Dave Barry's Money Secrets (20 page)

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This means that the hotel is charging you at least $75 more per night than a comparable hotel with unfolded toilet paper. The hotel industry has learned that when hotel guests see triangulated toilet paper, they think: “Wow! That is a classy touch!” As opposed to: “Yuck! They expect me to wipe my butt with somebody’s origami project!”

So before checking into a hotel, always do what savvy travelers such as Regis Philbin and Barbara Walters do:
Ask at the front desk to see a sample roll of hotel toilet paper.
If it’s folded, inform the hotel staff that you will be doing your business elsewhere.

Saving Money on Family Vacations

The best way to save money on a family vacation, according to the American Association of Travel Planning Professionals, is to “not take any members of your family.”

21

PLANNING FOR YOUR RETIREMENT

The Financial Advantages of Early Death

W
E ALL DREAM OF RETIRING—of waking up each day knowing that we have no job to go to and are free to spend the day taking a walk, reading a book, or simply “kicking back” and relaxing in our appliance carton of a residence.

Because the truth is that most of us, if we stop working, will instantly become starving homeless persons. Why? Let’s take a look at some sobering statistics:

•                  Every year, 200 Americans are killed by their own dental floss.

•                  In her brief nine-month lifetime, a single female cockroach can produce 16,000 young.

And the statistics for retirement are even more sobering. Many people today simply cannot afford to retire. The singing artist Cher, for example, was forced to keep her Farewell Tour going until she was routinely ejecting her dentures onstage. Another sad example is Queen Elizabeth II, who, faced with the high cost of castle upkeep and horse maintenance, had to keep on queening until her hands were shaking so badly that candidates for knighthood refused the honor for fear that they would be decapitated during the sword ceremony. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was unable to retire from the U.S. Senate until he had been legally dead for six years.

This is the bleak future that you face if you fail to plan for your retirement. The time to do this is
right now,
so let’s get started.

Step one is to create a detailed balance sheet showing your current financial situation in terms of assets and liabilities. This is really boring, so I’ve taken the trouble of doing it for you:

Y
OUR
F
INANCIAL
B
ALANCE
S
HEET

Your Assets

Your Liabilities

SOURCE: The Internet

Now, to see how much money you have available for your retirement, all we need to do is add up your assets and subtract your liabilities, which gives us a net total of . . .

. . . OK, without being too brutally specific, let’s just say that, if you’re relying on your current assets, it does not look good for you to retire any time in the immediate millennium.

This means you need some way to continue getting money
after
you stop working. One source of money, of course, is your company pension, which will pay you a certain amount per month until such time as either (a) you die, or (b) your company goes out of business or is purchased by a vicious bloodsucking predator company, which, the way things are going, could happen later today.

Your other source for retirement income is Social Security, a federal program started by President Franklin D. “Teddy” Roosevelt during the Great Depression, which was caused when the Stock Market collapsed onto Wall Street, creating a huge Dust Bowl that crippled the U.S. economy, put millions out of work, ravaged countless lives, and forced many young men to wear knickers. It was a grim time, a time that older people still talk about today, causing younger people to creep quietly out of the room.

Out of this national trauma came our Social Security system. Here’s how it works: Each pay period, your employer deducts a chunk of the money you have earned and sends it to the federal government, which holds it for safekeeping in a big sturdy vault surrounded by army tanks. When you retire, your money is waiting for you, along with your invisibility cloak and your magic time-travel ring.

Ha ha! As you may have gathered, I’m kidding
. Your money is
not
waiting for you. Because the way Social Security
really
works is, the instant the federal government gets your money, it does the thing that governments do better than anybody else when it comes to money, which is spend it. Specifically, the government sends your former money to some elderly person, who uses it to buy food and shelter, unless this elderly person happens to be, say, Warren Buffet, in which case he uses it to tip the guy who washes his various helicopters.

But in any event, by the time you’re ready to collect Social Security, all the money you paid in to the system will be long gone. This means that your Social Security money will have to come from the younger generation. There are two big problems with this:

Social Security Problem No. 1:         
The younger generation is, with all due respect, worthless.

This is a generation that doesn’t even know which part of a baseball cap is supposed to go in front.*
 
⁵⁷
And do
not
get me started on music, OK? Do
not
make me remind you that this is the generation that gave us “hip-hop,” a genre that requires essentially the same degree of musical skill as burping, as well as concert acts such as Britney Spears, whose “concert” consists of cavorting violently around the stage wearing pants cut so impossibly low in front that you begin to wonder whether Britney is in fact an anatomically correct human being, or if she had some of her key organs relocated to another part of her body, or perhaps her agent’s body. But the point is that with all the audiovisual distractions at a modern $75-a-ticket stadium concert—the choreography, costumes, acrobats, giant TV screens, fireworks, jet flyovers, onstage boa constrictors, etc.—the one thing you are
not
particularly noticing is the music, which is just as well, because neither Britney nor any of the other people on the stage is actually singing anything—they’re far too busy cavorting—which means the actual
music
is being produced somewhere backstage by a digital device about the size of a tin of Altoids. This device is the heart of the modern concert industry: It has its own bodyguards, personal trainer, manager, groupies,*
 
⁵⁸
etc., because without it, the show cannot go on, as was harshly demonstrated during a sold-out 1993 performance by the Backstreet Boys during which the Altoids tin was carried off by rats, shutting the music down entirely and forcing the artists to entertain the crowd with armpit farts.*
 
⁵⁹

Oh, it was different in my day. In my day, the musicians made real music, and they made it
live.
Can you imagine Elvis Presley or Aretha Franklin prancing around and lip-synching? Of course not! You can’t even imagine them prancing around without the aid of forklifts.

No sir, when I was young, if you went to a major rock concert, you knew what you were going to see on the stage: You were going to see a sweating promoter explaining why the act per se had not physically arrived yet. This happened a
lot
in the sixties. You’d be in a packed arena in, say, Philadelphia, to see a performance by The Who, and maybe two hours after the concert was scheduled to start, the promoter would appear onstage and say, “We have good news! The Who’s plane has landed in New York! Once they clear Customs they’ll be on their way!” Then, after some halfhearted booing, the crowd would settle back in its seats and resume passing around doobies the size of yule logs. Sometimes The Who would, eventually, show up; sometimes The Who would not show up; sometimes there was frankly no way to tell. But whatever happened, it was
real,
and no matter how long it took, we audience members remained in our seats,*
 
⁶⁰
because we were committed to our music, not to mention incapable of movement.

That is the kind of dedication my generation is known for, and that, along with the threat of federal prison, is why we have always come through with our payments to the Social Security system, which as you may or may not recall is technically our topic.

Yes, we Baby Boomers paid for the retirement of the generation ahead of us. But will the younger generation do the same for us? Or will they at some point rise up in unison and say to us, quote: “Up yours, Baby Boomers! We’re not paying for your retirement! We’re sick of hearing you criticize us and our music! What about some of YOUR music? Do you have ANY IDEA how many wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs we’ve attended where we had to sit around watching you Boomers lurch around the floor doing some kind of spastic 1968 boogaloo to ‘Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog,’ thinking you were the coolest thing on two feet? Do you have ANY FREAKING IDEA how much we hate Jeremiah the freaking Bullfrog? And do you have any idea how tired we are of television commercials for products aimed at your various Boomer insecurities and ailments, such as the apparent inability—to judge from the number of ads for Viagra alone—of 93 percent of all American men over the age of forty-five to produce a workable erection? Has it occurred to you that the younger generation does not want to be constantly reminded about the limp, flaccid, shriveled state of its parents’ sex life? Has it occurred to you that one possible reason why so many of you Boomer men can’t get it up is that you keep watching these stupid ads
telling
you that you can’t get it up?”

Oh yes, fellow Boomers, make no mistake: The younger generation loathes us and everything we stand*
 
⁶¹
for. When the time comes for us to retire and start collecting Social Security, these young people are going to look for any petty excuse to avoid letting us have a chunk of their pay. One petty excuse they are likely to use is that, in a couple of decades, the chunk required to support us will be approximately 100 percent of their pay. This is because of the other problem with Social Security:

Social Security Problem No. 2:
There are too many Baby Boomers.

Another way of looking at this problem is that there are not enough members of the younger generation. We Boomers failed to produce a sufficient quantity of babies, and now, what with this nationwide erectile-dysfunction epidemic, it’s too late.