Is That All There Is To Life?
Is that all there is to life? I remember asking myself that question as I stared at a slide projected on a board (image below) at another financial advisor’s conference discussing retirement planning.
The exact image below prepared by the OECD shows the length of retirement years for men and women in various countries. Your retirement years is your average life expectancy minus your retirement age.
I lived in Canada, where the average life expectancy was 87 for women and 80 for men. The retirement age is 65, which means that the average length of retirement for women was 21, and for men, it was 15. Of that time, about ten years is when we are in optimum health. And after the age of 80, many people are not as active as they would like to be. So, in reality, we spend forty-five years working and ten years actively enjoying the fruits of our labor.
It hit me: you mean to say that most people work for forty-five years, retire and then die twenty years later! WTF! What if we don’t last till 87? I even recalled a client dying from lymphoma the year he retired!
Is That All?
The first question that entered my mind, which I voiced at that advisor’s conference, was, “Is that all?”
The presenter at the conference stressed the need for us advisors to impress upon our clients the need to save more (so we advisors could make more — which was often the underlying theme at some of these conferences) to cover their living expenses during this long retirement period.
He did not understand what I meant. From my perspective, it seemed like a travesty that we spent twice as long of our lives accumulating wealth to spend the remainder of our lives free to do as we like!
As we dispersed after the conference was over, I voiced my thoughts to my colleague. Her response was, “So, are you thinking of quitting and sitting on a beach?” I answered emphatically, “absolutely yes!”
A Meaningful Life
Less than a year later, I moved to the Mediterranean and sat on the beach teaching people that if they’re going to spend most of their life working, be sure to create meaningful work! What are you doing now to ensure that you are making the best of your life?
Join Medium for $5 a month, enjoy thousands of articles, and get paid to write. Sign up HERE. This is a Medium revenue-sharing affiliate link. If you sign up using this link, you can support me and others as a fellow writer. I will receive a portion of your Partner Program membership fee for the referral; however, it will NOT increase your membership cost.