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Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 12:42:09 :
In Reply to: Re: Kind of sad, but true. posted by Jerry in Idaho on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 12:25:02 :
When I started to work as an engineer right out of college, I noticed a lot of guys that were only 10 years older than me talking about what they were going to do when they retired. They were going to build a cabin in the mountains. They were going to get a boat and go fishing all the time. They were going to build a nice shop and restore their old car. What struck me was that they were basically postponing everything fun in their lives for 30 years, until they would be presumably comfortably retired on their 401k and investments and could finally do what they wanted. I suppose those guys are still plugging away at the same job, only now they only have 10 years to go until they get to build their cabins and go fishing.
Meanwhile, what I've seen is a whole lot of men who didn't live 2 years after they "retired". My own father blacked out and fell off the ladder on the back of his brand new deluxe camper on his brand new Dodge Cummins turbo-diesel pickup and cracked his skull on the concrete as he was getting ready to go for his first trip with it. I've known of a couple other guys who also died just before they were going to leave on the first trip of their retirement in their new motor homes. I know of one man who spent most of his free time after work building a beautiful little wooden boat powered by a home-made triple-expansion steam engine, and then died just after he finished it, but before he ever got to use it.
I used to have an old Norwegian neighbor who had taken up wood carving after he retired from Weyerheauser and had his whole yard full of figures he'd carved. I told him how impressed I was, and he said, "I knew a lot of guys at the mill that when they retired, all they did was sit. Let me tell you, they didn't sit for long."
So, yeah. Working hard is good, but if you put off everything you ever really wanted to do for when you're "retired", there's a good chance you'll never get to do it.
Along the same lines, everybody would love to have enough investments that they can live forever with the same income they had when they were working, but most of us can't realistically come close to that, especially with the stock market crash, pension fund bankruptcies, drops in real estate value, etc. Better to live cheaply and spend a little money while the money's still worth something and you're still healthy enough to do something fun with it.
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