How to Retire Better, From Retirees Who Learned the Hard Way
Lessons from retirees on the biggest regrets of their postwork lives
4 min
Thousands of Americans retire every day short on cash, friendships and plans.
Many retirees say they realised too late how they could have prepared for a more financially secure and rewarding postwork life. They would have focused on saving more money to cover the higher cost of living. Or they would have put more time into building relationships, taking better care of their health or cultivating new pursuits.
One reason retirement is so hard to prepare for is we often lack models of postwork life to emulate, retirees and financial advisers say. Though our culture is awash with images of professional success, we are a little hazier on what retirement success looks like and what it takes to achieve.
To sharpen that picture, we asked retirees about what they would do differently if given a second chance. Their regrets offer insights that can help people think and plan better at every life stage.
“Regret makes us feel bad, but it can help us do better,” said Daniel Pink, who researched people’s relationships to regret across a range of areas for his book “The Power of Regret.”
Here are three lessons retirees say they wish they had known sooner.
Investing for retirement means more than money
Jim Pilzner, a retired entrepreneur, regrets not setting goals for himself when he retired about four years ago. Now 78, he found there is only so much golf to play and only so many lunches to go to.
“I would counsel my younger self, and any other active, achieving person to recognise what drives them and what success really means,” said Pilzner.
He eventually figured out that the two things that motivated him most during his career—taking action and learning new things—were the same recipe he needed for retirement.
So this spring he enrolled at University of Nevada, Reno with two classes (earning a 4.0) and will be full-time in the fall. He is studying for a degree in political science and history.
Retirees frequently don’t realise how much their career provided a sense of identity and self-worth. Many fail to grasp the need to plan for a different source of purpose in retirement, said Betty Wang, a financial adviser in Denver.
People carefully plan how they will spend money in retirement but often give far less thought to how to spend their time.
Jay Holt, 74, regrets not retiring sooner. He planned to spend his postwork years playing polo. But in 2015, he fell while playing and had to give up the sport.
The resident of Cincinnatus, N.Y., who retired in 2013 at age 64, now wishes he had had a few more years in which to enjoy this activity.
Relationships are the key to retirement
The best predictor of longevity, health and happiness in later life is the quality of your relationships. That is the finding of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed families for decades.
Dan Roberts, 72, in Idyllwild, Calif., wishes he had kept up with former colleagues for personal and professional reasons.
Roberts retired about 18 months ago. Soon after, his son and his family, who were living just two hours away, moved to New Zealand.
Roberts and his wife, Robin Roberts, said only two visits a year are doable on their budget. He said he would have been able to afford more-frequent trips had he kept the door open to contract work by maintaining both his relationships with former colleagues and a project-management certification.
“We miss our grandchildren terribly,” his wife said.
David Edmisten, an adviser in Prescott, Ariz., said clients sometimes regret delaying retirement for this reason. The extra years working come at the cost of missing time with family and friends and postponing trips, he said.
“Some even had people close to them pass away and regret not being able to spend more time with their loved ones while they still could,” Edmisten said.
Retirement is longer than you think
Arthur Parmentier, 69, regrets retiring at 65, rather than working a few more years, partly because he missed out on a few more years of contributions to his retirement account.
The Providence, R.I., resident claimed Social Security at 65, accepting a lower monthly benefit than he would have received by waiting.
“Had I waited two more years or maybe three, I would have been quite comfortable, but right now, I’m living on Social Security and trying not to touch my IRA,” said Parmentier. “I think now that I may live well into my 80s, so I have to be prepared for that and make sure my IRA will last me throughout those years.”
The life expectancy for a 65-year-old is 84 for men and nearly 87 for women, according to projections by the Society of Actuaries based on 2019 data. Surveys suggest many Americans vastly underestimate those numbers. Of 1,500 adults ages 45 to 80 polled by the Society of Actuaries in 2015, 41% of pre retirees and 37% of retirees underestimated their life expectancy by five or more years, while 14% of pre retirees and 18% of retirees underestimated it by two to four years.
Social Security allows people to start their retirement benefits any time between ages 62 and 70, and increases the payment for every month of delay.
For many, the math favours starting at 70, when monthly benefits before cost-of-living adjustments are 76% higher than at 62, according to Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economist.
A person who postpones benefits until age 70 instead of 62 would have to live to at least 80 to come out ahead, said Kotlikoff, founder of MaximizeMySocialSecurity.com, which advises people on claiming decisions.
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
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