During the last five years of my father’s life, he began a series of letters and memos to my younger brother and me about his life. Dad was not a famous man, nor a particularly accomplished man – at least, not by standard measures of success. Nevertheless, his letters chronicling a childhood during the Depression in the midst of the Dust Bowl, his experiences as a infantryman on the battlefields of Europe, and life in the 1950s were an incredible record of an extraordinary life and time in the history of America.
After his death, his writing was collected, organized chronologically for easier reading, and bound together for each member of the family, an incomparable legacy to his grandchildren and their descendants. As his son, I take great comfort in knowing that Dad will be remembered as a good husband, father, and friend for generations to come.
As my father used to say, “We come into and go out of this world alone, but the quality of our lives depends upon the people we touch along the way.” Blood and bones, and stones and steel eventually fade into nothingness, but the love between parents and children, siblings, and spouses endures forever. It is the stories of love that remind us who we are and why we are here.
Everyone has a story and an audience eager to read, enjoy, and remember the details of each narrative. Writing your autobiography is an opportunity to reach across the boundaries of time and space, set the record straight, honor the ones you love, and celebrate the journey you have taken. It is the chance to create your own time capsule; an opportunity to leave your handprints on the walls of human existence, and to shout to the world, “I was here and I mattered!”
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6 Keys to a Comfortable and Happy Retirement
Gene Perret, the comedy writer for such popular television shows as “All in the Family,” “Three’s Company,” and “The Carol Burnett Show,” once said of retirement, “It’s nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to get along with less cheese.” Almost everyone looks forward to that time when they can sleep as late as they want, spend their days traveling or playing golf, and opining about the state of the civilization.
But the responsibility for a comfortable retirement rests almost completely on the shoulders of the individual worker. Government programs like Social Security and Medicare provide a minimum level of income and healthcare costs to recipients – but those benefits are intended to be supplemented with employer benefits and private savings.
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Having failed to save enough during their earning years or being victims of poor investment decisions, many seniors are discovering that the retirement they expected is beyond their reach. As a consequence, they are working longer, scaling back expenses, and forgoing some of their dreams. But fortunately, all is not lost, even for those whose retirement dreams may seem dashed.
The Keys to the Retirement You’ve Always Wanted
Despite the travel industry’s advertisements showing seniors walking through the sand on exotic, foreign beaches or dancing the night away on a Caribbean cruise, fewer than one in five workers are “very” confident that they can retire comfortably, according to the 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey. Only one in four current retirees are “very” confident that they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years.
While the outlook for your retirement may be cloudy, there are steps you can take to improve your financial situation and the happiness of your retirement years.
1. Maximize Income Flow
Few people who retire continue to have the same level of income as when working. Nevertheless, there are options available to increase your income:
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To Ensure Compliance, Say What You Mean!
“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” This quote, often attributed to the late children’s book author Robert McCloskey, perfectly sums up the problem of communication. The possibility of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and mis-identification exists any time two or more people attempt to transmit and receive information, often leading to humorous – and sometimes, tragic – consequences.
The picture on the right – usually referred to as the young/old woman illusion – is an example of how miscommunication can happen. The speaker can refer to the “young woman” while the listener can only see the “old woman.”
A few classic examples of how people often say one thing, but mean something else:
Trip to the Grocery Store: A young wife asks her husband to run to the grocery store to pick up ingredients to bake a cake. Her husband, happily engaged in watching his favorite football team play, reluctantly agrees when she assures him it will be a quick trip, as he will be purchasing a minimal number of items. To ensure that nothing is omitted, she lists the six items she needs and hands the list to her husband before starting to preheat the oven. An hour later – the third quarter of the game almost over – the angry husband finally returns from the store, staggers into the kitchen with multiple full sacks, and returns to the car for a second unloading. As she opens the sacks, his chagrined wife discovers the following:
1 bottle of vegetable oil
2 bottles of vanilla extract
3 two-pound sacks of sugar
4 dozen eggs
5 pounds of butter
6 five-pound sacks of flour
In making her list, the wife failed to put periods after the numbers on her list, so the dutiful husband viewed the item number as the amount of units to be purchased. Fortunately, the honeymoon had not ended.
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Conscious Capitalism – A New Paradigm
The idea that a growing economy benefits all classes has a long history of acceptance. It has been embedded in political rhetoric for the past half-century, regardless of party – in fact, John F. Kennedy is credited with the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
The theory – popularized as “trickle-down economics” – presumes that economic policies that help the wealthy eventually benefit everyone. It’s led to federal legislation reducing taxes on the wealthy and easing corporate regulation, as well as Supreme Court decisions increasing the legal rights of corporations, bringing them in near-parity with natural beings.
Despite expectations that the country as a whole would benefit from these measures, the results have been disappointing. Consequences have included a growing income disparity between the wealthiest members and the rest of society. It’s also led to an increase in national debt and significant corporate abuses of public trust, such as the manipulation of energy and securities markets. As a result, citizens and corporate leaders are rejecting the old paradigm and exploring a new model for capitalism.
Failures of Traditional Capitalism
The 1990s savings and loan failures, Enron’s manipulation of electricity prices in 2001, and the mortgage securities crisis in 2008 are major examples of the negative consequences of capitalism. In the view of many business and citizen leaders, corporate greed and uncontrolled capitalism have also had the following general negative effects.
1. Lack of Equality and Opportunity
The most public critic of the current capitalist system has been Pope Francis. In an apostolic exhortation issued November 26, 2013, he asserted that “today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.” The Pope goes on to say that the minority who do benefit “reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”
Businesses overtly resist the efforts made by governments – which have the responsibility of protecting the rights and interests of their citizens – to pass laws or regulate corporate activities. All this, even as the wealthy benefit the most from publicly owned assets and exorbitant government contracts.
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