retirement Archives

A few lies about retirement, or, just a few things I know so far from personal experience and common sense.

You can’t retire with a mortgage

Well, here’s the thing. Of course you can retire with a mortgage! I’m not sure I know anyone who is retired who has also paid off the mortgage, although I do know a couple of high-earning folks who probably have. But honestly, they’re a tiny minority in my life.

My late father, my siblings who are retired, and closest friends who are retired all have or had mortgages when they stopped working.

Blogger in front of Liberace's house in Palm Springs — I wonder, did Liberace pay off his mortgage?

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I think this “rule” is a relic of that post-war past when middle class Americans could afford to buy a house with a middle income and live as a family on just that one income for 40 years, then retire for a few healthy years with a defined pension and their social security. And no mortgage, cause they paid it off in 30 years and they never moved!

Those days are ancient history for the vast majority. I know some contemporaries whose parents would have hit this sweet spot. But they’ve largely left the planet by now.

You can’t be a renter and retire: homeowner or else!

This myth is also something I often see in financial articles about retirement. Again, I think this is a bias that the financial press has about homeownership being the correct aspirational goal for everyone.

This is a hard one since we, as Americans, are conditioned to believe this myth from childhood. I used to have this argument with my father all the time. He was very invested in the idea of being a homeowner – well, he was a man with a wife and eight children, of course he’d want a stable home with something like a yard for his kids to play in. Also, I think he liked the security of knowing what the payment would always be.

I have a very different frame of reference. I’ve always been single, I don’t have children or other dependents, and both times I owned homes (condominiums, in my case) I soon felt antsy and trapped and really didn’t want the responsibility to take care of the many things that you get to be in charge of as an owner.

To get back to my main point – it may be desirable for the financial industry if everyone is a homeowner – more money for mortgage brokers, banks and real estate folks – but you can be a renter and retire just fine. I’m doing it, as are countless folks in apartments and senior housing around the country.

And one last point on that – a pet peeve of mine – are those who say you’re just throwing your money away on rent. How ridiculous! You are buying a roof over your head with that money – my current roof costs about $16 a day. If anything, the Great Recession schooled us on how foolish it would be to assume that real estate was always an investment that would appreciate endlessly. In most areas of the country, you’d be better off investing in an index fund.

And finally – for now, anyway, this lie about retirement:

You need a certain amount of money to retire

Is it $1.7 million? Seriously? If that’s true, most people will never be able to retire.

This is the headline for the above linked article on CNBC.com: Most Americans say you need $1.7 million to retire—here’s how much money to save each month to get there

So it might be nice – real nice – to have that cool $1.7 million when you finally stop working, but the truth is one day you’ll find yourself older and not working and realize you’ve “retired,” whether you’ve got the $1.7 mil or not.

Usually the pundits base these numbers on income level just prior to retirement: they’ll say you should have 10x your most recent salary in retirement savings.

I think this – perhaps it’s a good, general, rule of thumb – but at its heart is the wrong metric. What you should focus on is spending level, not income level.

By focusing on income level, the financial gurus perpetuate as a truism that all people spend all of their income. But, let’s say, you make 150K per year and only spend 75K. Wouldn’t it make more sense to pin the retirement numbers on what you actually spent? I think so.

It makes way more sense. But then, of course, it’s a lower number for most people, then you wouldn’t need all these financial advisors and their investment products. Heavens! What then – the gurus who write these things for financial sites like the ones I’ve linked will be making less money.

As with so many things, it’s helpful to follow the money to figure out who’s really benefiting from this kind of advice.

oh, this minefield!

Copyright All rights reserved by evan-etc

What people really mean is “what is your job?” But so often we take it to mean “What are you?” In America, it’s how people define themselves. Particularly men, but also increasingly, women.

What they really want to ask, is “who are you?” And here in the U.S. especially, we equate our self-identity with our paid employment.

So what if you don’t have that anymore? Or what if you never did? Or what if it changed, significantly?

“I don’t do anything” is not an appropriate answer, as it could just as easily mean you live in a luxury apartment on a trust fund or live under the freeway bridge. Or certainly, a million other scenarios.

For those pursuing artistic endeavors, especially those that do not pay enough to make a living at (and very well never will), we still don’t want to be defined by our day jobs which have no relation to how we think of ourselves. Always a conundrum!

Say, if you work in the typing pool (or, excuse me, the word processing/admin pool) but you’re using your breaks to memorize the Shakespeare lines for Saturday’s showcase, the last thing you want to answer when someone asks that question is “I’m an administrative assistant.” (Not to denigrate the admins out there, but this person has other aspirations that need to be respected.)

There are those who would kill your dreams and insist that you are what you do for money. They may feel they’re realists, but I think they suffer from a lack of imagination and a soul sickness of advanced consumerism.

I’ve found this puzzle is exacerbated when one gets to, what, well, semi-retirement, or is it just classified as self-employment or part-time work as a result of long-term underemployment? Certainly, one doesn’t want to just blurt out: “Ever hear of the Great Recession, underemployment and age discrimination? Huh, buddy? Well lemme tell you a little story. . .”

Because, well, that would sound like you’ve become Debbie Downer, like you had a lot of self-pity (even if on the face of it it’s pretty darn accurate for millions of people in this country and around the world and god knows you must remain chipper at all times) but there’s also the stigma of the word “retirement.” Eeek.

That old definition just screams visions of ill-fitting shorts and golf, cocktail hours with Hawaiian shirts and leis, hours of television in the afternoon. None of which sounds like something to look forward to, at least not to me.

So we avoid that word right now and say instead: we’re moving on to a new chapter in life, which will likely include some work, some creativity, and some leisure. We don’t know exactly what it will look like yet, but it will be different from what came before, and probably endlessly changing.

So, I am a writer. There needs to be no qualifiers or caveats (i.e., “I used to have a long career in PR” or “But I have a part-time job in the design sector” or whatever). This stands on its own.

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