1. Age 65 isn't old - when FDR picked sixty-five as the retirement age, the average American lived to sixty-three. Today the average American lives to seventy-five. And by 2040 the average American will be living to eighty-one. Age sixty-five will no longer be the onset of old age for baby boomers. For you, it will be the beginning of middle age.
2. You're on your own path - There's no longer a predetermined path. You're on a voyage of discovery that could take you from project to project, employer to employer, employment to entrepreneurship, industry to industry, perhaps even career to career.
3. The only finish line is death - Just as the path you take is up in the air, so is your time line. The only finish point you should worry about anymore is death. Up until then you can do whatever the market and your skills will let you.
4. You're not a job chronology - Just as you're no longer your job, your career is no longer just a chronological listing of where you've worked and what titles you've held. You are a constantly expanding package of skills and abilities that can be applied to solve a host of problems or tackle a range of projects, large or small, short-term or long-term.
5. Just grow your money - Throw away all those frightening tables and formulas that tell you how much you have to be investing and at what rate of return in order to retire comfortably at age sixty-five. There's no more rote pattern. This isn't a race. No one is measuring you. Instead you've got a fairly simple goal: grow your wealth as much as you can, as quickly as you can, within your own comfort range.
6. Rethink risk - But you should definitely rethink that comfort range. Most folks have based their risk/reward analyses on retiring at age sixty-five. If you're a boomer and you're not retiring, you've got lots more time to recover from stock market setbacks—perhaps as many as twenty more years. That means you should stick primarily with equity investments far longer than those traditional charts and formulas say. Don't take your foot off the gas too soon.
7. Keep a liquid reserve - If you're going to keep the pedal to the metal, you'll need some backup. In the twenty-first century anyone looking to practice sound money management will need to have, access to enough cash to cover six months' worth of expenses in order to overcome detours along their chosen routes.
8. Cover your income, not your life - At the same time you'll need to have adequate insurance protection for when minor detours turn into serious redirections. That means maintaining the best health insurance coverage possible, and most important of all, having the maximum disability protection. Almost all my clients start off having more life insurance and less disability insurance than they need. I'll wager you're no different. The longer you work and the longer you live, the bigger a mistake that becomes.
Conclusion - Giving up the pursuit of retirement has a great many practical and psychological advantages. But it also has an added spiritual bonus: By eliminating the finish line, life stops being a race. With all of us on our own path there's no way your progress can be compared to anyone else's. No one—not your parents, your friends, or Money magazine—can look at your life and say you're not as far along as you should be More important, you can stop measuring yourself against an arbitrary standard and feeling inadequate for not meeting the grade. You're on your own unique self-charted journey. Where it ends only God knows so until then all you can do is keep rowing.
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