How nice, one of my former students brought in a gift for me, a new digital voice recorder. Unlike my first generation Olympus, this Sony will apparently work directly with Naturally Speaking. This is one of the numerous things I expect to investigate full time once I get my research gran—oops, I mean, my pension. I’ll explain it all in a second. Anyway, these devices are expensive and that was awfully nice of her.
A great day for equations with composite unknowns. I may have gotten somewhere. Like all pensions, nobody knows how long you’ll live. My pension assumed I will live all the way to 65 and then some, or at least did so when I punched in the numbers back in my twenties. It would seem others have finally uncovered the very shortcomings of that whole arrangement. What if you are not going to live forever and want to reckon exactly how to arrange your affairs so you don’t get less than somebody else just because they live longer? (Remember, we all paid the same dollar amounts in and should get the same out.)Oddly, this entire situation might not have happened had I listened to [RofR] my business partner when I was twenty-one. He was against me spending $80 on “some toy” called a hand-held calculator. Although he later recanted that view and declared it to be the single most important tool in our early successes, it is true usually they were just toys. Mine was a single function 9 digit display that ate a set of batteries every time you left in on by accident. It had no features, but I once used it to calculate the interest on each installment of a ten year mortgage. Took a week. RofR didn’t believe that I had done it.
It was on that antique calculated I played “what-if” and came up with the magic table. This was a list of how much I would be required to invest weekly beginning on each birthday to eventually get a pension of $1,000 per month. (Weekly investment tables were unheard of at that time.) That is where the eventual amount of $19.34 came from and what I finally did. That is correct, all this stems from that amount put away early enough. The only alternative was to earn millions and that was never an option for me.
Certainly, I’ve done far better than the $1,000 per month, but nobody in the system will give you a straight answer so I have no definite amount yet. [Nor would I publish it here, I’m just saying.] The one thing they don’t want you to do is maximize your sources, yet you’d expect them to be the ones to help you do it. They consistently try to trick you into revealing all other sources of income before you proceed, whence they can merely “top off” the balance. So get the max from them before you do anything else. The good news is that as long as I don’t croak in the next few months, we’ll see some nice cash. It gets complicated but we can abbreviate things by calling it “Option 22”. My old union has come to the rescue yet again.
Instead of taking a fixed amount, I can take [nearly] double that amount now until I hit 65, which works out to one huge pile of money. Then at 65, my pension drops to $136 per month, exactly when my government pensions kick in, replacing all but $506 per month of the total. See the advantages? If my income was greater from the first pension, I would never qualify for any extras which the government is sure to pass to bail out the electorate. That gets significant since I am from the generation that bankrupted America but I’m not part of the crowd that has to pay it back. They blew it, not me.
[Author's note 2016-04-10: these figures were what I worked with at the time and have no bearing on what eventually happened. I did not take option 22 due to a "remarkable recovery". By 2016 I'd lived so long that I already have over five times as much out of the pension as was originally thought possible.]
Other good news, the bank wire arrived late today. I’ve set up the meeting for early tomorrow and the new place is as good as bought. I had to quit at Ramada, while assuring them nothing was their fault in any way. However, I most definitely was working in the quarter year that my condition occurred, or in this instance, re-occurred.
Brag, brag, but when I explained to a few people the situation, and they immediately stated they were shocked that someone my age could have a heart condition. What? It turns out they all thought I was around 10-12 years younger than I am. So I’m avoiding all mention of my actual age here. I would do that anyway. So’s I can get all dem nice broads whats got real class.
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