One of the things that I recommend is for people to choose good parents and good genes, because then you will have a healthier life! My mom lived to 94 and she was very healthy until she had adult onset diabetes and didn't believe it. She did have a broken hip and a variety of things at the very end, but up until then she did fine. My husband's mother, my mother-in-law, went to 96; again, she was from a farm family and very active. Vincent [my husband] is 84 and he doesn't believe in retirement but at the time he hit 65 the rules were such that he had to go. So, some of us have options that colleagues who are a few years older did not. Vincent had no option but to retire. But Indiana University has been pretty good; they don't kick you out of your office. I am just flabbergasted with how one of my German colleagues hit 65 and, wham! he was retired and his office was closed up. He has been able to reestablish it but it took quite a bit of doing. We have a lot to be thankful for because we have a lot more choice: retirement was at 70 for awhile and now even that has changed.

I just hit 70 and I am not intending to retire immediately. I co-direct two research centers. My teaching is primarily at the graduate level. I like to teach undergraduates but it is a little hard to do, given as much research as I do. I also supervise many ongoing research projects. This would be difficult with a heavy undergraduate load. But I do it every once in a while: I like the undergraduates, they are fun, and they are young.

Vincent's strategy after he officially retired was to continue an active program. He had an office and he kept teaching pro bono. The students wanted him to teach and he taught into his 80s.

I am now trying to think a little bit about how long I will continue to teach. I am now facing Ph.D. students coming to IU who want to work with me saying, well, are you going to be around? I encourage that question because I am 70—it's part of the public record, you can't hide it, and I don't want to. I am trying a bit of planning, trying to get out of co-directing one research center. I thought I would be able to so this July but I think I may have to go another year or so, moving some long-term projects to younger people. So part of what I want to do is to turn over things to colleagues. It is hard to retire from co-directing a center that you have helped found. Vincent and I created a new position, founding director, and we moved him into that at 84; I will eventually join him in that position.

Unfortunately, for a kid born into a poor family, while the genes were great, the money wasn't. Thank goodness for the University of California system which enabled us to go to college at a time when you work your way all the way through. It is a bit amazing, but I ended up without any debt. Young kids today end up in incredible debt, so I owe a deep debt to public education. TIAA has been a particularly good retirement system, so I don't face financial worry for the future. Indeed, part of our planning for the future is where our funds do go. We set up an endowment and contribute to it regularly. We already have written a will supporting it.

So this is planning for something other then retirement. I think that it is important that we think not only about what we will do when we are not doing what we are doing all the time, but also about our own financial future. Once we have that in pretty good shape, so we are sure that we aren't going into deep poverty again, our next obligation is to think about returning funds to others. I have a deep obligation to higher education and I want to return some to the enterprise. We established our endowment to do that. I think that is part of what we should be thinking about.

Then the next project is thinking through the implication that my graduate students are retiring. I trained them and they are retiring. All the people with whom I went to graduate school are retired. It's a little bit of a shock. I just started thinking about it, recognizing that, yeah, you've got to think about it.

My view is: My God, to be free and to be able to read and write. I've got three books I have been struggling to get out. One I have been working on for 20 years, and I think I am going to get it out soon. I have two more coming that I really want to do. So if they replaced me with people who had an interest in institutional arrangement and things of this sort, then I would be free to do writing and research. I think that would be nifty, but I am afraid that I won't be able to fix that for a while. I think that I am going to retire in about five years, maybe six or seven.