More Summer Thoughts About Work and Retirement

We'll continue our informal discussion of retirement as it relates to our work. We say "informal" because there are plenty of resources out there when it comes to the whole subject of retirement. Most seem to be focused on money - having "enough" of it when it comes time to retire.

Now, to be clear, we've already reviewed different meanings of this word "retirement," along with a cursory history of when retirement entered our vocabulary. As we saw, it wasn't that long ago. But these days, it's become a central theme and concern of the average working person, with money smack dab in the middle of it all. It seems everything else revolves around money.

For example, for those looking to move to "retirement friendly" areas of the country (or some foreign land, for that matter), everything depends on how much money we've go to fund those retirement years. Without trying to give a course, in retirement planning, we'll simply point out that money, in this context comes down to income and savings/investments. 

How much income will you be getting on a regular basis. For most of us, this will come first from social security. So it behooves the retirement planner to know what that might be.

Some of us - as we noted last week - will get a pension of some amount. But that's far less common than it once was. Most of us will need to work with social security and whatever we can draw down from our savings and investments.

While we've already noted that a good chunk of us haven't saved "enough" to live as we might prefer after we stop working, We're not going to focus on this now. But what we can do is at least look at what we've got and see where we stand in this matter. What will social security pay us? (You can get an estimate from your SSA.gov online account - something we should all have access to.) Is it enough to pay our anticipated expenses - both necessary and discretionary?

What? You don't know? Well, if you're nearing retirement, that's going to be an urgent and important task. Either do this yourself or seek professional help. But do get on it.

If social security won't do the trick, then take a look at your savings and investments and figure out how much they might provide to supplement your social security.

This is all very very basic money stuff to address. Frankly, as good stewards, we should really have a pretty good handle of this.

As Catholics, though, this is all really a rather superficial way to approach retirement. 

But first, let's sum up: We need to know how much income we'll be getting from social security and - for those who still have one - a pension. We need to know how much we've got in savings and investments and how much these might reasonable provide to meet our necessary and discretionary expenses - both of which we should pretty much know of the to of our heads.

Now let's make all this a bit more "Catholic." 

The reason it's important to get all this sorted out is that retirement isn't really - or shouldn't be - a time of "not working." Work is basic to us as human beings. And, as we've seen, the very concept of retirement didn't exist for most of human history.

We might even consider how this retirement thing has in some sense messed with our human nature a bit. If work is essential to us as God's creatures, what sense does it make to think that we'll be not working when we retire?

Maybe it's better to not even think of retiring at all. Maybe we should circle and imagine what life was like - especially work life - before this whole retirement thing became embedded in our thinking.

We'll try to dig into this more next time.