How to Retire Without Money
WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER RETIREMENT (page 2)
A youngster gets out of school and starts looking for a job. Jim Average might have liked to have become a doctor or engineer but it didn't work out that way. For one thing, his people couldn't afford to finance eight years of pre-med and medical school. The first job that opens up for Jim is in a local print shop where they teach him to do job printing. The pay isn't too good but they tell him he's learning a trade.He works in the print shop for a couple of years and the company puts in some new automatic equipment and Jim Average is let go. Not that he particularly cares. He never did like printing anyway. However, he's started going with Sally who works in a bakery so he needs to get another job as soon as possible. You can't get married on unemployment insurance.
The best job he can locate is clerk in a local super-market and he does his best to please a manager he can't get along with at all. He and Sally get married but since it's necessary for her to keep working if they're going to be able to live in a decent apartment and buy a car, they decide against having children...
Down through the years Jim has a series of jobs. Factory jobs, construction jobs, a job in a shipyard during the war, another print shop job. Once he and Sally even save enough money to open a service station but for one reason or other it doesn't go over and they lose all the money they invested. Once a depression comes along and for long months the family has no work at all. They have to move in with Sally's parents who can't really afford it.
Children come in spite of planning to the contrary and Jim and Sally sit up nights trying to figure out how to make ends meet. Except for when she's carrying a baby, Sally works at full time jobs. It's the only way they can keep going at all. Some years aren't too bad. During the war and the boom that follows, Jim does pretty well. They even make a deposit on a house and buy a bigger, flashier car. They also go into the hole for a TV set, a new refrigerator, and an electric stove. After which they sit around nights some more, worrying about what's going to happen if either of them lose their jobs.
At the age of 55 Jim stops being able to find work except such positions as night watchman or elevator operator in one of the run down buildings in the industrial part of town. And Sally can only occasionally find employment when her health is up to it, doing housework.
At 65 Jim Average gets his Social Security money and they sell their house and move down to Southern California to retire. However, the amount of Social Security money coming in hardly pays for living on the simplest standard. They get by only because one of the children is able to send them a few dollars each month.
These may sound bitter, the above accounts, but they aren't far off the beam. In one case you have a success and in the other you have an average life.
For my money, neither of them are worth the living. If I had to make a choice I'd probably choose to be Sam Lucky rather than Jim Average, but neither of them has lived a full life. And as far as retirement is concerned, both of them wound up retired at the age of sixty-five in circumstances which neither can enjoy...
Actually, it can be a great deal tougher than even the life of Jim Average which we've painted above. At least he reached the age of sixty-five, which a good many people never do, the pace of modern life being what it is. And at least Jim was able to get jobs until he was 55, a good many find themselves on the scrap heap long before this.
And I didn't even deal with the fact that while both Jim and Sally were working, trying to make ends meet, their kids were out on the streets probably taking their master's degree in juvenile delinquency. Nor did we mention that in the life of Sam Lucky he had a fine chance of becoming an alcoholic along the way in view of the pressures upon him. Or that Mrs. Lucky, in spite of her psychiatric visits, had a strong chance of winding up in a mental institute under the tensions of her frustrated life.
We haven't dealt, either, with the probability that after the age of thirty or so there was no longer any real love between Sam and Lois nor Jim and Sally. You don't lead the kind of existence they did and still retain the affection with which you started marriage.
Never in the history of any nation has there been such a large percentage of a people in mental institutions. Never has there been such a degree of juvenile delinquency. Never have there been so many divorces. Never has there been such insecurity in the hearts of a people, and our suicide rate is second highest in the world. We Americans, as a people, by no means "have it made."
§