BUT YOU PROMISED!

I'm not retiring..... But I am stopping work

I mentioned last week that there seems to be an unquestioned expectation that at a given point we should all stop working and migrate into a sort of golf-course-based half-life, where we are becalmed, out of the way of those coming behind us. Indeed, for the Baby boomer generation many have already done so. In the UK, boomers now comprise fewer than 10% of the working population.

But why stop work?

No, really, why?  Well, I’m sure that there are some of us who have endured a working life from which retirement is a blessed release. Plus, those for whom work has meant hard physical labour of any kind have probably done enough by their mid-60’s. But the modern world is a different place from the days in the last century when people worked in an industrial landscape doing difficult, physically demanding jobs. Nowadays the worst workplace-related injuries most of us are likely to get is RSI through overuse of the mouse.

But nevertheless, we get shovelled towards the exit door and we acquiesce meekly, without too much, if any, protest. Our colleagues wave us goodbye, closing the door and sighing with relief that we are out of the way. But there are excellent reasons to jam a foot in before the door slams shut. Some are obvious, others less so. Let’s have a look and let’s start with the most obvious one of all, the money.

When the UK Universal State Pension came into being after the last war the average life expectancy of a 65-year-old was another 11 or so years. Now, that number has roughly doubled. These days it is far from unusual to expect that a quarter to a third of our life will be lived after 65. My old man was 93 when he decided enough was enough. He lived 8 years longer than his father. Same improvement again and I’ll be into three figures, like many of us who benefited from post-war advances in healthcare and diet. The monetary arithmetic alone means that funding a retirement 30-plus years long is going to be a strain. The state pension age is moving slowly upwards, reflecting this. But what about those of us for whom standard retirement age is, well, about now?

Anything these days that smacks of paternalism is anathema, so things like pensions reforms have been trotted out under the guise of giving people control over their own money. A less well trumpeted side-effect has been to offload risk from employers onto the individual at the same time. The impossible economics of final salary pension schemes, with their guarantees, combined with terrible annuity rates after the financial crisis, mean that the risk is now almost entirely with you and I under the “fill your own pot” banner. Now, if you run out of cash because you fail to die according to the actuarial tables… you’re just about on your own. In my own case, yes we do have savings, but can they ever be enough? The only correct answer for almost everybody these days is a shrug and a ‘search me’.

So… the money. But let’s look at some other aspects of the whole stopping work conundrum.

I know I’m not alone in firmly adhering to the belief that I am as capable mentally today as I was 40 years ago (though my family’s opinion may differ..). Additionally, I now have a data warehouse full of experience, hacks, workarounds and general knowledge stored in my head. What I may have (just possibly) lost in raw mental processing power by regular intake of wine over the last 30 years, has been compensated for by my ability to bring a real-world experience to a problem before me. I therefore have no worries that I might not be up to a job in 10 years’ time.

Then there are the benefits of a bit of work stress. No really. In Naseem Nicholas Taleb’s wonderful book Antifragile, he describes the benefits of some overworking in various organisms in nature and points out instances where the same applies in our own physiology. Studies have shown that there is an element of use-it-or-lose-it to our brain function. In this context the raised cortisol derived from dealing with idiotic co-workers far exceeds the mild irritation of a missed putt.

Oh, and one other reason not to retire. For me I know I’d be climbing the walls in a few months. No. For me retirement will just not do.

Look, I do get it. The rules of the game are changing and it’s happening while we are more than halfway through our turn, but let’s face it, no generation is better than ours at drumming our heels on the parquet, screaming “But you promised!”.  We live in the real world though and so after some thought I believe I can see an approach which might just be a way through this for many of us. It’s a route I’m intending to follow, since it offers a way of reducing at least some of the risk and uncertainty, while avoiding brain atrophy and maintaining some business-related stress too. Let me explain.

I’m currently working in my career of 25 years as a one-man IT consultant. It’s well-paid but it has a high level of uncertainty because, when it’s boiled down to its core I sell my time for money. No contracts – no money.  After the recovery from the Covid work drought, there’s no sign yet of any drop-off in business. But for all the oft-quoted anti-discrimination laws, I anticipate that it will get harder to win business in what is still comparatively a young man’s game, as I begin to look increasingly like W.H. Auden without the hair. So, I’ve set myself a target.

The target is that within 12 months I will have started a secondary business that is structured in a way that no longer sells my time for money and generates some income.

So now all I have to do I work out how. I started to look at some of the usual older-person alternatives:

Fitness Instructor – Nope, dodgy back,

Delivery driver – ditto,

Tutor – Can’t stand kids. Plus, time/money equation again

Bookkeeper…..

Bookkeeper?

BOOKKEEPER?? One of the very worst moments of my working life was as a trainee Chartered Accountant sitting my Taxation exam. I turned the paper over and realised I was having one of those authentic nightmares where you can’t understand a single word on an exam paper. Except I was fully awake. So, no. Not a bookkeeper.

But that got me thinking…. Anything I might take on would stand no chance of success if I didn’t enjoy it. So, let’s throw the idea of a job per se out of the window and focus just on what I like doing, for the moment.

I like reading. I like talking. I like listening to music. I quite like writing. I like gadgets and I know about Tech generally. But we all know that there are millions of poor authors out there, plus I can’t play a single musical note. That said there are new routes to the market now that didn’t exist even 20 years ago. The digital and online world provides multiple frameworks for earning a living, though none of them are easy despite what the snake-oil salesmen say. On the other hand, the learning would be fun and I will be sparking up long-dormant parts of my brain again, that IT consultancy has not required in decades.

So, my route into non-retirement will be via newsletters like this – once a week for a year. YouTube videos the same again for a year, (But a bit more targeted, so the algorithm doesn’t blow a gasket). Oh, and I’ll continue my full-time consultancy, where I conveniently have a year-long contract in place. I’ll be charting my progress here.

All of this of course is a long-winded way of asking for your subscription and your enthusiastic spreading of the word. After all I do have a gadget habit to support.

 NEXT WEEK: The special inaugural music edition