Retirement Goals
Not Money!
My friend Dee Dee Vicino just did a podcast with Dan Haylett. Dan is a financial advisor and he is pointing out some of the most critical things most people do wrong for retirement. Dan echos David Bach.
“What are you actually saving for?”
Closely related is his question: “What are you retiring to?”
Both Dan and David emphasize the point that for the average person there are “12 Good Years” (60 to 72). The key concept here is that if you’ve done a good job of saving, you now need to learn how to spend! Don’t wait until it is too late to enjoy your life savings.
While this is an extremely important and valuable concept, it’s also important to consider that each person is an individual and we don’t all fit into “average”. Many people never make it to 60 or they make it but are in such terrible health they can’t enjoy it. Others are dancing and living a great life at 90, 100, 110 (okay, its a pretty small population at 110 but there are people over 110 that are enjoying very functional lives).
Dee Dee brings up the topic of whether there is something we can do to extend those “12 Good Years” and Dan mentions one of the key things that is killing our health: lack of physical activity. Yes! Stay physically active. The most healthy things I know are: dancing, walking, and swimming.
Longevity studies associate having a good social life as being perhaps the strongest factor associated with long and healthy life. As we retire (aka “age”), our social circle shrinks. Our friends and family die, we have less money to afford social activities, we have less energy to go “out” and engage with others.
That all sounds very depressing, so I’d like to offer an alternative view: it’s not social activity but rather mental stimulation which is truly healthy. Thus if you are engaged mentally and fascinated by the world, that may be every bit as valuable and healthy as “having coffee with some friends”. Hopefully I’m not wrong because I love curling up with a good book and I hate going out to bars.
If we get back to the question of “What are you saving for?”, it seems to me that many are saving for surviving an economic collapse. The most important thing I would contribute to that is do not save in dollars (fiat currency). If you want security and a nest egg against financial collapse the best preparation for that is to own gold and silver.
All in all, I think David and Dan have an excellent point: give yourself permission to spend. Perhaps set a goal for what you want to leave to your children or grandchildren, but then with the rest give yourself permission to spend. Budget wisely, but keep in mind you most likely will spend less as the years go by (settling into a quieter life), so front load that spending a bit. Whether that is in your fifties, sixties, seventies or eighties.
At the end of the podcast, Dan mentions that he is forty three. Thus confirming that he and I have very different points of view, not disagreement, but different points of view. Dan’s time framing would indicate that my “good years” are almost over and I haven’t even started retirement yet!
Some of us didn’t wait for retirement to enjoy our lives. We took the trips we dreamed of, we tried the ideas that interested us.
Anyone can give you financial advice, some of it better than others. From my view, the world is full of mediocre advice about “numbers”. Dan is quite right that the focus should be on what goals you have for retirement. Those goals should not be a number. A goal isn’t worth much if you never do it. I’m not saying you should expect to accomplish all your goals (if you do you aren’t thinking far enough). We should all have more goals we want to strive for, but we also shouldn’t put off doing things just because we feel like we should save up more money first!
One of my challenges is that some of the big expenses I am planning for are not available yet. Self driving cars are something I’m very much looking forward to, but I suspect it will be three more years before we truly have them. Competent and intelligent robots are another thing I’m very intrigued by, but alas that is also three or more years in the future.
In the meantime, perhaps I’ll get a cat?
I lived my life fully before retirement, visiting 25+ countries and most of the states here in the USA so don't really have the kind of goals many do when they retire. And I'm an introvert who hates socializing at bars or coffee shops; I love being at home. I agree mental stimulation is important though, and moving your body. And a good attitude. 💕
One element of this topic is that we don't know how we are going to change as we age. While your overall message of movement to keep the body healthy and stimulation to keep the mind healthy is good, the specific, useful advice around those things varies dramatically. I can't give useful information about those things to anyone. I'm not sure that I can give useful advice to myself right now and certainly wasn't able to give useful advice to myself at times when it would have helped. I'll just talk about some general ideas.
I worked for Shell for eleven years. Every company has the core values that they print on brochures and post on their websites. Every company also has its real core values that determine how things work in that company. Shell's real core values were arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. Shell was a lousy fit for me.
The problem is that I work in a very small career field, and jobs of any kind are hard to find. After a while, I was looking for another job, but I never found anything before Shell let me go. Then, I spent over two years stretching my seven months of severance pay to tide me into my next job. I was never in a good place to leave Shell.
If I had been able to stay at Shell, my date for full retirement was October 11, 2021. If I had still been at Shell, I would have retired on October 12, 2021. That's how much I hated being at Shell. I would not yet have been sixty years old, and I knew that I would be too young for shuffleboard and a rocking chair.
As a young man, I had been interested in teaching at the college level. For a while, I considered getting a PhD to become a full professor. Success as a PhD generally depends on research, and I was more of a technical service engineer than a research engineer.
By the time I was working for Shell, I no longer saw myself as trying to be a university professor someday. However, I still saw college campuses as cool places. My fantasy was to retire from Shell on October 12, 2021 and move to a junior college or community college where I could teach as an engineer with two master's degrees. At the bottom level, maybe I would just teach a few algebra classes. More ideally, I would teach topics related to engineering. I would teach classes that maybe kids could take to knock off an engineering credit if they were going to transfer to an engineering school. I wasn't even interested in having a full teaching load. I just wanted a nice, out-of-the-way office in an academic building and the chance to lecture to dedicated young people. I would make enough money to reduce the amount of retirement money that I'd need to spend or maybe just have money to use for fun stuff. Ideally, I'd have classes only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and could have a bunch of four-day weekends to do stuff.
In 2013, I started with Sinclair. Sinclair had its problems, but it was a much better place for me than Shell was. They gave me nice and fair vacation benefits. Wyoming was more exciting to me than Louisiana was. Suddenly, the idea of retiring at the earliest possible moment was no longer foremost in my mind. I'm thankful that my Dad is still alive, but I realized that by the time I hit sixty-two, both of my parents might be gone. I would no longer be spending vacation time to visit them. I thought that I would be finding fun things to do on the weekends and not have to spend vacation to have fun. The thought of working past sixty-five suddenly didn't seem so bad.
Of course, all of that became meaningless when my health failed and I wasn't even able to work until I was fifty-five. Life truly sucks sometimes.
Another odd thing that happened when I came to Sinclair is that I lost all of my interest in lecturing. I still loved teaching. I loved talking to young engineers, inspectors, and anyone else about engineering topics. I loved giving them the experience of my years. My desire to teach hadn't gone, but my desire to stand in front of a class lecturing had evaporated.
Maybe I'm just odd, but I wonder how many people who reach retirement age are going to find that everything that they thought perfect retirement could be is no longer a good fit. People who had longed to visit London and see the quaint sights of old movies and books may be looking around and realizing that London has become a Muslim hellhole. People who dreamed of being on exotic beaches look at themselves in the mirror and think, "I don't want to be seen in a swimsuit like this." People who dreamed of climbing mountains may realize that their knees just aren't going to be good enough for them to reach their goals.
The changes that I experienced between forty-five and fifty were not such that my previous preparations would have been useless. The same financial savings would have been beneficial for either future. When I was forty-five, I was walking quite a bit. That would have prepared me physically for any future I encountered. My recreational reading was equally applicable to either future.
At the same time, I can see where some people might reach that place in life, find it not what they wanted, and feel very let down. If someone spent forty years not taking trips across the state because they were saving for trips across the world, they might feel broken if he or she retired and found the world to be no longer appealing. Someone who spends a lifetime developing a particular skill to use in a particular retirement might feel broken if he or she retired and could no longer do that activity.
I had a friend who owned a thirty-six foot sailboat and then later traded for a forty-one foot sailboat. He talked of people he knew who waited their entire lives to retire and buy a sailboat. The problem is that sailing is a skill that takes time to acquire. He said that most people who sail are going to find themselves in a situation where they need to use brute force to solve a problem the first time that they encounter that problem. Over time, they may learn techniques that don't require as much brute force, but when they first face that issue, they need a huge amount of brute force to react. If they go through that learning curve at forty, they get through the incident okay. If they go through that learning curve at sixty-five. they have to be rescued.
I suspect that everyone who tries skydiving is going to have a few bad landings. With experience, the bad landings are unlikely because a person has developed real skill. The people who learn and have those bad landings in their twenties may avoid injury completely or at least recover quickly. The people who wait until they are sixty-five to learn skydiving are going to be in much worse shape when they have their bad landings.
I'm skeptical of the idea that one can substitute intellectual activities for real human contact. I say that as someone who goes days at a time without ever speaking to another human being. Having coffee with a few friends would help me tremendously. I just don't have the friends to make that happen. Just being able to sit on someone's porch and chat would be great, but I don't have that. As a lifelong bachelor, I can't rest on memories of a wife and children. I've never even had a girlfriend. The solution to senior loneliness isn't easy, but I don't think the problem can be discounted.
Everything is a balance. Shallow experiences probably won't mean much to someone who eventually loses a home and has to go into a miserable, efficiency apartment at at age eighty-five because he or she spent money stupidly. I tend to be very frugal because I want to be able to handle any serious expenses that might otherwise force me into an apartment, trailer, or some other bad living place.
I guess the crux of the matter is that spending one's time, energy, or money stupidly will hurt whatever is coming in the retirement years. Spending or investing one's time, energy, and money wisely is likely to produce benefits in whatever is coming in retirement years.