Retirement and Renewal (Income)...
Recently I sat down with a financial planner. It was not the first time I had done so, but this time I reflected upon an appointment that I had 10 years ago when I gathered with my resource manager and a pension planner. The question I posed then was: what did I need to do to provide the income necessary for my vision of retiring comfortably in Florida? I was stunned to learn how much it would cost to maintain my lifestyle into my late 80s or early 90s (given good health and present lifestyle expenses).
I credit my planning oriented parents with thinking ahead about how to finance their future, but also knew that what worked for them would not work for me. Recently, another “boomer” colleague conveyed to me a discussion some boomer academics had about their parents who had lived relatively long lives and been cared for through the safety net of Social Security and Medicare. Current evidence indicates that we can’t expect to receive such generous support and, if not left exactly on our own, we’ll need to plan for most of our own retirement. Remember, next year (2008) the first baby boomers will be eligible to receive early retirement checks from Social Security at age 62; data suggests that 50% of those eligible will do so.
Retirement was considered a relatively new experimental life stage expected to last perhaps three to five years when President Roosevelt introduced Social Security for Americans reaching 65 in 1935. Life expectancy was only 63 years then. Parents of early baby boomers, who were born during the 1920s, retired during the 1980s with the expectancy of living another 10 to 15 years. Many of them had only a high-school education and faced limited leisure options after retirement. One survey has reported that these retirees watched an average of 43 hours of T.V. per week. As one boomer said of his father, “He retired at 65 and died at 95. Can you afford a 30-year vacation?”
Boomers are now in the process of rethinking the life-work balance and clearly have no desire to be “put out to pasture”. “Phased retirement” is the order of the day, in which boomers are beginning to balance the time between new work and real-time leisure. This process is creating a new career stage where the need-to-work mode is shifting to a passion to live mode focused on activities that boomers really enjoy. What we are about to witness is a true “re-generation” in which the opportunities for both new kinds of work and extended forms of leisure are being crafted by the pioneer wave of self-propelled boomers now reaching their early sixties and looking forward to another 20 to 30 years of active life. What opportunities for extended renewal income might exist for those who still want to be productive and earn substantial additional income?
