J Wynia ran some numbers concluding retiring at 65 will probably happen less and less.
Retiring Retirement
- Post author By Garrick van Buren
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J Wynia ran some numbers concluding retiring at 65 will probably happen less and less.
That’s truly bad to hear.
I 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.
I 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.