We all dream of retiring -- of waking up each day knowing that we have no job to go to and are free to spend the day taking a walk, reading a book, or simply "kicking back" and relaxing in our appliance carton of a residence.

Because the truth is that most of us, if we stop working, will instantly become starving homeless persons. Why? Let's take a look at some sobering statistics:

- Every year, 200 Americans are killed by their own dental floss.

- In her brief 9-month lifetime, a single female cockroach can produce 16,000 young.

And the statistics for retirement are even more sobering. Many people today simply cannot afford to retire. The singing artist Cher, for example, was forced to keep her Farewell Tour going until she was routinely ejecting her dentures onstage. Another sad example is Queen Elizabeth II, who, faced with the high cost of castle upkeep and horse maintenance, had to keep on queening until her hands were shaking so badly that candidates for knighthood refused the honor for fear that they would be decapitated during the sword ceremony. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was unable to retire from the U.S. Senate until he had been legally dead for six years.

This is the bleak future that you face if you fail to plan for your retirement. The time to do this is right now, so let's get started.

Step one is to create a detailed balance sheet showing your current financial situation in terms of assets and liabilities. This is really boring, so I've taken the trouble of doing it for you (see chart):

Now, to see how much money you have available for your retirement, all we need to do is add up your assets and subtract your liabilities, which gives us a net total of . . .

... OK, without being too brutally specific, let's just say that, if you're relying on your current assets, it does not look good for you to retire any time in the immediate millennium.

This means you need some way to continue getting money after you stop working. One source of money, of course, is your company pension, which will pay you a certain amount per month until such time as either (a) you die or (b) your company goes out of business or is purchased by a vicious bloodsucking predator company, which, the way things are going, could happen later today.

Your other source for retirement income is Social Security, a federal program started by President Franklin D. "Teddy" Roosevelt during the Great Depression, which was caused when the stock market collapsed onto Wall Street, creating a huge Dust Bowl that crippled the U.S. economy, put millions out of work, ravaged countless lives and forced many young men to wear knickers. It was a grim time, a time that older people still talk about today, causing younger people to creep quietly out of the room.

Out of this national trauma came our Social Security system. Here's how it works: Each pay period, your employer deducts a chunk of the money you have earned and sends it to the federal government, which holds it for safekeeping in a big sturdy vault surrounded by army tanks. When you retire, your money is waiting for you, along with your invisibility cloak and your magic time-travel ring.

Ha ha! As you may have gathered, I'm kidding. Your money is not waiting for you. Because the way Social Security really works is, the instant the federal government gets your money, it does the thing that governments do better than anybody else when it comes to money, which is spend it. Specifically, the government sends your former money to some elderly person, who uses it to buy food and shelter, unless this elderly person happens to be, say, Warren Buffet, in which case he uses it to tip the guy who washes his various helicopters.

Social Security Problem No. 1:

The younger generation is, with all due respect, worthless.

This is a generation that doesn't even know which part of a baseball cap is supposed to go in front. (Answer: the front part.) And do not get me started on music, OK? Do not make me remind you that this is the generation that gave us "hip-hop," a genre that requires essentially the same degree of musical skill as burping, as well as concert acts such as Britney Spears, whose "concert" consists of cavorting violently around the stage wearing pants cut so impossibly low in front that you begin to wonder whether Britney is in fact an anatomically correct human being, or if she had some of her key organs relocated to another part of her body, or perhaps her agent's body. But the point is that with all the audiovisual distractions at a modern $75-a-ticket stadium concert -- the choreography, costumes, acrobats, giant TV screens, fireworks, jet flyovers, onstage boa constrictors, etc. -- the one thing you are not particularly noticing is the music, which is just as well, because neither Britney nor any of the other people on the stage is actually singing anything -- they're far too busy cavorting -- which means the actual music is being produced somewhere backstage by a digital device about the size of a tin of Altoids.

This device is the heart of the modern concert industry: It has its own bodyguards, personal trainer, manager, groupies (in the form of scantily dressed pink iPods.), etc., because without it, the show cannot go on, as was harshly demonstrated during a sold-out 1993 performance by the Backstreet Boys during which the Altoids tin was carried off by rats, shutting the music down entirely and forcing the artists to entertain the crowd with armpit farts. (These were recorded and later released as the platinum-selling album "Odor of Love.")

Oh, it was different in my day. In my day, the musicians made real music, and they made it live. Can you imagine Elvis Presley or Aretha Franklin prancing around and lip-syncing? Of course not! You can't even imagine them prancing around without the aid of forklifts.

No sir, when I was young, if you went to a major rock concert, you knew what you were going to see on the stage: You were going to see a sweating promoter explaining why the act per se had not physically arrived yet. This happened a lot in the '60s. You'd be in a packed arena in, say, Philadelphia to see a performance by The Who, and maybe two hours after the concert was scheduled to start, the promoter would appear onstage and say, "We have good news! The Who's plane has landed in New York! Then, after some half-hearted booing, the crowd would settle back in its seats and resume passing around doobies the size of yule logs. Sometimes The Who would, eventually, show up; sometimes The Who would not show up; sometimes there was frankly no way to tell. But whatever happened, it was real, and no matter how long it took, we audience members remained in our seats, because we were committed to our music, not to mention incapable of movement.

That is the kind of dedication my generation is known for, and that, along with the threat of federal prison, is why we have always come through with our payment to the Social Security system, which as you may or may not recall is technically our topic.

Yes, we Baby Boomers paid for the retirement of the generation ahead of us. But will the younger generation do the same for us? Or will they at some point rise up in unison and say to us, quote: "Up yours, Baby Boomers! We're not paying for your retirement! We're sick of hearing you criticize us and our music! What about some of your music? Do you have any idea how many wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs we've attended where we had to sit around watching you Boomers lurch around the floor doing some kind of 1968 boogaloo to `Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog,' thinking you were the coolest thing on two feet? Do you have any freaking idea how much we hate Jeremiah the freaking Bullfrog?

"And do you have any idea how tired we are of television commercials for products aimed at your various Boomer insecurities and ailments, such as the apparent inability -- to judge from the number of ads for Viagra alone -- of 93 percent of all American men over the age of 45 to produce in bed?

Oh, yes, fellow Boomers, make no mistake: The younger generation loathes us. When the time comes for us to retire and start collecting Social Security, these young people are going to look for any petty excuse to avoid letting us have a chunk of their pay. One petty excuse they are likely to use is that, in a couple of decades, the chunk required to support us will be approximately 100 percent of their pay. This is because of the other problem with Social Security:

Social Security Problem No. 2:

There are too many Baby Boomers.

Another way of looking at this problem is that there are not enough members of the younger generation. We Boomers failed to produce a sufficient quantity of babies, and now, what with this nationwide erectile-dysfunction epidemic, it's too late.

And so when we analyze the financial future of the Social Security system, the numbers do not look good.

The Social Security system is headed for bankruptcy and total collapse unless it is reformed soon. The good news is, the leaders of both major political parties are well aware of this looming disaster and the need for prompt, decisive action. The bad news is, our political leaders could not take prompt, decisive action if their undershorts caught fire. The Democrats and Republicans have been debating what to do about Social Security for years now without producing anything other than accusations that their opponents are lying vermin scum. This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't address the underlying problem.

So, to sum up your retirement situation:

You don't currently have enough money to retire.

You will probably never have enough money to retire.

You are up a creek.

So maybe you should consider some alternatives to retiring, such as . . . OK, here's one: not retiring. Retirement is not necessarily a good thing, especially if you end up as an inmate in one of those "adult leisure communities" with a name like "Sunny Glades Glen III," the kind that always describe themselves with the words like "fun" and "active," as though they are one big wild happening party, when in fact many of the residents display no more vital signs than a frozen beef patty, and the "action" largely consists of elderly people driving golf carts to activities with names like "Low Impact Senior-obics," wherein an enthusiastic instructor, accompanied by peppy music ("Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog"), leads participants through a workout routine providing about the same degree of cardiovascular stimulation as operating a stapler.

So maybe retirement isn't so great. Maybe you'd be happier if you just kept working right on into old age. Maybe it's not such a great idea for you to continue working, either. But does that mean you have no options left for old age? Heck no! There is no call for that kind of "negative Nelly" thinking! You still have time to salvage your retirement!

All you need to do is develop some financial discipline, develop a budget, avoid frivolous spending, pay off your debts and start putting away a meaningful amount of money each month for the future. Don't be discouraged! You really can do it, if you put your mind to it and use your magic time-travel ring!

Note: You'll want to look for a refrigerator carton. Those are the roomiest.

- - -

Your Financial Balance Sheet

YOUR ASSETS

Cash on hand in the form of spendable currency: $78.63

Cash on hand in the form of pennies that you will never get around to converting into actual money: $292.11

Cash under your car seat bonded by hardened ketchup to french fries dating back to 2001: $6.90

Checking account balance: $782.06

Checking account balance adjusted for outstanding check: ($1,803.69)

Savings account: $0.00

Stocks that you bought through your company's stock-purchase plan, which seemed like a good investment until your company was managed into bankruptcy by an incompetent and possibly criminal CEO who would ultimately be punished by receiving a lavish golden-parachute settlement including at least two jets: $2,038.52

Cash value of life insurance: $0.00

Equity in your home: $18,000.00

Equity in your home adjusted for the home equity loan you took out for an extensive and much-needed home-renovation project, although you wound up going to Vegas and investing the bulk of it in video poker: $12,000.00

Estimated resale value of your cars, TVs stereo, furniture, clothes, Jet Skis and other possessions: $25,000.00

What you would actually get for your cars, TVs, stereo, furniture, clothes, Jet Skis, and other possessions if you somehow managed to sell them: $1,832.40

YOUR LIABILITIES

Credit card debt as of 8:30 this morning: $12,657.25

Mortgage: $117,392.90

Unpaid balance of loans you took out to send your children to colleges where they either dropped out after seven semesters to pursue careers in the field of street mime, or, worse, majored in English: $53,482.06

Bills owed: $3,985.00

More bills owed: $6,938.96

Still more freaking bills owed: $8,409.78

Liabilities that you don't realize you have, but, trust me, you do: $21,847.69

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By Dave Barry

From "Dave Barry's Money Secrets." Reprinted by permission of Crown Publishers Inc., and distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune