2046: : Ask Farnoosh: Can I Pause My 401(k)? Plus, Parents With No Retirement Savings

Farnoosh Torabi (0:00)

Hey friends, if you've been sitting on a book idea and wondering could this actually become something, this is your moment. Join me in New York City on October 9th for Book to Brand. This is my intimate full-day immersive designed to help you turn your idea into a clear, compelling, pitch-ready book concept. You will meet the insiders, agents, publishers, and recent authors who can help bring your book to life. Spots are limited and early-bird tickets are on sale now. Head to booktobrand.co to reserve your spot. Welcome back to So Money, everybody. I'm Farnoosh Torabi. It is Ask Farnoosh Friday, October 9th. We're going to be talking about the financial decisions that are easy to make in theory, but a lot harder when you're actually living through life. For example, is there ever a point when you can responsibly stop contributing to your retirement account? We're also going to talk about what's happening with federal student loans now that the Save Repayment Plan has officially ended and whether it might make sense to use your savings to pay off your loans altogether.

And finally, what happens when your parents are in their 60s and they've saved virtually nothing for retirement and you're worried about what their future looks like and will you be on the hook? We have a lot to get into plus a couple of money headlines that caught my attention this week, including retirees are heading back into the workforce because they just cannot afford to not work. And then there's this lawsuit against McDonald's over allegations that AI is helping to determine what we pay for those happy meals. But first, some updates from my corner of the world. Today, I am in New York City, although if you're watching, I recorded this on Thursday. But if you're listening on Friday, I'm teaching Book to Brand all day today in New York. It's my annual in-person workshop for aspiring authors and writers who want to turn a great nonfiction book idea into a compelling proposal and hopefully a publishing deal. This is my ninth Book to Brand workshop, which is very hard to believe. We've been doing this for years, took a little bit of a break during COVID.

But we're back, back at it, bringing together writers with some of the most experienced people in the book publishing industry. I'm talking literary agents, senior editors, publishers, and other professionals who know what it takes to get a book from an idea in your head to something that actually belongs on a bookshelf and then transforming your career and your life. The workshop is especially focused on prescriptive non-fiction, we will probably be doing this again in the future. So if you want to learn what all this is about, you can go to booktobrand.co. You can also go on my Instagram. We have some behind the scenes footage and videos and pictures all there. So you can join in on the fun. It's going to be an interesting day because we're going to talk a lot about how the industry is changing. Like this conference this year, very different than what we talked about last year, and you can guess why.

Not just because there's more competition for our attention, for readers' attention, but publishers are thinking a lot differently about platform and social media and what it means to have an audience. Then of course, AI. It's entering the conversation, whether we like it or not, raising all sorts of questions about content, originality, and expertise.

That is what we are talking about today at Book to Brand. Then tomorrow, I'm back in the city for another event that is very much connected to where we will be in the new year talking about midlife.

I'll be at the very first MidiCon, a conference devoted to women navigating midlife.

I've been discovering through my own experience and through the hundreds of responses to my So Money audience survey, which is still linked in our show notes, that midlife is not simply about getting older and more tired and more achy. It's about confronting a set of questions that you might have spent the first 20 years of your adult life believing you had it all figured out, or you would have it figured out by now. Questions like, do I still want to work? Or do I still want to be in this career? Can I afford to work a little bit less? How do I care for my aging parents while also taking care of myself and my kids? What happens if my relationship changes and am I saving enough? And then there's this question that underlies all the others. I'm learning from your responses. I've worked incredibly hard to build a life. So why does it sometimes feel like I have so little room to breathe? I feel like I have done all this work, but I haven't made my life easier. At MidiCon, I'll be joining a conversation about managing money in midlife. And that is, of course, at the heart of what we're building with the new So Money in 2027 I've already started booking our guests. We'll be pre-recording over the next few months. And I'm just so excited to explore some of these financial questions and work questions that don't always make it to traditional personal money conversations. We don't say them out loud. We think of them at three in the morning.