Читать книгу What to Do to Retire Successfully - Martin B. Goldstein - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Practicality of Retirement
Not all people in a position to choose should consider retiring. Workers who are obligated to retire at a certain age or because of their physical inability to perform their duties properly may have no choice. Neither do those individuals whose positions are superseded by technological changes in their industries.
WHO SHOULD RETIRE AND WHO SHOULDN’T
The questions to be considered are: Are you ready and what will you do after you are no longer employed? Can you afford to retire? Do you want to retire? Have you properly prepared for retirement? Are you psychologically ready to change your life?
The best answers to these questions can be found in self-awareness, because ultimately the answer must come from the individual and how well he or she knows him or herself. How much is your life tied to your work? Do you have sufficient activities and hobbies to sustain your interests? Many people go through stages of their adult lifetime unaware of who they truly are. Bound up in obligations to others, they have consciously or unconsciously suppressed their own true desires in fulfilling their duties to occupation and family. They have become what they do and not who they are. The more you know yourself, the easier it will be to make retirement decisions.
If you have insufficient funds, find yourself unemployed and cannot sustain yourself on unemployment benefits, the answer is simple: you must try to get another job, even if it means retraining in a different industry or starting a business, no matter how humble. These are simplistic solutions to devastating situations and age or infirmity may make them impossible. In conditions such as these, retirement is not even a consideration. However, in this book we will address the positions, needs and desires of those individuals who do have a reasonable choice to make and the ability to do so. To continue working or not? To start a new venture or drift into a state of continual vacation?
There are many aspects involved in the assessment of one’s state of preparedness for retiring and we will explore them.
PRIDE
I shall never forget an experience I had many years ago while on vacation in Florida. While strolling through a marina, admiring the large boats docked there, I came upon an older man polishing the chrome rails running along the bow of a huge yacht and crying. I asked him what was wrong. Could I be of any help? He told me he had made a terrible mistake. A year earlier, he said, he sat at the head of a large table in a New York City office as the chairman of the board of a company he had helped to create. He was a “somebody.” Now, a year later, after taking voluntary retirement and ceding his power to another, he considered himself a “nobody,” doing the work of a deckhand, polishing chrome. He had believed that devoting himself to the object of his vacation time, his yacht, would bring him the joy he sought, not understanding that his prime pleasure was in administering to his real “baby,” his business. This sense of loss of self-pride and the admiration of others brought this still-vital man to a point of depression. He was not ready to relinquish the reins of power that had been the source of his pride.
Despite being well educated and affluent, this gentleman had insufficient insight into who he really was and what his personality makeup required for contentment at that time of his life.
PERSONALITY TYPES
Personality can predetermine one’s relationship to work: the degree of motivation, the amount of enjoyment in accomplishment, the attachment to the work milieu, the camaraderie felt toward fellow workers and the ability to easily (or with difficulty) exit this existence.
Compulsive individuals who readily become regimented, adhere to the discipline of the workplace and are prone to over-evaluate the fact of accomplishment may find it more difficult to leave familiar surroundings, while those who are more easygoing and apt to consider work as a means to an end may find it easier to transition to retired status.
Dependent individuals may, for various reasons—a lack of a social existence outside of the workplace, a need to replace an unpleasant home environment or the creation of a surrogate familial existence—find it difficult to divorce themselves from the work atmosphere. Whereas those people who are more independent, perhaps more used to working by themselves, especially the ones who create their own tasks and are capable of setting their own boundaries, are usually more readily adaptable to retirement. No matter how involved with other matters, the retirement years are usually more isolated than the working ones and, the more an individual enjoys his or her own company, the more gratifying this can be. This is not to denigrate the joy of companionship offered in retirement homes and villages.
Workaholics, those who relish work beyond all other endeavors and indulge this craving to the detriment of familial and social attachments, naturally should not entertain retiring if at all possible. These people usually have few pursuits outside of work and many would find the retired state wasteful and unfulfilling.
Adaptability is a prerequisite character trait which can foretell how an individual will ease into retirement mode. People who have had different careers during their employment lifetimes, adjusting adequately to each change of venue, can usually be counted on to move on from one phase of life to another without great difficulty.
Hysteroid and depressive individuals, who tend to exhibit extreme emotional responses to life’s changes, no matter what they might be, usually find retirement challenging. However, on occasion, relief from the stress of the need to perform at an expected level might even prove therapeutic.
REGIMENTATION
One of the most difficult tasks of adaptation to a retired state is overcoming the years of adherence to a pattern of behavior. Whether we are aware of it or not, responses to the stress of environmental stimuli become routine, and coupled with the added pressures of the workplace can cause subliminal or overt anxiety reactions. This is why we look forward to weekends and vacations, to get away from the cause of this discomfort. Over time these responses become an integral part of our makeup. At the extreme, some people always seem edgy, easily riled, even argumentative with or without any obvious cause. Some continually feel under some sort of pressure, with the need to conquer an ever-existing challenge.
A successful retirement should serve as a perpetual vacation, a time to unwind from the regimentation of a former career and the anxieties of the past. It should be a time when the worries of younger years seem trivial and are put to rest, a time for healing the wounds of the spirit.
NEGATIVITY
Let’s explore two extremes in the workplace. The first is the outsider, who by personality or desire doesn’t fit in or shows no drive to progress in his job, perhaps getting little or no pleasure out of the work, one who feels cast out or even a victim of the bullying that unfortunately exists in many industries, the “office dupe” who is the butt of jokes. The other extreme is the attempted overachiever, the “lab rat” or “brown-noser,” who is often abused by pranks. For these individuals, no matter how motivated or dedicated they may be, work can be a living hell, because the negativity from fellow employees is felt as a daily punishment. To these men and women, absence from work can be seen as a blessing, a reprieve from the grind of employment.
CULTURE
Work has been glorified as a gratifying endeavor in the western world; however, in some other countries leisure has assumed much greater prominence. When one has been brought up to aspire to a certain goal, the attempt to achieve that goal is then accredited to be the highest aspiration. You work to live, but you live to luxuriate, to love, to enjoy, to pursue and experience happiness. Therefore, while you can achieve through useful endeavor, you can exhilarate and perhaps gain a greater sense of peace and serenity with a successful retirement. Under such circumstances, the retreat of a religious monk to pray and to meditate could be considered a form of retirement.
ORIENTATION
Sometimes I feel as though I must be a naturally lazy person to enjoy being retired as much as I do. Then I remind myself of the half century of continuous professional work I put in, often being involved in several different areas of endeavor at the same time. Early on I worked many hours, sixty or seventy each week. My wife sometimes kept my daughter up past midnight when she was still a toddler so I could have time to play with her. My wife feared that otherwise my daughter would not truly know her father. I feel that she was such a great mother, she more than made up for any deficiency on my part. My daughter says that we both were great parents and that’s all that really matters.
I often wonder if the milieu I grew up in had something to do with how easily I have gone from a busy work schedule to retirement. I grew up poor, the son of immigrant parents. We lived in what is now called the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, in a transitional period for that neighborhood. I had many bright friends, who at a young age discussed worldly matters in quite an adult fashion. Today young people choose professional athletes or movie stars as their idols. We most envied the European nobility who didn’t have to work, living in luxury without monetary worries. Listening to our parents complain about hardships of the working poor—long hours and low wages—obviously had an impact.
Being indoctrinated, at a young age, into a culture of living frugally because of need, orientation or desire during the Great Depression and fearing the next economic downturn had a great influence on the decisions I have made in steering a conservative course in my life. It is reasonable to deduce that I have been guided unconsciously to emulate the lifestyle of the idle nobility I romanticized as a child.
SECURITY
It can be frightening to voluntarily walk away from a good job that is challenging and entertaining to begin an uncertain, relatively idle future. However, it is not as devastating as having to acutely adjust to an unemployed state due to corporate downsizing or an unforeseen bankruptcy. In either case, proper preparation can mitigate the trauma.
Longtime employment in one location can create a sense of security, belonging and trust. When this trust is broken, the harsh realization that each individual employee is ultimately on his or her own leads to the detriment of the sense of security. It is therefore important that each worker, whether low-level employee, self-employed, middle management or executive, understands that the comfort of their future and the comfort of their family is their sole responsibility. From the first day of eligibility, the worker should become knowledgeable about the pension benefits due him or her. Like the security all federal government workers have in knowing that a pension awaits them when they retire, all non-government workers should keep informed about the safety and availability of the benefits they can count on after they retire and the dollar amount they are due. If a union is involved, a representative should be sought out for clarification of the details. Many workers have chosen lower-paying positions with better benefits over higher-paying jobs with lesser benefits.
Even in more secure situations, where there are adequate funds available, the uncertainty of market fluctuations, with severe downturns an ever-present danger, the decision to give up earning and to depend solely on investments can be a difficult one to make.
HEALTH
The state of one’s health is always a factor in determining if and when one should retire. Robust individuals, constantly reassured by comforting medical check-ups, often assume they are just as hardy as they were years before and feel they can take on a workload equal to or even beyond the capabilities of younger, less experienced competitors. Sometimes this is foolish and leads to dire consequences, but on many occasions this proves to be a true assessment of one’s vitality and ability. No one who can fully carry out his duties, loves what he does, is good at it and gains satisfaction in the adequate completion of the tasks laid before him should consider voluntarily retiring unless forced to do so by factors not under his control. One of those important factors is failing health.
Ranking among the most common medical problems interfering with productivity, cardiac disease can be, in its most severe form, life threatening. The initial symptoms, such as anginal chest pain, should always be regarded as a wake-up call to let a person know it is time to slow down, reduce working responsibilities, or even consider quitting work altogether if possible. In many cases the condition may remain a minor one and no major changes would then be necessary; however, constant vigilance should be exercised to detect a worsening of symptoms and the need for further stress reduction. With the latest cardiac surgical procedures, such as bypass and stent emplacement, many workers may return to a reasonable facsimile of their previous schedule after a short recovery period. Those who cannot should be considered to be candidates for retirement.
Although patients with longstanding, especially terminal, illness are usually dismissed from work on medical leave, some self-employed individuals may find distraction from the unpleasantness of their affliction and side effects from therapy by continuing to perform whatever duties of their cherished occupation they still can. The rest should be afforded a well-deserved retirement.
STATUS AND RESPONSIBILITY
I have known people who wanted to retire, could afford to retire, but due to their status or responsibility could not. One, a successful businessman, could not find a suitable buyer for the company he started and since he was not expendable, due to a unique artistic talent he possessed, he could not find a replacement for himself. Not wishing to dissolve his company and feeling responsible for the welfare of his employees, he continued to go to work each day until he died. He wanted very much to retire to a carefree life, but morally he could not live with the knowledge that he would put two hundred people out of work.
In some families, after the children have been raised, educated and have left home to live separate lives, the burden of caring for older parents falls on the “in-between” generation, often interfering with retirement plans. Even if they don’t live in the same house, although that would be an obvious diversion, the need to be close by and on call for any of a myriad of geriatric emergencies would interfere with any desire to relocate. If the parent or parents are financially dependent, the cost burden might be just enough to derail any retirement plans until the death of all those dependents.
LIFESTYLE
The very affluent do not have to be concerned with downsizing after retirement, but the majority of retirees may find that they do have to curtail their lifestyles in relation to the success or failure of their financial planning. Hopefully those who adhere to the formulas outlined in this book and start at a young enough age will avoid the need to cut back on their reasonable expectations. Most projections of the financial needs of retired families anticipate that most, if not all, liabilities, such as mortgages and other loans have been satisfied. Retiring with large debts not covered by substantial assets is not advised.
The question must be asked if a family could be comfortable giving up some of the everyday luxuries they have become accustomed to and still function acceptably. Which ones? How much has to be sliced from the family budget? How should spending be curtailed? Should shopping sprees be eliminated? Should we move to a smaller home or buy a less expensive car?
To some individuals the status of being able to spend freely and accumulate “stuff” is very important in the evaluation of self-worth. What you have is equated to who you are. It is seen as the measure of your success. Throughout history, one has been evaluated by one’s possessions, whether it be the number of servants, cattle, homes, acreage of land or money. Today many people find this to be shallow thinking, but others discover it is very difficult to retire to a standard of living below what has become their norm in past years.
The family members involved in households with limited means must get together and decide whether they could be comfortable existing under the restraints of a lower standard of living or would an alternate course other than retirement be more advisable, if that option is available.
HOBBIES
Since childhood I have been attracted to the sea. When I was young, I used a tree branch for a fishing rod to fish off a pier and loved to go to the beach and swim. Now, in retirement, I answer the soothing call of the sea. As I sit in front of my computer, I often glance out the window at the lagoon that serves as my muse. Deep sea fishing is my passion. I never feel closer to nature, or God if you are so inclined, than when I toil in my garden or when I am out at sea. The sea calms me better than any chemical tranquilizer ever could. The thrill of hooking and reeling in a fish after a sporting battle refreshes my spirit. It is a spiritual exercise. The sea is my temple, my escape from the world. When the weather doesn’t allow outside activities and I’m not writing, I paint. Many of the walls in my house are now adorned with my best efforts.
Like many jobs, the work that I did for over forty years—listening to people hour upon hour of each working day talking about their deepest thoughts and darkest secrets, requesting help with difficult aspects of their lives and relief from troubling symptoms—was stressful. Although I enjoyed the work immensely and described it like being involved in an interactive soap opera on television all day long, after several months of this heavy burden of responsibility I literally demanded a vacation. These were not vacations of choice, but of necessity, to refresh myself so I could continue functioning at the level required to be at peace and helpful to my patients.
Now that I no longer treat disturbed people, many of whom exhibited vile and unpleasant symptomatology, vacations are once again a luxury and not a necessity. Since my wife and I now enjoy perpetual vacation time, long periods away are no longer needed. Shorter breaks in the usual routine suffice to serve as restoring escapes from the business of everyday living.
Involvement in our hobbies gives us adequate time away from chores to experience such periods of escape from the ordinary.
Reading a good book, riding a bicycle, playing a pleasurable sport or enjoying a lovely day at sea can be adequate vacation substitutes during retirement years, especially when age and physicality curtail maneuverability and make travel a bother.
I want to make a strong case for gardening as a hobby. Some men may consider this a less masculine endeavor, but let me tell you, there are few better ways to exercise and appreciate nature than by planting flowers, pruning shrubs or pulling weeds. Without realizing it, in a few hours you have done hundreds of deep knee bends. Planting or chopping down a tree can give your biceps and triceps a workout. However, the true glory is in the communion with nature: making and watching things grow, giving birth to living things. Thirty-five years ago I planted twenty-six evergreen trees, two rows of thirteen on each side of our small plot of ground. Some of these trees have risen to nearly thirty feet high, giving us much-desired privacy, as houses in shore communities such as ours tend to be built close together. Whenever I look at the rows of greenery at our property edges I appreciate their beauty with a sense of pride.
FRUGALITY
My love for the sea initiated my great wish to live on a large boat and travel at my pleasure. While this was still a pipedream, my wife and I enjoyed taking sea cruises with friends and family during vacation times. When the dream became more of a quest, we began to charter yachts with two other couples to experience life on the sea. What I discovered was a revelation. Buying a live-aboard boat not only entails the initial purchase cost, but the upkeep may be quite expensive. If the owner cannot afford a captain and a crew then he has to become an expert mechanic to tend to the engines by himself while away from shore. However, the more I learned about the costs and difficulties of being the owner of a relatively large boat, the more I realized that I could not afford it and, even if I could, it would at best be a temporary way of life of which we would ultimately tire. We would then hope we could sell our boat for a sufficient fraction of the original cost to be able to buy a new house. So we stayed in our old house, to keep my dream from becoming a nightmare.
Many people do stray into nightmarish situations by allowing their fantasies to overrule their good common sense. God knows what difficulties I would have run into if I had thrown caution to the wind and proceeded to spend my savings on a vessel I could ill afford. I probably would never have made it to retirement and would not be writing this book now. Whatever pleasure I would have experienced might have been drowned in the difficulties encountered out on the open sea.
Each year many new entrepreneurs go bankrupt. Thousands of workers who dream of being self-employed leave their jobs and go out on their own. Those who are fully prepared and perform adequate due diligence have a chance for success. Others, who through lack of education or preparation or both begin either under-capitalized or over-capitalized, are usually doomed to fail. Having a dream is a good thing, if it’s a possible dream. As with Don Quixote, impossible dreams lead to failure. Depending on the age of the individual or the amount of the loss, a business failure can obliterate the dream of any retirement.
Appreciate the value of frugality in choosing a lifestyle, if retirement is a goal when one no longer works at a daily job. More wild schemes are prone to fail than to succeed. At a young age one can fail and try again, because time is not yet a major factor, but at an advanced age time is precious.
BURNOUT
As I brought up earlier, the greatest determinant in regard to retirement readiness is self-awareness. The recognition of when one has reached his or her limit with a vocation is vital to knowing when it is time to quit and move on.
In my own life I have had several such epiphanies. As an undergraduate I trained to be a pharmacist, but after several years behind pharmacy counters I realized I would never be satisfied filling out prescriptions ordered by others. I wanted to be the physician making the diagnosis and writing the prescriptions. I wanted the responsibility of issuing the orders for the care and therapy of the patient. I consider pharmacy a noble profession and cherish it for having given me the ability to work and earn enough to pay my medical school tuition fees. However, I wanted to go on to study medicine.
Later I had a career choice to make. Throughout my medical school training I had envisioned myself becoming an internist and was sure it was my future to practice internal medicine, so I declined a prized surgical residency with the assurance of a partnership in a lucrative practice. However, during my internship I reassessed myself, my desires and abilities and determined I was best suited to the practice of psychiatry.
Upon completing my psychiatric residency, I was offered junior partnerships in the practices of two of the busiest psychiatrists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although this would mean less start-up costs, with shared expenses, I declined these invitations. I knew I would find the greatest gratification in building my own practice and doing it my way. So, despite having meager savings, I went out on my own.
For twenty-five years I lectured as a professor of psychiatry at a medical school and was invited to lecture at prominent universities. I became a leading candidate to become the chairman of my department, the position I had been groomed for by the retiring chairman. After careful soul searching I determined I was not cut out for the politics of academia. Soon I left both my clinical and lecturing activities at the medical college to devote myself wholly to my private practice, a decision I have never regretted.
My care of patients, both in office psychotherapy sessions and inpatient settings at hospitals and geriatric centers, became my prime concern and my great pleasure and honor of service. Teaching is a meaningful endeavor and I am indebted for the opportunity I was afforded, but attempting to heal and mitigate pain and suffering was my true calling.
After a number of years, like many practitioners who find the business of their profession overwhelming the desired aspects of their labors, with less time to devote to the work they love and more needed for administration, I began to tire of the interference of insurance companies and the loss of patient confidentiality. When insurance officials’ meddling began to deny adequate patient care, I knew it was time to call it quits.
I was unable to adapt to the new way of doing things: placing the best care of a patient secondary to the whim of an insurance decision. This is not what I signed up for. I grew weary of the pressure placed on me by officials to cut corners in administering care. So I severed my relations with those who caved in to the rationers of care and reached deep within myself and realized I was burned out. What I loved dearly had been taken from me and it could not be regained, so I decided that after fifty years of being involved with the delivery of health care, it was time to retire.
ADJUSTMENT
In all honesty, if I couldn’t financially afford to retire at the time I did, because I no longer could abide by the rules that were forcing me to compromise my integrity, I would have had to adjust to doing things against my conscience. How many of you readers have to do just that? Having to comply with commands from supervisors that you know are just not right, or even absolutely wrong, to make some deadline, meet a quota or keep within budget? That is why it is so important that you are financially secure later in life so that you cannot be bullied into sacrificing your integrity for a paycheck. Money cannot buy happiness and only in a pet store can it buy love, but it surely can give you a sense of freedom and independence.
The thought of having to compromise my principles to appease some official of an insurance company making a huge salary while patients are being deprived of adequate care raised my ire. If I had to do things that way I knew I would have trouble sleeping at night.
PASSION
It’s easy to sense the passion in the words I use to express the vehemence I feel toward those who forced me to leave a practice I adored. You see, I never wanted to stop working at my labor of love. Fortunately, I had planned for retirement in case it became a necessity, but I never really expected it to happen. I feel as though I was forced out; it’s as if I were fired from my job. Therefore, I can relate to anyone who has actually been fired against his will. I was given a type of a pink slip too. I know how it feels. I can commiserate.
When you have devoted yourself to a cause or a company for many years as I had and suddenly find out that you no longer belong, through no fault of your own but because they changed the rules, it’s painful to realize the game is being played at a lower level. There I was, in my clinical prime and fueled by years of experience, forced to retire because I wouldn’t lower my standards. I hope that all of you out there who want to excel at what you do, if you are called upon to compromise your integrity, have gained the wherewithal and the courage to thumb your noses at mediocrity.
IMPORTANCE
Respect what you do. An honest job, no matter how menial, fulfills a purpose. However, if you don’t feel your work is important to you, you are in the wrong line of work, no matter how glamorous it may seem to others.
Many years ago I was discovered to have a fine tenor voice and offered a scholarship to train with a famous vocal coach. I sang for a number of years at his studio and he obtained some roles for me in local productions, until it came time for me to make a career choice. Did I wish to make a career in music or pursue a life in health care? Among the most important factors which swayed my decision was my need to feel the importance of my work. I wanted to do something that mattered. Finally, I decided that to help others in their time of need and disability was more important, in my estimation, than entertaining an audience with song. Feeling important to yourself is crucial. It makes you feel as though you count. You are a contributor, a useful member of society.
Losing the work that is important to you, especially when it is ripped from you through no fault of your own, because of some ill-advised decision of a superior, change of company policy or government miscalculation, can be agonizing and demoralizing if you have no backup plan. Possess a retirement backup plan, especially if you have reached middle years.
EXPENSES
You must always know the extent of your expenditures, yet many people have no idea of what their budgetary limitations are. Only when they max out their credit cards do they appreciate the amount of their debts. Bankruptcy is a credit wrecker and should be avoided at all costs, if retirement is in future plans. Some resilient souls may overcome a bankruptcy with a strategic comeback, but the interim phase is usually painful and best to be avoided. Try the best you can to know where every penny goes, so you can know when you can truly afford whatever luxurious items you may wish to purchase. Always keep your assets and liabilities in balance. Run your household so that all necessities are paid for first before budgeting for other items. Save today so you can spend another day.
SAVING
Although the formulas for timely saving and investing for specific situations, time periods and retirement needs will be addressed in great detail in the next part of this book, let’s discuss some basic fundamentals now.
It is important to indoctrinate each child into the habit of saving. At a young age, perhaps in the first or second grade of elementary school, the parent should physically take the child to the bank and open a savings or money market account in joint ownership, so the child can appreciate having money set aside in his or her own name. Over the years such an account can be added to and earmarked for specific purposes, such as school tuition, birthday parties, weddings or the like. In periods of low interest rates, as soon as feasible, this account can be augmented with higher-interest-bearing investments, always bearing in mind that the non-bank investments do not carry the guarantee of the federal government and therefore are more risky.
