So, I've been hearing these dire warnings about the shrinking dollars in Social Security and the need to save money elsewhere for that golden time of life. I even got a notice from my 403B account holder telling me the good news, I could put away an additional $20,000 this year, tax free!
Wow! Of course, where that extra 20K is supposed to come from I haven't a clue. Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be deducting that out of my paycheck! Then, I see in the online issue of Fortune Magazine, after an article about how a family is poverty-stricken on $150,000 a year, a retirement calculator. What fun, I thought. How much money will I actually have at that magic age of 65?
The calculator doesn't work quite that way, instead, it tries to determine how much money you have to put away in the remaining years until age 65. (For those of you keeping count, that's 14 years to me.) The calculator then goes about telling me that I have a 0% chance of having enough money to retire on, based on current contributions and my anticipated social security.
This was not very comforting, but the calculator had a solution for me, all I have to do is, every year for the next 14 years is to contribute an additional $20,000 yearly to my 403B. That's all!
What the calculator did not tell me, was that at the current contribution rate, at what age I could retire. I suspect this is because it will be long after my anticipated life expectancy. I'm sure the calculator doesn't want to give me depressing news like that.
The funny thing is, $20K is such a ridiculous figure that I am actually finding this amusing. If I was short something like $5 or $6 thousand, I might have actually tried to shave that much off my household budget (I think food would go first, followed by medications and (sorry Zelda) dog food).
I figure now that I have just as much of a chance of retiring as I do of winning the lottery. And I never buy lottery tickets.
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