How does this retirement thing work

All around us; older workers jettisoned.  When they look for new jobs, they find only part-time service sector jobs paying low wages.  $10/hr maybe.  Or contractor.  Or temporary.  Or on call.

Multiply that by a whole bunch of people and the prosperous folks, maybe those working white collar jobs, considered too wealthy for financial aid for their kids, who've always done ok; things are unexpectedly looking bleak.

We watched our parents retire.  Now, some were wanting; maybe could not support themselves well.  But many could.  You just 'retired' and then you had plenty of money.  Many of use were so busy working jobs and raising families that we didn't really think about that.  We might even be lucky enough to have jobs with 'retirement benefits' but when you look at them, you realize that it might not be a 'defined benefit pension', that's talk for something where you get a check.  I know with my husband's employer, it is really really hard to figure out what you would get.  If anything.

And, as we age (or maybe before), we have those health issues that we were sure we were going to skip.  Which cause us to miss work, putting our jobs at risk.  Or maybe you turn around and there's not going to be any kind of job that's going to pay decent that we can see.  Or maybe it's so far away and the pay is low and truly you would lose money on the commute.  To say nothing of the carbon footprint.

Just this week, I have heard of two 50+ men who have lost their jobs of long standings.  Both have family members that do not bring in incomes.  Several friends have lost their jobs and really don't have many prospects for getting another.  Some others have excellent pensions though they know that if they started now, they wouldn't have them.  Working for the teamsters seems to provide quite a nice pension and Boeing workers generally will do well.  But I have a friend at a local university and she's wondering, how this will add up.

How does it add up anyway?  The boomers have to wake up and think about it.  Nobody wants to be old and poor.  One view might be that if I was so darn worried about that, how come I didn't work for an organization that had a good pension.  Oh yeah, 4 kids and also the information about things you might get as a young worker may not be there when you're 60 years old.  If you could figure it out, which they don't tell you.  And you stayed there, which you probably couldn't.

Likely I'll be ok but I wonder about those around me...the insecurity rises.  A doctor friend tells me that most of the 70 year old patients that she sees are huge stressballs.