How To Know When To Retire

In Baby Boomer parlance the "Number" is the amount of money you need to have in the bank (or wherever) to be able to retire and still maintain the lifestyle you so richly deserve and to which you have become accustomed. But this question was always more than just a mathematical calculation, it involved matters of risk tolerance, lifestyle decisions, so much more than just an actuarial analysis. Of course that's all academic now since none of us will be able to retire, ever, but back then I tried to think whom else do we know that faces similar issues that might be able to provide a guiding philosophy for this thorny question. And I thought of squirrels because they are obliged to make decisions like this every year during their entire adult lives.

When squirrels gather acorns and nuts for the long winter they hide them either in one huge hole or, as the common gray squirrel does, in several hundred different places, exercising behavior known as "scatter hoarding" (what investment advisors would call portfolio diversification). The purpose of the hoards is to allow the squirrels to rest quietly in their nests during the winter, leisurely cracking nuts while watching reruns of American Idol, without ever having to shovel the walk or put up with unpleasant commuting conditions. (By the way, it's a myth that squirrels hibernate during the winter season. They don't. What they do is snuggle together, leaving their nests only as necessary to "carry out" from their various food caches (presumably the ones that don't deliver). In that regard they are exactly like us, or the way we would be if we had the option to stay home on cold wintry days.)

But back to the nuts. The specific thing I wondered about squirrels is how they calculate their "Number". In other words, how does a particular squirrel figure out how many acorns and nuts he needs to maintain his standard of living during his season of retirement? How does he know when he has enough and can we borrow this instinct to help us to calculate when we finally have enough "nuts" so that we can stop hoarding and head home to our own comfortable nests.

So I proceeded to research the subject in the way all of the finest academicians do, I Googled "squirrels gathering nuts". The result was disappointing. Rather than relying on some combination of enlightened philosophy and extraordinary scientific phenomenon (e.g., an innate unerring instinct that somehow telegraphs to the squirrel "you now have all the acorns, seeds and nuts you require for the upcoming winter and the bell curve of satisfaction indicates you have reached the point of diminishing returns so you should cease foraging now and leave the balance of the nuts to your brother and sister squirrels who may have greater needs than you."), it appears, according to Almanac.com, that squirrels "...gather food until there's no more to gather. They are rather greedy." (Yet another parallel to humankind, but not what I was hoping to find.) Okay, so the squirrel doesn't know any more than we do when it's time to get out of the rat race, even though he is, more-or-less, a rat.

It's amusing to try to imagine how the squirrel might handle the unanticipated loss of a significant portion of his portfolio of savings as a result of a forest recession or other Act of God. Would he immediately cut back on berries and nuts and switch to fungi, twigs and bark? Put the second nest up for sale? Send incessant anxious chatter messages to his fellow squirrels - "Oy vey! Did you hear that Punxsutauney Phil saw his shadow and is predicting six more weeks of recession and they foreclosed on Alvin's nest and he had to move in with his mother-in-law?" (Yes, I know Alvin is a chipmunk and Phil is a groundhog, but I ran out of notable squirrel names.) And is there such a thing as a bailout for squirrels and, if so, what would that look like? Would "They" somehow replenish the caches of squirrels that had imprudently (perhaps in exchange for a few ripe berries) loaned their hoards to other squirrels who wanted to buy nice fur-lined nests they couldn't afford and, if so, exactly who would "They" be? Those are trick questions. The truth is there is no "They" since squirrels have no federal government to fall back on, which is bad news for them but then again, they presumably keep 100% of their income.

There are other interesting facts about squirrels that I came across in my research, and I find the comparisons between male squirrels and male humans to be especially striking. For example, it appears that, like men, male squirrels require twice as much time as females to groom themselves. (Squirrels are the cleanest of rodents.) I can just see the female squirrel now, front legs folded, tapping her little paws and swishing her tail irritably - "You ready yet Rocky? Mother's been waiting in the hollow of the tree for twenty minutes already!" And, this next tidbit will come as no surprise, the male squirrel also seems to be "commitment challenged", abandoning the female promptly after mating to raise the young alone. (He doesn't even hang around to do Lamaze class with her or cut the umbilical cord.)
But the most impressive information I unearthed about the squirrel is that, though his brain is roughly the size of a walnut, when spring arrives he is generally able to locate approximately 50% of the hundreds of places where he hid his hoard of nuts during the previous fall. According to neuroscience researcher Pierre Lavenex : "These squirrels are not putting any flag there, they are not smelling the nuts, they are really remembering the exact location of their nuts. They use information from the environment, such as the relative position of trees and buildings, and they triangulate, relying on the angles and distances between these distant landmarks and their caches." (I'm not completely sure how one "triangulates", but I believe it involves the use of a musical instrument of the percussion family, and some sort of a stick.)

I'm sure you can guess where I'm heading with this. How can this rodent, with his teeny hippocampus, remember roughly half of all those hundreds of locations six months later when you and I can only remember roughly half the time where we parked our car, even though it was only an hour ago and we didn't hide it under several layers of dirt. Is it because the need to find a giant SUV in a mall parking lot is not hard-wired into our brains since it is not tantamount to a survival instinct? (I, for one, would strenuously debate that proposition, especially since I don't think there's insurance for a misplaced automobile.) But in any event, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all learn to "triangulate" like a squirrel? Not only would we stop misplacing our vehicles, we would also learn to drive to our destination without having to try and program our expensive and hopelessly confusing GPS.

But surely the squirrel's enhanced memory skills are not an indication that he is more highly evolved than we are, because if that were the case, he would not be leaping from one treetop to another, kamikaze-style, without the benefit of a net (or at least a bungee cord). But come to think of it, perhaps the average squirrel is slightly more intelligent than mankind. After all, his investment loss ratio is roughly equivalent to what mine has been over the last year, and his fees are definitely a lot lower.

At the end of the day, sadly, it does not appear there is much we can learn from the ubiquitous squirrels that share our backyards, parks and the occasional attic. But there is one pretty important lesson we humans could certainly teach those squirrels, and they would do well to listen up. It goes like this - when you're standing on your hind legs in the middle of a road and you see four large round black rubbery things rolling towards you at an alarming speed, drop the nuts and run!

Alisa Singer © 2009