The Story of Us

What made us, a “pre-retiree” couple, with two incomes and a steadily appreciating home, children gone and last pet dearly departed, opt out of a Sunbelt retirement? Why have we launched a website advocating the same for others?

The short answer:

You’ve heard of a near-death experience – the tunnel, the glowing light, the
deceased loved ones, and then wham! You wake up at the accident scene and nothing about your life will ever be the same. Ours was a near-fatal brush with retirement, from which we awoke with an unexpected mission to share what we learned. Our website, 2young2retire.com, is alternative, off-road, a gathering
place for people to find inspiration and resources for independent choices in later
life.

The longer answer:

About a dozen years ago, we attended a National Association of Foodservice  Equipment Manufacturers seminar in Palm Springs, California. Howard, then 55, was founder/publisher of an annual directory for the foodservice industry, the perfect grace note to a long career in advertising sales. Marika, 49, was along for the ride, taking an R&R break from her work as a freelance business writer.

To so-called retirement planners we must have seemed the perfect candidates for their services. Our two incomes supported a pleasant lifestyle and with college bills easing, we had begun to save and invest a larger percentage of our income. Retirement was in the back of mind, like a dull headache, except occasionally in the middle of the night, Marika -- financial newsletter junkie that she was – would startle awake with the thought: Uh-oh! We don’t have nearly enough money saved to generate the 70% of our current income all the experts told us we needed.    

Discovering Palm Springs calmed those panic attacks. Rattling around in our five-bedroom home, we had already given some thought to downsizing. Housing in California was affordable: in fact, local real estate values were perhaps at their lowest point in decades. The desert climate was ideal for a couple who loved the outdoors. We estimated that, with a little catch up effort, our savings and investments would be more than enough to finance a comfortable retirement.

The universe must have been eavesdropping because a direct sale opportunity came our way fewer than six months later, and we acted on it. An adobe condo with glorious mountain views, nearby pool, tennis courts and hiking trails, became our second home, a place for long winter breaks, a test-drive of the retirement life we imagined we wanted. After all, didn’t everyone?

But a funny thing happened on the way to our “golden years.” The more we experienced the lifestyle and community, the less certain we became that our decision was the right one for us. Over the course of ten winters, we spent six, seven sometimes as many as 10 weeks at a time in Palm Springs, setting up temporary shop there. Nearby LAX enabled Howard to make frequent business trips to Asia and elsewhere. A computer, printer and fax were all Marika needed to serve her clients.

But if anything troubled our sleep, it was the prospect of our second, getaway home turning into a permanent residence. Could we idle away the hours making small talk, putter around the garden, decorate or redecorate our condo, and wait for visits from our (yet unborn) grandchildren to break the tedium of a life that was without direction or purpose? Would we, with our thousands of hours between us in personal development workshops, ever be? Much of what we noticed about retirement called to mind Dave Barry’s quip about the fine line between hobbies and mental illness. We also began to see the correlation between too much time on your hands and obsessive concerns about money, possessions and failing health.

Had this been a work of fiction, you might have expected an earthshaking “Hell no, we won’t go”, but real life isn’t usually like that. So, what eventually led us to conclude that, as was once said of New York City, retirement was a great place to visit, but who in their right mind would want to live there? In the quiet of many a Palm Springs evening, we found the time to read, think and talk about where we were and where we appeared to be headed. We were absorbing stacks of material on retirement and aging “issues,” noticing to our dismay, the persistent view of retirement as an entitlement, something one “earned” and inevitable for everyone. To judge from most of this, the only questions worth considering were “when” you were ready and how you would pay for a life of leisure.

Excerpt from Introduction, Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life (Plume 2004)