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In Reply to: Re: I think about this more these days posted by Modest Investor on November 11, 2004 at 22:20:36:
Interesting for me that Oldtimer brought this up because the day before yesterday my wife and I had another meeting with an insurance consultant who's helping us.
It's the third time we meet with him. We've only been completely out of the cult for 3 1/2 years. We're in our 50's. It's still a struggle getting integrated into the normal world and normal society, and when I started thinking about social security and pensions I realized that I had absolutely virtually zero understanding of how the process works in the country that we live in.
Fortunately I've made friends with someone who works as a consultant in the insurance business, which made it a little easier to explain to him how I was in the dark about how things work, and even worse to tell him that here we were already in our 50's and we had made very little in the way of Social Security payments to the government. This person has turned out to be a pretty good friend because he's one of the people to whom I could explain about having been in a cult that rejected being a part of human society. It was embarassing, ego deflating, it wasn't easy but I'm glad I did it.
So once I got past that stage he said the first thing he needed to know is an estimation of about how much we will be getting from gov't social security when we reach retirement, if we are to get anything at all. This was done by filling in a form to which I attached a long list of where we had lived, what we'd done for work, who worked and where, etc. In many places on the list I put non lucrative activity as members of a Christian community, The Family. We decided to be up front. Otherwise there were a few periods when one of us had worked. Sometimes it was my wife who had the job so I put my activity down as the house husband. It wasn't without embarrassment that I sent in this long list of different places we'd lived in this country and around the world, often staying for just a few months at a time.
It took a few months but finally we got an answer and learned that from the gov't social security, when and if we retire at 65, we can expect a low minimum. Not enough to live on, but at least something to build on.
After our last meeting, our friend is preparing a number of insurance proposals, the capital we pay into it won't be accessible until I reach 65. In the meantime we will be covered for any salary loss due to sickness or accident, things like that. When the policy reaches it's term the capitol plus interest will be accessible. I found out that retirees can put their savings into a retirement insurance that guarantees them payments until they pass. If you pass before the capital is used what's left goes to the insurer. But, if the capital gets used up before you pass, you're still guaranteed your payment.
Now I have a somewhat better understanding of how some of these things work, we're definitely goint to invest in one of these insurance plans within the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we'll be able to keep up the payments, but there's even ways of stopping the payments without losing any of the investment, as long as you wait till it comes to term. Some things I still don't understand very well, but I live in a country which provides a lot of safeguards, and where people don't get cheated very often. Our friend works for one of the major players in the insurance business, and I feel better and more responsible now that we acted on this.
Realistically speaking, since we haven't payed into any of these funds the way most people do starting in their 20's, we can't expect to afford the golf course, or world travels when we retire. But we should be able to have the basic comforts and maintain a sensible life style.
But as someone recently pointed out to me the most important thing to have when retirement and old age comes around is friends. It's so true, we live in a village and the older people neighbors who have friends are the happy ones, but our neighbor who doesn't have friends to do things with is lonely and unhappy and it's not easy to cheer her up.
