Best of The Long View 2024: Financial Planning and Retirement

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Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar. On this week’s episode, we’ll feature some of our favorite clips from interviews we’ve done with financial planners, advisors, and retirement researchers over the past year. It’s a counterpart to a previously released “best of” episode that was all about investing.

“Daniel Crosby: Can Money Really Buy Happiness?” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Dec. 17, 2024.

“Scott Rick: Are You a Tightwad or a Spendthrift?” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, June 18, 2024.

“Anne Lester: You’re Bad at Savings and It’s Not Your Fault,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, March 12, 2024.

“Mark Berg: How to Help Kids Financially Without Ruining Them,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Nov. 19, 2024.

“Marc Freedman: The Case for Encore Careers,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Feb. 20, 2024.

“Howard Gleckman: We Pretend This Isn’t a Problem,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Jan. 16, 2024.

“Roger Young: Visualizing Retirement Is So Important,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Feb. 13, 2024.

“Jamila Souffrant: ‘What Type of Life Do You Actually Want to Live?’” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, May 28, 2024.

“Jackie Cummings Koski: Late Starters Can Still Find FIRE,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Aug. 20, 2024.

“Meir Statman: ‘The Biggest Risks in Life Are Not in the Stock Market,’” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com.

“Christine Benz: How to Retire,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Sept. 17, 2024.

“Brad Klontz: What’s Your Money Script?” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Dec. 10, 2024.

“Anne Tergesen: What Retirement Looks Like Today,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Oct. 29, 2024.

“Jonathan Clements: ‘Life Is Full of Small Pleasures,’” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Oct. 15, 2024.

Transcript

Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar. On this week’s episode, we’ll feature some of our favorite clips from interviews we’ve done with financial planners, advisors, and retirement researchers over the past year. It’s a counterpart to a previously released “best of” episode that was all about investing.

Benz: We had several engaging conversations about the psychology of money throughout the year. One of my favorites was with author and financial psychologist Daniel Crosby, who recently released a wonderful book called The Soul of Wealth. I asked Daniel about how we can use money to increase happiness.

Crosby: When it comes to how we spend the money, I think the best publicized of the findings is that we should buy experiences over things. There’s a very particular reason why that’s the case. And it has to do with this human tendency to habituate to things.

So, a lot of what we call behavioral biases is really just human tendencies that are neither good nor bad. And habituation is one of those things. People can get used to whatever they’re going through for better and for worse. You hear people say all the time, if XYZ thing happened—if I lost my spouse, if I lost my child, I just couldn’t go on. And then that feared thing happens, the spouse dies, and they do go on. It’s hard. It hurts. But life finds a way, they adjust, and they make it through. So, that’s an example of positive habituation.

But we also get habituated to really nice things. And you think, if I just had this car or this house or this number in the bank account, then I would be set. But just as surely as you can get habituated to tough stuff, you can get habituated to good stuff as well. So, that is the reason why things don’t tend to buy us much happiness. Because that thing that we buy, that new car or that new house, quickly just becomes your grocery-getter or the place where you sleep at night—it’s not this magical thing anymore. It’s just sort of the backdrop of your life.

Whereas experiences tend to get better with time because we engage in something called rosy retrospection. My favorite example of this is, every summer, my family and I go to California for a month because Georgia is unlivable in July. So, we go to Southern California for a month, and we always go to Disneyland for one day—one full day we go to Disneyland. It’s one of the most miserable days of my year. If you texted me at any moment during that day and said, “Hey, how are you doing?” I would be absolutely miserable. I would have just paid $10 for water. I would be sunburned. I’d be standing in some long line to ride a 30-second ride. And yet we buy the ornaments. We put them on the tree at Christmas and we go, wasn’t Disney great? Because when we retrospect on an event, especially a trip or something with a loved one, all of the bad stuff tends to fall away, and we tend to hang on to the bright parts of that memory. So, we don’t habituate to experiences the same way we do to things. So, experiences over things is one way.

Another way is getting out of things that we hate doing. This is one of the ones that I think people fail to do. I talk about in the book, buying back our time: getting out of cutting the lawn, cleaning the house, doing the laundry—whatever the hated task is, buying back your time if you can afford to makes a great deal of sense.

Also, find the things that foster relationships. Relationships tend to be the number one driver of how good life is. Good relationships, by and large, lead to a good life. So, there’s research that I talk about in the book by Dr. Michael Finke, who talks about, people who buy a car don’t tend to have a great deal of excess happiness, but people who buy a car to join a car club do because they’ve bought themselves something to do on Saturday. So, they bought themselves some buddies to talk to about their engines and they bought themselves a road trip. So, it tends to be a different thing if the thing that we’re buying tends to deepen or foster a relationship.

Benz: Author and professor Scott Rick discussed the characteristics of people who are more likely to be cheap with money—tightwads, to use his terminology—and who’s more likely to be a spendthrift.

Rick: If I were to summarize across a lot of diverse samples, I would say roughly we find 25% of people who we would label a tightwad, 25% who we would label a spendthrift and 50% in that unconflicted middle. There are some demographic correlates. Women are a little more likely to be spendthrifts than men. It’s a small thing, but it’s something we constantly see. Tightwads are older, a little bit older than spendthrifts on average. Another small thing. Tightwads tend to be more mathematical in their college majors. And yeah, they view the world through that numerical lens a little bit more. But there aren’t a lot of obvious, gigantic demographic markers of this. But there are those small relationships.

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Benz: I wanted to ask about how we get these orientations, whether it’s nature and nurture. It sounds like our experiences with money during childhood and adolescence help shape our orientations. But can you talk about that and perhaps share a couple of examples of how people’s experiences might affect where they land on this spectrum?

Rick: No, I think there’s evidence for both, certainly. I think if you were born with a tendency to ruminate or perhaps be a bit neurotic, you might have a tightwad-friendly brain already. But yeah, I think experiences, there seems to be a lot of evidence for that, particularly in formative years. There are a lot of tightwads who seem to have gone through a time of struggle, financial struggle or stress. And some of them come through and come into money later in life, like a career works out or something else improves in their financial lives. But they don’t adjust so quickly. They develop these reactions to spending that protect them when times are tough. But when times are less tough, many of them still have these same reactions that they can’t shake.

Again, you might look at someone on paper and say, oh, you must be quite comfortable. But some people just can’t get past a period of struggle that they experienced. I quote a character in the book Love in the Time of Cholera who grew up poor and became a rich industrialist. And someone called him rich, and he said, “No, no, I’m not rich. I am a poor man with money. That is very different.” And so, he was not able to shake that mindset that developed in more formative years.

Benz: We had a few wonderful conversations about children and money on The Long View. Author Anne Lester weighed in on the main headwinds facing young people just starting their financial lives today.

Lester: We’re in overall a more affluent society than certainly society was when I graduated from college in 1986. Social media makes it a lot easier to see what your peers are doing. And I think there is a bit of norm-setting that happens when you see everybody else doing it, and you think you should be doing it too. It is also true that the median price of housing, whether you’re renting or buying, versus the median salary is significantly higher. The median price of a car is significantly higher versus the median salary. So, a couple of really big-ticket items that most people anchor on as signs of, “I’m an adult now because …” are really more expensive. We lose a little sight over the fact that they’re also probably a lot nicer. And some of that increase in cost is actually reflecting a much wealthier society. So, the car that you buy now is nicer and safer, the house that you buy or the apartment that you rent is probably per-square-foot bigger than what I would have gotten in my age, certainly nicer. So, it’s not quite apples to apples in terms of what you’re getting for the money. So, I think that’s just true.

And then I also think because society overall is more affluent, people are more uncomfortable struggling with stuff. I don’t want to sound like a cranky old boomer who says, “Oh, kids these days,” because it’s more than that. It really is more than that—these big-ticket items being one of them, and to get the same level of external achievement is just harder. But it’s also, I think, a more affluent society really struggling with a lifetime income curve. And it takes a while to have your salary increase to the level that you grew up with. I had this conversation with one of my kids who was saying, “I’ll never be able to afford what you and dad have.” And that may be true, especially for my child who is a musician.

He said, “We’ll never take nice trips.”

And I was like, “Honey, do you remember the vacations we took all the way through middle school?”

And he’s like, “What do you mean?”

We always used to see their great grandmother for spring break. And I said, “Remember where we stayed where dad and I used to pull the mattress off the sleeper sofa in the living room because it was so uncomfortable. We couldn’t sleep on the sofa bed, and we gave you guys the bedroom.”

And he’s like, “Yeah, I love that place.”

And I was like, “Well, let’s talk about how fancy a vacation that was.”

It wasn’t; it was like negatively fancy. Or the apartments we used to rent at the beach with no screens on the windows and mosquitoes. And they don’t remember any of that. They’re anchoring on the nicest bit of our life that happened when I was in my 50s. So, some of it, I think, is just that comparison, too, that people lose sight of.

But I don’t mean to derail this. I do think that because those big-ticket items—whether it’s colleges and debt—certainly starting off with debt is something that the boomers did not do to the same degree. College was just much more affordable. So, you’re starting in the hole from a debt perspective. Those big-ticket items that you view as milestone achievements are coming later because they cost more.

Benz: We also discussed raising financially independent children with financial planner Mark Berg, who shared some concrete strategies from his practice.

Benz: I wanted to ask about lifestyle considerations a little bit. You referenced earlier that it’s common for young people just starting out to adopt the creature comforts of their parents as their own. They might have gotten accustomed to a certain quality level for hotels, cars, furniture, whatever. It seems like that could be a problem for young people just starting out, especially given the Instagram culture that we live in that’s really fueling consumer culture. Can you talk about that? How parents can help their children make healthy consumer decisions?

Berg: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think it does go back to what are your goals, their goals—meaning these people in their early 20s—what are their goals, and then what are their resources toward those goals, and understanding that there’s going to be a delay in just about any circumstance relative to the goals that they have. And so, building that healthy foundation is important. Part of that building of the healthy foundation is, again, living within your means. And so, there’s a lot of different examples, a lot of different paths we could go with this. An apartment: Are they going to live at apartment or are they going to live at home? That’s a tricky area that I’ve had a lot of conversations with. The best approach that I have seen to this is someone who, their rule for their kids—and they let them know while they’re still in college—when you graduate, you are welcome to live with us. And the first six months is free. And after six months, that’ll help you get established, get some savings for a security deposit for an apartment. But if you choose to continue to live at home, it’s $400 a month for six months, and then that number will double every six months indefinitely.

I know one of their kids was just about at the, I think it was $3,200 a month, he was going to get to that point when they said, “OK, I give!” And they moved out. But I love having that type of thing that really helps with the transition and helps create a launching point. I think that’s a healthy way to help. I think in the other areas, like I mentioned earlier—cellphone, car insurance, medical insurance—that traditionally had been picked up by the parents, we recommend to our clients, they need to own those. They either need to take on their own car insurance, for example, and they’re on their own, or they need to pay their proportion on your policy and make Venmo or Zelle you each month accordingly, and it’s their choice. So, then they have to do the research, am I better at Geico versus your policy or whatever the case may be. But they need to own their expenses so they can make their decisions.

And they may come to the decision on some of these things: “You know what? It was a high priority when you were paying for it, but it’s not a high priority when I need to pay for it.” And that’s good, that’s healthy.

Benz: We tackled many dimensions of retirement planning on The Long View this year. We discussed the evolution of retirement with author Marc Freedman, who has been a pioneer in the realm of encore careers. He made the point that our conception of retirement hasn’t kept up with gains in longevity over the past century.

Freedman: I think for too long we’ve been locked into a conception of life that was roughly three score and 10 and wasn’t really designed for the much longer lives that we’re living now. Half the children born in the developed world since 2000 are expected to see their 100th birthday. And so, the idea that we load all the education up in the first 20 or so years of life, all the work up in the next 20 to 30 years of life, and then just have this balloon payment of leisure extending out for half a century is just not going to work for most individuals who can work for 25 or 30 years and then support such a long period of nonworking later. But it also, as you say, makes it clear that we can’t have societies where a small group of younger people are trying to support everybody else.

But I do want to mention something, which is for me has been a surprise and some learning that has happened over the last few years. I think it’s natural for us to focus on the longevity revolution, those 100-year lives. It’s also important to understand the growth in the number of older people. But what I don’t think I fully appreciated is that the big thing happening is actually age diversity. One hundred years ago, when you looked at the chart of the number of people from birth to 74, it was just a ski slope heading straight downhill. If you look at that same chart today, it’s a flat line—we have the same number of 12-year-olds, and 61-year-olds, and 37-year-olds. We basically have the same number of people alive at every age from zero to 74. And that’s just extending out further. What’s more, a quarter of the population is under 20 and a quarter of the population is over 60. If you move into 25 and 55, you start seeing that the two big groups in society are older and younger people and there are pretty much the same number of them. So, I think one of the challenges in our multigenerational moment, our multigenerational future is going to be learning how to work together with people at other stages of life at other ages.

Benz: We also discussed longevity—and specifically the connection between longevity and long-term care—with author Howard Gleckman, who’s an expert on aging and caregiving.

Gleckman: You hear these phrases about the crisis of aging and the senior tsunami and all this stuff to make it sound like it’s a bad thing. But in fact, it’s a wonderful thing that medical technology has made it possible for people to live much longer lives in old age. It’s an interesting thing. Life expectancy has doubled in the last 120 years since 1900. It’s just remarkable. And that’s all good. The problem is that we now have—of course, because of the baby boomers—a growing aging population. They’re living much longer than they ever did. And when they get sick and they need this kind of personal support, we don’t have a system in place to help them. We’re great if you need the most sophisticated, cutting-edge healthcare technology. We’re not so good if you need somebody to help you get to the bathroom.

Benz: One of the most frequently cited rules of thumb for retirement is the so-called “4% rule.” We discussed it with Roger Young, who’s thought leadership director at T. Rowe Price. He made the point that it’s a good starting point when thinking about retirement spending, but probably not an ending point.

Young: If you can support your spending with a 4% withdrawal, gross before taxes, in that first year of retirement, that’s helpful to say to yourself, OK, good chance I’m ready for retirement. On the other hand, we don’t think that people really live by the 4% rule. People can make adjustments. We don’t tend to get too caught up in estimating or perfecting what is that safe withdrawal rate—and “safe” in quotes—nothing is perfectly safe, even if it’s been historically safe. My colleague, Sudipto Banerjee, has done some good work on how people adjust in retirement, how their spending on an inflation-adjusted basis tends to decrease over time. So, there’s a wide range of outcomes in the population. That suggests that more comprehensive planning is really a good idea. So, that would be a way to adjust to your own situation.

One thing I’ll specifically call out though is—I’m sure you’ve heard of the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early—and some of the literature and blogs about that FIRE movement talk about rules of thumb like the 4% rule or 25 times your spending as a target. And we think there are some serious issues with extrapolating the 4% rule in that situation, the biggest one being if you’re retiring early, you’re not talking about spending 30 years in retirement, you could be talking about 40, 50 or more years in your retirement or financial independence. So, that’s a situation where we’d be very cautious about just blindly applying a 4% rule.

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Benz: Author and podcaster Jamila Souffrant provided her take on how the FIRE movement has evolved away from its previous focus on early retirement.

Souffrant: I definitely think it’s a healthy evolution—it probably is a revolution, too. It’s one of the reasons why in my content I created the journey or stages. There are five journey or stages to go through to reach complete financial independence, where work becomes truly optional, where you don’t have to do it. Because I did realize that when I did tell people about the FIRE movement that were not involved in the FIRE movement or maybe they were in the general personal finance space, the biggest pushbacks were: “That really feels impossible because of my starting point”; “how would I ever not be able to work and retire early? I’m not even on track to retire in general.” Or that it’s just not something they want to do because they like their job or they want to work.

And so, I think in general, work? I don’t believe that people don’t want to work at all. I think people like to feel like they’re contributing to society, whatever that looks like in our challenge. And so, the goal is not necessarily to never work again; it’s having the option to or not. It’s having the option to take a break for whatever it means in that break that you do, whether it’s travel, have a family, maybe you switch careers and do something more meaningful. But I think I love that the concept or the idea around what happens after you reach stability and security that it becomes more of a choice, and you can continue to pursue complete financial independence, or you can scale back and live a more balanced life. That I think is actually more relatable to a lot of people.

Benz: Jackie Cummings Koski wrote the book Fire for Dummies and cohosts a podcast called Catching Up to FI. We had a wonderful conversation about how people can pursue financial independence even if they feel they’re playing catch-up.

Cummings Koski: The first thing is to give yourself grace. The average person is a late starter because we don’t have personal finance in schools. That is starting to change. We actually have 25 states now where the law has passed to require personal finance. But for most 40-somethings, it wasn’t available. And a lot of us didn’t learn at home, or it was a taboo topic, and it wasn’t discussed, or we picked up some bad habits. So that’s OK. I did my first net worth at the age of 38. I didn’t even know what a net worth was before then. So, give yourself a little grace and then realize that even if you’re starting in your 30s or 40s, even your 50s, it takes roughly about 10 or 12 years once you start to wake up and start doing some things different with your finances. And even if you don’t end up retiring early, you have still improved your finances. If you decide to put a focus and a little time and effort toward improving your finances, you are going to be better off. So, it’s not like you have to subscribe to every little headline that you’ve read, or maybe an avatar.

My belief is that ignorance happens from afar. So, if you’re standing on the outside and you’re an onlooker, things look very different. It might be scary; it might be confusing. But once you move in and you start to learn a little bit more, see all these different people, different things, different communities, and that’s why we created the Catching Up to FI community because there’s a lot of people in this bucket, and there was really nothing out there that was focusing on this demographic of late starters. It seems like everybody is focusing on the baby boomers because they got all the money, or the millennials because they were the bulk of the workforce. So, what about us in the middle? There’s a lot to be said for being in these 40s, 50s, maybe even late 30s, because a lot of times we are moving past the bottleneck of younger kids and expensive daycare. We are making a lot more. Sometimes we’re in our peak earning years. There’s a lot of advantages that tend to come along with someone that’s a little bit older that is planning for retirement or retiring early.

Benz: We also discussed traditional retirement, including underspending in retirement. Author and psychology professor Meir Statman weighed in on the psychological challenges of switching into spending mode after a lifetime of saving.

Statman: If you speak to advisors, first, you will hear them say that we need to save more. Then when you asked them about their clients, those elderly clients who have accumulated a lot of money, they will say, “I really am trying to persuade him or her to spend that money on themselves, their family, their community. It is so hard.” And so, the way we end up accumulating a good amount of money—I’m not talking about the people who have sudden wealth because their company went public—but people who earn money, perhaps as professors, perhaps as even teachers in high school, perhaps as doctors and lawyers. These are people like me, and I would venture to say, like the two of you and the people who are listening to us now—that is, we are conscientious people, which means that we think about the future, not just the present. And so, we are good at self-control. We are good at saving. This is how we manage to accumulate so much money. We/they find themselves in situations where there are, as I call them, accidental wealthy people, but those habits of moving money from income into savings and don’t dip into capital, these stay with them.

And it is really hard to change those habits, to flip that switch as you call it. I wrote about it in an article in The Wall Street Journal and I got so many touching responses. One woman wrote, “Did Professor Statman know my husband?” Of course not. But she said, “He describes him to a T—that is he was reared,” she said, “by parents who grew up in the Depression. They taught him to squeeze all pennies.” Now that he died, she finds that they have way more money than she expected. And she says, “I will have to work really, really hard to spend it all.” And so, she’s starting a fund for a son of a friend who is autistic, and she’s traveling all over the world, and so on. And so, it is really important for advisors and for us to ask ourselves, what brings you joy? For me, I can afford $300 dinners, but if I were at a restaurant offering these, I would be unable to stop imagining the chef standing in the kitchen and laughing at me and the others about how he manages to sell chopped liver on toast as paté and so on. So, I don’t do that.

That does not bring me joy. But I found that in long transatlantic flights, coach is getting to be too cramped for me. Business class is very, very expensive. But I say, hey, Meir, you can afford it. It’s something that brings you joy. You’re not changing yourself and the kids—enjoy that. And so, figure out what is going to bring you joy. It might be a cruise around the world, fine. Or it might be just supporting your kids and grandkids, maybe an educational fund for your grandkids that will pay for college expenses, maybe contributions to charity, contributions to your university, contributions to the poor, whatever brings you joy. And it’s very hard. I know many people, adult children who would like and truly want their parents to spend more and they find great resistance. Some people have ingenious ways to do that. One told me that his mom really likes classical concerts and opera, but she buys the cheaper tickets. And so, he just buys her the better tickets. And he says, well, I’m going to have less as a bequest, but that is perfectly fine with me because I have plenty and they have plenty.

Benz: I jumped into the interviewee’s seat for an episode about my book How to Retire. Dan Lefkovitz and Amy Arnott asked me about some of the overlooked challenges of retirement planning.

Benz: Michael Finke made the point in the book—and he definitely says this—he’s like, retirement planning is not a math problem. So basically, just stop it, people, if you’re just focusing on the calculators and all that stuff. You should do that, but don’t stop there is the point. So, I do think there are several aspects of having a happy and successful retirement that maybe are underdiscussed.

One is the loss of identity that can accompany leaving the workforce. And this is especially true for people who have high-status careers: physicians, attorneys, and so forth. But most of us carry around with us some sense of “this is what I do.” And then when you step away from that, I would imagine it feels different out there in the world with people not necessarily aware of what skill sets you had while you were working. So that’s one thing that we discussed in the book—coming to grips with that change in identity later in life.

We also talked about the importance of having a purpose, just having some animating force that gets you up in the morning. And Jordan Grumet in the last chapter I think hit this topic especially hard where he talks about what he calls Big P purpose, which is like the really aspirational things like climbing Machu Picchu or starting a foundation or something like that. So that Big P purpose in Jordan’s parlance. And then there’s what he calls Small P purpose, which is like things that give you joy on a daily basis, whether it’s interacting with your family or pursuing some hobby that you used to love when you were younger, but you didn’t have time for while you were working. And Jordan talks about how cultivating both sets of purpose is really important and not to sweat it too much. If you don’t have that Big P purpose, the Little P purposes that animate your days and give you joy, those are just fine. And those are what people will remember you for. So, I think that’s a dimension of retirement planning that is perhaps underdiscussed, just having something to get you up in the day.

And finally, relationships. Several of the interviewees hit that concept hard. The importance of maintaining relationships later in life. Laura Carstensen, a researcher at Stanford, went in-depth on that topic. And she came away with I think, a reassuring point, which is that our friendship networks, our relationship networks, naturally winnow down a little bit as we age. But a lot of that is conscious that we may shed—I think she calls them peripheral others—we may shed some relationships that are OK; they’re good perhaps, but they’re not those really great relationships. And so, our social networks might get a little smaller. And the point is to know that might happen. Definitely keep building your next tier of relationships, but don’t sweat it too much if you step away from some relationships that were part of your life at one point.

Benz: Financial psychologist and author Brad Klontz made the point that retirement is a flawed concept in many ways.

Klontz: The idea of retirement in and of itself, I think is a terrible financial goal. What do you mean by retirement? Well, I actually looked up what retirement means, and I’ll give you the definition. It means to stop working. Well, of course it does.

But what is the definition of work? Well, work is a mental or physical effort designed for a purpose or to produce a result. I’m just going to suggest to you that if all of a sudden you decide that you will take no more action, mental or physical, to serve a purpose or to achieve a result, that is a terrible, terrible thing for your psychology. You’ll probably slip into a depression. You’ll be isolated, home alone, no friends. So, the idea of, “retirement,” I think, really needs to be examined and reexamined.

One of the reasons that people don’t save for retirement is because there’s no connection to it. It’s like, what does that mean? And what I want people to do is really flesh out, like, what exactly does that mean? Because I’ve seen a lot of people go through that transition and really suffer because they have no vision, exciting vision of retirement. And for many people, you’re taking away with work, and when you stop working, there goes your social connections, there goes your sense of purpose, your motivation, your passion. A lot of that gets baked into a job, even ones we hate. Studies also show, by the way, that people are happier at work than they are on vacation, which nobody believes me as I say that.

But if we asked you, you’d say, “Yeah, I’m definitely happier on vacation. Yeah.” Well, that’s not how the studies go. The studies actually have you rate your happiness throughout the day, and then they go back and figure out, were you on vacation or were you at work? It is unstructured free time is actually really bad for you psychologically. So, I do think we need to have people create exciting visions of what they want next in life. But “retirement” is not a very exciting one. So, I want to know, who are you with, what are you doing?

I actually like financial freedom better, because it suggests that you are free to pursue the things you most want to pursue.

Benz: Veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Anne Tergesen has had a lot of contact with actual retirees through a series of profiles that she does with her colleague Veronica Dagher. We asked her to expound upon her impression that people in retirement are generally pretty content with their lives.

Tergesen: I was not aware of a lot of the academic literature in the field of psychology, the literature on adult development. So, I feel like we’re very good at understanding that across the early part of the life span, there’s a huge amount of development that occurs. Most obviously the physical growth that occurs, with children, even into the 20s. And then there’s the period of childhood and adolescence. And we’re very good at understanding that developmentally people change over time. But I feel like where I never really understood is that people continue to grow and develop in adulthood. And you go through these different phases of life. And there’s a lot of academic literature that shows that over time people become more positive, more glass half full. Their life satisfaction tends to grow. They tend to focus more on the things that really matter to them, whether it’s the friends and family members that matter to them, the activities and pursuits. They just pare down their life a little bit to the things that they really want to focus on. I very much have seen that with this series, that people are really very positive, and they tend to sink their time into things that bring them a tremendous amount of satisfaction. It doesn’t mean that they’re super happy and joyful all the time, but I just feel like there’s a lot of life satisfaction that these people exemplify.

Benz: Finally, one of my favorite conversations of the year was with financial writer Jonathan Clements, who disclosed this past spring that he was dealing with a devastating cancer diagnosis. I asked him about how he had been spending his time since hearing the news.

Clements: So a lot of people have said to me, well, aren’t you angry about your diagnosis? Don’t you feel cheated? And I guess I might be angry, and I might feel cheated if I dwelled on it, but I absolutely refuse to dwell on it. I can’t change my diagnosis by being upset about it. I’m not going to give myself more time by sitting here and thinking, why was I picked out? And I am—to go back to what I said before—I’m not going to get myself more time by flying around the country and visiting cancer centers and asking, do I have the right treatment plan? Instead, I want to take the time that I have left and squeeze as much happiness out of those days as possible. And essentially that means doing what I’ve done up until now, which is to do work that I love and spend time with those that I love. Nothing is more important to me than those two things. And that’s how I plan to spend whatever time I am given from here.

I think that what makes us happy throughout our life, being with those we love and doing what we love, are the same things that will make us happy at the end of our life. I certainly have no thoughts of doing anything else. One of the things that I’ve mentioned is that while I have been doing some traveling, and I will be doing some traveling—I’m sort of going to aim to do a retirement’s worth of traveling in the few months that I have left or whatever I can squeeze in. But mostly, I like my life. I like the way I spend every day. Life is full of small pleasures. That first cup of coffee, exercising, going out to lunch with friends, working, the writing and editing that I do, sitting down in the evening and having a glass of wine with Elaine. That’s what makes the days enjoyable for me. And again, I’m not inclined to change that at this late stage.

Benz: Happy holidays from all of us at The Long View, and all the best for 2025. We hope that the year ahead will be filled with doing what you love and being with people who you love. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast this year.