Never Retire - Strategic Alternatives To Traditional Retirement

This month and next in the newsletter, we will focus on alternative strategies to traditional retirement.

It’s one thing to say/know you’ll Never Retire. It’s another to effectively plan for it.

Here’s our tentative schedule:

• What’s wrong with traditional retirement to begin with? We start by outlining the problem. What’s so bad about traditional retirement? Fundamentally nothing. In fact, it’s pretty dreamy, which is one reason why it’s such a hard habit to break. We’ll explore this.

• Coming to terms with the reality that you’ll Never Retire. It’s difficult for many people to accept the fact that they’ll fall short of a dreamy traditional retirement. We spend years shrugging and saying I’ll Never Retire. However, some of us spend that time at practical and psychological standstills. Moving past this obstacle—practically and psychologically—is the most important step to crafting a viable Never Retire strategy. We’ll dig deep into this. Because it’s a step that often gets skipped in conventional personal finance. How we feel about our situation might matter more than how much money we have or make.

• Exactly what does it mean to Never Retire? Unlike traditional retirement, Never Retire will look completely different on a case-by-case basis. It’s not a situation where, one-by-one, your family and friends retire and show up next to you for a morning tee time or buy a condo next to yours in a Florida or Arizona retirement community. Those days are gone, especially for those of us younger than a young baby boomer. We’ll illustrate several ways Never Retire can look.

• With a firm understanding of the why and what, we’ll take a few installments to explore how. We will detail personal finance strategies—related to money, work, and what life can look like now and going forward—to help facilitate the Never Retire reality.

I will also provide more detail on my plan to move—to Europe—with my girlfriend as part of a slightly more extreme, but feasible and sensible Never Retire plan.

In between these installments, we’ll dig into research on working less, given that working less now, but working longer across the lifespan tends to be a key Never Retire component for many of us.

Most of these installments will be available to paid subscribers only, so take this opportunity to consider subscribing for $5/month or $50/year now.

I look forward to writing these installments this month and in June. As always, thanks for reading and supporting. I appreciate it.