I have transitioned back into retirement, and I should be feeling great about it. A couple days ago I was. I’d made plans to visit the ancestral Garrett homelands in California, and hang out with my brother in Oceano. I’d bought train tickets from Baltimore to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to be driving cross country during snow and ice season, and also across red America after election day. I figured I’d decide how to get up the coast to Oceano when I got to LA, since the train schedules going north don’t always sync well with the Southwest Chief. Then I realized I had time left on my Disneyland annual pass and I could take a MetroLink to Anaheim and spend a few days in California Adventure and then take the Surfliner north to the Grover Beach station, which is walking distance to my brother’s house in Oceano.

So I was in a great frame of mind. Then. Later that afternoon I took an ad-hoc hike along the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore and it was a sunny pleasant sky blue day. Got a nice BLT at a local shop next to the trailhead. I was feeling wonderful. There was however, a problem I was waiting to get resolved the next business day. I have been in a state of despair ever since. I’m typing this now after waking up from a bad nightmare.

When I got what I thought was going to be my final paycheck plus all the vacation time I’d accrued, it was massively less than I’d thought. So I asked HR to look into it, and naturally it’s my fault, or so they say. And the tax man’s. This is going to make things difficult for me for the rest of this year, and it’s too late to cancel my train tickets and Disney hotel reservations without taking another big hit.

And while it’s true I have enough in my 401k to retire comfortably, the problem for me at this point is the current managers of my 401k have much more stringent rules for making sure you are not and never have been married that the other one I was previously on did not. Which is (hahaha) why the Institute dropped them and pushed us all onto the current one. So the buffer I thought I had to tide me through the paper are you or are you not or have you ever been married chase isn’t there and I’m going to be struggle to make ends meet until this new 401k manager decides I’ve satisfied requirements. And they have fucked me over dragging their feet on other matters before.

Saving grace of all this might be that at 73 I am subject to the Required Minimum DIstribution now and this current 401k manager has already informed me that I have a chunk out of my 401k I now I have to withdraw. Hopefully this means they will get serious about letting me do that.

Here’s the thing many of my friends and practically all my classmates don’t really get about me. I was raised by a single divorced mother and didn’t get a chance to finish college because the money ran out and what great granddad Garrett had put aside for me and my brother got disappeared somehow. I knocked around this and that low paying job for half my working life. And even when I started making a good living as a software developer it was contract work at first with zero benefits.

Mom didn’t have any tangible property when she died, let alone a house in Montgomery county that could be sold for a big profit, and I just don’t have the foundational wealth most of the rest of my classmates and co-workers have. It’s not like they’re rich by any means, just comfortably middle class. I on the other hand, am literally a kid from the other side of the railroad tracks.

If it wasn’t for the benefits I had at STScI I wouldn’t have anything but social security to retire on at all. The 401k and b have enough in them to let me have a comfortable, if not fabulous retirement, but I can’t tolerate sudden complexities very well at all. Like having to go through a paper chase just to prove I’ve never been married before I can access my retirement funds.

Most working people in this land of the free and home of the brave can’t tolerate surprises either. We have lived hand to mouth for most of our lives, if not all of it. I’m also excessively lucky I can still keep my employee health plan, even accounting for how that and Medicate part B increases are likely to eat all of the coming SS COLA increase and then some. You’ve no idea the panic that sets in whenever I hear republicans talking about cutting social security.

I’m just anxious and sick to my stomach right now. I just want to stay in bed for the rest of the week. Maybe the rest of my life.

Despair. Nightmares. So on and so forth…