption that has been rampant in this state for decades, their tax bills would be a bit lower.