Retiring Retirement
28 Mar 2006 in General by GarrickJ Wynia ran some numbers concluding retiring at 65 will probably happen less and less.
Comments (3)
Garrick Van Buren added these pithy words on Mar 28 06 at 2:29 pmI dunno. Seems to me, the more our economy focuses on “knowledge work” rather than manual labor, the longer we can be useful members of society.
J Wynia added these pithy words on Mar 28 06 at 5:14 pmI think both “stop working entirely at 65″ and “live to 80 or so” are both assumptions that are going to be blown away in the next 35 years (when I hit that magical ‘65′ age.
Increasingly, people aren’t actually stopping work, but are switching to doing something they *want* at 65. For instance, someone who’s been working a job they hate for 20 years to put the kids through college and pay the house off, making $75,000/yr might quit doing their high stress job and go to work at the local bait shop for $9/hr selling fishing lures.
When you remove the “have to” from work, it gets increasingly difficult to differentiate it from a hobby.
However, if life expectancies drift upward much further and you view retirement as “sitting around”, you had better be prepared to sit around for 25-30 years.
I can’t even imagine sitting around for a full 1/3 of my life. I intend to be “doing something” until the day I can no longer. It’s just that if I manage to save enough money to reach the escape velocity I describe, I won’t ever do stuff I don’t enjoy anymore.
