2023 July 18 Doing more by doing nothing

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about doing nothing, and how that can be really invigorating. 

I'm going to talk about the benefit of doing nothing, and at the end, I also have a quick financial tip for people who are retiring, related to your credit score. I'll be doing that at the end of the show, so stick around if you want to hear about that. 

So what do I mean by doing nothing? If you're listening to this, chances are you're at least somewhat like me, someone who likes to do a lot with their life, be busy, and just do things all the time. That doesn't necessarily mean work at a regular job all the time, but it probably means  you're busy with work and personal matters, and you have a lot of stuff going on all the time, which I find really enjoyable.

My only regret is that there's only 24 hours each day. Besides trying to make the best use of the 24 hours each of us has every day, what else can we do? Somewhat counterintuitively, one of the best things we can do is absolutely nothing. By nothing, I mean planning for and setting aside some time where the only thing on the agenda is to relax and take your mind off all your regular tasks.

For me, that means heading into the mountains. I recently did a side trip to the Hudson River, which was totally gorgeous, even though it's totally not my thing. I'm a mountain person. As it worked out this past weekend, I had a three day weekend, so I could put together a three day weekend with absolutely no guilt whatsoever. I drove up to the mountains on two consecutive days. 

The first was a regular hike. I stopped on the way, bought a gluten-free ham sandwich on the way there, which is a big treat, and on the trail, I met a bunch of nice people, sat on a peninsula in the middle of two lakes and thought about very little, other than how wonderful it was that I was able to take the time, find a gluten-free sandwich, and just spend a quiet afternoon. I didn't sit and think about work. I just sat there focused on nature, and just had a really relaxing afternoon. 

The next day after the river adventure, I went to a small, hidden waterfall in the mountains that has a big swimming hole at the bottom. I was too late to get there to swim, but I sat in the middle of the stream on a big rock, and ate the other half of my sandwich. I was just amazed about how pretty the whole area is. It's in a little valley. It's not just a fall off a cliff, but it's actually at the end of a little valley and it's just delightful.

I thought about how pretty it was, how the falls look, how neat it must have been to have lived there, because there's this little cabin at the top of the falls, feeling the breeze at the bottom of the falls, just taking in everything around me and not  thinking about anything else going on. 

So was I guilty about the loss of productivity? Not even a little bit. That was completely away from my mind. Both days I had done volunteer work in the morning, and it was quite physically strenuous in both cases, but even that was relaxing because it was different than my regular other jobs. 

My mind was able to work on new problems and think creatively, and work on new things with new people. It was a whole different environment. So it was invigorating just by that. All those things combined meant, by the time Sunday rolled around, I felt better than I had in literally months. I tackled some correspondence I've been putting off. I did a couple more physical tasks. It turns out I lost a pound in three days just by being physically active. The whole thing felt great, and I was by doing what other people would say was nothing. You can see what I mean by nothing is just not doing any of the regular stuff. 

There were plenty of things that I could have done for the day job. There's always a healthy backlog of tasks for the podcast, and - of course this is a really important point: Your day job may not be working at a regular job. It may be caregiving, volunteering, any other activity that occurs on a regular basis. That, by its nature, either causes some degree of stress or requires mental focus in the normal course of doing it. When you do that all the time, eventually it becomes your life. 

Both my regular jobs have the same challenges week to week. I've been working on them for months. I've just been busy with both. They both have benefits, obviously, but my head was just full. I needed a rest. I needed to think about something else completely, not just for a couple hours, but completely. And that's what I was able to do for two and a half days.

By doing something different and leaving my mind open to wander under whatever subject it wanted, it allowed my mind to really rejuvenate and re-energize itself. Even the bad hike to the river was refreshing because it was something new. 

So to summarize it and wrap it all up, to really make doing nothing effective, you really have to do nothing related to your normal challenges. There have been plenty of studies that show taking a vacation but checking in on work every day or two has nearly zero benefit. I thought they might say didn't have as much benefit as if you're taking a real vacation, but it's almost zero benefit, and it can even have a negative impact on your overall mental fitness because you are surrounded by things and you can't pay attention to them, because all your work problems are still in your head. The point isn't necessarily to sit all curled up on the couch. Perhaps that may work for you, but for me, it's getting away from things and to really fill my head with new experiences. 

It's to get your own self and your mind into a different frame of reference. That's what allows it to relax and be challenged in new and exciting ways, and to get the energy back into itself. So counterintuitively, it may take some planning, basically planning to do nothing. It seems funny to say that, but when you do that, you really have to get away from all your regular challenges and just let your mind open up to all the things in front of you.

Once you come up with a plan, follow through with it, and don't succumb to feeling guilty about  not working all the time. That won't help your mindset even the least bit. I know and associate with many workaholics, and most of them feel far better, even though they love to work and they work a lot, they still feel far better when they really detach from the main job and focus on something new once in a while. 

A friend of mine often takes his family to the national parks, and they'll go for a few days up to a couple weeks, and he's a new person when he gets back. He does sometimes have to call in because of his position, but when he's not, he's often in places that have no cell service, so for a day or two, he's just in a different environment. It makes a huge difference. 

In my case, it was only three days and I stayed in the areas I normally hang out in, but having those three days in a row with a different focus was simply wonderful. It's something to think about, something to try and put into your schedule. I know sometimes it's very difficult, but if you can get some time to just take off, just relax. It really is worth it if you can manage it.

Now for the quick bonus I mentioned about retirement credit scores. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal (July 17th, 2023), in the personal journal section, they had an article on retirement tends to pull down your credit score. It caught me off guard when I saw the title. 

I thought deeper about it. It seems like you'd be spending less money.  Overall, it seems like you'd be a better person for credit. I know a lot of you aren't in retirement, or ready for retirement yet, but you should start planning now for retirement for many reasons. This is just another one. You really want to have a goal of setting aside a generous retirement savings cushion.

It should probably be about two times as large as everyone says it should be. I've been through this for years and they say you'll never have to have it be that big, but you should double the recommended number in your head. That should be your goal at least. Just save. You'll never regret it. 

But if you do have significant retirement savings, you'll think that, as you get older, you're not going to have as many expenses. In some ways, that's true. However, medical expenses come around of course, and that's one of the things you want to save for, as well as having insurance for that. But the expenses differ. All of a sudden, you, you really want to help your grandchild go to school or get a car, so you have a different sort of expenses. 

How it affects your credit score is very different right now. Chances are, if you're younger, you may have a mortgage, maybe you have some credit cards, maybe you have a car loan, maybe revolving credit at a store or two, things like that. Hopefully not a whole lot of credit, but you have this mix of credit. It turns out that credit scores really reward when you have this mix of credit, so that pushes your credit score up. 

If you hadn't realized it before, credit scores are only partially about credit and your credit worthiness. It's also a tool to get you to spend more money if they think you're capable of doing it.

The things they weigh to increase your credit score aren't only about how much you can pay back that loan. There are a lot of other things because it's to help people who give you credit evaluate whether or not they can give you more credit. That's really the basis of what a credit score is.

Of course, income factors into it. Your ability to repay obviously factors into it heavily, but there's a lot of other things that inflate your credit score that have nothing to do with your ability to pay it back. It has to do with how well you're spending money. When you retire, often a number of spending changes happen. 

First, your income usually goes down. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it also means that you total available credit automatically becomes a larger fraction of your reported income.

You may also close older accounts, either old store credit cards, or lines of credit that you're not using anymore. Maybe you got a line of credit for a home improvement loan, you decide you're not going to do anything else on the house. Models will get rid of that. Part of your credit score is based upon all those older and hopefully good standing credit accounts, so when you close them, suddenly, they come off your credit report, and the average age of your credit accounts become shorter. That negatively affects your credit score. They no longer count towards that longevity score. The longer you've had credit accounts open, the higher your credit score. 

Also, as you get older and you're retiring, hopefully you have more engaging things to do. You're more likely to forget about making a payment because, if you have some little used account, maybe it gets charged once a year for some subscription you have or something like that. You might be away on a trip or down visiting the kids, and suddenly you have a missed payment. It can be small, but it still shows as a missed payment, and that can significantly affect your credit score when you're older. 

The credit lenders see that your accounts are a little younger, and think that maybe you're going into hard times. It's very easy to lower your credit score in your retirement, and very difficult to get it back up. Something may come up where you want to go get more credit and it's now more difficult because you have a lower credit score and you don't get quite as good a rate as you did before.

What the article recommends is that you try and keep using your older accounts, and that you pay them off every time so you don't get interest charged. Maybe you could easily pay cash for a pretty sizable purchase, but you should put it on the credit card, and then use the cash to pay that off. It'll show the account is active.  It'll show you're still making regular payments.

It'll show you have a breadth of credit sources that you're using, and being responsible with that will tend to bring your credit score up. Just be judicious about closing accounts, because it can negatively affect your credit score and be harder to replace them once you're retired. 

That line of credit you you think you're never going to use, when the bank sends you a note and says, Hey, you haven't used a line of credit in three years. We're going to close it in six months if you don't use it. Go put something on it. Take out $5,000 and two months later, pay it back. Maybe you pay interest on it for one month. Maybe, you pay it back later that month, but it still shows activity, so it keeps that line of credit open and that affects your credit score in a positive way. 

Naturally you want to try and enter retirement with as little debt as possible. That may require tradeoffs that aren't practical to make. Some people say when you retire, get rid of that big house, but the way the housing market is right now, the replacement housing situation cost is probably certainly higher than what you're paying right now. Keep that in mind. 

Some of the advice you see sounds good on paper, but the way the housing market is right now, it may not be the best choice. Just because somebody says, Oh, this is what you do to reduce  your retirement debt - yes, it will reduce your retirement debt, but you still need a place to live. Be careful of what you're doing, because costs are not how you remember them from a few years ago. 

The final advice was to be aware of credit lines with variable interest rates. If you do have a mortgage now, hopefully it's one either with a fixed rate or a much lower rate. As you retire, your income's going to become more fixed in nature. If you take out any new loans of any sort, whether it's a mortgage or any loan whatsoever, if it has a variable rate, chances are that inflation's going to continue. That means that your loan payment keeps increasing as the interest payments go up over time. That means that loan will become a larger piece of your available income. You may have thought that, by getting that loan and paying off some other cards, you're saving some money, but now you have that loan with a variable rate, and it's getting bigger too. 

Your credit company will look at that and say, I don't know. They're spending more and more on loans compared to the total income. Just beware of all those things. Again, this is from the Wall Street Journal. 

So that's it for the retirement credit score insight. Honestly, a few of the scenarios hadn't occurred to me, they're things that I wouldn't think would affect your credit score. Things like having less credit would affect us so negatively. I hope you found something useful here. Feel free to share any tips you may find on the issue of credit scores.

I'd love to hear from you. Remember probably the most important takeaway from tonight, is to take some time to just unwind, whether you're working full-time or not. Your primary job may be caregiving, volunteering, or maybe going to a day job in a regular place and maybe going to a storefront. Whatever it is, it's still a regular demand upon your mind

Your homework (always optional, but especially if you're feeling burned out) is to think how you could arrange any extended time away from your normal challenges. Like I said, for me, it was two and a half days, and it made a huge difference. Even just a couple of half days in a row can make a big change, dramatic and rejuvenating. 

That's it for the evening. As always, remember Ukraine. UKR7.com, there are links where you can donate to Ukraine's efforts. Also, there is the World Central Kitchen WCK.org.  People in Ukraine definitely need your support, but there's a lot of people in the world that need support all the time. No matter how bad we think we have it, we still have it pretty good compared to a lot of the world.

As I often say, remember. One of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. If you can, please try and make a donation to one of the organizations, whichever organization that you feel comfortable dealing with, whether it's for Ukraine or a local charity. If you can try and help those in need, it helps you focus from outside yourself to the rest of the world. That change in perspective is really good for your overall general feeling. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.