(Here I am at my first office job in 1981 – rotary phone, ashtray and rolodex and all!)
The year 2020 brings immediate thoughts to mind of huge events, including one for me that seemed inconsequential at the time. It was the year I became eligible to begin receiving my Canada Pension Plan benefits, if I chose to do so.
I was still working full out in my career, so it never crossed my mind at that point. I simply filed the document away in my ‘retirement planning’ file, which was getting stuffed with various notes and reminders. When I did retire a few years later, I stuck with my plan to try and wait until I turned 65 to begin collecting CPP and I stayed with the plan as best I could. Until the last while, when I became alarmed at how quickly inflation was eating up my savings. On my 64th birthday last month, I figured it was time to get into the system.
I dug out that unassuming document from my files to begin the paperwork and suddenly became captivated by the attached table that listed every year I had worked and what my CPP contribution was each year. My first thought was that they missed a few years at the start, because I began working part time when I was 14 – fifty years ago. No wonder I was ready for retirement – I’ve worked for half a century! But Canadians don’t begin paying into CPP until they turn 18, which for me was 1979.
Looking down the deceptively short list was strange at first – 1979-2020 fit easily on half a sheet of paper but oddly constituted much of the focus of my life. But then I started seeing how the numbers told the story of my life. The CPP contribution amount in 1979 was only $48.33. Hardly seems like it was going to amount to anything! The numbers got even smaller for the next few years, because that’s when I was backpacking overseas. I got a bit more serious after 1985, because I had gotten married and was trying to settle down by then. But it dipped a few years later when I decided to go back to college at age 28.
There are four years when my CPP contribution came from self-employed earnings. That would have been the early 90s when we moved from Calgary to a small town so my former husband could launch his career. I never actually made it back to Calgary, but that’s another story. The year 1996 is the only year with a big zero in CPP earnings – the year my daughter was born and I was absorbed with being a new mom. Then came a series of life changes and a move into a professional role, which created 25 years of stable growth in my contribution.
It was an unexpected record of my major life events, told through numbers. It’s like paint by numbers, but it’s life by numbers. You never know what will set you on the path for a jaunt down memory lane! Now I just sit back and wait for my first CPP cheque to arrive, and I can delay selling my plasma for a bit longer.