I opted out of the workforce in 1978, when I discovered that working for myself was much more rewarding than being a corporate wage slave. (I still had a jerk for a boss though!) In a few months I’ll have completed my first decade of retirement. I’m happy to say that my life now is finally like I imagined it would be after I graduated from high school. Along the way I’ve learned a few things which I feel compelled to share with those who are still years away from clocking out for the last time. If you are younger than 50, you may want to skip this long piece, since things will likely be very different when your retirement time comes.
The freedom of self-employment comes at a cost. There was no 401K waiting for me at the end. Having an income that was not predictable meant saving for retirement on a regular basis was often not possible. If you sit down with a financial planner, you’ll likely be told that you’ll need at least a million dollars at retirement. Actually my meeting was so long ago that the total is now probably two million. I don’t have a million dollars in retirement funds, or even half that.
The compelling reason to have a large nest egg is to keep your income close to what it was while you were working. If your expenses don’t change, that’s a reasonable idea. But your expenses will change, and you have some control over that. If you are a typical American (I have never lived in any other country, so I can’t speak to conditions outside the US.) you have a house and a car, and you may be making payments on both. If you pay those off before you retire, that reduces your income requirement by the amount of those payments. The same goes for credit card payments. Pay off all your cards, and you no longer need to cover the monthly payments and interest.
Yes, it’s easy for me to say “Pay everything off!”, but reality often makes that impossible. In truth, I was retired for a few years before finally paying off the mortgage. I did it by refinancing when rates were low (sadly a memory now), and paying “curtailment”, meaning adding extra money to each month’s payment to accelerate the payoff. This may not be an option for you, depending on what type of mortgage you have.
But for most retired people, the single biggest expense is not food, transportation, or housing. It’s health care. Doctors, prescriptions, and tests. There’s nothing you can do about that, right? Getting old means getting sicker. In my 50s I believed that, as my joints were beginning to get painful. It turns out I was very wrong in that assumption. The maladies of old age are mostly non-communicable diseases, like arthritis, diabetes, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and the most feared, Alzheimer’s. Watch any news channel for more than 10 minutes and you will see an endless stream of commercials for treatment of these problems.
Conventional wisdom would have you believe there is nothing you can do to prevent succumbing to one or more of these. Gerontologists, those who treat people “of an age”, are ready and waiting with an endless array of pharmaceuticals to treat whatever ails you. Medicare will cover that, right? Well, no. Doctor visits are covered by Medicare part B, which means you need a separate insurance to cover the shortage. That’s only part of the problem. The hardest part is finding a doctor that will accept Medicare patients. The dirty little secret about Medicare is that it does not pay the full amount of medical charges. If a doctor participates, she must accept whatever Medicare pays as payment in full. The only doctors that can afford to do that are the ones that did their internship on a chicken farm in Nicaragua.
If you do manage to find a doctor that will see you on Medicare, you will get one or more prescriptions. Those should be covered. But no, for that you need yet another insurance plan for Medicare, part D. And while you’re paying for all those plans, you probably also should have Long Term Care insurance. That’s so you will have the funds to pay for care on your final approach to the fabled pearly gates. The one bit of good news is that when you are near expiration, and moved to hospice care, it’s covered by Medicare! So your final move to the narrow apartment is paid for, though the disposition of your remains is hot covered. If you have no family, that may be of no consequence, but if you want to save your heirs from the financial burden you may want to get an insurance policy to cover that.
Now for the good news. All those non-communicable diseases I mentioned are metabolic diseases. That means they are a result of what you eat, and to some extent what you do. You can reduce the financial cost of retirement a lot just by not getting a metabolic disease. You’ll also have more time to enjoy life, because you won’t be wasting much of it in a doctor’s waiting room. This brings us to the golden secret of a good retirement, but you need to start right now.
Maybe you already get a physical exam every year. I think the only physical exams I got in my working years were of the pre-employment and pre-insurance type. Your doctor may fret over your blood pressure, lab results, and probably says you could take off a few pounds. Even if you gained just half an ounce a week, in 30 years you’ll be carrying 60 pounds you really don’t want. I know, I had them. Your doctor will suggest a diet. It will not help. Even in our age of medical miracles, most doctors know very little about nutrition and its impact on metabolic disease. I’m no expert, but I have spent many hours researching and reading books by experts. The result is that I’m now in far better health at 76 than I was at 26.
You may have considered one or more diets, but if you are working it can be very hard to stay on track. If your work involves travel, it’s even harder. So I’m not going to suggest a diet. You can sort that out after retiring. Instead I’m going to suggest some simple steps to get your body in shape to carry you to the finish line, which is hopefully a long way away. Your health is not going to come from a prescription, but from your kitchen. Yes, I know you don’t have time to cook. I’m not going to spout recipes. Instead I’m going to tell you two things you should not eat, ever again.
First up is high-fructose corn syrup, usually referred to as HFC or HFCS. This is not a product you would buy in a bottle, at least labeled that way. It’s used as a sweetener, because it’s cheaper than sugar, and it’s also addictive. Just about every non-diet soft drink on the market uses HFCS as the sweetener. So what is it, and why is it bad?
Fructose, as the name might suggest, is the natural sugar that’s found in fruit. In animals it acts as a switch, telling the body that winter is coming, so you need to accumulate fat to carry you through hibernation. Bears, for example, begin eating massive quantities of fruit as summer turns to fall. Humans don’t hibernate, of course, except those of teenage years on school days. But our ancestors survived winters, when hunting was difficult, by having extra fat to keep them alive until the next season. We don’t need that now, but nature has not gotten the memo.
When you consume fructose it isn’t processed quite like the rest of your food. It goes directly to the liver for disassembly. Remember, it’s a fat switch, so the liver wants to turn it into fat. Consume enough of it, and you will get Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver disease (NAFLD). This is just as serious as the cirrhosis caused by alcohol consumption, and can destroy your liver. It’s now becoming a problem even in children, largely due to high soda and juice consumption.
Whoa! What about all that advice about eating fruits and vegetables? Didn’t I just say fructose came from fruit? Yes, it does. But if you eat an apple you get a very small amount of fructose, and it’s offset by the digestion of the fiber in the apple. No harm, no foul. So you might think “Hey, cool. I’ll ditch the sodas and just drink apple juice.” Nope, not a good plan. That glass of apple juice is not just from one apple. It contains the fructose of 20 or more apples, and no fiber. Look out liver!
I spent a large part of my life consuming mass quantities of a popular brand of soda that “peps” you up. Every swig was another hit on my liver, and every day I thank that liver for not failing me before I finally gave up the soda. I did switch to the diet form for a few years, which has its own issues with artificial sweeteners, but the better solution for me was sparkling water. Carbonated spring water gives me the fizz I crave, but without any unwanted side effects. No, it’s not the same, and yes it will take time to get used to it. If you frequently find yourself ordering fast food, there’s a small bonus. Most of those places will let you have water for free.
HFCS is most frequently used in liquids, but you may also find it in some food products, particularly those in the candy aisle. Get in the habit of reading the ingredient label on everything. If you see HFCS in the ingredients, give it a pass. Note that I’m not saying sugar is okay. Table sugar is made up of sucrose and fructose, but is not quite as concentrated as HFCS. Try to keep your sugar consumption to a minimum. Both sugar and HFCS are addictive and will lead to insulin resistance, where the body stops reacting to insulin. That leads to metabolic problems. Eventually you become pre diabetic, and the full on diabetic. If you need motivation to cut down on sugar, just consider that Alzheimer’s disease is such a natural progression from type 2 diabetes that it is now referred to as type 3 diabetes.
I said that I was going to tell you two things you shouldn’t eat, but the second one is really a category with 8 subcategories. It’s industrial seed oils, which are created from the seeds of corn, canola, cottonseed, soybeans, safflower, and sunflower. It also includes oil from rice bran and grapeseed, but those are more often used in fast food production. You have almost certainly eaten corn, perhaps soybeans as edamame, and maybe sunflower seeds as a snack. They likely did not seem particularly oily, and caused no ill effects. The problem comes in the processing necessary to turn them into oil.
It starts out with processing at very high heat, much hotter than they would get in cooking. A chemical called hexane is added to allow more oil to be extracted. It’s also used as an additive to gasoline, varnish, and glue, and is very dangerous when inhaled. After the heat and chemicals are applied, the oil produced is dark, smelly, and nasty looking. More chemistry is applied to deodorize and bleach it to make the lovely clear liquid you see on the grocery shelf with the little “Heart Healthy” logo from the American Heart Association. Well if the AHA endorses it, it’s probably OK, no? The word should actually be spelled as endor$ment, because there’s a lot of money changing hands to get the blessing of that logo on your label.
So what is the actual danger of these oils? Chemically they are known as poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). These are long molecules with a lot of oxygen atoms in them. Well oxygen is good. We need it to live. What’s wrong with that? Oxygen is eager to bind with other elements, in the process called oxidation. We know it better as rust. It turns out that those PUFA molecules tend to break apart when heated. This creates free radicals, which are just about as radical as the latest mob featured on the evening news. Turned loose in your body, these things become thugs just looking to do harm. But wait - your body doesn’t get that warm, is it really hot enough to break them down? Oh, didn’t I mention that these oils are sold for COOKING? Or that insanely high temperatures are involved in just making them? Instead of a heart symbol, those bottles should be sporting a skull and crossbones to warn of the poison within.
If you eat a lot of fast food, it gets even worse. Restaurants use the cheapest seed oils they can get. It gets heated over and over through the course of a day, and they may use the same oil for several days before recycling it into diesel fuel. You have no way of knowing which oil your food is prepared in, and chances are good the people cooking it don’t either.
Wow. So what are we supposed to fry with? Or should we not fry any food again ever? Well, surprisingly nature comes through for us in that department, without the need for massive chemistry. The best fats you can cook with come directly from the source to you, from coconuts, olives, and avocado, to butter and beef tallow. Not only are they not trying to kill you, they actually contain healthy fat that is good for you. Hold on, my doctor says those things are full of cholesterol and will give me a heart attack! Well the fact is that almost all doctors have little to no training in nutrition. Cholesterol makes a nice scary thing to wave at people and push statin drugs to reduce it. In truth without cholesterol, you would die. It’s a major building block in the body. Study after study shows that it has no role in causing a heart attack, and having a high number may actually be beneficial.
So why do the natural fats get such a bad reputation? They cost more, which is a big consideration if you are a company selling food products. Food gets more expensive year after year, so keeping costs low is important. The myth of fat causing heart disease has been in place for 50 years, based on flawed research and governmental manipulation. The result is a nation full of sick people that keep the big pharmaceutical companies rich.
If you’ve managed to make it this far, congratulations! I’ll leave you with one rule that will help you get to the end game. When shopping for food, always read the ingredients. If you see high fructose corn syrup, canola, corn, cottonseed, soy, safflower, or sunflower oil, put it back on the shelf. That’s it. Enjoy butter, especially if it’s from grass-fed cattle. Use olive oil, or if you don’t like the taste, avocado oil. Don’t be so eager to trim off the fat from your steak. Well maybe go easy on the steaks, we’re trying to save for retirement here! But getting the cheaper, less lean hamburger is fine. You’re not hurting your heart and you’re helping your body.
My wife is right. I never know when to shut up. I’ll be back again with more about the promised land we call retirement. Thanks for spending 12 minutes or more reading through this. I hope it adds much more than that to your life!