In this week’s Ten Money Questions, we speak with Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By and Elderblogger-extraordinaire at BlogHer. There’s the saying, “With age comes wisdom” and Ronni is living proof that we all learn from a lifetime of experiences. So sit back and consider what Ronni has to say about surviving and thriving on a fixed-income, the concept of retirement vs. working-elders and how money still has an effect on this stage of life. Enjoy!

1. You once wrote a post that mentioned hair color and age discrimination in the workforce. What are your thoughts about how age impacts earning potential?
Statistics shows that prime earning years are between about 40 and 55. What has taken a toll on older workers in the past decade or so is the number of RIFs and layoffs. Laws aside (age discrimination is notoriously hard to prove in court for a variety of reasons), older workers are more likely to be laid off and it takes them many more months to find the next job than younger people.

If they can find a job at all. In the past five or six years, we have lost three million manufacturing jobs to overseas outsourcing. Many of those workers had been at their place of employment for decades. There are no other job for them, so it’s not earning potential that is the difficulty, it’s poverty and being forced into retirement long before one’s time.

Countless older workers take early Social Security when they become eligible at 62 – at a much lower rate than if they were able to work until the full benefit age - because they have no choice. Except for the elite few in the highest levels of corporate America with their guaranteed golden parachutes, the earning potential of older people is dismal and will remain so until ageism and age discrimination in the workplace are taken seriously.

2. What experience taught you the value of a dollar?
When I graduated from high school at 17, I immediately went to work. My salary was meager, but with careful budgeting I could afford my tiny apartment, my ancient car and the normal monthly expenses with a little left over for fun. I had five work outfits, one for each day of the week and two pairs of shoes. A run in a stocking, a broken shoe heel or handbag strap (we dressed more formally in those days) were budget disasters.

I don’t remember how it happened because single women of any age could not get credit cards in those days, but I got myself deeply in debt. It reached the point where I could pay the phone and electric bills or I could pay the minimum on the money I owed each month, but not both.

It was a tough lesson. I remember living one week until payday on a ten-pound bag of potatoes that was in the house because I couldn't afford to buy more food. The bus cost 15 cents and many times I carefully counted out those 30 pennies to get to and from work.

During the two years it took to pay off that debt, it was painful every day. Unless a date paid, restaurants were out of the question as were movies, books, a drink with friends after work - any non-essentials. I worked a second, night job at a local coffee house which helped a little, but all that money went to paying down the debt. I've never forgotten that lesson. Emergencies aside, I've never since run up bills I couldn't pay off each month, although I have an uncanny ability to spend right up to the exact dollar limit of what I've budgeted without going over.

3. What is your worst habit around finances?
Not tracking how much I am spending day-to-day. You know the old saying: a dollar here, a dollar there and pretty soon we’re talking about real money. It is why I prefer cash to credit cards for most non-major expenses; I can see in my wallet how much money is there and more easily adjust my spending to my weekly budget.

4. A recent study found that women are less financially prepared for retirement than men. What is holding women back from proper planning?
They don’t make enough money. It’s been stuck at about 70 percent of what men make for the same jobs for 20 years or more. But I think it’s almost impossible today for the working and middle classes – men or women – to save for retirement.

The “experts” have been bemoaning for the past two years that Americans’ savings is into the negative. Well, of course it is. Workers have not had a wage increase beyond barely tracking inflation in more than 10 or 15 years. Meanwhile, the cost of everything has increased. If I were young today, I would probably not have children based on cost alone. Think of what young marrieds – and single mothers even moreso - are up against: save for a house, save for the kids’ education, then pay off what they had to borrow and maybe they’ve got five or ten years to save for retirement.

I don’t see how it is possible nowadays for the average Joe or Jill to save for retirement.

5. The author, Mitch Anthony concludes that retirement is an unnatural condition and believes that even if you can afford to retire, the worse thing you can do is withdraw completely from the race. How important is it for elders to keep one foot in the work world?
In the past hundred years, science increased our age expectancy by 30, often healthy, years. Before now, people died so young, retirement was not a concept. Then, for several decades, it was enforced at age 65. Now we have choices – to the extent that corporate America will employ elders, which is not a guarantee.

Many older people would work longer if they were allowed to. And Mr. Anthony is probably right if the anecdotes we all know about people dying two years after they retire are true. But I am disturbed by a trend in recent years exhorting older people to start a business, upgrade their skills, jump into a new career after official retirement.

It is beginning to smell like the mistake the early second-wave feminists made in the 1960s - excluding stay-at-home mothers from the new agenda - and I don’t want elders to be culturally coerced into working rat-a-tat-tat as they did when they were young and on the make, building their careers.

There is an important issue working-elder proponents like Mr. Anthony don’t consider: that old people wear out and they do so at dramatically different rates. We hear only of the extraordinary elders who run marathons at 82. No one reports on the numbers who have difficulty walking by age 60, who have heart conditions that impair them and the many other diseases and ailments that accompany our longer lives.

And even when health is not a problem, many workers have put off pet interests, projects, travel, etc. all their lives because they were too busy. Now they want a few years to pursue those interests which are, many times, as consuming as full-time jobs. And by the way, retirees do volunteer work in larger numbers than any other age group. We are going to need more and more of them as the population ages in the next decades.

I agree with Mr. Anthony to a large degree. But let’s be careful that we don’t make pariahs of those who choose a little leisure before they die.

6. Is there an art of aging? What role does money play in this chapter of life?
Money is serious issue after one stops working for a wage. Most retired elders are on fixed incomes of, if memory serves, an average of $1,200 a month. So when the price of home heating oil increases or the car breaks down, it can mean the difference between food and life-saving, prescription drugs.

One of the best things about not working away from home, I’ve discovered, is how much expenses drop – by many thousands of dollars a year. Professional clothes, constant dry cleaning of them, commuting costs, business entertainment and networking are no longer required and many personal services once paid for because there was no time to do the chores and errands yourself aren’t necessary.

When you are lucky enough to be among those who aren’t counting pennies, money plays a less prominent role in retired life. I always worked in volatile industries where layoffs happened at the whim of a new executive producer which screwed up income plans for any given year. Layoffs were always a threat. I’m nowhere near rich by any means, but now I have a base income I can count on indefinitely and additional monies as work and other endeavors provide.

As to an “art of aging” – I’m working on that. I’ll let you know if I come up with one.

7. In another post, you wrote about your divorce in 1971 and not being able to get a credit card in your own name for several years. How important is it for women, both single and married, to achieve and maintain financial independence throughout their lives?
It is crucial. When that credit card problem happened to me, women could also not get a mortgage or many other types of loans or enter into most contracts without a husband or other co-signer. Thankfully, that era is gone now and I cannot imagine living under any circumstance without financial independence from a partner, husband, family, roommate – anyone.

That would include separate checking and savings accounts, IRAs, investments, etc. Fifty percent or more of marriages still end in divorce and the law often has a weird idea of what belongs to whom.

A young friend of mine went through a divorce last year in New York where her recently earned law degree is considered a “marital asset” which her husband threatened to claim. Had he succeeded, she would have owed him ten percent or more of her annual income for a decade or more. (BTW, New York is the last state to designate professional degrees as marital assets.)

We all like to believe that our relationships will last a lifetime; there is not much reason to enter into them without that hope and in my experience, there is no accounting for love – it happens whether we want it or not. But aside from human unpredictability, we live in such volatile times now in regard to politics, money and employment that it is folly to not maintain one’s financial independence.

8. What are your thoughts about intentional communities and real estate options for seniors?
There are dozens of new ideas for elder living and I can’t possibly go through them all here. The ones that interest me most involve multi-generational living rather than segregating elders from younger families and children as “retirement villages” have done for decades by requiring people to be 55 and older to buy in.

But some elders may like a distance from the noise and general messiness of living when children are present, so I think there should be choices.

With the burgeoning elder population in coming years, we must re-jigger such programs as Medicare, Medicaid and community, state and municipal assistance to allow more elders to remain in their homes by paying for services to help them as they require such aid. There are not enough assisted living facilities and won’t be in time due to poor governmental planning, so this will soon be a critical need.

Studies show that almost all elders prefer to remain in their homes and that 80 percent of all elders live independently until they die. Simple programs like affordable car services, house cleaning and laundry, weekly practical nurse visits and an idea I’m promoting – over-the-internet monitoring of basic health and vital signs – can help keep elders functioning in their home. I must say, however, that I am also interested in such ideas as co-housing and the Eden Alternative.

9. What are your personal plans for retirement?
If receiving Social Security benefits is the measure, I’ve been retired since late in 2006. Having been laid off from my last job in 2004, I spent a year beating my head against a brick wall, mostly of age discrimination, trying to find work as the younger people who were laid off with me found new jobs within a few weeks.

Fortunately – and it was accidental; I wasn’t thinking about my future when I did it – I had bought my Greenwich Village apartment in 1983. With time and the housing boom, it paid off handsomely when I determined in 2005 that the only way I could afford to continue living was to sell it and move to a part of the country that is less expensive.

Barring accident or ill-health, I never had any intention of quitting work at 65, nor of leaving Greenwich Village. But a government that encourages corporations to outsource as many jobs as possible, corporations who pay as little as possible for those employees who remain and a culture of an entire country that winks at age discrimination put me in the paradoxical position of needing to leave the workforce – and my home - to survive.

Am I angry about that? You betcha. For me and every other person in this predicament only because of age. These could have been some of my best work years with my experience paying off big-time for an employer. And the government would have continued to receive my tax dollars rather than paying me Social Security each month.

So instead of traditional employment, I’ve put my full-time energy into my blog about aging. It’s three years old now and still – as when I began researching aging in 1996 or ’97 – hardly anyone is writing about getting old in a realistic or positive manner. Doing so has become a personal passion, something I never found in my younger years. Plus providing some income.

I have time now to explore other interests I had no time for when I was traditionally employed, catch up on a lifetime of postponed reading, garden in a leisurely manner. And now I have an entire new home state – Maine – to explore. That should take the rest of my life. Filling time and boredom have never been a problem. I’m certain, when the grim reaper comes by for me I’ll say, “Could you wait a minute, I need to finish reading this chapter.”

10. Name a celebrity who is growing old gracefully and a good role model for others?
This week, I’d have to say Judi Dench. In the past it could have been Katharine Hepburn and it still is my great Aunt Edith who is a celebrity to me.

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Read other interviews in Nina’s Ten Money Questions series at Queercents.