The elephant in the room, David, is that a lot people are retiring earlier than expected because no one wants to employ people over 50. They lose their jobs and can’t get hired by anyone else. Corporations use any excuse to get rid of older workers and replace them with foreign nationals on visas or kids just out of college. Try to get an IT job in Silicon Valley if you’re over 50. It’s brutal.

My husband was out of work for three years and we finally had to move back East where the ageism isn’t so bad. In the past ten years, he’s been laid off a couple more times with a generous severance package which is code for “Beat it, Gramps, but here’s an extra year’s salary so you don’t sue us because you absolutely would have a case.”

My husband is the only person I know who worked in a corporate environment for most of his working life and retired when he wanted to at 67. But that’s only because he refused to quit when he got laid off. He took contract jobs in between regular employment stints, took courses and upped his skill set. He had the energy to do that in his fifties but if he had lost his job five years ago, he might not had the energy.