Rant #2,483: The Final Countdown

It is Tuesday, September 1, the 245th of this horrific 2020, and it is a milestone day for me, a day that I was forced into and never looked forward to like so many others do.

Today I am officially retired.

I put in for retirement on July 1 after months and months of being unemployed, of being unwanted, of being forced out of the market because at the ripe old age of 63, I was looked at as being too old to handle a job in both my chosen profession and other areas that I applied to for full-time positions.

I banged my head against the wall from October 10, 2019--the day my place of business for the past 23 and a half years closed after years of teetering--till that date, and with no job prospects at all, I felt I had to protect myself and my family for the future, so I filed for early unemployment.

I had my phone interview a few weeks later, was approved, and as of today, I am officially, legally retired.

The problem is that although my retirement begins today, the government pretty much doesn't start your payments right then and there. You have to wait at least a month for payments, and it has to do with when your birthday falls out on the calendar as to when you get them.

So for me, since I was born April 28, I will not get any payments from the government until October 28. That is when my monthly Social Security payments will begin.

If my mother could have held out a few more days until, let's say May 1, I would get my payments exactly one month after I was officially retired. Since she couldn't hold out those three extra days, I have to go roughly two months without getting a dime for my retirement.

Yup, that is how ridiculous the way this thing works, and with Social Security forever teetering itself, I just hope it works for me until my time is up.

According to the government, I believe I have about 19 years left in my life, and I will be getting payments based on my life expectancy.

So even though I was forced to check in earlier than I would have liked--I wanted to work full time until I was 70, which is the optimum time to retire--my total dollar payments will equal out to the same amount as those who retired at 70, because although my monthly payments will be smaller, I will get more actual payments retiring at an earlier age.

But retiring at age 63 puts me in a bind, because I cannot collect Medicare until I am age 65.

It does not matter now, because I am on my wife's health plan, but she is slightly older than me--five months--and thus, she will turn 65 a few months before me. When she retires--and she plans to do just that next year--she will get Medicare, as she retires at age 65, but I am going to have to wait a few months to get it.

I guess I will have to get a short-term plan when she retires, so I am covered in the case of any eventualities related to health.

Yes, the whole thing is horrid. I look back on the past nearly 11 months, and at least I can say that I did my best, never wavered, worked hard to get a full-time job, but I failed miserably.

As I look back on these past nearly 11 months of unemployment, I know that I had too many walls in my way to succeed.

First, I had the age stigma, the belief that anyone over a certain age--like 45 to 50 or so, and especially over 55 years of age--is washed up, cannot be retrained or learn anything new,and is useless in the marketplace.

Look, I know that we treat our elderly very poorly in many areas to begin with, and it stretches to the job. Older workers are looked at as gold diggers, looking to take the cash and run when the time comes. yet when it comes down to brass tacks, the older worker is looked at as the one to get the job done.

Yet ageism certainly exists in the job market, and it is the last stigma in that market that has yet to be addressed. And it has yet to be addressed because proving discrimination related to your age in this job arena is almost an impossible thing to do, unless it is direct, like, "I can't hire you because you are too old." I haven't experienced that, but let's face it, after applying for more than 1,000 positions over my unemployment span, and getting just a handful of interviews as a result, you just know that I am a victim of job discrimination related to my age.

Also, my contacts could not help me find a full-time job. Look, full-time workers themselves are in a precarious position today, so unless you have really prime contacts that can really open the door for you, you are sunk in job quicksand.

I had none of these, and I give many of them credit, they said flat out that they could not help me, and I understood that. Others tried to help, but for one reason or another, it did not pan out.

And finally, I had to contend with the coronavirus and everything that it has brought--or removed--from the table. Even though my family and I never were infected with this virus, it has infected us in so many other ways, and one of them certainly was that it closed off the job market for so many people, myself included.

Full-time jobs have become scarce during the pandemic, and with so many people being forced out of work, every job I applied for probably had at least 100 others applying for the same exact job, so my chance of landing a new full-time job during the pandemic was probably less than nil.

So here I am, newly retired, and no, I am not going to have a party or a celebration of any kind.

I did not choose to be in this position, so what's to celebrate?

But at age 63, I believe I still have a lot of life in me, and I am not going to let my situation deter me from living it.

Life is for the living, and I am alive!

Let me go with that, and proceed straight ahead for at least the next 19 years, and hopefully, well beyond that.

Let's go ... let's go ... let's go!