Retirement

[next_migration]

If you’re getting up there in years, whether or not you think you will want or be able to retire, the question of what you will do in your old age should be a major driver of where you go. The two most essential questions to contemplate are what you would like to have happen, or not happen, to you in your old age, and what social supports, if any, you have that are consistent with those goals.

 

As long as the medical and nursing-home industry has the power it now has, everyone needs to think about how they want the last years of their life to go. Would you be happy to be prodded into a nursing home by your kids to maximize your physical safety, the first time you have a fall or medical emergency at home? Would you want to go to a nursing home if and when you genuinely couldn’t care for yourself? Or would you prefer to stay in your own home until you die, even if that means you die sooner? If you were in a nursing home, would you want aggressive care to help you live there longer (mandatory ER visits whenever you tripped and fell or you seemed sick, tube feeding if you were too demented to swallow, artificial resuscitation when you died), or would you want those who had custody of you to let nature take its course?

Unless your answer is “the most interventions possible, please,” you absolutely must have a living will and an advance directive, following your state’s requirements, and a document designating a health care power of attorney, one or more people who can be trusted to refuse consent for procedures the first two documents said you didn’t want if you are too far gone to refuse them yourself. Sample forms can be found online, but be careful how you fill them out: in states that don’t like to ever allow a natural death, you have to sign in front of a notary public and multiple witnesses or they won’t count for anything. Even if you’re 20 and in great health, you could be gorked in a car accident tomorrow. Do this as soon as you can. In many states, notary publics (who may be found at local banks or similar institutions) have a fixed fee scale and can only charge $5 or $10; it’s not expensive.

If you want to be cared for by others in your old age, do you have any family who might be trusted to do it as long as you aren’t too disabled for them to manage? This was until recently the normal practice and is much better than assisted living, if a family can manage it. If, in your early retirement, you lived with one of your children and provided child care and household help, it would then be natural for them to provide you with increasing personal assistance as you became more frail.

This isn’t a family counseling book, but be sure everyone involved can get along in a single household before you suggest or enter such an arrangement. For it to work, all of the adults involved must respect the others as adults with autonomy. That you don’t want to feel infantilized goes without saying. If your child or the child’s spouse ends up feeling that you moved in and started infantilizing them as well as their kids, they’ll happily push you into a nursing home when you start getting feeble.

At this point a comment for middle-aged people with kids: If you have an aging parent or set of parents whom you love and get along with and who don’t have any pets you can’t stand, why not extend an open invitation right now for them to come to live with you? See my comments in the previous chapter about how much money a “non-working” household member who can cook and supervise children could save you, and compare that to how much an extra bedroom to make space for Grandma would cost.

Now back to the retirees: The single most important factor that can make your old age and ultimate death as good as possible is having people nearby who care about you: trusted family or friends. These should include people who are younger than you so that they can be asked to do occasional heavy lifting. If you have children or other younger relatives who love you and whom you trust, choosing a home that is near at least one of them, so they can visit easily and often even if neither you nor they want to live together, should be among your highest priorities. It is much more important than weather or state tax rates.

In fact, if you have a loving family who all live in a climate red zone, that’s one circumstance that could make it seem rational to stay there. But your grandchildren might not have safe or comfortable lives there. Perhaps you can persuade the kids to move somewhere else for their sake, and take you with them?

If you prefer to avoid aggressive medical care and/or to remain independent until you die, consider carefully whether you can trust your children. Do they share your general beliefs? Do they have advance directives, and what do they say? When you tell them about your wishes, do they seem supportive or negative? When they were children, did you never let them play outdoors or go anywhere alone lest they be killed by imagined roaming packs of child molesters? By teaching them that avoiding any possibility of physical harm to “vulnerable” people was the most important priority in life, you may have given them a fearful, risk-averse, controlling temperament that will lead them to coerce you into a nursing home the first time they find out you had a fall at home. You might be better off, if you don’t have any notion of expiating karma, to live a few states away from them and see them seldom and on your terms.

Some people have worse problems with their children than values conflicts. The kids may be leeches, often with addiction or mental health issues, who are forty years old and still shaking you down for money every week or two. Maybe they never work or want to, or maybe they have jobs but blow all their money on drugs or gambling. They would just love to be able to move in with feeble old Mom, suck her bank account dry, and steal her stuff to sell. Family dynamics in such cases can be nightmarish. Maybe your kid is like that because of your lousy parenting. Maybe you did a great job and there was nothing you could have done to avoid it; some people are just born predisposed to have mental difficulties. Set the past aside and coldly, rationally assess whether your child(ren) are fundamentally untrustworthy. If they are, unless you want to let them ruthlessly exploit you in their old age, move away from them and stay away.

If you don’t have kids then, if you want to live independently, you can do that and mind your own business. In certain states, Nevada being the worst recently, you have to watch out for doctors and other authorities who slip the names of physically weak widows with assets to predatory professional “guardians” who go to court to have the people labeled incompetent and dragged away to nursing homes, then sell their belongings and control or steal their money. If you have close friends who can be pre-emptively listed in legal documents as your choices for durable financial power of attorney, health care power of attorney, and conservator if needed, this might help to protect you from that racket. List more than one, if they’re as old as you are.

If you want to go into assisted living, those places and, even more, nursing homes cost a fortune. Cost can vary greatly in different states and in urban vs. rural communities, so if you don’t have close friends or family driving your decision to stay or move to a particular place, you might want to specifically search for communities with well-reputed, affordable assisted living centers. (Be a little cautious of assisted living centers whose owners also own nearby nursing homes or have nursing home wings onsite. The latter can be ideal for couples who are in different stages of decline, but you want to know that the management is not free to dictate, for example, that because you had a fall they will no longer allow you to use your feet to walk, and because you are now required to use a wheelchair, you can’t stay in assisted living and must be transferred to a nursing-home double room, which means you will no longer be allowed to leave the building alone. They make more money when that happens.)

If you can’t or don’t want to be near family so are choosing a retirement home to suit your own preferences alone, there’s good reason to favor a small town. Housing, whether an apartment or house or an assisted living center, is likely to be less expensive, and you are less likely to die in a heat wave assisted by an urban heat island. Very small towns, though, lack important services and public transportation, making residents highly car-dependent, have few recreational or social opportunities, and are sometimes so insular that you’ll have trouble making connections.

If you want to live independently, a major factor should be to choose a community and neighborhood where you would not need a car to survive. Aside from the general concern about gas and parts shortages, if you live long enough, your senses and reflexes will someday decline to the point that driving becomes dangerous to yourself and others. If you have kept walking throughout your life (or getting about by wheelchair if you use one), then unless you develop severe health problems, you’ll be able to make it a few blocks to a store under your own power long after you can no longer safely drive. (If you never walk anywhere but could, start now, before you are very old and frail. Going downhill slower is much easier than trying to climb back up the hill.) Pick a town where public transportation or ride services for seniors are available, and choose a residence within walking distance of the services you’ll use most frequently, such as a grocery store. If you will want a lot of medical care, check up on the quality of the local doctors and hospital; you won’t want to feel that you have to leave town constantly for your medical appointments.

If your faith is important to you, definitely prioritize finding a community with a suitable congregation. Look also for a community that has activities for seniors, such as classes at the Y or park district. Social ties are important in retirement: they make you happier and healthier and can protect you in difficult times. Form some as soon as possible after you move. Volunteer, join a church or social organization, take a class, do whatever you can to get to know people in your new home.

Moving after you retire is also a great opportunity to downsize. As the economy and nation decline, it will become increasingly uncertain whether retirees will get all the income they have expected to receive, whether from investments or pensions or Social Security. Or you might get the promised income, but find that inflation has greatly reduced its value. Your plan should be to live modestly, spending less on housing than you could afford and socking away the extra. That means less space to clean and maintain, and if your actual or effective income suddenly declines, you won’t face a sudden crisis.

 

If you’re young, you may not find it natural to think about retirement. That may be just as well, because there is a good chance that you’ll never get to retire, unless perhaps to live with your adult children: either you won’t get paid enough to amass an adequate nest egg, or it will be eaten up or made worthless by economic crises and/or hyperinflation. It’s possible that before you become eligible for Social Security, the United States will have split into multiple nations. Would the government of the New Confederacy, say, pick up Social Security obligations? Could they even if they wanted to? If Social Security does persist into your old age, one way the government might keep it from going bankrupt is to fail to keep up with inflation, so that your monthly check might just about cover a daily can of cat food. If the country is taken over by a right-wing regime, that might be a deliberate policy, to repudiate the obligation without admitting that they are doing so.

The pushback of the age for full eligibility also hits blue-collar workers and minorities hardest. The average life expectancy of a working-class African-American is lower than the Social Security standard retirement age now. Some people pay in for decades and never get to draw a check. It’s relatively tolerable for office workers to put in another few years on the job after 65, unless they’re among the increasing percentage of the population who are developing early-onset dementia for some reason (that’s a whole different sustainability issue). For people who do hard physical work, who get arthritis and repetitive stress injuries from their jobs, at some point in old age it just becomes too difficult to keep doing that work. Seventy will be past that point for many. Preparing yourself to survive in other ways would be a good idea.

Our society shoves old people who still have minds off into nursing homes not only because of their children’s controlling and risk-averse mindsets, but because those people are not perceived as having value in the outside world. Compare this to traditional societies that had sufficient resources to support old people. Native American cultures, for example, usually regarded elders with great respect and gave them places of honor. One reason for the difference is that those elders held skills, knowledge, memories, and wisdom from which young people derived benefit and understood that they did. A person who works a relatively independent job that relies on complex skills, such as a farmer or mechanic, may continue to accumulate knowledge and experience throughout life. Long after their physical strength and labor productivity have declined, younger family members or coworkers can continue to respect these people for their knowledge, learn from them, and ask them for advice about difficult problems. Traditional homemakers, even into the 20^th century, could fall into this category; jobs like scratch cooking and preserving food use skill and intelligence.

Most jobs nowadays do not allow people to gain such expertise. Many technical fields are changing at historically unimaginable rates, so that older workers come to be perceived not as repositories of knowledge but as dinosaurs to be pushed out and replaced with young people familiar with the latest tech. If you work a corporate or bureaucratic job until you retire and stop working, whether you managed a robot in a factory or spreadsheets in a cubicle, there is no opportunity in private life to practice this skill or pass it on. Individual creativity is not welcome in service jobs: fast-food employees are trained to cook like robots, and Amazon drivers are expected to work like robots but treated worse. Homemakers in the consumerist model are in the same boat. If you always “made” fried chicken by microwaving food bought frozen or from the deli, young people will see no need to stand at your elbow and learn from you.

If you are young and still have the option to choose a kind of work where you can accumulate skill and respect as you proceed through life (such as those independent skilled labor jobs), you might want to make that a criterion if you can. If you’re well into a working life that doesn’t fit that description and don’t see a possibility of changing careers, one way of bettering your position in old age is to develop an alternate type of expertise. As I suggested earlier, these could be skills, like homemaking, that would encourage younger relatives to want you to live with them in old age. Or they could be some kind of artisanship, or other skills that could bring in some independent income after you leave your corporate job or it leaves you. If you formed social ties with others in your community having the same interests, you could over time become one of the respected senior members of that group. Even if that didn’t directly do anything to feed you, it would support your sense of dignity and emotional health.

So, if your job is not helping you to develop skills that will be usable for a lifetime, you should consider your circumstances, talents and interests to identify skills that you might develop on your own. Almost everyone, men very much included, ought to develop some domestic-economy skills—at least, the art of cooking from scratch cheaply while minimizing labor. Other skills, from woodworking to writing, might be pursued as hobbies during working life. Some such skills are too expensive for working-class people to pursue, or require full-time effort to develop anything like professional quality. Many, though, could, at least at first, be affordably pursued for recreation in one’s spare time. Gardening, hunting, and fishing can all be productive hobbies, provided you spend (for example) less on gas, lures, bait, and beer than you would spend to buy the quantity of fish obtained! You could keep track and try to make that an entertaining challenge for yourself. If you have kids or grandkids, sharing a hobby with them would do them and you far more good than watching the “boob toob” with them. (More on that shortly.)