CNN iReport

The golden years....the american dream....pinch me I want to wake up from this nightmare. I'm 54 and have been working since I graduated high school. Minus 4-5 years while the kids were small. My husband is 62...and has worked since high school. We purchased our home back in the day of 18% interest rates. I came from a single parent home; he from blue collar family. We know tough. We kept plugging along. We kept believing things can only get better. And they did. Until the last 4 or 5 years. We've both lost jobs, a few of them. My husband took "early retirement" (or....you're loosing your job). Sure we have a pension and thank goodness health insurance, that eats up all the pension and then some with the $2000 deductible. We managed to help one of our two children with college....unfortunately the second is on his own. At this stage of the game we thought we'd be sitting pretty....not still living paycheck to paycheck and still having to use up what little money we managed to save and haven't completely lost in the market to pay the luxury items like $7000 in property taxes. In an older, well established community..no big luxury. We thought we could count on the sale of our home for our "nest egg". HAHA. With all the refinancing and borrowing to support college etc we now owe twice what we purchased it for. Can't count on social security to get us through........probalby not even Medicare in a few years.

The American Dream. All I can say to the young ones out there...........you can't trust the banks, you can't count on the market, real estate isn't looking too good any more. You better invest in a good outdoor storage shed like Tony Soprano did. You may not earn any interest but at least you'll have what you started with.