Surviving the looming retirement crisis

LOUISVILLE — The author of a book on how churches and other organizations can help mitigate the effects of what he calls “the looming retirement crisis” was a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.”

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Jonathan Grimm, a licensed investment advisor and author of “The Future Poor: How Families and Communities Can Join Together to Survive the Looming Retirement Crisis,” was the guest of hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 57-minute conversation here.

Up to 9 out of 10 people won’t have sufficient assets to live well during their retirement, according to Grimm. “What happens if we have lots of poor seniors running around? What about all the people who don’t retire by choice?” Grimm wondered. Most people don’t retire when and how they want to, he said. They’re forced into it either through aging or employment issues, or for medical, disability or family reasons.

“My book is all about the trajectory of where we’re headed. Most of us are going to be poor in the future,” Grimm said. What do we do about that?

Those demographic pressures could also make things difficult for churches and other nonprofits, Grimm said in response to a question from Doong. “If you have lower church attendance and people’s ability to give decreases over time, that’s not a good model, especially as things become more expensive,” Grimm said. “It’s a problem that’s not isolated in people’s individual financial situations. There are these really deep community situations as well that we’ve got to think about and begin to plan for — and probably do some things very differently moving forward than the way we’ve done them in the past.”

Despite the lessons learned from the Great Recession of 2007-09, which was brought on in large part by a housing crisis, “we keep returning to 1980s financial advice, saying what worked in the previous quarter-century is the thing that’s going to work for the next quarter-century,” Grimm said. But to make that paradigm work, American workers would each have to save $30,000 annually, which “eliminates most people from the equation,” he noted.

Churches can play “a big part” shaping what the financial future will look like for seniors, Grimm said. The first step is to help scrap the “retire at 65” mentality “and talk about what people need for their entire lifetime, taking a serious look at the statistical data on the likelihood of certain life events happening” and the products in the financial world that can help cover those expenses.

Grimm defines health broadly to include economic stability and access to a quality education, medical care and the built environment. “There’s also a social connection piece, making sure people have a social environment they can operate in,” Grimm said.

Churches have historically been instrumental filling portions of many of those needs. “We used to be deeply involved in those things that make us healthy, but we have backed away,” he said. “I think there’s a real opportunity to return to those, including creating economic stability for everyone attending our church, especially as people age and encounter the serious things of retirement, which is a precarious situation.”

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While retirement may not be a “flashy” topic, “it’s relevant to churches now,” Catoe said. “It’s a new emerging mission field many of us don’t know much about.”

Grimm said the PC(USA) “has been on the front end of a lot of social issues, which is great. I think this might be one of the most equal opportunity crises that we’ve had. It cuts across gender, orientation and ethnic lines.”

“I’ve asked some of my pastor friends: if 9 out of 10 people in your church are headed toward poverty, would you do anything different in your ministry? Everyone will come to something that’s socially or economically valuable to them. You don’t need to go very far in the Bible to see poverty is something we should be working on.”

“What if the poor is all of us?” Grimm wondered. “If the church becomes the place that creates economic stability for people, what kind of draw could that be? People would see that as revolutionary.” Church history shows that “at the high points of church engagement, when there’s largescale social involvement for the good of people inside or outside the church, it’s tapped into the idea of a reformation of sorts. Is there a new awakening that could be on the horizon in the midst of decline?”

Helping each other out, Doong said, “is the definition of being in community with one another.”

Grimm called community and pooled resources “the secret sauce of the financial world. Pooled financial resources go back as early as can be,” at least to the practice of gleaning, an arrangement that fed Ruth and Naomi.

“That’s community finance. It’s social principles at play. In order to take care of people, we don’t take everything for ourselves,” Grimm said. “We learn to operate in community and we learn to see resources in that way.”

When we do that, “some people have the ability to turn things into gold. Others work really hard and can never get ahead. How do we marry those together for social well-being and the health of us all? That’s a significant mission I want to be a part of — to help people understand, and bring my understanding from the standpoint of a professional advisor and also having training in theology and ethics. I’ve tried to bring those to reshape and think about this differently,” Grimm said. “If we don’t, we miss a huge opportunity to get in front of a large issue. We also miss an opportunity to keep the doors open.”

“There has to be a conversation around how we voluntarily opt in to join other folks to create greater safety nets for us,” Grimm said. “That’s why I’m a lover of all kinds of life insurance and why I think there’s some real wisdom in the pooling of resources so that everyone gets more out of it than they could on their own.”

Grimm speaks from experience, having in the past year suffered a serious auto accident and then losing his family’s home in the Altadena fire. Following each event, Grimm was thankful for insurance. Replacing an automobile and a home out of pocket “is something that’s not realistic,” he said. “But when you pool with other folks and you do things … together, that opens up a whole new world of safety net.” He called that “a reawakening” of “that sense that we have to do more of our financial lives together.”

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The fire particularly “was life-changing. My family and I have different moments of levity and grief, of sadness, loss and devastation. We’ve been through every emotion you can imagine,” he told the hosts. “We had to start from scratch, but it opened up my eyes to certain insights, which I lay out in the first chapter” of the book, insights that weren’t included in the original manuscript. “I had been looking for a vivid illustration of community resources. I would have chosen something else, obviously,” he said with a chuckle. But “in the aftermath of the fires, it was beautiful to watch the rallying of so many different resources.”

“It takes a lot of different things to make life work, and we can’t do it all on our own,” he said. “Can we [make changes] when times are OK? Do we need a crisis?”

“We have been conditioned to put things off,” Catoe said, “until we have to do something.”

The church’s response “is part of the magic that showing up as a community has,” Grimm said. He’s currently working with churches and community groups “to be an advocate for shifting some of this mindset.”

“It takes having conversations with people like you and with other people who have a heart and want to see different outcomes for one another,” Grimm told the hosts. “I think there’s something here for everyone. I look forward to seeing where this all goes.”

“You’re doing the Lord’s work out there,” Catoe told Grimm. “This is a conversation we need to be having, especially in our churches.”

“I appreciated how theological we got in that conversation,” Doong told Catoe after the talk had concluded. “The church has a huge role to play, and I appreciate Jonathan outlining that for us.”

“The church doesn’t give itself enough credit,” Catoe said. “This is an opportunity to say, ‘look at what we have. How are we meeting the needs with what we have?’ That can also open some doors to what’s next. We need to think less reactively and more prescriptively.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.