The first couple of years in retirement are often the most difficult. But they also can set the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically. Stephen Kreider Yoder, 67, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, 68, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly  Retirement Rookies   column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with early in retirement .

Karen

“Um, Karen?” Steve said without looking away from his computer. He was using the unnaturally neutral tone that means he’s trying not to sound judgmental.

“Oh, no,” I responded. “What is it?”

His screen showed the month’s credit-card statement. “What’s this bill for $28?” he asked. Then, after a few clicks: “Hmm, looks like it’s each month since August last year.”

We were in the study pouring over our spending records to smoke out what we call “parasites”—recurring costs that quietly suck dollars and give little or nothing in return.

I had no idea what the $28 was for, I said, racking my brain for several minutes. “Oh, wait. Yes, last August was when my sewing machine stopped working.” I had found a website that promised advice on how to fix my Bernina Sport 802. It didn’t help, I took the machine to an expert and I forgot about the advice site.

Here it was, much later, leaching a monthly fee. I must have used the credit card thinking it was a one-off.

Parasites like this were also infesting us back when we were working. But ever since our salaries stopped, each dollar seems to have grown in value. And retirement has given us the time to finally ferret out the freeloaders and to analyse what a drain they are on our wallets.

We decided to review every credit-card transaction and bank debit of the past year—and cancel as many recurring charges as we can.

Some parasites are unwitting, like the help-site bill. Others are for services we once wanted and don’t use anymore—like our Netflix account, which we’d been talking about canceling for two years. It was just $15.49 a month, so did we really want to lose it? Yes. We pulled the plug in October. (Sorry, kids, if you were still tapping in.)

Some sponges aren’t obvious from our statements alone. I recently realised that boxes of our eco-friendly dishwasher detergent were piling up. I thought I was buying online when we ran out but had mistakenly OK’d a monthly subscription instead.

Even where a service is useful, there are sometimes free alternatives. I was paying $14.95 a month for audio books. I canceled and now borrow them free of charge from the San Francisco Public Library. We’ll save nearly $180 a year.

We began looking for leaches more broadly and identified a subspecies: the lost-opportunity parasite. After we retired, we began riding city buses and local rail more often, pulling out adult-rate transit cards we’d accumulated. Then it occurred to us that we were leaving money on the table by not getting half-price senior passes: $1.25 for the bus instead of $2.50. Duh!

More lost opportunity awaited in a stack of gift cards I had rubber-banded together in my desk drawer including several from Barnes & Noble bookstores and Peet’s Coffee. I took a bus to the nearest Barnes & Noble, learned there was $30 on the cards and did some early Christmas shopping. All together, the gift cards were storing $225.

The $28-a-month parasite tracing to my sewing machine proved easy to exterminate. I called the customer-care number, negotiated a partial refund of $84 and canceled the subscription.

That will save $336 a year, enough to pay an expert to fix my Bernina several times over.

Steve

There’s a parasite down in the garage, it occurred to me after a bill came in the mail from the DMV.

The letter asked for $162 to renew the registration on my vintage Honda CB750 for a year. I nearly paid it, as I’ve done annually, each year vowing to tune the bike up and get it back on the road within months.

It’s one of two old Honda motorcycles that I’ve written about before—how they once brought me joy in the restoring but now are mostly garage gewgaws.

Our anti-parasite crusade forced me to get honest with myself last month. I could no longer use the excuse that I’ll get to the 750 after I retire. I’ve had two years, and I’m not likely to get to it next year.

So I registered the bike for non operation at $27, saving $135. Now I need to phone our insurer and back out of the $436-a-year policy on the bike. Between those two parasitic bills, I have probably paid more than the value of the bike over the seven years that I haven’t ridden it.

Maybe I can get the other bike on the road, the CB350F. If not, I’ll assign non operational status to it when the DMV bills me for it.

Still, the hardest parasite to face may be the biggest one of all: our house.

We love being retired in San Francisco, and our thriving neighbourhood has proved to be the perfect environment for a couple of aging city slickers. We are walking distance to restaurants, shops, libraries, parks and pickleball courts, and a 20-minute bike ride to the beach or nearly any other place in a city full of vibrant districts. Circles of friends are nearby.

Our home is a Victorian museum piece with a classic San Francisco feel that makes us feel even more part of our city.

But it’s too big, and it is increasingly becoming a financial and psychological drain. What we dish out in mortgage payments, home and earthquake insurance, utilities and property taxes could rent us a decent house in the Midwest with money left over to travel half the year.

There’s also the constant maintenance, the bane of a vintage-house owner. Tourists and residents alike love this city’s Painted Ladies, but we owners must fight constant entropy to keep them made up with paint jobs and preserved detail.

That’s not to mention the costs within. A decrepit old breaker box had been nagging at me from the garage wall for years, silently reminding me every time I walked past that we needed to replace it with a higher-amp box that was up to modern code.

I put off the task because of the cost. I could do it myself when I had time, I imagined, and avoided thinking about it—easy to do when life was busy with workplace and family demands.

I finally hired an electrician, who came in September to replace the breaker box and the wiring that fed it. There’s still the balky ancient redwood gutter to fix, and some plumbing issues.

We’re not ready to sell out and move to the Midwest, which we might eventually do when we’re in our slower years. And we can’t stomach the pain of looking for a smaller place in San Francisco.

So we’ll live with this big parasite for now, the elephant in the room as we hunt down smaller leaches.

Ever used the office printer for your kid’s homework assignment or scrolled Facebook Marketplace during an all-hands Zoom meeting? Fair warning: Your employer may be paying close attention.

Big companies on the hunt for efficiency are deploying perk police to bust employees for seemingly minor infractions that, by the letter of company law, can result in termination.

“We have had lots of requests for new controls,” says Katie MacKillop, U.S. director of Payhawk, which administers company credit-card accounts and watches for misuse.

Clients are asking Payhawk to restrict when and where company cards work. For example, a company can limit a lunch allowance to be available only on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and be usable at Chipotle but not at Kroger . In partnership with Visa and Mastercard , Payhawk is developing a feature that sends real-time spending alerts to corporate finance teams and allows them to instantly block suspicious transactions by employees.

MacKillop’s firm doesn’t track what happens to employees who violate company policies, but she says there is little doubt employers are taking codes of conduct more seriously.

That helps explain reports of crackdowns at Meta , where employees were fired for spending $25 meal allowances on other items, Ernst & Young dismissing workers who watched multiple training videos at the same time, and Target canning employees who jumped the line to buy coveted Stanley water bottles ahead of the general public. The companies declined to comment on the incidents.

As the employer-employee power struggle tilts in companies’ favour, some businesses are using strict rules enforcement to make an example of rule-breakers or reduce payroll without having a real layoff. An employer feeling buyer’s remorse after a post pandemic hiring spree can use the company handbook to push out unwanted employees, says human-resources consultant Suzanne Lucas.

“When you are desperately hiring, you’re definitely overlooking things,” says Lucas, who cheekily brands herself the Evil HR Lady. “When you need to cut head count, you tighten up the rules.”

Workers argue many so-called perks are designed to increase productivity. A free meal is an enticement to stay at your desk. A recorded HR tutorial is less a reprieve from the awkwardness of in-person, sexual-harassment training than an invitation to keep plugging away while paying half attention to a video on your second monitor.

Why gin up excuses to fire people instead of simply announcing a round of job cuts? A few reasons, Lucas says.

Layoffs imply a business is struggling, and companies may want to avoid shaking the confidence of customers or investors. Employers often feel obligated—or are contractually bound—to offer severance packages to laid-off workers. Firing people for cause can save money, she says.

Then there’s the effect on a company’s remaining employees. Few things put workers on notice like seeing colleagues pink-slipped for minor offences. And, as a matter of principle, stealing is stealing even if it is a small amount of company money or time.

Warning shot

If a goal of harsh consequences is to keep people in line, then it’s working on Matt Tedesco.

When he read a Financial Times report that Meta fired employees who spent Grubhub meal allowances on things like acne pads and laundry detergent in a saga dubbed “Grubgate,” he flashed back to a similar episode at a defunct company where he used to work. He says a half dozen colleagues in sales were shown the door because they used meal stipends to buy groceries.

Tedesco, 47, describes himself as a rule follower in general and says he is doubly sure to do everything by the book in the current climate. He started this fall as a sales account executive at Hearst after being laid off by S&P Global last year.

“It’s hard to get a job right now—it took me months,” he says. “From an employee standpoint, my takeaway is don’t abuse any privilege because it’s not worth the risk.”

People in a range of industries admitted to me privately that they’ve broken rules like these in the past but said they’d never cop to it publicly. One likened today’s workplace to a street with a 30 mph speed limit, where you routinely get away with driving 37 mph and feel blindsided when you’re pulled over and ticketed. Enforcement levels fluctuate, this person said, and seem to be high right now.

Cracking down is a time-honoured tactic when companies feel financial pressure. In 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession, a former private-client relationship manager at Fidelity told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he and three colleagues lost their jobs for running fantasy-football leagues at work, in violation of a corporate policy against gambling. The stakes in his league: $20. Fidelity had laid off 1,700 employees earlier that year.

And in 2018, when Wells Fargo announced significant head count cuts, the bank fired or suspended more than a dozen bankers who put dinners on the company tab and doctored the receipts. The bank said at the time that it pays for meals when employees work late, but some ordered takeout before the allowed hour and changed the timestamps on the bills.

Without knowing all the details, it can be hard to understand why companies police small dollars when they appear to spend freely on pricier items, says Jennifer Dulski , chief executive of Rising Team, a maker of employee-engagement software. She notes Meta offices are known for vending machines stocked with headphones, keyboards and other electronics available to employees free of charge, yet the company is getting serious about lunch money.

“They’re either weeding or just trying to make an example of behaviour they think is inappropriate,” Dulski says.

Employers have good reasons to be sticklers in some cases, says Cedar Boschan, a forensic accountant in Culver City, Calif. Companies can invite tax trouble if money earmarked for perks and business expenses is misspent on other things.

So, don’t put all of the blame for policy crackdowns on human resources. Save some for the one department that HR might beat in a popularity contest: accounting.

Eighty years ago world leaders meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., created the International Monetary Fund to prevent the sorts of economic imbalances that had brought on the Great Depression.

Today, imbalances once again threaten global harmony. China’s massive trade surplus is fuelling a backlash. The U.S. attributes those surpluses to China holding down consumption while subsidising manufacturing and exports, inflicting collateral damage on its trading partners. And it would like the IMF to say so.

The IMF, though, has steered a more neutral path. It has prodded Beijing to change its economic model while playing down any harm from that model for the world.

Decades ago, U.S. leaders thought bringing China into the postwar economic institutions such as the IMF and World Trade Organization would make Beijing more market-oriented and the world more stable. They now think the opposite. China has doubled down on an authoritarian, state-driven economic model that many in the West see as incompatible with their own.

The IMF, the world’s most influential international economic institution, may find itself torn between irreconcilable visions of the global economy, especially if former President Donald Trump is re-elected next month.

Trump has prioritised reducing the trade deficit, especially with China, through tariffs, an approach the IMF has criticised. Many of his advisers are deeply suspicious of both Beijing and international institutions. Project 2025, an agenda for a second Trump term that includes many Trump advisers as authors, has suggested the U.S. should leave the IMF, though there is no sign Trump agrees.

The U.S. has been upset about the growth in China’s trade surplus since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, wiping out U.S. factory jobs in what became known as the China shock .

China’s surpluses have since shrunk as a share of its gross domestic product. But because China’s economy is now so large, that surplus has grown as share of world GDP, to 0.7%. Other countries are alarmed at a growing flood of cheap manufacturing imports, dubbed “China Shock 2.0 .”

Jake Sullivan , President Biden’s national security adviser, said at the Brookings Institution Wednesday that China “is producing far more than domestic demand, dumping excess onto global markets at artificially low prices, driving manufacturers around the world out of business, and creating a chokehold on supply chains.”

Treasury Undersecretary Jay Shambaugh told me at a panel organised by the Atlantic Council two weeks ago that China is “already 30% of global manufacturing. You can’t grow at a massive rate when you start from 30% of the world without displacing not just us, but lots of countries.”

Pointing out such tensions is part of the IMF’s job, Shambaugh said at the event. While the IMF has said China’s industrial policies may be hurting its trading partners, “I would like to see them pay more attention…to the aggregate external imbalance.”

The IMF’s architects believed a breakdown in economic cooperation contributed to the Depression. Countries such as the U.S. that ran large trade surpluses felt no pressure to help those with deficits, like Britain. Depressed countries sought to limit imports and boost exports by devaluing their currencies or imposing tariffs, in effect seeking to export their unemployment.

To end such “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies, British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed that trade be conducted through a global bank and currency that would prevent big deficits and surpluses. Instead, at Bretton Woods, delegates agreed to peg their currencies to the dollar with the IMF overseeing periodic revaluations.

By the 1970s, inflation and growing trade deficits caused fixed exchange rates to collapse. Cross-border capital flows soared, enabling poor countries to borrow from western banks and investors. When they defaulted, the IMF had a new mission: helping them restructure their debts, usually on the condition of strict budget austerity. IMF, a popular joke ran, stood for “It’s Mostly Fiscal.”

Even today, while the IMF does still monitor trade deficits and surpluses, it rarely attributes those to cross-border influences, focusing instead on fiscal and other domestic factors.

In a blog post last month, IMF staff investigated the U.S. deficit and Chinese surplus and found little connection.

The U.S. deficit reflected strong government and household spending, while China’s surplus resulted from slumping property markets and domestic confidence. They “are mostly homegrown,” they wrote. In an implicit rebuke to the U.S., they wrote, “Worries that China’s external surpluses result from industrial policies reflect an incomplete view.”

This benign view of Chinese surpluses has drawn criticism. Brad Setser , a former U.S. Treasury official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the IMF has relied on data that understates the surplus.

Setser also raps the IMF’s advice to Beijing to let interest rates and the exchange rate fall while tightening fiscal policy—that is, raising taxes or cutting spending. That, he said, will weaken imports, boost exports and thus widen the trade surplus.

“Their analysis is all about how bad the fiscal situation is, with no real analysis of the balance of payments position,” Setser said.

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas , the IMF’s chief economist, disagreed. He noted the IMF has consistently urged China to boost household consumption such as by strengthening the social safety net and shifting more of the tax burden from the high-consuming poor to the high-saving rich. He also noted that the IMF has argued for fiscal stimulus now and consolidation later.

Does the IMF’s opinion make a difference? Most countries—the big ones especially—will never need to borrow from the IMF and can thus ignore its advice. The IMF has long urged the U.S. to rein in its budget deficit, noting this contributes to its trade deficit, and the U.S. has just as long ignored it.

And yet when the IMF speaks, it does so with an authority and credibility that no private analyst or individual country commands.

China’s approach to boosting exports is “killing jobs elsewhere, and that’s something the IMF should call out,” said Martin Mühleisen , a former senior IMF official now at The Atlantic Council. “China doesn’t want bad publicity from the IMF, in part because the criticism would resonate in many countries.”