Ben Shapiro's Controversial Take on Retirement (And What He Actually Means)

Ben Shapiro just said something about retirement in America that got a lot of people very angry, and this is something that a lot of financial advisors don't often talk about. Let's check it out.

"No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. Everybody that I know who is elderly, who has retired, is dead within five years. If you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick." - Ben Shapiro

Ben is going hard in the paint on retirement here in America. And before I give you my thoughts, I just wanted to share: first of all, I think anything that is shared online through social media that you read or watch on YouTube always needs to have the appropriate context because in this media-driven age, so many things can be clipped and cropped and taken completely out of context in order to spin a narrative.

I believe the original portion of this commentary was done back during the presidential campaign. If you know who Ben Shapiro is, he's a political pundit. He tends to be conservative and have some pretty strong views. He has a big following online. First, this isn't a political video. This is about retirement and how we look at retirement here in the United States.

Understanding Ben's Real Argument

Ben was approaching this from the fiscal standpoint of Social Security and the state of that program. So I'm not going to dive into specifically the content around that portion of the video. But he said something very interesting that I think is really where he's coming from. He also touched on this when he appeared on the Dave Ramsey show:

"There's two arguments there. The one I think I got hit more on was the virtue argument that you were making about the virtue of work and how it's not good to have a mentality at 65 that you're basically going to... and when I said retirement, what I meant was like actual retirement. Like go sit on a beach somewhere, move down to the villages, drink at 3:00 PM—that sort of thing.

I wasn't talking about people who decide that their back is broken from having worked a job for 30 years and now what they want to do is work in their community. What they want to do is work a part-time job, go teach at the local school, do charity work. That's not retirement to me. When I'm thinking of retirement, I'm talking about retirement retirement.

And I do think that income is a good incentive for people to continue to work because I've worked with enough people in the charity sphere that it turns out that working for little or no recompense is difficult to sustain over time. There are certain people who will work for free because they're just that community-minded, but the truth is that people want to feel some sort of fiscal and financial reward for the work that they're doing, even if it's not the kind of pay they could be making full-time in the private sector."

I think he starts to get a little bit more into his actual viewpoint, but he touches on something that a lot of advisors and a lot of people don't really dig into because it seems to be a little bit squishy, maybe touchy-feely. But it's our identity and how we view work.

The Deeper Question: Work, Identity, and Purpose

Is work virtuous or is it not? What are some of the deep values that we get out of work? There's retirement research on this, and truly, for a lot of people, work is one of the largest organizing components of your life. Getting up, going to work—it gives you structure, it gives you socialization, it gives you purpose.

There are friends and relationships that you tend to have with the office, and if you just full stop and go into retirement without a plan for retirement and an idea of how you want your retirement to be, a lot of people start losing out on some of that purpose, some of that socialization, some of the things that give them an organizing structure to their life.

So should you be thinking about this as it relates to your own retirement?

Two Critical Components of Retirement Planning

Component #1: The Financial Plan

First and foremost, the first thing you get from work is a consistent paycheck. So before you take that leap into retirement, you need to make sure you've got a plan for how to create a consistent paycheck for yourself. How are you going to actually do the economics of retirement and run your home and your household, and how sustainable is that plan? I think that's the first component.

Component #2: The Lifestyle Plan

But the other component that isn't often talked about is: What do you want your retirement to look like? What is your lifestyle in retirement going to be? Are you planning to get up and go golf five days a week? Golf is a typical activity that people talk about and relate to retirement. Whatever it is—what are you thinking about as it relates to retirement? What are you going to do? What do you want the typical day in retirement to look like for you?

Questions to Consider:

•       How much do you plan to travel?

•       Who do you plan to travel with—you and your spouse?

•       What is that dynamic going to look like if you have both spouses now fully retired at the same time, or is one spouse working and one spouse retired?

•       How is that going to change the nature of your day-to-day relationship?

These are all important things to just be thinking about.

Beyond the Money: Planning for Purpose

One of the biggest things that I would tell anyone who is planning for retirement and looking at creating their best retirement is: Don't just think about the money. Yes, the money is important and that's going to help drive the economics of the household.

But what type of life do you want to have? What does that next chapter look like?

How are you going to fill up your time, your days?

What are you going to be engaged in?

Who are those people you want to spend time with and cultivate relationships with?

Do you have people that you plan to have relationships with outside of work where you may not be seeing your work buddies or work friends nearly as often because you're no longer going to the office, you're no longer working?

Life outside of work and identity outside of work—those are some areas that everybody who is planning on retiring needs to be thinking about.

Finding the Wisdom in the Controversy

I think that was probably a portion of where Ben was coming from. Yes, he goes hard in the paint when he talks about certain things and he's very strong in his opinions. But at the same time, I think there's some wisdom that can be gleaned just from that piece where we think about: I've spent my time for 25, 30 years doing this work. I'm burned out. I'm tired. I'm ready for this new chapter called retirement. What does that look like?

Take Action Today

Hopefully this makes sense to you. Thank you for joining in and watching the video on the channel. Again, my name is Michael Baker. If you're new here and you think this video makes sense and is valuable, go ahead and hit that like button. It helps us reach more people.

But at the same time, I want to implore anybody: if you're planning for retirement, first and foremost, have a plan—not just for your money, but have a plan for your life.

Because ultimately we want you to retire and live your life to the fullest and be fulfilled with those people, those relationships, those experiences with the people that you care about and that you love. That's what ultimately we're thinking about when we think about retirement, and we want to make sure that that happens for you as well.

Talk to you next time.

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