"How much do those things cost?" my husband asked. "Per toe?"
He was gazing down at my bright red, freshly polished toes.
"You will never know," I said. "Unless you have a pedicure."
We are in an age cohort lightly labeled "pre-retirees," which means we can see the sun beginning to set on our working years. And it is terrifying.
Suddenly, every purchase — especially the non-essential ones, like Starbucks and Netflix — is under scrutiny.
Have we had our last beach vacation, our last new car, and our last cellphone contract with unlimited data?
What goes, and what stays, when the paychecks cease?
There are all sorts of retirement calculators out there, we should be able to figure some of this out.
But there is no line in those calculators where you plug in the $220,000 in medical expenses every healthy couple can expect to spend before they die — and that doesn't include long-term care.
There is also not a place to plug in "2008" and calculate the financial devastation of another major recession.
And there is no place to enter the phrase "my husband doesn't understand compound interest."
The dear man thinks we will spend down our little pile of money and it will be gone. He doesn't get the idea that you are peeling off just 4 percent a year in order to make the money last until you are 95.
He is certain we will be eating off the McDonalds $1 menu two weeks after he retires. Meanwhile, though I have given up on seeing the Great Wall of China, I still entertain the notion of traveling.
There is another problem we face in retirement. He has been to the Great Wall of China. And Japan and Italy and Australia and London and Canada. He is a sportswriter, and he has seen a lot of the world. What I've seen can be viewed from my deck. We are going to need counseling.
Christmas is approaching, and I want to buy gifts for the people I love. Lots of gifts. What happens to that kind of spending once you are on "a fixed income?" It is a phrase that has the same chilling effect as "in hospice care."
I am pretty sure there is no chance that we will be helping anybody buy a house. The financial adviser who oversees our inadequate savings would have a stroke. After all, he was the one who wanted me to tell my daughter that "she got a college education, she isn't getting a big wedding, too."
"If you want her to hear that message, you tell her," I said. "Here's her cellphone number."
But the real financial roadblock I face in retirement is the man I will be sharing it with.
All these years, he has only bought gasoline and coffee. He tried to buy dress clothes from Sam's Club for our daughter's wedding, and I thought she would kill him.
Through the whole affair — from engagement party to reception — he kept saying "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."
I had the chimney cleaned and the workmen were about to mention the price and he said suddenly, "Don't tell me." I hired somebody to climb ladders and clean windows, and he said, "I don't know why. I can still see out."
I am hearing a lot of "When I'm retired" appended to comments on where the money goes around here, and I don't like it.
Since I am no longer buying prom dresses or paying for sports camps and tutors, I have found other places for that money. One of those indulgences is having a cleaning service every two weeks. It takes the pressure off me, and besides, my roommate works too hard these days to add cleaning bathrooms to his list.
I am hearing that when he's retired, there will be no more cleaning ladies.
"You watch," I mutter to myself. "There may not be bread, and there may not be milk. But there will be cleaning ladies."
Susan Reimer's column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. She can be reached at sreimer@baltsun.com and @SusanReimer on Twitter.com.