Retirees Turn Their Twilight Years into New Beginnings
Retirement doesn’t look like it used to — and for good reason. For prior generations, age 65 constituted a threshold between the working world and the leisure world. Once you crossed it, you took your gold watch, your pension, and your savings, and kicked back in some tropical locale.
Why 65? Because when Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935, "Life expectancy for American men was around 58," per The Atlantic. By 2020, according to the CDC, that figure had risen to 75.1 years, and the life expectancy for American females, whose labor force participation now sits at 57.4%, had risen to 80.5 years. In short, people are staying healthier for longer, and the all-play-and-no-work model of retirement just isn’t cutting it.
In 2019, Catherine Collinson, president of Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, led a study that found that most people plan on doing some form of work in retirement, paid or unpaid. "The trend now is toward a much more active retirement," read a New York Times article on the study. "The transition itself — to ‘retirement’ — is highly personalized."
There are many channels available to people who dream of nontraditional retirements. Much of my work as an advisor revolves around helping my clients find and make the most of them.