Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers. Sara Geber
retirement accounts for the rest of her life. However, as a single, healthy child-free woman, Chandra was aware that occasional lunches with friends and a yearly international vacation were not enough to keep her brain stimulated and provide regular contact with a wide variety of interesting people.
Chandra’s employer did not have a part-time position available for her, but they did offer to bring her in on a contract basis. So, Chandra quit her job and returned to the same company on a project-by-project basis at a lower rate of pay than she had been making. Some weeks she went into the office four days, some weeks only one or two.
Initially Chandra rejected the prospect of making an hourly rate that was less than she had been earning on salary. The offer felt like a demotion and a dismissal of her value to the company. Ultimately, though, she realized the new arrangement opened the door for her to have a much more interesting and varied life. When she worked, her time was less regimented. In addition, she often found opportunities to help younger employees or those newer to the job, which was gratifying to her.
Our needs in a job change as we get older. By being willing to let go of her previous ideas about titles and her value to the company, Chandra constructed a very satisfying life for herself in her seventh decade.
Sometimes the pursuit of adventure and a life with maximum satisfaction can end up at odds with the quest for financial security. Janet’s story illustrates a life filled with travel and variety, one that might not carry enough certainty for most people, but it offers a glimpse into the choices that must be made at the juncture of life satisfaction and financial security.
Janet was twenty-one when a small US carrier that did international charter flights hired her as a flight attendant. It was her dream job, having grown up in a small, working-class town in Pennsylvania, and she was excited about the life it would offer her. Janet was outgoing, athletic, free-spirited, and wanted to see the world.
She flew for ten years, eventually becoming a senior flight attendant. But visiting the same cities over and over grew tiresome and monotonous for her. During her free time, Janet had learned to hang glide and sail. She became an excellent hang glider pilot, and for several years competed in international competitions with the US Women’s National Hang Gliding team. However, sailing was her first love, and when she quit flying she moved to Florida to pursue work as a crew member on large, privately owned sailing vessels.
Janet started her sailing career as an onboard cook, working whenever she could, for both a large charter company in the Bahamas and for private yacht owners. It was hard work, sometimes fun, other times thankless, and after two years she decided she needed to move up the sailing “food chain” and get her captain’s license. She enrolled in a two-year program and while continuing to crew, she studied celestial navigation and other nautical skills necessary to take complete command of a large vessel.
In 1989 she completed her studies and her apprenticeship and was awarded her license to captain any vessel under two tons. By then she had forged relationships with most of the sailing community in South Florida, and through this network Janet began to make an adequate living as a charter boat captain.
In 1999, Janet began to feel a little unmoored herself, having never owned a home and spending most of her time somewhere in the Caribbean or en route to the summer ports in the Northeast. She began experimenting around with cooking and eventually started a side business preparing and delivering home-cooked meals. In 2004, Janet left South Florida and headed north, this time to a rural area outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. She chose a spot on a mountaintop near a hang glider park, and with money she had inherited when her father passed away, built a small home with a guest cottage. At age forty-nine, Janet started her food prep and delivery business as a full-time occupation in a new community. Her new lifestyle also allowed her to move her eighty-five-year-old mother into the adjacent cottage.
The business was successful within two years, and with some interest from large food retailers, Janet figured she would eventually sell the business and use the proceeds to fund her life in retirement. It didn’t happen. When the 2008 recession hit, Janet’s business was hit hard. All interest from food retailers dried up and Janet decided to call it quits.
For the next five years, Janet worked at a variety of jobs to make a living, and between her mother’s Social Security checks and Janet’s small income, they did okay. However, none of the jobs Janet held were of lasting interest to her, so she talked to a financial advisor. Together they determined that Janet would be happiest, and do the best financially, back on the water. So in 2013, at age sixty-three, Janet resumed the sailing life, again taking jobs as captain or crew for large deliveries that paid well and allowed her to visit parts of the world she hadn’t previously seen. Her mother had passed away the previous year, so Janet had nothing tying her to Chattanooga other than a house she could lock up and leave. In addition, her mother’s passing had freed up the guest cottage, and Janet decided to rent it out for additional income. That worked well for her, considering how much she traveled. She also began to rent out the guest bedroom in her home on Airbnb. That added more to her monthly income, and today Janet feels secure that she will be able to enjoy a pleasant lifestyle with several income streams as she ages. Janet never was able to save any of the money she made, but she is still quite strong and healthy at age sixty-six, and looks forward to quite a few more years of sailing.
Janet’s and Chandra’s stories are very different, but the commonality is that both of them have carved out a life for themselves that is both meaningful and interesting. Janet needs to maximize earnings as best she can at this point, while Chandra will focus on doing what interests her today, regardless of what it pays. They are doing things differently from when they were in their twenties or thirties, and even though Janet doesn’t have the financial cushion Chandra can rely on, they each have years of experience to draw upon and, as you will see in many of the following chapters, “security” and a good life is not all about money.
NOTE: I am not a financial advisor or financial planner. In this chapter I have provided ideas and opinions about how to organize and stay on top of your financial affairs. I strongly encourage you to seek out professional advice before acting on any of the ideas or suggestions mentioned in the stories or narrative in this chapter.
Chapter 6. Good Health and Physical Well-being
“The greatest wealth is health.”
—Virgil
In 1960 the average life expectancy in the United States for a man (at birth) was about sixty-five years. For a woman, life expectancy was seventy-two years. Those statistics sound low to us today, but they were a huge improvement over life expectancy in 1900, which was forty-seven years. Most of the jump during the first half of the twentieth century can be attributed to advances in medicine, which dramatically lowered the rate of infant mortality. Additionally, antibiotics allowed more children to reach adulthood, and better sanitation enabled more women to survive childbirth.
“No drug … holds as much promise for sustained health as a lifetime program of physical exercise and proper nutrition.”
—Dr. Walter Bortz, Dare to Be 100
By 2015, life expectancy had jumped to around seventy-seven years for men and over eighty years for women.11 The more recent jump can also be credited to medical technology, but for a different reason. Today, when someone has a stroke, a heart attack, or gets a cancer diagnosis, their prospects for continuing to live are much greater than they were in 1970. Medical science has found numerous ways to keep us alive, well beyond the medical event that would have killed us in previous years. According to the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables, the average sixty-five-year-old man, in 2015, had better than even odds of living to age eighty-three and beyond, and the average sixty-five-year-old woman had an even greater chance of living to eighty-five or more.
Most of us want to live into our eighties or nineties—as healthy, functioning human beings. For those of us without children, staying fit and mobile takes on an even more critical notion as we face the challenge of continuing to be independent for as long as possible. We need to keep ourselves