Replacing Retirement with Meaning – Episode 578

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[00:00] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. We are thrilled. We’re actually working on a upgraded video podcast. So for any of you listeners that are on audio, make sure you jump over to the YouTube channel and we’ll put a link there so that you can subscribe and see the latest updates. But today we’re going to be talking, it comes from a book club that I’m doing with my son and it’s Man’s Search for Meeting. We’re going to talk about the swear word that starts with the letter R, which is retirement. Kim, why is that first off, why is that a swear word? Because it’s a societal construct that was literally invented in about the 1930s and there’s some variation on the storyline as to who, us, Germany, whatever, it doesn’t

[00:50] matter that is so detrimental to human beings. Now of course the word can have lots of different definitions and there are some people that have figured out how to do it beautifully, but under the typical definition, which is this magical age, 65, that was also chosen back in the 1930s when people didn’t really live past 65 very often, and this time in your life is supposed to be filled with friends and travel and frankly, it is a selfish act. It is. It’s another S word, but we’re not going to get into that. We’re going to read the quote from Man’s Search for Meeting to give context. Here’s how it goes. I have a son that’s 16 years old and he’s been in various book clubs with other friends and so I wanted to do a book club with him and the secret, his

[01:47] friends aren’t listening, so that’s good. So we start the book and then we told some of his other friends and they’re like, wait, that sounds cool, I want in. So that’s what we do. I love it. Leading with Man’s search for meaning. It’s not exactly the easiest candy read, but it’s not a hard read at all. So here’s the quote. You ready? Yes. So he goes, my own congregational experience has shown me the truth of Frank’s insights and he’s talking in the forward of the book, he goes, I have known successful businessmen who upon retirement lost all zest for life. Their work had given them meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and without it, they spent day after day sitting at home depressed with nothing to do.

[02:36] Kim, let’s make sure we change a generation. How do we fix it? Let’s fix it right now. Let’s do it. I’m so confident in knowing that we can because when I went to my son’s college graduation, so a whole bunch of 22 years old kids, this is I want to say five, six, seven years ago, there were people in the audience, so kids, parents, et cetera, and I don’t know how this conversation got started, but it must’ve just leapt from little group to little group and apparently somebody had asked a lot of these college graduates something about retirement and to a T, they were saying, I don’t really think I liked the idea. I don’t understand, and this is a college kid, you just gotta love it. I don’t understand why you would work so hard to find work and then

[03:31] quit doing it, especially because I, again, the kid talking, want to find work that I love to do. And so it was such a breath of fresh air for me because I realized that there is a generation out there that has seen the detriment of what retirement can do. And again, some people can pull it off beautifully. They volunteer, they serve, they keep meaning in their life. Maybe they had meaning elsewhere anyway, and if not, they find it. But for the majority of Americans, it becomes a selfish act and they are no longer putting the talent that God gave them out into the marketplace to be used. Now there doesn’t have to be a monetary exchange for that, but if we intend to live our lives full of travel and self-indulgence, we

[04:29] will get the results of a life lived that way. And it’s not a pretty picture and you don’t have to look far to see it. Walk through an American airport these days, it is shocking. And so it’s so important to me to continue to spread the message of, oh my gosh, do something different. Take sabbaticals, take free days, take other approaches to your desire for travel or downtime or whatever it is, and keep serving. Because serving, which we call working, is what gives your life meaning. Absolutely does. So I want to take a couple of other pieces that you’re packing in, which is the serving. You said you were listening to these millennials, Gen Z, I don’t know what age they were, but they’re in this age where they’re wanting

[05:29] meaning, they’re not wanting to retire. Is it a baby boomer thing? Is that what it is? Is it because they were sold that, hey, the runway ends at 65? What’s the reason? And how do we maybe even start to educate the older listeners? Because maybe some of the younger listeners are saying, no, this gives me purpose. What do we do? Absolutely. I think for those that are seeking meaning in their work, which is so wise, because for most of us, we will spend long, long hours at work. And for those of us that are either already there or seeking that, kudos to you, keep going, keep doing. The suggestions that I’m going to make are going to work for either section of the audience. For those that got sold the bill of goods, which is this societal construct

[06:23] called retirement, I encourage you to today start to rethink that. And we absolutely must rethink it. And it’s because of two or three very specific reasons. And then we’ll talk about what to do instead. So the reasons that you want to rethink it is first of all, longevity. So everybody knows that everybody is living longer. And what that means is in America, if you look at typical life expectancy charts and depending on which one you pull, you’re going to see basically early eighties, early to mid eighties is what you would see for life expectancy. It is so imperative to understand what that means statistically, which is that you have a 50% chance of living greater than that age. It’s not some brick wall that you’re going to hit and die immediately.

[07:16] It is a midpoint. 50% of the people in America are going to live past age 85 or four or whatever statistic you pull. Somebody showed me one the other day that said age 73. I said, I don’t know where you’re getting that statistic, but that’s ludicrous. But it doesn’t matter whether it is or not. 50% of the people are going to live longer than that and 50% less. Okay, fine. We generally have a healthy clientele that listens to this podcast. So my guess is they will live longer. In fact, gosh, another quick side story. I was speaking with a 70 plus year old gentleman who had just gotten approved for insurance at pretty good rates and he was thinking, I may not live till 85. I said, you just got approved for life insurance.

[08:03] You better believe you’re probably going to live well past age 85. So longevity, we need to be planning for those that are in their 60s. We need to be planning out past a hundred for those that are in their 20s and 30s, we need to be planning out past 120. And if you don’t believe that, please go look it up. Follow Peter Diamandis or Ray Kurzweil or many doctors out there these days are talking about lifespans in the 120 plus range for those that are 20 plus year old today. So longevity, must rethink retirement due to longevity. Thoughts before I go on to the other couple? Yeah, longevity, but we also have tied with longevity. I’m going to type in or tie in energy. And so I think what happens is some people have this problem where

[08:54] their couch gets Velcro or glue on it and it just sits them in there. There’s no reason for that. And so by living longer, eating better, keeping your mind engaged, you’ll have more energy to continue to do those things. And how awesome would it be if 70 year olds are beating out the 20 and 30 year olds? Absolutely. And you can find evidence of this. All you have to do is just a quick YouTube search of people in their 80s weightlifting or people in their 90s swimming or you name it. And you’ll find amazing examples and energy begets energy. If you spend and use your energy, you will get more of it. That’s just the way it works. And so if you don’t spend it, if you try to conserve it, then you end up getting less of it.

[09:49] And so it’s a very understandable and yet scary space. And when we talk about longevity, we want health spans that are long, not just life spans and energy and movement. And of course, also the mental and the social aspects that go along with that are a huge part of that. Yeah. It’s, it’s no fun for someone to be old and eat cat food alone, saving money, right? Correct. All right. So after longevity, what do we have next? Inflation. So I was looking at somebody’s situation the other day. Again, they were in their sixties. This is not my typical clientele. I actually prefer those that are younger and alive, both age-wise and mentally. Nevertheless, they had me look at inflation on their expenses.

[10:39] Their expenses tripled over their lifetime. It is, we know this, but your expenses are going to triple from 30 to 60. They’re going to triple again from 60 to 90. And you can say, I wouldn’t be doing whatever as much. Maybe not, but you would want help with the yard, help with maybe house cleaning, help with other things that though we want you to keep active and using your energy, you may not be able to, and so it’s imperative that you have extra money to be able to hire that talent to come and help you live your life. And so inflation is just astronomical. And the only way to beat inflation is to keep working and using money and enabling your body to be used to provide the service that then gets

[11:33] that money is the best thing that you can do. So we’ve got the longevity. We’ve got inflation. We’ve got these pieces that all fit together, the ingredients of it. So there’s another part to the puzzle. And it’s, again, I’m going to go back to the quote right here, where it says, often it was the only thing that they had given their lives meaning, meaning their work was the only thing that had meaning. So I want to ask a financial question, which is this, a person say they’re close to retirement age, they’ve decided how much money they may need. That number, would you say most of the time people are accurate or inaccurate with that number? Very inaccurate. And the press is not helping any, they’re causing this mistake.

[12:22] Are they inaccurate on thinking they need too little or they need too much? They are inaccurate because they have too little and they think they can make it work. Okay. So for those people, and I want to address the audience call 55 and over that inaccurately think that they have enough. And now we’re coming, we’re raising the flag and we’re saying, it’s time to be doing something else. Where do they access those funds? What, if they’re going to start a business, if they’re going to create other investments, other things, let’s talk about the financial tools and financial wisdom you can share right now for the 55 plus. I think it’s very fun to look at those resources and realize that they can help you pursue an opportunity to build those resources rather than

[13:17] feeling like, oh, these are my retirement dollars and I cannot touch them. First of all, there is a whole set of strategies that we can implement around those retirement dollars to make them more efficient and optimize the money as opposed to maximize it, which is try to make it as big as possible, optimizes to make it as efficient as possible. But I think in this position, they should also be looking at maybe 20, 30% of that money as opportunity money to pursue that thing that they could then work at for a long time. So let’s hope that the person enjoys their work and they can just keep working. But if they don’t enjoy their work, now is the time to cut the cords on that and go find work that they love.

[14:05] Go back and be that 22 year old kid that is on the search for work that provides them meaning. Now we could talk about the fact that you also need to have family and friends that provide you meaning. That’s a subset of the quote from the book. Nevertheless, because we do spend so much time at our work, it’s imperative that we find work that has meaning for us. And my age old advice in this space is to get your Colby profile, KOLBE, go to their website. It’s $55 and is the most valuable information in terms of self-knowledge around work that you can find that will fit the God given talent that was given you because when you’re working in the area of your God given talent, it does not feel like work.

[14:55] Absolutely. So the one nugget that I pulled out of there, because I’m trying to listen to this for our listeners, 55 and above, is to make the mental mind shift to say, I’m going to take a percentage of this. When you mentioned, let’s say 20% and be willing to use that as capital for an investment, capital for a business, whatever that would be. Why is it that most people are afraid to do that? Because they know that the dollars that they have are not enough. And so it seems very scary to actually purposely spend them today. And that’s no way to live life. And so you’ll do your research. You’ll check things out carefully and you’ll invest those dollars in yourself. You are your best investment and investing in some learning, investing

[15:53] in some skills that you could pick up, investing in a certification, investing in a program to do it carefully, because of course you can waste many dollars doing this kind of thing, but with careful, go slow, start small approaches, you can find that thing that you can then do the rest of your life with freedom and not only have more money and more meaning, but create the solution for the inflation and the longevity issues right off the top of the whole deal. Okay. You didn’t ask for this. I’m going to try and pull something out of you real quick, which is you’ve recently gone all in with online education, online groups, online training. So can you touch on why you decided to make that shift to be able to

[16:48] help not only this audience, but to reach more of an audience? Sure. As we know today, it is the way to reach a wider audience. And for me, it serves my purpose as well. And it gives me more meaning to be able to help people online in group coaching programs or in video training, as opposed to traveling about the country, going to events. Now I’ll still do some of that, but I enjoy our home very much. I love our dog and our pool and the alpacas. And to me, being able to help people, which I intend to do until my very last breath from our home is a more sustainable business model than traveling about and trying to help people that way. And I’ve really worked from home truly since the internet began.

[17:44] Nevertheless, I haven’t had the group approach as much. And yet I believe that it’s within community that we get better results. People are really looking for like-minded communities these days. And so why shouldn’t prosperity thinkers provide one? Yeah, absolutely. I know for me, that’s one of the best ways that I’ve been able to learn. I can think right now for any of our listeners that are on the path of figuring out, okay, I don’t want to retire, but there’s other things I can do. Join a community of like-minded people, go start a YouTube channel, go create a newsletter, do something. I’m, for example, I learned how to sharpen my knives from a 78 year old person. Like someone much older than me shared that wisdom and like the ability to

[18:35] have so much information at our fingertips from YouTube, from groups, from others is unbelievable. So Kim, thank you for sharing about longevity, about the swear word, the R word that we’re not going to utter and for helping listeners get some more of the meaning, the cliffhanger for any of you listeners that are under the age of 55 and you’re in the maximizing, not optimizing stage, and you need to figure out what you can do there. Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel, cause that’s where we get the full videos and the clips. And if you have a specific question, send it to hello at Prosperity Thinkers. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast.

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