An irrepressible young hotel owner repeats this mantra to retirees in the movie “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”: “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not the end.”
To millions of baby boomers of a certain age, retirement is an end to life as they know it. In the past, would-be retirees usually welcomed the change — if their finances were in order. But increasingly, say life coaches and financial planners, retirement is being postponed out of fear of the unknown, of being cast adrift without the anchor of work.
“They think of it as a slippery slope down to death,” said Jim Kelly, a former corporate officer who now is a self-employed executive coach in Chicago. “They don’t see what they can do besides what they’ve always done.”
The key to making this encore period — stretched by ever-longer life expectancies — more satisfying and less daunting is to start thinking about it well before the office door shuts for the final time, say experts and retirees who’ve made the transition. Unlike retirement finances, which can be plugged into any number of calculators or programs, planning how to spend one’s time is intensely personal and nonformulaic.
For those who pursued interests and hobbies while working, keeping busy may seem like a snap. Some people may have vague notions about taking trips, playing golf or completing household projects. Many may not be thinking much beyond catching up on their rest.
Retirement will be all this and more, says Kelly, who suggests people think long-term, as if they’ll live to be 100, and look at it as not leaving something, but moving toward something else.
“I say hurry up and retire so you have satisfaction before you die,” Kelly said. “Coaching can help people discover something to do in the rest of their lives that can be just as important as their job was.”
Rita Cheng, an ambassador for the Certified Financial Planners Board of Standards, offers the idea of scaling back, working fewer days a week, and maybe from home instead of an office to save commuting time. Then use that time to think, she said.
“Find your passion. It could be related to work, but it doesn’t have to be,” Cheng said, adding that it could be an interrupted dream of playing the piano or helping people.
“They find what they like, the qualitative, then we do the quantitative part,” said Cheng, who is based in suburban Washington, D.C.
She suggests looking to friends or others in the community who’ve retired and ask them what they did well and what they didn’t.
Carol Schwarz, 73, of the Garlands retirement community in Barrington, was a numbers nut, as she calls her work in medical administration. She knew she wanted out at age 65 and had thought about the next chapter.
“I wanted to work on the other side of my brain,” said Schwarz, who took up photography even though she’d never even taken pictures of her children. “It’s something I can do by myself. I enjoy the freedom of it and being outside.”
Her husband, Norb, 73, eased from banking and the corporate world to consulting, but expressed surprise that he now needs a calendar to keep track of all he’s doing.
“I had visions of sitting around, wondering what I’d do,” said Schwarz, who still has several family business clients he advises.
Over the years, he’s seen numerous first- or second-generation business owners reluctant to turn over the reins because the enterprise is their life and they think they’d be lost without it, he said.
A gift from his wife — a watercolor painting class — made a big difference to him, Schwarz said.
“You know how bankers are,” he said. “Well, there’s a reason she gave me watercolor lessons instead of oil painting — you have less control.”
He started painting before winding down his work and is still at it, in between walks, reading, visiting family and getting to know the wife he sometimes had to call on the phone because she was four floors below him when they lived in a Chicago town house.
“In the back of my mind is the question of what kind of legacy am I leaving to the kids,” Schwarz said. “It’s hard to imagine it’s a legacy of personality — Carol has a monopoly on that — but my daughter has a couple of my paintings on her walls and I take pride in that.”
Betty Kraft-Hartman, 70, of Freeport, Ill., has been retired from tool and die making for 12 years. And while the creep of age led her to give up her trade, it hasn’t put the brakes on her passion — riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
She’s been known to hop on her bike and travel to Omaha for breakfast and back again, a round trip of 800 miles. Harley has recognized her for putting more than 300,000 miles on her bike since she became an owner in 1978.
“I don’t know how I found time to work,” Kraft-Hartman said.
At first, retirement was a big adjustment, realizing that life had changed and she didn’t have to get up every day at 6 a.m., she said. It wasn’t long before she started taking on more volunteer work: Lions’ bingo games; teaching CPR, motorcycle safety, and safe driving to seniors; taking hotline calls and checking on the elderly who want to remain in their homes.
“I’m still not totally adjusted,” she said. “I choose motorcycle riding over cleaning the house.”
She recently turned in her scorecard for an annual Harley program that awards points for riding to a variety of cities, counties and states across the country. She’s been competing for years, but settled for a less-than-perfect score this year because she has too much else to do in coming months, she said.
“The guy upstairs is always with me. Motorcycling is a good opportunity to see all that he has created,” Kraft-Hartman said.
Bruce Elbin, 57, of Chicago, was a commodities trader before giving it up almost 20 years ago and becoming a lock technician. While the job was not always satisfying, he said, he feared change and did not want to retire.
“Until you don’t have something, you don’t know how much you’ll miss it or if you’ll miss it,” Elbin said. Now he knows, having recently lost his job. He’s been groping with idleness and isolation.
“I need to stay busy,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of other interests. Structure-wise, I need somewhere to go.”
Linda Granholm Myers of Brier, Wash., blogs about her two years in retirement that started after she unexpectedly inherited some money. “Thoughts of a Bag Lady in Waiting,” a title she says she chose because of her dread of becoming one, has joined a number of other blogs by retirees willing to open their lives to help others and themselves.
“When you’re working, the scarce resource is time,” said Myers, whose career was in technology.
When time was no longer an issue, she set retirement goals that included helping her husband, Art, write and publish a book, “Return to Vietnam: One Veteran’s Journey of Healing.” They took a road trip across country to distribute it to vets’ centers. She also learned how to teach English as a second language.
“I wanted to be useful. My brain is good, my body is healthy, and I didn’t want to just play golf,” Myers said.
But she learned she didn’t want to teach. Instead, she went on builds with Habitat for Humanity and took classes to become a mediator.
Now, she’s set guideposts for her second year in retirement, drawing praise for them from readers of her blog. And she was chosen as one of two nationwide subjects for a promotional video for the movie “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”
“I came to the end of the first year and said, now what,” which led to outlining the values of spirituality, health, community, curiosity and purpose, she said, to guide her time.
“I found what happened to me when I was not feeling good about myself, not getting enough exercise, not going to enough 12-step meetings, when I was isolated, not eating right,” she said. “I start feeling old and unuseful.
“I originally put spirituality last but knew I had to think about things bigger than me,” Myers said, and moved it to first.
Joe Lyons, a certified financial planner in South Barrington, advises would-be retirees to think in stages — the enjoyable activities, such as hobbies and travel; the relatively challenging, such as taking a class; and the more fulfilling, such as charitable giving and volunteering.
“They’re going to be bored after two to three years of relaxation,” said Lyons.
And he’s seen the consequences of not adopting new strategies for using time.
“My clients in their 80s — it’s more clear in men — were physically and mentally strong, but in their late 70s begin to deteriorate if they’re not doing stuff,” Lyons said.
“The financial aspects (of retirement) are logical, but the rest is not easy.”
