When time allows, I continue to work on the French I picked up for the first time since my school days during the pandemic.
The best way I’ve found is to spend some of my holiday time on immersion courses in France.
Because I’m always on duty, while I’m there I find myself paying attention to the ways people work, live and retire. This time, my teacher invited me to have dinner with her family one evening, and it got me thinking about the idea of ‘enough’.
My teacher’s father is 70 and has been retired from his work as a lorry driver for 15 years. He and his wife live on the edge of a village, with beautiful views across the countryside.
They have a small car, a couple of electric bikes and a camper van, in which they enjoy travelling around France.
He goes cycling twice a week with his friends and is a keen student of local history, talking interestingly about the Romans and the Gauls, the religious wars and the revolution. The couple eat and drink well, at home and in the local restaurants, and it doesn’t cost the earth.
I asked the family over dinner about their views on retirement, saving and investing for the future. They told me that if you’re the father’s age the state looks after you. You retire on 18 months of your salary – and he was able to do so at 55 due to the demanding nature of his work – and you are provided for.
Despite France’s hotly contested pension reforms, my teacher’s thinking is broadly the same. ‘Why would I bother saving?’ she asked. ‘The state will look after me.’ Life was good, she said, and retirement was so far away.
Contentment with the lot that the state will provide – a life lived with comforting certainty but within known limits – relies on a firm grasp of the concept of ‘enough’.
From this side of the channel, and with the days of final salary pensions behind us, that idea might feel quite alien.
On the flip side, my teacher’s father might look at the lifestyle here, which can seem like one of relentless striving and acquisition, and perceive it as stressful and exhausting.
Look at what I’ve got, he might say: my happy family, this pleasant and secure lifestyle – what else could I need?
A book I’m currently reading, Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, reinforces the point. Housel points out the idea of ‘never enough’ – a trap that even the richest people in the world fall into. The hardest financial skill of all, he argues, is to stop moving the goalposts.
