Getting Ahead, Staying Ahead Keeping Financial Heads Above Water Is No Easy Task When Facing A World That Constantly Pulls On The Purse Strings

In the past six weeks, I’ve been handing out money as if it were candy on Halloween.

The pool sprung a leak. The air conditioner in the van conked out. The trash compactor roared its final goodbye and my glasses broke.

I didn’t expect any of this. In fact, I had been squirreling away money for new tires on the car and a crown my dentist insists I need.

But that little nest egg went for the friendly repairmen.

This money juggling is far from unusual in our household and, I bet, most others.

Plan, plan, plan, and you can bet the unexpected will happen.

Conflicting financial pressures are unending. You want to take a long weekend at the beach with the kids, but you have to pay the doctor bill. You need to fix the leaky toilet, but the car needs a new muffler. You crave new family room curtains but the children need new school clothes. You’re supposed to be saving for your kid’s college education and for your retirement and for a down payment on a house.

What’s a working family to do?

Even for lucky parents, for parents with well-paying, secure jobs such as we have, getting ahead financially is a Sisyphean task.

Just when you think you’ve rolled the boulder up the hill, an unexpected expense will inevitably push it back down - and maybe bowl you over in the process.

We baby boomers have only ourselves to blame. We should live in a smaller house, drive less expensive cars (maybe even only one), take fewer vacations, cut back on extraneous expenses. And sock away lots and lots of dough.

My husband and I haven’t done all that. And yet, after long, frank conversations with relatives and friends, I’ve discovered that we are more conscientious than many.

We have no credit card debt - no debt at all, except for our home. We have a 401K retirement account with our employer, we do not frequent fancy restaurants or wear fancy clothes, and we save, sporadically and not as much as we should, but we do.

We are even ahead of the game on some counts.

I have become, as the experts recommend, financially educated. Our savings are well diversified. For my last birthday, I bought myself a financial software program to tally our budget and keep track of our investments.

I spend hours playing with it, fascinated with the pie charts it forms on my computer screen, with the whirring noise it makes while figuring out mutual fund profits.

“Bean counting,” my husband calls it.

Hey, what do you expect from the daughter of an accountant!

Still, it’s a long, winding road between crunching numbers and being committed to them, and it’s not easy to choose tomorrow’s compound interest over today’s creature comforts. Temptations are too great. Expenses mount. There are so many pressing bills: orthodontists, diapers, sitters, household repairs, car maintenance, college…

College. Gee, the expense of education alone is mind-boggling. When you start talking about both college and retirement, my brain short-circuits. Retirement, you say? Har, har, har. Does anyone plan so far away, three decades away?

The numbers themselves seem unreal, comical. Consider them and weep. Money managers say you need about 80 percent of your yearly pre-retirement income to retire comfortably. To figure out the total sum you should have in assets by 65, multiply that salary figure by the number of years you plan to stay alive after your final paycheck.

Astounding, huh? I know. My husband and I would have to save millions of dollars to live as long as we expect to live and to pay for the type of education (good colleges, graduate school, the works) we want for our five children. Even with wise, healthy investments, and the maximum contribution to the retirement plans at work, we’re nowhere near where we should be. We can pay for either but not for both. (And heaven forbid we should be faced with a chronic ailment or aging parents needing financial help.)

What’s more, the pressure to spend, to live large, proves endemic to my generation. And so, indulged, occasionally careless and too often intent only on the moment, many of us don’t follow the basic rules of financial common sense. It’s tough coming up with a budget, tougher still to follow it.

We may dream of the halcyon days of retirement - at 62, 55, 50 or earlier still - but we haven’t worked hard enough nor saved what we should to be able to call it quits anytime soon.

This is invariably true of every single one of our friends.

Barring an unexpected inheritance or the stroke of good luck, we all plan to toil until we are 65, perhaps longer.

Again, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Any lament is patently ridiculous, a childish whine, like Donald Trump claiming his divorce from Ivana is forcing him to shop at Kmart. As with many other baby boomers, we have confused wants with desires, luxuries with necessities.

We can put away a nest egg for retirement.

We can save something for our children’s educations. But we have to make drastic changes. Now.

Are we willing to do it? Are we disciplined enough to cut back, to downsize, to give up what is so comfortable?

I don’t know, and it pains me to say so.