It looks like I won’t be participating in what is being called the largest generational transfer of wealth in U.S. history. Younger generations are estimated to inherit more than $27 trillion within the next 20 years. None of it, unfortunately, will be coming from me.
I don’t own a house. My IRA is long gone. The only thing my kids are likely to inherit right now is a pretty good object lesson in what not to do financially.
It’s not that I didn’t know about preparing for retirement. I’m an advertising copywriter. For years I reminded customers that a 65-year-old ending a work career will need over $1 million to maintain a modest $50,000-a-year lifestyle for the next 20 years. But life happens. Houses get lost in divorces. Investments falter. And the workflow you’ve taken for granted for 40 years suddenly falls off a cliff and takes you along with it.
Sometimes I think I’m retired and nobody told me. Gone are the good old days ― was it only two years ago? ― when I’d respond to five freelance job leads and three of them would turn into interviews. Is it age-ism? I doubt it. Half of my clients have never seen me. The other half are as old as I am. What’s going on, I believe, is the “algorithmization” of the recruiting process. A job gets listed on LinkedIn or Indeed and within an hour there are hundreds of applicants, many of whom are using AI to apply to dozens of jobs. All but a few will be rejected by robots who couldn’t care less about charming personalities. At least give me the chance to come in and tap dance.
These days I work part time in a deli to make up for the shortfall between my rent and my Social Security. It’s the same job I had when I was 20 and the minimum wage was $2 an hour. Today I earn $17 for every hour I make sandwiches, slice turkey and mop floors. I get SNAP benefits (that sounds better to me than “food stamps”) to help paying for groceries. But the $900 a month I bring in pushing macaroni salad and brooms is apparently too much, and now those benefits might be cut.
What’s a boomer to do? Knock wood, I’m in good health. The $180 a month the government takes out for Medicare A&B and the $293 per month United Healthcare charges for Part C are a relatively good deal compared to the thousands a month some of my less superannuated friends pay. But unless the universe has some miracles in store for me, I’m soon pretty likely to make more use of the health care system than the simple physical checkups I now get twice a year. And that could mean facing crushing medical debt on top of everything else.
I watch every penny as I walk the tightrope between income and bills. The sandwiches we sell at my deli are now out of my price range. Streaming programming is a luxury. Staying within my budget often depends on the price of gas. The margin for error is frighteningly thin. It’s rough living life in mortal fear of the check engine light.
I decided to see a therapist to help me “adjust” to this dislocation of the middle-class professional I thought I was. Pete has me going for walks and cultivating gratitude for the things I do have. He talks to me about “catastrophizing,” the “recency bias” as a cognitive distortion, “all-or-nothing-thinking” and “fortune telling.” I’m guilty of all of them. He suggests broadening my possibilities by “thinking out of the box.” All I can think is I’ll be living in one if things don’t pick up soon. I am determined, though, to use this as a learning opportunity. I’ve only come up with “having no money totally sucks” and “more people than ever in America are in the same boat.”
So, forgive me if I have a hard time when I see tech giants sitting down for interviews wearing $900,000 watches or hear billionaire broligarchs extolling the virtues of belt-tightening sacrifice. Read the room, dudes. Millions of hard-working Americans are barely scraping by — and cutting SNAP, Medicaid or Social Security certainly won’t help.
I try to remain optimistic by telling myself more productive fairy tales about the way the universe works. Maybe I’ll write a book about this. Maybe I’ll win the lottery. Maybe I’ll sell a quart of macaroni salad so delicious that the customer immediately offers me a copywriting job in an advertising agency.
I don’t mind selling out. The problem right now is nobody’s buying.
Michael Borden is/was a corporate communications and advertising copywriter. He also has several screenplays making the rounds that he hopes will change his life. You can reach him at [email protected].
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