Grab This Button!
The Bennies of Boomer
Monday, February 2nd, 2009I nearly swooned from fear of the Grim Reaper when AARP started courting me in their join-up mailings during the months before I turned 50. By contrast, I was more than happy to collect my first oldie but goodie discounts when the time came. As I neared 55, I figured I deserved the respect that those price breaks represented, just for having played the game of life fairly and with a focus on helping others. While I’m still annoyed at the wide and confusing range of what various businesses call senior (55, 60, 62, 65), I’ve learned to grab for all the discounts I can get. While I’d like to forget the size of those birthday numbers, there are definite benefits to being a boomer!
A Real Eye Opener
Today I discovered one I never knew that knocked my socks off. My neighborhood optometry office gives a whopping 30% AARP discount on eyewear, which anyone who wears glasses knows has become an increasingly large expenditure. No one ever told me this before. I suppose, since the purpose of a business is to make money, they have adopted a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. (If you don’t ask, they don’t tell about the discount.) Fortunately, our optician du jour previously worked in an office in a lower socioeconomic neighborhood. He is used to helping people get the best for the least. We had the luck of the draw that day!
Boomers who don’t belong to AARP don’t know what they’re missing, and obviously, some of us who do belong don’t know what we’re missing either! If I had just explored the AARP website more than once a decade, I would have uncovered this groovy glasses benefit. Not only is there a network of opticians who give the discount, but certain popular companies who make spectacles of themselves like Pearle Vision, Sears, Lenscrafters, and JC Penney offer it, too.
Savings on Services Galore
Write yourself an electronic reminder to check out the AARP site at least a couple of times a year. Here’s the generic AARPs discount pages with savings on health, travel, financial, insurance and other products. Another example I just found in my e-mailbox: AARP offers a 45-minute free legal consultation and 20% off the regular fees of attorneys in their network.
Boomerific Bargain
For only $12.50 a year and graduated discounts from $10.50 to as low as $7.99 for buying several years at once, AARP might just be the best bargain on the planet for the 50-plus club. There are international memberships, too, starting at $17 annual for our Mexican and Canadian neighbors to $28 for other countries. And it’s a two-fer! Your spouse’s membership is free. And not to sound too mercenary, AARP is a serious lobby for saging citizens to make sure our needs are met and our voices heard.
In these shaky financial times when many boomers already have or may have to give up a steady paycheck in the workaday world, let’s swap resources and ways on making that buck stretch almost as far as it did in “the good old days.”
