Part of being a responsible adult is preparing for one's retirement. I would love to have a retirement like my father's; he doesn't have to work and can take a lot of the vacations he wants to. Granted he is also living in a house with a very low mortgage and his partner is still working full-time, so expenses are not so difficult. Using the Merrill Lynch online calculators & advisors, I am told that I should be contributing 9% of my current income level if I want to have a reasonable retirement. My current contribution level is 2%, with my company contributing half of what I do. I don't know if the Merrill Lynch calculators take my company's contribution into account. If they don't, then that means I need to contribute at least 6% of my income in order to reach 9% annually.
Also, having just cashed in the IRA I had from my old job (to pay some expenses), I feel that I need to really contribute more to my remaining retirement fund. I figure I have about 32-35 years before I can actually retire so hopefully I can suck up the blow to my finances now so I won't be as financially strapped in the future. (Side note: at my age, my father only had 25 years left until retirement.) Just looking at the number of years I have until I could retire makes it seem a long way away. Even if I were to look at my dad's retirement age, it feels so distant from where I am right now. I mean, age-wise, I am half-way there. But thinking about how long it has taken me to get to the point of 30 years, it feels like it will be a very long time before I retire.
Though, thinking about how my life has taken up 30 years of time, it doesn't feel that long. I don't know if it's because most of it has slipped from my immediate memory or because it feels like I am still beginning. Is this what people mean when they say that time goes by faster than you imagine? I don't think it passes by faster than one imagines, I think it passes by just as it should, but our memory of the time passed condenses as we load more information into our brains. So we feel like time has moved faster than it really has because we remember less of the mundane. As it is now, I really have to try to remember certain things from childhood. Even then it's not specific, only images and things known from "some half-remembered dream."
Do I remember every walk from the Anderson Avenue house to get a soda from the Fire Station on Union Avenue? No, but I know we went more than once and usually when we were bored in the summer. I know what that walk is like and I can fill in the gaps of memory even if it's not exactly as it happened. Kind of like the frog DNA in Jurassic Park. Other note: Why did Mom walk us all the way over to the Fire Station on Union Avenue just to get a soda? We could have walked up the street to the Acme or High's. Was it part of her diet regime?
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