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| Talking about what they want to do when they grow up. |
I have heard people say, "Well retirement isn't for everyone." I don't know if I agree with that. But I do know that retirement isn't for everyone right now. Right now is not the right time for everyone. It may be too early for some and too late for others.
If you are not retired do you have a preconceived notion as to when you should retire? If you are retired did you have a plan as to when you would retire? If so, on what did you base the when?
The other day I found myself reviewing something called the 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey which is published by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Now I know this survey would not interest everyone (maybe no one reading this blog), but for some reason I found myself spending some of my time on it. I am retired after all.
As I reviewed the survey I started thinking about when a person should retire. One of the survey questions was, “Did you retire earlier than you planned, later than you planned, or about when you planned?” In the results analysis of the survey there is a chart that summarizes the answers to that question. When I looked at the chart it was very interesting to me that in 2014 only about 38 percent answered that they retired about when they had planned to do so. In fact, about half of all the survey respondents answered that they retired before they planned. Then there was the group who retired later than they planned to or who had not given any thought to when they planned to retire. But all who answered this question were retired.
I know people who retired before they planned to because of health reasons or disability. I also know a lot of people who retired early in the years since 2008 because the economy went off the rails and required a change in their life structure. In fact the survey found that only about a quarter of the people surveyed who retired before they planned to report doing so because they could afford to do so.
*Former President Eisenhower once told this story, “When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish."
Remembering this story seemed to go right along with my thoughts about retirement. When to retire is like most of what we plan in life. Sometimes things in our lives go per plan, but more often than not they do not. We may plan to retire early; we may plan to retire late; we may plan to retire at sixty-five; or we may plan to not retire at all. But it is highly likely that life may push us toward an outcome different than what we planned. But, that does not mean that life is not good anyway.
*Quoted in Baseball's Greatest Quotes (1992) by Paul Dickson; cited in "Game Day in the Majors" at the Library of Congress
