“Look, I’m a liability. I get it.”
On the day of his catastrophic fall, Zarzecki had a police pension and $100,000 in retirement savings. He planned to max out the pension and build the retirement account to $500,000 with many more years of work.
“We wouldn’t have had to worry about money,” he said.
After the fall, Zarzecki’s wife divorced him. Hospital bills and medication copays chewed through his retirement account.
Now 61, Zarzecki lives on his disability pension, occupying a modest in-law cottage next to his son’s home in Stevensville on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
He recently paid off the last of his hospital bills, leaving him debt-free. But he still faces $3,000 a month in out-of-pocket costs for medication. He has no savings, and his income is more or less fixed. Simply put, he’s broke.
Every day, he jokes, Zarzecki must decide “whether to treat or eat”: to manage his many lingering symptoms with a dozen daily meds, or to purchase food.
Retired at 55, with kids still in college
Virginia Crespo had not planned to retire at 55.
She had two kids in college and a good job that she loved, teaching history and government at a suburban high school near Annapolis, Maryland.
But Crespo was also living with fibromyalgia, a chronic illness that causes pain, fatigue and brain fog. One morning, after teaching her first class, she thought, “How can I teach four more?” She put in her notice, setting her retirement for July 2002.
A few months shy of that date, her husband came home from work and announced that his employer was shutting down.
And thus, both Crespos retired at 55. Both had planned to work for several more years.
With combined salaries over $200,000, husband and wife could have expected to earn at least $1 million between ages 55 and 60.
Instead, the couple made do on Virginia’s pension, which paid about $32,000 a year, plus annual cost-of-living increases. They could no longer afford to cover their children’s college educations. Both children took out student loans. After college, they were on their own.
Joseph Crespo had a retirement account, worth about $150,000, but the 2008 recession gutted it.
Those setbacks left them with a more modest retirement, living on Virginia’s teacher pension and Social Security. The Crespos retooled their bucket list.
“We traveled the United States some, but not the world,” she said. “We did get to see the Grand Canyon.”
Joseph Crespo died in 2015. Virginia now lives around the corner from the old family home in a smaller dwelling.
She does not regret the decisions they made more than 20 years ago: Life takes unexpected turns.
“It is difficult to speculate how things might have been different,” she said. “We could have paid for our children’s college bills and avoided student loans. We could have paid off the mortgage.”
Booted from a top-drawer tech job at 61
At 67, Peter Plamondon is ensconced in a comfortable retirement with his wife in Sierra Vista, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert.
But he kicks himself at how much more comfortable it might have been.
Thirteen years ago, at 54, Plamondon started working with a financial planner. They crafted a retirement plan: Plamondon would work until he was 66 or 67. He would max out his retirement savings in the final six or seven years, adding another $500,000 to his 401(k).
And then, at 61, Plamondon lost his job in a layoff.
Plamondon worked at a tech firm, specializing in helping other tech companies build relationships with Microsoft, where he’d previously worked. He earned stellar reviews.
But he was also the oldest worker on his team, “at least 15 years older than anyone else, and 30 years older than some,” he said. And he earned a generous six-figure salary.
The layoffs targeted “the expensive employees,” he said, with “more experience, higher salaries, and higher health care costs than twenty-somethings.”
Undaunted, Plamondon applied for other jobs that seemed perfect fits. He’d never had trouble finding work.
A handful of job leads yielded interviews. “And then, nothing,” he said.
Each time, Plamondon believes, his application hit a wall when the hiring manager “figured out that I wasn’t 25. You can’t have 25 years’ experience and be 25.”
After more than 100 applications, Plamondon gave up. He and his wife left Redmond, Washington, the pricey Pacific Northwest address of Microsoft, and moved to the Arizona desert.
Plamondon found work as a technical writer, earning $85 an hour and grossing $20,000 a year: A drop in the bucket, next to his former salary.
Even that didn’t last. The arrival of ChatGPT upended the technical writing marketplace, allowing employers to hire lower-paid writers who leveraged artificial intelligence to cut corners. The hourly rate dropped to $40.
Despite the setbacks, the Plamondons have a secure retirement. Sierra Vista has a much lower cost of living than greater Seattle.
But the couple had planned to spend their retirement years seeing the world. That is no longer an option.
Recent events have Plamondon thinking about his father-in-law.
“He thought he was going to work till he was 67, 68, and life intervened,” he said. The father-in-law retired early with a broken hip, shaving several years off his career.
“Here was this example, right in front of my face, and I did not internalize it,” he said.
At 58, a choice between career and care
Betty Houseknecht planned to work until age 65, at least, selling diamond engagement rings and fancy watches for a jeweler in suburban Baltimore.
Then, in 2012, her 96-year-old father fell and broke his neck. Her 95-year-old mother needed help caring for him.
Houseknecht’s employer “would have given me maybe a month off,” she said. As it turned out, she would need eight years.
Houseknecht left her gemology job at 58 to care for her parents. Her mother died a few months later. She spent the next few years caring for her father and her husband, David, who had just retired from a management job at UPS and was struggling with diabetes.
David Houseknecht died in 2016 at age 64.
“The last nine months of his life were really a nightmare for me, between taking care of him and my dad,” Betty said.
The next year, she put her father in assisted living after a bad fall. She visited him for several hours a day. He died in 2019 at 103.
“I had a tough eight years,” Houseknecht said. “When I look back now, I don’t know how I survived it.”
They were also costly years.
The couple had planned to pay off their own home and a second one they owned in Sarasota, Florida, and to amass at least $1 million in retirement savings, leveraging Betty’s job and David’s pension and Social Security income.
Betty’s early retirement and David’s declining health laid waste to those plans. Shortly before David died, the couple sold the second home.
Both David and Betty had retired at 58. Their early exits cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost salary and savings.
Betty, now 71, lives in a condo near the family home.
“My plan is to stay there till the bitter end,” she said. “Hopefully, the money will continue to grow and not run out.”
Houseknecht has about $80,000 in annual retirement income, between her late husband’s pension, Social Security and savings. She has an aging car, but it’s paid off. She watches her spending. She doesn’t travel much. She misses the Sarasota home, “especially this time of year,” she said: Many of her friends are snowbirds.
If the need should arise for long-term care, she hopes to hire help and remain in her condo. Still, she wonders how many years she has left.
“I could easily live to be a hundred plus,” she said. “That’s kind of a scary thought. I could have another whole lifetime to live yet.”
Retired since 44, and looking to the future
At age 44, Deborah Scott-Nettles hadn’t thought much about retirement. Yet, after a series of setbacks, she found herself retired.
Scott-Nettles had worked a range of disparate jobs: Runway model. IRS customer service agent. In 2001, she was working in a college admissions office and dabbling in coursework, looking for a new career path.
Over several months, her plans fell apart. In October 2001, she tripped on a buckle on a sidewalk and fell, dealing permanent injuries to her neck. Months later, her longtime boyfriend attacked her with an ax.
“I think he just snapped,” she said. “The next thing I remember, I was out in the street, screaming for help.”
The ax attack left Scott-Nettles with brain injuries. But she would wait five years to reap disability benefits.
After a stay in a domestic violence shelter, she wound up homeless and penniless. She eventually moved in with her grown daughter. The boyfriend went to prison.
Between the neck and head injuries, Scott-Nettles lives now in constant pain.
“I have so many different kinds of headaches, they don’t know what to call them,” she said.
She tried to return to full-time work or study but found she couldn’t cope with either.
Before the injuries, Scott-Nettles had earned $60,000 to $70,000 in some years. Now, at 66, she collects about $2,000 a month in disability and Social Security. She also draws income through a training program at Legacy Link, a nonprofit that supports adults with disabilities. She lives in Gainesville, Georgia.
She is thinking of training as a Zumba instructor. She dreams of becoming a motivational speaker and maybe writing a book.
“If you have the strength, have the fortitude, you can rise above whatever your circumstances are,” she said.
Though she has no retirement savings, Scott-Nettles does not worry about the future. She is savoring her time with her six grandchildren.
“I don’t want for anything,” she said. “I’m driving a nice car. I’m living in a nice apartment. My refrigerator’s full.”
Put out to pasture at 56
John Guth planned to work at least until 60, overseeing maintenance on the St. Louis city bus fleet.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a nightmare scenario for public transit. Lost revenue drove the city to offer early retirement. Guth was 56. He rethought his retirement plans.
“I had seen several of my co-workers and friends, who could have retired, keep saying, ‘One more year, just one more year,’” Guth said.
“One of them was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer, one was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way home from work, one died from liver cancer, and two died from heart attacks. One, in the middle of the shop floor. There were others too. They could have retired and instead worked to the day they died.
“I promised myself that wouldn’t be me.”
Guth took early retirement.
Retiring early left Guth and his wife “very little wiggle room” with their finances, he said. His income dropped by two-thirds, the difference between his full salary and a city pension. His wife, who raised five children and had little time for work, draws only $600 a month in Social Security. Guth himself is not yet eligible for Social Security.
“I wish we were a little better prepared financially,” he said. “But we are doing OK.”
The Guths sold their house in St. Louis and moved into a rural property they had bought in 2017 as their retirement home. They used the proceeds from the family home to pay off their remaining debt, as well as the last of the student debt they owed for their grown children.
“We are debt-free, and we want to stay there,” he said.
Today, at 59, John Guth is a hobby farmer. He raises goats, rabbits and chickens. The goats provide milk and cheese. The hens lay eggs. The rabbits and chickens provide meat. Food inflation hasn’t affected him much.
“Rabbit meat has become 40%-50% of our diet now,” Guth said: Ground rabbit for chili, sausage and pasta sauce, the latter inspiring a dish he calls Bunny Alfredo.
“Between my pension and our Social Security, we should have enough to get by,” he said. Guth also has $200,000 in retirement savings, but his plan is to save it for emergencies. He drives two trucks, both 2004 models. The Guths have no real travel budget: “We’re pretty much homebodies,” he said.
“The one thing I love about what we’re doing here is, it keeps you mentally and physically active,” he said. “Before we retired, I didn’t know how to build a goat fence.”
