'Retirement': The new dirty word

If all the word "retirement" conjures up in your mind is endless golf games and blue-plate specials for the blue-haired crowd, prepare for a shock. You might find the next generation of retirees hang gliding in Colorado, running aid programs in Africa or establishing theater festivals. What retirement looks like now

It's a generational thing, experts say. As America's 80-odd million baby boomers approach the time when they step back from their careers and start to focus on their pastimes and passions -- the phase of life we have come over the past century to refer to as "retirement" -- they want to do it their way.

"The life stage that is retirement and the baby-boom generation are about to collide, and they are going to transform each other," says Ken Dychtwald, a psychologist and the founder of Age Wave, a San Francisco consulting and analytical company, who has spent his professional life studying the aging process. A new word for 'retirement'?

A boomer himself, Dychtwald, 58, knows his peers are less likely than their parents to shuffle off to Florida or Arizona to await the grim reaper in a comfy RV. That whole idea is so terrifying to many boomers that even their financial advisers tread lightly when urging their clients to save for a life after work.

"'Retirement' is a dirty word," says Brad Levin, an Encino, Calif., financial adviser. "Some just don't want to think that there will come a time when they will no longer be of value to the world -- and to them, that's what retirement means."

Confronted with a convention they find unacceptable, baby boomers are doing what they have done throughout their lives: transforming it.

Born into post-World War II prosperity, this generation was raised in a period of unprecedented stability and affluence. Supremely confident, boomers went on to shake up and remake everything from the education system and the workplace to gender roles, race relations and child rearing. They went to Woodstock, and they protested against an unpopular war. Now they intend to grow old rebelliously.

"Many of us boomers see traditional retirement as a wasteland, a place in which people wither away," Dychtwald says forcefully. "But this is a generation bursting at the seams with skills, experience and enthusiasm. Why not battle the stereotypes of what retirement means to the bitter end? This isn't a time to just sit back and rest on our laurels; it's a time for new adventures."

Some boomers will be luckier than others. Many will grapple with health issues. Others will have few options for financial reasons. But by and large, rarely has a generation been better positioned to set about redefining what the final decades of life will be like.

As a group, boomers lead more-active lives than their parents and will enter their retirement years in better physical shape. They can look forward to enjoying more years of good health than any previous group in history. Chart: How long are we living?

"As they say, 60 is the new 40, so perhaps 80 will become the new 60!" says Bob Gleeson, a vice president and the medical director of Northwestern Mutual, an insurance company based in Milwaukee.

Gleeson will be 60 this spring and is facing mandatory retirement from Northwestern, but he sees things differently than his employer does.

"I don't believe in retirement -- at least, not before the age of 78," says Gleeson, who plans to open a lifestyle medical clinic for the Medical College of Wisconsin in the fall. "When I get to 78, I'll still be young enough to actively plan a third stage of my life."

Reinventing retirement is all about doing just that: planning. So far, boomers and their advisers have done a pretty good job of understanding that a happy retirement will require a firm financial foundation. They've had plenty of help.

Barely a month passes without a major financial-services company announcing some new product, service or study aimed squarely at baby boomers preparing for their "golden years," from target-date-retirement mutual funds to retirement-income calculators,

"We've been great at getting the word out that people need to save and think about whether they're financially prepared for this transition," financial adviser Levin says.

"The problem is that even those of us for whom the financial stuff is at the heart of our business, we aren't talking enough to them about the point of it all. What are they going to do with this time and this money? What do they want to do with the rest of their lives? This is the generation for whom that question is of supreme importance."

The one thing boomers know for sure, Levin and his peers agree, is that they don't want to emulate their parents. To members of that generation -- who survived the Great Depression, fought World War II and then toiled long hours climbing career ladders -- a leisure-filled retirement was heaven or even better. Timeline: A history of retirement

"Ask these older people about what they want to do in retirement, it comes down to 'rest!'" says Carlos Lowenberg Jr., who oversees the portfolios of affluent clients at his Austin, Texas, firm, the Lowenberg Wealth Management Group.

"They've taken care of their kids; their grandchildren's college educations are financed. Most of them don't feel a driving need to do more to feel their lives have had significance."

The boomer generation couldn't be more different, he adds.

"To their parents, retirement meant escape from the world of work, but my boomer clients don't want to escape!" Lowenberg says. "I have to help them imagine a new kind of world."

For many boomers, retirement has nothing to do with stopping work. For some that's out of financial necessity. In other cases, it's because the retirees can't make the mental shift to defining themselves outside their jobs.

Then there are people such as Fred Mandell, who, seven years after retiring at age 58, has finally figured out how to answer the question "What do you do?"

"It's one of those questions that Americans always ask each other as a quick way to place the person they are talking to," said Mandell, a former senior executive with Ameriprise, a financial-services firm.

Answering the question became trickier once Mandell retired and moved into a world characterized by self-defined and self-created work.

"I'm in the world of work, but I'm not really of the world of work," he explains.

When Mandell first retired, he took up sculpture, a newfound artistic passion, and discovered a latent talent. "I won awards; a gallerist offered me a show. I sold my work to corporate and individual collectors," he recalls. See Mandell's art

Mandell began to reflect on the parallels between the challenges facing artists and those confronting business leaders trying to steer their companies in new directions. With a partner, he created an art-based program for business executives aimed at inspiring them to think innovatively.

Pondering that experience, Mandell realized he had become an expert in the field of life transitions. He then set up a nonprofit aimed at helping others navigate the kind of transition he had just undergone.

"I didn't think of myself as building a second career," Mandell explains. "Rather, I was pursuing those things that I found most meaningful and fulfilling to me."

In the process, he came up with a new way to answer that common question. "Anyone who asks now what I do, I tell them I'm a project manager. That's a nice, broad category that covers a lot of ground."

For financial advisers who work with retirees, this kind of voyage of self-discovery is the new era of retirement at its best.

"People are leaving behind doing something because they feel they have to and moving on to doing something that they want to do," says Tom Rogerson, the director of wealth-management services at BNY Mellon in Boston.

The problem is sorting out the possibilities, Rogerson says.

"Retirement literally means stepping back -- what nonsense!" declares Gleeson. "If anything, it's a time to step forward and engage with the world -- on our own terms."

Tell us: How will your retirement differ from your parents' generation?

Produced by Anh Ly / Graphics by Joe Farro

Published April 28, 2008

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