Why planning to work longer may be the better path to retirement

Sponsored by Practising Law Institute

People are living longer, and that reality may call for a different approach to retirement planning. In this episode of the Journal of Accountancy podcast, Kelley Long, CPA/PFS, shares why she believes working longer can be a positive choice, how mini-retirements and career flexibility fit into that vision, and what those ideas mean for personal financial planning.

In the last of the JofA’s summer episodes recorded at ENGAGE, Long reflects on discussions from the conference, including lessons for younger professionals and the growing interest in designing a career that supports a balanced life.

In April, Long previewed one of her ENGAGE sessions on the JofA podcast and wrote about planning for mini-retirements.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why Long believes many professionals should plan to work longer and why that doesn’t have to be a negative outcome.
• How mini-retirements and sabbaticals can fit into a long-term career and financial plan.
• Ways to approach conversations with employers about career flexibility and extended time away from work.
• How shifting from a retirement-focused mindset to a lifestyle-focused mindset can influence financial decisions throughout life.
• How first-time ENGAGE attendees can navigate multiple aspects of the conference — from its size, learning tracks, and networking opportunities to its indoor/outdoor temperature changes.
• Long’s review of several ENGAGE keynote sessions.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Hey listeners, this is the Journal of Accountancy podcast. Thanks for coming back for another episode. I’m Neil Amato with the JofA. Joining me is a repeat guest who has given us her Machu Picchu moment and many other highlights in the JofA and on the JofA website over the years. Her name is Kelley Long. You’ll hear that conversation right after this brief sponsor message.

[Sponsor message]

Amato: Welcome back to the show. As I said, our guest today is Kelley Long. It is the last day of ENGAGE, the low-key last day. We’ve got music playing above us. We’ve got people taping up big-screen TVs from the exhibit hall. There were mimosas for breakfast. So it’s feeling very summer vacation-like, and that’s not even counting the temperature outside the ARIA in Las Vegas. So Kelley, welcome. We’re glad to have you here.

Kelley Long: I’m really excited to be back, Neil. Thanks for having me.

Amato: Does it feel as low-key this day compared to the other days of ENGAGE?

Long: Very much so, which is interesting because as a planning committee member, we’re always talking about how can we make sure people stay through Thursday. If we promoted the mimosas a little better, maybe that would help.

Amato: That’s true. It’s a good idea. The last time I was at ENGAGE was actually 2019. It wasn’t even in this building. It was at a different hotel. And I remember having mimosas with a podcast guest as we sat and recorded. It was a lot of fun. I don’t even think it was the last day. I think it was like Tuesday mimosas.

Long: Oh, wow.

Amato: Maybe Mimosa Monday needs to be a thing.

Long: Maybe. Yeah, that would get people here earlier.

Amato: It would. OK, related to what we’ve already been talking about, because you mentioned this in our last discussion. Did you live up to this prediction and eat your way through Las Vegas?

Long: So far, so good. My favorite restaurant, maybe not in the world, but one of my favorite places is Bavette’s, and they have a Chicago outpost. It’s really hard to get a reservation. They have one here at the Park MGM.

So I suggested to the PFP committee that maybe we go there. So we went there on Monday night as a committee. And then another friend was doing a group dinner looking for suggestions. I suggested Bavette’s. So I went there on Tuesday. And I stayed through today. I’m staying over tonight so I could go to Bavette’s just in case.

So now I’m free for dinner because I am not going a third time. But one of the things that’s really great about ENGAGE, because I go to lots of conferences, is they feed you really well here already. And then dinner is kind of on your own, but you don’t have to even buy dinner. So for folks who are on a budget, every night in the exhibit hall, there’s great food and it’s delicious and it’s a variety. The lunches are easy. I mean, we eat so well here. I don’t even need to bring snacks.

Amato: That’s a good point. And it is one thing that makes this conference great. You had two sessions on the Wednesday of ENGAGE. And again, we’re recording while at ENGAGE. This is going to air later in the summer. Tell us the topics, which we’ve discussed, and then I’ll ask you some follow-ups based on what you say from how those went.

Long: Sure. My first topic was for the EDGE audience, so the young leaders up and coming, as well as the personal financial planning folks, and we called it Beyond FIRE, but I like to refer to it as the shifting definition of retirement, particularly for younger folks who are dealing with different competing priorities than their parents and grandparents did with their financial futures.

My second topic was called Your Clients Are Overinsured, and it was really just a subtle way to get in there and talk more about HSAs, which is of course one of my favorite topics to dive deep on.

Amato: Any standout questions, comments that you got from audience members or any follow-up emails?

Long: Most interesting, I suspected this was going to be the case, is that most people, even from the PFP side, came to the Beyond FIRE topic for their own good. But there were people in the room who recognized that they have younger clients or want to target younger clients and want to get in touch with the younger generations.

The biggest questions I get after sessions like that is how do I find someone to help me with this, which is really an opportunity for the PFP, especially PFS folks in the organization to let fellow CPAs know how they do business and how to work with them. One of the things that drove me into personal finance out of accounting was questions from my parents about personal finance that I couldn’t answer.

And you just assume a CPA knows how personal finance works. So I think at a certain point in our careers, if you don’t know about it, you fake it because you don’t want to be embarrassed or it might be even a little shameful. A lot of CPAs are naturally drawn to dealing with their own money, but a lot of us don’t have the basic knowledge. So I’m always just surprised by people who are looking for their own CPA/PFS to help them with their personal finances who are already CPAs.

Amato: Yes, I was in some of your session and you asked the people, how many of you are here for you? And the number of people who raised their hands, I mean, it was —

Long: Most of the room.

Amato: It was not people who were looking for ways to advise their clients. They said, I’m here for me. So yeah, it is interesting that the CPA audience still seeks out another CPA perspective.

Long: Which is a little scary, because I was there to present kind of a countercultural topic. Like my overarching thesis says, you should work longer and you should plan on it, but not in a bad way. And I hope that I got my point across about how you can make the idea that you’re probably going to have to work longer, but it’s not so bad because our lifespans are longer, more of a pleasant thing to think about.

And that my key takeaway there is it’s not going to happen overnight that you can think about ways to shift your career to be more of a lifelong endeavor. And just talking about earning capacity so that you don’t have to work so hard to optimize and maximize your earnings during your best health years and you can enjoy your life more and find balance throughout your whole life.

Amato: That was one thing that I thought about following up with you is thinking about that notion that we did discuss some in a previous podcast. I mean, it’s fascinating to say, hey, I’m going to have some mini retirements. And that’s M-I-N-I for the listeners who maybe thought I said M-A-N-Y. I mean, it’s both, but it’s also small retirements. So one of my questions was, how do you approach your manager about such a thing?

Long: Well, we already have a mechanism in place for people to take three months off unpaid in most businesses. We call it parental leave. So, the structure is there. It’s just a matter of shifting the narrative around why I might want to take three months off.

I shouldn’t have to or my partner shouldn’t have to give birth in order for me to say, can I just step away for a little bit and I’ll come back, hold my job. Now obviously there’s an element of cooperation needed from your colleagues in order to maintain your position in the work that you’re doing. But if you’re maybe in a more seasonal job, you can maybe find ways to time it in a way that works better for the organization.

I would say don’t spring it on them and say, I want to take a sabbatical next month. It might take a couple years, but approaching it from this is the benefit to the business, the alternative might be me quitting and walking away. That comes back to like making yourself indispensable, but also being creative with their thinking and being thoughtful around how this would impact everyone and coming with a plan is usually better than just saying like, I need some time off, can you help me do it? You’re less likely to get buy-in.

Amato: Yeah, so that conversation, it might take a little doing. Even if you think you do have a good relationship, it might not happen immediately. And you make the point, you can’t just say, hey, I’m on sabbatical, you know, soon. And yeah, I thought about that. Like, if you don’t get the answer you want, is that the sign you need to look for another job? I mean, I know this is not really an accounting, financial advising question, but it’s a kind of career advising question.

Long: It is, and it has to do with your money. There are other ways to approach this. I have a friend who wanted to go to Thailand for a month and didn’t have a month of PTO and was not in the type of job where he could just say, I need a month off.

And so he approached his manager and said, hey, can I work out a schedule where certain days of the week I check in on email for an hour and you know when that hour is or if we need to schedule meetings and then one day a week I will be online full business hours and then one day a week you’re not going to hear from me at all.

And he worked it out so he could be away from home, away from his office for a full month without having to actually take more than five days of PTO. So, being a little bit more creative and flexible, especially in our industry where you can work virtually for the most part. Probably the hardest part is, if you work with clients, is getting your clients on board with that, depending on what their expectations are. And that’s business design, not necessarily having anything to do with your manager.

Amato: That is a good point. Thank you for making it clearer for me and expanding on it. One of the things you’re doing this summer, I guess, is writing a book. We’ve talked about that. How’s that going?

Long: My book is due in a month, so by the time this airs, it’s probably going to be submitted. It’s been a really interesting journey. I got the book deal because a year ago I was speaking on the topic of financial planning for people without kids, and an editor saw that on the agenda. So shout out to anybody who’s thinking about speaking at ENGAGE. You might get a book deal.

Amato: Wow.

Long: And so I got the contract while I was at ENGAGE last year. And that’s how long it takes to write a book when you work with a publisher. Interestingly, it’s a 14-chapter book, and I had the first 12 chapters done way in advance. The last two chapters have taken me months to get done. But it’s almost done. It’s going to be really, I think, helpful and exciting.

The hardest part for me has been deciding what topics to include because there are a lot of topics that apply to everybody in financial planning that aren’t just specific to people who don’t have kids but still need to be included, but under what topic? I go in depth on long-term care. I go in depth on finding a place to live when you’re old. The title of the book is But Who Will Take Care of You When You’re Old?

Amato: Right. I mean, that is a thing because if you do decide to not have kids, you maybe have a clearer financial path, but you don’t have those things in place, meaning kids, who are going to take on that caregiving role.

Long: There’s two key differences. First of all, I don’t have the people that are going to figure out the tech glitches that I’m doing for my parents. Like the little day-to-day things that younger people can help their parents with. Functionally, my husband and I, I’m partnered, but this is even more of a thing when you’re single, we’ll have to know where we want to live and get ourselves and our stuff there before we have to do that. And parents have the luxury in many cases of waiting until someone has a fall or an illness and then the kids do all the work. I don’t have that. The second thing is I don’t have anybody to leave my money to, so how do I find that balance of enjoying it during my good, healthy years but still making sure that I don’t end up needing to be on government assistance in my old age because I run out of money.

Amato: Was your audience for that Beyond FIRE session —I know you said it was on the EDGE track —but I guess what I’m trying to say is it wasn’t too late for some of them?

Long: No.

Amato: Because I didn’t think it when I just looked around, it wasn’t a particularly young audience. It wasn’t a bunch of 30-year-olds.

Long: No, it wasn’t. I think there were a lot of people there who are kind of living this and wanted a little validation or to make sure they weren’t missing anything. The reason I thought EDGE would find it as valuable as the financial planning folks is that the technical aspects, which we talked about in my last session, especially the HSA and the Roth IRA, are more effective as techniques if you start them in your 30s and 40s versus you just don’t get to accumulate as much in those accounts. So that aspect of it was more targeted to like the younger you are with this, the better it will serve you.

But I shared a story in my session about how I kind of arrived at this work-optional mini-retirement idea for myself was when I first started my last job. One of my colleagues went on maternity leave and was the first person who had gone on maternity leave. And she came back and said, I really need to be part time. They called in all hands and said, OK, Danielle’s going to go part time. We’re going to try this, but we want to like she’s been here for five years and that’s why she can do it. So I think what they were trying to say, though, was like, don’t everybody try to go part-time that’s new here. But what I heard was after five years, I can go part-time. And so I started thinking right then about what would it look like to have this job as a part-time person.

And so these types of shifts in terms of making a career or a position for yourself that makes it easier to step away and come in and out do take time. You just have to start thinking about ahead of time and kind of retain and keep a file of ideas and creative solutions to serve you and your business or your job or whatever is going to be the thing that holds you back from doing this.

Amato: You mentioned the PFP committee. Is that the conference planning committee for the track?

Long: Yes.

Amato: OK, so how long have you been part of that group?

Long: This was my second year on the group and I was really honored to be asked to join. It’s actually a position of tremendous influence because we pick the topics and we pick the speakers. And I personally was interested in being a speaker, but a lot of the folks that are on the committee have no interest in getting on stage, and they really just want to make sure that the conference fulfills the needs of everybody who’s coming, especially in the PFP world, and not just CPAs. We really would like to draw in more financial planners in general to serve them with their educational and knowledge needs.

Amato: Thinking ahead as this is the last day of ENGAGE, but again, we’re not really tying it to the conference itself. Let’s think ahead to next year. If you were advising someone who maybe has not been to this conference before, what would you say?

Long: It’s a huge conference. It’s one of the biggest out there, definitely in our profession. So it can be overwhelming. And knowing where to go immediately to find other people that might also be a little introverted and shy about meeting people is probably the key. And so I would say, despite the fact that the exhibit hall is full of people trying to sell you things, it’s actually the best place to go to meet people.

I go to the AICPA pavilion. They have a huge setup in the conference hall and then they have around them little spots for the different tracks. And so I tend to go to the PFP pavilion and just hang out. And that’s a great way to meet the people of the AICPA, not just working in PFP, but all the staffers, and people from the Journal of Accountancy.

Amato: Shout out to Jeff Drew.

Long: That’s right. I met Jeff Drew in person finally. But it’s a great place to go to find other people [music begins to play].

Amato: We have a slight Chicago interruption. That’s Chicago the band, not the city.

Long: “25 or 6 to 4.”

Amato: I’m not sure we’re going to use this part, but it’s kind of funny as we’re watching a guy in the hallway just be totally oblivious to us. Anyway, you were saying.

Long: I was saying I go to the PFP pavilion and that’s a good way to just meet a couple other people who might be there or whatever your track is if you’re not PFP and meet other people, somebody to buddy up with, somebody to go to dinner with, somebody to discuss sessions with, to sit with. So there are networking opportunities here. They just might not be as easy to come by at smaller conferences.

But I would say also take advantage ahead of time of setting up your agenda. But then also check in throughout to make sure what other sessions are happening. Look at the other tracks, see what else is there, and know you’re going to be fed really well.

Amato: I do love when we can keep the conversation on food. I had some good meals in Vegas, too, and it was great. I love being here. I love seeing so many people that I either have known or have gotten to meet for the first time in person, including you.

Long: I would also say it’s really cold here, inside. So bring warm (clothes), bring a sweater. The number of especially women I saw in little sleeveless dresses just like freezing. It’s cold in this conference center.

Amato: It is. If you sit still in Vegas air conditioning, yes, because you think, well, Vegas is hot, so I’m going to —

Long: It is very hot outside.

Amato: Dress for warm [weather], yes. It’s a totally different wardrobe being in a conference.

Long: Yes, indeed, and it applies here. every year I always forget.

Amato: We’ve touched on a lot of topics, not too much, “Let’s advise CPAs on how to do their jobs better” or think about things differently. We’ve had some of that, but not as much. But I still love episodes such as this. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about from this week or looking ahead?

Long: Well, beyond the food, how can I not talk about the keynote sessions? This year we had Ryan Reynolds and Richard Galanti, the former and probably still very involved Costco CFO here, which was —

Amato: Yeah, he didn’t convince me he was retired.

Long: No, I don’t think he’s convinced himself. But that was such an entertaining session, but it was also informative. I think just seeing the approachability of this guy who worked at Costco for 40 years as an executive has helped make it like one of the best places in the world for a lot of people. And my favorite part was seeing him afterwards in the exhibit hall with his pockets stuffed full of tchotchkes. Like, he went around and collected the free stuff. He is a total accountant.

And then Ryan Reynolds was obviously very entertaining and insightful and wise, and hearing about their collaborations, that was an excellent way to kick off the conference. And every year there’s somebody that maybe does not have the star power, but there is always somebody that is insightful.

But then on the last day is always Ian Bremmer, has been for several years. As a committee member, we always advocate and I always prioritize that session and I would encourage, we put him on the last day so people maybe will stay and see all the speakers. He just brings such a helpful perspective to what’s going on in the world that is not, it’s completely apolitical. I have no idea how the guy feels about what’s going on in Washington, but he states it in a way that’s no bias, no — he did share some of his fears. So I just feel like we get it straight to know what we really should be worrying about and what we don’t need to worry about. So that is always a valuable session.

Amato: Kelley Long, we’re so glad to have you on the podcast again. Thank you for taking the time.

Long: It’s delightful to be here. Thank you.