Deciphering retirement's money game playbook
By JAN GLIDEWELL, Times Columnist
Published October 14, 2003
The realization settled on me with all of the clarity of the early morning Zephyrhills sky outside.
"I am," I told my wife, "a retiree eating breakfast at the Golden Corral in Zephyrhills."
"So?" she said.
"And I'm contemplating eating another helping of eggs benedict and then saving a couple of bucks by skipping lunch."
She was kind enough not to snicker.
An awful lot of retirement, I am learning, is about money. We spend our final working years trying to put enough away to make it possible, wondering exactly how much is enough and, for the more morbidly inclined among us, occasionally sneaking a peek at actuarial tables to get an idea how long we will live and, ergo, how long the money has to last.
Then it becomes a game; having enough money for the life while silently hoping we outlive the money.
And suddenly skipping a lunch here and there, especially for those of us who can afford to lose a little weight (okay, a lot of weight) becomes part of the game, as do matinee movie prices, grocery store specials and what I am trying very hard to see as the joys of spending a lot more time in the gym.
Buffet-style restaurants, legitimately, have traded on human greed for decades. We all go into them thinking we can eat enough to cut deeply into their profits while not thinking a lot about things like the insides of our arteries or the fact that we haven't seen our toes in a while.
And, while I was in competitive eating form, I was way ahead of the game.
But now I am at the age where I groan when even standard restaurants present me with helpings that are about twice the size that I will eat and, like Las Vegas casinos, the odds are shifting back into favoring the house.
Actually, now in my second month of retirement, I am still watching the money thing shake itself out.
Friends told me that I would save money on my wardrobe by not having the dry-cleaning and laundry bills that I had before. Since I still wear the same cutoffs, T-shirts and Hawaiian shirts I always wore, and never did have any of the above dry-cleaned, that hasn't been a big factor.
Lunch, however, has.
During my working days I was spending an average of $200 per month for lunch. Now, by taking a chunk of bread, some cheese and a piece of fruit to the park, I'm spending something like $40.
A big surprise, and a good one, for me was a result of my own sloppy planning.
When comparing my expenses to projected income before I retired, I forgot to factor in what was, in fact, the biggest one: saving for retirement, a monthly amount that was actually more than my mortgage.
Although I occasionally do it for fun, I haven't yet made penny-pinching a major focus of my life. I find myself comparison-shopping to save 3 cents on a can of green beans, and then spending 3 bucks on a bag of pistachios I don't really need.
And a week ago I was congratulating myself on getting a free continental breakfast at the place I have my car serviced (Okay, it was as doughnut and a banana, but it is Dade City) and then blithely agreeing to lay out $320 for a set of tires. My justification was that since the old ones were about to come apart, presumably at interstate speeds, I was still saving money by not having to meet my hospitalization insurance company's massive ICU deductible.
And on a recent vacation in Ireland I divided my time between cost-friendly B&B's and a castle that had been converted into a five-star hotel where dinner cost more than four nights at the B&B.
Probably one of the best deals continues to be the YMCA, where I can, for a pittance, spend three or four mornings per week working off those Golden Corral calories, reading while on a treadmill and wondering how things are going for the working people at my old office a block away.
Some readers wrote me before I left that I would hate retirement, and never adjust to it.
A retired teacher on the next treadmill told me one day that it had taken her almost seven minutes to adjust, but spoke admiringly of a school administrator who had done it in five. I actually took nearly 15, but I always have been slow on the uptake about some things.
Times columns today
Jan Glidewell: Deciphering retirement's money game playbook
Robert King: Hernando County lucky to avoid U.S. invasion
Mary Jo Melone: Musings on the pastime of politics with blinders
John Romano: We all can pull for Bucs' Yoder
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