Never Retire - Sometimes Obvious Strategies Don't Work

Apologies for my brief absence. As I noted in my last post, I finally got COVID. It knocked me on my ass and threw off my schedule. However, I’m pretty much back to my full daily slate of activities.

The time spent relaxing and recovering prevented me from doing some work, but it also helped me think about the core reasons why I write a newsletter called Never Retire in the first place.

We’ll start today’s installment with a brief story to help illustrate the thought trajectory I’ve been on the last couple weeks.

This graphic comes from a recent research article in the journal, Science.

In the shell of a nut, the study showed that those signs we see on the freeway (or highway, or thruway, depending on where you live!) telling us how many people have died in traffic fatalities don’t actually make things safer. In fact, they make things less safe because they distract drivers and increase anxiety. At least this was the case when the researchers studied their impact in Texas.

A timely research find. Because I had been thinking about some of the core things we tend to consider obvious when it comes to money. Particularly retirement.

We accept longstanding money-related tenets as fact and hardly think twice about following them. Even as we see the writing on the wall that not only will they not have the intended effect, they might produce counterproductive, if not disastrous results.

Let’s consider a couple of these things, specifically as they relate to the decision to Never Retire or, at the very least, abandon the traditional retirement approach.