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TWO YEARS AGO, at age 59½, I thought I was on the verge of taking a major step toward retirement. At the time, my usual zest for my work as a physical therapist was waning. Though I don’t think the quality of my patient care suffered, I found it took more effort to maintain the energy needed to complete a day at the clinic, and concentrating on work became tougher.
In addition to the tension building on the inside, I was also feeling external pressures. One concern was the care my wife and I were providing to our families. Over the past decade, we’ve become intricately involved in the lives of several family members who need our help because of age or illness. We love them dearly, and don’t consciously begrudge the time we give them. Still, anything that stretches time thin can fray nerves and shorten tempers.
Further stress came from the pandemic. We were all affected by COVID-19 in some way, from the annoyance of the toilet paper shortage to the heart-rending loss of a loved one. The social narrative about the disease took on a surrealistic life of its own. I finally stopped discussing it with nearly all except my wife, and I won’t comment on it here. I can’t deny, however, that the pandemic profoundly affected how I felt about my job.
My experience is hardly an anomaly. Howard, a coworker, notes that the pandemic magnified the stress inherent in a health care career. His opinion is supported by a study led by researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It discovered some 50% of workers from all areas of health care reported an increase in stress during the pandemic. The highest levels of job-related stress, which can cause an occupational phenomenon termed burnout, were reported among nurses and other clinical staff.
Burnout can lead people to leave jobs, and the health care industry hasn’t escaped the exodus. A report from Definitive Healthcare highlights the significant shortage of clinical staff caused by resignations and early retirements in 2021, including 22,000 physical therapists.
My home state of Georgia is one of five states hit hardest by shortages. Nurses were so scarce at my small hospital that roughly a third of patient rooms were unavailable due to a lack of staff. On weekends, instead of my usual weekday duty at the outpatient rehab clinic, I assisted in the acute care hospital, providing treatment to patients housed in the emergency department for multiple days because there was no other accommodation for them.
In summer 2021, I considered contributing to the shortage of physical therapists by trimming my work hours. I like to believe I’m an independent thinker, and perhaps even instinctively go against the flow. But I know at times I’m tempted to follow the herd. I don’t know how much pandemic stress contributed to my itchy feet, as compared to the stress from my personal life, but I know it was part of the force pushing me toward retirement. Although my wife works just a few hours each month as a physical therapist, she was thinking of racing me to the exit.
Even away from the clinic, thoughts of chasing other interests started creeping in. I didn’t imagine full retirement, but I dreamt of busy days at home working in my garden, playing with family and friends, or catching up on reading. I was acutely aware of the time I didn’t have because it belonged to my employer, and I realized the money I received was beginning to lose its luster.
Rising pressure must find a way out, or else it damages the vessel trying to contain it. My pressure-relief valve was created by shifting additional money from stocks to short-term bonds, to boost the amount already set aside in conservative investments. This move provided income protection for my wife and me in the event I decided to cut my work hours just when the market decided to drop, thus freeing us from the need to sell stocks at depressed prices.
Today, two years later, I’m still working fulltime, but in a different frame of mind. Why? For starters, the strain on my mind and my time has eased. The overwhelming flood of patients from the pandemic has settled down to a more manageable flow. Frontline health care workers are still dealing with the fatigue caused by staffing shortages, but the added apprehension that accompanied an unknown disease has dissipated. For now, COVID-19 has become just one more familiar hazard that can make a hospital an unhealthy place to work.
In addition, a change in our family circumstances has cut down on both brain time and actual hours devoted to that responsibility. My wife’s anxiety is visibly reduced, which eases my mind as well.
More important, our cash and bonds gave us the courage to face the possibility of cutting back on work hours due to need or desire. Knowing that I continue to work fulltime by choice, rather than by necessity, takes a load off my mind. Though a little wounded by inflation and rising interest rates, our stockpile of safe money remains substantial and comforting.
With our minds preoccupied by uncertainty over the future source of our income, we didn’t use our cash to make big buys of cheaper stocks last summer. Contrast this to early 2020, when we were chasing dropping share prices at the beginning of the pandemic. We have, however, continued to commit 25% of our income to purchasing stock-index mutual funds through our employer’s 403(b) and our IRAs, plus we have the company match and bonus money going into my 403(b). We also continue to invest our health savings account money in stock funds. Right now, stocks account for about 74% of our retirement savings.
The upshot: We haven’t needed the conservative investments we set aside two years ago. It could be argued we wasted the potential for growth by keeping money out of the stock market. I might be persuaded to lean that way during a weak moment, but I have few regrets. That would be like regretting the insurance premiums we’ve paid for claims we haven’t needed to make. The stock market growth we missed is the premium we’ve paid for the peace of mind we’ve gained.
Ed Marsh is a physical therapist who lives and works in a small community near Atlanta. He likes to spend time with his church, with his family and in his garden thinking about retirement. His favorite question to ask a young person is, “Are you saving for retirement?” Check out Ed’s earlier articles.
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Ed,
Your insurance premium analogy is perfect! I keep a list of great pithy bits about investing, and your remark will go there.
Also, your essay made me think of last night when I began reading Bill Bernstein’s new edition of “The Four Pillars” (Forward by some guy named Clements). On page 4, Bernstein writes, “…the most potent elixir of financial equanimity is a large pile of safe assets…”
Interestingly, through his writings and audio remarks, Bernstein has persuaded me to keep a far lower allocation to stocks than you and Jonathan C hold. Everyone’s needs/circumstances are different, of course.
Last, regarding the stresses of caring for ill and elderly loved ones and the myriad effects of, and responses to, the pandemic, we appear to be on the same page. But don’t get me started…
Thanks for including me on the list!
Hi Ed,
My wife and I are both retired as of 2020 partially due to COVID leading to my PTA wife retiring after she was furloughed due to COVID (she was planning on retiring in time for the holidays).
We were able to save a fairly large nest egg and have our retirement assets at a 50/50 split. The other day I decided to use Morningstar’s X-ray tool to compare how our portfolio has performed compared to Vanguard’s and Fidelity’s 2020 funds since we both were retired by then and was pleasantly surprised that we outperformed both funds by slightly more than 1%, and 2.5%.
We are presently utilizing our retirement funds and delaying Social Security so although it may be tough to see our accounts go up less than the market on the upside we also see it go down less than the market like in the past month.
Since you are getting itchy feet for retirement I suggest you visit a fire only fiduciary advisor who I would bet would advise you pare back your equity position.
Good advice to seek out a different perspective, David. I have used a fee-only planner in the past, and may again for questions where I need another’s view for something I may have missed.
I feel exactly the same way about our stockpile of cash, Ed. Every time I log into Empower (formerly Personal Capital) to check our account balances, it reminds me that we could be doing more with our cash. But we’re investing elsewhere (deferred comp accounts), and that cash cushion gives us the flexibility when we decide it’s time to go.
Another thing you said also resonated. Although I’m not in health care, I’ve wondered if my extreme sense of weariness in my job was just the natural course of aging or if it was pandemic-related. (I was chair of a large department when COVID started. That was already an extremely stressful job, and the pandemic made it so much worse. Trying to run a department from my home office, with staff and faculty melting down and desperate students trying to get classes and solve problems…it was awful and I had many sleepless nights over problems I didn’t create and couldn’t solve.) Now that I’ve been out of administration for a year or two and just back to the “normal” life of a professor, I don’t feel nearly as burned out. That said, I do think wistfully about other ways I could spend my time.
Dana, I coordinate students that come into our hospitals and clinics for clinical education, so I’m in regular contact with schools and students. During the pandemic, I had to cancel placements and turn down requests because we were keeping all unnecessary people out of our facilities. I knew how stressful it was for the educators and students. On the clinical side, we are still dealing with providing remediation for new hires to make up for what they missed.
Thanks for stepping up and making opportunities for health care students to get the vital hands on experience.
Edmund, people forget how scary COVID was at the beginning of the pandemic. Frontline providers were dying themselves from the disease. It was very stressful. Added to that stress were those who refused to or couldn’t protect themselves or others with vaccines or by denying that COVID existed.
Edmund, thanks for a very well written and thought provoking article. I can relate to taking care of aging parents with serious health concerns. But I can’t imagine having to do that on top of a pandemic and all the added stress it brought. I’ve seen first hand how amazing and selfless our health care professionals are. I’ve lived with one of the best for 42 years. I may regret many things in my life, but caring for loved ones (even my small contributions) will never be a regret. Best of luck as you journey towards retirement.
Nurses are the backbone of clinical healthcare. They took the brunt of the pandemic load, and suffered because of it. I hope for the sake of us all the profession recovers.
It’s nice to contemplate retirement. Thanks for the well-wishes.
I enjoyed your article. Thank you.
My decision to retire about a year ago, at age 72, from my career as a CPA occurred when my son-in-law needed major surgery, my daughter was finishing her DNP clinicals while working full time as a RN and my then not yet age one grandson needed a full time caregiver for over a month. In hindsight my decision, while caused by circumstances beyond control, was the right one for me and my family. Sometimes your presence is the only solution to solving a problem. Getting to spend extended time with my grandson was a bonus.
For me, my decision to have waited until age 70 to claim my earned social security benefit and the extra years of contributing to a 401(k) & IRA made the financial aspects easier to pull my retirement trigger at the time my family needed my time.
I do financially regret not contributing more to Roth IRAs or choosing some Roth 401(k) contributions options while I was younger. The lure of the immediate tax deduction and immediate tax savings by my younger self has a cost in terms of current and future taxes and financial simplicity for my current and future self. My current self is working to correct this regret by converting traditional deferred accounts to Roth account types and I am also in the process of changing my asset allocation to leave less of a tax headache and more financial certainty for my wife and/or heirs.
Again thanks for your article.
Thanks for the comment. I’m not sure when to call it quits. The high pressure is off for now, and work feels normal and mostly enjoyable again. I hear retirement fainting calling, though. I’d rather it be a nice, slow fade versus an abrupt ending.
Ed..I had to take a breath after reading your article.It parallel my own experience so much. So many to care for. We also had my husband’s parents to care for, as well as his younger brother who had a very severe mental disability, worsened by his brother developing cancer of the sinuses which had reached his brain and distorted his face. There were days my husband had to take his brother for radiation treatments in the morning and to chemotherapy at another location in the afternoon.
My husband’s father and mother also had serious health issues. His father was never the same after heart surgery in his 80s and was blind as well. His mother didn’t drive and by this time had a double ileostomy so we were the main transport for medical appointments , along with other needed errands and many concerns to address.
At this time I was also very involved with my own mother’s care. My husband went into heart failure at 65 and that was the end of his working career.
His father died in 1997. Our mothers died in 2005, a month apart and in 2011 his brother died from complications of cancer treatments–a sad life and a sad ending.
Our mistake was in not asking for help. There were others who might have stepped in for support but did not. My husband is the most unassuming person I know and not in his nature to ask.
There were so many expenses but we erred on the side of conservative investments and always believed in maintaining a healthy Emergency fund. We made it through financially – I’m not so sure about health wise and emotionally.
I have learned that caregiving boils down to the ones who are willing to accept it, and so we did.
We also accepted it, but not without some personal struggle. You’re probably familiar with that. The experience has allowed us to pierce the veil of ignorance surrounding end of life issues, to analyze them and perhaps do a better job of tackling them for ourselves.
You are right Ed. If we are given wealth, knowledge and talents we should use them to benefit others but not to the extent of our own detriment. Lessons in life I’m still
learning.
Ed thanks for another point of view. After a decade of retirement the adjustments are always being made especially at the grocery store. You can not control the future events, nor can you get time back from your employer. Covid robbed everyone of living and forever changed work and workers.
Intriguing comments about time. You’re right. The time we think is ahead may be consumed by unforeseen events, and when I look back at today’s use of time, I hope I’m not disappointed.
Really good article. I went through a similar stressful time some years back where family and work stress combined to create an intolerable situation. In my case it went on for 3 years until I finally (at some cost to my career) made a job change. Not my best moment in my career. If someone hasn’t experienced what you’re describing, I think it’s hard to appreciate how tough it is to handle. Day after day, it never lets up. Thinking back on those grim days makes my retirement seem all the brighter. Thanks for the trip down (albeit a dark alley of) memory lane as some of those lessons are useful to remember even in the more relaxed state I find myself in during retirement. Your article is also a good reminder that most (if not all) of us also have dark challenging periods when we have to put our head down and just try to plow through it.
The ability to “plow through it” is a great topic, one that I discuss with family, friends and patients on a regular basis as we figure how to get through the present trials. Glad to hear you can look back on the dark days from a brighter perspective.
“It could be argued we wasted the potential for growth by keeping money out of the stock market.”
It could, but I wouldn’t argue that. Imho you’ve done well to create that financial and psychological cushion when you did. Also 75% equity is still a sizable chunk. Nice article.
Thanks, Michael. I’m thankful to have that cushion. In the discussions here about the relationship between money and happiness, I think I’m in the camp that appreciates the trouble that money can help us avoid.