Welcome To the Retired Old Geezers’ Club

It’s open season on retirees like me: We are fair game to the predators. The hunters are out there, watching you, checking on you waiting for you. The instant that you slow down or lose concentration they will pounce in and strip you of every cent you have.

 

I worked my entire working life. I opened a pension saving account way back near the start of my career. I paid into it faithfully every month, moaning about the high premiums. Eventually I retired with a smile knowing that I had a nice plan going. But now that I’m there, it’s not what they told me. Sure, the money is there, I’m here but things have changed. Dramatically.

 

Everything has changed. Prices have soared beyond belief. Things we used to buy without thinking in my salary days are now totally beyond our means. We used to eat out at restaurants. These days if we decide to eat out at all, it’s a choice between different burger places. Gas has become a problem. A service on the car leads to a major debate between my wife and I. For that we have to miss out something else. We have money. In the days when I socked it away with a holiday in mind, a hotel room ran to $100 a night. Today we’re looking at $250. Clothes? We hardly buy anything new these days. The supermarket? We do minimum shopping. Now comes the bad news…

 

In all my planning over all the years, I counted on being able to invest my nest-egg money and earning interest on it. In the early years it was at least 10%, then it dropped to 8%. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought about 0 or 1%. Is this what I was saving for?     

 

I saw this small ad in the paper the other day: “We promise you at least 8% on your money.” So I called and I got a very professional voice who started by saying: “Sir, I need to know what amount we are talking about. Can you please indicate if it is less than $20,000 or over $100,000?”

“It’s well over a hundred,” I say. The guy got very excited and said, “Sir, with an amount like that I believe we can promise you a return of well over ten percent on your investment.”

 

I got quite excited at the thought that I could be earning a monthly amount of say $2,000 in interest on my investment. That would me back in restaurants and a couple of nice sweaters for the coming winter. I could even afford a set of new tires for the car. “How do you invest the money?” I asked. “Oh…, er…, um…, it’s a, you, know…”

I hung up at that point. 

 

I was breathing heavily at this point. I nearly fell for it. Retirement scams could leave you in the poor house. These days, retirement scams range from the out and out fraud, where scammers intentionally separate seniors from their capital, to the more benign cases such as employers misusing or squandering the assets in a 401(k) plan.