Tag Archives: #retirement

The RMD Blues….Or, What Happens When A Frugal Person Retires?

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Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

I hope to tell you we were shocked

At the 80-year-old man found dead

…

$180,000 in grimy envelopes scattered

Everywhere like old hopes, old sin.

Regret—Michael Riley

I was touched by Michael Riley’s poem, which conflates the misery of the miser and the equally meaningless life of a rich retiree with handmade shoes.  But, in a way, I relate to both unattractive images.  I managed not to squander today’s pleasures in fear of having too little tomorrow – but barely.  Retiring “comfortably” caused discomfort because there was something “wrong” about having a monthly income without working.

That disquiet began when I became aware of the dreaded RMD – the required minimum distribution from tax deferred retirement savings accounts….I spent hours in my late 60s using IRS tables to see whether I would have enough to live on until, in total frustration, I called Darla, who manages our money.  Her response:  “Yes, if you keep living the way you are.  In fact, because you are retiring late, you should spend what you want now, and travel where you want to go.  When you are 80, one or the other of you probably won’t want to do that anymore.”  Darla is blunt. 

When Karen Martha and I started this blog, we resolved to reflect on what we were thinking about (confronting?  agonizing over?) as we moved from satisfying mid-life and work to something less well defined.  We were also clear about what we wanted to avoid.  So many retirement blogs emphasize issues of money – how much you need to have to retire, how to manage it once you have retired, and how financial decisions should affect others, such as whether to work part time or to move to a less costly city/state.  We wanted, in contrast, to focus on what was in our hearts. But, money becomes unavoidable at some point.

We have much in common, but over our many years of friendship we never really delved into our unrealistic but unmanaged fear of poverty.  Karen Martha grew up with a single mother in her early years, and experienced financial hardship until her mother remarried; my father went back to graduate school in his 30s and, although not poor, my parents had to watch their finances carefully.  However, the Karens agree that our lessons — NEVER have any credit card debt and ALWAYS save more than necessary — were not particularly logical since we worked in education – not highly paid, but also a profession with employment security and good pensions.

Fast forward to my middle 70s:  Dan and I have Social Security, and we have enough from retirement accounts to live more comfortably than anticipated.  What a blessing!  I have the luxury of blogging, traveling, volunteering and playing with grandchildren, and don’t anticipate much paid work.  The same is true of most of my friends. 

But “you worked hard for it” feels self-satisfied when newspapers report weekly that most Americans are unable to save for retirement, and others are chronically under-insured and a step away from a health-induced financial disaster.  Then there is the annual “windfall” of RMD from those pre-tax retirement accounts which will, apparently, never run out. In other words, I feel guilty and even (sometimes) unworthy of being one of the “advantaged older population”. 

When I was working, I adhered to my family’s legacy of prioritizing charitable donations, but there was an upper bound set by the NEVER credit card debt and ALWAYS save rules.  Now, enter the late fall specter of the RMD windfall…the old messages argue in one ear that anything that I do not need this year should be reinvested so that I won’t be eating dog food when I turn 100.  An equally insistent message to give away what I can afford speaks in the other ear.  Then there is a new rumbling note that floats above:  I was fortunate to live during a period of unprecedented economic growth and to be financially secure; my grandchildren are unlikely to have the same experience.  How much should I be saving for them? 

Peter Singer has one answer in Famine, Affluence, and Morality: We all, within our means, have a moral obligation to reduce suffering, and owe this to all people and places because of our common humanity.  But his argument ignores every parent’s obligation to protect our loved ones from realistically anticipated harms.  The Native American 7th generation principle also requires me to attend to the suffering of the planet and all of the creatures and plants that make our home livable.  And what about the international movements to create peace and stability in our fragile social systems? Or initiatives that support flourishing as well as alleviating suffering (e.g., youth programs)?  Oh, the causes that I feel drawn to – and the guilt that I feel when deleting requests for contributions from groups that “do good” and are highly rated by Charity Navigator….

RMD sits there in the middle:  I have to take it and pay incomes taxes according to the government.  Then – SAVE for Dan and me, SAVE for the coming disasters that will occur in 50 years, SAVE for unaffordable college tuition for the next generation, or DONATE now. 

So, although I said that I would never, never be one of those retired people who perseverate about money even though they have more than enough, I find that I cannot avoid the subject.

And lifelong frugality kicks in…should we take that long-postponed Viking River Cruise? (Yikes!  Have you seen what they cost for a room that has a view?)  Should I feel depraved because we bought an upscale (used) car when the food bank sends me letters every month?  And what about my alma mater, which has a decent endowment but would like more for scholarships?

The gift of being affluent and older – definitely not in the 1% — is a niche market.  Until now, I have not had to think about the sardonic message of the cartoon below but it makes me uncomfortable.  When I was saving and young/middle aged, I would have viewed the message as political.  Now I have to ask if it is personal….

Life Connections

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Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

Retirement has put me in a stock-taking mood, less a search for meaning than simply an understanding of my past and present.  I often turn to internal story-telling….

My narratives change with new insights and reedits. These days, I have moved away from event-based stories (the college years; the productive 50s…). Julia Cameron, in her follow-up to The Artist’s Way focusing on the over-60 crowd, urges us to take our chronological age, divided it by 7, and write about the years included in each span.  As Dan and I watched the 7-Up series, which every 7 years revisits the lives of a randomly assembled set of English children, I thought of how powerful it is to break away from the constraints of decades or major events as chapter markers in our stories…

But in the past few months my internal storytelling has focused less on chronology and more on the way in which people intersect with each other and with loosely defined periods in my life.  Much of this happens when someone from my past seems to pop in to my mind for several days, causing me to rethink how and where they belong in the threads braided into my experience.

Last week a personal message on LinkedIn told me of the death of someone with whom I had lost contact.  That loose connection, between continents (my friend who died was Dutch) and across generations (the messenger is at least 20 years younger than I am), activated memories of a wider network of people who were meaningful to me over more than a decade, even though they did not constitute an identifiable social group.  What I was struck with again is the how this nebulous collection of colleagues, friends, acquaintances has provided meaning to my life, even though its members do not cohere into a usual life-story format.  They represent, collectively as well as individually, an extended period in which I felts as if I was learning about the world, other people, and professionally every day. 

Photo by Moritz Kindler on Unsplash

Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of interbeing – the dependence of all beings and things upon one another captures this nostalgic gratitude:   

… I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word “togetherness,” but I finally came up with the word “interbeing.” The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone … the action of interbeing reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and with all life…. Whether we’re at work or at home, we can practice to see all our ancestors and teachers present in our actions… We can experience profound connection and free ourselves from the idea that we are a separate self ( from The Art of Living)

While this way of thinking is still a bit mind boggling to a Westerner raised with Descartes’ individualistic claim that “I think therefore I am”, it leads me to pay attention to human connections beyond the people I love with all my heart.  Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can be a rabbit hole and a space to post the least interesting things that happen in my life (yes, I admit to occasionally bragging about Wordle), but they also allow me to contemplate the loose linkages that are part of my direct experience of interbeing.  

I smile when I read the words of adult children of friends whom I haven’t seen in years, and I am filled with awe as I look at them sending their own babies to college. At one level this seems trivial, but at another it reminds me that networks are never lost, even if they are not currently active.  And, as the miracle of Facebook informs me that a friend who meant the world to me from 7th through 12th grade had visited her childhood home, I became instantly reconnected to her parents, whose escape from Nazi Germany created the opportunity for hosting a gaggle of very ordinary American teenage girls, which in turn opened up other doors of connections, known and unknown.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

I am also in awe of how my own (middle aged) “kids”, who grew up in a world of cheap phone calls, cheap flights, and the internet, keep consistent contact with beloved friends from high school as well as college.  I, however, grew up in an era when a long-distance call home to my parents from college was short because it was costly, and visits to relatives who lived a few states away were rare because they involved several days of driving.  Constant connection is a habit I never developed, and my life is littered with people—friends, relatives, mentors– with whom I lost touch with completely.  And now, increasingly, I think about those who died before I could reconnect and share the unspoken gratitude for what we meant to each other.

I regret these lapses as a byproduct of the dismal period when the art of letter writing had died but the internet was not yet born. However, I am persistently struck by the way in which inactive connections become potent with even a few exchanges.  During Covid, Google provided me with the email of someone who I knew in both college and grad school — I thought she would be amused that I had cited her 1972 dissertation in a paper.  We have been exchanging episodic emails with personal, professional and family news – almost as if there were not a 50-year gap in our shared experiences. Facebook and loose connections allowed my own adolescent gang of “cool nerds” to commit to our 50-year high school reunion and, more surprisingly, to two additional get togethers with some (including me) traveling long distances.  Our parents are gone, none of us live near where we grew up, and we are the only ones other than siblings who can tell stories about our teenage years that stir a sense of connection not only with each other but with place and time. 

I know that taking interbeing seriously requires more sustained spiritual practice.  But perhaps it is the enforced isolation from our closest friends and family during Covid that supports the deeper significance of our looser human connections, whether one-off conversations, attentive participation in group events, or the spontaneous reconnecting that seems to be happening in my life.  As I get older, the significance of loose ties that are filled with caring and compassion has never seemed more important.  I am committed to contacting at least one “loose” connection regularly, only to remind ourselves of how we fit into each other’s stories….

My Perfect ‘Little p’

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Lake Harriet Community School

If you’re someone who’s followed this blog, you know that ‘little p’ refers to one of those small purposes that each of us carries out daily, purposes that make families run smoother, make people feel loved, and spread kindness. Things like volunteering at a book sale to raise money for scholarships, preparing and serving lunch at church after a funeral, and making sure family members have a good day. These are not grand purposes, but incrementally, they make life better.

A common ‘little p’ is volunteering. Although it’s almost a cliché to say that when we volunteer, we get more than we give, I have to indulge that cliché when I talk about tutoring, my ‘little p.’ I definitely get more than I give.

I have the perfect tutoring gig—four mornings a week at a nearby school in Minneapolis where my son is the principal, Lake Harriet Community School. It’s a small school, grades 3-5, and a highly successful school—a Minneapolis Public School that ranks 4th in the state. It’s also over a hundred years old, with shiny wood floors, heavy oak doors, windows, and woodwork, and tired classrooms, even though they’ve been kept up well. Like many districts, currently, it has children who were in primary school during the COVID shutdowns, and some are not ready for grade level work (we are avoiding calling them “behind.”). One way schools are addressing the needs of these children is through tutoring. That’s one reason I’m tutoring, specifically in math. The gift to me is that I AM NEEDED.

I tutor three small groups and then I help in a classroom. I’m on my feet for three hours, and on my toes mentally, even though it’s basic mathematics—in my day we called it arithmetic. Mathematics is not being taught the way you and I learned it or the way I taught thirty years ago. Now arrays are used to teach multiplication; children learn properties like commutative and identity; and algebraic thinking is introduced in first grade, etc. Clearly I must stretch mentally and find ways to teach new ways of doing arithmetic. That’s my second gift—keeping my brain challenged.

Then there are the obvious benefits, tutoring gets me out of bed and cleaned up early in the day; it gets me moving in natural ways rather than going to a gym; and my favorite, tutoring gives a purpose to my days.

Like other things we do in our mostly small lives, tutoring, at first, felt insignificant. I initially labeled it a feel-good way to spend some of my time in retirement. (By now you know I’m a hopeless cynic). I mean, how much difference can 2-4 hours a week make in a child’s mathematical growth? But to be an educator—which I am—is to believe fervently in small steps, small miracles of understanding. So, cynicism notwithstanding, a part of me believes what I do matters. I’m a caring adult in these children’s school experience who believes in them and supports them.

Yesterday, the impart of tutoring was resoundingly brought home to me. It occurred in the 4th grade class where my role is to hang out and help as needed. I’m the right hand “woman” to the teacher, who is especially creative and commanding when she teaches. She often starts the class period with a video that gives an example of kindness. Here’s a link to the video she showed yesterday. I urge you to watch it before you read further.

Please Enjoy before You Read On!

After viewing the video, the teacher asked students what was going on, what was the video about. Why were some residents in the nursing home tearing up? It took some time for these ten-year-olds to stop focusing on the gifts and to think about what was really going on for the residents. But they got there. As one little girl put it, “She showed that she cared about them.” That led to a discussion about loneliness. I’m not sure that all the children understood, but it was one of those small steps of learning.

For the remainder of the class we studied what to do with a remainder in division. That was fun and equally challenging. In my car on the way home, I reflected on the class in the context of the video. And suddenly I felt it, the biggest reason I tutor—I feel like I belong! I belong to this one classroom, to the other teachers I support with small groups, and in this small school. Best of all, I belong in a world that I care for because I know what individual children need.  I am doing my part to make this place and their lives better in small, incremental ways. 

If you want to find out more about Ruby, here’s her website:

https://3wishesproject.org/who-we-are/

Pause?

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Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash

Several weeks ago, I attended a contemplative writing session with Reverend Karen Hering, whose skill at eliciting new thinking always amazes me.  That evening, however, I  found myself befuddled by her first question:  When have you paused? . 

It took me several minutes to think of any time when I have paused in a memorable way.  During most of my life, I embraced the ideal of being busy, being of concrete use to other people, and, above all, being productive in a way that could be counted.  Like many (most?) women, I found it hard to say no, which meant that both at work and in my personal life, I was often overloaded, constantly prioritizing which obligation would get the most attention at any given moment. 

Vincenzo Campi, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, c.1580

I

I reveled in the research suggesting that multi-tasking is a female superpower…. 

In other words, there were few pauses.  As I scrolled through my past life, my first hit responding to Karen Hering’s question was the last month of my first pregnancy:  It was a torrid August in Massachusetts, and I was not working, largely immobile, and waited on by my husband.  However, it was less a pause than a period of intense anticipation.

A few days later,  I smacked my head and remembered that, as an academic, I had regular long sabbaticals, whose purpose is, in theory, a time for renewal and reflection, to live fully in the ideal of the Torah:  “…in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard “ (Leviticus (25:4-5).  But in the modern university, that ideal is as far from reality as the typical observance of the Sabbath as a day of rest.  Instead, when I  filed my sabbatical plans with the university, they included writing, data collection, and a projection of the usual output of publications, research proposals, and  new course syllabi. 

It is obvious that the usual American vacation – one or two weeks, crowded with delightful activities – may provide novel adventures but hardly qualifies as a pause….

The expectation that we should be doing something useful barely shifts when we retire, as we are urged make and then to work down our “bucket list” of experiences that we have been putting off.  And don’t forget the podcasts and books urging us to find a new purpose that will keep us sufficiently busy that we don’t sink into a Laz-e-Boy with a TV remote and a glass of wine.  But there are equally pervasive expectations that we should build yoga and meditation into our schedules.  Pausing has become a big business, especially for we retirees, who are also urged to remember that aging is expected to bring sagacity and spiritual growth. 

Photo by Amanda Jones on Unsplash

But these mixed cultural messages beg the real question that has nagged me since my disquieting evening with Karen Hering:  Why pause?  And, in my case, how to recognize “pause opportunities” rather than additional programmed obligations?

I thought about my recent efforts to do anything that might lead to meditating.  Long ago I read a book about different forms of meditation – I can’t remember much except that it gave permission to apply the label to almost any practice that clears out incessant to-do messages.  It remains my goal rather than a scheduled event most days, and when I decide to take a break, I try something.  Most of the time I successfully reduce my creeping anxiety about the to-do list, but I am also occasionally startled by an insight or a feeling that emerges not out of thinking, but out of emptiness.  I am willing to call those insights accumulating wisdom, even if I can’t easily name them.

Then there is the unanticipated stop-in-your-tracks that occurs as I practice reading slowly,  a skill that atrophied during the years of skimming piles of student papers with red pen in hand.  When I encounter an unexpectedly beautiful sentence, or a poem that just appears when I pick up a book, I sometimes feel my heart beating faster.

And there’s the  benefit of having a young child in my life who has  not digested the ideal of productivity.  To walk around the block with a four-year-old can take an hour, because it is in her nature to pause.  New flowers (or weeds) blooming (“What is that one called?  Smell it!”),  A bug eating a leaf (“it’s so blue!”).  Yards with intriguing ornaments, whether kitschy or real art, that are always worth re-examining.  When I feel today’s time ticking away, I remember how quickly four-year-olds turn in to teenagers and adjust my adult cadence to her desire to observe intently, with no real purpose in mind. 

— Jimsonweed, Bandelier National Monument

Sometimes I think that my granddaughter is channeling Georgia O’Keefe:

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.

So, if pausing is a value that I am starting to savor, what knot does it unravel other than being, for a moment, less engaged with busy-ness?  Yannis Ritsos suggests that these encounters with the intangible may be fundamental to my evolving consciousness:

I hide behind simple things so you will find me….

Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.

As I read this, I am aware that it is not big planned or anticipated pauses that give me the greatest joy, but the small ones that knock on my door—and then ask me to change. Ordinary time is suspended in wonder and, as Ritsos claims, becomes an opening to the “thin places” where I am able to experience life beyond that which I can touch.  When I meet a sense of communion with a granddaughter or friend, a feeling, a nascent idea, or a burgeoning of love, perhaps I am simply experiencing a flow that cannot be programmed.  The real problem solved is the (re)cognition that much of what I value most at this stage in my life is not planned, but experienced – often as a pause.