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Let me tell you a fictional tale with some touches of devastating realism:
It is the year 2050, the year in which a person who is 35 years old today would be retiring at 65 years of age . Imagine that this individual – whom we will call Juan for a name – never believed he was reaching retirement age or did not mind saving.
In that not so distant future (we are talking about only 30 years), this person lives cracking his fingers wondering what he will eat tomorrow. Juan was not poor, but now he is. He is poor and he is old. He lacks strength and his memories fade over the years. They have plenty of ailments and worries. Friends, family and illusions have been running out.
Juan, like many others, thought that he would continue working in his old age as “occupational therapy”, but today he suffers 12-hour shifts in exchange for a third of what he earned before retiring .
He forgot (or did not know) that once retired he would receive less than 30% of his last salary, with that money he barely enough to cover basic expenses. He didn’t consider that at 65 and older, he would naturally start to get sick more often and that the endless wait at Social Security would leave him sicker and more exhausted.
Juan had the opportunity to save a few pennies, but preferred to trust that “God would provide.” But even God is in crisis today.
He did not save a penny because he was sure that his children would “give him a little hand” and they are at least 10 years old without knowing about them. Others with worse luck than Juan, continue to support their “boys” who are already around 50 years old.
Like many others, Juan did not save, he did not prevent himself. He didn’t care or maybe he didn’t even know about it. He did not have enough information to make a better decision and did not look for it. He thought that time would not reach him. He imagined that he would retire at age 85 and die a few years later and he took, ate and lived how much weight fell on his hands. At the end of the day, for that one broke the soul working.
Today Juan can no longer work, but he continues to do so because all he has left is the courage to cling to life, no matter how sad and tired it may seem at times.
Don’t be like john
Does the story I just told you seem exaggerated? What if I told you that it could happen to you?
In a couple of years we will see the first “ AFORE Generation ”: those people who had the change from retirement scheme to Regime 97 and whose outlook is not very encouraging.
The bad news for those who touches us this law is that if we do not provide money voluntarily and additionally our saving systems, face years of retirement will be a challenge ca … nijo.
Either because we lack energy or because we simply want to rest and dedicate ourselves to something else, as the years go by it will be more difficult to find a good income. For this reason, we must anticipate and remember that we will live 20 more years of retiring (and there will even be those who will live much, much longer).
How to raise awareness when we have many years to go before we retire? It is difficult to imagine what will happen to us. There are those who say that they do not even know if they will live so many years or they assure that they will die young so they do not care to prevent for the future. But what if, on the contrary, they live for many years? If they die until they are 85, 95 or 105 years old (which is not so crazy)?
The good news is that if we save on our own and do it well in advance, the future will be more bearable. The younger we are, the lower the amount we must save each month and the higher the returns / earnings we will receive in one of the most important stages of our life, retirement.
If your dream is to reach the third age to travel the world and live everything you could not while working twelve hours a day, you can do it, but consider that you will need a few million pesos. If you don’t manage to raise all the planned money, at least you will have a good amount going for you. It is better to have a million than 50 thousand pesos to face 20 years of life.
We have two sides of the coin that we can use as a reference to take action today to be calm tomorrow. For example, there are many famous actors and athletes who, after having lived in opulence in their glory years, today have nothing and are in financially adverse conditions. They had to save but preferred to spend uncontrollably.On the other hand, we have those who fortunately foresaw their future and today in their 80s, they live calmly because they built a base of stability for what is now the present.
The question is simple, which side of the coin would you like to be on?