Communing with late stage retirement
21 02 2008I just spent the last week getting in touch with what life feels like at the end of retirement. The flu set in and I spent my days just hoping for the next to be a little less painful.
And it made me think that I don’t want to be spending my retirement isolated in some apartment where no one in my building knows me. At the same time, a certain amount of independence, like still being able to live in an apartment, is a real luxury. I’m really not keen on spending my days in a nursing care facility.
Who knows what kind of situations we’ll find ourselves in at the end of life? It’s partly this uncertainty that makes it difficult to motivate to plan for retirement. I should plan to live to 90, but what happens if I only make it to 80, or just 70? I can always keep working if it looks like my health is going to carry well into old age, right?
A study by McKinsey points to the fact that of those presently retired, 40% were forced into retirement. The two main causes of these premature retirements: disability and layoffs. An early retirement can put a serious crimp in quality of life later on. Fortunately, there are still some social and community services for older people to ensure that they can get the most basic care.
Retirement planning is tricky because we all want to hope for the best and it’s an event that is sufficiently far enough away that we can tell ourselves that there will be plenty of time to deal with this later. It’s also complex and not clear to most on where you should start your planning. The more money saved now, though, could be mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars extra in retirement. And that could have a major impact on how you live your life in your later years. Worse case scenario if you over-save, you’ll have money to leave behind so that others may benefit from you hard work. That’s not so bad.
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