read later.
Save,save and save some more was always my Dad's motto through life.
Ben has a few bucks and I guess he is used to being spoiled. I go to a car dealer and they jump me as soon as I hit the lot. They watch out the window like vultures and you cant get your foot on the ground before one of them comes bugging you. They act like they are starving to death. Geez- I want to take a minute and look on my own a while.
But Ben is right service has gone to hell. You cant get any business on the phone now unless you listen to a computer and push buttons. Forget the government or the phone company-too many buttons. I saw an ad on TV the other day saying they had a real person on the phone. so I guess they may ne starting to wake up.
Is this a sentence? The article as a whole meanders and is almost pointless except for the truisms about saving.
My answer to poor customer service and rudeness is quite simple.......confront it!!!! you pay full price for a seat, and someone moves you, get management involved!! If a clerk treats you rudely, get management involved!!! If there is no managment available, take down the address, do business elsewhere, and fire off a letter to the owners of the business!!! If you cannot understand someone because they are not good at speaking english, demand an english speaking person!!! It is really just that simple....
110K if you own 2 houses??? But wait - put your money in a mutual fund and you'll be fine? Rubbish. Putting your money in a tax deferred plan hoping that Al Gore never gets elected and taxes the crap out of it on the back end is stupid.
As far as not running out of money in retirement, I'll have Social Security. (Do I really need the /sarcasm tag here?)
One of the reasons that boomers have no savings is that 15% of their paychecks have been withheld to fund the retirement Airstreams and Callaways of the generation that preceded them.
bookmark
It's very simple: People will just continue to work. the VAST majority of retirement aged people are very capable of working.
Hmm...yep, Ben Stein makes a lot more than I do and has different expectations too. If I go to Walmart I expect Walmart service...if I go the Che' Louis I expect Louis level service.
But really folks he does offer some good advice, still sounds like a bit over the top investment hyper silliness, but good advice.
By the time I retire I don't want a big house to deal with; I'll take a one bedroom condo. I don't want to be trying to keep up with the Jones; I'd rather just have them as good friends I can borrow a cup of sugar from. As far as living on 1/2 of what I spend now, well I started doing that 3 yrs ago when the house got paid off. Life already is being simplified. I'd propose Ben Stein come live a week at my level...and then he might have a reason to worry or may be not?
Things that worry me about retirement don't seem to be on Ben Stein's radar, but they are on mine. Medical will be a big deal. A few years ago when my parents passed away it cost on average $45,000 to die. That's not the funeral...that's the cost from diagnosis to death medical treatment even with insurance.
From the business section of yesterday's Washington Post, a truly frightening picture. If our finances looked like this, I would just jump off a bridge, but it's the way people live, apparently. I know that I will be retiring - and they will not. :
"Meet the typical American family.
It has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it to the bank. The breadwinners make more than $43,000 a year but can't manage to pay off a $2,200 credit card balance.
That is the portrait of the median American household as painted by the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances. The survey, which does not distinguish between sizes of families, nevertheless offers the most detailed look available of the balance sheet of U.S. households."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030400238.html
If Ben thinks it's going to be bad being retired in years to come, imagine what it's going to be like working and paying for all those retireries getting poor service on United.
Heck, I'm not old enough to even remember when United had good service!
If I don't get the service I'm entitled to, I always ask to speak to a supervisor. It may take a while but my goal gets accomplished.
I, for one, find services in certain regards better than in days of yore. For instance, banks in New York City are open from 9 to 6 when they used to close at 3. Since ATMs have come into prominence, lines for tellers are much shorter (I remember waiting in 30 minute lines to cash checks in the old days!). Tellers at my bank are very polite and ask me what denomination I would like the money.
I can get any type of food I want delivered to my door. Not just the usual pizza, Chinese food, diner stuff, etc. I can order groceries online through a new vendor in New York named "Fresh Direct."
I can order shoes online from Zappos, which offers the best customer service ever. (When a heel separated from a shoe after 3 months of wear they sent me a brand new pair before I even sent the old pair back!)
Order from Overstock.com and shipping (even for bulk items like TVs) is $2.00 or less.
Order from the home shopping networks and utilize their 30 day return policies.
Ben Stein has never heard of the Internet!
And vice versa doggone it!
I save a large percentage and should be fine later on.
Roger this. That's what I'm doing, and I'll have over a million bucks by the time I retire in 697 days (but who's counting), plus pension and SS.
Of course, the fact that I've lived a fairly modest lifestyle while working at a good job with a pension and a 401k, and having a wife who did the same, will put me in a lot better position than many of my peers. I guess I should thank God that I never developed the taste for high-end "toys" that many of my friends have.
Most of the "Boomers" I talk to have done no planning; you can tell by the way they seem to fear the subject, and blame it on things beyond their control. I expect that too many people are going to find themselves hurting very badly in their senior years, and increasingly prey to a younger generation that will have no mercy when it comes to reducing what meager benefits that they will have.
So really, FRiends, go out and get a good financial planner and start putting it away now. The money you put away for the future will grow, and you will not miss it if you have it taken out of your pay directly. And the bottom line is, if you don't - well, you were warned, and will have nobody to blame but yourself if your retirement plan includes the phrase "would you like fries with that"...
The bulkhead is the best seat. No one can lean back into your face.