Say It Ain't So! Former Slowlane Success Story Now Flips Burgers!

[fastlaneCoder]

I thought you folks here would get a heckuva kick out of this article! It's the typical story. A six figure slowlaner retires and runs out of money! He has to resort to working 2 part time jobs. On second thought. He may be more of sidewalker if he was making that much for so many years and he only saved 80k before the 2008 crisis!

A retired businessman who once enjoyed all the perks that came with his six figure salary job is being forced to make ends meet in his retirement by working two lowly paid part-time jobs. Former high flying marketing executive Tom Palome, 77, now fills his days making $10 an hour to demonstrate food at Sam's Club and $8 an hour flipping burgers and serving drinks at a golf club in Tampa, Florida.‘I earn in a week what I used to earn in an hour,’ Palome, who used to fly first class on business trips to Europe, told Bloomberg.

 

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[Daniel A]

Damn that's scary. Poor guy has all that attention on his misfortune too. He's probably too old to care though. Poor planning got him there, if he had just thought ahead...

 

[FastLearner]

A six figure slowlaner retires and runs out of money!

This can happen to a fast laner though. Don't just assume that because someone works a slowlane job that they're more inclined to make stupid decisions. Heck, a lot of entrepreneurs make some pretty dumb decisions with their cash. The most intelligent thing anyone can do before they end up in this situation is to stop spending money on bullshit or at least start practicing not to before you get some real money.

 

[Breaking Free]

If he blew through that much cash, he probably was a sidewalker in slowlaner's clothing.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

A six figure slowlaner retires and runs out of money!

It's probably best we don't relish in other people's errors, but learn from them.

This man's predicament isn't reserved for only Slowlaners or Sidewalkers, but for all of us.

Monetary wealth is like Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll is the income side representing production ... Hyde is the evil expense side representing consumption. When Hyde takes over, you end up over the griddle flipping burgers.

 

[mayana]

It's probably best we don't relish in other people's errors, but learn from them.

This man's predicament isn't reserved for only Slowlaners or Sidewalkers, but for all of us.

Monetary wealth is like Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll is the income side representing production ... Hyde is the evil expense side representing consumption. When Hyde takes over, you end up over the griddle flipping burgers.

I agree 100%. The most important lesson from this is the importance of good money management... he said that he now makes in a week what he used to make in an hour, which probably puts him above $250,000 annual salary at his old job.

He now probably sees that he could've spent more time planning for the future and saving, which is something that EVERYONE should do, no matter their income level or whether they are an employee or a business owner.

And the second lesson that I see has to do with paying for children's college education. No parent should do this before they have adequate plans for retirement. It is much less of a burden for a student to figure out how to pay for college (if that's what the decide they want to do) than for a 65-70 year old parent to figure out a way to provide for themselves during retirement because they spent all of their money paying for their kids to go to college.

With the time value of money, $75k for a college education is a GIANT expenditure, considering that the money could be earning a return somewhere else (whereas with the student, it may or may not have turned out to be a good investment, and likely doesn't bring the parent any sort of financial benefit).

 

[Mike Kavanagh]

This can happen to a fastlaner though

It can happen a lot faster and multiple times!
Though we don't have time investment he does, we can recover faster.

 

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