Today’s retirement is nothing like our parents experienced it. It is an evolution rather than a milestone; a transition rather than an ending. And for many if not most, it’s definitely a longer journey.
It had to happen. People are living longer. The average Baby Boomer male will likely live to be 82.7 years old, the average woman to 85.3. That’s three to four years longer than the previous generation even though older Americans suffer more from obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension, and are far more drug dependent than their parents. And life expectancies will certainly increase in the years ahead as medicine and technology continue to evolve.
Retiring at 65 just doesn’t make sense anymore, whether it is to retain a sense of purpose and identity or to meet the financial challenges of living up to three decades longer. The timeline has completely changed.
Not knowing how many years you have left makes it difficult to plan for retirement. How many years of money will you need? At what pace can you spend what you have put away? There really is no way to know for sure.
When people live longer, their money has to last longer. So it’s no surprise that many people are also working longer. Or trying to. Ageism is rampant in the workplace, whether someone is trying to find a new job or hang on to the one that they already have.
Americans are notoriously bad savers when it comes to retirement. The pandemic and the subsequent recession took many people even further away from their goals and inflation is making it difficult to catch up. This likely means more years of work.
Women are most likely to work longer, whether due to wage inequities, later entry into the workforce or a life event which changed their economic status, such as divorce or the death of a partner. Finding a job in later years is no easy feat for anyone but it can be especially challenging for women. After dealing with gender discrimination throughout their working lives, women are especially impacted by ageism in later years.
Women are also more likely spend a large portion of their retirement years on their own, whether by choice or by chance. Solo retirement is a reality for many. No matter how happily married or partnered someone may be today, it is prudent to plan for future income, health, housing and social needs with the expectations of being single again in the future. Few partners die concurrently.
Each of us needs to rethink the way that we look at retirement and create a plan for our own financial, social and physical security. We need to think about how we are going to balance work with ageing, passions with commitments and the expectations of others with our own needs. We need to think about what we still want to do and achieve in life and plan how to realize those dreams, given the financial or other restrictions we may still face or the life changes that will certainly come our way. We must be ready to rebalance and reframe as needed to create the best possible version of our personal reality that we can. There’s no retiring from that.
