The tennis bag was packed and waiting by the door before I finished my first cup of coffee. We are spending the weekend in Maine with my wife's parents, and my father-in-law looked over his mug and delivered his verdict with a perfectly straight face: "She's been doing a lot of LA lately."
LA, in his courtroom, stands for Leisure Activities. It is the charge he files against my mother-in-law roughly once a day, and she has long since stopped contesting it. The evidence is overwhelming. Since she retired, she is busier than she ever was while working. There is more than one gym membership. There is the tennis club. There are the gardening clubs, plural, and now there is golf, a game she set down years ago and has simply decided to pick back up. Her calendar would exhaust a college athlete.
Here is the part that makes the joke work: he is still working. He gets up, pours his coffee, and goes to it, because he genuinely likes it. He has not retired, he is not entirely sure when he will, and he is happy. She retired, filled her calendar to the brim, and she is happy. Same table, same marriage, two completely different clocks.
So which one of them is doing retirement right?
Both of them. That is the whole point.
Watching the two of them tease each other over breakfast, it struck me that we talk about retirement as if it were a finish line, a single date you circle and cross. It is not. It is a game with more than one winning strategy, and the winning strategy looks different at every table. Her win is a full calendar and a fresh grip on a golf club. His win, for now, is work he still loves and the teasing rights that come with it. The only thing they share is that each of them chose it.
Is there a right time to retire?
No. There is no single right age to retire, and the rules are built that way on purpose. Social Security lets you claim retirement benefits as early as 62 or as late as 70, and for anyone born in 1960 or later, full retirement age is 67. Claim at 62 and your monthly check is reduced by about 30 percent for life. Wait until 70 and it grows to 124 percent of your full benefit. That is an eight-year runway, and even the government declines to tell you where on it you belong.
That window is not a deadline. It is a design space. The right time to retire depends on your health, your savings, your spouse's plans, and the honest answer to a question that has nothing to do with money: what would you actually do with a Tuesday? My mother-in-law had an answer ready. My father-in-law's honest answer, for now, is that Tuesday is for work, and that is a perfectly good answer too.
The only losing move
From the conversations our advisors have every week, the happiest retirees I hear about share exactly one trait, and it is not an age. They decided on purpose. Some of them stepped away at 62 to chase grandkids and tee times. Some of them are still at the office at 75 because work is their tennis club. The unhappy stories almost always start the same way: someone drifted into retirement, or was pushed into it, without a plan for the income or a plan for the Tuesdays.
The teasing at my in-laws' table is a luxury good. It exists because the income question was settled long before the tennis bag hit the floor. When the money plan is done, "when should I retire" stops being a math problem and becomes what it should have been all along: a lifestyle question with no wrong answer.
This same summer, on the other side of the country, my parents took in a concert at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. My grandmother is getting ready for her granddaughter's wedding. Three generations, three completely different clocks, everyone in motion, and none of it happened by accident. Somebody planned for all of it.
That is the joy of the retirement game. There is no right answer and there is no single right time. There is only what you plan for, and then actually make happen.
If you are somewhere on that eight-year runway and wondering where your right time is, that is exactly the conversation the team at American Retirement Advisors has every day. Call (602) 281-3898 and start designing your own version of LA.
Disclaimer: The information in this article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or investment advice. Tax laws change frequently, and individual circumstances vary. American Retirement Advisors does not provide tax or legal services. Before making any tax-related decisions, consult a qualified CPA, tax attorney, or financial planner who can evaluate your specific situation.