276: Don’t Retire, Settle Instead

Welcome to Money For the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I’m your host, David Stein. Today is Episode 276. It’s titled: Don’t Retire, Settle Instead. Last Saturday LaPriel, my daughter, and I visited a store in Phoenix on Central Avenue, it’s called, Stuff Antiques. It’s owned by Joe Weaver. The store sold vintage lights, lamps and chandeliers, and also some vintage slot machines. It was absolutely amazing, the variety and the excellent condition of these lights. Joe said he had been at this store for 24 years. He owned the building, he had been in his previous building for over 30 years. I asked him to do a fair amount of business online, he said, “No, I don’t do anything online. It’s just too much trouble.”

You walk around the store and there’s signs to just say, “Do not.” Not, “Do not touch”, just, “Do not.” I saw a banker’s lamp. These are green-shaded desk lamps that you often see in cubicles. I had one in my cubicle back at my investment advisory firm when I had a cubicle. The original green-shaded bankers’ lamp was invented in 1909 by American engineer, Harrison D. McFadden. He filed a patent that year. Joe had some of these lamps. The color of the green, it was just such a better shade of green than the $40 lamps you can buy on Amazon. I asked him how much it was, “$875.”

There were no prices in this store, but Joe knew exactly where each item came from and what he wanted for it. Before I found out how long he had been in business, I thought he might’ve been in his 60s. He’s 79 years old. He says his wife has been wanting him to retire for 10 years, but he said, “I’m not the retiring type.” He wants to sell his business though. He says he’s asking $3 million. You only had to put one and a half million down and he’ll carry a note for one and a half million dollars.

He’s kind of in a bind, I mean there was a ton of inventory in this shop. But the value of the business in some regards is the building, which is worth well over a million dollars because it’s right there on Central Avenue, the light rail goes in front of it. So, someone interested in being in the anti-gliding business probably doesn’t have $3 million. I asked him, “What will he do?” if he sold his business and retired. Said, “I just keep fixing vintage slot machines.” He really enjoys it. He didn’t start out doing that. He actually hired a guy that would fix the vintage machines and he found he just didn’t do it right, so he learned on his own little by little, just like he learned fixing lamps.

Settled work

Fixing vintage slot machines, for Joe, is an example of settled work. When I say “don’t retire, settle,” it’s a play on words. There’s a concept called “settled work”. It’s a term coined by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, in their book “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”. This is a book on architecture, design, and philosophy that came out in the ’70s.

Here’s their definition of settled work. “It is the work which unites all the threads of a person’s life into one activity. The activity becomes a complete and wholehearted extension of the person behind it. It is a kind of work one cannot come to overnight, but only by gradual development and it is the kind of work that is so thoroughly a part of one’s way of life, that it most naturally occurs within or very near the home. When it is free to develop, the workplace and home gradually fuse to become one thing.”

Now in this architectural book, they’re talking about having a part of your house that is sort of your workshop where you do this settled work. They continue. “It may be the kind of work that a man has been doing all his life, but as settled work, it becomes more profound, more concrete, and more unique. The problem is that very many people never achieve the experience of settled work. This is essentially because the person during his working life has neither the time or space to develop it. Work is all-consuming. When the weekend comes, people do not have the energy to start a new demanding kind of work. It does not allow time for the slow growth of settled work, which comes from within and may not always carry its weight in the marketplace.”

They suggest that perhaps when a person turns 40, that they take one day a week off or a half-day and then gradually build themselves a workshop in their home or neighborhood and start experimenting to figure out what this settled work should be. Work that you do when you’re in your retirement years. That’s what this episode is about. How do we find our settled work? Again, their definition is, “Work that unites all the threads of a person’s life into one activity. It becomes a complete and wholehearted extension of the person behind it. It’s work that is profound, concrete, unique. It develops gradually, not overnight, and it needs time and space to figure out.”

Soloing

The work that I do today, podcasting, writing, could be considered settled work. I started trying to identify that work 20 years ago. In November 1999, my oldest son was in the second grade, he’d just turned eight. We went on a two week trip to the Yucatan in Mexico. At the airport I found a book that I purchased. It was called “Soloing”, by Harriet Rubin. That book has changed my life.

In the book she writes, “In Solo land,” which essentially is working for yourself, but leveraging the tools and technology in order to do that. She writes, “Work and freedom are synonyms, not opposites. Soloing is like being an artist. Soloing demands creativity, self-discipline, self-leadership, an ability to see the world in a grain of sand. Because your expand of control shrinks, but your power to influence others expands. Most of all soloing demands courage, the gumption to be opinionated and stand up for your own visions. This last is not as easy as it sounds.”

She also wrote, “If you are not making promises that are bigger than you think you can keep, then you are going to be bored.” That book set out a vision for me like, wow, I could work on my own and get paid and not get bored which is what I tried to avoid being my entire professional life? I didn’t know what to do, but it planted that desire for that freedom. Now, as an investment advisor, I spent a lot of time on airplanes flying to client meetings, and in 2001 I decided to write a book on how to invest.

Now, it’s been 19 years since I started that. Only this year was the book actually published. The long stretch, not that I worked on it that entire time because in November 2002, we went back to the Yucatan. This time my entire family spent two weeks in Mexico and at the end I decided “I want to write a novel.” And I spent four years learning to write a novel, which I never published.

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