Thanks for the “thrifty” barb, TG …. I’m taking that as a compliment. I believe it’s one of my best attributes which enabled me to get thru life with everything I need, regardless of my circumstances.
Your cultivating your expensive taste in food over my thriftiness boils down to just one thing and that is income. You are still working, no? And your salary is undoubtedly at least 4x mine was when I left the gubment’s employ. In addition, your pension will be calculated on a later tier than mine was and thus will be a larger percentage of your highest year’s pay than mine is making your pension approx 6x or more my monthly pension.
It also helps you that you recently posted that your youngest kid is graduating from university this month. I still have two years to go (June ’18) but my youngest kid will be attending classes this summer and next summer and is on track to graduate on time. Kudos to you for having your kids while young! I was the oldest mom on the ward in the *new-ish* Sharp Mary Birch Hospital when my youngest kid was born.
You are not yet 50, correct? If you decide to retire at age 50, you’ve got a helluva long time to pay for health insurance and as you know, it’s going to cost you a fortune thru your retirement assn, you are not eligible for a HIR and may not be eligible for any kind of (now minuscule) allowance. I recall that you posted here recently that you are looking forward to getting married this year (Congratulations!) and retirement but this paragraph is just an FYI that the health insurance fiasco that is the ACA in CA is a colossal mess and there is very little choice out there for individual coverage, which is exorbitantly priced (esp if you are not eligible for a “subsidy”). It gets worse and worse until the premiums nearly fall off a cliff at about age 57 (depending on carrier) and it is all (very steeply) downhill from there. Good luck to you, TG, and I hope you will have more healthcare choices than I do!
This is all the more reason that a Republican needs to get elected President this year. The ACA needs to be summarily scrapped . . . yesterday. I just got my postcard last week from the Registrar of Voters telling me that I am an “official” Republican permanent mail-in voter!
I haven’t voted R since the Reagan era but I feel it’s time to change the status quo when it clearly hasn’t been working for decades. This country definitely needs someone with business savvy and street smarts to shake things up and I feel Trump is that person. I could care less about “personalities” and bluster and whether Trump was a “philanderer” in his past or whether Bill and Hill have had a “gentlemen’s agreement” to be “roommates” for the last two decades. They wouldn’t be the first “married” couple to put on this charade “for show” and won’t be the last. None of us knows what really goes on in other people’s relationships or what decisions they made in the past with their relationships that they now regret. The way I see it, long married people have three choices … sleep in the bed you made, get new bedding and to try make it work better going forward or leave. It takes two to tango. None of this affects a candidates ability to lead the country out of the morass it has found itself in of late, due partly to incompetence and partly to adherence to what I now see is an unsustainable ideology.
