The Awful Math Of Aging In America

We all go through the stages of life in their turn. Childhood, adolescence, young-adulthood, the peak earning years, middle age, and the varying degrees of old age, ranging from slightly old to decrepit. We all know what's coming, unless we willfully shut out the knowledge. The clock ticks, and the calendar pages flip, at the same rate for everybody, and when they're done, we're gone. It's very simple, and not so bad when you think about it. It happens to everyone, rich or poor, on about the same schedule. So far, anyway. The trick is to be well-organized about it, and a bit of luck doesn't hurt. It turns out that the whole enterprise is much more difficult in America than it is in any other similarly situated country.

Unlike the rest of the developed world, Americans are required to figure out how much money and how much insurance they will need to take care of themselves through the unpredictable end-game of life. For all of my long life, the help that Americans in bad situations can get from our government has been less, and less, and less. While other rich, modern countries are busy caring for their people, and cushioning life's blows for them, we Americans have the freedom to stand on our own feet, or fail spectacularly, it's our choice. All of the other fully industrialized nations prefer to level the playing field in a world where some people are born with a full house and others have to make due with a pair of fours. They seek to share the risks of life and help each other. America, on the other hand, prefers to deal with its citizens at arms length, demanding that we make all of our own arrangements. “Don't be bothering me, pal,” says America, “it ain't my fault that you got cancer in your forties.” Maybe you should have spent more on insurance! God help Americans whose children are born with terrible diseases. America is as rich and modern as any other country on earth, and yet our government will not lift one little pinky finger off of the table to help us. We are free to die in a ditch. We are free to charge so much for insulin that our diabetic neighbors die from the lack of it. We have every freedom you can think of, except the freedom to feed the hungry people among us. They put you in jail for that. This is all very problematic for me.

I've always said, if we were some paleolithic tribe living in some cave somewhere, and the chief acted so uncaring about the people under his leadership, we'd stove his head in with a rock while he was sleeping and toss his ass over a cliff. The next boss would be tuned in to taking care of the tribe from day one, knowing what happens if you don't. But those were simpler times, and now we're stuck with this uncaring bunch of millionaire “elected representatives” who only pay attention to the billionaires, from whom their prosperity stems.

The whole idea of making a life-plan when you are a young man or woman, or a young married couple, and then sticking to that plan for forty years or so, has always been a daunting proposition, and these days it has become downright unmanageable. How much has the country changed in the last forty years? How have costs and prices changed in that time? How have government policies changed? How has the medical community changed? What genius could have made a sensible plan forty years ago that would have put him on easy street today? Unless, of course, the plan was to make a huge fortune, and you had the talent and luck to make it work. 

It's even worse now for young people starting out. What will the world be like forty years from now? Any ideas? Should they hoard savings in Bitcoin? Buy gold? Stock? Bonds? Dollars? Stock up on canned tuna fish? Bullets? Do you want to try to predict the cost of living? Or the ways and means of it? Will houses be as good an investment as always, or will they turn into millstones around your neck? Condos? All of those things are up in the air, liable to come down anywhere. How is anyone supposed to plan for that?

It wasn't that long ago when all medical facilities and providers, including health insurance providers, were administered on a non-profit basis, and almost all jobs above paper-boy came with pretty good health insurance at no cost. It was not that long ago when the children of working class people could attend good universities at little or no cost. It was not that long ago that our grandparents actually bought houses in Florida and lived on Social Security! It all seems like a dream by now, of course.

So here we are, we “active retired,” trying to plan for the future. The very idea is comical. It's all questions, and no answers. How many years are we talking about? How long do we expect to live? Five? Ten? Twenty? God forbid, thirty years? Do you wish to continue living in America? Ouch! That's expensive. Maybe you're lucky and you have a house in a still decent neighborhood in a still decent city. If it's nice, the taxes are probably high. If you're like people my age, you still have a mortgage, because those re-fi's were hard to resist back when you were in those peak-earning years. Maybe the house is worth a lot of money. The trick there is that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. You've either got the house, and the bills, or you can have the money in the bank. That's if you're lucky, and then you'd still have to pay rent somewhere, or buy a smaller house in the stix, and pay all kinds of insurance, and various taxes, and co-pays on all of the meds, and co-pays on the Medicare. Yes, you will need more meds and more doctors visits over the years. When you add up the monthly expenses, even for a less than extravagant lifestyle, you come up with a figure that looks like it came directly from outer space, like it was old Italian lira instead of dollars. Does anybody save enough? Almost nobody, in fact. And pity those without the house to help out with this vicious mathematics.

Many Americans had personal retirement plans that included continuing health insurance coverage and a generous pension plan from a long-term employer. Many of them paid good money into those plans over the years. Well, my friends, if you retired and your old employer is still solvent, and is actually paying out those retirement funds as promised, you're well ahead of the game. Many employers are not honoring those agreements. Not just the unwary companies that went out of business or something, but also many perfectly solvent companies who had clever boys tell them how they could get away with denying you those benefits. Do you know anyone who was “laid off” by a perfectly solvent company right before retirement? Or just before their pension was scheduled to vest? I know several myself. Some of them needed that money, too. That's another thing about America. It's not just the government that is after your blood and treasure. There are not many companies that still have any sense of loyalty to their employees anymore. It's really not necessary for them to rob you, they don't need your money, not the government and not those still prosperous corporations, but they figured out that they could steal it and get away with it. The ethics of it are somewhere down in the dumpster with those tuition free public universities and non-profit health providers.

The whole thing is unimaginable. In my case, the odds are that I will live another ten years. What will happen with my health? Will I get cancer? The good kind? One of the terrible ones? Maybe a stroke, that's always possible. How about Parkinson's Disease? People still get that. Heart disease? Well, I've got that already. Will I need a bypass operation before it's all over? It's possible, although it does not seem probable. Lesser procedures? Almost certainly. Scans and angioplasties, sure. And meds. Those are things that I can afford. How about my wife? Cancer or something? And dentists! How they peck away at you! Boy, are they annoying. If our luck is good, we have enough money to get by okay and die in bed. If we have bad luck? If my doctors bills spend us down to the bright line where more spending would be money that my wife will need to live on after I'm gone, that will be it for me. Goodbye cruel world! I'm not spending a dime on doctors if my wife will need it to live on. And I'll be working right up until the day I die, one way or another. I'm still working a job right now, and I'm riding that one until the wheels fall off. What if they don't need me anymore? Not to worry! I'm already easing into an alternate income stream for when the time comes. I could get by nicely on my Social Security if there were no medical surprises, but we can't count on that, now can we?

Here's the big plot-twist: I'm doing all of this in a developing country. My wife's country, actually. It's all very comfortable and it's much more affordable than America. We have a very good lifestyle here, which includes restaurants and taxis and treatment at one of the better hospitals. I couldn't afford to live in America. I recommend living overseas as a solution for any of my dear readers who may be having trouble making ends meet in our country of origin. Go for it! There are many nice places with hospitals and doctors and dentists that are very good. Beautiful countries with better weather and more reasonable costs of living. Several Spanish speaking countries come to mind, and that's a relatively easy language for an English speaker to learn. And fun, too! Beautiful literature and poetry, beautiful songs. You'd be surprised. Challenge yourself! You might like it.

And you might find that you worry less about money, and that you are enjoying life more, and watching less news on TV, and that your quality of life has risen. You can always Skype your family, if they have time. Between social media and Skype and Line, they may not even know that you have gone.