Hard Truth on Retirement Planning

[Tekward]

Baby boomers delaying retirement: It’s a myth, because retirement is inevitable, and bleaker than ever.


The best line, "Working longer is a retirement plan like winning the lottery or dying earlier is a retirement plan. Being able to work longer is not a plan. It’s a hope.”

 

[W2R]

I liked this one:

"Finding a job past a certain age is harder than reading an AARP magazine story about finding a job past a certain age".

So true! In fact, I think this article makes a lot of sense.

 

[Greencheese]

Working until 70 or 100? So many people I know cannot physically or mentally continuing working after 60-62 if the job is stressful or physically demanding.

But thank goodness everyone can agree to tax the wealthy more to increase their own SS payments!

 

[donheff]

Sad but accurate.

 

[martyp]

I picked up one of these rah rah books which I will not finish. "Unretirement" by Chis Farrell. It seems they are looking at two types of people. Professionals who stay in the workplace and others stuck in mundane low paying jobs like retail. There are plenty of people, not inhibited by health concerns, to provide anecdotes for these books and articles. Of course there are people able and wanting to continue to w*rk. There are probably legions that have to w*rk (and don't want to). There are a significant number of people who don't know what to do with themselves and are/would be miserable in retirement or whatever they do.

We are the lucky ones . . .

 

[Sarah in SC]

I just read the article as well, and I cannot tell you how many of my friends (mostly in their 40s) just expect to work until they die. And these are folks in occupations like nursing and respiratory therapy, which are tough, physical jobs.

 

[poorcarver]

Obviously lots of folks who intend or have to work later in life will not be able to do so for all the reasons stated. But I clearly recall when I was a kid that there were a lot of very old women working retail. I don't mean old to a kid I mean way past 70. And lots of old men were mowing grass, doing odd jobs, working as janitors, etc. I remember my mother saying that most of them were people who never earned much in life so their SS was really small.

 

[mystang52]

The article is clearly wrong..........just ask Suze Orman when she tells people to keep working 'til 70. So many people ignore the forced retirement "problem," where higher-paid/older workers find themselves out of a job for supposed business reasons. Age discrimination is alive and well, and unfortunately difficult to prove (i.e., for purposes of a lawsuit).
Then there are those, as the article mentions, who have to retire, and it's not just those in physical occupations. My close friend is a 63 year old white-collar IT consultant. He's a former marathoner, still cycles and runs shorter distances. But this "easy" white collar job means he is on out-of-town assignment every week, and he carries TWO laptops, has constant pain in one knee and the opposite ankle, plus shoulder problem etc etc. More than once he's told me he's jealous of my retirement, as he thinks he has to work another 5 years AT LEAST.

 

[Big_Hitter]

thanks for the link


they are preaching to the choir:


"Pensions for people employed outside the public sector are vanishing. The defined-contribution plans that have replaced them aren’t cutting it. According to Fidelity Investments, the average 401(k) account belonging to someone at least 55 years old is worth $165,000. (And those people are lucky. They actually have workplace retirement accounts.) The Federal Reserve says the median amount held in all retirement accounts—individual or workplace—where the head of the household is at least 35 but hasn’t yet reached the official retirement age of 65 is $59,000."

 

[Chuckanut]

Age discrimination is the 2000 pound elephant in plans to get people to work longer. I know a number of 50-somethings who have drained their retirement savings because they were laid off and could never find a descent paying job. This was done, while many companies were crying that they needed more foreign workers. Not so good.

 

[Independent]

Excellent article (except for the last two paragraphs).

I'd add that "health" isn't just about bad knees. It just gets harder to get up in the morning and get back into the same old grind. Much of that is mental. The new idea that was an "exciting challenge" when I was 35 becomes "been there, done that, pushing the same rock back up the same hill" when I'm 60.

 

[2B]

Many of the people pushing "work forever" have ties to the financial services industry. Once someone really retires they start looking at their investments and what they are paying for very little or nothing. It doesn't take long for most retirees to pull their funds from the FA and managing it themselves. There goes the FA's easy money.

I worked with someone who was very well off ( as in over 5 million). He had a stroke at 64. Fortunately, it was minor and he fully recovered. It got him thinking about truly retiring. His FA "ran the numbers" and said he should work at least until he was 70. They could revisit it then. He retired anyway and moved his money to Vanguard.

 

[haha]

I graduated from college in 1963. Many of my high school and college classmates are still working mostly at very nice careers. These articles are really just "she loves me, she loves me not". I wouldn't doubt that the same person writes different articles, under different names, taking the opposite side of every issue.


Here's a real haha from the Slate article:


" A poll conducted last year found 79 percent of Americans agreed Social Security benefits should be increased, with the bill paid by the wealthy." That means us, ER denizens, not Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or even Courtney Love.


Ha

 

[MatatuPuncher]

I graduated from college in 1963. Many of my high school and college classmates are still working mostly at very nice careers. These articles are really just "she loves me, she loves me not". I wouldn't doubt that the same person writes different articles, under different names, taking the opposite side of every issue.


Ha

This is exactly what I did! I'll retire at 50 with 28 years service.

 

[Texas Proud]

Excellent article (except for the last two paragraphs).

I'd add that "health" isn't just about bad knees. It just gets harder to get up in the morning and get back into the same old grind. Much of that is mental. The new idea that was an "exciting challenge" when I was 35 becomes "been there, done that, pushing the same rock back up the same hill" when I'm 60.

I agree with that... another thing that I do not want to deal with is the commute... I have heard from a few headhunters about some jobs in an area of town that would take me 1 1/2 hours to get to and probably a little longer to get home... At this age I am not willing to commute 3 hours a day for a job.... but when I was young I did 2 hours without thinking about it...

I lost my job at mega when they brought in a young person from a consulting company.... she had all these great ideas to change us... all she had were old tired ideas that we had already tried and they failed badly... and it wasn't just me, but the whole group of us 'older' (at the time we were say 40 to 55 YO) employees would say the same thing... she got rid of us all... she got 'moved' a few years later when she failed at her job.... but all the experience was gone and the execs who put her there just kept doing what they do.... blame the workers....

 

[martyp]

As a supervisor I could observe myself and my other older employees and conclude that one of the problems with older employees is they have seen "too much" throughout their careers. They have capped out in their classification level and they are tired of watching younger employees and managers repeat the same mistakes they have seen many times throughout their careers. They can become cynical, unimaginative, and basically have an "attitude problem".

Similar to comments above, I had to let go of an older employee who finally got tired of his 2 hr (each way) commute. He was a classical case of an employee who called in sick on too many Mondays and Fridays. When we confronted him he admitted what his problem was. He was gone from my group in a couple of months.

Older employees have their issues as do younger employees.

 

[ERD50]

As a supervisor I could observe myself and my other older employees and conclude that one of the problems with older employees is they have seen "too much" throughout their careers. They have capped out in their classification level and they are tired of watching younger employees and managers repeat the same mistakes they have seen many times throughout their careers. They can become cynical, unimaginative, and basically have an "attitude problem". ...

I thought recognizing that someone was about to repeat the same mistake was called 'experience', and should be considered valuable?

I think I tried to be careful not to just blurt out 'we tried that before and it didn't work' as that would just appear negative.

So you say something like 'I've seen that tried before, and there were some problems we should be aware of, so we don't fall into those same traps...'.

-ERD50

 

[GravitySucks]

They have capped out in their classification level and they are tired of watching younger employees and managers repeat the same mistakes they have seen many times throughout their careers. They can become cynical, unimaginative, and basically have an "attitude problem".


Older employees have their issues as do younger employees.

I found many of my older coworkers did have attitude problems. Mostly from years of 60 hour weeks leading to that capped out career along with years of benefit cuts and raises that rarely met inflation after the 2000 tech bust.


Sent from my Nexus 7 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[Chuckanut]

I can only speak for myself, but as my financial assets grew my BS bucket shrank.

During those many days when FI was far off, I found ways to finesse or avoid the BS in as gentle a way as possible.

Reality is a strong motivator.

 

[timo2]

Nice article. Thanks for posting.

Regarding older workers and long commutes, working from home three days a week has done wonders for my attitude. Plus, I still have strong input into the workplace. For the older workers with bad attitudes, my experience is many of them have already been pushed aside, not given meaningful work, etc.

 

[Big_Hitter]

I don't think there is a big correlation between commute tolerance and age.


I worked 25 years in downtown Houston and never had more than a 20 minute commute.

 

[Texas Proud]

As a supervisor I could observe myself and my other older employees and conclude that one of the problems with older employees is they have seen "too much" throughout their careers. They have capped out in their classification level and they are tired of watching younger employees and managers repeat the same mistakes they have seen many times throughout their careers. They can become cynical, unimaginative, and basically have an "attitude problem".

Similar to comments above, I had to let go of an older employee who finally got tired of his 2 hr (each way) commute. He was a classical case of an employee who called in sick on too many Mondays and Fridays. When we confronted him he admitted what his problem was. He was gone from my group in a couple of months.

Older employees have their issues as do younger employees.

I was not cynical, unimaginative nor did I have an attitude problem....

I will give an example... my dept wanted to scan all documents so others could 'see' them... I asked many questions about indexing, how things would get scanned etc. etc.... I told them their plan would not work... (BTW, this was 1999 so computers were pretty slow then)...

So, one day the lady who sat in the office next to me came in and asked why I had such a problem with the scanning (she was on the team).... I used 3 examples of what I would need to look at any scanned document... I told her if you cannot get the doc in front of me faster than 'this' (I showed her how long it took me), then scanning is no help to me... the avg time for me to get info was less than 1 minute... it took an avg of 10 minutes to get to a scanned doc...


Now, they did implement scanning.... and guess who was the ONLY person who scanned all their docs and all their work papers? After 6 months the dept was so behind in scanning that they hired 10 to 15 people to just scan things in.... nobody used the scanned docs because the more that was scanned in meant it was harder to find anything..... remember, there was no stated method of what to call things and no order to put them in.... you had to keep looking for something until you ran across it...

They abandoned the system after two years and millions of dollars (I think upward of $50 mill)....



Yes, I was seen as not a team player.... I refused to work more than 60 hours in a week... but I also had 4X more accounts than the second highest employee... my required payments were 10X more than the second highest... so they put up with me...

 

[Texas Proud]

I don't think there is a big correlation between commute tolerance and age.


I worked 25 years in downtown Houston and never had more than a 20 minute commute.

You must live in the loop.... not where I want to live...

 

[Andre1969]

I don't think there is a big correlation between commute tolerance and age.

I worked 25 years in downtown Houston and never had more than a 20 minute commute.

I think I could tolerate a long commute, as long as traffic is actually moving. But I hate being stuck in gridlocked traffic. I'm also a bit spoiled, though. My job is about 2.5 miles from home. The furthest I ever had to commute was around 21 miles, but that was only for about 5 or 6 months. I had an evening job at a department store, which I had started when I was still in college. I held onto it after I started working full time, and initially the commute was only about 10 miles. But then I moved further out. I'd go straight from the full time job to the part time, so that part wasn't bad. And even the 21 mile drive back home wasn't too bad, because it was usually at 10 pm or later, so there was no traffic. Eventually though, I transferred to a different location closer to home. The drive from the main job to the part time job was longer, but the drive home at night was shorter.

Still, I've noticed the older I get, the less tolerant I am of heavy traffic and long drives. Sometimes if I have to run an errand and get caught in rush hour traffic, it makes me grateful that I don't have to put up with it on a regular basis.

Eventually, I want to move, but I've decided that's not going to happen until I'm close to retirement. Or at least to the point that I can go down to maybe 3 days per week. And I could see even 3 days per week wearing thin, fast.

 

[Big_Hitter]

You must live in the loop.... not where I want to live...

used to live in 77009 in late 80s - heights, a little sketchy but fun since we were young


ended up moving to 77018 in 1995 - garden oaks area - nice neighborhood


got out of there in 2011, never looked back


I liked living close in - how much time does one waste on the road living out in katy, Conroe, richmond or farfield? I worked with a guy that lived in farfield - when it rained it took him two hours to get home. not for me


I live about 4 miles from the office now, on a golf course and 30 minutes from a good (well, this year it wasn't so good) ski hill. Still, some ppl here commute from 30 miles away. smh