Betty Wants a Life

“Retire and do what?”

Betty had asked a reasonable question. Dudley had spent several days figuring out whether they had enough money for him to stop working. He had spent considerably less time thinking about what they would do if he did. Betty did not have this problem.

“I want to travel.”

Dudley nodded.

“Not vacations where we spend the first day getting there and the last day thinking about going home. I want to stay somewhere.”

“How long?”

Betty looked at him.

“I don’t know. Long enough.”

Dudley immediately disliked the unit of measure. Long enough could not be entered in a cell. He wisely said nothing.

“I want time with the kids,” Betty continued. “And our parents. While we still can.”

Dudley stopped nodding. That one landed differently.

Barb and Doug were building lives of their own. Their parents were getting older. Dudley had spent much of his life assuming there would always be another year. There usually was. Until there wasn’t.

Betty continued. “I want lunches with friends. Pool days. Flowers. I want Mom to come spend the night. I want dinner with your parents. I want to wake up one morning and decide we’re going somewhere.”

“Without planning it?”

Betty looked at him.

Dudley realized he had accidentally identified himself as part of the problem.

“Dudley.”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes we can just go.”

“Of course.”

Betty waited.

“I could probably keep a small bag packed.”

Betty laughed.

“What do you want?”

This was surprisingly difficult. Dudley knew what he wanted to stop doing. He was excellent at defining negatives: no meetings, no calendar controlled by somebody else, no waking up thinking about work, no problems that became urgent because someone else had ignored them for three weeks.

But that wasn’t a life. It was just a list of things he didn’t want in one.

He thought about Betty. Travel with her. Time with Barb and Doug. Time with their parents. Friends. The backyard. The pool. Long dinners that didn’t have to end because tomorrow was a workday. He wanted to build things. Maybe a greenhouse.

Betty looked at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I can see you thinking.”

“I was dreaming.”

“About the greenhouse.”

“A little.”

“You’ve already built it in your head.”

Dudley smiled.

“It’s a good design.”

“I know.”

“You haven’t seen it.”

“I don’t need to.”

Dudley wanted to learn. Maybe consult a little. Maybe help people. He wanted to stay useful. He liked solving problems. He wasn’t trying to stop being himself. But he did not want usefulness to quietly become somebody else’s calendar again. And occasionally Dudley wanted to do absolutely nothing. Nothing had begun to sound surprisingly luxurious.

“What if Wednesday is just Wednesday?” he asked.

Betty smiled.

“Exactly.”

That was harder for Dudley to understand than it should have been. For thirty years, an open space on his calendar had represented available capacity. If nobody had scheduled it yet, presumably something could be put there. Betty was proposing something different. An open Wednesday could belong to them.

They might work in the yard. They might have friends over to the pool. They might drive somewhere for lunch or spend the afternoon with their parents. Or they might do nothing at all. The important part was that they got to choose.

Dudley was beginning to understand that retirement wasn’t primarily about not working. It was about owning their time. This would require some unlearning.

Later, Dudley went back to the numbers. He already knew what it cost to be the Barksdales. Betty’s pad had established the basics, and Dudley had spent enough time with their accounts to know where the money went: mortgage, utilities, insurance, cars, groceries, healthcare. The machinery required to keep the Barksdale household functioning. But now he looked at those numbers differently. Where was travel? Where were the home projects? Where was the money for dinners with friends, trips with the kids, flowers, pool days and whatever they decided to do on a Wednesday because Wednesday belonged to them?

Dudley stared at the screen. He had figured out what it cost to maintain their life. He had not figured out what it would cost to live it.

Betty passed through carrying laundry.

“I found a problem.”

“That seems to happen a lot when you use spreadsheets.”

“I didn’t put our life in the retirement plan.”

Betty stopped.

“I thought our life was the retirement plan.”

Dudley looked at her.

This was another Betty answer that was both annoyingly simple and completely correct.

“So what do we put in?” he asked.

Betty shrugged.

“The things we just talked about.”

Travel went in. Home projects went in. Money for experiences went in. Helping Barb and Doug when it made sense went in. So did some room for things they hadn’t thought of yet. Dudley looked at the new number. It was bigger. Of course it was.

For a moment, his instinct was to make it smaller. Then he remembered the assignment. They weren’t trying to discover the cheapest possible version of retirement. They were trying to understand whether the money they had could support the life they wanted. That was a very different question.

Dudley looked at Betty.

“What if we’re wrong?”

“About what?”

“How much we’ll spend. How long we’ll live. What things will cost. What the market will do.”

Betty considered this.

“We probably are.”

Dudley stared at her.

“You understand that’s not reassuring.”

Betty smiled.

“We don’t have to know exactly what happens.”

Dudley did not care for this philosophy at all.

Unfortunately, she was right. They knew what they had. They had a reasonable idea what their life cost. Now they had a much better idea what they wanted that life to include.

What they did not know was what would happen next. Markets would go up and down. Things would cost more. Cars would break. Houses would need things. Their plans would change.

Life would happen.

The financial question had changed.

It was no longer simply: Do we have enough?

It was: Can the money we have support the life we actually want, even when we don’t know exactly what happens next?

Dudley did not love uncertainty. Fortunately, he was about to discover an entire branch of retirement planning dedicated to turning uncertainty into charts. This would make Dudley very happy.

For a while.