Okay, I Did It

     I'm not thrilled about it, but there is so little good information available for older people trying to navigate the governmental and financial bureaucracy that I gave in and joined AARP.  I still think they're kind of manipulative, but probably less so than the fast-talking insurance hucksters and pettifogging bureaucrats, and I'm tired of it taking me two hours to figure out if I can rollover my work 401(k) into my personal (and embarrassingly thin) conventional IRA without taking a bath on income taxes.

     (Apparently, no, though the IRS presents the information in a confusing enough manner that it it might mean no taxes.  I'm still not entirely sure -- but me needing to pay them is probably the way to bet.  But if it was a Roth...?  I don't know, especially since I get taxed if pull money out of the existing IRA, so doesn;t that make it a Roth?  I may have to go ask the bank, though the last time I did that, they tried to refinance my house and rope me into some high-risk/high yield investment scheme and it took a rather tense meeting with a couple of suits in nice offices to convince them that I do not like gambling, I do not want all my financial stuff in the same bank, and what I wanted was an account that going to still have some money in it even if Wall Street decided October, 1929 might be fun to replay.  The number of people I knew who had their retirement plans wiped out in the dotcom bust has me convinced it's better to plan poor and be able to collect on it.  Think of it as choosing known mild disappointment over lasting regret.)

     This is going to at least double my junk mail, mostly "retirement planners" and great deals on funeral services.  Since I plan to be cremated as cheaply as possible and have most of the dust dumped out at radio towers (some are really easy to get to -- just sneak in and pour it out!), and my "retirement planning" doesn't include enough surplus to pay a planner, it's all just more trash.