These days, I now know why father stopped answering the phone during the day. Back in the prehistorical telemarketing era, cold callers would besiege him. A retiree by then, he made a great target.

Thinking as a predatory boiler room operative might, father had plenty of time on his hands. His career finished he no longer needed maintaining the vigilance nurtured through decades of work. Mightn’t he be susceptible to a pitch assuring some sort monetary windfall or further gainful security?

Father and my former employer shared the same skepticism regarding these manna from heaven calls. His background having been one immersed in brokerage, the boss, a man whose father worked for J.P. Morgan – not the financial institution, but the J.P. Morgan – grew up with a seat at the table of investment chicanery. He’d listen to a bit of the cold caller’s pitch, then tell him to send a prospectus.

Which was a pro’s way of telling a ham-and-egger to get lost, both knowing no prospectus existed which to be sent.

Father, on the other hand, missing the same background, eventually intuited phone calls arriving during specific times of the day were merely bothersome. He wouldn’t answer. Looking back, it’s amazing no real-life urgencies demanding his attention never occurred during these same hours.

Decades later now in my own Retirement Year Two, telemarketing has gotten invasive. Solicitors mustn’t even dial anymore. Just tap a digit on a touch screen and one of the infinite telephone numbers generated by a marketing consolidator will automatically dial. All the caller must do is start pitching as soon as “Hello” fills the headset. Or maybe since AI are humans even necessary anymore? Have boiler rooms crowded with call callers gone the way of rotary phones and answering machines? Voice recognitions programs are so spookily advanced now. Their recorded spiels performed so convincingly, aren’t costly human telemarketers redundant?

Fortunately, my cell phone can discern likely “scam calls” from those perhaps being legitimate calls. Seeing “scam call” on the screen allows me to let it go straight to voice mail. When enough of these collect, I’ll go through the first couple of seconds of each to verify these are garbage. Then it’s an assembly line process of message deletion and number blocking.

Silence just lasts so long, though. As I’ve written, all sorts of telemarketers everywhere have purchased the same phone number lists. Just because one company is blocked doesn’t mean competing firms are thwarted.

The calls inundating me offer financial relief. Whether it be phantom bill consolidations, loans for nonexistent back taxes, or just sudden cash on hand to cross off impulsive bucket list adventures. Doubtlessly if I wasn’t retired, information about me coursing through the Medicare system, the easy enough background perusals into my revolving debt history, companies eager to loan me money I don’t need but might be susceptible to borrowing – because who doesn’t want more money to do whatever with? – wouldn’t be jingling my phone.

Money goes where money is. Do people in debt get these solicitations? Hardly. Why offer money to those who already owe?

That’s throwing cash into a fire pit.

Instead, why not offer money to potential borrowers who are already capable of affording trips, purchases? None of us should be surprised at the percentage of those targeted by such solicitations who might go through the twisty “make it make sense” logic of using some other entity’s money while their own remains safe in banks or investments. That leads to the question of is it worthwhile to borrow money, then make repayments demanding interest (fees also, certainly) instead of self-pay expenditures that wouldn’t exact and extract debt servicing?

It seems ridiculous, but know there are retirees who’d rather incur debt, interest on it, yet feel secure knowing their money remains untouched.

On social media feeds, homepages, and pop-up ads, I’ve been seeing a lot of pitches that ask prospective and present retirees whether they’ve accumulated enough to satisfactorily budget for their “golden years.” The first criterion must be if he or she has at least a million dollars socked in an IRA or 401K of some sort. Then they’re asked about the monthly amount to be collected from social security.

That monthly minimum is often $2800.

What sort of pressure must be created for retirees to believe the seemingly ample amounts they’ve accrued are instead somehow insufficient? Glad I’m not one of them.

Oh! Such First World problems.

Drawing off an invested million. Maybe with a company pension as the cherry in top. As well as a social security benefit the next COLA will push into 3K. With that much on hand to be drawn on and collected, is a budget really a night-sweat like priority for seniors?

As someone who started investing in his middle 40s instead of early-mid 30s, who felt trusting enough of diversified (diversified, not exotic) recommendations managed by aggressive advisors whose own rewards improved through mine, any suggestion of being financially deficient after my productive years ended never troubled me. I was fortunate to have parents who endured the Depression.

It can’t be overstated that what defined their lives wasn’t Jim Crow or World War II, but the Depression. The era’s economic misery seeped into them and formed their characters. On one hand, maybe it’s good for successor generations never to be part of a society flat on its back. On the other hand, maybe inheritor generations who’ve only known abundance should feel deprivation. At least short-lived deprivation.

Just for shock value.

As an adult, not only did I frontload costly big-ticket items like a home but I also worked like hell to keep debt load low. The latter meant deferring, delaying, and in some case denying myself goodies altogether for years.

Yes. I reflect and sometimes wish when a younger man in Quarropas, New York, I’d bought that article, item, been bolder, a bit more profligate when working. Nothing like 20/20 hindsight after successfully passing the test, is there? But today in Year Two of Retirement my monthly obligations remain relative pittances. So far. I generally have more at the ends of months now than I did while working.

That past included all the overtime I could eat.

And my investments amount to nowhere near seven figures. Yes, I’m frugal. But not miserly. Can’t be miserly in Las Vegas. Even Scrooge would spend freely in Las Vegas. It can’t be helped. It’s in the air. I’d add in the water but there’s less and less water here.

So, when I see those ads insinuating a million stacked through investments and the likelihood of a generous social security payout, as well as possible supplemental funds through a pension (if the beneficiary is old enough to have worked a job which maintained a company sponsored pension plan), just may be insufficient for anyone in his or her last third of life, I suspect niggling fears are being played upon.

No, I haven’t overlooked maybe the targets of these come-ons can also have substantial debts built through life.

Balloon payments. Outsized feelings of obligations towards their adult children. Second mortgages. And, alas, ruinous medical bills.

That last, America’s for-profit health system has probably stressed and strained more seniors’ financial viability than grayhairs still bending under student loans. The second should be seen as teachable moments for students currently matriculated in higher education.

Listening to stories of elder parents feeling it necessary to yank their adult children out of penury makes me laugh. The idea of father or mother rescuing me, or at least doing what they could’ve to slow my sinking, is unimaginable.

Particularly if I’d opened the sea cocks myself.

Having raised me, mother and father taught this son through example. Their actions prepared me to avoid such calamities. Something about letting trouble walk by.

Yet neither would’ve served as my deus ex machina. Knowing that helped me.

Though ours were lives in the “suburban splendor” of Quarropas, there always lurked the question of “What happens if … ?”

That’s not an exaggeration. It was a design for living. A nice portable one I’ve carried to Las Vegas.

Yes, we lived and thrived during postwar mid-century prosperity. In that America working people and bosses maintained a pact. It allowed management, executives, and shareholders to lead bountiful lives. In exchange the masses who created their wealth were properly renumerated.

Imagine that! Working people getting fair shares of the pie. What a radical notion!

It was enough to keep wolves from the door. Though “what happens if …?” never occurred, my family maintained our standing through it. Maybe the wolf stayed away from our door, our neighbors’ doors, because possibility – possibility, not probability – was thwarted by laboring people who did their utmost to look sharp and walk the line.

Then, it was impossible to conceive that someday later someone out of a sudden nowhere would’ve phoned with offers of helping our budgeting.

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