Retirement: A Full-Time Job

Everything Old is New Again

2009-07-13T18:46:09-07:00

I've been so excited all week to begin our first home exchange. Our week-long stay in San Francisco is on Telegraph Hill, right near Coit Tower. I lived in this neighborhood twice before, once for a few years in elementary school and then again for a week, when I housesat for some friends early in my grown-up career, 20 years ago.

I've been reminiscing for weeks about that long-ago week of housesitting, anticipating going back to some of those old haunts, like Savoy Tivoli, for a drink, to pretend we are 20-something again. I've been remembering some of the old fashioned-touristy Italian restaurants and the wonderful choices for an afternoon cappuccino.

Imagine my surprise when we got to the building and I realized it is the exact same building where I lived for that week, 20 years ago! In fact, this apartment is one floor above, and right next door to that apartment. Talk about deja vu all over again . . .

I knew the home exchange thing would be a bit like living someone else's life for a week, but who'd have thought it would be my own life, two decades ago.

This is going to be very fun . . .

Thank God It's Monday

2009-07-06T18:07:06-07:00

It used to be that I dreaded Monday mornings, the end of all that fun, the return to the grind of another workweek. It was enough to make a girl drink to excess on Sunday nights.

Not anymore.

Now I can't wait until Monday morning so ALL YOU PEOPLE will go back to work and let me rest!

Weekends are a whirlwind of activity, attending or throwing dinner parties, traveling to visit out-of-town friends, or hosting the out-of-towners in our home. We pack our weekends full with social activities because when the weekdays hit, most of our friends don't have the time to squeeze a significant social life into their busy workweeks.

Thank goodness!

This weekend a couple of families with kids ranging in age from 3 to 14 years old came to visit and enjoy our small town's Fourth of July celebration. We hosted a barbeque, joined in the cheering of our local parade, and then hit the county fair to watch the fireworks and subject ourselves to the spinning, twirling, dropping, and otherwise gut-jostling rides.

Did I mention the spinning and the twirling and the jostling? For these kids, it seems a ride is just not all that it could be unless an adult is cajoled into riding with them so they can laugh at the color her face is turning with each rotation of the Orbiter, Teacup, or Tilt O'Whirl. Yes, I was that coerced adult, and spent the entire day in a state of dizziness and nausea.

Thank God it's Monday! They all have to head home for work and I get to sit on stationary objects.

Retired Life in the Fast Lane

Sunday Evening Blues

On-Line Dating in Retirement

2009-06-29T21:58:37-07:00

Ok, it's not exactly on-line dating but it sure feels like what I imagine that experience to be like, the nerves, the sweaty palms, the excitement of a potential match. But instead of getting botox, a new haircut and outfit, and losing a few pounds, I'm painting baseboards, cleaning windows, and finishing up landscaping and home maintenance projects. Why the gussying-up of my home? I'm talking about on-line dating for my house, vacation home-exchange.

Much like on-line dating, there are concerns to contend with:

Will my date be an ax muderer? What if the home I'm exchanging to doesn't even exist, or perhaps the people that come to visit my house trash it or try to rip me off?

What if my date isn't as handsome as the pictures they posted in the on-line add? What if I have to spend a week in a total dive?

What if I get stood up? What if the exchanger I arrange with backs out on me?

What if no one thinks I'm attractive? What if no one exchanges with me because they think my house is ugly, or they think my town is not appealing?

I'm hoping to stretch the travel budget this year by swapping my home, a home that would just be sitting idle while I'm traveling, for free accommodations at my destination. I've sent over 50 inquiries to potential home-suitors and have arranged a sum total of exactly three dates and three potential dates. Over half of those I've approached have never responded at all. (Although, three of my suitors actually invited ME out.) I'm not sure how people with actual jobs have the time to arrange this type of travel, you definitely have to kiss a lot of frogs.

One alternative to all this dating drama would be to rent out my home and then take the money and just go rent places for vacation. That would certainly remove the need for a perfect match. But many of my concerns would still be there, I might wind up renting somewhere that wasn't really as pretty as the pictures. My renters still may not treat my home the way I would like. In fact, I do take comfort in the fact that in an exchange, we are both in one another's homes hoping that the other is taking good care of our place, so it seems we all might actually be more careful than actual renters would be.

I know a few married couples that met through on line dating as well as a few people that have successfully and enthusiastically swapped homes. It's not for everyone, you have to be careful, and you may be disappointed with the match, but who knows, you may just find your prince!

Boredom Begets Boredom

2009-06-28T15:42:06-07:00

S.B. left a comment on my last post that I've been thinking about all week:

"I don't think human beings will stay happy very long if they aren't doing something they feel is fulfilling to them. Whether someone is happier after retirement is ultimately likely to hinge on whether they can find something that they are passionate about doing."

This comment was made in the context of boredom in retirement. But really, this insight is relevant not just to retirement, but to working life as well.

I spent 18 years at my last job, and 22 in the field that I chose when I was 18 years old as I entered college. At some point those last few years, I lost the passion for my chosen profession, (well, if you can call it that, it was, after all accounting). It's probably more accurate to say it became unfulfilling to me, and when that happened, I became extremely bored at my job. Possible cures for this boredom were to get a new job, get a new career, or as I chose, retire.

It's true, the same thing can happen in retirement if you don't continue to follow where your passions lead you. The great thing about being retired though, is no one is paying you to stay bored, so if you find you want to head in a new direction, you can just pick up and do that.

It's true already that my second year of retirement is shaping up to be very different than the first year. Last year I was really just transitioning into retirement, shedding my work persona and the strict daily structure of working life. This year I'm obsessed with travel. Who knows where my interests will lie next year, but you can be sure that whatever it is I will commit fully and obsessively to my new passion.

With possibly 50 years of retirement in front of me, embracing change is not just an option, it's a necessity. If my retirement looked exactly the same in 18 years as it does now, I can tell you with absolute certainty, I would be bored. I'm definitely not bored now, but if I don't grow, learn new things, follow some dreams that I don't even have yet, I will be. I'm pretty sure this phenomenon operates whether you are working or retired.

Where Are All These Bored, Depressed Retirees?

2009-06-12T20:37:06-07:00

The second year of retirement is already proving to be very different than the first. You may have noticed it by the decrease in frequency of my posts. All that time I previously spent contemplating the transition to retirement I now spend in action. There is absolutely no time for navel-gazing. Now that I'm firmly in the actually-living-it phase, I don't have time to think anymore!

That's why I found this blurb from Fortune Magazine to be so amusing today. In contemplating the non-financial reasons that "even before 2008, the long-term trend toward earlier retirements had started to reverse," the explanation was that "it's extremely boring. We have built a fantasy in our minds that 20 years of free time is a dream come true. It's not."

The article continues, "Every study that's been done on this subject shows that more than half the retired population feels disoriented and depressed. They don't feel as productive and connected as they once felt. According to A.C. Nielsen, they're watching an average of 46 hours of television a week. The people who seem the happiest and the most comfortable with their maturity are those who by and large are still working."

So where are these bored, depressed retirees? If "every study" shows this to be true, then gosh, I guess it must be true. But I'm not encountering any of these unhappy retirees in my writing classes, in my bocce ball league, in my travels, or in the emails I receive from folks that read my blog.

Perhaps it's because the unhappy ones are home in front of the TV bringing up that average. (If that's where they are, I can guess why they are depressed, and it has nothing to do with not working. I'm now on month three of no cable news shows--apparently the only thing I've missed is some kerfuffle between David Letterman and Sara Palin. Please don't bother filling me in, I really don't want to know.)

Television watching aside, maybe I don't identify with the angst of not working because I AM still working. I may not be getting paid, but cleaning, gardening, exercising, managing the finances, and now devoting a huge chunk of my brainpower to travel planning, it all adds up to a full-time job!

In this second year of retirement the travel bug has taken a huge bite into me and I'm ready to be on the move as much as possible. When you are trying to wedge as much travel as you can into a fixed retirement budget, you have indeed created a full-time occupation for yourself. When I had a job, I had more money than time, so I booked the trips, paid the money, and then simply showed up.

Now that I'm not sitting at my desk at work, getting paid so that I can escape for two weeks on vacation, I have all that time in the hammock with my laptop to find ways to travel on the cheap. And believe me, I am spending all those hours doing just that.

Besides scouring the corners of the internet looking for travel deals, I'm working on my own deals for free lodging by swapping my home with other travelers, calculating the most economic use of my airline miles, and prowling for last minute deals.

How I'm expected to have time to do all that, see friends, keep up my blog, read books, AND watch the requisite 46 hours per week of television, I have no idea.

Happiness is Cheaper in Retirement

What Five Things Make You Most Happy (and Why Aren't You Doing Them?)

Happily Retired With The Science to Back Me Up

Downsizing to Recession

2009-05-20T20:22:31-07:00

If I had seen this article in New York Magazine before today, I would have mentioned some of this in yesterday's post. It seems that this whole it-doesn't-take-money-to-be-happy business, extends way beyond just the lives of retirees. It also has some application to that other group, that is, everybody else.

The article's author, Jennifer Senior, points out some of the not-so-expected effects of the financial bust on New York, a city hard-hit by Wall Street's meltdown. Of course there are all the obvious negative impacts, but consider these surprising positive effects on the Big Apple:

Volunteerism is booming,
Enrollments at divinity schools are way up (and not just among the laid off),
Violent crime has gone down in almost every category,
Apartments (and real estate) are becoming more affordable, enabling people previously priced out of the city to be able to move back in, and
people are even getting thinner (presumably due to eating in rather than out. Also it's cheaper to join the gym.)

Downsizing your life doesn't have to make you unhappy. Not only does acquiring less stuff not make you less happy, to the contrary, "some will go so far as to say that material acquisitions make us less happy." As Swarthmore psychologist, Barry Schwartz points out:

" 'During the boom, people were by and large chasing the wrong stuff, because they were chasing stuff.' Psychologists like him have a term for our misplaced and unending hunger for more and more stuff: the hedonic treadmill."

And it would be nice if there were another positive effect:

"Schwartz hardly regards this recession as a welcome development. But he hopes it will at least make people begin to recognize the value of experience over material accumulation. 'There's good evidence people get more pleasure from experiences than possessions,' he explains. 'So constraining people materially might make them more satisfied with their lives.' "

And isn't that what we all want, retired or not?

Downsizing to Retirement

2009-05-19T22:36:40-07:00

"On the other hand, sometimes you encountered people who'd stopped playing everyone else's game, who seemed to be semi-happy and with it, who said, in so many words, I saw the cheese, I lived on it for years, and it wasn't worth it. It was plain old Safeway Swiss."

--Anne Lamott, Grace Eventually

When you're busy playing "everyone else's game," it's easy to start thinking that it's the game you actually want to be playing. Work, work, work, so you can buy, buy, buy. Grow your career so you can grow your lifestyle. Then, keep on working so you can keep supporting your ever-expanding standard of living.

It's a vicious cycle, and one that most people have to break if they want to make the dream of retirement a reality.

An article in yesterday's New York Times points out, much of our consumption treadmill is really an attempt to signal a message to other people about our personalities, but it turns out nobody's really listening to that message. We may think that a luxury car, watch, or handbag says something about us, but the reality is that people don't really care what we're buying: "The fundamental consumerist delusion . . . is that purchases affect the way we're treated."

I'll admit, I've done my share of status purchasing. About a decade ago, we purchased a brand-new luxury sedan and gave our seven-year-old Mazda Miata to my husband's dad. He recently told us that he wasn't using it much and said we could have it back if we wanted. The paint is chipping, the driver's seat is splitting, and the interior is scented now, with a hint of mildew. I drove that car around today and couldn't believe we ever gave it away!

It is so much fun to drive, much more fun than that luxury sedan. It may be double the age, but at a mere 100,000 miles, it has 50,000 less than our "newer" car, and the gas mileage is a whole lot better. Driving around in that car was like hanging out with an old friend. It was familiar and comfortable, and it transported me back in time about 15 years.

I know now, since I've lapped full circle on the spending racetrack, luxury spending not only doesn't send a message to other people, it doesn't add anything of significance to your life. I acknowledge, it's much easier to understand this since I've lived at both ends of the spending spectrum, but you don't get any happier simply by spending more money.

And so, the reverse is true as well. You don't get any less happy when you spend less.

It won't make you unhappy to downsize your life in retirement. The truth is, you will naturally spend less money than you did when you were working, as this excellent post at The Boomer Chronicles points out. If you had a stressful job before you retired, you'll probably spend less in retirement since you aren't using shopping to self-medicate. And since you have more free time, you no longer have to pay someone else to do things you didn't have time to do when you were working so much.

Before I retired, I thought I might miss the spending level of my old lifestyle. I couldn't really have known until after I retired that it doesn't really matter to me at all. I lived on that cheese for years, and it's true, it was plain old Safeway Swiss.

Nostalgia About Being Poor

Retiring in a Down Market: It's Not as Bad as I Thought!

Retirement and the Magic Number

Happiness is Cheaper in Retirement

Change Your Blog, Change Your Life

2009-05-17T22:32:35-07:00

Thank you Penelope Trunk for the brutal honesty of your post: Reality Check: You're not going to make money from your blog. Not so much because I actually thought I would make money from my blog, but because I thought I was sick of blogging until you helped me realize I blog for totally selfish reasons, none of which have anything to do with money.

A couple of weeks ago, I was seriously considering abandoning my blog, like so many others Grace had been wondering about. I retired over a year ago. I wrote about the adjustment: I'm adjusted, it's fun, I'm happy. Why would I want to write about it anymore?

My writing teacher keeps encouraging each of us to figure out what is "begging to be written." She wants us to listen to what is compelling us to write, and then write about that. What I yearn to write about isn't retirement, it's about losing my mom when I was 16. So I've been thinking I should stop writing about retirement and start writing about my mom.

I had it in my mind that this could be a book. I would write a book about losing my mom to cancer when I was 16. So I went to a seminar on writing, publishing, and marketing a book. And now I know with certainty I do not want to publish a book. (Thank you again Penelope for already telling me that writing a book is a stupid idea.) I need to write about my mom, but publishing it is way more trouble than it's worth, and totally unnecessary as far as fulfilling the need to write it.

So I did a lot of writing just for myself, and I wrote about how I didn't want to keep the blog anymore, and then I thought of a whole bunch of things I wanted to blog about.

A lot of bloggers say that they blog to help other people. While I would love it if my blog actually helped anyone, that doesn't really have anything to do with why I blog. I blog because I love to write. And as far as helping people, my readers help me way more than I help them. The comments I receive give me support, great ideas, and interesting questions that make me think. So I get more out of blogging than I give.

Which begs the question, if I'm not going to make any money at the blog, and the reason I do it is to write and to read comments, why in the heck do I have these stupid ads on my site? They clutter up the page and in a year and a half of blogging, I've made something like sixty bucks.

So instead of quitting blogging, I took off all the ads to remind myself that I'm blogging for selfish reasons, none of which include financial gain.

Isn't Blogging Writing?

Blogging at the Library

That's the Way I See it, Maybe You See it Differently

Are Retirees More Financially Agile?

2009-05-16T20:57:27-07:00

I know that a lot of people that are considering retiring right now, are very apprehensive because of the scary economic conditions. I experienced many of the same apprehensions, but being that I'm already retired, it's too late for me to reverse course. And the truth is, my fears were far worse than reality proved to be.

I am not alone. Yesterday the New York Times reported that a poll done by The Pew Research Center shows that retirees are actually faring better in this recession than their 30 to 40-something-year-old cohorts that are still in the workplace:

"The most vivid finding to emerge from this survey is that older Americans -- most of whom have already retired and downsized their lifestyles -- have been far better insulated from the current storm than those who need to worry about keeping their jobs and building up diminished retirement accounts . . ."

At first glance, this finding was curious to me. The one group that has no more income coming in from gainful employment is faring the best? Kind of the exact opposite of what you'd expect if you are one of those people on the diving board thinking about jumping in, huh?

Why would this group be doing better than those 30 to 40 year-olds that have their whole lives in front of them to earn money?

I think it's partially because retirees are forced to be more financially agile. When you are working and retirement feels like it's such a long way off, it's much easier to get in financial trouble. You have the illusion that there is going to be a constant stream of income coming in for years to come; and some feel so secure of this future income stream that they borrow to finance current spending, thinking that a salary will always be there.

Retirees have already given up on that illusion since they have a fixed amount of money that must last them for the rest of their lives. Perhaps this makes the impact of bad times seem more real to us, forcing instant action to adjust our spending during a bad market. Retirees don't have the option of thinking "My job is secure," or "I'm sure I'll find a new job next month," or "Retirement is so far off, I still have time for my income to supplement my portfolio, or for my investments to come back." We have to react instantly. The negative impact of a major hit to the retiree's portfolio is immediate, and it's implications are clear.

The durability of your retirement nest egg is a function of four things: spending, inflation, portfolio growth, and your longevity. The only of these factors that retirees have any significant control over is spending, although I suppose you can influence the longevity factor as well, perhaps by taking up smoking, eliminating your exercise regimen, or by not wearing your seatbelt, that type of thing.

Fortunately, I am finding retirement to be a lot less expensive than I thought it would be. While our nest egg has been hammered along with everyone else's, our spending has decreased even more than I imagined it would, meaning, that the nest egg should carry us through at these spending levels (adjusted for inflation), even though it has been beaten down by the market. It looks like other retirees are finding the same thing, or perhaps they are more willing to make immediate and drastic cuts in their budgets than their working brethren.

In addition to downsizing lifestyles, it appears that retirees are following conventional investment wisdom. Such wisdom dictates, that as you get closer and closer to retirement age, you should shift your portfolio allocation more and more toward bonds and cash, and away from stocks. When you are actually retired, this shift should continue, creating an even more conservative portfolio as the years go by. This may also explain why retirees are faring better:

"The collapse in stock prices last year also caused less damage to those over 65. The poll found that 23 percent of elderly Americans reported losing at least 20 percent of their investments last year, well below those further from retirement."
"Those over 65 presumably had more conservative investments, which fared better."

Unfortunately, what the Times calls the "threshold generation," has not fared as well, and it wasn't because they were losing their jobs at a higher rate. In fact, "the younger the worker, the more likely he or she was to lose a job."

"The Pew poll found that the recession was having its deepest immediate impact on those in the "threshold generation," ages 50 to 64. They were most likely to have suffered significant investment losses, and three-quarters of them said the recession would make it harder for them to afford retirement, a greater percentage than of either older or younger Americans."

It's a good reminder that if you are considering retirement in the near future you should already be shifting assets toward a more conservative portfolio that will preserve its value even in rocky equity markets. At the very least, it should be comforting to hear that it may be easier to downsize your spending in retirement than you might think.

If I Weren't Retired, I'd Still be Working

Retiring in a Recession

Happiness is Cheaper in Retirement

Believing in the Dream

2009-05-14T23:26:18-07:00

That whole "ten-thousand hour rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, just fascinates me. He explains that people that excel at something don't just leap to the top of their field simply because they have talent. That expertise comes with tremendous effort, about ten thousand hours of dedicated practice.

Last weekend I went to a concert and listened to Karrin Allison accompany herself on the piano as she sang Brazilian jazz songs. As I enjoyed her music, I was thinking of how many hours of dedicated practice she must have put in over the last several decades, and was struck, not by the quantity of work, but by the faith of it.

All those years while she was practicing, doing this thing she loved doing, she had to have faith. Faith that she would keep learning, continue to improve, and perhaps even be able to make a living with her talent. Faith that it wasn't just time spent in vain.

I am struck with the same admiration when I read the work of a great writer. How many unpublished pieces did they have to produce before writing this wonderful novel I'm enjoying? The faith that it must take to keep at it until they actually get published, and then make a living at it, inspires me.

I have a friend whose family is working together to shed pounds, together nearly 200 so far. Of course we all know that if you consume less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. But to tackle the monumental task of losing so much weight, to stick to it, to have the belief that it is really possible to accomplish, it takes faith.

And so it is with the dream of retirement. Yesterday, Tim posted about why it's so hard to save money. As he says, when you opt not to spend money on something, and instead save it for your retirement, "you are buying a tiny bit of a future dream." It's hard to save because it requires faith in your future dream. It requires belief that the tiny down-payment you are making really will amount to the achievement of that dream someday.