Randy Fitzgerald

Like so many baby boomers and older folks in our age group, Barb and I have had a very nervous few weeks over the stock market and our plans for the near future.  As we planned for our retirement, we’ve been counting heavily on our 401(k) funds, but now—with all the financial disasters on Wall Street—we’re not sure what’s left of them. When that quarterly statement finally arrives, I won’t be eager to open it.

            It’s a harsh awakening to hear that those who have 10 years or so to wait for the market to rebound will be fine—but those of us who’ll need our investments soon for retirement—well, we’ll apparently just be out of luck.  We’ll have to take our losses, and maybe that will mean working for longer than we want to.

            Barb and I had been congratulating ourselves that we had continued to work past the usual retirement ages. We saw 62 go by and kept working. We saw 65 go by and kept working. We love our jobs, but it was wonderfully reassuring to think that we could quit anytime we wanted to and start calling on the money we had carefully put into our retirement plans over the years.

            We probably aren’t going to be able to do that now. Now, again like so many others who get that AARP magazine every month, we may have to keep plugging away longer than intended.

            What a mess.  I don’t pretend to understand all this. Should we try to remove what’s left of our investments from the market? And, if so, what do we do with the money that won’t cost us a fortune in taxes?  Should we remove something from savings, and if so, where do we put it?  If our bank should fold, could we get to our safe deposit box?

            One thing I did hear last week that was in itself frightening is that it can apparently take about a year and half for the FDIC to return the funds that they insure—and one banker even told me it can take as long as 10 years.  Check that out for yourself—I can’t verify that the people I spoke to were experts. If either of those figures is anywhere near correct, that’s not good news.

            I don’t remember ever having concerns like this in my lifetime. Though I was born in the 1940s and missed the last great collapse, I do know that my parents had vivid Depression-era memories—and certainly Barb’s parents did.  They were so haunted by that period and by bank failures that they actually buried their savings in Mason jars under the dirt floor of the garage. Barb never knew it was there until they dug up all the jars in 1960 to pay cash for a house they bought in Charlottesville. Barb’s sister said it was a little embarrassing when they counted the money out to the seller of the home because it definitely smelled very musty.

            For years Barb worked at an ad agency housed in the Plantation House down on Main Street. That building has the distinction of having been one of the tallest buildings in the city during the Depression—and legend has it that several men, wiped out financially, leaped to their deaths from there.

            Barb never researched whether that was true, but it was an unnerving story, especially when she worked there late at night, by herself.  She said she thought of it often because the elevator in the building had a tendency to go up and down by itself with no one in it—a mystery that was kind of funny during the daylight hours but a bit nerve-wracking in the dead of night.

While a lot of us may be weighing worst-case scenarios, whether it’s postponing retirement, cutting way back on expenses and credit, or downsizing, no one I know is feeling desperate yet. We older folks tend to be an optimistic lot—we’ve been up and we’ve been down, and we have faith in our coping and surviving mechanisms. I for one am grateful that social security is still available to us, at least for a few more years.

 Meanwhile, if things get worse, be advised that Barb and I will be open to dinner invitations at your house.