← Work For Humans
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- [00:04]
A
A lot of the older workers that I spoke with, they say I'm 80 and all my co workers are 20 because they're working in retail or on a construction site. So it's fascinating that a lot of older workers, I feel, are taking on more of the entry level roles and I can't see that slowing down. As this country continues to age and with AI, it seems that there's a bit more of an emphasis on younger people. Ageism continues to be very rampant, either explicitly or, more often than not, implicitly.
- [00:41]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. In previous episodes, we've spoken with a few experts on retirement. In those conversations, we discussed averages and abstractions, age brackets, savings rates, replacement ratios. We debate when people should stop working, as if work simply ends at some reasonable, agreed upon moment. In today's episode, we look beyond the numbers to the lived experiences of Americans working beyond the age of 80, especially those who don't have the luxury of stopping. My guest today is Noah Scheideloer, a senior economy reporter at Business Insider. And over the past year, Noah's been reporting on something we rarely talk about, what it actually looks like to be working at 80 and older. His series 80 over 80 tells the stories of people still working late in life, some because they want to and many because they have to. In this conversation, we talk about the lives behind the numbers, people working while dealing with serious health issues, people who lost savings during downturns, people affected by divorce or caregiving or financial advice that went wrong, and people who feel proud of the lives they chose, even if those choices came with financial consequences. We also talk about ageism, financial literacy, the role of the financial industry, and how little most organizations are doing to prepare for for an aging workforce. Underneath all of it is a bigger question about work itself. What responsibility do we have to support people over their lifetime and what happens when we don't. If you enjoy the show, leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Now let's get into my conversation with Noah Shidelower. Noah Scheidloh, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:43]
A
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
- [02:46]
B
Work for Humans is a show about the design of work and how we might design it better. And one of the things when I have interviewed people about what they want from work, that is one of the most common responses is I want work to support my family. I want it to help me take care of my family. And I want it to do that now. I want it to do that in the future. And so one of the gaps in work today is retirement and our ability to save enough to retire. And I've had guests on the show. So, for instance, I had Matt Rutledge from Boston College. He's one of the world's leading experts on the state of retirement in the United States. And we talked a lot about statistics, and we talked a lot about what the average and the median. But what you've been doing in your work at Business Insider is you've been looking at the individual stories of individual people and their experience of working over 80, sometimes because they have to and sometimes because they want to. So I want to talk about that. So tell me about the 80 over 80 project. How did that even originate? How did that, how did you arrive at that as a topic?
- [04:02]
A
Of course. And I think it's worth contextualizing that you're speaking to somebody who's turning 25 in a month. So it's been really interesting to cover the complete opposite side of the age spectrum as somebody who is very young and just getting my start in my own career. So the middle of 2024, I was covering Uber driving, Uber Lyft, a lot of rideshare platforms, and I noticed that a lot of the drivers I was speaking with were older. And we noticed that a lot of them were working because they could not afford to retire. They were working because they needed the extra income but didn't want the set hours of a 9 to 5 job. And that really stuck with me. So later in 2024, I did a series with a colleague about older people and their regrets about retirement. And we noticed that a lot of the people that we spoke with were still working into their 60s, their 70s, and a handful were working into their 80s. And we determined based on that series that the work part of aging is very often invisible or frowned upon or a little bit taboo. I know with my family and with a lot of my friends families that if a grandparent is working, it's a little frowned upon culturally to still admit that you're working when all of your friends and colleagues have been retired for a while. So I took it upon myself to look at this demographic of older workers, and we started with 65 plus. And then we noticed that there were some reports that people 75 and older were actually the fastest growing segment of the labor force, not in terms of pure numbers, but in terms of percentage. So we saw that while maybe the Millennials and the Gen Xers were stagnating as a demographic and generation, in terms of the Percentage of them continuing to work. The oldest of workers were growing faster than it ever has before. And we decided on the 80 number just because it was a rounder number to work with than 75. So the other reason we decided on 80 was because the oldest baby boomers turn 80, depending on your definition of the years that you're using. But most definitions for baby boomers said that the oldest ones turned 80 last year. So it started off with just a handful of sources, a handful of people who just landed in my inbox and say, well, I'm 81, I own a restaurant and I really enjoy it. Or I'm 89 and I just retired after a long career. And it got me thinking, okay, well, we can. These people can't all be working just because they love to do it. And then I remembered, and I'm sure all of us can recall a time that we've gone into a Home Depot or a grocery store and we've noticed one of the cashiers was maybe limping to their desk or struggling to stand up because their age and factors related to their health. And I, for a while have wanted to do a story about, well, what is the day in the life of a grocery store worker who's in their 80s? And that got me thinking, okay, well, how about we do a comprehensive series where we speak with exactly those types of people? And the data, as I mentioned previously, panned this all out where the data was suggesting that not only is this one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing, demographic in the workforce, but it's also incredibly diverse and way more diverse than anyone maybe would have expected. When you're looking at the jobs, maybe you would expect retail to be at the top. There's the stereotype of doctors and lawyers never really retiring. And certainly the data shows that. But there were some professions that we were shocked by. Construction is the number two occupation that people hold. And that was very surprising. We saw a lot of blue collar jobs like truck driving, I believe was number four, truck driving and drivers in general, and people and automotive services. And we noticed that janitors and maintenance staff were still very prevalent, as well as agricultural workers, farmers. So we knew that this was a series that was worth telling. The media, to my knowledge, and even in academia, had never really looked at the oldest of workers comprehensively. And I just figured, why not? It went from there, where I ended up speaking with maybe a dozen people. A couple more articles came out, and then more people wrote in. I found more people online on Reddit or Facebook or LinkedIn was a big one that we used. And then from there it was somewhat of a domino effect where their friends would want to speak with me or I would get random emails from people saying, I want to talk to you. Even my friends saying, my grandparents want to talk to you. So it was really interesting how I was able to build up the sources. But ultimately we landed on somewhere in the 180 to 190 range of workers that I ended up speaking with for this series.
- [09:52]
B
That's a big lift. And I agree it is not discussed. Maybe we don't discuss things that don't seem very fun to us. And although it's super important and you provided some numbers, which is 550,000 people in the US aged 80 or older are working. So 550,000, it's a big number. 36,000 of those are 90 or older. So it is a lot of people. And let's start picking a few that stand out to you. Let's start off with a positive situation. Somebody who you interviewed that stands out to you in your mind as an example of thriving in their 80s at work.
- [10:37]
A
I think the natural place to go with that question is I did an article about how America's oldest workers are engaging with AI and this was a story that I really wanted to tell, just given the fact that everyone right now is talking about how AI is the future and everyone needs to learn how to use AI or else they are going to be left behind. So we spoke with, I believe, about a dozen workers who were 80 and older and were actively using AI at work. And this was something I was not expecting. I think most people wouldn't expect that you can be 85 or 90 years old and using AI as part of your job. But many of the workers I spoke with said, I feel just as young as I did when I started my first job. Why would I stop wanting to learn? Why would I stop wanting to improve my skills just because my age might suggest a certain number? So that's where we took it. We spoke with people who were not only using AI in basic ways. I think a lot of us use AI to look up an answer to a question. We were speaking with people who were taking machine learning classes and applying that in their work. I spoke with an AI consultant who had just turned 80 at the time that I spoke with her who held very impressive positions in government agencies and with NASA and a lot of other big companies. And she decided that she turned 80. She's going to help other older Americans also learn how to Use AI. So that was the story of a woman who probably never needed to work a day in her life again, but decided that why the heck not? I might as well just continue to learn and continue to take classes and improve my skills, because what does my age matter? We spoke with people who one of them was using AI to help him write a book, and we spoke with another one who was using AI for helping students in a dissertation program in order to help build out some source lists and bibliographies and things like that. So really it was fascinating the way in which older Americans were engaging with technology, especially in an era where I feel that a lot of people tend to associate older Americans with a lack of technological acumen, where certainly we've seen this panned out in the statistics that even for jobs that require some degree of AI knowledge, a lot of those jobs pretty much they see an age, they see a number in a resume, and they say, I'm not even going to consider that person. And there have been many studies that suggest this, that once you enter your 50s, even if you are a whiz at AI and other sorts of automated technologies, they are going to likely throw out your application at a higher rate than younger people who may have less qualifications or similar qualifications. So that, I would say is a very positive example of people continuing to work into their 80s.
- [14:07]
B
Did you find among the positive stories that there seemed to be a high proportion of the self employed and founders?
- [14:15]
A
I would say it was somewhat the opposite from my reporting. It felt as though the people who were self employed often needed to be self employed or were self employed out of necessity because they couldn't find another job. So certainly we did talk to quite a few people who were in their 80s and one or two in their 90s did work for themselves because they have always been entrepreneurial, they've always enjoyed it. Maybe they started a company 50 years ago and we're continuing to run it, but oftentimes a lot of the people in those positions were offloading a lot of the work. They said, I've run this company for 50 years. Why do I still need to be running it when I can take on somewhat of a more advisory position and I'll let my kids take it over or I will allow somebody else that I've worked with for 40 years to take over and I will serve maybe as an advisor or some sort of unofficial overseer. The people who were running their businesses were the people who said I could not find a job after looking for a year and I Just said, all right, I'm going to do this myself because I don't want somebody bossing me around. I want to set my own hours. But I also think that I will achieve more and get more money from running this myself. So that was definitely surprising that I felt like for every person who was a CEO of their company who was doing it just because they didn't want to retire, there was another person who was starting a company because they said, I am a caregiver, for example. And no caregiving agencies want to hire somebody who is older than the patients that they are caring for. So I'm going to start it myself and just start locally and charge my own rates and then see if I can expand. Or we had a couple of people who said, I have been a freelancer for basically my whole life and why would I stop that now? I can make a lot more money doing this and being a freelance editor or freelance writer than I ever really could getting employed by a company. So definitely we found that the self employment bit was often out of necessity instead of maybe an admiration for entrepreneurship.
- [16:44]
B
So let's pick the population. Let's talk about an example, like the one who stands out for you, of someone working because they have to in their 80s.
- [16:55]
A
I would say the flagship story, the one that got us started, the one that got national attention and the one that I think is still probably my proudest work of the series, was about an 81 year old woman who's now 82, but she was 81 when I spoke to her. She had written to me the following year, so in 2024, saying, I work at Home Depot, I am making a little over minimum wage in Connecticut and I don't love it. It gives me something to do. And that was pretty much all that she wrote. It was very bare bones. And I said, oh wow, okay, well I really want to speak with somebody who's working at a big box retailer, a Walmart, a Home Depot, just because I feel like that's the demographic that you often will associate with older workers. There's the stigma, I would say, of the 80 year old Walmart greeter or the 80 year old home Depot worker. So I figured, okay, well this woman is interfacing with the public every day. I'm sure a lot of people make comments to her about her age saying, oh wow, you're a little old to be working here. So I reached out to her maybe five or six months after she, she had reached out to me and I wrote to her saying, oh my God, thank you for writing me. Sorry it's been so long since you wrote me. But really interested in getting to know you a little bit better. So we started off with an hour phone call. She was an open book. She was telling me that she works at Home Depot because she has to. She had a series of jobs that went well. Some of them did not go well. She decided, I want to be a business owner. And her and her husband, who her husband's about nine years older, got married in the 90s. She was a second marriage and he was a third marriage, or maybe it's the other way around. But basically they got married in the 90s and decided that they were going to start a family, and they had children from previous marriages, and they got married. They moved to Florida for a year from Connecticut. Decided that was a huge waste of their money because they had renovated a home and basically tanked a lot of their savings, only for them to realize, we don't want to be in Florida. We want to go back to the Northeast. Then they held jobs in the 2000s. In 2008 came. They lost a lot of their money in the market. They, like many other people, were not able to recover a lot of what they had lost. And once the 2010s hit, the woman decided that she was going to found a company. It was basically a downsizing company that she would run with some help for older people who wanted to either completely downsize their homes or wanted to sell a lot of things. The company was in business from maybe 2013 until start of the pandemic. And then when that shut down, they were really struggling because they had poured a lot of money into the business. Her husband was in his late 80s, was pretty much unable to work due to health conditions, and they just really were struggling to get by because of rent and the rising costs of daily life and a couple of medical procedures that they all had to go through. So she decided that she was going to drive down the road and end up at a Home Depot, and she got hired. She basically was a sales associate on the floor, on her feet for a couple of hours every day, and ultimately decided that she was going to do that until she no longer could. She did not realize, though, that when she took the job that she would be battling pretty severe heart failure. She knew when she had started that she was pretty out of breath. She had noticed this even before she started working. But when she had started working, she realized I pausing every hour, it's really hard for me to stay on my feet. It's really difficult for me to stay upright. And she would say it would be pretty much a struggle to get through any day. So she could not think of any other options. She would apply to many, many jobs, and the only one that would keep her hired was Home Depot. And I caught her at a moment where she was pretty much in a state of limbo. I would say she didn't really know what to be doing doing in terms of planning for the future. She couldn't really act upon any job opportunities because there wasn't a single one that would want her. She showed me her resume, her applications. She had applied to many different places, and on the side she was starting a business, but she hadn't quite developed the inventory and the website for it yet. So I visited her and her husband in Connecticut for a couple of days earlier this year when they had pretty much $1,000 to their name, aside from assets that they owned, pretty much it was just one car and a small apartment. So I was able to tell their story, and that one still sticks with me. She was able to quit her job a couple of months after the story published because she just could not do it anymore with her health, and she got her business started. I don't know exactly how it's been doing, but she, like many of the other people who I had spoken with and we discussed earlier, who are starting businesses out of financial necessity. She was another one of those cases where she felt, why would I make $20 an hour at Home Depot potentially hurting my health when I could be sitting behind my computer all day and it's a lot safer and I can set my own hours and be own boss? So that's just a pretty harrowing story of a couple that made mistakes, but didn't make any disastrous mistakes that they really, really regrets. A lot of the mistakes that they made were ones that anybody can make. I mean, who knew what would happen in 2008? A lot of people regret how they handled 2008, but when you were met with such uncertain circumstances or you lose half of your money overnight, a lot of people aren't thinking rationally. And a lot of people won't predict what could happen in 10, 15 years, let alone them saying, we didn't even expect to live this long. So that was just a very poignant story.
- [24:01]
B
I certainly have known people who said, my retirement plan is to die young. Both my parents died young, and so I suspect I don't need to plan well. Actually, the longevity of your parents is not predictive of your own longevity. It's weird to be hopeful, like, I hope I don't live that long is not exactly an encouraging plan. So I'm going to sort of separate the people who work as a lifestyle, even though they don't need to for money, and then the people who need to out of necessity. When I encounter people who are working in their 80s. And actually you interviewed one Uber driver who was in her 80s and she said, I wonder if there are any other Uber drivers in their 80s. And I know I've met one, so I know there are. He was a police officer, so he had a good pension, but he continued to drive in his 80s. So I think of people who've gone through divorce. Did divorce play a role in the lives of many of the people who were working? Because they had to?
- [25:01]
A
Definitely. So we noticed that a lot of the people that we spoke with, particularly women, were impacted by a divorce. Whether it was a divorce 40, 50 years ago or a divorce that was a little more recent, we found that it mainly was women who were impacted because of a couple of factors. One was oftentimes most of the assets that the woman in the relationship had were linked to the husbands. So they would find themselves pretty much homeless overnight, where they needed to quickly find a new place to live, they needed to buy a new house because the husband had the house to himself. Another aspect of it was oftentimes the woman became the full time caregiver to the children after a divorce. We found that it was rare, at least among the 200 or so people that I spoke with, that in the case of a divorce it was the husband who had taken full custody of the children. It was either split or in many cases the wife was the full time caregiver for the children. So as a single mom, a lot of the people that I spoke with said that they were raising two, three, in one case, seven children, while also needing to work on the side. So that was a particularly alarming statistic. And one of the other factors we noticed was Social Security, where because in many traditional relationships, I know this isn't as much the case nowadays, but when I'm speaking to people in their 80s and 90s, they were starting families in the 60s, in the 70s, when it was much more traditional for it to be a single income household where the husband was the one working and the wife was the one caring for the children. Because of a divorce, there's no spousal benefits, there's no survivor benefits to Social Security if the husband dies. So a lot of the time the wife in the Relationship had pretty stunted Social Security allotment every month, where she may have had only 20 to 30 years of professional experience, as opposed to 60 years, which means that oftentimes she would be earning maybe $1,000 a month in Social Security versus what her husband might have or her former husband might have been earning, which might be closer to 2 to 3,000amonth. So definitely we found that divorce had some long term repercussions in addition to all the obvious legal fees that come with divorce. And also just the emotional trauma that a lot of people spoke about where they said, well, I had a divorce in my 50s, I thought I was going to be married to this guy for the rest of my life. Now, not only am I a bit financially strapped, I am also just an emotional wreck. And oftentimes that comes with a lot of financial missteps. And also looking at it a little more positively, certainly redefinition in life, but which also comes with some financial tolls. So on the positive side, we found that some spouses had went back to college maybe in their 50s or their 60s. They really wanted to just forget every part of their life from the marriage and start completely new, which comes with student loans and things like that. And we also noticed that on the negative side, that sometimes this wasn't incredibly common. But we spoke with a couple of people who after a divorce or after a spouse died more broadly, they fell victims to scams just because they were in such a distraught place that they, they wanted to start speaking with somebody online, they were looking to remarry or just have a loving partner. Turned out to be a scam and they lost a lot of money. So divorce, I think manifested in many different ways in this project.
- [29:24]
B
How about being single in general? So one of the statistics I saw recently was that the number of people who are single is rising. And that seems to me to be just financially difficult. It's riskier. You don't have any backup, you have half the income but not half the expenses. So this may not have been as prevalent in the population that's now 80. But did you see that as a pattern at all?
- [29:53]
A
We certainly did. As you're saying, yeah, it was a lot more common, I think, for people to just get married in their 20s or early 30s, 50 years ago than it was today. But certainly I spoke with many people who just said, I've never gotten married in my life because it was just not something I wanted. I spoke with a lot of people who say, well, I've been independent my whole life. Why would I ever want to marry? And they echoed a lot of the points that you had brought up. They said things along the lines of, I didn't get a break in life because I didn't have an extra income. I still had to raise kids. Whether it was they were a single mom for or single father for most of their life, or they just said, well, I need to pay the rent myself, I need to pay the utilities myself. I know down the line I'm only going to be relying on my own Social Security. So this came up a lot where we had noticed that a lot of the people who are single, they made a mistake. They had nobody to fall back on. They wanted to buy a house, they had to wait a couple extra years to do so if they wanted to retire at all. A lot of the people who had never married said that they were very, very hesitant to retire at all because if something happened medically, who knows how much it would have cost them to pay for a caregiver because chances are they didn't really have extended family to help them out, they didn't have children to help them out. So they said, all right, if it's just going to be me, I need a lot of money in order to ensure that if I end up in an assisted living facility or I have an at home caregiver, I need to be the one to pay for that myself. So definitely there was a heightened level of caution that we noticed with people who had either never married or were single for most of their lives.
- [31:58]
B
I remember meeting a barista. He was in his 80s, he had long hair, he had a diamond earring. And I thought that guy was a lead guitarist is what came through my mind. He had a certain style and I thought, he's somebody who lived his life in the arts. And I don't know exactly why I pick on the arts. I pick on them, I guess because it doesn't have to be the arts. It could be. I was a social worker. It could be I pursued a career that was about something other than money as its primary objective. And so did you find an overrepresentation? It's hard to guess, but was it your perception that there was an over representation of people in the arts?
- [32:44]
A
I wouldn't say that there were many, many people in the arts, but I would say that we found a lot of people who had that philosophy toward money that you had mentioned, which is just pursuing a career to pursue it and not necessarily worrying about the monetary reward for it. So certainly I remember speaking to musicians I think we spoke with a couple of artists, but overwhelmingly, I think it was people working in your traditional white or blue collar jobs, but with that mindset of, I want my job to be more creative, I want it to be something that I run myself. I want it to be a very fulfilling and passionate career. So we spoke with a lot of people who prepared well. I would say that there were three camps of people. So there were the people who prepared well for their retirement and find themselves working because they want to do so. These are people who had the financial tools either throughout their whole life or discover them in their 40s or their 50s and were able to capitalize on a lot of the modern financial instruments that we use today, 401ks or the stock market, ETFs, bonds, a lot of those more sophisticated investment tools. Then there was a camp of people who said that they worked really hard but didn't know anything about financial planning. So they were the people who either never had a lot of money to invest in the first place, those single parents, or the people who were working in low wage jobs, or the people who were married to somebody a lot wealthier than them and weren't working the whole time. So that group and a related group, which is the people who may have been working, you know, a middle class job but said, I have never known what to do with that money. I thought it just growed on trees. You know, I never really expected that I would have needed to be so methodical earlier on in my life. And then there was the third camp of people, which I think is the one that you're getting at, which is the people who just said, who cares about money? They're the people who said, well, I could have done a lot of things with my money, or at one point I had a lot of money and I just spent it all. The people who had no regrets, which was something that was really interesting to me was just the sheer number of people I spoke to that said, yeah, I have to work right now, but I don't care because I expected to work my entire life because I knew I would go insane if I ever had to retire. So of the three camps, that third one was definitely one that I was most gravitated toward in my reporting because I think that people can really resonate with somebody telling them the opposite of what everyone else is telling them. Here's these people who are saying, all right, well, I maybe have $50,000 in the bank, I need to keep working. I know at some point I won't be able to. But also, I've lived an incredibly fulfilling life. And basically, you can kill me tomorrow. And I know that I've lived a fulfilling life and will have no regrets. And those oftentimes tended to be more the arts people. Maybe they were the people who worked a career that was a little all over the place, had them traveling a lot. Maybe it was people who took off a lot of their career and decided, all right, I'm going to come back to it later in life. And this wasn't incredibly prevalent with the series, but we found that there were quite a few people who fell into that camp. And they were so interesting. They were just like, yeah, I was a hippie. I still maybe am a hippie, but why do I need to worry so much about being a millionaire by the time I die? That money is not going to be mine when I die. Am I just supposed to use it while I'm alive?
- [36:50]
B
On Work for Humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds, and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create. Create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull so you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's one one f o l d dot com one of my father's friends. And so my father was. It was one of his high school friends. So he was born in 25. Late in life he was working. And what he had done with his whole life was he said, you know, I helped the poor worldwide. I was in the business of helping the poor. And a lot of times I worked for a bowl of rice. That's what I did. And he spent a great deal of his time in Indonesia in Southeast Asia. And he says, and that's what I chose to do, and I'm happy I did it. I'm proud of what I did for the world doing that. And he says, and so I work very much like that. It was essentially I took care of others instead of myself in the long run. And he didn't regret it, although he definitely, I mean, he told me that. So he was thinking about it. Let's talk about financial literacy. One of the things that really surprised me in talking to Matt Rutledge at Boston College was that one of the things we automatically think is, you know, why people don't have enough money in retirement, it's because we never told anybody how to do it. And so there is no education in high school about basic financial literacy. There is no education in college around basic financial literacy. I learned from my brother, and I teach my kids. It's something that. It's an oral tradition. It's not something that is really supported in the schools. But what he said was that teaching financial literacy does not correlate with financial outcomes in retirement, which really surprised me. But you found, at least in some of the people that you interviewed, I heard that they felt they had been financially ignorant. Is that true? Was that a common refrain? To some extent. What I'm starting to probe toward is what do people blame? If they blame something, Definitely.
- [39:21]
A
We saw that a lot of the people we spoke to put themselves at fault and not everyone, because again, a lot of the people that I spoke with had no regrets, even if they were in a financially vulnerable situation or had no regrets because they were way more financially successful. But most, I would wager, most of the people I spoke with had at least one or two financial regrets that was tied to how they manage money and their education. On the topic, I think a lot of them regretted things that were outside of their control, which is a really fascinating moral dilemma that I encountered when I was doing my reporting. I think that a lot of the people I spoke with wanted to share their story to be didactic, but oftentimes maybe went a little bit too far in that direction and say, well, I messed up everything I ever did in my life, and I want younger generations to learn from that, which in many ways is admirable. But in many ways, too, I felt that people were placing the blame on things that were not in their control. For example, people weren't educated growing up. And this was especially true 50, 60, 70 years ago. When these people were in high school and college, Many of them didn't even go to college. But it was just money was not talked about as much as it is today. It was. You were just expected that you would work, you would retire at 65, you would have enough money to give your kids, you would buy a house. And for many people, that was true and was true for most people I feel that I talk to. It's just now that we're in the 21st century that I feel it's so much harder to do any of those things. It's so much harder to find a job that pays you well. It's so much harder to buy a house, so much Harder to raise kids. So for a lot of these people, they felt, well, I messed up. And I wish that, you know, younger generations can learn from this. But, yeah, a lot of the time that the people I spoke to just said, I wish I got an education. But then I would probe them and say, well, what would you have done differently? And they were like, I have no idea. I should have went to the bookstore one day and picked up a book on investing. Or I know I should have went back to college where I maybe would have learned this stuff, or I should have left this job and gone to another job. But I would ask them questions saying, well, you wouldn't have known that doing that would have had any impact. Who knew that that book that you wanted to get even existed in your bookstore? Who knew that going to college wouldn't set you on a completely different trajectory that would have put you in a worse state? Who would know that, okay, well, you should have bought this house instead of this house. How would you know that that house, maybe, God forbid, would have been struck by lightning one day? There's so many things that you cannot control. And one of the other things that a lot of people said was, oh, well, I should have prepared better for health, for health challenges. How would anybody know? Unless it's a very predictable disease? Okay, I spoke with some people who got lung cancer because they had smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. I'm talking about people who had developed cancers, who developed heart disease, very serious conditions from a crash or a fall. How would anybody know to expect that? And even if you did know to expect that, how would you know how much money you would need to hire a caregiver or whatever your insurance doesn't cover and you have to pay that? So we found that this was very prevalent among people where certainly people regretted a lot of things that they should regret. I don't want to sugarcoat it, because certainly there is an amount of sympathy that you can give, and there is also an amount of attention that you can bring to some issues. It would be irresponsible of me to say that these people did everything perfectly in their lives and they got screwed by the system, and here they are. Certainly that is true for some people, but there were a lot of people I spoke to who made mistakes. We should talk about those mistakes. And many of them were very willing to talk about those mistakes. And what I mean by that is there were many people who said, when I bought this house, I didn't realize that it would have required a lot of renovations. I mean, that's something that we heard time and time again. And sure, you don't know everything when you buy a house, but there are certainly ways that you could have predicted that. There are other cases, like quitting a job too early because you didn't calculate everything that you needed for the rest of your life. That's unfortunate, but that's a mistake you should have predicted. Okay, well, if I'm alive for 20 more years, I would need $500,000 in the bank. But I did not do that calculation. So I retired and I only had 200,000. So those are the types of mistakes that we should be talking about. But there were so many mistakes where people would say, I should have predicted the future. I should have been an oracle. And in many of those cases, there's so much regret that you can have about the unknown. And that's something that I tried to dispel with my work was getting at. Okay, well, there's really only so much that you could have controlled.
- [45:17]
B
It sounds hard living with those regrets and struggling every month for money. And I'm reminded a little bit of there was an article in the Atlantic by Gabler, the Secret shame of Middle Class Americans. And that particular article was about his story, which was that he is a writer and he's a successful writer, and he lives absolutely paycheck to paycheck in his 40s, and he had a couple of TV series. He published works all the time. He made some financial mistakes, honestly, and they were essentially overestimating his wealth, like getting a vacation home in upstate New York when they were in a co op in Brooklyn. And that's the sort of thing, the vacation home was an error. You know, it was a mistake. They felt middle class because they had middle class jobs, but they were, in fact, not in a position to be able to do that. And then they couldn't sell the co op. And so there were just these things. And a life lived like that is not going to save any money. He had to borrow money for his daughter's wedding. So where do children fit into this? How important were children in how people were getting by? How important were children in creating the situation that they're in?
- [46:39]
A
There are so many ways to go with that question. I think that for everyone that I spoke with, they could unanimously say that having children was one of the best things that ever happened to them. Not all of them could say the same for was having children the best thing that could have happened to their finances? And I think many, many people told me that they Made a lot of mistakes, quote, unquote mistakes, however much you want to call them mistakes or just facts of life. But we noticed that a lot of people would say I quote unquote made many mistakes with regards to raising my children and also managing my relationships with them later in life. One of the kind of through lines that we have seen with this series was that many grandparents felt like they couldn't be grandparents. They felt that even though they had grandchildren, they were working, they could not see their grandkids because they were working. And that was something that I'm hoping to expand upon this year with some of my reporting is exploring the kind of shifting role of being a grandparents nowadays. Where back in the day maybe it was okay, you would watch the kids whenever their parents wanted to go on a vacation, or you're the grandmother who bakes the cookies and is the person who gives the gifts every Christmas. That role has definitely been shifting. So I think that that's one aspect of this, that the roles that a lot of these people are playing now in terms of being grandparents, great grandparents, is definitely shifting a little bit more away from that model that many of us may have grown up with. I think that one of the big through lines of this was parents giving their kids too much money or not teaching them the right values that would enable them to be successful financially. So a lot of parents told me that, oh, I don't regret this, but this is something I did was I paid for my kids college and I paid for their wedding and I paid for a lot of their resources as they were getting started. And that set me back a lot financially. And we heard this a lot with grandchildren too. We spoke with people who said, well, I really spoiled my grandkids. Some of them said that they even adopted their grandchildren because of some family struggles. But they said I literally adopted two, three of my grandchildren. So I basically was a parent twice, which was very disastrous to my finances. So a lot of that you cannot really say is a mistake or a regret or anything like that. It's just the fact of life. It's a fact of love. And there's a lot of money involved with that, with raising children. So definitely that was one component was parents saying, I should have pulled the plug a little bit sooner on giving my children money. On the other side, one of the trends that we noticed, and this is tied in with the grandparents piece, is a lot of research says that when you turn 70, more or less, the parent child's relationship kind of switches where instead of the parent Being the provider for the child when you turn 70 is kind of that baseline based on various polls and estimates. When you turn 70, then it's flipped where the child is providing for the parents. Which we found was often not the case for a lot of these workers. There's probably millions of factors at play for why that didn't actually pan out. But a lot of these parents didn't want the help. They said I can keep working. A lot of the parents said that even though I am in my 80s, I still feel that because I am earning income I should be helping my children. So that parents child's relationship continued and never flipped, even though might have supposed to. And certainly a lot of the people that I spoke with, they said that even if their kids are providing for them, they're still working because they did not want their children to view them as lazy. So for a lot of people it was really fascinating where they would move in with their children but would still work because they didn't want their children to think of their parents as some of them use the word useless or a waste of space. We heard some very alarming and heart wrenching terms when it came to parenting. So it felt like pride and respect, intergenerational respect were very big there. And then certainly there were a lot of parents whose children were estranged that they just did not talk to their children anymore. In the case of the Home Depot worker that I had mentioned earlier, she doesn't talk to her children anymore. So they're in this position partly because her children couldn't provide for them because they don't talk to each other. So that was another thing that I noticed was a very high rate and higher than I expected was a lot of parents saying I don't talk to my children anymore. Or I Talked to a 93 year old woman who's still working and is actually applying to jobs now essentially because her children, with one exception, she had six children, two of them passed away. So of her four living children, only one of them is really there for her and she needs to keep working because one out of four is not enough to cut it. So this was something we noticed a lot when doing this series. Just a lot of families that were struggling, a lot of families that were not whole and that had a lot of long term economic repercussions.
- [52:57]
B
Now let's talk about the financial industry and particularly financial advisors. One of the things that I read early on when I was starting to save was a. It was really just a pamphlet by somebody named William Bernstein and It was called if youf can and it had a section in it that said the financial industry is full of monsters. And he says they don't look like monsters. They may look like your cousin, they may look like your brother in law, they don't know that they are monsters. But they are not fiduciaries. Their financial interests are at odds with your own. And I saw that myself, which is that my parents had a really very respectable seeming financial advisor who was selling them instruments that made him a lot of money and were stupid, just absolutely stupid. My brother and I stepped in and got between this financial advisor and my parents and saved them an enormous amount of money. So this has been a topic of discussion. Obama passed a law saying that financial advisors needed to be fiduciaries and Trump undid it. So financial advisors are once again, some of them, many are good, but some of them are now free to prey upon their customers. So did you find that there were people who had not been scammed by scammers but taken advantage of?
- [54:27]
A
I recently spoke with a woman who lost all of her life savings in what was essentially a Ponzi scheme that was launched by her financial advisor who locked her in. And I don't know all of the details and I can't share all the details, but basically her financial advisor cornered her and made her invest in what was essentially a Ponzi scheme and she lost all of her money. Financial advisor got a lot of money as a result of that and she is now left in her 80s needing to work. We spoke with a couple of people who did not have as disastrous of outcomes but had employed financial advisors who lost them a lot of money because they, whether it was during the dot com bubble or during 2008, were making some very, very risky bets using their money. And it ultimately ended up being very disastrous for say about five or six people I talked to who said that it was directly because of a financial advisor that they ended up in a worse financial situation. Certainly as you had said, many, many of the people I spoke with had very successful relationships with a financial advisor and just engaging with the financial industry at Broad. But yes, there were quite a few people who preyed on some of these older workers that I spoke with. One woman that I spoke with, actually after an article that I came out on her went viral, somebody slipped in, sent her a text and said, I read this article, thank you so much for speaking about this. I want to work with you and help you make more money. And she fell for it and thankfully was very quick to get out of that, but ended up losing a couple hundred dollars and really not anything I can do as a reporter in that situation because she had agreed to talk with me, she understood the risks. But that's just one of these shocking examples of how prevalent this kind of predatory behavior is. Even if it's not a very complex, hard to understand financial attack against somebody, it can be as simple as something like that where somebody gets a hold of your phone number and says, I want to hire you to be my client and is essentially a scammer in disguise. So not a huge issue from what I was able to gauge from the series, but certainly a topic that came up quite a bit.
- [57:21]
B
Yes, well, and it's hard to say because there's scams and then there's just being bled, there's fleecings where you know, somebody's really out to take all your money. And then there's just the ones where their fees are too high. And it's one of these things where compound interest depends upon the percentage that you earn. And if a few percentage are being shaved off throughout your entire life, you don't know that it's happened to you. And these are folks who work for banks, you know, they work for Wells Fargo, but they are not fee based advisors, they are commission based advisors. It's really, really hazardous. It's one of the things I wish I'd spoken about when I spoke to Matt at Boston College, which is just the hazardous environment that there is out there. Financially, this is likely to get worse before it gets better, I would imagine. The reason I say that is that the people who are in their 80s are the leading edge of the baby boomers. And the baby boomers are the ones who about halfway through pensions were replaced by 401s in the United States. And so for anybody who's listening internationally, pensions are a defined benefit that your company takes all the risk and continues to pay out to you for the rest of your life, either your company or some other agency. And 401s are things where you need to save in there yourself. You take all the risk and they're tax advantaged, which is great, but you can do really dumb things with them. It's in your control and the risk is yours. And so when the principal that's backing a pension fund fluctuates, you don't experience it. But when what's in your 401k fluctuates in terms of value, you do. And there's a lot of variation in the outcomes that people Get. So what happened is that that transition you're interviewing the leading edge of the baby boomers in the United States. And about halfway through the 401k became the principal savings vehicle and nobody knew what to do with that. And so I suspect it's the leading edge of something a lot bigger. You mentioned that companies are starting to prepare for an aging workforce. What are you seeing in terms of that?
- [59:32]
A
I definitely think that this problem is going to get worse where not only is the quantity and also the percentage of people working at 70, 80, 90 going to keep increasing. On the flip side, you're going to have a decreasing labor pool of young workers. We're seeing that in 2030. I believe it will be the first year where there will be more Americans 65 and older than under 18, which is very concerning given the fact that we are already having a lot of talk about labor shortages in many different industries. And what you often see in terms of the income spectrum is that your income pretty steadily rises until you get to your 40s and your 50s, and then it declines once you reach your 60s and your 70s. So it's really interesting because you see a lot of the older workers that I spoke with, they say, I'm 80 and all my coworkers are 20 because they're working in retail or on a construction site. So it's fascinating that a lot of older workers, I feel, are taking on more of the entry level roles. And I can't see that slowing down as this country continues to age. And as with AI, it seems that there's a bit more of an emphasis on younger people. Ageism continues to be very rampant, either explicitly or more often than not, implicitly. I just saw the other day that there's kind of a class action lawsuit against a company, a job board online, where many, many people say that they suspect that their applications have gotten thrown out because they put their real age on there and AI flagged it. So I don't envision this slowing down. I don't envision this getting better. And we should be talking about this a lot more. And that's what I'm hoping with, with my series, is that we can really engage with this workforce and understand that they may be somewhat of a rarity now, but it's way less rare than it was even five, 10 years ago. And it's likely that you will continue to see people working into their latest of years. Back to your question. I reached out to about 75 of the biggest companies in the S and P, and we basically just Approached them with a simple question, which is, what are you doing to help your older workers? Not just 80 plus, because that's an incredibly small pool for a lot of these companies. But what are you doing to help your workers in their 50s, in their 60s, your workers who are going through menopause, Your workers who are maybe slowing down a little bit and don't want to work 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week? Most companies do not respond. I don't really want to speculate as to why that is because there might be many different reasons. But we heard from about 15 or so companies. So, you know, 20% rate, which you can interpret however you want. But we spoke with whether it was the PR people there or a couple of cases with people who are in charge of HR at these big companies. So we heard from companies like Google, Microsoft, Walmart, a lot of the really big names that you would expect. Disney, that's another big one that employs a lot of older Americans. And it is pretty encouraging. Even though we didn't hear from a ton of the companies, the ones that did get back said that it's not really just, oh well, we want to make sure our older workers feel supported. And that very bubbly but not very specific language. We really wanted to get as specific as we can. So we've seen benefits structures changing a little bit more, emphasizing health a lot more, but specifically illnesses that come up later in life. So we're seeing a lot more devoted to cancer treatments. We're seeing a lot more paid leave for health issues related to aging, whether that's common ones like cardiac issues, arthritis, lung issues. We've been seeing that very explicit in some of these benefits policies. Long term care, oh yeah, that's a big one. Long term care is a big one. We noticed that some companies had it very explicit that there are internal and external care resources that the company partners with in order to support family members and working with bosses to ensure that maybe one week your parent is going through a lot of stuff. It's making it pretty explicit in the company bylines that you can't be fired for this. This is something that you need to work with your manager on. But a little bit more flexibility, I would say in terms of the caregiving roles. We noticed a little bit more in terms of retooling jobs for the needs and wants of older workers. We heard from companies like Starbucks that said that they are allowing for more flexible schedules for older workers. We spoke with some companies that had said they allow for a more phased retirement system. So instead of retiring overnight, you can slowly renege on some of your responsibilities over the course of two years. So that was a big one. And that's one that's currently being discussed a lot right now.
- [65:29]
B
I did that, actually. I went to 20% for a couple years at Google. It wasn't a program, it was just I wanted to retire fully and we came to an agreement that I wouldn't. But it was a good thing to do. It was a really good thing to do, yeah. But it was also not that easy to do. And at one of my companies, I suggested an emeritus program, which is like to stay an employee. I'd like to be at 0%. It's something that my father did with the university, which is he worked for 30 years after retirement doing experiments. His last experiment was when he was in his late 80s. But it wasn't that it was rejected as an idea. It was just a pain in the ass to do from a systems perspective, to have a 0% employee. And the other challenge with it, and it's, IBM has a program like that which is you can go to zero percent, but the challenge is that you still have intellectual property constraints. And a lot of people are like, well, I'm not going to have my intellectual property constrained for nothing, right? And so that's a hard thing, which is you're inside the company and you have access to all the intellectual property, but you want the freedom to come up with your own ideas, write a book, do a podcast, and so that sort of thing, that's a constraint. So there are challenges to some of those models. You're 25 almost. What a good time to be having these conversations with people. How does it make you feel about your prospects and what you're going to do differently?
- [67:08]
A
This is one of the main reasons that I'm actually pursuing this is. I don't want to say it's purely selfish, but I am writing a series on older Americans for the sake of younger people, which may sound slightly paradoxical at first, but I think it's obvious once you dig deeper that these are people who are some of the wisest people on earth. They're people who have lived, some of them through a World War, Vietnam War, the couple of financial recessions, many, many different political systems in the US and abroad, people who have had many, many jobs, who have seen the invention of the telephone, the invention of the Internet. These are people that we should really listen to. And my big thing is I think younger people should take advantage of the older people in their life. And hear the stories and learn how life has changed, how jobs have changed, how rights have changed. And I think that just makes us all much more aware of people, makes us much more grateful people. And that's just the way that I want to conduct my life is by adopting a lot of these wisdoms and a lot of these pieces of advice and. And living the best life that I can financially. I already have a financial advisor. I am already thinking about buying a house within the next two to three years. I have really tried to internalize a lot of the pieces of financial advice, certainly for better and worse. I think that when you talk to a lot of people day in and day out who have made mistakes and who have struggled and who just had a lot of unfortunate events happen to them in life, you become hyper vigilant, and that can come with some stress and anxiety that any moment something bad can happen to you, which I didn't really start to think about earlier. So I'm working on that part. But certainly, I think financially, I've been trying to develop a good balance between work and life. I'm trying to travel a lot. I'm trying to enjoy my prime years. I have been running a lot because I want to preserve my health to the best that I can. I have been pursuing a lot of passions outside of work so that I can make sure that I am living the best that I can and not a life of regret. But I also am a lot more cautious, I would say, than a lot of my friends. And they make fun of me because they think I'm too cautious, which I think is valid to an extent. I mean, I definitely am a bit of a cheapskate sometimes where I feel like I don't know if I should be going out to that fancy dinner because that $100 that I save now might be $1,000 in 20 years. And it's just a difficult way of going through the world when you're somewhat overburdened by knowledge.
- [70:29]
B
Being cheap can be an aesthetic that's quite fun. It's a good time. I think anybody reading your articles might end up if they pay attention, behaving the same. There's a lot of fun to be had for no money. So thank you very much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate you being a guest here and love the reporting that you're doing. Where can people learn more about you? Where can people learn more about your work?
- [70:57]
A
Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. All my articles are on businessinsider.com you can search me up. This series is called 80 over 80 and I'm also very active on LinkedIn, so I post on all my articles there.
- [71:15]
B
Thank you very much. Really appreciate your time.
- [71:19]
A
Thank you.
- [71:21]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.