Homeless

My dad will soon be 85. He has been a Florida resident since his retirement from the US Postal Service in 1982 with twenty years of service. Lest anyone think he had an upper management job with a large salary, he was a window clerk in a small branch office. Yes, he was 60 when he retired. He had managed to pay off the mortgage on his home, a modest three-bedroom ranch in a typical suburban subdivision. Mom never really worked much outside of the home. She had held several part-time positions over the years, and had been basically a stay-at-home Mom for most of our childhood.

As a child of not much over six years old, Dad had watched movers enter his home in the aftermath of the market crash of 1929. Many of the home furnishings were sold as his parents tried to survive the economic conditions of their day. Those events left a permanent scar on the psyche of my father. Needless to say, he was a very frugal man as a result of his parent's experiences and his own views of the world as a young man growing up in the years following "Black Friday". He lived within his means. He saved his money as best he could. He taught his sons how to be self-sufficient. He enjoyed his life then and continues to enjoy it today. He plays golf twice a week, something I hope to be healthy enough to do if and when I reach 85.

And then there is Ed McMahon. I recently read where Ed's home is in foreclosure. He too is 85 but, unlike my father is shackled with a $4.8 million mortgage on his Hollywood home. Sadly, he explains his condition as one of not being able to work because of an accident that broke his neck. Without being able to work, he cannot make the mortgage payment, hence the foreclosure action on his property. Mr. Trump has offered to purchase Ed's home and let Ed continue to live there as a renter. I suppose Ed has enough equity in the property to be able to pay rent out of the proceeds of the sale, but it is very possible that those funds might not go very far.

Mr. McMahon is in denial. Though he has without doubt earned far more in his lifetime than my dad, he has managed to mismanage his assets and today, at an advanced age is left nearly penniless. For anyone to think they must continue to work when they are approaching 90 to sustain a lifestyle is folly. What can we learn from his circumstances?

As a child I recall a few of Aesop's fables being read to me. One of them, "The Grasshopper and the Ant", comes to mind.

ONE day in winter a hungry Grasshopper applied to an Ant for some of the food which they had stored. "Why," said the Ant, "did you not store up some food for yourself, instead of singing all the time?" "So I did," said the Grasshopper; "so I did; but you fellows broke in and carried it all away."

Unfortunately, even when Ed is faced with his own failure to provide for his own future, it somehow isn't his fault. If only he had not broken his neck in an accident, he says, he could continue his lifestyle.

Even more unfortunate, as a result of the same kind of behavior on a national level, hundreds of thousands of families are now looking at foreclosure on their homes. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently said "home foreclosure starts may hit 2.5 million this year, many of them the borrowers' own fault for taking out loans they couldn't afford." Living only for today is a disease that is killing America. We need to get back to frugality, to living within our means, to planning for our future by saving. If my father could do it on his income, others also can.

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3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."