My Mother-in-Law Has Never Been Busier. My Father-in-Law Still Works. Which One Is Doing Retirement Right?
July 18, 2026
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Show Notes
Eddie and Betty's Conversation
Welcome in, everyone. This is The American Retirement Advisor podcast, I'm Betty, and I'm here in the studio with Eddie, like always. And Eddie, before you say one single word, I need you to know that today's episode contains no spreadsheets.
None? Then what am I even doing here?
You're here because today's piece is a story, and it's one of my favorites we've done in a while. Ian wrote it from his in-laws' breakfast table in Maine, and it opens with a crime.
A crime. In Maine. Now you have my full attention.
Picture the scene. Summer morning, coffee's on, and there's a tennis bag packed and waiting by the front door. Ian's father-in-law looks over his mug, perfectly straight face, and says about his wife, she's been doing a lot of LA lately.
LA.
LA. Leisure Activities. It's the charge he files against her about once a day.
That sounds like a felony count. What's the evidence?
Overwhelming, and she's long since stopped contesting it. More than one gym membership. The tennis club. Gardening clubs, plural. And now she's picked golf back up after setting it down years ago. Ian says her calendar would exhaust a college athlete.
I like the golf detail. That one's doing a lot of work. It's not some new hobby she's forcing herself into. It's an old one she finally has room for again.
A game she set down years ago, waiting for her the whole time. So she retires, and instead of slowing down, she expands.
That's not retirement, that's a second career in fun.
A second career she gave herself. And here's the twist that makes the whole story work. Her husband? Still working.
Wait, he hasn't retired?
Hasn't retired, isn't sure when he will, and he's happy about it. Gets up, pours his coffee, goes to work, because he genuinely likes it. Which, by the way, is what gives him the teasing rights.
Sure. The LA charges only stick if you're filing them from the office.
Same table, same marriage, two totally different clocks. And Ian's watching all of this over his first cup of coffee, asking the question we're going to spend the rest of this episode on. Which one of them is doing retirement right?
I'll go first. Him.
See, I knew you'd side with the father-in-law.
Of course I did. The man found work he still loves. Do you know how rare that is? Why would he quit something that's feeding him? He's got purpose, a paycheck, and fresh comedy material at breakfast every morning. That's a full life.
And I'm taking her side, no apologies. She worked for decades, and the day she stopped, she didn't shrink. Tennis, golf, the gardens, the gyms. Most people are afraid of an empty calendar. She took hers and filled it to the brim with things she picked.
You realize which one you'd be in this story, right? You'd be the one with the tennis bag by the door at seven in the morning.
Packed the night before. And you'd be the one still answering emails at the lake house.
That's fair. I'd have the laptop at the breakfast table and I'd feel great about it.
So we've picked our teams. Now tell the truth. Who's right?
Both of them. And I'm not dodging the question. That is the answer, and it's the whole point of Ian's piece.
Say more.
We talk about retirement like it's a finish line. One date, circled on a calendar, and you either cross it on time or you don't. But look at that table in Maine and the picture falls apart. There's no finish line there. There's a game going on, and those two are winning it in two completely different ways.
Her win is a full calendar and a fresh grip on a golf club.
And his win, for now, is work he still enjoys, plus the pleasure of teasing her about hers. The one thing those two wins have in common? Each of them chose it. On purpose.
Okay, but I can hear a listener pushing back right now. That's lovely for them, Betty, but surely there's a right age for this. Isn't there a number?
There really isn't, and here's the part I find kind of wonderful. Even the rules are built without one. Social Security lets you claim your retirement benefit any time from 62 all the way to 70.
An eight year window.
An eight year runway. And where you land on it changes the math. Claim at 62 and your monthly check gets cut by about 30 percent, for life. Wait until 70 and it grows to 124 percent of your full benefit. And for anyone born in 1960 or later, full retirement age sits in the middle of all that, at 67.
So even the government looks at that eight year stretch and declines to tell you where you belong on it.
They hand you a menu, not an order. People read that window as a deadline when it's really a design space. Your health, your savings, what your spouse is doing, all of it pulls on the answer.
And one more thing pulls on it, and it's my favorite question in the whole piece, because it has nothing to do with money. What would you actually do with a Tuesday?
The Tuesday question. Sounds small, and it's everything.
Ian's mother-in-law had her answer ready before she ever retired. Tuesday is tennis, or the garden club, or golf with her friends. She never had to wonder what the day was for.
And her husband's honest answer, right now, is that Tuesday is for work. The piece goes out of its way to say that's a perfectly good answer too. Nobody gets to grade it.
What's your Tuesday answer, Eddie? Be honest.
Right now? Probably a spreadsheet and a second coffee, and I'd enjoy both. Ask me again in a few years. Yours?
A long walk, a garden, and a lunch that runs two hours. I've had it planned for a decade.
Of course you have.
So if both answers count, and there's no right age, is there any way to get this wrong?
One. Exactly one. The article calls it the only losing move. Drifting. Not choosing at all. Sliding into retirement, or getting pushed into it, with no plan for the income and no plan for the Tuesdays.
And drifting doesn't look dramatic, that's the sneaky part. It looks like one more year, then one more, with no answer for what comes after.
Or it runs the other direction. A retirement date somebody else picked for you, and then a Monday morning with nothing on it. Neither one of those tables has much laughing going on.
Which brings us back to the laughing, because from the conversations the advisors at American Retirement Advisors have every week, that's the pattern. The happiest retirees they hear about don't share an age. Some stepped away at 62 to chase grandkids and tee times. Some are still at the office at 75 because work is their tennis club.
What they share is that they decided. The unhappy stories almost always open the same way. Somebody drifted.
There's a line in the piece I keep coming back to. The teasing at that breakfast table is a luxury good.
That might be the smartest sentence in the whole article. The LA charges, the straight face over the coffee mug, none of it works if there's money worry sitting underneath it. That joke exists because the income question got settled long before the tennis bag hit the floor.
Once the money plan is done, when should I retire stops being a math problem.
And turns into what it should've been the whole time. A lifestyle question with no wrong answer. That's the trade. You do the unglamorous planning work early so the biggest decision of your sixties gets to be tennis versus a job you love, instead of a question about survival.
And then Ian pulls the camera back, and this is the part that got me. Same summer, other side of the country, his parents are at a concert at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, just taking in the music on a summer night. And his grandmother? She's getting ready for her granddaughter's wedding.
Three generations. Three completely different clocks.
Everyone in motion. Nobody sitting by the phone waiting for life to happen to them. And Ian's point is that none of it happened by accident. Somebody planned for all of it.
That's what the plan buys, and it's worth sitting with for a second. Not a number on a statement. A summer where she's on the golf course, he's at work he loves, the grandparents are at a concert, and there's a wedding coming. The plan is the thing underneath all of it, holding it up.
So let's land this the way Ian lands it, because I can't say it better. In the retirement game, there's no right answer, and there's no single right time.
There's only what you plan for. And then what you go make happen.
Here's my homework for everyone listening. Answer the Tuesday question out loud this week. Say it to somebody.
And if your answer comes out fuzzy, or the money side of it does, that's not a failure. It's just the sign that it's time to sit down with someone who does this every day.
The advisors at American Retirement Advisors have that conversation all the time, and they'd love to have it with you. Come design your own version of LA. And may every charge ever filed against you be Leisure Activities. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you next time.