Younger olds can’t afford a midlife crisis
What does it look like when you confront your mortality but can’t afford a sports car…and don’t really care? “Trend” articles are sometimes built on notoriously slim premises, and trend articles on midlife crisis seem especially so. But at least some of the underlying elements of these observational pieces seem true: one ages, one stares...
Reminder: many, many people aren’t ready for retirement
Retirement planning is easy. You just need to know what food and lodging will cost over the coming decades, your age at death, your partner’s age at death, the return on the money you save, the reliability of Social Security and how sick you’ll be along the way. Books have been written about how...
Ladies: eat, pray and stretch that check
They’re homebodies. And they’re affiliative, depending on social and emotional bonds to get through daily life…or so we assume, because when they travel they like to travel with others. And by they, we mean men. Editors for International Living—the on-line and print publication that encourages retirees to find new adventures and, crucially, save money by...
Work makes you crazy; retirement causes dementia
Let’s begin at the end: you are screwed, regardless. That is the rational conclusion you can draw from a recent and huge (half a million participants) study in France. What the researchers found was that you have two life choices, neither of which is good for you. You can keep working. (This wasn’t addressed...
After us, no one will ever retire again
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that older Baby Boomers are grossly unprepared for retirement. Theirs would be a riveting and tragic story, except that every other generation looks to be in worse shape. A new report on retirement from the Pew Charitable Trusts points out that Generation-Xers, who are now between 38...
More noise and chatter on retirement
A wintery mix of news about retirement savings over the past few weeks. There’s some variation in the details but a consistent underlying message, which is that you will die poor, Boomer. And your generation will likely impoverish the generations coming after it. (Here’s the upside: we are told by a study of cheery Germans...
Fauja Singh, the Harold Stassen of road racing
Fauja Singh, the baddest 101-year-old vegetarian marathoner on the planet, has maybe possibly (but not really) retired from competitive racing. Singh, who turns 102 on April 1, finished last weekend’s Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon’s 10-kilometer (6.25-mile) race in 1 hour, 32 minutes, 28 seconds—half a minute faster than he ran it last year...
Good advice for older travelers
It’s easy to be irritated with the New York Times “Booming” section, or subdomain, or whatever we are supposed to call it. Like many features aimed at Baby Boomers, it seems to slide easily into the morbid. There are upbeat stories, certainly (like a recent slideshow on attractive women who have decided not to dye...
Go south, old (broke) man
Retiring abroad! It’s like tacking a dragon’s tail onto the withered hindquarters of that 9-to-5 life you led for 40 years. See, you say to your kids, I still thirst for adventure. See, I’m willing to negotiate back alleys in a tropical city where no one speaks my language, just to eat at a...
Fauja Singh: don’t want to look, can’t turn away
When you’re, say, 50, it’s easy to feel like you’re dull. Uninteresting. You can feel invisible. So when you find something that puts you in high relief, that gives you an identity—especially if you excel at it and it demonstrates what a complete badass you are—you’re going to hold on to it. No. More...
Same old
The odd thing about being off for a couple of weeks…truly and completely off, out-of-cell-coverage-and-forget-your-passwords off…is that you can return to find that nothing much has changed. Apparently there were sporting events in London, and occasional disasters. But otherwise, no surprise. For example, there’s this story from AARP on how half of all non-retired boomers...
Why aren’t more old people leaving America?
There’s a lot of loose talk about people retiring outside the United States. It’s not as romantic a conversation as one might think, because the underlying premise is that most Americans don’t have the resources they’ll need to retire comfortably in the country they’ve helped to build. Say you have only $1,177 a month to...
