PISTOLPETE:
This topic of JWs who never planned for retirement is largely unknown by the general public.
These JWs toil and suffer in silence. Many of them are Baby Boomers who fell for the teaching that the New System would be here and they wouldn’t need to worry.
The hypocritical part that bothers me is that many of the older people who were preaching poverty to the then young JWs (and hosting gatherings) were all collecting THEIR pensions and were in the workforce and/or married to ‘worldly’ husbands...But yet they preached poverty to people who were young back in the nineteen seventies. I remember being labeled ‘unspiritual’ because I (wisely) wouldn’t quit my job to pioneer.
These older JWs are mostly all gone now. There’s a few of them I would have loved to tell off but good - and I would have tracked them down to do so!