Worried about retirement

[Reggy Miller]

I've worked for 24 years at the same hospital, so I built quite a reasonable pension, but still. I'm divorced so I'll have to pay everything myself. So when do I retire? Any other women inhere with the same issues?

God, if the economy had stayed high, I could've retired last year. Wish Clinton was back. I bought his book yesterday on his book tour diary site. He says if you can't make it to a book signing event, you can send the book to his library and get it signed. Now that's a good guy.

[Hellllllo Nurse, BSN, RN]

Reggy,

I am planning on buying the book "investing for Dummies". I heard it was really good. I have no retirment savings whatsoever. Hy husband has a great pension plan, but I know I can't count on that.

BTW, I dearly miss Clinton, too.

[Hellllllo Nurse, BSN, RN]

I expect to work until I drop. It's a good thing that I enjoy working, huh? I'm married but for retirement purposes, I may as well be single. Actually it's a little worse than that.

In Texas, community property means that everything a wife accumulates while her husband isn't working is theirs (i.e., she has to share it with him), and the tax return goes to him. Isn't that nice? Everything he accumulated before the marriage is his. Since women finally are earning 72 cents on the male dollar, you can imagine how much I have accumulated....

Meanwhile, he hasn't rewritten his will since his first wife died, and his ne'er-do-well sister (he shares this opinion of her) will inherit everything, including this house. He believes he doesn't have to do anything, because in Texas the wife inherits everything. He will not accept that if there is a will, and the wife isn't in it, and the husband dies, the wife doesn't get squat.

It is also his opinion that I should be paying him some sort of rent for the privilege of living here, because he pays the taxes on the property from his investment income. (You guessed it, I'm not on the title to the house, either.) He does not see keeping the house clean and tidy and tending to his every whim as worth any money.

Sometimes it is a little hard to do all the little nice things for him that I enjoy doing, and to remind myself that I will have to take care of myself, because there isn't anyone else to do it.

The sad upshot is that soon I will be working as an RN, and while I won't be making the big bucks he did when he was working (engineers can't get jobs in our area), he will be expecting me to turn my check over to him. It isn't going to happen this time around.

I suspect that there will be a big fight when I don't, and a bigger one when he figures out that I am having the most minimal amount withheld from my paycheck possible.

I have considered divorce--not to live apart or because I don't love him, because I do, but because it is the only way I can actually benefit from my own efforts, and protect my own old age. It would be sad, wouldn't it, to have to go to those lengths? I'm hoping he wises up before then, but I am not holding my breath. On the other hand, that would be one way to solve my retirement crisis, wouldn't it? :rotfl:

chris-at-lucas,

That doesn't sound like a marriage to me. I'm getting sad reading your post. You do not have to be a door matt for this man.

((((((((((hug))))))))))))))