Never Retire - What Does It Actually Mean

Putting nuance back into money and personal finance

In this newsletter installment, we briefly define and place some context around the notion of Never Retire.

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In a few days, I’ll release more results from the survey I sent out yesterday.

At this moment, 46.2 percent of you who responded say you’ll Never Retire. Another 23.1 percent say they might Never Retire. And the remaining 30.8 percent report that they will retire. Based on the answers to other questions, I think some of those readers have already retired.

This tells me that the Never Retire intention has broad appeal, which isn’t limited to people on their way to retirement or trying to sort out the probable reality that they’ll never be able to traditionally retire.

I developed this narrative and started this newsletter because there’s a lack of writing in the financial media that treats people like individuals with specific needs, wants, desires, preferences, concerns, and circumstances.

Specifically, Never Retire can apply—in some fashion—to retired people because the thoughts, ideas, strategies, and execution of these strategies we discuss boil down to something universal—sound cash flow management. Universal in the sense that, no matter your lifestyle and present life situation, you can pick and choose from what we discuss and adapt it to your unique setting.

This is something conventional financial media doesn’t provide with its stubborn focus on saving X,XXX,XXX dollars by XX age so you can quit work and run out the clock of your life in traditional retirement.

It’s this hyper focus on hitting a number that stresses people out. It forces them to feel like they have to do things with their money they’re uncomfortable with, such as aggressively invest it.

With this in mind Never Retire can mean many different things. It’s all dependent upon your situation and how you want to contextualize and operationalize it.

For example, it can be—

• My approach, which is to work less in my prime (basically part-time) at a relatively easy job with modest passive income potential (freelance writer), but work forever or something like forever.

• A plan B if you’re on the path or decide to go on the path to traditional retirement, but have concern over it not working out. Instead of letting the you’re gonna run out of money in retirement articles strike fear, you plan for that or some other possible eventuality.

• A hybrid approach to work and life. You want to take longish periods of time off of work during your prime and in some form of retirement. You need money strategies to help make this happen.

You can think of other examples.

This is how we should treat money management. As a fluid and situational process. You adopt solid strategies that work during most, if not any point in life and can help reduce the stress we often experience over money.

You can use Never Retire as a rallying cry. As something you look to for the comfort in knowing you’re not alone in not being able to traditionally retire. And, more importantly, to not feel guilty about it because the alternatives can be, for some people, healthier and overall more attractive.

You can use Never Retire as an umbrella of ideas at your disposal. You cherry pick strategies on the basis of how much they resonate with you and apply to your life and money situations.

Between here and Medium, that’s really the goal. To share ideas on how we can best allocate our cash flow to keep our options open and live the lives we wanna now and for the duration.

Rocco