Financial planner Kevin Lum has built a following by challenging conventional wisdom about retirement, and his advice about breaking specific habits after age 60 has struck a nerve. The core argument is straightforward: the years after 60 carry a different kind of urgency, and the routines that served people well during their working decades can quietly erode the time, money, and energy that matter most. What makes Lum’s framework worth examining is how closely it aligns with federal data on how Americans actually spend their hours and dollars once their children leave home.
Why Time Becomes the Scarcest Resource After 60
The first habit Lum targets is treating time as though it were still abundant. During peak earning years, most adults trade hours for income without much friction. After 60, the calculus shifts: health, mobility, and the presence of loved ones all become less predictable. The official time‑use tables published through the American Time Use Survey break down exactly how Americans allocate their days, including time spent with household children under 18. Those breakdowns reveal a stark pattern. As children age out of the household, the hours parents once devoted to direct caregiving do not automatically redirect toward meaningful social connection. Instead, they often drift toward passive leisure or low-value routines.
Lum’s advice to stop deferring experiences with family members draws support from this reality. The federal time‑use program documents how childcare, eldercare, volunteering, and personal care shift across life stages, and those categories change dramatically after 60. When the structured demands of raising children disappear, many adults default to habits formed during busier decades rather than consciously choosing how to fill the gap. That default mode is the first habit Lum says people should break, because it quietly spends the only resource that cannot be replenished.
Stop Bankrolling Adult Children on Autopilot
A second habit Lum flags is continuing to provide open-ended financial support to adult children without clear boundaries. This is not about cutting off family members in crisis. It is about recognizing when ongoing transfers have become reflexive rather than strategic. A January 2024 report from the Pew social trends team examined how parent and young-adult relationships evolve after age 18, covering financial independence, emotional connection, and life milestones. The survey-based evidence shows that many parents remain deeply involved in their adult children’s finances well past the point where both sides expected independence to arrive, often paying for recurring expenses or stepping in when budgets fall short.
The tension Lum identifies is that this ongoing support can quietly undermine a parent’s own retirement security. Household balance sheets collected through the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances show how wealth, savings, and debt change across age groups, and they highlight how vulnerable many near-retirees already are. When parents in their 60s continue subsidizing rent, car payments, or insurance for children in their 20s and 30s, they often do so by drawing down savings that were earmarked for their own later years or by slowing their debt repayment. Lum’s point is not that generosity is wrong but that unexamined generosity becomes a habit with compounding consequences, especially when life expectancy, health costs, and inflation all stretch retirement timelines.
Ditch the Screen Time Spiral
The third and fourth habits on Lum’s list relate to how people over 60 spend their attention. Excessive screen time and passive media consumption rank high on his list of patterns to break. Research from Pew’s internet research group on how families approach digital devices found that parents themselves struggle with the same pull they try to manage for their teenagers. The survey documented that rules and limits differ by teen age, with stricter controls for children aged 13 to 14 compared to those aged 15 to 17, but it also captured how difficult adults find it to manage their own screen habits. That difficulty does not vanish when children leave home. If anything, it can intensify when the structure of daily parenting no longer competes for attention and evenings become more open-ended.
Lum frames this as a direct trade: every hour spent scrolling through social media feeds or watching cable news on repeat is an hour not spent on the relationships, hobbies, or health maintenance that actually improve quality of life after 60. The habit is not technology itself but the passive, unintentional way many older adults use it. Swapping a two-hour evening news binge for a phone call with a grandchild, a walk with a neighbor, or even a short class at a community center is the kind of concrete substitution Lum recommends. The point is not asceticism or cutting off digital tools entirely. It is cultivating awareness of where attention goes when no one is watching and recognizing that the remaining years are too valuable to surrender to automatic scrolling.
Rethink the Parenting Identity
A fifth habit Lum identifies is clinging to an active parenting identity long after children have become independent adults. Research from Cornell family scholars found that raising two children requires a full day’s work and that the total time investment is roughly triple what earlier experts had estimated. That enormous front-loaded commitment creates deep psychological grooves. After two decades of organizing life around children’s needs, schedules, and milestones, many parents struggle to define themselves outside that role, and some continue to behave as if their adult children still require constant oversight.
Lum argues that this identity attachment becomes a liability after 60 because it can lead to over-involvement in adult children’s decisions, resentment when advice goes unheeded, or a sense of purposelessness when the parenting role naturally contracts. The Pew Research Center report on young adults and the transition to adulthood provides nonpartisan, survey-based evidence showing that the healthiest parent-child relationships after 18 involve a gradual shift from direction to connection. Parents who make that shift intentionally tend to report higher satisfaction with their own lives and with their relationships, while those who resist it often find themselves in a cycle of frustration. Reframing the role from manager to mentor is one of Lum’s core recommendations, because it frees both generations to grow without constant conflict.
Quit Postponing Health Decisions
The sixth and seventh habits Lum targets involve health: delaying medical appointments and ignoring preventive care. These patterns often develop during busy working years when scheduling a doctor’s visit feels like a low priority compared to job demands or family logistics. After 60, the cost of delay rises sharply. A missed screening, an untreated bout of depression, or a deferred conversation about joint pain can cascade into larger problems that limit mobility, independence, and the ability to enjoy the very experiences Lum wants people to prioritize. In his framing, every postponed checkup is a bet that the body will keep behaving as it did decades earlier, a bet that becomes less realistic with each passing year.
This connects directly to the way older adults actually spend their days. The American Time Use Survey, jointly managed by labor and census agencies, tracks hours devoted to personal care and health-related activities, and those measures tend to rise as people age. When adults over 60 continue to treat health maintenance as something they will get around to eventually, they are effectively borrowing against their future capacity to do anything else. Lum’s advice here is blunt: schedule the appointment, get the test, and stop treating your body like it operates on the same timeline it did at 40. He argues that the habit of avoidance compounds in ways similar to financial habits, but with a steeper interest rate because lost strength, balance, or cognitive function is much harder to reclaim than a few percentage points of investment return.
Stop Living for Other People’s Approval
The eighth habit Lum recommends dropping is the lifelong pattern of making decisions based on what others expect rather than what genuinely matters to the individual. This applies to everything from housing choices to social obligations to how retirement savings are spent. Many adults over 60 continue attending events they dislike, maintaining friendships that drain them, or keeping homes that are too large simply because changing course feels like an admission of failure or decline. Lum calls this the most invisible habit on the list because it rarely registers as a habit at all. It feels like personality, or like “just the way things are,” even when it leaves people exhausted and dissatisfied.
The data on how Americans structure their lives supports this observation indirectly. Population surveys conducted through the Current Population Survey track patterns in household composition, employment, and retirement that shape the social norms people internalize over decades. After 60, many of those external pressures lose their practical basis: children are grown, career advancement is no longer central, and community standing often matters less than day-to-day wellbeing. Yet the habits of accommodation persist because they were built during years when saying yes felt necessary for survival or success. Lum’s argument is that the post-60 years offer a rare window to shed those patterns, replacing automatic compliance with more deliberate choices about where to live, whom to spend time with, and what to do with limited energy.
Rewriting the Default Settings
What ties all eight of Lum’s recommendations together is a single insight: most of the habits that harm people after 60 were once adaptive. Providing for children, working long hours, deferring personal interests, and saying yes to social expectations all helped many adults build careers and families. Problems emerge when those same behaviors continue unchanged into a stage of life with different constraints. Time becomes more fragile, health more variable, and financial cushions more important. In that environment, autopilot is risky. Lum’s framework challenges people to notice which routines still serve them and which simply persist because they have never been questioned.
Rewriting those default settings does not require a dramatic reinvention. The shift can start with small, concrete moves: redirecting a portion of financial support from adult children into a retirement account, replacing one nightly hour of passive screen time with a walk or a hobby, or booking long-delayed medical visits instead of pushing them into the indefinite future. It can also mean loosening the grip on an old parenting identity and giving adult children room to make their own choices, even imperfect ones. Underneath Lum’s advice is a broader invitation to treat the years after 60 as an active chapter rather than an epilogue. By breaking habits that once made sense but now quietly work against their interests, older adults can reclaim more of the time, money, and attention that make this stage of life worth looking forward to instead of simply enduring.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
Cole Whitaker focuses on the fundamentals of money management, helping readers make smarter decisions around income, spending, saving, and long-term financial stability. His writing emphasizes clarity, discipline, and practical systems that work in real life. At The Daily Overview, Cole breaks down personal finance topics into straightforward guidance readers can apply immediately.
