You may have heard that millennials in the workplace are lazy and “entitled,” but sociologist Moen says that’s a bad rap. She says young workers simply don’t want to wait decades until retirement for their quality of life — an attitude that has been reinforced by the recession, as they’ve seen parents and boomer relatives lose their jobs.
“They no longer believe in the myth that working in rigid ways for long hours necessarily pays off,” Moen says. “That’s a real change.”
I think I might be slightly older than what is defined as a “millenial” but I understand the sentiment entirely.
Here’s the thing:
I’m a 29 year old American who doesn’t smoke, which gives me around 50 more years of life (on average). But that’s with current technology.
What happens if I get to 62 and medical technology has improved dramatically, and suddenly my life expectancy is not 80, but 100, or 110. Don’t scoff. I wouldn’t want to try to guess the odds on it, but it’s not unreasonable.
So what will my life look like at 62? Retirement seems unlikely if I might have 40 years of life left. I won’t have an employer pension, unless I have a dramatic career change. Also I assume I can’t expect much from social security. It will either be means tested, or I will have been self-employed long enough that I won’t have contributed enough to have it make a difference. Which leaves the IRA and other savings I’ve been funding. But how long can that hold out? Hard to say.
All that means I’ll probably have to keep working.
And that changes my perspective now. If there’s a fairly good chance that I won’t have the “Golden Years” style retirement, then I’m going to want as high a quality of life now as I can find. The life I have now, bouncing back and forth between Mary Holste Design, City Club, and Metro Parks, can be stressful and take a lot of energy. But on the plus side, some days I can sleep in, or work at the dining room table with Mary, or come to SXSW. Those are pretty great things.
Even thinking about this whole thing a little further, I’m not sure I want the “Golden Years” retirement even if it were available. One of the other things that has informed my thinking was some work I did recently for Mary Lloyd, author of Super-Charged Retirement. I normally wouldn’t have started to think about retirement so early, but listening to her questions and ideas got me started on the different kinds of retirement available to me.
Thanks for sharing, Erik. I’m a little younger than you, which puts me smack in the Millennial age bracket. I feel similarly about the traditional life path in America. The American dream for this generation was sold on the basis of a college education. “Get the education, and you can do anything.” “Struggle and work hard and you can go far.” The promise hasn’t borne itself out in a lot of cases, and the price of a college education continues to grow.
I plan on retiring by 50 and spending the second half of life being fully involved in the community, gardening and planting trees in potholes.
But how will you retire at 50–that’s still a golden years idea of retirement and makes me wary of how long the money will last? What if you have 40 or 50 more years of life left? Let’s say you live frugally and pay off a house before then so that you don’t have high housing costs and you can manage on $20,000 a year (which, given that this will be at least 50 years from now seems hard, but let’s stick with it for a second).
If you want to get $20,000 a year from interest and not dip into your capital, you’d need $500,000 so that you wouldn’t burn through any of the money (assuming you can skim 4% off the interest from stocks,bonds, etc). If you did just pile up the cash though, then even $500,000 would only last 25 years, assuming it earned no interest. Since that’s not likely, let’s say it would last 35 years. But you might live longer than that. What would you do at 86?
The reason I liked Mary Lloyd’s take was that it was suggesting that a lot of people would do better to “cycle in and out of work” instead of just flat out retire. 3 months on, 4 months off. 5 months on, 8 months off, etc. It keeps the money coming in and also gives you the best benefits of being retired. I think it’s an intriguing idea. (I think it’d be pretty awesome right now).
So I guess what I’m getting at is that if I can’t do many decades of life retired, I’ll just have a good quality of life while I work, even if it’s into my 60s or 70s so that by the time I have to retire, I can realistically know the money wont run out on me.