Jerry Cahn, PhD., JD., CEO & CLO of AgeBrilliantly.org, enables businesses to empower workers to lead productive, fulfilling 100-year lives.
When we start thinking about retirement planning, our minds naturally turn to money: How am I going to pay for all those years ahead without a paycheck? Can I really save and invest enough to pay for costs like health care and long-term care?
However, today our thoughts should be going to lifestyles: How do I really want to spend the next 30 to 40 years? Because when we think about it, this is a period when you may experience as many lifestyle changes as you did over the previous 30 to 40 years.
Toward this reframing, I believe business leaders need to prioritize helping employees design longer, multidimensional lives that go beyond traditional retirement plans.
Historical Demographic Shifts
In 1900, the average life span was 46. By 1935, when Social Security provided basic income to people retiring, mostly from manual labor in farms and factories, the lifespan was between 58 and 62, with a full retirement age of 65. During the last half of the century, life expectancies increased, so people imagined retiring at 65 with a few “golden years” to enjoy life without working for income.
By 2025, thanks to advances in public health and medical technologies, both longevity and health during this longevity are increasing. One of the fastest-growing age cohorts in the U.S. is people over 80; children born in this decade are expected to live to 104 or more. Therefore, the challenge is to create a series of lifestyles in which we’re healthy, happy and fulfilled at all times throughout our extended 100-year life.
Rather than the old three-stage view of aging—education, career and then retirement—we now can enjoy a fluid 100-year life filled with multiple passions, purposes, relationships, careers and lifestyles, in which we’re always learning about ourselves and the changing world.
From Phased Retirement To Purposeful Retirement Planning
The challenge is how to make the best decisions about the lifestyles we want to lead throughout our lives. We’re so busy actually living our lives that we rarely have time to explore and experiment with different lifestyles—instead, we focus on careers, relationships, family creation, paying off bills, financial stability and saving money for retirement. For many of us, the first real opportunity to think about this comes when we start having to consider our retirement from full-time work.
Fearing that companies with “ageist” views would limit their ability to work productively, many employees avoided speaking about their retirement plans until the last minute. I think this has led to a culture of “Congratulations, it’s your 65th birthday; now clean out your desk.” But in the 1980s, non-ageist companies began adapting a more open policy, called phased retirement.
A phased retirement allows a future retiree to gradually transition from full-time employment to complete retirement, i.e., working fewer hours with no overtime. For instance, the person might reduce their workday by one day per week over a five-year period, while still receiving some pay and benefits.
In return, the worker would also become a mentor to future workers. In the last 15 years, this model has been formalized for U.S. federal employees and is increasingly being adopted by the private sector.
Building A Bridge Between Work And What Comes Next
Today, demographic and social shifts in the workforce make this model an opportunity for businesses that want to help workers, normalizing the concept of giving people time off before fully retiring so they can explore options for their post-retirement lifestyle.
One of these major shifts is how older workers increasingly want to continue working past 65, for financial reasons as well as to continue activities they enjoy and to find purpose. On top of this, it’s important to note how the number of young people entering the workforce is expected to decline. These future workers may have as many as 10 different jobs/careers during their 20- to 60-year work spans.
The over 50 million people who quit during the Great Resignation demonstrated that in the 21st century, people want to lead holistic lives in which work-for-payment activities are integrated with their desire for health, financial security, relationships, passion, purpose and learning.
Increasingly, workers who “retire” without concrete lifestyle plans for the future are “unretiring.” Not happy with their post-retirement lifestyle, many seek to return to their old jobs or take on new ones. Often, the positions they take when unretiring are less rewarding than prior positions: They don’t use their best skills, they provide less income and/or are not engaging.
Forward-thinking businesses can harness existing skills, as well as new ones, that these retirement-age workers develop through lifelong learning. By using a phased approach, businesses can continue to tap their wisdom and expertise as project consultants, alum advisors and even traditional workers.
Developing New Models For Pre-Retirement Planning
The challenge is to develop new models for how workers can take time off from work to explore future lifestyle options. Two simple possibilities include:
1. Extend lifestyle sabbatical. Give them more time off so they can travel and experience living somewhere else for a period. One option might be to give a person a month or two off to immerse themselves in a different culture. Another variant is to give a person off the 13th week of each quarter, so the person can at least spend a week in four different places.
2. Allow for skills and passion development leave. You can allow workers to take extra time off to gain additional skills, which they can use to start a new business or career. It can enhance the person’s ability to continue working for you or enable them to use those skills as a consultant, part-time worker or faculty member of the L&D or training department.
Let your imagination run wild with options. When people can weave their work life into planning for the rest of their lives, feeling less fragmented and more holistic as a result, society can support healthier and more fulfilling lifestyles in retirement.
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