In Getting the Goalpost to Stop Moving, the ever-insightful Morgan Housel compares and contrasts money expectations today with the 1950s, which are often fondly remembered as a golden era of economic prosperity.
It’s important to balance Return on Investment with Return on Life™ (ROL). ROL is defined as: "How well you are doing in living the life you want with the money you have."
A key part of your retirement plan is a discussion of the benefits of working, regardless of age. Retirement is no longer an event...it's a segue into a new approach to life as you know it. One definition of “work” is that it consists of actions that bring value to others and meaning to you. While you may feel that you’ve had enough work, it’s probably the underlying issues (i.e. meetings, corporate politics, commuting) that have left you drained and exhausted. Think about this: many people who go back to work after retirement are motivated by more than money––they are also motivated by the health, psychological, and friendship payoffs.
Whether you’ve been told you should retire at 62, 65, or some other age, only you can decide what is right for you. In fact, you may want to reconsider retiring at all––at least in the traditional sense. Many of us don’t like the circumstances we find ourselves in and look at retirement as the nirvana we’ve been missing. The truth probably lies somewhere between completely dropping out (piddling around in retirement) and never retiring (dying with our boots on). The reason many of us find ourselves in such situations is we've been sold an idea about retirement that is flawed: the notion that we should do what we don’t enjoy to accumulate the money we need to someday do what we want. This hope of doing what we really want to do is why the concept of traditional retirement is appealing to so many of us.
Did you know that Americans today can expect to live about 30 years longer than our 20th century ancestors? That’s according to findings published in The Gift of Time, a survey conducted by the Allianz Longevity Project in collaboration with the Stanford Center on Longevity. So what will you do with all your extra time?