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Christine Benz on the Keys to a Happy, Prosperous Retirement
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- [00:01]
Christine Benz
I do think that we have a tendency to kind of want to fall back on how our parents did retirement or how the people around us are pursuing retirement. But it's a really lovely life stage to take a step back and think about what you're going for and create a retirement plan that's very customized to what you want to do.
- [00:24]
Robert Brockamp
I'm Robert Brockamp, and that was Christine Benz, director of personal finance at Morningstar and the author of how to 20 lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement. In this rebroadcast of an interview that first aired last November, Christine and I discuss her book and some of its main takeaways, including updated research on safe withdrawal rates, the right age to claim Social Security, whether retirement is actually good for our health, and the value of being a weirdo. So, Christine, your excellent new book is a series of interviews with 20 experts, each of whom have some sort of lesson about some aspect of retirement planning. So even though I'm interviewing you for this episode, I sort of feel like I'm actually interviewing a panel of experts and you're the spokesperson.
- [01:09]
Christine Benz
That's a good way to think about it. That's how I've been thinking about representing the book, because I do not want to take ownership for all of the great contributions in the book. They really belong to the people that I interviewed. And frankly, that's something I really liked about the project. Sort of the humility. I don't have to deal with my own imposter syndrome and pretend to have all the answers about things that are not right in my wheelhouse, like healthcare planning in retirement or, you know, estate planning, things like that. It leans on external experts. And so I really liked the, you know, sort of humility that that suggests.
- [01:43]
Robert Brockamp
Well, you definitely included many of the people who I respect the most when it comes to retirement planning. So highly recommend a book. Let's start with research on withdrawal rates in retirement, you know, because it attempts to answer a key question, right? How much can I spend? And be reasonably sure my money is going to last as long as I do? Plus, you could sort of then use that to back into how much you have to have saved before you retire, Right? This year marks the 30 year anniversary of the research report that sort of established 4% as a saved withdrawal rate, written by a financial planner named Bill Bengen. Since 1994, all kinds of studies have come out, many saying that 4% is too low, some saying it's too high. Morningstar jumped into the game a few years ago. The the most recent publicly available report was published toward the end of last year and it brought us back full circle to 4%. So what's your take on how someone should choose the right withdrawal rate for them when they retire?
- [02:41]
Christine Benz
Yeah, you know, this whole thing about safe withdrawal rates, in a way, Robert, when I think about it, kind of rests on what I think of as kind of a strawman. So like the formula that we use to even do our research, our kind of base case, safe spending research at Morningstar, is that we assume someone's looking for kind of a Social Security equivalent or paycheck equivalent in retirement, so they're going to take the same amount out every year. Inflation adjusts that dollar amount, so they take a little bit more if inflation's up, maybe take a lower inflation adjustment if it's not up so much. But that's sort of how we assume that someone marches along for however long their retirement is. The kind of baseline assumption that we use for our research is 30 years. So when we at the research on this, it's not really how people spend that people do tend to spend less throughout their retirement life cycle, sometimes for reasons of uninsured long term care costs. Mainly we see healthcare spending flare up later in life, then that inflates the averages for everyone, even though, you know, it's a fairly small segment of our population that has that catastrophic long term care spending need. So anyway, it doesn't really factor in real world spending. And another thing that we know when we look at this problem is that ideally you would pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in your portfolio. So in a good year you can take more. So in a good year like 2024, in a bad year like 2022, you'd probably want to take a little bit less. And the basic intuition there is that you're preserving funds if in a downturn you're preserving funds that will be available to recover when the market eventually does. So I definitely prefer that people think about flexibility if they possibly can. And one thing I liked in the book is that John Guyton, who's a financial planner and has also done some work in this realm of retirement withdrawal rates, he notes that it's like a rare thing where our behavioral instincts, which is to spend less when our portfolios are down, actually align with what's good for our portfolios. And in many cases that's not the case. Right. We feel like selling often times out of our portfolios when the market's up. Spending more feels better than spending less. This is a time where actually those two things are in alignment.
- [05:13]
Robert Brockamp
Yeah. One of the points made by Jonathan Guyton and at least one other person that you interviewed in the book is that 4% is a worst case scenario. It survived the worst conditions we've seen since the 1920s. In most situations, someone who filed the 4% rule would actually die with more money than they started with at retirement. So some of the suggestions from the experts, as well as the research from Morningstar, is like you could, for example, instead of assuming that you just take an inflation adjustment every year, whenever your portfolio is down, you just don't take an inflation adjustment and that moves up. That adds like 0.4 to 0.5% to the safe withdrawal rate. Or if you use the actual spending of retirees, which tends to go down over time, the actual beginning safe withdrawal rate could be 5%, especially if you are willing to cut back during times when your portfolio is down.
- [06:10]
Christine Benz
Yeah, no, it's absolutely right that this is particularly important for people with tight financial plans where, you know, there are real quality of life issues in underspending that if they wed themselves to this 4% guideline in many market environments, that would prevail over the subsequent 25 or 30 year period or shorter period, perhaps that would be too low. And so ideally you would revisit this. You'd think about how your portfolio has performed. You'd be willing to be a little bit flexible. And I think another factor that has gotten underrated that we're addressing in the 2024 Retirement Income Research that we're working on is that most people have other sources of cash flow in addition to their portfolio. So most of us will come into retirement with the stabilizer of Social Security that's going to make more comfortable making those adjustments. My portfolio isn't my sole source of spending. So if I'm able to kind of look at Social Security as providing my baseline living expenses, I probably am willing to tolerate a bit of volatility in my portfolio cash flows, or at least that's how I think about it.
- [07:24]
Robert Brockamp
We'll get to Social Security a little bit later. But one of the other benefits of the research on safe withdrawal rates is that it gives an indication of what asset allocation seems to best enhance portfolio longevity. It depends on your assumptions and frankly which withdrawal rate strategy you're going to follow. But the research seems to indicate that there's sort of like this Goldilocks amount of stock you should aim for, not too much, not too little. So what's your general idea in terms of a range of a reasonable asset allocation. Based on the research you've done on safe withdrawal rates.
- [07:57]
Christine Benz
Yeah, it's more balanced, I think, than many people might think. I frequently run into retirees who say, you know what, I just own dividend paying stocks, forget your bonds, I own maybe a little bit of cash and I call it a day. When we look at the research with sort of our base case where again we're assuming someone wants kind of that fixed real withdrawal throughout their retirement years, it very much points to the value of balance. In fact, when we did the 2023 research, in light of the fact that yields had gone up pretty decently on cash and on bonds, our model, because we're asking it to provide this fairly stable stream of cash flows, our model was basically saying back to us, I see that here today. And it's mainly in fixed income security. So the recommendation, like the highest safe withdrawal rate, somewhat counterintuitively to all of us, until we took a step back and thought about it, pointed to like a 20 to 40 equity allocation, which is pretty light for most retirees. I think many, especially investor type retirees, have more ample equity weightings. And I think the reason our model gravitated to that is because we are basically saying we kind of want to lock down our cash flows and we don't want a lot of volatility in those cash flows from year to year in light of higher yields. The Monte Carlo simulations that we run gravitated to that more conservative asset mix. If you're looking at a more flexible strategy where you are going to make changes to your spending on an ongoing basis and you're up for that, then if you look at something like the guardrails strategy, which is Jonathan Guyton's strategy for kind of dynamic withdrawals, it points to a higher equity mix, but still in the realm of balance, not 9010 equity versus fixed income, it's, you know, more sort of 60, 40 that delivers the highest spending rate with a guardrail.
- [10:00]
Robert Brockamp
Strategy that's generally consistent with many of the other studies that looked at historical returns as opposed to your study, which is more prospective and that you don't want to go too much over 60 or 70% when it comes to stocks.
- [10:13]
Christine Benz
Right. And the reason is pretty intuitive, like you don't have to be a market guru to understand the importance of if you're going to be spending from this portfolio, you basically want to. And this gets to the bucket thing that I often talk about, but you kind of want to lock down a stream of cash flows that you could pull from without disturbing equities. If you happen to be super unlucky, retire headlong into a market environment that you know where your stocks immediately drop. You would want to be able to withdraw from safer assets and leave those equity assets to recover.
- [10:50]
Robert Brockamp
With your bucket strategy. You've often talked about three buckets. That's one super safe bucket. About two years of retirement income in cash, maybe years two to eight, corporate bonds, maybe some safer stocks. And then years 10 and beyond are stocks. So when you're working, you're probably going to be mostly in stocks. But at some point you have to de risk. At what point do you think people really have to start taking that seriously? Is it 10 years from retirement, 5 years from retirement? And do you have any particular suggestions for how they should do that?
- [11:25]
Christine Benz
For sure, within a five year window, I would be thinking seriously about de risk. And I think sometimes people hear de risk and think that we're saying, oh, you're going to flee equities entirely. No, it's just that you probably have been neglecting safer assets in your portfolio. You might have that emergency fund and if you're using some sort of all in one fund like a target date fund, it's tipping you into more bonds. But if you haven't been paying close attention, well, we've had a great equity market. Your equities are probably hogging a bigger share of your portfolio. So I think the best way to address that is to perhaps turn your new contributions on to fixed income. That's probably the simplest, most painless way to approach it, where new contributions into your company retirement plan or maybe into your ira, if you're building an IRA would go into fixed income assets and then within, I would say probably a couple of years of retirement, then you would want to start building out that cash. But there's definitely an opportunity cost to having too much in cash too early, even though inflation has moderated a little bit. I think you want to be careful about the kind of peace of mind that you get with cash because there really is a significant opportunity cost over time. With inflation just kind of taking a bite out of that purchasing power.
- [12:50]
Robert Brockamp
Yeah. One of the points one of your experts made, Fritz Gilbert, that we talk about series of withdrawal risk often in retirement and that often conceived of as the series of returns you get in retirement. That sequence of returns risk actually starts before retirement because you don't want to get three years from retirement and then the market drops 50% and then your plans have changed.
- [13:13]
Christine Benz
Yeah, I love that point. That sequence risk I think is something that we understand to be like this, some sort of big market drop right after you retire. But Fritz is absolutely right that it's important if you encounter that, you know, just before retirement, you want to build a bulwark against having to come in. You want to let your portfolio fully recover. And I also think that inflation risk is maybe an under discussed aspect of sequence risk. It comes up in the book a little bit. But I think Wade Pfau talks about it where if inflation's really high in your early years of retirement, that's meaningful too. Right. Because I don't imagine that we'll be going Back to like 2021 Prices on cereal and hotels and all that stuff. We're probably kind of here to stay even though we will see the inflation rate moderate a little bit. So you need to be thinking about sequence of inflation risk too.
- [14:13]
Robert Brockamp
Yeah. Because it raises basically the floor of your spending for the rest of your retirement.
- [14:18]
Christine Benz
Right, Exactly.
- [14:22]
Robert Brockamp
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- [14:36]
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- [14:45]
Christine Benz
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- [14:51]
Robert Brockamp
Siemen mobile.com One of the most important decisions people make, besides what they do with their portfolio is something we mentioned previously and that is Social Security. And it does seem like the consensus of the experts in your book say that people should try to delay to age 70. You know, if you're married, maybe the lower earning spouse would claim earlier but that the higher earnings spouse should aim for age 70. That said, only about like 10% of people actually claim at age 70. So. So do you agree that people should aim for age 70? And if so, why do you think most people don't do it?
- [15:28]
Christine Benz
Well, I think because they need the money. Right? I mean that's still why we see this healthy cohort, even though we're seeing a bit of a shift. But you still have a healthy complement of our population claiming at age 62. And the simple reason is I'm retired, I don't have income from my work and I need some Money. And so I do think that many people want to retire and have some source of cash flow that isn't their portfolio. And many people retire prior to age 70. In fact, we tend to see a disconnect. People think that they will work longer than they actually do. But I think that that largely explains why many people don't delay all the way to age 70. And I do generally agree it's important, especially for certain cohorts. Single people, if they possibly can and if they believe that they have average or above average health, should think about delaying. And the bottom line is that it is that individual sole source of inflation adjusted lifetime income oftentimes. So if you can enlarge that, that's a wise thing to do. It puts less, fewer demands on your portfolio over time. And then as you said, Robert, for those married couples where you have one higher earning partner, that's often the best strategy for him or her because it enlarges the couple's lifet income from Social Security. So I often recommend Mike Piper's tool, open Social Security. People can hop on there and plug in some of their own variables and come away with a bit of a recommendation of how to proceed with respect to Social Security.
- [17:11]
Robert Brockamp
One interesting point Mike made in the book when you interviewed him was that delaying Social Security actually can have tax benefits. Depends on what else you're going to spend. If you're delaying Social Security because he used the example of you might have a traditional ira, all the withdrawals that come out of that are going to be fully taxable unless you had non deductible contributions. But most people don't. Social Security though is partially tax free for everybody. So if you can spend down your IRA assets so that you can get a bigger Social Security benefit which is partially tax free, it could actually result in lower taxes over the span of your retirement.
- [17:54]
Christine Benz
Right. And the name of the game is kind of that the post retirement pre Social Security, pre retirement, pre required minimum distribution period. So you know, kind of between say you retire at 65, between 65 and 70 is a really good period to do some tax planning. And Mike unpacks that that accelerating those traditional tax deferred withdrawals can make a lot of sense in that time period. So can exploring potentially converting some of those traditional IRA and 401k balances to Roth. It's a really good life cycle to get some some good quality tax advice about where to go for your cash flows. If your plan has been to to delay Social Security, it's you can get some guidance and that can kind of reduce your lifetime tax burden, which is really what you're going for. You're not going to try to reduce your tax burden in any one year. It's, it's you' to kind of smooth it out over the whole of your retirement life cycle.
- [18:58]
Robert Brockamp
You and I entered this business around the same time in the 90s. And I don't know about you, but the first several articles I read about Social Security, I would say like, you know, you can rely on Social Security, it comes from the government. Yes, the trust funds are going to be depleted, but that's 20 to 30 years from now. Well, now it's 2025, and they are scheduled to be depleted in 2035. We have an incoming administration that has said they're going to make Social Security completely tax free, and those taxes that people pay on Social Security go into the trust fund. So basically, if that happens, the trust funds will be even further, will be depleted sooner. So how do you think people should think about incorporating Social Security into their plan when there's so much uncertainty about.
- [19:47]
Christine Benz
Yeah, I think it's a question really that rests on your age. So if you're over 60, I would say, and never say never, but it seems quite politically untenable that people that close to getting their fair share from Social Security would see meaningful cuts in their promised benefits. You could maybe even lower that to, say, age 65. That Social Security is an immensely popular, valuable program. So the idea that Congress would sign off on really huge changes to the program seems unlikely. But I do think that people say under age 50 should potentially think about the fact that there could be adjustments to the program over time. There could be adjustments to the age when you can claim benefits. So maybe 62 would be no longer available, or there might be means testing where higher income people would receive less of a benefit than they do today relative to what they've paid in. So there are a lot of adjustments that could happen in that open Social Security tool that I referenced. It actually allows you to kind of haircut your promised benefit in the expectation of potential changes. I don't think that's an unrealistic thing to do. I do object, though, when people say, oh, it's going away, or I'm not going to count on it at all. First, I would say take a look at what that means for your savings rate, because you're probably not going to love that. You know, if you, if you're not expecting any help from Social Security with respect to your retirement spending, well, that is a Major shock to the system in terms of how much you need to be putting away. So take a look at that first, because I think it's pretty politically untenable that it would go away entirely and you would be really short shrifting your quality of life, you know, making these draconian cuts to your spending in order to save a huge amount. That would be appropriate if you're not expecting any sort of Social Security benefit.
- [21:54]
Robert Brockamp
Yeah, if the trust funds, if and when the trust funds are depleted, payroll taxes will still be enough to cover 75 to 80% of benefits. So when I run my numbers and I'm in my mid-50s, I assume I will get 75% from Social Security. And I think that's probably a good, reasonable assumption.
- [22:09]
Christine Benz
Yeah, I mean, better safe than sorry, but I wouldn't be radically safe because there are implications for your life in the here and now and that matters, too.
- [22:19]
Robert Brockamp
Yep, very good point. You mentioned Roth conversions, contributing to Roths. It's one of the big decisions, right. Are you going to go with traditional account? Are you going to go with the Roth? If you have traditional money, do you convert to a Roth? How do you think through that, that decision, particularly now when tax rates are historically on the lower side.
- [22:40]
Christine Benz
Right. If you talk to Ed Slott, who's a tax expert, he would be like all Roth all the time, basically because of low tax rates that we have today. I do think it's pretty individual specific. I often talk to groups of new employees at Morningstar, really smart people from good colleges. And my guess is that we probably aren't paying them as much as they will eventually earn in their careers. And their tax rate in retirement may in fact be higher than it is today. So for them, you know, it's an easy answer. Go Roth. For the late career saver who perhaps has not yet saved that much for retirement. The Roth contributions aren't necessarily a slam dunk that you may be in a higher tax bracket today than you will be in retirement. So you're better off taking that tax break, making the traditional tax deferred contributions, receiving that deduction on your pre tax contribution. So it's individual specific. But one thing I would say for a lot of people in my age cohort, many of us started our careers where the traditional tax deferred accounts were the only game in town. Right until very recently, all of our matching contributions were going into traditional tax deferred accounts. That was the only option for company retirement plans. So many of us have built up very substantial traditional tax deferred balances. And even if we are in our peak earnings years where that tax break on our contributions might be valuable, tax diversification is a valuable tool, too. So in retirement, if you have some assets that are Roth that can come out tax free, there's something to be said for that. So I've actually probably running counter to what might make sense from a math standpoint. I've actually been fully funding Roth contributions to my company retirement plan and also doing after tax contributions, which I won't bore you with the details of that, but I just want that tax diversification and the opportunity to have some tax free withdrawals in retirement. And you get that with Roth accounts.
- [24:53]
Robert Brockamp
Yeah. Part of the math is if you think you're going to be in a higher tax bracket in the future, the Roth makes sense. That's partially just making an estimate of how much money you'll have in retirement. It's partially also trying to look to the future and say where tax rates will be. Again, talking about what I would write in the early 2000s after the Bush tax cuts and then we had some wars and the recession and Social Security is underfunded, I would write back then, like, enjoy these tax rates now because taxes have to go up in the future. And here we are. We're probably going to get another tax cut here soon. So do you even try to project that anymore or do you think we should just assume tax rates are going to stay low forever? Even though I don't know as a country how that math works out.
- [25:38]
Christine Benz
Right. I think we have to work with the tax rules that we have. So we do have tax rates set to expire at the end of 2025. The Trump tax package was set to sunset. I think there's a general perception that it will be renewed for 2026 and beyond. So I think we have to deal with the tax laws that we have today rather than thinking too much about how things might change. And you're absolutely right, Robert, that it seems like the general mood in Washington for the past couple of decades has been to keep tax free rates nice and low. And this seems true really for both parties, as far as I can tell. Close your eyes. Exhale, Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.
- [26:50]
Robert Brockamp
In your book, you cover a lot of non financial aspects of retirement planning. In fact, you wrote, the more I've learned about retirement planning, the more I've come to understand that whether, when and how to retire is less than 50% related to money. So what else should people be thinking about when it comes to retirement planning?
- [27:08]
Christine Benz
I have to say I was guilty of this. You know, I toil on a lot of retirement income research and my articles are talking about the financial aspects of retirement. And that when I thought about some of my favorite conversations that I've had for the podcast that I work on, which is called the Long View, I realized that many of them were actually non financial conversations. So I think I had been under the importance of things like identity, that many of us have some sense of identity conferred by our jobs. When we walk away from that, we lose a little bit of that. And this is particularly true for people in kind of high status professions, you know, doctors and attorneys and so forth. But even for regular folks like me, I think, you know, when I, if I retire fully, when I retire, I'll kind of be walking around like, don't you know who I was? You know, there's a sense of that what you do for your job is who you are. And so there's that. There is, you know, the relationships that we get through our colleagues, real friendships that we have with colleagues. If we haven't built out a social network apart from work, that's a risk. You might overrate the extent to which you will stay in touch with those colleagues when you're no longer there sitting alongside them or seeing them on zoom meetings or whatever. So identity, relationships, and then perhaps most important is purpose. That work gives us a sense of the fact that we're contributing to the conversation, we're adding value to the world that we live in. If you haven't taken steps to kind of replace that purpose in retirement, you may feel kind of a sense of loss there as well. So I love the idea of people in sort of the, the ten year Runway leading up to retirement taking a step back and thinking about the whole picture. So certainly run the financial calculators, do your spreadsheets on what your budget will look like in retirement, do all that stuff, but also give due weight to the non financial side of the ledger.
- [29:20]
Robert Brockamp
I'm one of those people who will often say, I don't know if I'LL ever retire. But there are days when work is so busy and then I come home and then there's the kids and like, everyone wants something from you. I'm like, ah, maybe retire would be nice. But then I think the only thing worse than everyone wanting something from you is no one wanting anything from you. And I think that's sort of the whole point. You're sort of getting to like. You don't want to feel irrelevant. You don't want to feel like there aren't people who are looking forward to spending time with you and working you. You want to have some sort of. Of project intellectual stimulation. I thought one of the interesting points made by someone in your book, Jordan Grumman, and I don't know if I'm remind if I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
- [30:03]
Christine Benz
Yes, you are.
- [30:04]
Robert Brockamp
Yes. He wrote, he's a hospice doctor. He wrote a book about what people tell him toward the end of their lives. And he made the distinction between the big P purpose and the small P purpose. And if you think of the big P purpose, it's often like, I need to change the world. And that actually causes a lot of anxiety where it's the small P purpose that we should be looking for because it's really, we're doing it for our own satisfaction. There is still consequence for people, but it's really what brings us happiness.
- [30:31]
Christine Benz
Yeah, I love that section. I remember I told my husband I'm going to make Jordan's chapter the last. And my husband knows Jordan. He was like a hospice doctor. Seriously. The last chapter of your. But I find it really uplifting in part because he's reassuring about that, that he calls it purpose and anxiety, that people think, oh, you know, I need to write a novel or start a foundation or something really dramatic. That's big P purpose. But his point is like a set of small P purposes, whether it's like gardening or being a terrific parent or grandparent or like pursuing some hobby that you've been a little bit interested in cultivating a suite of those things is just fine, too. And when we think about our older individuals in our lives, probably our parents, we probably call upon those things like, oh, dad loved to garden and go to the opera and played the opera for us and all that stuff. Those are beautiful memories and very much a part of legacy, as much as some of those big P purpose sort of achievements might be.
- [31:43]
Robert Brockamp
And of course, we get some of that from work. I'm going to read a line from your book here. You wrote the more I've worked on retirement, the more I've concluded that many people should continue working in some capacity if they can, and not just for financial reasons. So in your opinion, is retirement good for people?
- [32:00]
Christine Benz
Laura Carstensen, who's a researcher at Stanford, head of the Stanford center on Longevity, actually makes the provocative point in the book that maybe it's not that provocative, that work is good for people and it doesn't need to be paid work. But, you know, getting back to this idea of purpose, she just thinks that the way we work in this country is all wrong, that people show up in retirement, they're so burned out, they haven't been able to visualize anything about what retirement might look like beyond like Netflix and, you know, just leisure activities, which is great. We all look forward to having more of that stuff. But the point is that if you have some pursuits, and again, they may be paid, maybe unpaid, those are the things that will give you something to relax from. You know, like it's all about balance, that ideally you would want some things that confer purpose, get you out in the world, get you mixing and mingling with other people, and then you would just have that pure relaxation stuff, whether it's. Whether it's golf or travel or reading or whatever is in that category for you.
- [33:11]
Robert Brockamp
Jordan may have made this point, and it's a point often made by Carl Richards, too, another financial writer about it can be just like what you subtract from your life, getting rid of the things that drain you so that you could focus on the things that you really derive value from.
- [33:27]
Christine Benz
Yeah, I love that idea. I've been encouraging people to use what I call the Sunday night calendar test, where you take a look at what's coming up for the week ahead and kind of make some mental notes on that. For me, one thing I love is when I see that wide open day, actually, where I know that's going to be kind of a writing researching day. Not a lot of meetings. And so sort of take mental notes of those things that you would perhaps like to continue doing longer and those things that you want to pull back from. And if you're, if you're in good standing with your employer in the years leading up to retire, I think this kind of can be an active sort of process, an active kind of discussion slash negotiation where you are saying, well, I want to keep doing this set of things and I want to do less of X, Y and Z. I think that's a valuable exercise. The challenging part is that some of the things that we've gotten good at probably are the things that our employers most want us to continue doing, but they may not be the things that we love love. So it's not always going to line up perfectly where your employer is, like, go, go, go, you know, and with letting you shed all of. All of the things that. That you don't love as much. But I think it's a way to kind of ease into retirement so that by the time you hit retirement age, you're doing a more agreeable set of tasks. And some people might listen to this and be like, you're nuts. I hate everything I'm doing and I know people like this. In which case, the healthiest, best thing is, okay, so let's think about what you will do instead of that. Because encouraging you to keep doing something that you are not enjoying in any way, shape or form isn't good for anyone.
- [35:17]
Robert Brockamp
Now, the evidence on whether retirement is good for us is very mixed. There are plenty of studies that find that people who retire die sooner, suffer some sort of cognitive and physical decline, sooner, become depressed. But there are other studies that find actually no people are happier. And I think it does depend on what you're retiring from and what you're retiring to, because there are some jobs that are very arduous, physically demanding, or frankly, just kind of boring. And certainly being able to retire from those is pretty good, 100%.
- [35:44]
Christine Benz
And the data on happiness in retirement, it's hopelessly polluted by kind of wealth and health that we do see a tight connection. The healthier and wealthier in our population tend to be able to work longer. They're the ones who are expressing a lot of life satisfaction. They have more longevity on their side, too. So it's really hard to disentangle. You know, healthier people are able to work longer, and so they're able to stay healthier longer. So it's really hard to disentangle.
- [36:19]
Robert Brockamp
Let's wrap things up with a couple of lines from your conclusion in your book. Give us a little riffing on these. Find your micro joys and don't be afraid to be a weirdo.
- [36:32]
Christine Benz
Yeah, so the micro joys is just something that I've been thinking more about because I've realized, like, the more I have traveled and done big things, the more it comes back to just those daily things that give me pleasure. And for me, I have, you know, for me, it's always cooking, reading and walking. Just the three things that I love to do. And I can do them day in and day, day out. They're cheap, can get my books from the library. And so I just would urge everyone to have those things that they can practice every day, not just in retirement, but in the years leading up to retirement. I think those things for many of us, maybe that dovetails with Jordan's small p purpose, but those are the things that really constitute quality of life for all of us. And then in terms of being a weirdo, I do think that we have a tendency to kind of want to fall back on how our parents did retirement or how the people around us are pursuing retirement. But it's a really lovely life stage to take a step back and think about what you're going for and create a retirement plan that's very customized to what you want to do. So even though all your peers might be taking their families to Europe or something like that and they that is not doesn't sound especially fun to you, don't do it. Really take a step back and make sure that your goals for your retirement and your spending in retirement is quite aligned with kind of your inner compass. And obviously, if you're part of a couple, you'd want to be somewhat on the same page with respect to these things, too.
- [38:09]
Robert Brockamp
Well, Christine, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for joining us.
- [38:12]
Christine Benz
Robert, thank you so much. I always love talking to you.
- [38:22]
Robert Brockamp
And that's the show, as always. People on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show Notes. I'm Robert Bro Camp Full on, everybody.