Not Acting Their Age
Certainly not if Kraker is the mold. At 47, she and husband Randy bought a home at Sun City Grand, an active-adult community (retirement is no longer a word used by those who market to the 55-plus crowd) near Phoenix close to the original Sun City retirement community where her in-laws live. "I really did fight it, actually," she says about leaving her job as a human-resources manager for a Minnesota casino. "All the way down here, I was on the cellphone talking to the casino." After six months without work, Kraker took a job snapping pictures of high school kids while earning her real-estate license. Now, she's one of the top producers in her firm. Her husband, meanwhile, downshifted from an executive's job to that of a salesman for the industrial chemicals firm he worked for in Minnesota. For fun, she sky-dives; both are in a local theater group. "I can't believe how much stress is gone," she says of her new life.
Dual incomes. Retirement experts say Kraker is emblematic of the zoomer generation: independent, youthful, with prospects of a long life ahead, and well off. Their bank accounts fattened with years of appreciation in their primary homes and their company-sponsored retirement accounts, their bodies strengthened by years of exercise, their minds stimulated by college and sometimes postgraduate educations, boomers are generally far better equipped for retirement than their parents were. Many will be in households where there is not just one, but two earners, with multiple retirement savings accounts gathered over the years at different jobs.
It's a pretty picture except for one big cloud: Most of these aging baby boomers are blissfully unaware--or maybe just unwilling to acknowledge--what it might mean to live 30 or 40 years beyond the day they quit their day jobs. This will be a time when they may be caring for adolescent children and aging parents at the same moment because they delayed having children, and because their own parents are living longer. "There is horrendous denial about the issue of aging," says Christopher Hayes, a Long Island University professor who studies boomer retirement trends. "My feeling is the first wave is going to get hit in the breadbasket in the next five to 10 years. The reality is the BMW is going to have to be downsized to a Beetle."
Scratch the surface of the statistics, and you begin to peel at the hidden anxiety. It's not just the recent implosion of the retirement savings plans that many are counting on to finance their retirement. Even though marketers paint a glorious picture of active zoomers retiring early, the reality can be quite different. According to a paper delivered last year at a Metropolitan Life retirement conference, the No. 1 reason cited for retiring earlier than planned was bad health or disability. "The thing I worry about is health," says Ralph Hegreness, who sold a computer-consulting company in Bellevue, Wash., and relocated to a new multigenerational community in the high desert north of Phoenix. "I feel quite vulnerable along that line. We're paying $560 a month for health insurance." He works out vigorously, hits the gym regularly, or just jogs in the neighborhood.
advertisement
