The LA Kings holiday pack is back the perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life a three-game pack starts at just $159 and includes a holiday blanket by today and you'll receive an additional game for free Don't miss out visit LA Kings comm slash holiday today Radical personal finance episode 12 How long do you guys would you work how would you decide not to work you gonna work forever Have you thought about that at all No, no Warren is much more fixed in his mind about what he's going to do about it And that's why when when people say well We ought to write a story about who's going to succeed Warren Buffett I say, you know, it's just kind of ridiculous to say that because he isn't gonna retire and if he doesn't retire if he Say he runs Berkshire ten years more the whole set of people who might succeed him will have changed and so it's ridiculous To write a story about that.

No, I agree The You know, I I'm having the time of my life at some point your mind goes I mean and I've told my my kid I think was I think it was David Ogilvie that says Develop your peculiarities when you're young that way when you get older, they won't think you're going gaga So I did that I followed that advice, but my children will come in to me and some point I've told all three to come in at the same time and tell me you're going gaga daddy And and if only one of them comes in there out of the will so they have to come in But it's the truth is In terms of managing money or even managing a business Depending on the nature of the business and the way it's managed Age really isn't much of a deterrence if you turn everything else I mean, you know, I'm in terms of I hand I coordination balance all kinds of things but in terms of getting the most out of other people which is What my job is and in terms of allocating capital so far it hasn't been a deterrent, you know Who knows what happens next week?

It's but you have a contingency plan in terms of governance. Oh, it's total I mean it if I died a night tomorrow morning There will be a CEO name every board knows exactly who it is if for some reason that person's unavailable They know another one. I mean, it's what we spend a majority of our time on You you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true and the reason is Is because it's so hard that if you don't any rational person would give up It's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it, you don't really love it You're gonna give up and that's what happens to most people actually if you really look at At the ones that ended up, you know being successful on quote in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't oftentimes It's the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere when you know when it got really tough And and the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane Right who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it?

so it's a lot of hard work and and it's a lot of worrying constantly and If you don't love it You're gonna fail so you got to love it. You got to have passion and I think that's the high-order bit the second thing is You've got to be you've got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are You need a team of great people and you've got to figure out how to how to size people up fairly quickly make decisions without knowing people too well and Hire them and you know see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to to help You know build an organization that can eventually just you know build itself Because you need great people around you I want to talk about the fact that this is my last keynote and It's middle of this year in July That I'll move from being a full-time employee at Microsoft to working full-time at the foundation As you heard and so this will be the first time since I was 17 that I won't have my full-time Microsoft job And I'm not really sure what that last day is going to be like You know it could be a bit strange.

You know what do you do on your last day? So I asked some friends to help me prepare for that and so We got together and did a little video So let's take a look at that It is a day the industry never thought would come join us all day as we report on Bill Gates last full day at Microsoft It's been in the planning for the past two years He'll still be active as chairman.

It's hard to believe it's really here Yeah, I think Bill's ready for his last day He's worked pretty hard saved a little bit He is Completely focused I Mean Bill's been going all out for more than 30 years so not having a completely full schedule every day It's been a little well interesting Never doubt the magic of software That's right listen to tobacco You know after all these years he's finally taking work-life balance seriously.

He's even got a personal trainer All right, that's good one in a row And you keep this up you're gonna get sexist man alive next year, bro That's good for the set man you won't let it go you want to keep going well Am I am I ready to take my shirt off um not yet?

Yourself come on back lean a little forward just think hi hi to the sky you and I right now Yeah, Bill's always been a bit of a ham, but more importantly it's the creative risk he takes that really set him apart Big pimpin I'm Bill T Big pimpin yeah, you know I Hey, let me let me get one thing straight with you you can retire and then unretire Exactly got keeping guessing.

Thanks Jay. No I was great Not so much Somebody got talent it's horrible Hello bill yeah, yeah, I'm a little busy here Dude wasn't that the craziest rip you ever heard We've talked about this before We're full up in the bag Positions are filled I know I know, but I can't just replace edge because you got a high score on guitar hero Bill's always had a passion for music and as long as it's not my music.

I'm fine with that Bill's always been a big fan of the movies, but he's probably gone a bit too far with this whole audition real thing Who are you expecting Superman? Well what money can't buy Yeah, I just watched it yeah look we all know it's all about casting anyway, right I know Steven I can't it's just I can't play Bill Gates, it's It's just not something I'm good at I want you Russell Crowe to do it you'd be You were Passed on that one too Hey, I was thinking though the last time I was on the show.

I I thought it was really successful Yeah, no you were great on the show man. We loved it was Although you know you did kind of run off at the end like guy you know had monkey pops You want to come back on the show that's fine That's you know maybe we could make it sort of a regular thing like you mean that the news a Co-anchor kind of a situation it's it's a great idea.

I gotta tell you it's a it's a great idea it's the only thing is I'm on my jet right now and they I'm worried the phone will they have to turn it off or it will throw off the navigation system The boom boom and you didn't hear this from me It's a pretty strange coincidence that his transition date is right in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign I know you're super busy, but I I'm sure you're starting to think about who would be your best running mate No, I know I haven't actually declared a running mate yet bill, but I'm not sure politics is really for you Hey, it's bill Bill Shatner of Star Trek now the other bill bill Clinton oh Hey bill No, it's not an inconvenient time Yeah, I get it.

Yeah, that was a good one Trust of course we'll miss him in the daily brainstorming meetings He's always been an innovator really inspiring all of us to think creatively about the future And we'll be the first to give credit where credit is due oh Absolutely Microsoft Bob his idea all his Like I said we've been planning for this But he's still bill and we'll miss seeing him in the hallway every day Hey, buddy.

See you tomorrow at the board meeting and all tech markets remain steady as Bill Gates completed his historic last full day as Microsoft Personal note all of us here at NBC News will miss reporting every night on this brilliant powerful Let's face it sexy and good-looking leader of men and women It just doesn't believe in paying more than seven dollars for a haircut.

I'm Brian Williams in New York Good night You probably know Bill Gates as the founder of Microsoft the hard-driving tech executive whose software fueled the personal computer Revolution you might also know him as the longtime richest man in the world Who left Microsoft five years ago so he could work full-time giving his money away We had the chance to witness Bill Gates 2.0 the man you don't know He is driven as much as anyone we have ever met to make the world a better place Gates told us why he thinks inventions are the key to success and just what he intends to accomplish with his time intellect and 67 billion dollar fortune Starting with its plans to knock out some of the world's deadliest diseases The story will continue in a moment You're gonna spend the next 20 years of your life trying to eradicate disease, yes.

Yep. That's your mission That'll be the the majority of my time starting with polio get it done by 2018 tuberculosis That one will have to see how the tools go. The current tools are not good enough. We can to do an eradication They're good enough to reduce the the deaths very dramatically But we'll we'll we need a few better tools that'll take probably six or seven years malaria Malaria is the one that the tools are being invented now 15 and perhaps even 20 years but Start to really shrink that map These are the people Gates wants to help They are what he calls the bottom two billion a third of the world's population that struggles on less than two dollars a day They are poor Hungry black electricity and clean water Gates most urgent goal help the millions of children under five who die every year one every 20 seconds from preventable diseases No one alive that I know of has said my goal is to eradicate a disease and then another disease and then another disease This is somebody that dreams high Yeah, because I'm excited about that and and it's it's doable Today Gates spent most of his time here at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle He runs it with his father Bill senior and his wife Melinda whom he credits with being a driving force behind the foundation There are over 1100 employees to help them decide which programs to fund But Gates still visit sites around the world to see what's working and what's not The government of Ghana and all school-age children are grateful for your support Very well done great to be here.

The grant here go towards school nutrition. This is spinach Improving agriculture. We don't have enough water in the river And most important to Gates lifesaving vaccines Well, whenever you see a mother bringing a sick child into a facility It's easy to relate to what if that was my child you realize how crazy it is That with the world being rich enough to afford all sorts of frivolous things that those basic things still aren't aren't being provided But providing vaccines throughout the developing world is no simple task So Gates has set up his foundation to run like Microsoft He insists on strict accounting and when a problem arises he pulls in the best people to find solutions We saw a good example of that when it comes to vaccines to be effective.

They need to be kept cold So this is using electricity, but that's tough in hard to reach areas where refrigerators are rare and unreliable So back in Seattle Gates turned to scientists at a company called intellectual ventures where he is both an investor and an inventor They created a superthermos using the same technology that protects spacecraft from extreme heat Using only a single batch of ice it can keep vaccines cold for 50 days So here is the thermos.

That's right This holds vaccines for over 200 children and it doesn't require any battery any energy Its walls have been designed to be such a good thermos that even in very very hot days Inside it will stay cold enough to make the vaccines work And then when you want to take them out you just go in here and there there's a whole tray of the vaccines You take them out it records everything you've done with it the temperature So it's a replacement for all those refrigerators that have been so unreliable I mean just look at this thing when we take it out in the field people go.

That's amazing You can't do that No matter how perfect the vaccine if you can't get it to the people who need it. It ain't doing no good That's right. And now you know, we need to get it to every child in the world Gates is betting technology will solve other age-old problems like sanitation Two and a half billion people around the world do not have adequate toilets That means streams and rivers get clogged with debris and human waste Becoming breeding grounds for disease the toilet is one of those things That's like a vaccine where it really would change the situation So Gates launched a global competition design a toilet that works without plumbing We had over 20 entrants.

We gave four top prizes. Some of them used burning some of them used a laser approach There there were quite a few novel ideas of how you reinvent the toilet And so this was one of the prototype designs of what a good-looking new toilet would look like it actually Processes everything down in here and then recycles water over the next four or five years We think we can have a toilet that's every bit as good as the flush toilet You can learn a lot about what motivates Bill Gates by visiting his private office He showed us why he draws inspiration from the Italian genius Leonardo da Vinci in 1994 Gates bought da Vinci's 500 year old notebook He had an understanding of science that was more advanced than anybody of the time The notebook we have here is one where he's thinking about water and he's looking at how it flows when it hits barriers and goes Around comes back together.

He's actually trying to understand turbulence You know, how should you build a dam how you know does it erode away? It cost 30 million dollars at auction making it the most valuable manuscript in the world For Gates it is priceless It's an inspiration that one person off on their own with no positive feedback.

Nobody ever told him, you know, what was right or wrong That he kept pushing himself, you know found knowledge in itself to be a beautiful thing Gates scoffs at any comparison to the great Leonardo But a look around his private office reveals a man equally obsessed with understanding his world Can I look at these sure?

This is the weather one meteorology My very first course that I watch is this geology course This is a whole series on the joy of science mathematics philosophy in the real world Gates collection of DVDs contains hundreds of hours of college lectures that this famous Harvard dropout has watched The more you learn the more you have a framework That the knowledge fits into when he's on the road Gates who's a speed reader Lugs around what he calls his reading bag when he finishes a book.

He posts his thoughts on his website Gates notes what I'll do is I'm reading these books. I'll take notes. Well, these are your notes already Right. Yes. No, I love to take So I just haven't written it up yet how long will it take to read all of this Oh long time Thank goodness for vacations.

I read a lot But Gates isn't just reading books for pleasure. He is determined to use his knowledge to back groundbreaking innovations Take this high-tech zapper. It is a laser designed to shoot down malaria infected mosquitoes in mid-flight And Gates showed us one of his boldest and he says most important ventures a new kind of nuclear reactor It would burn depleted uranium Making it cleaner safer and cheaper than today's reactors and your fuel lasts for 60 years And so during that entire time you don't need to open it up refuel it.

You don't need to buy more fuel So there's a certain simplicity that comes with this design and when could it come on stream best case? Would be to have a prototype around 2022 Bill Gates calls himself an impatient optimist a Description his wife Melinda says was accurate even when they met over 20 years ago Melinda.

What did you like about him? Just his curiosity and his optimism about life and this belief that you know that you can change things I mean he believed that clearly in Microsoft. He was changing the world with software and he knew it It's the curiosity shared curiosity or their different curiosities.

Well, we both have curiosity for lots of things Bill at this stage in our life also gets more time to read than I do quite honestly with three kids in the house But the great thing is Bill will go read an entire book about fertilizer and I can tell you Three kids in the house.

I'm not gonna read a book about fertilizer, but he loves to teach and so as long as I have time We'll spend time. What is it about a book about fertilizer? I mean seriously fertilizers are very interesting We we couldn't feed a few people people would have to die if we hadn't come up with fertilizer How do you find a balance in all this father?

Chairman of a major company a foundation and then all these other ventures has the balance come to you. I don't mow the lawn He's come a long way from that teenage prodigy obsessed with writing computer code over nearly four decades We've watched Bill Gates helped lead the digital revolution with what he now admits was a fanatic and relentless Determination you guys never understood you never understood the first thing about this I'm not using this thing in the early years.

There was a demanding guy. There was a driven guy. There was obsessed guy There was some say an arrogant guy. Have you changed? I'm certainly learned When I make a mistake, you know and my thinking is sloppy I like to be very hard on myself like that is so stupid How could you not see how those pieces fit together and that way that you're you know?

Very disciplined yourself and careful about your thinking you don't want it to extend To when other people may not get something quite as quickly It's like oh, you know, how come you don't don't get this thing as he mellowed at all I hope any of us in life mature, right?

We all mature but look I wouldn't have married Bill if there wasn't a huge heart with all the adjectives You just used about how he drove his career, which was very successful for Microsoft. There was an enormous heart always there No question Gates has softened with age Just listen to how he reflected on his often tumultuous relationship with the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs He and I in a sense grew up together.

We were within a year of the same age and you know We were kind of naively optimistic and built big companies We achieved all of it and most of it as rivals, but we always retained a certain respect communication Including even when he was sick. I got to go down and spend time with them and talked about what know about what we'd learned about Families anything Today gate says he gets advice on patience and generosity from his friend Warren Buffett who seven years ago entrusted the majority of his fortune to the Gates Foundation and From his father Bill senior a lawyer who prodded his son into giving his money away.

You've said before this is your hero Why? Well, my dad has integrity He's got a humble approach to things. He's calm And wise about things It's just a huge influence to always, you know want to live up to a great example Someone said to me your son may be the most influential person in the 21st century.

I can only say yes he's determined as He already has proven that he can dramatically reduce the number of kids under five who died You can't do any better than that. That's right. That's right is There's no way to be unimpressed about that You couldn't be more proud. I couldn't be more proud.

That is exactly true Go to 60 minutes overtime calm to hear more about the great rivalry and friendship between You You're working at two companies simultaneously which is kind of extraordinary in itself and you have this amazing way of You spent just talk really quickly about how you balance those two.

I think it's kind of interesting. Yeah, so I the only way to do this is to be very disciplined and very practiced and And the way I found that works for me is I theme my days So on Monday Monday at both companies focus on management and running the company, which is you know We have our directional meeting at square and we have our op-com meeting at Twitter I do all my management one-on-ones on that day Tuesday is focused on product Wednesday is focused on marketing and communications and growth Thursday is focused on developers and partnerships and Friday is Is focused on the company in the culture and recruiting Saturday?

I take off I hike and then Sunday is reflection feedback strategy getting ready for the the rest of the week and there's interruptions all the time, but I Can quickly deal with an interruption and then know that it's Tuesday I have product meetings and I need to focus on product stuff and it also sets a good cadence for the rest of the company So that we're always delivering.

We're always showing, you know where we were last week and where we're going to be The following week so it's been good But we're always we're always evolving and you're splitting your time equally between the two. Yep. How many hours at each one? eight hours at each one and I live across eight hours Another thing I wanted to ask you about was your work day.

I mean, I know you're famous for the four-hour work week But you've also explained, you know that beyond just doing the basic things you you go beyond those four hours Do you love doing that you're passionate about and that yeah, that's inspiring and I'd like to hear about your Typical work day your routine.

I know it changes probably, you know day-to-day, but just something that you typically do Sure, so I'll give you the framework I think that that routine can be very empowering as a as a positive constraint and I think Having things scheduled also helps you to get more done So you've probably heard the expression if you want to get something done give it to a busy man I think that's very true and that comes back to Parkinson's Law So I'll give you my framework for the day and then what fills certain spaces varies day to day But generally I wake up around 10 a.m Which is very late for most people but I go to bed around 2 or 3 And I do make sure that I get my sleep Almost always 8 to 9 hours unless it's prior to some type of event or presentation in which case I generally don't sleep Then I'll get up have a quick breakfast Do about 10 to 15 minutes of reading generally things like Seneca something to really put my mind in the right frame for the rest of the day and Then I'll do a Workout, so I'll do a workout generally Resistance training for 20 to 30 minutes and then from that point for about a two-hour period I'll work on any one of my projects that could be helping Startups that I've invested in I do work as an angel investor here in Silicon Valley It could be any number of different things this week I'm actually selling a company that I'm involved with and that's taking up most of my time Then I'll have lunch around 1 or 2 p.m and that's usually Along with a trip to pick up mail or packages if I have any after that point I will In the last few months do a Swimming workout of about 45 minutes then do another let's say 4 to 5 hours on particular projects I'll take us to 6 or 7.

I have a small snack workout again and then Two or two or three, but they're very short some of these workouts might only be 10 15 minutes keep in mind especially in the morning It's the greatest mental performance enhancer Possible physical exercise really not separating the the brain and other organs and then I will have after working out I'll have a nice big meal and Come home and from about I would say 8 p.m.

To 11 p.m. Is generally allocated to spending time with friends And I'll oftentimes have lunch with friends business associates. They're they're usually one in the same now And then my most productive writing period and I enjoy writing As difficult as it is for me my best writing period is from about I would say midnight or 1 a.m.

To 3 4 a.m. And so I'll generally sit down with a glass of wine or two and Some tea and write and I'll put on a headset and usually play music off of Pandora and I'll have a music in the I'm Sorry a movie in the background playing on big screen TV So that it feels like I'm in a social environment, even though the TV is actually muted That is my routine Well, that's part of the reason I found that I get my best work done between 1 and 3 or 4 a.m Is that particularly since I'm on the West Coast the options for?

procrastination and distraction are fewer and Whenever possible in my life, I try to control my environment Rather than control my behavior. So I think that's Changing your environment and designing your environment and that includes schedule is oftentimes much more effective than trying to rely on Self-discipline for certain things and I've really tried to follow that as much as possible making it impossible for me to misbehave in other words Welcome Welcome welcome welcome.

Welcome to episode 12 of the radical personal finance podcast today is July 2 2014 and our topic of the day retirement Today we're gonna expose the elephant in the living room is Retirement a complete and utter scam or is it something that we should be working towards at all?

Stay with us So welcome welcome welcome again, my name is Joshua sheets I'm your host for today's episode of the radical personal finance podcast and after that length the Introduction. I hope that you have some sense of where we are going with today's show I'm sure that if you picked up on it the theme through all of it is retirement and so One of the things that I've learned working with financial planning is that retirement is almost the universal goal in the universal Universal discussion.

So today we are going to try to break down some of the myths of retirement and we're going to try to Expose some alternate ideas and some alternate things that can be done to advance retirement. I Find the return I find the retirement Discussion a lot of times extremely frustrating and the thing that I've learned over time is that nobody retires Nobody retires.

I first learned this I'll share a little bit of personal history I first learned this watching my two grandfathers and I had one grandfather Who was a farmer and another grandfather who was a teacher? he was actually a Farmer and a rancher earlier in his life and then he went back to school and became a teacher and ultimately Wound up spending most of his career working as a college professor But in working with and watching these grandparents, one of the things that I learned is that neither of them quit My grandfather who was a teacher he actually quote-unquote retired about three times I think he left three different retirement parties at different points of his age, but at his final job He was working as a tutor at a local community college tutoring students on on Math and The only reason he ever quit at about the age of his mid 80s I think it was 84 83 84 something like that But the only reason that he ever quit is because it became unsafe for him to drive, but he loved it every single day Every single day of his life prior to that time He would get in his car get up early 5 5 30 in the morning get up early go down spend his day Tutoring his students and he loved it.

My other grandfather was a farmer and if any of you know farmers Then you know that a farmer never retires He just kind of pulls back a little bit and so I on the other hand was always interested in early retirement I was always interested in quitting work early And so when I became a financial advisor about six years ago One of the things that I decided to work at was to focus a lot on retirement planning but I learned that Nobody retires and I make I'm gonna make some broad generalizations in today's world and I'm gonna bake Excuse me in today's show.

I'm gonna make some broad generalizations, and I understand when I'm making Statements for dramatic effect, so I'm aware of them, but I think they do need to be said But one of the things that I learned is that nobody retires in today's world the people that have the money to retire are the ones that never quit and the people that desperately want to retire the most are the ones who never accumulate the money to quit and So in in essence you find out that nobody is retiring so I just played that audio montage and I'll tell you who they were as far as who all of the all of the Videos were that I played for you there But the first video that you had was an introduction the first video was an introduction From on Warren Buffett and here's Warren Buffett at however old he is now He's never retired.

He wrote a there's a book written about him called tap dancing to work That's his by and the person that was being interviewed with him was Carol Loomis who's his longtime Person who editor who helps him with his writing and so Warren says I'll never retire and the day I'll retire is the day.

I'm gonna go is the day. I'm gonna die Billionaire Steve Jobs billionaire never retired till the day that he died Bill Gates billionaire that video that I played was from his see CES Presentation right before he quote-unquote retired and then the video following shows that clearly it's obvious that he's never retired although He's no longer working at Microsoft.

He moved on and he's spending more time working He's spending more time working Than probably he did before and maybe there's a little bit more of a balance in his life There sure could be but he's certainly not retired. The next video was Jack Dorsey who is the billionaire?

co-founder of Twitter and and the CEO of Square The next video after that is Tim Ferriss So Tim Ferriss writes a book called the four-hour workweek excellent book highly recommended enjoyed it immensely But he writes a book called the four-hour workweek and it's clear from his daily schedule He's probably working on average 12 to 14 hours a day now to his credit He's very clear about that in any interview and he's very clear that you know The four-hour workweek is kind of a gimmicky title designed to sell books and that he doesn't praise inactivity his goal is to get people to His goal is to to get people to be to stop the time-wasting parts of activity But just pointing out this this issue of that nobody retires so this one this has really bothered me over the years and I do not have I don't have the answers but As I observe something I just I believe we need to have a new conversation In this country and where it's gonna start is with retirement in today's world in the finance world You have a lot of people that are very focused on early retirement.

I think that's awesome to me. That's a really valuable Thing to pursue as well, but even the people that are early retirees. They don't retire The Probably the two most prominent financial bloggers that I'm aware of one is is is Jacob Lund Fisker who writes the blog Early retirement extreme I've reviewed his book and I hope he'll come on this show for an interview at some point But Jacob Fisker He's written on his in his writings that he actually regrets using the word retire because he's not retired Even now he's no longer blogging.

He's working to the best of my knowledge in the investment trading business Earning money. I don't have any idea doesn't really matter Mr. Money mustache at mr. Money mustache comm blog about early retirement. See retired. Absolutely not he's working harder than ever, but he's working on projects that he enjoys and He's probably making more money than ever.

He's probably just simply enjoying his life more. So whether we By the way, he wrote an article called the internet retirement police, which is quite fun I don't think I qualify as part of the internet retirement police, but it's one of the common Allegations against people saying, you know, you're not actually retired.

I just think the word retired. We needed an expanding understanding of that word The idea that you're gonna reach a point in time at which you just completely quit and never and never work again is a very new and interesting idea so it's the origin of the retirement has always really always bothered me and I'm gonna do my I don't first of all to be clear.

I don't have all the answers In fact, I am looking for answers on this subject and I've done a good bit of research But I've done a good bit of research, but I still don't have I still don't have A full understanding of it. And so for the next couple of shows we're gonna be talking about retirement But not from the technical how do you save money and what should you do to save for retirement that comes later?

But right now we're just gonna be talking about retirement as a concept and I would invite your comments and invite your feedbacks I'm gonna be doing a lot of Reading of some articles and I'm gonna be doing some extensive reading from a book which I'll introduce in a little bit as well that has helped me and basically the idea behind today's show is simply to Give some background for you As far as some ideas and some commentary that may help you to understand more of what you want to do I'm gonna add one more article before we go into Kind of the history of retirement.

I'm gonna read an article from the Washington Post And this article was bylined of June 10 Of the art in the Washington Post and the title is called Bill Marriott Warren Buffett Rupert Murdoch Murdoch and the age of the everlasting executive The writer here is Michael Rosenwald He's 82 now But Bill Marriott can't bring himself to completely walk away from the company that bears his name on Tuesday the octogenarian presided over the grand opening of the gleaming 1175 room Marriott Marquis the new Convention Center Hotel in Northwest, Washington that his family considers one of its proudest legacies.

I Really do wish my parents could be here to see this wonderful and monumental Hotel Marriott told about 200 guests who toasted the hotel with root beer to honor the nine stool district root beer stand that begat a hotel empire Though Marriott no longer runs the company. He transformed into a global lodging chain He remains its executive chairman still working 50 hours a week and visiting more than 200 hotels a year in the process He has become one of the country's most prominent everlasting executives a small but high-profile group of golden aged Titans whose identities and personal fortunes are so wrapped up in their firms that the concept of retirement is incomprehensible Many of them bear famous names News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch age 83 Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone 91 Berkshire Hathaway investment legend Warren Buffett 83 and Marriott who ran his company for 39 years But there are less prominent ones to Melvin Gordon chief executive of Tootsie Roll Industries is 94 Oh Bruton Smith, the chief of Sonic Automotive a fortune 500 group of auto dealerships is 87 Owning large stakes gives these executives the ability to essentially hang around as long as they please But academics who study and interview older executives say there is a complicated psychology at play and that advances in health care Marriott has survived several heart attacks mean the country could see more everlasting executives in the future What motivates them for starters death?

One way of pushing death away as hard work said Manfred FR Ketz DeVry who studies management psychology and is the author of a paper titled death and the executives and Executive encounters with the stealth motivator Work as a way of not thinking about it as opposed to sitting on the golf course and having some drinks It's about finding and having meaning though There are studies showing that the older executives get the more risk averse they become Potentially robbing shareholders of big acquisitions that could improve companies bottom line that that drawback some experts say is ignored by corporate boards too worried about pushing out popular figures whose identities would vanish without their jobs a report by the conference board a business research group showed that mandatory retirement policies are now seldom used and the Idea of everlasting work is filtering down to the lower executive ranks with surveys by Gallup and others Showing that large numbers of baby boomers intend to put off retirement because they find work Rewarding or because their retirement accounts took a beating in the recession Some 10% of organizations now offer some form of phased retirement according to the Society for Human Resource Management If you have reasonably good health and a real interest in what you're doing There is no reason why you can't continue contributing for as long as you can said Fred Malek a close friend of Marriott and former President at the company.

He's still working at age 77 people like Bill are lucky to have that Marriott's everlasting career is somewhat rare when compared to Murdoch Redstone and Buffett all of whom still wield considerable day-to-day control over their companies Marriott stepping away was the subject of intense speculation over the years Especially after his son John left the company in 2005 leaving no other family member ready in age or experience to fill the top job Marriott turned to Arnie Sorenson a young well-liked executive he had personally groomed Sorenson said he regularly consults with Marriott whose office is just down the hall at the company's Bethesda, Maryland headquarters Not because he has to but because he wants to Marriott he added remains deeply interested in hotel operations and isn't shy about bringing up ideas or problems He attends monthly senior staff meetings in Marriott Sorenson has a counselor with such love and recall for details that in an interview He offered the secret to a famous hot shops dessert The key to our hot fudge ice cream cake was to leave a spot in the middle of the cake on the top and not cover It with anything so you could put your whipped cream and cherry on a dry spot If you put it on top of the chocolate, it would slide off and you wouldn't have good ice cream cake by hanging around Marriott is hedging a bit and making sure his successor lands on his feet said Donald C Hambrick a management professor at Penn State University who has studied lengthy executive tenures He is showing that he's pooling for Sorenson and doesn't want to leave him high and dry Asked what he thinks Marriott gets out of his role Sorenson said it keeps him young and active and engaged He's a big competitor.

He wants to win His family thinks they win, too My dad will never stop working said daughter Deborah Marriott Harrison and we're happy about that because he would probably curl up in the fetal Position and die because this company has been so much a part of his life But he's no longer putting in 80 hours a week.

They get more of him at home He's less preoccupied and more in the moment Harrison said earlier this year Harrison saw him play a game with one of his 15 grandchildren a fishing expedition with magnets He and his granddaughter played for 45 minutes who won. Are you kidding? Marriott said laughing she won So contrast that article with this article right here, this is from USA Today of from a USA Today article on personal finance published April 1 2014 and the writer here is Nancy Helmick.

And so this is the article that pervades Just about everywhere you look in the financial world Retirement a third have less than $1,000 put away Most people aren't trying to figure out how much they'll need in their golden years Most people have very little tucked away for retirement and many aren't even trying to figure out how much they'll need later in life a new national survey reveals About 36% of workers have less than $1,000 in savings and investments that could be used for retirement not counting their primary residence or defined benefit plans such as traditional pensions and 60% of workers have less than $25,000 according to a telephone survey of 1,000 workers and 501 retirees from the non-profit employee benefit Research Institute and Greenwald and Associates Only 44% say they or their spouses have tried to calculate how much money they'll need to save by the time they retire So that they can live comfortably in their golden years the survey shows Workers who have done calculations and what they need to save tend to have higher levels of savings than those who haven't crunched the numbers interesting little did Excuse me a little interesting little tidbit there in that sentence There's an incredible difference between those lucky enough to have a retirement plan and those who don't says Jack Vander High.

I'm gonna pause this drives me nuts anybody can have a retirement plan and I Won't preach on it right now Nobody is lucky to have a retirement plan people who want a retirement plan can get one There is nobody that's excluded from retirement plans in this country period There's an incredible difference between those lucky enough to have a retirement plan and those who don't says Jack Vander High The Institute's research director and co-author of the 2014 retirement confidence survey What's really striking is that 73% of those without a retirement plan?

My comment because of their choice such as an IRA 401k or 403 B have less than $1,000 in savings and investments the reason defined benefits weren't included in the total is most people don't know how much those are worth He says that's been hugely true in my own benefit If you have a defined benefit plan understand how much it's worth almost nobody that I've ever talked to Actually understands how much their defined benefit plans are worth Continuing on many people realize that they are not on track and saving for retirement and the two most important reasons They give for not saving more our cost of living and day-to-day expenses Vander High says People's confidence that they'll have a comfortable retirement has risen slightly after record lows in the last five years with 18% of workers in 2014 saying that they are very confident they can retire comfortably up from 13% who are very confident in 2013 meanwhile 24% are not at all confident.

They have enough saved for a comfortable retirement about the same as 2013 Retirement confidence is moat is present mostly in people with higher incomes and in those with retirement plans Vander High says The survey quote highlights the impending retirement crisis that we will face over the next 20 years says Mark fried president of TFG wealth management in Newton, Pennsylvania When I see those these numbers I have a I have a I have to ask the question.

How did we get here? We need more financial education in the schools in the media in the workplace If possible people 40 and older should try to save up to 20% of their income He says quote if you can't afford to do that right now Then set this as a target and as you get annual raises put aside part of each raise until you reach the 20% number Fried says invest in your company's retirement account up to the match One of the best ways to increase your retirement savings is to take advantage of your employer match if you have one He says John Pearshale a certified financial planner at Pearshale financial group of Crystal Lake Illinois says try to imagine how much you're going to need to have saved up to last you to 20 to 30 years during Retirement the only way you can figure that out is to do some retirement calculations.

We help clients figure this out If people are way behind in saving for retirement They may need to work longer at their current job or get a second job to help fill the savings gap Pearshale says quote if you had the idea that you were going to retire at 62 or 65 And you don't have enough saved up then you have to keep working other survey findings Debt is weighing heavily on many people with 58 percent of workers and 44 percent of retirees saying they have a problem with their level of debt Like workers.

Did you notice 44 percent of retirees saying they have a problem with their level of debt? Like like workers many retirees are also short on funds with 58 percent of them having less than $25,000 in savings and investments not counting their primary residence or defined benefits plans Which are traditional pensions and 29 percent having less than $1,000 note that 29 percent of retirees have less than $1,000 Although 65 percent of workers plan to work for pay in retirement only 27 percent of retirees say they are working for pay during their golden years That point is incredibly important, and we're going to talk about that in detail Total savings and investments reported by workers not including the value of primary residence or defined benefit plans such as a traditional benefit 30 for 6 percent have less than a thousand bucks 16 percent have between a thousand bucks and ten grand eight percent have ten to twenty five thousand Twenty five to fifty nine percent fifty to not ten to a hundred nine percent and a hundred to two fifty eleven percent 250 or more 11% Total savings and investments reported by retirees not including the value of the primary residence less than a thousand bucks 29% So This is a decent article.

I mean, I don't have any problem with the article just the problem is is that it's it's an it's a Find myself speechless which is unusual the problem with the article is that there's no It's like what do you do? Okay, and what I compare this to is I compare this to Kind of like the low-fat thing in this country if you pay any attention over the last 30 years how long has you know eat low calories whole grains and low-fat been working and go and look at the statistics and you'll See that over that entire time Americans have gotten fatter and fatter and fatter and less and less and less healthy So at what point in time do you wake up and say the Emperor is not wearing any clothes?

You know the elephants in the living room. There's you know, this isn't working and To me that's what I feel like the whole retirement situation in in this country is it's not working clearly if you say that you have this woeful kind of ringing of the hands article which again this one's pretty balanced and less than 36% of workers have less than a thousand dollars and 11% of workers have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more Which two hundred fifty thousand dollars or more is just scratching the surface of what you would need to have saved for retirement if you were planning on living off of investment assets You've got a problem.

It doesn't work. It's clearly not working period now. What's the solution? There's tons of solutions and that's what we're going to talk about at length throughout this show But again 29% of workers have less than a thousand dollars. So that means that either they're living purely on social security or that So this doesn't this doesn't include the value of a traditional pension defined benefit plan So hopefully they have some defined benefit plans, but you got 30% of retirees have less than a thousand dollars saved So what's going on?

Well Clearly, you know those retirees are figuring out a way to To make it work and we've got to talk about new solutions We've got to talk about new solutions of ways that you know Other than just simply a bunch of you know Certified financial plan are saying you need to save more money and no offense to the guy that's in this article.

It's true It's 20% would be awesome That would be a great recommendation for people to make unfortunately, these little soundbite pieces of Advice just simply don't work because you know a who's gonna change their behavior because they they just read an article on this And it doesn't give you any tools.

That's why I'm creating this podcast is kind of because of this frustration We've got to do something better but I think before we do and talk about solutions which we will not get to in today's show and 55 minutes and and I'm just getting warmed up, but we're not going to talk about solutions today That's gonna be a separate show we're gonna talk about history today, and I'm gonna read a couple more articles that are helpful and so And then we're gonna go in detail Using a book called a history of retirement that I was able to find that was written back in Back in 1980 By it's published by Yale Yale University and the author's name is William Grabener and To me it's been the most comprehensive thing that has helped me but to kind of set the stage Let's talk about the history of retirement What got me interested in this is that I've always heard this anecdote and maybe you've heard it as well but that retirement was originally intended as a punishment and so the story as it was told to me is that the inventor of retirement was German Chancellor Bismarck and the way that I was told the story in the way that I remembered it is that retirement was intended as a punishment and basically he looked around and he had a bunch of Political competitors and he was trying to figure out how to get rid of his political competitors and He noticed that they were all old.

So he said I've got an idea let's institute mandatory retirement starting at the age of 65 and That'll get rid of my political competitors. So he sold it to them as this is a great idea Let's have mandatory retirement for everybody. And so everybody loved it We're gonna sit back and live on the dole for the rest of our life and we're in good shape And the state's gonna pay for our retirement So at this point in time, we can you know, we can retire and that single-handedly wiped out his political competition That's how I heard the story and as was most things anytime anytime you check a story like that Probably has some amount of truth in it, but it's probably not the full truth, so I've done a lot of research on this and I want to do more But let me read you some articles and I think these articles have set a good overview and then prior to our getting into retirement in the United States of America, which is the the primary focus of the primary focus of this primary focus of This show obviously, so we're gonna cover three articles here The first one is from the New York Times and it's called the history of retirement This was published March 21 1999 by Mary Lou Wiseman the history of retirement from early man to AARP in The beginning in the beginning there was no retirement There were no old people in the Stone Age Everyone was fully employed until age 20 by which time nearly everyone was dead usually of unnatural causes baloney But I'll keep going any early man who lived long enough to develop crows feet was either worshipped or eaten as a sign of respect even in biblical times when a fair number of people made it into old age retirement still had not been invented and Respect for old people remained high in those days.

It was customary to carry on until you dropped regardless of your age group No shuffleboard, no Airstream trailer when a patriarch could no longer farm herd cattle or pitch a tent He opted for more specialized less labor-intensive work like like prophesying and handing down commandments or he moved in with his kids Drives me nuts Elder hostile elder hostile as the centuries passed the elderly population increased by early medieval times their numbers had reached critical mass It was no longer just a matter of respecting the occasional white bearded patriarch old people were everywhere giving advice Repeating themselves complaining about rheumatism trying to help getting in the way and making younger people feel guilty Plus they tended to hang on to their wealth and property this made them very unpopular with their middle-aged sons who were driven to earn their inheritance as the old-fashioned way by committing patricide and Even as late as the mid 18th century There was a spate of such killings in France by 1882 so patricide being the idea of killing off the the the patriarch evidently in 1882 Anthony Trollope wrote a futuristic novel the fixed period in which he foresaw retiring large numbers of old men to a place where They would be encouraged to enjoy a year of contemplation followed by a peaceful chloroforming, but this was hardly an acceptable long-term strategy Old people hanging on to their worldly goods also threatened the social and economic fabric of colonial America Celebrated Puritan zealot Cotton Mather is generally credited with stimulating the national appetite for witch trials But few people realized that he was among the first to try to force the elderly to retire Quote be so wise as to disappear of your own accord He exhorted them be glad of dismission be pleased with the retirement which you are dismissed into and quote nobody listened in 1883 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany had a problem Marxists were threatening to take control of Europe to help his countrymen resist their blandishments Bismarck announced that he would pay a pension to any non working German over age 65 Bismarck was no dummy hardly anyone lived to age 65 at the time Total baloney as well Given that penicillin would not be available for another half-century Bismarck not only co-opted the Marxist but set the arbitrary world standard for the exact year at which the old age at which old age Begins and established the precedent that government should pay people for growing old It was the world-renowned physician William Osler We're going to discuss him in depth who laid the scientific foundations that when combined with a compelling economic Rationale would eventually make retirement acceptable in his 1905 Valedictory address at the Johns Hopkins Hospital where he had been physician-in-chief.

I'll read that to you tomorrow Osler said it was a matter of fact that the years between 25 and 40 in a worker's career are the quote 15 golden years of plenty and Quote he called that span quote the anabolic or constructive period Close quote workers between ages 40 and 60 were merely uncreative and therefore tolerable He hated to say it because he was getting on but after age 60 the average worker was useless and should be put out to pasture Retirement came in very handy in the United States when large were large numbers of aging factory workers were wandering around the Industrial Revolution Dropping things into the works slowing down assembly lines Taking too many personal days and usurping the places of younger more productive men with families to support it was one thing when an occasional an Occasional superannuated farmer leaned on his hoe in an agrarian culture a few bales of hay more or less didn't matter But it was quite another when lots of old people caused great unemployment among younger workers By refusing to retire the Great Depression made the situation even worse it was a Darwinian sacrificial moment Retirement was a necessary adaptation and everybody knew it But the old guys were not going quietly the toughest among them refused to quit Even when plant managers turned up the conveyor belts to chaplain esque speeds pause for a moment to the best of my ability to Research this this paragraph in in my experiences is kind of the the key this to me shows again, probably the the primary The primary reason and we'll talk about that in detail tomorrow by 1935 it became evident that the only way to get old people to stop working for pay was to pay them enough to stop working a Californian Francis Townsend initiated a popular movement by proposing mandatory retirement at age 60 in Exchange the government would pay pensions of up to $200 a month an amount equivalent at the time to a full salary for a middle-income worker horrified at the prospect of Townsend's radical generosity President Franklin D Roosevelt proposed the Social Security Act of 1935 which made workers pay for their own old age insurance What used to mean going to bed suddenly meant banishment to an empty stage of life called?

Retirement if people were not going to work. What were they going to do sit in a rocking chair? Eleanor Roosevelt thought so quote old people love their own things even more than young people do it means so much to sit in The same chair you sat in for a great many years she said in 1934, but she was wrong Most retired people wished they could work the problem was still acute in 1951 when the Corning company convened a roundtable to figure out how to make retirement more popular at so notice 1951 but she was wrong most people most retired people wished they could work the problem was still acute in 1951 when the Corning company convened a roundtable to figure out how to make retirement more popular at that conference Santa Rama Rao an author and student of Eastern and Western cultures Complained that Americans did not have the capacity to enjoy doing nothing The opposite of work turned out to be play the rich discovered leisure first, but by night But by 1910 Florida became accessible to the middle class Retirement communities were older people did not have to see younger people working began to appear in the 1920s and 30s the number of golf courses in the United States tripled between 1921 and 1930 Subsequent technological developments like movies and television helped turn having nothing to do into a leisure time activity From now on the elderly would work at play The publication in 1955 of senior citizen magazine was the first widespread use of the euphemism that While intending to reconfer respect instead made a senior citizen sound like an over decorated captain in the Pirates of Penzance It's it's merely partial success may also be so the introduction of the word Senior or senior citizen it's merely partial success may also be linked to the fact that there is something inherently Suspicious about an age group that has to offer its potential members discounts to induce them to join the R word in 1999 the American Association of Retired Persons Once the welcome wagon of retirement dropped the word retirement from its name and became the American Association of our persons This change was affected in recognition of a basic reality Many of its members are not retired and in anticipation of the baby boomers threat never to stop wearing lycra turn gray And in anticipation of the baby boomers threat never to stop wearing lycra to turn gray to stop carrying around bottled water or retire Although the article is clearly a bit sarcastic which good for her to me, that's a good overview of a good overview of a Good overview of kind of the situation and she and the author there Mary Lou Weissman writes a couple of a couple of important details Especially about the development of retirement in America, but the key couple of key points.

I want to point out from that in 1951 people still did not want to retire and I feel like this is probably underrepresented in today's world and You know, I was born in the mid 80s and I grew up in a world thinking Well, everyone needs to retire and all I stuffed into my head was retirement books about how to retire with retirement Kind of being painted as this golden prospect I'm not so sure it is and there are lots of strategies of how to deal with it But there are a lot of changes that are happening Incidentally a quick side trip.

I kind of mocked this idea that That the average person hardly anyone lived to be age 65 in 1883 I'll give credit for this is that I've listened I listened to a long time to a podcast called the survival podcast by a guy named Jack Spirico And I'll give him credit for pointing it out to me is that he pointed out in one of his shows He pointed out that the statistics on lifespan are a little bit odd because we're taught that you know back in the 1800s no, but hardly anybody lived to make it to the age of 65 and His point was that that's not true Think of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and many of them lived past Many of them lived past the age of 65 And so I thought that was kind of interesting So I went one day and I did a research project just to kind of prove it to myself And I went and I took and I wrote down all the signers of the Declaration of Independence And I calculated their out their average lifespan And the reason I did that is because if you try to figure out okay maybe the general population number was that was that amount but why and So is it the fact that we have great medications now?

Or is it the fact that we have dry beds to sleep in? Is it the fact that we have awesome hospital services or is it the fact that you know, we have that we have adequate food? What's the actual answer here as far as? What's the answer and I'm certainly not sure of the answer.

I don't know I certainly don't know what the actual answer is, but I did go and do this interesting Chart and I'll share it with you I looked made a list of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and I calculated their average age and The average age of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence ended up being sixty seven point five years I took out the one so but however, obviously when you read through why different people died You have accidents you have old age.

And so I took out one signer who died at age 30 of shipwreck That was the one that that was the one that was an accident that was very clear that raised the average lifespan to 68 Point two so the average lifespan of these people was sixty eight point two If you look down the list and I just pulled it up here on my computer If you look down the list some of the oldest ones Well, I'll just give you a few so Josiah Bartlett died at 65 and a half from poor health and heart poor health poor health So that would be kind of the normal old age old age William Whipple died at fifty five point not So he's sixty years old from heart disease is he had clogged arteries Matthew Thornton died at 89 while visiting his daughter John Adams died at 90 of a coma.

He died while in a coma Samuel Adams died of at 81 from severe lung hemorrhage Elbridge Gary died at 70 in it Excuse me. I'm looking at my chart wrong Samuel Adams It doesn't list the cause of death here and my notes that I took Elbridge Gary died at 70 John Hancock at 46 I'll skip I'm not gonna read all of these just a few noted ones Francis Lewis died at 89 Benjamin Franklin died at 84 James Smith died at 87 Charles Carroll died at 95 Thomas Stone died at 44 Some of the older ones George Wythe died at 80 and so you have a broad range of these people dying it You know relatively normal ages Seems like one of the interesting things is that the gout was a major a major factor at that point in time and And that really affected a lot of these people's health health, but the point is I'm not sure It's something if anybody has any knowledge share it with me I'm interested in researching this because I personally think that it's like it's possible That a lot of the increases in lifespan are just simply due to the more widespread the the greater prevalence of You know a warm bed to sleep in at night to keep the rain off and enough food for people to eat Rather than you know this idea that I've had in the past that that it's just simply that you know amazing medicine I think it's much more basic than that probably the discovery of germ theory and Warm beds to sleep in and enough food and enough nutrition is a compelling compelling Idea another article here that I think these articles do a good job of laying out in a short version Kind of the history of retirement so this article is from the Seattle Times published December 31 2013 and I don't see the author listed here at least not on the top this one's relatively short a brief history of retirement It's a modern idea Work until you die or until you can't work anymore Until the late 19th century that was the old age plan for the bulk of the world's workers Only in 1889 did German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced modern pensions Bismarck wasn't really motivated by compassion for the plight of the working class He wanted to present preempt a growing socialist movement in Germany before it grew any more powerful The idea of providing financial security for the aged gradually caught on and expanded in Europe the United States and other advanced economies Now as life expectancy reaches links Bismarck couldn't have imagined and retirement lasts two or three decades These countries are struggling with government pension plans They can no longer afford the pension Bismarck offered was the first to be widely available But it was hardly the world's first in 13 BC the Roman Emperor Augustus began paying pensions to Roman legionnaires who had served 20 years The troops pensions were financed at first by regular taxes then by a 5% inheritance tax according to a 2009 history by Frank Ike an Economist now with the International Monetary Fund in the 16th century Britain and several European countries offered pensions to their troops starting with officers and gradually expanding to enlisted men the first civilian public servant known to have received a pension was an official with the London Port Authority in 1684 he was paid half his working income deducted from the pay of his replacement Thomas Paine the Revolutionary War firebrand famous for his essay common sense called for a 10% inheritance tax Part of the tax was be used to pay benefits to everyone aged 50 and older to guard quote guard against poverty in Old age according to a history by the Social Security Administration The idea went nowhere After the Civil War the US government paid pensions to disabled or impoverished Union veterans or to the widows of the dead Southern states paid pensions to disabled Confederate veterans the Civil War pensions became a basis for Social Security decades later When farming dominated the economy most men worked as long as their health held out as they aged though They often cut their hours and turned the most physically demanding chores over to sons or hired hands in 1880 when half of Americans worked on a farm 78% of American men worked past age 65 as factories began to replace farms and economic importance Skeptics wondered whether old folks could understand and work with the new machines one of the giants of American medicine Johns Hopkins Johns Hopkins Hospital co-founder William Osler in 1805 decried quote the uselessness of men older than 60 and said they should leave the workforce Growing prosperity also meant more people could afford to stop working late in life in 1875 American Express offered America's first employer provided retirement plan five years later the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad introduced the first retirement plan financed jointly by contributions from an employer and its workers From their private pension plans grew in the United States the plans received a boost during World War two when the government imposed wage Freezes that led some companies to offer pensions and other benefits to attract scarce workers That was a key a key development in retirement plan history right there Is that they weren't able to pay more wages?

So the employers came and built up other? other ways of Compensation which which really helped with fringe benefits so pension contributions other ancillary fringe benefits health plans, etc Made a big difference there when that when that happened the United States created Social Security in 1935 and added Medicare health benefits for the elderly in 1965 in the 1980s many countries lowered the age at which people could retire and collect full benefits This step was part of an effort to clear older workers out of the labor force to make way for the young And a pause and emphasize this in the 1980s many countries lowered the age at which people could retire and collect full benefits This step was part of an effort to clear older workers out of the labor force to make way for the young One of the things that I found researching retirement is that retirement has usually been used as punishment and I think it'll be tomorrow when I go into some of the detailed history From this book a history of retirement.

It's very interesting to see that a retirement was originally intended There's many reasons why but one of the major factors originally intending Excuse me originally affecting retirement was that retirement was intended to solve an employment problem and the idea was that economically speaking with Industrialization it was never going to be possible to have full employment and especially during the Great Depression The policymakers had decided it was never going to be possible again to have full employment And so they needed to reduce the number of people that were unemployed But one of the fastest ways that they chose to do that was to introduce and mandate late at later dates The concept of retirement and so retirement was originally intended as a solution to the problem of employment That's key.

Don't rely on my statement. So I'll try to prove it to you tomorrow with with some better researched information finishing this article now governments are reversing those policies and raising retirement ages to prevent aging populations from breaking their budgets and Older older people who now enjoy better health are working longer again in the United States 18.6 percent of people 65 and older were working or looking for work as of November That was up from a record low ten point four percent in January 1985 according to Labor Department figures dating to 1948 Why on earth do we have these constant articles decrying the the retirement crisis Many older people are enjoying work are working longer again So we're going to talk about kind of some alternate ways because from a financial planning perspective This opens up a huge huge huge number of opportunities for us to kind of reinvent basically reinvent the entire concept if you could if we can get free of this concept of Work for my lifetime and then I have to retire at 65 if we can get free of this concept Then we can completely re-engineer our lives in some really awesome ways and we can take control of it again Over the over the years of working as a financial planner.

I've asked hundreds of people This question is kind of part of my standard fact-finding process and the question is this is there a point in time at which you'd like to be in a position to not to have to work if you didn't want to and kind of phrase it like that to try to not be critical of you know Do you want to retire to try to kind of phrase it a little more?

elegantly or you know, is there a point you just like to work because you choose to not because you want to and Almost universally I get one of three answers. There are exceptions The most common answer is oh, yeah, definitely The follow-up question is what age when do you want to do that?

You know 65 that's the by far the most common answer. I'm gonna make up some some percentages on the spot here I would say that's probably 50% of the time The second most common answer is no. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I'd like to have money but no, I'm never gonna quit You mean retire?

I'm not gonna quit and that answer is probably the second most common. I make up a number that's 30% Well, let's say 20% and then the third most common answer is yeah, absolutely at what age, you know Maybe a little bit early like 60 and that's probably another 20% So if I got my statistic if I if I made up my percentages appropriately, that's 90% The other 10% has various answers And I always push back and say why why 65?

I don't know, you know That's a good age, right? That's the Social Security age, you know, that's when I get collect collect Social Security and The thing I always I just feel like is a big deal to push back on is why are we choosing the age of 65?

Why Why not 66? Why not 64? Why not 44? Why not 94? I don't care what you choose, but don't just choose the answer because that's the convenient answer Don't just say I'm gonna make this retirement plan because here's what happens I take that number and I go and create a written financial plan and it shows that by the age of 65 you need You know 1.4 million dollars and I come back and I deliver the financial plan and I talk you through it But the reality isn't door to accumulate the 1.4 million dollars You got to be saving a thousand bucks a month and then we don't follow through and do the savings so We got to change that Begin we got to create Individualized plans that are really compelling and so whether that's I'm gonna I'm gonna take a year off every 10 Whether that's I'm gonna work, you know and get early retirement I'm gonna you know, I don't know what what the answer is, but I mean there's lots of answers to it I'll give you one of one of mine.

This is me speaking personally This whole retire at 65 thing has never made sense to me And the reason it doesn't make sense to me primarily is because of you know, my personal family values So I look at it and I say why on earth should I do this?

So go to school Joshua graduate from high school go to college go to college You know get a get a degree get out get a good job. Okay, I'm gonna get a good job now Now you need to really work hard on your job So you should also however get married when you're in your early 20s and you should start a family So now that's the career building time and that's when you've got a family you need to work really really hard So you have a bunch of money saved up so that at the age of 65 you can retire So I work from let's call it, you know, let's say I got married and had kids at 25 So I work from 25 to 45 during those 20 most crucial years really building my career I'm a workaholic always, you know, just slaving away at the office to allow me to save money and I miss my kids Like, you know my kids childhood So I go to some soccer games from time to time and I get home at about 8 o'clock at night because I'm living on An airplane, but I miss my kids childhood because I got to build my career and I got to save for retirement So then about the age of 45, I'm ready to pull back a little bit But now I look down and my kids are 14 years old They don't want anything to do with me because I wasn't there and now they're 14 years old They're trying to establish their independence And so here I am at the age of 45 and now I'm senior enough in my company That I can afford to pull back a little bit of all my time And so I do that but the problem is they don't care much about me And then I keep working and I retire at 65 right when my kids are, you know, 25 years old And they're the ones that are working, you know, 25 to- they're in their 25 to 45 years old And they're working to build their careers doing exactly what they watched me do So I'm 65 so I can afford to sit around and do nothing But my kids don't want anything to do with me so I have to go play non-stop It doesn't make any sense to me Why not, you know, just a very simple alternate plan Why not simply say, okay, I'm gonna, you know, graduate from college, you know, 22 or whatever Work really hard for a few years, save a bunch of money But then all during the time that my kids are growing up, why don't I pull back from the work?

Why don't I pull back and spend time being present with them? And then once the kids are starting to kind of establish their independence, they're 14 years old Why not at that point in time then really pour on the effort at work? And forget this whole 65 thing Why not just simply build a lifestyle and a career that allows me to integrate fully my life and my work?

If it's good enough for Mr. Marriott and Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates, why is it not good enough for the rest of us? Now, there are a lot of alternate plans So I love the early retirement concept The concept that, you know, for example, Money Mustache Hopefully we'll have him on the show at some point, I'd love to interview him But Money Mustache talks about he and his wife's plan Their plan was to retire by the time they had kids So they did it at 31 That's awesome!

How cool is that? That works And now they're both home full-time raising their son That's an awesome plan It's a lot smarter than doing it at 65 So there are a number of different plans that we have But once we get out of this age 65 thing Then we create a dramatically different financial planning options I'll read this article here, very short But to me this is the constant And over the next couple of decades it's going to get worse and worse and worse and worse As the government balances, the government debt balances get worse and worse and worse Here's the constant refrain, this is from the BBC News "Thinking of the Bismarck legacy" "Otto von Bismarck was the Prime Minister of Prussia before overseeing the unification of Germany The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced the world's first state pension system in the 1880s You had to be 70 years old and the expectation was that you would probably only live a few years after that to collect it But in 1916 they lowered the pensionable age to age 65 It has remained at 65 for almost a century And it will take a brave government to juggle with the political sensitivity of raising that age again "It is a part of our political system and we pay for it The employees, the employers and the state" Says Wolfgang Wipperman at the Berlin Free University "They have to continue with this Otherwise there will be a revolution of the pensioners" Bleak future But 9 out of 10 old people around the world do not have a pension And for many of those lucky 1 in 10 who do, these are worrying times Sinking portfolio values and demographic changes are forcing cash-strapped governments to consider fundamental reforms Bismarck designed the system in 1881 and it came into force at the end of that decade In a very different world from the current one Old people are living longer than they were 50 years ago, blah blah blah Today there are 4 working Germans paying the pensions of every retired person But by the time today's youngest workers retire, there will be only 2 You don't need to know anything more than that The system is going to change So instead of having these whiny articles constantly about how we got to adjust things Instead of us financial planners yelling at people saying "You got to save another percentage" We need to find a new way of tackling this problem And the best way I know how to tackle it is with the concept of lifestyle design Now lifestyle design to the best of my knowledge was popularized more recently by Tim Ferriss in his book In his book "The 4-Hour Workweek" And he designed it, which is a great idea But I would maintain that all people design their lifestyle Whether they do it intentionally knowing the idea of lifestyle design or not All people still design their lifestyle Why does one person choose to go to welding school and why does another person choose to become a horse farrier?

One I would assume likes horses and the other I would assume likes welders So that's designing a lifestyle But the key is that we've got to apply this lifestyle design to every aspect of life Bill Gates has a lifestyle that I think is really really neat Not because of the private jet and the big house, to me, fine, good for him To me the fact that he gets to sit around and read books all day is my...

To me that's an idea, read books and watch videos and talk to people and solve great problems In my mind that's one of the world's greatest things you could do That would be the most fun thing you can do That's why I'm creating a podcast, it's lifestyle design And any one of us can do it now if we integrate it So we've got to integrate the lifestyle design and the goal setting And figure out an individualized plan which will be different for each one of us One person may say I want to work till 65 Another person may say I want to quit at 45 Another person say I never want to quit Doesn't matter what your answer is as long as you know what it is I think that's enough for today, a longer show today Tomorrow I plan to come back and continue on this retirement program And we're going to continue with...

I'm going to read at length from this book, A History of Retirement Because it gives some background I think that is so crucial to understand the world today I had to go and learn this from books because I wasn't around But I've never heard anybody kind of reference this history Once you reference this history and once you understand that retirement is not this end all be all of leisure That this is a very new concept It allows you to feel good about making alternate plans And I really believe that the idea of leisure being the goal We see through that for the most part We've all been on a vacation that's kind of like we're ready to be off a vacation when we're done with it That's something that I think we've all experienced However, there's so much noise in the media There's so much noise in all of these articles that come across Yahoo Finance everyday And USA Today finance section about how we're supposed to beat ourselves up for not saving for retirement It's okay to not save for retirement It's fine Now, let me be clear I save for retirement But the point is that just saving in a 401k On this arbitrary idea of I've got to save for retirement may not be the best way to do it The best thing to do sometimes may be to cash out that 401k and go start the business Warren Buffett didn't become rich by saving in an IRA Conrad Hilton didn't become rich by saving in an IRA And I'll just finish with this I just want to point this out One of my biggest frustrations with the financial media is that a lot of the advice just simply doesn't work It's lies Now, it's not lies in the normal way that lie is defined It's not actually untrue It's that it just doesn't work The idea that, well, you know what, if you'll just save $200 a month into a Roth IRA, you're going to be rich Is that true?

Maybe There is no mathematical reason why that can't be true If you will save $200 a month Just a second, I've got to get my calculator If you will save $200 a month Let's run the numbers here If you will save $200 per month, every month Let's say over a 40-year period of time 40 years And we do this Let's just plug in 10% interest and start with nothing Yes, at the end of 40 years, you will have $1,264,815 That is absolutely true And there's no reason why you can't do more than that If you save $400 a month At the end of 40 years, you will have $2,500,000 So $400 a month over a 40-year career is $2,500,000 Which considering, what was that statistic that I read?

29% of retirees have less than $1,000 And only 11% have more than $250,000 That will put you there So I was mistaken So current retirees, 17% have $250,000 or more So yes, $400 a month into a Roth IRA Will in fact, if you go to my 10% number Will indeed get you there Let's plug in 8% And 8%, you're at $1,400,000 So you're in that top echelon of retirees with money But look at the people that are in the Forbes 400 None of them ever got there by saving for retirement And look at the fact that Excuse me, in an IRA Look at the fact that only 17% of retirees have more than $250,000 So what about the rest of them?

What's wrong with taking that and starting a business? What's wrong with taking that and investing in other ways? I love Roth IRAs I think they're one of the most incredibly flexible accounts But it's not the end all be all It's okay to do other things with the money So we'll talk about that on another day Hopefully today has been interesting I really appreciate you listening To close out here, just a couple of comments I'm going to say this once and I'm going to try not to Apologize a lot in the future about this stuff I don't expect my A lot of times podcasts are expected to be short I'm here at an hour and a half I don't have any predicted time for the show Whether that's 20 minutes or 1 hour and 45 minutes If you're bored with what we're talking about Just feel free, just turn it right off That won't bother me a bit if you turn the show off If there's something you want to completely skip, skip Pick and choose what you find interesting I do my best to try to present things in a way that I think are interesting But it won't bother me a bit if you just shut it off and move on Love to hear your comments on today's show Come by the website at radicalpersonalfinance.com/12 For episode 12 Radicalpersonalfinance.com/12 Send me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com Connect with us, got a Facebook site up Just search Facebook for Radical Personal Finance And connect with us on Twitter RadicalPF is our Twitter name Hopefully the information today has been interesting for you Disclaimers at the end as always I give authoritative information Which is my opinions I screw stuff up, I would love to know about it If you found something I screwed up Come by the show page radicalpersonalfinance.com/12 Tell me about what I screwed up Let me know so I can correct it Financial planning is very personal And it's very state and country specific Please call a professional for their opinion on your situation And don't rely on the advice of a random guy on the internet For any major decisions Have a great day Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th For an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions And create lasting memories with your little ones