“I’m 85, and I Wanna Go Home!”

I’m actually 36, but I’d like to go home too!

Everybody’s Working For Retirement

When I was completing my first year at my current job (in early 2011), my co-worker who served as our HR Assistant came to me in the lunchroom during my break, carrying a packet with her.  I was eligible for a retirement plan, she says.  A 403b Thrifty Plan (the non-profit version of the good old 401k), she says.  Do I want one, she asks?  Why, yes, I’m not getting any younger here (I was 28 at the time).

Nine years later, I’ve saved $20 a paycheck, 26 times a year.  That may not sound like much, but it is matched 100% and my retirement nest egg looks pretty darn good.

If only I had started doing this a few years earlier at my last job, when the 401k stuff was offered to me.  Stupid 24-year-old me said “I won’t be here much longer, I’ll worry about this at my next job!”

Yeah, that was  2007.  My next job didn’t happen until early 2010.

Retirement Is Important!

If commercials and your Human Resources Representative haven’t taught you already, saving for retirement during your working years is of the utmost importance.  I throw commercials in there because there is one that has made the rounds since the Super Bowl last year (and one I only just saw again recently) that reminds us of the consequences of not investing wisely in one’s retirement.

You’ll be 85 and doing jobs alongside people much younger than you.

And since I’m not for the idea of working alongside millennials when there is about a ten-year age gap between me and them (and as I said, I’m 36 years old), I certainly wouldn’t want to be fifty years older and having to do this.

Which brings me to that commercial…

“I’m 85, and I Wanna Go Home!”

ETRADE’s 2018 commercial “This is Getting Old” features octogenarians having to work jobs meant for much younger people, all because they didn’t save for retirement…or use ETRADE to do it.

The version that I’ve been seeing lately is the shorter version of the Super Bowl commercial, featuring an 85-year-old lifeguard in Savannah, and an elderly woman dropping sick beats that they call DJ Nana, but the Super Bowl commercial features many more people working jobs meant for a much younger set.  And they lament about their retirement woes to the tune of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”.

Whichever version you see, they’re both funny, but the longer one is hysterical.

I’ll never get that song unstuck in my head.  And it has been there since Sunday.

Because I Checked…

Harry Belafonte, I should add, is 91 and still not retired.  Probably because he chooses not to.  And since you aren’t him, you best start investing now if you’d like to retire someday!

Don’t be 85 and wanting to go home.  It’s not fun!

Have a great day!