Counting the cost/s...

A question of value...

You might imagine that reaching retirement age would also mean having the wisdom, knowledge and experience to manage every aspect of life with confident ease. Those of us born in the 1950’s and early 1960’s were encouraged to work hard, to save as much as we could, to plan ahead and to take care not to be too profligate with money. Born to parents who lived through WW2, scarcity was part of their childhood landscape; the generation born in the 1930’s didn’t buy anything they couldn’t afford and carried a lot of fear around money, whether that was to do with earning it or spending it.

As I get older, I can see the many ways people carry thoughts, feelings and beliefs from their childhoods into their retirement years and sometimes, these thoughts, feelings and beliefs need to be challenged to enable us to live (now) with more freedom and less self imposed restrictions.

There’s one conversation I have over and over again with fellow retirees and that’s around money; after spending decades working and saving/investing, it’s so much more difficult to spend the money we’ve accumulated than you might imagine. No one knows how long they’ll live, so none of us know how long our money has to last, but even for those people who absolutely won’t run out of money, there can still be a feeling of fear, discomfort and scarcity around spending. I’ve known people with full salary pensions take a part time job, so as not to have to ‘break into my capital’; I’m certainly not criticising anyone for choosing to work, but if we don’t spend the capital we worked and saved for, who will?

After decades of working with the focus on increasing our savings, to see a steady decrease in those savings can feel alarming, even though we know we need to get comfortable with this very thing. Also, we were raised with a strong ‘value for money’ ethic and spending money on experiences, holidays or any ‘non essentials’ can feel uncomfortable. We talk about ‘treating ourselves’ as though doing something we really want to do is somehow a bit naughty, reckless and irresponsible. For many of us, the scarcity mindset of previous generations lives on in us, even though it holds us back from living the life we want to live and doing the things we’d love to do.

Because I’ve had this conversation a lot, I try to shift my focus to the ‘value’ that experiences will give me, rather than what those experiences will cost in terms of hard cash. Let me explain….a couple of years ago, we went (I was about to say we treated ourselves!) to a very nice hotel that had a suite with an outdoor copper bath. It was January and the weather was beautiful; clear blue skies and bright sunshine, though freezing cold. We stayed for 3 nights and every night we sat in the bath (it was huge) looking up at the stars, hot water up to our chins and a gin and tonic at hand. I barely remember the room or what we ate, although I know both the room and the food were great, but I’ll never forget looking up at the stars on a freezing cold January night whilst lying in a deep bath of hot water. I’ve long forgotten how much it ‘cost’ but I’ll never forget the ‘value’ of that experience. We could have chosen somewhere less expensive and arguably better value for money, but the experience and the memories were worth every penny.

When we first moved on board our narrow boat home, we cruised the canal network continuously for 3+ years, which meant we had fewer living expenses than we do now. When we decided to buy a motorhome last year, we had to move the boat into a marina to enable us to leave either the boat or van somewhere secure when we were travelling on either one. Our living expenses have increased, but so have our travelling options and choices of how we spend our time; if we were only focused on how much we were spending, our life would be so much narrower (pun intended!).

My husband Rob has been an avid cyclist for over 60 years, but we sold our bikes when we moved onto the boat. Recently (he’s now 74) he’s been toying with the idea of buying another road bike; not knowing anything about bikes, I’ve left it to him to think about whether he’ll actually buy one or whether the idea is just an idea. When I asked him what his thoughts were, he mentioned a company that builds bikes to order and how he used to cycle miles in his younger days to their workshop, knowing he could never afford a custom built bike. He’d also been talking about another more mainstream brand, so I suggested he thought about each one, the custom built one he’d have loved as a young man and the off the peg one and feel which one made his tummy flip….there would be his answer.

We don’t have lots of money or even know whether the money we do have will last our whole lives, but I do know that we have fewer years ahead of us than we’ve already lived. Rather than counting the cost (of anything) in monetary terms, I’m focusing on the value of experiences; how will this make me feel? Is this something I’ll likely remember forever? Will I have a chance to do this again in the future? Does this make my tummy flip?

So buy the bike, rent the fancy apartment, do the thing!

With love,

Karen x