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Business Insider
13-05-2025
- Business Insider
A retirement travel dream, deferred
Traveling wasn't unusual for Jim Laabs, a 72-year-old retiree from the Midwest. As a former regional sales director, Laabs spent 65% to 70% of his time on the road in the US and Canada. Later in his career, his partner would join him. But as they approached retirement, they wanted to take it slower — and wondered if they could afford to be snowbirds for about five months a year in Southern California or Arizona, both states that are "almost guaranteed" to have warm weather during the winter, he told Business Insider. When Laabs retired in 2022, they tested the concept for a month, spending roughly $5,000 on a 28-day stay at a two-bedroom home a short walk from Huntington Beach in Southern California. But with costs rising each year, the couple has downgraded to cheaper accommodations and reduced their vacation days. He said it hasn't made much of a dent in their travel expenditures. This year, they spent $3,100 for a one-bedroom suite in Phoenix, around 62% of what they spent on accommodation back in 2022, but this time for only a nine-day stay. Laabs isn't alone in having to cut back on travel plans in retirement because of rising costs. Business Insider spoke to several retirees and people planning for retirement who are reconsidering their dream to travel during retirement, whether that's cutting back or scrapping plans altogether. In an AARP survey late last year of Americans who'd expressed an interested in traveling for pleasure in 2025, about 70% of respondents ages 50 and older said they were planning trips this year. But on average, those respondents weren't expecting to spend more on their trips than they did in 2024, and cost was the most commonly cited travel barrier among them. Laabs and his partner have an annual travel budget of around $7,000. He said it can already be "a little bit of a challenge to cover" their travel budget despite having what he describes as a "comfortable, but not exorbitant" retirement pot and receiving double what the average American gets for Social Security, since he began working young and retired at 69. "We're going to live our life, and if we can make it work financially to do a week or two of cold weather to get out of the area, then we'll do that," he said. But travel "would be one of the first things to go" if they had to tighten up their budget. Unanticipated volatility Retirement was going to be Patty Sorell's chance to travel. As a small-business owner in Boston, she would often work weekends and holidays running her balloon shop, so she didn't have time to go on vacation. "I knew I wanted travel to be part of my life plan," the 62-year-old said. "Something that happens when you own your own business is you hustle all the time, and when a job comes along, you take it because you don't know when the next job is going to come along." As she approached retirement in 2022, she invested in an RV to take more short-haul trips across the country. When she fully retired, though, she knew she wanted to travel internationally. "Of course, I think everybody would love the fantasy of getting out and being a tourist more than they are," she said. "Not all of us can do it, people have financial obligations, familial obligations. I thought I was going to be great, but I'm only 'pretty good' in terms of financials." More than a year into retirement, her fantasy is colliding with reality. Her travel funds for the next few years, which she describes as her "fun money," are in the stock market. "That's the stuff I want to make sure doesn't dip or crash, and that's what makes me nervous right now," Sorell said, referring to the stock market's wild swings in response to changing US policy on tariffs and the war in Ukraine. "I can't pull my money out either, because pulling it out when it's down is the worst thing you can do," Sorell said. Financial planners agree that investors shouldn't panic during downturns and exit the market at a loss. In an annual Gallup survey last year, 62% of US adults reported having money invested in the stock market through mutual funds, individual stocks, or retirement funds — and older people hold the vast majority of those equities. An analysis of Federal Reserve data by Rosenberg Research released last year found that Americans 55 and older own about 80% of the US stock market. Amid the wild market fluctuations this year, many retirees like Sorell and people nearing retirement are left wondering where they'll be left financially. "One of the few things I can cut down on is travel," Sorell said. "I'm not going to cut it out, but I can cut it down." Jake Falcon, the founder of Falcon Wealth Advisors, said that people who need money for bills, living expenses, or travel in the next five to 10 years should avoid parking that money in the stock market because volatility could affect those short-term goals. He added that people shouldn't get too frustrated by the current economic environment because it will inevitably change. For retirees who are feeling stretched but still want to travel, he recommended getting creative and looking off the beaten path. Off the beaten path Jeff Mayernik and his wife, Sandra, who both worked in real estate until 2023 and 2024, respectively, did just that when health issues prompted them to examine the age at which they could retire. When doing the math and looking at savings, home equity, and future Social Security income, they discovered that at 59, they could retire within a year. Still, it came with a catch — they wouldn't be retiring in a fixed place. "There are 100 countries where we can stay 90 days at a time, so let's go see them," Jeff, 61, said. "We put together a plan, sold everything we owned, and hit the road with a couple of backpacks and a little suitcase." The couple sold all their belongings and a 5-acre property in Oregon that included three outbuildings. They set a spending target of around $40,000 a year, which includes all travel expenses as well as general expenditures such as insurance and cellphone costs. "Year one, we went over budget," Sandra, 61, said. "Year two, we'll be closer. We've learned some things, obviously, but it was less expensive than just living in a place somewhere in Oregon and not traveling." They decide which country to visit next based on affordability. "We looked at Italy and went, 'Hmm, yeah, not this year for sure,'" Jeff said. "And so we put two months in Albania because the weather is similar, and it's a lot less expensive to rent a place for two months than it would be literally anywhere in Italy." Jeff said they plan to travel for at least two years before committing to a place to retire permanently — somewhere with a reasonable cost of living. Kari Lemay, a 58-year-old corporate marketing executive, quit her job to travel the world with her retired partner, Bill, who is 70. They rely on their savings, investments, and income from a travel blog to fund trips, but increasing costs are eating away at their travel budget. They're now downsizing to continue funding their trips by selling their five-bedroom house in Minnesota to buy a one-bedroom condo instead. "My insurance is going up, my taxes are going up, therefore my mortgage payment — because it includes those things — is going up, and we're not even here that much," Lemay said. Both Lemay and the Mayerniks run monetized travel blogs, AchieveYourBucketList and TheMobileRetiree, respectively. Lemay hopes her earnings from the blog will provide her with additional funds to travel for longer, especially since her retirement fund isn't as large as her partner's. Having an income during retirement is one of the best things retirees who want to travel extensively can do, said William Gogolak, an assistant professor of finance at Carnegie Mellon University who teaches courses on financial investing and analysis. Those in their 40s or 50s who are planning to travel in retirement should start thinking about a part of their career they might be able to parlay into consulting work later in life, he said. Now or never? Some people nearing retirement age have begun to shift or delay their travel plans as they examine their finances more closely. Suki Eleuterio and her partner, who initially bonded over their love of travel, have viewed their 401(k)s as their ticket to traveling the world once their two children, both under the age of 10, have flown the nest. " Traveling with kids is very different than traveling as a couple," Eleuterio said. "We tried to do the Disney thing a few years ago … that was very stressful. I did not feel that that was an adequate vacation for us as a couple, but I think the kids had a wonderful time. " "I'm looking forward to when we can also just travel just the two of us again," she said. Eleuterio and her partner are both in their 40s and envisioned island-hopping in the Caribbean and eating like locals in Europe in their 60s, following in the footsteps of her partner's grandparents, who were "big travelers" and did much of the same as they got older. Yet getting to check places off their travel wish list, hanging on a wall in their home, feels further and further away. The couple has just a "little nest egg" after they used a large portion of their savings to buy a house in 2022, after nearly two decades of renting. That, combined with her partner losing their job late last year, means they're spending more cautiously and saving less. As their debt creeps up and with the future of Social Security in doubt, Eleuterio said they wonder what their retirement will actually look like — "Will we just be forced to keep working and working to pay off all the bills?" As a result, the age at which they plan to retire keeps getting pushed back, Eleuterio said. Retiring in their late 50s or early 60s doesn't feel as attainable as it might have 10 years ago. "It makes me think about, maybe, we should travel now a little bit, and get some of those things checked off our bucket list now, even if we do it with kids," Eleuterio said.
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The most important thing was getting to the truth': how Claude Lanzmann broke all the rules to create Shoah
Forty years after its release, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) is regarded not just as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, but a film that had to be made in order to shake the world into engaging with its still recent trauma. A new documentary, however, shows how the French director's seminal 'fiction of the real' was almost never completed. In preparation for All I Had Was Nothingness, which premiered this week at the Berlin film festival, French director Guillaume Ribot revisited the entire 220 hours of raw footage that Lanzmann filmed between 1976-81, before he then edited it down into the nine-and-a-half hour film released in cinemas. The outtakes reveal unseen insecurities and self-doubt on behalf of an auteur famed for his subsequent grandeur, all while coupled with an earth-shattering persistence and determination. It also frames Shoah as a classic case study of how the rules of journalistic ethics must sometimes be bent to expose the truth. During the filming, Lanzmann, who died in 2018, was frustrated in several attempts to doorstep Nazi criminals such as Gustav Laabs, a driver of 'gas vans' at the Chelmno concentration camp, north of the Polish city of Łódź. Prisoners at the camp were ushered into and then locked inside these mobile gas chambers before the vehicle's exhaust pipe was connected to the interior of the van via a flexible hose. Drivers like Laabs then pressed the accelerator and let the engine run 'for 10 to 15 minutes'. Footage discarded by Lanzmann during Shoah's four-year editing process show Laabs refusing to open his door to the film-maker and his crew, most likely because his neighbours had tipped him off about their arrival. 'We are not at all interested,' one German man living in the same apartment building tells the director when informed that Laabs killed 200,000 Jews, adding: 'What we don't know doesn't interest me at all.' Lanzmann mutters to himself in disgust as he walks away: 'Mass complicity, truly.' It was at this point Lanzmann decided he had to use subterfuge to get the Nazi criminals to open their doors. 'He had to find a way to trick the tricksters, so to speak,' says Ribot. Realising his surname would immediately give away his Jewish heritage, Lanzmann used a fake passport with the name Claude-Marie Sorel. For his cover story, he gave himself a made-up PhD and set up the fictional Centre for the Story of Contemporary History, telling Nazi criminals he wanted to speak to them for a research project. He loosened up his interviewees with lavish meals, paid them a fee (schmerzensgeld, or 'damages', as one war criminal calls it with unknowing irony), and repeatedly promised that he would not divulge their identities in his film. Unbeknown to the former German officers, he filmed their conversations via a small cylindrical camera hidden in the handbag of his translator, transmitting the footage to a van with recording equipment parked outside. On one occasion, his cover was blown. During an interview with Heinz Schubert, an SS officer who oversaw a massacre of Jewish prisoners in the Crimean town of Simferopol, the war criminal's wife checks on the van outside and notices the moving antenna. The camera cuts out, but a ghostly audio track documents the subsequent confrontation. 'You've played a dirty trick on us,' Schubert's relatives accuse Lanzmann, before bundling him out of their apartment. Shoah's use of subterfuge was debated after the film's release in 1985, and again upon the publication of Lanzmann's memoir The Patagonian Hare in 2009 (passages from which Ribot reads out to provide his film's sole voiceover). The consensus at the time was that bending the rules of journalistic ethics was justified given the enormity of the crimes carried out by these men, and because the evidence against was not merely prima facie but had been accepted at the Nuremberg trials. Forty years after Shoah's release, Ribot says that consensus still holds. 'I do agree with these methods, because the most important thing for Lanzmann, for me, is the possibility of getting to the truth, no matter what the methods that you need to use in order to do so,' he says. 'Nowadays, in the era of the smartphone, not only whistleblowers but all of us would use such a recording to denounce or to expose the situation, and nobody would criticise us for doing so,' he adds. What had surprised him over the three months he spent watching Lanzmann's original footage, Ribot says, was how much doubt the director had about the shape and purpose of his career-defining work. Fellow director and former friend Max Ophüls famously called him a 'megalomaniac', but in the first years of filming Lanzmann often seemed uncertain of what he wanted to do. Originally commissioned by Israel's foreign ministry as a two-hour film, officials withdrew funding after a few years out of frustration with Lanzmann's slowness. A pitch for financial support in front of the American Jewish Committee, the director admits in his memoirs, were a 'total failure' because he couldn't sum up what the message of his film would be. 'If I'd said, 'never again', or 'love one another', wallets would have sprung open. But I was a lousy fundraiser.' Not a single US dollar financed the making of Shoah. In the end, All I Had Was Nothingness at least hints that it was the continued rejections and the undiluted antisemitism Lanzmann experienced at the hands of his interviewees that spurred on and shaped his masterpiece. In one scene that ended up on the cutting-room floor, a Polish peasant casually explains the local populace's attitude to the atrocities that happened around them: that the mass-killing of Jews was an expiation for the crucifixion of Jesus. 'It's an element that is deeply rooted in the popular culture, adding to a feeling of relativity about what has happened,' says Ribot. 'It implies a religious justification, that the Jews somehow deserved what they got.'
