The Unfair Senior Discounts I Love

It’s not like when I was living on a credit card float

Saturday night I got a senior discount of $3.00 for attending a concert by new composers. Most of us in the audience had gray hair, though most of the performers were young musicians, instrumentalists, and vocalists.

Last weekend I got a senior discount of a few bucks when attending a garden display where, once again, gray-haired attendees were in the majority. And this was on a Sunday, a day when kids weren’t in school or people weren’t at work, for the most part. Tuesdays are senior discount days at the movie theater.

When I was 35, a single mother and living from one paycheck to the next by the float on credit cards, I didn’t qualify for any discounts. I didn’t earn cash back on credit cards by getting $25 back for always paying my balance or earning an extra 3% discount on gasoline that month. I didn’t qualify for the “fast-growing feet” discount because it was the third time that year my son needed a new shoe size.

It is a reminder, though, of how costly it is to be poor and how beneficial it is to be affluent. (I count affluence as the financial freedom to pay off your bills on time at any time.)

When I was struggling, I paid interest on my credit card balances. I paid penalties for overdue payments.

Poor people don’t qualify for credit cards. How does anyone get along in today’s cashless world without a credit card? One program I promoted, years ago, was helping poor people clean up their credit records so they could apply for an apartment or other necessities. Oh, and apartment applications have fees attached. Some landlords earn money on fees for the one apartment they have open, and the many applicants seeking it. The landlords are simply maximizing the opportunity presented to them.

If I want to shop at a really good thrift store, I pick the thrift store in a wealthy community. My favorite Goodwill store was located next to a Maserati dealership. I loved buying last year’s designer brands there on the cheap.

A new grocery store that I now patronize offers senior discounts every Wednesday, instead of only the first day of the month, as its competitor does. I tell the clerks at checkout on Wednesdays that I am there for the geezer discount, but they seem to know I meet the qualifying age. The discount is ten percent, so it is substantial. Almost everybody has gray hair, if they have hair, on Wednesday.

I’ve known people who keep spreadsheets of which credit cards qualify for which discounts in different months or which days of the week offer senior discounts by different vendors. I am not that obsessive. I have a friend who chooses the restaurant based on which coupon she has.

I am enjoying the financial freedom of senior life, and having lunch out, going to a matinee, or using all my $3 senior discount savings on a trip to Europe.

I know not everybody has that freedom. But I didn’t have it until now, either.

And I’m not one of the people moving my investment account because this stock is doing better than that one or opening an account because Chase is offering a cash incentive for a $50,000 minimum balance. I haven’t morphed from the savings mindset to the how-to-make-more-money mindset.

I have enough, although we all face that unanswerable math word problem of how much money you have divided by how much you need each year times the years remaining. Since I have always been bad at word problems, I’ll just settle for the answer“enough.”