Retirement Income
Heed Ye Charles Dickens

Edward Lear is expounding again, this time upon the theme, "retirement income," and given the man’s net worth, there is immediate silence in the pub as all ears strain to catch the pearls he casts:

Well, there is gross income and net income. Gross is a pleasant fiction, for it exists merely on paper or little electrons that fly about, before various institutions quench their thirst at your tap. Net is what you get, and even a net is somewhat leaky. Then there is the “triple net,” which rather implies less leakage, but I digress from my theme, retirement income. May I quote Charles Dickens?

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
   Charles Dickens From David Copperfield

In a nutshell, after retirement, if everything altogether from your sundry investments is earning 7% (such number merely pulled from the ether, of course) you had best be drawing down 6%, or less if you are up to it.

Is each dollar in your savings plan
Pressed in service to earn what it can?
Maybe laddered CDs
Will give your mind ease?
Lose the broker, your banker's the man.

Having found this out belatedly, and finding themselves a day late and a dollar short on income for retirement, it would seem that Americans seldom retire, or if they do, it is to one of those nice places where people pat your hand saying “Now there’s a good girl, take your meds.”

Upon that first occasion when your invitation to join the estimable AARP lands in your mailbox, steady yourself. No doubt you were moments earlier packing someone off to the college of her choice, still fully engaged in the business of putting the daily fires out.

Howsomever, it is a harbinger of things to come and an alarum to betake yourself to the phone to make certain all your ducks are in a row, so to speak.

Retirement Income and the Wage-earning Slave

Retirement, isn't it grand?
Is everything going as planned?
As a wage-earning slave
Did you scrimp, have you saved
Every sou, dollar, and Krugerrand?