Here is the full text and summary of Elizabeth White’s talk titled “Fifty-five, Unemployed, Faking Normal”at TEDxVCU conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
You know me. I am in your friendship circle, hidden in plain sight. My clothes are still impeccable, bought in the good years when I was still making money. To look at me, you would not know that my electricity was cut off last week for non-payment, or that I meet the eligibility requirements for food stamps.
But if you paid attention, you would see that sadness in my eyes, hear that hint of fear in my otherwise self-assured voice. These days, I’m buying the $1.99 tile-sized jug of Tide to make ends meet. I bet you didn’t know laundry detergent came in that size. You invite me to the same expensive restaurants the two of us have always enjoyed, but I order mineral water now with a twist of lemon, not the $12 glass of Chardonnay.
I am frugal in my menu choices, meticulous, I count every penny in my head. I demur, dividing the table bill evenly to cover desserts and designer coffees and second and third glasses of wine I did not consume. I am tired of trying to fake appearances.
A friend told me that I’m broke, not poor, and there is a difference. I live without cable, my gym membership, and nail appointments. I’ve discovered I can do my own hair. There is no retirement savings, no nest egg. I exhausted that long ago.
There is no expensive condo to draw equity and no husband to back me up. Months of slow pay and no pay have decimated my credit. Bill collectors call constantly, reading verbatim from a script before expressing polite sympathy for my plight and then demanding payment arrangements I can’t possibly meet. Friends wonder privately how someone so well-educated could be an economic freefall.
I’m still as talented as ever and smart as a whip, but work is sketchy now, mostly on and off consulting gigs. At 55, I’ve learned how to fake cheeriness, but there are not many opportunities for work anymore. I don’t remember exactly when it stopped, but I cannot deny now having entered the uncertain world of formerly and used to be. I’m not sure anymore where I belong.
What I do know is that dozens of online job applications seem to just disappear into a black hole. I’m wondering what is to become of me. So far, my health has held up, but my body aches, or is it my spirit? Homeless women used to be invisible to me, but I appraise them now with curious eyes wondering if their story started like mine.
I wrote this piece a year ago. It’s a composite of my story and other women I know. I wrote it because I was tired of pretending I was all right when I wasn’t. I was tired of faking normal.
I wasn’t seeing myself in the popular press. Nobody I knew was traveling the world or buying a condo in Costa Rica. Very few of my friends had set aside the 15 to 20 percent experts tell us we need to maintain our standard of living in retirement. My friends, many in their 50s and 60s, were looking at a downward mobility, a work for life proposition, just a job loss, medical diagnosis, or divorce away from insolvency.
We may not have hit rock bottom, but many of us saw a sequence of events where rock bottom was possible for the first time. And the truth is, it really doesn’t take much. The median household in the U.S. only has enough savings to replace one month of income. Forty-seven percent of us cannot pull together $400 to deal with an emergency. That’s almost half of us. A major car repair, and we’re standing on the abyss. You wouldn’t know it to look around you.
I’m not the only one in this situation. There are people in this room who are in the same predicament. And if it’s not you, it is your parents or your sister or maybe your best friend. We get good at faking normal. Shame keeps us silent and siloed.
When I first decided I was going to come out with my story, I did a website, and a friend noticed that there were no photos of me. It was all kind of cartoons like this. Even as I was coming out, I was still hiding.
We live in a world where success is defined by income. When you say that you have money problems, you’re announcing pretty much that you’re a loser. When you’re a graduate of Harvard Business School, as I am, you’re some kind of double loser. We boomers hear a lot about how we have underfunded our retirement, how it’s all our fault.
Why on earth would we draw down our 401k plan to cover the shortfall on our mother-in-law’s nursing home care or to pay for our kids’ tuition or just to survive? We’re accused of being poor planners and deadbeats, all that money we spent on lattes and bottled water. To shame and blame is so deliciously tempting. Many of us don’t even wait for others to do it. We’re so busy doing it to ourselves.
I say let’s own our part. We all could have saved more. I know I could have saved more. If you were to rifle through my life over the last 30 years, you would see more than one dumb thing I have done financially. I can’t change that now and neither can you.
But let’s not mix up individual isolated behavior with the systemic factors that have caused a $7.7 trillion retirement income gap. Millions of boomer age Americans did not land here because of too many trips to Starbucks.
We spent the last three decades dealing with flat and falling wages and disappearing pensions and through-the-roof costs on housing and health care and education. It used to not feel like this.
We all remember the three-legged retirement income stool which had the savings and pension and Social Security. Well, that stool has gone wobbly.
Take savings. What savings? For families there’s just nothing left to save after the bills have been paid. The pension leg of the stool has also gone wobbly. We can remember when many people had pensions. Today only 13% of American workers are employed by companies that offer them.
So what did we get instead? We got 401k type plans and suddenly responsibility for retirement planning got shifted from our companies to us. We got the reins, but we also got the risk. And it turns out that millions of us just aren’t that good at voluntarily investing over 40 years. Millions of us just aren’t that good at managing market risk.
And really the numbers tell the story. Half of all American households have no retirement savings at all. That would be zero. No 401k, no IRA, not a dime.
Among 55 to 64 year olds who do have a retirement count, median value of that count is $104,000. Now $104,000 does sound better than zero, but as an annuity it generates about $300. I don’t have to tell you that you can’t live on that. With savings down, pensions becoming a relic of the past, and 401k plans failing millions of Americans, many near retirees are dependent on Social Security as their retirement plan.
But here’s the problem. Social Security was never supposed to be the retirement plan. It’s not nearly enough. At best it replaces something like 40% of your pre-retirement income.
Things have changed a lot from when Social Security was introduced back in 1935. Then a 21-year-old male had a 50% chance of living until he was 65. So he retired at 60, did a little fishing, kissed his grandkids, got his gold watch. He’d be dead within five years of receiving benefits.
That’s not the pattern today. If you’re in your late 50s in good health, you’re going to live easily another 20 or 25 years. That’s a really long time to make ends meet if you are broke.
So what’s the play if you’ve landed here and you’re 50 or 55 or 60? What’s the play if you don’t want to land here and you’re 22 or 32? Here’s what I’ve learned from my own experience. Recovery’s not coming. There is no big rescue, no Prince Charming, no big bailout in the works.
To have a shot at something other than being old and poor in America, we’re going to have to save ourselves and each other. I’ve had to come out of the shadows, stand here openly, and I’m inviting you to do so as well. I’m not going to tell you that it’s not easy. I ventured, though, to tell my story because I thought it would make it a little easier for people to tell theirs.
I think it’s only through our strength in numbers that we can begin to change the national lala conversation that we are having on this retirement crisis. With so many of us shell-shocked and adrift about what has happened to us, we’re going to have to build up from the grassroots, forming what I think are resilient circles. These are small groups of people coming together to talk about what has happened to them, to share resources and information, and to begin to figure out a way forward.
I believe from this base that we can find our voices again and sound the alarm, start pushing our institutions and policy makers to go hard on this retirement crisis with the urgency it deserves.
In the meantime, and there is an in the meantime, we’re going to have to adopt a live low to the ground mindset, drastically cutting back on our expenses. I don’t mean just living within our means. A lot of people are already doing that. What is called for now is to, in a much deeper way, ask ourselves what it really means to live a life that is not defined by things. I call it smalling up.
Smalling up is figuring out what you really need to feel contented and grounded. I have a friend who drives really beat up raggedy cars, but he will scrimp and save $15,000 at one point to buy a flute because music is what really matters to him. He smalled up.
I’ve had to also let go of magical thinking, this idea that if I just was patient enough and tightened my belt that things would go back to normal. If I just sent in one more CV or applied to one more job online or attended one more networking event that surely I’d get the kind of job I was used to having. Surely things would return to normal.
The truth is I’m not going back and neither are you. The normal that we knew is over. In this new place that we are, we’re going to be asked to do things that we don’t want to do. We’re going to be asked to take assignments that we think are beneath our station and our talent and our skill. I have had to get off my throne.
Last year a good friend of mine asked me if I would help her with some organization work. I assumed she meant community organizing along the lines of what President Obama did in Chicago. She meant organizing somebody’s closet. I said, I’m not doing that.
She said, get off your throne. Money is green. It’s not easy being part of the advanced team that is ushering in this new era of work and living. First is always hardest. First is before there are networks and pathways and role models, before there are policies and ways to show us how to go forward.
We’re in the middle of a seismic shift and we’re going to have to find bridge work to get us through. Bridge work is what we do in the meantime. Bridge work is what we do while we’re trying to figure out what is next.
Bridge work is also letting go of this notion that our worth and our value depend on our income and our titles and our jobs. Bridge work can look crazy or cool depending on how you were rolling when your personal financial crisis hit. I have friends with PhDs who are working at the container store or driving Uber or Lyft. I have other friends who are partnering with other boomers and doing really cool entrepreneurial ventures.
Bridge work doesn’t mean that we don’t want to build on our past careers, that we don’t want meaningful work. We do. Bridge work is what we do in the meantime while we’re figuring out what is next.
I’ve also learned to think strategy, not failure, when I’m sort of processing all these things that I don’t want to do. And I say that that’s an approach that I would invite you to consider as well. So if you need to move in with your brother to make ends meet, call him. If you need to take in a boarder to help you pay your mortgage or pay your rent, do it. If you need to get food stamps, get the darn food stamps.
AARP says only a third of older adults who are eligible actually get them. Do what you need to do to go another round. Know that there are millions of us. Come out of the shadows. Cut back. Small up. Think strategy, not failure. Get off your throne and find the bridge work to get you through the lean times.
As a country we have achieved longevity, investing billions of dollars in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of disease. It’s not enough to just live a long time. We want to live well. We haven’t invested nearly as much in the physical infrastructure to ensure that that happens.
We need now a new way of thinking about what it means to be old in America. And we need guidance and ideas about how to live a richly textured life on a much more modest income. So I am calling on change agents and social entrepreneurs, artists and elders and impact investors. I’m calling on developers and disruptors of the status quo.
We need you to help us imagine how to invest in the services and products and infrastructure that will support our dignity, our independence, and our well-being in these many, many decades that we’re going to live.
My journey has taken me from a place of fear and shame to one of humility and understanding. I’m ready now to link shields with others to fight this fight. And I’m inviting you to join me.
Thank you.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Elizabeth White’s talk, titled “Fifty-five, Unemployed, Faking Normal,” offers a poignant and eye-opening perspective on the financial challenges faced by many middle-aged individuals in America. In her talk, she shares her personal experiences and those of others who are hidden in plain sight, struggling to make ends meet despite outward appearances of success. Here are the key takeaway points from her talk:
The Hidden Struggle: Elizabeth White highlights that there are individuals in our social circles who appear successful on the surface but are silently grappling with financial difficulties, such as unpaid bills and dwindling savings.
Downward Mobility: Many middle-aged individuals, including those with education and talents, are facing a precarious financial situation due to job instability, medical issues, or divorce. They are one step away from insolvency.
Savings Crisis: A significant portion of Americans has little to no retirement savings, with 401k plans often failing to provide substantial support. The median retirement savings for those aged 55-64 is alarmingly low.
Social Security Inadequacy: Social Security, designed decades ago, is now insufficient to support a lengthy retirement. People are living longer, and Social Security alone cannot provide a comfortable retirement income.
Redefining Success: Elizabeth challenges the societal notion that success is solely defined by income. She encourages individuals to reevaluate what truly matters and embrace a mindset of “smalling up,” focusing on contentment and values over material possessions.
Ownership of Mistakes: While acknowledging personal financial mistakes, Elizabeth emphasizes the need to distinguish individual behavior from systemic factors that have led to a massive retirement income gap.
Community and Grassroots Efforts: To address the retirement crisis, Elizabeth advocates for forming resilient circles where people can openly discuss their challenges, share resources, and work together to raise awareness and push for change at the grassroots level.
Bridge Work: In the absence of a quick fix, individuals may need to engage in “bridge work” – temporary solutions to make ends meet. This may involve unconventional job choices, seeking government assistance, or relying on family support.
Dignified Aging: Elizabeth calls for a shift in how society views aging in America. She urges change agents, social entrepreneurs, artists, and others to invest in infrastructure and services that promote dignity, independence, and well-being for older individuals on modest incomes.
Unity in the Fight: Elizabeth’s journey from shame to understanding has led her to call for unity among individuals and organizations to address the retirement crisis. She invites everyone to join her in this important battle.
In her talk, Elizabeth White sheds light on the financial challenges faced by countless Americans, challenges the societal norms surrounding success and aging, and calls for a collective effort to create a more equitable and dignified future for older individuals in the United States.
