Double Edged Sword

I’m having mixed feelings about this ‘being retired’ part of life.

After more than 40 years of working with other people, for other people, having them determine when I need to arrive at work, when I can leave, and what I have to be doing while I’m at work, I really love the freedom of determining my own schedule and working out my own time table. I no longer have to be at 5 to be at work by 7; now I get up between 7 and 8, and usually don’t have any place I need to be. I have some control over who I see, when I see them and what I do with them.

On the other hand, now that I have no one else to decide what I will do each day, I have to do that myself. After all, I’m retired, not dead. But I won’t last long if I don’t stay active and engaged, both physically and mentally.

So I decided to start my own business. I really didn’t have any money to spare to set it up, just a few dollars here and there, so it was going to involve a lot of hard work. And it does. Every morning when I get up, I have to decide what parts of my never-ending list of things to do I will tackle that day. And there are times when I wish I had somebody who would tell me which items have a higher priority, which items are worth my time and which are not.

So I plug along, learning new skills, and trying to make the best use of my time.

Still, when the mood hits me, I take the afternoon off and go see a movie. I think that might be the best part about being retired.

Working Around the Insurance Companies

A friend is on vacation this week, and she’s having fun, despite having to shave some of her medications every 2 or 3 days. Here’s the deal;

She has medical insurance through her former employer, the same medical insurance she had while she was working, but since she’s retired, the actual insurance company has changed. Apparently, this new company wants to ‘save’ every penny it can. No matter what the cost to the people who rely on them for help with medical bills.

My friend was diagnosed many, many years ago with chronic depression. After taking antidepressants and getting counseling for several years, she felt she had it under control and her doctor helped her wean herself from the antidepressants. She did well for over a decade.

Almost a year and a half ago, she realized the depression had snuck back into her life, and she asked her doctor to prescribe some antidepressants. There were some new ones available that he thought might be a good fit, the insurance company (at that time, the old one) had no problems approving them.

The insurance company changed, and the friend felt that particular antidepressant wasn’t working well, so her doctor changed her prescription. The insurance company threw up all sorts of road-blocks; ‘This drug is a level 2, and should not be prescribed without a clear indication this strong a drug is needed’, and who knew what else. Happily, her doctor and pharmacist argued with the insurance company on her behalf, and eventually, she got her new antidepressants.

All seemed to be going okay, although she still felt more depressed than not after several months. When she mentioned that to her doctor, he agreed to up her dose. She had just refilled her prescription based on the old dosage, and simply increased the number of pills she took each day from 2 to 3. Realizing her insurance company would need to ‘approve’ this higher dosage, she called her doctor’s office a FULL WEEK before she needed more pills so that the change could be made, and (she hoped), she would be able to refill the higher dosage without any problem.

She had to go for 3 days without any antidepressants before the insurance company finally approved the change in dosage. Once she started taking her pills again, it was a full week before she felt she could function.

When she realized she would be on vacation when it was time to refill her prescription, she cringed at the idea of fighting with the insurance company over an early refill. She would get home only 2 days AFTER she ran out of pills, but she didn’t want to go completely without for 2 days, and be unable to function for 4 or 5 days after that. So she’s been carefully skimming her dosage down to 2 pills every 3rd or 4th day, and taking the full dose of 3 pills the remaining days. On those days when she only takes 2 pills, she returns to her room a little earlier, in case some fogginess overtakes her as her drug level dips, and the following day, she may start her activities a little later, to give that drug level a chance to start raising.

She thinks she’s exercising some control, but the fact is, the insurance company has won. They have become the de facto death panels.

Tangled Web

A friend of mine was recently wondering how she could make a few extra bucks. A lot of people are, these days.

My friend is usually pretty savvy about all these ‘work at home’ schemes you see advertised on the internet. She’s looked into a lot of them over the years, and she’s learned to ignore all the hype. But this one didn’t have all that hype, it all sounded very above-board and fairly believable.

She signed up. She got a $5.00 bonus for doing so, and was promised she would be paid – yes, actually paid – for every survey she completed.

The next day, she sat down, intending to spend an hour filling out surveys and see how it went. After 2 ½ hours, she finally had enough and signed out of that website. She had made 50 cents, and isn’t sure how she had done that. When she calmed down, we talked about her latest experience.

“It had me fooled at first few,” she admitted. “After a while, I realized they were all yes-no questions; Do you suffer from back pain? Do you have allergies? That sort of thing. Then I realized that every time I answered ‘yes’ to anything, I was shunted to another ‘survey’. And that survey was set up exactly like the first, even asking the same questions. So if I answered ‘yes’ to a question in the 2^nd ‘survey’, I was shunted to another survey.”

“Sounds like it would be impossible to make any progress,” I suggested.

“Right. So I stopped worrying about giving ‘honest’ answers, and just answered ‘no’ to everything. Then I got to the end of one of those ‘layered’ surveys, and I was asked to choose 2 of the following wonderful offers.”

“Uh oh.”

“You know it. First, they didn’t offer anything I actually wanted. Second, if I had chosen even 1 of those ‘wonderful’ offers, I would have paid out far more than I would make on the survey. And third, if I did NOT choose any offers, my survey was not considered complete.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah. I should have known better. Lesson learned. Again.”

She’s still looking for a way to make a few extra bucks.

Revamp the Tax Codes

My husband has grown increasingly frustrated trying to make sense out of filing taxes. Unfortunately, they have to be done. This year, he handed me the folder of papers and asked me to take it to a tax preparer.

A couple decades ago, we used to get some substantial refunds back from both the federal and state. It gave us a chance to take a chunk out of our debts, even if we had ‘loaned’ it to the government without getting any interest from it. The kids are pretty much grown and gone, and it happens that we are no longer paying enough in taxes.

Yeah, that’s right. We are looking at paying a bill to both the feds and the state. We not only are trying to clean up some Christmas debt, and stay on top of our regular debt, pay our real estate taxes, license all our cars and pay this year’s insurance premiums, now we have taxes to pay.

“Where’s the problem?” I asked the tax preparer. “For years, our taxes have been withheld at the appropriate rate for ‘married, no dependants’. We assumed that would at least put us in the approximate neighborhood of what we would owe for the year. But just in case, I instructed my part-time job to hold out extra.”

I was told that the W4 we fill out for our employers has little to do with what we will owe in taxes. Each employer withholds as if that job is our only source of income, which puts us in a lower tax bracket. Then when we file our taxes, our sources of income are combined, which puts us in a higher tax bracket. Suggestions for ‘rectifying’ the problem was to change our “married, no dependents” to “single, no dependents”, ask them to hold out extra. One last suggestion was to contact my pension plan manager and ask them to hold out a higher percentage of my pension for taxes.

I seem to vaguely remember one of the President Bushes cutting back how much was deducted from our paychecks. It was heralded as a means of stimulating the economy, a way of giving the middle class a few extra dollars in their pocket. This doesn’t really make sense to me. A couple extra bucks in my paycheck doesn’t go far enough to do any good; it’s not enough to pay a bill, it’s just enough to get a frappachino I really don’t need. I’d much rather ‘loan’ the government a couple extra bucks each paycheck and get a refund rather than a bill.

Why do we have to jump through hoops just to break even?

A Place to Sit

A few years back, a friend went to a specialist. Walking had become so difficult, she couldn’t go a full block without stopping to let her knee pain fade. She was just past 50, and even though the doctor agreed that her arthritis was bad, he felt she was ‘too young’ to have a knee replaced. He gave her a pair of knee braces to help keep the bones in proper alignment and suggest she lose weight. But the braces tended to slide down her legs, which didn’t keep anything in alignment, and without being able to use her knees for exercise, it was pretty impossible to lose weight.

About 5 years later, she returned, braced to receive shots of fake lubricant in her knees, even though that stuff had to be renewed (more shots) every 3 months. NOW he was ready to replace one of her knees, but felt she could ‘put up with’ the other one a while longer. He still wanted her to lose weight.

Today, she is doing better. Only the one knee has been replaced, but the ‘old’ knee only occasionally gives her any pain. She belongs to a gym and works out fairly regularly, but has only gotten up to 1.5 miles on a treadmill. She enjoys theme parks and shopping malls, and used to enjoy a nature walk from time to time, but she really can’t do those any more. Why not? Because a lot of these places don’t have benches in the locations where she needs them.

For instance, at a theme park, you are expected to walk from your car somewhere in a sea of a parking lot to the entry gate, stand in line to get in, and then walk some more before you come to a snack place that might have a bench. And after you’ve spent the day walking and standing in line (with only a minute here or there sitting on a ride), you are expected to walk all the way back out the gate and to your car, if you can remember where you left it.

She had a handicapped sticker for her car for 3 months while she recovered from her surgery, but now she gets to park out with the regular people, beyond the handicapped stalls, the pregnancy stalls, the taxi stalls ... and there won’t be a bench for her to catch her breath when she finally gets to the mall door, either.

I don’t think a day goes by that you don’t hear somebody mention that today’s citizens are aging, that the ‘baby boomers’ are starting to retire. So why can’t anybody install a few benches scattered along the pathway?

Entitlements

I’m sure you’ve heard this word a lot lately; the Republican candidates have assigned it a negative connotation. I’m not sure exactly what they include in the ‘foul’ embrace of ‘entitlements’, but they certainly have been pushing my buttons.

Social Security – I’ve worked over 40 years, have been paying into Social Security since my mid-teens. When I can start receiving an ss check every month, then … darn right I’m entitled to it! It’s MY money! Politicians talk about the trouble social security is in. I remember hearing – years ago – that Congress saw social security as another pocket they could dip into whenever they felt like spending. Has that money ever been put back in? It’s just like a pension plan, right? Of course it breaks down if the company dips into the pension plan to buy office furniture! But that isn’t the fault of the people who have been paying in.

Medicare – I have heard horror stories about Medicare, like a 96-year-old falls on a patch of ice and breaks a leg (at least), and Medicare argues that it wasn’t ‘necessary’ for the ambulance to take her to the hospital, and they wouldn’t pay for that. But the fact is, businesses don’t continue paying any of your insurance premiums once you retire. And buying your own insurance is not feasible. I know someone who pays over 1/3 of her pension to her mortgage. She recently got a quote for health insurance that would take another 1/3 of her pension each month. If she wants to eat, have water to drink and keep her house above freezing in winter, all her other bills would go unpaid. So she’s gambling she won’t get sick, won’t slip on any ice patches. At least, not until she can sign up for Medicare in a few years.

The fanatics who are fanning the flames against ‘entitlements’ must either be rich, or they have ‘forgotten’ that old people don’t just disappear when they retire. After working for decades, retirees are hoping for a few years of relatively good health when they can enjoy themselves. Possibly they still have one or both of their own parents who are now relying on them for assistance, a ride to the doctor’s office, or so on. What do these fanatics do when their mother falls? Do they say, “Oh, well, she’s past her prime, and we can’t expect any more productivity from her, so just leave her there.” Or do they call for an ambulance, take her to a doctor to be checked out?