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Rethinking Retirement: A Non-Retirement Plan

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@stevelivingston
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Retirement as a concept remains ingrained in our consciousness, but wasn't this a concept borne out of the days of heavy-duty back-breaking industrial age work (think coal-mines and shipbuilding) versus today's plonked in front of a computer monitor version of work...?

We no longer need to slug our way to the finish line at aged 65(ish) and then rest our weary bodies from years of hard toil. Many of us can work from laptops and surely keeping our brains active until the day we drop is a better option. In fact, we'll probably find that we can bring more wisdom and insight to the table in our 60s, 70s, 80s (and beyond) than our younger selves were ever capable. Today, seeing all those folk with years of deep ingrained knowledge slide off quietly aged 65 to prune their roses for the next 30 years of life is often such a waste.

I wonder if we should rethink the whole concept of retirement?

To think that we will go on working and adding value to society in some capacity until the day we die might be a better way to think. Forgetting about some arbitrary age (e.g. 65) as the time to stop working and instead stopping when we feel we have nothing left to offer.

This doesn't mean that we have to carry on with the same work as we're doing now. In fact, I think it might lead to the opposite. Thinking longer term (with no set "finishing line") would allow us to follow our curiosities and interests, as we would know that we might have an extra 20-30 years of work ahead of us - so why not choose stuff that we enjoy? Rather than grinding on in the same job "as there's just 10 years left until we hit 65..." as our driving chain of thought.

A non-retirement would also take pressure off our personal finances as there would be no need to build up a nest egg that is capable of "lasting us for 20-30 years (or more)" - this task is becoming increasingly onerous as life expectancies extend and right now with over-inflated asset prices e.g. stock markets.

An ongoing question is:

How much do I need to save? What's your number?

(almost impossible to answer)

Non-retirement would have two key financial benefits:

  1. Not necessarily needing to save up a certain amount of finances to "last us" (aka "The Number");
  2. Not running down savings, in fact we might be extending them.

This latter point is a double benefit: we're not eating into savings, we're adding to them or at the very least preserving them. Every day of work pushes the potential problem of financing retirement further away into the distance.

Our ability to work (our "human capital" in posh terms) is the single most valuable financial tool at our disposal. The more and longer we can leverage it, the better.

What are your thoughts on retirement?

Photo by Anukrati Omar on Unsplash