We cover lots of topics, including split childcare shifts, how work and productivity have changed since Covid, our thoughts on digital calendar frames, our thoughts on retirement, dealing with kids who have different sleep needs, and how we see the next five years of Best of Both Worlds.

Please give the episode a listen! As always, we welcome ratings and reviews. You can also submit a question for a future mailbag here, or by emailing me at laura at lauravanderkam dot com.

I have been pondering this concept since the writer reached out to me a few weeks ago, because I find it fascinating to think about the opportunity cost of time in different stages of life…Now that her piece is published, I can write more about it.

My first thought: we are all going to die eventually. We might have Four Thousand Weeks (I hope more) but time is ultimately limited. It’s harder to see that early in life, when time feels expansive, and possibly even endless, but the older you are, the more that reality starts to hit.

This is a particular issue for folks who are retired. At least on the middle-to-upper income side of things, sixty-something people often retire with the goal of doing  activities such as travel, hanging out with family and friends, spending time on community endeavors that were tough to do while working full time, eating out, going to matinees, whatever. The goal is to do this for a good long time, but at some point (for many folks), health concerns make it harder to take a trans-Atlantic cruise or take that woodworking class. So there’s always a question of how many healthy retirement years you have available for these pursuits, and how you should distribute these pursuits over these hopefully-numerous-but-possibly-not years.

For certain folks, the 1-2 years (depending on place) when many activities were limited by Covid and Covid restrictions represented a very high proportion of their healthy retirement time. Obviously dying of Covid would end those healthy retirement years completely, so this is a question of calculating risks, but not doing things like visiting family, acting in the local theater group, or traveling to Europe, involved severe trade-offs, given that there may not be much time left to do those things.

Covid isn’t over, but now that there are vaccines, and boosters, and milder variants, some folks are wondering if you can make up for lost time. That’s why Barron’s — a publication aimed at people with portfolios large enough that money is not the primary limiting factor — ran this story.

The short answer is: no. Once a second is gone, it is gone. All the money in the world can’t buy it back. I know some retirees who made certain choices even during the darkest days of Covid — such as continuing to visit family members — precisely because they weren’t willing to accept the risk of for sure not seeing their loved ones vs. the lower percent chance of contracting Covid in its riskier forms. Others made different choices. That is the tough calculus of a pandemic.

But that doesn’t make for a good article, so I did offer some thoughts on how to think about time now. One is to think about what you would have liked to have done in 2020 and 2021, and accelerate the timeline on doing more of that. So, for instance, if you would have taken 2 big trips a year, try taking 3 or 4 per year. If you’d go visit some old friends who live 3 hours away once or twice a year, do that more often. Accept that life will feel a little more “full” now— even “busy.” It balances out the time when it wasn’t full at all. Life goes in phases, and no one phase ever lasts forever.

(Speaking of which, I am flying three times in two weeks — including making good on two talks booked for June 2020 and rescheduled for June 2022. It seems that phase of my life is back…)

Photo: This photo doesn’t have much to do with retirees, or Covid, but I enjoyed that I could see Canada from my Detroit hotel room, and even cooler, I was looking south to see our “northern” neighbor.

I also thought, more, about writing the book with talking points in mind. Here goes:

1. Sweat the big stuff. For most people, the key to less financial stress is to spend less on their houses (and to a degree, cars) than the real estate calculators say you can. Sure, houses can be investments, but so are other things, like actual investments. Spending less on your house frees up space for all manner of small indulgences which do a lot to boost happiness. You can also do what we did and move to a cheaper state.

2. Don’t scrimp more, make more. Money is a tool. As such, having more of it enables you to do more things. High income people, for instance, are more likely to save. They are less likely to live paycheck to paycheck. Sure, some people suffer from lifestyle creep, but not everyone. If you’re big into frugal practices, you might try spending an equal amount of time pondering ways you can earn more money. Income is more malleable than we often think.

3. Rethink retirement. The usual retirement goal, to build up enough assets to live comfortably off the investment income, is going to be a stretch for most people. Fortunately, most Americans say they wouldn’t stop working if they won the lottery, so perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. A better question is to figure out what kind of work you’d enjoy doing in your later years — hopefully something flexible, creative, fun. Something you’d never want to retire from.

4. Spend to make your life easier. We all have 168 hours a week, and all the money in the world can’t buy us a second more. Money can, however, buy us back hours from life maintenance and non core competency tasks so we can spend more of those 168 hours on things we enjoy.

5. Money is completely fungible – a dollar spent on one thing can always be spent on something else. Figure out what you love to do, and how much that costs, and then view all purchases in light of that. A $50 sweater could also buy you and a friend a trip to an art museum, complete with lunch. A $200 impulse buy could be viewed as four lunches and afternoons with your friend, or a weekend getaway with your spouse. What would you enjoy more?

6. Use your money to create a better world – starting with your own neighborhood. You can build strong social institutions with your philanthropy, and figure out ways to invest in order to create a thriving community in which you’d want to live. Shop local and spend your money on people.

by Laura Vanderkam

Judith Van Ginkel is 71 years old and works 50-60 hours a week. And yet, “I’m the luckiest person I know,” she says.

Here’s why: Well beyond what many people consider retirement age, Van Ginkel (whose career has mostly been in medical administration) runs Every Child Succeeds, a home visitation program overseen by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Over the past decade, the dozens of social workers on her team have checked in on 17,000 at-risk pregnant women and their children, ensuring that these growing families get proper medical care and support. As a result, the infant mortality rate among participant families is well below the national average, despite their poverty rates — an outcome that Van Ginkel finds more exciting than playing golf. And so, “I’m going to continue doing this as long as I can do it well,” she tells me.

A growing number of older Americans are having similar thoughts. After decades of decline, the labor force participation rate among people older than 65 rose from a low of 10.7% in 1987 to more than 17% now. Nearly a third of those ages 65-69 are working or looking for work, up from less than 20% in the 1980s, and surveys of Baby Boomers find that many don’t intend to retire immediately either.

Certainly, not all older workers feel as lucky as Van Ginkel about their situations (nor do some younger workers eyeing these jobs). But while the economic crisis has trapped some people in the workforce, the trend began during good times and in general is a positive development — a recognition that people both need and want to be part of the workforce longer in an era of longer lives, and that seniors with incomes feel more secure and spend more in a way that generally boosts the economy. Though some older workers encounter barriers in the labor market, there is plenty that we, as a society, can do to encourage our most expert workers to continue sharing their gifts with the world in a way that is rewarding for them.

‘A desire to stay engaged’

The notion of a decades-long retirement is relatively recent. When President Franklin Roosevelt introduced Social Security in the 1930s, life expectancy (at birth) was 58 for men and 62 for women. These low numbers, though, reflected widespread infant mortality that, in an era without adequate antibiotics or vaccines, even a group such as Every Child Succeeds couldn’t have done much about. But still, people who made it to adulthood tended to die earlier, too.

These days, more of us make it to 65, and people who turn 65 can quite reasonably expect to live to age 85 or more. One factor contributing to the rise of senior labor force participation is that even with Social Security and significant personal savings, 20 years to 30 years is a long time to go with no new income. And most people don’t have significant personal savings (or don’t now, given recent stock market losses).

But that’s not all that’s going on. The notion that work is something you want to stop doing is getting a makeover as well. Baby boomers in particular have “a desire to stay engaged and active in the workforce, and in many cases to try their hands at second careers and new work adventures,” reports Mark Miller, who runs the website Retirement Revised. Some do this through volunteering, but there are plenty of enjoyable jobs in for-profit enterprises, too.

Of course, just because people need or want to work (or both) doesn’t mean that staying in the labor force is easy. Surveys of job-seeking seniors have found rampant age discrimination among hiring managers.

But there are ways to help. Andrew Biggs, a former principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has floated an intriguing idea of reducing the Social Security tax rate on workers older than 62. “Under current law, older workers receive very little additional benefit if they decide to remain in the workforce and pay additional taxes to Social Security,” says Biggs, who’s now at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Reducing the tax rate would make the system more fair to them. A lower Social Security tax rate would give older workers a little more money in their pockets and would make older workers cheaper to employers. That could counter the age discrimination such workers are facing.

‘Encore careers’

More broadly, though, in an era of longer lives, we all need to spend more time pondering what we’d like to do with our years. For her work, Van Ginkel recently won a $100,000 Purpose Prize from Civic Ventures, an organization that encourages older Americans to pursue “encore careers” — work that is meaningful, flexible, serves the greater good and, in many cases, their finances as well.Veteran business people can advise new entrepreneurs. Former health care administrators can help people with chronic illnesses choose the best care, and former educators can design curricula and coach rookie teachers. The true sweet spot is when we ask, “What do I love to do so much I’d do it for free?”, and then figure out a way to get paid for it.

That’s what Van Ginkel has done. “I never get up and feel, oh, I have to go to work today,” she says. “I get up wanting to do this.”

Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

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What I was attempting to say is that a common theme of personal finance books is to tell people that saving and investing small amounts of money over time adds up, due to the miracle of compound interest. This is true, to a degree. For instance, if you invested $3000 a year in the S&P 500 from 1970 to 2009, you would have achieved a rate of return of 10.38%, and the $120,000 you’d invested would have turned into $1.625 million. Investing $6000 per year — just $500 a month — would give you $3.251 million.

This is a fair chunk of change. But there are a few things to keep in mind. Most notably, this doesn’t take into account inflation. Investing $3000 a year seems relatively doable now, in 2010. This is less than $10 a day. Cut out a few coffees, lunches, movies and mall trips and you could probably find the cash. Saving $6000 a year would be more of a stretch, but this is still only 12% of the average household income of $50,000.

Saving $3000 a year back in 1970, however, would be an entirely different matter. The average household income then was less than $9000 per year. Telling a young person then to invest $3000 a year would be like telling a young person now “Hey, all you have to do to have a secure retirement is invest $17,000 per year!” True, but not particularly helpful. In terms of household income, $6000 would have the sticker value of about $34,000 today. Very few 25-year-olds can sock that away.

That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t save for retirement. The best reason is that most retirement funds are tax advantaged, plus many employers match contributions. So that’s easy money. Which is why it’s fascinating to learn how little most people have saved up. I’ve spent some time today reading the Employee Benefits Research Institute’s 2010 Retirement Confidence Survey. Some 54% of workers have less than $25,000 in savings and investments. Only 18% of workers who are older than 45 have more than $250,000 in savings. The survey notes that many people underestimate how much money they’ll need for retirement, though this is partly a matter of how you calculate it. If you use the rule of thumb that you can pull out 4% of your assets per year, pulling out just $2000 a month ($24,000 a year) would require you to have at least $600,000 in assets.

Anyway, what all this points to is that most people would find it very difficult to save up enough of their income from ages 25-65 to live for 20-30 years with no new money coming in. I don’t want to get much into Social Security, but far from being an argument for the program, I’d note that Social Security has the same problem in that it’s not clear that overall payroll taxes are enough to support multi-decade retirements either. That’s why people are worried about its solvency.

But here’s a different question: why are we so into the idea of retirement? The whole financial planning industry is based on this idea of having enough money to not work, and yet surveys of Americans find that two-thirds of adults say that they would continue to work if they won the lottery. Perhaps people are thinking that, if they were financially secure, they’d be able to do work they loved and not think about money first. But then that suggests this idea: instead of fixating on retirement, we should put that same mental energy into figuring out what kind of work we’d never want to retire from.

To be sure, we will probably all reach some age where we will not be capable of working. But for many of us, that is not 62. Indeed, given that I’m home with a 1-year-old today due to a babysitting issue, I’d wager that I will find it easier to focus on my career at 62 than I do at 32!

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