Saturday, August 31, 2013

Reflecting…

Ronda and I arrived at the campground last night and dropped off the items to be auctioned off for a campground member who has stage 4 terminal cancer. I dropped off an HP Slate 500 and Ronda made a rainy day basket with games, candy and other goodies a family can use to keep the kids entertained when it’s raining. We’re hoping that all of these items people dropped off will help Ted and his wife stay above water. Ted’s prognosis isn’t good but hopefully he is able to beat this, he’s a great guy, always lending a helping hand.

My sister in law is also battling cancer, she has stage 1 bladder cancer and we pray for her continued improvement every day. My Aunt is recovering from cancer, as is her husband so it seems that cancer has become part of our lives the past 5 years.

Around 11pm last night emergency vehicles entered the campground, I think they were here to pick up a man named George who I learned had just started full time with his wife when they retired. His health wasn’t good when they started. I hope to find out how he’s doing this morning when we see other people for the auction. It’s taken us over a decade for us to learn together that life is more than work and accumulating stuff when my Mom died of Pancreatic cancer in 2009 that hit home.

Now, 4 years later we are spending our weekends at the camper, sure I still work while camping but we aren’t buying stuff anymore. When we see people taken to the hospital so soon into their retirement it makes me want to head to Congress and scream at the morons there who want to raise the retirement age because these halfwits burned through the SS retirement funds people have been funding for decades, this will never affect them of course but they can make us pay for their mistakes. Must be nice to have an un-ending checkbook, 16 trillion later they still believe it’s endless and instead of holding them all accountable we argue with each other because one side might be democrat and the other republican, seriously folks, neither side cares about anything but staying in office, if they had to walk over you to stay in office they would do it with a smile.

I’m not sure where I meant to go with this post, I’m reflecting on so many things in my mind I can’t get them onto the page so it makes sense. It’s time to start getting ready for the auction, if you’re still reading and this post made sense, great. Have a great weekend everybody.

5 comments:

Merikay said...

Most of us could get by on Social Security if we hadn't bought so much stuff in our younger years. Buy now, pay later. Credit Cards made it so easy.

We are debt free except for a relatively small mortgage. We could have bought a better rig if we had wanted to borrow the money. Actually we did borrow it by refinancing our house mortgage, but when that sells we will be completely free.

We rarely went on vacations, bought expensive cars, clothes, or toys.

Now we have enough to get by if we are careful. I think we will be. We never really expected Social Security to take care of our needs. We did that for ourselves.

The Odd Essay said...

My husband's early work career deducted Social Security... then he worked under State Retirement at the university... paying into that retirement fund. When he retired he can only draw a pittance of SS because his state retirement takes precedence. It's called "double-dipping"... even though he paid in enough for much higher benefits. So... it's not only the younger generation that get ripped off.

TexCyn said...

All this cancer really sucks. I hope all can beat it! Yes, the retirement age really sucks.

JO said...

After so many years of research I can't believe they haven't found a cure fo this awful thing. I hope the auctions does well and helps out these people. And of course I hope all is well the other camper who was whisked off.

Erik's RV Blog said...

Merikay - Not many people can say the same thing. I can't be specific but people I know will be stuck with SS which our leadership used like a credit card for decades so now people like the ones I know are screwed.

The Odd essay - Agreed! They made sure they ripped off as many of us as they could young and old. If you pay into both you should get both, the only double dippers are the guys stealing from SS to use for other pet projects only never to re-pay what they took, fully expecting the tax payer to handle it, Government at work.... :(

TexCyn - Agreed on both counts.

JO - The auctions have done well and Ted will be able to pay off some of that huge debt. Unfortunately he is part of the crowd that is on medicare so our awesome new affordable care act took away much of what could have helped him and his family.

THe man who was taken away is back home now and doing well. :)