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By Stan Hinden, the
Seven years into his
retirement, Hinden can lean back and smile. All good things eventually
come to an end. And that includes the Retirement Journal column, which I
have been proud to write for the past seven years. It has been a unique
journalistic experience and I would like to tell you how it began and what
it's been like. In the spring of 1996, I
walked into the office of David Ignatius, who was then The Post's business
editor, and said I had decided to retire. I was 69 years old and had
worked at The Post for 23 years, 12 of them in the Business section,
writing two columns a week about stocks, bonds, mutual funds and the
financial markets. My wife, Sara, I
explained, had retired from General Electric Co. two years earlier and we
wanted to have more time together. We had moved from a five-bedroom house,
where we had raised our children, to a two-bedroom condo in a retirement
community. It seemed like the right time to go. David said he understood,
but then asked me a question I hadn't expected: Would I be willing to
chronicle my experiences in a column about what it is like to retire?
Pleasantly surprised, I agreed to write Retirement Journal -- even though
I knew little about what I would face in retirement. Thus began the most
unusual assignment of my nearly 50 years in journalism. Trained to be a
"just the facts" reporter, I soon found myself in the uncommon
and sometimes uncomfortable position of writing about myself, my finances,
my health and my family. Some examples: When Sara and I were
trying to decide whether to join a Medicare HMO -- a decision faced by
millions of people -- I wrote about how HMOs work and why we chose to stay
with Medicare rather than join an HMO and give up our regular doctors. When I turned 70 1/2, and
was thus required by IRS rules to take money out of my IRA accounts, I
wrote about the brain-numbing process of trying to calculate how much I
should withdraw. When Sara and I were
thinking about moving to Trying to develop a
retirement budget and an investment plan that would keep me from running
out of money. (I never did get that quite right.) Deciding whether to
continue to pay for the long-term-care policies we had bought through The
Post. (We decided to keep them.) Figuring out how to stay
happily married with Sara and me home together 24 hours a day. (The
strategy: Sara has time for her activities, I have time for mine, and we
spend the remaining time together.) I also wrote about my
investment and financial mistakes: I recounted how I lost
$70,000 during the bull market of the late 1990s by keeping most of my
savings in a low-yielding money-market fund. I described how I took a
monthly pension from The Post that left no benefit for my spouse after my
death. I also told how I erred by
taking my Social Security payments six months too soon and thus had to
give back some of my Social Security benefits. On the lighter side, I
also had time to write about some of our trips, including our
50th-anniversary cruise to the As I explored the
frontiers of retirement, I was constantly surprised by the intense
interest my fellow retirees showed in my columns. They often told me:
"That's what happened to us," or "We tried to do the same
thing" or "We made the same mistake." Many retirees, I
found, are full of doubts about whether they are making the right
financial and life-style choices. Older retirees, especially, worry about
their health and the costs of a serious illness. Hoping to help other
retirees, I wrote a book called "How to Retire Happy," published
by McGraw-Hill in 2001 and updated in 2003. Along the way, I realized
that Retirement Journal was more than a column. It was a bridge that took
me from the heart-pounding tempo of daily deadlines to the slower, less
stressful pace of a monthly column. The work was no less demanding, just
less frenzied. But it worked for me, and
I would tell people nearing retirement: Find a bridge that will help you,
too, ease into retirement. Choose an activity that you love, one that will
help you remain mentally and physically active and will maintain your
connections to other people. All told, in my first
seven years in retirement, I wrote 59 columns, including this one.
Retiring from Retirement Journal will give me more time for personal and
family activities -- and maybe even some golf. My interest in the subject
of retirement remains intact. Like any reporter, I love a good story. And
the forthcoming retirement of 77 million baby boomers -- including my own
children -- will be one of the biggest social and cultural stories of all
time. It will take years to play out, of course, but I expect a series of
fierce struggles over how the nation will pay for the soaring costs of
supporting and caring for Indeed, the recent
conflict over the creation of a Medicare prescription drug benefit, I
believe, was not only about drugs, but also about where the nation will
get the trillions of dollars needed to pay for retiree health care in the
coming decades. An even more dramatic clash over the affordability of
Social Security is not far away. Unfortunately for the
boomers, they will retire in an era when the If I were a young person
choosing a career today, I would give serious thought to not only what
kind of work I wanted to do, but to where I wanted to work. The retirees I
know who are most secure financially, and have the best health and other
benefits, are folks who worked for federal, state and local governments,
as well as colleges and city and county school systems. Other well-off
retirees include people who owned their own businesses and were able to
sell them when they retired. In the corporate world,
some companies still offer old-style pensions, but many firms have shed
their pensions for the 401(k) plan, which puts the responsibility for
saving and investing squarely on the shoulders of the employee. The
tax-deferred feature of the 401(k) plan makes it hard to beat as a
long-term investment. But, as we've seen, investment success depends
heavily on the ups and downs of the financial markets and when a saver
gets into the plan, and gets out. Thus, I would advise young
people to redouble their efforts to save, to live frugally and to invest
carefully. They will need those savings. By the time they retire, Social
Security, Medicare and even Medicaid could be very different from what
they are today. The nation, no doubt, will always provide help for the
poorest of the poor. But for everybody else, the message in the future is
likely to be: "You're on your own." Clearly, there are momentous days ahead for future retirees. Hopefully, there will be some quieter days for this retiree. Copyright © 2004
Global Action on Aging |
