After EMS: Retirement Toolkit

This article is part of an ongoing series from Mike Rubin. In this series, he’ll reflect on his career and share practical retirement advice for emergency medical personnel. Catch up on articles you missed.

Updated Jan. 21 to correct number errors.

I’ve always liked toolkits, those compact collections of practical gadgets sharing form or function. Even the word “kit” reassures me that if I get into trouble, all I need to do is reach in there, grab the right gizmo, and fix the glitch.

I have a retirement toolkit that serves the same purpose: quick solutions to everyday problems, but with documents instead of widgets because accurate information is a healthy supplement for the aging brain. If you were alive during the Eisenhower administration, you’re old enough to know what I mean. If you’re not sure you were alive during the Eisenhower administration or don’t remember who Eisenhower was, you’re going to need a bigger toolkit.

These days, we can design reliable tools for almost anything except Caracas-to-Key-West fishing trips. Keeping my very senior life orderly—not terrifying—calls for a data management kit with way more personal information than I had as an unretired person. We’re talking user-defined summaries of income, expenses, assets, medical history—things that make you feel prepared even if you have no place to go.

Here are three common-sense components of my retirement toolkit:

Assets

Do you know what you own—how much cash, stock, bonds, property, etc.? That’s a no-brainer for me, but I’m surprised at the number of colleagues who aren’t sure what they have or where they have it.

Your goal should be to protect what’s yours by periodically reviewing your records against printed statements or online accounts, so you can hunt down thieving weasels who steal your stuff and … sorry, I’ve had some bad experiences with criminal elements. If you use your administrative tools weekly, you’ll catch errors and theft well within the grace periods offered by most financial institutions.

Start with a list of your assets—something like this:

Then insert month-end subtotals to show progress:

There’s so much more you could add: planned versus actual yields, subtotals by source and type of investment, how much you’d lose in a divorce (I may have prepared something similar, or something exactly like that). Playing with the numbers helps make decisions, especially during the next step.

Budget

The best reason to know what you have is to spend less than that and keep some cash for emergencies. A simple budget can highlight deficits and encourage thrift.

Here’s one with a few sample accounts:

You don’t have to do your version of a make-believe budget the same way I did—grouping money spent by category or showing variances between this year and last. To do both real-time, you’d have to track specific costs as you go along—much more work than estimating expenses by type and summing them before the start of each year. Then you could compare actual and budgeted totals monthly according to, say, checks written and received.

What’s most important is to recognize when your net income is looking negative. If I’d earned only $4,000 instead of $8,000 in fees, I’d expect to be $570 short in the bill-paying department, unless I cut my spending by at least that amount. This isn’t fancy math or radical decision-making; it’s good business and keeps the repo man away from your Wrangler.

Advance Directives, Medical History, Last Will

What would you like emergency responders to know about you if you couldn’t speak for yourself? Here’s my list:

1. Relevant medical history, including meds.
2. Outcomes I believe would make life not worth living, e.g., permanent unconsciousness, dependent on others in all aspects of daily living.
3. Steps that shouldn’t be taken to prolong hopeless life, such as CPR and ALS.
4. Who would make those decisions for me if I couldn’t.
5. How my body should be treated after death.

All my directions are printed, notarized, and available to a few close family members. You may need a lawyer to express your wishes using state-specific forms and language.

Too Big for the Toolkit

There is one topic we haven’t addressed since it requires specialized knowledge beyond the scope of this article: taxes.

Most people I know don’t do their own taxes. I do, probably because I began adult life as an engineer. Tax calculations that challenge engineers are fun in much the same way paramedics enjoy intubating people. It’s about understanding your nature and knowing your strengths, even if folks make fun of you. The last guy who laughed at me got tubed. I would have asked him about his taxes if his larynx had been working.

If you earn self-employed income like I do, knowing what you make versus what you spend isn’t just smart; it’s required. You can learn to keep your own books pretty easily if your business is simple and small.

I have to admit, tax returns have gotten too complicated even for engineers. Most filers make mistakes unless they use specialized software or pay someone to do that work. Or you could simply wait for the number of people employed by the IRS to fall below 10. Then no one would care what we write on their stupid forms.

I keep a homegrown tax planning template in my toolkit, but it assumes experience with IRS returns and personal computers. If you have that and want to see more of what I’ve done, contact me. Otherwise, I suggest you try popular tax preparation software; or find someone reliable to do your taxes for less than it would cost you for, say, dinner and a show while your date waited in the car.

Mike’s Exit Poll #13: Have you used a more frustrating tool than a manual typewriter?

I hear there’s growing interest in collecting clunky old typewriters. Take mine. Please.

Like encyclopedias, crow jerky, and drum solos for Gregorian chants, typewriters never fully met their promise. They were supposed to ease transcription of words to paper, but their success varied according to the dexterity of operators and the number of symbols in their languages. Plus, you had to use a real dictionary to check spelling and definitions—a radical concept these days that builds character and vocabulary. (Hint: The correct spelling of “because” isn’t “b/c” on any planet in our solar system.)

I grew up using manual typewriters—first my mom’s, then the one she bought me as a high-school graduation present. That was the second year in a row I got a gift I didn’t want. The first was tuition for a six-week summer school course in—you guessed it—typing.

(Memo to mothers of a certain age: Why the fascination with these filthy machines? Teenagers get turned on by competition, not composition. Buy them hockey skates.)

I assume all of you have “typed” on computer and smartphone keyboards. They are nothing like unpowered machines. Mechanical keys require effort plus commitment to accuracy, stroke by stroke. Make a mistake on a manual typewriter and you face four bad choices (five if you count self-harm): redo the page, type over the error (tacky), use an eraser, or cover the misprint with carcinogenic correction fluid. Okay, that last one exaggerates the danger of generic white-out a tiny bit, but I used to inhale more paper vapor than oxygen when I was a sportswriter in the ‘70s. Now I can’t remember how baseball is played.

You won’t catch me making messy corrections anymore. My editors would hate me, I’d never get published, and this space would be repurposed for government health bulletins like “The Pros and Cons of Polio.”

Mike Rubin is a retired paramedic and the author of Life Support, a collection of EMS stories. Contact Mike at mgr22@prodigy.net.