Retirement Is a Government Program

You've got a number in your head for when you can retire.

Ask yourself what's actually supposed to happen the morning after.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast.

I’m your host, Jason Duncan. This whole show runs on one idea: to expose the lies you believe and the truths you don't. Most of us have believed things for a long time that just weren't true, and when you finally see the truth, it changes things.

The most dangerous lies don't look like lies. They look like success. They look like golden cages, where the bars are covered in gold so you can't see them, and as a result people like you and me get deceived, because the lies that trap us look like good things, they look like truth, they look like wisdom.

Maybe there's something you used to believe that kept you trapped and you are so glad you don't believe it anymore. Maybe there's something you still believe, and you don't realize that it's keeping you trapped. This show is about helping you break free from that cage.

I expose these lies twice a week.

Every Monday, I interview someone who believed one of those lies. We talk about what they used to believe, why they don't believe it anymore, and what it costs people to stay stuck inside that lie for another five years.

On Wednesdays, just like today, I bring you a special edition, where I read you a version of the article I write for my newsletter every Wednesday called What's Real?

You can subscribe free at therealjasonduncan.com/articles, and it hits your inbox every Wednesday morning before this episode drops.

This week's post is called "Retirement Is a Government Program. It Was Never a Life Plan."

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Somewhere in your phone, or on a whiteboard in your office, there's a number and a date.

The number is what you think you need when you retire. The date is when you finally get to do it.

I've watched people arrange twenty years of their life around those two things. And I've done a version of it myself, so I'm not throwing shade here.

But I want to ask you something I couldn't answer for myself for a long time.

What are you actually aiming at?

Not the number. The thing on the other side of it.

Say the word retire out loud, and then try to describe what that actually means for a Tuesday in your life.

Most people can describe the picture from the commercial. Very few can describe the actual Tuesday.

Now, the idea of retirement didn't come from anywhere near where you'd think.

Germany created the world's first national old-age pension in eighteen eighty-nine, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. And his motives were purely political. Socialist parties were gaining ground all across industrial Europe, and Bismarck wanted to take the wind out of them by having the imperial state hand workers something first.

When critics called him a socialist for it, he said, call it socialism or whatever you like, it's the same to me.

Now I checked the popular version of this story carefully, and most of what you've heard is wrong.

Germany set the age at seventy. Not sixty-five. Bismarck was seventy-four at the time. And the age wasn't lowered to sixty-five until nineteen sixteen, which was eighteen years after he died.

America didn't copy him either.

The United States launched Social Security in nineteen thirty-five and picked sixty-five after the Committee on Economic Security surveyed what already existed right here. Private pension plans. About thirty state-run old-age systems. The federal Railroad Retirement System. Roughly half of those used sixty-five and half used seventy, and sixty-five was the more common norm. Then the actuaries confirmed that sixty-five could pay for itself on a modest payroll tax.

So the age you have organized your entire life around came out of a survey of existing plans and a calculation about what was affordable.

Now read that history again and notice what's missing from it.

Nobody sat down and asked what a good final chapter looks like for a human being. Nobody asked what a person should actually do with their sixties and seventies.

It was a benefit built for industrial workers whose bodies had been used up by factories, and the numbers were set by actuaries figuring out what a government could afford to pay.

That's a fine thing for a government to do. It is a terrible thing to build your life around.

And there's a detail in the German records that tells you exactly what it was for.

Because that German system combined disability benefits and old-age benefits together, roughly ninety percent of covered workers left on disability before they ever reached seventy.

They didn't retire. Their bodies quit on them, and the state caught them.

Now I spent over a decade as a pastor, so let me add one more thing I noticed a long time ago and never had a good answer for.

Retirement isn't in the Bible either.

Scripture talks constantly about work, and rest, and seasons, and Sabbath. Rest is all over that book.

What isn't in there is a phase of life where you stop contributing.

There's one narrow passage in Numbers chapter eight where the Levites serve from twenty-five to fifty and are then released from the regular service. But even there, the text says they can still assist their brothers. They didn't go off to an over-fifty community in the hills of Canaan. They changed roles.

So between a book that's been around for thousands of years, and a pension program from eighteen eighty-nine, only one of them ever proposed a stage of life where you stop producing.

And it wasn't the book.

So how did an eligibility rule turn into something people actually dream about?

The financial services industry did it. How? Because they had products to sell, and they needed you to want that day badly enough to fund it for thirty years.

Think about the imagery you've absorbed your entire adult life. The couple walking on the beach. The golf course at sunset. The sailboat. The RV. The grandkids running across a lawn.

Then look at the bottom of the page and see who paid for the ad.

I'm not claiming a conspiracy here, because honestly, this is just how advertising works. Somebody selling you a thirty-year accumulation product needs you emotionally attached to the day the accumulating stops.

So let's be specific about the arrangement you signed up for.

You work for forty years, handing a percentage of every check to the government and a percentage to a fund manager. Then at a certain age, you stop producing anything. And for the next twenty or thirty years, you live on a government program, a fund you don't control, and a pile of money in a race against how long you happen to live.

That's the plan. That is what I'm going to retire at sixty-five actually describes.

Now before you start getting mad at me, I am not saying don't save. Save and invest aggressively.

What I'm saying is look straight at what you've been told to aim for. Because the aim is to become entirely dependent on other people's promises, at the exact point in your life when you have the least ability to do anything about it if those promises don't hold.

And I've seen the other part of this enough times that I don't think it's a coincidence anymore.

A lot of the people I know who spent decades looking forward to retirement, and then finally got there, stopped being givers. They became takers. They stopped producing anything for anybody, and something in them got smaller.

Not because they got old. Because they quit contributing, and nobody had ever told them that the contributing was the point.

Now the research backs up part of this, and I want to be careful about which part.

Studies on retirement are all over the map, and honestly, most of them find that mental health improves. Less stress. Better sleep. I went looking for evidence that retirement wrecks people, and I mostly didn't find it. So I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I did.

But one finding holds up across the reviews, and you should pay attention to this one.

What predicts a hard landing isn't the age, and it isn't the money. It's how much of yourself was in the work.

Retirement takes away the routine, the people, the sense of being needed, and an identity you built over decades. The more of you that was in it, the more of you leaves when it goes.

Now think about who that describes.

It describes you.

And let me be fair here, because this part is true too. If you saved well, and you decide it's your turn to sit back for a while, that is a legitimate choice and you have earned the right to make it. I am not calling that failure.

What I'm against is being shackled to an age and an amount that somebody else picked, without ever asking yourself what you were aiming at.

Now since we're talking about building things that work when you're not standing there, let me tell you about something I use.

Think about how much of your week goes into saying the same thing over and over. The long follow-up email. The proposal walkthrough. The explanation you've given forty times this year.

Dubb lets you record that once as a personalized video and send it straight into email or text, with tracking so you know who actually watched it. It's one recording doing work while you're somewhere else, which is the whole idea behind everything I'm talking about today.

Go take a look at therealjasonduncan.com/dubb. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, D-U-B-B.

So what's the alternative here?

It isn't working until you drop, and I want to be clear about that.

The alternative is to build something that produces without you standing in it.

That's the whole argument for owning an asset instead of owning a job. If the business runs when you're not there, you don't need a date on a calendar to give you permission to go somewhere. You don't need a fund manager's returns to hold up. And you're not sitting around waiting on a government program that was designed in eighteen eighty-nine for factory workers.

That's the difference between an Owner-Operator, an Owner-Manager, and an Owner-Investor.

The Owner-Investor didn't retire. He built something that keeps producing, and then he went and did what he wanted with his Tuesdays.

So here's one thing to do this week, and it won't take long.

Name one thing you own, or one thing you could build, that produces income without you working in it.

Not a theory. An actual thing. A part of the business that runs without you. A piece of property. A product. A stake in something somebody else operates.

If you can name one, write down the next step on it, and put a date on that step this month.

And if you can't name one, that answer matters more than the other one. Because it tells you exactly what the last forty years of your working life are currently set up to depend on. And it tells you what to work on before you think about a retirement date again.

Save and produce. Both. For as long as you're able.

One more thing before I go. I'm booking keynotes for twenty twenty-seven. If you know somebody who puts on a conference or runs an industry group, send them to therealjasonduncan.com/speaking. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, and the link is in the show notes.

There's a proverb that lands right on top of this one. Proverbs six, verses six through eight.

Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider its ways and be wise. It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.

Look at what Solomon points out about that ant.

No commander. No overseer. No ruler.

Nobody set its retirement age. Nobody ran an actuarial table on it. It doesn't have a program, and it isn't waiting on anybody's promise.

It just produces, and it stores, on its own initiative, in the season when producing is possible.

That is a really important nugget of truth right there. Written down three thousand years before Bismarck ever picked up a pen.

Go read the full post at therealjasonduncan.com/articles.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.