Why retire young?

[Austin_Explorer]

Not sure about the validity of the data, but I found this interesting:

Why retire young? Below is a very interesting study comparing age at retirement vs. age at death. The average person who works until age 65 dies 18 months after retiring while the person retiring at age 50 lives to be 86 years old. For those contemplating working another few years before retiring, realize you are losing two years of your life for each year you work beyond age 55.

http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/Inf...tireYoung.html

If this is true it would get me FIREd up!

I certainly don't want to dissuade you from Early Retirement, but the Dr. Sing Lin thing is bogus.* It's been floating around cube-farms and the internet for ages.* I checked out snopes and couldn't find a good debunking there, but I'm sure someone could come up with a link.

That said, why do you need further inspiration?* Just look to Mr. Galt!

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Ephrem Cheng (aka sing lin...doesnt the fact that the originator uses aliases make you all warm and fuzzy about the study?) built this analysis on the basis of data he got second hand from Boeings actuarial department, and it was "supported" by anecdotal information from other people.

It is initially suspicious because of the linearity of the data itself.

On further review and when Ephrem was challenged, he recontacted his actuarial friends at Boeing who acknowledged that the data had been "floating around" for more than 20 years and nobody knew where it had actually originated.

A current study done at Sandia labs in 2001 indicated that regardless of the retiree date, age at death spanned a 30 year period. The correlation between retirement age and longevity was only .37, extremely low.

On recontacting Boeing with this new Sandia data, Boeing acknowledged that the new data was consistent with current data they were using.

The determination from this is that the original Boeing data was a hoax or simply a bad conclusion drawn from bad, aged or mixed data.

Do a search for "boeing" and you'll get my total, 3 full length post analysis of this study.

[Austin_Explorer]

I didn't put much credence in the reality of the numbers. The whole page looked a little flaky. But I like the premise, as flawed as its evidence may be, nevertheless!

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I think this was an attempt to get some of the aerospace workers to take early retirement buyout packages. That the author pretended to be two different people and sourced his alias is a bit of a giveaway.

[fire5soon]

I believed it because I was mesmerized by the lovely mauve background...* *