Boomer and Busted

This is not fun. The whole lot of us, are going mad ... and feeling mad ....and soon, we'll be behaving badly. You just watch.

This week, MSNBC posted this story: "Boomers Face Stark Choices in a Bleak Economy". Now there's a headline that'll turn your blood to ice.

The article lays out the daunting tasks ahead for people my age who are too young and too financially vulnerable to retire. Between the crash in the housing market -- where most of us stashed a big chunk of our money -- and the crash in the stock market -- where our alleged retirement savings safely resided for "the long term" -- we've been left floundering. More dire, our jobs are at risk and when we lose them, many of us never find another. Today, even the poorly paying ones in retail and low-paying service businesses, are vanishing.

Losing your job when you are in your 50s and 60s is nothing like the experience when you are in your prime -- your 30s and 40s. Ageism rules, and don't for a minute think it doesn't. You are too expensive to hire -- not just the overt salary cost, but the cost of your health care may be higher. Your experience makes people reluctant to place you in a lower level job, where you might cause trouble for your (almost certainly younger) boss. You are presumed to be less adaptable intellectually, less technologically savvy, less interested in new approaches to work. And you are expected to tire easily and resist working long hours.

Most of this is bullshit. And if you've ever worked with a lot of 30- somethings, you should have some pretty eye-opening experience with the gap between the baby boomer work ethic and the one held by younger workers. But I digress. The bottom line: if we lose a job, we aren't going to find one any time soon and if we do, it will pay less.

The article goes on to promote a return to school. Go ahead, retrain, "re-invent" yourself. OK. I'm good with that. I've done that more than once. The last time, I spent the majority of my life savings going to graduate school in my late 50s. It landed me my current job, which I've just been told may be at-risk. For all the hype around the potential for growth in the health care industry, many hospitals and physician groups are down-sizing. They may need workers, but they don't have money to pay them. So what are we supposed to reinvent ourselves to do??

Yeah, I know, we are all going to have to work until we die. OK, I'm "in". But the assumption is that the work will be there. I fear that it won't. If my hunch is right, then what? The burden of this reality is not going to strike my generation alone. For those of us with adult children, the possibility is growing that we are going to have to move back to multi-generational homes. Parents, grandparents, and grandchildren may begin to live together again, and we will all be living with less. Even if the economy begins to recover over the next 12-18 months, our savings and our jobs will never return to the levels they were before the Great Recession of 2009. We are facing an entirely different future than the one we envisioned.

Compounding it all is our guilt and shame. We almost certainly made mistakes ...investing badly out of ignorance, assuming the boom times would persist, getting hooked by the seductions of a consumer society. Now, even if we still have a job, we know how thin the ice is beneath our feet. Most of us cannot survive a catastrophe -- major housing expenses, a dire health care diagnosis, a job loss. We have vowed to work harder, to prove our value to our employer, to be willing to do whatever it takes to earn a living. But the dice may not land as we hope ...and so much is out of our control. The article notes that we have become increasingly isolated, for we don't want to let on how scared and vulnerable we are. We are a proud and mostly optimistic generation, who believed we could achieve all our dreams if we just worked hard enough. Here we are. With dreams and assumptions shattered, along with our security.

On the community level, we need to use our legendary boomer creativity to imagine other futures, other ways to live and be of value. We need to consider the potential for founding new businesses that have growth potential. And we need to loudly and aggressively lobby for universal, government sponsored health care -- the source of our largest expense, a major deterrent to entrepreneurial activity, and a primary reason for bankruptcy.

On the personal level, we need to talk. To our kids, to our friends. We need to be honest about the reality that at some point, despite our best efforts, we may not be able to afford to live on our own, much as we dread that possibility. Some good may come of that. We may create stronger and more compassionate families. We have much to teach our children and grandchildren, if they choose to value our experience and wisdom. But none of this was in our plan. We never intended on becoming more dependent than our own parents were. But if we've hit our high mark, and it is likely many of us have, we'd all -- parents and children -- best be thinking pragmatically about Plan D.