Retirement Can Be Really Hard: The State of Retirees in America

I’m writing this from Palm Springs, California, I’m here for FinCon, which if you’ve never heard of it is basically the annual gathering of the whole money media world. Bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, writers, financial coaches, authors, and the brands that work with all of them. This year it’s three days at the Palm Springs Convention Center packed full of sessions, hallway conversations, and a whole lot of people who talk about money for a living finally getting to be in the same room!

This is my kind of crowd. Heavy Metal Money is a podcast, a blog, a newsletter, and a community, and running all of that from Minnesota can get a little isolated. FinCon is where I get to compare notes with people doing the same work, steal a few good ideas, and remember that this weird little corner of the internet is full of folks who genuinely want to help people stop drowning in money stress.

But I don’t come here just for the business crap. I also come for the sessions and conversations that change how I think, how to help people, and to get ideas.

It was Thursday morning, the second day. My coffee still kicking in and the room was filling up with money podcasters, YouTubers, bloggers, and coaches.

Wes Moss got up on the main stage and opened his talk with a Slido poll. He asked us to pull out our phones and type what we dream about when you think about retirement. up on the screen the answers started scrolling in the big screen. Things like, sailing the ocean, a lake house, cruising in Caribbean. Traveling with my wife. Relaxing with my husband. Somebody typed “with my NEXT husband” which got a laugh.

This was an interesting exercise. We also stared to think about what our retirement vision or dream would be, because about 90 seconds later Wes hit us with some crazy stats, one of which he said would earn an R rating if this were a movie.

The Short Version

So there are roughly 45 million retired Americans. Wes has done a butt-ton of research on this. He says about 25 percent of them are not having a good retirement. That’s around 10 million people!

Ten million people! It’s hard to wrap our heads around that number. Let’s look at it this way. Wacken Open Air, the biggest metal festival on the planet, draws around 85,000 people a year. You would need to run Wacken every summer for well over a century to move 10 million bodies through the gate. That is the crowd we’re talking about. Not a statistic, a full festival grounds of people, every year, for a hundred and some years, all of them at the finish line and miserable.

And the crazy thing here is it’s not a money problem. It’s not lack of money causing these peeps to have an unhappy retirement. We are like the richest nation in history and keep getting richer! The problem is two other things, and almost nobody in the personal finance world talks about them.

The Stats That Woke Me Up

Wes then asked the room a question. What demographic in the United States has the highest rate of suicide? Yeah… it’s heavy.

The answer is men 75 and older. Roughly eight times the rate of women in that same age bracket! 8X! His slide put it next to the CDC source data

Okay, then he asked a another question. Which group has had the largest percentage increase in overdose deaths over the past 20 years? Age 65 and up. Men and women both.

And one more he mentioned in passing that I cannot stop thinking about. One in four older Americans is socially isolated.

So when we think of retirement, nobody puts that on the f’n brochure, right? You know the brochure? The silver haired couple, at the beach, with a golden retriever. Professionally posed with a soft focus, right? Nobody shows you the guy who retired at 65, lost his whole identity and about who he is in about six weeks, and has not had a real conversation in nine days.

Retirement can be really hard. That’s the ACTUAL state of retirees in America, and I appreciate that he led with it instead of burying it.

Headwind One: The Purpose Vacuum

This is the first of the two big problems Wes laid out.

You work for 40 years. You are the provider. You are the parent. You have a schedule, a purpose, a team, a reason to put on pants! lol. Then it all stops. Right?! That is the part that gets people, it stops fast. And, it can happen right around the same time the kids are grown and raising their own families and building their own lives.

The provider status is gone. The parent status is gone. Their schedule is gone. Their purpose starts to fade.

That right there is what he called the purpose vacuum. And the data on it is just brutal. Wes asked retirees to respond to the statement “I have a strong sense of purpose.” Among happy retirees, 88 percent agreed. Among unhappy retirees, 32 percent. That’s a 56 point gap between the two camps on a single question.

So what fills the hole? Wes calls them core pursuits. Hobbies on steroids! Or what I’d call Hobbies TO THE EXTREME! So it’s not something like “oh, I golf sometimes.” it’s more like “golf is a real part of my life!”

We did the Slido exercise again! He asked the room for ours and the screen lit up with activities like reading, travel, hiking, weightlifting, riding horses, art, music, podcasting, family reunions, spending time with mom, kayaking, and of course pickleball, obviously. Somebody actually typed in sex into the word cloud! lol Wes said, “God bless him, that is a great core pursuit” and kept rolling. lol. Wes says of the 1,200 surveyed Americans asking to name the one core pursuit that brings them the most happiness, sex never once showed up. Not a single time! haha!

Oaky, so here’s the data underneath it. Happy retirees average five or more core pursuits. Unhappy retirees average four or fewer. And it’s not just how many, it’s how much. Happy retirees also spend over 18 hours a week on their core pursuits. Unhappy retirees spend around 13 hours.

Five hours a week does not sound like much. If we run it out over a year it’s 280 hours. That works our to about seven extra work weeks of doing the stuff you love. This tells me I need to spend more time playing my sick repulsive electric twanger.

Keep in mind, you cannot just build this the week after your retirement party. The hobbies have to be there before the job goes away.

Headwind Two: The Friendship Recession

This was the part where I looked around and saw peeps in the room nodding.

Wes called it a friendship recession, and said we’ve been in it since about 1990. The numbers he showed: Americans reporting zero close friends went from 3 percent to around 17 percent. Six or more close friends dropped from 55 percent down to 27 percent.

Now check it out, if we stack that on top of the fact that more than 11,000 Americans turn 65 every single day right now. Over four million a year. That’s not a trend, that’s a real f’n wave.

And here’s the chart that stuck with me. He showed how easy people say it is to make new close friends by decade of life. In your 20s, about 90 percent say it’s easy. In your 30s, about 85 percent. By your 60s it’s down to 35 percent.

It gets harder every decade. Forever. That’s the headwind.

So check this out, Wes shared a story about a client he’s worked with since the guy was in his 60s. He’s 80 now. He has a real issue about having friends. Half his friends are dead and the other half can’t do anything anymore.

That’s the slow leak here. People die. People get sick. People move to Arizona. Marriages end. Your friend group does not hold steady on its own. It drains out a little at a time, and if you are not adding to it, you are losing it.

The happiness data on friends is some of the clearest stuff he showed. Two or fewer close friends puts you 22 percent below the US happiness baseline. Three or four is roughly at the baseline, and the American average is about just over three friends. Four puts you 11 percent above. Five or more puts you 22 percent above.

So what do the people with five and six close friends actually do? Wes had a great word for them. They’re the joiners. Church groups. Walking groups. Book clubs. Pickleball leagues. Volunteer organizations. Same people, same room, same thing, on repeat. This reminded me of the discussion I had with my friend Roxanne from FinanceRox and she said one thing we can do is be an “inviter” you invite people over to your place, or to an outing, and over time those people you meet start to reciprocate, and we start to make and build a friend group.

Sound familiar? That’s literally why I run local in-person meetups and started to travel with groups of friends!

Now the Money Part

You knew I’d actually get here.

Wes showed just one money slide, and he put it up mostly to take money off the table as the explanation. American household net worth was around $91 trillion in 2016. Today it’s north of $183 trillion. As we mentioned, we have never been richer as a country, and we still have 10 million unhappy retirees.

That said, money does show up in the happiness data, and here’s the shape of it. He measures everything against a US happiness baseline. People with $100,000 or less in liquid investable assets land below that baseline. From $100,000 to just under a million is the neutral zone. At a million dollars in liquid investable assets you hit what he calls the Money Green Zone, and average happiness jumps well above baseline. It climbs a bit more around $3 million and then flattens out.

Two things about that.

One, it flattens. There’s a ceiling on what more money does for you. The third million buys you a lot less happiness than the first one did.

Two, and this is the part I want you to sit with, money is the thing we already talk about. We always talk about f’n rates of return, roth conversions, and withdrawal rates. The podcasts, blogs and YouTubers have covered that shit to death. The purpose vacuum and the friendship recession are the two things many people haven’t been talking about, and they are the two things breaking people.

The One Word That Changes Everything

So remember when we talked about our core pursuits, and we all built our word cloud. Wes brought up something he noticed so often both in our exercise and his research many of the answers, almost every single one was followed by the same word. “With.”

Travel with. Kayak with. Golf with. Garden with.

The activity was never really the point. The people were the point. Purpose and friendship are not two separate problems with two separate fixes. They’re the same fix. Find the thing you love, then go do it with other humans, over and over, for years. Start doing this now!

That is the whole recipe. It is not complicated. It’s just not something you can buy in a single transaction, which is probably why nobody sells it to you.

What I’m Taking Home From Palm Springs

Wes closed by telling the room full of us we’re the financial media, and we’re the ones who can actually move this. He said something like, you may even help save a life. That was so heavy and inspiring.

So here’s what I’m doing with it, and what I’d tell you to do.

Let’s start your core pursuits now. Whatever age you are. Not “I’ll figure out what I like when I have time,” because that day arrives and you’ll just watch TV. Build the thing while you’re still working.

Fight for your friends now. Assume the number is going to shrink and plan accordingly. Be a joiner, or inviter. Say yes to the group. Show up to the same thing enough times that people notice when you don’t.

Of course, do the money work, because the money work is real. Just stop believing it’s the finish line. The account balance is what buys you the time. It does not tell you what to do with it.

Ten million people made it to the finish line and found out nobody told them what came next. Don’t be one of them.

Horns up! Rock on!

If any part of this hit close to home, for you or for a dad or a grandpa or a buddy you’re thinking about right now, make the call today. In the US you can call or text 988 any time to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.