So finally she starts her annuity, good.
But now we don’t have pie-in-the-sky money, just a monthly check for a whole lot less. Still, this is a good thing, knowing the income is there “forever,” that being as long as she’s alive: no spousal benefit! That’s what I opted for because her checks were going to be so little anyway — an insult, really, considering how many lives she touched and helped shape over the course of her college teaching career — with a single-life option, she’d get the most there was to get. If I die, she has her lifetime income. If she dies, I get nothing, but so what? Before I met her, that’s exactly what I had, nothing. And if she died, what would I really have but nothing anyway?
It’s not easy living outside-the-box, but then that’s why there is one: most people do just fine inside, thank you very much. Like with housing, for instance. It would be nice to be sitting on a supposedly impregnable fortress of certainty and security, like living in a paid-for home I never wanted to leave, but my life hasn’t taken me there yet. (I keep showing it the brochures…)
You just never know what’s coming down the road. If we had stayed where we were, for example, we’d be roughly ten years away from having the house paid off, or would we, considering how much of a temptation it would have been to pull money out? And when my wife went back for a visit last June, she drove by the old place and saw that the neighbors (or whoever they sold out to) had built a huge new home in place of their own one, so large in fact that it now looms over our old house, which according to her “looks like shit and ought to be razed.” Just imagine how it might feel now to have stayed there and been “safe.” Good Lord!
Anyway, to make up for no spousal benefit, we figured we’d just take out a life insurance policy on my lovely wife, only it turns out that people of a certain age aren’t hardly even allowed to GET insurance. In short, it would cost almost as much as medical insurance in a few years, then a bunch more on down the road, leaving us with absolutely nothing if it expired before anyone died. What a sick joke. We were sitting here after phoning for a quote and literally freaking out. Conventional wisdom, like about insurance, can be such fucking madness. Sometimes I wonder why the murder rate is so goddamned low, you know?
Screw the insurance, we’ll just save the money for ourselves. But Jesus, half the world would murder me for my shoes, and we still let the collective fear of going without get to us? (“You’re at risk, you’re at risk!”) That’s what they do to you these days, I guess. At this point, it’s outside-the-box just to be quiet, happy, and alive.
No small achievement, but then I’m a late bloomer.
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