As I See It: Riffing On Retirement
December 11, 2023 Victor Rozek
It didn’t take long after my father retired for him to start getting bored. There were suddenly lots of unstructured hours to fill and no prescribed way to fill them. So, he did what many retired men do: He stayed home and annoyed his wife. But after several months of straining my mother’s tolerance for togetherness, he settled on a novel solution.
The back of our property was bordered by a very tall hedge which shaded portions of the lawn. During the rainy season the shaded areas never fully dried and became saturated. So my father decided to replace patches of grass with cement. Not altogether a bad idea, except when he was done with the soggy parts, he started tearing up the sunny side of the house. The family joke was that if he hadn’t unexpectedly died, we would have run out of lawn.
Retirement, always so pleasantly portrayed in commercials targeting Boomers, is not all Viking cruises and long walks on the beach. There are a number of factors likely to intrude upon expectations of carefree commercialized bliss.
For many people nearing retirement, the first consideration will be financial. At one time, retirement income was likened to a three-legged stool consisting of personal savings, Social Security, and pension. The pension leg was essentially sawed off as companies moved to part-time and contract employment. That leaves savings and social security, and both are buffeted by uncertainty. A vociferous group of lawmakers is constantly yowling about cutting social security and/or raising the retirement age as a way to offset tax breaks for the uber rich. And that would be a devastating blow to the 40.2 percent of older Americans who, according to the Social Security Administration, only receive income from Social Security in retirement.
Meanwhile, Americans are notoriously poor savers and inflation is eating up what little they are able to set aside. In March of this year, the Federal Reserve released data showing that the average American has about $65,000 in retirement savings. By retirement age, the Fed estimates those saving will have grown to a value of $255,200. At one time that may have been a lot of money, but no longer.
Consider that many people approaching retirement are caring for either aging parents or grandchildren. And the cost of care, particularly for the elderly, is staggering. In our own family, my wife’s ailing stepmother expressed a desire to remain in her own home for as long as possible. Eventually, that required 24-hour care. And even at a modest rate of $25 per hour, the bill came to $18,000 per month. Assisted living facilities are not much better, charging outrageous buy-in fees and between $5,000 and $10,000 per month for pleasant facilities and questionable care. Thus, the quality of retirement may depend on whether elderly family members outlive their assets and how much financial assistance they will require.
There is a shared delusion that descent into helplessness is something that happens to other people. And that’s especially true for those functioning as care givers rather than care receivers. But that’s the inevitable state that awaits all of us should we live long enough, and planning for that pricey inevitability is an essential aspect of retirement preparedness.
One of the best ways to save money, if at all possible, is to pay off your house. A home with a $200,000 30-year mortgage at 6 percent will end up costing more than twice as much by the time it is paid off. The mortgage interest tax deduction is hardly worth carrying the debt. For most people their house payment is their biggest monthly nut and eliminating it provides a level of freedom and choice unavailable to those anchored in debt by a mortgage.
The other option is to downsize, which can potentially solve two problems: retirement affordability and generational dread. Leaving an unsettled estate to your kids can be a cruelty, forcing them to get rid of a lifetime accumulation of things that often no one wants. Having a legal will helps, but gifting or donating unnecessary items in the living years will free surviving family from the burden of conducting a massive cleanup and dispersal project.
In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond describes a scene in which a native chieftain comments that white people have a lot of cargo. Indeed, most of us have an unconscionable amount of cargo, and those responsible for accumulating it should also assume the responsibility for disposing of it.
Perhaps the biggest retirement wildcard is health. We’re all one diagnosis away from receiving life-changing medical news. So, maintaining fitness, especially if you desire to remain active, is paramount. The trick is to train now for the level of fitness you would like to enjoy post retirement. Counterintuitively, that will require doing more now so that you can do less later. Regardless of which activities you prefer, in the years after retirement you will lose muscle mass, strength, and endurance. That’s called aging. So, if you want to be able to hike 5 miles when you’re 75, train to hike 15 miles now. Hiking 5 miles at age 60 will not translate to an equal distance 15 years hence. If you want to play 18 holes of golf post retirement, knock off 36 holes every now and then. If you want to swim a mile, practice swimming two. I can almost guarantee that the use-it-or-lose-it dictum was coined by a person who tried to use it, only to discover it was too late.
Regardless of the status of your finances and health, retirement offers the great gift of slowing down. It is an opportunity to rediscover and reclaim your identity outside the workplace; to be mindful of your value beyond job title. It is an opportunity to notice; to delight in the journey, not just rush toward yet another destination. To walk in nature, not through it. To notice the sublime architecture of a leaf, the sunlight dancing on moving water, the unexpected flower.
It is an opportunity to practice gratitude for all the successes and achievements, and self-forgiveness for the failures and needless cruelties. Ultimately, retirement is an opportunity to take stock and make peace.
It is also an opportunity to catch up on all those unfinished projects unless, of course, you plan to rip out the lawn and replace it with cement. In that case, it’s best to put off retirement and continue working.
RELATED STORIES
As I See It: Elusive Connections
As I See It: Entitlement Master Class
As I See It: Greetings, Comrade IT Professional
