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~ This is What Happens When You Begin to Age Out of Middle Age

The Write Side of 59

Tag Archives: Retirement

Counterpoint: Think Florida for Retirement

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by WS50 in Opinion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bob Smith, Florida, Retirement, Wet heat

Wet and wild in Florida

Wet and wild in Florida

BY BOB SMITH

I loved Frank Terranella’s entry yesterday about retiring in Arizona because of the dry heat. But let’s be honest here – the entire state is a desert. Of course it’s dry – bone dry – like the desiccated remains of livestock and other unfortunate critters that found themselves stranded in that dry heat a little too far from water for a little too long. Without air conditioning and plenty of water, every living thing in Arizona would quickly dry up and blow away.

Then there’s sunny Florida, a perennial punchline about people with blue hair peering over steering wheels and peeing into Depends, filling their days with golf, Mah Jongg, and kvetching about their health. Its climate is the exact opposite of Arizona – it’s a giant swamp. Like Arizona, it gets hot as hell, but it’s a moist, clingy, slice-the-air-with-a-knife kind of heat. Without air conditioning it would be incredibly uncomfortable, but there sure would be plenty of water – oozing up from the ground, or pounding down in torrents during one of those severe thunderstorms that target Florida’s trailer parks every other day, or simply hovering in the ambient air.

Desert or swamp, desert or swamp…it’s so hard to choose. With its ravenous mosquitoes, water snakes, giant cockroaches, and prehistoric eating machines (alligators, to you Northerners), Florida seems to have its fair share of icky predators. But so does Arizona – it’s loaded with rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and scorpions.

Okay, let’s call that a draw. It’s really a matter of preference – would you rather spend your declining days in the sauna of Arizona, or the steam room of Florida?

And what about the future? For all we know, Arizona’s water supply may evaporate as a result of climate change. And the melting polar ice caps could soon raise ocean levels so much that most of Florida would be underwater.

Maybe I’ll just stay in New Jersey.

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Think Phoenix for Retirement

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by WS50 in Opinion, Travel

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Tags

Dry Heat, Frank Terranella, NYC heat, Phoenix, Retirement, Sun City

frank and the cactusBY FRANK TERRANELLA

Several years ago, I saw a cartoon showing a man at the gates of hell. Satan is there in all his horned glory sitting behind a desk and before him is a man who has obviously just arrived. Sweat is pouring off the man’s brow as he wipes his brow with a concerned look on his face. Satan is speaking to the man. The cartoon’s caption reads: “Yes, but it’s a dry heat.”

On my recent trip to the Southwest desert I was able to experience this dry heat for three full weeks. And after all that time, I have to say that there’s something to this retort by residents of Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico when asked how they can stand triple digit temperatures for weeks at a time.

Of course, traveling in April and May, I did not get to experience 100-degree days. The hottest it got in Phoenix while I was there was 98, but a few degrees don’t matter too much when you’re baking in an oven. So what’s the difference between 98 degrees in Phoenix and 98 degrees in New York?

You can breathe in Phoenix. It’s as simple as that. Breathing on a hot August night in New York is like drinking a thick shake through a narrow straw. It takes effort. Breathing hot air in Arizona takes no effort at all.

The other advantage of low humidity is the fact that shade brings instant relief from the heat. I didn’t bring a thermometer too measure it, but I swear it felt like a 20-degree difference. The low humidity also means that due to radiational cooling, the temperature drops like rock as soon as the sun goes down. Our days began in the 50s and rapidly increased, but the mornings were always delightful. Likewise, the evenings were comfortable enough to sit outside and dine al fresco.

Having said all this, it is a fact that modern life would be unimaginable in Phoenix without air conditioning. The afternoon heat seems intense enough to bake bread. Air conditioning is not a convenience; it’s life support. The evidence of this is that in 1950, only 107,000 hardy souls lived in Phoenix. Once air conditioning became practical, the people came. By 1960 there were 440,000. As of 2012, there were 1.5 million.

And people are still coming. Why? One word — sunshine. We were in the Southwest for 20 days and had 19 days of sunshine. Those are pretty good odds. On average, Phoenix gets 296 days of sunshine every year and just 8 inches of rain. By contrast, New York averages 50 inches of rain. Even Los Angeles averages 15 inches of rain a year.

So if you want to wake up every day to sunshine, Phoenix is the place.

And in fact, thousands of Americans retire to Arizona every year. The famous retirement village Sun City is just outside Phoenix. Everywhere we went we met former New Yorkers who had retired to Arizona. I don’t think I would want to go that far, but if I could swing it, I certainly would love to spend my retirement winters there. Sure it’s hot, but it’s a dry heat!

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Hats Off to Me: I’m Leaving the Law for Retirement

20 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by Lois DeSocio in Confessional, Men

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Bob Smith, confessional, lawyer, Men, Retirement, The Write Side of 50

Bob chair hat

BY BOB SMITH

I began practicing law in 1984, when I was 29. I’m now 58. One week ago today I advised the management of the law firm where I’m a partner that I’m leaving the practice of law as of October 1. I chose that date because it coincides with the close of the firm’s fiscal year, which will make the settling up of my finances neat and clean. But there’s nothing neat and clean about leaving a career you’ve pursued for half your life.

Most people consider a full-time job something that requires you to be at work forty hours a week. But to a lawyer in private practice, “full-time” means all the time. And perhaps because it’s so all-consuming, the prospect of not doing it any more is daunting – how will I fill up my time, I wonder? While practicing law, my time was so full I couldn’t consider any other activities. Life, it seemed, revolved around my work. Everything I did was defined by the demands of the job – and they are many.

Here’s a non-exhaustive, but nonetheless exhausting, list of the things you have to do to succeed as a lawyer in private practice:

  • Think clearly, write well, and verbally advocate your client’s position.
  • Manage expectations, which means having pointed – often heated – discussions with your clients about proposed strategy, potential outcomes, and of course, expected costs.
  • Train, motivate, mentor and supervise younger associates, paralegals, and other support staff.
  • Bill your time, which means writing a detailed narrative of the legal work done for each client and how much time it took – down to the tenth of an hour – to perform each task. To meet your billable targets, you should account for eight or more billable hours every single working day. Like J. Alfred Prufrock, who “measured out [his] life with coffee spoons,” for half my life I’ve measured out mine in six-minute increments.
  • Constantly seek new clients or new legal work from existing clients, which requires you to do things that most people see as recreation: play in golf outings, attend charity dinners, and take clients or prospective clients out to restaurants, concerts, and sporting events. But the fun fades when those activities start to gobble up days and evenings you’d rather spend with your family and friends.
  • Keep abreast of current developments by attending continuing legal education seminars.
  • Speak at legal conferences or other public events.
  • Do pro bono legal work and donate your time and energies to worthy causes that help your community, both because it’s your duty as a citizen and an attorney, and as a way to “get your name out there,” and develop contacts who may refer work to you or the firm.

The list goes on. And the stakes are high: if you don’t do your job right, your clients can lose big money, lose their businesses completely, or be precluded from doing things they want to do. If you make a really terrible mistake, you may be found to have committed malpractice and the firm itself could pay a steep financial price for your misstep, not to mention the personal price you would pay to endure that kind of crisis. In short, you’re under incredible pressure, all the time: to perform, to serve, to produce results.

So why was I so terribly conflicted when I realized I could just get out? There’s comfort in the known, and terror in the unknown. It’s like Hamlet contemplating suicide, and acknowledging that we have no idea what awaits us after death – which ” … makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” I was afraid to leap from the relative comfort of a demanding, but well-defined career, into the unknown called “retirement.”

bob chair faceBut I’ve done it. I’ve just taken that first leap into the cold pool. And even after only one week, before I’ve fully withdrawn from my life at the firm, I can sense it was the right thing to do. A few months from now I have no doubt I’ll be saying come on in, the water’s just fine.

For now, however, I’m still shivering a bit.

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Close to 60, but Nowhere Near Retirement

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by WS50 in Confessional, Men

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

AARP, confessional, Frank Terranella, Men, Retirement, The Write Side of 50

what me retire

Photo by Julie Seyler.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

In 1953, when I was born, my life expectancy was 66. That’s why, back in the 1950s, when my grandfathers quit working, most people were retired by age 65. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) admitted members at age 50. Today, my life expectancy is 83. Those 17 extra years are literally life-changing, and quite significant for retirement planning. This year I will turn 60. And rather than consider retirement as my grandfathers did at this age, I am looking forward to at least another decade of work. I can’t imagine retiring in my 60s. That’s the difference the extra 17 years of life expectancy have made.

Yet the world has not adapted to the longer life expectancies.The AARP still admits members at age 50. Senior citizen housing is available at age 55. Most senior citizen discounts still kick in between 60 and 65. Perhaps this is a subtle hint for us baby boomers to step aside and make way for the younger generation to move into our jobs. But I have a problem thinking of myself as a senior citizen at age 60 because there are still members of my parents’ generation alive and well in their 80s and 90s. Those are the real senior citizens – the Greatest Generation. People in their 60s and 70s are perhaps juniors. That makes 50-somethings just sophomores in the school of life.

So with almost another quarter century until my life expectancy age, I have no intention of slowing down. It’s full speed ahead into my pre-retirement. The only thing I hope to do is begin retirement saving in earnest. But that will be tempered by all the vacation traveling I hope to do in the next 10 years. My wife and I already have the next five years of trips mapped out. This is really my idea of a hedge against not making it to retirement. For someone like me who has had heart disease and cancer, it’s more important to live life than to save for retirement.

Actually, as long as I can take frequent vacations, I see no reason to ever retire. I’ve seen retirement, and it didn’t look like fun for my grandfathers. It was just a lot of television. I would much prefer to be useful every day and earn a paycheck. Maybe I’ll revisit the issue of retiring when I hit 80. But I doubt that it will be attractive even then. I think that our generation may actually retire the word “retirement.”

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