Treva, people may volunteer for social status, to earn admission to Heaven, for the warm, fuzzy feeling of virtue it gives them, for the satisfaction of paying back a debt they feel to society, or in order to look down on others who are not so “virtuous”, but EVERYBODY does it in the expectation of getting something in return. “Perks” are just another reason, better than some.

But I think most people think that the “whole point of volunteering” is to provide a needed service, and the motivation is less important than the service. Please volunteer, for whatever reason floats your boat.

The whole point of volunteering is to do it without the expectation of getting anything in return. Please volunteer, but do so for the right reasons.

If someone’s retirement fund was so badly damaged during the past decade (and they didn’t have to dip into it because of job loss, for example), it’s probably because they panicked and sold all their stocks at the bottom, and missed out on the subsequent rebound. Not that that makes their loss any less real, but it’s not the market’s fault that they messed up. Those of us who held our stock investments (and kept adding to them, if applicable) are not doing so badly.

And once you leave the labor force, particularly in your 50s, you better plan on being unable to ever reenter it.

“I also plan to live to be 95″

Thats a good plan for anyone as far as I’m concerned. I recently actually wrote an article on my blog along those lines. One fact I dug up was that for a retired couple at age 65 there is about a 40% chance that one spouse will live to 95.
If you live to retirement age then life expectancy at that point makes getting to 95 a decent likelihood.

My parents bought their house in 1957 for $25,000. It would now sell for about $200,000. Try looking up food prices, and figure out where they are now. This is not going to change. Our current economic situation is already causing major inflation in food and fuel prices, and that will spread as fuel prices affect everything else. And in my 55 years, I have NEVER seen prices fall back to where they were before inflation. Investments seldom keep up with inflation, and with the crooks running our money system, I wouldn’t count on that happening. Instead, I think more people will lose more money to them, and the more they have invested, the more they will lose.

Plan accordingly, and pray hard!

We, too, had started saving young, but job losses, re-education for both of us (to fields that one can maintain into older age AND who are pretty unemployment-proof) and children’s health and education, combined with the crashes of ’87 and recently, took a big bite out of the rest. No argument that savings is NEEDED..but remember that the best laid plans of mice and men….

There are plenty of “retired” people who would love to get back into the workforce; unfortunately, age discrimination and abysmal growth in the job market have become the one-two punch that keep those folks down and out.

At 52, I am “semi-retired.” I work part-time at things I enjoy. Our hope is that when my husband is 55 he will start working part-time and we will be able to spend time traveling in the U.S. while our health allows it. Fortunately, we both work in fields where that is possible and we can continue his health insurance coverage in retirement.

We are fairly frugal and have no debts other than a house that is almost paid off. Once the kids are out of the house, we will downsize. We are considering living in an RV. (My aunt and uncle have lived in one for decades to facilitate their early retirement. There are all sorts of jobs that pay enough to cover RV expenses.)

Ideally we and others will be able to find a way to transition from full-time work to full-time retirement in a graceful useful way, if luck and health cooperate.

Hey there! You don’t know what the future will bring! You could get very sick. Your children could have any one of a myriad of very expensive problems. You could lose your job(s) and not be able to find others. The political, environmental, and economic problems facing this country and the world could throw a wrench into the works. The list goes on and on…

Planning is great, and necessary, but don’t be too surprised when things don’t work exactly as you would hope.

Also, even healthy people can get cancer, or get into a car wreck and be left seriously disabled, etc. so eating healthy & exercising (which of course are good ideas) are not a guarantee of being healthy when you’re older.

I also agree with the comments that you can’t assume there are going to be all these jobs available when we retire.