a quaint twentieth-century concept

[swan_tower]

My husband and I reached a point a while ago where we ought to start thinking about doing something more useful with our savings than letting them sit in a savings account. After much procrastination, we finally went to see an investment advisor to talk about our options.

During that meeting, one of the things he asked us was when we expected to retire. I forget what my husband said; my reply was basically that so long as I am healthy enough to write, and continuing to earn money by doing so, I see no reason to stop.

What I did not say to him: I don’t think I believe in retirement anymore.

I have a dreadful suspicion that fifty years from now, “retirement” is going to be seen as a quaint twentieth-century concept, an unusual social construct that existed for a little while and then went away again. There will be no retirement; there will only be dying or reaching a point where you are no longer able to work. If you’re lucky, you’ll have enough money to more or less support yourself when that latter point comes. If you aren’t . . . and a lot of people won’t be. I have far too many friends with no savings and too much debt — college- and even grad-school-educated friends who can’t find jobs worthy of their qualifications, who work at what they can get to make ends meet but god help them if one thing goes wrong. There’s no “retirement” when you can barely afford a nest, let alone put together a nest egg.

I’d like to be wrong. I’d like to see this country, and a lot of others around the world, reverse the current trend toward wealth stratification that leaves 1% with obscene amounts of money and 99% with a life plan straight out of the nineteenth century. I don’t really plan to retire, but I’d like it to be a thing people can still do when I get to that age.

In the meanwhile, I will save money, invest it wisely, and count my lucky stars that I’m in a position to try.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[marycatelli]

Retirement was invented by Bismark. And set a good number of years past the life expectancy of his time.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's part of the problem: our life expectancy has gotten longer, but our assumption of when retirement should happen hasn't. (At least, not officially.) There's a big difference between saving for those last five years of your life, if you even make it that far, and saving for thirty fairly likely post-productive years. There was a golden zone where it seems to have actually been possible, but it was short-lived.

Mind you, with the way health in the U.S. is going, I believe our life expectancy has actually started to drop. So maybe we'll solve the problem by another route. >_<