3 thoughts on “Retiring Retirement

  1. J Wynia

    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.

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