Finding Purpose
Since 2020, I have been writing about my journey to retirement as others around me found the exit from paid employment. The first installment is here and this is last year’s. As a reminder to readers – I am many years into a phased retirement where I work about half-time.
It’s been almost six years since the pandemic stole my job from under me – I like to go see people and talk about problems and solutions – and it was depressing being told you can’t do that. The problem was compounded by my difficulty staring at a screen all day, making meetings on zoom exhausting.
Over time, I have gotten better at video calls and, more importantly, I am back to visiting folks as part of my routine. As I sit down here on Saturday morning to write (I have always liked working Saturdays as the time is peaceful and helps me focus), I find myself with a job that I absolutely love. My job includes:
- Talking to clients about their problems, the solutions, and sometimes writing a report to explain it all.
- Working with our team on actuarial and pension administration problems to grow everyone’s understanding of how all the pieces fit together.
- Talking with our network partners about how we can work together to serve clients – the classic win-win-win.
- Meeting with Jason, Dean and Matt continuing to build ASI by increasing the effectiveness of our people and our processes.
- Sharing my ideas with our industry through this blog and LinkedIn.
Note that the first four things on the list all involve working with people. My lack of success early in my career is rooted in the fact that actuarial analysts are expected to spend many hours alone in front of a screen – that just wasn’t me then and still isn’t me today.
What is interesting is that when I do my writing, I am still not alone. I sit at the typewriter (can we call it that anymore?) but I visualize that you the reader is sitting with me and that we are talking. My fingers simply put our conversation onto paper.
One of the reasons that I am reluctant to retire is a fear of losing all these connections that bring joy to my life. In fact, I don’t know anyone that enjoys their work as much as I do.
Rethinking Retirement
CAAT just issued an interesting report on the idea of retirement. The conclusion is the same as the one I have reached over the last five years. Here are the key messages:
“To truly support longer lives, we need to reimagine how work and retirement fit together. That starts with moving from rigid timelines to more fluid pathways. Many workers don’t want to stop working entirely — they just want work that reflects their capacity, interests, and priorities later in life.
Organizations can benefit too. Older workers often bring higher retention, lower absenteeism, and deep emotional intelligence. Yet many employers lack intentional strategies to support them. Flexible off-ramps, mentorship roles, and project-based transitions aren’t luxuries — they’re smart workforce planning tools.”
Inside the report is a pitch for the importance of reliable retirement income to fund a life that might run 100 years. I don’t disagree that financial security is important – it’s what I have been writing about for more than a decade. But what struck me was that the defined contribution plan is much better suited than the defined benefit plan to the ‘flexible off-ramps’ that CAAT is promoting and the one that I am navigating. If I was promoting CAAT, I probably would have picked a different story about retirement.
For those that have forgotten, Otto Von Bismark introduced pensions in Germany in 1889! But those pensions had no resemblance to what we have today. Bismark’s pensions started at age 70 when life expectancy was around age 40. Pensions were for the old and frail – not the equivalent of the 55-year-old schoolteacher today with a likely 20 plus years of productive energy. My buddy Paul once wondered if in 100 years we will look back at the defined benefit plan experiment as a blip on the screen with the defined contribution model the winner. I have reached the next level where I wonder if in 100 years we will look back and wonder why we saved so much in our working years to fund decades of unproductive time.
Back in 2020, CD Howe published my paper The Power of Postponed Retirement. In a nutshell, the math is phenomenal – working longer means a shorter retirement, requiring less savings while at the exact same time creating more time to do the saving. It is a similar argument to postponing CPP – but not exactly the same argument since you can collect CPP and keep working so there is a double dipping component to the CPP decision.
Family Time
Some of you will have seen my post on LinkedIn a week ago about the sudden change at home with two kids moving out in two consecutive weeks, leaving us with an empty nest. I am excited for the kids on this next stage of their adventure, but I am also excited for me and Paula on our next stage. As this day has approached, I have seen with increasingly clarity that balancing my time in my semi-retired life will not be too difficult and the joy I get from work need not be thrown out just to say that I am retired.
A week ago, I went to the 80th birthday party for my cousin Nick. Most of his brothers and sisters were there – tons of their kids and what shouldn’t be a surprise, a whole whack of grandkids. Cousins Gregory and Gordon were as animated as ever – if you want to understand why I am so extroverted – my dad’s side of the family is Exhibit A. I asked Gregory if he was retired – which seemed a reasonable question for someone that had passed age 65 and his reply was ‘no, what would I do if I retired?’ It sounds like he might retire around age 70 which to me should be the new normal.
For me, this journey has brought me to purpose. I want to wake up every morning with a purpose – it could be to talk pensions, it could be to write a report, it could be to go for a walk with Paula and our dog(s), and it could be another attempt at playing half decent golf. My friend Don once said that he finally retired when working started getting in the way of the other things he wanted to be doing. That hasn’t happened to me yet.
