Reader question: My thoughts on retirement

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! Have you signed up for the March Marketing Madness challenge group?? Registrations are going strong; the price ($90) is the same as last year, and my favorite thing is hearing from people who say, “I can’t do the group this year because I have so much work from the marketing I did last year!” We kick off on March 4!

Here’s a topic that a couple of people have asked me about lately? Do I ever contemplate retirement and what it might look like? Short answer: Yes! I’m a planner, so I like to think ahead!

Longer version of the question: A couple of blog readers and online course alumni have asked me:

• Assuming that money isn’t a problem, have I contemplated when I might retire and what that might look like?
• What should those of us who aren’t 22 years old think about when we think about retiring?

My thoughts, in various categories. First, the logistical factors:

I’m 52, my husband is 58, and we have one child who is 21 and on track to graduate from college/university in 2026. We are fortunate to have three out of four of our own parents still alive; we are also fortunate that all of them are financially secure and we don’t anticipate having to spend our own money to care for them. Thanks to several decades of frugal living (basically, spending less than we earn), our house is paid for and has approximately tripled in value since we bought it in 2004, we have no other debt, and we have a good amount of money in retirement savings, so I anticipate/hope that money will not be a huge issue when/if we want to retire. I realize that right here, we have a lot of advantages–some are the result of our own careful planning, and some are the result of luck,and I feel grateful for that.

Random question: Why is it becoming more normal to retire in your 50s when most of us are going to live into our 80s and 90s?

Perhaps the most important factor here is that I love my job (more on this below), but this is something that really puzzles me. I was born in 1971, which means that in the US retirement system, I need to work until I’m 67 in order to get full social security benefits. That’s 15 years from now. US life expectancy is now age 73 for men and age 79 for women, and yet, we have a fair number of friends in their mid-50s who are either already at least semi-retired or who are planning to fully retire in the not-too-distant future. Everyone should do what they want, but personally I don’t really get this phenomenon. (End of rant).

The emotional/lifestyle factors:

• Bottom line, I love my job, I just went back to school for interpreting three years ago, I really have zero interest in retiring right now, and I think that I’m kind of a poor candidate for total retirement in general. I’m easily bored, I don’t enjoy being home all the time, and although I can see wanting more time for non-work activities (more on this below), 30 years of unstructured time isn’t something that really appeals to me.
• At the same time, I appreciate this question because I also have some fear, especially when it comes to interpreting, of being the person who holds on for too long and doesn’t know when to get off the stage. I really don’t want to be someone about whom others are saying behind my back, “She really needs to retire.”

Thus, here’s my current line of thinking:

• As long as my mind and body hold out, I’m planning to keep doing what I’m doing until I’m around 70. That being said, life can change a lot, and life can change very quickly. One variable is that my husband is six years older than I am, and is also more interested than I am in fully retiring. If he completely retires in ~7 years, I can see us wanting to do more extended travel, which could affect how much I work.
• My plan after that is, roughly, to retire from interpreting, or at least from high-stakes interpreting where cognitive processing speed is a big factor. Rightly or wrongly, I think that when older interpreters have trouble hearing, make mistakes or have trouble keeping up, it’s blamed on age. I think this is sometimes unfair; young interpreters have bad days too. It’s also not that hard to just get a hearing test every year and see how you’re doing. But, as stated above, I really don’t want to be the person about whom other people say, “She misses a lot of stuff and needs to retire.”
• I honestly don’t know that I will ever fully retire from translation unless I physically or cognitively can’t do it anymore. On the question and answer session where I got this question, I said, joking/not joking, “If I translate a couple of birth certificates the day before my funeral, that sounds good to me.” I would also really enjoy being able to dedicate more work time to lower-paying projects like book translation, without worrying about the loss of income.
• I think the beauty of freelancing is that we can be very flexible. I completely understand why people don’t want to be tied to a 9-5 job with limited vacation until they’re too old to enjoy their non-work interests anymore, but/and I feel like I’m already taking advantage of “the free in freelancing” at this stage of my career. Specifically, I often do not work on Fridays if I don’t have urgent work; I often take a three-ish hour break in the middle of a workday to go play lute duets with a friend; last year I took basically six weeks of vacation, which was really nice. I could see some sort of digital nomad situation in my future; my husband and I both love Canada, and US citizens can spend six months there without any special visa. We also both have dual citizenship in Switzerland, so we can go to Switzerland or any EU country for as long as we want. It’s more that I don’t see an imperative to retire when all of those options are available.
• I have a couple of examples of freelancers in their 70s who are scaling back in a way that I hope to do. Specifically, one of these freelancers told me that they still work part-time because they enjoy it and want to keep their mind active, but that they have let go of the fear of losing out on work or even losing a client by not being available; they work when they want to, and they don’t work when they don’t want to. I think this is a good philosophy–again, as the initial question-asker said, as long as money isn’t a problem.
• One final thought: The extent to which all of this is driven by health insurance frustrates me. Assuming that my husband retires at 65 and goes on Medicare, I still have to figure out what to do about health insurance for another six years, and we’ve been spoiled by my husband’s current job situation, where we pay $300 a month for full-coverage medical and dental insurance for all three of us. The thought of paying $1,000+ a month for health insurance for myself (as is the case for several freelancers I know) is not appealing. So I don’t know where that leaves us; just another rant!

Although I’m hopefully several decades away from actual retirement, I found this to be an interesting “food for thought” topic at any age!