The Winter 2004 issue of the newsletter published by the financial company that handles my husband's 401K came today. Usually I can count on pages of informative reading that make me so confused I forget that I ever took a course in economics. But this time, I got treated to an interview with the honorary chairperson of the National Retirement Planning Coalition, Ben Stein. And he's calling me names.
The newsletter devotes two pages to interviewing Chairman Stein so he can, as far as I can tell, scare the crap out of us. He makes it clear that although he is a comedian, this is not a particularly funny subject. "The idea of being old and not having enough money, of running out of funds before you run out of years, is not funny." He hits us with cold facts: There are 77 million baby boomers and they haven't saved enough. That's because "there's a national ethos of irresponsibility." Shame on us. The Greatest Generation we ain't. And what we stinking unaccountable Boomers have invested in is largely the wrong stuff, although he doesn't elaborate on that idea. (I hope he's not saying my basement full of unopened baseball card packs and collectible plates from the Franklin Mint won't be enough to provide for my old age.) And don't even get him started on the people who cash out of their employer retirement plans when they change jobs - Ben will tell you, "That's idiotic." I'm just not feeling the love here. I mean, we're giving lots of our pre-tax money to these people and their guest is so angry with us.
What I am hearing is that Boomers can't count on Social Security because they had the bad judgment to be born. And although the Federal Government has known about their births since they occured, no plans have been made to modify the system to account for them. There's just too many of them and they are too irresponsible to understand that, as Ben tells us, no "miraculous force is going to come along and rescue them." They "can't pass the buck to Congress or to other taxpayers. With the deficit now, the next direction for Social Security benefits is almost certainly not up." Certainly not. The sky is indeed falling and it's all our fault. Even Ben's teenage son, and by extension all our children, won't stand for helping us out of this jam:
You have a teenager. Do you think he'd rescue you in retirement?
Our son has already told us that he expects to kick us out of our house and put us in a retirement home. The cusom of children taking care of thier parents - it's a nice idea, it appeals to me, but not to young people.
I'm not sure that Ben's kid knows how much retirement homes cost these days. He'd do better to leave the country and not return their calls. But we get the point. We won't be resuced and we're too irresponsible to deserve help from our kids. Although I think getting born to Boomers was a pretty lousy financial decision on their part. I guess our only hope is to get responsible and fast. Ben tells us that we must stop yielding to "the endless barrage of advertising in this country to buy cars, buy vacations." Start yielding to the barrage that tells us to start acting like grown-ups for once - with the help of competent financial advisors and insurance companies. It is they and not our government and not our children, who can be counted on to help us help our lazy, feckless and probably not terribly bright selves survive the hell that is old age.
And if you don't have the funds to invest and you don't have the money to buy insurance against the inevitable long-term hospitialization that nobody can afford, well, you probably weren't smart and responsible enough to avoid that in the first place and really, you can't blame anyone but yourself for that, so don't go crying to Ben.
UPDATE: typos
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