We’ve lived our lives relying mainly on our own judgment. But at some point, our major decisions won’t be ours alone to make.
Illustration: Paul Blow
The first few years in retirement are often the most difficult. But they also can set the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically. Stephen Kreider Yoder, 67, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, 68, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with early in retirement.
Steve
We had a brush with death last year when a semi driver sideswiped our tandem bike, ripping off a pannier bag and sparing us by a few inches. After we stopped trembling, one of us asked: “What will the boys say?”
We figured they’d say a lot. They might ask us to rethink the risks of road cycling, we speculated as we got back on our bike, and even urge us to give up touring or stick to car-free trails.
We wouldn’t like either scenario, but it would be hard to defy their advice. Suddenly, it seemed, the decision wouldn’t be ours alone.
Still, on the phone that night, our middle son told Karen he hoped the collision wouldn’t make us quit bike touring. Refine your safety protocols, he advised, but don’t stop.
The other two agreed, which coincided with our own assessment: Karen and I got so much gratification from bike touring as a core retirement activity that it would be a shame to let the trucker steal that joy from us. Our eldest bought us a rear-facing radar device to warn us of approaching vehicles.
Their affirmation helped us regain the confidence to get back on tour this year. The whole exercise, though, made us realize something much more profound: The next time they advise us on a life decision, it might be with something harder to hear, and we need to be ready for that.
Before retirement, we lived our lives without consulting family as much as we should have. We had good judgment, we figured. But as we age, we’re getting the feeling we need to start listening to our children more for guidance—on how to live, where to live, where to travel, how to manage our health and finances.
We’ve written in this column of our discussions about whether to stay in our San Francisco house or move to Kansas. We’ve run that by our sons several times since we retired.
Their advice is to stay in the city a while, at least while we’re thriving here in early retirement. “You might not have as much to do in Kansas,” one son said, but adding that he’d be happy to visit us there if we did move. “Many of our extended family are there.”
It isn’t that we’re suddenly making disastrous decisions. But we know our judgment will slip as we age—we need to trust it, but verify. And our decisions will eventually affect our children more, too.
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We’ve been on the other end of this parent-child equation over recent decades, advising our aging parents on care facilities or joining them on appointments with financial advisers. My 93-year-old dad is probably tired of my reminding him that we’ll have to ask him to give up his car keys eventually.
We’re not ready to have our children decide we can’t drive, but they can help decide what we drive. We ditched our car four years ago—don’t need one in this city—but we talk of getting a modest used vehicle for retirement travel.
One son recommends a plug-in hybrid. Another favors a Toyota 4Runner but suggests we buy a new vehicle for the first time in our lives. That would be a tough payout for us cheapskates, but he makes valid points: New cars are safer, and “Toyotas sometimes have crazy resale values, so if you value your time then new might be cheaper overall.”
He also advises that I stop being cheap about bicycles and spring for a custom-fit tandem that can make our remaining years of touring more comfortable. Our rig, which I call “The Frankenbike,” is a 2005 frame we bought six years ago with a motley assortment of parts I’ve put on since. We can amortize the new-bike cost over the many miles we plan to ride, he argues—especially easy while we don’t have a car leeching on our finances.
The children can decide when to take our pedals away.
Karen
Before November’s election, I grew increasingly anxious about potential outcomes. So I called our youngest, who has relationship and mental-health wisdom beyond his years.
“Whatever happens, stay in close contact with your primary community,” he said. “Be there for them. They’ll be there for you.”
As we revamp our lives in retirement, we increasingly see that our sons have life skills we can draw on. Our middle son, who has financial expertise, can help us when it comes time to sell our San Francisco house. Our engineer son can help us keep our home and vehicles in good shape, and has a knack for giving advice from his own life that might work for us. When we were discussing how to make decisions to improve our retirement version of work-life balance, he offered: “I do things that make me feel alive.”
He and his brothers aren’t pushy with advice for us and haven’t been second-guessing our retirement decisions.
The time will come, though, when we need both from them. We wonder what we can do now to make sure we’re ready for them to start managing our affairs—what to do with our remaining stuff, when to move to a care facility, how to spend money and time effectively for us and people more needy, how to help us if dementia settles in.
I recently ran across a three-page agenda from 2008 when my parents sat their five children around the kitchen table and reviewed aspects of their finances, end-of-life wishes, charitable-giving patterns and unfinished projects.
They mostly told us where they stood, but they did ask for counsel from us on several concerns, such as where to live when they needed advanced healthcare and when to quit driving.
We had to press them on other topics—removing tripping hazards from their newly downsized apartment, accompanying them to medical appointments, giving assistance on medications and culling their collections of slides and travel memorabilia.
My notes remind me that my dad had already limited himself to daytime and local driving, without passengers. My mother said she would keep asking us periodically about when she should stop driving.
They were 89 and 84 at the time, roughly two decades older than we. But time flies even faster in retirement, we’ve found.
So we might set up our own kitchen-table session now to get ahead of the ball. This would include talking with our boys about how best to transfer a portion of our assets to them. Do we simply leave them in our will? Or better to transfer more now, when they can use funds earlier in life, at the risk of digging into assets we might need to keep us secure into our 90s?
To be honest, this all feels pretty theoretical. We’re still very much in our rookie-retirement years—healthy and financially secure. As our youngest says, “You’re still young, so I’m not concerned yet.”
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