Why Retirement Maybe Should Not Be In Your Future

Maybe the idea of retirement really shouldn't be in your future. That's pretty much where we've arrived after our little series on retirement. Let's recall how we got here with the help of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski's Working Your Way Into Heaven. 

We launched into this "non-retirement" idea with this clear statement: "Work is the duty of man. This duty arises from the very needs of man's life, as well as the meaning that work holds for his perfection."

If we have a duty to work, how can we plan for a time when we don't work? If the needs of our life depend on our work, why would we strive to stop working at some point?

Sure, we can look at this from a strictly financial perspective. And many - if not most - do just this. We use calculators and estimates of our needs when we reach some "retirement age." if we have enough money to sustain those needs at that time, we don't need to work anymore. Right?

We can even factor in - and, again, many do this - how much we need to sustain our accustomed "lifestyle." That could include both things we're used to having and doing now, as well as additional items we might desire when we stop working - stuff like traveling around the world, playing lots of golf, etc.. You know the drill.

If we assume our projections and estimates will turn out to be accurate - and that could very well be a stretch - we're looking for some amount of income and assets where we'll be "set" for life.

But here's the rub for many of us: The projections we might have begun with now have to consider living a lot longer than we may have thought we would. "Experts" tell us that lifespans have increased dramatically. And it's likely we know of one or more folks living well into their 90's. And this creates a dilemma for many of us. Can that "set for life" amount we calculated sustain us that long?

Then there's the whole "long-term care" thing. You know this one too. The statistics tell us that some significant percentage of us will need institutional care of some sort, either for a stretch of time, or until we die. And that sort of care costs a lot. We won't get into the numbers here. You can easily find them on your own. But more and more of us are aware of just how expensive what is now known as "elder care" has become.

Even if long-term care doesn't suck our money, there's the whole general health care thing. In the U.S., pretty much everyone goes on Medicare at Age 65. It doesn't pay everything. Again, you can look it up. (The best place to get the details is ssa.gov.) 

We won't get into all the details here. It would simply take too much space and time. But if you're not aware of those details, it would certainly behoove you to start dredging them up.

So much for our quick summary of the financial realities of what we all either face now or will face some day. 

But our lives are more than our money - as should be obvious. We are body and soul, matter and spirit. For as long as we live in this world, those two are united. Money can provide for our physical needs. Handled in the right way, it does not need to distract us from the needs of our souls.

As we've seen, work is a fundamental and integral part of our lives in this world. And so it's simply not something from which we retire. 

Of course, if we are going to reach an age where one part of our work ceases, causing the income we relied on to stop, yes, we need to prepare ourselves. 

Just remember, our income may stop, but our work does not.

Next time, we'll consider this in more detail...