Yet despite the lack of feasibility for us to save enough, this dream is based on recent cultural assumptions that have been lacking for the majority of human history and for the majority of current cultures around the world. A major factor behind this manner of retirement is due to the cultural value of not burdening our children with caring for their elders and conversely valuing not having to care for your elders. I can see the appeal of this sentiment since I would neither enjoy changing my parent's diapers or having my children change mine. Yet, I wonder if something is culturally lost if we follow this idea. Does this create more distance in our families? Does it teach us to not take responsibility for others? The rest of the world seems to take caring for your elderly as a matter of course.
It is also interesting that it is a recent idea that people would stop working before they were no longer able to. I grant that the increase in the life span has complicated things where people live a lot longer after they are no longer able to work, which gets expensive. Yet the model that most Americans seem to be shooting for is based off of rich CEOs who can afford to not work after 65. This model would not be applicable to most Americans nor I would argue sustainable for our society.
So here is our plan. Firstly, if we have children, we need to teach them that it is our value as a family to care for our elderly and model this with our own parents. (They won't care for us if we ship our parents to the nursing home :) ) Secondly, We plan on working until we can no longer work. Thirdly, we see the need for rest from work as important in order to maintain sanity and quality of life so we propose the idea of a "Sabbatical" every 7 years. After saving enough money over seven years of hard work we would have a year long break to reflect, rejuvenate, and plan the next part of our lives. (And get excited about working again.) If we start this plan when we are 30 we will have 7 sabbaticals before we are eighty. Over this 50 yr span we would need to save roughly $280,000 (assuming $40,000 saved for each sabbatical yr,~$6,000 saved each yr), about the equivalent of a nice suburban home.
One potential difficulty I forsee would be getting hired again after our sabbatical year. We both have fairly marketable qualifications and are in careers where I think it would be possible, yet the older we would get the more difficult it may be to be hired by companies. It would also be difficult to save $6000 per year especially if we had children and limited our income to one provider. Also I have yet to do the math on what would get us more bang for our buck in terms of if we were to invest $6,000 in the stock market every year. We will keep thinking about this one. :)
some inetrestin ideas here! I've been thinking about this lately, how to manage one's life from now till, well, the end. Some good thoughts you have :)
ReplyDeleteDid you think about reverse mortgage? Earn, buy a house and few other valuable things. Then sign an agreement with a bank. The bank will pay you your pension and will confiscate all your belongings after you die. Although it sounds like a potential cause of another financial crisis, it seems to work just fine. http://www.reversemortgage.org (and google ;-) )
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of this before! interesting.
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