Is “retirement” now a dirty word?
With some 36 million (12 percent of the population) longer-living Americans already over age 65, half of whom have an annual household income of $108,000 or more and 20 percent of whom have at leasta college degree, the challenge, according to some, is not just financial provision for one?s golden years but “passion provision.”
“Surveys have shown that over half of the nation?s retirees are bored,” said David Corbett, author of the book “Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose and Passion After 50” and founder of the retiree-coaching consulting company New Directions.
Corbett, who often visits the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis to coach naval officers on retirement preparations, said today?s seniors “are watching on average 47 hours of television a week. They?re going crazy. They need to find their passion and purpose.”
Corbett?s premise is that the old idea of simply providing for the financial needs of a few years of post-retirement life is now passe, and that today?s pre-retirees must think more creatively about the “blessing of an extra 25 years of bonus time.”
His book and consulting company promotes the idea of organizing one?s retirement time around a portfolio of activities that reflect one?s discerned passions and perceived purpose.
“We work with a lot of people who are 50-ish,” said New Directions President Jeff Redmond, “and so we have created what we call the ?life portfolio program.? The idea is that one consider a portfolio of activities ? like a diversified financial portfolio ? arrived at through a process of personal passion assessment.”
This assessment, Redmond said, includes: decompressing after retirement to allow one?s true purpose and passions to emerge; retelling one?s life story to jog memories and distill interests; and using verbs, not nouns, in retirement planning because verbs convey activity.
“We continue to work to make sure that folks are doing everything they can to save money for retirement ? so they can pursue their passions,” counterposed Mike Beall, president of the Maryland/D.C. Credit Union Association, touting the traditional ideas of IRA and 401(k) plan participation by pre-retirees.
Redmond, however, believes that New Directions? approach is just the other side of the coin that Beall stresses, and that more and more American seniors would like to retire the traditional idea of retirement.
