A More Expansive Approach To Retirement Planning

Until recently, I’ve never been enamored with the notion of living a longer-than-average lifespan. Perhaps this is because my primary observation was that old age didn’t look all that appealing. I’d observed grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and aged family friends face a seemingly hyperbolic hill of discomfort, disease, and, ultimately, death.

Sure, I wanted to live long enough to have grandchildren, enjoy some benchmark anniversaries with my spouse, have a measurable positive impact in my career and community, and check off a host of bucket-list boxes, but the notion of living, say, until 100 wasn’t a goal. Two things happened, then, that changed my mind:

First, surprise! My wife and I welcomed an unexpected blessing into our lives in the form of a baby girl, just after celebrating our 44^th and 48^th birthdays, respectively. Now, we have two in college and one in diapers, so if I do want to be around to enjoy a relationship with all those presumptive grandchildren, I’m gonna need to stick around.

Then, a friend introduced me to a simple truth about longevity. He noted that I’m very dedicated to my personal health and wellness—quality of life—and that if I maintained that focus indefinitely, the likely outcome would be a longer life as well. Huh, good point.

I’m now well down a rabbit hole of books and podcasts on the topic of health and longevity—like Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia, Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, How Not To Die by Dr. Michael Greger, and Young Forever by Dr. Mark Hyman—and the universal takeaway in all is that the goal isn’t just life span, it’s health span, which Peter Attia defines as, “…the period of one’s life spent in good health, free from the chronic diseases and disabilities of aging.”

“The goal is not just to live longer, but to live better for longer,” Attia concludes. “It’s about extending the period of life where we are free from disease, maintaining our physical and mental capabilities, and continuing to engage fully in life.”

I get it now. If you stay healthy, you’ll have a higher quality of life, and if you have a higher quality of life, you’ll likely live longer and enjoy it more. Alright, I’m in.

As I’ve been learning and wrestling with these concepts, it also struck me that we have a similar dichotomy in the way we look at financial planning—and especially the notion of retirement or financial independence, the phase of life in which you’re not reliant on work to sustain yourself financially.

We’ve been so focused on the sustenance piece—the length of retirement and not running out of money—that we’ve neglected the quality of the existence we’re sustaining financially. My colleague and co-founder of SignatureFD, Doug Liptak, calls it “the 96% problem,” suggesting that financial planners have long been so focused on their clients living off as little as possible (4% or less of one’s financial nest egg) that we’ve neglected helping people fully enjoy the wealth they’ve worked so hard to acquire.

One of the most extreme versions of this is a movement about which I have mixed feelings—the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement. FIRErs save as much as possible as soon as possible to reach financial independence earlier—often decades earlier—than the traditional retirement age of 65. Fundamentally, I’m on board with the notion that our time is more valuable than our money (and the stuff it buys) and that financial independence—working only because you want to, not because you have to—is a good thing. But my observations are that most FIRErs are only able to make the numbers work if they practice a nearly ascetic lifestyle.

Sure, a lot more people could count themselves among the “financially independent” ranks if they lived at or below the poverty line—but what’s the point of that? Why not dedicate yourself to work with intrinsic meaning that you find fulfilling, especially if it means you can afford some of the finer things in life that you genuinely enjoy?

Please don’t misunderstand me: If you absolutely love the minimalist lifestyle and “retiring” in your 30s or 40s is your genuine life purpose, I’m cheering you on. But I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in financial independence any more than there is in having a specific net worth—it’s what we do with our time and our money that gives it value.

And that, I suppose, is the point. Wealth isn’t worth anything until we activate it.

We activate wealth—including our time, influence, money, relationships, and health—by applying a purpose to it (them). A good starting exercise is to apply a simple tag to our wealth-building strategies—is its purpose to 1) live life to the fullest, 2) protect all you’ve worked so hard to achieve, 3) grow the impact of your wealth today and into the future, or 4) give to the people and causes that are most important to you.

Through this deliberate application of purpose, we can enjoy not only financial sustenance (life span), but also financial wellness (health span).