Testimonials and regrets

[Tamon Stephen <tamon@sfu.ca>]

Dear all,

Like some of you, I have found a lot of value in this thread is in the testimonials that people have given about their personal situations.  (The numbers having been presented in SFUFA's information page <http://www.sfufa.ca/current-issues/pensions/resources/> and forums.) 

Many of the testimonials have focused on the difficult situations of young faculty meeting current needs, or older faculty facing retirement.  As Dan Laitsch succinctly writes below, we are faced with choices between the needs of the present and the needs of the distant future.  My feeling is that in many cases, the choices younger faculty are making intuitively* between present and future are actually good choices, i.e. we really should value our 40-year selves over our 80-year old selves.  That said, I'm sure a few of us now and then have made some _bad_ choices.  I wonder if there are any older faculty, especially those favouring DB, who could offer some anecdotes about things they regret that they would not have done had wiser heads been able to force them to save 10% of their annual salary?  It could be misadventures, bad investments, or something completely different.

I think these anecdotes could be both educational (cautionary) for younger faculty, and add a bit of lightness to the somewhat inevitably bleak discussion of medical benefits, financial crunches, inheritances, old age and all that.  To restate, the anecdotes should be about dumb stuff you did in part because there was that extra $5K sitting there in your bank account, which in retrospect you should have put into savings.

Best regards,

Tamon   

* Certainly most of us are too busy to run the numbers in a reasonable way, even if there is a clear way to do it.
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From: Dan Laitsch <daniel_laitsch@sfu.ca>

> For me, the needs of the present always seemed more pressing than the needs of the distant future, until I got here, although in truth, had I been investing from the start, I could have balanced the present and future with minimal impact.