Tickling the Beast
While I have a hard time saying it and as much as I consider myself an expert in the subject, I am retired. I have spent a year now preparing myself for being retired and think I have done some admirable work in positioning myself appropriately for my next stage of life, which I consider to be the retired state of being. We all understand that in a world with increased longevity (my actuarial life expectancy at this moment is to live to 84 or 16.5 years more), retirement will need to adjust and be flexible for this new longevity reality. After WWII, the average retirement age actually exceeded the expected life span of a working man in the United States. To be clear, in 1946 male life expectancy was 64.4 years and retirement age was 65. Even if you looked at the newborn cohort in 1946, life expectancy was 72 years so an expected retirement period of 7 years. The social contract was, work your whole life (call it 45 years) and you get 7 years to relax in retirement. With the retirement period extending out to somewhere around 16-17 years now, the math implies that we have some societal adjustment we have to make to this whole arrangement.
I am not interested in this story in delineating the economic fix needed, but rather to discuss the personal issues we all (or at least I) face as we sidle up to retirement. I am more aware than most of the overall insufficiency of retirement income security in the U.S. overall and the world overall. It’s a very scary set of numbers that I delineated in 2013 in my book Global Pension Crisis, and those numbers have only been reinforced or, more likely, gotten worse since then. Nonetheless, for those of us fortunate enough not to have an economic beast to combat in our Golden Years, I assure you most of us have the psychological beast to wrestle to the mat.
Today I had lunch with my newfound half-sister Marissa. Marissa turns 60 early next year so she is in the pre-retirement stage where she is duly focused on the sufficiency of her retirement income sources (in her case they include Social Security, a Defined Benefit Plan, a Defined Contribution Plan and a Rollover IRA from a spousal bequeath). In other words, she has all the sources one can have, but she has the problem of having started (actually restarted) her career later in life, so she doesn’t have the years of contributions to rack up maximum dollars. I told Marissa that she is FAR more fortunate than most, less because she has so many plans to draw from and more because her chosen profession gives her so much retirement flexibility. Marissa is a Registered Nurse. Assuming she will be in good health (a key determinant in all retirement issues), she will have the ability to find work (full-time, part-time or episodic) almost regardless of where she chooses to retire. In fact, given the coincidence of health care needs and retirement communities, she will have wonderful access to greatly-in-demand work almost for certain. I reminded her that this element of her situation has the multi-faceted benefit of giving her income generation flexibility, giving her more freedom to ratchet up her investment portfolio risk (and thus maximizing return), but, very importantly, it gives her meaningful work in a flexible amount to keep her engaged doing meaningful and community-assisting activity that is perfect during “retirement”. In fact, I would argue that this aspect of her situation virtually eliminates the beast of retirement for her altogether.
I, on the other hand, have all the benefit of not having much of a retirement income security problem (assuming my household projects don’t break my back year after year), but my retirement beast is the very real issue of how to spend my time given all that flexibility. We all know that the majority of people who enter retirement will tell you that that they have no idea how they had time for work. They are just so busy, busy, busy and fully engaged. And here’s the thing, its mostly horse shit. They say that getting old is not for sissies, well, I say that retirement is not for sissies either.
At the end of 2017, my tenure at The New York Wheel had drawn to a close for better or for worse. My intention was to call it a day and retire to our home in Southern California, which had been awaiting us for six years. I stopped teaching at Cornell after ten years as a Clinical Professor. A friend of mine was keen to have me sign on as CEO of a scientific R&D venture company with which he was involved. I had no intention of doing it and was off in Istanbul with Kim when he begged me to visit with a scientist at a leading Turkish University. One thing led to another and the working beast snagged me and I got sucked in and have been CEO of the company as we have bumped along over the last three years. Then a year ago I decided to force the issue by moving out here to make the issue inevitable. In order to maintain some flexibility for the transition, I kept the CEO role for the time being, I connected with the University of San Diego to possibly teach, and I reactivated an old interest in expert witness work. I thought each one had limited leg to it, so I was more concerned that there would be too little to do versus the opposite.
Then COVID hit and my decision to move out here looked suddenly prescient, but all three channels for work activated, some more than others. The expert witness business far exceeded my expectations for activity and kept me very busy. The other two were less engaging, but active. Then, as I turned the corner into 2021 and my expert activities are momentarily waning, my teaching and CEO activities have started to rev up. Today I got a call from a highly-placed hedge fund principal I know and to whom I had referred a possible candidate who used to work for me and was engaged in a job search. The call was ostensibly to talk about that candidate. I was surprised because I hadn’t heard from this principal for a year and I never thought he would find my candidate to be more than of passing interest. His interest seemed both genuine and quite serious. As the call went on, this old colleague asked about me in the third person. He said, “And what about Rich Marin, what’s next for him?” He caught me flat footed with that.
Throughout my career and my life, I was always surprised to find people seeking me out for opportunities. I am not sure why I am so surprised, I have an accomplished resume, but I always am. And here’s the funny thing. I am always more than a little bit flattered when someone indicates interest in me, almost regardless of why they are inquiring. Did I mention that I am trying to retire? So why would I do anything other than to laugh off such an inquiry? I have spent my life having a hard time saying no…to anything. When I hung up I found myself wondering why a small and perhaps meaningless tickle of the beast that is my work life would cause my pulse to quicken. I guess it means that I am still alive and I guess that is a good thing, but now I wonder when retirement will set in to the point where the beast cannot be tickled awake.