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My name is Patricia and I worked for a large national firm in the northeast when the merger took place. I thought that it would not be such a good idea to stay. I decided to take an early retirement since the house that my husband and I had built was paid for in cash. I had a great pension and a 401K that would be able to give us the lifestyle that we were used to having.
My husband George worked for a well know Wall Street...
After being laid off, I had to use my 401(k) to pay my mortgage and other bills. Now as a childcare provider, I don’t have a pension or a 401(k).
I should be thinking about retirement, but I can’t even work part-time. I’ll have to continue to work full-time in order to make ends meet. If anything ever happens and I won’t be able to work anymore, I’ll have nothing to fall back on. After working all my life, I should be able to...
Like anyone else when I first started working, I was young…. I was living paycheck to paycheck, I didn’t even think about retirement. I needed all my money just to live and to eat. And when I started thinking about retirement, by then it was still hard to save living in the nation’s capital making a descent salary. I was considered middle class, maybe upper middle class. But between what you have to pay for living...
For most of my life, I ran a one-person architect shop. Then, what happened in 1993 and 1994 nearly killed me. My investments fell. The housing industry went into a slump. My daughters were starting college, and my mother was in a nursing home. These extra expenses wiped out most of my savings.
Since then I’ve been trying to rebuild my retirement savings. The current downturn comes at exactly the wrong time. I gave up my own...
I worked for the state of Connecticut for more than 30 years spending most of my career at the Connecticut Health Department while my wife, Carol, worked in the private sector treating patients as a psychiatric nurse at a local hospital and psychiatric facility.
When you’re planning for your retirement, you budget for things like food, medicine, and a few vacations. You certainly don’t expect a single item in your budget to cost...
Retirement USA is collecting personal stories about people’s fears and concerns for retirement. Washington isn’t paying attention to the retirement concerns of workers and retirees, so we need to speak out. The stories will help show lawmakers the reality of the retirement income crisis.
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