When To Retire

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

I Admit It -- I have become trailer trash (at least part time)

Early 21st Century Trailer RV Park

Recently I was sitting outside drinking coffee while the sun climbed into the morning sky.  As I was sipping my pre-breakfast cup I started thinking about something.  Let me set the stage.

When I was a preschool aged boy "the early 1950's" we lived in a house down a small unpaved side street across from a trailer park.  I remember clearly my mother telling me that I was not to associate with the children or the other folks who lived in that trailer park.  She told me that there was one nice older lady who had been there for quite some time that we considered a friend and who was safe, but the rest of the residents were off limits.  I don't think she ever used the terms, but she insinuated that the people who lived in trailer park were "transients" and "trailer trash."  The insinuation had very negative connotations that the people living there were not our kind of people.

As I looked around me that morning I observed that I was beginning my day right in the middle of a trailer park. And i was probably going to associate with the folks in that park.  It was a trailer park of the early 21st century and it was much different from the one I remember as a small boy.  There are thousands of these parks dotting the countryside and they are called "RV parks."  These RV parks do not for the most part contain people that fit the demographic of people my mother worried may be living in the trailer parks of the early 1950's.  But instead they are filled with people who have been reasonably successful at something throughout their working careers and who were considered upstanding members of established communities.  They are not people about whom mothers would warn their children not to associate.  In fact, a large percentage of them are grandparents who from time to time have their grandchildren with them.  Instead of one nice older lady like my mother told me about in the park across the street, the park is full of nice older men and women.  I am talking about retired people.

Perhaps the most interesting group of people I meet in these trailer parks are the RV "fulltimers."  These are people who live full time in their RV.  They are interesting to me because after spending a lifetime accumulating stuff and being a part of a fixed location community of neighbors, churches, schools, civic organizations, hospitals, etc. (you get the idea); they decided to sell, give away, or throw away 95% of their stuff, leave everything else behind and move into 200 to 400 square feet of space that moves around from place to place.  What would motivate people to do such a thing?  That is the question that makes them interesting.

Our economy is built on obtaining stuff.  Our society also has a huge group (town, school, community) spirit component.  But when these people retired they moved away from all that in a big way.  An extreme downsizing took place.  Were they rejecting their previous life style with its set of drivers?

I don't think they were rejecting their previous lifestyle.  But I believe they felt a need to retreat from that lifestyle to experience a life directed by a different set of drivers.  They felt the need to live life in a different way to achieve different things.  With their new lives they are making a statement that their past lives do not represent the only valid way to live.  These “fulltimers” are truly interesting people.

Note about the picture:  Our rig is the fourth one on the right.  It is the one with the dark brown front cap.  The park is in Jersey City, NJ just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Pondering What Is Important

A friend of mine pondering what is important.  And he's not even retired yet!

I recently did one of those online life expectancy calculations on myself.  The claim of the website where I found the life expectancy calculator is that it, "uses the most current and carefully researched medical and scientific data in order to estimate how old you will live to be."  Sounds pretty authoritative, huh.

Well I answered the forty questions it asked relating to my age, gender, family background, overall health, fitness level, driving habits, stress levels, etc., and then the website went through its calculations.  It said that my life expectancy indicated that I would probably live another 7800 days.  I thought, “Not bad for a guy my age and weight.”

Now I know that none of us can really determine how long we will be on this earth.  There are just too many variables and not enough equations to calculate a specific passing date.  But if I can expect to live another 7800 days then I probably should give some thought as to what I might do with that much time.

Before retirement I knew a few managers who would set aside time upon which no one was allowed to infringe.  The time was set aside just for pondering.  These were almost always good managers, and in hindsight it seems unfortunate that most mangers do not set aside such time.  .

Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important."  

I believe he was right and I believe I probably learned this too late in my life.  It seems like the press of the day to day grind on my job made what was urgent seem to be most important.  After I retired and I was able to look at things through a different priority scheme.  I realized that the really important things take time to ponder and develop and the urgent things just steal time needed for that pondering and developing.  I wonder how much I could have accomplished if I had learned this before retirement?  Retirement will probably be better if I set aside some time to ponder, and that is really what these blog posts are about.

In case you are interested, I found the calculator at https://www.livingto100.com/.

Retired Guys and Blondes

Blonde With More Time

What do other people expect from a retired guy?  Now that can be an interesting question.

A friend of mine said something about twenty five years ago that has stuck in my mind ever since she said it.  And it has changed my outlook on life as a retired guy.  My friend was a blonde haired lady and as we were talking one day. I somehow worked the trite saying "blondes have more fun" into the conversation.  In response to my weak attempt at putting some humor into our conversation she lamented, “Blondes have more fun; blondes have more fun; that's all I ever hear.  But it's not true.  People expect so little from us that we just have more time."  She wasn't making a blonde joke when she said it, she was just expressing her frustration at what I had said.  Something must have happened in her recent past that caused what I said to trigger the frustration.

When I began my life in retirement I began to notice that as retired guys people expect less of us than they used to before we retired, so we have more time.  How we use that time determines whether or not we have more fun.  It also has a great impact on how we will make the most of our lives for the next twenty or thirty years or for whatever time we have in retirement.  


Maybe people expect so little from us that we can sneak up on them and do something that really counts.  Think about it!

Comfortable In Retirement

How long does it take to get comfortable?

How long does it take to get comfortable in retirement?  It did not take me long.  I came home from my last day on the job, ate dinner, went to bed, and woke up the next morning comfortable with what I had done.

I know many people though who struggle with their lives in retirement.  They are just not comfortable being retired.  They don’t know what to do with themselves.  I have a friend who has “retired’ twice already and who is back working full time and does not consider himself retired now.  He is more comfortable not being retired.

I believe from observing retired people since I retired that part of the adjustment toward being comfortable in retirement is to realize that retiring at the right time means you have paid in full.

No one asks to be born, but after we have been born and we reach adulthood the pressure is on us to make our own way.  The pressure is on to provide for our own upkeep.  The pressure is on to raise our children.   The pressure is on to contribute to the well-being of our fellow man.  Etc., etc., etc.  But if we work hard enough, if we live long enough, if we are lucky enough the pressure eases and then we really are retired.  We have paid in full.

I believe there is a difference between being retired and being unemployed.  In fact some people who are retired are very much employed.  Maybe a day or two at a time -- maybe full time.  But they are not employed because they have not paid in full.  You see, when you have paid in full, you are then free to add value with what you do above and beyond what you did to make your own way.  You are free to be a net contributor.  You may contribute a little or a lot.  There is no requirement for a prescribed contribution.  I now realize that after you have retired at the right time you contribute because you want to not because you are required to.

The difference is perspective, and in my thoughts perspective makes the difference.

Unemployment With A Party Beforehand

The cake from my "party beforehand"

One of the books I read shortly after I retired was Stumbling on Happiness* by Dan Gilbert a psychology professor at Harvard University.  In this book Mr. Gilbert says that one of the most traumatic things in the human existence is to be unemployed and that retirement can be seen as unemployment with a party beforehand.

Many times we identify ourselves by our employment.

I am a doctor.

I am a mechanic.

I am a salesman.

I am a welder.

I am a (you fill in the blank).

It gives us a sense of who we are and who those around us are.

But when we say we are retired, what does that mean.  Does it mean we used to be somebody but now we are unemployed?  How are we differentiated from those other unemployed people who are really looking for a job?   Are we different from them only because we were the honorees at a party on our last day of employment?

I like to think that now that I am retired I can be employed if I want to just for the joy of doing whatever it is I am employed to do.  Not because I am trying to make a living (even though any resulting money will be nice), but because I really like doing what I am employed to do.

Or of course I can avoid employment if I would rather.

The way I think about it, before retirement employment was a fact of life not a choice.  After retirement it is a choice.

*Gilbert, Daniel Todd. Stumbling on Happiness. Kindle ed. Random House LLC.

OK To Go To The Beach

What does it mean to be retired? Well everyone knows what it means to be retired. At least that is what I thought until I actually stared retirement in the face. Then at that point I realized that maybe everyone else knows, but I am not sure that I know. 

So I decided to look up the word “retired.” When I looked up the definition of the word “retired” on a dictionary website* I saw the "official" dictionary definitions, but I also saw a comment posted by a fellow meaning seeker next to the “official” definitions. The posted comment said, "I have finally fully figured out what the word 'retire' means. I've been "retired" for a year and a half but I now understand that I've 'paid in full'. It's OK to disengage, go to the beach or a cabin on a whim, sleep late, rise early, watch movies til 2 p.m., eat lunch at 3 and dinner at 9. Whew, this feels good!"

  

When I read this I had to ask myself, does retirement feel good enough for me to say, "Whew, this feels good!” If not maybe I need the perspective this person had when he thought about retiring a debt. He realized he had “paid in full.”

The difference is perspective.

*"Retired." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster,  <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retired>.