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Rose Mula, A Moving Experience: My movers were as inept as I, stacking boxes haphazardly everywhere. Though my new condo has two bathrooms, the paths to both were blocked with cartons. Crying was not an option. I had no idea where my tissues were packed

The Wall Street Journal runs a feature, Ask Encore/ Focus on Retirement, a weekly column answering questions from their readers. This was a recent entry by Kelly Greene:

In Your 70s, Weighing Whether to Buy a Home or Rent

We recently sold our home and have relocated to a different part of the state. We are renting until we decide which neighborhood we wish to live in and have eight more months on our lease. Should we decide to buy at our ages, 75 and 73, or continue to rent? We are both healthy and able to pay all cash, or shouldn't have trouble getting a mortgage as we both have excellent credit and no debt. We have heard arguments both ways involving life expectancy, the continuing drop in housing prices within our time frame, and rentals becoming more scarce as homeowners are having to foreclose, etc.

Two certified financial planners, one on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast, suggested that you seriously consider continuing to rent — or, if you'd rather buy, at least scale down to a condominium with less maintenance involved than a house.

Read the rest of the WSJ Ask Encore article

Article

Pat Beurteaux, The Big LXV: It doesn’t help that, here in Ontario, one receives a congratulatory message from the Minister of Health. What is it really saying? `Congratulations. You made it despite our best efforts to kill you.’ Or `Best of luck. You’re going to need it’

A New Sighting

Sightings: Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities and Other Things. We noticed that the slogan of the Naturally Occurring Standards Group was: Because Life is Naturally Occurring. We like that.

Article

HTG Investment Advisors: Retirement Planning and Magical Thinking — Without a doubt, there is a “disconnect” between the reality of pre-retirees’ financial situations and their perception of what it takes to retire.

You're Now 70½ and Other Distributions

I never quite realized that taking money from my IRA or 401K would require a fairly complicated set of calculations. Minimum distributions are to be determined, otherwise known as your RMD (Retirement Portfolio Distribution).

So we turned to Morningstar, a thoroughly straightforward site to use for this kind of problem. Fortunately, there was an article, How to Manage Retirement Portfolio Distributions that contains a formula. We'll leave you to figure out how you fit that formula. The free article may require registration.

Happy Distribution!

New Links

WorkPlaceFairness

What constitutes age discrimination in a company is something that most of us will wonder about sometime in our career. This section of the WorkPlaceFairness site lays out most of the questions that we have and, you may be surprised to learn, it starts at age 40:

If you are 40 years of age or older, and you have been harmed by a decision affecting your employment, you may have suffered unlawful age discrimination. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) is a federal law that protects individuals 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age. Here are some examples of potentially unlawful age discrimination:

You didn't get hired because the employer wanted a younger-looking person to do the job.
You received a negative job evaluation because you weren't "flexible" in taking on new projects.
You were fired because your boss wanted to keep younger workers who are paid less.
You were turned down for a promotion, which went to someone younger hired from outside the company, because the boss says the company "needs new blood."
When company layoffs are announced, most of the persons laid off were older, while younger workers with less seniority and less on-the-job experience were kept on.
Before you were fired, your supervisor made age-related remarks about you, such as that you were "over-the-hill," or "ancient."

There is also a section devoted to women.

The Retirement Security Project "is dedicated to promoting common sense solutions to improve the retirement income prospects of millions of American workers and is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, in partnership with Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute and The Brookings Institution. The goal of The Retirement Security Project is to work on a nonpartisan basis to make it easier and increase incentives for middle- and lower-income Americans to save for a financially secure retirement." The Project publishes evidence-based policy briefs as well as policy and legislative analysis, discussion papers, original research, working papers and Congressional Testimony.

Spending and Adjusting Retirement Money Amounts

One approach to deciding how much to withdraw from your retirement 'nest egg' is formulated by Jonathan Guyton, a planner at Cornerstone Wealth Advisors in Minneapolis, and another devised by Ty Bernicke, a planner in Eau Clair, WI.

We found these references in a New York Times article, New Advice to Retirees: Spend More at First, Cut Back Later. This, of course, made sense to us as our philosophy has been to try to reduce our possessions, rather than add to them.

Here's Mr. Guyton's Executive Summary of a paper he wrote

For the entire paper, go to the FPA Journal site.

From the same Journal comes Mr. Bernicke's set of recommendations set out in an executive summary:

For that complete article, go again to the specific Journal page.

Men's and Women's Adjustment to Retirement

The paper, Renegotiating identity and relationships: Men and women's adjustments to retirement by Helen Barnes and Jane Parry, draws upon research literature and interviews conducted with 48 men and women aged 50-65 in four contrasting parts of the UK. Fieldwork was conducted using semi-structured in-depth interviews, covering personal information, family and social relationships, paid and unpaid work, community and leisure activities, and future hopes and plans.

Here are some excerpts from that paper:

Work provides a plurality of functions and rewards, including purposeful activity, sociability, status, and material gain. Individuals attach different significance to these and prioritise them differently over the lifecycle. Work also provides a series of routines giving structure and meaning to people’s lives, upon which they rely more or less heavily. Consequently the loss of paid labour, in the context of structural positioning and social involvement, affects people in different ways. Gender is an important dimension in this process, since women’s employment biographies have typically been more fragmented then men’s, including time taken to raise children or care for parents. Men’s frequently more intensive employment patterns also have implications for the character of their social networks.

Some women also referred to missing work, although they were more likely to miss social aspects and to stay in touch with former colleagues. The minority of women who expressed a strong identification with their work found it painful to retire. For Mrs Barber, a former teacher, retirement was triggered by reaching sixty and by her husband’s health problems. She had not felt ‘ready to leave’, and described losing her job as ‘a bereavement’, saying that she had ‘cried for weeks,’ and could not bear to return to her former school and see someone else in ‘her’ classroom. Mrs Ramsay, unusually amongst the female informants, expressed her work identity in terms of a ‘worker’ and ‘provider’, which related both to her status as a lone parent and the ‘work ethic’ her own parents had adopted. She reported feeling ‘devastated’ when ill health forced her to leave.

By contrast, some men who had expressed considerable pleasure and satisfaction in their work and felt it to be central to their identity, had experienced no great sadness at leaving, sometimes to their surprise. Key factors influencing their feelings included choice, a reasonable level of income, and the prospect of enjoyable activities in retirement. For instance, Mr Kamir expressed his pleasure in a newfound freedom from ‘the discipline of work’, although he had thoroughly enjoyed his time as a lecturer. A long-standing local politician and writer, he had strong ideas about how he wanted to spend his time and attractive alternative roles to pursue.

Even women who had been employed in fairly senior positions tended to stress that work was of secondary importance to their family lives. Mrs Napier, who had been a senior social work manager, described herself as ‘not very ‘career-minded’ and having ‘no ambition’, saying ‘I was quite happy at home with the children’, while Mrs Norman, who worked in a senior local authority post, said that her central identity was a ‘Jewish matron’ and described her home as ‘her life’, while her job was ‘just her job’. Following retirement, Mrs Napier returned to work part-time at a more junior level, as she enjoyed the day-to-day practice of social work, while Mrs Norman relished the chance to express other aspects of her identity, writing a book about Judaism, doing voluntary work with elderly Jewish people in Eastern Europe, and concentrating on home life.

Women who described work as more central to their lives often emphasised that it had been a financial necessity (complementing their partners’ income). It is difficult to know how much this self-presentation resulted from normative pressures faced as working wives and mothers, but it appeared to be qualitatively different to the more ‘vocational’ attachment expressed by other informants. Several women commented that paid work had not been central to their identities because of societal attitudes prevailing during much of their working lives. Mrs McIntosh remarked that when she left school there were only three possible jobs for girls:

You either went into an office, became a nurse, or you went to university, which invariably just meant you became a teacher. In any case, once married, ‘you were expected to leave work and become a mum’.

Although she later retrained, she found it impossible to break into her chosen field, and reflected that she ‘never really had the kind of work [she] wanted’.

Fewer men than women expressed dissatisfaction with their jobs, or expressed an instrumental orientation (such as financial issues) to working. Those that did, however, were less traditionally gendered in their work identities, and found it easiest to adapt to being retired. Mr Fraser, who had taken early retirement after feeling increasingly unable to cope with the stress of his job as a computer programmer, commented:

Most people don’t enjoy their jobs and probably wouldn’t work if they didn't’t need the money.

Mr Adams, whose enjoyment of teaching had been soured by stress, decided that ‘you shouldn’t live to work, you should work to live,’ and described the supply teaching he had done since retiring as ‘purely for money’. Reflecting on his working life, he regretted the all-consuming nature of his commitment:

I mean, I worked, worked, worked, and I didn’t spend enough time with my kids. We didn’t do things because I was always working. It was a big problem. Even though you get these nice holidays. It doesn’t compensate for the rest of the time.

A number of those interviewed had been or were involved in caring for someone, whether this was an ill or disabled partner, adult child, elderly parent or grandchildren, and this was often their reason for leaving paid work. While both men and women were affected in similar ways by these caring roles, more women than men took them on, and only women were involved in them for an extensive period of their lives. Caring in retirement, and caring as a significant influence on adaptation were distinctively feminised trajectories.

Read the entire paper Renegotiating identity and relationships: Men and women's adjustments to retirement