16 to 61: A Reflection on Our Working Life

 

I recently started a position as a retirement analyst with an agency that, among many other services, provides pension benefit calculations for state and county employees anticipating retirement within six months of their application. What was so striking as I forensically parsed through the data to accurately gather every service credit, plan code, accrued leave and fiscal year to determine their average final compensation, is that this information was not a cursory glance at a culmination of employment but a summary of a purposeful career serving their respective organization.

Most of the applicants had reached the required age for full retirement without deductions, which is 62.  I began to think about the decades between the time that we are legally eligible to become licensed to operate a motor vehicle (16) and the age (61) before we become eligible to receive a portion of the soon to be endangered Social Security benefits.

The common narrative concerning our income during retirement is that it will decrease.  While not an optimistic projection, it’s apparently become palatable because of the assumption that your expenses will also decrease or be less than they were during your working career.  So here’s the rub, as I continued to enthusiastically analyze the data to determine the post-work income of these pensioners, I realized that the emphasis on investing a portion of your salary from the time you get your first check until you notify your employer’s HR department of your pending retirement date, seems to have been a casualty of either benign neglect or the cost of “ life be lifeing” eating up the vast majority of people’s earnings.

 According to an article from One Main Financial, the average person spends about 3.3 million dollars in their lifetime. I will qualify these numbers as being predicated on location, income and lifestyle. What I mean is that in many areas of the country you can, by default, be a resident of what is called a VHCOL (Very High Cost of Living) location. 

CATEGORY	Cost
Housing	$1,486,160
Car	$470,000
Children	$467,220
Health Insurance	$290,016
Retirement/401k	$195,754
Renovations	$190,429
Furniture	$61,630
Education	$42,960
Vacations	$118,000
Wedding	$34,000

 

Oddly enough, the article did not include the costs of food. It might be a bit disconcerting to realize that the multi-million-dollar lottery ticket you were hoping for appeared in the form of an annuitized income over the course of your professional career.  So, the question of who wants to be a millionaire has been asked and answered but not necessarily as you anticipated.

The class of 1977 represented one of the largest groups of citizens turning 62 in our nation’s history.  According to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, only 3.2% of retirees have over one million dollars in their retirement accounts.  There is a plethora of reasons that folks make a declaration of independence from the work force yet are not adequately funded based on conventional rules of thumb like the 70% Rule, which states that you’ll need 70% of your annual pre-retirement income to live “comfortably.”

These guidelines, I assume, factor in variables like the daily battle of what I call the tyranny of now, meaning that while we know we need to put something away for our future selves, old adages like tomorrow’s not promised and the immediate desire to have, experience or consume make the redirection of assets for retirement a dicey proposition.  The other economic reality is that a vast majority of working-class folks’ income is barely keeping up with the invisible tax of inflation so saving and investing is a luxury. 

The four pillars of a middle-class standard of living are: Quality Housing, Reliable Transportation, Nourishing groceries, Adequate Insurance.  Noticeably absent, vacations, and other leisure activities.  The fastest growing segment of the U.S. population is people 85 and older, a segment that is expected to triple by 2060.  Why do I bring this up?  There was a term coined years ago called the Sandwich generation.  These are people who find themselves responsible for their children and directly or in an ancillary way one or both of their parents.  While our nation’s agrarian roots made multi-generational living common, the Industrial Age and its attendant advances like urbanization and transportation shifted this dynamic to become less common.

No one told us when we were teenagers that our superhero parents would one day morph into a geriatric population that required us to make them a part of the financial algorithm that would determine our post-career lives.  Those 45 years of earning, spending, saving and hopefully investing would provide a repository for us to draw from that would allow us as retirees to explore life away from the cubicle, classroom, office or field. From teenager to well-aged teen, we have to navigate financial obligations while simultaneously cultivating and compounding seeds to become ideally multi-generational oaks. 

The projected benefit estimates for people that had dedicated decades to a noble cause gave me pause because even being beneficiaries of a defined benefit plan, an option that has fallen dramatically out of favor in the private sector, they still were going to have to have established other retirement accounts to have a semblance of the standard of living they had before they pondered and ultimately submitted their requests to terminate their employment.   

My deepest hope is that any of you between these goal post ages are strategically and diligently funding your future. It won’t be crowdfunded, and you don’t get a do over.

                                                               

                                                             

                                                   Of Dreams Past (Passed)

 

Today marks the culmination of approximately nine months of preparation for the transfer of a landmark.  That timeframe could be called a gestational period in which four of them were spent deconstructing my parents' homestead.  This "real estate" property was built by my grandfather, a fact that was always a point of pride as I remember going on the final walkthrough with my father before we occupied it as a family.  These reflections are what has made this process at times gut wrenching as my sisters, and I sifted through fifty plus years of accumulated memories.

From the moment we compelled our mother to realize that living alone in a place where she had spent decades building her life was no longer safe, we began in earnest the daunting task of preparing to sell, at her request, what to us felt like a sacred place.  I am sharing these thoughts because many of my peers are facing similar transitions in which, if we're honest, can be turbulent emotionally and financially if you have not soberly planned or pondered the delicate scaffolding that accompanies this decision.

I asked God for wisdom and compassion.  This process can be traumatic for our parents who had crafted and curated a life in a homestead that shaped our initial sense of society and family. There was an internal conflict wherein I felt with each piece of furniture moved or clothing packed in boxes, I was ripping up roots while simultaneously planting them for the new owners.  As the listing agent, I had to vacillate between my professional obligation to make decisions that made the property the most appealing to potential buyers while ignoring the kid in me who remembers when his dad built the now weather-worn storage shed for his lawn equipment and other tools.  

This long, ranch-style home seemed endless when we first moved in.  As we began to strategically clear each room, at times we had to pause, breathe, reflect and yes mourn.  My parents provided a plethora of wonderful experiences not just for us, but for countless college students, church members and neighbors. Fish fries, Sunday dinners, friends, and neighbors gathering and most of all a purposeful habitation for the Lord’s presence. Each room of the house had its own unique history, including the “Do Not Touch” living room which still looked like it was suspended in time.  We chose to be stewards over this preparation/process because of a sense of sacrality and respect.

Four months later, she stood barren, stripped of her covering of furnishings, books, appliances and my mother’s enormous wardrobe. Her makeover required a new roof, restored front porch, minor landscaping, plumbing and drywall repairs, and fresh coats of paint all of which gave us a glimpse of her former glory. As I finished the administrative requirements to list the house, my finger struggled to press the key to actuate this transaction. Memories began to cascade of what this address meant to me, my sisters but most of all my mother. I wanted to preserve that, “keep it in the family” maintain legacy. Truth is that you must have an astute grasp of what that decision requires financially, and the ancillary responsibilities bereft of the emotions. Having managed a similar transaction showed me in high definition that owning and managing older homes will quickly jar you from the HGTV version of what it entails.

As I walked through what now felt like a cavernous abode, even barren, decades of love caressed me as I walked from room to room to inspect the contractor’s work. I was okay until I glanced at my dad’s empty study and the open space where my mom’s baby grand piano once occupied. The Psalmist and the Berean were no longer here. At that moment, it felt safe to cry a hybrid mixture of mourning and celebration that my sisters and I had honored my parents in preparing their home for a family that I prayed would provide the kind of experiences we were so fortunate to receive.  

                                                         A Tale of Two Hopefuls

In a few weeks, the NFL draft will make instant millionaires of 20-something year-old men that have dreamed, fantasized about suiting up professionally on the gridiron since they were tiny tikes playing Pop Warner football in their respective city leagues. Aside from my concern about how coming into virtual, dynastic wealth after an existential state of middle and lower class sensibilities, this draft provides another layer of comparison and contrast above the legends that have gone before them.

Dwayne Haskins is being compared, by some pundits, to New England Patriots demi-god Tom Brady.  Of course, throwing one into the rarefied air of Mt. Olympus before you've taken a single snap is the feeding trough for ESPN conjecture and spectator commentary.  The lofty expectations for Haskins-by-some, even in the effervescent hype bubble of Heisman trophy winner Kyler Murray, reminds me of the optics by which I believed Florida State's Jameis Winston was fully capable of rising to.  As a Florida State fan, I saw first hand the transcendent talent he displayed in two of the most successful back-to-back seasons of one of the premier football programs in the nation...at least until recently.

From the first spring practice, until the final snap of the 2013 National Championship against Auburn, Winston was a force of nature on and off the field.  His ebullient personality made him a natural leader and his preternatural ability at the QB position literally led to a kind of messianic sports worship that is all too familiar below the Mason Dixon line. Florida State was absolutely destroying everybody in its wake and for two years they only came close to sniffing defeat once.......due to Jameis' absence from under center.  Therein lies the conundrum.  The dichotomy of uber measurables and intangibles on the field and questionable, head-scratching conduct off of it. The ignominious cloud he brought to the Garnet and Gold made his early departure, even after unprecedented success for the team, imminent and quite frankly welcomed.

This is where the the comparison stops.  Although Dwayne and Jameis are almost identical in their physical dimensions, Haskins enters the league with none of the baggage following an all-time record-setting season for Big 10 quarterbacks. He will also be the first, well maybe after Alex Smith, Urban Meyer field general with a legitimate shot at having a substantial career under center. Sorry Tebow!  Like Jameis, Dwayne is a true pocket passer with a very high football IQ and absolute command of the ever shrinking area his offensive line provides him to do work.  He is god awful slow, which makes his proficiency under center paramount; something I believe that has led to Superman's ( Cam Newton) marginal improvement at passing completion percentage.

In an order of magnitude that matches the history making accomplishment of Doug Williams and what should have been back-to-back Super Bowls for Russell Wilson, I believe Dwayne Haskins can throttle the still dormant, pernicious, racist undertones of putative ineptitude ascribed to blacks at the most coveted position in sports.  He checks all of the boxes: height, intelligence, leadership, ability. It is my hope beyond hope that he lands with a team that can develop him into what truly has the potential to be something special. 

                                                                           
                                                             Through The Years

On December 11th of this year, my wife and I celebrated 25 years of a union that for me has been transformative and instructional.  The institution of marriage has been caricatured to the point that many couples who have considered entering into its sacred bonds are anxious, if not discouraged.

 I have often stated that the primary challenge with a lot of people that decide to get married shortly after meeting each other is that they enter into it in a chemically-altered state. The avalanche of endorphins and the almost Pollyannish view in which some begin this covenant make the inevitable challenges that will present themselves hostile and seismic in the shaking of their love-engorged foundation. When two hearts beat as one, their lives begin as an amalgamation of different ideologies, world views, expectations and life experiences.

Neither of us had been spouses or parents before yet we were embarking on a lifelong pursuit which by default included one and aspirationally would involve the other.  We began as lovers, friends, confidants and partners in building a home, a micro-economy that would serve as the first society our children would ever be exposed to.  At a very organic level, this union was a demonstration of ex nihilo- we were fashioning a life out of the simple belief that our love was immutable and eternal.

Each year would expand our roles, our responsibilities and our sense of self. Within the first two anniversaries we grew from babe and sweetie to the life-changing title of mommy and daddy. As I watched my wife's body transform into this spectacular repository for our child to grow and be nurtured in the safety of her womb, nothing could have prepared me to witness the second greatest miracle in my life-the birth of our first born ( the first being salvation through Christ). Anniversaries are ostensibly chronological milestones. But as I reflect on the one score and five that my wife and I have shared, they really are moments in time in which you can reflect/pause on just how the events-planned and mostly unplanned-have influenced the tapestry that is your life together.

We met as college students.  My sojourn was an expectation, my wife's a departure from the norm. The two became one flesh and and that merging of soul, body and spirit became the foundation for us to evolve into a plethora of other titles, integration into a variety of professional, community and religious circles and ultimately craft the future that we so eagerly sought to explore. We don't tend to use the term matriculation when it comes to marriage. However, in reflecting, that is essentially what Stacy and I have done. We started as child-less, young professionals who quite frankly had to feel our way through the unique dynamic that was to be the Stallworth household.

Just as you would expect there to be an enormous difference in expertise between a first year teacher and the 25-year school administrator, my wife and I are very different people than the two that stood before God and over 400 witnesses declaring our love for each other in Bethel AME on December of 1993.  The love- the one constant- has been immutable yet at times incredibly tested.  Actually it has intensified in a way I can't quantify. We have changed physically-my gray hairs are aggressively vanquishing the black, intellectually, ideologically, and yes spiritually-a quantum leap in maturity and growth. I don't know if you are consistently aware of the modicum of change that each year brings.  Certainly we can see and feel the physiological, but the more substantive things like the emotional, spiritual, and worldview follow a different rubric. We have become the enormously proud parents of two incredible adult- well our youngest is 17- daughters and been the beneficiary of the immeasurable joy they have brought into our lives.

We also have become aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces, godparents, play-play parents, administrators, business and home owners, and leaders in a variety of different circles. The years have greatly added...but they have also sadly taken away.  This blog is not your normal Hallmarky reminiscing of a union that has been the greatest gift in my life.  I just wanted to share in a more incandescent way how two people love imperfectly by the grace of God for 25 years.

                                                               
                                                                   The Movement

It was intriguing to read an article highlighting the catharsis experienced by the Asian-American journalist who watched the box-office hit "Crazy Rich Asians."  A lot of her sentiment could easily be cross pollinated to the wildly enthusiastic reactions of African Americans to the global box-office sensation Black Panther.

The existential challenge of constantly being seen as other, foreign, or invisible in a dominant culture was not lost on me as she exquisitely articulated her angst and celebration of seeing an all Asian cast highlight the complexity of the diaspora found in Asians who have acculturated in many different parts of the world.  She spoke of how refreshing it was to see people that looked like her not portrayed as cheap facsimiles that were either caricatured martial arts experts or tragic survivors of despotic driven pogroms.

Similar to W.E.B.Dubois' allusion to a divided soul, she anguished over the challenge to cultivate an identity that is virtuous to one's heritage while not falling into a crevasse in between.  She introduced  a pejorative term-banana- that could be the equivalent of the derisive "oreo"  I remember hearing hurled at black folks who were accused of assimilating or acting white.  Banana meant that you were "yellow" on the outside but white on the inside.  The thing that struck me about this article is that my friends whose families hailed from Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, or Southeast Asia were never this transparent in their assessment of the duality of cultures many experience in Eurocentric countries.

The hegemony of one culture is engendered by default of population dominance and tribalism. The ubiquity of all things European does not beset one who is not consciously made aware of its preeminence until social eruptions like integration or immigration that could irretrievably alter the demographics of the nation become a concern.  The axiom of the United States being a "melting pot" always struck me as politically and culturally naive.  At best we are a heterogeneous mix, more like a salad where each individual ingredient maintains its own identity within the amalgamation.

 Cinema has long been the creative portal to illustrate the human tapestry that shows the state of the union. Hollywood's portrayal as liberal and egalitarian has not translated in the number of projects like Crazy Rich Asians or Black Panther green lighted by executives. Movie making by its very nature is collaborative and "inclusive."  The challenge has been that the lens by which projects are deemed profitable and having global appeal has been suffocatingly limited to an archetype that finds very little intrinsic value in hues, stories, and narratives that are outside the safe spectrum of their myopic sensibilities.

The story of America's rich heritage found within its incredible citizens is gaining bandwidth.  This is not growing as subtext or sidebars.  There is an increased awareness that the pattern recognition of what it means to be American is decoupling from a tired, familiar trope.  That is actually a good thing.

It was always (still is) my belief that the truth was immutable, inelastic, intractable and not subject to the court of public opinion or vacillating social mores.  With that as a premise, I find the term "my truth" problematic and highly subjective as it has gained increased bandwidth in the national narrative of social movements.  If we expunge moral absolutes, then the basis of this statement undulates like the popularity of dance moves.  I had an interesting discussion with my enlightened, intelligent sixteen-year old daughter about the growing concern of allegations being tantamount to guilt within the context of the #ME TOO movement.

As a husband, father, brother, nephew, uncle, cousin to incredible women and young ladies, I have a less than zero tolerance for inappropriate or violent behavior-verbal or physical-directed towards women! What has become very troubling is that now the hint, allegation, intimation of boorish, crude or aggressive behavior by a man transmogrifies into something resembling the prolific serial assault of Harvey Weinstein, the catalyst behind the movement.  Let me be clear, our patrician culture has without question fostered the behaviors that not only engendered predatory conduct, but I have personally seen the direct impact to women who have been the recipient of this sadistic "boys will be boys" axiom.

However, there seems to be in this glacial swing of the pendulum, a propensity to look past the same abuse of authority that spawned this national uproar. This movement has ignited a conflagration of which no one seems to be concerned about the possibility of collateral damage.  My daughter began to voice a concern about unsubstantiated claims by women not only gaining traction, but even after losing credibility still being given a shelf life that ultimately proved ruinous to the innocent.  My daughter wasn't giving a Stepford wife response as if the accusation against powerful men was without merit.  Somehow, in this new zeitgeist, improbity can not be attached to the accuser.

It seems that the new script singularly affords truth to be the sole domain of the accuser.  The presumption of innocence, a cornerstone of our legal system, seems to be withering on the judicial vine.  There is an old adage that says, ' the abused tend to become abusers."  Unfortunately, there seems to be a dangerous precedent emerging as the scaffolding for the old construct that devalued and subjugated women to this doleful, sexual misconduct without recourse is being torn down. The cautionary tale is what will this much needed shift yield as the voiceless and the powerless are given a platform to change this troubling trend.

                                                             The New Normal

Years ago I posited the ramifications of people's thoughts being audible.  While we have not developed telepathy, the ubiquity of cellular towers has allowed our digital appendages ((smartphones) to create platforms by which all of our mental meanderings or machinations, no matter how mean-spirited, can spill out like a tsunami as tweets, posts, blogs and hi-def pictures.  Our bandwidth has expanded beyond the daily atrocities of murder, mayhem, and geopolitical tragedies to include a drastic reconfiguration of the now very subjective term normal.

Maybe we have misdiagnosed normal all along.  Greek historian Herodotus wrote,'The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing." The Age of Enlightenment was supposed to be the epiphany, the birth of consciousness of rational men and women in control of their own destinies.  The Age of Science purportedly expunged the reliance on superstition, god(s) and religion.  The Promethean promise of progress as humanity dismantled the shackles of ignorance would usher in a Utopian construct by which the endemic challenges of the human condition would be superseded by new insights and technology.

Well............

Few could have imagined that the pace of technological advances could have accelerated the opening of what is essentially Pandora's Box. We have this strange dichotomy of good and evil, which have always co-mingled, battling for dominance not just in the public square, but in the hyper loops of social media platforms.  Bill Gates is fond of quoting statistics from one of his favorite researchers that empirically demonstrate that things are getting better using the metrics of global poverty, average life span, access to healthcare, clean water and reduction of hunger.  Yet with the calculus that created all of these innovations, we can't create an algorithm that explains the surging spiritual drift in our culture. To what do we attribute this current malaise that seems to be ushering in an apparently rhetorical question: what kind of world do we live in?

If we constrict our focus to the natural at the expense of the spiritual, we limit solutions to merely heritage, biology, sociology, politics and economics. Christ summarized the issue with this simple pronouncement, "It's a heart issue."  Russian philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky said,"Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he can not find anything to depend upon either within or outside of himself."Christ expanded his narrative by saying in Mark 7:1," It is not what goes into your body that defiles you, you are defiled by what comes from your heart." (New Living Translation)

The new narrative of our nation, a hodge podge of moral relativism, New Ageism, secular humanism and atheism is not a reflection of new modalities of enlightenment.  It's just symptomatic of  the heart disease we have suffered with since humanity's fall.  This new normal is neither.