Thursday, July 26, 2012

Pension to the Rescue


Tuesday could not have been any worse of a day. My brother Rex texted me asking to lend him $1000. He knows how much I hate lending money so it must have been for something important. The downstairs Indians of property Alpha said that they have bedbugs from some relatives that came over. When I got to the shipping depot, a pissed off customer looking for his package pushed my buttons to the point that I was seconds away from beating him to death. Things were just awful. And then my mom Rita called.

Rita told me she received a letter in the mail from one of my very first security jobs, Top Flank Security. It said that Top Flank had been taken over by another company and discovered that I had some money in my pension that I never received. They wanted to know whether I wanted to get a lump sum pay out or if I wanted it in an IRA account. The amount of money for pay out? Almost $4,000!!! I completely forgot about that pension thing!

I worked at Top Flank during my last two years of college. It was after graduation that my dad Roy gave me that “How To Be An Automatic Millionaire” book that I first mentioned in a blog I did in January called A Victory for the Scatterbrain. One of the things the book talked about was distributing your paycheck to different investments while keeping enough money in your pocket to live, and one of those investments was pensions. Top Flank was one of the few security companies that offered pensions and 401k plans so I was quite lucky. I went to management and asked how much was taken out of my paycheck for my pension and it was very small. So I told them to up the percentage to 15% of my total paycheck. Once I got my teaching job, I was still working at Top Flank on the weekends, so I then upped it to 50%. By the time I had quit teaching, I completely forgot about the pension and moved to Smalltown. Now of COURSE I’m gonna ask for the payout, and this money could not have come at a better time. I’m still gonna try as much as possible to reach the quotas I set for myself, but it’s good to know that there’s help on the way.

I plan to only take $3,000 or 75% of it, and give the rest to Rita. She was the one that told me about that job in the first place, and she was even the one that hooked me up with the Nigerian guy that got me my security license without having to take any exams. One might say that it makes no sense to give her that money because she didn’t do anything more than any mother would do, and one might be right. Whatever, call it tribute. It’s like the Mafia or something. Besides, it’s one of those random acts of kindness that I would have done just because it feels right. Like the time they were holding a raffle for a waitress at a diner who had to pay medical expenses for her brain tumor operation, and I gave $100 for no reason. I didn't know her, I hate giving to charity, and I especially hate it when people ask for money to pay for operations when I had to spend almost 28K out of my own pocket for chemo and radiation therapy. Sometimes I have no explanation for what I do, but who cares? With extra $3,000 on the way, I should have no problems putting an offer on prospective property Charlie before the end of November.
 
I decided to lend Rex $500—half of what he was asking for, and he has to pay me back before the end of August. Not only do I need my money to start paying my taxes off, but I absolutely refuse to work my ass off at these god-awful security jobs all month just to see that I have almost the EXACT same amount of money in my bank account as I did at the beginning of the month. I’m definitely not going to reach my 13k goal this month, as I’ll probably end July just under 12k. That’s less than $1500 I saved this month which is just awful. But at least I know now that there’s help on the way. Thank goodness for pensions...

No comments:

Post a Comment