Amerika

I can feel the anger building up in me and no, it’s not because my dog ate my automatic pool cleaner, or because he destroyed my garden, or because he peed on the carpet, or because the veterinary costs exceed my child’s medical bill.

It’s my son-in-law asking me for “advice” on pension management. And I can’t answer him other than to depend on combined consciousness, where nature’s feedback was: “There is no such thing as a functional pension.”

This means that, for a realist, if you want it, you manage it yourself. It may have been a bit harsh, in retrospect, but it merely reflects the abnormality of our civilizational state where I am starting to connect the dots between my dog and my child.

For example, since the dog grows up a lot faster, I can use that experience to help me with raising my child. But now there are all these problems and the veterinarian advised me to castrate it because it is genetically incompatible with the/our environment.

I have to castrate my child too, I guess. Since a castrated dog becomes “mushy” and very obedient. Clearly my child will follow the same path. That will be wonderful: no more complaining about the food, going to bed on cue, and remembering to flush the toilet and put the clothes back in the closet. Later in life, this child will have broader employment options including secretarial work, cooking and cleaning, and even if it really excels, to become the Minister of Defense in some neutered borderless country.

Imagine how fantastic that must be: no wars, but lots of organ harvesting that will enable life extension therapy using aborted fetuses and sheep parts to keep us all alive indefinitely. Maybe there will even be better stuff on Netflix that I would have missed with an early demise, one never knows.

But my dog has feelings too. He quickly realized from my aura what I was contemplating, so he pushed back with attention-demanding barks, waking me up at night, and wanting to play or go for a long walk and Gnon help me if I do not hop up and doing, because otherwise he gets frustrated, which means all the bad behaviors return in interminable form.

Indulgent rule provides a better return on investment, in this case, than being parsimonious and totalitarian. Maybe the same can apply to my child. Indulgence is a wonderful male characteristic (few realize these days apparently).

So the question becomes: What would an indulgent man do?

1. He would not castrate anything or submit to the false promise of mushiness (“pacifism” and “conformity” in human terms).
2. He would castrate pension funding as far as possible though, by managing it himself, just like he manages his child and his dog using return on investment as a measurement.

Looking at my personal history of “pension funding” in contrast to what my Dad advised — “get a job, pay pension, retire” — I have to wonder, “so what happened?” Here’s where things went trotters-up in the pension scheme:

1. Because I resigned from my first four jobs, I got zero pension pay-out. (Dad didn’t say I should stay in the same job for forty years however, so it’s my fault).
2. The fifth company formerly guaranteed pensions at eighty percent of salary, but they quickly changed that to employee controlled pension, meaning it will be my fault if my investments do not add up to eight percent. The company receives no blame if this happens.
3. A few years later (this time I persisted in staying on the job) the same fifth company changed the salary structure so that medical aid and pension costs are included in your package and made it look like you earned one helluva salary despite earning less.
4. A few years later still, the same company, routinely contributing fifty percent of pension costs, started doing actuarial assessments of its pension liability despite abdicating that responsibility. This meant that the actuaries (or paid actors impersonating them) identified that too much pension was in the fund, which mandated returning funds into the company’s current account. Managers then used the increased account balance to declare profits in order to get bonuses.
5. A few years later, the same fifth company decided to retrench employees and (of course) this meant that affected employee pension accounts were paid out. The benefit to the company is substantially reduced medical aid costs as well as no more fifty percent stuff. They would then perform this “retrenchment” scheme every so often in order to keep the bonuses going.

In the end, my pension is a tenth of what it would have been if companies were honest.

However, I did try something on my own, which was to take out a forty year annuity at my very first job. It promised to be inflation-proof. But in hindsight it was a total failure, because in order for that scheme to successfully overcome inflation, the monthly payment would have had to be my entire salary, which was obviously impossible since I was going to get married, get a car, get a house, have kids, and pay off student loans.

The lessons learnt out of this are:

1. Be indulgent.
2. Have good relations with your kids and dogs (and family where possible) more so than with your colleagues and friends.
3. Manage your own pension by doing it differently, more independent from large stock funds. You could still socialize your own costs by deducting them from your taxes and parasitize stock exchanges/funds.
4. Listen to your rich uncle when he advises you (at the time, I didn’t know how) to use fifteen of your liquidity for such purposes. This requires changing the company pension policy to include payments directly into your own legalized “pension savings account” of sorts.

Good luck, because the organ harvesters are expensive.

Tags: finance, indulgence, organ harvesting, pensions