Retirement is a Scam – Episode 462

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[00:00] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. This one is called Retirement is a Scam and it’s from a Twitter thread. Kim, are you ready? Always. Thank you, Spencer. This is going to be so good. So this is from Joe Cassandra. We’ll put a link inside of the show notes and give a shout out to Joe. So he says, retirement is a scam. We will finally travel and take up hobbies. And actually, you’ll do that two months of the year. The rest of the time, you’re watching TV. And here’s the best part, or looking out the window to see if the garbage man showed up. Oh, isn’t that harsh? But you know what? That’s reality. So let’s hear it, Kim. Oh, my gosh. Well, this has been a soapbox of mine for quite a while, although I’ll admit

[00:53] not forever. In my early years, I totally got the whole retirement thing. And I would properly ask people the question, at what age do you want to retire? The most ridiculous question in the world. And you know what’s really funny? If I had listened to my mom, who was a teacher her entire life, had no knowledge of the personal finance space, who said to me, that’s a silly question. Why would I even know that answer? And I just never would have gotten into the retirement landscape. I would have been so better off. Nevertheless, since I did get into it, I know how much of a scam it is. And furthermore, I see people, thankfully not a lot, but I do see people that have quote retired and it’s awesome for two months.

[01:41] I’m going to say not two months out of the year, just two months period. Because what happens after that is, oh, it’s too cold to travel, or oh, we don’t feel like traveling, or we maybe don’t have the money, or we don’t have the money freedom, those can be different things, or whatever the reason is. And I don’t know any hobbies because I never developed any during my working life and I don’t have friends beyond my work because I didn’t take a sabbatical or take time for vacations or the myriad of things that we’ll talk about as solutions for the retirement is a scam. And then just one more thing. Don’t even get me going on age 65 and really what has happened in our society around that. Yeah, it’s scary.

[02:31] So I think, you know, we’ve got the general concept of retirement as a scam. But then there’s the offshoots and the problems that the government forces people into. For example, you hit a certain age and you’re forced to go into their medical programs. You’re forced to sign up for certain paperwork. You’re forced to take advantage and pull some of your assets out. It’s like they want to force people out of the things that they built and did. So talk more about that. Well, it is very interesting, especially around, for example, age 70 and a half. So you put money, the bulk of people’s assets are money that are put into retirement plans, IRAs, 401Ks, 403Bs, all of that type of thing. And at 59 and a half, you can take them out.

[03:18] And at 70 and a half, you have to take them out. And like age 65, to my knowledge, those numbers have never, ever been moved. So just a quick bunny rabbit trail. In 1930, when age 65 was put forth, and I assume it was around that same time that 59 and a half and 70 and a half, I actually don’t know when 59 and a half and 70 and a half and really half. I mean, who comes up with this stuff? Were put forth. But to what I do know is in 1930, when age 65 was put forth, life expectancy was about 64 for the typical male. And there are still corporations that have required retirement and they have to like get a board of directors approval to have somebody work longer than that, which is insane when you know the math behind it.

[04:11] And that is that if you moved age 65 forward, the same way that our life expectancy has been moved forward, then age 65 should actually be 87. Well, if 65 should be 87, that means 70 and a half when you are supposed to start government should have any say at all on when we withdraw our money. I don’t know the exact math, but we can guess, and it would need to easily be 92 or something like that, maybe 93 or 94, the way the numbers play out. So here we have this governmental program that is restricting creativity and opportunity. And then when you look at what happens when somebody actually does retire and all of the bad things that start to happen to them around their social lives, their physical selves, their mental selves,

[05:12] their physiological selves. So I always use all the L-Y words, you know, retirement is bad for you socially, mentally, emotionally, physically, socially, I already said that, psychologically, physiologically, like what other L-Y words do we need to know that the government telling us what we should be doing with our lives and our bodies and our minds is a really dangerous space. And I think this is one of the most dangerous spaces and it’s so sad because it’s sold as such a bill of goods. Oh, absolutely. I’m going to get some feedback from you on something from a conversation I recently had with a friend of mine that’s in his seventies. So this will actually give perfect context to it, I hope.

[05:57] So he owned a successful landscaping and lawn care company. And ultimately the bulk of the value of his business happened to be in the real estate he owned. You know, that happens many times. Sure. And so when he got into his early seventies, he decided that he wanted to sell his business and he had a, you know, a conversation that typically starts with a business broker or financial advisor. And then he ended up getting an offer someone purchased and we were talking and he said, I really, it’s not that I don’t want to work anymore because he moved to a different job. He’s still working. He said, I just didn’t want to deal with parts of the business. And I think our retirement folks, have you seen the same thing that

[06:45] they’ve engaged for 40, 50 years in something, their brains are sharp. Maybe it’s not that they don’t want to work. They just want to do something different with that brain. So dive into that for us. Well, I love the idea of second, third and fourth careers, because I think a lot of people would absolutely enjoy working. Maybe it’s 30 hours a week, or maybe it’s in a different capacity, or it’s maybe part of the work and not all of the work or what have you. And clearly for business owners, it’s the best because you can hire people to do what it is that you don’t want to do yourself, but interestingly enough, this is one of the big fallacies around retirement and that’s that retired people also don’t want to do certain things.

[07:30] Like you might want to have enough money to continue to hire a driver as an example, or a housekeeper or somebody to do your groceries or what have you. And so when you think back to the person and the opportunities that are out there now for part-time work and applying your skills in a fairly narrow environment, meaning one that you love that you could do every day or at least maybe three or four days a week and still have as much energy at the end of the day as you did at the beginning, because you loved that work so much, that is literally endless employment. Because if you didn’t like that exact job, it could shift a little bit. Employers now are so willing to bring on experience and capability and work with the person.

[08:17] And maybe it’s that you want to work four days a week instead of paid a little bit more, or maybe it’s you want to be paid a little bit more and jam it into three days or whatever it is that suits you and your family and your goals and what you do want to have happen in your life and your own cadence of work schedules and all of those things can truly be dialed in these days with corporations and small businesses that are willing to be flexible to get the good people and the engaged people. And that’s what everybody should want for their life. Literally right up to the very end, like die on stage. That’s a Dan Sullivan quote. He says either die on stage or die while I’m talking or something like that.

[09:02] Yeah, that’s so well put. So, you know, this episode right here, retirement is a scam. I know on previous episodes, you’ve used the actual language. You’ve broken down the language. To retire means to be taken out of service. I enjoy what I do. You enjoy what you do. That’s a punishment. That is not a reward. Yeah. Yeah. And I think also people do desire the societal approved activities of retirement. You know, when you see the ads on TV, okay, well then go do that for a period of time. If you want to travel, go travel, work that into your life as opposed to waiting because so many people wait and then they die. I mean, my mom passed on in her, I think it was mid fifties. I don’t really remember how old she was at the time, maybe early sixties.

[09:53] She didn’t get to go back to Europe like she had hoped. She didn’t get to travel. She worked and then died and that’s, you know, I’m sad about it, but not really, thankfully it was a long time ago and I’m way past it. And at the same time, it was such a really good example of what happens to people sometimes. So mix the things in that you want to do now. Take a year sabbatical if you want to, but find a way to create the environment that gives you the time that you make the time for the hobbies or whatever it is that you think that you’re going to do, because I guarantee you the few people that I do know that are retirement, you said it so well or the quote really from the post, holy cow, you’re

[10:41] looking at the mailman, you’re watching TV way, way more than is good for any human being. And it’s just a life that’s on a downhill slide. And instead my dad is in his early eighties still working for the university, my mother-in-law still goes to the lab in the hospital that she’s worked at and she does it on her terms. She works when she wants to work and there’s so much good joy in their lives because us human beings need a little bit of that structure. We need to have a reason to get up and get out of bed every day. We need to have the societal good that comes from serving, which is the total opposite. I mean, when you think about it, really retirement is an extremely selfish way of living.

[11:30] It is totally. I’m going to spin a spiderweb of action right now. So I’m thinking for all of our listeners that are in that age where you’re still working and retirement quote, I’m using that as the language retirement is not in the near horizon. This may be an episode for you to reach out to the generation that is older than you and get them engaged. If they’ve retired, pull them in, get them actively working with you or working with your kids. If you’re at that retirement age, this is the opportunity for you to reach down to the younger generation and say, Hey, how can I sharpen my mind? And for the younger people, our millennials or our Gen Z audience, this is the opportunity for you to collect wisdom beyond

[12:19] your years by asking them. So I hopefully have spun a little bit of a spiderweb to help there. Yes, I love that. There’s so much good that can happen. And if you don’t have people in those two generations in your own life, church groups, even things like that, you can go on meetup.com and find little groups of areas of interest of yours and see if there’s people of the different generations there. You know, of course, even the social media platforms, all of those are spaces where you could find some of those people. And there’s so, so much good that can happen in that. And then I would also like to speak to the 50 and 60 year olds that I get on the phone occasionally that say, you know, I really like to slow down.

[13:02] I think that’s such a dangerous term. Go find a life that engages you so that you can make it more graceful and keep working. And I counsel people left, right, and center do not retire. We’re going to live so much longer than the previous generation. I mean, we need to be lasting our money out 40, 50 years. And frankly, most people, there’s definitely some exceptions, but most people just don’t have that kind of money. And so then not only are you retired, but you’re living a life of scrimping and not having fun because you don’t have financial resources with which to do that. And I truly cannot imagine anything worse, except maybe 20 years later, then trying to get back into the workforce when you’ve been out of it

[13:51] that long because you have to, because inflation has eroded your purchasing power and your social security check doesn’t pay the bills anymore. It’s going to be so much easier just to stay engaged and go take vacation or a year sabbatical or do something different and keep working. Such a good episode. Kim, thank you for that. So I think everyone’s heard and we’ve hit home. Retirement is a scam. Don’t do it. And Kim’s given actionable pieces on how you can reach out and be engaged. Thanks for this episode. A lot of fun. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.