I would like to live to be 100 or more. So how long should I keep working? Then, what should I replace work with?
In his book 'Dare to be 100,' Dr. Walter Bortz puts forward the suggestion that we should work until age 80--which would suit the performance of my current investment strategy just fine. Ten years ago the thought would have filled me with dread--work until 80? But I am doing work that I enjoy right now, and which is not physically taxing. If my eyes hold out, the idea no longer scares me.
This would give some of my investments to um, (cough, cough) mature a bit, and would relieve my pension strategy from the responsibility of supporting me for the entire 33 years between 67 and 100--I think I can squeeze 20 years out of it.
My wife is similarly inclined, and similarly positioned. Neither of us has considered stacking shelves at the local grocery store--she's a translator and I'm an analyst. New kinds of workers, actually. Neither of us would have been able to do what we do thirty years ago. Translation was a very local profession before the fax and then the internet. Data capture was too slow to generate sufficient revenue to support the army of analysts that now exist.
My message--okay, my messages are, that being one of Peter Drucker's 'knowledge workers' is much more fun than what I used to consider work, and that it's remarkably easy to move into this line of work. I know people who are proofreading at 80 and teaching at even older ages.
The key is to keep learning something useful. I've been studying French sporadically. I now want to learn how to make databases do what I want them to do, by studying a series of commands known as SQL. There are tutorials for both available for free on the internet. So why not?
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