On the surface, it sounds like an absurd question. How could finally reaching the most highly anticipated phase of life turn you into a liar? Whats more, I’m not talking about it causing people to start telling little white lies or harmless fibs. I’m talking about bold-faced lies.
Retirement lies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and encompass everything from how people feel about it to what they do everyday in it. I know all of this because they have confessed them to me. Not because I’m a pastor but because I am one of the few financial professionals trained to help people plan for the non-financial aspects of retirement.
The fact of the matter is, it’s hard not to lie about retirement because of the social norms and stigmas associated with it. It causes people to say one thing but feel another way. And we can ignore it, continue to enable it, or do something about it.
To start, one of the main issues is that we have an age-based approach to retirement. We still use a person’s age to gauge where they are at in life and what they should be doing. For example, traditional retirement ages like 62 and 65 culturally suggest that someone is at the end of their career, likely burned out and in need of a break, and declining both mentally and physically.
The problem is that this entire age-based approach to retirement was established almost 85 years ago, when retirement ages were created through Social Security legislation in 1935.
Since then, life expectancy has increased by close to 30% but the age in which a person is considered “old” and not capable to work has remained the same. It’s interesting because I hear so many baby boomers talk about wanting to eliminate the word retirement but they are missing this point. We don’t have to re-brand or rename retirement. What we have to change are the social norms and cultural perspectives of when someone is consider old because it’s no longer 62, 65 or even 70 or 75.
The second reason people lie about retirement is because as a society we value leisure more than work. People assume work is bad and that the sooner you don’t have to do it, the better off you will be. That may be the case for some people, but work provides a number of mental, social, and physical benefits that aren’t easy to replace in retirement.
Therefore, some people get to retirement and don’t like it. But here’s the thing. They can’t really tell anyone because people will think they’re crazy. Look at it from an non-retired person’s perspective, “You’re telling me that you have enough money to never work again, and you finally have all the time and none of the work distractions to dictate what you do, and you’re not happy about it?”
People wrongly assume that having enough money to stop working and enough time to do what you want, will somehow make them happy and that it will be easy to replace work friendships, routine, physical exercise, and purpose to name a few.
This leads people to say things like “Retirement is going great… couldn’t be better,” “Wish I would have done it sooner.” However, they miss parts of their work life and are struggling with their new roles and identity in retirement. It’s referred to as Disenfranchised Grief and is a very normal part of the transition process. This is why it’s so important for people to develop a written plan for the non-financial aspects of retirement and why the financial services industry needs to offer these types of services instead of just financial products and services.
Another issue people face as they reach traditional retirement age and begin to plan out their next phase of life is what I call the Longevity Trap. We all know that people are living longer, but many people assume that living longer means that they will be less capable for increasing periods of time. Many baby boomers express this fear or concern when I tell them we should run their retirement plan out to age 95 or even 100. They reply with something like, “My dad died at 82 and mom made it to 87, but she had a rough time the last few years, so if I make it past that, just let me go.”
What they assume is that because the last few years of their parent’s life may have been tough before they passed, it doesn’t mean they will start having similar issues ,at a similar age and have to deal with them for longer periods of time. So they get caught in this mental trap that they need to retire now because so much of the remainder of their life will not be as valuable.
On top of it all, is another stigma with continuing to work past normal retirement age. Unfortunately, people don’t assume that you love your work and have found a way to balance it with your personal life. Instead they assume you are either a workaholic, didn’t save enough, don’t like your spouse, or prefer to avoid the grand kids for now. Nothing could be further from the truth, but once again, because our culture bases so much on traditional retirement age, negative assumptions pervade through society.
As a result, people can feel trapped and struggle with a number of issues. They end up lying about how they feel and what they are doing. Which is why it’s more important than ever to find a trained and experienced retirement coach to help you plan beyond the dollars and cents, as well as to start training future generations not to look at retirement as starting at a particular age, but rather based on a frame of mind and attitude.
