I have just found a new reason to vent. Ray is in his 65th year, that is he will turn 65 in September 2007. So I am starting on all those preparatory steps towards him turning from a disability pensioner to an old aged pensioner. This is a mine field as if I don't claim all he is entitled to we may have an impoverished old age.

We took out all our insurances etc was when we had our first house, a young family and looked at insurance as funding our old age and providing for all those things we would need including a change of housing from family home to retirement home. We planned trips - those nebulous dream holidays we all conjured up as the culmination of our working life and maybe giving our kids some money as a present for help them through middle age as we had once thought our parents might do for us. Well none of that happened. Instead Ray had strokes and we retired in 1999.

None the less we still have to go through the retirement process. We face difficulties our financial planning did not account for. The pensionable age for women rose from 60 to 64/5 so we had planned that I would be a pensioner in June 2007, Ray in September 2007. That is not going to happen either. But already I am getting all the paperwork as our little amounts of insurance/super etc start to mature. And all told it is not going to buy us a hatful of donuts.

I wondered why I suddenly have become shaky and unsure of life and I think it is the sudden realisation that another dream has been shattered. That from the moment Ray had the strokes and we both had to retire, life as we knew it changed not only then but all our future changed too. So now we are still feeling the tremors from that earthquake. And facing an old age that has changed dramatically is a challenge still with us. I know we are luckier than some of our contemporaries who opted to take the money and run, they have no extras at 65 but ours are not the benefit we planned either.

I think this is another form of denial I have been guilty of, that we will achieve in retirement all we had planned. Oh no we won't. It is no good pretending that everything will come out right in the end, that we will all live happily ever after, that the dreams we once had are still a possibility. (For those of you that have it so much harder I apologise in advance as you murmur :"she should be in MY shoes"). It is hard to face this new set of facts that $1000 here and there is not a nest egg, it is a drop in the ocean in the face of spiralling inflation. But we have our home, our family, our time together and I am grateful for that.

BTW the insurance agent that made an appointment to see us and straighten some of this out for us did not appear at 4pm. Anyone surprised? Instead I received a phone call from an assessor in their Sydney offices promising to send me a sheaf of forms to fill in my "claim". The paper wars continue.