Loading ...A quarter century earlier , I had hired on with the European subsidiary of a well respected American corporation . At the time there were 130 000 global employees , but as the years passed , more and more of that corporation’s technology was spun off to enrich the coffers of the HQ entity , and ‘make the numbers’ . Each time there was an accompanying reduction in global head count . I started keeping a file of the company year end newsletters which listed the remaining head count .
As part of my job I had become interested in math modeling , and about 15 years into my employment ( including transfer from Europe back to USA ) , I decided to make a simple linear regression model of headcount , based on those numbers , more as amusement than anything . I was astounded that my ‘model’ predicted the demise of that American icon by 2015 , and the goodness of fit was over 99% ! So that told me the corporate plan had been in place already when I first hired on , to run the company into the ground a few years after my projected retirement date . That also told me that pension benefits would one day be worthless .
A few years later , I was in charge of a multi-million dollar project back in Europe that was deliverable a couple of years later . The corporate retirement package was to be drastically altered at year end 1996. About thirty of us in a certain age group and years of service would be impacted by the proposed changes and corporate legal knew there could be lawsuits , so each of us were called in individually by an upper level management type and asked ‘how we would feel’ if we were to be laid off with a golden parachute .
I had known my answer to that question for over six years previously … “YES ! I would happily accept a lump sum payout , and would gladly hire back on the day after as a consultant on the same job AT HIGHER PAY and with retirement health care benefits etc.”
My lump sum was put into a 401K , I worked for another year until the project was delivered , and then took a few months off before taking a part time position in a small company . Three or four years later the administrator for the 401K became DB ( DeutscheBank ) and they changed the rules of the 401K which I did not like . By this time it was almost Spring 2001 , and I did not like the smell of the .com stocks , so I visited the local office of a well known brokerage firm which converted my 401K into a self-directed IRA . I had been a long term gold bug , so decided to dabble in PM mining shares . At the time I was subscribed to RUFF Times and took a lot of his advice to heart . In addition to the IRA , I was converting a portion of my earnings ( which was more than my frugal monthly expenses ) to start buying physical G&S .
The .com bubble crashed , I was buying Swiss Vrenelli’s (0.18 ounce gold ) for $52 apiece , and my IRA was doing better every month . Five years in , I had quadrupled my IRA nest egg with zero tax liability except for non-mandatory withdrawals .
THOSE WERE THE DAYS , MY FRIENDS !
Then my wife* died suddenly and things went downhill for quite a while .
(* I had seen her once on passing escalators for a few seconds and thought she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen . Ten years later , coming out of a bitter divorce a colleague at work began pestering me to meet his wife’s cousin . I put it off for over half a year , but finally relented and SHAZAM ! …it was the gorgeous creature from the escalator . She was it from that evening . We married a month after I got my divorce , and had twenty wonderful years together until a sudden medical intervention went wrong and took her life .)
But a year later I met my current wife on line , and found happiness again about a half year afterward when we finally met face to face .
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train .