Retirement: To Be or Not To Be?

Interesting food for thought in this article (Point No. 5) about how our generation’s retirement will be vastly different from our parents’ or grandparents’. If we plan to retire at or around 65, we should expect 25-30 more years ahead of us with little to no income. I’m not counting on Social Security to be solvent by that time, so that would mean our retirement savings would have to fund all those extra years. In order for that to happen, we would have to save up a huge amount of money, probably $4+ million in today’s dollars. That raises the question, should we really be saving as much as possible (currently around 15% of our income) right now for our retirement? Or should we focus on living our lives with a little more spending now, and plan to continue working as long as possible? My first instinct is that we should do both: first, save as much as possible over the next two years, then, while that is (hopefully) growing, relax on the saving to allow for more traveling, etc. Both of us highly resist the idea of “waiting” until retirement to chase our dreams, and the idea of having a little more money freed up now sounds great. But is it a sound financial decision?

The Whole Foods Big Deal

Whole Foods, one of the grocery stores we frequent, is currently in a struggle with the FTC to allow them to purchase a small competitor, Wild Oats. The court hearings which will decide the case have been going on yesterday and today, and a decision is expected by the end of the day. As both a customer and a stockholder, I’m very interested to see what the decision will be. To me, it seems almost incredulous that the government is arguing that WF will not have competition if the purchase is allowed to go through, even though every grocery store I’ve been to in the last year or so has organic offerings. On the other hand, WF does sell a lot of unique products that are not found at many other stores, so from that perspective I can see how competition might possibly be reduced if they purchase another store that also (from what I hear) carries many unique products.

Basically, the FTC is protecting the health-food crowd by attempting to ensure that all the alternative ingredients that we already pay way too much for don’t get sold only at WF. For that, I can thank them. However, I think in general they are taking this way out of proportion, because even if WF was allowed to purchase Wild Oats, there are still many, many other stores that compete with WF; some on quality, some on uniqueness, and almost all on price. It will be interesting to see how this court decision ends up, and how it affects the “healthy” grocery store markets.

Interesting blog posts from WF’s CEO, John Mackey, here.

News article describing both sides of the argument here.