September 28, 2026
The advantage of having a wife who is a few years older than I am is the fact that I’m treated to the educational experience of watching her experience certain things in life before I have to carry them out for myself. Since we worked for the same company, I just figured when she retired from work, I could take notes on all the processes she went through in order to prepare for my own departure. I could observe how she’d work up to that moment of retirement, counting down the days, taking in the good cheer from all of her co-worker well-wishers, the afterwork retirement party, and all that other cool stuff that one goes through when a life career at a company is coming to an end! Well, things didn’t go quite as planned. After forty-five years of working for the same company Margaret got a call on the morning of one of her off days and was told that she was no longer needed. The call came completely out of the blue, and she hadn’t even heard the slightest rumor of such a termination possibility. Although it was all a bit of a shock, the company did give her a decent forced retirement package, and management cleaned out Margaret’s work locker, boxed up everything, and mailed it to her. Okay, so much for the glorious build up, happy countdown, or anything that might have remotely resembled a retirement party. Needless to say, I learned absolutely nothing from my wife’s experience that would assist me in my own future company departure.
Now that we’ve both departed the work scene, Margaret’s company insurance only has a month left, and since she has already passed the big 65-year milestone she can now apply for Medicare as well as Social Security. So here’s the big question. When should someone start collecting Social Security? The amount she will receive if she waits until she is 67 is more than she would receive now, but it’s only a few bucks shy of two hundred dollars more a month. So this brings up the question, “Is the wait worth it?” Now if she decides to wait until she’s 70 years old to start reeling in the Social Security, her monthly payment would be bumped up by nearly a thousand dollars! My wife has been contributing to Social Security since she was a teenager, but we also have money stashed away in our retirement fund from work that will provide us with roughly the same monthly salary we received at our old job without touching our Social Security.
So the big concern now revolves around the question regarding should Margaret start receiving her Social Security now…….or wait until………..oh, I don’t know! It all gets a might confusing! I would imagine that a lot of the deciding factor depends on how healthy one feels, and that’s a question that only she can answer. Personally, I’ve convinced myself that I’m going to live forever. Indeed, I’m the Highlander and will probably spend my retirement seeking out other immortals while chopping off their heads in order to absorb their power. Now if you’ve never seen the movie HIGHLANDER, that statement might come across as a bit disturbing, but such a plan is all within the plotline of the movie.
Margaret’s mother lived to the ripe old age of 87, but her father passed away at the relatively young age of 68, so she’s a bit torn on how long she might be around if her family history means anything. I once had a boss whose father died at the age of 51 due to health issues, but his mother lived to be 102! So with this in mind, we dove into the Social Security website on my computer. I’m afraid the modern computer age has left my wife in the virtual dust because her computer skills are on the same level of a medieval monk. “Attachment?” she would scream out. “I don’t know how to add an attachment to an email!” While listening to her vivid rants of computer despair I would quietly poke around on my computer keyboard, wondering how she survived a forty-five-year career as a line lead at an electronics company with such minuscule computer skills. Such made me recall the time I had tried to show her how to work with EXCEL, but after two minutes into my presentation she got bored and put an abrupt end to the lesson. As far as my wife was concerned, if she couldn’t learn everything there was to know about EXCEL in two minutes or less, she had no interest! So, this means I got to do all the heavy lifting, computer work once we finally launched into the Social Security website.
After a few choice “WTF’s” and “You’ve got to be fXXXing kidding me!” from the little woman, we managed to set up an account for her on the Social Security website. “Keep this in your file!” she ordered as she came up with a password. “Make sure your webcam can’t see your keyboard while you’re entering the password,” she barked out, thinking that at least a thousand hackers are constantly staring at me through my webcam. Who knows? Maybe they are. “Oh, this is a fXXXing nightmare,” she grumble when the process stretched into the second hour. “The HR representative said this would only take ten minutes!” These are the times when I miss the old days of just wandering down to an office and letting some nice government employee walk me through the mess. However, Margaret had procrastinated regarding this procedure for so long that she was now faced with a deadline as far as the Medicare procedure was concerned. Meaning, she had to have it done NOW! There was some rule that she had to have health coverage within a certain time she applied for Medicare, and the extended health coverage from her former employer was about to come to a crashing end!
I felt like asking the little woman if there was some reason she had pushed all of this fun to the very last moment, considering she had been given an entire year to complete the procedure. Over the years though, I have learned that silence can be golden. There are also times when a few shots a Jose Cuervo Gold might be appropriate as well, but I figured I needed my mind sharp for the day. After a few clicks here and a few forms there and plenty of cuss words thrown everywhere, I think we might have actually launched into a good start. Was the task finished? To be honest, I don’t have a clue. I was kind of scared to ask.
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