Years of newspaper and magazine articles have offered to help us answer a single question: “Can you afford to retire?”

    With such conditioning it’s difficult to think about anything but piling up vast sums of money.

    But today I’d like you to consider the reverse.
Can you afford to work? Is leisure a better use of your time?

    I’m serious. While the necessity of work is obvious at 30 or 40, aging has a way of changing things. You complete big projects like educating children--- even the pestie one who insists on going to Princeton. You pay off a home mortgage. You have some money in the bank. You have a retirement account and, just maybe, the prospect of a pension.

    But you trudge on. Work has become a comfortable habit. And the more money you put aside the better your retirement because, well, you’ll have more money.

    That’s conventional logic.

    Now let’s reframe the problem. Rather than ask if you can afford to retire, ask:  “How much will another year of work improve my retirement income?”
Do that and you’ll understand why millions of Americans retire at age 62, in spite of the harsh warnings from the Employee Benefit Research Institute and a chorus of investment companies.

    Here are the basics. Unless you truly have a very large ship coming in, your savings aren’t going to grow very fast, even with good contributions, because you’ve already accumulated a good deal.  The income you can expect from your savings may grow at 8 percent, unless you’re taking a lot of risk.

    Ditto Social Security. Your benefit rises a healthy 8 percent  for each year it is deferred. The income from a corporate pension might rise a bit more. Put it all together and the retirement income you might collect next year isn’t likely to be more than 8 percent higher than what you could collect today.

    The exception, of course, is the person who has no savings, no pension, and still has a mortgage. For them, work is a necessity. But that’s probably not you.
Now suppose you’ve been earning $150,000  a year and know that you can retire this year with income from all sources of $105,000--- 70 percent of your work earnings. So an additional year of work could add $8,400 a year to your lifetime retirement income.

    Not bad, at first glance.

    But that $8,400 a year amounts to only $175 a week for the 48 weeks you will work. That’s about $4.38 an hour, before taxes, and less than the minimum wage.  Lop another 30 percent off for taxes  and your take home pay for another year of work will be a tad over $3 an hour.
Of course, you’ll enjoy that increase for the rest of your life, not just a year. But, viewed this way, you can’t help wonder. Leisure looks like a very good alternative. At the very least, it makes early retirement less surprising.

    As with anything, there are exceptions. When I mentioned this to my wife she said, “Wow, we pay our gardener $15 an hour to weed. You could stop writing and start weeding!”
If you have been working to avoid weeding, don’t discuss this column with your spouse.