What If You’ve Got Retirement All Wrong?

Forget the Number…

The problem with American television is that too often it reminds me of what I miss about those fruited plains.

Recently, my wife Yulia and I have been working our way through The Four Seasons, Shrinking, Hacks, and a few other American series. And every so often, one of them will show a quiet lakehouse outside a cozy New England town, or a familiar California street, and I find myself narrating to Yulia absentmindedly:

“Oh, I know exactly where that is, I had lunch there…” or “If we ever move back to the US, that’s what I really want—a small, simple house on a lake in the Northeast, maybe Tennessee.” Don’t get me started on Yellowstone…

The point here is that the American TV series we watch fuels a wicked sense of ambivalence.

I mean, I talk a big game about retiring to Europe, and with great reason: Affordability.

The lifestyle I have in Europe is unavailable at a reasonable price point in America. And there’s the joy of hopping on planes, trains, and automobiles (sometimes ferries) to flit off to some random and amazing corner of Europe… the south of Ireland, northern Scotland, western Greece, eastern France, Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula.

Honestly, I could carry on with the list for several more paragraphs. So much of Europe is so phenomenal once you escape the tourist trail of major cities with direct flights to America. Traveling the continent, or popping into North Africa, is one of the great adventures of European living, eating, and exploring this corner of the globe.

Then again, lots of America is equally phenomenal. I’ve traveled through 47 of the 50 states and the list of beauty is just as long… Puget Sound and western Washington all the way down through western Oregon and the California coast to San Diego. Northern Montana. Eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and the Smoky Mountains.

That is the stew that swirls inside my mind all the time.

I love Europe; I love my European life.

I love the affordability and I am content knowing that the nest egg I’ve built will very likely afford a very pleasant retirement in some place like Greece (as I mentioned in a dispatch last week), or maybe somewhere else like Montenegro or France or even affordable parts of Scandinavia (snow doesn’t bother me).

But… my kids are in America. I’m 60. I miss them tremendously, and just maybe I want to be close to them again so that I can spend time with them as I grow older.

What I’m getting at here is that retirement—whether in the US or Europe—is an exercise in flexibility.

All those American TV shows that pull on my red, white, and blue heartstrings have quietly taught me that I don’t have the retirement plan I thought I did when I first alighted in Prague back in 2018.

Not a real one, at least. Not a pin-in-the-map, this-is-where-I-die-content plan. I imagine most people don’t. Most of us have fuzzy notions of where we might like to live.

Wall Street and the mainstream personal-finance media sell retirement as a decision—a number, a date, a dot on a map—as though you sit down at Age X, sign the papers, and coast into the sunset.

But 40 years of adulting has taught me that life doesn’t run on a spreadsheet.

Kids move. We move. A country you adored growing up jumps the shark financially; a country you never considered suddenly makes perfect sense. The Greek lifestyle I’m eyeing today might well be the New Hampshire cabin on a lake I’m eyeing in five years.

Truthfully, I don’t know.

And I’ve made peace with not knowing—because I realize what actually matters was never the plan—it’s whether you’ve built the freedom to changethe plan. Optionality is the plan.

The financial flexibility to wake up at 65, or 70, or 75, and decide you’d rather be near your kids after all, and simply do it—without a bank balance reminding you that you can’t.

That’s exactly what I have been building toward in my nest egg over the last five or so years: safety to weather the lunacy of financial markets in the current age of egregious over-indebtedness, and income to grow that nest egg now and to kick off even largely monthly cash flows when I decide to scale back my earned-income efforts.

That kind of flexibility is deliberate, you build it because you decide that freedom of choice is always worth more than a fixed address.