Retirement & Aging with MIT AgeLab
5/12/2023 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Are you prepared for retirement and old age?
Are you prepared for retirement and old age? What are the ways men and women treat retirement planning differently? How can you be prepared not just financially, but socially? We ask these questions and more to Joseph Coughlin of the MIT AgeLab.
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Funding for TO THE CONTRARY is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.
Retirement & Aging with MIT AgeLab
5/12/2023 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Are you prepared for retirement and old age? What are the ways men and women treat retirement planning differently? How can you be prepared not just financially, but socially? We ask these questions and more to Joseph Coughlin of the MIT AgeLab.
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Retirement planning begins early.
Not just because you're saving money and that you're you're banking on the miracle of compound interest, but you also have to start laying the foundations as to what are you going to do?
What is going to get you up every morning.
Life is not in retirement is not a vacation.
{MUSIC } Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe Welcome to To The Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.
This week our topic is gender differences in retirement.
With me to discuss this is Dr. Joseph Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab.
He is also the author of the upcoming book The Longevity Economy.
Welcome, Joe.
How are you?
Hey, Bonnie Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here and thank you for joining us.
So let's start by you informing the audience of what exactly the AgeLab is and what it does.
Well, The AgeLab is a research program here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that looks not just about how we're going to be living longer, but how are we going to be living better.
My students and researchers are from engineering and data science as well as psychology and all the social sciences to imagine 100 good years.
So Bonnie, we don't look at, shall we say, how well you chose your parents in terms of your genetic makeup.
But we do look at where are you going to live?
How are you going to get around?
How do you provide care for your loved ones?
How will you receive care?
And how do you plan longevity, not just retirement, but how do you plan to live those 100 good years?
So we're a team of multi-disciplinary folks looking at, shall we say, a multi-disciplinary and indeed extreme sport called aging.
(Laughter), Yeah.
One of the biggest problems in aging as far as I can see, is the lack of funds to age well, to get the medical treatment you need to get have the help you, the, you know, assistance with getting around physically that you may need.
You have a cure for that yet?
No, not not quite yet.
And what's amazing is that the inequity of income and savings is perhaps most dramatic in the aging population.
Think about this.
The older adults, the United States, the 50 plus control more than 68% of the discretionary spend, but half of the very same cohort has less than $25,000 saved for their entire retirement.
Well, that's definitely something our educational institutions need to do a better job of training people for.
But anyway, so let's get to the gender differences in retirement.
Who is happier and better prepared for retirement?
Men or women or a little bit of both.
Well, it's probably a little bit of both.
But I'll say one thing.
You know, we're talking about money for a moment.
Men typically and traditionally have more money saved in retirement.
Women are at a great deficit when it comes to financial security.
But, Bonnie, I'll tell you this, women are far better at something else than perhaps, shall we say the financial part.
They're better in older age at friends having things to do.
Getting out.
They didn't retire on a Friday afternoon and on Monday, ask their spouse, What are we doing?
They actually have things to do.
So if happiness is built around having a reason to get up in the morning.
Women quite often are doing far better than their male counterparts.
What about what makes, as far as your findings are concerned, what keeps men happy in retirement?
Is it golf buddies?
Is it taking up a whole new hobby like woodcarving or starting a new business?
What is it?
My colleague, Dr. Chaiwoo Lee and I did a study on the words that we use to describe, if you will, life after work.
We didn't want to use the R word.
Retirement, because then you get all kinds of visions in the head of golf courses and beach walks and bicycles, if you will.
And so, yes, men, when they think about retirement or what they think will make them happy in retirement, is that hobby, that woodshop and maybe playing golf or something like that.
It's about recreation.
The dominant story we have of retirement.
Women are a lot more sophisticated.
They don't see this as simply a time to rest and play and endless vacation.
They actually have things to do because they've had friends before and they maybe have been working before.
They actually see this is time for them.
Time for me.
In fact, they use words like peace and happiness and the like.
Men, after a short time of golf and pickleball, actually started hounding their their spouses and partners about, hey, what are we doing next?
Where are we going?
What are we doing?
And quite often we find her saying, you know something, I don't know what you're doing, but I know what I'm doing and they're out the door.
(Laughter) That sounds to me more typical of what was going on when we first started the show in the early nineties and issues I reported on even before then, which were that women had other things they wanted to do, even if even for full time career women who still do the majority to this day of housework.
Absolutely.
They wanted to be free to do other things when the kids were out of the house and they didn't have to work.
The men used to come and say, okay, what are we doing?
And the women would say, I've been doing this for years.
It's now your turn.
Figure out what to do.
And I've had more than one woman.
Tell me whether it's in interviews, focus groups or just passing by, that they will tell their husband effectively, you know, I married you for life.
I didn't marry you for lunch, so you had better find something to do.
And that's why you find a lot of the Uber drivers are not just people kind of putting money in pieces of life together.
A lot of those Uber drivers are simply driving because they need to do something to get out of the house.
And quite often it's because their their wife is giving them the boot to find something to get out of the house.
Are there specific things you have found that make retirement easier?
Of course, you need that foundation, which is financial security, if you will.
But the other thing is, is that retirement planning begins early, not just because you're saving into money and that you're you're banking on the miracle of compound interest.
But you also have to start laying the foundations as to what are you going to do, what is going to get you up every morning.
Life is not in retirement is not a vacation.
Bonnie, if I may, let me do some very quick math with you and your and your viewers.
Think about this, that from birth to 21 years old and if it makes it easier for some drinking age, do you know that's about 8000 days And from 21 years old to what many of us might call midlife crisis, 46, 47 years old.
It's about 8000 days.
I bet.
I bet you're getting the algorithm now.
And from midlife crisis to that, Newtonian law, physics are retirement 65.
It's 8000 days.
But here's what most people don't recognize from 65.
And if you make it to 65, you got better than a half, 50% chance of making it to 85 and change from 65 to 85 plus is another 8000 days.
So if we take birth to 21 and we move that gently off to the side and we call that childhood Bonnie, retirement is one third of your adult life.
So having things to do, people to do it with.
Don't just think about your financial portfolio.
Think about your social portfolio.
Who are your friends?
Do you have those that you need?
Those that are have fun.
Those who will be there when you're in deep, deep trouble.
But also, do you have friends under development, so to speak?
You know, as one woman told me in a research project, there's a she was about her late eighties.
She said, you know, Joe, there's a natural attrition to friendship.
So you got to kind of keep on replacing the friends that you have, particularly in older age.
So, yeah, this is not a short trip to Disney and a few hours with grandchildren each day.
This is a long, long time.
But we live in a society where there's an attrition to family relationships too.
And in many cases, I know so many parents , estranged from children and vice versa.
And my parents had a very individualized attitude toward retirement, which I will never I will never make my child take care of me in retirement.
And yet I believe that more Americans, especially because of finances, are having to do that these days.
My lab has been doing research on caregiving, which most of us don't know what that means.
We think of ourselves as a good partner, good spouse, son, daughter, whatever it might be.
But families caring for older adults and already in the United States, one in four American families provides upwards of 24 to 29 hours a week caring for an older adult.
But the research is mixed.
Bonnie, Not only does it take a lot of time and indeed money, but also the price of caregiving most often than if it's not the female spouse.
It is more likely after that to be, frankly, the oldest adult daughter.
She gets paid with fatigue, with with pain, back pain quite often, but also financial costs in terms of either having to step out of the workplace or not take a job that might have a promotion but requires her to travel.
And so we are certainly expecting family to be there, but we can't expect that anymore.
First off, we're having fewer children.
So that adult daughter, she doesn't exist or she's moved far away.
And as you said, Bonnie, we don't want our kids to take care of us.
And by the way, the research indicates that older adults who live with their adult children, it sounds like a good idea at first, but both the older adult and the adult children are very stressed, living under the same roof.
Remember, that's not just your kid.
That's an entire other adult who has found their own way of living.
I did hear many, many years ago that the biggest thing separating a retired parent from a nursing home was a daughter.
Yes, not a child.
A daughter.
Just because women are still, to this day, more likely to be taking care of children, is that why they're the ones who also take over for their parents if their parents don't have the funds to check into a nursing home or one of those newer facilities that starts with you rent an apartment and then you go in and then they have a hospital if you needed above that.
And then they have long term care in a facility if you need it beyond that.
Sure.
I mean, certainly continuing care retirement communities, as you describe, are out there.
But even the best of them, keep in mind, less than single digits of older population ever sees anything to do with senior housing.
No, Bonnie, it's not about biology as to why women are the ones who step up.
It seems to be socialized roles of what women believe they should do, but also what parents believe that their their children should do.
Look, it's not that men don't provide care.
In fact, the more recent data is showing that they're providing more care.
But men are more likely to clean your gutters, take out the trash, balance the checkbook, but the hard stuff, taking it to the doctor to hear a diagnosis you don't want to hear getting you dressed in the morning, feeding you, changing you, toileting you and the like.
If you're not in formal care that caregiving is often coming from the oldest adult daughter.
And by the way, Bonnie, to get back to the original question, that's one of the reasons why men tend to look at retirement as a, you know, 8000 days of playtime.
But women in their thirties and forties.
But certainly by their fifties have already seen the other side, that other face of retirement.
And therefore, when they see retirement coming, they know it's not 8000 days of recreation.
And so they're hoping that they get a little time and peace and quiet for them because they've been often caring for children, perhaps a partner who can't make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but probably more parents than they'd ever planned on having.
Let's get back to a point you made earlier about women seeing retirement as a new venture and and a, you know, an adventure, if you will.
How many of them are going back to work just in something they enjoy more, and how are they battling discrimination?
But ageism, if I might say that, too, to get there to do that?
No, Unfortunately, women, particularly older women, are faced with a triple threat gender, gender bias, ageism, bias.
And quite often they're at a financial disadvantage.
So old age for women is, shall we say, a lot of work.
And so we are seeing women going back to work in large numbers or staying in the workforce longer.
Largely lower income women are not only more likely, by the way, to need to work and therefore they're in the workforce.
But believe it or not, a lot of the new business starts out there are lower income women and women of color starting new businesses to navigate around ageism and the like.
But even those who have education that were in the workforce previously and maybe even worked at a fortune, pick a number 100, 1,000 company if they stepped out of the workforce for children and then to caregiving and then they want to get back in in their fifties, they're faced with a number of things that are institutionally against them.
But there's something else.
Quite often, women who have managed a household provided care essentially, as I wrote in my book The Longevity Economy, or the chief financial officer of a home, don't want to put up with a lot of nonsense that big companies often have.
So as a result, believe it or not, entrepreneurship indeed is the new women's movement.
A lot of those 50 plus educated women say, I don't need the hassle.
I'm going to start my own business.
And maybe I'll even start out with a few girlfriends.
So you say the obstacles are getting financing to start a business and ageism, sexism multiplied by a factor of, you know, however old you are.
So how do they how do they do it?
How do they start their new businesses?
They pool money with their friends or?
Well, one of the reasons why you see entrepreneurship in older age is that, first off, you've got more experience.
You've got more confidence typically in yourself, but also you might have a partner who has got a pension or a retirement capability.
So you've got a, shall we say, steady stream of income or at least feel somewhat stable and yes, pool money with friends and family and the like.
And quite often these businesses are not product focused, but service focused.
So the real capital, if you will, is her time, not just the money.
A recent development, I should say, demographic development is about 20% of Americans now are not having children.
Right.
Tell me about how that's changed retirement for everybody.
You know, it is amazing because, you know, the way that we've always retired or aged well was not by following doctor's orders are choosing our parents well or frankly, even eating and exercises the way we should.
You know, those are great indicators of what we should be doing.
Well, frankly, we always age well because we had family that was there to support us to to do those big and little things have become more difficult as we age.
And Bonnie, you're right, the birth rate, the fertility rate is dropping right through the floor.
And we've seen this happen before with with famines and war and disease.
But right after that, the birth rate would pop right back up, hence the baby boom after World War Two and after the Great Depression.
But this time after COVID, it even dropped lower.
In fact, just between us born because, you know, I don't if anybody else is going to hear us say this, but during COVID, during quarantine, I thought there'd be a baby boom, because after all, you had a lot of time on your hands.
Answer was No, actually birth rates went even further down.
How does retirement differ in LGBTQ families or couples?
Well, we're finding that LGBTQ and companies with no income, so-called double income, no kids, families, they are starting to show, we say self annuitize, if you will, their own longevity.
They're becoming painfully aware that they need to find, shall we say, the supports of how they will age well in their older years.
So some of the strategies that are being used is you'll often find that LGBTQ families and individuals have really kind of adopted, if you will, a niece or a nephew to almost fill in like a daughter or son might otherwise moving to communities where there's real services that are available to them.
And quite often that because due to luckily for luck and hard work, they may have higher incomes.
So they are in many ways really driving the business for home care and home services.
So they can age well even without family support.
I think of myself obviously getting closer to retirement age people.
What about people who do everything they need to do, who save for retirement, who make plans of what they're going to do in retirement, and then when they get there or get close to it, none of that is going to work because they have lost capabilities physically.
I used to be a show jumper in addition to hosting this show, and I broke my neck and damaged my spinal cord.
And one of the things I wanted to do in retirement was, ride.
I can't do it anymore.
So what do you say to those people?
President Eisenhower, when he was in the military, would say, you know, for warfare, you plan your plan, you plan, and when it's time to go to war, you throw the plans away and you just get up and fight.
And I think that perhaps we know we can do the best plans possible.
We need to do that to envision not just the future singularly, but we need to imagine the futures.
And so for those things that we want to do, we might want to have a range.
We are not want to say that I'm definitely going to be doing one thing or the other, but to try to prepare to lay the groundwork for two or three things.
You know, it's not just your own health, but the health of a loved one may really put, you know, proverbially the kibosh, if you will, to say where to spend the first three years of our retirement, traveling everywhere that we put on hold.
If one of you is not well, that's not going to happen.
What about those who can do that, maybe in terms of subject area or where they want to live or something like that, but can't do it financially?
What do you say to them?
Well, you know, the vast majority of us, upwards of 80, 85% want to age in place, which is fancy for my marriage.
My mortgage in my memories is right where I'm living.
This is where I want to stay.
And so it's it's going to be a real challenge on, you know, you may have retired from a career, but you may now also have to work part time or full time or something like that to have the additional liquidity that you'll need.
We may want to think more creatively, not just for ourselves, but for our children, which is stop asking the question, what do you want to be when you grow up or when you think your career is going to end?
Sort of asking yourself how many things will you be when you grow up and how many things will you possibly do?
And so we have to rethink work in order to be prepared for rethinking retirement.
What about volunteering?
How does that play into all this?
The pay isn't great, but the pay is perfect for something else.
It gives you the reason to get up in the morning.
It gives you a sense of meaning.
And by the way, the real idea of being part of a community is contributing.
And so volunteering, the volunteer workforce is over whelming, with the older population overwhelmingly built up by older women.
That is the human capital that makes all those big and little things we take forgranted in community actually happen.
It's a great way not just to give back, but that's how you meet new people.
That's how you get out.
That's how you say, you know, I may be retired and I and on Monday morning, though, I've got something to do that has a greater purpose and simply an hourly rate wage.
How is the Internet changing all of that?
The Internet is, shall we say, a license to hunt.
It really allows you to connect with more organizations, find out things.
And by the way, the Internet is a great way to learn.
Just because you are 18 or 21, If you choose to go to college or grad school or whatever, learning never stops.
If you're going to be living for 85 plus years, think about how many things in technology and knowledge have changed over your career.
Now, before I start, praising, technology as the answer.
Let me caveat it with one thing, though, Bonnie.
Keep in mind, the average older adult over 65 spends upwards of 5 to 6 hours per day watching TV.
Don't let the computer and video games fill in another 5 to 6 hours.
High tech is no replacement for high touch.
There's a sneaking thing in me that is telling me that's a whole lot easier to say than to do.
I mean, what about shy people who have a hard time making friends?
And those with physical disabilities, or not healthy?
But the bottom line is, is that we should try.
And by the way, you don't wake up one day say, I retired on Friday, Monday, I'm going to start.
No, this is something that as we're talking about, planning for retirement, it's not just about how much money you've put away, how much practice have you put into finding out where you might retire, where you might work to work on those social skills?
Early fifties, late forties.
Retirement begins in our heads far sooner than than we ever thought.
You mentioned earlier that you expected after COVID when people started having fewer children and or Americans, I should say, started having fewer children.
And you expected it to pop back up again.
But that didn't happen.
What we do have, regardless of COVID, a fairly shaky economy right now, there have been all kinds of layoffs in the tech sector.
And, you know, inflation is calming down a little bit, but there may be a whole lot more of it needed to calm down in the next year or two.
So how is that impacting people's plans for retirement?
I committed the greatest sin of any research scientist, and that is is I, I made a forecast and a prediction during my lifetime usually should predict them far enough away where if you're right or wrong, you don't go get the blame or for that matter, the credit.
No, certainly the economy.
But uncertainty is infecting affecting birthrates around the world.
This is not just a U.S. phenomenon, in fact, of the industrialized countries, we're still pretty good.
1.6 children per female.
You need 2.1 children per female just to keep it even.
So, well relatively speaking, we're doing okay.
But uncertainty, whether it's about the climate, the economy, about politics or our personal situations, we are finding that that to be, shall we say, the the surest form of birth control that you can imagine, which is very interesting because our parents and our grandparents who faced world wars, great depressions and had far less education than the younger population today, they had kids, they had a lot of kids and so something else is going on here.
And it is, shall we say, it's uncertain as to what it is.
Our birth rate is going down, but immigration, as I understand it, is gone so far up in the in recent decades that the average number of Americans has gone from over the last almost 70 years, from about 150 million to or 170 million in the fifties, mid-fifties to 340 something million no.w For the foreseeable future, the United States will probably be the third largest country in the world for the next couple of decades, population wise.
But one of the things we do have to do is to start rethinking what are the institutions around education and health care and whatnot to enable not just having pure numbers is national wealth, having pure numbers of educated, engaged workers and skilled workers to be able to fill the jobs, the needs and indeed the volunteering tasks that we need is really putting population to use.
Thank you so much.
Dr. Dr. Joseph Coughlin, head of MIT's AgeLab.
Really appreciate your time and learn so much from listening to you.
Fantastic for being and thank you so much for being here Bonnie.
That's it for this edition.
Let's keep talking on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and please visit our PBS website Www dot to the contrary Dot org.
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{MUSIC } Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
The Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.
Funding for To the Contrary provided by E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.
Retirement planning begins early.
Not just because you're saving money and that you're you're banking on the miracle of compound interest, but you also have to start laying the foundations as to what are you going to do?
What is going to get you up every morning.
Life is not in retirement is not a vacation.
{MUSIC } Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe Welcome to To The Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.
This week our topic is gender differences in retirement.
With me to discuss this is Dr. Joseph Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab.
He is also the author of the upcoming book The Longevity Economy.
Welcome, Joe.
How are you?
Hey, Bonnie Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here and thank you for joining us.
So let's start by you informing the audience of what exactly the AgeLab is and what it does.
Well, The AgeLab is a research program here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that looks not just about how we're going to be living longer, but how are we going to be living better.
My students and researchers are from engineering and data science as well as psychology and all the social sciences to imagine 100 good years.
So Bonnie, we don't look at, shall we say, how well you chose your parents in terms of your genetic makeup.
But we do look at where are you going to live?
How are you going to get around?
How do you provide care for your loved ones?
How will you receive care?
And how do you plan longevity, not just retirement, but how do you plan to live those 100 good years?
So we're a team of multi-disciplinary folks looking at, shall we say, a multi-disciplinary and indeed extreme sport called aging.
(Laughter), Yeah.
One of the biggest problems in aging as far as I can see, is the lack of funds to age well, to get the medical treatment you need to get have the help you, the, you know, assistance with getting around physically that you may need.
You have a cure for that yet?
No, not not quite yet.
And what's amazing is that the inequity of income and savings is perhaps most dramatic in the aging population.
Think about this.
The older adults, the United States, the 50 plus control more than 68% of the discretionary spend, but half of the very same cohort has less than $25,000 saved for their entire retirement.
Well, that's definitely something our educational institutions need to do a better job of training people for.
But anyway, so let's get to the gender differences in retirement.
Who is happier and better prepared for retirement?
Men or women or a little bit of both.
Well, it's probably a little bit of both.
But I'll say one thing.
You know, we're talking about money for a moment.
Men typically and traditionally have more money saved in retirement.
Women are at a great deficit when it comes to financial security.
But, Bonnie, I'll tell you this, women are far better at something else than perhaps, shall we say the financial part.
They're better in older age at friends having things to do.
Getting out.
They didn't retire on a Friday afternoon and on Monday, ask their spouse, What are we doing?
They actually have things to do.
So if happiness is built around having a reason to get up in the morning.
Women quite often are doing far better than their male counterparts.
What about what makes, as far as your findings are concerned, what keeps men happy in retirement?
Is it golf buddies?
Is it taking up a whole new hobby like woodcarving or starting a new business?
What is it?
My colleague, Dr. Chaiwoo Lee and I did a study on the words that we use to describe, if you will, life after work.
We didn't want to use the R word.
Retirement, because then you get all kinds of visions in the head of golf courses and beach walks and bicycles, if you will.
And so, yes, men, when they think about retirement or what they think will make them happy in retirement, is that hobby, that woodshop and maybe playing golf or something like that.
It's about recreation.
The dominant story we have of retirement.
Women are a lot more sophisticated.
They don't see this as simply a time to rest and play and endless vacation.
They actually have things to do because they've had friends before and they maybe have been working before.
They actually see this is time for them.
Time for me.
In fact, they use words like peace and happiness and the like.
Men, after a short time of golf and pickleball, actually started hounding their their spouses and partners about, hey, what are we doing next?
Where are we going?
What are we doing?
And quite often we find her saying, you know something, I don't know what you're doing, but I know what I'm doing and they're out the door.
(Laughter) That sounds to me more typical of what was going on when we first started the show in the early nineties and issues I reported on even before then, which were that women had other things they wanted to do, even if even for full time career women who still do the majority to this day of housework.
Absolutely.
They wanted to be free to do other things when the kids were out of the house and they didn't have to work.
The men used to come and say, okay, what are we doing?
And the women would say, I've been doing this for years.
It's now your turn.
Figure out what to do.
And I've had more than one woman.
Tell me whether it's in interviews, focus groups or just passing by, that they will tell their husband effectively, you know, I married you for life.
I didn't marry you for lunch, so you had better find something to do.
And that's why you find a lot of the Uber drivers are not just people kind of putting money in pieces of life together.
A lot of those Uber drivers are simply driving because they need to do something to get out of the house.
And quite often it's because their their wife is giving them the boot to find something to get out of the house.
Are there specific things you have found that make retirement easier?
Of course, you need that foundation, which is financial security, if you will.
But the other thing is, is that retirement planning begins early, not just because you're saving into money and that you're you're banking on the miracle of compound interest.
But you also have to start laying the foundations as to what are you going to do, what is going to get you up every morning.
Life is not in retirement is not a vacation.
Bonnie, if I may, let me do some very quick math with you and your and your viewers.
Think about this, that from birth to 21 years old and if it makes it easier for some drinking age, do you know that's about 8000 days And from 21 years old to what many of us might call midlife crisis, 46, 47 years old.
It's about 8000 days.
I bet.
I bet you're getting the algorithm now.
And from midlife crisis to that, Newtonian law, physics are retirement 65.
It's 8000 days.
But here's what most people don't recognize from 65.
And if you make it to 65, you got better than a half, 50% chance of making it to 85 and change from 65 to 85 plus is another 8000 days.
So if we take birth to 21 and we move that gently off to the side and we call that childhood Bonnie, retirement is one third of your adult life.
So having things to do, people to do it with.
Don't just think about your financial portfolio.
Think about your social portfolio.
Who are your friends?
Do you have those that you need?
Those that are have fun.
Those who will be there when you're in deep, deep trouble.
But also, do you have friends under development, so to speak?
You know, as one woman told me in a research project, there's a she was about her late eighties.
She said, you know, Joe, there's a natural attrition to friendship.
So you got to kind of keep on replacing the friends that you have, particularly in older age.
So, yeah, this is not a short trip to Disney and a few hours with grandchildren each day.
This is a long, long time.
But we live in a society where there's an attrition to family relationships too.
And in many cases, I know so many parents , estranged from children and vice versa.
And my parents had a very individualized attitude toward retirement, which I will never I will never make my child take care of me in retirement.
And yet I believe that more Americans, especially because of finances, are having to do that these days.
My lab has been doing research on caregiving, which most of us don't know what that means.
We think of ourselves as a good partner, good spouse, son, daughter, whatever it might be.
But families caring for older adults and already in the United States, one in four American families provides upwards of 24 to 29 hours a week caring for an older adult.
But the research is mixed.
Bonnie, Not only does it take a lot of time and indeed money, but also the price of caregiving most often than if it's not the female spouse.
It is more likely after that to be, frankly, the oldest adult daughter.
She gets paid with fatigue, with with pain, back pain quite often, but also financial costs in terms of either having to step out of the workplace or not take a job that might have a promotion but requires her to travel.
And so we are certainly expecting family to be there, but we can't expect that anymore.
First off, we're having fewer children.
So that adult daughter, she doesn't exist or she's moved far away.
And as you said, Bonnie, we don't want our kids to take care of us.
And by the way, the research indicates that older adults who live with their adult children, it sounds like a good idea at first, but both the older adult and the adult children are very stressed, living under the same roof.
Remember, that's not just your kid.
That's an entire other adult who has found their own way of living.
I did hear many, many years ago that the biggest thing separating a retired parent from a nursing home was a daughter.
Yes, not a child.
A daughter.
Just because women are still, to this day, more likely to be taking care of children, is that why they're the ones who also take over for their parents if their parents don't have the funds to check into a nursing home or one of those newer facilities that starts with you rent an apartment and then you go in and then they have a hospital if you needed above that.
And then they have long term care in a facility if you need it beyond that.
Sure.
I mean, certainly continuing care retirement communities, as you describe, are out there.
But even the best of them, keep in mind, less than single digits of older population ever sees anything to do with senior housing.
No, Bonnie, it's not about biology as to why women are the ones who step up.
It seems to be socialized roles of what women believe they should do, but also what parents believe that their their children should do.
Look, it's not that men don't provide care.
In fact, the more recent data is showing that they're providing more care.
But men are more likely to clean your gutters, take out the trash, balance the checkbook, but the hard stuff, taking it to the doctor to hear a diagnosis you don't want to hear getting you dressed in the morning, feeding you, changing you, toileting you and the like.
If you're not in formal care that caregiving is often coming from the oldest adult daughter.
And by the way, Bonnie, to get back to the original question, that's one of the reasons why men tend to look at retirement as a, you know, 8000 days of playtime.
But women in their thirties and forties.
But certainly by their fifties have already seen the other side, that other face of retirement.
And therefore, when they see retirement coming, they know it's not 8000 days of recreation.
And so they're hoping that they get a little time and peace and quiet for them because they've been often caring for children, perhaps a partner who can't make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but probably more parents than they'd ever planned on having.
Let's get back to a point you made earlier about women seeing retirement as a new venture and and a, you know, an adventure, if you will.
How many of them are going back to work just in something they enjoy more, and how are they battling discrimination?
But ageism, if I might say that, too, to get there to do that?
No, Unfortunately, women, particularly older women, are faced with a triple threat gender, gender bias, ageism, bias.
And quite often they're at a financial disadvantage.
So old age for women is, shall we say, a lot of work.
And so we are seeing women going back to work in large numbers or staying in the workforce longer.
Largely lower income women are not only more likely, by the way, to need to work and therefore they're in the workforce.
But believe it or not, a lot of the new business starts out there are lower income women and women of color starting new businesses to navigate around ageism and the like.
But even those who have education that were in the workforce previously and maybe even worked at a fortune, pick a number 100, 1,000 company if they stepped out of the workforce for children and then to caregiving and then they want to get back in in their fifties, they're faced with a number of things that are institutionally against them.
But there's something else.
Quite often, women who have managed a household provided care essentially, as I wrote in my book The Longevity Economy, or the chief financial officer of a home, don't want to put up with a lot of nonsense that big companies often have.
So as a result, believe it or not, entrepreneurship indeed is the new women's movement.
A lot of those 50 plus educated women say, I don't need the hassle.
I'm going to start my own business.
And maybe I'll even start out with a few girlfriends.
So you say the obstacles are getting financing to start a business and ageism, sexism multiplied by a factor of, you know, however old you are.
So how do they how do they do it?
How do they start their new businesses?
They pool money with their friends or?
Well, one of the reasons why you see entrepreneurship in older age is that, first off, you've got more experience.
You've got more confidence typically in yourself, but also you might have a partner who has got a pension or a retirement capability.
So you've got a, shall we say, steady stream of income or at least feel somewhat stable and yes, pool money with friends and family and the like.
And quite often these businesses are not product focused, but service focused.
So the real capital, if you will, is her time, not just the money.
A recent development, I should say, demographic development is about 20% of Americans now are not having children.
Right.
Tell me about how that's changed retirement for everybody.
You know, it is amazing because, you know, the way that we've always retired or aged well was not by following doctor's orders are choosing our parents well or frankly, even eating and exercises the way we should.
You know, those are great indicators of what we should be doing.
Well, frankly, we always age well because we had family that was there to support us to to do those big and little things have become more difficult as we age.
And Bonnie, you're right, the birth rate, the fertility rate is dropping right through the floor.
And we've seen this happen before with with famines and war and disease.
But right after that, the birth rate would pop right back up, hence the baby boom after World War Two and after the Great Depression.
But this time after COVID, it even dropped lower.
In fact, just between us born because, you know, I don't if anybody else is going to hear us say this, but during COVID, during quarantine, I thought there'd be a baby boom, because after all, you had a lot of time on your hands.
Answer was No, actually birth rates went even further down.
How does retirement differ in LGBTQ families or couples?
Well, we're finding that LGBTQ and companies with no income, so-called double income, no kids, families, they are starting to show, we say self annuitize, if you will, their own longevity.
They're becoming painfully aware that they need to find, shall we say, the supports of how they will age well in their older years.
So some of the strategies that are being used is you'll often find that LGBTQ families and individuals have really kind of adopted, if you will, a niece or a nephew to almost fill in like a daughter or son might otherwise moving to communities where there's real services that are available to them.
And quite often that because due to luckily for luck and hard work, they may have higher incomes.
So they are in many ways really driving the business for home care and home services.
So they can age well even without family support.
I think of myself obviously getting closer to retirement age people.
What about people who do everything they need to do, who save for retirement, who make plans of what they're going to do in retirement, and then when they get there or get close to it, none of that is going to work because they have lost capabilities physically.
I used to be a show jumper in addition to hosting this show, and I broke my neck and damaged my spinal cord.
And one of the things I wanted to do in retirement was, ride.
I can't do it anymore.
So what do you say to those people?
President Eisenhower, when he was in the military, would say, you know, for warfare, you plan your plan, you plan, and when it's time to go to war, you throw the plans away and you just get up and fight.
And I think that perhaps we know we can do the best plans possible.
We need to do that to envision not just the future singularly, but we need to imagine the futures.
And so for those things that we want to do, we might want to have a range.
We are not want to say that I'm definitely going to be doing one thing or the other, but to try to prepare to lay the groundwork for two or three things.
You know, it's not just your own health, but the health of a loved one may really put, you know, proverbially the kibosh, if you will, to say where to spend the first three years of our retirement, traveling everywhere that we put on hold.
If one of you is not well, that's not going to happen.
What about those who can do that, maybe in terms of subject area or where they want to live or something like that, but can't do it financially?
What do you say to them?
Well, you know, the vast majority of us, upwards of 80, 85% want to age in place, which is fancy for my marriage.
My mortgage in my memories is right where I'm living.
This is where I want to stay.
And so it's it's going to be a real challenge on, you know, you may have retired from a career, but you may now also have to work part time or full time or something like that to have the additional liquidity that you'll need.
We may want to think more creatively, not just for ourselves, but for our children, which is stop asking the question, what do you want to be when you grow up or when you think your career is going to end?
Sort of asking yourself how many things will you be when you grow up and how many things will you possibly do?
And so we have to rethink work in order to be prepared for rethinking retirement.
What about volunteering?
How does that play into all this?
The pay isn't great, but the pay is perfect for something else.
It gives you the reason to get up in the morning.
It gives you a sense of meaning.
And by the way, the real idea of being part of a community is contributing.
And so volunteering, the volunteer workforce is over whelming, with the older population overwhelmingly built up by older women.
That is the human capital that makes all those big and little things we take forgranted in community actually happen.
It's a great way not just to give back, but that's how you meet new people.
That's how you get out.
That's how you say, you know, I may be retired and I and on Monday morning, though, I've got something to do that has a greater purpose and simply an hourly rate wage.
How is the Internet changing all of that?
The Internet is, shall we say, a license to hunt.
It really allows you to connect with more organizations, find out things.
And by the way, the Internet is a great way to learn.
Just because you are 18 or 21, If you choose to go to college or grad school or whatever, learning never stops.
If you're going to be living for 85 plus years, think about how many things in technology and knowledge have changed over your career.
Now, before I start, praising, technology as the answer.
Let me caveat it with one thing, though, Bonnie.
Keep in mind, the average older adult over 65 spends upwards of 5 to 6 hours per day watching TV.
Don't let the computer and video games fill in another 5 to 6 hours.
High tech is no replacement for high touch.
There's a sneaking thing in me that is telling me that's a whole lot easier to say than to do.
I mean, what about shy people who have a hard time making friends?
And those with physical disabilities, or not healthy?
But the bottom line is, is that we should try.
And by the way, you don't wake up one day say, I retired on Friday, Monday, I'm going to start.
No, this is something that as we're talking about, planning for retirement, it's not just about how much money you've put away, how much practice have you put into finding out where you might retire, where you might work to work on those social skills?
Early fifties, late forties.
Retirement begins in our heads far sooner than than we ever thought.
You mentioned earlier that you expected after COVID when people started having fewer children and or Americans, I should say, started having fewer children.
And you expected it to pop back up again.
But that didn't happen.
What we do have, regardless of COVID, a fairly shaky economy right now, there have been all kinds of layoffs in the tech sector.
And, you know, inflation is calming down a little bit, but there may be a whole lot more of it needed to calm down in the next year or two.
So how is that impacting people's plans for retirement?
I committed the greatest sin of any research scientist, and that is is I, I made a forecast and a prediction during my lifetime usually should predict them far enough away where if you're right or wrong, you don't go get the blame or for that matter, the credit.
No, certainly the economy.
But uncertainty is infecting affecting birthrates around the world.
This is not just a U.S. phenomenon, in fact, of the industrialized countries, we're still pretty good.
1.6 children per female.
You need 2.1 children per female just to keep it even.
So, well relatively speaking, we're doing okay.
But uncertainty, whether it's about the climate, the economy, about politics or our personal situations, we are finding that that to be, shall we say, the the surest form of birth control that you can imagine, which is very interesting because our parents and our grandparents who faced world wars, great depressions and had far less education than the younger population today, they had kids, they had a lot of kids and so something else is going on here.
And it is, shall we say, it's uncertain as to what it is.
Our birth rate is going down, but immigration, as I understand it, is gone so far up in the in recent decades that the average number of Americans has gone from over the last almost 70 years, from about 150 million to or 170 million in the fifties, mid-fifties to 340 something million no.w For the foreseeable future, the United States will probably be the third largest country in the world for the next couple of decades, population wise.
But one of the things we do have to do is to start rethinking what are the institutions around education and health care and whatnot to enable not just having pure numbers is national wealth, having pure numbers of educated, engaged workers and skilled workers to be able to fill the jobs, the needs and indeed the volunteering tasks that we need is really putting population to use.
Thank you so much.
Dr. Dr. Joseph Coughlin, head of MIT's AgeLab.
Really appreciate your time and learn so much from listening to you.
Fantastic for being and thank you so much for being here Bonnie.
That's it for this edition.
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