You call this retirement?
Today's retirees are defying the stereotypes about the golden years
Having options. This much is clear: The new unretirees want choice in how to stay involved. But choice is hard to find, say a chorus of sociologists and economists. "The policy issue is how to provide more options for people who don't want a full-time job," says Phyllis Moen, a University of Minnesota sociologist who has spent her career studying retirement. She means options like gradual retirement, "bridge" jobs, intermittent work, and more volunteerism.
Joanne Johnston is a case in point. A Ph.D. in family relations, child development, and administration, she was a troubleshooter interpreting federal policy for 10 counties in North Carolina's social services department at a time of widespread child abuse and child neglect. When she retired recently at 52 after 31 years, she thought she would "go about doing good," so she volunteered at her church and local hospital.
After eight months, "I was fit to be tied to find something to stimulate my mind," she recalls. Johnston took a job at Mission Hospitals in Asheville tracking the postoperative health of heart surgery patients. Then she managed a 150-unit HUD elderly-housing complex. "I did everything from finance to tenant relations, to seeing that the elevators ran and people paid their rent on time."
Now Johnston edits books and studies at the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. "I feel young, vibrant, alive, energetic, and enthusiastic. I'm learning to play the piano and do strength training." Having no financial worries helps, she acknowledges. "I'd like to work until I no longer can."
That sentiment is echoed by former Wall Street investment banker Henry Lanier. Lanier left Lehman Brothers at 59, after managing its housing-finance group for 10 years, to join the Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit that gives loans to developers to build kindergartens, day-care centers, and affordable private housing in poor neighborhoods of California and New York.
The closer Lanier got to retirement age, the further the vision of chilling out with family at a beach house in Massachusetts receded. "The house on the shore is a wonderful idea as long as it's a break in the action, but if it becomes the action itself, it becomes a little unappealing," he says. The switch was a big pay cut, but he still brings in six figures.
Many unretirees gravitate to nonprofits and the service sector, which are eager to have skilled professionals and impose fewer barriers to gradual retirement than corporate America does. Last year, hospitals hired 100,000 new nurses, most over the age of 50. Universities routinely permit professors to gradually retire by teaching fewer courses over a number of years.
"I love the congeniality and camaraderie," says Manhattanite Audrey Bloch, who helps people move out of poverty at the HOPE Program in Brooklyn by assisting them in finding jobs. The former director of career services at Pace University wants to work "until I feel I am not productive," observing that many of her female friends retired when their husbands did and now regret it.
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