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Jun 2714 min read

We Need to Redefine Retirement

Updated: Oct 16



Explore the changing landscape of retirement as we confront challenges and reveal hopeful strategies for a future that will inherently differ from the past. We discuss the financial hurdles women face and spotlight the rising financial savvy among younger generations. Challenging traditional life stages, we introduce a 'new map of life' and push for redefining terms like aging, retirement, and financial security. This episode also highlights the growing trend of Americans retiring abroad, drawn by lower living and healthcare costs. Tune in to discover how the future of retirement might unfold and learn how to define it on your own terms.





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Episode Transcript:

This transcript was computer-generated and human-edited and might contain errors. 


Lana: Welcome to Signal Shift by Horizon Shift Lab. We’re your hosts, Lana Price, Raakhee Natha, and Sue Chi. Each episode, we explore the latest signals—in technology, culture, and society—uncovering insights that will impact our daily lives in the future. Join us as we shift perspectives, explore possibilities, and delve into real changes in our world. Curious to learn more? Go to horizonshiftlab.com.


Ok so today we will be discussing the future of retirement. We know that retirement will look different in the future. For one, in the US, the Social Security Administration has projected that by 2034, it won't be able to pay out full benefits unless changes are made. We're also living longer lives; advances in healthcare and better living standards mean that many of us will spend more years in retirement than previous generations. However, this increased longevity comes with challenges. In the US, we have some of the highest healthcare costs in the world, and it doesn't necessarily translate into better health outcomes. So, older adults are more likely to incur higher healthcare expenses, which can, of course, significantly impact their financial stability in retirement. So what could the future of retirement look like?


Today, we will each present a signal that we found—something that isn't necessarily commonplace today but could be part of a new normal in the future. So, who would like to go first and present their signal on the future of retirement?


Sue: This is Sue. I can take a shot at it.

First, Lana, I have to say thank you for picking this topic because retirement is one of those things I know is really important, especially the older I get, and yet the impetus just isn't there to continue to proactively work on it. So, I take this as a really great nudge and just an eye-opener. 

The focus that I have is on women—specifically, as women, I wanted to understand how we're impacted by retirement in the future. 


Many studies have shown that women basically face what I'm calling a Triple Tax, right? So, you mentioned some of it—one is we’re living longer lives in general, and on average, women live about five years longer than our male counterparts. The second is that they already make less compared to men due to wage inequality. So, actually, by the time we retire, we will have, on average, 44% less savings than men, according to Vanguard. And then the third is that, actually, when we do invest, women tend to be more conservative investors, and so we like to keep things in cash a lot more than we like to invest in the market. So that reduces our overall size of our nest egg, right? 


So, basically, all these reports are telling me, as a woman, not only am I going to outlive my partner, I'm going to have much less running room to do that financially. So, I was like, great, what's the good news? And actually I did find some good news. And so there are some hopeful outlooks. 


The signal I wanted to focus on was a study from Fidelity that actually showed that women, particularly younger women from Gen Z, are taking retirement savings and investing very seriously. And so, according to them, since 2019, there's been a 48% increase in new accounts at Fidelity by women, and according to the survey they have, six in ten women are now investing outside of their retirement accounts. Seventy-one percent (71%) of Gen Zers are investing, compared to 63% of Millennials, and that's compared to 55% of Gen X and 57% of Baby Boomers, and these are women. 


So, overall, even though women tend to be more conservative than men when it comes to investing, if they're invested, that bodes well in the future because we've seen traditionally, people who kind of use the 'set it and forget it' investing strategy over the long run tend to do really well. 


And so, I actually found this really surprising because so many of the reports are continuing to say that women are not investing and all of these things and to me, this is really important in a couple of ways because I think it breaks some old taboos that we've been holding, right? 


The first is especially women, when we were younger, we were told that talking about money isn't proper. It's not ladylike. And so now people are breaking that mold and saying it's actually okay to talk about investing as women. So, I love that. 


And then, in the meantime, in a household, men have traditionally been the ones taking the lead on investing, but now women are seeing themselves as the role of money manager, not just in the traditional sense of paying bills for your household, for example, but really taking control of their investing future. So, I really like that as well. 


And then I gotta admit, we talk about this idea, about technology a lot—this wouldn't be possible without the advent of financial technology tools. Just making it very accessible to invest, and as scary as it may sound to some, the idea that you can actually do financial transactions on your phone now just makes it accessible to so many people. 



So, overall, I just found that this was a real bright spot among some gloomy news about what the future of retirement would look like. And I think, especially because younger women are taking advantage of this and taking control now of their future, I really hope for them in the next 30 to 40 years, they're going to have a sizable investment that they will have that kind of financial security the longer that they live and they can be more comfortable later on in life. 


And I think for me, it was just a really great conversation here in my own home on this topic, really starting to think more proactively about what we want the next few decades to look like and how we can start just being better prepared for it. So, yeah, so this was very meaningful at home. Thanks for the topic.


[6:36]


Lana: Thanks so much for sharing that, and especially of course since we're all women, right, and making it personal to us and what we can do to prepare for retirement. What about you, Raakhee?


Raakhee: Yes, I think it's another optimistic one. The Stanford Center on Longevity is focusing on working on, Lana, what you mentioned right up front—is that we're going to be living to a much longer age. So pegging really is saying, the 'Hundred Year Life', is kind of a normality, right, within certain cities and for certain people.


And one of the big things for them is understanding that these stages of life, the traditional framework of life, which was typically: school, and work, and then retirement—kind of those three blocks—that really has to change. And when the timing of that, what that looks like, even what we may call the stages, or the breakup of those stages in that way, right. 


We've certainly seen it with education; continuous learning has been the biggest thing. We now know that, hey, there are no boundaries to when you go to school and when you study something.


So they are developing something called a 'new map of life', really throwing out creative ideas around how these stages of life can look different, and how somebody could start to do something really different at 50 years into their life, right? Because there are really no boundaries around that; the ones that we created were societal. They were just made up; they were constructs. So now we get to create new constructs within what we are able to do. So as long as you're healthy and fit, which you can or cannot be at any age—it's not necessarily an age dictation, right, if you do the right things -- you're able to do all kinds of things we never thought possible.


And that goes with another signal that really stuck out to me in the last few weeks. Two incidents of this-- one, we’ve seen this in the last couple of years, but there are more older models on the catwalk, right. We see a lot more older models in print photography, and everywhere. And I think this year on the catwalks, they were the most oldest models they've ever had cumulatively across the catwalks, right. So it's very normalized. Look, I will go and say that the pictures I saw, the women typically had gray hair, their faces weren't covered not to show their wrinkles, but they were still slim and tall, right? So that's another conversation about what we are saying there. But definitely, older women on the ramps, so the highest number of that.


And then something interesting I saw as well, I think this was in Buenos Aires, but one of the beauty pageant holders, a 60-year-old woman, won. So they took away the age restriction, and y’know, however we feel about beauty competitions… But the fact is this lady was able to now enter, won this competition. 


So what that really has got me thinking about, in relation to this—what Stanford's doing with this map of life—is again how different these phases can look, and it really raised for me how sometimes how I feel about the word 'geriatric pregnancy'. Is that how people might feel about the word 'retirement'? Right? That it's almost offensive to be like, "I'm retiring at 60? Why would you even ask me that? Like no.” And would we maybe differentiate and start talking about financial retirement, exactly to your points, Sue—that's the really important part—and not use 'retirement' as a term so loosely around, "Yeah, pack up your bags and take it easy now," kind of thing, right?


When we have so much ahead of us, and would we maybe start using new terminology, like 'transition' or something like that? So, yeah, that's what I found.

[10:46]


Lana: So many interesting points there. So right now, I'm in Barcelona, and I'll be here for three months—just temporarily—but I'm really intrigued by other expats, like people who are living abroad. 


There's been a growing trend of Americans retiring abroad, and the Social Security Administration has said that even in the last three years, the number of people drawing their benefits overseas has almost doubled. But that really isn't even the full number because someone could have an American bank and still pull their money overseas, so they still think that it's not representing the full number. The State Department believes there are five million retired Americans living abroad outside of the US. 


And so even in my own life, I know, I started to think about it, and I can name four people who have decided to retire in a different country. They've all picked different places, and so I know someone who's retired to Mexico, one in Italy, one moving to the Philippines, and one moving to Korea—and that's just from an extremely small sample size.


And I think the other signal that I found is countries that are, specifically providing incentives and visas for retired Americans, right. So, they have certain qualifications—like an age and then to have a certain minimum monthly income that comes from your benefits. And then you have to pass a criminal check, and then they give you a visa where you can become a citizen, or live there, and qualify for benefits in that country. And so, to me, this says people are voting with their feet. Right? If it's too expensive in the US for our housing costs and for healthcare costs, they're looking at other options. And so just to think about if this became wider, even on a broader scale, of course, the economic implications both for the US and also for the host countries, but then there are other second-order, third-order consequences if we have waves of people leaving so that they can have a better quality of life somewhere else. 


So that's something that I found, and yeah, I would love to open it up for conversation in terms of thinking about all of these signals and how they might come together. What's coming up for you both as you think about these signals on the future of retirement?


[13:46]


Raakhee: Yeah, I think kind of circling back to Sue, your signal was so interesting because I literally just saw on my phone that the account, I think it's Girls That Invest, won the entrepreneurship award at a Cartier event last night. And I literally just had the thought around: social media has also played, in this sense, a really really good part in educating Gen Z around money and saving and financial investing. So yeah, I just want to highlight that and say hey then, TikTok for the win in this case, and social media for the win here.


Sue: Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking there's probably a lot of mixed things on TikTok, but this is one really great way of normalizing a conversation that just a few decades ago was not okay to have, so I really love that.


One image that's coming up for me is the FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early movement. And it’s, interestingly, it says 'retire early,' but ironically a lot of the people involved in the FIRE movement are older, who realize as they look ahead, this whole notion of you work a long time at one job, you get a watch, you get retirement, and you get some kind of pension benefit—that's just not how the world works for a lot of people these days. So, I like the idea that all these signals to me are leading to FIRE, which is really just about redefining how you balance your meaning in life, how you afford it, and the kind of community and experience you want. It doesn't all have to be wrapped up in, essentially in your employer who then gives you retirement benefits. 


And so to me, the decoupling of that is I think where we're headed so that as women we can define how we work, how we live, how we're going to support ourselves in the future.  I know that BlackRock actually just announced a very new retirement product that essentially gets to this. This is to deal with some of the uncertainty that you'll have in the future, but they were mentioning that there's a lot of innovation going on in the retirement industry to repackage retirement for people, so that whether you're a gig worker, you’re a freelancer, out of work for a few years, you’re in all of these undefined positions, you can still have a retirement account, and so I like that-- it's about time that there's some kind of disruption around that.


[16:30]


Lana: Absolutely, and I think that aligns well with what Raakhee was saying about even decoupling from the term. Like, the whole notion needs to be redefined.

I really loved that thought, and Raakhee, I really appreciated how you tied it to your observations about sort of the older models on the catwalk and things like that, and I think ageism—I read somewhere a quote—and we can put it in the show notes—that ageism is the last 'ism' that we're to tackle. And so, I think that's very true if we think about the new map of life. If we were able to really face ageism the way that we're doing with our other 'isms' in society, we might think about the whole thing differently. And so, I really appreciated that too.


Raakhee: Yeah, and I think coming back to women, we do have the reality of a biological clock, but that means that our stages do have to be different. And for so long, those stages kept a woman, right, stopping their careers at a certain point or capping their education at a certain point because I have to have children, which is absolutely a natural desire if you want to do that.


And I think maybe this will help shift that as well. If a woman has the comfort of knowing, "Cool, this is that phase, I do have to do it now for biological reasons, but I get to go back, and I can enter this beauty competition, and I can go get my degree, and I'm still gonna move up that corporate ladder—you better believe it.” So I think particularly for women, that also makes me, it feels fair. It feels much more fair.


Lana: One of the questions that I thought of is, in thinking about how the future could be different, is we have all these tight rules like when you're investing your money in your 401k, you can't pull it out before you hit a certain age, right. But then, to your point, Raakhee, if things are more flexible, right, when you go back to school, or when you start a second or a third career, maybe you need access to those funds. Y’know, I understand the logic of having that barrier so you don't pull it out too early, so that it's there when you need it, but there's a downside to that, too, that's also something that came to mind.


Sue: One fascinating fact I learned in our retirement investigation was that the concept of 65 as the age of retirement originates from the Ottoman Empire. That's how old this concept is. There are lots of things up for consideration about how we redefine it in this modern world.


Lana: That is insane.


Sue: So, yeah, definitely the age of retirement, even the definition of what does it mean to be retired? How do we just switch these notions? Because I'm lucky—I'm picturing myself in the future not intending to just sit back. I think everybody wants to have a meaningful life. And if you want to continue in the career that you're already in, why not go ahead and do that? If you want to switch careers, why can't you do that when you're older, especially if now your financial investment is decoupled? And you want to start anew somewhere that'll give you, I would imagine, some more liberty and freedom to try out some new things.


Raakhee: And I think the one thing I'm leaving with so strongly is that, gosh, the financial industry needs a lot of disruption, like really quickly, right? To keep up with all these changes. Why is it just—I mean, it's still 401k and it's so locked in. And where are the other types of funds? I've had this frustration with wanting to study and being like, "After you have one or two post-graduate degrees, you cannot afford it," right? Just logically. Yet, that's so unfair because we're living longer. We have the opportunity. We have remote learning, but the financial side just doesn't match up to it. So there's so much room for disruption there.


Lana: Definitely. Yeah, well this has been such a really provocative and interesting conversation. So I just want to thank you both so much. and thanks to everyone for joining us in this conversation and we look forward to seeing you, well not seeing you, but being with you in the next episode.


[21:12]

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